Page 71 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

Someone is thumping on the door. Janet lies in the hallway with a ragged burn hole in her forehead and her eyes wide open. She is motionless, but blood trickles from her nose, down her cheek and drips quietly, tap-tap-tap, on the wooden floor.

Frankie and Ashley stare at each other, for a moment united in panic, but then he drops the gun and runs for the back of the house, his movement unsteady on his injured limbs, the kitchen door banging open as he goes.

Frankie drops to her knees beside Janet, as the front door thuds grow ever more insistent.

She presses her fingers to the older woman’s soft neck, crying out as she makes contact. It’s very obviously too late.

Frankie’s hands smear blood on the door as she pulls it open and blinks out at the faces. Pale panicked faces of a man in his forties with kind eyes. Just behind him, a teenage girl. The teenage girl.

‘Juno here came to our house for help,’ the man says. ‘We came to look for you.’

‘Juno,’ Frankie says, dazed. ‘I never asked your name.’

‘I ran across some fields and found their house, I told them about the crash,’ Juno says, staring not at Frankie but at the body of Janet. The man is looking at Frankie’s hands, and the gun lying behind her.

‘I didn’t …’ she starts.

‘Help me!’ another man’s voice calls, somewhere near the road.

‘Nathan,’ the man shouts, rushing in the direction of the voice.

Juno steps forward, grabs Frankie by the wrist and guides her out of the house. ‘I told them what the Curtiss brothers did to us. They’re here to help your boyfriend.’

In the road, next to a Jeep seemingly filled with writhing greyhounds, the two men are holding Ashley Curtiss down. The light from the Jeep’s headlamps pools around them, all three men look wildly out of their depth.

She hears Ashley say, ‘I’m sorry.’ The words are muffled, his lips pressed into the tarmac. He is limp, exhausted and no longer fighting. The blood from his injuries now a dark red.

‘This was all my fault,’ Frankie says, turning to look back into the cottage but Juno shakes her head.

‘Don’t look back,’ she says to Frankie, pulling a tissue from her coat pocket and wiping the blood from Frankie’s hands, so gently that Frankie starts to weep.

Ashley bucks his body one final time and then appears to pass out. ‘This was all their fault, not yours,’ one of the men says, gesturing to Ashley without loosening his grip.

‘And we’ll make sure the police know that. I’m Mark, by the way, and this is Nathan.’

With one hand and a knee still on a felled Ashley, Nathan pulls his phone from his pocket. The dogs watch with mild interest from the Jeep windows.

‘The network’s back!’ He dials 999 and then looks at Frankie. ‘It’s ringing. Tell me where you crashed.’

Frankie should not be sitting here. Frankie should be with Otis. Wherever the doctors have put his temporary trolley while they try to fix him, that’s where she should be.

Although neither of them should really be in this chaotically busy hospital, where walking wounded like her sit in shocked piles anywhere they can find floor space, staring at nothing or trying to make contact on devices with hardly any battery, through networks that keep falling over under the strain.

Whispering calls to find out who made it, urgently thumbing screens.

Frankie and Otis should never have come to Devon. They should be at home in their flat, milky brew and trash TV, maybe a book in the crook of her arm. Toast. Lots of toast. And crisps. Life can’t be that bad if we’ve still got crisps.

But there are no crisps, nor tea and toast. The vending machines were emptied during the fifty-nine minutes, a nurse told her, the kitchens turned over.

A local warehouse has promised to bring supplies, but nothing has arrived.

Frankie thinks, stupidly, of the flapjack back at the cottage, the fancy soap. She’s so hungry, she’d eat them both.

When will they let Janet’s daughter know? And her granddaughter?

There is a TV in the ward, turned up high to do battle with the crying and the low moans of pain that permeate the whole hospital.

It’s well past midnight but no one will be sleeping tonight.

All those crammed into the ward stare at the screen bringing news from around the country, tributes and promises from across the world.

Earlier, the television news said the north was ‘relatively unscathed’.

This has already turned out to be very relative because, by most normal measures, it was extremely scathed.

But compared to the gridlocked Midlands with the multiple fatal pile-ups on the M40, the M6 and the M1, compared to the south where people jumped into their cars out of habit and slammed into each other, with nowhere to actually go, the north was lucky.

As Frankie drinks tap water from a paper cup, the Manchester mayor is interviewed. In the coming months, the statement he just made will become an ironic T-shirt slogan and reframed as multiple memes: ‘The North is alright.’ But no one is laughing yet.

Time has become doughy, hard to measure. She knows she has asked repeatedly about Otis. Where is he? When can they leave? Can he be transferred to Wythenshawe or the Manchester Royal Infirmary or St Mary’s or anywhere up there, anywhere but here? But no one can say.

The police got to Ashley quicker than the ambulance got to Otis.

She’d gone to wait at the car with Juno, holding Otis’s limp hand, while Mark and Nathan stayed outside the cottage.

Otis didn’t wake up. So maybe he is dead, and they’re just not telling her.

By leaving him in the car like that, alone and damaged, maybe she killed him.

Just like she killed Janet by leading that man to the cottage. Maybe no one is safe from her.