Brake Before the Bend

I drive the ridge road home from late shifts, a national-speed-limit ribbon with hedges tight on both sides. You learn its bends like verses; I take the blind left after the old dairy at a steady 55 every night, and every night the road is empty, because there is nothing out there but fields and the dairy's rotting roof.

That night, three hundred metres before the bend, something instructed me to slow down. I hesitate over the word 'voice' because there was no sound — it was more that the concept of braking was inserted into my head with an urgency that did not belong to me, twice, like two taps on the same nail: slow. down. now.

I have driven tired enough to imagine things, and this was not that flavour; I was fresh off a quiet shift, radio on, tea in the holder. But the instruction had weight, and after the second tap my foot obeyed on its own, which annoyed the rational part of me even as it happened. I came into the blind left at under thirty.

Filling the entire lane, broadside, stood a horse. Black or near it, unrugged, invisible against the hedge-dark until my dipped beams were on it — an escaped mare from a paddock a mile off, I learned later, when the farmer arrived apologising into the blue lights of the police car that came to manage traffic around her. At 55 I would have taken her mid-body at chest height. The officer, filling in his form, said as much in blunter terms, and asked what made me slow on that stretch. I said I had a feeling.

He wrote 'driver reduced speed on approach', which is true, and nothing like it.

I still take that bend at thirty. The instruction has never returned. Once was a whole education.