A ROLLING BOY

The silver car tumbles end-over-end three times, skrump skrump skrump, before resting on its roof at the crossroads. A traffic light shifts from red-amber to green, detecting nothing wrong with this arrival. The yellow haze of the kebab shop, the stark whiteness of the off-license and the spatter of residential windows illuminating like fairy lights. Faces peeking through the curtains.

A wet road reflects the pixelated upside-down world in the tarmac – orange now, red now, and the birdsong of distant sirens. It was the wetness that caused the tyres to slip – tyres, illegal, too bald, beige threads – it was the wetness of the road and the wetness of the driver’s lips from the Jägermeister he’d brought to the party. Stomach fizzing from the ecstasy. A smell of sparks from the car’s roof as it scraped along the road, and from the fireworks behind the terraces. Factory smell of burnt rubber.

Nothing moves but everything speaks. The car speaks, the signs speak. It all speaks so quiet, so gentle, and the sirens grow louder, the lights alternating – blue, red, blue – throwing ridiculous shadows of buildings upon buildings, and the front wheels keep spinning, the chassis crushed like a beer can. A circular sign reading ‘30’ juts mockingly at the driver-side door.

They arrive – an ambulance and two police response vehicles. The traffic light does its best to recite what happened in its light-language, but none of them listens – the paramedics scurry to the scene, urgent and cautious and tired from the long night. The police chatter like budgies into their radios. They await instruction.

But no instruction comes, for the world slows, slows.

It slows and slows and slows to an imperceptible crawl.

Paramedics with their steely faces masking worried ones – paramedics caught mid-stride, the flaps of their hi-vis jackets frozen behind them in the cold air. The police officer trapped in a half blink. The rain suspended in space, a billion glass beads reflecting the scene, and the wheels of the car finally still.

I pass between all of it, through the emergency team, through the hanging raindrops, and I savour the fragments of windscreen glass crunching beneath my bare feet. Fragments scattered like the diamonds of some careless collector. And when the boy, the driver, Samuel Preston sees me through the side window, his eyes are wide. His eyes are wide because he knows who I am and why I’ve come. Everyone knows, when they see me.

I kneel down, open the driver’s door.

He’s sprawled on the upside-down ceiling, all crushed and crooked, awkward, strapped into his upside-down seat, legs mangled somewhere above the steering wheel. Both arms broken. Neck broken, the column cracked, its wires severed. Airbag face like a powdered lord – a lord who spent his final moments a-leaping over the grit and white lines, skrump, skrump, skrump. He’d planned on proposing to his girlfriend this New Year’s Day. Now his friends are unconscious – one in the front-passenger seat, one in the back. He tries to move, but I hush him. I lean into the car, holding his head on my lap, and I stroke his hair, and he’s scared, and I tell him it’s okay now. It’s okay.

He tells me he can’t move, and I say I know, it’s okay. He says, is this it? This can’t be it, can it? And I don’t answer because he already knows. And when he asks if this has to happen, I say yes, it’s okay. Close your eyes. He does, and he winces from the pain. I whisper some things. I tell him things a person should only know right before they die. And the pain rushes away, and he relaxes, caught in this motionless double-world where the light flickers from blue, to red, back to blue, minutes at a time.

He asks, will you tell my girlfriend what happened?

I can’t, I tell him. But someone will.

She’s pregnant.

I know. It’s okay. Close your eyes now.

Oh god, he says. Oh god, I’m gonna miss it. I’m gonna miss everything.

Samuel Preston does nothing for eight seconds. Then he slips the bracelet from his topsy-turvy rear-view mirror. Wooden beads on elastic. He holds them to his lips as he cries, and he smells them, and he remembers. His face is tight and brave. We rest there together in the stillness, just him and I, and the smell of the bracelet is the last thing Samuel Preston ever knows.

Samuel Preston – 28 years, 5 months, 4 days

BEN REEVES is the winner of the Bath Novel Award 2024 for Dance of the Mayflies. ‘Death’ is a theme that has fascinated him his entire life and in Dance of the Mayflies, Death is personified as a down-to-earth man named Travis Smith, living in a flat in England – a man endlessly enchanted by the world around him. Ben is a computer programmer for a book printing company, a father of two children and lives in Peterborough, England.