The police came late one night, but there were no scenes. There was an uncomfortable disparity in Jenna’s mind; the policeman’s soft, firm rap against the family’s front door, contrasted against the story he came to tell. For months afterwards Jenna couldn’t close her eyes without visualising against her will the invented last moments of her brother’s life. On some nights she was haunted by desperate screams and cries for help, on others there was simply a crash, flashing lights and a descent into darkness.
She had been in bed, asleep, on a night very much like any other. After dinner Jenna had spent over an hour on the phone to a friend she had seen that day and, Jenna had assumed, would sit with again in geography the following day. Ellie usually called after their walk home to dissect the day. They would either discuss the previous weekend or make plans for the next one, depending on how far into the week they had gone. In this case it was Tuesday, so speculation about Dawn and Liam in the disabled toilets of the under-eighteens club night was still rife. “She said nothing happened” Jenna had mused, only to be struck down with Ellie’s assertion that “she always says nothing happened” and they concluded that there was still more to be discovered about the situation. Jenna’s dad had joked again about the phone-bill and about the necessity to put Ellie on friends and family even though she lived three roads away. Jenna found his jokes tiresome and he never understood how they had so much to talk about.
After several thwarted attempts at maths homework not due till Friday there was a programme on about the nation’s obesity levels then Jenna went to bed, and slept easily. She was woken by a knock at the door. It took a few moments for her to fight through the fuzzy layers of sleep and realise her parents were at the door, joined by an unfamiliar voice. Not wanting to get out of bed into the cold night, lit only by streaks of moon seeping from the back garden through her patterned curtains, Jenna stayed in bed and listened with interest to find out the reason for the late night visitor. The unknown man’s solid tread followed the flip-flop of her mum’s slippers and the heavy swishes of her dad’s bare feet against parquet flooring. The three settled in the lounge, situated directly under Jenna’s bedroom, but voices grew muffled by the thick carpet in between. Jenna lay as still as possible, trying not to breathe too loudly. Her head was cocked sideways, ear lifted off the pillow to avoid the plump cotton muffling the voices further. After a short while, it was impossible to say how long what with the strange contracting and expanding of time that happens in the dark, Jenna grew impatient and gradually more awake and slowly wiggled her way out of the warm bed, leaving padded covers morphed to her shape. There was no reason for her caution as everyone in the house was already awake, but a sense of quiet had descended on the building. There was something present which had filtered into the collective subconscious of those living there and it seemed bad manners to cause a disturbance. Barelegged Jenna padded out onto the landing and sat on the worn shag-pile of the top stair. The banister and front door glowed a sickly black and amber as the streetlights slipped through gaps and reflected back on themselves against the polished wood below. Placing her forehead between cold spindles leading down the stairs Jenna could see a warmer yellow light seeping out under the lounge door invitingly, but still she did not move. Waiting and listening she tucked her legs comfortingly against her chest and pulling her t-shirt down over her knees, like they used to in primary school assembly, all sat cross-legged in row after row of bottle-green sweaters stretching the front of the material, to the annoyance of their parents. She was still straining to hear voices, but the pauses between words were now getting longer, yet despite the unusual late night visitor and the night-time loneliness she still felt none of the gravity of the situation pervading into her consciousness. Finally satisfied that this was a conversation she would not be invited into Jenna tip-toed back to bed shivering and fell into a disturbed sleep, occasionally punctuated by a rise in volume downstairs but by time she awoke the voices subsided and Jenna was left to wonder if she had imagined the whole thing.
Jenna woke the next morning with a strike of fear, not at the memory of the strange visitor but simply in the knowledge that she had overslept. The light in the room was unusual for 8am, it was too bright and was the sign of a fully-fledged sunshine rather than milky fingers poking their way gingerly around corners and edges of drawn curtains. Sure enough when she rolled over the red cubed letters read 8.57. Jenna never set an alarm, as she disliked the momentary panic at being beeped awake so suddenly through the deepest of sleeps, and instead relied on the noise of her family and her ever-dependable mother to ensure she was up before eight for school. Even though things appeared to be in excess of fifty-seven minutes behind schedule the house was lay quiet.
