Dark Tides (4 page)

The hazard sign at the beginning of the Mountain Road had been flashing amber in the grey drizzle as we left Onchan:
WARNING
.
FOG
.

For some people, that would have been enough to make them take extra care or even turn back. Not Scott. He accelerated hard into the swirling gloom, windscreen wipers thumping from side to side, headlamps illuminating the thick smog from within like sheet lightning inside a storm cloud. He was reclined way back in his seat, arms straight and elbows locked, the back of his skull pressed against his headrest as if by some monumental G-force.

The Mountain Road is the most famous section of the TT course, a historic and perilous sequence of fast straights, sweeping bends and multiple accident blackspots. And that’s fine when the road is closed for the races. But it becomes a problem when boy racers like Scott take to the tarmac and drive as if they’re playing a video game.

It didn’t help that Scott was training at a local garage as an apprentice mechanic. His job had only increased his love of fast cars and speed and it had given him access to a wide variety of customer vehicles. Some were rusty old wrecks. Most were mundane family cars. But some, like tonight, were powerful, luxurious and expensive.

I couldn’t tell you the exact type of vehicle we were in. Scott had reeled off the manufacturer and the model and the engine size as if it was shorthand for something altogether more significant about himself, but the information had meant nothing to me. What I
did
know was that it was a lavish four-wheel-drive SUV with a gleaming metal bull bar on the front, a fancy leather interior, and a six-speaker stereo that was capable of playing hip-hop music seriously loud.

The other thing I knew, or at least suspected, was that Scott wasn’t really supposed to have ‘borrowed’ the car from the garage where he worked. But then, this was Scott’s Hop-tu-naa; his year to decide what we should do. And if he wanted to risk his job by taking us joyriding, I had no problem with that.

The part I
did
have a problem with was being killed while he was at it.

I was clutching the sculpted sides of the front passenger seat, peering through the misted windscreen at the darkly blurred tarmac hurtling towards us. We’d passed the corner known as Kate’s Cottage just moments ago and were gaining height all the time. The fog just got worse. I knew there were open fields on either side of us. I knew there were steep drops and sudden gullies and low wire fences. There were brick huts for the TT race marshals. There was oncoming traffic. If Scott made a mistake, we’d crash for sure.

Not that the others seemed concerned. I tore my eyes away from the road and glanced over my shoulder. Rachel was jammed between Callum and Mark on the rear bench. David was sitting in the boot. They were all moving their bodies with the music booming through the speakers, nodding their heads to the staccato rhythm. Rachel caught my eye and made some kind of rap gesture with her hands, her fingers pointed at me like pistols, her mouth wide open in a mock-ghetto pose.

She was my best friend. My one true friend. And though it seemed normal by now, when I really thought about it, it still struck me as odd because we had so little in common. Rachel didn’t care about books or poetry or plays. She liked movies, provided they were rom-coms or action thrillers, especially if they starred Ben Affleck or Leonardo DiCaprio, but she’d roll her eyes if I suggested watching a period drama or anything from Hollywood’s Golden Age. She never listened to the radio unless it was a station playing pop music. She liked MTV and
Heat
magazine and reality television shows. She’d yawn theatrically if I tried to discuss something I’d read in the
Guardian
or mentioned an essay I was writing for my English A-level course.

I was the only one of us still at school. The boys were too old and Rachel had left at sixteen to take up a job in her mum’s hairdressing salon. Most of her days were spent taking appointments, making cups of tea or sweeping the floor. She wasn’t trusted to cut hair yet, though that hadn’t stopped her from reinventing my look whenever the mood took her. Lately, she’d given me an asymmetrical bob that she’d meant to be symmetrical when she started out.

She yelled at me, ‘Hey, I love this song,’ and I smiled, because I was pretty sure she’d never heard it before. The CD belonged to Scott. I guessed someone, somewhere, had told him it was credible.

‘Me too,’ I shouted. ‘I have all their albums.’

‘I’ve got their poster on my wall.’

‘I’ve been to every gig they’ve ever done.’

She threw back her head and cackled, then rocked in time with the tempo, bashing her hips into Callum and Mark, clicking her fingers.

