Before I let slip I want to tell myself that there are no reasons. Even though there probably are. If people knew what I was doing they would look for a reason. They would evaluate everything that led to this point and formulate their opinions and based on those opinions have a label for me and act accordingly. They, whoever they are, have labels for everyone.

Cars are parked all along the road on both sides and I’m tightly penned in as cars overtake me. No one gives room to cyclists. Tonnes of metal hurtle by. This looks just like I thought it would. All week long I’d played this out in my mind. If, when the moment comes, I have time to think I’d want to think about all the things that have been running through my head ever since last week when I was inches away from being roadkill.

All week long one strange silly thought stayed with me after my near crash experience. And it was silly to be hung up on the incident because if you cycle in the city there are so many times when you could be smeared all over the road like a nasty mangled mess. The incident, as it was, hardly makes for a fantastic story. There’s a marked difference between being hit and clipped. I wasn’t hit. I was barely clipped and the car that clipped me was a parked one. I’m not sure any significant contact was even made. The car driving by me just got too close and I was penned in so tightly that as it passed I wobbled and lost control. My left hand side clipped the parked car, I became unseated and the moving car drove on oblivious of me. I staggered and dropped the bike but managed to stay on my feet. I quickly grabbed the bike to get it out of harm’s way.

I see myself standing there. On a normal day I’d ride away. Nothing happened. All I can tell as a story to others is that I almost had a crash, that I was knocked off my bike by wind. The silly idea that won’t go away? The result of this non-story? I was left standing amazed that I stayed on my feet, my heart rate hardly changed, not much. I was struck by the idea that people rarely fall over. The idea of falling over seems appalling. We live in fear of crashing but we, people in general, hardly ever do it.

As a child you were so better acquainted with the ground. Most of the time you didn’t want to fall but if you did it was usually part of a game. You got up and quite often didn’t even bother to brush yourself off. Getting tagged in a game of tag was more embarrassing than falling over. If you fell whilst evading the tag then all was well. And you could fall over on any surface and it didn’t seem to bother you. Playing tag on a concrete playground gave you more incentive to stay upright but cuts, grazes, bruises and scars were part of the game too.

All week this ran through my head. I thought of old people struggling to stand on weak hips and joints. Children and the aged hit the ground with a regularity that adults never know. If you watch any adults fall over you can see their dignity shatter on the pavement. I’ve been here everyday since the non-accident, cycled past the same spot and every time I’ve done so I’ve wanted to fall, to slip, to satisfy the urge, to scratch the itch, to let go. I know what’s coming up behind me and I know where I am. There’s a silver Nissan Micra type car coming up way too close. Otherwise the road is clear. I know this road and how I’ve travelled along it to work every day for god knows how long. As I begin to loosen my grip on my bike, I think hard about falling, I’m thinking of the odd recent occasions when I was walking along and touched the ground. I’d bend down, without any pretence, to touch the concrete pavement. I could have easily pretended to be tying up my laces, or picking something off the ground but I didn’t. I would squat down or bend over and touch the hard asphalt for seemingly no apparent reason. I’d feel around and wipe the dirt from where it lay.

No more time to think, I’m at the point I want to be at, this perfect point where this all started. It might look like an accident.  If I lean just a little too hard on my handlebars, just push too much to my right, lean my shoulder, look like I’m cycling hard and losing control, then with a hard twist of the handles I’ll hit the front portion of the stubby looking ugly car.

The sound of screeching breaks dominates all other sound and destroys the peaceful normality that had existed up to this point. Everything does indeed look like a blur to me, just like I thought it would. The little Nissan is not travelling so fast as I fall into the wing of its left hand side. The bike bounces off the car and careens into one of the many parked vehicles to its left. I ride along the front of the car for a few seconds, lost in the sound and fury of this minor road incident until I am thrown to the road where everything is still and soundless once more. It’s all over so quickly. It’s a quick hit, a little rush and then a come down to reality.

Somewhere in reality I’m lying in the middle of the road on my side. I’m happy with the way I’ve embraced my fall. My heart rate is sky high, my breathing is erratic. My mind searches my body for any pain and discovers a whole load of it running up and down my left side. The warmth of the tarmac feels as good as my bed to me, so good that I don’t want to move but that was never part of the plan. This now feels like a crime scene and I need to be gone.

As I push up from the ground I can hear unhappy sounds from the driver.

“What the hell were you doing?” He shouts to me.

I look stunned. I try to understand his anger but can’t.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“All you cyclists are a fucking danger to everyone, you know that?”

At this point I feel indestructible.

