The Black Path Read Online Free Page A

soldier.’
    Owen laughs. ‘Yeah. See you around.’

CHAPTER THREE
    Helen pulls the car door closed and feels the weight of tension lift from her shoulders. Tossing her handbag onto the passenger seat, she glances back at her mother’s front window. The blue light is flickering from the flat screen television. Frank had probably been waiting for her to leave. She pictures him sprawled in his armchair watching the rugby, lager can in hand. If his team wins, he’ll celebrate with a few more cans. If they lose, he’ll console himself with a lot more.
    Reaching to adjust the rear-view mirror, her fingers brush against the worry beads Owen brought back from Iraq. He didn’t tell her exactly how he came by them, and she never asked. Sometimes it’s better not to know. She sighs deeply and breathes in the warm smell of leather and the faint, comforting tang of air freshener.
    It’s only a small car, a second-hand silver Matiz, but Helen loves it in a way nobody can understand – not even Owen, and he understands her better than anyone. She imagines him seated beside her, urging her to check her mirror before pulling out. ‘Bloody women drivers!’ But they’d both know that he was only joking. Owen was the one who encouraged her to drive.
    She’d been reluctant at first. The thought of being in control of a fast-moving vehicle filled her with dread. It was only through Owen’s gentle persistence that she’d plucked up the courage to enrol at the local driving school and apply for her test.
    ‘So what if you fail?’ Owen had said. ‘Most people fail their first time. Try again. Fail again. Just try not to fail so badly the second time.’
    It was a silly thing for a man in his position to say. Soldiers were trained not to fail. For them, failure could mean the difference between life and death. But then Owen wasn’t like most soldiers. There was no doubting his ability or his courage. She’d feared for him when he fought in Iraq, and admired his conviction when he returned home to find that public opinion was rapidly turning against the war – even in a town like this, where patriotism ran high and the local cemetery was filled with generations of dead soldiers.
    But there was a gentler side to him too. He cried at soppy films. It was a running joke between them. He was her big soft soldier boy, her sweet and tender fighting man.
    He was there the day she took her driving test and passed with flying colours. Helen couldn’t have been more surprised, but Owen had acted as if it was a foregone conclusion.
    ‘See,’ he said when they tore off the ‘L’ plates and climbed into the car. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’
    ‘But you said it would be okay if I failed.’
    He turned to her and winked. ‘I lied.’
    The roads are clear and soon she’s driving through the sprawl of prefabs known as Wildmill and then up past The Saints where she spent the first eleven years of her life. Wildmill is where the town’s drug dealers do most of their trade. Sometimes the local paper would report that an addict had overdosed or hanged themselves, at which point her mother and Frank would exchange a knowing look as if to say ‘serves them right’.
    After The Saints, the road veers up Litchard Hill where Helen used to walk to primary school. She’d loved school before her father died, before she was forced to face the terrifying anonymity of the comprehensive with its noisy classrooms ruled by hard-faced girls with purple nylon uniforms and their boyfriends’ names scratched into their forearms.
    Soon the landscape changes and the main road gives way to narrow streets and rows of small shops, terraces with stone cladding and pebbledash fronts and modern semis with Welsh names and mock Tudor extensions. The valleys were once a symbol of industry in South Wales, but those days are long gone. There are no coal mines anymore, and few opportunities. Teenage pregnancies are common. Jobs are not.
    It’s mainly from the