Here is the next instalment of Min, as promised. It’s Monday the sun is blazing through the garden room window and morning tea has been taken. Remember this is a work in progress and is shape shifting. I’m working it out, freeing my imagination, grappling with writing technique, language and the organisation of the idea. I’m playing. I could keep on switching things around, editing, deleting, adding, but for now I serve up this slice of the story as a second course. An entrée. See what you think, have you an appetite for more?
Ten weeks previously, on a fresh, clear Sunday morning, Mr and Mrs Harding had set out for their weekly country drive. Min never joins them now, preferring instead to stay home and enjoy the bliss of an empty house. She is old enough to stay at home alone, can be trusted…. It suits them all. Inside the car Jan and Roger Harding are happy, they stare out at the open road stretching ahead. The Sunday drive is their favourite thing. Their happy place. Jan has packed sandwiches and a flask of tea. Roger has his cigarettes - only ever smoked outside. At some point they’ll pull over in a lay-by, wind the windows down and picnic. They had been on the road less than an hour. There is no time to register what happens before the crashing, hurtling weight of the articulated lorry behind them ploughs into and pushes them into concertina creases up against a beautiful standing oak. Life extinct, this had felt like a very ordinary, blue sky Sunday.
Pavel was tired, very tired. He’s been driving his truck all night, for 36 hours straight. Yes he knew it was illegal, but he’d managed to swing it with Karel (a Czech guy) who was happy to accommodate a route swap. Both of them knew the company would turn a blind eye to their bending the rules a bit. The drivers often switched things up to make some extra cash. It suited the bosses to get things done no questions asked, there were ways round everything. He learned very quickly how to work the system to his benefit. He notices the Fiat up ahead. A fatter pay packet means a summer holiday back home in Poland. Irena, his wife will be delighted to see her mother again. He loves Irena. He loves Jakob and Jana. They are his life. Pinned to the dash a photo of his young family smile up at him although his eyes have closed and his head nods forward over the steering wheel. His foot slips down hard on the accelerator and in that split second everything changes. His truck rams the back of the Harding’s pale blue Fiat pushing it full speed through the hedgerow and into a tree. Metal meets metal. Roger had looked to his rear view mirror and sees with certainty their final moment approaching. There is no time. They are driven into oblivion. Mashed up tight together in one killing intimate crush. Screeching brakes, splintered metal, shattered glass, smoking tyres, ripping hedgerow and the dull thudding impact of metal on wood, the sound of bodywork being folded into nothing. The birds are not singing, there is silence in the field. No one hears Pavel’s last groaning breath.
It takes the emergency services the whole day and part of that night to separate and clear the debris of the two vehicles, finding body parts mixed up with metal and plastic: headlights and heads, arms and bumpers, legs and steering column all snarled up in one bloody, burning mess. There is dense smoke and the acrid smell of burning rubber, scorched flesh. It’s impossible to distinguish one from the other, bits are collected into bags. Labelled and taken away for the mortician and pathologist to make sense of back at the morgue. Oddly both number plates on the Fiat are in tact. They lie ripped from the car, thrown thirty metres into the field behind the Oak tree and in the ditch under the front end of the lorry. They are collected and a check is run on the plates. Roger Harding of 16 Lime Hill Road - in the passenger footwell a brown leather handbag remains untouched. Jan’s library card is in the pocket. Officers are despatched to the home address, the bearers of bad news, steeling themselves for shattering another life. It’s a shit job.
The Hardings were identified by dental records. Pavel isn’t registered with a dentist, but it’s easy to work back to Karel. A gold St.Christopher found in the cab still hanging on the mirror and identified by Irena confirms him as the driver. That and the tattoo of their names set within a heart on his partially severed arm. The accident investigators and the Coroner reach the conclusion that there could be no doubt about who was at fault. The haulage company, Solution Logistics, pay out a six figure compensation. Min is satisfied. Justice is done. Her own logistics are all in place. She does wonder a little about the driver’s family. The Bakaskis. They attend the inquest too and the difference between her own grief and theirs is tangible. The two children are an especially difficult part of this mess. They are all irreversibly and invisibly connected. Their mother has an arm curled around each of them as they listen to the officials. She is protective. Min has never known this. She notices their red eyes and noses. It’s pitiful. There is a twinge of something inside that she doesn’t recognise. She doesn’t want to see it, feel it. Leaving the inquest she’s aware of her future, their future. Min walks away without looking back. She can just hear the sound of a weeping family behind her as she steps out through the swing doors of the building into another sunny day. It sounds like young animals keening and her eyes feel wet, a tissue in her pocket sorts that out.
Till the next time,
A
Well, that was unexpected. I cannot now remember the original Min piece but I don't think it prepared me for such a dramatic event. Well done Alice. x
Love it! Excited for the next installment ❤️