A Trick of the Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

food. I think there’s an all-night supermarket in the town,’ I said.
    ‘You’re not driving?’
    ‘I’ve only had one glass,’ I said.
    Chiara frowned.
    ‘You OK?’
    ‘I’m fine.’ I wanted to go now. I couldn’t bear to wait any longer.
    ‘Do you want me to come?’
    ‘No, it’s OK. Thanks though. I’ll leave Pepper here if you don’t mind. Won’t be long.’
    ‘Can’t it wait till the morning?’
    I shook my head.
    I couldn’t speak any more. My mouth was dry. Because my real reason for going out at midnight in the car in the rain seemed completely absurd, but I would never rest until I had gone back
and done what I should have done to start with.
    Checked.
    It was darker than I’d thought it would be and the rain drummed against the windscreen, obscuring the view further. I tried to remember where it was I’d felt the
impact. I screwed up my eyes, looking out for the broken branch. Anxious about my driving, I went slowly, peering in my rear-view mirror, checking all around. The road twisted. It was difficult to
see anything but the beam of the headlights reflecting off the wet road.
    I had been driving for maybe fifteen minutes when I thought I saw it. The branch, bent in the middle like a long arm dangling its fingers onto the narrow road – it would be hard to miss. I
couldn’t stop here, it was close to a bend, so I drove on and then, just a couple of hundred metres further on, there was a police cordon, the cones, the place they taped off where the man
was hit. A notice asking for witnesses. And more tree parts, snapped off, scattered on the road. Now doubt played through my mind. Which branch had I hit?
    I had to drive for another five minutes in order to reach a junction where I was able to turn and come back, reliving the journey I made earlier this evening when I had been so convinced I was
taking my life in a new direction.
    I was ignorant about impact, and thrust, and momentum, all those things we were supposed to learn about in physics that seemed pointless – of no relevance to my life as it was at that
time. If I’d listened, I might have had some idea of what it might have felt like. Whether I might have knocked into a grown man and only heard the slam of the wing mirror, experienced a
tilting of the car to the right. Whether the impact could have thrown him far.
    What speed had I been travelling at when I came down this road? How fast would you have to be going to do that? I wasn’t a fast driver – something my more reckless friends laughed
about. But I hadn’t been thinking clearly this evening. I’d had the music on loud and Pepper had distracted me with his barking. I might have been going at forty, possibly fifty.
Don’t they say if you hit someone at thirty you can kill them, but at twenty they survive?
    I certainly hadn’t been going slowly enough, in that case, to hit a man and
not
kill him.
    The radio had said he was alive though. Injured but alive.
    For a few moments this skewed logic reassured me – I had been going too fast to have hit and not killed a man! Hoorah! I couldn’t have hit him – if I
had
he would be
dead.
    Then the truth flashed back. He might be brain-damaged or his back might be broken. He might be crippled for life even if he wasn’t dead. It might be worse than if he’d died.
    I passed the spot again, the tape and the cones and the police cordon. I looked into my rear-view mirror.
    I could see nothing but the bough of the tree. Nothing else on the road, nor in my memory. But if you did something so ghastly might you wipe it from your mind? Might you shut down, unable to
relive that awful vision, the intolerable knowledge that you’d just destroyed a life, while you were so full of your own rosy future that you didn’t even bother to look where you were
going? I had been distracted by Pepper. I was talking to him, telling him we’d be OK without Finn, and so I could have hit the man, and passed it off as nothing but a broken