Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  Sources were untraceable. Someone’s sister played golf with the wife of a nurse from the hospital. Another person’s brother rode motorbikes with a detective.

  Rumours bloomed into truth. White lies became facts. The simplest explanation – that generally law-abiding teenagers made a rash decision to overload a car, before their sober driver overshot a bend while under the speed limit – was the only version considered implausible.

  The senior constable was a nice guy with tired eyes who had understandable suspicions about my impartiality as a witness, given my close friendship with the driver. He seemed sympathetic, while providing the obligatory reminders of my legal responsibilities.

  ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘you can’t get in trouble for telling the truth. But you can get in a lot of trouble for lying.’

  What happened? I knew, but I didn’t really have a clue.

  We were driving along the New England Highway towards Toowoomba. I wasn’t paying much attention and then I looked up and thought we were heading into a yard or something and then we went through the trees and got hit on the other side.

  Dom was sober. Prior to losing control he was driving normally. It didn’t seem like he was going fast. It happened suddenly. As far as I’m aware everyone was behaving normally in the car.

  After we got hit I remember bouncing up and looking around. I saw some people come over. I looked in the back and saw all the boys. I remember seeing blood and it looked like everyone was sleeping. Some of them made funny sounds like they were snoring.

  Someone yelled turn the car off. I reached over for the keys but couldn’t find them. I remember someone pulled me through the driver’s side window.

  I got out of the car but I couldn’t really remember what happened. I sat down for a while somewhere. I remember I called my sister and she came to get me.

  On 18 May 2009 I attended the Toowoomba Police Station. I have no further information in relation to this matter.

  At the end of the interview, I signed five sheets of paper declaring that I wasn’t lying. A weight lifted off my shoulders. I looked at the cop optimistically, as though he might announce Dom’s exoneration. We could piece our shattered lives together with privacy.

  ‘I’ll ring you when we need you to come back,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We’ve only just started sifting through the evidence. More will come to light. So we’ll need to do some more interviews.’

  I asked the officer how long the legal process might take, thinking in months, worried that a court case might interrupt the bliss of graduation and Schoolies Week.

  ‘Just the investigation?’ he asked.

  ‘And then if it goes to court.’

  ‘Criminal cases can take years.’

  The car crash wasn’t over. It was just getting started.

  Nick was officially a miracle. Doctors had at first predicted that he would need 24-hour care for the rest of his life. Yet three weeks after the car crash, he’d been transferred from the Gold Coast to the brain injury rehabilitation unit at Toowoomba Hospital. Now neurologists believed he’d make a full recovery. I staged sleepovers on the La-Z-Boy beside his bed. We watched slapstick comedies.

  Nick was exhausted from learning how to walk and talk again, but he saw it as a fair sacrifice for friendship. ‘I’m glad this happened to me,’ he said, ‘and not you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m used to getting knocked out. And breaking shit. I don’t think you would’ve woken up. If you were in the boot.’

  ‘Is this your heroic way of calling me a pussy?’

  ‘Nah. But yeah. You’re a bit of a pussy.’

  ‘Thanks. You took a coma for the team.’

  A snicker knocked the wind from his lungs. ‘Bones heal, bro,’ he said.

  Nick’s rapid improvement was bittersweet. I envisioned Tim following suit, but day after day he stayed deeply asleep in the state capital. My best mate had been transferred from ICU to the high dependence unit, but was stuck at five on the Glasgow Coma Scale.

  I took a Friday off from school to pay him a visit.

  ‘Timmy,’ said Linda. ‘Lech is here to see you.’

  I watched Tim’s eyelids for a flutter, but they stayed stubbornly shut. A hose in his windpipe provided oxygen. Tubes through the nostrils filled his stomach with food.

  ‘I’ll leave you guys to have a chat. Tell him to wake up, hey?’

  I sat silently beside Tim, suffocated by the strange and dangerous weight of all the painful phrases that I was aching and incapable of saying to him.

  Wake up. My life is over without you.

  ‘Pray for him,’ said Linda. ‘We need a miracle, Lech.’

