Lines crossed

“I opened the door, and there he was my brother.” The prologue of I Will Crash takes place at the threshold of a door, an unnamed brother on one side and Rosa, the narrator, on the other. “No, sorry, no, I said and closed the door.” The rest of the book unfurls from this moment of rejection. I Will Crash is Rebecca Watson’s second novel, following little scratch (2021), which was adapted for stage the same year by Miriam Battye, premiering at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Formally, I Will Crash resembles little scratch, occupying a space between poetry and prose that is both pacy and original: typographically, the sentences are scattered across each page, often split between action and internal monologue.

The main narrative takes place between a Wednesday and a Sunday in October. On the Wednesday Rosa receives a phone call from her father announcing that her brother has died in a car crash. The “accident” might have been intentional. Her thoughts emerge between moments of speech; as she talks to her father, she is simultaneously thinking:

I am in the car with him. With my brother. Younger. How have I forgotten? It was why I have always refused to get in a car with him since. But a story I never told (perhaps how it has stayed down) too cruel in paraphrase he threatened to kill us both.

The plot itself exists in a state of tension, the present moment persistently interrupted by memories of the past that both inform and undermine Rosa’s experience of the present.

We learn that her brother had been abusive, and that she cut off contact with him entirely once she went to university. They had not spoken for five years and his attempt to establish contact occurred just weeks before the crash. Rosa is home alone when her father tells her the news. Her boyfriend, John, is at the pub, and when he comes home, tipsy, she opts not to tell him until the morning. When she does break the news the next day, “I explain in half statements … my body reacts against what I say”. Watson has a Woolfian ability to capture the cacophony of the present moment. We witness the stream of Rosa’s thoughts (“I do not say I had been waiting for him to die. Not willing it, but patient, open, ready”) as she goes about her business, weeping, falling back asleep, getting up again, making coffee, dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door.

On the Friday, her boyfriend leaves to give a keynote speech at an academic conference. Rosa seeks out the company of her colleague and friend Sarah. Like Watson’s protagonist in little scratch, both Rosa and Sarah have been raped in their pasts, a shared trauma that lurks in the background, “unspoken, not hidden, a nod really the night we both said we had been raped it wasn’t a surprise, just one of those sad inevitable matches like playing Snap if half the cards were the same”. The depiction of this shared history – “so much simpler with women often only a verbal nod” – is all the more affecting for its economy.

The details of Rosa’s brother’s abuse emerge as she attempts to make sense of his death. “It wasn’t just the being hurt that I feared, it was the endlessness of it.” She also recalls moments of tender complicity such as sharing biscuits as children. On the Saturday her mother shows up and Rosa tries to make her understand the texture of her childhood and the attacks her divorced parents consistently downplayed as normal sibling rivalry: “I don’t think you get how much time I spent full of fear and anxiety of what might happen next, in the very place I should have felt protected”. On the Sunday Rosa takes a train out of London to meet her brother’s girlfriend, who she quickly learns is pregnant. During this meeting Rosa’s memories of her brother conflict with the life she sees that he has built. On the train back to London she concludes: “no one knew my brother other than me”.

Both little scratch and I Will Crash end with their respective narrators’ thoughts spiralling out of control. In little scratch the narrator is trying to fall asleep, “eyes dissolving subsiding returning lines of red”, and in I Will Crash a line appears too: “a line running in and out of focus clearing steady … there is no one else here not even my brother”. But the red line that appears in little scratch refers to the narrator’s habit of self-harm as a trauma response to rape: in short, it means something. In I Will Crash the significance of the line is blurrier. Perhaps we are returning to the threshold of the door; or perhaps it refers to the line crossed in abuse. Either way, why end two different books in almost exactly the same way? One is reminded of Freud’s conception of repetition compulsion – and seized with the desire for Rebecca Watson to make it new.

Oonagh Devitt Tremblay is a writer based in London and works for the TLS

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