He says oh shit oh fuck oh my God.
There is a thunder of footsteps around him, somebody says is he alright and he says I don’t know I don’t know, people are crouching and kneeling around the boy, somebody says help me turn him over and two pairs of hands slide under his body and roll him over onto his back.
He almost looks undamaged, his eyes closed, his head turned gently against his shoulder. But there is blood, seeping from a long graze down the left side of his face, the skin torn from the top of his forehead down to the sallow of his cheek. And there is blood gathering cloudily between his eyebrow and his ear, swelling beneath the skin like a clenched fist. And there is a little too much stillness about him, lying in the road, watched over by people who don’t know what they can do.
Nearby, a few streets away and a few dozen feet in the air, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache from number twenty can see what has happened, he is falling to earth again and there is nothing he can do about what he can see. He rises and falls, rises and falls a little less, and the assistants take hold of him, undoing the ties and lowering his stiffened body to the ground, he looks at them and he opens his mouth but he cannot speak.
A young woman from number twenty-four runs to the middle of the street, she has coloured ink on her hands from drawing diagrams all afternoon, she says let me see, I’m a medical, I mean, let me see, and she kneels beside the boy and pulls her long hair aside to lay her ear against his chest.
They look at her, the people around the boy, they wait.
The young man from number eighteen looks at her, blinking, he was not quick enough and he did not know what to do.
She brings her head up and sinks two fingers into the boy’s mouth, she takes her fingers out and squeezes his nose and presses her mouth to his.
There are more footsteps and somebody says there’s an ambulance on the way.
The younger twin is standing behind the crowd of people, looking through the gaps, twining his fingers into one another. His mouth is moving, but he is absolutely silent. Tears are spilling from the rims of his eyes.
The young man in the car has not moved, he cannot move, his foot is still stiff against the brake pedal, his face is turned to one side as if from a sudden impact and his eyes are closed. He is barely breathing, small gasps are rushing in and out of his mouth, struggling to reach his lungs. His hands are still wrapped around the steering wheel, his arms locked out straight, pushing away. He cannot move, he cannot look at what has happened.
The young woman from number twenty-four kneels over the boy, her mouth pressed to his mouth.
And the young man from number eighteen, the first to arrive, he is the first to leave, he is backing away with his hand knotted into his hair, he is looking but he doesn’t want to look. He stands in his doorway and he feels a kind of breathless pain right across his body, a revulsion, a tight numbness spread across his chest and his arms and he turns away.
She lifts her head from the boy’s mouth, she clamps her hands together and pistons them into his chest. The people around them are quiet, awkward, shocked.
The man doing the painting is walking towards the closed front door of number nineteen, he still has a paintbrush in one hand, there is a trail of pale blue drips on the pavement behind him, he is looking at the crowd of people and he is looking at the closed front door.
She says, God, how long is that ambulance going to be, and people look down to the main road and don’t say anything.
The man with the paintbrush knocks on the only closed door in the street, he waits, he pulls at his long beard, he knocks again and when the door opens he very quietly says I think you should come and see.
And this is the point at which faces turn away, in embarrassment or pain, as a mother runs wailing across a street, as an ambulance is heard in the distance, as a father stands beating himself around the head, a mutely screaming son clinging to his knee.
The old woman in number twenty turns away, she has been standing by her window with her husband, watching, he is standing tall with one arm around her and the other gripping the windowsill. She is hunched over, turned into his chest, looking up at him, mouthing something like oh lord oh lord oh that poor poor boy oh lord over and over. He turns and guides her away from the window, he lays both hands on her shoulders, protectively.
The young man in number eighteen turns away, he can hardly breathe, he stumbles onto his sofa and tips his face to the ceiling. There is a feeling like a rope circled around his chest, I was not quick enough is all he is thinking, I was not quick enough and the thought clamps down upon him like a vice.
The man with the burnt hands turns away, he turns to the boy’s father and takes hold of his wrists, pulls them away from his head. It hurts him to do so, violently, the strain of gripping is pulling and cracking his scarred skin, but he does this, he pulls the man’s hands to his side and looks him in the eye and says, enough, now, this is no good, your boy. And the man straightens his distorted face, looks down to his son, picks him up and whispers hushush it is okay.
His daughter stands at her window, not watching. She has taken another ribbon and wound it around her face, across her eyes, there is smooth silk where her eyes might be, she is perfectly still.
