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AN END TO THE AFFAIR

I lay in the roadway, cursing the driver of the car that had just driven into me. “You bastard; you bastard; you bastard”, I repeated to myself. My limbs smarted from the bruises and abrasions that the harsh tarmacadam had violently inflicted upon them.

I hazily perceived someone removing my bicycle.

Unknown voices enquired about my health.  “Was I alright?”

Of course I bloody well wasn’t alright.  Did they suppose that lying in the street on a Sunday afternoon was some kind of weird fetish?

All right, so I wasn’t dead, but I didn’t know what my injuries were, and something like this could really mess up my life.

Was I annoyed?

No one enquired about that.  But I wasn’t annoyed; I was angry; outrageously angry.

Though there is not a proper time in life to go diving onto hard paved surfaces, Sixty-four years is, by any consideration, certainly not the most appropriate.  Surviving the most part of a normal lifespan: the troublesome teenage years; the joy of falling in love; the raising of infant children; career success; the completion of mortgage obligations and soon to come, the retirement years.  Life’s bonus; the time to collect the big dividends of life.  Me and that lovely woman that I married some years before, can now anticipate once again spending significant amounts of time together, like we did before we married, and after, but before children imposed their ceaseless and selfish demands upon that bliss.  To have this prospect whipped away by some thoughtless driver intent on saving a couple of poxy seconds from a pointless journey, seemed grossly unjust.

I could feel somebody moving my limbs now.  I don’t know who it was, but by their gentle touch and distant muffled voice, it seemed to me that they had dome this sort of thing before.  I vaguely heard the sound of emergency sirens getting closer and louder.  More distant voices, evidently not speaking in hushed tones but rather as though they were in another room.  And then, softer still, as if they had closed the door to that room.

Then I was twenty or thirty feet above the knot of people that were crowded around the scene.  The traffic was backed up for a considerable way in both directions and impatient drivers were standing by the open doors of their cars, trying to understand the cause of the congestion.

Below me I could see the ambulance men lifting a limp body onto a stretcher and then carefully loading it into the ambulance.  I looked up again and I could see my wife running down toward the centre of the confusion.  The people at the scene were sombre.  Few spoke.  The ambulance men closed the doors of their green and yellow van and drove away and the small crowd began to disperse.

My wife was left alone, weeping copiously, not needing to be told who the passenger in the ambulance was.  Her face buried in her hands and the involuntary movement of her shoulders, bore witness to her grief.

I wanted to go down to her and comfort her, but I could not.

And I cried too! I mourned for my lost life and wept for my lost love.