Page 17 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

‘We can’t get through,’ Otis says, staring at the cluster of abandoned cars. As his engine idles, he drags both hands down his face, Scream-masking himself. He reverses a few metres, keeping some space all around the old Mercedes, which suddenly feels enormous.

The lane snakes around a tight bend, it is impossible to know how many cars are ahead. Frankie swallows back her rising nausea.

Otis squeezes her hand quickly, shuts off the engine and gets out. She wrestles out of her seat belt and opens the door. Her coat is back at the cottage and the cold air smarts her skin, the wind feels like a personal attack.

‘Can you run in those?’ He points to her clumpy boots.

‘I’ll have to try.’ His much bigger hand swallows hers like a mitt and then, hefty in her boots, she starts to run.

They weave and dodge through cars, some nosed up on the pavement, some two abreast, or diagonal. People clearly tried to do this neatly at first, even in panic. But it didn’t work.

They pass a Fiat 500 with a tiny Yorkie dog going nuts on the back seat, his desperate teeth chomping at the windows, limbs whirling.

The small car is entirely wedged in, will his owner be able to get him out?

Get him home? How many dogs will be left outside, cats too …

it’s not like they’ll have received the emergency alert. Oh god, all the ponies.

As they skim the car, the Yorkie cries plaintively and Frankie has to look away or she’ll be breaking in to rescue him. He looks just like her parents’ dog, out in Spain.

‘Cough the dog’ was originally called Bartholomew, which her mum thought was distinguished. He got told to ‘fuck off’ from under her dad’s big feet so many times he started responding to the name. Fuck off. Cough. Cough the dog. She wonders if they’re—

‘Ow!’

‘God, are you okay?’ Otis stops suddenly, his hand dropping from hers and moving towards her hip but she pushes him away, panicked.

‘I …’ she gasps.

She’d not seen the wing mirror there, jutting like a prank, clipping her hard on the side as she squeezed through. How had she not seen it? It was right there. But Otis was pulling her and she was miles away, thinking about her parents and …

‘The baby,’ Otis says, but it’s a question. She rubs her side, it’s not her belly so she shakes her head.

‘We need to go,’ he says, gently.

‘Don’t pull me so fucking hard,’ she says, even though she knows it’s not his fault. He looks wounded, but he starts to move again and she follows.

Otis strides ahead and Frankie shuffles after him.

He clearly wants to run, but every step for her is hard in these boots and she doesn’t even have the spare breath to ask him to slow down, let alone to run with him.

She’s never been sporty, unlike Otis, and, for most of her life, stayed thin the same way her mum and her aunties did.

The smoking of fags and the denial of pleasure.

They follow a conch shell of lanes, turn a corner and finally see the village.

The skeletal decorations still hang dormant.

Will everyone still be sheltering at Christmas?

Will anyone be keeping track of the date by then?

How many people in this village will die, either from the strike or the fallout?

They should have lit these decorations today, had one last hurrah.

Just down the road, a queue leads to a grocery shop.

It is unnervingly orderly. As they join the back of the queue, she says, ‘We shouldn’t have left the fucking north.

’ She says this instead of saying she’s terrified and her hip hurts.

That she hates how dependent she’s being on him.

That she was always so worried she’d end up like her mum, negotiating a marriage that was more like a terror campaign.

She was so happy, just eighteen minutes ago, to know that her child would never experience that kind of fear.

And now, in utero, they face something immeasurably worse.

‘I thought you wanted to go away,’ Otis says. ‘You seemed really happy.’

‘I was really happy,’ she says, louder than intended. Two wax-jacketed women queuing in front of them turn to look, then turn back. ‘I was really happy. Otis, I was so fucking happy. I’m sorry.’

A woman rushes out of the shop ahead of them, hugging a full carrier bag to her body as she runs down the road away from the village square. A rumble of disapproval spreads. ‘There’ll be nothing left,’ one of the women in front says as they all take a collective step forward.

‘This is my fault,’ Otis says, pulling at his hair. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you all this way, I shouldn’t have risked you or—’

‘We’ll be okay,’ one of the wax jackets says to Otis, her voice kind. She gestures to the church behind them. ‘He will look after us.’ She smiles and pats Otis on the arm. ‘Just trust in Him.’

For a moment no one says anything else. The crowd turn back and then Frankie looks at Otis and he at her.

Her shoulders start to shake with delirious laughter.

When people in films laugh during a crisis, she rolls her eyes.

That would never happen. Unrealistic. But it does now.

She shakes and laughs, a fraction away from hysteria.

She feels like she did when she first ate a chocolate brownie loaded with weed, a million years ago.

Laughter that took her over, threw her around like a rag doll.

Otis watches her, alarmed at first. Then his own shoulders shake and his face folds and he is laughing, and she is laughing and then he is crying and she is holding him and he’s gulping great wretched sobs and she’s telling him it’s really not his fault, none of it, and she’s trying to convince herself that she doesn’t blame him, not at all.

Even though the Lake District was right there.