Ducks in a row

The ducks are in rows three across and four deep, waiting for the lights to change. The young man glances to his right and lightly depresses the accelerator; he will race away if the glance is returned and the vehicle worthy. But the driver is old and the car sedate so he waits, softens the engine, checks his mirror and waves back to friends in the car behind. They’re going to the same place and they’re travelling in a laddish two-car convoy aiming to get there at the same time.

            The old man smiles to himself; he has just been kind and his journey today is a warm one for that reason and others. The sun is not melting the tarmac but it is making rolled-down windows and an elbow on the sill a summer pleasure after the days of rain. He glances left; in his younger days he would have given the laddie in the next car a run for his money when the lights changed. In his older days, he is content with some tuneless whistling.

            Two cyclists weave to the front. Some disdain traffic lights but not these; they each put a foot down and pause, taking in the brightness of the day, the summery whispering of the roadside trees, the midday blue of the sky, and the glinting rear windscreens of vehicles that got lucky by arriving at green. They are well on their way now to shops, the beach, grannies or aunties waiting to be taken for a pub lunch. The air has a slightly metallic tinge to it, of fuel maybe. Someone’s engine needs adjusting.

            The men in the row behind pass sandwiches between them; it may not be possible to eat when they get where they’re going. They salute a can of fizzy drink at the windscreen but their friend up ahead doesn’t see it. He is looking in his rear-view mirror once again but the shiny can is not as important as the dark shape in the sky that is looming and growing and makes no sense.

            The driver to his left sees it too and his brain throws up words such as ‘thrill’, ‘danger’, and ‘excitement’, which seem to apply but in the exact moment in which he sits, feel somehow wrong and inadequate.

            The people at the roadside are about to cross but with their ears unhindered by cocoons of glass and metal stuffed with airbags, or the clamouring streams of noise coming from in-car entertainment systems, they stop and look up. There is impossibility in the sky accompanied by roaring, shrieking, and not enough space left between its world and theirs. Some run; others are transfixed because of the words that push reality away – these things do not happen.

            The traffic lights are extinguished amid a greater brightness. Red and amber but not green.

            The tarmac boils and burns billowing black.

            There are no ducks at the oncoming lights, only witnesses.

SCH 2015.

On August 22nd, 2015, the unimaginable happened. A jet plane which had been part of the Shoreham Air Fayre, failed to pull out of a dive and ploughed into traffic waiting at lights on the A27 towards Worthing.

The people on the eastbound carriageway of the road must have seen it coming but were likely frozen in place, trying to make sense of it. Some of the people in the traffic queue on the westbound side saw it in their rearview mirrors and threw themselves out of their vehicles.

The ones at the front probably heard or saw nothing and we have to hope, also knew nothing about what was about to happen. One, a chauffeur, had let another vehicle into his lane ahead of him. That vehicle got through the lights before they changed.

Like many other people, I sit at those lights often, and the week before at about the same time, I had been there with my two kittens on our way to the vet for their first injections. I still wonder what I would have done if I had seen this nightmare bearing down on us and if I could have got all three of us, none of us, or just me out safely.

The chauffeur and ten other men died that day. We were lucky; me, Flora, and Tallulah, by an accident of timing. Today is the anniversary of that day.

SCH August 22nd, 2023