Free Blink of an Eye (2013) by Cath Staincliffe

have, but at the same time I wanted him to keep talking.
    ‘We went right across the road on the roof, towards the river. The railings stopped us, they ripped through the back. I was shouting, I remember shouting, but Naomi, she was . . .’ He blinked, put his good hand to his forehead, a fist next to the swelling. ‘She was . . . she didn’t answer, she couldn’t. I undid the seat belts, got my door open and went round and tried to get hers open. There was this really, really strong smell of petrol.’
    Phil squeezed my hand. I put my other hand on his arm, needing more contact, more connection.
    ‘I got her out, pulled her away from the car. She, erm . . .’ Now his eyes glistened and he opened his mouth, a silent cry. After a few moments he spoke again. ‘She wasn’t doing anything, not breathing. Her eyes . . . I thought she was dead.’ He dipped his head and sniffed. ‘There was no heartbeat. Her face was bleeding. The bike was on the railings like it had fallen from the sky and the little girl, she . . .’ He covered his eyes. I looked at Phil, tears welling in my throat. ‘The petrol tank, it blew. And I rang the ambulance.’
    There it was. The facts.
    Unbearable.
    ‘You saved her,’ I told him, reaching out to touch his arm. ‘You got her out.’
    ‘Alex,’ said Phil, ‘you’ve no idea how much that means to us.’
    ‘I thought she was dead,’ he said again, and he began to cry, silently, his shoulders shaking, tears spilling down his pale cheeks.
    I was delighted when Naomi met Alex. The boyfriend before had been very full of himself from what I’d heard, and unreliable. He’d let her down on several occasions. She’d get all excited about some arrangement, a concert or whatever, and at the last minute he’d rearrange or bring extra friends or be horribly late. If she complained, he accused her of being a whiner. He made her unhappy.
    I tried telling her to talk to him calmly about it in between any actual crises, but she dismissed me. ‘He won’t listen, he hates that sort of thing.’
Being told his behaviour is unacceptable?
‘He just doesn’t think.’
Doesn’t care, more like.
    You can’t tell them how to live their lives, much as I sometimes yearn to.
    Alex was a ray of hope. He’s exactly a year older than Naomi; they share the same birthday. ‘How cool is that!’ Naomi crowed when she told us. His parents are divorced and his dad, who’s American, lives in the States. Alex is quiet, quieter than Phil, say, or Jonty, but not shy. He’s clever, too, intelligent. I guess he’d have to be to study law.
    He’s a bit geeky, up with all the social networking stuff, Facebook and Twitter and so on, but perhaps that’s my age showing. Nowadays that’s normal, isn’t it, not geeky?
    Alex has travelled a lot more than any of us. His mother’s an air hostess and they get reductions on flights. I was green with envy at that. It was something we talked about a lot, Alex and I, with me picking up tips for my world tour with Phil. Alex raved about Vietnam and Japan. Told us we must look up his dad if we ever got to San Francisco.
    Neither Suzanne nor Naomi took a gap year to see the world, which was all the rage at the time. Suzanne was too intent on getting a degree and finding a job; she had her next ten years mapped out, and bumming round the planet wasn’t on the itinerary. Naomi never really got the chance. She had to repeat the first year of sixth form when everything went pear-shaped, and just getting her back on track was the priority.
    She was skint, anyway. The way things stood, if she had found a way to travel, I’d have been really worried that she wouldn’t cope with the pressures and temptations. Or that she’d end up in danger, getting mugged or raped, or suffer some terrible accident and we’d have to fly out and bring her home. My faith in her was at a low point then.
    But by the time she and Alex got together, some four years later, she was back to her old