Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  Praise for Car Crash

  ‘A poetic, unflinching meditation on the exuberance of youth and the trauma of survival. It shines with a fierce intelligence.’ —Kristina Olsson

  ‘A clear-eyed, bruising and tender account of how the moments that thrust you into adulthood can take place in seconds. Lech Blaine’s journalism has long made me suspect he’s one of the best writers of his generation. Car Crash confirms it, without a doubt.’ —Benjamin Law

  ‘I began this book with my guts in my mouth. Then, as I read on, I winced with recognition, I laughed and my heart gradually broke open. It’s odd to talk about “talent” when a book covers such sensitive, sad subject matter, but the truth is that Blaine has it. There are wicked one-liners and a mastery of metaphor. This book is for everyone – it truly captures something of “modern Australia” in a tenderly told story of one young man’s tumultuous coming-of-age.’ —Bri Lee

  ‘Brutal and gutting, but also moving, lyrical, warmly told and very funny, with the kind of wisdom and hope that’s made possible by the understanding of pain. Blaine is a fearless writer of great agility and heart, and this book is an astonishing insight into the wild work of grief, in all its dark corners, in all its bright illuminations.’ —Brooke Davis, Lost & Found

  ‘A story of carnage and lifelong consequences – not just from a single, sudden catastrophe but from the long, slow cataclysm of masculine confusion.’ —Tim Winton

  ‘For fans of Don Watson, Corey White and Chloe Hooper’ —Books+Publishing

  ‘A profound reflection on the deafening soul noise heard by a beautiful group of young friends fated to live the rest of their lives with the silence of the dead.’ —Trent Dalton

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Lech Blaine 2021

  Lech Blaine asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781863959698 (paperback)

  9781743821459 (ebook)

  Cover design by Design by Committee

  Text design by Dennis Grauel

  Typesetting by Typography Studio

  Author photograph by James Brickwood

  For Will, Hamish and Henry

  Contents

  ACT I: THE BYSTANDER

  Black Hole in the High Beams

  iGrief

  Terrible Perfection

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Larrikin

  Blank Volcanoes

  ACT II: THE GRADUATE

  Class Excursions

  Guilty Parties

  Rebel with a Stress Disorder

  Fast Nights, Dark Days

  ACT III: THE SURVIVOR

  Solidarity Forever

  Performance Anxiety

  Unmotherly

  Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

  The Soul Is a Black Box

  Acknowledgements

  car crash

  noun

  a chaotic or disastrous situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for observers

  ACT I

  THE BYSTANDER

  ‘No matter how you twist it,

  Life stays frozen in the headlights.’

  John Ashbery

  Black Hole in the High Beams

  There were seven of us: five in the car and two in the boot. We were alive together for the final time. It was quarter to ten on a Saturday night, May 2009 – the Labour Day long weekend.

  The trip kicked off in the sticks north of Toowoomba, ninety minutes west of Brisbane. I’d shotgunned the front passenger seat of the 1989 gold Ford Fairlane. I was short and soft-bodied with a black mop, a poet moonlighting as a hoon.

  Tim sat back middle. He was broad-shouldered and short-haired like Will, back right. Henry was in the seat behind me, tall and thin. He had the same blond hair and blue eyes as Dom, the driver. Hamish – pale and lanky, with thick black hair – was in the boot with Nick, brown hair above a squat frame.

  It was our final year of high school. Tim and I went to St Mary’s, a Catholic factory of athletes in the western suburbs. The others went to Downlands, an elite co-educational school on Toowoomba’s north side.

  Up front there was nothing between the road and me except the windscreen and thin air. The speakers blasted ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis, an elegy inside a singalong. My memory is a blinking mix of lyrics belted out incoherently and the stink of alcohol, sweat and cigarettes – a million things and nothing in particular.

  We stopped at a new set of traffic lights. To our left was the city. To our right was Highfields, one of the fastest-growing subdivisions in carved-up country. Nuclear families hid from chaos on quarter-acre sanctuaries, safe from talkback-fuelled rumours of refugee gangs and possible mosques.

  When the lights blazed green, we turned left onto the New England Highway. The speedometer rose: 60, 70, 80, 90. Streetlamps streaked by. The road, half-lit and disappearing, burnt a blur into my brain.

  My brand-new iPhone vibrated. A message from Frida. Our courtship was at a critical phase – tomorrow afternoon, we were going to the movies before a party at a mansion on the Great Dividing Range.

  There was a swift change in our direction. My gaze shifted between the competing sheets of glass. We’d drifted onto the left-hand shoulder of the highway. The back tyre drifted from the road, spinning out in the mouth of a gravel driveway.

  This was the split second of our unravelling.

  Dom reefed on the steering wheel, a knee-jerk attempt to regain control. We slid in, out and in again. He’d overcorrected an overcorrection. A stream of images flickered in the windscreen. Road half-lit by headlights. Windscreen filled with branches and leaves belonging to the median strip. A dark front yard at the start of a farm.

  It took us three seconds to travel from the gravel back to the maze of nature. The Fairlane ploughed to the wrong side of the highway. By rights I should’ve been the bullseye, but the vehicle scraped a tree stump within the median strip, spinning us another ninety degrees.

