‘Did you hit your head?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ moaned Laura. I just sat there, moaning and groaning. Whatever we didn’t want to happen had already happened. It was already too late to do anything about it. One moment we were about to crash, the next moment we had crashed. The crash was wedged between these two moments. There wasn’t even time for things to go into slow motion as they allegedly do in the build-up to a crash. Laura was lying on the floor, moaning, now she was sitting up and walking. I was sitting, moaning. A taxi stopped.
‘We can take a taxi,’ Laura said, as though we were late for a concert with no bus in sight. I got up. ‘I can’t move,’ I said, moving towards the taxi. Everything was terrible and in the back of the taxi I kept saying sorry to Laura. Through the shock there were different kinds of hurt: the stinging of grazes which was nothing, the pain of cuts which was also almost nothing, the hurt of my hip which was less but worse, an ache in my back and, deeper within, hardly even perceptible as pain yet, there was a very dull ache of something that might be badly wrong. Laura was crying. I kept asking if she had hit her head and she said yes but there was no bump or blood or anything and so I said you can’t have hit your head and she agreed. We got out, the taxi stopped and left. It was terrible, walking into the hospital which was not even a hospital, just a kind of dressing station where there were no doctors to be seen. Then one appeared, a doctor, or at least someone in a white coat, moving unhurriedly. Laura said her ribs hurt and I said, ‘I am so sorry.’ I sat there, on a chair, hurting everywhere, but differently in different places. The doctor-orderly took Laura into a room and she lay down while I sat there, not in the room with her but in the waiting room. I held myself together very carefully, not moving anything. I walked into the room where Laura was lying down because the doctor said her blood pressure was way up or way down because she was in shock, and after waiting a while it came down or went up to normal. Now I sat in the room with the couch or the bed where Laura was lying down and the doctor was cleaning out the cuts on her fingers. The stuff he was putting on her fingers hurt and she kicked her heels up and down on the bed. ‘My ribs hurt,’ she said, ‘I think I’ve hurt my ribs.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said.
Then it was my turn. The doctor did things to my arms, cleaned out some cuts. He began putting stitches in my arm and Laura left the room. I have had so many stitches in my time that they did not worry me at all. Cuts don’t really matter even though they hurt. It was the bits that were broken up inside, like my spleen which might have been ruptured, that worried me. My arm was stitched. I stood up. ‘My hip hurts,’ I said. The doctor took off my trousers and saw my hip was all gouged up and said, ‘We’d better do something about that too.’
After all these repairs we sat and waited awhile. They had no X-rays at this little hospital and so there was nothing to be done about Laura’s ribs which were hurting more and more, or my back which was beginning to hurt strangely. We sat and then we walked back home. A taxi took us back to the moped which I had thought we would ride back home but which turned out to be mangled and unrideable. We walked home and climbed in over the wall to our house. We got into bed, hurting everywhere.
From there on it got worse. As the day wore on the hurt set in. We hurt everywhere and we could not stop replaying the crash even though the thought of it made us both sick. The other thing we could not stop doing was having sex. We were in a terrible state but, for some reason, we were desperate to have sex. It was the shock I suppose. Neither of us could move properly but if we arranged ourselves, carefully, we could make each other come. I lay on my back and Laura moved over my face, saying ‘Ah, my ribs!’ when she came. We took it in turns to come and we took it in turns to say, ‘How was it possible that we didn’t hit our heads?’ We kept saying this because the more we replayed the crash the more it seemed a miracle that we hadn’t killed or paralysed ourselves. I kept saying, too, that I would never get on a moped again, ever, anywhere.
It was my fault, the crash, but Laura never reproached me about it. Had Laura been driving I would have held it against her, I would have nagged her about her reckless driving, how she had been on the brink of getting us killed in Rome and now, in Alonissos, had actually succeeded. As it was, the crash was my fault but at least I had taken the brunt of the impact. I had softened the blow for Laura and the reason my back hurt so much was probably because her head had banged into my spine. The last thing I wanted to think about was the moment of impact but that word ‘impact’ and the phrase ‘the moment of impact’ kept repeating themselves in my head. That’s all I could think of: the impact, the moment, the moment of impact.
The next morning I could not move. I had to be helped out of bed. I couldn’t move. My back, I said, my back and my neck. My hip was murder, my hands and arms smarted, but it was my back that worried me. We went to see the osteopath, an Australian woman whose hands inched up and down my spine, her fingers performing a manual X-ray, feeling her way through the skin to the bones beneath.
‘It can’t be anything too bad,’ she said. ‘If it was, you’d be in agony.’
‘I am in agony,’ I said, but not the kind of agony she had in mind. It was possible I had cracked a vertebra but that was all and even if I had cracked a vertebra there was nothing to be done about it anyway. It was the same with Laura and her ribs: even if her ribs were cracked all she could do was wait for them to get better. Reassured, we shuffled back home, Laura holding her ribs and me with my chin resting in my right hand, supporting it. To everyone else on the island it looked like I was deep in thought, wrestling with philosophical problems, when all I was doing was trying to bear the awful weight of my head — which, on reflection, is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head.
We were keen to leave Alonissos, and Hervé and Mimi were keen to get rid of us. One way and another we had pretty well ruined their stay on the island. Before leaving I tried to negotiate the return of at least part of my deposit from the guy who had rented us the moped. He wouldn’t budge, not by a drachma. He took out great wads of drachmas from his till — mechanic’s money: oil-smeared, disintegrating, held together by grease — and explained how impossible it was to make a living renting mopeds. At one point Lawrence says that ‘the Italians are really rather low-bred swine nowadays’. He should have gone to Greece, should have hired and crashed a moped on Alonissos before making such an insulting generalisation — insulting to the Greeks, I mean, for they pride themselves on being swine.
Hervé and Mimi took us down to the Flying Dolphin. We had a difficult journey in front of us — boat, bus, plane, another plane, train, taxi — but not an impossible one. Luggage was a problem and so I left my copy of The Complete Poems behind, together with many other books by or about Lawrence. I had taken The Complete Poems to Alonissos and now that we were heading back to Rome where I would be housebound for God knew how long I would once again be without it. I didn’t care. There was a curse on that book. I was better off without it.