Widows

This time she was on target for the time limit, but it was awful to watch the veins standing out on her neck, her arms flailing at her side. Just a few yards before the finishing line, her body caved in. Her legs started to buckle under her as she forced herself on. She flung herself toward the finishing line then collapsed in a heap, her breath forced out in noisy, heaving, rasping sighs. On her hands and knees in the sand, she just managed to wheeze, ‘Get this off me, Bella!’

Bella quickly lifted the heavy rucksack from Dolly’s back. Linda smirked and shook her head smugly. Shirley looked daggers at her, and knelt beside Dolly.

‘It’s no good, Dolly,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t make the run.’

Gradually, Dolly’s breathing slowed and settled. She gave one final heavy sigh and got herself to her feet. She picked up the rucksack and handed it to Bella, who gave Dolly the stopwatch. Bella stripped off her bike leathers to reveal a pair of running shorts underneath. Heaving one rucksack on her back, she took Shirley’s rucksack in her hand and strolled off down the beach.

‘Just watch her go,’ Linda bragged. ‘She used to run for her school.’

Shirley could have hit her; sometimes Linda was really evil. Dolly said nothing as she watched how effortlessly Bella walked with the weight on her back.

Back at the Morris, Bella emptied Shirley’s rucksacks of sandbags onto the picnic blanket; she’d need these when Dolly was timing her. Picking up the chainsaw, she tested the engine, starting and restarting it. Satisfied Linda hadn’t damaged it, she got into the wrecked Morris Minor, rucksack on her back and chainsaw in her hand.

The second Bella jumped out of the car, Dolly started the stopwatch.

They watched in silence as Bella started the saw with one pull of the cord and cut a hole in the car door large enough for a shotgun to be pushed through. Bella then ran to the picnic blanket and lifted the sandbags, pacing the time it would take for her to fill Linda’s rucksack, then Shirley’s. She was like a machine. When Bella set off down the beach, Linda couldn’t control her excitement any longer. She began jumping up and down, waving her arms in the air.

‘Go, girl! GO! GO! GO!’ Linda screamed.

Dolly’s eyes flickered between Bella and the stopwatch. Bella ran toward them in long easy strides, as if the weight on her back had no effect at all.

Dolly didn’t have to give the actual time because it was obvious Bella was by far the quickest. While Shirley and Linda hugged Bella, Dolly walked back up the beach toward the Morris alone.

‘Let’s do the whole thing now,’ she called back them, and whistled to Wolf, who was rolling in a dead seagull.

They spent another hour running through the plan before calling it a day. While Dolly packed up the picnic hamper, Bella and Linda carried the chainsaw and rucksacks back up to the boot of her Merc. Shirley emptied the sand from the pillowcases and watched Dolly from the corner of her eye. Dolly’s lips were pursed tight and she seemed still to be seething at her own inability to keep up with the rest of them. Shirley had tried a big, consoling smile, but her split lip opened up again and anyway, Dolly had just ignored her. She was a tough old bird. Her own weakness in the face of Tony Fisher’s assault was playing on Shirley’s mind. I was pathetic, she thought angrily. But I won’t be anymore...

The final rehearsal run had been the slickest yet and well under time. Dolly’s decision to reorder the roles, with her now driving the blocking van up front, Bella back on the chainsaw and Linda driving the transit van behind, turned out to be absolutely the right thing to do and played to everyone’s strengths. They’d finished the day on a high, tired, filthy, achy, but invigorated. For the first time it seemed real, very real. As Shirley cleared the beach of their debris, she picked up one of the driftwood shotguns and smiled. Checking Dolly’s back was turned, she held the ‘gun’ in position one last time before throwing it into the dunes.

Dolly hadn’t cared about the decision she’d had to make about driving the lead van, but she did mind failing in front of her girls. They looked to her for guidance, for stability and for leadership and she had to maintain that role; there was no way they could think she was weak in any way.

Linda and Bella were almost at the bottom of the steps by the time Shirley and Dolly were packed up and ready to go. As Dolly looked at her three girls, she spotted the not-so-subtle sideways glance that Linda gave the others. While they no longer seemed to doubt that they could do this, by the way they looked at her, Dolly could see that it was her they doubted now.