Callum winked at me. It had been several weeks after our first Hop-tu-naa before I’d seen his face. He hadn’t looked anything like his emaciated ghost mask might have led me to believe. He was strong and athletic, with a large square head and the mangled ears of a rugby player. He had good skin and thick brown hair that kicked up into a spike at the front. He got a lot of attention from girls, and I could understand why. He looked wholesome enough, but with just a hint of the bad boy about him.

Rachel flirted with him all the time. Problem was, I knew she was just goofing around but I was pretty sure Callum was really into her. She didn’t notice the wounded look he sometimes got when she draped herself over Mark, or planted a kiss on Scott’s cheek in return for a free drink. Just because she didn’t take herself seriously, she forgot that other people might. I’d tried to set her straight. I’d told her to cool it with Callum before she really hurt him. But she’d rolled her eyes and said, ‘Oh,
puh-lease
,’ and so tonight, like most nights, Callum seemed to be under the impression that something might actually happen between them.

Still, when he wasn’t drooling over Rachel, I liked him a lot. He and David were planning to go backpacking through Thailand early in the new year and I thought they’d make a good team. David was smart and mature but Callum was worldly and tough. He spent most of his spare time sea kayaking, rock climbing or camping. He wouldn’t be fazed by anything travelling might throw at them.

I wasn’t sure how Mark felt about their trip. He’d been quiet whenever it was mentioned, and I guessed it was because there was no way he could afford to go. His mum had kicked him out and forced him to get a crappy place of his own as soon as he’d turned sixteen. He never mentioned his dad, though Rachel had told me that he’d left when Mark was young. The pain of a missing parent was a bond we shared.

Just at the moment, he was working at one of the kipper smokehouses in Peel. We joked about it sometimes, but not often. There wasn’t a lot that was funny about Mark’s life. The time he’d served for burglary as a young offender meant that he wasn’t likely to catch a break any time soon. As for break-
ins
, we didn’t talk about those either, though I’d heard enough from the others to suspect that Mark hadn’t exactly reformed. I didn’t ask him about it and Mark didn’t tell. I figured it was better that way. I liked the side of him I knew.

It had taken me a little while to understand how Mark fitted into the group. He didn’t hang out with us on a regular basis – partly because of his shift patterns, partly because he was a natural loner, like me. He always made it along for Hop-tu-naa. He caught up with us five or six times a year other than that. So how had a kid from the wrong side of the tracks become friends with three middle-class lads like David, Callum and Scott?

‘Hero complex,’ Rachel had told me once, and when I pressed her for more, she said that Mark had stood up for David when some older kids were bullying him at school. He ended up taking a beating on David’s behalf and getting into trouble for fighting so ferociously. The upshot was David felt like he owed Mark, but more than that, I got the feeling Mark had become a kind of project for David. He wanted to rehabilitate him. Wanted to help him lead a better life.

Good luck, was all I could think. In my experience, people didn’t change all that much. I never had. I had friends now but I was still shy, still anxious. And one look at Mark was all you needed to sense the anger and bitterness that lurked inside, crackling under the surface. If Dad had been more engaged with my life, Mark was exactly the type of boy he should have forbidden me from hanging out with.

The SUV lurched and I swung my head back around to see Scott sawing at the wheel. We’d veered out over the centre line in the middle of a corner.

I stared at the side of Scott’s face, stained green by the electronic glow from the dash.

‘This fog’s pretty bad.’

‘Relax. There’s nobody up here, anyway.’

Just as he said it, a pair of headlamps emerged from the gloom and a white van blitzed past.

‘Correction,
hardly
anyone.’

‘You could slow down a bit.’

‘I know what I’m doing.’

Yeah, killing us, I thought. But I didn’t say anything more. He’d only tell me I was boring. I spent most of my life
feeling
as if I was boring and it seemed like it could only be a matter of time before everyone else reached the same verdict.

I drew my feet back a little and checked the tension of my seatbelt. The fog through the windscreen was thicker than ever. It was a solid grey mass.

