Last night at about midnight, I was woken by what I thought was a hoon burning bitcumen up my street. This time the usual kabooshhh noise didn’t stop, but escalated into a bang, wallop, smash, screech, crash, kaboom! I ran outside to a bent and busted car, door open and shadowy figures staggering about a fair distance down the road.
It was cold and deadly quiet down the street. I called out ‘are you ok? do you need an ambulance?’, and had to wait a few seconds before a weak voice answered back, “I’m alright” and then a few seconds later “can I talk to you?”
Ben, as the young driver turned out to be, had just had a miraculous escape from certain death. Starsky and Hutch-like, he came down our street, swerved (or lost control, not sure which) onto the wrong side of the road, smashed our wheely bin, mounted the curb, pulverished a street lamp – miraculously missing our three large deciduous trees that stand between bin and lamp (they are set back only centemters), rolled the car twice – at least one time on the wrong side of the road and avoided all the other trees that line both sides of the street, and came to rest facing the right way in the correct lane. He opened his car door and merely stepped out. There was amazingly no oncoming traffic (it is a reasonably busy through road), and no-one ran into him from behind (it was dark and his rear lights were not working).
The things he said to me, standing in my front yard as pale as a ghost and vauge from the shock were: ‘I’ve totalled my car; my parents will kill me; sorry, I smashed your wheely bin; lucky I didn’t hit a tree’ in that order.
The ambulance and police were on the scene incredibly quickly – mere minutes later.
There were no passengers – lucky again because the roof on the passenger side was very badly damaged.
I saw him again today with a friend, still with the same amazed look on his face. There was absolutely NOTHING wrong with him. They kept him overnight in hospital but he didn’t even have a SCRATCH or BRUISE on his face or body! He was perfectly OK!
I told him he should race out and buy a dozen lottery tickets, because his parents could have so easily have been organising his funeral today.
I said to him, “you must have come FLYING down here, because you hit this and that and rolled and rolled and ended up about 50 metres down the road.” But he didn’t reply.
Even after everyone had gone, we couldn’t sleep because the road people came and used a grinder (at least that’s what it sounded like) to cut down the street lamp and then clear the glass. It took hours and hours.
Yawn, I’m so tired today, but kind of elated because I feel as if I saw a miracle last night, and then to see him again today, just walking down the street…it could have ended so very differently so very easily.
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