A Life Not Taken. A Sobering True Story. Part Three.

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We didn’t talk much on the way home, Janet sat in the back of the car with Alastair, and I drove more slowly than usual, to avoid causing him undue physical or emotional stress. Once we arrived, Janet settled him in his own bed, and we all tried to get some rest. As it happened, I was due at the Agency at 10.00am to meet with the Director / Asia Pacific, of the US Agency whose International Network we were a part of, and there was now no reason not to go, but at around 8.00am I called my partner anyway, and gave him a heads-up that I might be “a little less than my usual razor-sharp self” when we met up later. Because I wasn’t in fact that egotistical, he took it in the light- hearted way it was meant, and was unconcerned as he asked why not. He quickly became less so, as I gave him a brief rundown on the night’s events, but I reassured him that Alastair was well, and said I’d see him later.

As I was leaving the house, having just said to Alastair, who was dozing rather than sleeping, “I want to catch up with you, hear exactly what happened, but it’s more important right now that you just relax and get some sleep”, the father and the boy turned up, all hale and hearty, “Just been to see the wreck. Boy, it’s a good thing those Falcons are strong, they’d have had no chance otherwise”, said the father. “Just thought we’d drop by, see if everything’s all OK, and (whatever his name was) wants to see Alastair.”

Given there was no mention of the word ‘apologise’ in the previous utterance, and plenty of swagger in the body language, coupled with Alastair’s battered condition, I made the unlilateral decision to suggest to them both that, “since we obviously have widely differing perspectives on the events of last night, I don’t think there’s really much point in your sticking around.” To the boy, I said, “I’m sure if Alastair wants to talk with you about the crash, he’ll do so when he gets back to school, probably in a few days.” When the kid responded, ”Why won’t he be back on Monday, he’s not really hurt is he?”, I knew I’d made the right call, and had they not turned and left, I would, I swear to God, have kicked them off the property.

As it turned out, after I had my chat with Alastair later in the day, he knew exactly how close he’d come, exactly who he blamed for that, and he had no intention of speaking to (whatever his name was) ever again. His view was that, although they had both had a couple of beers, that had been hours earlier, they weren’t drunk, and it wasn’t alcohol that caused the crash, but rank stupidity. Small brain meets big engine. He said he‘d actually been screaming at the kid, pleading with him to slow down, but that just seemed to egg the idiot on. Apparently, he wasn’t looking at the road, but literally laughing in Alastair’s face as he pressed the pedal to the metal.

As we talked, Janet was giving Alastair a cloth wash in his bed, and I was looking at his chest bruises, still essentially red, the purple and yellow not yet having fully surfaced, and commenting on how perfectly they matched the positioning of his diagonal seatbelt strap, when he pulled the sheet down to show me the even more severe bruising across his stomach and hips.

He asked his mum to get the cotton shirt he'd been wearing out of the washbasket, and showed me that the breast pocket had been almost ripped off. He'd had a sound cassette tape in it, a virtually weightless object, but the force of the impact had sent the tape flying forward, with enough velocity to render the pocket no barrier at all. If I'd ever had any doubts about the laws making seatbelts compulsory, which in fact I hadn't, they'd have evaporated right there and then.

Not that his belt had kept him in place, only kept him from flying through the windscreen. And dying. He told us he'd actually "ended up lying on the back floor", as the car interior disassembled itself trying to dissipate the enormous force of the sudden stop. Alastair had obliquely covered that the night before, in response to the Doctor's question about how he thought he'd come to have so many superficial facial cuts. "Broken glass", he'd replied, "window glass, all over me".

That's when he told us what he hadn't mentioned until now. As he lay on the floor in the back of the wrecked car, he couldn't move, "but I wasn't in pain, I didn't think I was paralysed or anything, it was like I was in a deep sleep. But I could hear voices, and I hoped they'd realise they'd got it wrong when one of them said, "This one's dead, wait til the ambulance gets here, and we'll get him out then".

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Coincidence And Confluence

The kid and his father turning up was pretty predictable, I guess, but as the day wore on, I was to find out how unpredictable life can be, in terms of coincidence; or was it confluence..?

