Driftwood (16 page)

This much accomplished, he sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. He stretched out a hand in a gesture which meant Belle could move, and felt a surge of guilty relief when she came to him without hesitation. In her canine mind, then, everything forgiven and forgotten. She was just hungry, waving her tail in long slow arcs, all sorrows passed.

In some strange way, Tom's were gone from him too. He fed her, then limped upstairs and stood for a long time in the shower. He hadn't switched the tank on last night, and the water flowed cold, but he barely noticed. He dressed, paused for long enough to disinfect and plaster the worst of the cuts on his feet and his hands, then went out into the rain-washed morning. The wind was fresh, rich, full of salt. Opening the Land Rover's door, he stood for a moment, letting the air's damp turbulence rock him.

He was here. He was glad he'd booked the locum, but he was here, on his feet in the morning light, not dragging himself off the sofa with the black jaws of his hangover sunk deep inside him. Not crawling out of the pit.

Getting into the truck, he started her up and headed for the road. The rain increased, and he switched on her lights, watched the sweep of the windscreen wipers with a kind of peaceful satisfaction. Clear, he was clear. His mind stretched out like the headlamps, finding the path ahead. He knew, after years of
one drink won't hurt
and
I can deal with it
, that he was and always would be an addict, and that his only salvation—not his cure, never that—lay in absolute sobriety. He knew that he was locked in mourning for one lover, that his efforts to accept another, with this grief unaddressed in his heart, had been hopeless from the beginning.

He knew that he'd lost Flynn. Turning onto the lonely stretch that would take him past Lanyon on the road to the Hawke Lake base, Tom took firm hold of the wheel against the wind's buffeting, set a straight course. He'd lost Flynn, but, God, Flynn didn't have to
be
lost, not to the whole world, not to everything a man like that could have and do if he could be set free. Taking Tremaine from him, turning him in, was not the answer, even if Tom had been sure of his facts, and as time had gone by he was becoming increasingly uncertain. All he could do was tell Flynn what he thought, what he feared, and leave it up to him.

The quoit this morning had hidden itself entirely. Tom shook his head, trying to squint through the veils of the rain. No, there it was—crouching low, looking ready to run. He remembered hot light and warm hands on his bare skin, guiding his movements, opening him up. Pain went through him with a clarity that snatched his breath. God, not much hope for him in a bottle now anyway, was there? He'd drunk because he couldn't feel, and the numbness of a skinful was preferable to that dead zone inside. It was all restored to him, the full bloody human birthright—from the stinging ache in his cuts to the tearing, oddly physical sensation of loss in his heart. The piercing joy that lit him up in spite of everything, when he thought of Flynn.

Headlights in the road ahead. Couldn't be, Tom thought calmly, beginning to brake anyway. Too close, too fast, and on the wrong side. He started to pull over. The road curved round to the right here—not much escape for him, and the Rover's tyres were already bouncing and slipping on mud, but plenty of room on the far verge when the other driver saw him. There was a blind crest ahead. Tom, out of evasive manoeuvres, braced and hoped.

His serenity never wavered. He was thinking of Flynn when the vast truck roared over the crest, full beams blazing, all the way over on the left. Still somehow he was lit up inside, hauling the wheel round in the movement that would smash him into the wall.

No. A gap about four yards long, where the drystone had crumbled. The Rover shot off the road at fifty. Hit the barbed-wire fence that bridged the gap, which slowed her momentum a little but flipped her, turned her flight into a wild sideways arc. She hit turf and rocks on a diagonal, shattering windscreen and bodywork, rolled once and slammed down onto her driver-side flank.

Not much point in worrying about car wrecks, was there? The thought came to Tom slowly, as if wrapped in clouds. It became tangled up with a raw scent of petrol, a threatening darkness, and almost slipped away, but he snagged it back, interested in this new aspect on an old fear. He'd seen so many crash victims. Wondered how they'd felt—if a crippling terror had entered them, an anticipation so dreadful that impact must have come almost as release. Did he have his answer now? He wasn't sure of anything anymore, but maybe if you got that much time to think, you'd avoid the bloody crash in the first place. He hadn't had a second. The period between knowing it would happen and the whole thing being over was…

Nonexistent? One dark flash? His mind, on the run from its prison, tried to give him the right word, but there didn't seem to be one. He had felt something. A bang, like a roadside device going up, but inside him.

