Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  Toowoomba was the definition of a big country town. People justified voyeurism with an intimacy that didn’t exist – I couldn’t have named a neighbour on my dead-end street at gunpoint. Nobody knew anyone, really.

  To capture the wreckage from the most dramatic angle, the photographer had crouched behind the boot of the Fairlane. The vehicles were way more crumpled than I remembered. My dead friends were pictured beside the wrecks in their school uniforms, smiling naively.

  My mother appeared from the laundry. She smelled of Rexona deodorant and menthol cigarettes. ‘Did you read it? They’re saying it was caused by alcohol, and that the driver was speeding. Now I don’t know who to believe.’

  ‘Not them,’ I said.

  I didn’t think Dom had been speeding or drinking – but maybe this just proved the unreliability of my perceptions.

  Inside, I saw my face grinning from the bottom of page two. LECH BLAINE, 17 – Minor Injuries.

  The others ranked above me. A close-up of the Fairlane was on the third page, beside a photo from the school vigil. The photographer had escaped detection with expertise, snapping dazed teenagers from a distance, surreptitiously, like we were gangsters at a graveside.

  A Subaru dealership seized prime advertising space. There was an eye-catching graphic of the four-wheel drive gliding along a highway, grey and gleaming, a car that you couldn’t dream of dying inside. $33,884 drive-away. The price was printed in the same shade as the bloodstain on the headrest of the Fairlane.

  ——

  The tyres of my father’s manicured 2009 Falcon hit the driveway. He reeked of Diet Coke and Joop! cologne. We set off on a tour of Queensland’s best intensive-care units. The events of the previous day indicated that I should have been scripting my goodbyes, but I felt unreasonably confident that my surviving friends would make it.

  The static of talkback radio spat from the speakers. Brian from Dalby was welcomed onto the line. ‘What about these hoons on the weekend? Lock up the driver, I reckon.’

  ‘Good call,’ said the shock jock. ‘Thanks, Brian.’

  Dad reacted sluggishly. We made it halfway through the next call before he inserted a Beatles compilation.

  ‘Opinions are like arseholes,’ he said. ‘Every prick has one.’

  Tim was in Princess Alexandra Hospital, on Brisbane’s east side. The waiting room smelled like a cross between a florist and a bakery, as visitors came armed with bouquets and cakes.

  ‘You’re a miracle!’ said Linda, hugging me.

  She introduced me to aunties and uncles as Tim’s best mate, and the front-seat passenger. My condition winded them. I would’ve killed for a set of crutches.

  ‘You should buy a lotto ticket,’ said one.

  Tim and I had always been opposites. His bedroom was obediently clean; mine was a mess. He wanted to join the army after finishing a bricklaying apprenticeship; I dreamed of being a left-wing politician.

  I went into the hall with Linda. ‘He’s also got a bruised lung and fractured vertebrae,’ she said, ‘but they’re the least of our worries.’

  The Glasgow Coma Scale is an international system used to evaluate the severity of head injuries. Fifteen is fully awake. Three is basically brain-dead. Straight after the crash, Tim was given a GCS rating of three. This had improved to five after hospital admission, but 90 per cent of patients with his extent of neurological damage remain in a persistent vegetative state.

  ‘They need to give his brain a breather, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure.’

  We were operating on different wavelengths. I was more worried about whether Linda would let Tim attend Schoolies Week after the concussion lifted.

  Linda pressed a bell to summon assistance from the nursing station. I rinsed my hands with the disinfectant before the nurse took me through to Tim’s bed.

  He discharged the same schoolyard scent. I moved close enough to touch him, but didn’t. A hole had been drilled through his throat for a thick hose. Blue and white tubes ran from the mouth and nose. His sealed eyelids were wet, as though he’d been crying. I stared at Tim for fifteen minutes, and gnashed my teeth to muffle an embarrassing flood of despair.

  In the waiting room, I hugged Linda. Her words dripped with nostalgia for a past so recent yet irretrievable.

  ‘You two were good boys,’ she said. ‘Weren’t you? You knew how to have fun. But you were good.’

  ‘Tim’s a good guy,’ I said, unsure about myself.

