My name was Miranda, which I loved. At school that year we studied The Tempest and I remember feeling proud because I had the same name as Prospero’s daughter. About the only time I ever paid attention in class.

I felt like a heroine in those days; waiting for adventure to come and sweep her off her feet like it does in films and novels. I know it’s easy to romanticise about something that you’ve lost, but back then, at eighteen years old and about to leave school, the world really did seem to glow with opportunity. It was like a sparkling dew-soaked garden on a spring morning, over which someone has strung thousands of tiny shining jewels during the night. And each one of these dewdrop diamonds is a possibility, a multifaceted mirror you could pluck and whisper your secrets to, which would magically unfold into the path to your dreams.

I was pretty too. I had a lovely face. I think that’s one of the things that made it so hard – to have been so pretty. My skin was always very pale and I didn’t tan, but it suited me. I had long red hair - not that carroty ginger stuff that some people have, the ones who are called red-heads when they should be called orange. Mine was proper amber and with the sun shining on me it really did look like my head was on fire. People used to remark on it. Mum used to say it meant I was marked out for greater things. She was very proud of my beauty - the only thing about me she took much notice of. I sometimes wonder if she didn’t accidentally put a curse on me by telling people that.

The only aspect of my features that ever bothered me was that I didn’t have much in the way of eyebrows. When I was at playschool I got teased for it, and it gave me hang ups later on. But then when I got older and prettier I was able to get my own back, since I was one of the most popular girls in West Leigh. It became easy to make life hell for those who had once made fun of me.
That’s another thing I sometimes wonder about. If I hadn’t been cruel to the other kids in town, would it still have happened?

So I’m wrong when I say I was one of the most popular girls in West Leigh. A lot of people didn’t like me. Most of them in fact. They thought I was wild, and a bad egg. I think a lot of people must have been gratified when it happened.
Well, not gratified exactly. I don’t see how anyone could have been pleased by it, not when they heard the grisly details. But I bet along with the horror they felt, some of them must have also secretly felt just the tiniest bit smug. It must have seemed like retribution. A hideous, cruel-as-cruel-can-be retribution, drastically out of proportion to the wrongs I committed, but retribution all the same.

My best friends, if you were to call them that, were Charlotte and Sue. They hung out with me because what I was able to do for them rather than because they liked me. When you’re pretty and wealthy in a small rural community everyone who isn’t afraid of you wants to be your friend. My father was a successful entrepreneur and he owned shares in various companies all over the world. When he wasn’t away he would drive me to school in our shiny red Jag - A proper chariot, he used to say, Fit for a proper princess. How we must have tempted fate.

We lived in a mansion with white pillars across the front and steps leading up to it, about three miles out of West Leigh. All the good houses were situated at a distance from town, as if someone had decided they were too good to be mixed in with the general populace. We had a huge long garden that stretched all the way to the cliffs, which are hundreds of metres high and overlook the ocean. It is quite a dizzying view, and if you are brave enough to approach the very edge it is impossible not to sink to your knees. They are very dangerous, these cliffs, when the wind is up, and not long before the accident Teddy, a boy from our school fell to his death. They put a cross up to commemorate him right there on the lip of the cliff, and from a distance it looks as though a man is standing up and waving his arms at you, trying to motion for you to stay back. Perhaps it is the man Teddy never grew up to be. He was one those kids I taunted - for being too fat, too slow and too stupid.

Charlotte, Sue and I were regarded as terrors by the townsfolk. I used to take Dad’s Jaguar while he was away and we’d roll down the convertible roof and drive round with the stereo turned up full volume, coasting down the hills and honking at ramblers. We’d park it just outside the houses of boys we liked and we’d do strip teases for them while they watched from their windows. Sometimes I think their fathers must have watched too, because whenever we got screamed at it was always by women.

Once I stripped until I was wearing nothing but my panties. The guy was Fred Green, a handsome but aloof boy whose parents made him study after school because they wanted him to be a doctor. We thought he was stuck up. He wasn’t stuck up that night. He sneaked out of the house after I showed him my breasts and I gave him a blow job behind the large oak tree at the foot of his house while the others kept watch for his folks. But at school next day he returned to being cold and wouldn’t return my hello. I think I was a little bit infatuated with Fred, because that’s the first time I remember a boy really hurting my feelings. To avenge myself I spread it around that he couldn’t get an erection. After that he became nicknamed Flaccid Fred, and kids used to shout it at him in class or on the street when they saw him.
I suppose you will think that was very cruel of me. But there are worse nicknames. I should know.