My first indication of this was when I arrived at the Agency to greet Teddy Jones, the Area Director from the States, an older, urbane kind of guy you’d probably pick as an adman, if you found yourself alongside him in Business Class on a long-haul flight. I figured my partner would have let him know that I’d ‘pulled a different kind of all-nighter’ the night before, and the reason why. But although we knew each other in a business sense, we’d never spent time together socially, so I was surprised when he got up out of his chair, rushed across the conference room, grabbed both my hands as though we were long lost bosom buddies, and said, “I’m so glad your boy’s OK. He is, isn’t he? He’s gonna be alright?”

That’s when I noticed his eyes were full of tears, but before I had a chance to wonder why he was so emotional, his face took on a middle-distance stare, and he said, very softly, “My own boy was in a car wreck. Few years back now. Couple years older than your son, he’s 16 right? My boy was 19. Same thing as you, phone call in the middle of the night...only I was overseas on Agency business and my wife had to handle it on her own.” I was about to commiserate with him about that, when he said, “saddest thing, he never woke up after the crash, lost the fight after a few days. We never got to say goodbye...tell him how much we loved him”.

We went ahead with our meeting, but there was a pall in the room; it would be truer to say we went through the motions of a meeting.

I was certainly distracted, thinking about the randomness of events, the unfairness of outcomes, and thanking the Universe for tossing the coin in our favour, this time.

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I mentioned earlier that we felt lucky as we took Alastair home. But “didn’t know the half of it”. My realisation of that came from two sources. One, I diverted after my business meeting to the local Police Station to thank them for their attendance at the crash, to find out where the Falcon had been taken, and to make arrangements to be allowed into the wrecker’s yard to take a look for myself. I didn’t want Janet or Alastair to see the car, but wanted to get a clearer picture in my own mind of what had occurred the night before.

I’ve been interested in cars my whole life, and as a boy, would spend every non-school hour at my father’s car painting business. There was a panelbeating shop right next door, where badly damaged cars would be towed and left over the weekend, awaiting insurance assessment, and over the years, I’d become very familiar with the damage that high speed crashes can inflict on vehicles.

But I had never seen a car as comprehensively destroyed as the Falcon that lay dead before me.

The entire front had disappeared into the interior, the chassis was ruptured upwards, as though some giant had picked the car up and dropped it onto a fulcrum, so the centre had lifted up while both ends fell lower. It looked as if the car had spun on impact as well, the sideways distortion from the still travelling rear attempting to overtake the suddenly-stopped front being as severe as the upward distension of the floor. All the windows were gone, all the tyres flat. I looked inside, and saw what Alastair would later confirm in our chat. Everything you’d expect to see inside a car was there, but nothing remotely where you’d expect it to be.

"Good thing those Falcons are strong”, the father had crowed that morning. This one had certainly gone down fighting, but I couldn’t help feeling that both boys owed their lives to something much stronger still.

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My second experience of the coincidence / confluence of things had come when, after viewing the wreck, I detoured on the way home to take a look at where the crash had taken place.

Driving along the street, looking for the telltale signs of a crash, I saw an XJ6 Jaguar, half on and half off the footpath, and as I drove slowly past I realised that this must have been the parked car the Falcon had hit. I don’t know if you’re familiar with cars, but the XJ6 is a solid, heavy beast, not given to surrendering lightly in a conflict. I pulled over a little way down the road, got out and walked back, unable to avoid imagining how different things had been for Alastair, when the Jaguar hove into his view, little more than 12 hours earlier. The best way I can describe it, without going into unnecessary detail, would be to say “Wrecked Falcon? Ditto.”

I was quietly contemplating the sight when I heard a voice calling my name. I’d realised when I stopped, that the crash had occurred only a few doors from the home of a long-term family friend, and there was Bryn, now saying, “Couldn't help stopping to check it out, huh? Bad one this. The Jag’s only just been refurbished, but I don’t think it’s got another life in it after this. You should’ve seen the mess last night, these things have dual gas tanks, and the Falcon the kid was driving hit it so hard it ruptured both of them, and they were full. Petrol everywhere, I’d already called the police, and when they turned up they held everyone well back until the fire guys came to foam it all down.”

I was reeling to think that Bryn had seen the crash, but hadn’t contacted us to say so, or to ask after Alastair, but I reeled even more when he continued, “I’ve been listening to the news, but they haven’t mentioned it, you’d think they would. Someone died, after all.”

“What? Who died?”

“Well, like I said, it was a kid driving the Falcon, there were two of them in it, when I came outside, one of them was wandering about, you know a bit dazed and confused, he said his mate was still in the car, but the petrol was everywhere and I was telling the other neighbours to stay back, we were worried about fire. The cops got here very fast, and when they had a quick look inside, I saw one shake his head, then they just stepped back and waited for the fire and ambulance guys to arrive.”

