chapter one: research project

‘Jim was a traffic cop. Motorbikes. Always been a biker. Trail bikes, scooters even, moto-cross, superbikes, you name it, he’d ridden it. Had a signed photograph of Barry Sheene taken at Donnington on his bedroom wall for years. Came off a Norton Commando on the A38 once. Didn’t get hurt, much. Belstaff saved him. The cop that attended kept him talking while they waited for the ambulance. Told him about the Electra Glide he had at home. Told him about the job, being a motorbike cop, anything to keep Jim’s mind off his injuries, trying to prevent him going into shock. Anyway they kept in touch for a bit and eventually Jim took the exams. Nothing else to do in that part of South Yorkshire by then.
So Jim was a traffic cop. Used to patrol the M1. White Beamer. K1100 LT. Full fairing. Great in straight lines, but…… Anyway, one afternoon he was on local duty in town, when he got a call about some kids who’d boosted a Subaru and were running lights and doing rally style turns outside Bentley, near Doncaster. He got there pretty smartly and sure enough they were burning rubber on the edge of an estate grandstanding for a crowd of teenagers. Course as soon as they see the police bike they’re off. Nothing they enjoy more than a chase and if he’s honest, Jim didn’t mind it either. Crowd disappears down the side streets and the car takes off, fast. With 276+ bhp, and 260 lb/ft of torque this thing can accelerate faster than just about anything else on the road, even give some Porsches a run. This one has the full McRae trim, right down to the gold coloured alloys so it’s probably turbo charged too.
Jim’s in pursuit mode now, lights and siren and a call to control. They’re heading for the motorway when they pull a handbrake turn at a roundabout, pretty neat manoeuvre it has to be said, especially for a fifteen year old, and before Jim knows it they’re behind him, trying to ram the chuffin’ bike.
Well, he was having none of that. One of his best mates got invalided out just last year when a stolen Land Rover deliberately took him off the road on the A61 near Alfreton.
So he evades their attentions for a mile or so and just as they’re approaching the junction for the M1 southbound the kid loses control and it spins off into a ditch. So Jim hauls round and just as he’s radioing in he can see a car on fire down on the slip road below. The young cunts are off over the fields by now, legging it sharp while the Scooby Doo’s lying with its arse in the air, engine bellowing like a bull in a slaughterhouse. So Jim cancels the pursuit and goes to investigate the fire'.
The narrator pauses to relight his fag which has gone out in the telling. He exhales a wreath of blue smoke and recommences the narrative.
‘Jim always said that approaching a crash scene was the worst part. Not knowing what to expect. He could see there was a small group of people from some cars parked on the hard shoulder and they were all caught between wanting to help and being beaten away by the flames. The car was a bonfire. The petrol tank must have blown and so he pulls up a regulation 20 metres from the scene and walks forwards. Someone, the mother as it turns out, is screaming and wailing and fighting a couple who are trying their best to restrain her. When she sees him she breaks off and rushes at him, launches herself at him, still screaming, ‘My baby! My baby! My baby’s in the car!’
The fag’s gone cold again but he can’t relight it because his hands are shaking too much. But he can still talk. Just about. His voice is clotting and the vowels are coming out in lumps. He gulps air, sucks it in like the cigarette smoke he craves.
‘What can you do? The rules are plain. You wait for the fire brigade. You’ve got to. The driver had pulled over when she thought she could smell burning coming from the engine and directly she got out the door the fucking thing blew, knocked her clean into the carriageway, nearly got hit by a truck.
Her daughter, thirteen, was in the back seat because sitting up front made her car-sick. Jim could see the corpse plain enough through the flames. She was wearing one of those baseball caps a lot of the kids had then with a little metal logo on the side. It didn’t mean anything, wasn’t a boy band or owt, just a little design. It was starting to melt and it trickled down the side of her face like molten tears.
