by Ian Mcewan
In what followed, the rapidity of events was accommodated by the slowing of time. He was preparing to overtake when something happened – he did not quite see what – in the region of the lorry’s wheels, a hiatus, a cloud of dust, and then something black and long snaked through a hundred feet towards him. It slapped the windscreen, clung there a moment and was whisked away before he had time to understand what it was. And then – or did this happen in the same moment? – the rear of the lorry made a complicated set of movements, a bouncing and swaying, and slewed in a wide spray of sparks, bright even in sunshine. Something curved and metallic flew off to one side. So far Stephen had had time to move his foot towards the brake, time to notice a padlock swinging on a loose flange, and ‘Wash me please’ scrawled in grime. There was a whinnying of scraped metal and new sparks, dense enough to form a white flame which seemed to propel the rear of the lorry into the air. He was applying first pressure to the brake as he saw the dusty, spinning wheels, the oily bulge of the differential, the camshaft, and now, at eye level, the base of the gear box. The upended lorry bounced on its nose once, perhaps twice, then lazily, tentatively, began to complete the somersault, bringing Stephen the inverted radiator grill, the downward flash of windscreen and a deep boom as the roof hit the road, rose again several feet, fell back, and surged along before him on a bed of flame. Then it swung its length round to block the road, fell on to its side and stopped abruptly as Stephen headed into it from a distance of less than a hundred feet and at a speed which he estimated, in a detached kind of way, to be forty-five miles an hour.
Now, in this slowing of time, there was a sense of a fresh beginning. He had entered a much later period in which all the terms and conditions had changed. So these were the new rules, and he experienced something like awe, as though he were walking alone into a great city on a newly discovered planet. There was space too for a little touch of regret, genuine nostalgia for the old days of spectacle, back then when a lorry used to caterpult so impressively before the impassive witness. Now was a more demanding time of effort and concentration. He was pointing the car towards a six-foot gap formed between a road sign and the front bumper of the motionless lorry. He had removed his foot from the brakes, reasoning – and it was as if he had just completed a monograph on the subject – that they were pulling the car to one side, interfering with his aim. Instead he was changing down through the gears and steering with both hands firmly, but not too tightly, on the wheel, ready to bring them up to cover his head if he missed. He beamed messages, or rather messages sprang from him, to Julie and Kate, nothing more distinct than pulses of alarm and love. There were others he should send to, he knew, but time was short, less than half a second, and fortunately they did not come to mind to confuse him. As he shifted to second and the small car gave out a protesting roar, it was clear that he must not think too hard, that he had to trust to a relaxed and dissociated thinking, that he must imagine himself into the gap. On the sound of this very word, which he must have spoken aloud, there was a brisk crunch of metal and glass and he was through and coming to a halt, with his door handle and wing mirror scattered across the road fifty feet behind.
Before the relief, before the shock, came an intense hope that the driver of the lorry had witnessed this feat of driving. Stephen sat motionless, still holding the steering wheel, watching himself through the eyes of the man in the vehicle behind. If not the driver, then a passer-by would do, some farmer perhaps, someone who understood driving and would have the full measure of his accomplishment. He wanted applause, he wanted a passenger in the front seat turning to him now with shining eyes. In fact, he wanted Julie. He began to laugh and shout, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’ And then, ‘You did it! You did it!’ The whole experience had lasted no longer than five seconds. Julie would have appreciated what had happened to time, how duration shaped itself round the intensity of the event. They would be talking about it now, thrilled to be alive, curious to understand what it must mean, what significance it had for their future. He laughed again, louder, and whooped. They would be kissing, taking one of the bottles of champagne from the back seat, beginning to undress each other, celebrating their survival in the settling dust. What a time they were having! He put his hands over his face and cried briefly and messily. He blew his nose hard on a yellow duster supplied by the hire firm, and got out of the car.