  Screams howled from the back seat as we flew into a flood of high beams. I’m dead, I thought. Then it hit: another car, speed meeting speed, like two protons colliding.

  I didn’t get the luxury of a concussion. There was a glimpse of black as my head reeled from soft impact against the dashboard. After that, everything went berserk. Liquids pissed from engines. Radiators hissed with steam. Car alarms out-screamed one another. Wipers whipped across the shattered windscreen.

  The bonnet blocked vision of what we’d hit. A sticky fluid pooled around my ankles. I’ve pissed myself, I thought. My hairy toes floated in the foam from a six-pack of beers. I wiped blood that wasn’t mine onto the sleeve of a new jumper and searched frantically for my iPhone, finding it down beside the seat adjuster.

  Sick sounds issued from the lips of four friends in the grip of oblivion. Dom lay face-down on the steering wheel. The back seat was a mess of erect necks and flaccid limbs. I reached out and shook Tim’s arm, calmly and then much more urgently.

  ‘Oi!’ I yelled. ‘Wake up!’

  This will go down as the loneliest moment of my life.

  A heavy guy appeared at the driver’s side window.

  ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Can you turn the car off?’

  I hadn’t noticed the Fairlane’s engine still
revving. I reached for the keys, but the ignition was missing. It was hidden in the plastic mess where the steering wheel used to be.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  The man fished under the bonnet and stilled the motor. ‘HEY, CHAMP! Everything’s gonna be fine!’

  The door handle had been obliterated. The window winder was gone. Mine was the only window still intact. I was trapped in a fast-moving disaster, each new fact more startling than the last.

  A team of swift Samaritans assembled, divvying the injured between them. An off-duty nurse joined the man at the window.

  ‘Get me out of here,’ I screamed.

  ‘Sweetie,’ she said, ‘I need you to sit still. Is that something you can do for me?’

  I nodded dishonestly, no intention of playing hero and staying inside a portable slaughterhouse. I scanned for an exit route and found one through the driver’s window.

  The woman’s eyes went wide. ‘No! Don’t!’

  I pitched my hands into the void across Dom. The first responders yanked me to safety. My feet hit the bitumen with relief. I scooted to the boot of the crushed Fairlane.

  ‘Wait!’ said the man, or the woman, or maybe someone else.

  The back cavity had been ripped open like a tin of tuna. Hamish reclined against the bumper, eyes closed. A woman rubbed my shoulder.

  ‘He’ll be okay,’ she said.

  I searched below, above and beside the boot.

  ‘We’re missing someone,’ I shouted.

  ‘Another one?’

  I located Nick ten metres away, lying parallel to the fog line, pupils facing up towards his brain. A crooked Z was carved between hairline and eyebrow. The glow from my iPhone revealed the white shock of his skull.

  ‘Ambulances are coming,’ said a stranger.

  Sirens wailed faintly to the north and south. A dozen genderless bodies moved through the lunar gloom.

  ‘Hang in there, mate!’ I yelled, clapping to boost the morale of the newcomers. ‘You’ll be right!’

  Blood gushed unabated from Nick’s cranium. The lips of a first responder dripped with it, due to performing CPR on an unconscious passenger. The man dry-heaved.

  Soon, the dead end of the highway was alive. Cones of red and blue spun on the road like strobe lights. Fire engines. Police cars. Ambulances. An endless stream of hi-vis men and women pirouetted between each other seamlessly. They relieved the first responders of responsibility and herded the bystanders away.

  My main impulse was to put some distance between my body and the wreckage. Barefoot, I was careful not to stand on broken glass. I noticed a blue heeler trying to slide its paws into the bitumen and picked up the leash. The animal could be my alibi.

  A mob of onlookers swarmed from parked cars and neighbouring acreages, drawn like mosquitoes to LEDs erected at opposite ends of the crash site. Nobody seemed to connect me to the catastrophe.

  Beside me was a man in boxer shorts and thongs. He gripped his jaw like it might fall off if he let go.

  The dog whined. The sirens went quiet, or I stopped hearing them. Spotlights glimmered like twin midnight suns. I heard the same ringtone sing from different phones. Ambulances left. Sirens started again. More bystanders arrived, feigning indifference.

  ‘So what do you reckon happened?’ the man asked.

  The Fairlane’s roof was pitched into a tent, doors bent off their hinges. Blood covered what was left of the rear windscreen. Strangers in yellow jackets and white helmets liberated Dom – now conscious – from the driver’s seat.

  ‘No idea,’ I said.

  An eavesdropper strode over. ‘I got right up close,’ she said. ‘Hoons. Kids no older than fifteen, I reckon. Drunk. Probably on drugs! I just feel sorry for the other guy.’

  Only now did I really see the other vehicle. It was a blue Holden Viva. The driver was an old guy sitting on the bitumen, face cut up and bathed in blood.

  News crews and freelance photographers beat most of the emergency workers to the scene. They were voyeurs for hire, capturing proof of the accident before the trauma cleaners arrived to scrape it from the highway.

