Gurriers (89 page)

I did very well on my little donkey to stay within sight of Vinno all along that stretch of road, making every gap and using all three lanes along the heavy but moving traffic to enable me to keep my machine at full throttle and actually gain a little
on the Blade’s faster moving but less erratic route towards the roundabout.

I’m sure my headlight would have flicked in out of his mirror view, as I flung my machine from one side of the road to the other to gain every possible millisecond on the faster bike.

I would have been visible in his mirrors when, at the crucial distance from the roundabout that he would have been applying his brakes, he hit the wet patch of slop that could only have splashed out of a skip lorry. I knew this for a fact because I have seen splashes of slop escaping from skips on moving lorries plenty of times. They are unique and easy to recognise with their greasy, slimy texture, the tell tale assorted crap that they take out of skips with them and their positioning on the roads, usually at braking points, accelerating points and bends - the worst possible places for such dangerous material to be on our roads.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how this happens. Skips are parked outdoors while they are being filled with whatever rubbish necessitates their use, usually for a couple of days. There will always be some rain in Ireland over a space of a couple of days to deposit a certain level of water in the skip. When the full skip is being transported to the dump – probably faster than would be advisable because of the full time driver at the controls, whose earnings more than likely depend on his speed – this water would splash around as it moved, occasionally splashing over the edge of the container, bringing other debris with it.

The bigger splashes would always be when the lorry was braking, accelerating or swinging around bends, depositing dangerous materials at the most treacherous parts of the road surface.

The solution to this problem isn’t rocket science either. If every skip had some drainage holes of the appropriate size drilled in the bottom and sides of it, any rain that fell into the skip while it was in use would simply leak out and be washed away with the rest of the rain.

This might, depending on what the skip contained, lead to muckiness of some sort being washed along the drains with the
rainwater, but surely this is preferable to having it dumped on the road just where vehicles are braking, accelerating and turning. If every skip had these holes in them that slop wouldn’t have been on the road at the Spawell roundabout that day and what happened would not have happened.

What happened was a horror of horrors that will live with me to my dying day.

The first sign that something was wrong was when Vinno dropped down out of view beneath the roof level of a car that happened to be changing lanes between him and me. In the next miniscule fraction of a second my brain solved the mystery of his disappearance by convincing itself that he had suddenly leaned as far as possible to his left early for some reason that I didn’t have time to surmise, because by then his legs had come into view above the car to the right of where his head had been, with the back wheel of his bike sideways to the left, with an indiscernible piece of plastic between them rising way above both of them.

My throttle was off and my brakes were on as the shock flooded my system with adrenalin. I had never seen a crash before, but when it was so close, so unexpected and to someone so dear to me, it was no surprise that in terms of shock it was just the same as if I had been in the crash myself. The shock had the effect of causing my memory to run the events in my head in slow motion ever since.

The car between us was gone by the time Vinno and his bike hit the road for the second time. I remember too vividly the sickening wrench at the bottom of my gut on the realisation that the slide was taking him into the flow of traffic around the roundabout. I was automatically swerving around the panic-braking traffic between him and me, conscious only of my concern for his well-being. Recognising when I came to it the sloppy mess for what it was and deducing it to be responsible for what was happening instantly.

Whatever way Vinno and his bike crashed – after his front wheel had lost it on the slop – the bike had gone ahead of my friend, giving the traffic moving around the roundabout that in
valuable extra fraction of a second to take evasive manoeuvres.

The bike itself did hit the back of a car – hard - and catapulted across Vinno’s path ahead of him, but Vinno slid through the gap made by motorists slamming on their brakes.

I distinctly remember the joy of the split second of hope as Vinno slid across the face of the traffic, that gleaming instant of well-being, a wondrous moment in which my shaken system rapidly projected the future image of myself and a bashed up Vinno regaling the crowds in the local with tales of a close call. I could see him laughing, a pint in his good hand and a joint in the one with his cast on it, as he hit the slight kerb of the roundabout. A big “cheers” towards me with the pint as he bounced on the grass, grinning that grin of his. And then he hit the warning sign.

The warning sign on the Spawell roundabout, as with most roundabouts in Ireland, was a ten foot long and two foot high metal sign with alternating yellow and black chevrons pointing in the direction of the flow of traffic that was supported by four five foot metal poles set in concrete foundations 15 feet into the roundabout perpendicular to the road. The idea is that motorists approaching the roundabout will see the sign and realise where the roundabout is and how far they are away from it and thus avoid accidentally mounting the roundabout. It is supposed to be a safety feature.

It is truly a sickening example of idiotic, ironic apathy that some clock watching pencil pushing moron thought that putting something big and solid in the direct line of moving traffic would make our roads safer, that some ignorant fuckwits designed and built the bastard without considering all of the consequences and some team of brain dead jobsworths put it up without thinking to question the logic behind their orders. I curse everyone involved in this process and I pray to God that they all suffer the misfortune that their ignorance deserves.

If any of these gobshites had had the cop on to put heavy duty springs in the foundations to mount the signs on, to make the signs out of plastic instead of metal and to break them up into four individual parts with gaps between them, they would
have still had their effective warning to motorists but it would have been safe.

My friend would have survived. Who knows how many other good lives would not have been lost had these people had the cop on to truly think of the safety of the Irish public. Who knows how many would be saved if they wisened up now and applied some common sense to help reduce the carnage on our roads.

My cursed memory torments me still by replaying the horrific collision in slow motion. Vinno had tumbled to a forward facing kneeling position about two feet off the ground by the time he hit the dammed solid metal (fuck you, you fucking brain dead shitheads!) with his hands splayed upwards. This could not have been worse for my friend, because it meant that the front of his torso bore the brunt of the collision.

