Driver

The thing of it is this: that I didn’t have anywhere to be going to. I had lost my job at the company I was working for: an unfair thing if there was one. Do you really want to hear this? I thought not, most people are I suspect like me and leave their jobs in a final blow out. But I love to drive and it has been known for me to drive the whole night through rather than give up that empty stretch of tarmac in front of me. I think it gives me a purpose.
I drive a ‘rep-mobile’ a dark blue Sierra. It has plenty of power and I can cruise at eighty miles an hour, for hour after hour. I was driving with the radio on, hardly needing to watch the road. I was engrossed in the program, which was talking about the roads I was so familiar with. ‘Bartleby Rise’ and ‘Agrippa Hill’: which is a damned hard slope in winter I can tell you. I’ve often slowed down to look at the capsized cars on the roadside. Occasionally I’ll even stop and check to see if anyone’s been hurt. It’s only the right thing to do after all, they should be driving more safely.
The nasal whine of the radio shows presenter was not exactly appealing, I was beginning to feel very irritated and tired. It whined on and on interminably and at great length about the danger of hitchhikers. This was old news to me, my parents have always told me not to pick people up off the side of the road. “It’s not safe!” and “You don’t know where they’ve been.” Funny people, my parents, snobs, they’re not idealists like me. The amount of people who claim to be idealists, but are never willing to suffer for their beliefs. I have lost prestige, money and love, to my idealism but I’ve never lost sight of what I am doing and what is right. I always try to follow the mantra my old Headmaster taught me, ‘because right is right and wrong is wrong, full stop.’
It was 4AM, when I saw it a yellow anorak, bright in the gloom. I was up on ‘Bartleby’, cruising at 40mph in pretty dirty weather. My radio program had become too annoying to bear; I was getting a headache. The arm of the anorak came up to thumb at me I slowed the car, the engine coming down to a low rumble of sound. “Would you like me to take you as far as Thredenfall?” I asked the anorak, as I couldn’t see the wearer very well in the gloom, especially with that hood. It was a very stupid thing to do in retrospect and I wouldn’t want the readers of this to think ill of me. I was aware of the dangers when I did what I did.
“Thanks mate.” Was what he said as he sat down beside me, and I regretted stopping already, ‘Mate’ I hate that colloquialism and I know I’m not alone in it. Why is it that people who I have no wish to know are always the ones who always say ‘Mate’? ‘Alright Mate’ excuse my shudder as I think about it even now. The women are worse, with their ‘Love’ or the scummier ones, ‘Lover’. As if I would ever want to go near a desiccated piece of common… I can’t really describe how I feel about women like that, with their horrid mouths and their sentence construction. I hope you understand that I don’t hate as a rule but I feel as a person, so very violated on every level by the usage of terms that should mean something more. To be someone’s mate is to be a participant of the act of mating with him or her, pure magic with the beauty of conception making the act of copulation deeper and more significant. To be a lover is to be something less than a mate, you aren’t looking to conceive someone anew. That said I wouldn’t want to love any of those people either. To a man with my sensibilities to share a car with one of those people, who may well beneath those thick woolly gloves had ‘Love’ written on the left hand and ‘Hate’ on the right, was an act of great effort. I really know so very little about these people and thusly it was hard to tell what kind of person was sat next to me now. He was of medium build with a brown beard. I had happened upon the hitchhiking cliché himself and the only good thing that could come out of this was sticking to the fact that I was performing an act of goodness and would hopefully be rewarded by the fates.
“Sorry to put you out Mate.” He was grinning through that beard, grinning beneath the upper part of his beard, which was stained an odd yellow shade. “I got pissed up… back in town and the landlord wouldn’t let me drive.”
“Why didn’t you take a taxi?” I asked, trying to sound un-inquisitorial.
“Got no money left.” He gave a laugh. “The wife should have given me a lift back but she didn’t come out tonight.”
I didn’t believe him at all, for a start there was no smell of liquor on him. He looked pretty offensive but really all I could smell was rainwater and a cigarette like smell wafting about the car. He looked the type to go drinking but I didn’t buy the allusions to a wife. It was very obvious that he was in a state of tension. It frightened me to think that his mentioning of a wife was merely an attempt to accrue respectability in my view. What did he have to hide? The radio reports were beginning to haunt me now. Why was this man out in the middle of nowhere at this hour? Was it a trap?
I tried to make polite conversation. “Quite alright, it happens to me occasionally. I’m not as good as you though. I still drive home and hope for the best, hoping I don’t get spotted by the pigs.” I looked for a response to my slang term for the police, there was none. Maybe he wasn’t what I thought he was. He didn’t seem to register much of an awareness of my addressing him, until he answered quite slowly.
“Don’t we all mate, don’t we all! But I was stopped from driving home my own car and now I’m sober as a judge, I should have slept it off in the car. I mean I’m grateful and all I wouldn’t want you to think different but I’m absolutely knackered. I’ve walked a good ten miles from the Bell and I won’t be doing it again.” He let out an almighty cough. “Christ!” There was something ‘fake’ about him and I just didn’t trust it. He started to reach to his pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Erm…” I would rather he didn’t but I didn’t want to anger him. His hand was already going into his pocket and I nearly swerved off the road when he pulled out the knife.
“Woah there, sorry, I thought it was my lighter.” It was what is called a ‘Stanley knife’ a small carpentry tool, but lethally sharp. It’s handle I suppose, could have been mistaken for a lighter, in the confines of a pocket. “I work on Jeapes Farm.” He said by way of explanation.
“Oh.”
“Oh Ha, Ha, Ha!” He began to laugh uncontrollably at my supposed fear. “You thought I was the killer!” He was laughing but in the mirror the eyes looked a little distant. The laughter a little forced despite the spontaneity. “I’m in the wrong seat for that ain’t I?” Overly familiar and perhaps worse, a little too knowing.
