Gears
Change up. Change down. Change up. Change up. Oh, come on. What the fuck? Stupid pissing caravan. Change down, change down. Indicate, pull out, accelerate. Don’t these bastards know how long it takes to get a rig up to speed? Inch past Mr. Clean in his mauve Mondeo with Old Frumpy sat beside him in her Sunday best. Forty years of savings got ploughed into that caravan, for what? Might as well have a sign on the back: “KILL ME NOW.” Murray Mints and driving gloves, a tartan box of Kleenex on the parcel shelf, only cancer to look forward to. Pull back to the slow lane. Change up. Settle at 65. Fat spatters of rain on the windscreen. Switch the wipers on. Squeaking. Got to get those blades changed. Light going now. Through the murk, cattle mooning in waterlogged fields, brainpans rotting in the rain. Probably too depressed to go and shelter under a tree. Probably some attempt at mass bovine suicide. Going about it the hard way, though. Quicker just to eat their mash. Din-dins, moo cows! It’s your favourite: mummy’s spinal chord garnished with horse balls and brains. Sign coming up now. Thank god, only 63 miles till I’m home. Hope I can hold out that long. I’m fucking bursting. Don’t want to have to use a Lucozade bottle again. You’d have thought a jumbo bottle could hold anything. You’d be wrong. We live and learn. So: take my mind off it. Thumb the speed dial on the hands-free. Dialling tone and feedback over the speakers. A signal bouncing up to space and back. Remember the telephone line bobbing outside the window? Lying in bed, scared to sleep, wondering what the darkness held beyond the halo of a street light? Hold that thought, someone’s picked up. ‘Phil? Phil, you there, mate? Yeah, it’s Paul. Yeah, I’m on my way home. Yeah, yeah…Listen, I was wondering. You want to meet up in a couple of days, go for a couple of drinks? I might have some news. Yeah? Nice one, I’ll give you a bell.’ Click, silence. Change up. Change down. The road unwinding in front of the wheels. Up ahead crimson indicators blink, ascend the off-ramp into the gloom. Leave an after image. The colour of her hair. No matter how hard I try, I can never find the words for the colour of her hair. Steve, he's my other mate from home, he could tell you. When the three of us used to go out, back before Phil got married, Steve was the one would talk to anyone. Talk the hind legs off a donkey, Steve could. Or a bird. I’ve never been like that. In a nightclub, fit girls everywhere, I don’t know where to look. But Steve just bowls right up to them, starts talking. Real gift of the gab. Fearless. Doesn’t care if they laugh at him. Expects it. Says it’s him who gets the last laugh, when their knickers are on his floor. And he’s right, too. Even the ones who laugh give in eventually. I can’t do that. If people look at me, I curl up inside. Stupid, really. I'm big enough, I can handle myself. But put me in a room with strangers, especially pretty ones, it's like I’m five years old again. Steve used to say it’s ‘cos I lack the killer instinct. But what’s killing got to do with it, that’s what I say. Her hair was like all the colours of autumn, all at once. Nah, that’s not it. It’s just I know it would have smelled like rain. Of course, it was down to Steve that we ever met em in the first place. Wouldn’t never have happened without Steve. He told them some shit line, so they let us sit with them. Steve went for the blonde. Steve always goes for the blonde. I was left with her. Well embarrassed, I was. Thought it was going to be another night of feeling like a tit, buying all the drinks to make up for the fact that I didn’t have nothing to say for myself; another night watching the girl who got lumped with me making frantic signals to her mate that she was bored, that she wanted to leave. Meanwhile her mate's there laughing at all Steve’s jokes, playing with his hair, sitting in his lap. Then off they go, Steve and whoever, back to his place, or sometimes no further than a bus shelter, while I see mine off in a taxi and head back to my mum’s place or more often than not the truck. One time all three of them went off together. I never heard the end of that one. Anyway, that’s how it normally goes. But not this time. She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t take the piss. She listened, and she looked at me like I was human. I mean, not at first. At first she was well shy, I reckon she wanted to be there about as much as I did. Then I said something, can’t remember what it was. But it made her look up, right at me, like she hadn’t expected to hear something that made sense. After that we got on like a house on fire. Just talking, you know, but talking about proper stuff, stuff that matters, like how she hated her job, and how I missed my dad, and how she envied me because I got to travel. And I told her it wasn’t real travelling, just passing through places. When the lights finally came up, it was Steve pulling on my arm this time, trying to get me to leave, instead of the other way round. So we all went outside and walked up the street to get some food. I didn’t reckon she’d want to talk to me anymore, but pretty much straight away the pair of us fell behind Steve and her mate and carried on talking. It was so easy. We ended up in a kebab shop, with doners and cans. Steve was in a right mood, wouldn’t talk. I didn’t care. I was trying to work out how to ask for her number. Couldn’t do it in front of Steve and blondie, though, cos I knew they’d laugh at me. Told myself I’d wait till we got outside. But then, when we got outside, I bottled it. She looked at me and everything stopped for a second and I knew that was when I had to say something, but I couldn't. The next day I was off on a long-haul, taking 400 photocopiers to Estonia and bringing back 4,000 lamp shades. I was away five days. Five days I tortured myself thinking how I’d blown it. I’d imagine her in the office, sitting down at her desk with a cup of tea, staring out at the rain like she was stuck in some high tower. As soon as I got back I called Steve, asked him if he had either of their numbers. Told him I was planning on getting in touch with the red head. Steve got angry, told me not to bother. Said I was being a wet wanker, that she wasn’t interested in me. I kept asking him how he knew. He lost his rag eventually. Told me I should forget about her, that she was a slag, that he knew she was a slag. I didn’t understand. Then he said he’d got in there while I was away. He laughed, said they’d done it over at her manky little house, all over it, in fact. She was a right dirty cow. I hung up then. And then I smashed my phone to pieces on the dashboard. That’s it, I thought. Back to the road unwinding in front of my wheels, lamp shades and pork bellies, crimson indicators, the memory of her hair. By the time I dragged my sorry arse back to my mum’s, I'd stopped crying. I was only interested in drowning myself in cheap lager and shit telly. The next day I went to the office and got them to give me the first job out of there. I was six hundred miles away from home when the message came through. Turns out some girl had called my mum’s, asking after me. She’d got my number from a girl she went to school with whose mum knows my mum. I rang up the number the office gave me from a payphone in the arse-end of nowhere, the sort of place where the men marry their donkeys and the women pull the ploughs. Turns out it was her, hair the colour of autumn. Also turns out she never slept with Steve, even though he tried. And her name. Her name’s Clare. It’s only 55 miles now, 55 miles till I see her again. Change up, change up, and don’t you get in my way you bastards, I’m almost home.
