Christchurch novelist Chloe Lane on being bowled
“I feel embarrassed I didn’t get more injured,” I say.
My husband raises his eyebrows.
“I can’t even get hit by a car right.”
We both laugh nervously, but neither of us denies there might be some truth to what I have said. Before I have caught my breath I slowly climb the stairs and return to bed, which is where I have spent most of the week since the accident. I keep revisiting the facts of it. I was crossing at the lights, west to east. It was my right of way. The car came speeding around the corner and hit me on my left side. I didn’t see it coming. When I stopped moving I was six metres down the road. I suffered no breaks, no scary internal traumas. All the medical professionals I dealt with seemed surprised by this. I have willingly shared these details with anyone who has asked. Mostly this is because I can hardly believe what happened, and the facts of it are the only way to know for sure that it did.
Our three-year-old wants to know why I can’t pick him up.
“Mummy got hit by a car remember,” my husband tells him.
“Oh,” he says.
Every time this: Oh. As if it’s all new information to him, and he and his dad didn’t have this exact conversation ten minutes ago. Oh. During the time I spent at the hospital I learned from the x-ray and ultrasound technicians that I have a beautiful heart and a lovely spine. When I explained the facts of the accident to my family and friends I added this detail as a kind of coda. To make light of it. No exclamation marks though, to keep it deadpan, to make myself feel like a character in another person’s funny story.
It was a newer model car, pedestrian friendly, so the front of the car absorbed a lot of the impact. My left shoulder, arm, and hip absorbed the rest. I haven’t been sleeping well. Partly due to the pain in my left shoulder, partly due to the worries that were keeping me up before the accident, and partly because I can’t stop reliving the moment of impact. The force of it, the being shunted off my feet, the hard landing on the asphalt. I pace out the frames of it in my mind like a Muybridge serial study, except it is not some guy lying down on a bed, it is me and my body moving wrongly against a plain gray backdrop. I replay the scene to remind myself that it happened. I also replay it to try and find the moment, the smallest smudge of a moment, where I had the thought, I am going under.
I didn’t go under. If I had, this would be a different story. I saw the portal to a different outcome though. It was there. The portal wasn’t a physical to-scale thing, like a door in the space beneath the car, that would be absurd. It was small and moving quickly very far away. Like something from a B-grade sci-fi. Like the projection of the Cat’s Eye Nebula on my son’s bedroom ceiling from his space-themed torch. Like the crack of a tooth breaking. Like the flash of a seed being dropped down a grate. Like the swift razing of skin, a carpet lifted free of its tacks. Like the wink of a single strand of my son’s hair in the sunlight.
I didn’t nearly die, not in a medical sense. I didn’t even lose consciousness. So it doesn’t make sense that this glitch in my psyche, if that’s what you can call it, was something like a near-death experience. So what was it? And why can’t I stop revisiting the scene of it, running my hands over the painted cream walls of my mind, searching for that opening.
Yesterday morning I finally returned to the intersection where the accident happened. I crossed at the lights, east to west. When I reached the other side, I stopped and turned and pressed the return crossing button. I transported myself back to the day of the accident. When the signal turned green, I stepped out on to the road. When I reached the location of impact, the exact spot, I felt it. I looked down the road to my right and I thought, I was here and then I was over there. And yet nothing has changed.
One of our best family stories is how the day my first piano arrived I almost got flattened by a car. I was six years old. I was crossing the road behind the school bus. The car that almost killed me came to a screeching halt mere centimetres from where I stood in the middle of the street. That was the first time I didn’t go under. I have recently started teaching my son about road safety. Because of my first near-miss it is possible I am too cautious. Sometimes when his dad takes him out for a ride around the neighbourhood on his scooter, I watch him zoom through the gate, helmet on, yipping and whooping, and my heart has already crawled so far up the back of my throat I think I will be sick.
Yesterday when my son arrived home from preschool he remembered not to jump into my arms. He forcefully hugged me around my legs instead.
“Mummy got hit by a car,” he said.
“How was your day?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
His teachers had helped him make a “get well” card for me out of a folded sheet of paper. I asked him what the drawing on the front of the card was of.
“It’s colours,” he said.
“Yes, but colours representing what? What’s the picture?”
“It’s just colours,” he said.
When the trauma doctor in the ER checked inside my ears for signs of a brain bleed, a small part of me wished she would find something. I forget that my brain is real and that it is inside of me, up there in my skull, so close, pressing against the canals of my ears. Doing it all. I was aware of it that day in the ER while I waited to be examined, the throbbing pain of it, the fear that it could be damaged. However, I also feared that as soon as my headache subsided I would forget all about it again. I would stop being concerned for its health and return to taking it for granted.
The doctor found no sign of bleeding.
“You’re going to feel terrible for a while still,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
When my therapist first questioned me about when the depression started to get bad again, I told him probably around the evening my son was born. And the anxiety? They arrived together, I said. Conjoined twins. I haven’t seen the therapist since the accident. I bet he will have a lot of questions for me. I don’t yet know how I am going to answer those questions. On the one hand, I am alive and pleased to be alive. On the other hand, I am lying flat on my back on the living room floor, eyes closed, once again playing over and over in my head the facts of it. I am searching, but for what? A sign that there’s another side? That there’s more than just this? Is it wrong to want to take a peek?
I open my eyes. It’s time to put on the rice for dinner. Across the city my husband is starting the engine of our old VW, and my son is fastening the Velcro of his purple sneakers. I was there and then I was over there, I think. I was there and then I was over there. You could go mad thinking about it. The starting point and the end point. And whatever might be waiting after the fact. And whatever else might happen in between.
This article first appeared on the writer's blog. Tomorrow in ReadingRoom: Steve Braunias on the curious case of the long-lost short story "by" Katherine Mansfield