Jim just got on with organising the witnesses. It’s not that he didn’t care, it was just a way of getting the job done. The ambulance crew dealt with the mother, the brigade doused the car, paramedics got the body out and a truck loaded the wreck and took it away. Ten minutes later, apart from the scorched tarmac, there was nothing there to suggest anything had gone wrong. The traffic was building up to the usual gridlock and Jim was on his way back to the station to write up his reports’.
The storyteller pauses and rubs his face like he’s trying to restore the circulation. He goes on.
He went home as usual, they all said. His wife reckoned he was just himself when he got in and at eight o’clock, or thereabouts, their daughter got home from her friend’s place. She was fourteen. Lovely lass. She was wearin…..she was…. she…….
He completely loses the plot at this point and the recording is edited. When it starts up again he’s obviously been crying his eyes out but he continues. He’s rushing it now, though, trying to complete the story before his emotions catch him out again.
She was wearing the same baseball cap. The exact same. So he screams at her. ‘Take that fucking thing off your head! Now, you hear me!’ The wife is shocked. The daughter’s terrified. Her mother puts a protective arm round the girl’s shoulders wondering what’s gone off. She’s never seen him like this before.
‘Take that fucking thing off!’ and he swings at her head to snatch it but she moves, misinterpreting his actions and he catches her on the side of the head with a hand. More screams. Panic. Pandemonium. Tears. Angry shouting. And when the quiet comes back Jim’s nowhere to be seen.
He doesn’t come back that night. Nor the next day neither. The station phones that night enquiring and she talks to the duty sergeant but Jim’s disappeared. Then she gets a call two days later from the police in Bournemouth. Jim’s only nicked his own bike from the compound and driven to the coast where he’s in jail after being found drunk on the beach, wading into the sea because he wanted to rescue some kid from a fire. They’ve sedated him, waiting on a doctor’s report.
Back home again, minus any official charges, he’s suspended from active duty. The desk job drives him crazy. He drinks regularly now. See the wife and daughter less regularly. He’s going to be pensioned off soon. PTSD. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. And that’s my story. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.
And with that he reaches over and switches off the camera. The screen turns blue. The silence swells to fill the room before the psychotherapist flicks off the VCR and brings up the lights. Even this doesn’t shift the quiet that starting to suffocate thought. Eventually Eddie from the orthopaedic ward helps us all out.
‘So, that was actually Jim…… telling his own story, like?’
The psychotherapist explains for us.
‘It’s called disassociation. To help distance themselves from traumatic events some people employ techniques to help them cope. Jim talked about himself in the third person. Some footballers do the same but that’s probably not disassociation, more like bad grammar’.
If you could hear smiles you’d have to strain your ears but the willingness is there. He goes on.
‘We use this series of videoed interviews to help you to understand the far reaching implications of post traumatic stress disorder on people who have been variously involved in road accidents.
Now you’re all here, in the first place, because that’s exactly what’s happened to you, and you’re here, more particularly in this room, because you’ve signed up to a new research project that looks at people’s experiences of hospital care post road accident and as part of that project we’re here today to share some stories.
Now the film you’ve just seen was recorded last year as part of a pilot study that looked at how emergency services personnel experienced road accidents from that perspective. Jim’s story is unfortunately not so uncommon. What we want to do, with your permission, is to make more short films of that nature. These will be used for educational purposes. Our main audience would be ER, trauma staff; accident and emergency if you prefer. But we also want to help improve the psychological services contribution to the general welfare of families, friends and relatives of road accident survivors. And above all we want to help you people because every one of you in this room now will in the future or may already be experiencing psychological difficulties associated with what you’ve been through’.

No shit, Sherlock. And all around the room people are pondering these words. It’s true. Everybody is already fighting the demons in their heads, worrying about the future, scared of what might happen, more scared of what might not.
‘Some degree of psychological impairment is inevitable. Accept it. It will happen. But it doesn’t need to get any worse, it doesn’t need to get so bad you can’t cope and with early intervention we can make sure it stays within your control.