And the ambulance arrives, and the paramedic crouches over the boy, his fluorescent jacket rustles and squeaks, he puts down a plastic case like a box of tools, he presses two fingers against the boy’s neck. What’s his name love he says to the boy’s mother. His name is Shahid she says, and the paramedic starts repeating it, shining a light into the dying boy’s eyes, hello Shahid, Shahid can you hear me, hello Shahid?
And behind him, watching, his mother is murmuring his name as well. Shahid, his name is Shahid. His name is Shahid Mohammed Nawaz. His name is Shahid.
There are faces at windows up and down the street, faces in frames like portraits in a gallery. The man with the tattoo, the boyfriend of the woman with the henna-red hair, stretching his head from the high window, a jarful of petals in one hand. The architect boy at number eleven, a pen behind his ear and another clamped between his teeth, his fists stacked on top of each other and holding up his chin like a greek column. The girl and the boy at number twenty-seven, naked, a duvet held up across their chests like a beach-towel, squashed together in the small square of the window, their skin creased from being so long in bed and their hands covering their mouths.
And so they pick him up, Shahid, they lay him on a stretcher and they roll the stretcher into the ambulance. And his mother gets into the ambulance with him, and as the ambulance driver closes the doors he meets the eyes of the paramedic and an understanding passes between them. The ambulance leaves the street, the siren is sounding but the vehicle is not moving as fast as it could be.
The man with the sponge, dabbing at his forehead with an unfolded white handkerchief, he offers to drive the father and the children, the father calls to his daughter, she comes running from the house and they all squeeze into his shining car and disappear around the corner.
And that’s all there is. That’s it. There is no pause or rewind, there is no image enhancement, no recording of the moment beyond a thick streak of black rubber smeared across the road, a stain which itself will soon fade. Later, the police may come and take measurements, make estimates regarding speed of impact, suggest possible causes. They might ask people living in the street what they saw this afternoon, what exactly did they see please. Later, possibly, a court will sit silently considering the facts and opinions, and maybe they will pass judgement upon the young man still sitting in his new car. But the moment will never be again, the moment is gone.
The two girls on the front step of number twenty-two, sitting and watching and not speaking, they look at the girl with the long straight hair, the girl whose lips still taste of the young boy’s mouth, they look to her as she walks towards them. She stops, and she crouches by them, she says no, no chance, he was already, he had no chance, and she stands and walks into her house,
and the boy with the soapy trainers stands and follows her and closes the door.
The young man at number eighteen, sitting low in his sofa and holding his chest, he can think of nothing else, he will never think of anything else. I could have saved him is what he is thinking, I could have, there was something, maybe, and then underneath this thinking, shamefully, there is the thought that she was watching and she would have seen.
The thin bearded man, from number thirteen, he picks up his son from the floor, he kisses him gently on the cheek and whispers something to him, he holds him to his chest and picks up his tricycle with the other hand, he carries his son back to his house. As they pass number seventeen, the father catches the eye of the boy with the shirt and tie, standing in his doorway, but nothing is said and they both look away. And the son pokes his head above the father’s shoulder, like a soldier from a trench, he stares at the end of the street, he blinks once and he stares.
At the end of the street, the man with the ruined hands stands with his arms wrapped around his daughter, he watches the traffic on the main road, re-forming after the ambulance’s passing, like the surface of a pond stilling from a stone’s entry.
He thinks of the boy’s mother, saying his name, he echoes her, he mouths the words, Shahid Mohammed, Shahid Nawaz, he wants to call it out loud, he lifts his face and lets his lips shape the words, miming a bellow, Shahid Mohammed, Shahid Nawaz, he thinks oh Allah have mercy let the whole world hear. He imagines what would happen if the whole street called his name, joining with the mother’s small voice, the whole street lifting the words and the words spreading through this city, taking flight like a flock of birds at dusk, clouding the sky, the voices allpresent, across fields and forests and oceans, sent out, transmitted, broadcast, on BBC and CNN, satellite and terrestrial and international optic fibres, on billboards and buses and videoscreens, on flyers and posters and newsjournals and magazines, the information, the name, pouring down from the sky like electronic rain, out from this one street and sucked down into the lightning-rod antennas that bristle from mansions and shantyhouses across all our misconnected world, a chorus of name-saying, a brief redemptive span of attention.
He imagines this, he whispers the name alone, Shahid Mohammed, and his voice does not rise even above the sound of a passing car.
But he whispers it all the same, like a prayer, he has no faith but the words keep coming, he thinks oh inshaallah let the whole world hear, let the whole world listen for a moment, his name is Shahid, Shahid Mohammed Nawaz, and he is dying.
