Page 36 of Where Do We Go From Here?
‘Shit, Jill, wake up. It’s snowing!’
‘Oh my God!’ Jill exclaims, leaning forward and wiping the windscreen with her arm. ‘Oh I love it! How absolutely beautiful!’
Wendy rolls her eyes at this.Beautiful!she thinks, as if snow were something to be admired rather than something she’s going to have to drive through.
‘… not settling, though,’ Jill comments, sounding disappointed.
‘No, for the moment it’s fine.’
But ‘fine’ doesn’t last for long because as they rise, leaving Gourdon behind them, the road surface turns from black to grey, then to light grey, and then to a scintillating white purity that puts the willies right up them both.
‘It’s going to take forever to get home at this rate,’ Wendy says as she slows to forty, then thirty, then twenty kilometres an hour.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jill says. ‘It’s fine. It’s not like we have a train to catch.’
Which gets Wendy thinking about Jill’s flight from Nice airport in less than forty-eight hours. Because what if itreallysnows? How will Jill get home then?
Another bend, another rise, and now they’re drivingthrough a bloody snow globe. Despite all the danger and stress of the situation, it’s incredibly beautiful. The pine trees at the side of the road look like images on a Christmas card.
‘It is just so—’ Jill starts to say, but suddenly Wendy is slamming on the brakes and the car is shuddering, sliding briefly out of control before, thankfully, slithering to a halt.
‘Look!’ Wendy says, once they’ve stopped. She points out of her passenger window to where the deer she almost hit has paused, sniffing the cold night air.
‘Oh!’ Jill says, her voice almost tearful with awe. ‘God, I’ve never seen a Bambi before. And in the snow!’
‘She’s not goinganywhere,’ Wendy says. ‘I think she wants to say hello.’
The deer sniffs the air again, snorts, and then turns and bolts off into the trees.
‘Abso-bloody-lutely amazing,’ Jill says.
‘That was,’ Wendy agrees. ‘Scared the shit out of me, though. She ran right in front of the car. One second earlier and she’d have been dead meat. One second earlier and we’dallhave been meat.’
After a couple of nerve-wracking failures, Wendy manages to re-start the engine. And now they’re off again, moving even more slowly than before.
‘That’s, like, proper inches of snow, isn’t it?’ Jill says as they round a bend into ever more perfect whiteness. ‘We are going to make it, aren’t we?’
That is, after all, the real question, isn’t it? Wendy has been trying to picture the road ahead, trying to recall the various twists and turns. Because if there’s one more proper hill they need to climb then they might not make it. She’s never really driven in snow before. You don’t get a lot of it in Kent and when you do you tend to leave the car at home. She’s having trouble predicting how the car will react.
The steering wheel is getting less and less precise thethicker the snowfall becomes. The car is starting to feel more like a boat, where you steer and then wait a bit for something to happen.
‘Should we turn back?’ Jill asks, unnerved by the fact that Wendy hasn’t answered.
But Wendy has been picturing that option, too. She’s been imagining driving backdownthose hills and trying to brake for all the hairpin bends, in snow, in order to avoid sliding over the edge and dying. ‘No, I think that might be worse,’ she says, glancing at Jill. ‘We’re nearly home anyway.’
When she looks back at the road, though, she sees a bend she has failed to anticipate. It’s not acrazybend by any means, and the downhill slope they’re on is only a gentle one, and they’re travelling at less than twenty kilometres an hour, but all the same, when she tries to brake nothing happens, and when she tries to steer that doesn’t seem to work either, so they continue to slither gently, undramatically forward, as if in slow motion, in an almost perfect straight line on a road where they really do need to be curving to the left.
She turns the steering wheel one way and then the other until she can’t even tell which way the wheels are pointing anymore. She tries braking, accelerating, anything, but nothing makes the slightest bit of difference. They slide inexorably onwards.
‘Wendy?’ Jill cries, reaching for the wheel herself. ‘Wendy! Do something!’
The car is now slewing sideways, and nothing either of them do makes the slightest bit of difference. ‘Wendy!’ Jill screams. But they’re both realising there’s nothing to be done except wait and see where the car comes to a stop.
In a ditch at the side of the road. This is where they have landed.
With the exception of the wipers, which continue to swipe fresh snowflakes from the windscreen every couple of seconds, all is silent.
‘Christ!’ Jill eventually says when, after a few swishes of the blades, she finds herself able to speak. ‘Jesus! Are you OK?’
