crash

I stop and decide to turn around. It’s early afternoon. I am driving down a country lane. I reverse into someone’s driveway. The driveway has box hedges on either side, the height of a house. I pull straight out. The van clips me. The impact cannot have been too great, as I am not wearing a seatbelt, and although I am thrown forward, my head does nothing more than bump, sharply, against the windscreen.

The Renault’s front right hand wing is a mess. The steering’s affected. The Renault’s not going anywhere. The van’s fine.

The people whose driveway it is come out. They are elderly and sympathetic. They say it’s the third time it’s happened or maybe the forth or the fiftieth. The council need to put up a sign. The van driver is hopping around. He wants us out of there before the police arrive. We exchange insurance details. He says it always turns into a pantomime if the police get there.

In the end he drives me home in his white van. The old people call a garage for the car. There’s someone else there, I think, as well as N. They’d been worried about me. I’d left on the drop of a shoulder, needed to turn and go. Didn’t know where I was going. Looking for air, looking to break something.

N fixes the van driver a cup of tea. I’m a bit dazed. The van driver sits in a corner. He’s short-haired, middle-aged, sensible Yorkshireman. He talks about the idiots there are out there, driving, He says you wouldn’t believe some of the idiots he’s seen behind the wheel of a car. I don’t know why he’s still here, sitting in one of the uncomfortable chairs we never sit in, drinking tea.

When he leaves, everything’s OK again. Crashes are physical. They heal the abscesses of the mind. All is soothed. The Red Renault will be remade. I will hitchhike out past the high security prison to rescue it.

We are young. We laugh at our craziness. The places it leads us to. The damage it causes and the damage it has not caused.