I came to as she was dragging me over the pavement. That’s not going to do my new car much good, I thought.
I opened my eyes just in time to catch the flash of the camera on her smartphone. Taking a picture of me? What for?
She jumped as I opened my mouth to speak and hid her face with her hands. I could who see she was, though. I knew her by reputation. She was the…
But I’m going to one fast. Let me start from the beginning.
Five minutes earlier I’d been walking in the dark on the way home from the shops. There’s a split path and I was walking on the pedestrian side. You don’t want to walk on the other side because that’s for bikes. Everyone knows that. And everyone stays in their lane. Mostly.
She was one of those people who break rules. She came around the corner fast, without lights on and never gave so much of a tinkle of her bell to let me know that she was going to hit me smack in the middle of my pedestrian lane.
It didn’t hurt much, but that’s only because her bike whacked me into the wall and the whiplash of that smacked my head into a particularly hard brick. I went down like a sack of secondhand paperbacks.
And that was that.
After she’d done taking a photo of me lying in the middle of the cycle lane, a good two feet to the right of where I’d actually been walking, she got on her bike and cycled off. She had the audacity to ring her bell at that point.
‘I know where you live’ was what I tried to call after her but it came out as ‘Ur uhr uh uhh uurve.’
And that’s when the front tyre of the next cyclist hit me.
Robert C Day 