CHAPTER 14
I managed to steady the bike enough to get it onto its sidestand, pain ripping into my chest as I did so. Something felt broken there, and I found my vision greying out as I struggled to get off. There was a lorry stopped just to my left, another pulled slightly away to my right, angled into traffic. I found myself falling, another agonising stab from my chest as I sat down hard on the tarmac. I really didn’t want to look behind me, but it had to be done. I had to know.

Caro was lying on her side immediately in front of yet another artic, her head resting on her left arm. She would have looked as if she was sleeping, if her right arm hadn’t been ticked far too tightly into the small of her back. There were chunks of tyre all around us, and horns were blaring everywhere. As I struggled to make sense of it all, the driver of the truck to my nearside clambered down.

“Fuck, mate! You okay?”

He turned to look behind me.

“Oh shit… Mate’s run off to the SOS phone, putting a call in for an ambulance. Stay down, mate. I… shit. Other bloke’s checking. Stay down”

I found the pain getting steadily worse, and as I slumped back onto the road, he grabbed my throwovers and stuck them under my head as a pillow.

“Caro… Carolyn. Wife. How’s…”

He was looking back towards her, and I can only guess that some signal was passed, because he winced.

“Mate…”

A deep breath.

“Sorry. Sorry”

Another pause, and then he tried to brighten up.

“Jim’s back, went for the phone call, yeah? Says ambulance and that on their way. No. Stay down. You’ve got blood on your lips, and I don’t like that”

Things went away just then, and when they came back, there was someone in a yellow jacket kneeling next to me.

“Hello love. Can you tell me your name?”

“Michael Rhodes. Mike”

“I’m going to move you in a minute. Not far, and I will warn you first. I’m Jenny Hinton, I’m a paramedic. Got my mate Sean with me. We need to undo your jacket to see what things look like. Can you handle a little bright light?”

I nodded, and she shone a little torch into each eye in turn.

“Reactive and equal, Sean. Mike? I need you to tell me if you are in pain. Zero for nothing, ten for really bad. Got me”

“Ten. Fucking ten!”

“Right. Going to need to move you, get you onto a backboard and a collar, and get that lid off”

“Caro? My wife?”

There was a little catch in her voice.

“Not just now, okay?”

I am pretty dure I passed out as they moved me, and when I came to, they had an oxygen mask on my face and a group of police and lorry drivers was around the board thing I was now on.

“Two three, lift!”

I swung a little as they moved me to the trolley, and then I was in the ambulance, my jacket having vanished somewhere, and there was the prick of a needle in my arm, and then it all went away properly.

Light, and that smell that said ‘hospital’. I had a drip in my arm, and a mask over my mouth and nose, and I hurt. As I stirred, a policeman, who had clearly been dozing next to my bed, jerked upright.

“Mr Rhodes?”

My answer was a little muffled, with the mask in place, so I nodded.

“Going to call a medic, Mr Rhodes. Don’t think the normal way’s going to work here. Hang on a second, please”

He left my little room, returning three or four minutes later, a nurse in tow as well as another copper.

“Mr Rhodes, I am really sorry about this, but because you have been in a road traffic accident, I am required to check if you have any impairment through alcohol. The thing is, with your injuries, I don’t think it would be appropriate to take a sample of breath”

“Injuries?”

The nurse fiddled with the drip.

“Fractured sternum and two ribs, and a damaged lung, Michael. Doctor will tell you more when he does his rounds, but you are doing well now”

The first copper nodded.

“Not right to make you blow into my little machine, Mr Rhodes. I simply need your permission to take a blood sample. Sorry for this bit, but a refusal to comply is an offence in itself, for which you may be arrested. I am also sorry for the next questions, but when did you last have a drink?”

“About ten last night. We only had a few, cause we were… I don’t drive or ride with a hangover”

“Thank you, and that is appreciated. Nurse here will take some blood, and then we are done”

“What about Caro? My wife?”

The second copper made a face, and my man shook his head.

“Mr Rhodes, I am PC 433 Ibbotson, traffic officer, just for reference. I’ll leave you a note with my details. I am with the Northants force. I am really sorry to have to tell you this…”

He was as kind as he could be, as kind as anyone could ever have managed, but there is nothing kind in such news, nor could there ever be.

I was released after far too long a stay, as my various fractures and wounds settled into ache rather than agony, but I had a bottle of oxygen in the house for quite a while before my lung was properly healed, and there was an inquest.

PC Ibbotson was there, a man who had taken the trouble to ring me at home to confirm that my blood sample had returned the result he had expected. Jenny my paramedic was there, along with Cam Mackie, who had been driving the wagon behind us, and still had nightmares where he hadn’t been able to stop, as he had managed. Jim, who had called the emergency services, said his bit, as did Neil Shepherd, his driver, whose tyre it was that had caused so much pain, and who broke down in the middle of his evidence.

The verdict was simple: misadventure. Accident. The doctor’s evidence was that she had sustained a broken neck and a dislocated shoulder, but he couldn’t be sure if the damage had been done before or after she had hit the road.

The coroner gave his verdict, expressed his sympathy, and I went home and lined up all my bottles of single malt after one look into our wardrobes.

Alan and Auds didn’t push to drop off our kit, and Keith and Penny popped in frequently enough to make sure I was eating, often actually bringing food and insisting on eating it with me. Once my lover’s body was released, it was the two of them who stirred me into organising her funeral, and by ‘stirred’ I mean they actually did most of the arranging off their own bat.

It wasn’t a big thing. We buried her in Stopsley, and what passed for a wake/reception, whatever the bloody term it is for an afternoon piss-up when the love of your life goes into the ground, was of course held in the Red Lion. I ended up at Keith and Pen’s, throwing up in the small hours into a bowl they had left by the sofa.

It took a long, longtime before I could function again, but my employers were diamonds, utterly unlike the shitfest that Derek/Simes would no doubt have gloried in unleashing. It was two months before Alan and Auds turned up at my door on a Saturday, pushed their way in and simply stuffed my harness and rock boots into a rucksack. Audrey was insistent.

“Change. Now”

I was shoved and tugged into their car, and to my surprise we set off south, around the M25 and past the Dartford crossing. Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, and finally into a carpark with a long stretch of tawny rocks that looked rather soft, like gritstone’s soppier brother. Alan turned in his seat.

“Needed to get you out, mate, but didn’t want to take you… Well, you understand. This is Bowles Rocks, pay to climb, and the rock is weird, but well, you understand. This is a day out, with an option to climb if you want. Otherwise, just sit in the sun with a cuppa, and we’ll climb. Now…”

He went through a recitation of local etiquette, largely based on the simple fact that the alleged rock was as soft as butter, so no gear, long extensions over the edge to avoid rope-cut grooves, bar towels to wipe sandy dust off holds, and so on.

Of course I climbed. What else could I do? There were very few jams, a lot of palming and friction moves, and everything was rounded, and as a result I found myself getting more and more absorbed in the physical poetry of climbing. It was weird rock; where I would have thugged a grit route, I had to pull back and use control and, to be honest, delicacy in some moves. I ended up really enjoying it, in a perverse way.

Gradually, then, I came out into the world again, and everyone seemed to be happy with that. I kept my own counsel, though, about the thing I had found in Carolyn’s…

That particular act very nearly broke me, clearing her clothes from our home. Some went to friends, most to charity shops, and throughout it all I felt a horrible and painful sense of finality. She was really dead, and that just confirmed it, as did the used pregnancy test kit in her bedside drawer,

Positive.