Coming to his Senses

Keith always made the final cup of tea in the evening, a couple of plain biscuits on the side. Caffeine never bothered him. He slipped easily into unconsciousness deep in his dorma pillows.

For years he had worked in the same office.  Between those beige walls he had even fallen in love, and extricated himself. Elena still worked five desks away.

His father was a postman until the morning he keeled off his bike onto a grass verge and died. He was a kilometre from home, in a street where he had delivered letters every working day for thirty-eight years.

They had all turned up for the funeral – friends, family and neighbours – then, they had all went away. Postal deliveries didn’t miss a round. His mother’s presence in the house had become frail after that. Sometimes in the night, Keith woke with a start, his heart racing, his body sweating and his mind filled with the terror of his own life rushing towards its full stop.

But this particular night, what brought Keith to wakefulness, was an unexpected light. He opened his eyes to swags of silent, blue beams swinging around his room. He moved to his window, parted the curtains gently.

The circling lights came from two fire brigades. Large and important, these glamorous vehicles formed a rough L shape on the road beyond his driveway. Two ambulances flanked them. The nearer one had its doors flung open, its insides staring into Keith’s home. Like a theatre set they surrounded a car. The shape of the car made Keith think of a dried out dishcloth on a tap: it was stiffly wrapped around the lamp-post outside the front gates. The driver’s side was nearest the post; two firemen were approaching the silent car.

Further down the road he saw paramedics bent over a girl. In the yellow streetlight Keith could see the dark, widening pool in which she lay.

On the broken white line, the windscreen rested – incredibly in one piece – like a lens from a giant pair of glasses.

The firemen were talking to the person or people in the car. Good! They were alive. The squeal of metal slicing metal started. The sound of the powerful saw sagged as it met resistance, but mostly maintained a thin high pitch as it carved. Keith was certain the fine screech would cause lights to appear in the darkened windows of the neighbouring houses. But maybe, like the rodent deterrents his mother had plugged in all over the house, this frequency was high enough to leave the sleeping undisturbed. Certainly, no other witnesses were evident.

The girl on the road was now in recovery position. There was a paramedic working intensively on her leg. His head and hands moved rapidly as he spoke to the medic assisting him.

The fireman with the saw was removing the roof. Systematically he amputated each of the metal limbs framing the shattered windows. Firemen were in place all around the car supporting the weakening roof. Some of them squatted, some of them stretched to take the strain. The section nearest the lamp-post was trickiest. Sparks disappeared as they leaped. Keith couldn’t see properly but he thought the complication was due to a person inside the car being trapped against the frame that was most acutely swung around the post.

The call “clear” was real, not part of a TV script.  The girl on the ground was being shocked.  Blonde curls were sneaking out from beneath a rainbow cap.

Then she was back.  Work on her smashed leg had stopped and they were concentrating on getting her onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. Keith wondered if her family had been contacted. Were serious faced Gardai already driving to her address, searching for her front door? He wondered if, like him, she lived in her parents’ house. He felt a vague sense of embarrassment as he thought that and then he could hear Elena laughing in his head.

“So will you always live with your parents?” Elena had teased.

He had responded with silence.

“Oh Keith…I’m messin’ with you.”

“I’m supposed to laugh?”

“It’s not criticism, it’s asking you to consider living somewhere else. Think of it as an invitation.”  She had laughed. Her eyes were merry, inviting. He had crossed to her and kissed her.

The top of the car was being lifted off like the lid of a giant aquarium. Immediately a paramedic and a fireman climbed carefully in.

On the opposite side of the road, a Garda was guiding a passing car. Keith could see the rise of interest switch to horror in the driver’s face. Then he was gone.  Not much traffic at all. Keith glanced at his clock. It told him in square luminous digits that it was 3.47.

The memory of Elena’s lips was staying with him. She had the best lips. Full, fleshy, pouty. Although, she was seldom solemn enough for them to take on that pout. She was always on the brink of mischief. He loved her for that. What unsettled him was the speed of her great ideas and new plans. The clincher had been her “getaway plan”.

“Keith, why don’t we move away?”

“Together?”

“Well, why not?”

“Move where?”

