I watched as Matty ran to the other car. By now, the driver was sitting upright in his seat. He was in his late fifties, maybe, his hair sparse. His face was scrunched tight with pain, his eyes closed and his lips pressed together. The driver’s door of his car was hanging off its hinges. Matthew reached inside and clamped both hands around the driver’s neck.

I sat very still for a moment. Although I had told Matty I wasn’t hurt, I was still interrogating my body before I moved. I tried lifting the soles of my feet one by one, to check my legs worked, and moving my head slowly from side to side. While I did this, I watched Matty. He was speaking to the driver but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He still had his hands clamped around the man’s neck. Beyond Matty and the car, standing on the pavement, was a couple in their teens. The boy was looking at Matty with his mouth open. The girl was on her phone.

‘Are you alright, Lisa?’ My mother’s voice was still high-pitched.

‘Yes, sorry Mum, just a bit stunned. Are you?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. Are you really alright? Should we get out of the car or wait for Matty?’

‘I think we should get out.’

When I pulled on my door handle, it didn’t work from the inside either. I unclipped my seatbelt and moved myself gingerly across the back seat to exit the other side.

Mum and I were standing on the grass verge next to the young couple as an ambulance swayed around the corner and came to a halt. The driver was a young woman. The man who leapt from the passenger seat was large, well over six foot, in his fifties I guessed, and exuded authority. As he approached the car where Matty was still holding the man’s neck between his two hands, the paramedic said, ‘Okay, son, we’ve got this now.’

With no fuss or flurry, Matty said, ‘I’m a doctor. Get the neck brace.’

My mum said quietly, ‘That chicken needs to go in the oven. Your dad will be back before we know it.’

*

Matty applied the neck brace, then let the paramedics extract the driver from the car, lay him on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance. We all watched the ambulance pull off, and then Matty came over to us. ‘I’ll wait for the police, to deal with the cars,’ he said. ‘You get your mum home and give her some tea with sugar. Two sugars for both of you, that’s an order. Okay?’

We both nodded bravely. Matty looked at me. ‘The absence seizures, were they ever brought on by a blow?’ I shook my head slowly.