A life can change in an instant. That’s all it takes. Then be haunted by “what ifs.” What if I hadn’t gone for a drink that night, or had taken a different route home? What if it hadn’t been raining? What if I hadn’t been there at all? Someone else, with a different name, living another life.

She came at me out of the blue, I said to the coroner. I’d never known what it meant before. She came at me out of the blue gloom, the blue rain, the blue shadow of the red bus. A smudged shape moving in a royal-blue school uniform between the rear of the bus and my moving car.

I didn’t see her. I didn’t have time to brake.

“Why didn’t you have your headlights on?” he’d asked. He had a thin angular face, eyebrows that met in the middle, thinning grey hair.

I couldn’t tell him about the light in November. When it’s easy not to notice the first signs of dusk. When shapes suddenly lose their edges and a girl moving quickly from behind a stationary bus, moving in the fading light, in the rain, in the November gloom, may be a ghost, a spirit, something from the Underworld, a phantom from out of my own mind.

“It would have made no difference,” I had told him. “I wouldn’t have had time to stop.” She came at me suddenly out of the blue.

“You can’t be sure,” he’d said, his mouth a thin line of disapproval. “Even a second could have made a difference.”

He was right, of course: I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything anymore.

I couldn’t tell him about time either; how there are two sorts. There’s clock time where seconds mount up to minutes and minutes to hours. Where day changes to night and weeks build to months and months to a year, and the years play out on your face and in your thickening waist. The time most of us live in.

Then there’s the other sort. It has no limits. It reels you backwards without warning, spins you young again on a whim. It can be triggered by anything: a fragment of music, a scent on the air. Or a child moving in a blue school uniform in the rain. It claims you in dreams, on the borders of sleep, even in your waking moments when you think you’re safe.

A child moved out suddenly from the rear of a bus, ran in a blue smudge of uniform through the misted rain, moved out from that forward linear tick-tock time into the other, where she’s caught forever, like a broken leaf in a whirlpool current. I’ve seen her a thousand times. Running through the blue shadows in the rain. Stopped by a screech of brakes and my voice shouting. Stopped by the sudden boom of my heart.

Her name was Laura. I found that out later in the station. Bob Lees was on duty that night. He sat me down in the interview room, fetched me a coffee and handed me a cigarette. I’d given up months ago but none of that mattered now --- my old life wiped out now like a cloth wiping a smudge from glass. My hand trembled when I held the cigarette and put it to my mouth. Bob lit it for me and I inhaled. It tasted bitter; I was thankful for that, needing the bitterness.

“Jack, you know that Laura is dead.”

More a statement than a question. He said her name gently. He could have been naming someone I’d known for a long time, even someone I loved. His voice made her name sound intimate. Laura. Derived from Laurel, meaning victory.

When I knelt over her in the road she lay as still as a doll, her pale face like wax, not a mark on it. There was a bubble of saliva in the corner of her mouth. I’d touched her then, but only lightly, my hand brushing the top of her head. She could have been my own child lying there, her blue school skirt hitched up above the thin bones of her knees, books spilling out from the school bag by her feet. My hand, resting on the top of her head, felt damp. When I pulled it away my fingers were dark with blood.

I’ve seen dead bodies before. Often. I’ve seen them in the morgue and in the autopsy room. It’s part of the job. I’ve seen them encased in plastic, like a joint of meat. The zip’s pulled down and I’ve breathed in death, musty, like rotten leaves. A dead body has no name, although on the records a name might be assigned to it, surname first. But it’s just a word; there’s no music attached to it, no essence.

I’ve seen casualties of road accidents before, like Laura. I’ve been first on the scene a few times, waiting for the ambulance. I’ve done the stuff you’re supposed to do. Check for consciousness, for breath, for a pulse.

“Can you hear me?” I’ve said. “Can you hear my voice?”

I’ve tilted my head towards their nostrils, hoping to feel the warm tremor of a breath on my ear, watched for the rise and fall of their ribcage. I’ve even had to do CPR once. He was an old man, a derelict. He died with the bottle still clasped in his hand. I’d felt his whiskers in my mouth. It did no good; he’d gone anyway. But you have to try.

When someone dies suddenly, within seconds, within minutes, they’re not like those corpses on the mortuary slab. There’s a touch of colour in their cheeks still, a suggestion of light in their eyes, as if the soul --- if you believe in that stuff --- is uncertain where it should be.

Did I know Laura had died? Yes. But she wasn’t dead then, lying on the gritty tarmac, a drizzle of rain on her face. I saw her lips move slightly. A faint sigh, a low moan beneath the breath.

I dipped my head towards her face and listened to her breath and felt a faint fan of warm air on my cheek.

“Sweetheart,” I said, as if she was my own child and I loved her. “It’s OK. You’re going to be OK.”

Her eyes stirred beneath their closed lids. I kept my eyes fixed on her face and noticed little else. Not the froth of blood that welled up from her chest wall and seeped into the royal-blue blazer. Not Dave’s voice behind me on the mobile. A curl of blood leaked slowly down from her hairline. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and stroked it gently upwards towards her brow-bone so it wouldn’t get into her eye. I held her hand. Her fingers lay cold and still in my own.

How long? Seconds. Minutes. I don’t know. What’s time? Sometimes it stops all together.

Dave’s voice breaking in, restoring me to clock time. Its forward motion.

“The ambulance is coming, Jack. I can see it.”

I could hear it too. Shrieking down the road towards us, the road emptying suddenly, making way. Within seconds, the paramedics were leaping out, their brisk urgency nudging me back. Checking her pulse, clamping an oxygen mask over her mouth. Her body slid from me onto the stretcher and they lifted her up. That’s when it happened. I felt a cold rush of air come over me and pass me and that’s when I knew she had died.

Although I didn’t know her name then. Laura.

***

“Jack, you know that Laura is dead?”

More a question, than a statement. Bob was ten years younger than me. He looked at me like I could have been a brother.

“Yes, I know,” I said softly.