“God Keith, you’re exasperating. Whenever you don’t like an idea, you hedge your response with questions.”

“Do I?”

She burst out laughing. “Do I? Do I?” she had sung. He had gone red, felt anger.

She had stopped and looked at him, suddenly earnest.

“I love you,” she said.

He was too ruffled to let this register and had turned away to make tea. He could feel her silently watching him. When he turned around, he was polite.

Now, in his room, with this searching light, he cringed.

They had put a splint on the driver’s neck. Keith was relieved to see them talking to the man. The lower part of his body was lodged beneath the engine that sat around him like a duvet. One medic got behind him and kept his hand lightly on the trapped man’s shoulder.  The saw stopped and started. The job moved very slowly. The quiet work of two medics punctuated the metallic noise. Delicate. In the background, firemen were sweeping. The windscreen now watched from the footpath where it leaned against a cement wall. Keith heard the reverse warning beep of a recovery truck backing into place, its smaller warning light flashing. Everyone now waited for the cutting to finish.

Keith found himself remembering the curiosity he had felt at the unlikely sight of two uniformed Gardai arriving into the office. He had been puzzled when they stopped at his desk, but he had asked politely,

“Can I help you?”

No response. Then to his surprise he had felt the warmth of Elena behind him. So unexpectedly pleasant to feel her breasts behind his head and her arms on his shoulders and her hands moving across the top of his chest. How quickly she had understood that something was wrong. He had savoured her warmth for an instant and repeated his stupid question.

“Can I help you, Guard?”

And as realisation exploded around him, he had felt her arms tightening, holding him together, keeping him together.

Now he leaned against the wooden window frame. Tears, extraordinary tears, came. He clung to the thin folds of the curtains, holding their dusty dryness to his face. He leant against the cold glass, struggling.

He opened his eyes as the man was being lifted from the wreck, and horror froze him. The man’s lower body was crushed. The streetlight caught the gleam of an exposed bone. Keith realised it was the man’s femur. There were four firemen moving on either side of the man. Strong firemen’s arms formed a human raft.  Like a slow pendulum, they shuffled a mesmerising arc around the lamp-post, until they slowly brought the man face to face with the house and with Keith, appalled, in the upper bedroom window. He tried to understand what he was looking at. The stretcher was spread with heavy-duty plastic.

When that ambulance moved away, it moved slowly, without urgency.

Keith huddled on the bedroom floor in the small space between the cold radiator and the wall. He wrapped his arms around his knees and buried his head. They had been talking to the driver. He had been alive.

New sounds outside. Keith hauled himself up and peered over the ledge. A hoist had placed the wreck on the truck. Last parts were being loaded.  A torrent of water from a yellow hose swilled through the emptied space. When it hit the dark patch of blood the stain lifted easily. He watched the water flow to the side of the road, gutter-bound.

A corporation truck appeared. It methodically vacuumed any remaining debris and glass, even sucking up loose water, leaving a tightly cleaned surface. The second fire engine left, then the patrol car. He was staring at a blank street. A car went by. He could hear the boom of bass, the snatch of laughter from a partly opened window.   He stared for a long time at the street.

“My father is dead.” He had repeated after the Garda. He had turned to Elena. Her face was shocked white, but strong. She was there. He had burrowed into her and she had held him. The soft rose wool of her jumper, the smell of her. So hard to know what to think, what to say. She had whispered in his ear.

“I’m here Keith, I’m here.”

This time when he opened his eyes, the clock flashed 6.32. Daylight’s thin frame surrounded the curtains. He crept down the stairs and out onto the road. He walked to where the girl had lain and let his toes feel the tarmacadam. He moved back to the fatal pole. It glinted in low sunlight.

To his mother’s surprise, she came down stairs to the smell of breakfast. He left her eating scrambled eggs in bemused silence and stepped out onto the front porch where light flickered through the old honeysuckle. Although it was only 8.30 he took out his phone. On Saturdays she didn’t waste time at home. He needed to act fast to catch her before she was gone.

He dialled her number, listened to the soft intermittent burr of his call. Before he had time to panic, a flush of heat spread through him as Elena’s smiling voice filled the warm hollow of his ear with her bright and happy – ‘hello’.