Thinking of these things, struggling to define them, was very tiring. He lay for a while in the rain. The wind was howling in the Rover's undercarriage, a mournful, familiar sound. He could hear a rhythmic creaking, like the spin of a disengaged tyre. A gentle pattering, cold small feet, on one side of his face, in the open palm of his hand.
Flynn
, he thought, with utter satisfaction, beginning to fall away.

He must have said it out loud.

“Yes. I'm here. Oh, holy fucking
Christ
, Tom. Hang on.”

Another cloudy interval. When he surfaced again, it was to full inhabitation of his flesh, and all he could do was fight not to let go, not allow his ragged breathing to turn into the howls of pain and fear that had suddenly surged up inside his chest. The Rover was lying on her side on the moorland turf. He had gone through the windshield and was trapped from the thighs down in her crushed wheel housing. “Oh… God, Flynn…”

“Here, sweetheart. Breathe. Just breathe. Did this thing have no airbag? Weren't you wearing your belt?”

No,
he tried to say to him.
No, too old a model. No, for the first time in my last neurotic, triple-checking, terrified three years, I drove off without it.
“See,” he managed, smiling faintly. “This is what happens.”

“Too bloody right. Gonna get help for you. Just hang on.” The feel of a warm hand on his hair, brushing broken glass off his face. The click of a mobile being flipped open, then a triple beep, repeated two seconds later. A volley of swearing that almost made him laugh. Navy boys, no matter how civilised, were all the same underneath. “Godforsaken bastard of a country. Can't get a fucking signal.”

“No. Not here. Go…” Tom's throat seized, and he clung to Flynn's hand through a spasm of coughing. “Back to the road. About fifty yards south. Parking bay. There's… There's a clear patch.”

He was gone. Tom listened to the fading pounding of his footsteps on the turf, and wished he could see him. A lovely sight, he'd be willing to bet, that light-made frame at full pelt. The vision deflected his thoughts for a moment. Then he was cold and alone. Shock began to hit him. He felt the first jolts of his reaction, a convulsive shivering, and fought to stay still, to do all the things he would tell a crash victim to do.
Breathe. Don't struggle. Don't, for God's sake, start crying out after your saviour to forget the bloody phone call, to please come back and not let you die here alone.

“All right. They're coming.”

Tom released a pent-up breath, the one that had been holding back that last plea. The turf had resounded once more to running feet. There were warm hands on him. He swallowed hard, tasting blood. There was Flynn, kneeling on the grass outside the Rover's wrecked and empty windshield frame. Irrelevantly Tom noticed that he was wearing the grey T-shirt he had given him. That he was soaked to the skin, and fighting not to cry. “It's okay,” he told him. “Be okay. Do I… Do I get a Sea King, then?”

“For this? You're joking. Common or garden ambulance, for you. And some firemen with the tin opener.” It was a good effort. Tom heard it—Flynn sounded good. Giving him back at least his own effort at humour. On the blurry edge of his vision, Tom saw him lean to look through to the Rover's rear, which a glance in the cracked rearview had told him was a mangled hell of torn metal and vinyl. “Oh, God. Not Belle.”

“No,” Tom said. “No, she's at home.” Now that he thought about it, there was something he needed to tell Flynn, wasn't there, about Sea Kings. It was why he'd been on the road in the first place. Something important…

“Tom. Tom! Wake up. You do not bloody drift off, you hear me?”

Struggling back at the harsh command, Tom became aware that Flynn was reaching past him to drag through from the back the tartan rug he carried for Belle. The one Tom had given him, he now remembered irrelevantly, to wrap around himself a million years ago at Porth beach. Flynn had been cold then, hadn't he? Bleeding as Tom was now, from dozens of places where his shirt was ripped and blossoming red in the rain. Tom felt barriers of perception and identity slide. His blood, or Flynn's? Flynn was bruised, he knew that much. Terrible livid thumbprints on his arms.

Covering his shoulders with the rug, Flynn said suddenly, as if following Tom's thoughts, “Tell me Rob did not do this to you.”

