his palms raised. Mike roared, and his body twisted as he pulled away from the leg. Dust eddied around him. Hope, or was it Faith, had a length of wood, was holding it like a batter at the plate, shouting at Thane. All this was processed as Dot ran to Michael, spoke to Thane, and tried to lift the car. Squatting at the knee she heard her jeans rip, the arse of her jeans, something went pop in her pelvic floor or near it, and she wasn’t able to budge the tyre. Her heart wrenching. Now Thane lifted too, helping, inches of searing air between the rubber tread and the leg and Mike dragged himself out from its shadow. The leg was fucked, and he retched into the dust. A two-legged metal jack lay next to him on its side.
Blood streaked his jeans but there was no severed artery. The problem, Karen said when Mike was lying across the back seat and Thane was trying to start the car, was the distal tibia, which was splintered and crushed. She cupped the side of Mike’s face with her palm. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Something has happened to your lateral condyle. It might be split or it might be pulped. We don’t know. They’ll give you an anaesthetic and find out. Maybe the neck of the fibula is broken. These things sound worse than they are. They might put a pin in your lower tibia. Or you might go into traction, depending on the knee, but the knee looks OK. They’re going to bolt you together,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the bionic man. Screws and rods, the works.’
Dorothy asked her to come to the hospital with them but Karen said no, put a kiss on her palm and pressed it to Mike’s good leg. ‘I can’t go into the city. Sorry. I’ll be here waiting.’ That I know my boundaries tone of the recovered person, the once damaged. It was a truth about life for those people that love had its limit. Survival came first. At last Thane had the car in gear and shouted at Dorothy to get in.
She sat in the back with her brother, holding the tourniquet she’d made out of her shirt as tight as she could above his knee, her knuckles and the pads of her fists green-white. She was hunkered down in the space behind the passenger seat to do it, hold him steady. He looked old.
‘He going to lose the leg?’ Thane said it stridently, as though she couldn’t hear him although he was just there, driving, inches away. Where was Thane from? Who was Thane?
‘No,’ she said.
The car slowed, and she raised up on her knees to get blood back into her legs, and the world floated through the window – white roadside flowers, the bank dotted with purple and pink wild flowers, the raffia-petals of cornflowers or anemones, the road dust yellow and the faint sweet smell of cows. ‘We need to get there fast,’ she said, and then there was a bump and Michael moaned and the car slowly, carefully, tilted and lowered over the cattle grid, her brother breathing in pain with every rise and fall. Dot released one stiff hand from the knotted shirt. She held his enormous open hand that was like a catcher’s mitt. Michael closed his eyes slowly and mouthed something.
‘It’s better than it looks,’ she said, a tiny portion of her mind surprised that she could lie. They drove past a brindled cow, conch-shaped eyes either side of its head. Straggly agapanthus.
‘There was a leak,’ said Thane. ‘Up the front here, antifreeze or something.’
‘What colour?’
‘Green, dark green kind of.’
‘Not the oil?’
‘Don’t know, skid plates, makes it hard to see where the leak comes from. That’s how come he was under the car. We’ve lent our jack stand to the farmer down the road, there was just a scissor jack.’ Thane’s voice was unmoored. He was losing it.
‘It looked like you were running him over.’
‘No.’
‘What about what’s-her-name, with the baseball bat?’
‘Yeah, she tried to lever the car but it didn’t work.’
‘Are you worried about the leak? Will we make it?’
The engine groaned as the car climbed a hill, a stock truck crawling in front of them, the hot smell of wool and live animals jammed together in the dark. Mike’s eyes were closed and his lips slightly parted over his harlequin teeth. He wasn’t wearing shoes. She couldn’t look at the foot that she had twisted