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Someone was standing next to the car. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. He peered in at her through the hole in the windscreen. He looked like a mechanic or a breakdown man or something. He was wearing a waxed jacket with rips in the elbows, and jeans. He looked tired; his eyes were puffy and dark and his breathing was heavy. He rested his hand on the bonnet and leaned in closer. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said again, raising his voice against the traffic; ‘you all right, love?’ She smiled, and nodded, and shrugged, which was weird, which meant was she for some reason apologising for his concern? ‘Bloody hell,’ he said for a third time. ‘You could have been killed.’
Thanks. Great. This was, what, news?
She looked down at the sugar-beet, which was sitting on a heap of glass on the passenger seat beside her. The bits of glass were small and lumpy, like gravel. She noticed more bits of glass on the floor, and the dashboard, and spread across her lap. She noticed that her left arm was scratched, and that she was still holding on to the steering wheel, and that maybe she wasn’t breathing quite as much as she should have been, although that happened whenever she thought about her breathing, it going wrong like that, too deep or too shallow or too quick, although that wasn’t just her though, surely, it was one of those well-known paradoxes, like a Buddhist thing or something. Total mindlessness. Mindfulness. Just breathe.
‘The police are on their way,’ someone else said. She looked up and saw another man, a younger man in a sweatshirt and jeans, holding up a silver phone. ‘I just called the police,’ he said. ‘They’re on their way.’ He seemed pleased to have a phone with him, the way he was holding it, like this was his first one or something. Which there was no way. His jeans had grass-stains on the knees, and his boots were thick with mud.
‘You called them, did you?’ the older man asked. The younger man nodded, and put his phone in his pocket, and looked at her. She sat there, waiting for the two of them to catch up. Like: yes, a sugar-beet had come through the windscreen; no, she wasn’t hurt; yes, this other guy did phone the police. Any further questions? I can email you the notes? The younger man looked through the hole in the windscreen, and at the windscreen itself, and whistled. Actually whistled: this long descending note like the sound-effect of a rock falling towards someone’s head in an old film. What was that?
‘You all right?’ he asked her. ‘You cut or anything? You in shock?’ She shook her head. Not that she knew how she would know she was in shock. She was pretty sure one of the symptoms of being in shock would be not thinking you were in shock. Like with hypothermia, when you take off your clothes and roll around laughing in the snow. She’d read that somewhere. He looked at the sugar-beet and whistled again. ‘I mean,’ he said, and now she didn’t know if he was talking to her or to the other man; ‘that could’ve been fatal, couldn’t it?’ The other man nodded and said something in agreement. They both looked at her again. ‘You could have been killed,’ the younger man said. It was good of him to clarify that for her. She wondered what she was supposed to say. They looked as if they were waiting for her to ask something, to ask for help in some way.
‘Well. Thanks for stopping,’ she said. They could probably go now, really, if they’d called the police. There was no need to wait. She thought she probably wanted them to go now.
‘Oh no, it’s nothing, don’t be daft,’ the older man said.
‘Couldn’t just leave you like that, could we?’ the younger man said. He looked at her arm. ‘You’re bleeding,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pointed to the scratches on her arm, and she looked down at herself. She could see the blood, but she couldn’t feel anything. There wasn’t much of it. It could be someone else’s, couldn’t it? But there wasn’t anyone else. It must be hers. But she couldn’t feel anything. She looked back at the younger man.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Really. Thanks.’
‘No, it might be though,’ he said, ‘it might get infected. You have to be careful with things like that. There’s a first-aid box in the van. Hang on.’ He turned and walked back to the van, a blue Transit with the name and number of a landscape gardening company painted across the back, and a little cartoon gardener with a speech bubble saying no job was too small. The doors were tied shut with a length of orange rope. The number-plate was splattered with mud, but it looked like a K-reg. K450 something, although she wasn’t sure if that was 0 the number
or O the letter. The older man turned and smiled at her, while they were waiting, and she supposed that was him trying to be reassuring but to be honest it looked a bit weird. Although he probably couldn’t help it. He probably had some kind of condition. Like a degenerative eye condition, maybe? And then on top of that, which would be painful enough, he had to put up with people like her thinking he looked creepy when he was just trying to be nice. She smiled back; she didn’t want him thinking she’d been thinking all that about him looking creepy or weird.