To have been watching Stephen, the driver would have needed to cut a hole in the roof of his cabin. Stephen was not immediately aware of this as he walked back up the road towards the lorry. The front end was so badly battered and wrenched that it was difficult at first to decide which way it would have been facing if it had been unscathed. Diligently, he kicked his ruined handle and side mirror to the edge of the road. The air ahead was warped by evaporating diesel fuel. Glass rasped unpleasantly underfoot. It occurred to him that the driver might be dead. He approached the cab warily, trying to make out where the door, or any other kind of opening might be. But the structure had folded in on itself; it resembled a tightly closed fist, or a toothless mouth held shut. He put one foot on the wreckage and hoisted himself up until his face was level with the windscreen. It had shattered into a milky, opaque surface. When he climbed further and found a side window, he saw only the padding of the cab’s ceiling pressed tight against the pane. The road was of such a tidy construction that he had to jump over the irrigation ditch and search about in the bracken before he could find a large rock. He returned with it and banged the wreckage.
He cleared his throat and called out absurdly into the silence, ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’ And then louder, ‘Hello!’
There was a stirring deep within the cab, then a short silence, then a man’s voice close by spoke two words, two muffled monosyllables. It was a deadened acoustic, the murmur of a voice in a heavily furnished room. He called again, and broke off immediately. He had shouted over the voice as it repeated the words. He waited several seconds this time, and peered into the mess of chrome and metal, looking for a chink. When he called, the voice answered, two words of equal length. In here? Help me? He circled the cab, trying to keep the agitation out of his voice. ‘I can’t make out what you’re saying. I’m trying to find you.’
He had returned to his original position. There was a pause in which, Stephen imagined, the man was gathering his strength.
He heard a sharp intake of breath and then a voice saying plainly, ‘Look down.’
There was a head at Stephen’s feet. It protruded from a vertical gash in the steel. There was a bare arm too, wedged under the head, pressing tight into the face and obscuring the mouth. Stephen knelt down. He had no reservations about touching the stranger’s head. The hair was dark brown and thick. At the crown there was a bald patch the size of a large coin. The man was face down into the road, but Stephen could see that one eye at least was shut.
The gash was in fact a gap between two crumpled sections of tin plate. He could make out the top of the man’s shoulder in the gloom, the red and black check of his workshirt. He slapped the man’s face gently and the eyes opened.
‘Are you in pain?’ Stephen asked. ‘Can you wait while I get help?’ The man was attempting to speak, but the forearm trapped under his jaw was obscuring his words. Stephen lifted the head with two hands and used his foot to shove the arm clear.
The man grunted and closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, ‘Have you got pencil and paper there, mate? I want you to take something down for me.’ It was a London accent, husky and friendly.
Stephen had a notebook and pencil in his pocket but he did not reach for them. ‘We’ve got to get you out of there. You might be losing blood. There’s fuel everywhere.’
The man spoke reasonably. ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it. Do me a favour and take a couple of messages. Then if you rescue me after that there’ll be nothing lost, will there?’ Stephen was as amenable as any man to the necessity of final messages.
‘This one’s for Jane Field, Tebbit House
, Number two-three-one-six, Anzio Road, South West Nine.’
‘That’s not far from me.’
‘Darling Jane, I love you …’ He closed his eyes and considered. ‘I saw you in this dream I had last night. I was always going to come back. You know that, don’t you. I knew something like this was going to happen. Yours, Joey. Oh yeah, and put, love to the kids. The next one’s to Pete Tapp, three hundred and nine Brixton Road, South West Two. Dear Pete, Well old mate, it happened to me first. I won’t be able to make Saturday. Put a couple of, you know, exclamation marks. I still owe you that hundred quid. Get it off Jane. I want you to have Bessie. It’s one whole tin a day, round about six, mixed in with some rusks and a cup of milk. And no chocolate. Cheerio, Joe. Oh yeah, and put on the first one, PS, I owe Pete a hundred quid.’
Stephen turned the page of his notebook and waited.
