Free Ibrahim & Reenie by David Llewellyn Page A

subside. It would escalate, consuming him; his thoughts a maelstrom of derailings, head-on collisions, deafening flames and black, volcanic clouds of smoke.
    On the night of the crash, his heart had stopped beating twice, but he had no memory of this, and so he wondered obsessively how the instance of death in another accident might feel. Would it be a sudden going out of the lights, or would that split second be drawn out, an infinite scream of white noise and searing pain; the unending awareness that this was terminal?
    He entered England halfway across the bridge spanning the River Wye, and he stopped there, at that halfway point, and looked back the way he’d come. He wasn’t sure what he left behind, but it felt as if he’d passed a point of no return, as if to go back now wasn’t just an act of surrender, but a physical impossibility.
    On the English side of the bridge the road narrowed down from four lanes to two. A dog leashed to the gate of a farmhouse strained against its rope and barked at him as he walked past, and the sheep in an opposite field followed him with their communal, blank-eyed gaze. He passed small towns and villages he’d never heard of, places that sounded almost fictionally quaint, like Wibdon and Stroat, and he entertained himself by imagining the petty rivalries between villages – the flower competitions and lawn bowls tournaments that turned nasty; the cider festivals where local lads became provincial Bloods and Crips.
    He wanted to carry on walking, but he was weak. His stomach ached with hunger, and his mouth was sandpaper dry. Lydney, the place he’d hoped to reach the night before, was only a few miles ahead, but they were a few miles too many. Now, out here between the towns and cities, he realised there were few places he would find shelter. There were no guesthouses or bed and breakfasts, and besides, he doubted any guesthouse would take him in. To the owner of a guesthouse in rural Gloucestershire, he imagined he would look as outlandish, as intimidating, as a Viking.
    Instead, he left the road and searched for a place where he could hide – from the road, from the locals, from the elements – settling on a barn that stood a hundred metres or more from its farmhouse. There were no cattle inside or nearby, just bales of hay and what might be bats fluttering in the shadowed beams above him. Though he had virtually no sense of smell – hadn’t enjoyed a sense of smell since the accident – the air itself tasted sickly sweet, of cow dung and fresh hay.
    He found a place to sleep, hidden from the view of anyone passing the barn’s open door. The hay was comfortable enough; despite the straws piercing his sleeping bag and clothes and jabbing into his flesh it was better than the previous night’s hard bed beneath the motorway.
    It was a cloudy night, and once the sun had set the darkness was absolute. Even when he’d been lying in the dark, trying to sleep, for an hour or more, his eyes failed to adjust. Holding his hand before his face, he still couldn’t see the outline of his fingers. He heard what sounded like a screaming baby, echoing across the fields: a desperate, chilling scream. A fox. It had to be a fox.
    Another scream, and he shuddered.
    There were few other noises that night, but in a way he found the absence of a city’s constant drone – traffic, helicopters, sirens – more distracting. Any sound, however small, was amplified by the stillness. A wooden beam creaking as it expanded in the damp night air became the mast of a tall ship sailing into a storm. A single bat flying across the barn became a whole colony of leather-winged nightmares. His feet and legs throbbed painfully, and in the seconds before he fell asleep it felt as though he was still walking, his whole body rocking forward with each imaginary footstep.

9
    It was no surprise to find herself alone; she hadn’t expected any different.