ACCIDENTS AND EMERGENCIES

GIBBY IS STANDING AT the end of his road, waiting for the bus that will take him to the train, that will take him to the airport, that will lead to him boarding a plane, which will take him away from the known. ‘I’ll run you out there,’ Mr Lux had offered. ‘We can pick up Lacey too.’

But, even though it’s a Saturday, there was an emergency to do with undelivered cables for an anti-aging cosmetics convention. ‘Bring back some samples, will you?’ shouted Mrs Lux from a living room crammed with roaring engines and the squealing of Formula-One tyres.

Over his shoulder, Mr Lux had issued vague promises of retinol while hunting for correspondence with his subcontractors. ‘Must have left it at the office,’ he’d muttered. ‘Sorry, son?’ And he’d given Gibby a ride as far as the corner.

Blue tyre marks on a frosty road, exhaust plumes hanging in the air: the signs of a father departing. But Mr Lux reverses back, lowers the window. ‘Ring us if you need funds, won’t you, son.’ He doesn’t seem entirely sure where Gibby’s going or why, but he’s always been sure about the usefulness of money. ‘Ring if there’s an emergency.’

An emergency? True, there could be another one in store for Gibby — but not if there’s any justice in the world. Two in twenty years seems unfair. Most people barely remember what happened to Gibby when he was twelve, but it’s left him like this: white-faced and shaking at a bus stop. How the hell do other people travel so far, and so often, with such insouciance?

He places his bag carefully on the bench. Cars pour along the road beside him. Where are they all going? To lunches, to family reunions, to football matches? It astonishes him, the way that other people live with such certainty, as if their lives have already been marked out and all they have to do is follow the flags.

Other people’s lives have always been a mystery to him. It’s the other things, the more hidden things, which he can see astoundingly clearly. For instance, standing under a tree, he sees the sap pulsing under the bark, pushing buds out into the wind. He can hear the tiny crack of a root six feet under asphalt. And if you stand beside him now, and look up the way he is, you might start to see the separate components of the clouds, each one an intricate woven ball of water vapour —

‘Shit!’ He swears, looks despairingly after the departing bus. ‘Oh, no. Oh shit.’ He tries to read the timetable but the plastic is scratched and graffitied: ‘Pammie for Brent’, ‘Defend Palestine’, ‘Love Jesus’.

He doesn’t usually have the nerve to address strangers, but he can’t bear the thought of having to ring his father before he’s even left his own street. He steps up to the only other person there: a gum-chewing girl in a hooded top. ‘Excuse me. Any idea when the next bus is?’

‘Every fifteen minutes on Saturdays. Are you going to the stadium?’

‘No, the t-t-train station. Then the air-p-p-port.’ He bites his lip. ‘Got a p-p-plane to catch.’

‘Where’s your luggage?’ The girl stares out at him from an overhang of grey cotton.

‘This is it.’ He picks up his bag; it feels alarmingly light. All he can remember packing is shaving foam and razor blades.

‘Cool!’ Her face flickers into momentary life. ‘I wish me and my mum could be like that. Whenever we go away it’s like a travelling bloody circus.’

‘Yes, I travel light.’ Gibby attempts a nonchalant shrug. He feels a little better. A stony-faced teenager thinks he’s cool and as long as he doesn’t lapse again — Don’t look too hard! Don’t listen too closely! Don’t succumb! — he’ll catch the next bus, and he’ll be on time for the plane.

Around him the world creaks and shuffles, turning everlastingly on its axis. A squirrel slithers up a tree, its heart beating loudly enough to shake the ground. ‘So, where are you going for your holiday?’ The girl’s voice has the same grainy timbre as the gravel, which is making infinitesimal crunching sounds as it rearranges itself under her feet.

VERY OCCASIONALLY, YOU’LL HEAR a survivor say that something good came out of an accident. Perhaps they met the love of their life in a rehabilitation unit, or they realised they had courage where before they believed they had none. A fortunate accident may sound like an oxymoron, but certainly such a thing exists. Who can resist the concept of a silver lining?

Let’s take Gibby as one example. When he was just a little younger than the studiously indifferent bus-stop girl, he suffered a very serious mishap. One terrible hour that made his ears ring for two weeks afterwards, and changed him forever.

Because of the damage to his hearing, his parents were forced to communicate through handwritten signs:

Do you still want to go to Alexander’s birthday party?

Would you like oven chips with your sausages?

It’s time you were in bed!

During that period, both silent and eternally roaring, he began to see the world with a searing clarity. This set him apart — he’d never met anyone else who saw the inanimate world in all its writhing, shimmering glory — but he’d been isolated before the accident, so this was nothing new. When the ringing died away at last, the first sound he heard was a ferocious clacking. He looked around in alarm for something out of a science-fiction comic, advancing on lethal metal feet, but saw nothing except his parents calmly eating their dinner.

‘What’s that noise?’ he said faintly.

His father reached out towards him. ‘You all right, son?’

Gibby noticed that the second hand of his father’s wristwatch was moving in time with the clacking. ‘I can hear your watch!’ He spoke very loudly, to be heard over the Omega drumbeat.

‘That’s good news.’ His father beamed; so his son wasn’t going to be deaf for the rest of his life! ‘There’s no need to shout about it, though,’ he added.

By now the dinner table had become a medley of sound. Blood oozed noisily from the steak (medium-rare, but not by design: even then Mrs Lux was easily distracted by gin and greyhound racing). The sauce bottle spluttered, gassy air exploding under its screw top. The weave of the tablecloth expanded between the water jug and the salt shaker, sounding like paper ripping. But strangest of all was the heavy thumping, slow and then slower: a progressive steadying.

‘It’s my heart,’ said Gibby in wonder. ‘My nerves and my heart. They’re settling.’

‘Eh?’ Mrs Lux looked up in vague alarm. The past two weeks had dusted her hair grey with anxiety, but she’d taken solace in a new regime that included two stiff drinks before lunch. ‘Heart pain? We’re supposed to take you straight to A&E if you have any heart pain.’

‘No, my heart’s fine.’ Gibby prodded his chest experimentally and watched a pea fall from his mother’s fork — whining like a bomb — and land in her gravy with an enormous splash. ‘I’m fine,’ he elaborated. ‘I feel normal again.’

This wasn’t really the truth. He’d never been normal, as other people would see it, and now he was even further from the state. The intensity with which he experienced the world that day — well, it isn’t always that heightened. (And now, at the bus stop, Gibby finally remembers George Eliot’s words: were his vision always so keen, he would die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.) Sometimes the state doesn’t happen for weeks; sometimes, arriving out of the blue, it’s almost a pleasure. But more often than not it’s something of an endurance test: downright frightening.

The accident, as terrible as it was and as handicapped as it’s left him, has transformed him into something extraordinary. He’s lost more than he can bear to think of — even now, eight years later, tears come to his eyes and he wrenches his mind away from it — but he’s gained the essence of the Incredible Gibby Lux.

AND SO HE STANDS inside a scratched bus shelter, seeing the world flickering behind its eyelids of wood and steel, and still he manages to have an ordinary conversation with the teenage girl about where he’s going, and for how long.

‘Cool!’ says the girl again. ‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Me neither,’ says Gibby.

‘When you get back,’ she says, cynical beyond her years, ‘you can give private coaching on how to pack light. All the ladies around here would sign up to get your secret.’ She cackles, and then her mobile rings and she retracts into her hood like a tortoise.

Saved by the bell! Gibby also busies himself with his phone. He’d been on the verge of revealing something that he might have regretted. Does anyone else need to know that the Incredible Gibby has never been away from home in his life? Not right now. For the moment, let’s keep it a secret.