The man was staring into the road surface. At last he said dreamily, ‘This one’s for Mr Corner, care of Stockwell Manor School, South West Nine. Dear Mr Corner, I don’t suppose you’ll remember me. I left about fourteen years ago. You chucked me out of your class and said I’d never do nothing. Well I got my own business now, with my own lorry that’s almost paid off, a pink twenty-ton Fahrschnell. I often think about what you said, and I wanted you to know. Yours faithfully, Joseph Fergusson, aged twenty-eight. The next one’s to Wendy McGuire, Thirteen, Fox’s Road, Ipswich. Sweetheart …’
Stephen snapped the notebook shut and stood. ‘That’s it,’ he called as he walked quickly to the car. He opened the boot and rummaged irritably until he found the jack, which was held in an obscure place by a magnetic device.
‘I tell you,’ the man said when Stephen returned and tried to wedge the jack sideways into the gap, ‘I can’t feel a thing below my neck. I don’t want to see it.’
It looked as though there was no purchase along the crumpled sides of the opening. However, the thought of taking more dictation drove Stephen on and at last the jack was in place and he began to work the ratchet.
He was kneeling on the ground with the head between his knees. The man was resting his cheek against the tarmac. The jack was positioned about eighteen inches above his neck, and wedged at an angle. As it took hold, the lower end began to ease the tin plate aside, opening the gap a fraction with each hard turn of the ratchet. The upper end was against something too firm to shift and this provided a useful purchase. When the gap had opened up by three or four inches Stephen was able to reposition the jack, vertically this time, with the base close to the man’s throat. With a penetrating squeaking sound, like that of a finger nail being run across a blackboard, a torn section of the lorry began to lift clear. It moved six inches before it jammed against something heavy. Stephen peered into a dark chamber where the man’s body could be seen curled. There was no blood, or any evidence of damage. Careful not to disturb the jack, he took hold of the man’s shoulder with one hand, and cupped the other under his face and pulled. The man groaned.
‘You’re going to have to help,’ Stephen said. ‘Raise your head so I can get my hand under your chin.’ This time there was movement, almost an inch. When this had been repeated several times, the man was able to use his free arm to push himself, and Stephen could grip him under both arms and pull him clear.
The man was nursing his wrist as they walked back to the car. ‘I think it’s broken,’ he said sadly. ‘I was due to play in a snooker tournament on Saturday.’
Stephen, who himself was shaking now and felt weak in the legs, decided that the man was in a state of shock. He helped him into the passenger seat and tucked a rug round him. But the driver’s door wouldn’t open without its handle and Stephen had to get the man out of his seat while he climbed across and squeezed behind the wheel. When at last they were settled they sat for a minute or two. The rituals of inserting the ignition key, of jiggling the gear stick and of gripping the steering wheel calmed Stephen. He looked at the man who stared through the windscreen and trembled.
‘Listen Joe, it’s a miracle you’re alive.’
Joe ran his tongue over his lips and said, ‘I’m thirsty.’
Stephen reached for the bottle from the back seat. ‘Champagne is all we’ve got.’ The exploding cork bounced off the dashboard and struck Joe hard on the ear. He grinned as he took the bottle. He closed his mouth over the foaming neck and sucked, and closed his eyes. They passed the bottle between them and did not speak until it was empty. When it was, Joe belched and asked Stephen his name. ‘You were brilliant, Stephen. Fucking brilliant. I wouldn’t’ve thought of the jack.’ He looked at his wrist and said wonderingly, ‘I’m alive. I’m not even a cripple.’
They laughed, and Stephen excitedly told the story of the six-foot gap he had driven through, how time had slowed, and how the road sign had sheared off the wing mirror and door handle. ‘Brilliant,’ Joe murmured repeatedly, and, ‘Fucking brilliant,’ when Stephen reached for the second bottle of champagne. They set about reconstructing the accident from their separate points of view. Joe said it felt as though a giant had picked his lorry up and tossed it in the air. He remembered the road surface coming towards him, then the upside down glimpse of the car behind and of everything folding in around him. It was a miracle, they kept saying, a bloody miracle. Some time towards the end of the second bottle they cheered and roared for the hell of it, and for lack of anything else sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, each man gesturing towards the other on the ‘he’.
As they drove away, Stephen remembered the jack and thought he would leave it where it was. They headed for the nearest town and discussed whether Joe should be taken to the hospital or the police station first.
He insisted on the latter. ‘Want it all above board for the insurance man.’
