The Motorist
It’s a boring Sunday. Rain beats against my windscreen, my bonnet, my roof, like a thousand fingers drumming a monotonous, impatient rhythm against the glass and the metal. The clouds it falls from have cast a twilight over the whole day, but I think now it finally must be dusk, because the streetlights have switched themselves on and are casting an orange glaze over the dark blue tarmac, under the dark blue sky.
I slow down for a junction, indicate, and then come to a stop as I see headlights. A couple of cars go by, and I hear the slow repeating clicking of the indicator over the rain and the gentle whoosh of the cars going by me. Their red tail-lights fade into the distance and I pull away from the junction. The indicator flicks off and the rain beats more rapidly, more impatiently against the windscreen as I pick up speed. The radio in my car’s been bust since I got it, so I can’t drown out this perpetual background noise, but at least the roads are quiet.
I turn the wheel slightly, following a long sweeping curve in the road, then find myself caught up with the cars that just went past me, now stopped at a red light. This red light is distorted every few seconds as large rain drops magnify and refract the rays through the windscreen, but these are then wiped away. The motion of the windscreen wiper’s black arms distracts me for a moment, but then the light turns amber and I slowly apply pressure to the accelerator while releasing the clutch.
It’s nothing fancy my car, just a Ford Fiesta. It hasn’t even got power steering, but it gets me around. Trouble is that tonight I don’t have anywhere to go and am just driving aimlessly, trying to kill some time. As I drive I consider places I could go, even consider stopping at one of the pubs I pass, but then I just drive past them and watch them fade into the rain from my wing mirror. Even if I did stop and go in one, it wouldn’t be like I knew anyone in there, and in those sort of places, at this time on a rainy Sunday, there wouldn’t be anyone my age anyway.
I take a left at the next set of lights, knowing this will take me onto an even quieter road that runs by the river. Before the river though are a few houses. I’m practically in the countryside now, and so, as I pass these houses, I think how quaint they look, even if they are just semis with a few plants outside and the occasionally creeper clinging onto the crumbling brick-work.
Most of them have at least one lighted window, though a few, from the front at least, appear to be in darkness. For a few seconds I consider the people that live in these houses. People I know nothing about, people who I’ve never met, who have their own lives and live in these houses and are completely separate from me. There are a lot of people in the world and it’s kind of weird how there are all these people, and yet most of them you’ll never meet and they’ll live and die, and you’ll know nothing about them.
But in a second they’re gone, and I’m driving past hedges and the occasional tree. I begin to think about the people I know and for a second I put my hand down to the phone in my pocket. Mentally, I run through the names in its phonebook, but no one springs to mind as someone I could just call up now and go see. I put my hand back on the wheel, but now I’m conscious of the weight in my pocket, the phone pressing against my leg, an impotent little bulge in my jeans.
I press harder against the accelerator, then dare myself to let go of the wheel. I’m only doing forty, maybe forty-five, but the rain and my hands hovering a few centimetres away from the comfortable hard rubber of the steering wheel make it feel a lot faster. I find myself suddenly thinking of Fight Club as I do this, that bit where Brad Pitt lets go of the steering wheel and Ed Norton’s trying to grab it, but Pitt won’t let him. And then Brad Pitt shouts to the guys in the back “What do you wish you’d done before you die?”
I couldn’t think of an answer to that question right then though, I was too caught up in the movement of the car, the rain against the windscreen and my hands, aching to grab the wheel. A few seconds later, before I’d even begun to drift into the middle of the road, I gave in and wrapped my fingers around it. I’d never really not been in control, though. I could have grabbed the steering wheel at any time and I did.
I glanced up into the rear view mirror, leaning to the left a little so I could see myself. My dark eyes stared back at me from reflection looking quite despondent, a little cold perhaps, and maybe tired too, I couldn’t quite tell just from the near-black circles surrounded by white, but this was certainly how I felt. I looked back at the road. It stretched out in front of me, no change for maybe a mile, no road markings and no oncoming traffic.
To my right was the river. I looked at this now. It was choppy and reminded me of the sea. It reminded me too of that term from English Literature, ‘pathetic fallacy’. It means when natural phenomenon reflect the emotions of a character. I half-smiled at the thought that there might be some cause-and-effect relationship between the weather and how I felt, but then I came to a corner and was forced to turn away from the river.
Soon I was lead back to a thirty limit road, but I still felt somehow unfulfilled, so I carried on along this road until it came to a national speed limit. I put my foot down and was doing seventy maybe half a minute later. The oncoming traffic whooshed by, nothing more than two yellow strokes on a navy backdrop. In between the whooshes of the passing vehicles came the continuous sound of the rain as it pounded against the screen and, even over this, the sizzle of the tyres on the wet tarmac.
As I drove I felt each little bump and imperfection in the old road, and I felt the puddles that had build up against the grass verge snatch at my tyres and jerk the wheel in my hand a little to the left. Somehow the car felt almost like an extension of my body while I travelled like this, and glancing again in the rear view mirror I saw my eyes now gave a much stronger impression of life.
But then I reached a roundabout and had to slow down. This was a good road though, so I went right round the roundabout and came back again, deciding to go even faster than the first time.
At eighty I began to scare myself a little. I was reminded now not of a movie, but of an experience I myself had had. It had happened a couple of years ago. I had been going down this hill near my house on a skateboard and I had started to pick up speed way too fast. I was never very good at skateboarding so I didn’t know how to slow myself down, and didn’t think I’d be able to keep my balance if I went any faster. So I jumped off the skateboard and was obviously carried forward by my momentum. I tried to run, but after a few steps I tripped and fell hard on my arm, grazing badly my elbow, and then my back, which I was thrown onto by the force of my fall.
The shaking of the car on the road at this speed made me think of the skateboard that day. If I were to lose control now, I thought, that would be the end of me. I would just crash into an oncoming vehicle and the two cars would just crumple into each other. I’d be thrown forward against the seat-belt, probably smash my head into the steering wheel, and then I’d be crushed by it, by the ton of metal and the force of the impact.
I take my foot off the accelerator. It’s a boring Sunday, but it’s not a day to die.
Tags: driving, Fiction, original fiction, Rain, Sunday
