Six hundred thousand dollars was an interesting sum of money: large enough to alter a life, small enough to be discussed in court without anybody laughing.
David Vern had spent much of the morning looking at Steve Penderhurst and wondering what, exactly, six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage looked like. It looked surprisingly healthy. Steve sat twelve feet away in a charcoal suit, having previously suffered in navy at the preliminary hearing and grey during mediation. There was nothing visibly wrong with him, which David knew was a wicked thought and, worse, a legally irrelevant one. Trauma did not require plaster. Depression did not announce itself with a facial rash. Steve had reports: post-traumatic stress, disturbed sleep, intrusive recollections, depression, anxiety around traffic and a particular fear of pedestrian crossings which David, despite himself, found almost offensively specific.
“Nobody disputes the seriousness of the original incident,” the judge was saying, “nor, I think, does Mr Vern dispute his responsibility for it.”
“No,” David said, before noticing his barrister shift and realizing the question had not been addressed to him.
The original incident. That was what six months could do to the worst three seconds of your life. On 6 May, shortly after nine in the evening, David had driven through a poorly illuminated pedestrian crossing and hit Steve. It had rained earlier. David had consumed two glasses of wine with dinner. Steve had the right of way. Then came police, ambulance, breath test, hospital, conviction, driving ban and criminal record. The consequences proved more reproductive. David’s job required driving, so that went. His marriage, already carrying rather more structural weight than its architects had intended, followed. Louise took the children. David still saw them, technically. Technically he remained their father; technically every second weekend constituted a relationship.
David had accepted most of this, or told himself he had. He had hit a man with a car after drinking wine; the world was unlikely to organise a testimonial dinner. What he had not expected was Steve returning six months later with an invoice.
“Mr Vern’s position,” his barrister said, “is not that Mr Penderhurst suffered no psychological consequences. But proceedings were initiated approximately six months after the accident, by which time my client had been convicted, lost his license and employment, and experienced the breakdown of his marriage.”
“The defendant’s misfortunes,” Steve’s barrister replied, “do not reduce the claimant’s injuries.”
Misfortunes.
David almost admired it. Everything that happened to Steve was an injury. Everything that happened to David was a misfortune.
There had been a time when David desperately wanted to apologize. After the accident he had asked whether Steve was all right until a police officer told him to stop asking. He had tried to visit him in hospital and later wrote a letter his solicitor advised him not to send. Even after losing his job, Steve remained outside David’s expanding circle of blame. Why shouldn’t he? Steve had been walking across a road.
Then Steve discovered that David had money.
David could not prove the sequence mattered. He merely knew that it did.
The medical evidence was revisited. Steve woke sweating, experienced low moods, had become irritable and sometimes avoided the crossing. His marriage had survived. He continued working. His physical injuries had resolved. His body, in other words, had recovered with indecent efficiency. It was his mind that had become expensive.
Six hundred thousand dollars.
Had David been broke, Steve could presumably have experienced precisely the same nightmares for considerably less. His solicitor had explained the distinction between damages and recoverability. David understood it perfectly well. That was the problem.
Then Steve’s barrister returned to 6 May.
“You accept that you consumed two glasses of wine and subsequently drove?”
“Yes.”
“And failed to stop at the pedestrian crossing?”
“I didn’t see him on the crossing.”
His barrister looked at him.
David knew he should leave it alone.
“I saw him,” he said. “That’s what I’ve always tried to explain.”
“You saw Mr Penderhurst?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m not sure I understand.”
“He was at the side of the road.”
“Except he wasn’t.”
“I know.”
“You struck him on the crossing.”
“I know.”
“Then you were mistaken.”
“Obviously I was mistaken. But something happened to me as I approached that crossing.”
The judge looked up.
“I know how it sounds,” David continued. “I wasn’t seeing double. I wasn’t confused. I saw Steve beside the crossing. I remember thinking he’d cross after I went through. Then I went through and hit him.”
“Alcohol can impair perception.”
“I know what alcohol does.”
“Mr Vern,” the judge said, “this was considered extensively during the criminal proceedings. There is no need to conduct those proceedings again.”
David nodded.
And that was that.
He remembered the crossing approaching beneath the headlights and Steve standing at the kerb. Then impact. The impossible thing was not that he had failed to see Steve. The impossible thing was that he had seen him, only in the wrong place. There were respectable explanations—alcohol, darkness, shock, memory, the brain’s enthusiasm for becoming defence counsel to its own mistakes. David knew them all. He wasn’t certain he believed himself.
But the memory remained: Steve had been at the side of the road.
By late afternoon the case returned to money. Experts had translated misery into arithmetic. Perhaps Steve really did wake at three in the morning with his heart hammering. Perhaps he saw headlights when he closed his eyes. David could believe all of it.
What he couldn’t believe was that it cost six hundred thousand dollars.
The judgment came shortly before four.
Steve won. The judge made no secret of his attitude towards drink-driving. In his written judgment he described it as an offence deserving of increasingly stern consequences and remarked that he was pleased, in this instance, to contribute to that sterner approach. David read that sentence several times. Apparently the six hundred thousand dollars was not merely compensation. He had also been selected for a small supporting role in the improvement of society.
Across the courtroom, Steve closed his eyes while his solicitor put a hand briefly on his arm. Nobody put a hand on David.
Outside, David’s barrister talked about costs and options while David watched Steve emerge from the courthouse. For a moment he hoped Steve might approach him—not to forgive him, nothing theatrical, merely to acknowledge that the thing had become grotesque for both of them.
Steve said nothing. He descended the steps and disappeared with his solicitor into the afternoon crowd.
David remained where he was.
Six hundred thousand dollars. The job. The licence. Louise. The children. There was apparently always something else available to lose.
He watched the place where Steve had vanished.
A thought arrived with extraordinary clarity.
You wanted damages?
I’ll give you fucking damages.