Page 38 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas
“Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry to be a pain but I don’t suppose anyone’s got any jump leads? My car won’t start.”
Nobody did. Apart from one girl who’d walked the fifteen minutes from her house, they all commuted in by train and were eager to get cleared down and gone before they missed the last connection.
They offered her the use of the phone to call a breakdown service, but Kate hadn’t bothered to get it renewed when she set up her last insurance. She’d decided to shop about for cheaper breakdown coveragebut never got around to it. The manager said she could stay in the club until they closed down, and Kate was grateful.
It was too late to call her dad, and she didn’t want to bother Matt and Sarah. She looked up train times on her phone, but the last connection to Great Blexley had been and gone. The drunk man stumbled out of the club shouting, “’Bout effing time!”
“I’m just going to give it another try!” Kate called to the bar manager. He nodded and carried on working.
It was bitter. The snow had almost filled in her second set of footprints. The chessboard roof of her old Mini Clubman was covered in a white frosty fur. She climbed into the icemobile and tried the engine. It gave one quiet wheeze and gave up.
“Shit shit double shit!” shouted Kate.
The snow was creeping up the windscreen. She slammed the door and tramped back over to the club. The doors were locked.
“Shiiiiit!” she said. They must have gone out the back way and thought she’d gotten her car started.
The club was on an industrial estate and at this time of night it was empty and eerily quiet. Through the muffling of the snow she heard a train pull into the station and hoped the bar staff had made it in time.
She shuffled back to her car and climbed in, pulling her coat tightly around her. Kate jabbed a stiff finger at an app on her phone and music began to play. She kept the volume low; she didn’t want to advertise her status as lone-woman-Popsicle.
She couldn’t feel her toes at all. Her limbs, so supple and pliable on the dance floor just hours ago, felt brittle. She pulled the tartan throw—usually draped over the backseat for esthetics—up over her nose and mouth.I’ll give it ten minutes and see if it’ll start, and if it doesn’t then I’ll really panic.
After a few minutes she turned the music off; she didn’t want to run the battery down, just in case. A pair of foxes padded lightly across the car park, coming in from different directions. They saw each other and stopped. Kate wondered if there’d be a fight, but they seemed to think better of it and turned back out the way they had come; one stopped to nose around the bins before leaving.
Two men, drunk by the sounds of them, walked past the car park, talking in shouts. One declared he needed to “take a piss!” Kate watched as he doubled back and stumbled into the car park.
He zigzagged toward the car. Kate slunk down in her seat, hoping he wouldn’t see her. The man stopped a stone’s throw from the Mini and began to urinate against the wall. Steam rose up as he melted the snow.
“Come on!” yelled the man outside the car park. “I’m freezing my nads off here!”
“Coming!” shouted the other man, doing up his fly.
Kate sat very still, breathing shallowly. The man stumbled back out again and their noisy commentary resumed. She breathed out, relieved.
After another five minutes she tried the key in the ignition again. It turned over once and then choked.
Kate banged her head against the steering wheel. “Oh bloody, shit, shit, shitters!” she shouted, pummeling the dashboard with her fists. She didn’t hear the car pull into the empty car park.
There was a knock on her driver’s-side window. “Fuck!” she shouted; she jumped so high, her bottom left the seat and she banged her head on the ceiling.
“Sorry!” said a man’s voice. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just wanted to check if you were all right? See if you needed any help?”
The man backed away from the car with his hands up like asurrender. The window was misted with her breath. She opened the window a crack. “My car won’t start,” she shouted through it.
The man walked slowly toward her.
“I’ve got jump leads in my car,” he said. “I can help you get it started. I was on tonight’s date,” he went on. “I came back to see if I’d left my phone in the club.”
He was tall and broad, made all the broader by a heavy ski jacket. The hood was up and his face was half in shadow. He reached the car, still with his hands up, as though trying not to frighten off a wounded rabbit. He knelt down by the window.
Kate didn’t open it any wider, but she wiped her sleeve across the glass to clear the mist.
“Kate?” said the man, squinting through the glass. “Are you Kate?”
He pulled his hood down.
“It’s me, Richard!” he said. “From the Twelve Dates of Christmas.”