  The cattle dog was gone. I wandered in the general direction of the city. The vista was a Milky Way of witnesses. Blank faces framed by dark glass. Cars flanked by unlit farmland, no stars in a silver sky. My bones glowed with guilt. Police diverted drivers to the other side of the highway. Horns blew so far and wide they were like a cathedral organ. How had I not heard that shrill sound until now?

  ‘Are you alright?’ asked a police officer behind me. He nodded sympathetically towards the wreck. ‘You were in the car, right?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  We walked back towards the glowing dome. I hadn’t even left, I realised, only making it twenty or so metres from where the staring witnesses were cordoned off by police.

  ‘Let’s get you some privacy,’ said the officer, eyeing the photographers.

  We ducked behind some gum trees. The path was red dirt and gravel. Weeds tickled my knees.

  ‘So, what school do you go to?’ he asked.

  ‘St Mary’s,’ I said.

  The cop explained that he used to be a rugby union coach at Downlands, so he knew five of the passengers. This was his last shift before retirement.

  A female police officer was waiting beside a fire engine with a kind smile and a hand poised to take notes.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  The story poured out of me in breathless declarations of innocence. ‘I was just looking at my phone and then saw the trees and next thing you know we skidded and got hit and I don’t know who hit who or which way we were going or whose fault it was IT ALL HAPPENED SO QUICK you know what I mean?’

  ‘We know you’re still in shock,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to solve everything for us right now.’

  The police left me. I sat cross-legged on the blacktop. A shopping bag flapped from a barbed-wire fence like a jellyfish trapped in a shark net.

  The police radioed the IDs of passengers, so phone calls could be made to their parents. They eventually returned with a blanket and bottled water.

  ‘You can go home,’ said the woman.

  I gave them my sister’s mobile number. Hannah was asleep half an hour away, but she sounded less surprised to hear my voice than might be expected.

  ‘I’ve been in a car crash,’ I said.

  Nothing about my tone suggested anything more serious than a minor traffic bingle, but already Hannah was crying on the other end of the line.

  ‘It’s gonna be fine,’ I said.

  The ambulances had left and most of the bystanders were gone. The news crews kept chasing the most gripping image. The only passenger still at the scene was lying sideways in the back seat of a police car with his eyes squeezed shut. I wasn’t tired, but I couldn’t bear staring at my reflection in the plexiglass.

  Suddenly, my hysterical sister was drumming her knuckles on the darkened glass. We hugged on the highway. I sat in the back seat of her boyfriend’s grey Toyota Camry. I was starving and needed to piss, but there didn’t seem a sensitive way to mention this.

  ‘The police told me you should go to the hospital to get checked out,’ said Hannah. ‘They told me there’s complications that can come up even if you feel fine now. Lech, they said it’s not looking great for some of your friends. What the hell happened?’

  My sister stared in the rear-view mirror, seeing a person where a ghost was supposed to be. We had the same big mouths and dark brows. People who didn’t know the elaborate history of our secretive foster family told us that we were indistinguishable.

  ‘The car came out of nowhere,’ I said. ‘Like a shooting star.’

  ‘This isn’t literature, Lech. It’s real life!’

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ I insisted, and this seemed to settle the matter for the time being.

  We climbed over Blue Mountain Heights and began our descent into the city. It always amazed me how big Toowoomba looked from the north. My home
town was built in the crater of an extinct volcano. Streetlamps to the north, south and east of the city streamed into the beaming sinkhole of the CBD. The lights sprawled west before flattening and then blacking out.

  ‘You should call Tim’s parents,’ said Hannah.

  I dialled my best friend’s number off by heart. His blonde, bubbly mother answered the phone. The police hadn’t been able to reach her.

  ‘Hey, Linda,’ I said. ‘It’s Lech.’

  ‘Lech,’ she said. ‘Do you guys need a lift home?’

  ‘We were in a car crash.’

  She laughed uncertainly. ‘Is this one of your pranks?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t in a good way. But he’ll be all right.’

  Linda probably pictured a heavy concussion and a broken collarbone. She thanked me and hung up to get dressed.

  The Camry idled at a red light beside the Blue Mountain Hotel. In the shadows stood the original Blue Mountain, peak half-eaten by an open-cut quarry. Soon the only mountaintop in the area would be on the neon signage of the run-down pub.

  We flew along a silent main street, passing the tree-lined driveway of Downlands on the left. Eighteen months earlier, Nick had been imported there from St Mary’s on a sporting scholarship. Thanks to him, Tim and I had been consorting with the sons and daughters of old money.

  I realised that Hannah’s frowning boyfriend wasn’t driving west, but ahead, towards the centre of town.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘The hospital,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad are meeting us there.’

  My parents were still officially married but slept in separate suburbs. I hadn’t rung them, fearing his anger and her nervousness.

  ‘Why would you tell them?’ I asked.

  In the mirror, Hannah looked irritated. ‘Did you see the news crews at the crash site? Everyone in Australia is going to know tomorrow.’

  Toowoomba Hospital became a leviathan at night, shadows filling the gaps. Hannah and her boyfriend waved politely at my parents before motoring away.

  The loveless couple stood beneath the red glow of EMERGENCY.