| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  By the time the third tire blew we were somewhere near Preston and we spun twice across two lanes of traffic. Three of us were in Andy’s Fiat Panda, a two-door hatchback. Andy was driving, J was in the front and I was packed in the back with the stuff of students heading back to college.The first tire blew about an hour into the journey. The car shuddered a little before we realized we had a puncture, and limped off the road into a garage, grateful that help was close. We emptied the suitcases from the trunk and with the help of the mechanic, got out the spare. He levered up the vehicle and swapped the tires, packing the punctured one back into the well where the spare had been.
“You don’t want to drive too far on that,” said the garage attendant in his overalls. “That wheel’s got almost no thread.” He showed us how we should be able to put a coin in the tire’s rubber indentations. There was nothing there. We were teenagers. Irresponsible. Immortal. My friend didn’t want to fork out a hundred quid for a new tire and we drove out of the garage on the spare. The second tire blew not too long after that. This time required towing and more money. Andy mentioned that the vehicle was thirteen years old and she’d never replaced the tires.When Andy and I were eleven, one of the girls at school, Ann Acre, lost both her parents in a car accident. She was in the year above us, with a freckled face and the thick dark hair of a movie starlet. One day she was just another girl, the next she had no parents. So we knew accidents could happen. Andy started pumping the brakes when the third tire blew. We teetered for a moment after the second spin, another car swerved away from us, there was screeching, car horns, swearing, roaring in my head and we came to rest on the verge. The car stopped on the brown grass just ahead of a deep trench. A hundred yards further up the road was a concrete wall, the base of a bridge. The distance between our vehicle and that impact was a matter of seconds. We pulled ourselves out, stunned. A tow service appeared and it was dark by the time we pulled into a garage on the outskirts of Preston. Someone kind gave us coffee from a machine. It warmed us. We had three hours further to drive. We were lucky, irresponsible, stupid and alive. Seconds always matter. I keep learning that. Years later when I worked in radio, I’d work on pieces that could be no longer than 90 seconds. I’d spend all morning getting the right voices, the right facts, the right sound effects. The adrenaline was high, the editor was hard to please, seconds mattered. Time expands and collapses with children; the long arch of days in which things happen so fast. For eight years I’ve stayed home with my sons, a choice I made to give the seconds more meaning than the next headline. Now, on the other side of forty, I’m clawing back the seconds. The boys hurl their hugs at me. I try to write, in the moments before breakfast, before a fight breaks out about who sits where around the kitchen table or who gets the Mickey Mouse spoon. Precious seconds with all their joys and terrors. |
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