I look down the drive. Toby’s car has been hit side on by another vehicle. I see crumpled metal. Steam rising.
I stand up. The pain is nothing.
I hope Toby’s dead.
The driveway’s short, but it seems to take me forever to walk up it.
Imogen hears the collision, too, and gets to her feet.
She looks out of the window. Unlocks the door. Drops the axe. Runs.
“Mum,” she shouts. “Mummy?”
“No,” I yell. I try to stop my daughter running past me. She needs to be protected from seeing this.
She dodges me, and runs toward the scene, screaming for her mother.
I work hard to catch up with her. At the mouth of the driveway, she stops. I reach her side.
The destruction is beautiful and terrible. The smell is intoxicating and unnatural. Toby’s car is crushed on the driver’s side where the other vehicle has slammed into it. I put my arm around Imogen and pull her toward me.
“It’s not your mother’s car,” I say. “It’s not Mum.”
She pulls away and runs toward the vehicles. I follow. I can see through the shattered windscreen of Toby’s car that he’s unconscious. His head is tilted back, his neck looks stretched, there’s blood on his face, and his eyes are beads of white.
It’s hard to look at. Everything feels exquisitely painful as if all my plans are falling apart right in front of me.
I look at the other car. Its bonnet is crumpled where it impacted Toby’s Honda, its windscreen has partially shattered, and the light inside the car has come on. I can see that the driver’s a woman. She’s hunched over the wheel and unmoving.
“Phone an ambulance!” Imogen screams at me. “What are you doing? Phone for help! Give me your phone!”
She’s tugging at my arm. I look at her. Of course. That’s what I should be doing.
I take my phone out but find myself staring at it. She grabs it from me and dials 999.
I listen to her talking to the operator and I stare at the accident.
It’s so potent. I feel almost bewitched by the sight, as if I’ve been the cause of all this and I don’t know if that makes me a god or a monster.
When Imogen has finished making the call, she shouts at me, “Why aren’t you helping them? I thought you knew first aid,” and I realize I do, of course I do, and I should be helping and that perhaps I should be supporting her and not her supporting me. And I get the sudden conviction that she might never be able to love me after this if I can’t pull myself together and prove myself to her.
Imogen runs to Toby’s car and tries to open the doors, but they’re stuck. She crawls onto the bonnet, trying to reach him via the shattered windscreen.
I approach the other car. Steam hisses from the bonnet. Imogen is calling Toby. Apart from that, the silence is otherworldly. I can’t see the face of the driver in the car that crashed into Toby’s,but it doesn’t look good for her. Her door is jammed but I get the passenger door open and crawl across the seat and feel for a pulse in her neck.
It’s there but weak. Her breathing is shallow. I daren’t move her.
She moans. It’s a shocking, inhuman sound. Through the front window I can see Imogen trying to reach Toby. She’s lying on the bonnet, her hands through the gap in the windscreen but it’s not big enough for her to get to him. She’s so unbelievably brave.
Imogen glances at me, desperation on her face, and immediately I lean forward, and talk to the woman the way Imogen has been talking to Toby.
“You’ll be okay,” I tell her. My words sound stilted. “If you can hear me, help is on the way.”
I don’t care if this woman lives or dies but I want Imogen to see me doing the right thing, so I lean in even closer to pull the woman’s bloody hair aside so that I can see her face, and I realize with a shock that it’s Ruth.
An animal noise escapes from her mouth and her head moves a fraction. Her blood is all over the steering wheel. I can’t get away from her fast enough. I scramble backwards out of the car and when I stand up I feel as if everything around me is moving and I am still, in its center, in the eye of the storm, and I am finished.
Ruth is here, dying, in front of me. And so is Toby. She has driven into his car as he backed out. They might have killed one another.
