I remember boycotting Esso petrol garages age 14, following
my state of passage on a minibus journey back from Wales, caused by fatal car
crash.
I blamed Esso for death as cause of place that led to
collision and end of game. This tale on
my lips is on top my tongue; is felt when I push tongue upwards to touch roof
of mouth. These tales we don’t tell
because they reek of fragility and blame and topics of convulsion in dread.
I was listening to Greenday with one ear piece of my
headphones, the left side stretched to the ear of my best friend, a sweetheart
who believed in holy ghosts. We sat at
the front, I think that quite telling.
The motorbike crashed into where the engine was and the
first sound was silence, eerie; grey; consuming; like tinnitus, I feel it as I push
up against the roof of my mouth. In
reflection I memorise the sound of shattered glass as Perspex lining, masking breaking
bones. My memory is acid calm, but
consumed by commotion in forced displacement; such force that I imagine the
wheels jammed and we skidded 40 metres to a grinding halt.
If I open the door I get out and look back, that’s how I know
how far we travelled. Pretty ricky sing grind with me out of sorts now you put
it like that. I study memory and response
now so I know what happened isn’t real and The Grief I Never Felt overshadowed
my grasp of its reality. First aid
training doesn’t explain about helmets so we ran between minibus and corpse
until we could get response from man in minibus enough to convince him to call
ambulance. His face had seen his ghost
it seemed he sat there frozen and sure of it.
I called my mum who cried out, we’d argued before I left because there
was no female supervision and we were staying in a cabin and I didn’t know where
we were going and after I told her we were waiting for an ambulance to arrive
she re-realised that it didn’t really matter after all.
