Drive By Read online

  As I’m walking along the road, it starts raining – big, plump drops of rain – slowly at first, just one or two drops, but within seconds it’s absolutely tipping it down. I hurry even faster, cursing.

  A car swishes along the road through the rain. I look up at it. It’s the silver car. The one we hit with the football the other week. The one whose window we fired through. The Poisoned Dwarf’s car. I walk on quickly, keeping my head down but watching it. The brake lights come on just before it gets to number fifteen. The passenger door opens. I stop still and stare as the raindrops soak me. A lady gets out of the passenger side. Not someone I recognise.

  The lady jogs round the front of the car to the parking space in front of the house and moves the traffic cone they always put in their space. It’s usually the Poisoned Dwarf that does that. At least, it used to be her. As she’s doing that, the car pulls into the parking space. I move a few paces forward so I can see better.

  The driver’s door opens as the lady goes to the porch and unlocks the house. The Poisoned Dwarf’s husband gets out of the car. He sweeps his comb-over back into place, then he goes to the rear door of the car and opens it. He bends down as though he’s speaking to someone in the back while the lady from the passenger seat comes back outside with an umbrella. She holds it above the back door of the car. The Poisoned Dwarf’s husband moves back, and as he does someone slowly gets out of the car.

  It takes the person a while to get out, but when they have, my stomach churns. It’s the Poisoned Dwarf. She stands unsteadily underneath the umbrella and looks around. She starts to shuffle slowly along the pavement, through the gate and to her house. I just stand and stare. She looks pale. She looks skinny and frail, like a ghost or something. She takes a while to get up the step – her husband and the other woman (her daughter or a social worker maybe) help her up. They all go slowly inside the house and shut the door behind them.

  I feel relieved. I’m so glad she’s all right, that she’s not dead or anything. But . . . Well, she looked really awful. She looked about ten years older than before. Did we do that to her? Will she get better? How should I feel – relieved she’s out of hospital or guilty because she looks like a ghost?

  Then I realise that I’m standing in the pouring rain, getting soaked, and I rush home.

  Summer

  Nan comes shuffling slowly into the house. Grandad holds her elbow as he guides her in through the front door and then the hallway. Nan looks up at me. I smile at her.

  ‘Hi, Nan,’ I say.

  Nan takes a couple of deep breaths, like she’s just run the hundred metres or something. ‘Hello, Summer, love,’ she says. She sounds a bit better than when I saw her in hospital, but not much.

  ‘Good to have you back,’ I say. ‘Welcome home.’

  Nan looks at me again. She doesn’t smile, but I see something in her eyes – something like her old sparkle – and I know that inside she’s smiling at me.

  She continues to shuffle through to the lounge, right over to her armchair. Grandad keeps hold of her arm the whole way, keeping her steady. When Nan gets to her chair she kind of backs towards it and slowly lowers herself down. Grandad only lets go when she’s sunk into the chair.

  ‘Right, I’ll get your bag out of the car, Jean,’ he says. ‘And let’s get the kettle on while we’re at it, shall we. Summer . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘What does everyone want to drink?’

  Once everyone’s decided what they want, I go through to the kitchen. Mum, who’s taken the afternoon off work especially, comes with me.

  ‘It’s good to see her back, isn’t it?’ Mum says.

  I nod. I take the lid off the kettle and turn the tap on.

  ‘Do you feel relieved?’

  I don’t say anything, don’t look at Mum. I feel weird now I’ve seen Nan. It’s great to see her back, but she seems frail. She doesn’t seem like Nan. I look for mugs and tea pots and coffee and everything else to avoid having to look at Mum.

  ‘Are you OK, Summer?’ Mum says, watching me fuss around the kitchen.

  I nod my head again. I don’t look at her. I can’t. I’m not OK. I don’t know what it is. I walk over to the fridge and take the milk out.

  ‘Summer?’ Mum says. She comes over and puts her hands on my arms, tries to turn me round so she can look into my eyes.

  I avoid her eyes for as long as I can, but after ten seconds or so I crumble. I look at her and the tears start immediately.

