casualty

I’m home from hospital long enough to feed the long-suffering JRT, scoff a bowl of Weeties and check some footy scores. I’ve been sitting next to my good woman for four hours in a corridor of Box Hill Hospital while she nurses a broken arm. She is in pain, physical and psychic.

At seven the day barely dawns at all: the day generates no light. The fog is thick, the cloud beyond it grey as a convention of suits. At eight the fog is thicker, at nine thicker still. Rock and Nicky have rejected my offer of a ride this morning. I plan to ride solo, as flat a ride as possible from my place, around 60 kilometres. That would make 200 for the week.

At nine-thirty an unexpected call from my good woman who asks have I been for a ride yet. No, I have not. She suggests I ride the 14 kilometres to her place, pedal with her for an hour, then ride home again. She assures me the sun is out in Vermont. Hard to believe, but I tell her she has a deal.

I postpone the JRT’s walk and tog up, fit the yellow fog lenses over my prescription clip-ins, and mount the Red Star. Rain begins, not heavy, enough to bead on my new shower-proof jacket.

Rain still falls when I get to Vermont. My good woman is not so sure about riding but claims to see blue sky from her kitchen window. I look at the same sky, convinced she’s colour-blind. She puts on the lovely warm top I gave her and we ride down the hill to the highway and along the service road to join the Dandenong Creek Trail near Morack Road.

Signs warn of the slippery surface along the several hundred metres of raised duck boarding with a metre and a half drop on either side that meanders through the swampy wetlands before the trail runs into Koomba Park. Slow down, a sign urges.

I enter the path 50 metres ahead of my good woman. I consciously keep left, just rolling along. A rider approaches, too fast. Almost before he passes I sense what is to come. A yell behind. I stop, look back. Carefully I one-eighty and scoot back along the boarding. The fast man is on the deck on his arse, his bike under and around him. No sign of my good woman.

There she is, on her back in the drink. I ask and both claim to be OK. He gets to his feet. I reach down and lift my good woman’s bike off her,  the front wheel a potato chip. Her left wrist is painful so I take the right and haul her up. She was on the right and should have been on the left. She knows she is in the wrong.

During the afternoon at the hospital I piece it all together from the evidence, her blackened index and middle finger knuckles, the fracture in the styloid process of the radius where his handlebar has smashed into her, jarred her left arm backwards, and pitched her into the swamp. A soft landing.

She says he was barrelling along, head down, not looking, in the middle of the boarding. She was in the wrong place but had no chance to adjust her position.

She hurts; she will hurt more tomorrow. I feel for her. 

Rock on.