Concussion

“Love is wise. Hatred is foolish... If we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”

- Bertrand Russell

She never knew when the darkness began. There had been shouting, Mum pleading with her to put on her belt, then an immense wall of black had materialized, instantly blotting out the light. Imogen found herself cocooned in a void, without sound, shape or form. Yet rather than dread the silence, she felt at ease with her surroundings. It proved to be a welcome alternative, this quiet serenity, to the fighting that would surely have awaited her when they arrived home.

She could envision the chain of events if she squinted hard enough into the dark. Faded, disjointed images drifting separately, yet connected by the same theme.

Mum would drag her out of the car and into the hallway. She would call Imogen a “disgraceful, disobedient child” – a common jibe she heard often – before addressing her behaviour at the supermarket, in front of other parents, in the town centre; generally somewhere filled with the gazes of strangers. It would be made quite clear that she had never felt so embarrassed. Imogen would snap back. Mum would raise her voice to a fever pitch. Dad would overhear from a distant corner of the house. He would intervene, shouting gruffly at either one of them, and Mum would loose her venom on him instead. He would, of course, retaliate.

Imogen would slip quietly upstairs, unnoticed, stepping inside her bedroom wardrobe to curl up in one of its corners, a pillow mummifying her ears to the worst of the rage. The darkness that she now encountered reminded her greatly of her wardrobe, minus the requirement of a pillow.

In hindsight, her refusal to wear a seatbelt had been purely to spite her Mum. Mum had made the fatal mistake of asking Imogen, in a morbidly sarcastic tone, if “she wanted to see her mother go to prison for not making her wear it.”

The memory turned to fog and a faint greyish light emerged, as if Imogen sat on the floor of a deep ocean and could only now look up and see the water's surface. A pair of hands erupted from the grey. The fingernails were coated in nail varnish, the right hand sporting a wedding ring. They embraced Imogen, at first clutching her shoulders and gently shaking them, then holding her chin and exploring her forehead, brushing aside strands of her hair.

The darkness, receding away like melting snow, struggled to keep the light at bay. Eventually it burned itself out. What prevailed were a collection of blurred shapes. Some appeared geometric in composition, others existed in softer, less defined arrangements like coloured patches in a tapestry. Most of them remained still but one, a pixelated mass of screaming, was wildly charged and animated, caught in the throes of hysterics.

Imogen suddenly began to pick up sound again, if it could be called that as such. It was a high-pitched whine familiar to anyone who had experienced tinnitus. The raging tornado of objects was also producing sound but had no clarity. As the seconds crawled by the whining gradually started to wear off. In unison with Imogen's sight, it grew sharper, decipherable.

Imogen's senses, at last, unscrambled reality. She lay on the backseat of the car, slumped on one side with her arms hung over the seat's edge. She was aware for the first time of an intense pain that flared up inside her skull. Imogen repressed the feeling of nausea that accompanied it.

The maniacal, raging shapes had now merged together into the wailing image of Mum. The hidden sound revealed itself as incomprehensible shouting. Her face was puffed up and red, twisted into pure rage, her eyes waterlogged. She had a cut that grinned across the bridge of her nose, the blood flowing along the contours of her lower face.

Imogen weakly brought up a hand to check her own face. Her fingers didn't catch any gore but she could trace the outline of a tumorous bulge that grew from under her fringe. The smallest glimpse in the rear-view mirror showed it to be a delicate pinkish-red.

Mum's yelling had been replaced with heavy panting. She checked over Imogen's body one last time. Imogen instinctually wanted to push her off but could only groan instead.

“Don't try to move”, Mum said after finishing, “stay here.”

She disappeared from Imogen's view. From the corner of her eyes, she could hear glass crackling and metal groan as the driver's door opened and shut. The car was now surprisingly quiet in her mother's absence. Sleep called to her, that it might alleviate the worst of the migraine.

Imogen just then remembered from a kid's TV show (an episode in which the enthusiastic presenters shadowed the movements of an ambulance crew) that, in cases of serious head injury, it could be dangerous for the patient to fall asleep, so she resisted the urge to snooze, afraid that she may not wake up.

Looking over at the opposite window to where she lay, Imogen almost cried out. A motorcycle helmet had bobbed in and out of sight without precedence. Now startled, Imogen could sense the rush of adrenaline taking its course, the gravity of the situation weighing her down.

It was time to make a move.

She reached out a feeble arm, clawing her way up the back of the seat, wanting to grip anything solid. Her hand found the top of the seat and she pulled. She fell back into her original position, unable to support her own body weight. Her body lay in a more crooked, uncomfortable position.

Outside the wreckage, Imogen became aware of raised voices, one of them being her mother's. She was hurling copious amounts of profanity at an unknown person who, from the general ambience of the conversation, was probably counter-attacking with their own colourful language. Whether it was the man with the motorcycle helmet, Imogen couldn't say.

Head still furiously pounding, she turned slowly onto her back, tensing up her muscles for another try at sitting up. This time, she jabbed her elbows into the cushions of the seat, intending to lift her upper body into an upright position.

It was just as tough; her abdominal muscles hardened into iron from the strain. But she was able to raise her head to within a foot of the ceiling handle. Summoning up what energy her tired body had left, Imogen thrusted up an outstretched hand.

It caught the handle. Ensnaring her fingers in its grip, she started to pull herself up. As she sat up, a searing pain flared up in her left leg. Mum, in her panic, had not thought to check if there were any broken limbs or pieces of glass imbedded in Imogen's flesh. Fortunately there appeared to be no bleeding but it was impossible to tell if it was just a sprain or something more serious.