They were travelling at over ninety miles an hour when Stephen remembered that he was almost drunk and slowed down. Joe was silent for a while, murmuring only as they came into the outskirts of the town, ‘Used to know a nice girl lived round here.’ When they were in the centre looking for the police station he said, ‘How long was I in there? Two hours? Three?’
‘Ten minutes. Or less.’
Joe was still muttering how incredible that was when Stephen found the police station and stopped. ‘What do you make of it, that thing about time?’ he asked.
Joe stared through his window at three armed policemen getting into a patrol car. ‘I dunno. I was inside once for almost two years. Nothing to do, nothing happening, every fucking day the same. And you know what? It went in a flash, my time. It was all over before I knew I was there. So it stands to reason. If a lot happens quickly it’s going to seem like a long time.’
They got out of the car and stood about on the pavement. The celebration was at an end.
‘You’re alive,’ Stephen said for perhaps the tenth time that hour. ‘What do you think it means? What difference does it make?’
Joe had been thinking, he had his answers ready. ‘It means I’m going back to Jane and the kids and bugger Wendy McGuire. It means I’ll buy two second-hand rigs with the insurance money.’
Reminded by this of the important business in hand, he turned and walked towards the police station, still too dazed, Stephen supposed, to remember the formalities of thanks and goodbyes. As Joe stood aside to let two police-women pass, before disappearing through a set of swing doors, Stephen thought of the messages in his notebook and felt encumbered by them. He tore the pages out and then, taking the postcard from his back pocket, he leaned over the gutter and posted them all down a drain.
Perhaps the influence of the junior Minister had kept the fir plantations and the hedge-ripping machinery from the immediate vicinity of Ogbourne St Felix. The five-hundred-acre wood, coppiced since before Norman times and mentioned in the Domesday Book, was set in a pocket of land visited by commercial photographers and film makers because of its resemblance to what was generally accepted as the English countryside. The wood belonged nominally to an ossified charity. In effect it was in the posses
sion of the owner of the only house on the property, who was obliged to pay for its maintenance. A row of three wood-cutters’ cottages had been knocked through to form the house which stood in a small clearing on the southern side of the coppice. The approach was by a minor road and then a pot-holed track lined with rowans and limes. Only the experienced visitor knew that a spread of thickened undergrowth was the Darkes’ wild hedge, and that in summer you had to search hard in a tangle of shrubbery to find the wicket gate which opened the way to a green tunnel and out through a rose arch into Thelma’s cottage garden.
Stephen had stopped in the nearby market town to replace the champagne. He had been feeling heavy-limbed as he crossed a small square with his purchase towards the town’s principal hotel. He wanted to wash and drink a large Scotch. He was not prepared for the group of beggars gathered by the entrance. They looked less beaten-down than the usual London types, healthier, more confident. There was laughter as he approached and a muscular old man in a string vest spat on to the pavement and rubbed his hands. None of the usual regulations seemed to apply here. By law, beggars were not even permitted to work in pairs. They were supposed to be on the move all the time, down certain authorised thoroughfares. They were certainly not supposed to be crowding round entrances like this, waiting to pester the public. Here, even badges were not correctly worn. They were strapped round tanned, sinewy forearms, or, on a couple of girls, sewn into colourful headbands. There was a giant wearing one as an eye patch. A young man with a shaved, tattooed head had attached his to an earring.
As he came closer, Stephen was aware of his bag of clinking bottles, and the provocative way the gold-foil protruded into the sunlight. They were all watching him now and it was impossible to turn back. It was the Government and its vile legislation, he thought. All the same, such a situation would not be tolerated for a moment in London, and he was on the look-out for a policeman. He had slowed his pace, and then he was among them. He stared ahead, seeing no one. He heard a voice say, ‘How about a tenner, then?’ and he kept on. He glimpsed a pocket edition of Shelley in a girl’s hand. Someone plucked at his bag, and Stephen pulled it towards him roughly. Another voice parodied a cultivated accent: ‘Hmm, Bollinger. What a frightfully good idea!’ There was laughter as he shouldered his way through the grassy smell of sweat, and the scent of patchouli.
