All the bases

A scar can be described as an unwanted tattoo. My face suffered slight scarring from a car crash when I was young. Adults held different reasons for the injury. But, beyond conjecture, the force of the accident catapulted me out of the vehicle.

Our small family car idled at the edge of a Victorian highland highway—a morning of rolling fog in the winter of 1968. My mother stopped to retrieve a coat stowed in the boot of a vehicle lacking heating. Parking on the grass verge, she saw a sedan in the rear mirror approach.

"Sarah, I'll wait. There is a wagon coming."

Josh's mum sat in the front passenger seat. She touched the coiled braid of her hair as she listened. My mate and I lounged on the passenger seat, bored.

The station wagon hit our car. Towing a speedboat, it clipped our vehicle like a punch to the back of the head. Later, we realised the car had spun; we avoided flipping or rolling. In an era of no seat belts, unaware, the spinning momentum hurled me out of the vehicle. A child meteorite on a collision course with fate. As dangerous as walking out to investigate retreating ocean water in a tsunami.

The great unknown, how I survived? Parts of my memory about the crash are blank.

Is this because the mind closes during traumatic events? It is like death is an assured, preordained event, irreversible.

The impact lives as noise—a heavy, dense bang—a blunt, bludgeoning, a thick wham as metal collided and yielded. Panels groaned as they buckled. A jarring, ear-drumming tumult. A shocking bursting boom.

Hurled afar, faster than a giddy spinning top, luck landed me on my tush!

An unexpected perspective cast me in the role of an observer. Ahead, I stared at our small black Holden on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. My pants seeped wet, saturated, as I sat in a paddock in the foggy dew. Strange, I recall the grass, dark green and short and unseen cows mooing in the distance.

The car became my fixation, even though a cow pat split my legs and a trickle of blood leaked and spread on my jaw. A warmish smear spread on the palm of my clammy hand.

The Holden's boot was smashed, crumpled, and mangled.

A door grated and rumpled offensively as I tracked my mother's totter before she leaned on the bonnet. Her head rose, and her eyes scanned. As she located me, her voice wafted, concerned, her words unclear. Then and now, the distance between us remained more extensive than in reality. To a child, the metres loomed formidable, separating and detaching.

Whatever my mom said, I answered, "Mummy, I've lost my shoe."

After that, I don't remember who lifted me off the grass. I retrieve a faint recollection of a ride seated in an ambulance's bowels.

The shoe remained missing, forgotten, and forever unpaired.

What followed was a rural hospital, nurses and doctors.

An ER guy hoisted me onto a high bed covered in a crisp white sheet.

So crunchy snowy. Milky. Lily or chalk hues. Starched and bleached.

A doctor came into the small room.

He asked my mother, "Any idea what cut his chin so deep, mam?"

"Perhaps the edge of the car door! If it was the top of the barbed wire fence, I thank God he sailed over it!"

"But what did his eye smack into? I have to admit his black eye is a shocker. The worst I have ever seen!"

"Doctor, maybe the swinging door, surely not a fence post?"

"Well, we may never know, mam? Though the score grazing on his cheek suggests the wire? Perhaps the shattering glass?"

To this day, the finest of lines — a personal chops watermark.

Josh suffered, too, as the rear window shattered and glass fragments splintered and stuffed his skull like buckshot pellets. In the ambulance, he nursed his bandaged head, war veteran style.

Later, he ranted about being tossed and thrown in the car. Over the years, he joked, he lost his brains that morning.

Both our mothers, seated in the front, emerged dazed and bruised by the crash. Otherwise, they remained unharmed.

Josh manned up next to me in the emergency department, receiving his stitches.

When it came to my turn, I snivelled.

"Luke, don't be a baby. My oh my, Josh has already had seven stitches in the back of his head, and he never cried."

As gloved fingers flashed a needle at my chin, I shut my eyes.

I opened them when Mum patted my shoulder.

She said, "Now that wasn't so bad."

As the doctor exited the room, he said to the nurse, "The boys will need to stay overnight."

This event became an adventure. The nurse escorted Josh and me to hospital beds in a big ward, where other patients included old blokes.

Under his blanket, Josh said, "It was like I was hit by a grenade, Luke. Geez, your eye looks rough! This is us being wounded, green berets."

The nurse interrupted, "Boys, I need to check your full names."

Embarrassed, we mumbled our second Christian moniker.

"Boys, will you make me check it on the charts? Come on, clearly, please!"

We fired our baptismal identity in tandem.

Then sat silent till the nurse walked away.

Her voice trailed, "Like a roll call of The Disciples."

Josh formed his arms and fingers into a sniper rifle, aiming at the nurse's backside.

"Bang," he said, then added, "We will look the battle-hardened wounded part next time we play special force marines hunting those sneaky Vietcong."

Josh chattered like a fighting soldier.

I recalled at home, our stockpile of toys included cap guns, camouflage shirts, and plastic machine guns whose triggers clicked and made a rat-a-tat-tat sound. The backyard bushes flourished as a hunting ground for tracking sneaky VC. Josh and I tossed a coin to decide who would play the 'bad guys.' Unless someone younger played as 'cannon fodder.'