“I’m sorry pal, I’m trying to get my head around this. Are you angry because I’m still alive? Would you be happier if we did it again and you sped up this time? You could accelerate instead of breaking and maybe get a better outcome.”

I take a breath and feel good. The driver man says nothing.

“Let’s just be happy that no one got killed today and you can take your weird misdirected anger to work with you and shout at some poor unsuspecting secretary instead.”

I wander over to my bike and pick it up and then, not because I personally care but because I feel a million cyclists would want me to say it, I say, “Stop being angry at the cyclists you run over and perhaps give them a little more room on the roads.”

As I walk away at pace the driver shouts to me, “Shouldn’t you go to hospital or something?”

I only manage to get ten minutes away from my accident site before I lie down in a local park. I should call in sick for work as I have a legitimate reason. What’s the point in getting run over if you don’t use it as an excuse not to work? But I don’t call. I can make excuses later. I don’t want to deal with work right now.

Most of my pain has subsided. I feel lucky to have scrapes and bruises. The first thing I did when I laid down was light up a cigarette. It felt post coital. The next thing I did was try to rerun the whole event in my head. I’m still paranoid that it all looked staged and not natural enough. I already want to do it again but this time better. I have in my mind that it looked a little pathetic. Above all else it felt stupid. It felt stupid and wrong. Those people that give labels, they probably have a term for me. There is probably some sort of dysfunction that covers this behaviour. I’m not an idiot. I know that this is not entirely normal. There will be no surprise revelation in which I see the light and realise that this is wrong. I lie still in the grass. I feel like I’ve achieved something. The silly feeling of achievement will stay with me all week.

And the feeling does sustain me until a week later I find myself crashed and twisted in a bush in an attempt to impress a girl late at night after Kevin’s house party. I’m not sure Claire is at all impressed but she laughs when she pulls me out of the bush. This is the only memorable thing to happen all night. I’d been day dreaming about pounding myself and bike into a lamppost on my way home but this seemed more fun.

“Don’t worry. I do this sort of thing all the time,” I tell her, my voice clear and sober from my position inside the bush.

Claire thinks I’m drunk. There is so much in life that you can pass off or blame as drunkenness.

“Oh my God, Ben, Ben,” she pulls at my arm to pull me free of the bush.

I hear something rip and we both fall to the pavement. It’s a warm night and Claire has had enough to drink that our place on the concrete does not bother her.

As we sit up Claire looks at my face. “Oh god Ben, you’re really scratched up.”

She brushes some thorny leaves away and I touch my face.

“This should be a painful reminder that stunts like this need more planning. Note to self, a less thorny bush will make crash landing less painful,”

I say it as though this is all very funny.

“What were you trying to do?”

“It went a little wrong. What I had in mind was so much more impressive.”

We both sit there looking at each other for a few seconds until she spits out a laugh.

“You flew, you really flew. That probably really is the most stupid thing you’ve ever done. I keep telling you about cycling whilst drunk.”

I wish I could have seen through Claire’s eyes. I try to imagine it and make up my own mental picture. I see myself, my legs fire like pistons, my mountain bike swaying from side to side until I stop peddling and for a couple of seconds, just before I hit the curb, I am still, perched on my bike, ready to fly. I am sure in all my imaginings that the flying part looked daft, clumsy and painful.

“Claire, what would you say if I told you I’d done this before?”

“I would tell you that you should buy a crash helmet if you insist on cycling whilst drunk.”

I want to tell someone what I’ve done, how being smeared across the bonnet of a car is more appealing than going to work, going to parties, getting drunk or anything else I do with my life. I want to tell Claire everything and here on the pavement seems an unlikely perfect moment but I can’t see what good could possibly come of it. Perhaps I could tell her and I’m seriously considering it when she reaches her hand out to my shoulder and touches me. She withdraws her hand and laughs at what she sees. I think it might be nervous laughter

I crick my neck to look at my left shoulder and I see that my shirt is ripped and bloody. Claire leaps up and grabs me by the arm that isn’t injured. She pulls me to my feet and stands there frozen, preserving the moment in time for us both.

“Ben, that’s a lot of blood. What have you done?”

I look at my shoulder and it looks as though a thorn has ripped right through me. I don’t know what to say or do. Claire seems almost excited when she says, “You are so going to need stitches.”  

By the time the doctors have finished stitching me up Claire is asleep in the waiting room. It’s now daylight outside. I leave her to sleep there. I don’t know why. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. When she wakes up she’ll work it all out and later tell stories of our drunken antics. The world keeps spinning. I’ll have a silly scar to mark the event.

