Thursday 14 May 2015

The Accident

For audio click here

Sunset began to streak the sky as the sun itself prepared its last so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. We edged through the crowded streets looking for somewhere to park so we could have dinner. The traffic was crazy, the only rules seemed to be that there were no rules and even then the drivers seemed to break them. The road looked like it was  single carriage but cars jostled for positions like marathon runners on the start line, two sometimes three abreast. To make it worse pedestrians jostled too, while motorcycles criss-crossed our paths cutting the fastest route to their final destinations. I gripped the door handle hoping it would provide me some protection from the collision that was destined to happen.  It was my last day in Morocco and I think Casablanca apart, this was the worst traffic I’d seen. My only solace was that at this speed not much harm would come of me.  My driver was as calm as you like, talking on his hands-free to someone while scouring the landscape for a space large enough to squeeze his car into.
We could have only gently clipped the back wheel of the moped but it was loud enough to make me jump out of my skin and hard enough to send the bike and rider sprawling across the tarmac. A sick feeling rose in my stomach as I looked at the stricken rider on the road, I feared the worse.
From what I saw it was actually the rider’s fault, my driver had, for once, stayed in his ‘lane’, it was the bike that had crossed us. But obviously that didn’t stop me worrying for the injured party. My colleague on the other hand hardly broke sweat, like it had happened 100 times before, which it probably had. For a while, I didn’t even think he was going to stop, but then he put on his blinkers and halted the car.
The silence in the car contrasted with the pandemonium outside it. The rider was getting groggily to his feet, his helmet was off and he was rubbing his head looking around the street as if trying to remember where he was. Then he set his eyes on us and a glimmer of recognition lit in his eyes. He took a step towards us and then another and then launched his helmet towards our windscreen with a discus motion. We’d obviously knocked Nabil Kiram off his bike because his aim was straight and true, the helmet clattering into the glass and shattering it into a million tiny pieces of safety glass. Then he continued his march towards us. He looked like the giant chasing after Jack. He was a huge man, the likes I had not seen in the previous 5 or 6 days. There was blood dripping down his face but he had a determined look in his eyes. He reached across the bonnet and grabbed my host by his lapels, pulling him out of the car through where the window once was like a rag doll.
It was then that I recognised him. I hadn’t seen him since he’d left school to go into the army but it was certainly Kev Flynn. He’d always been a man mountain even back then and yes he was the school discus champ. He was the kind of guy that was shaving at 14, the guy you didn’t want to tackle when playing rugby in P.E.  and you were glad he was on your side when playing other schools.
I got out of the car.
‘Kev, Kev,’ I said. The man still had my colleague in mid air but he looked around at me. It was then that I remembered the last time I’d seen him he had me in a similar hold that he now had my driver.
‘Kev, it’s me, Gareth, from school, remember.’

 ‘Mophead!’ He said, recalling my old school moniker, despite my now near bald appearance. ‘Bloody hell.’ He dropped my colleague like a cat might drop a mouse and picked me up in a bear hug instead. The accident was forgotten, soon we were sitting around a table beers in hand catching up on the last 25 years, ignoring my colleague who was still grumbling about his smashed windscreen.

2 comments:

  1. miss the recordings

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  2. These are my lines of the week: The traffic was crazy, the only rules were that there seemed to be no rules and even then the drivers seemed to break them.

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