Watched: When Road Rage Follows You Home (2 page)

She eventually settled on something just about bearable and then began stripping wallpaper from the spare bedroom. Before long, the room was filled with a mix of babbling steam, shreds of sodden paper and Esther’s slightly off-key warbling to the choruses she knew. There was clearly something wrong with the acoustics in the room – she was a much better singer than the partially stripped walls were giving her credit for.

From downstairs, the telephone engineer called up that he was finished and Esther slopped her way down the bare stairs, picking the pieces of wallpaper from her shoes and hoping he hadn’t heard her singing.

He handed her a welcome leaflet complete with new phone number, talked her through where the cables were, and then asked her to sign half a dozen sheets of papers. There was seemingly less signing your name involved in getting married or applying for a passport than there was in having some bloke pop around to set up a phone.

After he left, Esther typed the number into her mobile phone and sent it to Charlie, then filed the pamphlets alongside the piles of drenched wallpaper in the bin outside. The last thing they needed were yet more things to pack away.

Esther was just about to head inside when a flicker of movement in the back garden caught her eye. She headed along the crumbling path at the side of the house and stepped onto the overrun lawn, peering from side to side until she saw the bundle of white and black fur cowering close to the fence.

‘Hello.’

Esther crouched, stretching her hand towards the bedraggled-looking cat. Even from a distance, she could see the patches of fur missing from its head and a stumpy, threadbare tail. On its back was a dark black spot that was almost perfectly spherical. It had stopped with one paw raised, as if it had been caught doing something it shouldn’t.

‘What’s your name?’

The cat began to slink along the fence, ears pricked, not taking its eyes from Esther. The garden was an unkempt forest of overgrown grass and bushes growing into each other. Daisies, dandelions and moss were having the time of their lives, creating a toxic haze for hay-fever sufferers. Esther batted a patch of long grass away, knowing that starting the outdoors tidy-up was a job for later in the week.

‘Do you live around here?’ she asked.

The cat didn’t seem remotely interested in coming any nearer, edging closer to the hedges at the rear of the garden, before disappearing into the undergrowth with a swish of its squat tail.

‘Nice to meet you too,’ Esther said, before heading back into the house.

From the combination of the upstairs steam and the simmering beginnings of the summer day, the house was stiflingly warm. Esther returned to the spare bedroom and began scraping at the walls again, deciding she’d already had enough of moving for one lifetime. They’d only been in the new house for a day but this was it – no more boxes, hire vans, fetching, carrying, labelling or anything else. It was no wonder her parents had lived in the same place for thirty years – it was nothing to do with what the house was like, it was that having to move all of their things out and into somewhere else could drive even the healthiest of people to the brink of insanity.

Charlie had avoided it all, of course, simply because of his new job. Not that she could blame him. She was the one who insisted she would do up the house while he went to work, even if that meant stripping, papering, painting and doing everything else herself.

What a stupid statement that now seemed.

In her desperation to get away from her parents, Esther had somehow convinced herself it was a good idea to take on renovating at least two full bedrooms, a hallway and a staircase – not to mention landscaping what was, in essence, a jungle.

As she dug the scraper into the wall in a failed attempt to remove the welded-on wallpaper, Esther felt the blade catch a camouflaged screw, before clinking and falling to the ground. She plucked it from between the floorboards, holding it up into the sunlight, but the sharp end had snapped too. Somewhere in among the boxes, there was a replacement but Esther couldn’t be bothered hunting and she wanted to get out of the house anyway, if only for a few minutes. It was far too bright and sunny to spend the entire day in a smoggy room scratching the walls.

Esther’s car was a small, metallic purple Fiat. Charlie had joked that the only reason she wanted something so compact was because she couldn’t park it otherwise, which was a little too close to the truth for her liking. Still, it was better than driving around in the sleek, black company BMW that he’d been given as part of his new job. In his suit with the top button done up until it was practically choking him, Charlie looked every inch the big car/little dick-type she would usually make fun of, much as she knew that wasn’t what he was actually like. As soon as the tie and jacket came off, he was back to being her Charlie again. She much preferred him dressed down, trying to squeeze into her car and joking that he was going to have to sit in the back seat so that there was room for his feet to touch the pedals.

