by Lech Blaine
Back in Brisbane, I moved into a three-bedroom unit with Vincent and Big Red. We had all graduated from different high schools and ideological traditions. Big Red grew up on a farm, the son of National Party voters, and wanted to be a professional rugby union player. Vincent, the son of white-collar Liberal Party voters, was studying law.
‘How’s the serenity?’ asked Big Red, slurping a protein shake following an afternoon gym workout.
Vincent and I sipped from stubbies of XXXX Gold. From our sixth-floor balcony, we watched tiny cranes serenade the skyscrapers. Coronation Drive – sunk in the floods – was slowed by roadworks. Motorists pressed horns like they were morphine pumps.
‘So much serenity,’ said Vincent.
In the afternoons, I scaled the rolling hills of St Lucia, shirtless to avoid nipple chafe. Mud mapped flood levels on the balustrades of tall Queenslanders. Hard rubbish covered front lawns lush from summer inundations.
My father’s new motel in Bundaberg was booming due to tradies staying for municipal repairs. He was running the business with a Maori barmaid from one of our pubs.
‘It should flood more often!’ he said on the phone.
‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk,’ I said.
‘Make hay while the sun is shining, mate,’ he said.
I was studying English literature and creative writing, and getting high distinctions. But recovering from depression was like trying to unlearn a second language. My brain translated mundane frustrations into excruciating pains. Some days, a stubbed toe or missed bus seemed like the last straw.
‘My nihilistic boyfriend,’ sighed Frida.
Frida had traded the Conservatorium for a degree in international relations. She remained a recipe for a panic attack. We were always on different wavelengths. That’s the kind of thing you only see in hindsight: she was in the prime of my life, but I was never in the prime of hers.
‘Just because I’m super busy doesn’t mean that I’m about to break up with you, ya flake,’ said Frida. ‘I love you, remember?’
Unfortunately, love wasn’t enough. The simple impulses of a summer fling in the country couldn’t be reheated in the city.
I waited until we were driving back to Toowoomba on Easter Saturday to have an existential crisis.
‘Can we please stop for hash browns?’ said Frida.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe if you didn’t get shit-faced last night, so we weren’t running half an hour late …’
‘Okay, old man.’
Outside Gatton, the flags of Australia and McDonald’s flapped at matching altitudes. I flicked my indicator.
‘Praise the Lord,’ said Frida. ‘It’s an Easter miracle.’
I chucked a piss that felt like a prayer to God, lingering a minute, pins and needles in my feet and fingers. When I returned, Frida was in the front seat, eating hash browns.
‘Dude,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t think we’re compatible,’ I answered.
She spat salt and saturated fat against the glass. ‘Is this because I was running late?’
‘No. I’ve been thinking about it for a month.’
‘So you’re breaking up with me?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. I think so. I don’t want to have this chat tomorrow.’
For the rest of the trip, we performed an autopsy of our second failed stab at a relationship.
‘Can we stop by your house?’ asked Frida.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘We’re not going to my place for break-up sex.’
‘I thought that only happened in movies.’
‘For a reason. It’s the best.’
We drove through the intersection where the mother and her son had been swept to their death at the start of January. A roadside bouquet was skewered with faded flags left over from Australia Day. The gardens at Queens Park and the War Memorial were more scenic than ever before.
‘Everything is beautiful again,’ said Frida.
‘For some.’
After the flood, a widowed single father had criticised bystanders for idly watching the floodwaters drown his family. Many of the same gossipers spreading untrue rumors about him had recently attended a flood fundraiser at the showgrounds. Prince William arrived to gleeful chants of WIL-LY! WIL-LY! WIL-LY! It was the final stop on the ‘Disaster Down Under’ tour.
‘Look on the bright side,’ she said.
In my bedroom, we made out with the same intensity as during the game of spin the bottle at Nick’s place.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Frida.
I was thinking about how, two years earlier, Henry was pressuring me to message Frida. That night, we walked from Mount Lofty to Queens Park to the Australian Gospel Music Festival.
I started weeping uncontrollably. Where did those feelings come from after so much numbness?
Frida hugged me and said, ‘It’ll be okay,’ until she realised that I was upset about griefs far deeper than a break-up. Of course being with Frida was an anticlimax: she couldn’t make me seventeen again.
‘I just want to go back,’ I said.
‘Go back where?’ asked Frida. ‘To Brisbane?’
‘To before the car crash happened.’
‘Oh, Lech. So do I. But this is it.’
Frida didn’t lie everything would be fine. She embraced me patiently and waited for the tide of sorrow to subside, a private kindness inside a public tragedy.
That night, Toowoomba was hit with one last monsoon, an aftershock from the summer floods. East Creek released a mini tsunami through Queens Park. Fifteen thousand Christians were evacuated during an apocalyptic blackout.
God is punishing you for breaking up with me on Easter Saturday, texted Frida. of all days
The Soul Is a Black Box
Dom’s trial was set for the dying weeks of winter 2011. After class, I saw a police car parked on my leafy street in St Lucia. I knew that they were here to deliver the court summons, but I felt no panic, just mild relief. The couriers were laidback. I was named as a witness, not the front-seat passenger.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.
