Gil - Road to Nowhere

Things would never be the same.”

October 12th, 1994

“Mr. Guillaume Briar?” The voice on the other end of the phone managed to totally mangle my name as usual, but after 21 years I had resigned myself to the inevitable, and didn’t bother to correct them.

“Yes.” I replied, rubbing sleep from my eyes after the impromptu nap I had ended up taking whilst waiting for Katie to come home from work. She was late - it was just after six I noted, glancing up at the clock as I waited for the speaker to continue. I didn’t recognise the voice, which could only mean I was about to spend the next 15 minutes of my life being quizzed about whether I was a homeowner, over 21 and interested in making the most of my heating system. Maybe I could put them off by pretending to be Dutch….

“This is The Royal Liverpool University Hospital,” the faceless woman continued, cutting off any further speculation regarding the irritations of telesales operators and grabbing my full attention. “You are listed as the next of kin for Miss Katherine Talboys.” Katie. My heart jumped at the thought that followed immediately, excitement mixed with vague apprehension. The baby. She wasn’t due for another four weeks, but it was possible we’d somehow got the dates wrong, it wasn’t as if we’d exactly been careful. Or perhaps she had fainted again – I’d been telling her for weeks now that she was overdoing things. Maybe now she’d actually listen and get some rest…

The next words though shattered any such thoughts, my world narrowing until it consisted of nothing but that one awful sentence:

“I’m afraid I have to inform you that Miss Talboys has been involved in an accident. It would be best if you came immediately.”

I still don’t remember that drive to the hospital. I could have run every red light there was and not have noticed; from the moment I slammed down the phone and scrambled for my car keys until I pushed into the crowded hospital reception, there was nothing but a jumbled blur.

“If you would just take a seat…” was all I could get from the harassed receptionist in response to my demands to know where they’d taken Katie and what the hell they were doing to her.

“I don’t want to take a bloody seat – can’t anyone in this damned place tell me anything?” I could hear myself shouting, but the shrill panic filled voice didn’t sound anything like my own, and I felt sickeningly out of control. She was my life, all I cared about. Why couldn’t these people see that?

“Can I help?” a steady, almost relaxed voice enquired, one point of calm in all the noise and chaos around me. At last. I thought with something akin to hope as I wheeled round to face the latest participant in the drama that my life had somehow, without warning, suddenly turned into.

“Katie. Where is she?” I demanded, voicing the only coherent thought I had in my head at that moment. I don’t know what I expected to hear – that she was paralysed, in a coma perhaps, or even, in the worst possible scenario that my tortured brain could come up with – something had happened to the baby. I prepared myself in that moment to hear countless possibilities, and terrible as they might be, I knew that if I could only see her, it would somehow be all right. It had to be – there was no way it could be otherwise. If they would just let me see her…

“”Miss Talboys sustained considerable injuries to The head and spine…” the words were slow and deliberate, and I fought down the urge to shake the speaker in order to force them from him more quickly. So It’s serious then, I remember thinking, trying my hardest to digest the fact as I made myself listen to the rest of what he was trying to tell me. She could be in there for days, we might even have to postpone the wedding, but as long as she was going to be ok….

“….we managed to stop the bleeding,” he continued, still in that same halting manner that made me want to strangle him. I didn’t want to hear this, I wanted to be with her, to see with my own eyes what I could only half understand from the medical jargon that was being thrown at me. Injuries – that was bad. But they had stopped the bleeding, a good sign, right? Rest, time, but eventually she would recover. I was panicking for nothing, now if they would just tell me where she was…

“I’m very sorry…there was no more that we could do.” Those next words brought me up short and sent the illusions I had been building up in my head crashing down around me. No more that they could do? That wasn’t how this was meant to go. She was hurt, yes, but they had it all under control, she was going to be fine, and in two weeks time she was going to become Mrs. Katherine Briar and make me the happiest man on earth. Those words had no place in this conversation, and couldn’t possibly have any connection to myself or Katie.

“There must be some mistake…” I told him confidently, as if ignoring what was said would make it somehow not real. “You just said she was fine…” He was still talking to me, but I couldn’t focus on the words any more, everything merging into one until it became nothing more than a constant buzzing in my head as I tried to make sense of what I was being told.

Finally though, I had to listen. She wasn’t coming home. Not that day, not ever. They told me the details – the drunken bitch who thought it would be a good idea to get behind the wheel of a car after an argument with her husband, the head-on collision, the truck that didn’t have time to swerve – but it was all meaningless beside the one fact that was forever stamped into my mind. She was gone.

That was two months ago today. Two months without her. And seven weeks since I watched the man who should have been marrying us intone useless prayers over a hole in the earth; a hole containing all that gave meaning to my life and in which I willingly buried my heart as I no longer have any use for it. Just over five weeks now that I first set foot in the United States, with nothing but my music, a box of Katie’s possessions and enough money to buy this rattling old jeep that has been my home ever since. Driving, sleeping, eating when I can be bothered enough to remember; my life is reduced to a blaring stereo and highways that seems to go on forever.

Where am I going? I don’t know. Do I care? Very little. I’ll keep going until I run out of roads and have to start living again.

All I can say is it’s a good thing I chose a place with so many miles of asphalt.

“And I know, when I gaze to the sun,

No place to hide, I’ve got nowhere to run from you.

Away from you.”

posted at 12:34 a.m. on 09-12-02