Free Exposure by Talitha Stevenson Page A

them back in again from the other side.
    The side windows cracked on impact. And then came the gentle shower of glass on the pavement, the standstill, the car creaking in its new shape, and the two girls crying quietly. There was a strange, starlit quiet as the scene took shape around them. A few passers-by came up and stared, dumb and curious as cattle.
    If it hadn't been for that tree, they would have gone right through the window of the Indian restaurant. The winter sun bounced off the huge pane of glass in front of all the tables. It remained intact; a sparkling miracle. They were all alive.
    And that was how, twenty minutes later, the incredible girl came to be crying in Luke's arms in the back of an ambulance—before he had even told her his name.
    Â 
    Arianne didn't have a French accent any more. Luke discovered later that it came and went according to her mood. Her mother was French, but Arianne had only ever been to France on holiday herself. She wanted to be an actress and she expected acceptance of this and other small insincerities as part of her vibrant performance. In fact, acceptance was not enough: she found it hard to forgive the sin of literal-mindedness in any of her friends.
    Thankfully, none of them was seriously injured. The other driver was unhurt and had given Ludo his details, looking guilty and afraid. A gaudy blonde girlfriend came to collect him. She eyed the dishevelled opposition, tightening her fuchsia lips, anticipating litigation.
    Ludo and Luke had mild whiplash and Jessica, whose whole weight had been caught by her seatbelt as they spun towards the tree, had bruised her hip badly. Arianne had broken two bones in her foot. It struck Luke that she barely complained about the pain. She merely referred to the shock of what had happened as if it had been full of sinister import—like a terrible noise in an empty house at night.
    Arianne had a deep-rooted pessimism to which her imagination gave lurid expression. It was not uncommon to see her wince—while she brushed her hair or put on her clothes—at the potential injuries and betrayals that ran through her mind. She sensed a forest fire of disaster raging just over the horizon, and if she came too close to it her reaction was always to fall asleep, as if she had been drugged by the smoke.
    They spent the whole afternoon in the hospital, having X-rays and waiting for the promised doctor to come and see them after the initial examination and filling in of forms. After a while they were asked to wait in a cubicle. They felt demoted, ushered offstage on their big day, but there was no protest in them. They had waited so long that nurses had ceased to be a source of information and passed them by holding peculiar objects, entirely without significance. Arianne slept peacefully on the trolley while the others sat on plastic chairs. They were too tired to relive the accident any more so they stopped talking and listened to the comings and goings of other patients. It was with an increasing sense of contamination that they realized this was a world of bad luck that usually they had no cause to acknowledge.
    Stories could be pieced together around them. The woman in the cubicle next to theirs had somehow spilt a kettle of boiling water over her neck and chest. Her husband refused to leave her alone with the nurse. 'We'd just like to ask her a few
questions
, Mr McPherson,' the nurse repeated. 'That's all.'
    'What questions? There are no questions which I can't answer,' Mr McPherson said.
    Opposite them an old woman lay on a trolley and a young man held her hand. She slept placidly, her small head sunk deep in the pillows. Every so often, he would say, 'Mum?
Mum
?' with a note of panic in his voice. The old woman would smile and raise her free hand as if she was too tired to answer him in words. And the man would rub his eyes under his glasses as if he was trying to wake up. Up and down the hallway, two children wearing surgical masks ran