My unlucky brake

One wet morning, Jonathan Raban crashed his car. It was his first accident, caused by one fateful slip. While his car was written off, he was unharmed - but, all the same, something had changed for ever
I'd been driving for 42 years without having an accident or ever filing an insurance claim, and had grown lazy in the assumption that accidents happened to other people, not to me. Then, one recent evening, my car escaped from my control and turned itself, in a heartbeat, into a total write-off, though my own injuries were only of the metaphysical kind: disbelief, humiliation, shame, and the realisation that 42 years of doing something almost every day of your life won't prevent you from behaving like a novice and a jerk.

I had just fed the car into the inside lane of Highway 99 in Seattle - dark, wet, and relatively free of traffic - and was accelerating from second up to third when the world changed: a slight fishtailing of the rear end, my stupid - stupid! - right foot going for the brake, and then a lot of exclamation-mark stuff that is usually confined to the balloons in comics. Nothing happened in slow-motion: everything happened at once - the sturdy telephone pole slamming into the door-pillar on the driver's side, the continuing spin that put the car facing in the direction from which it had started, the hoar frost spreading from the bottom left-hand corner of the windscreen, the spilling-out of previously hidden internal auto organs from beneath the steering wheel and dashboard, the strange banging and grinding noises coming out of the transmission.

I had to wrestle with the wheel to make it turn, but the car, which was now slightly L-shaped, was still capable of forward motion, and I limped it into the parking lot of a grungy, low-rent motel, less than a hundred yards down the road. The driver's door was not a door any more, but the passenger door was in mint working order (how often I had told my 12-year-old daughter to close it gently). Conscious that the most accidental thing about this accident was my own entirely unreasonable survival of it without a scratch, I walked to the motel office to report to the police what had happened. But no one came when I rang the bell. For a while I stood in the light rain, waiting for a cab, but the cab drivers were all otherwise engaged.

Slithering back into the driver's seat of my silver wreck, I forced it homeward. Every bit of its machinery protested: clanking, whining, thumping, scraping, it limped along at a fair walking speed, and eventually made the two miles to my house, where I called the police. Operator 78 (she wouldn't give her name) politely declined to give even the small dignity of an incident number to what had happened, though she did ask after the welfare of the pole.

The friend whom I called a few minutes later said that I needed a drink, so we went out and had several. Next morning I woke in a state of confused penitence, mostly for the accident and some for the hard stuff consumed after it happened. Neighbours were out on the street admiring the car, which, in watery sunlight, now looked like a piece of sculpture begging for a title. Misfortune? Idiocy? Blind Luck?

"What happened?"

"I braked."

Forty-two years, and I braked, when every driving instinct ought to have told me that braking was a fatal - or should have been a fatal - thing to do.

"You weren't in it?" She was incredulous. "You were driving ?"

That the worst I had to show for it were the symptoms of a mild hangover was an obviously disappointing inconsistency: had I been on crutches, in a wheelchair, or bandaged like a mummy, there would have been a satisfying symmetry between what was left of the car and me. As it was, there was something suspiciously fraudulent about my well-being, or so my neighbours' eyes told me. He's pulled a fast one, they said.

The damage assessor showed up within 30 minutes of my phoning the insurance company, a smallish outfit based in Seattle. He had the rubicund cheeriness of an undertaker: when you're a professional in the death business, good humour comes as naturally as breathing. Taking pictures of the smashed-in driver's side, he told me that he likes to show his most spectacular photos to his teenage son, "to teach him how easy it is to die in a car". But my wreck wasn't in that league.

"It's in fine condition for its year."

"Fine condition?"

"Before the incident, I mean, of course. It's a total loss."

Just the previous week, he'd photographed a similar case of a side-impact collision with a utility pole, in which the point of collision was a few inches aft of the door pillar. The driver's kidneys were on the passenger seat, but she was still hanging on to life in intensive care.

At 3pm, that is, 19 hours after the accident, the insurance company called to say it could cut me a cheque then and there. The pleasant woman at head office asked me if I'd agree to the sum offered. Choosing the word with some caution, I said I thought it "generous", which it was - amazingly so, considering that I had paid only about $400 less for the car two years and 25,000 miles ago, and that, five days before, a dealership had offered me $6,570 less than the insurance company's quote when I asked what its trade-in value would be against a later model that I'd been fancying all year.

Odd, then, how very flat I felt when I went car-shopping the next day. The cheque from the insurance company, combined with a fat dealer discount and manufacturer's rebate, made the '04 turbo model irresistible. 0-60 in 6.2 secs, down from 8.1 ... I'm still readily seduced by such figures. Yet I declined to take the thing for a test drive; just took a quick glance inside to check the odometer (1 mile), and settled down to the epic paperwork involved in buying a car in the US (it is - dangerously - a lot quicker and easier to buy a house).

The extraordinary speed at which everything had happened, from the crash itself to the insurance settlement, left me no time to sort things out in my head, which was swilling with a promiscuous sort of guilt - for allowing my foot to travel to the brake pedal, for being rewarded for my foolishness with more money than I believed the car was worth, for ... for ... for. Once it gets started, guilt races away in a dozen different directions, like spilled mercury.

What did take a while was the removal of the wreck from the street. Over the weekend, the two cars were parked nose to nose, almost identical in their original design: two small convertibles; one silver, one titanium grey; one immaculate with dealer plates, the other like grievous bodily harm in automobile form. My next-door neighbour got it exactly right when he carefully named the two cars.

"Dr Jekyll ... " he said. " ... Mr Hyde."

I drove the new car with exaggerated timidity. Two days after its purchase, I took it to the tyre shop and got them to lever off the high-performance Toyo Proxes and replace them with Continental Extreme Contacts. Talking to a friend who, several years ago, when she was a motoring journalist, had a similar crash on an ice-ridden freeway in eastern Washington, I said, "It's like I'm back to L-plates again. I suppose I'll get over it in a week or two." "I never did," she said. "It'll probably stay with you for the rest of your life."

Writers ought to know about living with crises of confidence. That you lack the intelligence, the talent, and the nerve to carry off what you're trying to do is a conviction that, quite properly, settles on most writers with daunting regularity. But it was never so for me with driving. I was good. I had the concentration, the quick reflexes, the feel for the road. At boarding school I shared a study with Derek Bell, who went on to become a famous racing driver (his studies then were mostly conducted inside the pages of the green-liveried Motor Sport magazine), and sometimes, heeling-and-toeing round a bend, I was prone to see myself as a Fangio manqué, on a controlled drift through a chicane at Monza.

Though I have slowed since, my confidence in my own skill has been unshakeable. But I braked, and with that one daft movement of my foot, I'm thankful to say that I wrecked something more than just a car. About time too.

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