I looked around the waiting room again. In the seat next to me, a girl was tinkering absently with saucer-like headphones attached to a small electronic device resting in her lap. Next to her, a man approximately the same age, who had wrapped his hair up into a pale turban, was busily grooming his impressive beard with a small tortoiseshell comb that seemed designed specifically for that purpose and was like no comb I have ever seen, each tine a different thickness, and inexplicably spaced at uneven intervals along the bow of the almost translucent bridge. I watched him for some time in that state of hypnosis that any seemingly regular, if unusual, act induces in such places at such hours. Sunday night. Casualty. Albert Street, Redfern.

As I sat there, unable to speak yet unable to leave, two women came through the doors surrounded by several police officers. Their clothes were rumpled, as if they had just come out of a police van. They were wearing fur coats and each was handcuffed at the wrists. They crossed the room quickly and disappeared into the corridor beside the woman behind the glass. I wondered where the corridor led, and if the person I had hit had been steered down there too. If I waited long enough, I thought, perhaps I would see him emerge, his arm in a sling, or hobbling on crutches. I hoped it wasn’t anything worse.

There were more dark faces now than I’d noticed when I first walked in. But how could that be? No one, apart from the figure on the gurney and the two women escorted by the police, had come in after me. If my victim was here, it could have been any one of them. What did I have to lose? I knew I wouldn’t be capable of shouting, but what did emerge, finally, after two false starts, was comical, like the quack of a duck: ‘Has anyone here just been hit by a car?’ No response. Perhaps they hadn’t heard me. My throat was tight now and I was breathing quickly, but I managed to squeeze out, louder this time: ‘Has anyone been hit by a car?’ Not everyone looked at me, but on the faces of those who did was not even acknowledgement I was speaking a common language. Only the woman behind the glass stood up.