Black Car Burning by Helen Mort

Author:Helen Mort
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473548817
Publisher: Random House

* * *

Dave picked Alexa up on Hinde Street.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’m taking you back.’

She spoke to him without knowing what she was saying. The only thing that made sense was that she’d failed, she wanted to quit. She’d had enough of working for South Yorkshire.

Dave parked the car. She didn’t know where. He told her to sleep, let him cover for her. She heard the door slam and she leaned her head against the cold window and closed her eyes. Felt that heaviness drop over her like a shroud, the heaviness she was feeling all the time these days, especially when she lay in bed at night. She felt Page Hall and Burngreave soften as they merged into the background.

As soon as the dreams came, she wished she could get out. But sleep was too heavy. She dreamt she was in a vehicle, moving very slowly. At first she thought it was a police car, but it was too big. And full of equipment. Oxygen masks and first aid. Ambulance, it had to be. Now it wasn’t moving at all. In the dream, she didn’t want to look out of the window, kept looking into the back instead. But it was as if she was a puppet and something kept turning her head, controlling her movements. Bodies in red shirts. Bodies with people crouching round them. The roar and the screams and the shouts for help. And other people, behind cages, behind mesh. A policeman running past, his face opened up with panic. She was trying to move forwards, the ambulance should be moving forwards, but it was stuck. She couldn’t get on to the pitch. And nobody seemed to be able to get to her, either, nobody could carry the bodies that filled the ground. If she could move, where would she start? And she realised with a lurch that she wasn’t even in the driving seat, she was a passenger. She tried the door and she was locked in.

She woke up and she was gripping the door of the police car, breathing hard. Christ. It must have been something on the radio. A testimony from one of the ambulance drivers at Hillsborough, something she’d caught early this morning as well. But why did it always feel like a memory? The stadium was in her, somehow. Poisoning her. It had got into her blood.

She didn’t go back to sleep. Dave had a newspaper supplement in the back and she read about the seven things that happy people never do. Happy people do not complain. Happy people do not compare themselves to other people. Happy people do not live in the past. She read until she felt like there must be a great Tribe of the Happy that existed somewhere, an exclusive club that wouldn’t admit anyone she knew. Happy people do not avoid mirrors. Happy people don’t stand on rooftops until the afternoon’s not the afternoon. Happy people don’t always have the same nightmares.

When

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