  ‘Oh, Summer, come here,’ she says.

  I sob into her chest. We stand there for ages, Mum just patting my back as I cry. I hear the kettle boil and switch itself off.

  ‘What’s the matter, Summer?’ Mum says eventually.

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know. I just feel weird. I thought Nan would be like her old self.’

  Mum makes a sympathetic face at me. ‘Give her time, Summer,’ she says. ‘Give her time.’

  ‘She looks like a ghost though,’ I say, my voice cracking as I talk. ‘She looks so ill.’

  Mum doesn’t say anything. She just makes a face that I think is meant to be a smile, but looks more like a grimace. I wipe my eyes and then go over and make the teas and coffee. Mum doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Thanks, Summer,’ Grandad says, coming in and picking up the mugs. ‘You’re a good girl. I’ll take these through.’

  Then he sees my face and he kind of freezes. He doesn’t say anything for ages. When he finally does, he says, ‘Everything all right, Summer?’

  I nod my head. And then I pretend to busy myself at the dishwasher.

  Johnny

  It’s Saturday morning – nearly Saturday afternoon, to be accurate – and I’m still in bed. I can’t be bothered to get out of bed. I’ve been awake for a while and all the time I’ve been thinking and staring up at the ceiling. I’ve been worrying about the Poisoned Dwarf and trying to work out what to make of what I saw. Her being let out of hospital has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? If she’s been allowed out, she must be better.

  The thing is, she looked bad. She was kind of hobbling. Her skin was the wrong colour. She looked like a corpse. A zombie. A dead person walking. A living person trapped inside a dying body. And I know that it’s all down to us, to what we did that afternoon.

  Surely that’s not it for her though. She’ll get better than that. It’s still only a week or so since it happened, isn’t it? It must take a while for the body to recover. She’ll get back to how she was before it happened. I hope.

  My phone beeps to say I have a message. I roll over and grab it from my bedside table. It’s from Jake.

  Just had a call from Coach — we have next Weds off! Wanna go to the theme park then instead?

  I text him straight back and say yes. What Jake said the other day is right. I need to relax about this. I need to act normal. I need to start having some fun. I need to get on with the rest of my life.

  Summer

  We hardly ever talk about Dad. I don’t know why. We just don’t. But sometimes, if you get Mum in the right mood – usually after she’s had a couple of glasses of wine – she’ll talk. Once she told me all about her and Dad’s plans.

  Right from when they first met, they decided that they wanted to have lots of kids. Mum reckons that Dad wanted enough to play five-a-side football in the garden. Their plan was that after I was born, they were gonna find a house in the countryside, one where they’d have some land, so they could grow their own vegetables and keep chickens and all that kind of stuff. They’d planned to buy an old house that needed loads of work done on it, but with tons of rooms so there’d be space to fit all their kids. There was gonna be an open fire in the living room. Maybe even some woodland around the house. Dad wanted a workshop as well, so Mum could do her painting and he could fix bikes to earn some money. That was their dream. They were gonna try and work part-time and start their own businesses in their spare time, just earn enough to pay the bills. Apparently Nan used to laugh whenever they talked about it
in front of her. She called it their ‘pipe dream’.

  They even knew what the kids were gonna be called. Being kind of hippyish, they wanted all their kids to have natural kind of names. Which is why we’re Sky and Summer. Obviously they didn’t know if they’d have boys or girls, so they had a whole list of names they might use. Some of them were pretty cool, like River and Amber. Some were OK, like Leaf and Rainbow. And some were just outright lame, like Breeze and Jasper. Imagine going through high school with a name like Breeze. You’d be asking for trouble.

  As it happened, they never had their five-a-side football team. Just me and Sky. And they never moved out of London into the countryside. Dad died before I was even born. And that was that.

