On Days Like These
written by: Richard Wall
Aosta, The Italian Alps. 1969
“What happened?”
Simon Faith sat at the edge of the mountain road, staring down the ravine at the twisted remains of the 1968 Lamborghini Miura burning fiercely on a rocky outcrop fifty feet below.
The last thing he remembered was entering the tunnel, windows open to get the full effect of the glorious sound of the V12 engine. Then the smell of petrol, the whumph as it ignited, smoke filling the cabin; then the impact and the sensation of the car spinning out of control.
Simon turned, saw the strips of rubber on the asphalt, interspersed with metallic scrapes and flakes of orange paint showing where the Miura had spun, rolled, and then left the road. He looked back down into the ravine.
“I must have been thrown clear. Where’s Michelle?”
She had been sitting next to him. He recalled the sound of her laughter and then, moments before the impact, her screams. Anguish gripped his heart like steel talons as he realised she must still be in the car.
He strained his eyes, searching for any sign of movement, but the area was obscured by thick black smoke billowing from the burning wreckage. He hoped that Michelle had somehow been thrown clear, too, and tried not to think of her trapped within the remains of the Lamborghini.
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
He thought back to how they had met, and their life together. He was a struggling actor, offered a part, his first speaking role, on a television play that she had written. It was a gritty, kitchen-sink drama about a mother forced to take her three young daughters to a hostel to escape an abusive marriage. It highlighted issues not widely discussed in the media at that time and propelled Michelle and him into the limelight.
They hit it off from the outset, and since meeting, they had not spent more than one day apart. They were married six months later, in a no-frills ceremony at a Registry Office in Brighton, after which they went for fish and chips on the beach. In addition to exchanging rings, they bought one another Rolex wristwatches, Michelle certain that they would be good investments for the future. Unlike many showbusiness marriages of convenience, Simon and Michelle lived for one another and had recently been trying for a baby.
Thanks to her, Simon landed further TV roles and then crossed over into films, his latest being a part alongside Michael Caine in ‘The Italian Job’, which earned him very favourable reviews and an offer to work in Hollywood. The film also gave him the desire to emulate the opening scene by driving an orange Lamborghini Miura through the Alps.
Simon found a secondhand Miura at a dealership in London. It was a P400 in orange, and for the full Italian Job experience, he fitted a radio-cassette player and bought a tape of Matt Monro that included the song, ‘On Days Like These.’
The trip was meant to be their holiday before they both flew out to LA. Deep down, Simon knew that Michelle would have preferred a different kind of break to being cooped up in a noisy, uncomfortable sports car and thrown around the twisting switchbacks of a notorious Alpine road, and yet she smiled without complaint and said she was looking forward to it.
Simon had also been warned by fellow enthusiasts about the tendency for carburettors to leak fuel onto the engine, causing Miuras to catch fire – a fact he had neglected to mention to Michelle. Now, it seemed, his chickens had come home to roost.
He contemplated scrambling down the ravine and searching for Michelle. Ordinarily, he would have done so without even thinking about it, but he found that a kind of inertia had befallen him, stripping him of any desire to move from the edge of the road. Instead, he continued staring at the carnage below, hoping against hope that Michelle would appear, look up, and wave to him that everything was alright.
Simon shivered as a chill passed through him.
Someone walking over your grave.
Before the crash, it had been like they were driving beneath an upended bowl painted in brilliant cobalt. Now the sky was grey, not misty or cloudy, just grey. As if its colour had somehow drained away.
He shivered again, frowning as he sought to make sense of what was happening.
The air grew colder still. Down in the ravine, the Miura had burned itself out. The smoke was almost gone, revealing the true extent of the damage. The car was on its roof. It must have rolled end-over-end because its front and rear were concertina’d into a twisted mess, almost a third of the original length of the car.
As he stared, Simon began to make out more details. Stubs of scorched plants lined the gaps between smoke-blackened rocks. Automotive debris surrounded the wreckage; pools of melted rubber, shards of plastic, and windscreen glass scattered around like spilled diamonds.
And then somehow he was inside the Miura. The interior had been incinerated. Everything flammable was gone. Instruments and switches dangled by strands of copper from the ruined dashboard, like a mobile above a child’s bed. The seatbelts must have burned through because the bodies lay slumped at the bottom of the wreckage, flesh roasted to a crisp, teeth bared in rictus grins that seemed too large for their blackened, shrunken heads. They had been holding hands, her left in his right, the steel band of the Rolex still visible on her wrist.
As realisation dawned, Simon looked up at a familiar sound.
The Lamborghini Miura emerged from the tunnel and slowed to a halt. As Simon stood up, the driver’s door opened, Matt Monro singing softly in Italian.
The driver’s seat was empty.
Michelle smiled from the passenger seat, her hand resting on the swell of her midriff.
“It’s time to go, Simon,” she said.
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