Read Online If I Never See You Again by Niamh O'Connor - Free Book Online

collection. This was where she’d come to terms with the car crash that had killed her father. She had been fifteen years old. In the two decades that had passed since, she’d learned to live with the grief, but nothing could change the simple fact that it had all been her fault.
That night, she’d gotten drunk for the first time. First disco. First fag. First snog – some guy in blue suede crepes into The Cure who asked her to dance to Bros then put his arms around her waist for the slow set. She’d written her number on his arm in black eyeliner after standing still for the national anthem at the party’s end.
    She was supposed to have used her last fiver to travel home with her sister Sue, just as she’d promised their dad before heading out. But she was having too good a time. Instead of filling her empty bottle with tap water in the ladies to make it look like she still had something to sip, she’d used her taxi money to buy two more bottles of Budweiser.
    She’d had to ring home to ask her father to come and collect her, from a phone box outside. She’d lost her sight temporarily after the crash – maybe that was why the memory of the sounds of what happened were so amplified in her memory: the phone box where she’d rung home being shelled by rain; a moth thrashing off a light bulb over her head, the static twitching after each bash; her change clinking into the slot; the pips ticking like a heartbeat; the round dial whirring back after each number; her father’s sleepy voice agreeing to come and collect her from the disco . . .
    He’d found her sitting on the kerb, head hunched between her legs – the whole street swimming. She’d never got the chance to panic about what he thought of finding her in that state. That little rite of passage was supposed to come the next morning, along with the hangover from hell, Sudocrem on her beard rash and obsessing with her friends about whether Curehead would ring. Instead, she was lying in a hospital bed praying to God that at any minute she would wake up and her father would not be lying in the morgue downstairs.
Later, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her mum or sister what had happened. The truth was, she’d pulled the handle of the passenger door open while her father was driving so she could lean out of it on the carriageway to vomit . . . His pyjama-sleeved arm had lunged across her to close the door, and the car swerved straight into an oncoming lorry.
    Jo never told a soul. Not even Dan. What would she have said? That the reason she was so good at getting into a killer’s head was because she was one?
    After she’d recovered, she used to come to the gallery because it was the only place it was socially acceptable to stand absolutely still without looking like a weirdo. All around her, life went on regardless as the sounds of that night kept playing over and over, like one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head: a single heel clicking with every second step as she walked to her dad’s car – she’d lost a shoe; the lorry’s horn blowing that deafening foghorn noise; tyres screeching; metal ripping and glass shattering; a hollow brushing sound as her dad was sucked through the windscreen; and the sound of someone crying, almost drowned out by the car alarm – herself.
    Who was she before the night her dad died? Jo asked herself. Someone she’d never got the chance to know.
    Who was she after? Someone completely different, who’d have traded blindness in a heartbeat – she’d needed cornea transplants – if it had meant freeing herself of survivor guilt.
    Her mum and Sue had moved to Australia a few years later, when she was eighteen, to try and ‘put the past behind them’. They’d begged Jo to come, but she couldn’t leave her father on his own, not in a grave, not when she’d been the one who’d put him there. And she could never shake the feeling that they’d have a better chance of starting over without her.
The smell