The garage owner came at me with an angry expression as I pulled on to his forecourt, which was the last thing I was expecting.
His employee had just crashed head on into the builder boyfriend while driving a sales car and, in my naivety, I was expecting the garage owner to cover the cost of the removal of the resulting wreckage – the written-off pick-up truck belonging to the BB and the totalled car driven down the wrong side of the road by the garage worker.
But for some strange reason, which I hoped would become clear, he had let me pick up the bill for the recovery. I had just come from the yard where a bad-tempered man had taken my money and grudgingly given me a receipt.
I had also fantasised that this garage owner would be showing me the larger vehicles on his forecourt and asking me which one he could offer us as a courtesy to help us through this difficult period. For without a truck, we couldn’t even get hay for the horses.
Instead, as I pulled on to his frontage, he stormed out of his office and gestured at me to move my car as it was in the way. I ignored him and got out, walked towards him, allowed him to usher me impatiently inside his office, and said: ‘I’ve come to get your insurance details.’
For it was now two days since the crash and the other party had still not provided any policy that came up as valid or any vehicle details that made any sense. At one point, the garage owner sent the BB a text in which he listed a different registration plate to the one of the car that had hit him, which he had photographed. I was beginning to get scared.
The garage owner began reading something on his front desk and didn’t look up as he told me he didn’t have time for all this, but in any case, he was fully insured.
He brought something up on his phone and flashed it at me. It was a text from his wife – ‘My Other Half’ said the contacts header – showing a copy of an insurance policy. Before he could take it back, I placed my iPhone over it and photographed the screen.
He seemed not to have been expecting this and angrily pulled his phone away. I said I was glad no one was killed and that the young lad who worked for him was all right. His response: ‘Yeah, well, that’s the joys of motoring.’
The BB had been sick and dizzy for days and now he was experimenting with moving about
I told him I wasn’t sure I liked his attitude. The Gardai who attended took statements and the boy admitted he was in the wrong. He shrugged. I had to walk away.
Back home, the BB was looking a little better, colour-wise. He’d been sick and dizzy for days and now he was experimenting with moving about. It seemed the main problem was his hip and his knee on the right side.
I decided to take him to the doctor. But to get the BB in the car, and thereby make him admit some form of physical defeat, I had to have a very heated argument with him on the driveway about everything, including our relationship. I don’t know where this came from, but it seemed that the concussion had dislodged something.
He is, like many men, emotionally shut down and we chug along happily on that basis. But a major jolt had shaken something up and it was pouring out of him like lava. We ranged from what’s wrong with me and why I do this, to what’s wrong with him and why he does that, and back again. It became extremely embittered, which is unusual for us. Things were said that maybe needed to come out, so I fastened my seatbelt and sat there. He shouted that he did not see the point of what I was doing, by which I think he meant what I was doing about anything, ever.
While protesting that I was making a big thing out of nothing as usual, he struggled so much to get into the car that him being wrong on this occasion became self-evident. And he reacted to that by becoming even more emotional.
In all the years I’ve been with him, I’ve never known him to go to a doctor or hospital. He claims that everything is best left alone to heal: if you poke around you’ll find something and it will escalate.
By the time we got to the village and pulled up outside the small, rundown bungalow of a rural Irish doctor’s surgery, we were screaming at each other so loudly the entire place looked at us when we walked in.
The waiting room was packed and we waited in silence. He refused to speak to me or even look at me for the half hour we sat there. I gritted my teeth, read a book and waited.
The village doctor is an elderly chap and an old-fashioned medic who I like very much. When the BB sarcastically dropped his trousers within seconds of walking in and said ‘There!’, the doctor laughed and said he wouldn’t need that.
As he felt around while the BB told him what to think, the old doctor said ‘Yes, yes’ and carried on poking. ‘Sick and dizzy and seeing double for days, doctor,’ I said, filling in the gaps. ‘Pins and needles all down that side, yes.’ And the doctor nodded silently as he worked on the BB laid out on his table.
When he was finished, he sat the BB back down and gave him a lecture on what happens to a body in a head-on car crash, no matter how strong that body is.
There was a particular question mark over the hip. He suspected it might be cracked, and he began writing out a form requesting an X-ray.
‘What does that mean?’ said the BB, becoming breathless. ‘Nothing, shush,’ I said. ‘But what if it is? What does that mean?’ He shifted about in his seat, then announced: ‘I don’t want to know. I’m not going for an X-ray.’ ‘You’re going for an X-ray,’ I said.
His mood did not really improve after we left and I hoped we wouldn’t have to have another outburst. Maybe he was right. If you poke around looking, you’ll find something. In terms of us, I didn’t want the concussion to shift something that was better kept in.
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