I interrupted him there, and filled him in on the real reason why I’d stopped to look at the Jag. Of course, this was the first I'd heard of just how close a call Alastair had had, and I was obviously a bit shaken by it. In turn, Bryn was distressed to think he hadn’t recognised Alastair, else, "I'd never have been so blunt in telling you about it."

But to be fair, he hadn’t been close enough to recognise Alastair, there was no reason for him to connect him with the Falcon, and as he said, ”When they put both of them in the ambulance, only one was moving, so we just assumed the cops had called it correctly, I guess. I’m so sorry I didn’t recognise Alastair, try to do more to help. But, shit mate, I’m extremely glad he’s still with us.”

I told Bryn I was pleased he’d called the emergency services so quickly, and that that alone may have played a bigger part than he realised. But the shocks continued when he said, “Oh, I had the phone in my hand before the crash. I knew it was going to happen. That car was travelling so bloody fast it woke me up. Somehow I knew it was going to hit the Jag, and I was just waiting for the noise. There was no sound of braking, and to be honest, when I came outside, I didn't expect to find anyone alive.”

By another quirk of fate, as Bryn also informed me, “The ambulance got here so fast because it had been called to another crash only a few blocks away. They did mention that one on the news. Two people killed on impact. So the ambulance was close by, and available, nothing they could do to help there. It’s all just chance, isn’t it?”

He was right about that. Chance, coincidence, and confluence. And, a higher force on our side the past few hours?

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What’s This Story Been All About?

It’s certainly turned out to be a long one, I hope you haven’t found it too boring, but now to bring it back to my start point; a week later leaving the Staff Christmas party uncharacteristically early, and how, “for me, as far as staying back late, and drinking, was concerned, things had changed”.

It had been a week of reflection really. As a teenager, I’d done some silly things, especially in cars, but I’d survived, as had my older brother, and all our friends. Most of whom had also done dumb things on wheels. But at least we’d all got our kicks out of conscious acts of stupidity, not drunken ones. (I know, I’m grasping..). Even though, in this case, Alastair didn’t blame the beers, it was clear from our experience at the Emergency Ward that booze was a factor in virtually all of those potentially life-damaging casualties, many of which had involved car crashes. Yet here it was, another ‘fun Friday night’, leading to ‘stupid Saturday’, and ‘let’s get loaded before Monday’ Sunday. And the pattern would repeat.

Coupled with Teddy Jones’ terrible story, it all helped to form a new, more sober outlook for me. One where I’d also aim to redress the work / life balance. Although, regrettably, I realised I'd already left that too late. My one recurring thought ever since we got the call, had been, “What if?” And I’d come as close as I needed to, to not want to ever wonder that again.

So, quite a while after I’d arrived home early that Friday night of the Agency Staff Christmas Party, I found myself standing with my wife, at the open door of Alastair’s room. He’d rebounded fairly well, (although hadn’t been back to school yet, and as we were to find out, the after effects of the crash were actually quite deep and quite long lasting), and he was sound asleep.

We’d always looked in on our boys at bedtime, ever since they’d each come to enrich our lives. But Mitchell, our older son, had left home earlier in the year, so tonight we had only one ‘little-boy-young-man’ to check up on.

As I looked at Alastair, safe and secure, sleeping peacefully in his own bed, I couldn’t help but reflect on the effect the crash had had on my view of life. With my arm around my wife’s shoulders, I thought about all the family photos we had of Christmases past, and how, if things had gone the way they did for Teddy, we’d never have been able to look at them again, without tearing an ever bigger hole in our hearts.

I thought about good times yet to come, and how blessed we were to be able to look forward to future Christmases, as both our sons grew and matured, and how empty and barren half of that landscape would look if we now had only the one.

But mostly, I thought about the events of the previous Friday night and Saturday morning, about the awful severity of that terrible crash, and how there was no way Alastair should have been able to survive it. I thought about that miraculous outcome, thought about all the things we don’t understand as mere humans, and thanked the Universe for the indescribable Christmas gift, of a life not taken.

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Author's note: This story is based on actual events. Real names and some details have been avoided, or altered, to preserve anonymity. I did take photos of the car wreck, but destroyed them the day the prints came back, and my wife threw up on seeing them.