Page 35 of Where Do We Go From Here?
Yes, she struggles a little more than usual opening Google Maps on her phone, but that’s only because her eyes are tired. And maybe she does forget that the gearstick is on her right, not once, not twice, but three times. But overall she’s fine. She’s quite sure she’s totally fine.
‘More bloody rain,’ Wendy mutters, blinking repeatedly in an attempt at getting her tired eyes to focus on the shiny road-surface of the Promenade des Anglais. ‘And why did they have to make these lanes so bloody narrow?’
Jill, who a second ago had been drifting into sleep, forces her eyes open and peers out, but the drunken blur of her visionplus the droplets sliding across the glass just combine to make her feel woozy. ‘Windscreen wipers, maybe?’ she offers.
‘Good idea,’ Wendy says, then, ‘I was about to do that, actually. But do you see what I mean? Do you see how narrow they are?’
‘Umh,’ Jill agrees, already closing her eyes again. ‘They areverynarrow, honey.’
Luckily there is little traffic at this time of night and Wendy feels proud when she realises that she has managed to negotiate the full length of the seafront without incident, narrow lanes and all.
When she reaches the autoroute, however, she discovers that the lanes still feel unusually narrow. And it’s only now – because she finds herself correcting her steering over and over again simply in order to remain within those silly white lines – that she realises that it’s not tiredness causing her problems at all. It’s the alcohol. She’s drunker than she’d let herself realise.
‘Jill, I’m…’ she starts, glancing over at her friend, but seeing that Jill’s head has fallen to one side and that her mouth is wide open, she shrugs and smiles to herself. ‘Looks like you’re on your own here,’ she murmurs.
A signpost comes into view for the next exit and she wonders if it wouldn’t be wiser to get off the motorway. There does seem to be something particularly criminal about drink-driving along a motorway, but what would they do then? It’s – she glances at the dashboard – six degrees outside, and raining. If they tried to sleep in the car they’d wake up frozen, and finding a hotel at – another glance – almost 1 a.m. would prove challenging, if not impossible, and would probably involve more driving than simply going home. Plus the GPS says the next exit is ‘her’ one anyway.
So no. The road is almost straight and she has four empty lanes to choose from. If she concentrates and keeps her speeddown – if she constantly reminds herself that she’s had a few and that her reflexes are going to be slow – they’ll be fine.
She can’t believe that she’s let herself do this. It’s criminal, is what it is. But that’s kind of the problem with alcohol, isn’t it? It makes you unable to do most things properly. And that includes making you unable to realise youcan’tdo them.
The GPS is telling her to leave at the next exit, and initially she feels relieved about this. But once she’s negotiated the toll gate, a complicated underpass and two roundabouts, she finds herself feeling even more stressed than before. Because these small roads with their signposts and traffic lights are infinitely more challenging than the long straight lines of the autoroute.
Anyway, thank goodness for the GPS, eh? Because God knows how people managed in the old days. Actually, she remembers perfectly how they managed in the old days. You had the map open on your lap, or folded small and wedged in the middle of the steering wheel, and you just did your best not to run anyone over while you were trying to work out the route.
Coming out of a roundabout, her rear right wheel briefly mounts the pavement, making the car jerk noisily.
‘Whoa!’ Jill says, waking, sitting bolt upright and grappling for the panic handle.
‘Kerb,’ Wendy says. ‘Sorry ’bout that.’
‘God, I though’ you’driben over someone,’ Jill says. She sounds more drunk now than when they left Nice.
‘No,’ Wendy reassures her. ‘Everything’s fine. Just go back to sleep.’
‘I wasn’tsleeping,’ Jill says, sounding offended at the suggestion.
‘Right,’ Wendy says. ‘Fine. Well, go back to whatever you were doing.’
Once Jill has drifted off again, Wendy opens her side window in the hope that the fresh air will make her feel more alert – which it does. She drives past a police car, blue lightflickering, and holds her breath until they’ve vanished from the rearview mirror. But the French cops were far too busy harassing two Arab lads on mopeds to even think about glancing her way.Thank God for white privilege, she thinks.
And then suddenly, without her having really noticed, she’s leaving the final proper town on their route and heading up into the hills.
The roads here are dark, wet and winding, but at least there’s no other cars on the road and hopefully zero chance of coming across more police. She takes a deep breath of cold air and forces her shoulders to relax. ‘You’re fine,’ she tells herself. ‘You can do this.’
She thinks how they’ll laugh about this in the morning – imagines telling sleepy Jill how drunk she was – and, for the first time since leaving Nice, she smiles.
‘Whoa!’ Jill says, once again jerking to attention from her slumber. ‘What was that?’
‘Just another stone in the road,’ Wendy tells her.
They’re almost at the Gourdon roundabout now, passing by the car park they did a lap of this morning. So, in a way, they’re nearly home which is just as well because Wendy has had enough. She’s feeling far more tired than drunk now – in fact, she thinks she has sobered right up. But she wants to be home safely in bed. This journey feels like one of those nightmares where every bend is followed by another and another, and then another.
The rain, which stopped a few miles back, has now returned, the droplets slapping strangely against the windscreen. She focuses, briefly, on the peculiar splatter pattern they’re making rather than on the road beyond the windscreen and almost misses the bend.Concentrate, Wendy, she tells herself, once she’s jerked the steering wheel to save the day.
After a couple more bends an alert appears on the dashboard with a ‘bong’ sound, but she doesn’t immediately recognise what it means, essentially because she’s too busy staring at the road to give the dashboard her full attention. It wasn’t a particularly worrying ‘bong’ anyway, more like the noise a lift makes when it reaches the desired floor. Perhaps she needs to buy petrol.
After a couple more bends and rises up the side of the mountain, the raindrops change form again, and it’s exactly at that moment she understands what the warning meant – what the weird orange symbol represents.
