Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

She’d met Marcus in her second year, when he’d taught a module on ‘The Literature of Marginal(ised) Places’. Which she’d enjoyed enough to actually go to at least half of the lectures rather than just download the notes. He had a way of explaining things like he properly wanted you to understand, instead of just wanting to show off or get through the class as quick as he could. There was something sort of generous about the way he talked, in class, and the way he listened to the students. Plus he was what it was difficult to think of a better word for than totally buff, and also had what she couldn’t be more articulate than call a lovely mouth, and basically made her spend quite a lot of time not actively addressing the issues of appropriation inherent in a culturally privileged form such as literary fiction taking exclusion and marginality as its subject. Her friend Jenny had said she couldn’t see it at all, as in the buffness and the lovely mouth rather than the inherent appropriation, but that had only made her think it was maybe something more along the lines of a genuine connection thing and not just some kind of stereotypical type of crush; and Jenny did at least agree that no way did it count as inappropriate if it was just a PhD student and not an actual lecturer. His last seminar had been on the Tasmanian novel, which it turned out there were quite a few of, and afterwards he’d kept her talking until the others had left and said were there any issues she wanted to discuss and actually did she want to go for a drink. To which her response had been, and that took you so long why?

There hadn’t really been anyone before Marcus. Not since coming to university, anyway. There’d been a few things at parties, and she’d slept with one of her housemates a bunch of times, but nothing serious enough to make her change her relationship setting. With Marcus it had been different, almost immediately. He’d asked her out, like formally, and they’d had late-night conversations about their relationship and what relationships meant and even whether or not they were in love and how they would know and whether love could ever be defined without reference to the other. She didn’t really know. She thought being in love probably didn’t mean telling your girlfriend what she could wear when you went to the pub together, or asking her not to talk to certain people, or telling her she was the reason you couldn’t finish your thesis.

They hadn’t moved in together, but almost as soon as they’d started going out their possessions had begun drifting from one house to the other until it felt like they were just living together in two places. Sometimes when she woke up it took her a moment to remember which house she was in. It wasn’t always a nice feeling. Which meant, what? She fully had no idea what it meant. Because she liked Marcus, she liked him a lot. She liked the conversations they had, which were smart and complicated and went on for hours. And she liked the way he looked at her when he wanted to do the things she’d been thinking about in class when she should have been thinking about discourses of liminality, when she’d been imagining saying he was welcome to cross her threshold any day. There was still all that. But there were other things. Things that made her uncomfortable, uncertain, things she was pretty sure weren’t part of how a relationship was supposed to make you feel happy or good about yourself or whatever it was a relationship was supposed to make you feel.

She should be calling him now, and she wasn’t. He’d want her to have called, when he heard. Something like this. He should be the first person she thought of calling. He’d think it was odd that she hadn’t. He’d be hurt. She thought about calling Jenny instead, to tell her what had happened, or her supervisor, to tell her she’d be late getting back to the office. She should call someone, probably, but she couldn’t really imagine having the words to explain it and she couldn’t face having anyone else tell her she could have been killed and plus anyway she was totally fine, wasn’t she? She looked down at the sugar-beet again. Was that what that smell was? It wasn’t a sugary smell at all. It was more like an earthy smell, like wet earth, like something rotting in the earth. She didn’t see how they could get from that to a bowl of white sugar on a café table, or even to that sort of wet, boozy smell you got when you drove past the refinery, coming up the A1. Which come to think of it was probably where the lorry would have been heading. It would be, what, an hour’s drive from here? Maybe she should go there and give them back their sugar-beet, tell them what had happened. Complain, maybe.

The passenger door opened, and the older man leaned in towards her.

‘You need to get out,’ he said. It seemed a bit too directive, the way he said it. She didn’t move. ‘It’s not safe, being on the hard shoulder like this,’ he added. ‘We should all be behind the barrier.’ They’d been discussing this, had they? It looked like they’d been discussing something. The older man was already holding out his hand to help her across the passenger seat. She looked at the traffic, roaring and weaving and hurtling past, and she remembered hearing about incidents where people had been struck and killed on the hard shoulder, when they were changing a tyre, or going for a piss, or just stopping to help. She remembered her cousin once telling her about a school minibus which had driven into the back of a Highways Maintenance truck and burst into flames. Which meant they were right about this, did it, probably? She swung her feet over into the passenger’s side, took the man’s hand, and squeezed out on to the tarmac. It was an awkward manoeuvre, and she didn’t think she’d completed it with much elegance or style. The younger man was already standing behind the barrier, and she clambered over to join him. She didn’t do that very gracefully either. He started climbing up the embankment.

‘Just in case,’ he said, looking back at her. Meaning what, she wondered. ‘Something could flip, couldn’t it?’ he said, and he did something with his hands which was presumably supposed to look like a vehicle striking a barrier and somersaulting across it. The older man caught her eye, and nodded, and she followed them both up the embankment, through the litter and the long grass.

It was much colder at the top. Sort of exposed. The wind was whipping away the sound of the traffic, making her feel further from the road than they really were. The two men looked awkward, as though maybe they were uncomfortable about the time this whole situation was taking. The younger man made the whistling noise again. She could barely hear it against the wind.

‘You’re lucky,’ he said, nodding down towards her car. ‘I mean, you know. You’re lucky we stopped. You could have been killed.’ She didn’t know what to say to this. She nodded, and folded her arms against the cold. The older man arched his back, rubbing at his neck with both hands.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ he said, and she nodded again, looking around.

Behind them, the ground sloped away towards a small woodland of what she thought might be hawthorn or rowan trees or something like that. The ones with the red berries. There were ragged strips of bin-liners and carrier-bags hanging from the branches, flapping in the wind. Past the trees, there was a warehouse, and an access road, and she noticed that the streetlights along the access road were coming on already. Beyond the access road, a few miles further away, there were some houses which she wasn’t sure if they were some estate on the outskirts of Hull or some other town altogether. Hull was further than that, she was pretty sure. It was the other side of the estuary, and they were still south of the river. Almost certainly.