Events.

My father walked back into the house, his whole body shaking.

"Get me a whisky!" he demanded of my mother, "and tell that bastard" - pointing a trembling finger at me - "we're never going out on another driving lesson!"

We'd driven about two miles from our home, and I was coming up to a junction.

"You need to start braking around now, son."

"Paul - slow down!"

Then, screaming: "Put the fucking brakes on!" as I went straight through the white line and into the middle of the road. Luckily, nothing was coming, otherwise we'd have been annihilated.

That was at least 10 years ago, but I've never lost the blindness that comes with failing to react to events - I can see disaster coming, but do nothing to avert it. I watched Bluefish shatter into a million pieces on a stone of uncertain origins, and didn't even close my fingers as she trickled through them. Now the wind has taken hold and carried her away irretrievably.

(I remember when my grandmother's ashes were scattered - for various reasons it remains perhaps the most deflating day of my life. When her grey powder was cast into the breeze, my father got the blowback in his hair, in his mouth, over his clothes. Old bugger's still troubling me now, he remarked.)

I can do nothing, except freeze, and wait for the moment of impact. When I was hit by a van at the age of 14, I stood open-mouthed, leaden in the middle of the road, waiting for the red block to eat my flesh like a carnivore.

With Bluefish, I woke every morning with a sick feeling, waiting for the contact that would send us spinning in opposite directions for evermore, never to coincide again. To begin with, the sickness is a weight dragged by time itself, but then the new, dilated, clock becomes routine - to be pinned to the ground by dread itself, eternally relapsing, a thousand times a day.

I can see it coming, but there is no stopping its progress, and I can't get out of the way. I drink wine from a plastic cup to blur what the eye can see, and then wake with a head of stone, and sure enough, when I check, my uneasy sleep has caused no impediment to that which growls and turns over in the distance, but less distant than before.