When the traffic lights flashed from red to green, I doubt my father expected my mother to start screaming and shouting. Screaming and shouting was more of a trait my older sister, Magdalene, sported, but she, like my ten-year-old self was securely plugged into her music. So the incoming motorcycle was really quite a shock, and quite the novelty; neither of us had ever had a motorcycle in the car with us before. I realise now that the man must have hit the front of the car with a terrible speed, hurled himself and his bike through the windscreen and landed, with the motor still running, somewhere between Maggie and myself. Somehow, during his displacement, he had managed to sever his head from his torso, but I was young then, very young, and I took such things in stride far more easily than I would now.
The only thing I really noticed was that the motorcycle was orange. His head lay in my lap. My pretty green dress had an icky brown stain on it. It worried me, because when I showed my parents, neither of them moved, or even breathed for that matter. It might have had something to do with the fact that the motorcycle had displaced their intestines and splattered them all over the seats, but I was ten years old and that sort of thinking didn’t enter my consciousness. So by the time that the friendly police doctor people came to check on me, I wondered if I'd done something wrong. I asked the policeman, all he did was put me in a police car. I figured maybe they'd been eaten by someone. The concepts of 'car accident' and 'death' didn't feature until later when the novelty of living in Grandma Stella's big house wore off.
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