Slow Man

THREE

FRIVOLOUS. HOW HE had strained, that day on Magill Road, to attend the word of the gods, tapped out on their occult typewriter! Looking back, he can only smile. How quaint, how positively antique, to believe one will be advised, when the time comes, to put one's soul in order. What beings could possibly be left, in what corner of the universe, interested in checking all the deathbed accountings that ascend the skies, debits in the one column, credits in the other?

Yet frivolous is not a bad word to sum him up, as he was before the event and may still be. If in the course of a lifetime he has done no significant harm, he has done no good either. He will leave no trace behind, not even an heir to carry on his name. Sliding through the world: that is how, in a bygone age, they used to designate lives like his: looking after his interests, quietly prospering, attracting no attention. If none is left who will pronounce judgment on such a life, if the Great Judge of All has given up judging and withdrawn to pare his nails, then he will pronounce it himself: A wasted chance.

He had never thought he would have a good word to say for war, but here in his hospital bed, consuming time and being consumed, he seems to be revising his opinions. In the razing of cities, the pillage of treasure, the slaughter of innocents, in all that reckless destruction, he begins to detect a certain wisdom, as though at its deepest level history knows what it is doing. Down with the old, make way for the new! What could be more selfish, more miserly – this in specific is what gnaws at him – than dying childless, terminating the line, subtracting oneself from the great work of generation? Worse than miserly, in fact: unnatural.

The day before his discharge he has a surprise visitor: the boy who hit him, Wayne something-or-other, Bright or Blight. Wayne is calling to see how he is getting on, though not, it emerges, to admit to any fault. 'Thought I'd see how you are getting on, Mr Rayment,' says Wayne. 'I'm really sorry for what happened. Real bad luck.' Not an artist in words, young Wayne; yet his every utterance is carefully evasive, as though he has been told the room is bugged. And indeed, as he later learns, Wayne 's father was in the corridor throughout the visit, eavesdropping. No doubt he had coached Wayne beforehand: 'Be respectful to the old bugger, say you're sorry, but at all costs don't admit you did anything wrong.'

What son and father say to each other in private concerning the riding of pushbikes on busy streets he can imagine all too well. But the law is the law: even stupid old buggers on pushbikes have the right not to be ridden down, and Wayne and his father know that. They must be trembling at the thought of a suit, from him or his insurance company. That must be why Wayne picks his words so judiciously.

Real bad luck. There is a range of replies he can think of, starting with Nothing to do with luck, Wayne, just real bad driving. But what use is there in scoring points off a boy who does not have it in his power to fix what he has smashed? Go, and sin no more: that is the best he can think of right now. Just the kind of sententious, old-geezerish pronouncement that the Blights, father and son, would chortle over on the way home. He closes his eyes, wishing Wayne to go away.

An accident: something that befalls one, something unintended, unexpected. By that definition he, Paul Rayment, certainly had an accident. What of Wayne Blight? Did Wayne have an accident too? How did it feel to Wayne, the instant when the missile he was piloting in a haze of loud music dug into the sweet softness of human flesh? A surprise, no doubt, unexpected, unintended; yet not unpleasurable in its way. Could what occurred at the ill-starred crossroads truly be said to have befallen Wayne? If there was any befalling done, it was, in his view, Wayne who befell him.

He opens his eyes. Wayne is still by the bedside, sweat pearling on his upper lip. Of course! At school Wayne would have had it drummed into him that you do not leave the room until the teacher signals the session is over. What a relief it must have been to Wayne when at last he was free of school and teachers and all that, when he could put his foot down flat on the accelerator, wind down the window and feel the wind on his face, chew gum, turn up the music as loud as he liked, shout 'Fuck you, mate!' at old geezers as he ripped past them! And now here he is, constrained again, having to put on a dutiful face, to grope for apologetic-sounding words.

So the puzzle resolves itself. Wayne is waiting for a signal, and he wants Wayne out of his life. 'Good of you to come, lad,' he says, 'but I have a headache and I need to sleep. So goodbye.'