He came out of the
supermarket having forgotten what he went in for, holding only an
apple. At the bus stop outside a woman was attempting to wrestle a
small girl into a push chair. The child, whose hair was styled into
discrete knots all over her head performed a can-can of resistance.
He was a scientist now, he supposed, nineteen years old and up at
Imperial doing physics. He cared more about pleasing his parents
than his painting, and that, presumably, was what separated artists
from dabblers, regardless of their ability. He wore shorts and a
polo shirt with the name of his hall of residence embroidered on the
chest. His name was Lee Chen and he had never had a girlfriend.
Richard Finch headed
south towards the river in a convertible Saab he had bought for his
father with his first bonus. It was too big for the old man's
garage, the door sat at thirty degrees from vertical, nestling on the
bonnet. The bungalow in Hove wasn't built to house a man with a
large Scandinavian sports car so the big black thing had gone back
to London, whence it came, replace by a silver grey Nissan Micra
which Dad drove twice a week, to the cemetery and the cinema in
Brighton. Finch saw the lights change ahead of him, accelerated and
passed through the bollards before they were red, and across the
junction to Beaufort Street.
The car missed him by
half a metre, travelling at twenty metres per second and
accelerating, its wing mirror still closer. Lee knew the driver had
seen him, he saw a hand of apology raised almost instantly. He
wasn't the type to shout. He was infuriated by that hand, though,
there was something careless about it. The hand of someone who lived
a life without consequences. Without thinking he turned and threw
the apple at the back of the car. He misjudged the trajectory
completely. The apple flew higher and further than he intended.
Could adrenalin act so quickly, he wondered, almost certainly not.
The apple descended in a shallow parabola and struck the driver on
the left temple. He saw the man twitch at the steering before the
car thumped irreversibly into a parked UPS van. Glass exploded, the
car's airbag deployed with a great puff of powder and an unpleasant
smell that was unfamiliar to Lee. The van's alarm sounded. People
ran towards the accident. Lee walked.
The man's face was
misshapen but he was breathing and alert. Lee stood and looked at
him for ten seconds. He counted. Then he walked back away from the
river, picking up the apple, bruised now on two sides, from the
gutter.
