Page 84 of Six Days

‘Phone’s broken,’ he said, the words sounding croaky, as though they’d been dragged reluctantly past his parched throat.

She nodded and the gossamer-thin veil bobbed up and down with the movement. She looked so beautiful that tears sprang to his eyes. He couldn’t afford to lose any more bodily fluids, but he let them run down his cheeks unchecked.

He reached out with his right hand – the one that could no longer move – and gently touched her face. She leant into his cupped palm, the way she always did.

‘You’re not really here, are you?’

She shook her head sadly. He’d known it anyway, but it still hurt.

His mobile was still ringing, but he tuned it out. He wanted to focus on Gemma, on the feel of her hand as she reached out and stroked his face, the smell of her perfume, which obliterated the odours in the car, and the love that shone from her eyes.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he told her brokenly. ‘I had this big, incredible surprise planned for you and I’ve totally fucked it up.’

‘Hush, hush,’ she soothed, leaning over and pressing her soft, warm mouth on to his cracked lips.

‘I had something to tell you. Something really important. And now you’re never going to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘That you were right. About you and me, about our future, about everything,’ he said brokenly. ‘And the worst thing about all of this is that I’m going to leave you without you ever knowing that I changed my mind. I’ve let you down so badly, Gemma.’

His hallucination shook her head fiercely. ‘Don’t you ever think that. The only way you’ll let me down is if you stop believing you’ll get out of this.’

‘I won’t,’ he vowed. ‘I’ll never stop trying to get back to you.’

*

The sound was loud. Like an explosion. Finn opened his eyes, but at first it made little difference. He blinked and waited for a moment as the darkness gradually separated into discernible shades of black and grey. This was what the middle of the night looked like at the bottom of the gully.

The noise came again, and he flinched, as though dodging artillery fire. It had been excruciatingly hot in the car all day, and yet at night the temperature still plummeted to a desert-like chill. Despite the cold, it felt muggy and airless in the wreckage. The rumbling sound was directly overhead now, and this time he identified it. Thunder.

In the weeks leading up to the wedding, they’d been keeping a watchful eye on the long-range weather forecast. Getting married in the middle of a heatwave carried with it the risk of summer storms, something that had admittedly worried Gemma far more than it had him. Finn would happily have married her in the middle of a monsoon.

‘We’re in luck,’ she had declared happily, looking up from her laptop screen. ‘It looks like the weather won’t break until the week after the wedding.’

He’d bent low to peer at the Met Office web page, getting momentarily sidetracked by the scent of her perfume. ‘By then we’ll be an old married couple, enjoying the weather on the other side of the world,’ he’d said with a smile.

A sudden flash of lightning scythed through the foliage in a way the sun’s rays had never achieved. It allowed Finn to see the cramped, mangled space he was entombed in with a brief and horrible clarity. It looked like the kind of photograph you might find in a coroner’s report.

How on earth did he ever manage to get out of there alive?

He didn’t.

The voices in his head sounded so real that when the lightning flashed again, he glanced over his shoulder to check the back seats. He saw nothing but lacerated leather and twisted metal.

It was a tomb. His tomb. He wasn’t sure when the realisation had finally forced its way to the front of his thoughts, but it was there now. All the time.

It wasn’t just the seat belt he couldn’t release or the metal lance through his leg that imprisoned him; the car itself was a massive steel trap that had sprung shut on impact. Without the benefit of acetylene cutting torches, the so-called jaws of life, and a whole team of rescuers, there was no way he was getting out of there.

Morbidly, he wondered how long it would take for them to find the car. He really hoped, for Gemma’s sake, that it would stay hidden for years. He wanted the discovery to happen far into the future.Let it be when there’s another man’s ring on her finger, he thought.Let the phone call come when she’s surrounded by small red-haired children who look just like her.Perhaps that way it wouldn’t hurt quite so much when the news she would have been waiting so long to receive was finally delivered: ‘They’ve found Finn’s car.’

FRIDAY: DAY SIX

29

I showered with my phone on the glass shelf above the basin. It nestled among the make-up in my cosmetics bag while I swept mascara across my lashes. And it was propped up between the jar of marmalade and the butter dish as I ate my breakfast.

I’d been on the newsagent’s doorstep at 6 a.m., impatiently waiting for them to open. I truly don’t think I’d been that nervous or excited to see something I’d written in print since my very first article.

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