I’ve pissed myself, I thought.
I looked down with mixed relief. Half a carton of wasted beers. I pulled my feet back towards the seat. My thongs floated in the foam. I unclicked the belt. My hand was like the claw inside a toy machine. I made it move without feeling anything. I wiped blood that wasn’t mine onto the sleeve of my jumper. I flicked shards of glass from my clothes with numb fingers.
My iPhone was missing. I searched frantically and found it down beside the seat adjuster. The screen resembled the windscreen, completely shattered, but that damage was pre-existing. It was 9.53 p.m. I looked beside me. Dom lay facedown on the steering wheel. I looked behind me. A mess of heads and limbs leaned forward. Will and Tim and Henry. Necks bent at unnatural angles. Sick sounds issuing from their lips.
I reached out and shook each of them by the arm, gently and then more urgently, to absolutely no avail.
‘Oi,’ I yelled. ‘Hey!’
This was the loneliest moment of my life. It was like waking up in a nuclear bunker where everyone else had been gassed.
So I waited. At no stage did it occur to me that they may not wake up. I underestimated death, the ease and speed with which it can sneak under your guard. My only visits from the grim reaper came in the dim minutes every morning and night via radio and TV. Earthquakes and tidal waves. Hijacked planes and celebrity suicides.
Death had less credibility to me than a reality TV show.
*
A shadow streaked across the headlights. This came as a revelation to me. I could leave any time I liked. The shadow came to the driver’s side window. It belonged to a heavy guy with terrified eyes.
‘Shit!’ he screamed. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Shit! Shit! Can you turn the car off?’
I hadn’t noticed it was still going. The engine revved and dropped again, lead foot on the accelerator. I reached for the keys. The ignition was missing. It was hidden in a mess of plastic.
‘I can’t find them,’ I said.
The man stuck his hand into the plastic and made the motor stop. Everything he said confirmed the dire straits we were stranded in.
‘HEY, CHAMP! Relax. Everything’s gonna be fine!’
I reached for the door handle. It had been obliterated on impact. The window winder was gone. Mine was the only window still intact. I was trapped in a fast-moving disaster. Each new fact was more startling than the last.
Meanwhile, a team of swift Samaritans was assembling beside the car. They divvied up the serious injuries between them. A blonde woman joined the man at the window. She was fearless. Later I found out she was a nurse on her way home from patching up other people’s broken body pieces.
‘Get me out!’ I screamed. At this stage in the proceedings, the police reports describe me as being hysterical. The reports have only a passing resemblance to my memory.
‘Sweetie,’ said the woman, ‘I’m going to need you to be brave. To sit still for a little bit. Is that something you can do for me?’
I nodded dishonestly. I had no intention of staying in the wreck a second longer. My eyes scanned for an exit route. I found one through the driver’s side window. The woman’s eyes went wide.
‘No! Don’t!’
I climbed over the top of Dom, hands pitched into the void, leaving the first responders with no choice. Cowardice is easy to commit and difficult to live with. They helped yank me to safety. My feet hit the bitumen with relief. I started running to the rear of the vehicle.
‘Wait!’ said the man, or the woman, or maybe it was neither of them. Fresh responders were arriving every second.
The boot was ripped open like a tin of tuna. Hamish reclined against the bumper. One hand reached back inside the boot. I used my iPhone to light up his face. Eyelids shut and unblinking. Blood dripped behind his ear.
The rest of the boot was crushed into a crawl space. I searched frantically below and beside the car. Nick was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if he’d ever been in the boot to begin with. I hadn’t seen him climb in. I just knew – that sudden certainty produced by a stray sound or throwaway phrase.
A woman rubbed my shoulder. The situation permitted these strangers to lay their fingers all over me.
‘He’ll be okay!’ she said.
I broke free and searched further afield from the car. Twenty metres away, I located a silhouette on the highway. I sprinted over to the shadow, using my iPhone as a searchlight.
