Strange Sally Diamond

I had never heard Dad scream before. What a strange sound. I opened my mouth but, like in a nightmare, no sound came out. Blood filled my vision and I could hear the loud twisting of metal and the cracking of bones as we fell until we stopped. The car was upside down. I wiped the blood from my eyes with my shaking hands. My door had been torn off. Dad’s door was wedged against the earth, mud tumbling through the shattered windscreen on top of us. I unbuckled the seat belt that was tangled around my knees and fell on to the ceiling of the car before hauling myself out. When I tried to stand up and orientate myself, I felt a searing pain through my right ankle. I looked back at Dad. He was still screaming. His shirt was stained with blood. The car had crumpled around him and it looked like he was crushed against the door. The way he was positioned, he couldn’t reach it. His right arm was mangled and broken. The smell of petrol filled my nostrils and I noticed a plume of flame in the undergrowth at the rear of the car.

‘It’s on fire,’ I said, my voice trembling.

Dad lunged towards me. ‘Get me out!’ His head was pinned sideways to the roof of the car. It would have been easy for me to release him from the seat belt. I’m sure there would have been time. I could have pulled him out. But, instead, I scrambled up the incline with my elbows, dragging my useless foot, grunting with pain. Dad was screaming again, begging, ‘Don’t leave me here! Peter! Please!’ and then in fury, ‘I am your father. Get me out!’ I heard the flames taking hold as I edged my way up the embankment. I heard my father’s screams. I didn’t look back.

I woke up on a stretcher at the side of the road in the dark as the ambulanceman lifted my right foot. Another one held my head with his bare hands. The shock was intense, but I wasn’t sure if it was the fact that he was touching me or the pain in my ankle. My shirt and jacket lay in ribbons on the grass verge. My trousers had been cut open. I didn’t dare to look down at my foot. The ambulancemen talked to me in soft and sorrowful voices. ‘What’s your name, kiddo?’

What was my name? I felt exhausted, too tired to talk. One of the men said, ‘I think he’ll be okay. Not coughing blood or clutching his stomach, so probably no internals. You think that was his dad?’

I raised my head long enough to say, ‘Yeah, that was my dad.’

Everyone touched me in hospital, the nurses, the doctors, the police, the social worker, the chaplain. In my haze of medication in the first two days, each touch was joyous. I shook hands with everyone, cried tears, laughed aloud at the craziness of everything that happened. My foot was operated on straight away. I had broken my ankle. They said it was a clean break. Six weeks in a plaster cast and using crutches and I’d be as good as new.

Every time a nurse or a lady doctor touched me below the neck, I got an erection. Most of them noticed and ignored it, but some kindly told me that it was nothing to be embarrassed about and that it was a totally normal reaction, especially at my age. I felt less like a freak by the day.

I had a laceration across my hairline where my head had hit the rear-view mirror. Nine stitches across my head made me look a little bit like Frankenstein’s monster. The food was regular and about as wholesome as whatever Dad and I had cooked. I shared a ward with four other men, all much older than me. I had never shared a room with anyone before, not since those two nights when I was seven years old. These men spoke to me sympathetically. A nurse told me she had turned away a local journalist who wanted to ask me about my father’s last moments. They were all disturbed when I explained that I had no living relatives. They referred to me as the orphan.

Everyone in the hospital felt sorry for me. I got anything I asked for, including a haircut and new clothing.

The police ruled that my dad’s death was accidental. I said I had swerved to avoid a dog. It wasn’t unusual to see dogs everywhere around Rotorua, so it was entirely believable. The police were kind. They handed me a bag of what they were able to recover from the car and from my dad’s burnt corpse: his broken watch with its melted strap, his fake wedding ring, his large set of keys and a briefcase containing some tax forms and that day’s newspaper that had been thrown from the car.