He is still thinking about the damage.
About how easily it might not have happened. If he had only arrived a few minutes earlier or later, for instance, he would surely have found a different place to park. There was one slightly tricky space near the entrance that he had almost taken — then he kept on looking, though the space he ended up in, after a few minutes of irritable prowling, was even tighter.
He had needed a piss. That might also have played its part — the way it made him still more impatient and unfocused on what he was doing. And he was tired and hungry and in a hurry and had been stuck behind a tractor for ten minutes while he tried to find the airport. And all of these factors, all of these individually unlikely or indecisive factors had united in the fateful moment, had placed him exactly then and there, and the damage was done.
And what will happen about it?
He will have to pay to have the fucking…
‘There’s something I need to tell you, Karel,’ she says.
He doesn’t quite understand the emphasis, has forgotten that he used the same phrase himself, half an hour earlier, in the airport.
‘What?’
A long silence.
He is still thinking about how much the paint job will be, and whether Stańko knows someone who can do it for less than the usual price, when he notices that the silence is still going on.
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she had said.
And the number of things she might have to tell him shrinks, as the silence extends, until there are only one or two left.
One part of his mind takes that in; the other part is still energetically fretting over the scraped wing.
She is either about to end their little affair, their succession of tousled hotel-rooms, or
‘You’re pregnant,’ he says, throwing the indicator lever, moving out to overtake in a tunnel of spray.
He hopes that she will immediately negative this.
Instead the silence just prolongs further.
Outside, a wet, grey world unfurls around them, wind-whacked trees huddling at its edges, pouring into peripheral vision.
Part of him is still doggedly preoccupied with the prang. That is starting to drift away, though, as if into infinite space.
‘Are you?’ he asks.
Those moments when everything changes. How many in a life? Not more than a few.
Here, now, the moment. On this rainswept German motorway. Here and now.
—
‘That’s shit,’ he says, still searching the road ahead with agitated eyes.
Finally she had spoken. ‘I think so,’ she said. And then, ‘Yes.’
‘That’s shit,’ he says again.
The prang is far off now, though he is still just about aware of it, like some object far out in the darkness.
His whole life seems to be out there, divested.
What is left? What is he to wrap himself in, now that everything has floated off into space?
It hangs out there, in the darkness, like debris.
She is, he notices, shaking with sobs.
It takes him by surprise.
And then she starts, still sobbing, to hit her own forehead with a small white-knuckled fist.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Stop that.’
‘Stop the car,’ she says through tears.
And then screams at him, ‘STOP THE CAR!’
‘Why?’ His voice is shrill and frightened. ‘Why? I can’t…What the fuck are you doing?’
She had started to open the passenger door. Wind noise roared at her. Cold air and water were sucked momentarily into the civilised leather interior.
‘Are you fucking crazy?’
Her tears redouble and she says, piteously now, ‘Stop the car, stop the car…’
He stares more frazzledly at the oncoming world. Suddenly it seems unrecognisable. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘Why?’
She has started to hit her forehead again, her fist knocking on the taut pale skin with a sound that inordinately upsets him.
And then an Aral station’s lit pylon looms out of the rain — the blue word ARAL high above everything — and, indicating, he slows into the lake of the exit lane.
As soon as the car stops moving, or even a moment before, she is out of it.
He sees her, through the still-working wipers, walk away, hugging herself, and wonders numbly what to do.
He had just stopped on the apron of tarmac short of the petrol station. Now he lifts his foot from the brake and the car moves on at walking pace, under the huge canopy that protects the pumps from the rain.
He has lost sight of her.
One of the parking spaces in front of the shop is empty and he slides straight into it. With his thumb he shoves the button that kills the engine and then just sits there for a few minutes. That is, for a fairly long time. The life of the service station swirls around him, as if in time lapse. He is staring at the stitching of the steering wheel, the elegant leather. There is a temptation just to drive away — drive back to his own life, which feels as if it is somewhere else.
There is no question of actually doing that, however.
Instead he discovers he has tears in his eyes.
Tears just sort of sitting there.
Tears of shock.
Inside the shop, he peers about, looking for her. He hangs around outside the ladies for a minute or two, as if she might emerge. He tries her phone.
He starts to worry that she might have done something silly. That she might have taken a lift from a stranger or something.
He is in the car again, moving slowly through the acres of parked trucks along the side of the motorway, when he finds her. She is still walking. Walking with purpose. She must have been walking, all this time.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouts through the open window, keeping pace with her.
She ignores him.
He overtakes her and pulls into a space among the trucks some way ahead. He sits there for a few seconds, fighting a furious urge to just drive away. Instead, getting out of the car and hunching his shoulders against the rain, he takes his umbrella from the back seat. It bangs into place above him, and immediately fills with sound.
As soon as she notices it — it is very large and has ‘University of Oxford’ written on it — she turns and starts to walk the other way.
Only for show — he is able, with no more than a slight quickening of his pace, to draw level with her, and take hold of her arm.
A truck lumbers past and he drags her out of the way of its spray, into the puddled alley formed by two other, stationary trucks.
‘What are you doing?’ he says. ‘Where are you going?’
Her face is twisted into an unfamiliar tear-drenched ugliness.
This whole situation, this awful scene among the trucks, has taken him totally by surprise.
He waits for her to say something.
Finally she says, ‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Away from you.’
‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Why?’
It has been his assumption, from the first moment, that there will be an abortion, that that is what she wants as well.
Now he starts to see, as if it is something still far away, that that may not be so. It is initially just something that his mind, working through every possible permutation in its machine-like effort to understand, throws up as a potential explanation for what she is doing. She does not want to have an abortion. She is not willing to have an abortion.
In a sense this is the true moment of shock.
He fights off a splurge of panic.
She has not said anything, is still just sobbing in the noisy tent of the umbrella.
He asks, trying to sound loving or sympathetic or something, ‘What do you want to do?’