  Tim believed in God. He was morally opposed to smoking. I saw human beings as intelligent chimpanzees. Our friendship was like a parable: the optimistic bricklayer and the pessimistic poet.

  This was always the biggest schism between us. Optimism never made any sense to me.

  On the penultimate day of autumn, the upper crust of an extinct volcano came together for a famous game of rugby union. Grammar vs Downlands. It was an annual tradition for rival private-school alumni to dress primly and watch bloodthirsty teenage boys ruck and scrum each other into surrender, before burying the hatchet by getting hammered together at the Spotted Cow Hotel.

  The paper declared the glitz and glamour must go on in the wake of a tragedy that made old passions seem irrational. ‘We need to approach it as another game of rugby,’ said Grammar’s head prefect and rugby union captain. ‘It has to be First XV on First XV.’

  On the morning of the game, I went clothes shopping with my father. Normally he’d just give me fifty dollars from the till, but recent events had made him feel guilty about skipping out. So we endured some excruciating male bonding at a department store called Hannas. I tried on Ralph Lauren polos with cream chinos.

  ‘Are you sure that pony on the shirt is big enough?’ he blurted. ‘The Liberal Party recruiters won’t be able to see ya.’

  The parents of my new friends were right-wing farmers and white-collar professionals. One of them was the grandson of the agricultural minister in the Fraser government. Not only was I partying with the enemy, now I wanted to dress like them too.

  Dad was about to play lawn bowls. His thick sideburns matched his shirt, trousers and shoes in colour. He belonged to a cabal of left-wing drinkers at a clubhouse filled with right-wing retirees.

  ‘You look like a sunburnt Colonel Sanders,’ I said.

  My father coughed with mock outrage, but the banter broke the ice between us. He said, ‘Get whatever you want,’ before noticing me eyeing a pair of four-hundred-dollar R.M. Williams boots. ‘You’re pulling my dick, aren’t ya? Buckley’s chance my son will be seen dead in a pair of those fuckin’ things.’

  I went home to get showered and dressed. The PR system at the race club was publicising winners to the surrounding houses as I pulled up. Country music blared from the radio in the kitchen. My mother was chain-smoking Longbeach Menthols beside the jacuzzi on the back patio of our souring Australian dream.

  Mum came inside and cracked open a Bundy and Coke with a dessert spoon, due to her arthritis, while inspecting the designer outfit paid for by her rival.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ she said, incapable of negative feedback. ‘Did your tight-arse father pay for that? Good one.’

  I drove away without a goodbye kiss. Sheets of corrugated steel spread like melanomas across a sunburnt horizon, answering the cancer of drought with the radiation of real estate. In the steep east, Queens Park remained green. Lavish gardens shielded the courtyards where mothers drank shiraz instead of rum, different stiffeners for matching Lexapro prescriptions.

  At Grammar, I approached a festival of prosperity with anthropological fascination. Gothic buildings soared above hills filled with boys chanting vaguely pagan slogans. They wore grey Akubras and blue blazers with yellow pinstripes. Botox saved grinn
ing mothers the inevitable wrinkles of parenthood. Fathers wore R.M. Williams boots and brave expressions on their faces.

  ‘WHO’S GOT THE CUP?’ barked the heirs to vast agricultural empires. ‘WHO’S GOT THE CUP?’

  The question was rhetorical. Grammar had won four of the last five cups, including a 21-point thrashing the previous year.

  Downlands supporters congregated opposite, blazers darker but blood a lighter shade of blue. Their privilege was seen as kitsch due to the glitch of Catholicism and the fact they never gained full admission to the GPS, a clique of elite rugby union schools. This was a vital source of self-esteem for Grammar, who in turn were seen as hillbillies by the Brisbane GPS schools, who were viewed as hicks by the truly rich in Sydney and Melbourne. This was the harsh secret of the Australian dream: no matter how high you flew, there was always some other bastard above you.

  ‘Fire up, Downlands, fire up!’ the underdogs chanted.

  I stood with Dom and Nick, as a tightknit trio of survivors made their first public appearance together. Dom still had his collarbone in a sling. Nick was in a wheelchair, gruesome scars splayed across a pale forehead.

