I Emptied the School Run Car of Everything Loose

I am not a superstitious mother. I'm the one who rolls her eyes at horoscopes. So when I say the morning felt wrong, understand that I have no framework for it and it embarrasses me to write it down.

It was an ordinary Tuesday, and I woke with a low, wordless dread, a sense of the day being loaded, cocked. No image, no thought, just a heaviness that followed me through breakfast and would not lift. And it attached itself, irrationally, to the car — to the school run, the twenty-minute drive I do twice a day without thinking. I kept looking at the car through the kitchen window with a feeling I can only describe as suspicion.

So I did something I have never done before or since. Before the kids came out, I went to the car and I strapped down everything loose. The travel mugs. The umbrella on the parcel shelf. The kids' water bottles, the tablet, the bag of library books, the tin of travel sweets, the phone mount — everything that lived loose in that car, I stowed in footwells and boot and strapped or wedged, until the cabin was bare. I told the kids, when they asked why the car was so tidy, that I'd 'had a clear-out,' which wasn't a lie exactly.

Two hours later, coming back from the supermarket with the younger one, a lorry failed to stop at the lights and went into the side of us.

We were fine. Bruised, shaken, the car a write-off, but fine — the safety cell did its job, the belts held. And here is the thing the attending officer remarked on, because he sees a lot of crashes: how clean the cabin was. In a side impact at speed, he said, the danger isn't only the collision; it's everything loose in the car becoming a missile — a travel mug to the temple, a tablet to the face, a tin of sweets at head height. He'd seen bad injuries from flying junk in survivable crashes. Ours had nothing loose to throw. The cabin was bare. Nothing became a missile because two hours earlier a dread I couldn't name had made me strip the car of every projectile it contained.

I've thought about it a great deal, and I have no explanation I'm comfortable with. I didn't foresee a lorry. I had no vision, no number, no voice. I just woke up certain, wordlessly, that the car was dangerous that day, and I answered the certainty by making it as safe as I could, and then the danger came, exactly to the car, exactly as if it had been trying to warn me the only way it could.

I still roll my eyes at horoscopes. But now, on the rare mornings the dread comes back — it has, twice, and both times nothing happened — I strap the car down anyway. It costs five minutes. I've learned what the alternative can cost.