Lech Blaine - Car Crash: A Memoir

Praise for Car Crash

A poetic, unflinching meditation on the exuberance of youth and the trauma of survival. It shines with a fierce intelligence. Kristina Olsson

A clear-eyed, bruising and tender account of how the moments that thrust you into adulthood can take place in seconds. Lech Blaines journalism has long made me suspect hes one of the best writers of his generation. Car Crash confirms it, without a doubt. Benjamin Law

I began this book with my guts in my mouth. Then, as I read on, I winced with recognition, I laughed and my heart gradually broke open. Its odd to talk about talent when a book covers such sensitive, sad subject matter, but the truth is that Blaine has it. There are wicked one-liners and a mastery of metaphor. This book is for everyone it truly captures something of modern Australia in a tenderly told story of one young mans tumultuous coming-of-age. Bri Lee

Brutal and gutting, but also moving, lyrical, warmly told and very funny, with the kind of wisdom and hope thats made possible by the understanding of pain. Blaine is a fearless writer of great agility and heart, and this book is an astonishing insight into the wild work of grief, in all its dark corners, in all its bright illuminations. Brooke Davis, Lost & Found

A story of carnage and lifelong consequences not just from a single, sudden catastrophe but from the long, slow cataclysm of masculine confusion. Tim Winton

For fans of Don Watson, Corey White and Chloe Hooper Books+Publishing

A profound reflection on the deafening soul noise heard by a beautiful group of young friends fated to live the rest of their lives with the silence of the dead. Trent Dalton

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright Lech Blaine 2021

Lech Blaine asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781863959698 (paperback)

9781743821459 (ebook)

Cover design by Design by Committee

Text design by Dennis Grauel

Typesetting by Typography Studio

Author photograph by James Brickwood

For Will, Hamish and Henry

car crash

noun

a chaotic or disastrous situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for observers

ACT I
THE BYSTANDER

No matter how you twist it,
Life stays frozen in the headlights.

John Ashbery

Black Hole in the High Beams

T here were seven of us: five in the car and two in the boot. We were alive together for the final time. It was quarter to ten on a Saturday night, May 2009 the Labour Day long weekend.

The trip kicked off in the sticks north of Toowoomba, ninety minutes west of Brisbane. Id shotgunned the front passenger seat of the 1989 gold Ford Fairlane. I was short and soft-bodied with a black mop, a poet moonlighting as a hoon.

Tim sat back middle. He was broad-shouldered and short-haired like Will, back right. Henry was in the seat behind me, tall and thin. He had the same blond hair and blue eyes as Dom, the driver. Hamish pale and lanky, with thick black hair was in the boot with Nick, brown hair above a squat frame.

It was our final year of high school. Tim and I went to St Marys, a Catholic factory of athletes in the western suburbs. The others went to Downlands, an elite co-educational school on Toowoombas north side.

Up front there was nothing between the road and me except the windscreen and thin air. The speakers blasted Wonderwall by Oasis, an elegy inside a singalong. My memory is a blinking mix of lyrics belted out incoherently and the stink of alcohol, sweat and cigarettes a million things and nothing in particular.

We stopped at a new set of traffic lights. To our left was the city. To our right was Highfields, one of the fastest-growing subdivisions in carved-up country. Nuclear families hid from chaos on quarter-acre sanctuaries, safe from talkback-fuelled rumours of refugee gangs and possible mosques.

When the lights blazed green, we turned left onto the New England Highway. The speedometer rose: 60, 70, 80, 90. Streetlamps streaked by. The road, half-lit and disappearing, burnt a blur into my brain.

My brand-new iPhone vibrated. A message from Frida. Our courtship was at a critical phase tomorrow afternoon, we were going to the movies before a party at a mansion on the Great Dividing Range.

There was a swift change in our direction. My gaze shifted between the competing sheets of glass. Wed drifted onto the left-hand shoulder of the highway. The back tyre drifted from the road, spinning out in the mouth of a gravel driveway.

This was the split second of our unravelling.

Dom reefed on the steering wheel, a knee-jerk attempt to regain control. We slid in, out and in again. Hed overcorrected an overcorrection. A stream of images flickered in the windscreen. Road half-lit by headlights. Windscreen filled with branches and leaves belonging to the median strip. A dark front yard at the start of a farm.

It took us three seconds to travel from the gravel back to the maze of nature. The Fairlane ploughed to the wrong side of the highway. By rights I shouldve been the bullseye, but the vehicle scraped a tree stump within the median strip, spinning us another ninety degrees.

Screams howled from the back seat as we flew into a flood of high beams. Im dead, I thought. Then it hit: another car, speed meeting speed, like two protons colliding.

I didnt get the luxury of a concussion. There was a glimpse of black as my head reeled from soft impact against the dashboard. After that, everything went berserk. Liquids pissed from engines. Radiators hissed with steam. Car alarms out-screamed one another. Wipers whipped across the shattered windscreen.

The bonnet blocked vision of what wed hit. A sticky fluid pooled around my ankles. Ive pissed myself, I thought. My hairy toes floated in the foam from a six-pack of beers. I wiped blood that wasnt mine onto the sleeve of a new jumper and searched frantically for my iPhone, finding it down beside the seat adjuster.

Sick sounds issued from the lips of four friends in the grip of oblivion. Dom lay face-down on the steering wheel. The back seat was a mess of erect necks and flaccid limbs. I reached out and shook Tims arm, calmly and then much more urgently.

Oi! I yelled. Wake up!

This will go down as the loneliest moment of my life.

A heavy guy appeared at the drivers side window.

Shit! he said. What happened?

I dont know, I said.

Can you turn the car off?

I hadnt noticed the Fairlanes engine still revving. I reached for the keys, but the ignition was missing. It was hidden in the plastic mess where the steering wheel used to be.

I cant, I said.

The man fished under the bonnet and stilled the motor. HEY, CHAMP! Everythings gonna be fine!

The door handle had been obliterated. The window winder was gone. Mine was the only window still intact. I was trapped in a fast-moving disaster, each new fact more startling than the last.

A team of swift Samaritans assembled, divvying the injured between them. An off-duty nurse joined the man at the window.