Spectral incidents

Driving to Yorkshire at speed, in flow in the fast lane. Darkness illuminated only by head- and rear lights. I glance at the clock. It’s 5.13pm. I’m aware of the car in front – a yellow Audi A3 – and the one behind, a silver people-carrier, probably a Ford Galaxy. They’ve been our companions for some distance. We overtook the latter a little while ago. There’s a small gap opening up behind us, perhaps five car lengths, where a minute ago it had been three. Fine by me. I glance again at the rearview mirror. I see a hatchback – I think a Vauxhall Corsa – drive at right angles into the crash barrier. Everything appears to move at slow motion, condensed information packed into the same number of visual frames. For the briefest of moments, I see the the hatchback driver silhouetted by the oncoming headlights. The people-carrier ploughs into the hatchback which has rebounded off the safety barrier. It takes some moments to process what I’ve just seen in the darkness. By the time I consider slowing down, we’re a mile or more away. The scene is imprinted upon my retina, momentary, unreal, I wonder whether it was a hallucination. I scan the newspaper the next day, but there’s no mention of the incident.

A week ago a friend knocked on our door, upset. She’d been turned back en route to the local underground station. Her six year old son had been informed by a bus driver that there’d been a double murder and that whole streets were closed. I scan the news sites and, later, the local paper. There’s no mention of an incident.

Returning from Yorkshire through blizzards and low visibility. One more car in a succession of traffic queues surrounded by moors, fields and, occasionally, cities. There’s no sign of the cause of the queues, the inevitable conclusion being the vague and all-inclusive ‘weight of traffic’. I have a different suspicion: the huge new LED traffic signs that have sprung up in recent years. Each displays warnings such as ‘Queue between jcns 25-23’, ‘Queue jcn 18a’ and so on. These all-too suggestive messages cause us to reduce our speed and line up one behind another silently, obediently.