Cleo

On the way into town, Steve dropped me at my friend Jessie’s place in a suburb wedged between the hills. Climbing out of the car, I turned and invited Sam to take my place in the front passenger seat. Smiling, I told him I’d see him after lunch. His blue eyes beamed into mine as he slid into the front. We had no reason to believe that “after lunch” would never happen.

Jessie was on the mend after a week in bed with the flu. Like a Victorian heroine in her white nightgown, she stretched on the covers and made the most of her semi-invalid status. We drank soup, talked and laughed about our kids. Her boys were older than ours, well into high school and turning into artistic rebels. I imagined Sam and Rob would be getting up to similar antics in the not-too-distant future.

Somewhere a phone rang. Jessie’s husband, Peter, answered. I was vaguely aware of his voice in the background. His tone was clipped, then jagged. He seemed to be receiving some kind of bad news. Wondering if he’d lost an elderly relative, I arranged my face in what I hoped was a sympathetic shape as he entered the bedroom. He looked pale and on edge, like someone being devoured by a drama he wanted no part of. He glanced at Jessie, then at me. His eyes were black as onyx. The phone call, he said, was for me.

There’d obviously been some kind of mistake. Who’d ring me at Jessie’s house? Hardly anyone knew I was there in the first place. Confused, I walked into the hallway and lifted the receiver.

“It’s terrible,” I heard Steve’s voice say. “Sam’s dead.”

His voice reverberated across space into every cell of my body. His tone was measured, almost normal. “Sam” and “dead” were words that didn’t belong together. I assumed he was talking about some other Sam, an old man, a distant cousin he’d previously forgotten to mention.

I heard myself scream into the telephone receiver. Steve’s voice arrived like rounds of artillery fire in my ear. Sam and Rob had found a wounded pigeon under the clothesline. Sam had insisted on taking it to the vet. Having seen the Disney film The Secret of NIMH the day before, he was feeling even more attuned than usual to the suffering of animals.

Steve had been making a lemon meringue pie in preparation for lunch. He’d told the boys if they wanted to take the bird to the vet, they’d have to do it themselves. They’d lowered the bird into a shoebox and carried it down the zigzag. Lennel Road was a main route into town from the outer suburbs. In a less car-obsessed age, a town planner had decided to wedge in a bus stop for people wanting to travel up the hill out of town. The road narrowed so dramatically at the footbridge that there was only room for a footpath on one side of the road. Any pedestrian wanting to go farther down the hill into town had no choice but to cross the road at the bus stop. It was a perilous crossing with no signs to make traffic slow down.

As the boys arrived at the bus stop at the bottom of the steps, a bus pulled in on its way up the hill. Rob told Sam he thought they should wait until the bus had moved on before they tried to cross. But Sam was impatient to save the bird. Determined to reach the vet’s rooms down the hill as quickly as possible, he told Rob to be quiet, and ran out from behind the stationary bus. He’d been hit by a car coming down the hill.

The words were like pieces from different jigsaws that didn’t fit together. A nightmare voice that wasn’t mine yelled down the phone, demanding to know if Rob was okay. Steve said Rob was fine, though he’d seen the accident and was badly shaken. A shudder of relief jolted through me.

When people receive ghastly news, some say a sensation of disbelief sets in. Perhaps it was the simple harshness of Steve’s language, but his words hammered through me straight-away. My mind collapsed into different compartments. From a position high on Jessie’s hall ceiling I watched myself wailing and screaming below. My head felt about to burst. I wanted to smash it against the glass panels of Jessie’s front door to stop the pain.

At the same time, I registered the incongruity of the situation. The purpose of my visit had been to cheer Jessie up. Now here she was, standing in her white nightgown, trying to soothe me. Having trained as a nurse, Jessie switched into practical mode. She rang the hospital’s accident and emergency ward. When she asked if Sam was D.O.A. the logical part of my brain deciphered the abbreviation. I’d heard it as a cadet reporter late at night on the police round. Dead On Arrival. Leaden with resignation, she put the phone down.