I don’t mind familiarity in friends; I was very familiar with many in my youth. I had a wide group of friends as a child and this dissipated upon puberty. People often accused me of being difficult to get along with but to this day I don’t see how I have changed at all. Many suggested it was a case of teenage angst or high spirits but they weren’t talking about the right thing. What really is the case, is fear. I am terrified an awful lot, I wake up in the night with a thick layer of grease about me, worrying about being judged harshly and losing everything. That’s why I drive a lot at night, not seeing the point in trying to sleep anymore. To spend a nights untroubled slumber would be a dream come true but since I lost my job, things have gotten worse not better.
I lost it over a matter of honesty. One of the men at the timber suppliers I worked for was taking off-cuts home. I was in charge of the stocks and would have lost my job, when the management discovered that tons of wood had been burnt in this mans fireplace. I must admit I got a little angry with him and tried to teach him to follow the rules I live by. The look of dumb innocence in his eyes and the heavy breathing didn’t fool me. Oh he claimed he was asthmatic and all that, but I ask you, what kind of asthmatic would work with wood. He was a damned liar and why they fell for it to the extent of calling for an ambulance is still a mystery. It’s like what people ‘think’ is happening to these hitchhikers, how can they tell they are the true victims, it’s the other way around, people are looking at this from the wrong way. Just like everyone at work, they knew that he had been discharged from the hospital only two days later.
My manager, a tall, thin, prig with a pencil moustache, that I’d until this point thought was my friend, had sat me down in his office and told me that MY behaviour wasn’t going to be tolerated. It was like being in front of a firing squad, for a crime I hadn’t committed. He didn’t even listen when I had told him how we were being stolen from, how I had saved the company hundreds maybe thousands of pounds, that this worker had had to be taught a lesson in the only language he’d understand. I was out, and as I looked back at the sorry building with it’s corrugated steel façade and it’s worn, dirty doors I knew I was suffering for my idealism. I’ve been suffering for it ever since but I’m working on avoidance now. I can see when I’m going to be betrayed, well enough in advance to do something about it.
It was like this with the man I picked up in the car. I don’t know why I bother I really don’t. There was no legitimate reason for him to be out there in the middle of nowhere. If he was drunk, where was the smell of alcohol? What was it he wanted? He was very pointed in his ‘joke’. ‘In the wrong seat…’ I smelt a rat in that anorak, a big one.
He had been very quiet since the joke. He hadn’t even asked to put the radio on, which is what they usually do. It was another point that served to confirm my suspicions. He was going to hurt me. His eyes that looked closed seemed to me to have a slit in them. As if like a child who is pretending not to be peeking during a game of hide and seek. When we reached a crossroads just before Thredenfall, I reached out and shook his arm gently. I could feel the heftiness of it beneath my fingers. He was a very strong man and fit into his role perfectly. They had chosen the right type to be the farm labourer.
“I’m very sorry but I’m afraid I’m going the other way. I hope you don’t mind walking the last half mile into town.” His eyes opened and I for the first time I noticed he had the two bluest eyes I’d ever seen. It was horrid, they would have looked more at home on a pretty girl. It was like they had been transplanted, there was something of Frankenstein’s monster about the effect, as if they didn’t belong. He reached toward his pocket again and instead of the knife I feared would return he pulled out a velcro-sealed wallet.
“I’d like to pay a little for the lift.” He seemed a little insincere. “A shame you ain’t going into town.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, I have to get back to my wife. She’s a… uh… she’s a nurse and I’ve got to pick her up off her shift.” I was sorry, because I was beginning to think this man was harmless after all. He seemed genuinely put out but only at not being taken the extra half a mile to his doorstep. I knew my voice sounded like it was lying, but I am an honest man and I can’t lie easily. Really, I just wanted him gone, never should have picked him off of the grass verge. It was too dangerous, I felt for the first time, like I was being foolish.
As he got out of the car, into the night air he gave a nervous smile of thanks, and looked behind me at the back seat and went to walk away. I was willing to leave it there but then he turned and looked back at me, he seemed to be looking down. My license plate! He was getting my registration number. I felt a bolt of rage begin to forge itself in my intestines and it felt like I was cooking inside. Yet again I was going to be blamed for events, when all I was doing was trying to keep things fair. I placed my foot on the accelerator and felt it, sponge beneath it as I forced it to the carpet.
I wasn’t going that fast when I hit him. He fell to the floor and I heard him cry out in total pain and fear. This only confirmed me in my own mind, it was obvious that he knew, he knew. I feared leaving traces of my car upon him paint or tread marks. I stopped the car and reversed back up to his prone form. Then I got out and fetched the shovel from the backseat.
It was and always is a dirty business and I try not to look into the face of those who try to get me. I know they feel themselves to be in the right but in the end, that is the problem. If only they could acknowledge their wrongdoing. Just once, I’d like this scenario to end differently. I just wish someone could apologise to me and help me help them. It’s like everything is spoiled and marked by that lack of ideals, so spoiled that the people perpetrating it can’t even admit it to themselves, let alone to me.
All I want is a bit of idealism and some proof that the world still holds some values, even the Police stoop to such stupid methods. How many cars had picked this man up in the last week I wasn’t sure. How many license plates the Police had written down? Were they going to watch everyone who picked up a hitchhiker? To repay a simple act of kindness in this way is so very wrong, and yet I’ve seen it too many times now.
The only thing that ever makes me worry, is the thought that out of all the people I’ve had to deal with maybe one or even heaven forbid two, of them may have been innocent. But then, in general, I always know when people are trying to deceive me.

End..............