  Dom grinned at Nick with thinly veiled guilt. ‘How ya feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘I wish I was playing,’ Nick said.

  The most confronting thing for Nick to witness wasn’t the match, but how seamlessly I’d replaced him. ‘Everyone keeps sucking your dick,’ Nick muttered, and I laughed, but he wasn’t hallucinating. I was cool, that elusive quality usually monopolised by the rich, beautiful or athletically exceptional. Ever since the car crash, people wanted to meet me.

  There was a minute’s silence for Will, Hamish and Henry. Downlands supporters gaped into blank space, yearning for an alternative present. Athletes on high-protein diets wore skin-tight jerseys and black armbands for the dead.

  ‘Get me a jersey,’ the missing outside centre whispered.

  Nick was the one player who inspired blind faith in teammates and fear in rivals. The truest way he knew to honour the memory of the departed was to see Grammar annihilated. But without him, Downlands didn’t stand a chance.

  The first half was a bloodbath. Fumbles and forward passes reigned supreme. Panicked teenagers couldn’t live up to the weight of expectation from nostalgic fathers, or prospective girlfriends with fussy mothers. Along the packed sidelines, anticipation for a nail-biter dissipated. Grammar ran out to a 22–3 lead.

  Nick suffered from FOMO. As he watched Downlands lose, all his friends discussed plans to get to the afterparty.

  ‘I wish I was coming out,’ he mumbled at half-time.

  ‘It won’t be that great,’ I said.

  ‘Piss off, Lech. It’s gonna be hectic.’

  ‘Nah, it’ll probably get shut down by ten.’

  ‘If it’s gonna be so shit, come to the hospital.’

  I tried to think of a way to change the subject.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said.

  In the second half, Downlands added respectability with a belated try, but the game was over. Grammar won 22–10. Blue-and-yellow blazers flapped across the oval. The rival captains lifted the cup jointly towards the heavens.

  The afterparty was at Vincent’s mansion. I drove there with Dom. We had become inseparable on weekends. The two survivors who escaped without brain damage could trust each other not to highlight that luck, or to judge the numbness underpinning our continuing social activities and alcohol consumption.

  ‘What did you think of the game?’ he asked.

  ‘Boring as batshit,’ I said. ‘But don’t tell anyone I said that.’

  At Vincent’s, we were welcomed by the same faces from the vigils and wakes, except now they were smiling. The partygoers had gathered on a timber balcony above the swimming pool. Girls kissed my cheek. Guys competed to give me a beer.

  Frida hugged me. We walked along the pristine lawn overlooking the Great Dividing Range.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ she asked. ‘And don’t give me that cliché bullshit about hanging in there.’

  ‘I don’t really know yet,’ I said, caught off-guard.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it.’

  It was rare for someone to ask about my mental wellbeing with aspirations to a complicated answer.

  ‘It’s not that hard to talk about. It’s sort of too easy to say something that doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘But as long as you can say that,’ said Frida.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like, just admit the emptiness of it all.’

  In the background, the Lockyer Valley was a mosaic of lime and beige acres spreading hazily to the horizon. The distant outer limits of Brisbane faded away until they blurred with the sky.

  ‘I don’t know if the words exist to admit the emptiness,’ I said.

  ‘That’s perfect! You aren’t supposed to have the right words.’

  We went back upstairs. The farms turned black. Cars on the highway looked like slow shooting stars.

  On Millionaires’ Row, minors smoked cigarettes and swallowed

  Jägerbombs to the same soundtrack as the summer. Alcohol quarantined me from the hospital visits.

  This is how grim spirits become kindred.

  This is how numbness becomes a ritual.

  After midnight, most of the party went home and Vincent raided the wine cellar. We drank merlots and cabernet sauvignons in red plastic cups left over from games of beer pong. Mineral water and Doritos sobered up those of us sleeping over.

  ‘It feels wrong to fall asleep,’ sighed Frida.

  In the cinema, Vincent put on Anchorman. A dozen bodies dropped across couches and spare mattresses.