I caught the elevator while reading the charges against Dom: dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing three counts of death and two counts of grievous bodily harm. There’d been a one-in-seven chance of me not being killed, disabled or charged with a serious crime. The car crash hadn’t happened to me, not in the same way as to the others.
‘If they put that kid in the clink,’ said my father on the phone, ‘they’ll have to lock up half the country! I’ve done far worse things than him.’
On a nondescript Tuesday morning, I awoke from broken sleep and sped west. The justice system had paid for petrol and two nights off work. The blurry sun had no bite, rising behind the bumper and making everything in the windscreen seem especially unreal.
I parked between Queens Park and the War Memorial. Photographers assembled outside the courthouse for one last hurrah. They took a few desultory pictures of me, but saved most of the film for Dom.
Inside, bereaved family members clung together. The comparatively relaxed first responders made conversation with the police and paramedics. Everyone watched the stairs for the arrival of the driver.
Dom’s face was blank and freshly shaven.
‘Good luck,’ I whispered.
Witnesses were forbidden to sit in the courtroom except while giving evidence. Nick was in the same situation, and we reunited in the waiting room. Unlike me, he couldn’t remember a single thing from the night of the accident. This was a different kind of dismay: knowing too much versus missing information.
‘How’ve you been, Lechtor?’ he asked.
‘Good,’ I said.
Nick had forgotten the drunken fights and slights behind each other’s back during our final months of school. But that alone couldn’t explain my inability to sit and talk openly to my oldest mate. I was capable of spilling my guts to a room of g
raduate students, but not to Nick. There was too much history between us. He revealed a side of me that I wanted to deny had ever existed.
‘I saw that article about you getting done for drink driving,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Thanks for taking the heat off me, bro.’
I had to laugh. Nick had appeared at the courthouse a few weeks before me, charged with ‘occasioning grievous bodily harm’. In the food court of Grand Central, Nick had crossed paths with an internet troll who had mocked his injuries on Facebook a few months after the accident. The troll placed his hands on an imaginary steering wheel and mimed losing control. Nick punched him in the side of skull, busting his eardrum and drawing blood.
‘I go to the pub waiting for someone to say something,’ said Nick. ‘So I can headbutt them. When I’ve got a brain injury.’
For a glorious period in his youth, Nick was worshipped for sublime athletic performances. Now he was nostalgic for his lost popularity and prestige. This led to an aggressive streak that had never been present when he was unquestionably the best.
‘I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,’ I said. ‘You’ve had a rough trot.’
‘I don’t want your sympathy, dude.’
The bailiff saved me from patronising him further. He mispronounced my Polish name at the courtroom door. I drifted into the witness box. It was stunning that a room united by doom could generate such a disciplined silence.
The judge offered a Bible, but I made a non-religious affirmation. The prosecution cued the footage from Henry’s mobile phone. The courtroom gasped at hearing the rendition of ‘Wonderwall’. I listened to Will’s last breaths, so fast in real life and slow in my recurring dreams.
The prosecutor wanted answers. I stuck to the same script: I remember seeing the trees. I thought we were driving into a yard. Headlights came out of nowhere. I testified that I knew there were extra passengers before we left, indicating that the driver did, too. But I remained vague about the details. I genuinely hadn’t been paying attention. I don’t remember. Maybe. I believe so. It happened very quickly.
‘No more questions, Your Honour,’ said the female prosecutor.
‘I invite cross-examination of the witness,’ said the judge.
Dom’s defence lawyer grilled me much more vigorously than the prosecutor. The legal strategy was to plant seeds of doubt in the jury about whether Dom knew there were two passengers in the boot. The barrister recited passages from statements I couldn’t remember making.
‘I can’t specifically recall saying that,’ I said, shredding my credibility as a witness. ‘But I wouldn’t doubt the validity of the statement.’
‘No more questions for Mr Blaine,’ said the barrister.
‘The witness is excused,’ said the judge.
My testimony was followed by two forensic investigators. I had to wait to read their evidence in The Toowoomba Chronicle the next morning. The driver had recorded a blood-alcohol reading of 0.00, they said. He was travelling at roughly 94 kilometres an hour in a 100 zone. The back tyre drifted onto a gravel driveway, spinning out, a lapse that lasted approximately 0.7 to 0.8 of a second. It took less than three seconds for the accident to happen. The collision wasn’t caused by a drag-racing drunk driver or a homicidal passenger grabbing the wheel. This was a catastrophic moment of inattentiveness and overcorrection.
The headline didn’t read: SOBER DRIVER WAS UNDER THE SPEED LIMIT. It read: VIDEO FOOTAGE PLAYED AT TRIAL.
The pendulum swung between guilt and innocence among talkback listeners. On Wednesday afternoon, the jury was taken on a tour of the New England Highway. News photographers snapped pictures of the court-appointed bystanders stranded on the blacktop. A minibus ferried them back to the courthouse for closing arguments.
The defence said that the collision was a tragic accident, but the driver was innocent. The prosecution said that Dom had allowed the car to be overloaded. Someone needed to be held legally responsible. He was guilty.