The SUV’s big engine purred and hummed and vibrated. The note changed fractionally whenever Scott raised his foot from the accelerator or blipped the brake pedal. He didn’t do either very much. If I could have snapped my fingers and made the fog magically evaporate, I didn’t believe his speed would increase at all.

The track on the stereo finished abruptly and a new song started playing. It sounded just the same as the one before, except maybe the rapper was swearing more.

‘Turn coming up,’ David yelled from the boot.

So perhaps I wasn’t the only one who was worried.

A raised footbridge materialised from the gloom and I glimpsed the unlit warning sign for the level crossing belonging to the mountain railway.

Scott braked hard and heaved the steering wheel to the left. I grasped for the moulded handle in my door and felt the suspension go light. There was a moment of weightlessness before we thumped back down, tyres chewing into the misted road surface. The SUV shimmied, then straightened out and powered on.

We thundered over a cattle grid, tyres juddering fast, and plunged down the narrow track that skirted the mountain.

I guessed Scott wanted to prove something by driving so fast. I always got the impression he was overreaching; trying to be someone he couldn’t possibly be. He’d never be the funny one in the group. Never be the cool one or the dangerous one or the handsome one. He was just average. Just Scott.

The wiper blades beat furiously.

‘Scott,’ I tried again.

Big mistake. He stomped on the accelerator and the SUV surged forwards.

The road dipped suddenly and Rachel whooped and raised her hands above her head as if she was riding a roller coaster. We were losing height all the time. Visibility was starting to improve. The fog was thinning out, breaking down into wafting bands and misty streaks that writhed and twirled in the glare of our headlamps.

Below us to our left, I could see the blue-black slick of Sulby reservoir and the ruins of an old stone barn. Sheep dotted the fields or chewed grass by the side of the road. We blitzed on, the tarmac glistening. A plantation appeared on our right, the grey pines looming high and thin and damp in the frigid condensation.

We were coming up fast on another cattle grid. A low yellow wall funnelled the road into a single lane. Scott didn’t slow. The tyres zipped over the gridded bars, pummelling the suspension, my soft leather seat absorbing the blows.

Then the headlamps picked up something else.

A sheep – a Manx Loaghtan – standing sideways on in the middle of the road.

The sheep raised its head. It had a long, tan face and bulging yellow eyes. Its wool was brown and it had four horns: two long and splayed on the top of its skull, and two short and curved.

Scott stamped on the brake pedal.

The discs bit instantly. Fiercely. They squealed and locked and the chunky off-road tyres skated across the greased blacktop. But the SUV’s mass was considerable. There was a lot of metal and plastic and glass. A big engine. Six passengers. Plus we’d been moving at high speed. We had a lot of momentum. There was no way we were going to stop in time.

The sheep didn’t flinch or rear up or try to dodge out of the way. It almost seemed resigned to what was about to happen.

The massive bonnet bore down on it. Then the treads gained traction and we started to slow.

But not enough.

The bull bar punted into the sheep with a hollow-sounding
whump
. The creature was launched from the ground. It arced in the air, then bounced and bounced again. It spun on its hindquarters and came to a rest on its side.

We skidded to a halt. Scott yanked on the handbrake and lifted his foot from the clutch, but he’d forgotten to put the SUV into neutral and the engine seized and juddered, then stalled with a jolt. The stereo died. Scott snatched his hands away from the wheel.

Everything was silent for a long moment. Tyre smoke wafted up through the glare of the headlamps. The wiper blades had stopped on a slant.

‘Holy shit.’

‘Is everyone all right?’

‘Not the sheep.’

‘I thought it was coming through the windscreen.’

‘Me too. I thought we were screwed.’

I pushed myself back from the dashboard and raised my head. I’d been twisted sideways by the force of the sudden braking and had slipped half down under the strap of my seatbelt. A hot pain ripped up the side of my neck.

I eased my head from side to side. It rotated to the right with a grinding crunch. It wouldn’t move to the left very far at all.

‘It just came out of nowhere.’ Scott’s jaw was hanging open. ‘You saw that, right? It just stepped out in front of me.’

Nobody said a word. The quiet lingered.