  I sometimes imagine it though, what it would have been like if it had all happened like Mum and Dad dreamed it. What if I had loads of brothers and sisters and we lived in this mad, rambling house in the country with lots of animals. I think it would have been amazing. I’d love to have younger brothers and sisters. Me and Sky have always got on really well, but she’s been away at uni for the last couple of years and this summer it doesn’t seem like she’s gonna come home at all. I miss her. I feel kind of lonely in the flat every day on my own. I’d love it if there were more of us here. I don’t know what living in the country would be like, seeing as I’ve lived my whole life in Tooting, but I like the idea of it. I’d love to be able to just walk out of the front door and be in the woods.

  But it’s never gonna happen. Mum had another boyfriend for a little while, years after Dad died. I didn’t feel right about it. Neither did Nan. It didn’t last very long. And Mum’s never had another boyfriend since. I don’t think I’d want her to either. It would be weird.

  Johnny

  I wake with a start. I sit up in bed and look at the clock. The red digits glow 2.43 a.m. I rub my head. My hair feels sweaty. I feel disorientated, not sure what on earth is going on. My heart’s beating at a million miles an hour. I take a couple of deep breaths and try and get my thoughts together.

  I look around the room. My window’s wide open. The curtains are blowing in the wind and it’s freezing cold. Moonlight pours in where the curtains blow open. I hear a train rumble along the railway line in the distance and cars on the main road. I get up and go over to the window, close it and lock it.

  I sit on the edge of my bed. My bed feels kind of damp from where I’ve been sweating. I run my hands through my wet hair. I feel on edge and I don’t know why. I try and work out what made me wake up. I think about what I was dreaming about just before I woke up. It was the Poisoned Dwarf, the drive-by and then I saw her, lying in bed as her heart stopped beating. It must have been the bad dream that woke me up.

  One thing’s for sure – I’m wide awake now. But I’m struggling to work out what’s real and what was the dream. I have this image in my head of the Poisoned Dwarf in bed, pale and grey and lifeless. No matter how hard I try, I can’t shift it. It feels too real to be a dream, which sounds mad, I know. But it feels like it’s something I’ve actually seen, something that’s actually happened. I shiver.

  I lie back down on my bed and pull the duvet over me. I close my eyes and move my legs and arms into the position I like them to be in to sleep. I try to go to sleep again.

  I don’t drift off though. I don’t feel right. My head’s buzzing, my heart’s beating too fast. I can still see the Poisoned Dwarf every time I close my eyes and I can’t get comfortable. I shift around my bed, trying to find a good position, trying to block the image from my mind, but it doesn’t work.

  I sit up, grab my pillow and try to puff it up. I lie down on my back, close my eyes and try again to sleep. But when I close my eyes she’s there – the Poisoned Dwarf, at death’s door. Her eyes are open. She fixes me with a look that says, ‘I know what you did’.

  I sit up again and look at the clock. It’s after three now and I’m wide awake. There’s no chance I’m going back to sleep at the moment. So I get out of bed, pull a T-shirt on and go downstairs. Everything’s still and silent, illuminated in a kind of bluey grey colour by the moonlight coming through the back door and the kitchen windows. I go straight into the kitchen, open a cupboard and take out a glass. I open the fridge and take out the milk and pour myself a glass. It’s supposed to make you sleepy, isn’t it? At least, it works for babies.

  I walk over to the back door and, as I sip the milk, I stare out at the garden. It looks unreal out there, bathed in the moonlight, everything completely still. I finish my milk and walk over to the sink, place the glass in there and put the tap on just long enough to fill the glass with water.

  I walk back up the stairs to my bedroom. As soon as I open the door, I realise something isn’t right. My room is seriously cold, like a freezer. I look over at the window. It’s open again. The curtains are billowing wildly. I stand and stare for a second, my brow furrowed. I’m sure I shut the window. I locked it. For definite. How the hell did it come open again? I look around my room, kind of expecting to see Mikey lurking, smirking. But there’s no one here except me.

  I sigh, walk over to the window, close it and lock it. I take the key out of the lock and put it in the drawer of my bedside table. I climb back into bed and pull the covers back over me and try and get some sleep.