“What?” The question called him back from a great and increasing distance. He was stupid, he supposed. It hadn't occurred to him. Wasn't occurring now. “No. Of course not. Wasn't his truck. Listen. I'm sorry, Flynn. What I said to you about him… Didn't mean to hurt you.” That was it, though. Something about Tremaine, and the Sea Kings.
Don't fly with him.
He had to say it, but the shuddering was boiling up in him again, his body's hopeless reflex to tear itself out of the trap. “Flynn, don't—”

“No. Stay still.” Flynn crouched low, reached over the wheel arch and grabbed him. “Got to stay still. Come on, Doc, you know this stuff. Ssh.” Tom wondered if his face was intact. He hoped so. Flynn was kissing blood and rainwater off it, holding him down. “I've got you. Keep still.” He stroked his hair, and Tom used a last access of strength to reach up for him. “That's it. Hang on to me.”

A time passed. At first Tom listened for sirens, then he lost that thread and began to track the rhythmic warmth of Flynn's breath, coming and going against his cheek. So much had happened, hadn't it? This man's irruption into his life, an unexpected daybreak. Then night coming down again, so hard it had almost consumed him. And yet Flynn was here with him. The strangeness of that drifted over Tom's mind like cobwebs, or the dandelion fluff he could see catching on the wet cotton of Flynn's T-shirt. “How… How did you find me?”

A quiver of fraught laughter went through Flynn. “Oh, well… Remember how I bumped into you by chance at the quoit the other day? It only took me three goes. I reckoned it was worth another try.”

“Oh great. My beautiful stalker. Did you…?”

“Tom. Hush a minute.”

Tom fell silent. A new tension had seized the lean shoulders he was holding. Tom felt him inhale—took a diagnostic breath himself, of the sharpened petrol tang in the air. “What is it?”

“Not sure. I…” He paused, absolutely still. Listening. And Tom heard it too. A trickling sound, and then a soft and utterly unique thump. “All right. Got to get you out.”

“Thought you said I had to stay still.”

“That was then, sunbeam.”

Tom waited. There was one last moment of uncertainty, terminated by the hiss of spilled fuel igniting. “Oh, you're kidding. A spark? In this bloody weather?”

“Yeah. Shit out of luck today, aren't you, Doc? Don't worry.” Flynn braced his shoulder into the distorted shield frame and got a hand beneath the steering column. “Got to lift this a bit. Can you push?”

His contribution would be token at best, but he appreciated Flynn's effort to distract him. Then he understood why he had made it. “No. Flynn. Get out.”

“In a minute.”

“No. Now. The tank's gonna go up.”

“Push up from under the wheel. Come
on
, Tom.”

I filled her up yesterday. Full load; cost me a fortune. She'll blow like a culvert bomb.
“Flynn, fuck off out of here,” he rasped, trying to shove him away. But he was too weak, the pain occasioned by his movement too unmanning, and he fell back. Something in him still was capable of admiration, of aesthetic response—God, the sight of Flynn, every muscle in his lean tanned arms corded and standing, shoulders straining against the frame…
No, don't die here. You're too damn lovely.

But he was tough as whipcord too, wasn't he? Flynn hauled deadweight bodies out of freezing water and into rescue baskets for a living. By contrast with a heaving Atlantic storm, Tom supposed the fire starting up in the back of the truck might not seem to him that much of a threat. He watched him lock a grip beneath the Rover's crushed dashboard, pulled until Tom thought he could hear ligaments tearing down his spine. Something in the wheel housing cracked. He got an inch, got a couple, and then it would do. Grabbed Tom by the armpits and dragged him out of the wreck.

They ran. Not far, but far enough. Tom knew a moment's wild elation. He was whole, his legs beneath him numb but working. He was running with Flynn, back on Porth beach, outrunning the ninth wave. Nothing could catch them. When Flynn tackled him to the turf, it felt like brief flight, a cliff dive. He did not see or hear the truck explode, experienced the blast as a jolt through Flynn's body where it lay over his, a warm unflinching shield.

Days passed in flickering shadows. Their airless antiseptic heat was so familiar to Tom that he did not question it, and simply dreamed himself making his rounds in the ICU, dispassionately looking down on his own bruised flesh laid out on the hospital bed. He borrowed the voices of his colleagues, of Mike Findlay, making diagnosis, trying to reassure the dishevelled young RNAS airman sitting by his bed that he would live.
Don't worry. There was some swelling on his brain, some pressure, but it's coming down. He'll wake up soon.