Chapter 43
The Rabbit
He always wished he hadn’t called attention to the rabbit.
Because maybe in that version of events Dougie would have never seen it, and he would have continued to drive in a straight line, or Wilbur would have gained control of the brake and everything would have been – probably, possibly – okay.
Not totally okay. There would have been consequences.
Dougie had, unmistakably, broken the law at least three times that night.
With the fight, the knife, and now the car.
But then again, all those things stemmed from Wilbur talking him into going out, and dropping the news about Oxford at the most inopportune moment – the start of a night out.
Dougie looked up and saw the rabbit hopping across the tarmac.
And this man, who was so tough in so many of the wrong ways, was at his core just a soft kid who wouldn’t hurt a rabbit.
He swerved wildly. Hands on the steering wheel passing over each other one, two, three times in succession.
It was all so fast and yet so beyond time.
As Wilbur had replayed it so many times, it had slowed with each silent evocation, but really it was just a moment.
The skid, the rough ride onto the verge, seeing the tree right there, front and centre on the pavement.
The silent, oblivious terraced houses beyond.
The sudden tightness in concentration like the air was solidifying around them.
The terrible vulnerability of being flesh and bone, the deafening, fast crunch, and the impossibly violent whip and jerk as they smashed straight into the trunk of the tree.
In the lived version, Wilbur had no time to think, but the Ghost saw now what had saved him.
Unlike his brother, who was upright and facing the windscreen, Wilbur had been in a strange twisted position as he wrestled for control of the car.
And this awkward contrapposto, with his leg trying to reach the brake pedal, meant that he was lower in his seat.
So when he was thrown forward he hit the dashboard at such an angle that his arm and ribs took most of the force.
But still, his head took more of it than he ever realised. And now that the Ghost was watching it all happen, he could amend the memory of it, and also prolong it, as – unlike Wilbur himself – he wasn’t falling fast into unconsciousness.
So the Ghost could properly witness the thump and smash of the window that led to Dougie’s body suddenly being there, glittered with glass and contorted like a collapsed puppet, at the base of the sycamore tree. The kind of shape a body only makes if it has no life left in it.