  ‘I never imagined this. Not in a million years. I’m praying to God, Lech. I beg for a miracle. Will you pray for Tim?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied, a second-generation atheist. ‘I’ll pray for him.’

  My father and I retreated down the Pacific Highway to the Gold Coast. There was heavy traffic on all eight lanes as people headed home at the end of the long weekend. Dad parked on the street outside the hospital, a lime hinterland climbing above the horizon.

  Nick’s father, Steve, was in the smokers’ area. He had managed the rugby league team that Nick, Tim and I once played for. The tough truck mechanic hugged me while sobbing.

  ‘Nick’s so messed up,’ he said.

  I followed him into the waiting room. Nick’s mum, Anne, was a short public servant with a jet-black bird’s nest. Mascara was smeared around her eyes, but she remained in control, providing a precise inventory of Nick’s tongue-twisting injuries.

  Nick had a GCS rating of six, one better than Tim, with brain swelling and two small haemorrhages. Bruised lungs and broken ribs. On impact, the tendons on his right hand had been slashed cleanly. His ring finger had snapped in half, piercing the skin.

  ‘Trust you to get in the front seat,’ said Anne, ‘and Nick to get in the boot. He’s always been the loose cannon, hasn’t he?’

  Nick and I had met at St Mary’s as ten-year-olds. I’d just transferred from a tiny public school to a frightening new world of navy ties and Hail Marys. I spent the first morning tea sitting alone and trying not to cry or shit myself.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Nick, clinically disinhibited.

  ‘Lech,’ I said, preparing for the explanations. ‘It’s Polish.’

  ‘Cool,’ he said, mercifully.

  For the next ten minutes, my first friend at St Mary’s tried with increasing success to make me piss myself with laughter.

  Anne led me through dark hallways. The grim facilities made me less confident about the patient’s prognosis, even though he was much closer to life than Tim.

  By flying from the boot while crossing the median strip, Nick had avoided a final, fatal ricochet of grey matter. A drip spiked from the peak of his freshly shaved skull. He looked like a comatose Harry Potter.

  ‘You saved him,’ said Anne. ‘The doctors reckon that he could’ve bled to death if you weren’t there.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I’m serious!’ she said. ‘He owes you his life. We owe you.’

  I waited for ages with my hand on the metal railing, so tired that I felt no guilt about my inability to cry.

  That night, the highway was a ghost route. AM radio played the best of the eighties. Billboards advertised the right to life, lies writ large in the headlights. ABORTION IS A SIN! JESUS IS COMING!

  The patriarch’s mobile phone lit up with extended family who’d heard The Bad News. He received a call from my cousin, Allan Langer, a rugby league player famous for punching above his featherweight frame. Dad’s eyes flicked to his limp-wristed son. ‘He’s a tough little bugger,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  I watched the side-view mirror with a sinking feeling. Semi-trailers dribbled away in small, colourful blinks.

  Dad cleared his throat of phlegm, lowered the window and spat out the side of his mouth strategically.

  ‘I was really proud of you today, mate. To show your face like that. I don’t know what I would’ve done if …’

  His bloodless knuckles gripped the steering wheel.

  ‘Just remember
that I’m gonna be here for you. Right?’

  I kept my eyes straight and breath steady. The range was black tape reeling between ground and clouds.

  ‘No worries,’ I said.

  Dad turned up the radio. I unlocked my iPhone with the urgency of an asthmatic. It hadn’t stopped vibrating between hospital visits. Hundreds of acquaintances and strangers sought a subscription to the ongoing soap opera of my survival. I went through and accepted every friend request, mistaking curiosity for kinship.

  Others spammed my wall with digital chitchat.

  heyy im so sorry about the crash :( i hope u dnt mind the random add im michelle btw im 16 and live in toowoomba. my msn addy is sxc_babe789@hotmail add me :)

  sorry about your friends :( they seem like great guys

  hey i hope your ok nobody deserves what your going thru!!!

  The memorial page had ballooned to more than one thousand members, with hundreds of wall posts. There was little to distinguish the rubberneckers from the genuinely bereft. Strangers pleaded for medical updates and gave heartbreaking accounts of exaggerated relationships. Trolls preached about evil P-platers, provoking moral condemnation from others.