Sue and Charlotte were always being given warnings and ultimatums by their parents, but I was given a free reign by mine. Dad was never around; always off on business or romancing some floozy he thought Mum and I didn’t know about. And as for Mum - she didn’t care. She felt that the people of West Leigh were beneath her. They had moved there from London when I was a little girl. The reason was supposed to be fresh air for her nervous attacks, but she never suffered from an attack that I ever saw, and the real cause for the move was always cloudy to me. Mum made no secret of her resentment that we still lived there. She was always on at Dad for us to go away - to move back to London or even to somewhere hot like Spain. She had crazy, romantic ideas of passionate Spanish men and flamenco dancing; of desert palaces and wealthy sultans. She could sound a little deranged when she spoke about it. Dad always promised to think about it but he never really did, and there was little Mum could do except rant at him. She used to say that when I had graduated we would move – when it was time to show me a bit more of the world. But I don’t know if she really believed it. I suppose had I ever paused to wonder about her I might have thought it strange she didn’t simply leave him. She had so many wonderful memories of living in the city and it was as though I was stopping her from going back. But there was always something a little unhinged about her stories, something that suggested she needed a controlling hand more than she could admit. Perhaps she simply felt that she would not survive on her own. Dad was certainly no pushover and could have made things very hard for her. But there in that house, with no friends and nothing to do, she must have been stifled half to death. She cleaned the place from top to bottom and then from bottom to top. The rest of the time she padded about like a tigress in a cage, shouting whenever she caught sight of one of us.

I think she liked the fact that I was bit wild. I think I reminded her of herself in her city days. I think it seemed to her that I must be cut out for greater things, with my flaming hair and devil-may-care attitude. Things a lot bigger than West Leigh could ever offer a girl like me. Things she would have liked to do in my place. I used to go biking with the boys. Even now it pains me to think of those engines, those huge roaring mechanical beasts, speeding through the night barely under control over the Cornish hills.

Motorbikes were a big deal in West Leigh. If you were a boy and you wanted to impress the girls you had to have one. Skateboarding was for little children. Being a proper lad was all about being macho: racing, drinking, smoking and most importantly impressing girls. Us. Especially me. I was the queen of bikers for those years, from the age of fifteen and eighteen. I was the girl every boy wanted to have with him, my arms wrapped tightly around his chest as we sped through the night with my long hair streaming out behind us like a scarlet standard.

Is it any wonder I felt special in those days? That I was wild? My parents did nothing to prevent me from doing and saying whatever I wanted. At school I could be vicious and mean to the other children and the teachers had no one to call and complain to. In town I could wear what I liked and make fun of people on the street. I got up to a lot of mischief.

For instance, Mrs Sawyer who owned one of the three grocery shops in West Leigh banned me from entering because I mimed obscene acts with her vegetables in front of her customers. Meanwhile John, her middle-aged step-son, rushed out to the street whenever I was passing and threw me freebees like chocolate bars and candies when he thought Mrs Sawyer was in the back. She caught him once and bawled at him so loud all the shopkeepers on the street came to see what was going on. After that he no longer threw me freebies. I didn’t care. I used to use them as ammunition for throwing at cars when riding on the back of bikes.

All this is making me sound like a nasty piece of work, but I wasn’t. Not to begin with. I was just a teenage girl with lots of hormones and lots of attitude. And I had plenty of problems, just like every other teenage girl. For one thing I had no one to talk to – I mean to really talk to. I couldn’t confide in Charlotte or Sue: they would have seen it as a weakness. I was supposed to be ice cool and in control, you see. That was my image. But it made me very lonely, especially when I was with people, with Charlotte and Sue, because I was putting on an act and none of them had the sense to see behind it.

Also my parents didn’t love me. Rather they loved my image – a beautiful, passionate daughter with big things ahead of her. It is hard not being loved for yourself. I know that must sound very precious, but it’s the truth. I didn’t consciously realise how they felt towards me before the accident – it was their reaction that made me finally see it. I suppose up until then I just told myself I was lucky because my parents didn’t stop me from doing what I wanted. But once in a while I think I would have liked to have been stopped. All those wild times out with the boys – I don’t know if it’s normal behaviour. I wanted affection and admiration from those boys, and you don’t do crazy things for affection and admiration unless there’s a deficiency of it in your life.
Perhaps you won’t agree. I just want to point out that although I wasn’t a saint, I was only eighteen. And there is nothing on this earth that I could possibly have done to deserve what was to happen to me.

George Beasly was my boyfriend in my last few months. At least that’s to say, he thought he was my boyfriend and I hadn’t got around to correcting him. I usually kept a boy for a few weeks before I chucked him. It was easy enough to find another. And because I never had out and out sex with anyone, I was never called a slut. I just did jobs. Jobs got you respect without ruining your reputation.