Nick lay parallel to the fog line, eyes facing his brain. The glow from my iPhone illuminated the white shock of his skull. He’d been ejected headlong from the boot. A crooked Z was carved from his hairline to his eyebrow, deep and gushing with blood.
I noticed bystanders behind me. Half-a-dozen of them. Where did they keep coming from? A shadow pulled me aside, no gender in the lunar gloom.
‘Leave him be,’ the stranger announced to me. ‘He’s fucked.’
‘Ambulances are on their way,’ said another.
They were right. I heard the faint suggestion of sirens. The bystanders seemed down-beat, afraid of losing their proximity to the action. I clapped my hands enthusiastically.
‘Hang in there, buddy!’ I yelled. ‘You’ll be right!’
The bystanders looked my way admiringly. I just stood there, grimacing, wishing I were somewhere else.
*
Soon the dead end of the highway was alive. Sirens screamed in the south-easterly wind. Cones of red and blue spun on the road like strobe lights. Fire engines. Police vehicles. Ambulances. Utes and four-wheel drives of indeterminate authority. It was a nightclub for lifesavers. An endless stream of high-visibility men and women, pirouetting between each other seamlessly.
The emergency workers didn’t need to learn the narrative. This was bread-and-butter stuff. Saturday night. The high-speed ambition for mischief and risk. Young men bored literally to death. It was the same operation every weekend since they’d become accredited. They relieved the first responders of their responsibilities. They herded bystanders to cheaper seats further away from the main stage. And then they tried to save lives.
This would be a fine opportunity to describe what it’s like to watch your best friends dying and being revived across a highway, or the shocking split between stopwatch youth and clockwork eternity, but from this point onwards I don’t really remember anything about my friends. I seem to remember everything except their bodies and the medical attention they were getting.
Life is easy to see. Death is left to guesswork.
I drifted barefoot across the blacktop, careful not to land on broken glass, mostly unfazed by the mayhem. My main impulse was to put some distance between my body and the metal wreckage.
There was a grass clearing adjacent to the highway. I slipped into a spontaneous mob of onlookers. People swarmed from parked cars and nearby properties. They were drawn like mosquitos to the LEDs erected at opposite ends of the crash site, a plague of strangers in a nightscape exploding with light. I became a blank face in a contamination of curiosity. Nobody suspected my connection to the event.
Beside me was a man wearing boxer shorts and thongs. He gripped his jaw like it might fall apart if he let go for just a second.
‘Well fuck me dead,’ he said.
I shook my head indecisively. The sirens went quiet. The spotlights shone like twin midnight suns. I heard the same ringtone sing from different phones. Someone offered me a cigarette. I declined. Ambulances left. The sirens started again. More bystanders arrived. They tried to appear only mildly interested in the wreckage. Bodies faced away from the road, necks craned back towards the spectacle. This is where everything met. Death, energy, attention. The saving graces of a mundane life.
‘So what do you reckon happened?’ he asked.
I stared hard at the cars. The roof of our 1989 Ford Fairlane was pitched into a tent. The doors were bent off their hinges. Blood covered what was left of the rear windscreen. I ran one hand through my hair and th
e other across my chest.
How could I possibly associate my racing thoughts and beating heart with this bloody artifice of body bags and CPR kits?
‘No idea,’ I said eventually.
An eavesdropper strode over like she’d just checked on the progress of her tomatoes in the front garden.
‘I got right up close,’ she said. ‘Beers everywhere. Kids no older than fifteen, I reckon. Drunk. Probably on drugs! I just feel sorry for the other poor bastard. Brand-new friggin’ car as well …’
I nodded with municipal vigour in my chin. Only now did I really see the other vehicle. It was a dark blue Holden Viva. The driver of the other car was an old guy with no hair sitting on the bitumen. He was alive. Face cut up and bathed in blood.
Do I remember these details, or were they gleaned from the newspaper articles that came later?