‘Police will be here in a minute,’ he said. She nodded. ‘Lorry must have been overloaded,’ he said. ‘Driver’s probably none the wiser even now.’
‘No,’ she said, glancing down at the sugar-beet again. ‘I suppose not.’ The younger man came back, waving a green plastic first-aid box at her. He looked just as pleased as when he’d held up the phone. She wondered if he was on some sort of special supported apprenticeship or something, if he was a little bit learning-challenged, and then she thought it was probably discriminatory of her to have even thought that and she tried to get the thought out of her mind. Only you can’t get thoughts out of your mind just by trying; that was another one of those Buddhist things. She should just concentrate on not thinking about her breathing instead, she thought. Just, total mindlessness. Mindfulness. Just breathe.
He passed the first-aid box through the hole in the windscreen. His hands were stained with oil and mud, and as they touched hers they felt heavy and awkward. She put the box in her lap and opened it. She wondered what he wanted her to do. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just thought. Has it got antiseptic cream in there?’ She rummaged through the bandages and wipes and creams and scissors. And now what. She took out a wipe, dabbed at her arm, and closed the box. She handed it back to him, holding the bloody wipe in one hand.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll be okay now.’ Was she talking too slowly? Patronising him? Or was she making reasonable allowances for his learning-challenges? But he might not even be that. She was over-complicating the situation, probably. Which was another thing Marcus said to her sometimes, that she did that. She looked at him. He shrugged.
‘Well, yeah,’ he said. ‘If you’re sure. I just thought, you know.’
Status update: Emily Wilkinson regrets not having signed up for breakdown insurance.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
She’d chosen Hull because she’d thought it would sound interesting to say she was going to a provincial university. Or more exactly because she thought it would make her sound interesting to even say ‘provincial university’, which she didn’t think anyone had said since about 1987 or some other time way before she was born. She wasn’t even exactly sure what provincial meant. Was it just anywhere not-London? That seemed pretty sweeping. That was where most people lived. Maybe it meant anywhere that wasn’t London or Oxford or Cambridge, and that was still pretty sweeping. Whatever, people didn’t seem to say it any more, which was why she’d been looking forward to saying it. Only it turned out that no one knew what she was talking about and they mostly thought she was saying provisional, which totally wasn’t the same thing at all.
Anyway, though, that hadn’t been the only reason she’d chosen Hull. Another reason was it was a long way from home. As in definitely too far to visit. Plus when she went on the open day she’d loved the way the river smelt of the sea, and obviously the bridge, which looked like something from a film, and also the silence you hit when you got to the edge of the town, and the way it didn’t take long to get to the edge of town. And of course she’d liked the Larkin thing, except again it didn’t seem like too many people were bothered about that. Or knew about it. Or knew how much it meant, if they did know about it. When she first got there she kept putting ‘Emily Wilkinson is a bit chilly and smells of fish’ on her status updates, but no one got the reference so she gave it up. Plus it made her look weird, obviously, even after she’d explained it in the comments.
She’d met Marcus in her second year, when he’d taught a module on ‘The Literature of Marginal(ised) Places’. Which she’d enjoyed enough to actually go to at least half of the lectures rather than just download the notes. He had a way of explaining things like he properly wanted you to understand, instead of just wanting to show off or get through the class as quick as he could. There was something sort of generous about the way he talked, in class, and the way he listened to the students. Plus he was what it was difficult to think of a better word for than totally buff, and also had what she couldn’t be more articulate than call a lovely mouth, and basically made her spend quite a lot of time not actively addressing the issues of appropriation inherent in a culturally privileged form such as literary fiction taking exclusion and marginality as its subject. Her friend Jenny had said she couldn’t see it at all, as in the buffness and the lovely mouth rather than the inherent appropriation, but that had only made her think it was maybe something more along the lines of a genuine connection thing and not just some kind of stereotypical type of crush; and Jenny did at least agree that no way did it count as inappropriate if it was just a PhD student and not an actual lecturer. His last seminar had been on the Tasmanian novel, which it turned out there were quite a few of, and afterwards he’d kept her talking until the others had left and said were there any issues she wanted to discuss and actually did she want to go for a drink. To which her response had been, and that took you so long why?