After a month of on-off moving that had culminated over the weekend, Esther had a vague idea of where the town centre and the various shopping areas were in relation to the house. Well, she remembered a B&Q being somewhere near a pub called the Sheep & Anchor and if she could find the main road, she had a fifty per cent chance of heading in the right direction.

Esther set off quite enjoying the fact that she didn’t really know where she was going. The estate was a mix of red-brick housing association flats and two-bedroom houses, alongside rows of slightly larger private dwellings. The roads were almost empty and, after a series of turns she wouldn’t remember, Esther stumbled across a play park next to a community centre advertising Slimming World meetings and a weekly coffee morning.

A little further along was a small church with bright stained-glass windows and a pretty white steeple. To the side was a primary school attached to a wide playground with luminously painted patterns on the ground. Esther had already done the research, knowing that it had the third-best results in the area. With house prices utterly out of their reach around the top two schools, it was the main reason they’d started looking for houses on this estate. Thoughts of children and the future were finally a reality now they had their own space.

Esther reached the end of the road, waiting at an empty T-junction with a childishly fun sense of being lost. There were no street signs, only the name of a road she didn’t recognise. She could use the maps on her phone to check where she was but that would take the enjoyment out of it. Guessing left, Esther continued to drive, recognising odd glimpses of houses they had thought about offering on. There had been one with a beautiful pond, another with a conservatory the width of the house that faced east. The owners told them how it devoured the sun every morning, which, on a day like this, would have been wonderful to enjoy. Both of those, and all of the others they had liked, were beyond their budget, leaving them with the compromise they had now.

‘It has potential,’ was how Charlie kept describing it. He was right, of course, and the house would undoubtedly be worth it when it was finished – it was just the work involved in getting it to that point.

It was only when Esther took another left that she realised she was about to drive past the turn for the road they lived on, having somehow gone in a full circle. She headed past the junction, resting her arm on the ledge of the open window as the sun burned down.

At the end of the road, Esther turned right, listening for the faint hum of traffic and heading towards it.

After passing a nursery, an off-licence and a sandwich shop wafting the smell of bacon through her open window, Esther finally reached the main road. Dual lanes of traffic surged past, spluttering exhaust fumes into the summer sky. She had been a passenger as Charlie drove along the road on their various visits to the area but had never driven on it herself. She was fairly certain the sign towards the town centre would take her away from where she wanted to go, so headed in the opposite direction.

The road was a mass of lanes, faded arrows on the tarmac, traffic lights, roundabouts, and an all too typical lack of signs. As locals weaved in and out with full knowledge of where they were going, Esther stayed on the inside, continuing in a straight line and hoping for the best.

Two lanes became three and it was only when she stopped at a red light behind a row of cars that Esther realised she had made a mistake. Because the arrows showing where she was supposed to be were painted on the road, she’d slipped into the central lane even though she needed to turn right. Over her shoulder she could see the pub with the bizarre sign hanging outside. It was the only reason she’d remembered this spot: the multi-coloured image of a sheep with a silver chain and an anchor around its neck was hard to forget.

Esther waved to try and catch the attention of the driver sitting in the lane outside of her but the woman was busy singing at the top of her voice, air-drumming on the steering wheel for good measure. Esther flicked on her right indicator, hoping the driver behind would be kind and let her in.

When the lights turned green, she edged ahead, stopping at the solid white line as the person in the car behind leaned on their horn. Esther swore under her breath as the traffic outside of her continued to stream through with a grumble of engines and a steady thump-thump-thump of a stereo somewhere behind. The car that had beeped swerved into the inside lane to go around as the ones outside continued ignoring her.