The depiction renovates the event.
The narrative bleeds into reality.
In my memory, the driver leaned against the side of his destroyed pride and joy, same pissed-off face as in the paper, resistant to the paramedics, like he was trying to squeeze in private time with a dying loved one.
You can’t keep secrets in a catastrophe. News crews beat most of the emergency workers to the scene. They were bystanders for hire, capturing proof of the crash before it vanished entirely.
The presence of cameramen and -women gave licence to the amateur bystanders beside me. They spat clipped phrases into their phones – ‘THERE’S BEEN A CRASH!’ – the TV script of an emergency, making apologies for running late that were fake, of course, otherwise they would’ve climbed back in their cars and tried to leave. The truth is there’s nowhere in the world they would’ve rather been than here, observing the event in the first person.
I looked into their eyes for a guide to what I should be seeing.
No fear, only awe.
Pretty soon they were on their third and fourth and fifth phone calls. ‘It’s pretty bad,’ they whispered.
Already, the priority of the bystander had skipped from witnessing to describing the event, which is why they missed most of what they were seeing, filling in the gaps later with lies and speculation.
The more candid bystanders cut out the middleman of memory. One guy aimed his smart phone in the direction of the cars. A flash exploded from the roadside. Digital devices cave in quickly to our most primitive desires. Some of the witnesses held up phones without committing to the pictures, leaving their memories unverified, as if they only needed the screen to see.
I didn’t begrudge them souvenirs. I considered myself one of them. But I’d stood by long enough. I wandered in the general direction of the city. Nobody tried to stop me.
Traffic was backed up behind the horizon. Two columns of red and yellow pixels divided by a black strip. Police diverted a trickle of pissed-off motorists to the other side of the highway. Car horns blew so far and wide that it sounded like a cathedral organ.
How had I not heard that shrill sound until now?
I felt sick. Forget about death and grievous bodily harm. My biggest fear was recognition. The vista was a Milky Way of witnesses. Blank gazes framed by glass windscreens. Cars flanked by complete darkness. No stars in a slightly silver sky. My bones glowed with guilt. I started fading out, head light and body leaden, one step behind myself, hiding on the sidelines of my own life.
*
‘We’ve been looking for you.’
The statement came from behind me. I turned around and came face to face with one of the police officers I’d been eagerly evading.
‘You were in the crash?’
The question sounded rhetorical. My legs trembled. A dry heat engulfed my throat. But I was ready to accept whatever plot twist was next suggested to me.
‘Yep,’ I said.
The policeman looked back towards the crash scene.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
We walked back towards the glowing dome. I hadn’t even left, I realised, having made it only twenty metres or so from where the multitude of witnesses began to thicken until containment by police tape.
Where did all the time go? Nowhere. I’ve just spent so many years remembering the intervening period between escape and discovery that those vivid few minutes have proliferated into hours.
The policeman veered unexpectedly away from the crowd. He turned right onto a driveway and right again onto the highway. We emerged into the darkness created by a shield of emergency vehicles. A policewoman was waiting beside a fire engine. They didn’t need to undo me through routine. The story was formed and pouring out of me in breathless declarations of innocence.
‘I was sitting up the front and saw the trees and next thing you know we skidded and got hit and I don’t know who hit who or which way we were going or where we were going or whose fault it was IT ALL HAPPENED SO QUICK you know what I mean? Like a bolt from the blue and Dom wasn’t even drinking or speeding we were just driving back into town it was so random …’
‘We know you’re still in shock,’ said the policewoman, ‘but later we’re going to need you to be clearer with us.’
That was it. No nice sentiments about keeping my chin up. They left me adrift in a wilderness of unlit bitumen. The roadside was a garbage tip. Broken glass sparkled in the dark. Shopping bags flapped along the fence like jellyfish trapped in a shark net.