On Wednesday night, I drove past Downlands to Dom’s place in Mount Lofty, for the last supper before the verdict. I parked alongside the rifle range and koala sanctuary across the road from his parents’ dream home. It had been remortgaged to pay for their son’s legal fees. His mum fretfully prepared a roast dinner. Dom and I sat on the front patio.
‘I just want it to be over,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if I go away.’
‘What does your lawyer think?’ I asked.
‘Seven to eight years. But that’s fine.’
Seven years would see him released from prison by twenty-five. It seemed like a gap year compared to disability and death. The lucky part wasn’t just climbing from the window without a scratch, but that I wasn’t following him to jail: I was equally guilty of whatever moral offence Dom committed.
Before dinner, I helped Dom unspool a layer of giant bubble wrap across the swimming pool. A pool cleaner chugged through the chlorine.
‘I just wish I could say that it was a stupid mistake,’ he said. ‘Without incriminating myself. But my lawyer doesn’t want me to say anything.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘It could get twisted the wrong way, I guess.’
Survivor’s guilt and criminal guilt were two different things.
We ate greedily, pleased to be doing something meaningless with our mouths. Over dinner, Dom asked if I was seeing anyone. I lied that I was over Frida. He told me about a potential flame.
‘She’s keen,’ he said. ‘But let’s see what happens tomorrow.’ The gleam in his tired eyes disappeared.
It was one thing to discuss the prospect of incarceration, but we still couldn’t talk freely about what it was like to be in a collision that killed three people. Death eclipsed the animal technology of lungs and tongues and lips.
‘Thanks for coming over,’ said Dom.
I felt an urge to touch him in some way, but resisted.
‘No worries, mate,’ I said. ‘I’m here, no matter what.’
‘Cheers, Blaine Train. I’ll be all right.’
The line came out more like a whine than a roar.
When the verdict was handed down the next day, I was 121 kilometres away. A professor was discussing the development of the 24-hour news cycle. My iPhone vibrated. I rushed from the room and took in the breaking news:
NOT GUILTY
Three counts of dangerous driving causing death: NOT GUILTY. Two counts of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm: NOT GUILTY. One count of overloading: NOT GUILTY.
The final newspaper article in the sequence on the crash finished with an optimistic plot twist:
For much of the three days of evidence the driver sat quietly in the dock with head bowed as the most painful moments of his young life were aired in open court. And that quiet, dignified demeanor remained yesterday when the jury brought back not guilty verdicts to charges of dangerous driving causing death and grievous bodily harm … The driver left the court declining to speak to waiting media, preferring to now hopefully get on with his life.
I skipped the bus and wandered along the river in the comfortable dusk of a Brisbane winter.
Congratulations mate, I wrote to Dom with a knot in my stomach.
Why did I feel so numb, even when something good happened for once? Had I subconsciously been yearning for punishment? The life of a survivor is an anti-climax. We feel like flakes and failures and fakes, the same as everyone else, except the stakes became much higher.
I smelled butter chicken wafting down the hallway before I reached my apartment. Vincent and Anna were in the kitchen cooking dinner. On the balcony, I sat with a salivating Big Red. He applauded as the curries were served. The four of us toasted Dom’s innocence, but didn’t dwell on the technicalities.
‘Do you feel different?’ asked Vincent.
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
It didn’t matter what the jury decided, or if the public agreed with the verdict. The trial provided a legal answer to an existenti
al question. I couldn’t unsee the abyss, or unfeel the grief.
‘It’s still shit, isn’t it?’ said Big Red.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately.’
The skyline climbed above the slimy mangroves and hireable bicycles across the water in Orleigh Park. A City Cat skidded on the black water. Fruit bats flapped in the opposite direction, flying back towards the university.
Human beings chase yardsticks in the distance, until passing those markers and seeing that the dark feelings we were fleeing from are actually part of us. The trick was to stop striving so damn hard to be alive. To laugh and fuck and love till death do us part from a bargain that I never asked to receive. And to fight the urge for flight, even when my body told me it was time to leave.
I saw Nick once in the next seven years, at a twenty-first birthday party. He had a job painting trucks and was friends with a cast of rugby-league-playing public schoolboys who didn’t judge his rough edges.
On 2 May 2018 – the ninth anniversary of the car crash – I sent him a Facebook message. I was back living in Toowoomba for the first time since school. Hey mate, thinking of you today. How’s life been? We should catch up.
We arranged to meet for lunch on a Saturday afternoon. Nick didn’t have a licence, so I punched his address into Google Maps. He lived 100 metres from my new share house.
‘You have arrived at the destination,’ said the sat nav almost immediately.
A pool in the front yard was filled with leaves. Nick answered the door with paint in his crooked eyebrows, voice lower and slower than I remembered. Now a father of two, he had put on some weight since the court case. The silent house behind him looked to be filled with toys and fast-food wrappers.
‘Nick,’ I said.
‘Hey, Lechtor,’ he said. ‘You look good, man. How are ya?’
I had grey hair and the unintentional suntan of a marathon runner. I jogged 50 kilometres a week as a pre-emptive strike against my father’s diabetes and my mother’s melancholy.