So I witnessed an accident

So I witnessed an accident.

There I was on a Friday afternoon, waiting behind a flashy black ML — as you do — indicating to turn right from Bryanston Drive into Wilton Avenue, thinking about how, when I got home, the first thing I would do is phone the doctor’s rooms to find out if the results of my biopsy hadn’t come through, because I really, really wanted to know, one way or the other.

And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man on a Harley connect with the front end of white car, wobble for a moment and clatter unceremoniously to the tar.

You know, when you see this kind of thing happen in front of you, that you must stop to help.

So I turned down Wilton Avenue and parked on the nearest piece of flattish pavement, thinking: no phoning the doctor now. By the time I reached the scene of the accident, the two men from the Merc were kneeling beside the Harley guy and asking him where it hurt. A model of efficiency, one of them had already cut his jeans from hip to ankle (later I wondered what kind of blade he’d used to do this — it went through denim like a knife through butter — and also why he happened to have this sort of thing on him.) No broken bones, no bleeding.

The car was hardly dented, the yellow Swazi numberplate in the road the only evidence of its encounter with a bike and a human body. The driver stood by, a soft-spoken old man wearing a Royal Swazi Sun golf shirt stretched over an enormous boep. I hadn’t been paying enough attention to see who had caused the accident — it was probably one of those things that happen on the orange, when the driver turning right thinks it’s safe to go, and the other scoots through before the light turns red. Happens all the time.

The Merc guys — tall, almost identically dressed, perfectly quaffed and tanned men in their early thirties, superb specimens both of them — helped him to the side of the road and pushed the bike out of the way, and I wondered whether I wasn’t just getting in the way.

The biker’s name was Liam and he lived in Krugersdorp. He looked like a typical Harley rider to me — the real kind, with a ponytail and multiple earrings, not a man with a midlife crisis and a cluster in Morningside. Sans leather jacket and helmet, he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a History Channel documentary on Celtic life in pre-Roman Britain, though he’d probably be more convincing as a blacksmith than as a warrior.

*****

I sat down beside him, reasoning that he could probably do with the company. “About R20 000 to fix,” he said, when I asked about the damage to the bike. He seemed philosophical.

“Is it insured?”

“No.”

Somebody moved the car out of the intersection. There was revving and hooting (if only the taxi strike would continue ad infinitum), then the scribbling down of names and contact details. The Merc men, the Ken dolls, waved goodbye and hurried off, leaving us alone.

Liam called his wife to tell her what had happened. “I’m in Bryanston,” he sighed, as though finding oneself stranded in the northern suburbs of Joburg was akin to taking a wrong turn and ending up in Prieska. By now his airtime had run out, so I lent him my phone to call the guy who fixes his bike to see if he could come to fetch it. “Number doesn’t work,” he said mournfully.

“Let me Google it,” I offered. “What’s the name of the guy who fixes your bike?” After stabbing the name of the company into my iPhone, it came up with a result that listed both the landline he’d just tried and a cell number (hallelujah, for once I was getting decent download speed on Cell C’s crappy network). I poked at the cell number, the phone started dialing and I handed it to Liam, who got through to his bike guy’s business partner, who gave him the right cell number, so he could call and ask the bike guy if he could come and fetch it.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

The bike guy said he could fetch the Harley if it was too damaged to be ridden back to Krugersdorp. I squinted doubtfully at the scratches and bruises on Liam’s right leg. “I don’t think you should try to ride it anyway,” I said. “In your condition you might have an accident.”

He agreed. So we waited there, sitting on the side of Bryanston Drive, as afternoon rush hour clattered past over what remained of the Peugeot’s front numberplate. That Swazi plastic was solid stuff, because most of it stayed resolutely intact. A South African plate would have been shattered and scrunched into a hundred little pieces long ago.

I wondered what those people in their coupes and SUVs thought we were doing there. Oddly enough, the notion that they might assume that I was involved in the accident bothered me, and I wished I could hold up some sort of sign that read: I’m only helping.

“Do you have medical aid?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

*****

The minutes ticked by. Still no ambulance or paramedics. Being Sandton born and bred, and needing to talk about something, I asked Liam what he did for a living. It turned out he was a freelance digital designer who’d done work for an agency where I used to work. Small world.

“Are you thirsty?” I asked him. “I’m thirsty.”
I called my mother.