Imogen breathed hard through the fiery pain. She pushed off the handle, slumping onto the head of the seat. The windscreen was now decorated in a spider-web crack, minute diamonds of glass collected in the dashboard. The impact must have occurred from the passenger's side for the door was now concave, the side mirror ripped from its moorings and the interior buckled inwards. The airbags on both sides had been detonated. Imogen briefly wondered if any broken glass had caused the scratch on her mother's nose.

She peered further through the decimated windscreen and could see the man in the helmet engaged in a shouting match with her mother and another middle-aged gentleman wearing a designer jacket. Imogen couldn't see the rider's bike which meant that it must be somewhere behind the car.

The other man's vehicle was parked on the embankment adjacent to the crater left on their car. The bonnet had crumpled inwards, the sheet metal bending in on itself, and the headlights had shattered inwards. Imogen could discern that he must have been the one to collide with them but what the motorcyclist had to do with any of this had yet to be answered. From the blazing riot outside, it seemed they were unsure as well.

The well-dressed man had unsheathed a smartphone and was threatening to use it. The man in the helmet stabbed his finger towards a position behind the crash site, presumably where he was slammed into. Imogen noticed that as he waved his arms, gesticulating his body erratically as he did so, he moved with a limp.

Mum was focusing her attention on the smartly-dressed man. She yelled with a force greater than Imogen was used to, framing the cut on her nose with two index fingers. The recipient of her wrath never raised his eyes from his phone. Its screen was as obliterated as the windscreen and he intensely prodded the surface trying to revive it.

Motorcycle man sensed his point wasn't getting across. Dismissing the other two with a wave of his arm, the leather torn and blackened by the road, he hobbled over to the grassy embankment, one leg still rigid, and camped on the ground to nurse his injuries. His hands swept his helmet as he did so. Miraculously, it was still intact.

Imogen's attention returned to her mother. The attempted phone-call (whether police or insurance) had obviously not gone through. The man had spent the best part of five minutes alternating between Mum and trying to coax a response from the phone to no avail.

The pain in Imogen's head pulsated behind her eyes. She used a free hand to wind down the nearest window. Fortunately the rear part of the car still functioned and a strong breeze ruffled her fine hair, delivering the welcome relief she desperately needed. The cool wind, at least, took of the edge of the migraine.

She could also hear the altercation happening outside more clearly. It sounded much worse than it looked.

Mum was in the middle of a tirade regarding the safety of her child.

“She's suffering from a serious concussion right now and all thanks to you smashing into me”, she roared, “ I had right of way and you just didn't give a shit. You ignored me completely and you almost killed my daughter!”

“Maybe if you shut your gob for two seconds, I could explain to you how you just wrecked a quarter of a million pound car and how you can shove it and take it up with my solicitor, you stupid fucking cow!” The phone leapt out of the man's grasp, landing several feet away on the tarmac. It skidded towards the motorcyclist who was still preoccupied in massaging the hamstrings of his injured leg.

The man hesitated, glaring at Imogen's mother but too startled to know how to react. Mum stood her ground defiantly, proud of her outburst, her expression daring the man to fight back or retreat.

Imogen's nerves, having been set on edge from this sudden turn of events, couldn't hold back her stomach. She could feel the onset of bile rising up into her throat. Her forehead was coated in sweat and her fringe stuck to it in stringy cloisters. At this point, what was she holding back for, she thought.

She hurled. Loudly. The floor of the car was splattered in green.

Mum overheard from the open window and turned her head towards the car. Momentarily distracted, she never saw the gentlemen's hands enclose themselves around her neck from behind.

Imogen emitted a panicked scream, fumbling with the door handle, instinct and adrenaline overriding all logic. The weight of the door was too overwhelming and she barely pried it open ajar.

The struggle had turned one-sided. The man had Mum held down on her knees. Her tights had split open from stray pieces of gravel on the road, her kneecaps bleeding freely. She dug her cat-like fingernails into his wrists, trying to hurt her attacker in some way. Instead of halting his assault, it only antagonised the strangler. His steel-like grip tightened.

Her thrashing was beginning to slow down, her body falling lower to the ground as her oxygen was cut off. Her eyes darkened.

But then the murderous fingers uncoiled as the assassin's head was violently shunted forward. An explosion of plastic knocked the would-be assailant off balance and Imogen's mother rolled onto her back, gasping for life. The strangler landed hard on the centre road markings, spread eagle. Imogen called out for her mother, unable to move the back door with so little strength.

The motorcyclist tossed the remains of his helmet into the grass before pogoing on one foot to the mother. She accepted his awaiting arm and stood hunched over, arms crossed and held against her diaphragm.

“I've just called the police,” the motorcyclist said, holding up his own smartphone, “they should be here in a few minutes.”

“Mum!” The force of Imogen's call had sprayed phlegm onto the window pane.

“You should check on her”, he advised. Mum steadied herself. Pushing off the man standing, she came down upon the unconscious body predatorily. She clawed his face, stabbed her thumbnails directly into his pupils, twisted out whatever patches of hair were trapped in her fingers.

“Stop it! Mum, please, come back!” Imogen didn't cry out again after that. Her throat was raw from acid. Fresh tears were her only consolation even though the act of sobbing hurt just as much as her head. She hid her gaze into the faux leather of the seat, preferring to burrow her sight in another darkness.