The Car

 There was nothing really special about the car until you stepped inside it. From the outside it was just another plain matt black car with a slight dent on the left hand side of the bumper nut when you entered the car it shone but not in a glossy way. It shone from the love that had gone into the car from its owners. You could instantly tell by looking at the car that it was a car that had been religiously taken into a drive-through car wash every Sunday and then rubbed with a chammy cloth by its owner until not a miniscule speck of dust had remained on the car. The car was then waxed professionally and then a hoover was ran lovingly over the imitation leather seats and the windows were scrubbed until every strand of spiders’ webs were removed. Spiders were inexplicably attracted to the car and would weave intricately beautiful patterns in the corner of the windows especially on the left hand side of the car.

Its owners were a family of three. Martin, Jessica and Cameron. Martin was the father of the group who cared so much for his car which Jessica and Cameron called his third child. Jessica was the eldest of the two siblings and was much quieter than Cameron, often assuming a pensive look on her face and kept her opinions to herself. Cameron, often had what he termed verbal diarrhoea, he never stopped speaking and it was often pure gibberish that tumbled out of his mouth and one could see that he struggled to arrange his thoughts before he spoke and so there often failed to be any logic to his speeches.

They were an eclectic family that came together rarely as Cameron and Jessica had moved away from their parents and were living their own lives within their own circles. Jessica had trained for four years to become a lawyer but had suddenly decided to follow her real passion which was becoming a secondary school teacher of classics. Whenever she spoke about work to her family it was always inside the car as the car represented a safe, contained space to her. She had come out to her family as bisexual in the car, had told them about her marriage in the car and then the subsequent breakdown of the engagement. The only time her father and brother had seen Jessica cry was inside the car.

Cameron was a professional drummer but he had never believed enough in his potential to join a band that was serious about becoming stars in any genre of the music industry. Instead he allowed himself to be resigned to a dead-end job in Shake Shack and to believe that being promoted to manager was a serious achievement. In the car, that was the only the time he spoke to his father. For some reason, which he could not really explain, he did not get on with his father, there was no real familial bond. Cameron thought it was because he had not followed any of his dreams and passions or really achieved anything actually substantial as an adult. Outside of the car, Cameron was lucky if his father ever looked in his direction and if he did it was to show his judgement about something Cameron had said.

Martin was not an important person. He was retired, widowed, and a balding middle aged man who bordered on the line of being described as nondescript. No-one really remembered Martin, he barely had any friends and since his wife’s death he had taken to drinking his usual afternoon two pints at home alone. The bartender in the pub Martin had been attending for the last twenty years every afternoon the pub was open did not even realise that Martin had stopped attending the pub. Martin’s compact existence meant that he struggled to convey his emotions and this had led to a breakdown in his communication skills with his children and he knew that he was going to die alone and probably would not really be grieved for by his children but Martin was perfectly okay with it or so he said.

Growing up Jessica and Cameron always had memories of their mother sat in the front seat always eating chocolate covered peanuts or yoghurt covered raspberries and singing along to the most underground artists unimaginable that could only be found on Soundcloud. Now as adults they were painfully aware of the fact that the front seat always remained empty in Martin’s car. No-one had sat in it since their mother’s death. However, they were unaware that for each of them the seat represented something different.

For Jessica, the empty seat was for the baby that she had lost during her second trimester due to a nasty fall down a flight of stairs. Every time she looked at the seat she was reminded of the pain of losing her child as well as the loss of her fiancée as their marriage broke down soon after the death of the baby. The physical emptiness of the seat was too metaphorical for her liking but she would never tell Cameron or Martin what the empty seat really meant to her.

For Cameron, the empty seat was for his unfulfilled passions such as becoming a professional drummer. He imagined crowds cheering him on as he bashed out the most syncopated and complex rhythm on his blue acoustic drum set. However, Cameron believed that the fantasies he had about making a mark for himself in the music profession had passed and now he had to work for a company that he did not really like. But he believed that seeing the empty seat as his unrealised dreams was too selfish so he never corrected Martin’s and Jessica’s supposed belief that he saw the empty seat as a representation of their lost mother.

For Martin, the empty seat was allegorical for the person he could have become. He imagined a new and improved version of himself that attracted attention form strangers and friends alike and that he was driving a more powerful car than is Peugeot sports car. Martin felt like a shell of the man that he could have been and his pride and joy was his car. It was the one thing he felt proud of. He was not proud of his wife, his marriage, his children but his car was the sole thing that kept him going. Martin had been so alone for so long that he had shut out the good things in his life such as children but had been all-encompassed by the car.