So I was a virgin too when it happened. If I’d have known, I suppose I would have done something about that - maybe with old Fred that time behind the oak tree in his garden. But you never know what fate has in store for you. Neither can you appreciate what you have, not truly. Not until it has been literally ripped from you.

SECOND EXCERPT
George was a cool one. All the girls liked him. He wasn’t from West Leigh and he was older than the rest of us – nearly twenty. I kept him longer than the others because I liked the way the other girls would gather at the end of the school day to look out for him riding up the driveway to pick me up. I liked to feel their envy. It gave me goose bumps.

George was also a daredevil, and in town he had a reputation for being the fastest racer in the county. He’d been in a few competitions, strictly unlawful, and he liked to boast about them. Once he’d come off his bike and struck his neck on the stump of newly felled tree, snapping his spine. He told us he was in a coma for a week and just as the doctors were about to switch off his artificial respirator he made a miracle recovery. To prove it he had a small hole-shaped scar on his nape from where they’re operated. That was all he offered as proof, but we were all very impressionable, us small town folk, especially the simpering girls.

To be honest I suppose I knew his tales were tall, but I never said so. I wanted people to believe he was cool, so I acted as though there was no doubt that what he was saying could be anything other than true.

George wasn’t the one who suggested the race along the cliff. Later on it was easier to let him take all the blame so that’s what I did. After all, he wasn’t in any position to deny it. But here and now I’m setting the record straight. It was me.

I wasn’t drunker than usual. I had my wits about me, as they say. I don’t know what made me do it. Sometimes you just do something, an irrational something, without the faintest idea it will have consequences you will have to reckon with every day for the rest of your life.

We were camped out on the cliffs. George and I had come on his bike. Sue and Charlotte were with Tony and Lou, who were friends of George’s. They’d all come in Lou’s Land Rover. Like George, Tony had a bike, but there was something wrong with it. I forget exactly what it was, but he was mighty angry about it because it meant he had to get Lou to drive him everywhere. All he could talk about was how he’d ridden his bike too hard and it was the damn hills in this bloody county because you couldn’t ride straight for quarter of a mile even before you found yourself flying through the air because of some stupid lump in the ground. We were passing around a joint and couple of bottles of red I’d stolen from home. We had crateloads of wine in the cellar at my house and nobody ever noticed when I took it.

Then Tony said something that got George going – something bike related. Despite riding all the time I was never very interested in them and whatever it was I found it very funny. Charlotte and Sue caught my giggles. All of a sudden the boys were both on their feet, pushing each other and calling each other a liar. Meanwhile us girls were rolling round the ground in stitches laughing at them.

Tony was really riled. George was saying that he could ride his own bike much better and much harder. That was gist of their argument. He was being all smug about it and only lost his cool when Tony pushed him too hard and made him fall on his backside. Then he went at Tony with his fists.

They fought for a while and disappeared into the night. Then George came back and after a bit so did Tony, only with a massive shiner and blood dripping out of his lip, which had been split. Charlotte I remember was a bit shocked by that and tried to clean him up with some tissue but he just pushed her away and drank about half of the bottle Lou passed him straight up. He loosened up a bit after that though, and soon we were all talking again and making jokes, and George was trying to persuade me to sneak off with him. He wanted a job. But I wasn’t in the mood, and that’s when I took up the argument about the bikes. I only even half understood what they’d been fighting about, but I took it up anyway. I said a race was the only way for George to prove himself.

The cliffs are very rugged terrain, but I’d ridden across them plenty of times in the day and it could be a lot of fun. Skimming over them with the wind against you and the view of the ocean stretching out as far as the eye could see, it sometimes felt almost as though you were flying. I suppose I thought it would be like that at night as well.

The idea was that the others would drive along behind us with the flood lights on and make sure George wasn’t avoiding the bumps. No one was particularly opposed to the idea. It wasn’t a situation where it was a clear case of doing something dangerous. We did dangerous things all the time. No one thought anything of it. In fact, we almost didn’t do it because Lou couldn’t be bothered, but then George became complacent and Tony became riled again and declared it was the only way to settle things and that was that.

Initially George didn’t want me to ride with him because he said I’d slow him down, but then I grabbed his crotch and asked him what it meant to him and he reconsidered. It’s strange, even now, mulling over those small details and wondering how different things would have been. Would I have been better off if I had been in the car, plummeting into the dark for a few sheer seconds before simply exploding into a yellow bonfire?