Halfway across the city, in the back of the ambulance, Mrs Nawaz is holding her son’s hand. She is talking to him, she is telling him how special he is and how special he will always be, she is talking in her parents’ language and in her son’s language, she squeezes his hand and she shakes it a little as she speaks.
At number eighteen, the young man with the dry eyes is realising something is wrong, something is very wrong, there is a scorching pain through his left arm and into his chest, there is a crushing around his ribcage that feels like it will snap his bones. He is trying to breathe, but his mouth feels stuffed full of rags and paper.
In the ambulance, the paramedic glances up at the boy’s mother, and he takes hold of the boy’s hand himself. He squeezes it, and he says his name, Shahid. Mrs Nawaz squeezes her son’s hand tighter, as tightly as she held her husband’s hand the day she gave birth.
In his room, the young man with the dry eyes hammers at his chest with a weak fist. Suddenly, almost silently, he is dying, and he stands and thrashes around the room to escape it, pulling down curtains, spilling his box of packed possessions, knocking a small clay figure to the floor.
And there is an interruption in the way of things, a pause, something faint like the quivering flutter of a moth’s rainsodden wings, something unexpected. Something remarkable.
In the ambulance, Shahid breathes suddenly and violently through his nose, spraying blood and phlegm over the hands of his mother and the paramedic, a splutter that sets off sensors and alarms, the siren suddenly louder, the paramedic moving the mother to one side and calling through to the driver.
In his room, the young man lies on the floor, utterly still. Scattered around him there are broken plates and mugs, a torn poster, curtain hooks. He will stay here for three more days, and it will only be once his brother has telephoned, and banged on the door, and fetched the landlord, that he will be found and taken away.
And the ambulance passes on through the city, the traffic parting around it like the red sea, the city bearing it up, fast through the afternoon, along steaming pockmarked streets lined with parades of pubs and shops, past old factories with fading nameplates and retail outlets with neon signs, past the cinema and the bowling alley and the twenty-four-hour garage.
A row of taxis with their doors hung open.
A park full of children and parents and dogs, topless gardeners tugging out weeds.
The ambulance passes on through the city, through a red light, past a dead queue of traffic, up onto the dual carriageway, lifted high on concrete stilts over houses and shops, passing between two tall block buildings, dropping back down and left past a pub with a siege of shirt-sleeved drinkers, right past the supermarket and the carpark crammed with cars.
A man running with a weighted rucksack on his back.
An alleyway with three boys playing basketball, a spokeless wheel for a hoop.
A shop window with a hole the size of a small marble.
A boy in a skip swinging a skinned umbrella around his head.
The ambulance passes on through this city, on through it all, a flash of attention trailing behind it, a fading scorch through a hot afternoon, on past the river, on past the arches, on past the factories and workshops and retail estates, on past the endless rows of anonymous terraced houses, on, finally on, to the last of the roads, past the carparks and signposts and entrance gates, straight through to the emergency doors of the waiting hospital.
And as these streets are travelled, in the time it takes for a hand to be clasped and unclasped, Shahid Mohammed Nawaz wakes gently, lifted through a gap in the way of things.
And at the entrance to the hospital grounds, four queues of traffic sit facing each other, trapped by traffic lights which have synchronised red for the ambulance to pass, dozens of feet resting on accelerators, dozens of pairs of eyes hanging on the lights.
All waiting for the amber.
All waiting for the green.
Acknowledgements
Thanks, for various reasons, to the following;
Tom Davies, Maggie and David Jones, Chris Boland,
Cormac and Jane, Bek, Jitan, Mark and Kim, Alice,
everyone at Squeek, Rose Gaete, Marian McCarthy,
Rosemary Davidson, and my family. But most
of all, thanks to the seven.
A Note on the Author
Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham.
This is his first novel.
Also available by Jon McGregor
So Many Ways to Begin
‘An homage to ordinary people and ordinary things, to the parts of our lives that often go unspoken . . . moving and honest’ The Times
David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife Eleanor would be the sparkling girl he once found so irresistible; that his job as a museum curator could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter’s arrival could have brought him closer to Eleanor. But a few careless words spoken by his mother’s friend have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around a lie.
‘McGregor’s careful prose is sharpened by anticipation and expectation’
Observer
‘An intimate tale with penetrating things to say about the wider
history of twentieth-century Britain’
Sunday Times
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006
First published
in Great Britain 2002
This electronic edition published in 2003 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2002 by Jon McGregor
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 3442 8
www.bloomsbury.com/jonmcgregor
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Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
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