There hadn’t really been anyone before Marcus. Not since coming to university, anyway. There’d been a few things at parties, and she’d slept with one of her housemates a bunch of times, but nothing serious enough to make her change her relationship setting. With Marcus it had been different, almost immediately. He’d asked her out, like formally, and they’d had late-night conversations about their relationship and what relationships meant and even whether or not they were in love and how they would know and whether love could ever be defined without reference to the other. She didn’t really know. She thought being in love probably didn’t mean telling your girlfriend what she could wear when you went to the pub together, or asking her not to talk to certain people, or telling her she was the reason you couldn’t finish your thesis.
They hadn’t moved in together, but almost as soon as they’d started going out their possessions had begun drifting from one house to the other until it felt like they were just living together in two places. Sometimes when she woke up it took her a moment to remember which house she was in. It wasn’t always a nice feeling. Which meant, what? She fully had no idea what it meant. Because she liked Marcus, she liked him a lot. She liked the conversations they had, which were smart and complicated and went on for hours. And she liked the way he looked at her when he wanted to do the things she’d been thinking about in class when she should have been thinking about discourses of liminality, when she’d been imagining saying he was welcome to cross her threshold any day. There was still all that. But there were other things. Things that made her uncomfortable, uncertain, things she was pretty sure weren’t part of how a relationship was supposed to make you feel happy or good about yourself or whatever it was a relationship was supposed to make you feel.
She should be calling him now, and she wasn’t. He’d want her to have called, when he heard. Something like this. He should be the first person she thought of calling. He’d think it was odd that she hadn’t. He’d be hurt. She thought about calling Jenny instead, to tell her what had happened, or her supervisor, to tell her she’d be late getting back to the office. She should call someone, probably, but she couldn’t really imagine having the words to explain it and she couldn’t face having anyone else tell her she could have been killed and plus anyway she was totally fine, wasn’t she? She looked down at the sugar-beet again. Was that what that smell was? It wasn’t a sugary smell at all. It was more like an earthy smell, like wet earth, like something rotting in the earth. She didn’t see how they could get from that to a bowl of white sugar on a café table, or even to that sort of wet, boozy smell you got when you drove past the refinery, coming up the A1. Which come to think of it was probably where the lorry would have been heading. It would be, what, an hour’s drive from here? Maybe she should go there and give them back their sugar-beet, tell them what had happened. Complain, maybe.
The passenger door opened, and the older man leaned in towards her.
‘You need to get out,’ he said. It seemed a bit too directive, the way he said it. She didn’t move. ‘It’s not safe, being on the hard shoulder like this,’ he added. ‘We should all be behind the barrier.’ They’d been discussing this, had they? It looked like they’d been discussing something. The older man was already holding out his hand to help her across the passenger seat. She looked at the traffic, roaring and weaving and hurtling past, and she remembered hearing about incidents where people had been struck and killed on the hard shoulder, when they were changing a tyre, or going for a piss, or just stopping to help. She remembered her cousin once telling her about a school minibus which had driven into the back of a Highways Maintenance truck and burst into flames. Which meant they were right about this, did it, probably? She swung her feet over into the passenger’s side, took the man’s hand, and squeezed out on to the tarmac. It was an awkward manoeuvre, and she didn’t think she’d completed it with much elegance o
r style. The younger man was already standing behind the barrier, and she clambered over to join him. She didn’t do that very gracefully either. He started climbing up the embankment.
‘Just in case,’ he said, looking back at her. Meaning what, she wondered. ‘Something could flip, couldn’t it?’ he said, and he did something with his hands which was presumably supposed to look like a vehicle striking a barrier and somersaulting across it. The older man caught her eye, and nodded, and she followed them both up the embankment, through the litter and the long grass.
It was much colder at the top. Sort of exposed. The wind was whipping away the sound of the traffic, making her feel further from the road than they really were. The two men looked awkward, as though maybe they were uncomfortable about the time this whole situation was taking. The younger man made the whistling noise again. She could barely hear it against the wind.
