Lee Rourke - The Canal

“Ha! I like them! Those old Beetles …”

“I loved it. I had a name for it, too … If you want to know then don’t bother asking, I won’t tell you. We went everywhere together. Even if I had to go to the shops or make a phone call, I would drive up to the top of the street and use the phone box, my bashed-up old blue Beetle parked outside where I could see it. It’s funny, I could have walked there and back in the time it took me to grab my keys, my shoes, drive around the block and find a parking space. But I didn’t care. Like I said, I never went anywhere without my car. It was the saddest day of my life when she was written off. The day she was hit face on. She was stationary, parked there, where I always parked her of an evening, when the other car hit her. I still have bits of her, though, like the steering wheel, the gear stick … That’s it.”

“That’s a shame …”

“It happens.”

“It’s still a shame …”

There was pause in our conversation. The whole canal was extraordinarily quiet. I watched her pull her brown skirt down to cover her slightly bruised knees. Her mouth twitched to the right and then to the left, and then back to the right again. Then she looked at me. It was a vacant stare. It was without any trace of emotion, like there was nothing inside her, as if she was beautifully hollow. And then she continued.

“Something happened to me last year.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was in a car.”

“A crash?”

“Something like that, I suppose …”

“What happened?”

“It’s difficult for me to say. I’ve never mentioned this to anyone before. I don’t even know why I’m about to tell you, I shouldn’t be mentioning this to anyone — it should be extinguished from my mind, but I can’t, I can’t put it out of my mind. I don’t think I can until I have told someone … you … do you understand?”

“I think so …”

“I hit someone …”

“You hit someone?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah?”

“In my car …”

“In your car?”

“Yes, while I was driving in my car … I hit someone.”

“You mean you knocked someone over?”

“Well … yes … I suppose so. In my car … my perfect machine.”

“Was it an accident?”

“…”

“Was it an accident? Did you …?”

“…”

“What happened? Tell me.”

“I meant to hit him … I had every intention of hitting him … I headed straight for him … I wanted to hit him … To hit him.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean where ?”

“Where did this happen?”

“Before I tell you when and where this happened please allow me to tell you about my car, the car I was driving …”

“I don’t know anything about cars …”

“You don’t need to. You just need to know what type of car it is …”

“But even if you told me I wouldn’t be able to visualise it, I just don’t know enough about these things … cars … that sort of stuff.”

“Then I will explain in as much detail as I can so that you can at least visualise something … The car, my car, is integral, you see.”

“Oh … Okay, I understand.”

“The car I was driving, on the night I hit him, was an Audi TT 225 …”

I don’t know why I was so interested in what she was saying to me as until that moment I’d never thought about learning to drive a car, let alone owning one, and people who often talked about cars — groups of lads in pubs and at work, et cetera — sickened me to such an extent that I had to get up and remove myself from the conversation. But this was different. I have often asked myself what I would use a car for — if I could, in fact, drive. Certainly not for long drives in the country, or to visit relatives on the other side of London; such things weren’t for me. I like the distance as it is. I’m not averse to people giving me lifts to places if I am in a rush or stuck or something. I don’t mind that. But that’s as far as it goes. I’d have to have had a really good reason to have bought my own car.

I’ve been involved in one car crash in my lifetime. I was seventeen years of age. I know this for certain as it was on my birthday. My parents had offered to pay for driving lessons but I told them that I didn’t want them. Three of us were in the car that crashed: me, Mike McCooty, and some lad whose name I have since forgotten. We were somewhere in Epping on a long, winding lane. Mike McCooty was driving, I was in the passenger seat and the other lad was in the back, laying across the back seat, his feet resting outside the open window of the right-hand door, like he was in a hammock. I can still recall the tyres screeching as we tore through each bend. It happened quite quickly, the crash: another car came hurtling around a blind corner which caused us to swerve and brake abruptly, skidding up the embankment to our immediate left. The car — it was silver, that’s all I can recall — flipped, the engine revving uncontrollably as we lay in a crumpled heap on the underside of the roof. None of us were wearing our seatbelts and it was lucky we weren’t injured. All I remember is Mike McCooty laughing hysterically as the lad in the back lay screaming like a baby. It was me who first noticed the thick acrid smoke pluming from the engine. I remember feeling a peculiar excitement: that’s all it took, snap, crack, bang, like that — anything could take you away. It could happen at any time. I remember thinking that this didn’t bother me. We climbed out of the open window in the back of the car and stood by the embankment, looking at the crumpled wreck before us, until the police arrived. The driver of the other car — an elderly lady — was just pleased that no one was hurt or wanted to accuse her of reckless driving.

The last I’d heard of Mike McCooty he’d made millions importing discontinued Adidas trainers to feed the consuming habits of the burgeoning Indie and Retro markets. The other lad: I have no idea; he could be dead for all I know.

“I, er, know nothing about them, sorry … about cars in general …”

“It doesn’t matter that you don’t know. Really, it doesn’t. What matters is that this was it …”

“ It ?”

“The real deal … The car … The car of my dreams … The car I’d been waiting for all my life. I owned nothing else in comparison …”

“Tell me about it then.”

“The car? Or what happened?”

“The car … and then what happened.”

“It’s an Audi TT 225 Quattro Coupe. It’s a powerful little machine able to explode from zero to sixty in six point six seconds flat. A top speed of one hundred and fifty-one miles per hour. Although, I’m positive I’ve pushed it further. It’s specified in pearl-effect black with a grey leather interior. But the wheels — perfect seven and a half by seventeen inch rims. People would turn heads whenever I sped by. It’s really my ultimate machine. You should see the engine — seventeen eighty-one cc’s in size, gleaming all year round.”

“Your pride and joy?”

“More than that.”

“I don’t understand …”

“It’s simple: we are technology — we rival nature. We are able to mould ourselves into something superior. Put simply, my car means more to me than any other thing I can think of …”

“But you sit here every day …”

“I haven’t set foot behind a wheel since it happened …”

“Since what happened?”

“The day I hit that man …”

“Was it …?”

“What?”

“Was it a …?”

“Hit and run?”

“Yes.”

“Yes … it was.”