The doctor said that there would be no permanent marks from the scratches on my face. But for now I have to look scary with a dozen or so nicks that cover the left side of my face and forehead.

You’d think I’d look like the last guy you’d want to be throwing fries at in a McDonald’s. But some kid is doing exactly that whilst his mother pollutes the air with her awful music that she’s playing through her I-pod. She seems to think that everyone else wants to hear her music. She seems to be ignoring what’s going on with her fry flinging son, who is old enough to know what he’s doing is wrong.

There was a time when I would say nothing and move on. It’s the smart option and I used to be smart. I try not to look angry as I call over to the mother. She looks like she’s no stranger to anger and knows how to reciprocate it.

“Hi, your kid is throwing fries at me. I’m not bothered but, well, but I am.”

She hardly acknowledges me and grabs the fries away from her child.

“What have I told you?” She says through angered gritted teeth.

I smile a pained forced smile and then I push my luck. If I say nothing the day looks very different.

“Also, do you mind not playing your music out loud?”

You would think that no one had ever dared ask her to turn her stupid music down.

“Yeah, I would fucking mind,” she tells me.

I used to let people talk. I used to have no answers and the superhero type skill of creating awkward silences out of thin air in situations like this. I think the woman is about to tell me to mind my own fucking business but she never gets a chance. 

I get up slowly and approach her table and calmly say, “I want to help you here.”

She gives me a confused look.

“You think that there’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing. You’re thinking that your shitty music makes you happy and that no one around you could possibly find it annoying and offensive. You’d like to tell me to chill out and tell me that your music isn’t hurting anyone but you lack the vocabulary to do so.”

No one speaks like this. I’m speaking with a cold precision that even I’m finding creepy. I’ve moved in close now and am really invading her space.

“You’re fucking weird mate,” the kid says and throws another fry at me. I keep looking at the mother.

“But if you’re not playing your crap and let’s get this straight, it is crap, then we are not having this awkward conversation. You don’t have to be sitting with me with that hateful look on your face and the world is just a little bit more peaceful.”

Her response is inevitable. “You’re mental you are.”

I’m mental? I quickly think of an answer. I begin to drool. She looks at me as drool spills from my lower lip on to her meal.

“Please don’t tell anyone. I’ve just escaped for the day. I really do like your child,” it’s cute the way he’s so cheeky,” I tell her.

“Get away from us,” she says raising her voice. I don’t move. So, she pushes me away. As I stagger back I grab hold of a table to stabilise myself and then considering my new found ways and thoughts about falling over, I let go and fall.

From the ground I shout out, “Does any of this have to happen? Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if you just kept your crappy music to yourself?”

McDonald’s staff, McWorkers, are heading my way, no doubt to remove me. Ronald Mac is on the woman’s side here. The law is probably on her side. Twenty first century morals are on her side too and there’s nothing I can do but let myself get knocked down by it all. Part of me wants to get on my bike and crash into McDonald’s. Part of me wants to wait until the woman leaves in her car and then I can fling myself at her windscreen. I want to cycle full speed ahead when I see her coming and collide with her warm bonnet and impact in on the surface of her windscreen. I want to lie there bleeding. I want to collide with all the things I hate, let them run me down and see if my crumpled body slows them down at all. Will they think about me as they squash me? Could they feel bad about it?

 I look at the dual carriageway as it flows underneath the bridge I’m standing on and all I see is instant death, huge engine driven, piston pumping bullets that kill cyclists. Who the hell came up with the idea that bicycles and cars should share the same roads? What lunacy.

There’s a busy road in my neighbourhood, not too far from my first crash site. I’m riding along it on my way home when the urge hits me. I haven’t been to work for a week and my boss keeps leaving messages for me. But I don’t want to go back to the real world. I’m trying to work out the best way to fall into traffic when it occurs to me that the reason the first crash felt so fake was because it was too calculated. I need something much more random.

Here’s an arbitrary right hand turn into my future. I turn without looking. I think I sense a car behind me, overtaking me, at speed, through a residential area. My eyes are closed as I turn. I feel like I’m playing Russian roulette. And then I don’t know what I feel. It happens in flashes. What I will remember is that there was a lot of noise, a screech, a scream and shouting and then I was a crumpled pile in the road.

From my hospital bed I am told that I tried to stand up. I remember moaning in pain and then laughing and then I apparently pushed myself up off the ground to a chorus of shouts telling me not to move. My laughter was later passed off as shock induced hysteria. A passer by stayed with me until the ambulance came. It was at this stage that someone first said that I had appeared to crash on purpose. The only thing I had to say on the whole subject was to the ambulance crew.  Apparently I asked, “Could you ask the doctor to write me a sick note?”

