What the Sky Sees

And this is the journey that I never forget. It's a journey I make often, driving into town, but it's this journey I never forget, the night I returned to my father's house from hers, the night when I knew that things were going to be different.

I drove with my hand on my chest, feeling the burn of her finger there still, and I drove along the straight road with the moonlight shining off the Sixteen Foot. She had told me many things I thought I'd never hear, talking about us and we and our as if something had already been decided. Driving along that road I realized that something already had, that I would not after all be able to endure a life of solitude as my father had learned to do. I considered it to be an awakening, a welcoming to adulthood, and it felt right that it should take place out on the road with the sky taking up most of my field of vision and the land flat and dark on all sides.

It was sudden, it was so sudden.

First I was driving along the empty road thinking about her, and then there was a man in the road looking over his shoulder at me and I was driving into him. I don't know where he came from, I don't know why I didn't see him sooner. He was not there and then he was there and I didn't have time to do anything. I didn't have time to flinch, or to throw my hands up to my face, or to shout. I didn't even have time to take my fingers from inside my jumper, and as the car hit him I was flung forwards and crushed my hand against the steering wheel. As the car hit him his arms lifted up to the sky and his back arched over the bonnet and his legs slid under one of the wheels and his whole body was dragged down to the road and out of sight.

His arms lifted up to the sky, his arching back.

The sound his body made when my father's car struck him, it was too loud, too firm, it sounded as though I had driven into a fence rather than a man, it was a thump, it was a smack. And the sound he made, a sound which is always in the back of my throat now, a muffled split-second of a scream.

His arms lifted up to the sky, even his fingers pointing upwards, as if there was something he could reach up there to pull himself clear. His back arching over the bonnet of my father's car before being dragged down. The last I saw before my head hit my chest. The jolt and the lurch as he was lost beneath the wheels. His lifted arms, the sound he made, the lurch of the car, my hand crushed between my chest and the steering wheel.

Then stillness and quiet and me turning the engine off and my heart rattling inside me.

He lay on his back with his legs underneath him, looking up at the night. His legs were so far underneath him that I supposed they were most probably broken. I stood by the car looking at him for a long time before I moved towards him. He made no sound, there was no sound anywhere, the night was quiet and the moon bright and the air still and there was a man lying dead in the road a few yards from me. It didn't feel real, and there are times, now, when I wonder whether it really did happen at all; but then I remember the way his neck felt when I touched my fingers against the vein there. Not cold, but not warm either, not warm enough, the temperature of a stillborn calf. There was no pulse to feel, the man's eyes were seeing nothing. I looked at him some more, at his broken body on the tarmac, his eyes, his open mouth.

He was wearing a white shirt, and a red V-necked jumper, and a frayed tweed jacket. His arms were up beside his head, and his fists were tightly clenched. A broken half bottle of whisky was hanging from the pocket of his jacket. There didn't seem to be any blood anywhere; there were dirty black bruises on his face, but no blood. His clothes were ripped across the chest, but there was no blood. I didn't understand how a man could be dragged under the wheels of a car and not bleed. I didn't understand how he could not bleed and die so quickly.

The whites of his eyes looked yellow under the moonlight.

I didn't understand who he was, why he had been on the road in the middle of the night, how I had not seen him, why he was dead. I didn't know what to do. I knelt beside him, looking out across the fields, up at the sky, at my father's car, at my shaking hands, up to the sky.