I don’t know why I was here now. There was no one on the street, but inside, in the waiting area, there was barely a vacant seat. Who were these people? How had they come here? Pain, sickness, fear produce in rooms like this either a kind of catatonia, or histrionics that border on hysteria. A man younger than me had laid his crutches between two seats as a kind of barrier or bridge – I couldn’t tell which. His eyes were open but he sat as if what he was looking at was not before him. From time to time he emitted a barely audible groan, or his hand jerked up to his shaved head to pick at a bloody scab; it moved as if pulled by an invisible thread. Apart from these tics he was as silent and still as an indoor plant. A large Aboriginal woman wrapped in what looked to be a curtain was trying to pacify a man who may well have been her son and would not be still but paced up and down the aisle, shouting across at the woman at reception and complaining they weren’t paying him any attention. He kept walking in front of me, trying to catch my eye. He seemed to thrum, the noise coming everywhere from his body at once. Two Aboriginal boys sat nearby but gave no indication of any connection to either the woman or the man. They didn’t speak to each other but looked on as if an audience to a play.

When finally I managed to get back into the car and leave the site of the accident, I didn’t know at first where I was driving. A silence seemed to have settled around me, as if I had lost my hearing. I ended up at the hospital before I realised where I was. I still wasn’t sure if I had done anything wrong, but I couldn’t get the sound of that small thud, which had grown great in its smallness, out of my head. If I had hit someone, I must have thought, perhaps they had come to the closest hospital – on their own, if they were able to walk, or with the aid of some good Samaritan who may have happened upon them after I had driven on. I can’t recapture my thinking from that time. But it makes sense to think that might have been the case.