Esther could feel her heart pumping, the hairs on her arms rising as a gentle panic began to grow. She had never enjoyed driving at the best of times, largely for reasons like this. People became so angry at the merest things.

She continued waiting, trying to block out the tyre squeals, pumping stereo and horn-honking behind, focusing on her wing-mirror.

Finally there was a gap in traffic and Esther accelerated ahead, swerving into the adjacent lane.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

In the fraction of a second it had taken her to check her rear-view mirror, a metallic blue car had roared into the outside lane, stereo blaring a pulsing doof-doof-doof sound that felt as if it was throbbing through Esther’s body. It had stopped barely inches from her door, with the driver leaning out of his window, eyes bulging, top lip curled.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

His hand thumped his horn as Esther tried to move ahead, forgetting what she was doing and bunny-hopping the car to a halt just as the light turned red again. The pounding music stopped instantly.

‘You fuckin’ bitch.’

Esther stared straight ahead but the driver’s voice was clear through their open windows: a growling, unconcealed fury.

‘You stupid fat cow. Women fuckin’ drivers. Oi – you listening to me?’

BEEP!

Despite the summer heat, a shiver slipped along Esther’s back. Her knuckles were pale white as she squeezed the steering wheel, wrapping her hand around it so tightly that her nails were digging into her palm. With her free hand, she pressed the button to close the electric window.

‘Don’t you fuckin’ well—’

Esther finally breathed out as the window hummed shut. She could hear the muffled sound of a raised voice but nothing specific. This time, the driver used his headlights to get her attention, a series of short flashes glinting from her wing mirror.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Esther mumbled under her breath, praying for the traffic lights to change but it remained an unwavering red. She glanced down at the steering wheel, where her hand had started to tremble. She tried to tell herself to calm down and take a breath but the headlights continued to flash in her wing mirror.

Then she made her biggest mistake.

She’d been forcing herself not to look in the rear-view mirror but Esther’s resistance deserted her as her eyes flicked upwards. The driver in the blue car was in his late-twenties like her, wearing a baseball cap. As soon as she saw his face, she couldn’t look away. His eyes were so wide that she could see the red veins almost popping around the edges. His nostrils were flared, teeth bared with flecks of saliva dribbling down his chin, like a rabid dog tied to a post seething with aggression.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Finally the light turned green and Esther pulled forward. The entirety of her rear-view was taken up by the bonnet of the blue car as it clung to her bumper. Esther concentrated on the road, taking the turn into the retail park and heading along the side of the pub before turning left towards the giant hardware store. She was hoping the other driver would go right but he stayed tight to her, the roar of his enhanced exhaust overpowering, even through her closed windows.

Esther kept her speed steady, following the arrows on the tarmac that led around the car park. Still the car hugged her bumper and she risked a glance in the rear-view mirror. This time the man was steering one-handed, holding a phone to his ear with the other. His eyes were swollen with fury as he nodded towards her car. Esther knew that if she braked, there was no way he could avoid shunting her. She looped around the one-way system until she was close to B&Q’s front entrance. With another glance backwards, she pulled into the nearest space and tugged the handbrake up. She hoped the other car would continue past but instead it spun around, the driver wrenching the steering wheel and starting to encircle her.

Esther slapped the door lock but didn’t feel too protected, despite the clunk of the central-locking system. As the other car’s tyres squealed on the dry ground, Esther spun to face the front of the store, hoping someone would emerge. Aside from a scattering of other empty vehicles, the rest of the car park was deserted, the only movement the blue car racing around.

Esther realised her hand was drumming the steering wheel with anxiety, her foot jammed tightly underneath the brake pedal. She didn’t want to look at the driver but couldn’t stop herself. He was accelerating in a circle around her, flashing the car’s lights and jabbing a finger in her direction. As he veered around the front of her car again, he was mouthing obscenities that didn’t take a lot of lip-reading ability to understand.