  Family members of the dead explained with harrowing detail the ways their lives would never be the same.

  At 9.09 pm, I posted my third public statement.

  Thank you to all the well wishers, I wrote. My thoughts remain with Will, Hamish, Henry, Nick and Tim’s families. If there is anyone I can help at this terrible time, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me.

  My iPhone was a bright light to be blinked at, until the blank minutes became days and nights of missing time.

  ——

  Grinning school ID photos of Henry, Tim and Nick greeted newspaper subscribers on Tuesday morning. TRIO FIGHTS FOR SURVIVAL read the headline. For the rest of my life, I would pay spiritual attention to every newspaper article about motor vehicle mortality. These are the secret scriptures of a survivor.

  After breakfast, I drove to St Mary’s. A special assembly was scheduled to update seniors and dampen spreading speculation. The sparsely attended barbeque before the accident became a bit like Woodstock – I was there – transformed into an underage rager attended by hundreds. Some claimed that they were offered entry to the boot, but didn’t cave in to peer pressure.

  ‘It could’ve been my son!’ said their mothers.

  By the end of the day, the consensus was that we were drunk and/or high, drag-racing back to town after gatecrashing a party with baseball bats.

  On the phone, the deputy principal had begged me to keep a distance, perhaps fearing that I would contaminate the campus with grief, or simply freak my classmates out. ‘You need a breather,’ he said.

  I insisted on coming in. Breathers were for the weak.

  The campus was far more basic than Downlands. Dense assemblies of besser blocks and corrugated iron were set in a treeless scenery of hot blacktop.

  In the hall, one hundred teenage boys gaped at my arrival. I received a round of applause. My geography teacher hugged me. This was even more awkwardly received than the one from Vincent, because it had so many witnesses. The scene was different to the day at Downlands. Will and Hamish were strangers to these students. The bleakness of Tim’s condition was a secret.

  I took a spare seat in the back row. The priest, kitted out in a white robe with purple trimmings, spoke about the healing effects of liturgy. ‘Two things in life will last,’ he said. ‘Faith and hope.’

  It was announced that a psychologist would be available to students for the rest of the week. To my knowledge, nobody visited. I didn’t even consider it. At Downlands, the presence of girls permitted a grander level of emotional expression. St Mary’s boys were moulded into athletes and tradies who negotiated hardship with stiff upper lips.

  The deputy principal asked half-heartedly if anyone had further remarks to make. I hijacked the microphone and delivered a bizarrely macho speech.

  ‘It ain’t over yet, boys!’ I said.

  The room was still reeling from news of the car crash and the secondary information that I hadn’t been killed. Now I was front and centre in the main hall, rallying them. The phrase out-of-body experience didn’t do justice to how far I’d flown from my feelings.

  ‘Let’s stick together,’ I said. ‘For Tim!’

  Five hundred metres away, at a private girls school, a delirious senior took the microphone. She claimed to be a cousin of one passenger and a girlfriend of another. She’d been at the ‘party’ before the crash. She heard the collision happen a few hundred metres away and rushed to cradle the victim’s bloody bodies.

  It was emotional karaoke. Nobody in the crash had ever met her. The most unsettling thing wasn’t the quality of the performances, or how deeply people believed in their forgeries of trauma. It was that complete strangers seemed more capable of feeling real grief than me.

  ——

  Since the car crash, a dozen different media outlets had contacted me to address the conjecture. Some of the programs had celebrity hosts and seven-figure audiences. The producers would cold-call the house or my father’s business. I came to recognise the glib sympathy: Hope you’re doing okay! They tried to seduce me with the erotic pleasure of widespread attention.

  ‘Social media is causing a lot of untrue rumours to spread,’ said one. ‘This is your chance to straighten the record.’

  I told my father that I wanted to address the rumours head-on. Less than a week after the crash, I met a journalist and a photographer from the local newspaper. I came armed with a 1500-word essay about voyeurism that I expected to be printed, carte blanche, in the editorial section.

