Stranded on the hard shoulder

Text 1: Between Junctions, by Rosalind Tierney

An original short story extract.

The car died between junctions in the worst of the rain. There was a sound under the bonnet like a drawer of cutlery being dropped, the dashboard lit up with a row of small red pictures that Ivy did not understand, and her mother said a word Ivy had never heard her say and steered them, coasting and silent, on to the hard shoulder.

The wipers had stopped with the engine, and the rain came down the windscreen in a thick moving sheet, so that the motorway beyond it was nothing but smeared light: white coming towards them on the far side, red going away on theirs.

Then a lorry went past.

Ivy felt it before she heard it. The whole car rocked on its springs, sideways, as if a giant had leaned on it, and the noise arrived after, a tearing roar that went on and on and dragged a wall of spray across the glass. Then it was gone, and the car settled, trembling slightly, like an animal that has been brushed past by something much bigger.

“Right,” said her mother. “Out. My side. Now.”

Ivy had seen the films at school about breakdowns. You did not stay in the car. You climbed over the barrier and up the bank and you waited there, in the dark. It had seemed ridiculous in a warm classroom. It did not seem ridiculous now.

The rain hit her like a slap. The barrier was wet and cold and higher than it looked, and beyond it the bank rose steeply into blackness, long grass and brambles and something that crackled underfoot. Her mother came over after her in one ungraceful heave, holding her phone above her head like a torch in a cave, and the screen threw a small blue light on to the wet grass and on to Ivy’s trainers and on to nothing else at all.

They stood halfway up the bank, holding hands like much younger people. Below them the lorries went by in a continuous thunder, and each time one passed, the little car flinched in its wake, its hazard lights ticking on and off, orange, dark, orange, dark, as patient as a heartbeat.

“Forty minutes,” her mother said, reading the screen. “They said forty minutes.”

Ivy nodded. She found she was counting the hazard lights. At four hundred she stopped. Somewhere around then she noticed that her mother’s hand was shaking and her own was not, and she held on tighter.

Explore how Rosalind Tierney uses language and structure to create tension as Ivy and her mother wait beside the motorway.

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