Driving alone at night

Text 1: Ten to Two, by Hannah Zielinska

An original short story extract.

Her mother handed over the keys at the kitchen table, the way she might have handed over a small bird: carefully, with both hands, as if it could still escape.

“Just to Kirsty’s and back,” she said. “Text me when you get there. Not while you’re driving. When you get there.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

The car was cold and smelt of her mother’s perfume and the pine tree that swung from the mirror. Jess adjusted the seat, then the mirrors, then the seat again. For two years the passenger seat had held someone: her instructor with his clipboard and his sighs, her father pressing an invisible brake with his right foot. Now it held nothing but her bag, and the nothing was enormous.

She pulled out of the drive at eleven miles an hour.

At first the town held her. Streetlights, a lit chip shop, a bus shelter with its advert glowing like an aquarium. She knew these roads. She had walked them, been driven along them, fallen asleep in the back seat on them. But at the roundabout by the garden centre the lights stopped, all at once, as if somebody had drawn a line, and the road ahead turned into the lane over the hill.

Dark. Real dark, the kind that pressed against the windscreen. Her headlights pushed a short way into it and the hedges leapt up on either side, pale and close, and fell back as she passed. A rabbit froze in the beam and then flung itself away. Her hands were at ten to two, exactly where she had been taught, and they were aching.

Then, behind her, lights. A car, much faster, closing in until its headlamps filled her mirror and filled the car with a hard white glare. She could not see the road for it. She could not see anything. She slowed. It slowed. She held her breath and her hands and her nerve.

At the passing place it swung out and roared by, and its red lights dwindled over the brow of the hill and were gone, and she was alone again with the hedges and the dark and the sound of her own breathing.

Then, quite suddenly, she laughed. She was doing it. Nobody was doing it for her.

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