| |
The crowd was loud but incoherent, excited comments buffeting against each other. Wind boomed against the tiny mic. A man lit by strobing red and blue smoked a cigarillo right of foreground. The phone took in the scene in a leisurely fashion, panning left from him and getting Beth and Luc on the trolleys centre of frame. Beyond them was the misshapen brown camper, fragments of metal and twinkling glass lying scattered in its wake. Emergency-vehicle headlights illuminated the bodywork and the diagonal rain hosing the road.
It was like tourists had got themselves present in Beth’s worst nightmare. She was thankful the angle didn’t allow her to see Luc’s face. It was turned away from the camera, but she inhaled sharply as she made out her own swollen expression. She was trying to understand him. The female paramedic stood over her, looking from side to side, and then moved away and out of shot.
She found herself frowning, appropriating the look of painful confusion she could see on her own face. Then her injured self squinted briefly out of the clip at her sitting in Jody’s lounge.
It was the first time she’d registered the crowd watching them. But it felt as if she was looking directly at herself.
Cold bubbles fizzed at the base of her spine.
Her horizontal self’s attention returned to Luc as he shifted on the trolley. She watched her inflated lips move as she tried to get him to lie still. She frowned harder. Beth wondered if this was the moment Luc apologised to her.
Her distended features looked out into Jody’s lounge again and this time there was disbelief and anger on her face.
How can you watch this?
She swung her feet off the trolley, sat up and reached out to Luc. She clenched the balled hands at his chest, gripping them tightly.
Beth found her own fingers doing the same. Her face in the present screwed up a few seconds before the expression on the screen, however, because now she knew it didn’t matter if she held on tightly to Luc. She’d already lost him. He started to convulse.
Her onscreen self yelled to nobody in particular. The mic barely picked up the words, misshapen by her swollen mouth and smashed jaw.
Beth’s finger rose to hit the pause button again but she forced herself to continue watching.
She stood up from the trolley, a red blanket falling away from her. Her sapphire blue dress was soaked and clung to her trembling body and her short red curls were dark and plastered to her scalp. Her shoes had gone and her tights were both ripped at the knees, revealing raw and bloody gashes. She pitched forward and Beth winced in both moments as her body harshly struck the edge of Luc’s trolley. She observed herself crawl up to Luc and tenderly touch his face. She could see from the distress in her reaction that the pain he was in made her invisible to him.
The paramedic appeared again and started to help her to her feet. “Couchez-vous!”
She turned to the paramedic, issuing a guttural plea for help and then looked out at Beth again, mortification and anger in her eyes.
“I will. Lie down first.”
She could see the panic on the paramedic’s face and registered how young the black woman was. Mid-twenties? Her dreadlocks were tied in a ponytail behind her head, and it whipped about her shoulders as she supported Beth under her arms and looked for assistance.
Beth’s gaze was still fixed, accusing, almost as if the censure was for her sitting watching the event from the comfort of the armchair. She broke free from the paramedic’s grip and strode shakily across the road. The paramedic was about to pursue her but seemed to have second thoughts.
When she threw the first punch, the operator of the phone stepped back and briefly she could see their shoes – a pair of green trainers. A man’s or a woman’s? The recording didn’t cease, though. It repositioned itself a few paces back from the crowd that was scattering and settled to capture Beth wildly swinging her fists at anyone within reach.
Although it repelled her, she felt strangely envious of the undiluted anger she was exhibiting on the screen. Beth wondered if she could ever be capable of such feral rage again. Since she’d woken, she knew there were components of her missing. Anger was one. It didn’t feel like it was being blocked, but as if her capacity for it had been completely removed.
The sound of the helicopter distorted in the mic. Beth’s hair bristled in its draught as she turned to look upwards, and leaves whirled and blasted against her. When she retrained her aggression on the crowd, she looked right into her own eyes and scarcely recognised herself.
She’d been recorded in countless clips at family gatherings, but apart from her physical appearance, no other part of her she knew was present.
She gripped the tablet tightly. More than this past desire to harm the voyeurs, Beth knew she wanted to confront the driver of the brown camper, the man who should have helped them but had instead attacked her and not called an ambulance. It was the coach driver who had alerted the emergency services. How many valuable minutes had been wasted as they’d lain there unaided? Would Luc have survived if they’d arrived sooner?
Behind her she could see a male paramedic and two police officers darting over to restrain her. The female paramedic was beyond them, leaning over Luc.
But even though she wanted to physically attack the driver who had fled, a man she knew she would never meet, she felt the compulsion only as a cold current flowing from somewhere distant. It should have consumed Beth, but the truth was that even maintaining the emotion exhausted her.
The phone operator stepped back a few more paces, the camera tilting to the grass and then focussing on Beth again just as the male paramedic and two officers reached her and she collapsed in their grip.
