I left the room quickly. There was nothing for me there. I sat in my car but did not turn the key in the ignition. I sat like this for hours. From time to time I tried to open my eyes but I kept drifting into sleep. I seemed to remember the accident. The person I had hit was sitting in the car next to me. I didn’t have the strength to turn and look at her, but her face came to me with photographic precision. One of the police officers I had seen in the waiting room held up what looked like an identikit portrait and asked me if I recognised it. I studied the face until I thought, yes, I know who it is. The shock of this recognition brought back the memory of a kangaroo I had seen frozen in a spotlight the moment before its death. The kangaroo did not have a kangaroo face but the face of my mother. Again I heard the police officer ask, ‘Do you know this person?’ – louder now, as if he was speaking through a megaphone. I had the impression I was lost in bushland, the voice echoing off the walls of an escarpment. Once my strength returned, I remember thinking, I would climb the wall to the ledge where I had left her after the fall. She would still be wrapped in her fur coat. I would ask her all the questions I needed to ask. I would find out exactly who she was.

Later, driving back to the hostel on the outskirts of the city, I caught the lights of the car behind me in the rear-vision mirror and wondered why I had not looked in the mirror the moment after I heard the thud. It would have been the natural thing to do. But all that came into my mind was another question: why all those injunctions against looking back? I thought of Orpheus, and Lot’s wife, turned to a pillar of salt. I thought again of my dream. The face had seemed so clear to me that I was certain I knew it, and yet when I woke there was nothing: like a photograph handled too often, it had lost its definition and faded without trace, the sense of loss it left behind a phantom limb.