Warhol's Prophecy

49

THERE WERE ALREADY a number of cars parked outside the school as Caroline Hacket arrived.

She selected a position about twenty yards from the main exit and swung her red Saab into it.

The rain, she was delighted to see, had eased to little more than drizzle. The storm had passed and the sky, though still bruised with cloud, seemed to have released the worst of the deluge.

Caroline sat for a moment behind the wheel, checking her reflection once or twice in the rear-view mirror.

There was a car parked a few yards away from her, its windows badly steamed. The passenger side-window was open a few inches, and she could see a harassed-looking young woman in her mid-twenties trying to pacify a child of two or three who was strapped in the car-seat. The child was crying, struggling to get out, and the woman had gone from cajoling and reasoning to shouting and threatening.

Caroline looked away. That was one thing she didn’t miss about kids.

And yet, people said it was different if they were your own.

She would never know.

Caroline continued to gaze through the windscreen, trying not to dwell too much on that subject. Aware that unwanted thoughts and memories arose with this kind of self-analysis.

The abortions.

The string of lovers

(no, lovers wasn’t the word, was it? Love had never been involved. It had been sex, pure and simple)

she’d had during her teens and early twenties.

The operation.

She still remembered that day when a doctor had told her she’d be unable to ever have children. How the news had not hit her like the thunderbolt she’d expected. Instead the realization of it had festered and grown within her, slowly. Like some kind of cancer.

It was this inability to have children that had caused her second marriage to break up. That and her husband’s affair, of course. For a short time she had blamed herself. If she had been able to give him the child he wanted so badly, then perhaps he wouldn’t have gone to another woman.

But any feelings of guilt she had harboured left swiftly.

She was left with the pain instead.

Caroline looked across towards the car closest to her and saw that the small child in the front seat had stopped crying. His mother was kissing him on the cheek and the child was laughing.

The realization that she would never know that joy struck her as hard as it had ever done.

She brushed a single tear from the corner of her eye, inspecting her reflection once again in the rear-view mirror. She didn’t want Becky to see that she’d been crying.

It was while she was retouching her mascara that she noticed another car parked about thirty yards behind her.

Or, more to the point, its driver.

It only took her a second to realize it was Adam Walker.

She had never seen the Scorpio he drove before. She had only ever seen him on that one occasion, but she knew instantly who it was.

He was leaning against the side of the Ford, gazing towards the school, hands dug deep into the pockets of his leather jacket.

He looked distracted, his eyes scanning the cars already stationed outside the school, and also those constantly pulling up and parking.

Caroline turned in her seat to get a better look at him.

After a moment or two he slid back behind the wheel, but didn’t drive off.

He merely sat.

Waiting.

Caroline glanced at her reflection once again, then swung herself out of the Saab.