I should have checked if the child was still alive.
I couldn’t get myself to touch him. His body lay crumpled, like a discarded toy beside the road. He couldn’t have been more than 12. Just looking at his face you would think he was asleep, but his arms and legs were twisted in a macabre fashion in opposite directions, snapped as if made of paper and caught in the wind.
The car was still on the road, the driver, a woman in her late 30s in shock. She stared at me with large eyes as she clutched to the top of the door. “I didn’t see him!” she wailed.
Frank stood with his arm around her shoulder.
I stepped closer to the body and squinted to see if there was a visible pulse, but I could not get my eyes to stay on his skin. I had to look away. The blood. The smell of it filled my nostrils as it pooled around his body before seeping into the ground.
The flies had already arrived and were sitting on the exposed bone at his elbow in frenzied clusters, buzzing and twitching.
“I think his dead Frank,” I said as I walked back up to the road. I had to swallow numerous times to get the lump out of my throat. Frank nodded.
The boy’s bicycle was lodged under the front of her car.
Its twisted metal, plastic and rubber almost unrecognisable as its former self. “I didn’t see him,” the woman wailed again and started to sob uncontrollably.
Frank was biting his lip and looking at his cell phone.
He looked up at me and shook his head. "There’s no signal."
I turned to look up the road in the direction we had just come from, and then back in the direction we were heading. Not a single car, donkey cart or person was in sight. I looked around us and realised we were in the middle of nowhere with not a single road, gate or house in sight.
“Where did he come from?” I wondered.
“We need to get help, but she can’t leave,” I said.
Frank nodded in agreement and started walking back to the car. I thought he was going to get his camera, but sighed in relief when he didn’t. I didn’t want to be a journalist today. Not now, not like this with the boy lying in the grass and the blood smear on the road leading me to this point in my journey.
Frank remembered seeing a rural police station about 10 miles back. We couldn’t leave her. I was afraid she would take off and then the police would never know who did this. I couldn’t stay. I didn’t want to be alone with her as she sat in her car crying. I didn’t know what to say to someone who had just killed a child.
We heard the car approach before we saw it. It was a small truck with about five people inside. I sighed in relief. “Thank God.”
The truck stopped, they had no choice as the woman’s car was still standing in the right-hand-lane, her emergency lights flickering and making an annoying clicking noise, which was unbearably loud.
They spoke to the woman in her native tongue and came over to talk to Frank. There was a lot of gesturing and two of the men walked over to the boy and leaned over him. Were they so used to seeing death that they hardly flinched? One man scratched his head, muttered something and came back. Frank nodded and waved to me to follow him back to our car.
“We’ll go find the police and they’ll stay here,” he said and started the car, turned it around and as I watched the blood smear disappear on the dark road below, we left that place. The place where the boy lay twisted on the ground.I should have checked if the child was still alive.
This majestic tall ship came into Hamilton Harbour this week.
