It was almost frightening — the size of it, the speed, the sudden noise. I saw glass glitter underneath its tyres. But nothing happened. The car hurtled over it and on. Its tail-lights were snuffed out. It was gone.
‘Church-goers,’ I muttered.
I reached for the bucket, and looked round at Karin. She was kneeling beside me, biting her bottom lip.
‘Now it’s your turn.’
I shook the bucket as if it was a game and she could choose any piece she wanted and maybe win a prize. She hesitated, though. The trees above us shifted in the wind.
‘Don’t you love your brother?’ I whispered.
Her eyes looked into mine.
‘Your brother, Mazey. Don’t you love him?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Come on, then. Cup those hands of yours.’
I trickled glass out of the bucket. Her hands were so small, even when they were joined together. I hoped it would be enough.
‘Careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t cut yourself.’
No sooner had I set the bucket down than I heard the sound of an engine again. It came and went in the silence, the way mosquitoes do. Headlights were searching the darkness on the bend. I waited until they disappeared, then took Karin’s arm.
‘Now, girl. Do it now.’
I watched her step out into the road, lightly, almost on tiptoe, as though she was afraid the surface might give way beneath her. She stood still for a moment, then she flung both hands upwards into the air. She might have been releasing something she had caught — an insect, or a butterfly. The glass bounced prettily. But it held her there too long. She’d forgotten all about the car. And now the headlights were rising above the level of the road and bearing down on her, two circles merging into one fierce glare. I reached out, seized her arm and pulled her down into the ditch.
The car howled past us. The hot diesel blast of it.
I heard a tyre blow. As I lifted my head, I saw the car swerve. Then it was rolling, the metal spitting sparks. It hit a tree, bounced off it, turned over half a dozen times. Then it was lying motionless, on its side, two hundred metres down the road.
I stood up. Kicking most of the glass into the ditch, I walked towards the car. One of the headlights pointed into the undergrowth, as if it was trying to show us something. I could smell burnt rubber. Nothing was moving.
Two people were inside. The man wore a suit and a pale hat. His mouth was open. One of his teeth had a green jewel in it; the rest were glistening with blood. There was a woman, too, but she was harder to make out. She was beneath the man, all folded up in what was now the bottom of the car. One of her shoes had fallen off and I could see her stockinged foot, the underside of it. She had high arches. I thought she might be a dancer.
‘Trying to kill my son,’ I said.
I took Karin’s hand and looked down through the windscreen at the ungainly tangle of their bodies.
‘Murderers,’ I said.
Two days later, at the breakfast table, I read a report of the accident in the local paper. The two occupants of the car were named as J. Swanzy, also known as Emerald Joe, on account of the gemstone he wore in his front tooth, and his companion, Kamilla Esztergom, the singer. Both were killed outright. Police were calling it a case of reckless driving, since the levels of alcohol in the blood of both the deceased had been well in excess of the legal limit.
I touched the names with the tip of my finger. Emerald Joe. Kamilla (the singer!). Had they been talking when the car hit that patch of glass? And, if so, what about? What had their lives been like? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I’d never met people who wore emeralds in their teeth. They reminded me of the stories Felix used to tell. I thought of Mazey, who would walk with a limp until he was dead. Mazey in the ditch, alone, in pain. I brought my eyes back into focus. Only then did I see the misprint: instead of reckless, they’d written wreckless. What had happened had happened — but, at the same time, somehow, it had not. All the accounts were balanced, all grudges cancelled out.
One year I took Mazey to the lake. I wanted to show him the place where I had found him, and I was also curious to see it again for myself. There was nowhere to park on that particular bend in the road, so we drove past it, leaving the car on a farm-track half a kilometre further on, then walked back. Mazey had recovered full use of his leg. From time to time he would reach down and touch it, just above the knee, and there was a slight unevenness to his walk. You wouldn’t have called it a limp, though.
‘Your leg’s mended pretty well,’ I said, ‘hasn’t it?’
He looked at the leg. I did, too. We looked up again, both at the same time, which made me smile.
‘That doctor,’ I said. ‘He was just trying to frighten me.’
I had the sudden feeling I weighed nothing. I could have floated up into the trees.
Nothing had changed on the road, not in twenty years. As I walked along, I had a thought. What if time wasn’t a straight line at all? What if it was more like the wire on a telephone, with loops in it? You seemed to be going forwards, but actually you were going round and back on yourself. There were moments in your life that were far apart, but, at the same time, they almost coincided.
The damage to the tree was old, though. When I bent down, I could see it clearly, a black oblong scar in the wood where the truck had caught it. I took Mazey’s hand and we began to scramble down the slope. The trees had healed. Otherwise everything was identical. It was even the same kind of day — halfway through autumn, leaves falling, blue sky high up between the branches …
We reached the lake. There was nothing to mark the place; the shrine everyone had talked about had never been built. I bent down at the water’s edge, as I’d bent down twenty years before, and dipped my hand in it. I tasted the water. Not the slightest trace of sulphur. Had I imagined it that day? Or was it just that everything had rearranged itself for those few hours? Was it part of the pattern of surprise? I looked around, puzzled by how little I felt; I was almost disappointed. I noticed Mazey tasting the water, as I had done. He put the tips of his fingers in his mouth, then took them out again. His face didn’t alter.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure why I’d brought him or what I wanted him to understand. At first, I just talked around it, anything I could think of. I told him a story I’d been told by Felix. It had happened early in the century, when the hotel was at the height of its popularity. A wealthy shipping magnate and his wife came to stay for a few days. One afternoon they went for an excursion on the lake. Their boat sank and everybody drowned. It was a tragedy, of course, but it was also a mystery: the bodies of the shipping magnate and his wife were never found. The company mounted a search with teams of expert divers, underwater specialists, but the lake defeated them. It was just too deep, too cold. The bodies simply disappeared.
I pointed eastwards, out across the water. ‘They’re still down there somewhere.’
The best part of the story was the end — and, knowing Felix, it was almost certainly untrue. Out boating on the lake once, while still a boy, he looked down into the water and saw something glinting. A long way down, it was. A long, long way. What did you see? I asked him, my eyes all wide. What was it? He claimed it was the diamond on the finger of the shipping magnate’s wife. I begged him to take me out on the lake. Begged him to show me the diamond ring on the dead woman’s hand. But Felix, in his later years, was frightened of deep water. Also, he wasn’t sure he could remember his precise position on the lake. And besides, he said, the sun would have to be shining at the right angle or you wouldn’t see a thing.