“I didn’t have so much as a splintered fingernail. Amid a Milky Way of witnesses, my bones glowed with guilt and loneliness. An endless stream of hi-vis men and women pirouetted between each other. Soon, the dead end of the highway was alive.Ĭones of red and blue spun on the road like strobe lights. “Ambulances are coming,” said a stranger. The glow from my iPhone revealed the white shock of his skull. A crooked Z was carved between his hairline and eyebrow. He’d flown head-first from the boot as we crossed the median strip. I located Nick 10 metres away, lying parallel to the fog line. “Another one?” said one of the first responders. I searched below, above and beside the boot. Hamish reclined against the bumper, eyes closed. The back cavity had been ripped open like a tin of tuna. “Wait!” said the man, or the woman, or maybe someone else. I scooted to the boot of the crushed Fairlane. The first responders yanked me to safety. “No! Don’t!” I ignored her advice and pitched my hands into the void across Dom. Is that something you can do for me?” I scanned for an exit route and found one through the driver’s window. “Sweetie,” she said, “I need you to sit still. An off-duty nurse joined a man at the driver’s side window. Credit: Nine NewsĪ team of swift Samaritans assembled, divvying up the injured between them. I reached out and shook Tim’s arm, calmly and then much more urgently.įirst responders at the scene of the crash. The back seat was a mess of erect necks and flaccid limbs.

Sick sounds issued from the lips of four friends in the grip of oblivion.

Wipers whipped across shattered windscreens. There was a glimpse of black as my head reeled from soft impact against the dashboard. Then it hit: another car, speed meeting speed, like two protons colliding. Screams howled from the back seat as we flew into a flood of high beams. By rights I should’ve been the bullseye, but we scraped a tree stump crossing the median strip, spinning us another 90 degrees. Within seconds we’d travelled to the median strip, then traversed to the wrong side of the highway. We slid into the gravel, out and in again. This was the split second of our unravelling.ĭom reefed on the steering wheel, a knee-jerk attempt to regain control. The back tyre spun out in the mouth of a gravel driveway. We’d drifted onto the left-hand shoulder of the four-lane highway. My gaze shifted between the competing sheets of glass. There was a swift change in our direction. A message from my soon to be girlfriend Frida, asking about our date the next day. The New England Highway, half-lit and disappearing, burnt a blur into my brain. 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. The speakers blasted Wonderwall by Oasis.

Up front there was nothing between the road and me except the windscreen and thin air.

Thanks to Nick, Tim and I had been consorting with the sons and daughters of old Queensland money. Eighteen months earlier, Nick had been imported to Downlands on a sporting scholarship. The others went to Downlands, an elite co-educational school on the north side. Tim and I went to St Mary’s, a Catholic athletes factory in Toowoomba’s western suburbs. We were in our final year of high school. Teenage boys in country towns don’t stage committee meetings before climbing into car boots. I didn’t witness the process of their entry. Our second lift had fallen through at the last minute, so they’d drawn the short straw. Hamish – pale and lanky, with thick black hair – was in the boot with Nick, thin brown hair above a squat frame. He had the same blond hair and blue eyes as Dom, the driver. Henry was in the seat behind me, tall and thin. He was broad-shouldered and short-haired like Will, back-right. Short and soft-bodied with a black mop, I was a poet moonlighting as a hoon. I’d shotgunned the front passenger seat of the 1989 gold Ford Fairlane. We were driving the 10-minute trip from a barbecue in the sticks back home to Toowoomba. It was 9.45pm on Saturday – the Labour Day long weekend. There were seven of us: five in the car and two in the boot. “No matter how you twist it, Life stays frozen in the headlights” – John Ashbery

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