"Hey, this is Lauren. I can't come to the phone right now, or I'm ignoring you. Either way, leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Or I won't…because, you know, I'm ignoring you. You know what you did."

I grinned, shaking my head at my sister's idiotic voicemail greeting and waited for the beep.

"Hey, Lauren. Listen…I know it's late, and you're probably asleep, I just…I don't know, I'm just out for a drive and I felt like calling you. I don't even…whatever, I just got a feeling that maybe you'd be awake right now or something. Just wanted to hear your voice…shut up, don't make fun of me!" I laughed, picturing her rolling her eyes at my sappiness. Truth be told, I wasn't really sure why I was calling her. I had hit dial before I even realised I was thinking about calling her. I shook my head, realising that my inner-thought-process had left a good five-second silence on the voicemail message. "Yeah…so, anyway…give me a call back when you can. I love you."

I hung up and sighed, wondering briefly where I was going. I didn't know, but it didn't seem to matter somehow. I was just driving. There was a nagging voice in the back of my mind that insisted that this wasn't normal, driving around at 4am on a Wednesday for no good reason, but it was all too easy to ignore it. The sky was a light grey colour, not quite dark, but not quite light yet either, and the roads were empty. What road was this, anyway? I was surrounded by green fields on both sides, but that didn't exactly narrow things down out here. My family and I lived in a tiny village called Auchenheath, which was surrounded by seven or eight other tiny villages within walking distance of one another, all connected by the area's dominant farming community. It was a lovely place, really, but when you grow up here, you don't appreciate the quiet beauty of trees and rivers and green hills: you just look for a way to get out – to escape the quiet and the green for somewhere busy and breathing and grey. You get out, or you live and die your quiet life, just like your parents and your grandparents before you, and you definitely don't make a difference.

I'm not saying that I want to make a difference, exactly. But I would like the freedom to be able to choose to want to make a difference…and there have got to be hotter guys in the city than there are here. I mean my God, if Gavin Grieve is what qualifies as a heart-throb in this place, I may as well just resign myself to being a spinster right now.

And then I was thinking about Gavin. Phht. Gavin Grieve. He was the sports champion at the local high-school, he had average grades but that didn't matter, because everyone knew that he was going to work on the farm with his dad anyway. And that was good. People around here respected that.

My sister used to say that he was the "biggest little shit in Lanarkshire". I grinned at the memory. And then I was thinking about Lauren again. I still wasn't sure why exactly I had felt the need to call her, but as soon as I started to wonder about it, I felt anxious that I hadn't got through. I tapped out a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel, chewing my lip, and reached out, almost subconsciously, to the phone still nestled in the hands-free holder on the dash, and hit re-dial.

It rang twice and I shook my head, hanging up.

What am I doing? If I wake her up, she'll kill me.

My sister was not a morning person. I slapped both hands back on the steering wheel and drove for a few more minutes in silence. The clock on the dashboard flashed 5AM. George Bowie's Radio Breakfast Show would just be starting on Clyde One. I had never actually been awake early enough to catch the start of it before. I moved to turn the radio on, but my hand wouldn't budge from the steering wheel. I frowned, trying again to release my grip on the wheel, but my hands stayed stuck fast, like they didn't belong to me, or like I was no longer in control of them. Confusion and panic rose up inside of me, and my heart pounded in my ears.

At the same time, the dial on my speedometer started moving slowly, going from forty to fifty…to sixty…to seventy…I was screaming now. Not sure when that started. After that, things start to blur – hardly surprising when you're pushing ninety miles an hour on a country road in half-light – but I do remember the tree. Gnarled and black, it stood out from its surroundings like it didn't belong there. My hands – not my hands anymore – turned the wheel ever so slightly so that I was heading straight for it – like it was a homing beacon, pulling me in. I closed my eyes, and I knew that this was the end.

"Lauren…LAUREN!" Without knowing why, I screamed her name, and the darkness swallowed it, and became me, and my hands finally let go of the wheel. Too late. Too late.

When you grow up here, you don't appreciate the quiet beauty of trees and rivers and green hills: you just look for a way to get out – to escape the quiet and the green for somewhere busy and breathing and grey. You get out, or you live and die your quiet life, just like your parents and your grandparents before you, and you definitely don't make a difference.