Many a time have I wished I got in the car. When you’re young and wild you accept danger as though it is a simple matter of life or death. You don’t consider any of the gruesome alternatives.

We took off. We had quite a head start on them but they soon caught up with us because the bike couldn’t go as fast as a car over that kind of land. I mean, when we hopped a bump we went up into the air like a rocket. And when we landed it was so hard it felt as though the very earth might buckle beneath us.

But it was fun. I remember that I was having a good time. I could feel George’s heart pounding through his jacket and T-shirt; my arms were wrapped so tightly around him. I could taste his excitement, the thrill and the fear, and it excited me too. It made me feel strong to know that he was afraid, because it took my fear away. I felt invulnerable - which is the worst way to feel when you are not.

The way was lit by Lou’s floodlights. The ground ahead was an eerie yellow rectangle which faded to darkness twenty yards ahead. The wind roared in our ears – on the cliffs at night you are right at the frontier that meets the icy Northern currents blowing in from across the Atlantic ocean, over verge and into your very bones. To our left, the lip of the cliff edge could just be seen, where the light suddenly vanished and blackness stretched out, as if all that lay beyond was an endless expanse of time and space.

The light kept catching on the mirrors of George’s bike. When it did it was blinding. It’s no wonder he found it hard to see where he was going. And of course we had been drinking and smoking. Afterwards they said that if ever an accident had been waiting to happen, there it was.

I often think of accidents like that now – as waiting to happen. It’s a good expression, because that’s just what they are. Unexpected, hidden just around the corner preparing to strike. Unwittingly you rush out toward them - to reach some objective past them in the horizon. Then, as you get closer, they suddenly leap up and rush out to meet you. When you see one coming you’ve usually got less than seconds to try and avoid it.

The accident must have been over in less than a minute. That’s quite extraordinary to me when I think about it as an event that changed the course of my life. All I knew was that we had hit a bump harder than before, and as we rocketed up gravity seemed to be tipped upside-down. Suddenly the earth was where the sky should be, and beneath our wheels was a blanket of stars. It was so, so beautiful. The pounding of George’s heart was deafening, and it seemed to slow down. I heard maybe three or four beats before we landed.

As we came down I understood what was happening and I screamed. You always scream, even though you know it won’t change anything. You do it out of instinct, to let fate see that you understand what is happening to you, just in case that alone will induce it to change its mind. Of course it never does.

Before we made impact I saw the others veer off the cliff. They were right behind and Lou had swerved to avoid crashing into us. At least, that’s what was decided by the investigation. It’s the only explanation I have.

If he’d swerved to the right it would have all been very different. Him, Sue, Charlotte and Tony would still be walking and talking and the only scars would be mental ones: those of watching what happened to us. They might even have got to me in time to help me escape from the worst of the damage. It’s just possible that I might have been able to live a normal life afterwards.
But that’s just another if. Lou didn’t swerve to the right. Upside down and in midair, I watched the car go off the cliff. I couldn’t see their faces because of the floodlights. I just saw the shape of the vehicle as it disappeared into the black, taking with it all the light so that for a fraction of a second the world was plunged into dark. And that was that.

Then we hit and there was noise and light. Both were unbearable. I was thrown at the crash – it was George who took the brunt of the impact. We landed on his head. When they examined his remains they found that his neck had been cleanly snapped in two and concluded that he was dead even before the bike exploded. I was not so lucky.

I felt the terrible jolt as we met the earth and then the shock wave that slammed through my body and then nothing, an amazing sense of nothing despite all the noise in my ears and light in my eyes. I was sailing through the air, spinning through all that time and space, weightless as a dream.

I landed several metres away, my body twisting terribly as I hit the earth for a second time. Then the noise and light was joined by pain. Bright red was streaking out around my eyes and this time it wasn’t my hair. It was because my head was on fire. I couldn’t move to do anything about it. I couldn’t feel my legs. All I could feel was the white hot sensation of the flames.

I drifted in and out of consciousness for several days. The first memory I have after the accident is of voices – an unknown man’s voice and those of my parents. I realised the man was a doctor. He was trying to reassure them. None of them seemed to know I was awake. My father was asking this doctor angry questions, such as Don’t tell me she’ll be just the same! – How will she be the same? And Don’t you think that was her life?

There were sobs. It was my mother was crying, but because I’d never known her to cry before I wasn’t sure at first if this sound was coming from her and not some other person in the room. But then she began begging, saying Please do something! Do anything! There must be things you can do! and I knew it was her.

