278 - A collision
In which, a quiet night in goes spectacularly off course...
A quiet night in…
02/07/22 – Saturday, late after eleven…
I’m sitting in the living room, watching a film, considering making tea but it seems that when I’m completely switched off – like several other times in my life, I’m unknowingly on a timeline to chaos.
A sudden BOOM!!!
Followed immediately by glass breaking outside on the main road.
Then… quiet.
“Fuck, that's a car crash.”
Telling my daughter to stay put and sleepily trying to put trainers on, grab my phone.
Out the gate in the dark and right towards the growing noise of a constant car horn.
On the way, a neighbour is out, half-dressed asking about what’s going on.
I walk towards the source of the blaring horn, trying to make out the figures milling around the car lights.
A white car is diagonal across the road, it must have mounted the pavement, hit railings and bounced or spun back on itself into the opposite lane.
Debris is everywhere, railings are twisted by the nearby school gates. The car looks shredded from the front of the passenger side – carnage.
I'm expecting dead people.
On my side of the pavement up ahead, a guy is on his phone, I talk to him about calling 999.
“I’m on the phone to them now, they nearly killed me! I was just stood here and they ploughed into the railings beside me!!”
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Mr Nearly Dead” goes back to his call describing the occupants of the car to the cops.
Two females and two males are falling out of the car. Doors open, and they're sitting on a nearby wall. The occupant of that house is asking if they’re ok but also filming with his phone. Unbelievably, no one is hurt.
Not yet.
The great escape…
One of the males is in shorts, angry, lifting the hood and ripping out the horn cable. He then starts going through items on the driver seat and dash.
He walks like he's drunk, posturing, puffed up muscle man walk – ape like.
Goes to the females and says aggressively,
“This is on you! This is on you! yeah?”
And then… runs away up the road leaving the females, I notice at this point that the other male is gone – I can't remember him at all. They’ve made the decision (probably from prior experience) that legal responsibility will not be falling on them thanks, gallantly do the right thing and leave the females and… peg it.
I see a neighbour who lives right there and we talk.
The females start screaming at Mr Nearly Dead:
”Fuckin’ snitch! Fuckin’ DEAD MAN!!”
He responds, “What the fuck you say?”
“We know you AND where you live, you're fucking DEAD!!!”
“Where do I live then??”
Slight pause and with perfect comic timing, she sneers,
“Doesn't matter!”
Laughter: Mr Nearly Dead, the neighbour and I.
A new character is introduced…
A car pulls up and stops and a guy, steps out, diagonal bag on chest, and bad boy vibe.
My first thought is that he is part of their circle and has come to pick up the females.
Mr Nearly Dead says:
“Are you part of this mate??” He's had the exact same thought as me.
Bad boy, kicking glass across the road in front of his car, says
“I'm just trying to drive through… fuckwit!”.
With that, he walks disinterestedly back to his car and drives through and on his way.
But wait, there’s more!
Mr Nearly Dead’s adrenaline seems to have dropped and he starts to consider what has just happened...he’s now angry. He strides out into the road and screams at the females by the remains of the car,
“You… stupid… fuckin.. cunts!!! You almost killed me !!!!”
Both females come straight over and are instantly throwing haymakers at him which miss as they're quite obviously pissed. I stepped back and somewhat abstractly noted the poor technique of the punches, locked elbows and a wind up to rival a showboating Sugar Ray Leonard in his prime, a gift for a solid single arm block, I mused...
One is in a bra top and leggings, very small and massively aggressive. The other is in a loose t shirt and shall we say, “larger”.
Mr Nearly Dead is at least 6'1 / 40's / athletic and ready to go.
The two “ladies” don't give a fuck about his ability to better them physically and are attacking him.
So, there I am, mere minutes after considering a relaxing cup of tea to end the day embroiled with my neighbour friend, trying to avoid getting our eyes clawed out by two feral witches as we endeavour to extricate this stranger from a very bad tactical decision involving two psychotics. But, sadly, it’s a decision he seems determined to make despite our attempts to dissuade him. So I leave him to it.
Now the cops arrive...
I turn and run down to them as they exit… slowly... the patrol car.
“This is kicking off here!”, I start to tell the female officer what happened and that the larger guy is a near-victim of what looks like drunk driving.
The witches are now trying to walk away quickly...
“Excuse me ladies...can you come back please!!??” Says the female cop, catching up to them.
A group huddle forms and then the revisionist history portion of the evening begins:
“He called me a slag!!! and tried to hit me!!!!”, a shrill voice screams.
The male cop is now with Mr Nearly Dead – he's being admonished for raising his voice during note taking...
“I'm the victim, you stupid idiot!”
Both cops are now turned to him.
At least one of the females (little witch) now simply walks off and slips off down the road into the dark.
I leave shaking my head, realising I’m still in shorts a vest, no socks and am freezing. In no mood to observe this human folly, I go to return home.
Street map déjà voodoo.
Some geographical coordinates are like strange, stuck records. The needle sticks in the groove and a phrase plays out again and again.
If you live in a place long enough you start to see weird and negative shit always around the same locations.
This same spot, a sample 200 metre stretch of road, leading into what is advertised by one of the national newspapers as the most desirable town in the UK to live in has seen, over the years, multiple similar car crashes, a crack house, road rage, child predators, drug arrests, gang activity, domestic violence, a family run brothel (!), a probation centre that closed making it a viable feeding ground again for some of it’s former clients, weekly drunken after-hours vandalism as the booze wears off on that walk home and many more deviations from the narrative.
But these are not exceptional events in any way, it’s just that they’re rarely ever seemingly reported locally.
The collision is right outside some very ostentatious school gates that caused a large resident dispute, with the school threatening locals with lawyers to realise the fantasy vision of a brochure-friendly, highly desirable academic future for wealthier kids – a perfect snapshot of a daytime fantasy town in a literal collision with an unspoken, other town that comes out at night.
In the days to come after this crash and ensuing micro drama, there will still be no mention in the local news media that it ever happened. No mention either of a still missing (for several days) teenage girl. Just featured content of a new restaurant or where the best property buys in the area can be found.
What the many read and the not-so-few experience just don’t match.
Before I reach my humble peasant dwelling for that cup of tea, a guy lurches out of my neighbour’s garden path – looks away from me, head down and hurries off. It’s not my neighbour, of course, just some guy that needed somewhere convenient to piss.
It seems like you picked an eventful part of Town to live sir! What an eventful night! I know what you mean by Idyllic town meets shameless in the southwest.. lucky we have such a helpful local police force at our disposal.... here’s to the many pillocks we must mosey amongst.. and to the evident need for us to learn to defend ourselves.
It’s that thing about the optics again, isn’t it? If, say, the police come late to the party and they see a big athletic man swearing at some wee (and not so wee) lasses it doesn’t look great for the man, even if he was just minding his own business before a car nearly wipes him out….
Your comments about the reporting, or lack thereof, is interesting. It made me wonder how the reporting is initiated. As in, who tells the paper that something “newsworthy” has happened? I suppose sometimes it’s a press release by the police, when it’s deemed in the “public interest”, although often there are too few details to be remotely useful (case in point recent-ish rape at the Cemetery at the top of town - no details about the perpetrator, nothing about the circumstances, nothing for anyone to make intelligent decisions about - just a generalised horror that they walk amongst us, but we knew that anyway).
It would be interesting to see what happens if an MOP were to contact the press about something like this. I suspect you may well be right that it wouldn’t fit the narrative….