A movie diet of slain villains, minus genuine understanding or empathy for the dead of war, provided our stimulus for conflict games. Our black and white television screens showed the horror of war. As minors, we did not understand Buddhist monks self-immolating on Saigon streets.

Now, my memories lay scattered. My mind meshes two different times. In the sixties with Josh, bang, bang, you're dead! Get up when you count to one hundred! As a young man in the eighties, I recall impactful black-and-white photographs from the Iran-Iraq conflict.

As kids, I remember Josh and I cheated when counting and jumping entire tens sequences. Yet, we honoured the principles of the game. We counted one to ten, then ninety-eight, ninety-nine, and a slow-paced, loud one hundred. We played war games. But real war is death. Not, oh, I'm dead and jumping up after garbling some numbers.

I recall a Time magazine snapshot of an underage child soldier. Serving in the Iran-Iraq war, photographed crawling forward toward the front line. The caption stated he died soon after. In contrast, Josh and I 'died' repeatedly. The boy-soldier in the photo once.

Cheating the game count makes me remember when I was two-faced with Josh. At the end of November '74, he confided to me at table tennis. He spilled the details of what I partially knew; he cheated on Coral and indulged Brittany in his van at the beach.

"Sweet Jesus, I decked out my new van, believing it would be for Coral! Though Brit is hot. I must admit she is hot. Busty and blonde, eh mate!"

As he spoke, his face alternated between pleasure and a grimace—the relished smugness of sexual satisfaction when elaborating on a provocative Brit. While every time he mentioned Coral, he winced and furrowed his brow.

"Damn it! How will Coral react? Luke, believe me, I only went to the beach to surf with Max, not chase his little sister. I should have sucked it up and attended Coral's mum's birthday party- so boring though!"

Josh twirled his paddle.

"You were at the beach, Luke. You could have stopped me!"

"Mate! What could I do? Besides, who could stop Ruby? She planned your downfall to get Coral for herself!"

"Yeah, and I fell for it. Though who wouldn't have? I was a goner once Brit removed her bikini top!"

I pondered a seduction tip provided by Ruby, who joined Brit at the seaside—a topless Brittany made Josh follow her agenda.

After the initial singles game, he supplied the details of the sex in his panel van.

"Damn that, I didn't play well. My mind drifted to Brittany. Geez, the minx moved through foreplay fast."

He whistled.

Then divulged, "I kissed her, and as I did, she guided my hand between her legs."

A double grip on my table tennis paddle, rather than Josh's glee-filled face, became my focus.

He said, "God, she was wet, you know where!"

Josh dropped his table tennis bat.

His hands-shaped breasts and lewd gestures suggested tugging and a head job.

"She raced through the bases and launched her snatch at me."

I pictured Brittany's curves and her whispered reputation, 'easy.'

She hunted boys.

Josh concluded, spreading broad hands, "I felt so good inside her! It was amazing!"

He stopped and changed focus to prep time as our next match began.

After we lost the doubles game, I patted his back.

"You are way down on form, mate."

"Yeah, and I'll need your help to get back Coral! Damn Brit, so fast, so uncomplicated versus Coral, but I should have waited for her, for our together!"

"Later, yeah, later, Josh. Right now, let's play the reverse singles."

After his final match loss, Josh said, "Sorry, Luke, my mind wasn't in it. We should have won. We were the favourites. Damn it!"

"No worries, mate."

"Okay, our table tennis season is over. But what about Coral? Should I take her fishing at the jetty?"

My lips pursed. I let my mate unload.

"But if she tells me what to wear or uses that silly bear name for me, Baloo, I'll… I'll…"

I noted my friend's mature sideburns versus his juvenile voice.

Josh pushed hard on the glass swinging doors as we exited the stadium.

My eyes audited his pimped van: a sleek golden paint job and mag wheels.

Mid-car park, he grabbed my arm. I bounced off his tensed frame.

His jaw tightened, "My uncle has offered me a job in his workshop in Ballarat to be a mechanic."

"Yeah, you like cars, and your dad does pressure Uni on you like Coral."

"Mate, Uni is not for me."

At the tricky part, he slumped.

"Will Coral take me back?"

I shuffled my feet and avoided eye contact as he ran his fingers through his dark hair.

I pictured his girlfriend, my bestie, venting, and given his cheating, any second chance involved a scorching scolding and a tight forward reign. Yet, I knew Coral's nature; she would accept her boy back!

"I take your silence as I better go to Ballarat. I don't want to see her face when she knows I've messed up. I'll go make a new start."

Josh opened his van.

I sat with arms folded as he mashed the throttle and completed a burnout before driving off fast.

Josh talked himself into running away because I quashed supporting him by not advising, 'rebound to Coral.' 

He withdrew and avoided seeking his girlfriend's flinty forgiveness. 

I failed to share Coral's capacity to harbour no long term malice.

Exasperated, Josh floated alone. 

God damn it, I left my mate aching in a maelstrom for a near eternity for the mellifluous Coral.