The date was the ninth of December 2004, a little over a year ago. At the time we lived in Nottingham city centre above a main road, Upper Parliament Street, criss-crossed with a complicated and impractical network of pedestrian crossings.
I was just getting changed into my gym clothes to do a workout on my rebounder when I heard a crack like an egg being split open into a pan. The crack was followed immediately by the screech of tires as a driver slammed hard on his brakes, and then shouts and screams of horror from passers-by.
Sticking my head out of the window I could see that a car had braked in the middle of the busy junction, blocking the traffic. The windscreen of the car was undamaged. A boy – he couldn’t have even been twenty – got out of the car. At the front of the vehicle sprawled on the road was a balding, middle-aged man who might have been someone’s father. The man wasn’t moving.
He had been crossing the road where he shouldn’t have been crossing, where there were normally railings to stop the pedestrians from going. Currently there were no railings and instead an inadequate temporary fence because of the road works that were taking place at the junction. A hundred other people must have made the same sprint across two lanes of traffic the same day. People made this journey all the time because the pedestrian crossings were so badly designed that to follow the proper route took you a hundred yards out of your way. Indeed I was to give my boyfriend a sound dressing-down only two hours later when he automatically tried to take the same path.
It must have been twenty five minutes before an ambulance arrived. The ambulance station is only around the corner. I had my head stuck out of the window all of that time, on the verge of tears. “Where the HELL is the ambulance?” I kept exclaiming. I have been at the scene of a traffic accident before, and the ambulance took a similar amount of time. In the time it took for the ambulance to arrive, I heard sirens on at least three occasions and believed they were finally on their way. I even saw an ambulance drive past the scene without its emergency lights on. The whole of the time, nobody tended the man. Two men stood over him, talking, and someone who must have been a traffic conductor beckoned the traffic around the car. I thought I saw the man fitting, but the men who stood over him didn’t bend down. The boy leaned against the pedestrian railing with his mate, looking pale. Eventually he was taken away by a couple of police officers. When the ambulance did arrive, the paramedics loaded the man onboard and the ambulance didn’t move for another twenty minutes, and then it took off without putting its sirens on. My feeling was that the man was dead, though I can never truly be certain. There were never any signs put up or flowers laid out.
I had once held the hand of a boy who had been in a hit-and-run motorbike accident. They (presumably) got the guy who did it because he left most of his number plate at the scene. They also got the guy who killed my cousin, but he got off.
My cousin R. was killed as she sat in the back of a car after a night out partying. One of the other girls in the car was ill, so they pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the motorway so she could puke. A drag queen at the wheel of a van fell asleep and drove into the back of the car. R. had a brain haemorrhage and died in hospital a couple of days later. She had been a beautiful girl; willowy, attractive, popular, intelligent. She was a straight-A student and she was going to University. She was only nineteen. Yeah, we all still get upset about it now and then.
I wasn’t in the UK when my cousin died, I was in America, going through a bad time, without much money and no real chance of getting a flight, and I was an emotional wreck of a human being before I even got the news. I didn’t want to go home into this scene of grief and despair, so I cried myself out in Baltimore. I was desperately lonely and I did irrational things for weeks. Selfish, I know, and I’ve always regretted it, but always known what it would have done to me.
Now every time I see a car pulled over on the hard shoulder I shout at them, I get angry to the point that other people in the car think I’ve gone mental. If you break down and pull onto the hard shoulder and stay in your car, you have a one in eight hundred chance of being hit. You will be struck, on average, within ten minutes of pulling over. Two hundred and fifty people die each year. Frequently these deaths are caused by lorry drivers veering onto the hard shoulder and clipping parked vehicles. Motoring surveys repeatedly find that people still think staying inside their vehicle is the best thing to do. It is not.
On average, every person has a serious car accident every forty years of their life. I almost lost my best friend to two separate car accidents. That’s how frequent they are. My mother reminds me now and then that I almost didn’t get to grow up. When I was a baby, my parents were travelling in their car behind a lorry carrying planks of wood. Then one of the planks slid off. It went through our windscreen and stabbed the back seat, less than six inches from my head. I still sport a small white scar on my forehead from fragments of glass. My mother had to have her face reconstructed.