  ‘I’m Ron Burgundy,’ muttered a guy on the brink of sleep.

  It was the first film Tim and I saw together at the movies. We’d recite the quotes so often they became involuntary.

  Frida’s lips found mine in the murk.

  ‘Who even are you?’ she murmured.

  I was a well-spoken bogan from a broken home.

  The carefree behaviour of the day just gone made me ashamed to still be breathing. I thought about where I was forty-eight hours earlier: visiting Tim.

  Frida curved assertively against me, but I couldn’t manage anything sensual. She sighed and fell asleep. Her limbs twitched every now and then, as though they were being zapped with a cattle prod. I shut my eyes so that I didn’t feel like a creep.

  When I opened them again, sunlight flooded through the shutters, uncovering a roomful of spooning teenagers. Frida and I kissed one more time, just for existing.

  Autumn passed its expiry date. Red leaves ringed the trees like campfires. Subscribers fetched papers from thawing lawns. Our faces were replaced on the front pages.

  Death was everywhere that winter, but the main danger was swine flu. Mexican pigs had spread the virus to farmers before it mutated and became an international smash hit.

  Journalists reported feverishly on the disproven hoaxes that their coverage promoted. ‘Swine flu has not spread to Toowoomba,’ wrote a journalist. ‘But the city is in the grip of a rumour pandemic.’

  Frida and I had agreed to see a movie before exams, but one of my classmates tested positive. St Mary’s students went into a two-week quarantine. The 99.99 per cent of pupils without swine flu fist-pumped and high-fived the delayed exams.

  I guess we’ll have to delay that date, Frida texted.

  we can die of swine flu together, I said. it’ll be a Shakespearean tragedy for Generation Y

  I want a doctor’s certificate saying you are swine-free

  For a fortnight, I watched footage of vaccinations getting stockpiled and farm animals being herded into sacrificial abattoirs. The death toll for pig influenza stayed in the single digits, making it less deadly than the common type.

  massive overreaction, I said. it’s just the flu. not syphilis

  you should get tested for that too

  On the first Saturday night of th
e winter holidays, I borrowed my father’s black Falcon XR6 – which looked vaguely like a Mercedes-Benz – to take Frida on a belated first date. At the Drayton Tavern, I waited for my father to finish pouring schooners.

  ‘You got a missus?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why don’t you bring her out here for a feed?’

  The main attraction on the menu was the Drayton Dream, a 500-gram rump steak covered with butter, garlic, mushrooms and mozzarella, served with beer-battered chips and vegetables.

  ‘She’s vegetarian,’ I said.

  ‘Get her the garlic bread, big fella!’

  Greyhound racing was interrupted by breaking news about Michael Jackson suffering a fatal overdose.

  ‘Someone finally shut that poofter up,’ shouted a plumber.

  ‘Ya hear about his toaster?’ asked a plasterer. ‘The bread goes in brown. And comes out white!’

  Customers in his vicinity laughed hysterically, lips dry from beef jerky and fingertips oily from boiled peanuts. It was my job to rinse their spew from the piss troughs on Saturday and Sunday mornings, before doing a split shift in the kitchen.

  My father’s pride and joy was a thick wad of fifty-dollar notes folded in his wallet. He slipped me one. ‘Take her somewhere nice. And remember to tarp up!’

  ‘You’re a grub,’ I said, blushing.

  Fog wafted democratically between the trough of Drayton and the peak of Rangeville. Frida’s home was an architect’s impression of a French château. The electric security gates were open. I knocked on a tall front door. Frida wore a black cashmere sweater tucked into jeans, bare feet displaying white toenails.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ she said. ‘Michael Jackson is dead!’

  Frida sat down on the couch to put on a pair of sneakers. The living room brimmed with minimalist design. I studied pictures of Frida’s photogenic parents stuck to the fridge.

  ‘Do your parents go out much?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. They have a busier social life than me.’

  Her gaze was still glued to the TV. The media were staging a 72-hour celebration of a man they’d spent a decade accusing of paedophilia.