Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Nineteen has always been my lucky number. It wasn’t so lucky for Betsy. While I was working, a patient reversed his car out of the practice car park, straight into the back of my car.
I dropped my car at the BMW garage and was lent a brand spanking new BMW One Series while mine was repaired.
It was gorgeous, but that was the whole point; to suck you in to a hire purchase agreement you would never normally consider, unless of course you had driven the car, become profoundly attached to it, and somehow convinced yourself that the ridiculous monthly repayments weren’t actually that bad after all.
The smell of the brand-new leather, the feel of the power at the wheel, the quiet hum of the engine, the metallic graphite grey paint, what wasn’t to love?
The one-thousand-pound excess – what was not to fucking love.
Admittedly, I was thinking about John, just for a change, not concentrating as I should have been.
On approaching a small roundabout, I watched the traffic from the right as I waited for an opening to pull out.
After several seconds, I saw my chance and put my foot on the accelerator.
A deafening bang alarmed me, but not as much as the fact that I couldn’t actually go more than a foot forward.
I pressed hard on the accelerator once again. I kid you not.
Sadly, I hadn’t taken into account the car in front of me had not taken the opportunity to progress out onto the roundabout. Not only had I driven into the back of it once, but I had done it a second time for good measure. Fuck.
A middle-aged, angry little man thundered out of his Vauxhall Clio and stormed over to me. I let the window down with a wince and inhaled deeply to prepare for the onslaught of abuse that was surely coming my way.
‘What the fuck were you thinking? Were you even looking at all?’ he shouted.
I presumed it was a rhetorical question and didn’t bore him with my potential new lover and impending divorce.
‘What am I meant to do with this now? How much do you think it’s going to cost to get this fixed?’
I let him vent before I replied. ‘I’m really sorry. This isn’t even my car, it’s a hire car. I’m so sorry.’ I repeated myself about twenty times while he stood there shaking his head and pointing at the back of his car.
I didn’t dare get out and look at the damage to the BMW. He mustn’t have had any insurance because eventually the angry little man got back in his car and drove off. There was a tail of traffic forming, and frustrated commuters beeped their horns at the delay.
I shakily drove the rest of the way to work, turned off the engine and put my head in my hands before I started to cry. I mean really cry.
It wasn’t the car.
It was everything. My head was wrecked from over-analysing everything. I’d barely slept a wink in weeks.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The guilt.
The feeling of despair, of being trapped. Claustrophobia.
The longing for what I never knew existed until recently. The uncertainty was something I couldn’t bear, but had to endure.
One of the other dentists arrived and made me a cup of tea. He took the newly damaged BMW away to his mate’s garage and brought it back at lunch without a scratch on it, all for one hundred and fifty pounds.
If only the rest of my life could be sorted out so easily.
That night, I parked up at Southampton seafront overlooking the harbour and described my eventful encounter to John. I fully blamed him for my accident.
I’d become one of those ditzy lust-struck women with no rationale.
Once he ascertained I wasn’t hurt, he howled with convulsive snorting laughter. How I’d actually tried to go, not once, but twice. As an afterthought, he added seriously, ‘Remind me not to let you drive my car any time soon.’