something like privacy. I wanted a little time to get used to myself as a wronged wife-as the phrase applicable to me, rather than the fact-because I was bemused at the cliche of it. I wasn’t driving faster than usual. Between villages, the road rose and fell between fields and hedges, and here and there narrowed to a single lane. As always, it was almost deserted.
Up a hill on the left side was an orchard bordered by a low wall. I drove towards an overhanging line of trees in blossom whose ornamental acid pink was pressing hard into the blue of the sky. Set back from the road before the trees stood a pair of modern pebbledash cottages, each with a carport and a satellite dish. In the garden of the first one stood a caravan; in the other the sun was glancing off the glassy, dead surface of an artificial pond. Unremarkable as the houses were, I noticed them particularly, as if I knew I should later be unable to forget any detail of the moments just before. I passed by them and up towards the trees whose moving shadows cut like slate across the tarmac. The road was rising towards a bend beyond the trees and an even higher stretch of ground between garish spring fields. The green of these fields in the distance stung my eyes with almost chemical sharpness, the fresh bitterness of sap in new leaf, new grass. Green can be too green.
Perhaps I did wince as the pink branches bobbed above, almost in my face, or I may have blinked as a splinter of sunlight sliced at my eyes. And I’m not sure if I truly remember this or have constructed it after the event-after learning what the event must have been-but I can describe a jolt and a bang and the car bucking like an animal, and a black bulk thrown up and looming at me and blotting out the sky, and two or three ghastly, weighted thumps and then noises of scraping and rasping all around me. The windscreen crackled and crumped inwards. The bulk disappeared and the sun burned back through the crazed glass in fragmented darts of light that pricked my eyes like a fistful of thrown needles. I have no idea how I stopped the car.
This I do remember. In silence I walked-I did not run-towards the shape on the road. It was sprawled a shockingly long way back. It wasn’t black. She was dressed in a russet checked jacket and navy trousers. She lay on her front, irretrievably broken. I went close enough to see that her head was the wrong shape, and I saw the crimson puree growing under it. It no longer fitted correctly on her neck. One side was flattened so it seemed to be lying in a hollowed-out bowl in the tarmac. I went close enough to see the off-centre rictus of a dislodged dental plate forcing a mad smile out of one side of her torn mouth. I saw on her face a look of slight surprise, a single backward glance arrested indelibly in an eye that was drowsy and glistening with the filmy, departing gaze of a drunkard, or a very tired baby. I did not hear if the spinning rear wheel of the bicycle on the side of the road was making the usual cheerful ticking noise. All seemed quiet until I became aware of a soft, lamenting whine coming from my own lips. Beyond us, the wind flicked some sheets of paper across several spilled books on the road. A ring binder lay splayed, its cover showing a cartoon of a quill pen and the words
The wind got up, too. A sudden gust blew the loose papers on the road up into the light and shadow and for a few moments I stood transfixed by their swirling, indecent exuberance, the loveliness of bright white paper as the sun caught each flapping page. Then, perhaps to stop myself from screaming, I chased after them through the scattering wind, grabbing them in midair or where they dropped momentarily to the ground. I don’t know what I thought I was saving, or for whom. All I saw was that every sheet bore the heading THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK, and all I knew was that I could not bear that a single paper should be swept into the dirt and blood. I would not let a single word be smirched. By the time I’d picked the pages all up and bundled them in my arms, I was weeping.
I think my whimpering stopped in the second or two before my mouth dried. I didn’t faint or fall but all at once I wanted to be down on the ground. I was clutching the papers against my body and they were suddenly unbearably heavy. I was going to have to sink down next to her and stay there forever, or I was going to have to move. I ran back to the car, opened the door, and threw the papers into the back. With my hand reaching for my handbag-I was about to get my telephone, surely I was?-I turned and looked up, hearing a raucous hacking sound above me. A crow swooped out of the trees, skimmed over the wall, and alighted in a tatter of wings on the small of the woman’s back. Two more landed on the road nearby. The first one, watched by the others, lifted its wings and tidied them over itself like a pair of oily folded hands. It hopped up the length of her body until it stood on her hair. Prayerfully, it dipped its head and began to peck. In the sunlight its feathers gleamed rainbow black. I drove away.
A.
As I drove, I knew the sun would still be shining through the windy trees, painting the road in moving daubs of shadow. Daffodils and a lost hat would still waft together on the grass. Horror that should have quite overwhelmed me was somehow at bay, though I sensed that it was massing, growing in a place in my mind where it would wait and visit later when its full force had gathered. For the moment I was calm enough to know my calm for what it was: merciful, sedating shock, the kindly muffling of the brain that slows the world down following the rush of a disaster. And so what first horrified me was not what had happened, of itself, but that it was already receding, as a dream evaporates within seconds after waking. The event, though catastrophic, was already turning vague while new events, banal but new-a hat rolling in daffodils, clouds buffing and dulling the ground-claimed my attention irresistibly.
I thought about the wind flipping the strewn pages on the road and teasing the woman’s hair. I thought about her wrecked body and my incidental, obliterating swipe that had punched the life out of it, and I realized that our being caught up in this together would never, ever be explained. How could two strangers be bound to each other forever as we now were by an event so haphazard, yet so crucial and so intimate? A husband was unfaithful. A shopping bag was punctured by the edge of a carton. A wife made too stark a discovery, on a day already angular and confusing with blades of shadow slicing through trees. But these were not reasons, merely circumstances: routine car maintenance, routine adultery, broken eggs, spilled fruit, a day of wind and sun. No divine or other congruence, no pre-ordained astral spinning, could possibly be in motion either to prevent or determine that this conjunction of trivia would cause anyone to drive under a flickering arch of pink blossom towards a single, injurious, cataclysmic encounter with a stranger on a bicycle. Why should it?
People vanish as if they never had been more than apparitions and all the life in them little more than a movement that caught the eye. A woman invisible among the watery shadows on a lane in spring, my uncle walking away from me into a snowy night long ago. My grandmother in the early morning, pegging out washing and playing hide-and-seek behind the sheets: all vanished. Not a word comes back and not a breath remains, though the rippling of laundry on a clothes-line can still make me wonder if she lingers there, teasing me with that
