When I asked my friend what happened, she said, very bluntly, that everything happened. Every single thing and its fucking mother. At least, that’s what she reckons. The whole thing went pear shaped, she said, absolutely sideways, towards the end of that particular October. She’s sitting here telling me this, months later, drinking a flat white, like I didn’t know the score.
The poor girl still has no clue that I was the one who found her initially. I wonder now what she’d say if I told her? Would she be happy with it? To know finally that it was me who cut her out with my dad’s chainsaw. That I was the one who saw her mangled with her two legs folded up behind her ears like she were some kind of contortionist.
The sight of which still makes me want to hurl.
And then I remembered, in a moment of clarity, that the same girl, during secondary school, was only too well used to having her legs stretched up over her head and that is exactly why we had all, for years, called her The Slut.
“You were fucking drunk.” I wanted to say to her. “Way too drunk and driving too fast. What the fuck did you expect, thinking you could make that journey down all the way from Point A to Point B without some kind of incident. The biggest retard in the world wouldn’t even attempt such a thing.”
But I didn’t say that to her.
Instead I asked her about her new wheel chair. Electric. Was it a good one? Was she nifty? And how the new prosthetic legs were treating her. Were they comfier than the last ones and made of carbon fibre just like the surgeon promised.
“Yes.” she said. “Everything is good and where it should be. I can finally think about maybe getting my life back on track someday soon. If it wasn’t for those first responders I’d be dead meat. Still though, I do miss the drink.” She said “All I want to do now is get out of this gay fucking looking cafe and get sloshed. But, I know that’s just the trauma talking and not the real, real me. Fucking hell.” she said then, looking around. “This place gets very loud on a Saturday. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life.”
Back at the scene, I remember it took me a good few goes to get the chainsaw working. It’d splutter like a cunt for God knows how long before I realised it was a shit model from the nineties. A thing so old they don’t even make them anymore.
“Fuck sake.” I said. “I have to act fast or this one is gonna seriously die in a real bad way and that’s a fact.”
By the time I got the thing going, I was sweating like a prized mink. Then I saw the blood. And lots of it too, dripping out of the car and down onto the dirt.
Drip, drip, drip.
I panned up with my eyes, slowly, and there she was, Magoo – sprawled like a little pancake, with her guts pouring out of her belly like a wounded antelope, and I thought to myself –
YUCK!
Before this, I hadn’t much experience in working with chainsaws. In fact, I’d never even held one. But fuck it when it’s your best friend in there, and when it’s a matter of life and death, you seem to learn pretty quick how things work. A couple of minutes was all it took me in the end – vroom, vroom – and I was away. The sad part was, these were minutes I didn’t really have to spare.
Especially not when the fire started.
Fuck!
So I stepped in closer and started cutting, and I gave it all the elbow grease I could muster.
When she finally came to, shortly after 10pm, I was busy making good with the sawing. The pleading and the begging out of her now was a side I hadn’t seen before in my life. I found it loud, pathetic and a little repulsive. I asked her to stop. But she didn’t.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” I asked.
“No.” she screamed. “Just get me the hell out of here please.”
I sawed some more, figuring it out as I went along, and before I knew it I had her laid out on the wet muck in a few different bloody pieces. Like a trooper, she was still breathing and making noises through her mouth and to this day, fuck, I don’t know how she did it.
Her eyes, hardly working.
Legs, pretty gone too.
Car, fully totaled.
Tick, tick, tick.
In my head though I knew she’d survive it – this ordeal. But I also knew that life from now on, for her and her family, would be absolute wank seeing as she would have to change up a lot of her ways.
The poor and careless pet.
I grew sad then when I realised she’d never get a kiss again from a boy or even a good fingering. And I felt that one so I did, real hard, right in my chest, because I myself do love a good fingering from time to time. Who doesn’t?
That’s when the fire brigade arrived and I knew it was them right away because the ice-cream man’s lights are pink.
