He puts down the juice carton and watches the man falling again as the adrenalin fades away, breaking down and dispelling itself like a sigh. He wonders what it might feel like, that moment before the cord tightens and recoils, how strong the doubt in your mind would be, if there would be time to imagine the possibilities. He wonders if the relief would be stronger than the fear. And he remembers a man he heard about on the news, a man whose parachute didn’t open when he did a jump for charity, he wonders what that might be like, those two or three minutes, that freefall, the roar of the wind and the delirious bellow of death calling in your ears. And the landscape laid out beneath you like a vision, fields and trees and rivers like a picturebook, cars moving slowly along threadlike roads and you wondering if they can see you rushing to meet them. He wonders what he would do, if he would panic, fight it, tread air like a canyon-bound cartoon character. If he would spreadeagle, lie flat to the air to slow his descent, or draw himself in, point arrowlike to the ground, hands pressed together, eyes closed, mumbling come on come on and wanting to get it over with.
He thinks about it, wondering what he would do, wondering if he would be ready, wondering if he would be as lucky as the man on the news who fell into trees and broke branches and bones but didn’t die.
He sits on his step, he drinks more juice with the sun on his face, and he wonders how that would feel, how it would be, to know that your own existence is a miracle.
A young man in a car sees the figure falling from the sky, a man in a car coming around the corner at the far end of the street.
Coming around the corner a little too quickly they will say, we noticed.
He comes round the corner and he sees a figure falling through the air, he doesn’t see the elastic trailing out behind, he sees four limbs flung out, he is astounded and he stares up and follows the fall.
He is not looking at the road, not at this particular instant, and he is not looking at the child in front of him.
He wasn’t looking where he was going they will say, you could tell, it was obvious.
The child looks up. He has been concentrating on the tennis ball, arranging his fingers along the seam in a hopeful parody of his cricketing heroes, and he is just about to turn into his run-up when he lifts his head and sees the car. It’s a white car, a smal
l white Fiat, and it’s facing towards him. It’s moving towards him, but in the time it takes to reach him his perception of distance and movement will falter, become unable to register this fact. The car is facing him is all he can see.
The headlight on the left is cracked, and dirt has squeezed into the crack so that it stands out against the clear plastic casing like a fork of black lightning. The numberplate is printed in glossy italicised lettering, not the usual bold black capitals, he has time to notice this but not to read the letters. The car is clean, very clean, waxed and polished and shining in the sun. He can see the driver’s face, he is wearing sunglasses and his face is half hidden by the shimmer of sun across the windscreen but he can still see his face and it’s a face he knows, the boy from number twelve who played with them this morning, before he went out with his friends to spend carefully earned money on a car.
The child looks up, and he sees the car, and he sees the driver.
He doesn’t move.
Later, when people talk about this moment, they will disagree about why this was. He had time to move, some will say, he could have jumped out of the way, run out of the way, moved just a few feet to the right or the left. Others will say he had no time, that he barely had a chance to see the car before it reached him, that perhaps he didn’t see the car at all. Some, perhaps the ones who find themselves unable even to open their mouths when it happens, they will say that the boy had time to move but was unable to, that he was held static for that all-important moment between the seeing and the happening.
He looks up, he sees the car, and he doesn’t move.
He can see the road stretching out behind the car, the still-wet surface gleaming darkly, he can see the houses on either side, magnified and distorted in his panic-struck vision so that they loom up like monsters, window-eyes leering, door-mouths snarling. He can see people in the street looking at him, the girl whose daddy has funny hands standing on one leg, and behind her in his garden her daddy with his hands held out, beginning to stand now but so far away, he can see the funny man at number eighteen, the one who can’t catch the ball, he is jumping towards him and his whole body seems to be in the air, and he can see the people sitting outside the house next to his, the noisy people, they have all turned suddenly and are reaching their hands out towards him, he can see the small boy on his tricycle, further up the street, heading towards him, feet pumping away as furiously as ever, and he can see somebody on the flat roof of the shop, there are two people, one of them has their hands pressed to the sides of their head, their arms stretched out against the sky like a big O and he can see the sky, the blue sky, it is split from left to right by a tight white vapour trail but the aeroplane is too small to see, there are clouds, only a few, only thin ones, the sun is bright and splayed across a whole corner of the sky, there is a bird stretching out its wings to steady itself on a high branch of the tree outside the old couple’s house, there’s a cat rolling in the dust outside his own house, a white cat, there are wildflowers growing in the mulch of a blocked gutter on the roof of number fifteen, overflowing and hanging down across the brickwork, tiny white flowers in a spray, larger yellow ones, poppies.
He can see all of this, the boy in the middle of the road.
He can see the street, and the people, and the sky.
But he sees nothing. It is all there, all within his field of vision, the colours and the brightnesses all striking the rods and cones of his young retinae, but there is too little time and he sees nothing.
He looks up, the child looks up, he sees the car, and he doesn’t move.
And the young man in the car sees the child, and he slams on the brakes.
He is in the driving seat, he wants to stop the car, he wants to stop it quickly, so this is what he does, he slams on the brakes, with a movement as sudden as the noise of a slamming stable door.
He slams on the brakes.
And in the time it takes to speak those words, everything happens.
Electrical impulses fluster across the cells of his brain, back and forth like runners in a network news headquarters until they converge into a single impulse, a burst of intent which goes laundry-chuting headfirst down the spinal column, leaping and twitching through the shortest route like a cycle courier down a wrong-way street until it arrives at the ankle muscle and yanks the foot to the floor, ignoring the usual feedback control, jamming the foot down onto the pedal so hard that the skin will swell purple and yellow for days after this one day and then the job of the brain is done.
This is what the highway code calls thinking time, but if this was live on CNN the correspondent would be saying no the brakes are not active yet no not by a long way now back to you in the studio.
He slams on the brakes.
Which means that he reacts with panic and presses his foot down onto the pedal as hard and as fast as he possibly can.
And the pedal pulls against its spring mechanism, sinking a plunger into the small reservoir of brake oil, compressing it and sending that compression in a single wave of movement along a thick-walled flexible brake hose, the urgent energy sliding round the rubber curves like opiates through a bloodstream and arriving at the calipers which yield instantly to the pressure, squeezing the brake shoes onto the drilled steel disc, gripping tighter and tighter, gripping like a free climber’s last hold on a rockface. But no matter how desperately the brakes embrace the disc the car will not be stopping yet, there is no car in the world that can come to an instant halt under these conditions.
And so this is the beginning of what the highway code refers to as stopping time, and on CNN the correspondent is saying no Christina, the car has not come to a stop yet, I can confirm the vehicle is still moving and I will keep you posted now over to you.