Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [12]
Stolen Car
He was lifted from his seat, weightless on earth. The car hung in the sky. For a few precious moments, Jimmy was an astronaut floating in space. All that had happened and would happen meant nothing. He was free.
And then the ground.
Glass sprayed in glittering arcs as the car flipped and toppled down the bank. Even when the world stopped turning, the wheels kept spinning. Strung upside down by the seat belt, he opened his eyes. A crimson ribbon unravelled on the surface of the stream. Blood dripping from his forehead. He unclicked the seat belt and splashed into the freezing water, then crawled through the broken window.
‘Now, you’re not going to start running, are you?’
The voice came from the clouds. He looked up to the bridge and saw black and silver uniforms, a blue light pulsing. The policemen watched him stagger like a drunk and fall face down in the rain-fast brook.
Two days before the crash, just as his teacher marked him down as absent, he had stood at the junction of the M1. Sunshine beamed through the grey and broken clouds. The shadows on ploughed fields drifted into each other like shifting continents. He watched the changing map. He listened to the traffic. It sliced through the water with a sound like hissing through teeth. He stepped back from the exploding puddles.
When no cars passed he took the penknife from his pocket and wiped the bloodied blade on the wet grass.
The first time he stuck out his thumb, a driver reined a truck on to the hard shoulder in a fanfare of air brakes and plumes of spray. The cargo was a mass of steel girders that shone through the rain. He ran along the kerb, pulled himself up to the passenger window and tapped on the glass. A bald man studying a map shooed him away. He jumped down from the step and called him a cunt. But no one heard or was there to listen anyway.
After an hour of waiting, of watching cars splash and pass, staring faces hanging in windows, he jogged over the slip road and under the bridge. He turned to the wall and pulled his numb hands from the sodden sleeves. The dried blood of another life cracked across his skin. He fumbled with the buttons, desperate for a slash, dead hands, paled and paralysed with cold. His piss was luminous yellow. Steam rose to the roof, dry and dusty with blackened cobwebs, shuddering with the weight of roaring traffic.
He shivered when he finished, thought of him walking on his mother’s grave.
From the next change of lights a black Mercedes pulled over. The driver pressed the horn twice, and again, Jimmy ran along the kerb. He bent over at the passenger window and a Pakistani man in a navy suit put the glass down.
‘You goin’ London, mate?’
‘I stop forty miles before M25. I can drop you at the services.’
‘Sound.’
The Mercedes door shut with a satisfied clump.
‘Cheers.’
Jimmy had never been to London, but this is where people from the North go when they run away.
‘You look cold.’
‘Fuckin’ freezing.’
Jimmy shuffled in his seat and sniffed. The leather squeaked against his wet jeans, muddied and flecked with the same red clay that covered his trainers.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the driver. ‘It’s a good heater.’ He drove the tilt of the slip road and eased into the southbound flow.
‘Nice car, mate.’
‘You think it’s mine?’ He smiled and drove on. ‘I drive diplomats and foreign dignitaries. To and from the airport. Meetings, lunches, you know.’
No. Jimmy didn’t know. He sat back in the seat and rubbed his hands in the stream of hot air from the vent. The driver looked across smiling, assured, nodding. As though he divined his past, present, and future.
‘So, what is it you’ve done?’
‘Eh?’
‘Or what is it you’re going to do?’
‘Just goin’ to see me auntie, mate.’
‘Of course, of course.’
They drove on in silence.