His shadow was enormous; the headlights gave every movement and colour a nightmarish cast. Havoc, it seemed, had leant in and set me running.But I hadn’t emerged unscathed. But the body remembers. Indeed, it was hard to think of a vocation more uncertain or less likely, but I always figured I could supplement my income with physical labour: work the deck of a cray boat or sign on as a brickie’s labourer. Her husband, the sole breadwinner of the household, was in a coma. I don’t like surprises. What you have been, all through your moment of extremity, is a casual-sounding robot. I shouldn’t have been surprised. We’ll forever be vulnerable to havoc.
I came to suspect that he was really dead and no one had the nerve to tell me.
Humans, you come to understand, are frail creatures.
My dad was back. A wild man was attacking my dad.
He said we had to find a phone and call an ambulance. Afterwards he said I was a rotten pillion passenger, that it was like carting a hairy coffin.And now I’ve been a writer longer than he was a copper. A moment later the old man got back in. Looking back I’d say I was depressed.It’s galling to lie in bed for weeks, absorbing the results of someone else’s mistake. And it was this mortal ruin the old man sought to keep at bay.But he brought havoc home, anyway – on his tunic, in his limbs and in midnight whispers. It was as if he was being shot through with electricity.
He had the look of a mistreated dog. He was a big, strong man, but his injuries were awful, and to some the speed of his improvement was unsettling. We press a button or swipe a screen and receive exactly what we’re expecting. All the same, there wasn’t a hopeful air in the house. "Inrix update at 9.27pm: "B3193 in both directions closed due to accident investigation work from John Acres Lane to Strap Lane. This drama did not seem to impress him. B3193 at Kingsteignton is likely to remain closed for some time, say policeA 20-year-old motorcyclist from Newton Abbot has died following a crash in the early hours of this morning in South Devon, police have said.The B3193 at Kingsteignton remains closed between John Acres Lane and Strap Lane as result of the incident.Devon and Cornwall Police's Force Incident Manager (FIM) said police were called to the scene at around 2.20am this morning.Officers remain at the scene and the road is likely to remain closed for some time.A police spokesperson said: "At approximately 0220hrs on Friday 21"The male rider of the motorcycle, was sadly pronounced deceased at hospital and next of kin have been informed. My father strode over and knelt beside the rider. I remember the ordinary, reassuring smells inside the vehicle: the pilchards we used for bait, the burnt-toast whiff of the gas mantle, and the old man himself.
You say the kindest things, the brightest things you can summon. The road was closed for more than five hours whilst a forensic examination of the collision scene was conducted. Four seconds of unscheduled plummeting in a commercial aircraft and they’re wailing for their mothers. The long months of my father’s convalescence had a lasting impact on me. Again, I should have known better, but I was unprepared for how long it took me to reconnect with the life I’d been living. These days I crave stability. As Dad climbed out of the car, he said he had an important job for me.
For a while he manned the Accident Desk. Just as an ecosystem requires cataclysmic disruption now and then, the mind and body need a similar jolt. By now we know how that scene goes. Mercifully, a child is rarely forced to confront the fact consciously. I was not allowed to visit him. With the curtains drawn against the heat, the place was infused with a faint amber light, and in that atmosphere of bewilderment there were times when the only signs of animation were the churn and swirl of dust motes. Sometime during that long convalescence, I came upon the helmet Dad had been wearing when he was hit. We’d gone down at sunset and caught a feed, but at the age of nine I could take or leave the fishing. I couldn’t know the many ways in which the parameters of her life – and my own along with it – had been radically redrawn in an instant, but I did understand that the world had changed for us. Risky behaviour of all sorts gave me a buzz. And she was genuinely courageous. As a kid it was good to be commissioned, to feel useful for a short while, and as I clung to the steering wheel and jabbed at the brake pedal, which I could barely reach, my father crouched out there in the lights, talking to the fallen rider, who kept fluttering in and out of consciousness, trying to get up on his shuddering legs. I was in danger of becoming a bit of a pretender. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you.
I was feeble and mentally stuck.I wondered if what I was feeling was a little like grief, or maybe shock. Everything you know and see is fragile, temporary, and if there’s any constant in life it’s contingency.
The chief attraction of an outing like this was the chance to be alone with my father.The evening had gotten cool and the windows were up. No one had prepared her for what was coming her way. Many years later, by another roadside, I employed a similar tactic to keep my own kids from seeing something worse.