‘Probably just a fox,’ he said.
‘Go have a look.’
‘What do you want me to do, bury the thing?’
‘Steve…’
He climbed out of the car.
Poppy scrambled after him, slamming the door shut behind her. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
It was only a dead bird. She saw it when she walked around to the front. Stephen had crushed its little bones under the wheel of the car and he stood staring at the carcass with wide, curious eyes, as if he could see colours in it that she couldn’t.
‘It looks like fireworks,’ he said quietly. Poppy tried to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about: the way the blood sprayed the dusty tarmac, bits of feather, flesh and indistinguishable strands of sinew bloomed on the road.
‘It’s the same colour as your hair,’ he said, then knelt down and pressed a thumb into the blood before touching her forehead, as if it was Ash Wednesday. Poppy felt something grow in her stomach. She felt proud and special.
‘Adieu pour toujours,’ she said. She’d been reading Bonjour Tristesse in the car.
Stephen pulled a camera out of his pocket to take a picture.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, the spell suddenly broken.
He looked at her and spoke slowly. ‘You’re right, of course, a picture won’t do it. I need to take it with me. I need the real thing, right?’
‘For what?’
‘For art,’ he said.
Which began their life on the road. Stephen was so captivated by his new idea – driving up and down high roads in search of roadkill – that Poppy’s mother didn’t attempt to stop him. Instead, they all came along. They made a family outing of it, every Saturday waking up early to pile into the increasingly foul-smelling car and drive up and down the roads until the sun slipped off the horizon. Poppy downloaded language podcasts, and mouthed the words silently at the window – Il mio nome è Poppy, Come ti chiami? Mi annoio. Annoiato. Annoiato – looking at the open fields, the power lines and houses with the adolescent certainty that something immensely fun was happening elsewhere.
She could hear Stephen and her mother arguing some nights, through the wall beside her bed. She’d bury her face into her pillow and fight to sleep.
One night she opened her eyes and saw a small flickering light in the darkness. ‘No, don’t move,’ said the shadow at the end of her bed. He was holding up a video camera.
‘What are you doing?’ Poppy asked, her voice still thick with sleep.
‘It’s got to be natural.’
He’d come most nights after that. Poppy didn’t always know because it was always after she was asleep, although sometimes she would wake from a dream and see the flashing light of the camera at the foot of her bed. The most he would ever do was raise a finger to his lips to shh her, and in the morning he would be gone.
When she was older and she thought about it an uneasy feeling would settle in the pit of her stomach. She could never figure out why she’d never simply locked her door.
THE ARGUMENTS ESCALATED, AND when the house wasn’t filled with her mother’s stony silence, she and Stephen were screaming at each other across the kitchen table, smashing glasses no one swept up, so they would all have to tiptoe around the debris for a week. Poppy had become an expert at using tweezers to pull sharp little splinters from the balls of her feet.
One day, from the living room, Poppy heard her mother call him ‘a shit artist’ and the shouting stopped.
She listened out for a little while but then she heard the door click open and the sound of a car horn outside. Another few moments of stillness before she pressed mute on the remote and listened for the growl of the engine revving up.
‘Poppy,’ a voice called, and she stiffened. ‘Poppy!’
‘I’m coming.’
It was Stephen’s shout from the open door of the purring car. Poppy was still in her pyjamas but she slipped into a pair of old slippers and ran outside.
Stephen and her mother were sitting in the front, her mother’s face wet with tears. ‘Get in,’ he said. Poppy bit her lip in hesitation, but Stephen was starting up the car and the wheels were already beginning to push off the tarmac when Poppy jumped in and slammed the door behind her.
The car accelerated so quickly she was thrown back against her seat. ‘What are you doing?’ her mother gasped. They rounded a sharp bend in the road and Poppy was thrown against the window. ‘Put on your seatbelt,’ her mother shouted. ‘Steve, what are you doing? Stop the car. Stop the car.’
‘You think you know about art?’ he roared, pushing on the accelerator. The car flew over a speed bump, almost knocking them out of their seats and causing Poppy’s spine to slam back down again. ‘You don’t know a thing about art.’
Another speed bump and, though she’d braced herself, it tore a cry of terror from her as she lifted off the seat.
When they turned the next corner they narrowly missed another car, which swerved past, horn blaring. Poppy felt the air evaporate from her throat.
‘You’re driving like a madman, Ste—Watch out!’ They’d driven right off the road, juddered up onto the pavement and burst through the picket fence surrounding the common. Stephen was charging towards the pond and, for a horrifying moment, Poppy thought they were heading right into the cold water, but he turned them around at the last second with a shout of delight and trundled over the grass.
The car accelerated again, heading for a group of ducks, and both Poppy and her mother screamed as something rolled under the tyres. Feathers flew up by the window and the air filled with the squeal of birds, the crunch of branches and bone. ‘Stephen!’ Poppy’s mother shoved his hands off the steering wheel and Poppy squeezed her eyes shut as the car lurched back towards the pond. They were going to plunge in, she was sure of it, but she was too scared to unbuckle her seatbelt.
Then, she felt the car slow under her and come to a sudden stop. Scrambling to open the door, Poppy made it out just in time to throw up on the grass.
When she finished and wiped the side of her mouth, she was surprised to find that she was crying. Heat spread across her face as more sobs came and she did nothing to wipe them away. She walked away from the car for a while, sat on the bench overlooking the scummy pond.
The sky was a disgusting colour, and she was shivering in her thin pyjamas. She wished she’d brought a coat in addition to her now-soiled slippers. There were Coke cans floating in the pond, and when her tears finally subsided she could see across the water to Stephen’s car, and the feathers smeared into the tyres. She wondered if her mother was okay, and knew that she had to go back. When she did, she couldn’t spot either of the adults behind the windscreen and wondered if they had walked off and left her. Then she saw her mother in the back seat. She was being attacked. Poppy pressed her face against the window but then wished she hadn’t. Understanding came to her all at once; her mother squeezing Stephen’s hair in a wet fist, the knife-bright slice of thigh, a jet spray of hair at the base of Stephen’s spine, his bottom waxing over the edge of his loosened belt.
She ran.
As the wind stung her eyes she thought that she heard her mother’s voice calling out behind her, but she didn’t look back.
A WEEK LATER, STEPHEN finally left for good. Poppy was called out of her class by the school’s receptionist and driven to the hospital. For the rest of her life, whenever Poppy recalled the way her mother looked that day – tiny and helpless, folded in on herself, her eyes closed, still connected to a drip – it was with a twist of pain. ‘Has she done this before?’ the social worker asked.