Read the story being discussed on Jesse Mulligan’s show on Radio New Zealand on 8 March 2018.
I could imagine the other driver’s testimony – she just ran out without looking from between the parked cars. She seemed to be running towards another car. It was so sudden I had no time to react. All her friends and acquaintances would be asked the same question, but no one would know who S had been running towards - if she died. If, on the other hand, she was only injured, as was most likely because the car that hit her hadn’t been going very fast, she would soon come to and clear up the mystery. And then I would be blamed for something I had no part in, something that happened entirely because of another person’s carelessness and flawed choices. Flawed personality, if you ask me, always jumping the gun and over-reacting to everything. In fact, that was why the relationship, such as it was, hadn’t worked out between us. You simply could not trust somebody like that to be discreet. It was fun the first few times with a personality of that sort, but afterwards it would have just got exhausting, and then, plain dangerous.
By this time, I’d found a park and was a couple of minutes’ walk from the dry-cleaner’s, where I had to pick up a suit and a party dress of Tilly’s. That last thought had actually fortified me, and I was even feeling somewhat cheerful. The accident definitely couldn’t have been serious, she would be fine in a couple of months at most, and there was a more-than-fair chance that she wouldn’t blurt out my name, except perhaps in private to one or two of her closest friends.
And full redemption arrived for me while Kevin the dry-cleaner had gone into the back of the shop in search of our things. If I paid her a hospital visit very early into her recovery, shortly after she’d regained consciousness, and emphatically told her with the most natural of expressions that I had stayed right beside her (but of course) after the accident, and had even been among the passers-by to phone for an ambulance, but surely she would understand why I couldn’t accompany the ambulance to the hospital or let my name be entered into the record alongside hers, who else had been present who knew us both and could contradict my story? S would have been knocked unconscious: I was pretty sure of that. Whatever I said about the few minutes after that would be the unchallenged truth. All I had to do was get in there early with my version, have that one visit alone with her.
Kevin had, as usual, done a fantastic job with our clothes: they were so pristine and unwrinkled it always seemed a shame afterwards to wear them. I told him the party we were going to wasn’t far from here, just behind the Albert Hall in fact, after a recital that evening. He asked me what I thought of the 8–2 drubbing at the hands of United a few days before: it was one of our regular topics of lament, although this week had been even more painful than usual.
And as I left, after paying and thanking Kevin, I felt pleased with myself for having finally got that off my chest. I had wanted to say that out loud about Wenger for a long time now, especially to a fellow supporter. This last season, every single thing about him – his accent, his expressions, even his suits and his hair – had just brought out the venom in me.
‘A Good Dry-Cleaner is Worth a Story’ © Rajorshi Chakraborti, first published in Turbine.