Girl Behind the Car

I was working as a live-in carer on the Norfolk coast, in one of those quiet English corners where the sea is grey, the wind is steady and nothing dramatic is supposed to happen.

My client loved car rides. She barely walked, but the car was still her way of touching the world. So we would drive: through villages, along hedges, to the sea and back again. Sometimes we’d sit on a clifftop car park and just watch the water from inside the car, the heater humming steadily in the background.

That day was like any other. Autumn, the kind that isn’t romantic at all – not golden, just cold. The sea was there, doing its usual thing. The car park was almost empty. There was our car, one more in the corner, and later another one pulled in.

No drama. No soundtrack. Just a normal, slightly grey English day.

My client was tired and wanted to go home. I turned the key, listened to the engine wake up, and did the usual scan: mirrors, handbrake, the car behind us. Behind me was a couple, still messing around their car, pulling things out, putting things back in. It looked like a small argument or at least a disagreement about what they needed to take with them. Ordinary domestic chaos. I put the car in gear. I looked in the mirror again. They were still there, moving around, at a right angle to our bumper. No one directly behind us.

I released the handbrake. And for some reason – no idea why, no conscious thought – I checked the mirror one more time. Not because anything changed. Just because something in me said: look again. This time, a small girl stepped out from behind our car. She was exactly in the place where the car would have rolled if I had just moved, trusting the first two looks. Too small to see in the earlier angle, walking that slow, careful child-walk, a bit behind her adults, not holding anyone’s hand. They had already walked ahead, assuming she was with them.

She wasn’t.

She was with me. With my bumper.

I froze. Foot on the brake. Everything in my body went completely still. No one else noticed. Her parents kept walking toward the path to the beach. My client in the passenger seat saw nothing; she was looking out to sea. The girl didn’t even look towards the car. She just passed behind it and followed them, like nothing special had happened.

I sat there, suddenly aware of how thin everything is. How one second earlier or later, one less glance in the mirror, and my entire life would have split into a different version.

In one version of this day, I reverse, there is a bump, a scream, and my life snaps around a single second I can never undo.

In the version I actually live in, the car stays still, a child walks past, her parents keep arguing about their bags, and only I see the fault line between these two worlds.

It felt exactly like standing between parallel universes, one foot on each side, and then quietly stepping back to the one where the worst thing did not happen.

No explosion, no drama, no angel choirs. Just a silent decision that was never even a decision – a third look in the mirror, for no good reason. I drove home very carefully that day. My client chatted about the sea, the wind, the birds. For her it was just another ride. For me it was like driving through a peeledback version of reality, knowing how close everything is to being completely different.

What stayed with me most was this: I was the only witness.

There was no one to say, “Do you know how close that was?” No grateful parents, no heroic saving of a life, no newspaper story. If I had told the couple, they probably would have laughed nervously, apologised and then forgotten it by the time they reached the sand. But I didn’t tell them. I kept it. That moment became one of those private coordinates my life is built on. I carry it the way I carry certain lines in my drawings.

Hidden, but structural. The geometry of “almost” instead of “too late”.

Somewhere under the lines, there is always a girl walking behind the car, in a world where the driver decided, for no logical reason at all, to look one more time.

Parallel Worlds

These drawings belong with this frame because both begin where one moment splits into different realities.