  Summer

  The first thing I hear is the telephone. I don’t wake up properly to begin with, but it keeps on ringing. Just as I’m thinking that maybe I should get up and answer it, it stops and I can faintly hear Mum talking. I look at the clock. It’s 6.38 a.m. I sigh, roll over and go back to sleep.

  A little while later, I hear a gentle knock on my door and I look at the clock again. It’s nearly seven o’clock. I think about closing my eyes and going back to sleep, pretending I didn’t hear Mum knock. I’m tired. I didn’t go to bed till after midnight because I was reading. But there’s another gentle knock and Mum’s voice.

  ‘Summer, are you awake?’

  I rub my eyes and sit up in bed. ‘Yeah,’ I say sleepily.

  Mum comes into the room quietly. She perches on the end of my bed like she’s nervous.

  ‘Your grandad just phoned,’ she says. And even before she says any more, I can tell from the tone of her voice and the look on her face that it’s not good news. ‘It’s your nan.’

  I look straight back at her. I get a sudden sinking feeling, even though I kind of knew she was gonna say that.

  ‘She passed away in her sleep last night,’ Mum says. She’s not crying, but she looks sorrowful, like she’s sorry for how I’m gonna feel about it.

  I brush my hair back away from my face.

  ‘Grandad tried to wake her this morning, but . . .’ She trails off. She touches my face and gives me a sad, sympathetic smile. ‘It would have been painless. She wouldn’t have felt a thing.’

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Is Grandad all right?’ I ask.

  Mum screws her face up, like she doesn’t know what to think either. ‘It’s difficult to tell, Summer. I think he was still a bit shocked, to tell you the truth. He’d only just found her. I’m going to take the day off work today. I said I’d go over there and help him out.’

  ‘Can I come too?’

  ‘Of course, if you want to.’

  ‘Yeah. I do.’

  Mum touches my face again.

  ‘Have you told Sky?’

  Mum shakes her head. ‘I’ll give her a call later on.’

  Johnny

  I wake up late. My eyes struggle to focus on the digits on my clock as I open them. I feel rubbish. I haven’t had enough sleep.

  But that’s not what’s bothering me. It’s the fact that I feel anxious, like something isn’t right. I can’t put my finger on it. Oh God, what am I on about? I must be tired.

  Last night was weird, waking up in the middle of the night. It felt strange, as though someone was there, in my room. And so was the dream that I had before I woke up. The Poisoned Dwarf dying. Dead. It makes me feel ill with nerves.
So I try and think about something else. I sit up in bed. I look over at the window. It’s closed, like I left it at three in the morning. I get up out of bed and go and take a look at it. I try the handle, but it’s locked. I study the window frame and the sill. I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m looking for, but I guess if someone had been messing with it, they might have left some sign. I know for sure that I shut the window before I went to bed and I also locked it before I went downstairs and got a drink. Somebody messed with it. Someone must have.

  I can’t see anything strange on the window though. It’s just like it always is: a cheap white plastic frame. No odd marks on it. No sign of it being forced. I rub my face with my hands. Maybe I was wrong last night. Maybe I dreamed shutting the window. Maybe I even dreamed waking up and going downstairs. Who knows?

  I go over to my bedside table and open the drawer. The window key’s still in there. I take it out and walk over to the window. I unlock the window and open it, lean out a little and look on the outside. There’s nothing strange there. I shut the window, lock it and put the key back in my bedside drawer. I go and have a shower to try and wash it all out of my system.

  When I get downstairs, Mikey’s already there, eating his breakfast like a wild animal – mouth wide open, gulping and gnawing and chomping. I see the free newspaper next to him on the table. I grab it to take through to the bin.

  ‘Hey,’ Mikey says. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘The newspaper.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I was reading that –’

  I raise my eyebrow. ‘Since when have you started reading the local paper?’

  Mikey smiles. ‘Since they started having cool stories about drive-by shootings on the cover.’

  I shake my head. ‘Idiot,’ I say.

  I drop the paper back on the table and then go through and make myself some breakfast. I bring my bowl through and sit at the table with Mikey, but I look out of the window as I eat so I don’t have to look at or talk to him.