He had slowed down considerably by the time he hit it, but not enough.

It was immediately obvious to me that he had collided with lots of momentum by the way the light reflecting off the metal monstrosity changed as he hit it. Then his head and arms continued forwards above the sign, then downward due to the torso’s motionlessness, with his legs moving forwards and upwards for the same terrible reason.

My short lived optimistic fantasy was gone as if with the pop of a bubble, the breath left my body for an instant – I still don’t know to this day whether it was from shock of what I was seeing happen before me or out of sympathy for the suffering of my best friend. I felt sick to the bottom of my stomach and I genuinely believe that I felt my heart break in what was unquestionably the worse instance of my life ever.

Looking back now I can compare previous terrible moments in my life with this one: the love of my life splitting up with me in my boss’s office; the terror instance when I knew that I was about to crash; the uniquely horrific smashing of me and my beloved machine into the side of an American tourist’s car at Whites Cross; the same smashing accompanied by the snap of
my shoulder bone in the head on with the German tourists on Northumberland Road, and I can say truly, hand on heart, that I would suffer each and every one of them ten times over if I could, instead of this one.

I went so weak in all of my joints that’s it a wonder I didn’t fall off my bike before I got to the roundabout. My eyes flooded with water quicker than ever before in my life, blurring my vision instantly so that Vinno falling backwards off the sign was little more than a moving shape. I felt my face take the form of a ghostly grimace that I would hate to ever see, let alone feel again. A croak escaped from my open mouth that – had there been any air in my lungs to get behind it - would have come out as a horrific howl.

The adrenalin forced me to drag some air into my lungs and do something to help my friend. My right hand shot to my radio as I crossed the stationary traffic on the roundabout.

“Four Sean, Four Sean, four! Emergency, need an ambulance. Four Sean!”

“Everybody stand-by – go again, Four Sean.”

“Ambulance at Spawell roundabout. It’s Vinno….!” My voice deserted me on saying his name. I needed my hand on the bars for an instant, as I mounted the roundabout before slamming on my back brake as soon as the back tyre hit the grass to dump my bike to get me to Vinno sooner.

“Ambulance being called for Spawell roundabout, Sean… how bad is it?”

“Bad….high…speed…. hit sign.”

As I ran towards my prone comrade I did well to get those few words out.

Tears were flowing down my cheeks as if they were being pumped under pressure, my bottom lip was quivering uncontrollably, as I flung my helmet away from me and I had to clench my jaws to stop myself from wailing as I dropped to my knees beside the best friend that I had ever had.

The spatters of blood on the inside of his visor filled me full of dread, but the sound of laboured breathing gave me some
hope.

“V…Vinno, I’m gonna lift your visor and open your strap.” I never found it so hard to get words out in my life, but I found some mettle somewhere for his sake. The last thing he needed to see was me blubbering like a baby.

It startled me slightly to see his eyes looking into mine as I lifted the visor and the depth of desperation in his stare will haunt me forever. My shaking hand struggled a little, but I managed to open his helmet strap. The bottom of his face was covered in blood, some from his mouth and some from his nose. This blood was bubbling around his lips as he struggled to breathe. Then he tried to speak.

His hand grabbed my arm and his face contorted into a grimace of effort. I could hardly hear the word he had strained so much to say but knew it to be the name of his daughter.

“Aoife’s going to be fine, man, don’t worry – just relax yourself, don’t try to speak. The ambulance is on the way. Come on, man, you’ll pull through this. Come on, brother Vinno, hang on in there.” There was no stopping it. I openly wept, barely getting the words to make it through my crying. I did well to force the words out audibly.

Again I felt his hand’s grip with what must have been all of his available strength, his whole body tensed with the effort it was taking. I could tell by the slight movement of his mouth that he was trying to speak.

“Don’t try to speak, Vinno. Save your energy, man, the ambulance will be here any second. You can make it through this.”

But he didn’t relax. I could feel his hand pull me towards him, his whole body now convulsing with the exertion and somehow his eyes beckoned me closer without moving. I leaned over him until my left ear was only a couple of inches from his chin piece.

Then he spoke, the barely discernible words with so little air behind them, such an eerie shadow of the confident bellow of a voice that I was so accustomed to.

He tried so hard to get just three words out, but I did hear them, just about, above the clamouring noise of the aftermath
of a crash as many concerned motorists gingerly approached the devastation.

“Get another job,” was the ghostly whisper. Then his body relaxed. He was gone.

My reaction, as I’m sure most people’s are when a loved one leaves them, was to try and talk them back, desperately clinging to the hope that what I knew deep down to be true was not the case, despite the absence of blinking or efforts at breathing. I was forced to face the fact, however, when his skin changed colour.

I had never been present when somebody died before and had no idea how quickly the skin changed colour after the heart stopped beating. I could no longer deny the fact that my friend was dead after his skin had turned that unmistakably sickening pallid shade.

I held myself together long enough to close his eyelids and then let go of whatever composure that I had been struggling so much to hold on to. I fell back into a sitting position, on the grass, supported by that cursed sign and cried like I have never cried before or since.

The next few minutes are little more than a blur to me. The only movements that I made were to wave away concerned well-wishers. I suppose some of them thought that I, too, had crashed, since there were two bikes prostrate on the grass of the roundabout. One of the motorists that saw the crash took it upon himself to explain to the others that I hadn’t actually crashed, but dumped my bike in haste to get to the motionless one. I vaguely remember hearing his voice and I have no idea what he was saying, but I know that he was advising the others to give me space. Fair play to him.