Now before we turn you into Oscar nominees we need to get together as a group, to help each other to accept what’s happened, to talk about it, to share our experiences. The timetable is outlined on the paper you should have found on the chairs when you came in’.
Dutifully we all shuffle our sheets of A4.
‘It may not have escaped your notice that your physical injuries are all being pretty well catered for. In fact by the time you arrived on these premises your healing process was well under way, from a clinical point of view. Most of what has happened since, the medical interventions specifically, are just incremental, a bit lie the icing on the cake. The surgery can sort most things but as expert patients you’ll all know by now that it’s not the physical side that hurts more; it’s up here, and he touches his temple, the real problems are psychological, the ones that hinder recovery are in your heads. There’s a lot of literature out there, and I guess he waved in the general direction of the medical library, but don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the details or make you read any of it… but there’s plenty evidence to suggest that the fuller recoveries are made by those people who can cope best with the sequelae, sorry, jargon, the aftermath, the consequences if you like, of the accident. So this afternoon we’re going to start that process.
Now Jo, and here he indicates a thirty something blonde I’ve seen in physio before, struggling to make her legs maintain her body weight, Jo has volunteered to open by telling us a bit about the accident that got her here. Jo, in your own time please…..He sits down and Jo seems to freeze.
There’s s lot of shuffling of chairs and throat clearing. When it goes hushed Jo starts. But her voice is so quiet nobody can hear a thing. One of the older guys at the back asks her to speak up a bit. He asks her really gently but she burst into tears and runs from the room. Well, ‘runs’ is wishful thinking. Jo is clearly still having some coordination problems. Even so that doesn’t stop the bloke next to me from commenting on the shape of her arse as she exits the room. We both look at each other. Then we look at the floor. Then we both exhale.
The therapist is on his feet immediately.
‘Ok everybody, you’ve just seen how hard it is to talk about your trauma. It happens a lot. Now when Jo gets back to the room, because she’ll be back, don’t worry about that, let’s all give her some encouragement. You don’t need to be an American game show audience but let’s give her some verbal stuff and don’t feel embarrassed about touch. A hug is fine in the circumstances. Ok? Now she’s on her way back so let’s display a bit of sympathy, huh?’
When she gets back there’s a spontaneous round of applause as she sits down again and she cries some more but she’s happier now and the guy who asked her to speak up goes round to her chair and pats her on the back.
Nothing is said but I know that the bloke next to me wishes he was giving her a hug and he knows that I’m thinking the same.
She looks pretty neat from where we’re sitting. 40 maybe? Or perhaps it’s the trauma and lack of sunshine. Puts years on you, apparently. Size ten? Five ten?
The patting goes on a bit too long. It’s a bit like a watching a kid with a pet rabbit but Jo clearly appreciates the gesture and the bloke comes back to his seat with something in his eyes that he’s keen for nobody else to see.
Jo decides she’ll stand at the front now and opens by asking if everybody can hear her at the back. There’s a quick splurge of laughter and a few handclaps and you can see her in front of a group of students somewhere or calling the office together. Then she talks.
‘It was very rainy that night. It had been raining for days. In fact, the weather ruined the weekend really. And the Met office made one of those announcements about not travelling unless your journey was absolutely necessary. Well, I’d been staying with my daughter in Carlisle for the weekend and I had to get to work on the Monday so I reckoned it was absolutely necessary.
There was a strong wind too and the water was pooling in patches on the road surface. It was like being by a seaside wall with waves crashing over the top. The spray from the artics was coming in huge sheets and sitting behind them just wasn’t an option but overtaking was frightening. I could feel the tyres losing touch with the surface. Just then a truck pulled out in front of me. I couldn’t overtake it because it was blocking the lane so I braked and the steering wheel leapt out of my hands and the car touched the back of the lorry in front and did a complete 360 and hit the crash barrier side-on before flipping over and rolling down an embankment at the side of the motorway. This was on the M6, near Preston.
