The smashed pick-up truck was delivered back to us after I burst into tears and began wailing at the recovery man.
When all else fails, men usually cave in to what I like to call tear pressure. Their brains scream ‘Make it stop!’ and they’ll do pretty much anything.
The tears gushed out of my eyes very easily as I stood in that recovery yard two days after the builder boyfriend had been hit head-on by a driver speeding down the wrong side of the road who smashed into him at such force that he took apart the entire driver’s side and undercarriage of his Mitsubishi L200.
The truck was still on the low loader that had brought it back from the crash site as I stood there demanding its return. This was odd, I thought. Wouldn’t they have taken it off the truck by now? It looked like it was loaded up again ready to go somewhere…
How we loved that truck. The model was Warrior and suited the BB so well. He bought it from a couple in London who had taken it on a round-the-world trip before they found themselves on the wrong side of the Ulez border.
It came to us in Surrey and then the BB drove it to West Cork when we moved. It was often loaded up with hay bales and did every conceivable kind of job with uncomplaining toughness.
He had just done the oil change on it and hoped to keep it going. It was the last generation of L200s not ruined by electrics – mechanical and able to be fixed. They have become classics. We would have kept it for ever.
The tears pricked my eyes as I looked at it all smashed up on the loader. The recovery man was arguing, rather convolutedly, that we ought to leave it with him.
I insisted we wanted it, and had been advised by our insurance company to get it, so he charged me €200. I had to argue for a receipt which he wandered off for a long time to arrange. He then said he had just remembered some reason he couldn’t bring it for a few days after all, sounding vague.
I cried at that point, whereupon he caved and said that he would bring it that evening. He delivered the truck home to us a few hours later.
He backed the low loader into our farmyard and the BB hobbled out of the house to see the poor girl dumped off in a corner of the yard. The man barely spoke to him as he unchained it. The BB tried to chat, but the driver wasn’t having it. Watching from the back door, I thought it was all very strange.
An idea was turning in my mind since we’d struggled to get any insurance details out of the boy who hit us. He had been driving a trade car from the garage where he worked, and both he and his boss had at first given us the registration of another car, which turned out to be his personal car, which we later found out he had also written off in another crash he was in weeks earlier. ‘Oh this isn’t good,’ I told the BB.
In the aftermath of the crash, as the BB was driven home by a neighbour, the garage boss had offered to organise the recovery, using his contacts in the motor trade, but had then had our truck spirited away to this recovery yard, a journey which saw it being driven past our house and not dropped off in our yard, as the BB had requested. ‘Oh this just isn’t good,’ I said, and I stormed over there to demand its return.
It all began to add up to a not very nice impression of something I didn’t like the feel of. I almost began to pine for the unfairness of England and the horrible but knowable process of having a car crash happen to you there.
I told myself to keep it simple: the BB was lucky to be alive. The roads in rural Ireland are so dangerous that you take a significant risk of death every time you get in a car. It doesn’t matter how carefully and slowly you drive, there is usually a young person hurtling the other way at such speed that there is little you can do to protect yourself if he or she cannot hold the road as they do their rally driving.
The statistics are dire. In the week of the BB’s accident, there was a particularly bad pile-up in which five young people in their twenties were wiped out. Maybe the youth of rural Ireland are so bored they drive like fools to entertain themselves, or maybe it’s the way they do learner driving here. Incredibly, they let learners drive alone with their L plates on with unlimited chances to ‘learn’, test, fail and keep on trying.
Partly because the roads are so dangerous, and partly because the smash was so obvious, I thought the police would help us. The Gardai who attended gave the BB a scrap of paper with her name, number and email scrawled in tiny handwriting. I deciphered it, just, and rang her a few days later. She said she was glad he had been ‘so good about it’. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
Would she be providing statements? She said she would if the insurance company asked her to. An insurance company that we can’t get the details of, I thought. I felt like an unknown system was closing in on us.
After it started to look like we wouldn’t be getting an insurance claim, I emailed her a letter asking for help. There were laws requiring drivers to provide details so could she enforce them?
Days went by with no reply. I tried her number, left messages. Nothing. ‘Oh this isn’t good,’ I said.
‘It’s just as well we’ve got the evidence,’ said the BB, nodding to the truck. I agreed. That was a very good use of €200 and an attack of the waterworks.
Comments