Accidental

A life can change in an instant. That’s all it takes. Then be haunted by ‘what ifs’. What if I hadn’t gone for a drink that night, or had taken a different route home? What if it hadn’t been raining? What if I hadn’t been there at all? Someone else, with a different name, living another life.

She came at me out of the blue, I tried to convince the coroner. I’d never known what it meant before. She came at me out of the blue gloom, the blue rain, the blue shadow or the red bus. A smudged shape moving in a blue school uniform from in front of the stationary bus to in front of my moving car. 

I didn’t see her. I didn’t have time to brake.

‘Why didn’t you have your headlights on?’ he’d asked. He had a thin, angular face, with hollow, sunken eyes that stared lifelessly at me, and thinning, grey hair.

I couldn’t tell him at first about the light in November. The time of the year when it’s easy not to notice the first signs of dusk. When shapes suddenly lose their edges. When shadows start dancing in the street, waving to you in your peripheral vision. When a girl moving quickly from in front of a stationary bus blends perfectly into the shadows cast from the bus. 

‘It would have made no difference,’ I had told him. ‘I wouldn’t have had time to stop.’ She came at me suddenly out of the blue.

‘You can’t be sure,’ he’d said, his mouth a thin line of disapproval. ‘Even a second could have made a difference.’

He was write, of course: I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything anymore.

I couldn’t tell him about the time either; how there are two sorts. There’s clock time where seconds mount up to minutes and minutes to hours. Where day changes to night and weeks build to months and months to a year, and the years play out on your face, and show on your thickening waist. The time most of us live in. 

Then there’s the other sort. It has no limits. It reels you backwards without giving you a warning, spins you young again on a whim. It can be triggered by anything: a fragment of music, a scent on the air. Or a child moving in a blue uniform in the rain. It claims you in dreams, on the borders of sleep, even in your waking moments when you think you’re safe. 

A child moved out suddenly from the rear of a bus, ran in a blue smudge of uniform towards the train shrouded by the rain. I’d seen her a thousand times. Running through the blue shadows in the rain. Stopped by a screech of brakes and my voice shouting. Stopped by the sudden boom of my heart.

Her name was Ginger. I found that out later in the station. Rob Leer was on duty that night.  He sat me down in the interview room, grabbed a coffee for both himself and myself, and handed me a cigarette. I’d given up smoking a few months ago, but none of that mattered now -  my old life, wiped away now like a cloth feverishly trying to wipe away fingerprints from glass. My hand trembled when I held the cigarette and put it to my mouth. Rom lit it for me, and I inhaled. It tasted bitter, for which I was thankful. I needed the bitterness, to remind me that I was still connected to reality.

‘Jack, you know that Ginger is dead.’

More a statement than a question. He said her name gently. He could have been naming someone I’d known for a long time, somebody extremely close to me. His voice made her name sound intimate. Ginger. Meaning of the name, flourishing. 

When I knelt over her in the road, she lay as still as a doll, her pale face was like wax, not a mark on it. There was a delicate bubble of saliva in the corner of her mouth, waiting for a gust of wind to come along and either blow it away or pop it. I’d touched her then, only lightly, my hand brushing the top of her head. She could have been my own child lying there, her blue school skirt hitched up above her thin, bony, knobbly knees, books spilling out from the school bag dumped by her feet. My hand, resting on the top of her head, felt damp. When I pulled it away eventually, my fingers were stained red with blood.

I’ve seen dead bodies before. Often. I’ve seen them in the morgue. In the autopsy room. On the television. It’s all part of the job, I guess. I’ve seen them wrapped up in plastic, like a slab of meat. The zip on the bag’s pulled down, and I’ve breathed in death, musty, like rotting leaves and leaf litter. A dead body has no name, although on the records, a name might be assigned to it, surname first. But it’s just a word now; there’s no real name attached to the body anymore, no music, no essence.

I’ve seen casualties of road accidents before, like Gingers. I’ve been the first person on the scene a few times now, waiting for paramedics to arrive. I’ve done all of the stuff that everybody tells you to do; check for danger, response, clear airways, are they breathing, CPR if there are no signs of life, and use a defibrillator if it is needed and available for your use. 

‘Can you hear me?’ I’ve said. ‘Can you hear my voice? Can you squeeze my hand?’

I’ve tilted my head towards their nostrils, hoping to feel the warm tremor of a breath on my ear, watched for the rise and fall of their ribcage. I’ve even had to perform CPR once. It was on an old guy, an old, homeless guy. He died with the bottle still in my hand, and a bottle of rum clutched in the bony grasp of his. I had felt his untrimmed whiskers in his mouth. There was no use in trying; he’d already passed away. But you still have to try.

When someone dies suddenly, within seconds, within minutes, they’re not like those corpses on the mortuary slab. There’s a touch of colour in their cheeks still, as if they’re sleeping. There’s a suggestion of light in their eyes, as if their soul is uncertain as to where it should be.

Did I know that Ginger had died? Yes. But she wasn’t dead then, lying on the gritty tarmac, the rain drizzling lightly on her face, what looked like tears running down her cheeks. I saw her lips move slightly. Only slightly, but they did move. A faint noise, a low moan hidden within the breath. I dipped my head towards her face and listened to her breath and felt a faint breath wash over my cheek.

‘Sweetie,’ I said, as if she was my own child, belonging to me, ‘it’s ok. You’re going to be absolutely ok.’

Her eyes stirred beneath their closed lids. I kept my eyes fixed on her face and noticed little else. Ignored the froth of blood that was welling up from her chest wall, seeping through her royal blue blazer. Ignored Dave’s voice behind me, on the phone. A crop of blood started to run down her cheek, carving a path down her cheek line, clearly defined, the crimson against the pale, white skin. I took my handkerchief out of my pocket and stroked it gently upwards towards her brow so that it wouldn’t run into her eye. I squeezed her hand tightly, her fingers cold and still, encased within my own. 

How long? Seconds. Minutes. I don’t know. What’s time? Sometimes it stops all together.

Dave’s voice broke the barrier between the two types of time, pulled me back to clock time. Pulled me back to its forward motion.

‘The ambulance is coming, Josh. I can see it.’

I could hear it too. Shrieking down the road towards us, the road ghostly deserted, clear of any and all traffic. Within seconds, the paramedics were leaping out, their brisk urgency nudging me back to the sidelines. Checking her pulse, clamping an oxygen mask over her mouth, letting the rush of oxygen fill her insides. Her body slid from me, onto the stretcher, before being lifted up and placed in the back of the waiting ambulance. And that’s when it happened. I felt a cold rush of air come over me and pass me, and that was when I knew that she had died. 

Although I didn’t know her name then, I would learn it over the coming days. Ginger.

‘Jack, you know that Ginger is dead?’

More a question, than a statement. Rob was 10 years younger than me. He looked at me like I could have been his older brother. 

‘Yes, I know,’ I whispered.

Author's Note

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