“I’m not calling you about the results,” I told her. Of course that was the first thing she would assume. I told her that I was helping out on an accident scene around the corner, and I was desperate for something to drink. She said she would send my brother.

I checked the time. It was getting on for five. Would there still be someone at the doctor’s rooms? I called the number, grateful that for once I’d been efficient and remembered to programme it into my phone. “I just want to make sure that the results haven’t come through,” I explained to the woman who answered. “In case you weren’t able to get hold of me.”

She said she’d look for my file. I waited.

“It’s not here,” she said when she got back to the phone. “It’s on the doctor’s desk. He has it with him now. I’ll get him to call you.”

Which meant that the results had come through, that he was studying the report, and that the longer he took to call me, the more complicated the results must be, and the more chance that something was seriously wrong.

*****

So I was grateful when the cavalry showed up in the form of two Rescue 911 Golfs speeding down the hill, lights all red and glitzy. Are paramedics disappointed when they arrive at an accident to find no serious injuries? Maybe they are. Or grateful not to find the scenes of devastation that usually greet them. Eventually, four emergency paramedic vehicles and an ambulance showed up, which struck me as a waste of time and petrol, but I suppose you can never be sure.

The first paramedic, a young woman, asked Liam if he was OK, checked him out, and told him he should be taken to a hospital. The other placed cones around the ambulance, effectively blocking off a third of one of the busiest single lane roads in Sandton. One car nearly ran him over as it sped around the obstacle. South African drivers: so many of them are four-letter words. I will be honest and admit I was pleased that I was at the vortex of traffic chaos, at the centre of the stage, though not involved in the events that had led to its impromptu construction.

“Lots of drama here,” I told my brother when he arrived to find me surrounded by flashing lights, paramedics and two teenaged girls standing watching, the word “observer” printed on their luminous yellow vests. An accurate description of what they were doing, I suppose.

He handed me a Coke. The last time I had investigated my mother’s fridge I’d found Appletiser, so I experienced a ripple of disappointment. I never drink the real thing if I can help it, except when I’m sick because for some reason nothing works as well for nausea as flat Coke. But I poured its fizzing, tooth-rotting sweetness into my parched mouth, and it was good.

By now the paramedics had Liam trussed up on a stretcher. They heaved him onto the trolley and pushed him into the ambulance like a tray of dough into an oven. I passed his right boot through the door. “You’ll need that,” I said.

He asked me to look after his helmet.

*****

As the ambulance drove off in the direction of some or other government hospital, one of the paramedics instructed me — in tones I thought were unnecessarily brusque — to get the driver’s details for him. I tripped and tottered to the Peugeot, cursing the fact that I’d worn open-toed heels on the one day when flat shoes would have come in handy. The driver stood there with a family friend and a good Samaritan; it turned out he was on his way to the retirement home across the road from my old primary school. He looked so vulnerable, this old man from Swaziland who had stumbled into an accident in Sandton on the way home on a Friday afternoon, and I felt a surge of gratitude that he seemed to be alright.

Just then, there was a familiar buzzing in my back pocket. I took out my phone. The doctor’s name was on the screen. I took a breath, put it to my ear. “Hello,” I said, as though I didn’t know who was calling, though of course I did. The doctor asked me how I was. I apologised for the noise, explaining that I had witnessed an accident. I strained to make out the words. Here I was on the most important phone call of my entire life and I was trying to conduct a conversation over the roar of traffic.

Still, I heard the news I needed to hear.

It wasn’t cancer.

It will be cancer if I don’t do anything about it, but it isn’t cancer now, and that’s what counts.

I thanked the doctor, turned to my brother, told him the verdict. “Oh thank God,” he breathed. We’re not big on hugging each other, my family — we hug others without qualms but amongst ourselves we’re awkward and repressed — but this was one time when some kind of embrace was called for.

My stomach felt leaden and my heart felt light as I turned to say goodbye to the others. I must have looked dazed because the good Samaritan asked what was wrong. I told him. He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed.

Then I headed back down the road in my stupid impractical shoes to my car, holding Liam’s helmet in one shaking hand and my keys in the other. I gasped back tears as the dread that had settled in my stomach for the past week floated up and drifted away. This was not just cancer, you see. This was the next logical development in the progressively dismal narrative arc of my life, and I had been waiting for it.

But it was not going to come to that. Liam was okay, the old man was okay, I was okay.

I am okay.