Page 2 of 59 Minutes
FRANKIE
Frankie wakes in the passenger seat, bent-necked and Picassoed in the warped wing mirror.
She fell asleep somewhere near Bristol, although everywhere looks the same from the motorway.
Warehoused fringes and constellations of Lego houses, their roofs just peeping out over the noise-proof fencing on either side of the carriageway.
While she slept, the road thinned from a multi-lane monster into a fragile grey ribbon. No more bright service stations, just the empty shells of old Little Chef diners.
Cottages and trees now creep to the edge of the tarmac, dusted exhaust grey.
Spread out and a million miles from a city, they look like locations from horror films or true crime shows, where young women break down in their cars, stumble into sex dungeons and are never seen again.
Then people like Frankie and Otis watch documentaries about them to unwind after work.
They are now in – or is it on – Dartmoor, and Otis is threading his way between rust-coloured banks, trees looming over them from either side.
‘These names,’ Otis says at every signpost they pass. ‘Sticklepath!’
Frankie joins in. ‘Black-a-Tor Corpse.’
‘ Copse .’ He laughs with a kind of manic delight. ‘Not corpse. You massive goth.’
‘Is that a Dartmoor pony?’ she says, drily, pointing to a huge black horse, hair shining like granite, plodding along the fringe of a field.
‘Yes.’ Otis laughs. ‘Definitely.’
They play the Dartmoor pony game as they pass sheep and cows too. And when three pheasants leap out and zigzag like nutters in front of them, Otis jokes that each one of them is a Dartmoor pony, too. ‘And him, and him, and that fella too.’
Booking this romantic weekend break for them was a typically Otis move, though she hadn’t expected him to book somewhere so far away from Manchester.
There are moors in the north, there is the epic beauty of the Lake District.
But she likes a road trip, and she likes the two of them in his car, expanding their shared map.
He has been reading guidebooks every night for the past three weeks, flipping through them in bed and reading aloud from the chapters he thinks she’ll like best.
Signs for Princetown begin, and Otis says that’s a euphemism for Dartmoor Prison. ‘Some really bad pennies in there, Frankie. Proper rotten eggs.’
They sweep through a village called Chagford, so perfect it might have been pieced together from Pinterest boards.
The Christmas lights and decorations are strung up already but not switched on, as if pencil-sketched over the mellow market square.
And now they’re out of the village again and weaving through a network of lanes that might be called paths in other circumstances.
A blood-red tractor appears, bearing down from the other direction.
Most of the lanes have regular passing spaces bitten out of them but not this one.
As the nonchalant farmer watches, Otis reverses jerkily and pulls into the driveway of a house, just a few minutes from the village but standing completely alone.
She thinks again of the archetypal true crime setting, imagines what – or who – the householders might have in their cellar as Otis grinds the gears, his ears pink with embarrassment.
They finally reach their own rented holiday cottage. Square and squat, with cloudy walls of thick, creamy stone and a scratchy thatched roof. She nods that yes, it is lovely, and keeps all her jokes about true crime shows to herself.
Visibly relieved, Otis grabs the weekend bags with gusto and jogs off to the front door.
She follows slowly and finds Otis in the kitchen, rifling through the welcome basket like it’s a Christmas stocking.
A bottle of cider, some jams, a slab of flapjack, a loaf of bread, an artisanal bag of crisps and a frou-frou bar of handmade soap that Frankie will take home and never use.
The fridge is an empty shock of white, but for one pint of milk and some local butter wrapped in paper.
In the bedroom upstairs, beams run up the walls and across the ceiling, caging them in like the ribs of a giant beast. They sit on the bed and bounce briefly in surprise, shoved from underneath by eager springs.
It unbalances her so she tips towards Otis’s torso and he wraps a solid arm around her, his hand then snaking down her side and grabbing her buttock.
‘Oi,’ she says, but she loves it.
He smells of warm toast and black pepper.
She closes her eyes and soaks up his heat but when she opens them, she sees Otis watching her in the ornate mirror.
She can see how they must look to other people.
Her, small, pale and solemn with thick, dark bird’s nest hair.
Him, huge, blond, tanned and smiling, like a real-life Beach Boy.
No one else gets it, but it works. It works perfectly.
‘Are you okay?’ he says. ‘You’re smiling.’
‘I am okay.’ She’s smiling even more now. ‘I’m really … really okay.’
He sags with relief. ‘I think I love you,’ he says, resting his Labrador head on hers. He always says this, like a mantra. Ever since the first time, over fish and chips, squished together on a bench under the electric lights of Ancoats Green.
‘I think I love you too,’ she replies, as she did then.
And now, suddenly, it is the perfect time. ‘And I have something … there’s something I need to tell you.’
Her phone makes a loud beeping sound on the bed next to her but the same sound also seems to come from downstairs. Is that his phone getting a text too? She ignores them both.
‘What is it?’ he says. ‘What do you have to tell me?’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘the simple fact is that I’m pregnant. I am with child.’
‘What?’ He laughs and she realises he’s still watching her in the mirror. His laughter dies in his throat and his eyes bulge. ‘Like, actually?’
‘Like actually. God, is that alright?’
For a moment, he says nothing. Wets his lips, swallows. And finally smiles.
‘Of course it’s alright, you weirdo! It’s bloody brilliant! How … how pregnant are you? You don’t look pregnant.’
‘You don’t get a massive belly on day one, dingus.’
Her phone makes that same sound again. A long screech that she’s never heard it make before.
She doesn’t mean to look at it, she means to answer Otis properly, to tell him that she did the test yesterday, that she is five days late and doesn’t know quite how because they’ve always been so careful.
Careful most of the time. Careful when sober.
And that, while she had always been ambivalent about kids …
now it’s happened, with him, she is the very opposite of ambivalent.
She’s super-bivalent . She’s bloody delighted.
But she doesn’t say any of this, because the screen is right there and she reads it before she realises what she’s doing. And her blood turns to ice.
SEVERE ALERT. NUCLEAR MISSILE THREAT TO SOUTH ENGLAND. 59 MINUTES UNTIL IMPACT. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A TEST.