Last night, Craig and I were on our way to meet a friend of his and her husband for dinner, and we saw a bundle of something in the street, or what looked like the cobbles dug up, except they were too high. Somehow I missed what happened next, but Craig saw a car hit the shape and bounce over it, and as we heard the loud noise we both looked and saw that it was a person.
Craig stopped the car and went to her side, trying to talk to her and assess what state she was in. I ran into the junction to keep any more cars from hitting her. As I passed her, I saw her face and thought she might have been dead — her elderly face looked like the blank faces of my grandparents at their wakes — but then I saw her eyes move like those of a mad, wild horse from a film, one that had been injured in a race. They were empty eyes, staring and moving almost mechanically.
I called 999 and tried to keep my wits, looking at the street names, trying to get the overly calm emergency services person to the point where he would send out an ambulance. I couldn’t remember my phone number. He gave me instructions, but a first aider and a doctor were both on the scene, taking charge. Any first aid training I’d had went completely out of my brain, because it never occurred to me that those plastic dolls might represent real people who didn’t just need their breathing and circulation checked out but were very badly hurt in ways I couldn’t see. Her mouth gawped like a goldfish’s out of water.
The ambulance eventually came, and they shifted her onto a stretcher, one arm dropping, her thin legs rolling back and forth in ways they shouldn’t. We stood in the cold for ages, being questioned by the police, watching the ambulance, waiting for it to leave, speculating about why she’d collapsed in the street (someone said she’d collapsed on the sidewalk and inexplicably crawled out there). I shivered, and eventually we went on to dinner, forgetting for a while what we’d seen, enjoying the evening’s company. Back home in bed, we lay there in the dark, talking quietly through what we’d seen, sharing our confused and sad feelings. We both felt sick to our stomachs.
This morning I made pancakes for us to eat with lots of maple syrup, and we enjoyed that, getting back to normal life and savouring each other’s company. Where the night before it felt like we’d been relating to each other through a pane of glass, now we seemed to be taking special care to appreciate each other.
Then the police called Craig and arranged to come around and get our full statements. We sat in separate rooms, him talking to the female constable, me to the male — who turned out to have aspirations about writing a screenplay. We talked about that a bit, then he asked me all his questions, then we got back to talking about writing. But I had to ask him what happened to the woman. He told me: She died.
I don’t know what to feel. That was a sad and wrong end for her to meet. No one should go like that, battered beyond survival, lying on the cobbles surrounded by people but alone. To forget is callous, to keep revisiting the thought ghoulish and upsetting. Every woman I saw on the street today had her face; every car that whooshed or bumped past on the street seemed like a killer metal dragon.
When Craig and I parted company I sent a text telling him I love him, because I do and I know it, there’s no time to wait with these things; he replied in kind.
I made sure to cross only at the lights as I went to two birthday parties with friends, partly being with them and loving them, partly wanting to go home and be by myself. Now that I’m home, I feel scared: that deathly door was opened so close to me and I can still feel the cold. Everything in the world is made of the thinnest glass.
Tomorrow I’m off to the northwest coast with the Friday Gang for a week’s holiday. This is probably for the best.
