The Incident.

The Incident.

Lodged in the M56 tailbacked dead lane, I was playing the usual games. Guessing whether the driver in front of me was a man or a woman from the silhouetted clues. Trying to hit on the cerebral driver in the next lane. Letting cars in, letting cars out with double wink of the headlights. Making words out of the registration plates within eyeshot. Leaving a gap between my car and the car in front so I wouldn't have to go through the gears in the idiot take-up space. Weaving.

The motorway parade was getting to the lurching phase at roughly five miles per hour. Drivers were distracting themselves. Making mobile calls. Reading texts and peering into Sat-Navs like they were mirrors. Adjusting ear-slugs. Half-turning to amuse the heads of tots swivelling round anarchically . Morging Subway sandwiches like there was no tomorrow.
I was contemplating the hinged arm of a driver behind me and the whumping of local radio news on someone's car stereo when a black and chrome S.U.V. which had been fast-tracking on the outside lane swept in behind me. Dark-red-faced, its driver began to push forward on my tail in an attempt to force me out of lane. In the rear-view mirror, I caught a soundless stream of open-mouthed vitriol from the squared face that was growing out of a dark suit.
Tramelled on both sides by moving vehicles, the gleaming horns of the S.U.V. bullied me down the M56.

Eventually, a gap wide enough for me to escape into opened up in the 'slow' lane. Over-revving, the S.U.V. driver lurched into the space that had been my vehicle, jabbing an 'up yours' finger from behind the smoked windscreen and glaring down from his bumped up height.
It seemed that, of all the drivers that made up the endless stream of fag-emnds that made up the M56 at 6p.m., he had singled me out as the object of some personal vendetta. I scraped around my mind for some transgression I had committed but the kitty was empty. Was there something that emanated from the back of my mind, my vehicle that this psycho had picked up on?
He reminded me of the unleashed Staffordshire Bull terrier that once hurled its compacted weight at my lower leg, inducing that queasy sensation as its jaws had closed magnetically over my calf muscle. The dog, it seemed, had already sensed my horror and I had accepted the inevitability of the slavering jaws with a kind of 'condemned man' mix of frenzy and resentment. This was to be the first of several dog attacks.
The S.U.V. driver's fury was gathering momentum as fast as his oversized Nissan. I did not dare to lock my gaze with his, especially in the crushing period of his obscene gesture. A dog attack might have ensued. I rummaged instead in the glove compartment for something imaginary. Other drivers were now falling within the orbit of his fury as they drew alongside him or he passed them like a slow ache.

The distance between me and the S.U.V. man lengthened, thankfully. So did the passage of time. I tried not to think about the episode, unsuccessfully. The image of his dark-red face kept imprinting itself on that imaginary plane between the forehead and the world in front of it.
Forty minutes, four miles down the M56, the upturned, cramped Stag Beetle of a car, surrounded by high-viz vest Support Officers and green-doublooned ambulance staff hove into the view of my lower-left windscreen.

In between the seething bodies, I could just make out a dark-suited man. He was crouched over a thin, white twisted body, ministering a stream of anguish. I thought his dark, red face looked familiar.