Broken ribs hurt in a way you wouldn’t believe and there isn’t a lot you can do about it. It’s true that every time you breathe your whole upper body aches. My left wrist was broken in such a way that it will need metal pins surgically implanted. I tuned out when they started explaining the specifics of it all.

It takes me six weeks before I am free of any rib pain. The wrist is an ongoing problem. In six weeks I didn’t once get on a bike. A doctor had come by and assessed whether or not I was a danger to myself or anyone else. I was asked if my accident had in any way been a suicide attempt. I said, in all honesty, that it wasn’t and that was the end of my assessment.

Claire had called whilst I was incapacitated and from my bed at home I told her what had happened. She came to visit and we had regular film nights at my flat for a while. I lost my job because apparently in the real world if you just don’t turn up you get fired, no matter how much you get run over. I didn’t care.

Claire, on one of our nights, asks me about my crash. I wince in pain whilst sitting on the sofa and it catches her attention.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“I crashed a bike into a car travelling at forty miles and hour,” I sarcastically respond.

“It hasn’t ruined your sarcasm. What did you just do, right here on this sofa?”

“It still hurts sometimes, even now.”

When I originally told Claire what had happened I did just that. I described the act of getting run over. I didn’t tell her what was going on in my mind. She had asked one question I couldn’t answer and the fact that I couldn’t answer it changed everything. She had asked me what the hell I was thinking. Don’t you actually look where you’re going? Do you want to die?

And I said nothing.

The right answer was to keep up the charade and make a flippant joke about having no road sense. I have this theory that my subconscious can’t handle any more excitement and has a strange desire to keep me alive. So, something inside me strangled any excuses and left me in awkward silence, forcing this situation. From that point on I got the feeling that our film nights were made so Claire could conduct suicide watches.

It’s a typical film night when I ask her, “You know I crashed my bike on purpose that day?”

She reaches for the remote control and pauses the DVD and turns to look at me.

“But it’s not what you’re thinking,” I quickly add feeling frantic because I want to clarify and I want to get this over with.

“What do you call it when you intentionally throw yourself in front of a car?”

“I really hope you haven’t been waiting weeks to hear me say the word suicide.”

Claire doesn’t know what to say and just as I go to explain everything I feel exactly the same as I did in those moments before my collisions. I feel like I’m about to crash, that Claire should run a mile as soon as I’m finished talking.

“I did it on purpose, with no desire to be dead. I don’t know why.”

Claire looks like she wants to understand and listens, fending off any awkwardness.

“I really don’t know why I’ve been doing this. It’s a weird compulsion. It’s a ‘fuck you’ for everyone and everything. I didn’t want to die. Not sure I wanted to live either. I just wanted to be in an accident. Slow self destruction seemed like a ‘fuck you,’ albeit an inverted one.”

“Isn’t an inverted ‘fuck you’ just a ‘fuck me,’ especially if no one cares?” Claire asks absolutely straight faced.

The only answer that I can muster up is, “I had a close call on my bike one day and then asked myself what’s so bad about being roadkill? What else happened to you today?”

I pick up the remote control and we carry on watching our DVD. Claire doesn’t run away. We both fall asleep on the sofa.

Ten weeks after being swept off the road by an ambulance crew after breaking four ribs, mangling my left wrist and giving myself a concussion in a crash of my own making, I’ve bought myself a new bike. I had to have it specially modified so that the back brake, the more important of the two, is on the side of my stronger wrist, which Claire says shows an improvement in me and shows a willing to be a little more safety conscious.

As you drive by me you’ll be none the wiser. You might shout abuse if I’m cycling whilst on the phone or listening to music through headphones or slurping with one free hand on a cold coffee beverage. Yeah, give me hell, if it makes you feel better. Life and traffic carries on. Maybe if you knew me you’d be kinder and give me more room because despite all your hot air you’re not crazy. You’re not a murderer and you don’t like the sight of roadkill.

If you knew me there are simple answers that you can tell yourself to make you feel better about my existence. You could give me whatever label you want. The typical psychological profile is that I’m an obsessive compulsive with tendency to self harm. I’ve turned it into a social protest and an art form.

Imagine me in support groups. There are support groups for everyone. We’d talk about my actions and reasons for them. You can dream up any reasons. You can explain to me that I’m bored, have a crap sex life, a crap job, that life is crap. Imagine what you will. I feel like a symptom of your reasons. I’m the answer to your crap job and mine, your unhappy love affair and every one night stand I can remember and everything that’s wrong in you and in me. Doesn’t it sometimes make you want to crash into everything?