The windscreen shattered on impact and I just remember thinking that the new CD player would probably get broken and how I was glad my daughter wasn’t in the car with me because the passenger door had been caved in by the impact with the barrier and there’s no air bags on that model’.
Jo choked a bit here but stumbled on.
'It seemed to go on rolling and tumbling for ages and I was consciously thinking, “Ok, still here….that’s ok…I’m still alive…” but eventually the car hit a tree and stopped upside down. It was so quiet then that I could hear the birds screaming and squawking above me, well, beneath me, in the trees. And the air was coming in though the gap where the windscreen had been and I could smell petrol and I got scared the car would catch fire………………'
Jo paused to light a cigarette at this point subtly reminding everybody that this is the only place in the entire fucking building where smoking is allowed.
‘There was glass everywhere, all crunchy and small and the colours were refracted in the moonlight. It was like some stars had broken and the pieces had landed inside the car. At that point I seriously wondered if I’d died or was just hallucinating but then a jolt went through my leg and when I reached down it was just a sticky lump. I unclipped the seat belt then. Mistake. I landed on my head and the pain in my leg made me pass out. The police found me like that with my skirt round my waist and my knickers wet because I’d wee’d myself too. Not very dignified, really.
They shone a torch in to look at the extent of my injuries and they stayed with me until the ambulance arrived. They explained that they were going to leave me in the car because they thought my leg was trapped in the wreckage of the pedals and steering column. It turned out it was just my shoe that was caught but the doctor reckoned not moving me was best because of the way the bone was broken. A comminuted fracture, I think he called it. Anyway I must have passed out again because the next thing I knew I was waking up in a hospital bed with tubes everywhere and the pain…….'
Jo stopped to sob for a bit there while everybody else studied their shoes and wondered whether a round of applause was appropriate for occasions such as this. Nobody knew what to do as we remembered our own injuries. Save for Jo’s sobs it was so quiet in the room you could hear the television in the ward next door. Some day time crap with a canned laughter track and a jazzy theme tune. Eventually the therapist thanked Jo for her story and asked if there were any other offers. A lot of people looked my way but I kept my head down, having found the stitching on my trainers suddenly fascinating to behold. My left leg had gotten a lot thinner and there was a lot of lateral movement available, even when I laced them up tight.
I knew I’d arrived as a bit of a celebrity. Sole survivor of the biggest ever British motorway pile-up, as of last week anyway when the other poor surviving sod had pegged out. Fastest recovery from severe head injury the hospital had ever seen. Star patient to the top neuro consultants and half a dozen medics and therapists and now a room full of people waiting to see if I’d crack.
‘Gary’, says the therapist. ‘your recent and very rapid improvement meant that you were actually the last person to sign up to the project so that means your accident was a bit more recent than anybody else’s. It also means that unfortunately you missed the first meeting the group had when we all got introduced to each other. So, would you mind giving us some of your story…………..you don’t have to give us the whole thing, just enough to set the scene…would you?’
I looked up, swallowed hard. Fourteen people were looking my way. I hadn’t had so much undivided attention since the helicopter flew me to the emergency room, all neatly packaged for transport, blocked and chocked, splinted rigid (spinal trauma having been presumed until excluded) dripping with drips, just like T.V. really. I wish I could have seen it. But I didn’t see much for a while.
The therapist motioned for me to come forward to the front of the assembly. Well, it was worth a short stagger. Who knows, maybe even get a sympathy snog out of it. I shuffled out to the floor.
‘Well’, I began, ‘if you’re sitting comfortably…’ That got a laugh. There wasn’t any one of us could sit comfortably if we tried. The last comfort any of us had had was probably on an operating table under general anaesthetic. God, that ketamine rush. No wonder the kids go wild for it.
‘Well, if you’re sitting comfortably, or even if you’re not…then I’ll begin…………………..’