Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

He can see all of this, the boy in the middle of the road.

He can see the street, and the people, and the sky.

But he sees nothing. It is all there, all within his field of vision, the colours and the brightnesses all striking the rods and cones of his young retinae, but there is too little time and he sees nothing.

He looks up, the child looks up, he sees the car, and he doesn’t move.

And the young man in the car sees the child, and he slams on the brakes.

He is in the driving seat, he wants to stop the car, he wants to stop it quickly, so this is what he does, he slams on the brakes, with a movement as sudden as the noise of a slamming stable door.

He slams on the brakes.

And in the time it takes to speak those words, everything happens.

Electrical impulses fluster across the cells of his brain, back and forth like runners in a network news headquarters until they converge into a single impulse, a burst of intent which goes laundry-chuting headfirst down the spinal column, leaping and twitching through the shortest route like a cycle courier down a wrong-way street until it arrives at the ankle muscle and yanks the foot to the floor, ignoring the usual feedback control, jamming the foot down onto the pedal so hard that the skin will swell purple and yellow for days after this one day and then the job of the brain is done.

This is what the highway code calls thinking time, but if this was live on CNN the correspondent would be saying no the brakes are not active yet no not by a long way now back to you in the studio.

He slams on the brakes.

Which means that he reacts with panic and presses his foot down onto the pedal as hard and as fast as he possibly can.

And the pedal pulls against its spring mechanism, sinking a plunger into the small reservoir of brake oil, compressing it and sending that compression in a single wave of movement along a thick-walled flexible brake hose, the urgent energy sliding round the rubber curves like opiates through a bloodstream and arriving at the calipers which yield instantly to the pressure, squeezing the brake shoes onto the drilled steel disc, gripping tighter and tighter, gripping like a free climber’s last hold on a rockface. But no matter how desperately the brakes embrace the disc the car will not be stopping yet, there is no car in the world that can come to an instant halt under these conditions.

And so this is the beginning of what the highway code refers to as stopping time, and on CNN the correspondent is saying no Christina, the car has not come to a stop yet, I can confirm the vehicle is still moving and I will keep you posted now over to you.

He slams on the brakes is what he does. The child looking at him and everyone looking at him and everyone panic-frozen in the endlessness of Stopping Time.

He slams on the brakes; he stamps on the pedal, the fluid compresses, and the brake shoes clamp against the brake disc. The brake hose shows signs of kinking, the brake shoes are not brand new, the disc is not spotlessly clean or dry, and these things stretch the moment by vital fractions of a second and these things will not be remarked upon in weighty investigative reports.

So he slams on the brakes, the wheels lock, and the car keeps moving on, dragging across the greasy wet surface of the road, the tyres beginning to spill their dark and poisonous residue across the road, and that noise, that noise, now the people in the street hear that noise.

The noise which people sometimes refer to as a screech of brakes but the word doesn’t even come close.

It’s the noise which will open half the narratives people will tell of this day. I heard this noise they will say, the lucky ones who avoided seeing the whole thing, I heard this noise and turned to look out of the window, or looked up from my newspaper or stopped walking and turned around. This is what they will say, to friends, in letters, in diaries, to people in pubs if the conversation drifts that way. I heard this noise and it cut right through me, like a chainsaw through my head, screaming through from ear to ear, and it was so sudden, and it seemed to go on forever. That’s what they’ll say, when they run out of ways to express the sound, when they’ve tried talking about nails on blackboards and screaming fireworks and they’ve not even come close, they’ll say it was so sudden and it seemed to go on forever.

They will mean different things when they say forever. Some of them will mean that as the noise began time seemed to stretch out, that as they turned and saw the source of it an awful inevitability flooded into the street like a shadow across the sun and all they could do was wait for the noise to end. It was like that first descent on a rollercoaster they’ll say, and waiting for your stomach to catch up and it seems to last a lifetime, and then they’ll look away because that’s not really what it was like at all.

And others, when they say forever, they will mean that long after it was over the noise seemed to carry on, ringing in their ears, echoing through their heads, replaying through their dreams. I couldn’t get rid of it they’ll say. I kept hearing that sound, that awful juddering shriek, whenever the room was quiet it would come back, endlessly sliding down the road, I had to have music on the whole time to drown it out they will say.

That noise. The car, sliding down the road, the wheels locked and the tyres dragging darkly across the steaming surface. The child, looking up, unmoving. And all the people watching, their heads turning like magnets, like compass needles, their hearts jumping like seismographs, caught uselessly in the time it takes for the eye to see and the mind to understand. The sun shines down, music plays, flowers grow, traffic passes at the end of the street, and everything is tipped into the centre of this moment.

The child in the road, the figure in the sky, the car, the noise.

And the young man from number eighteen, moving into the centre, covering the distance without touching the ground, unthinking, an unwitting part in the way of things.

And sitting here now, waiting, trying to be calm, all these things are rattling around inside my head, like coins set loose in a tumble dryer.

Michael, rushing back out into the rain wearing my jumper.

Michael, that night I first met him, saying and you didn’t even know his name?

My mother and father, gathered in a red-faced bundle by the telephone, my mother saying I’m safe now and my father unable to speak.

My mother managing to say it’s got a hood with a pair of teddybear ears on it I thought you might like it.

Sarah, wide-eyed, saying tell me about it tell me about it, listening to my story about Michael, his brother, what happened after the funeral.

The boy in Aberdeen, naked and beautiful and asleep as I left his house, him now, working in a bar, unaware of what he has planted in me.

Michael’s brother, his notes and photographs and objects, his observations, his silences.

Michael’s brother, moving to the centre of that awful afternoon, his hands stretched out.

When he left, when I’d watched him hurry across the carpark and disappear around the corner without looking back, when I’d decided not to go after him, I picked his wet top off the floor and spread it across the radiator to dry.

I picked up the towel and held it to my face, I hid my face in its warm dampness and I wondered if what I could smell was him, I was expecting to cry but I didn’t.

I phoned him, I wanted to apologise without speaking to him, I listened to his answerphone message and I said hello it’s me.

I said I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I said I don’t know whether you’re angry or embarrassed but I don’t want you to be either, I’m sorry.

I said it was a mistake, I didn’t, I said do you think we could just forget about it?