  ‘I don’t want any pictures,’ I said.

  The journalist had to disenchant me gently. ‘Here’s what you’ve gotta understand. My editor isn’t going to print a rant. And if you don’t let me take your photo, they’ll just get a picture of you from Facebook.’

  I waved the stapled reams of paper. ‘I really need to address the stuff about drink driving and speed. It’s bullshit.’

  ‘This is excellently written,’ he said, glancing through. ‘I could definitely get some of this into an article.’

  ‘I don’t want to do a front-page sob story.’

  ‘Well, tell me about them. Let’s get the gossipers to see that they’re dealing with real people here.’

  The journalist pressed the red button on the tape recorder. I spoke about my dead friends. The photographer clicked in the background.

  ‘You’re a bloody inspiration,’ said the journalist. ‘People are going to see a different side of this thing.’

  The following morning, a beaming Bindi Irwin tamed a snake atop the front page. FREE: 24 Bindi wildlife cards for you to collect! Underneath, the headline said EXCLUSIVE in blood-red font. Our reporter speaks with Highfields crash survivor LECH BLAINE.

  My glum face evaded eye contact with the photographer. I looked full of shady secrets, with bags under my eyes, gazing at the miniature vignettes of Hamish, Will and Henry. They were moons trapped in the dark orbit of my self-absorption.

  WE’LL STAY STRONG FOR FAMILIES

  Lech Blaine is a very lucky young man – he just hasn’t taken the time to think about how lucky. Lech walked away from Saturday night’s horror crash near Highfields virtually unscathed. Rather than dwell on the circumstances of the tragic event, he has instead focused energy on his dead mates. TURN TO PAGE 3.

  The portrait of my stoic survival was encircled by advertisements. NEW SLIMMING DRINK. Add twice a day to your favourite beverage. What have you got to lose? LEISURE POOLS TOOWOOMBA: Huge Saving on Our Specials! Call 1300 SPLASH. WANT LONGER LASTING SEX? Find out about nasal delivery technology. Call now for a free consultation.

  ‘It’s important that we stay strong,’ I said. ‘The best thing at the moment is that the boys are still fighting.’

  Tragedy attracts eyeballs. If it bleeds, it leads. The journalist and advertiser both win. Mea
nwhile, survivors feel an equal need to be seen and to disappear, to spill our guts and then cut our tongues out.

  Terrible Perfection

  I said goodbye to Henry on Wednesday afternoon. He was dying on the fourth floor of the Royal Women’s Hospital.

  The mood was much lighter than I expected, and this made me briefly optimistic. All it meant was that the end had been accepted.

  I hugged his mother, Melissa, in the intensive-care waiting room. She articulated her anguish with bitter precision. No last-minute bargains were getting thrashed out with God.

  ‘Henry is going to die soon, Lech,’ she said. ‘We have decided to switch off his life support later today.’

  As the Fairlane flew across the median strip, grey matter smashed against the front of Henry’s skull before rebounding, wiping out the links between brain cells. At the crash site, he recorded the maximum GCS score of three.

  I’d only known Henry for a year, but we’d become close. He was ranked fourth on my list of Myspace friends, I was ranked fifth on his. We were similar enough to kindle a swift intimacy and different enough to avoid competitive friction. Most of the guys in our clique wanted to be tradies, soldiers or professional athletes. Henry and I talked about moving to Brisbane for university.

  ‘The doctors have been extremely honest with me,’ said Melissa, away from the other visitors. ‘If Henry were to survive, it wouldn’t be my son waking up. I can’t imagine him wanting to live like that. Can you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No. Neither can I. It will destroy me. Nobody understands. Our connection is different, deeper.’

  I found her candour refreshing. Melissa didn’t tell me that I was breathing for any particular reason.

  ‘Apart from the brain, the rest of his organs are in immaculate condition. So we’ve decided to donate them. I think Henry would appreciate that. Don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He really would.’

  At Downlands, Nick and Henry had quickly formed a tight bond. I became their third wheel, a beta between two alphas. We spent entire weekends together at Nick’s place. I waited all week through the repetitive lessons at St Mary’s to reunite with a more dynamic life.