Now, the rarer times when he told this later part of the story, the part where his mother came off so badly, he would remind his listener that she had just heard the news that her eight-year-old son had been run over by a car, so she certainly had cause to be overwhelmed. But still, George found himself wanting to apologise to all the kind strangers who’d helped him for how his mother was acting, for how she was needing to be calmed by the ambulance driver herself, for how she was eagerly accepting an oxygen mask from a paramedic. This same woman who had so (ostensibly) heroically bitten Miss Jones’s finger, now hogging the spotlight at her own son’s car accident.
They lived. Of course, they lived. They hadn’t even been that badly injured. No bones were broken, though Roy had torn ligaments in both his knees. George, though in by far the worst danger from the actual impact, came out of it better. Two huge bruises across both thighs that prevented him from walking for a week and a host of bloody scrapes across the back of his head and arms from being pushed across tarmac, but a breathtakingly minor haul of injuries from something that could have been so much worse. George, in fact, didn’t even get an ambulance ride. It had driven off with Roy in the back, sirens wailing, and George was left with his own mother to take him to the hospital, weeping all the way, to the point where he had started comforting her.
She was so upset, in fact, that he never told her or his father what he realised even in his eight-year-old brain, which was that if Roy’s bike hadn’t been there, if it hadn’t fallen in such a flukey way, first catching on the bumper to hold him in place, then coming dislodged at precisely the right moment to guide him clear, the old lady would have run right over him. The tires he could see turning through the frame of the bike – like dragons behind a cage, seconds away from eating him – would have driven over his head and neck.
But the unlikeliness of it all also meant that he wouldn’t have had that moment of staring up into the sky, a moment where he had been the only person who had ever lived in all of glorious creation.
George had no idea of the fate of the old lady. Perhaps even more strangely, he had no other memories of Roy either. He couldn’t even remember his last name or how well or badly he had recovered from his injuries. Nor could he place him back at O Come O Come, so perhaps he never even returned, his parents having who-knew-what reaction to the near death of their son. George did know that his own parents had given him $100 of the insurance settlement to spend – he bought books – and then used the rest to re-carpet the house. But as for everything else? Well, he lived, and what could have been a tragedy became instead a minor story, to be told now and then by his mother, exclusively in the context of how upsetting it had been for her.
Time passed. The fourth grade teacher at the public school turned out to be a wonderful woman called Mrs Underhill, and for reasons unknown – probably financial, his parents not being people who could really afford even a heavily church-sponsored private school; though possibly also because it was, frankly, a bit of a weird place and there were limits, after all, for sensible people – George left O Come O Come and returned to Henry Bozeman the following year. He performed well, well enough that both the town and his parents started to seem increasingly parochial, until he won a scholarship to a university on the whole other coast.
Once in New York, Miss Jones was finally proved prophet. Whatever small scholastic flair George had shown seemed to throttle back towards average. He managed to scrape a post-grad scholarship that took him to England just in time for him to stop really caring about a degree altogether. It didn’t matter. He met Clare at a party and rarely went home again, save for the funerals of first his father, from an on-site accident, then his mother, ostensibly from a heart attack but more likely from putting too much of her vital self into the keeping of her husband. Which happens. George settled in and had now lived in England longer than he had lived in the United States, which seemed like it should mean something important, but never actually quite did.
This story, though, had really happened, every detail, despite all its improbabilities. When he talked about it now, he realised as the years passed that he was telling it less and less as an emblem of his own history, as a single strand that told part of his life.
Because all those people, yes?
All those people who ran from the gas station and the grocery store, those were the people George began to think about more as he got older, especially as he became first a father to Amanda, then a grandfather to JP. All those people, strangers whose names he never knew, whose faces he would never remember, all those random individuals who had seen two very small boys get run over by an old lady in a massive car.
Did they ever tell this story, he wondered? Even though Roy and George had fully recovered, there were those unbearable few seconds where their fate was in flux, where all that was knowable was that two boys were probably on their way to death and there was nothing, not one single thing, that any adult watching could do about it, something that George only fully understood one afternoon when Amanda, fifteen steps ahead of him on a pavement and still struggling with this whole new walking lark, had suddenly lurched sideways and fallen off a curb between two parked cars, momentarily disappearing from sight. She’d actually stopped crying when she saw how upset her own father was and how fiercely he held her to his chest.
George felt connected, was connected to those nameless, anonymous witnesses who were now unfindable, even in this unstoppably networked age. Their lives had intersected with his for a moment, something that real life did in various ways at every instant of every day for every person everywhere, of course, but it only ever really mattered when it was you, didn’t it?
What was true, though, and what he thought about often, was that although he was the hero of his version of the story, naturally, he was also a supporting player in this same story when told by someone else. How did these people tell it, because it seemed likely they might? ‘You won’t believe what happened to me one day. I was at the supermarket, and I remember clear as anything, I’d bought a carton of cigarettes for Del and two bottles of grape juice. Don’t know why I remember it was two, but then I just happened to look up . . .’
And what of the old lady? What story did she tell, if at all, in her presumably few remaining years? And what about the ambulance drivers who can only have quickly forgotten an incident where two boys were mildly injured?
For that matter, what would Miss Jones’s version be like of the story where the crazy white woman bit her finger? Would it be any less true than his own? Than his mother’s? Which between them were different enough already.
Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding the truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.
Whenever he finished telling someone his version of this story – his surprising American-ness explained, his late parents cast in their various thumbnails, the finger-biting that somehow led to a car accident – and the conversation then diverted itself down another track as someone else told their own story, he would often sit back a little, not listen very closely, temporarily retreating into his memory.
He would picture himself there, decades and an ocean and a continent away, under a beautiful blue sky, in the impossible silence of being pushed along a road on his back, under the watchful, terrified eyes of dozens of co-tellers, and because he could see it, and because they could, too, in all their different versions, as their lives crossed each other and bound together in what George could only describe as a mutual embrace, that moment still happened. It was always still happening.
And for that eternally repeated instant, pain was at bay, fear was held off, and everything was astonishment and wonder.
Things started to go wrong for Amanda this time when, of all the stupid places on this whole green earth, she and Rachel and Mei drove past the Animals In War Memorial.
‘What a fucking disgrace,’