What followed could only have taken one second, maybe less. No time for the sounding of horns, for braking, for swerving. Yet it seemed to take forever. Side by side, the two approaching vehicles widened to fill my field of vision. The slab front of the Range Rover closed in on us as if I was watching a series of still frames, each shot an enlargement of the last. The closer the car came, the slower time passed, our distance from disaster being halved, halved, halved again. I locked my arms against the side of my seat, drove my body backwards. The enormous slatted grille bore down on us, expanding until it enveloped us, shrunk us to nothing. I was staring down two and a half tons of steel ploughing towards us at over seventy miles per hour.

The impact came. And went. The deafening bang of flattened steel. The wrenching of everything round my own axis. Now I was staring at a grass bank forty metres away. Still in my seat. Still upright. It was almost nothing. There’d been a second of panic. Now it was over. Like waking after a nightmare. Everything was serene. Everything seemed fine.

In no hurry, I released my seat belt. I pushed my door open. There was no need to unlatch it – the frame had become far wider than the door itself. I slid to the edge of my seat.

The old Triumph had not quite hit the other car head-on: the impact had been taken on the driver’s side. The whole car had been bent to the shape of a sickle, the cockpit elongated on my side, compressed on Aunty Kaye’s. Calmly, I turned to face her.

Hers was no soap-opera death. There were no poignant last words. No pale eyelids slowly closing. No gentle slipping away.

For nearly a year, people have been saying, ‘His aunty died in a car crash.’ It’s a statement that can’t possibly conjure the right image in anyone’s mind. They couldn’t know about the purple blood that slopped in the footwell. They couldn’t imagine the stench of iron that filled the cabin. They couldn’t visualize her head, that may have been turned towards me, may have been turned away, it was impossible to tell.

I stepped from the car. I stood alone on an expanse of deserted road littered with shattered pieces of debris. In the far distance in both directions, queues of traffic amassed, an audience leaning on opened driver’s doors. A bald man in a short-sleeved shirt staggered from the wrecked Range Rover twenty metres away. The enormous front wheels had splayed outwards; the front panelling had opened like wings. Beyond the cracked windscreen, the interior was draped with flaccid airbags. He looked at me with a frown. His mouth moved but I could hear no sound.