“I’ve just killed someone.” He had never imagined saying these words, but that was before the motorbike had swerved wildly to avoid the sharper end of his car as he accelerated into the traffic. How would he have said them? To his wife? To his children? How would they have told the grandchildren?
“I have just had an accident…” would have been met with a mixture of alarm and a look that knew there was something not yet said about whose fault it was. But to kill somebody: culpability hardly seemed important then. Even if it weren’t his fault – a pedestrian being buffeted by a strong wind into the path of his car – there would be the taint of death about him. What frightened him, though, was that there was a greater chance that, were he to kill someone, it would be due to a moment of absent-mindedness or mistaken judgement. He knew he was one of the huge mass of human beings whose ability and inclination to manage the lethal projectile which they were licensed to use was imperfect. Forty years of driving, one tiny error, one life gone – the sooner they introduced self-driving cars, the better.
In many ways life made little sense: the fact that something so valuable and prized could be snuffed out so trivially showed bad planning from above or below. What made this worse was the guilt that followed, totally incommensurate with what led to the tragedy, the blindspot of the mirror, a foot on the wrong pedal. Being a guilt-sensitive soul (always going red when teachers at school had asked for the person to own up) he knew that he would take the blame fair and square. But even if he could handle that, what about the repercussions? Family of the deceased? Friends of the deceased? Would he go to the funeral? He dismissed the stupid thought immediately, but it would be a fragile afternoon.
How would his family react? He didn’t exactly have blood on his hands, but he had taken life, that ultimate of taboos. Dead men tell no tales, but that dead man would sit in his car for the rest of his life – that is if he drove again. The thought frightened him. What if he lost all confidence, feeling like Cain among men? He didn’t know of anyone who had killed someone accidentally (or for that matter deliberately). Perhaps someone he knew had: he just kept quiet about it. Time was known as the great healer, but how much time? Was he now too old to qualify as a patient? That he was more worried about his own situation than that of the victim’s also showed a self-centredness, but he knew it was due to the case being a hypothetical one. All would change, of course, were it to happen.
One of over seven billion. That, among other drifting thoughts, had entered his mind. Was it significant that one of over seven billion lives had ended, even if it was at his hands? He knew the easy answer: what if it was his life? But what interested him more about this thought was how little death he had experienced when there was so much of it around. Not only had he not killed someone yet but he also had never seen a person being killed; in fact in the course of nearly seven decades he had seen three dead people. He remembered them clearly: an oldish man in a suit lying outside a lift on the groundfloor of a hotel in Switzerland – he had been sixteen; then a man whose head had been opened by a car – in his thirties then; and his father. His mother had phoned that Sunday morning. “Please come quickly. I think Dad’s had a heart attack.”
As with the others, the sight of his father, his body drained of its life, had neither alarmed nor frightened him. Lifelessness was a fact; death’s overcoming of life was simple and stark. The greyness of his father’s once strong face was a colour he had never seen before: the colour of death. But how amazing that human beings could shield one another so well from death, living as though it did not happen until it did. He remembered his astonishment when, as a boy, he had read that, every minute, 143 babies were born and 87 people died – he had seen neither and it would be many years until he saw his first birth. Society managed to arrange things so that, from cradle to the grave, most saw little to prove that life began and ended.
When he turned the car into the driveway, the incident of nearly killing the helmeted man seemed an age ago. As he entered the house, he looked around and thought how different his life would now have been had the skill of that biker not saved them both. Where that man lived, if he had a companion, he might be saying: “You know, some fool nearly wiped me out this morning.” Oh, how that fool would love to be there and rejoice in the escape from death!
He would not say to his wife, “I nearly killed a man today.”
