Page 58 of Merry & Bright
The quick, dirty thrill of pulling someone.
Of scoring.
Of surrendering himself to someone else—giving up all control.
How the hell had he gone nearly a year without a single night like that?
God, he was going to get so drunk tonight. The hangover would be horrendous after a year’s worth of quiet weekends, but it would be worth it.
The next rise loomed, the last one on the way up to the Rest. Cam took the Volvo down to second gear as he approached, grimacing as the clutch scraped again. His anxiety ebbed a bit when the noise died away and the car began to steadily climb the hill, but when the hill levelled off and he rounded the bend, he had to bring the Volvo to an abrupt stop.
“Shit.”
There was rock everywhere, all over the road and several feet high. Rock and mud and clumps of vegetation that Cam realised had sloughed right off the side of the mountain.
A landslide.
They happened with notorious regularity here at the Rest, though Cam had never seen one himself before. This one must have only just happened given that the road was still open, and there were no traffic cones blocking the area off with flimsy neon officialdom.
Cam had stopped the Volvo a few feet away from the edge of the debris. He stared out his windscreen at the stony river being illuminated by the car’s headlights and found himself wondering if there was any chance of driving over those sharp, rocky teeth, before rejecting the idea as absurd.
“Fucking hell.” His voice sounded too loud in the eerie silence.
Releasing his seatbelt, Cam got out of the Volvo, slamming the door behind him and zipping his elderly North Face jacket up against the cold. The jacket protected his upper half from the freezing wind but he felt its bite at his ankles, in the space between the hems of his skinny red jeans and his flimsy sandshoes. His outfit was definitely more suitable for clubbing than the great outdoors.
He walked up to the edge of the debris, wondering how recently the ’slide had happened. Perhaps he was being fanciful, but there was an air of stillness about the scene that made this moment feel like a very recent aftermath. To his left, the hillside that had shrugged the rubble off glowed a little in the darkness, a new gash of whitish scree scarring its surface. And right then, Cam realised that he could have been driving past here as the mountain collapsed. If he’d been just a few minutes earlier—if he hadn’t gone back to the cottage for that bottle of Champagne—he could’ve been under this rock instead of standing here, looking at it.
It took a few moments for the bolt of gratitude that thought prompted to pass. Once it did, however, reality set in with a vengeance.
He was not going to reach Glasgow by this road. Not tonight.
Distantly, he wondered how long it would take the Police to open up the old military road—that was the fall back when landslides happened. The only other option was to drive all the way back to Inverbechie, then head for Oban and take the long way round. Another four hours of driving at least.
If the Volvo held up that long.
“Shit,” he said again. Then, more loudly.“Fuck!”
The rubble just sat there, unmoving and unmoved.
“Youhadto do this today, didn’t you?” he accused, his tone driven and raw, though whether he was talking to the rubble or to some cosmic force he didn’t even believe in, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he was suddenly full of festering, welling rage.
“You had to ruin my one and only chance at afuckingnight out, didn’t you!” His voice rose to a yell at the end of that rhetorical question and he kicked out, hard, only to howl with pain when his foot connected with unyielding stone.
He hopped onto his other leg, grabbing hold of his foot and cursing fluently.
“Fucking, bastarding, stupid,wanky,fucking shoes—”
He was so used to wearing walking boots all the time, he’d forgotten how uselessly flimsy these shoes were. Shit—had he broken a toe?
He was about to investigate further when the slow sweeping arc of another car’s lights announced the arrival of someone else on the scene, and not just anyone else: the police.
The police car pulled up behind the Volvo and two officers got out, an unfamiliar man and a woman Cam recognised from the village, though only to nod to.
“Evening,” the female officer said, nodding a greeting and walking towards him while the male officer went to open the boot of the police car and started rummaging inside.
“Evening,” Cam replied. “I take it you’re here to block off the road?”
She nodded. “I reckon it’ll be a few days before it gets cleared what with it being Hogmanay and with all the snow that’s been forecast. Were you off to Glasgow?”