I sat cross-legged on the blacktop, leaning against the bright red metal of a fire engine, wading through the meditative blamelessness of nobody knowing what I’d seen or been involved in.
After an extended delay, the same cops returned with bottled water and the news that I didn’t need to be there any longer.
‘You’re free to leave,’ said the man.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Unless you have more information,’ he said, ‘go home and get some rest. You’ve got a long road ahead of you.’
I had no intention of getting on that long road any sooner than I needed to. They were insistent. I gave them my sister’s mobile number. They called her and handed me the phone. Hannah was asleep twenty minutes away.
‘I’ve been in a car crash,’ I said.
Nothing about my tone suggested anything more serious than a minor traffic matter, but already Hannah was crying on the other end of the line, swiping through the mind archive of images that opens whenever you hear the phrase car crash.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
The police gave her directions. I followed them around to the other side of the remaining fire engine. A few latecomers loitered miserably behind the police tape, ruing whatever they’d been doing at the expense of the event.
The only piece of trivia still at the scene was hidden in the back seat of a police car, wrapped in a tinfoil cape like a lunatic. It came in plastic packaging that said ‘Survival Blanket’ on the front and ‘Made in China’ beneath the barcode on the underside. Asian labour for Australian mass emergency. I slumped to the side, eyes tightly shut, not because I was tired, but so I didn’t have to see my insane reflection without filter or special effect.
*
Suddenly my sister was tapping her knuckles on the window of the police car and then she was hugging me for dear life on the highway and after that I was sitting in the back seat of her boyfriend’s white Toyota Camry as he sped over the ridge that made a colosseum of the crash site, no sound inside the car except for the whisper of the demister, a few lonely cones of red and blue blinking behind me like Christmas lights on Boxing Day. I was starving and needed to piss but there didn’t seem to be any sensitive way to say this.
‘The police told me you should go up to the hospital to get checked out,’ said my sister. ‘They told me there’s complications that can come up even if you feel completely fine. Brain bleeds. Blood clots. They said it’s not looking good for some of your friends. They might die, Lech. What the hell even happened?’
She knew more about the evolving storyline than me. ‘The car came out of nowhere,’ I said. ‘Li
ke a shooting star.’
Hannah stared at me in the rear-view, irritated then amazed. She saw a person where a ghost was supposed to be.
‘This isn’t poetry, Lech,’ she said. ‘This is real life!’
‘They’ll be fine,’ I said, falsely confident, and this seemed to settle the matter for the time being, windows demisted and the car interior regressing into a silence that seemed prehistoric.
We climbed over Blue Mountain Heights and began our descent into the outer limits of Toowoomba. The classroom myth I believed when I was a little kid is that my hometown was built in the crater of an extinct volcano, and that’s how it appeared to me now: low and half-lit suburbs spilling down slopes into a beaming CBD.
The descent evened out. The windscreen panned to street level. We idled at a red light. The light turned green. Within 500 metres the heavy industry was replaced by trees. No-one spoke. I realised we were driving in the wrong direction.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the hospital,’ said Hannah. ‘Mum and Dad are meeting us there.’
I felt anxious and angry simultaneously.
‘Why,’ I said, ‘would you tell them?’
Hannah gave me a filthy look.
‘Because they’re our parents, Lech.’
We arrived at the hospital, a precinct of rectangular prisms that became a leviathan at night, shadows filling the gaps between right angles. I thanked my sister and her boyfriend without any real sense of gratitude. They lingered in the loading zone a minute, waving ridiculously in my direction, before driving quickly away.
*
Nothing prepared me for the vision I saw irradiated below the red glow of ‘Emergency’. My parents stood in quiet conversation, smiling tenderly at each other. They’d separated two years earlier. To the best of my knowledge they hadn’t been on speaking terms for three months.
‘Hey,’ I said.
Mum hugged me. ‘Baby!’
Dad shook my hand with too much firmness, nervously, like he’d been caught philandering but in reverse.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 28
