‘I’m going to turn this bike into a gun,’ Roy said. ‘I’ll take it to Vietnam when I turn sixteen.’
George said, ‘That’d be.’
And the car hit them both.
When George told this part of the story, he invariably found himself saying ‘This actually happened’ and ‘I’m not making this up’ because it seemed too cruel that the car that had run the red light and knocked into Roy and the bike and him should have been driven by an eighty-three-year-old lady who could barely see over the steering wheel.
Sadly, it was the truth. If George had ever learned her name, he’d long forgotten it, but he’d remembered that she was eighty-three, that she was barely taller than him or Roy, and that the words she kept repeating afterwards were, ‘Please don’t sue me. Please don’t sue me.’ For the dignity of old ladies everywhere, George often wished this part of the story hadn’t happened, but there you were, sometimes life didn’t oblige with appropriate variation.
She wasn’t going especially fast, but the impact was so shockingly irresistible, so bluntly unstoppable, that both George and Roy cried out simultaneous, surprised ‘Ohs!’ as she drove into them.
And didn’t stop.
There were theories about this afterwards, most of them unsurprising: that the impact had taken a short while to filter through her diminished-by-age capabilities; that it had shocked her so much that she had simply frozen, her foot remaining on the accelerator rather than moving to the brake; or that the disbelief at what was occurring in front of her was so strong that, for a few terrible moments, she simply expected someone else to act. Whatever the reason, she hit them, and on she drove.
Roy had seen her coming at the very last second and had taken a step back, though not nearly far enough. The car hit his knees, spinning him around and throwing him to the pavement, out of the way, as she ploughed on through George and the bike.
George saw the impact, of course, but he couldn’t remember feeling it. Roy had been thrown out of his line of vision, and suddenly here was this massive, unstoppable block of metal filling it, knocking the wind out of him as he flattened his stomach across the bike seat and onto the hood of the car.
It didn’t stop. It kept coming. There was nowhere for George to put his feet, nowhere he could stand that made sense as the ground was dragged away from underneath him, and he fell, still so surprised it was happening it seemed as if only his eyes were working, that each of his other senses – ears to hear it with, feeling to register pain – had been shut off.
He fell with the bike, its handlebars catching the front bumper, and as the old lady still drove on, ten, twenty, thirty feet past the crosswalk, George slipped all the way to the ground, the body of the bike pushing him along the road in front of the car. He remembered the sensation vividly, more vividly than any other detail of the accident. It felt like sliding on his back across snow, any feeling of pain from the scraping still just a future possibility. He was helpless to stop it anyway, his arms refusing to grasp anything, his legs refusing to push him out of the way, his head refusing to even look around for help.
What he remembered most was that it was, paradoxically, a moment of tremendous calm. All he saw was the sky above, its serene and soothing vastness, looking impassively down on him as he bumped and scraped along the pavement, pushed by a massive car and a fallen bicycle. It was a moment like when he found the crane, or the crane found him, a moment of stopped time, a moment to live in forever. He stared back up at the sky with a kind of ecstatic disbelief and was only able to ever remember a single coherent thought, ‘This is really happening.’
‘This really happened,’ George would say as he told the story. ‘It sounds like I’m making it up, but I’m really, really not.’
The handlebars dislodged from the bumper of the car, and the bike fell, but somehow – luckily? miraculously? improbably? impossibly? – did so in a way that the old lady’s car pushed it to one side and George along with it. Instead of being crushed flat by the tires, George had a close-up view of them as they drove past, inches from his face as the car trundled down the road.
And then there was only silence. Utter silence. George, still on his back, glanced up the street and saw Roy. Such a little amount of time had passed that Roy was still lying on the road, too, struggling to get up. George did the same, and he and Roy discovered at the same moment that neither of them could walk. Both lurched forward and fell in exactly the same way.
Which made them laugh.
Nearly forty years later, George could still remember the feeling of that laugh, the sincerity of it, the truthfulness of it. In their mutual, eight- and nine-year-old shock, before the inevitable pain that hovered seconds away came rushing in, before the acceptance or even knowledge that they had just survived a possibly fatal calamity dawned, they had, for an instant, laughed.
But the world would no longer wait. What was probably not more than a dozen adults but what felt like thousands came running in a flood from the forecourt of the gas station and out the glass doors of the supermarket, unthinkable terror written so clearly on their faces that all at once the pain showed up, too, and George began, suddenly, to cry.
They put their hands on him and Roy, lifted them from the pavement and out of the road, while some of them also went racing angrily after the car of the old lady, who was only just now coming to a stop a good hundred feet past the point where she’d hit them. These people called the ambulances that came, and a fire truck, too, that even in his bewildered pain, George thought was a bit much. He didn’t remember giving anyone his phone number, but he must have because one woman said to another behind him – he remembered this part so clearly he could still hear the precise words to this day – ‘Well, I called the mothers. One of them’s fine, the other’s hysterical.’
George’s shoulders slumped, like a deflating ball.
Sure enough, his mother arrived in tears as unstoppable as the old lady’s car, and the first words out of her mouth were – and George remembered this clearly, too – ‘Why didn’t you call me to pick you up?’
Now, the rarer times when he told this later part of the story, the part where his mother came off so badly, he would remind his listener that she had just heard the news that her eight-year-old son had been run over by a car, so she certainly had cause to be overwhelmed. But still, George found himself wanting to apologise to all the kind strangers who’d helped him for how his mother was acting, for how she was needing to be calmed by the ambulance driver herself, for how she was eagerly accepting an oxygen mask from a paramedic. This same woman who had so (ostensibly) heroically bitten Miss Jones’s finger, now hogging the spotlight at her own son’s car accident.
They lived. Of course, they lived. They hadn’t even been that badly injured. No bones were broken, though Roy had torn ligaments in both his knees. George, though in by far the worst danger from the actual impact, came out of it better. Two huge bruises across both thighs that prevented him from walking for a week and a host of bloody scrapes across the back of his head and arms from being pushed across tarmac, but a breathtakingly minor haul of injuries from something that could have been so much worse. George, in fact, didn’t even get an ambulance ride. It had driven off with Roy in the back, sirens wailing, and George was left with his own mother to take him to the hospital, weeping all the way, to the point where he had started comforting her.
She was so upset, in fact, that he never told her or his father what he realised even in his eight-year-old brain, which was that if Roy’s bike hadn’t been there, if it hadn’t fallen
