Over in a Flash (almost)

A tale of marijuana, a near-fatal road accident, Fiorucci and James Bond

A blinding blue light was the last thing I saw before I was struck by a motorbike at the age of 17 while high on marijuana. There was no time to get out of the way and No Time to Die. I like to think that Agent 007—(Connery, not Craig)—played a part in saving my life. Bear with me and you’ll understand.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early 1998. I had recently been signed by Storm, a top London model agency, and was about to do my first Fashion Week. It finally felt like my dream had come true and everything was about to take off. 

My boyfriend was driving us back to London after a weekend in the countryside. I opened the glove compartment and found a bag of weed and some rolling papers his friend had left in there. I rolled us a spliff and we spent the remainder of the car journey getting high and giggling. It was the sort of high that creeps up on you, so by the time we got back to London, I was rocked.

He dropped me off at Blushes Café on King’s Road (a favorite hangout of mine, long since closed down) as I had plans to meet a girlfriend for drinks. I was wearing beige suede jeans by Fiorucci that fitted me to perfection. I loved them—they were the most flattering, comfortable, and stylish piece of clothing I owned. Whenever I wore them, I felt fabulous and oh-so-grown-up.

My friend was alarmed by the state I was in when I sat down at the table. I was all over the place, completely incoherent and laughing maniacally. She found it hard to believe I was that stoned from a spliff. It did feel different from the other times I had smoked.

I thought the feeling would taper off, but it didn’t. I couldn’t even have a proper conversation with her and started to get paranoid. I called my boyfriend and asked him to come and pick me up. He had just parked outside his friend’s flat on Beaufort Street and told me to get in a taxi and meet him there. By now it was dark outside, and I was nervous to stand in the street and hail a cab. I called again, pleading with him to come and get me. Even my friend tried to convince him as I couldn’t stop giggling, so he didn’t take me seriously. The answer was no, again. He wasn’t budging from his friend’s sofa. What a nice guy.  

I managed to get myself into the back of a black cab and asked the driver to take me to Beaufort Street. Before I knew it, we were there. The driver turned his head around, “What number, love?”

I couldn’t remember, so I tried calling my boyfriend again, and this time he didn’t even answer the phone. “I’ll just get out here,” I said, thinking I would recognize the block of flats once I was outside.

The cabbie looked concerned. “Are you sure?”

“Yup.” I opened the door, paid him, looked up at the nearest streetlamp, and started to hallucinate. The light appeared to be the sun. Without looking, I wandered into the road thinking, I must be at the beach.

It happened in a millisecond—out of nowhere—an engine roar—a bright bluish flash in my face—Bam!

I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but when I opened my eyes, I was lying on the side of the road beside some parked cars, a circle of strangers around me. I looked up at their horrified faces. “You’ve been in an accident. The ambulance is on its way,” one of them said.

I told myself to get up, but nothing was working from the waist down. I could not move my legs and the position they were in did not look normal. It was like half my body was dead. I started to panic. “Can someone call my boyfriend? He’s in a flat here on this street.”

“What’s his number?” a woman asked, eyes wild. I blurted it out as she punched the buttons on her phone. Those were the days when I knew everyone’s number by heart. She spoke in an urgent tone, and then looked at me with disbelief—“He hung up on me. Said I must be joking.”

“Call him again!” I screamed. How the hell could he think this was a joke?

The ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Beaufort Street is a busy main road and this spectacle had attracted a large crowd of onlookers. I became hysterical with helplessness—the sheer horror of not being able to move my legs made me fear the worst. The paramedics attempted to move me, and that’s when the pain kicked in. The worst pain I had ever felt in my whole life, starting from my hip, spreading all across my pelvis and down my legs.

“Am I paralyzed?” I cried out to the medics. “Tell me! I need to know! Am I paralyzed? Am I? Please!”

I will never forget the look in the man’s eyes or the gravity of his voice as he spoke the words—“We don’t know.”

I looked down again and started screaming. The top of my beige suede jeans had turned dark. I put my hand over the soaked fabric, my palm wet and bloody. A female paramedic appeared with a large pair of scissors. “These are going to have to come off now,” she said.

“No!” This was all too much—and still no sign of my boyfriend. Visions of my legs being amputated and having to roll around in a wheelchair for the rest of my life drove me into the darkness as they chopped off my beloved Fioruccis, the sound of the blades butchering the fabric like something out of a horror film. And yet this was no film, no joke, no dream—this accident had really happened. Life as I knew it was over, or so I thought.

I was later told that when the bike hit, my body was thrown several feet in the air, landing in a position that made one witness vomit. My limbs were so distorted it took the paramedics half an hour to get me on a stretcher. At some point during those agonizing thirty minutes, my boyfriend arrived on the scene. He accompanied me in the ambulance, his head in his hands, crying like a baby.

Under the stark white lights of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, dark red blood surged from a cavernous wound on my left hip. The sight of that tsunami, the stricken faces of the medical specialists, and the intolerable, relentless pain made me go berserk. There are many details about that night that I will never forget, but the most memorable moment of all was when they shot me up with morphine. That transition from hell to heaven was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Transcendent.

The next day, I was transferred to the Lister Hospital and holed up for several weeks in a private room with a shattered hip and fractured pelvis. I was told I wouldn’t be walking properly for at least nine months, but that I was young enough for the bones to heal. I was also lucky enough to have been hit in such a way that my pelvis had effectively been snapped in half—a clean break right down the middle. The orthopedic surgeon was incredulous. He told me it was a miracle, that an accident of that magnitude should have killed or paralyzed me for life.

And here’s where James Bond comes in. I am right-handed and almost always carry my handbag on the right side. I exited the cab that night on the left side of the road, and had slung my bag over my left shoulder before wandering into the path of a motorbike that was going 40mph over Battersea Bridge into Chelsea.

Inside my handbag were two video cassettes that I had rented from Blockbuster for the weekend—(remember, this was 1998)—both James Bond films starring Sean Connery. The contents of my bag were emptied in hospital and those video cassettes were smashed to smithereens. The bike struck me on the left side of my body and my bag, bulked up by 007, had softened the blow.

Twenty-six years have passed since that accident and I still remember all the details. It was the first of a few near-death experiences I’ve had. I am lucky to have made it this far and I don’t take a single day for granted. The bluish flash of light on Beaufort Street could have been the last thing I ever saw.

Nobody knows when they will take their last breath or how they will depart this life. That night wasn’t my time to die, but I am well aware that it could have been—still could be—all over in a flash.

My first test shoot at Storm, aged 17