I thought I must be dead, because I couldn’t think why else she would be doing that. Mum was not one to beg. But then I thought that my father’s questions wouldn’t make sense if I was dead, and I knew that I must be alive and in hospital. There was something pressed over my eyes stopping me from seeing, and my body didn’t seem to be responding when I tried to move. I thought that I must be paralysed. I couldn’t feel my face.

Then the doctor said to my parents that there was nothing more he could do. He said that they should be thankful because at least there was no way I could have felt anything. At that point my father began shouting and I drifted back out of consciousness again.

He was wrong. If you’ve ever been told by a kindly looking doctor that at least a loved one didn’t suffer then I’m sorry to report this comes right out of the book of what they are supposed to say. I felt everything. I felt the fire as it danced over my skin and ate up my face. I knew what was happening to me. I could do nothing but lie there and scream and scream and scream. But as I’ve said, screams don’t change anything. I lay there conscious and helpless within the ball of flame that was my head.

They said it was a miracle that my eyes were not permanently damaged in any way. I think they meant a scientific miracle, because no one would have used the word miracle when seeing my condition. No one would have been so cruel, or used so twisted a logic. All they meant was that that considering the intensity of the blaze and the fact that it fed off my entire face it was amazing my eyes didn’t simply melt. I even retained full use of one eyelid.

This, according to those who operated on me, who were able to take a purely technical view of the process, was a miracle. A miracle in the sense of its being a scientific improbability.

I didn’t know this yet though. They didn’t let me see myself for a long time. I kept asking them to give me a mirror when they changed the bandages, but I kept being told that my face would not have healed yet and that it was too soon. I knew they were stalling, but I didn’t insist. In truth I was terrified of what I would see. I found out later that my father had given instructions that on no account was I to be shown a mirror.

Surgeons visited me to have a look. They would stand opposite while the nurse gently removed the white strips from my face. Their expressions were always the same – always stoic, unreadable. I never knew what they were thinking, or what they had to say about it afterwards. I only know that once they went away none of them came back.

When my mother told me about the others it was several days after I had regained consciousness. I hadn’t asked about them. You will doubtless think this very heartless of me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want to think about the accident at all, because thinking about it always led to thinking about what I might see when I finally faced a mirror. I was virtually catatonic with fear about how I now looked. The one time I caught a glimpse of myself was when a nurse changing my bandages lent forward and I saw something red and pink reflected in the pendant she was wearing. I was so shocked by the glimpse that I fainted. I pushed all thoughts of the accident away. It wasn’t very hard to do. I was on a lot of drugs because of all my fractured bones.
But then one day Mum came in and sat beside my bed and said she had something terrible to tell me. She said that I must be a good girl and be very, very strong for her. Her voice was choked up, as if she was having trouble getting the words out. She said it was about George, and Sue, and Charlotte, and the two other boys. I knew right away what she was going to say.

It’s okay, I said to her, I know.

But she acted as though I hadn’t said anything. She took my hand, the one that hadn’t been broken by the fall, and gripped it tightly.

They died, she whispered. Then she said, Don’t think about it. They couldn’t have suffered.

I didn’t see any psychiatrists because Dad didn’t believe in them. He had nothing but contempt for all forms of counselling – which went for religion as well. The hospital must have offered, but he refused. He was a businessman and liked to say he had made his way in the world all on his own terms. His dogma was brutal self-sufficiency: if you relied on the advice of another then you were weak and destined for failure. This was the principle he had stuck to his whole life. He simply could not abide the thought of using sympathy as a coping mechanism.

Perhaps some terrible experience lay behind this resolute rejection of people professionally trained to help. Perhaps therein lies the key to a man who is unable to love a daughter who has lost her looks. All I know is that he stuck to his system and nothing, not even my disfigurement, could make him change it.

Eventually, after weeks of lying in that room with my head shrouded in bandages, two nurses and a doctor came and said it was time to take them off for good. The nurses manoeuvred me into a wheel chair and took me into another room where the doctor very slowly and gently undid the strips from around my head. The nurses watched in silence.

Miranda, said the doctor, You know what to expect?

I nodded. He had told me several days ago. First he said that I would look different, and then when I asked How different? he had said Very different - that there had been a lot of scarring and a lot of the tissue had been burnt up and this was why I couldn’t feel my face. Along with the skin most of the nerve endings had been fried. He tried to get me to be positive:

I wasn’t dead, he said, and soon I would recover full use of my body. They had made me another eyelid by this point out of skin taken from my behind.

It was an excellent job, he informed me, and soon it wouldn’t sting anymore when I shut it.
Off came the bandages. One of the nurses took my hand – a strong careful, grip, masquerading as support. I knew it was so she could restrain me. The other nurse held up a mirror.

This is what I looked like: sausage meat.