Sat Nav (noun. Abv. feminine)

I trudge up Pentonville Road to the car hire place. Breathing hard from the climb, unfit, God I need to do some sort of exercise. I stayed fit giging, I don’t do anything now. 

I always hire the smallest car and they always upgrade me. Today is no exception.

“If you’d like to pay just a few pounds more we can upgrade you to a BMW Series 1”

“No thanks, I can’t tell the difference between a cardboard box and a Ferrari, I just want a cheap car.”

I wait for ages, fidgeting and increasingly worried I won’t get to the airport on time. Which is pretty stupid cos I have hours. Eventually I start to loudly make comments to any of the staff who pass by.

“I’m not paying you a sizeable chunk of money to stand around waiting, I need the car I was promised an hour ago. You’re making me late.”

A smart looking woman appears. Crisp white blouse, freshly-ironed black skirt, carefully tidy hair. She assures me they are doing their best. I tell her it isn’t good enough and she tells me there’s no need to be unpleasant.

“I’m still seventeen, it’s my god given right to be illogically mardy. Often. Let alone legitimately pissy when I suffer from rubbish service.”

She is livid, but knows I get to rate her later, so tries to pacify me. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I don’t normally get pissy with servers or people at desks, but there’s a guy who keeps looking at me and I feel uncomfortable. I think he’s French, maybe Italian. Tall and dark, but not handsome. Wouldn’t be so bad if he said something, but he just keeps staring. I pace the small office like a miserable tiger and his eyes follow me. And to be fair the car is taking an age, and I’m not really English so I’m not required to be polite. I do have an English passport, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mention anything about being polite, in fact I have a right to pass without let or hinderance. And not being given my car is definitely a hinderance at the moment. I don’t know what a let is, but I’m betting they are giving me one of those too.

As I expect they give me the BMW anyway. They are clearly annoyed I wasn’t willing to pay for it, but it’s all they have. In fact, it has sat nav which I’m really pleased about, but I don’t let on in case they try to charge me more for it. I shunt the seat around. It takes me a few minutes to work out how to start it, what some of the bigger buttons do, what the brighter flashing lights mean. Jabbing curiously at the hieroglyphs. Everything is on the wrong side. I learnt to drive in California. I set it’s air con to dead cold to keep me awake and feed the sat nav the info it needs. Then I set off, trying to avoid the congestion charge.

Ms Sat Nav is stern, snappy. I imagine a German woman in her thirties with pulled back hair in a tailored black suit with low heels. She has large calves from running a lot.

She snaps at me “Keep left, keep left for two hundred metres.”

I tell her diffidently that I can’t judge two hundred metres, I don’t run as often as she does. She ignores me and sounds really annoyed when she almost shouts, “Turn left, Now!”

I’m glad when I get on the motorway. At least Ms Sat Nav seems calmer. I don’t, I stay tense and nervous that something will scratch my upgrade and the insurance won’t cover it. The back of the seat is getting very little wear. I suspect Sat Nav is filing her nails to points while squeezing her knees together against some sort of fierce exercise device. She gets tetchy again as we approach the airport. Maybe she suspects I’m going to turn her off and find my own way home. I almost feel bad.

“Look, I’m sorry, but it’s a bad time of the month and I could do with a little compassion here.”

The mess of roundabouts at Heathrow is overwhelming. I don’t get Sat Nav’s logic. Sometimes she counts roads and sometimes not.

“That wasn’t the third exit it was the fourth, you’re just being a cow now.”

“Do a U turn.”

“Don’t be daft, you silly cow, I can’t do a U-turn here.”

“Take the last exit at the next roundabout.”

“Jesus, it’s a circle, there isn’t a first or last, that’s just dumb.”

“Re-calculating route.”

“God damn it, hurry up, where do I go?” I’m shouting and on the edge of tears. “Please. Get me into a bloody car park.”

We spin around roundabouts like I’m in a pinball machine, with Sat snapping at my inability to decipher her irritatingly logical understanding of roadworks.

She is heartless. She must know I’m on the edge of a meltdown. Can’t she see the tears welling? We spin round and round, my wet eyes darting between road and screen and clock. I wipe tears and slap the steering wheel and beg her to be clearer.

Sat barks at me. She’s just plain cruel. She’d make a great Mistress if I was in the mood for some bdsm play. I’m convinced she is holding a riding crop. I mean I’m not beyond being subby sometimes and I bet she’s tall and in good shape; severely attractive.

Confused and indecisive, I indicate to turn off left, but don’t. I drive on surrounded by a hail of angry horns.

“Turn here.”

I try to stop thinking, just blindly obey. I reason she is only being cruel to me for my own good. She knows best. Submit.

Eventually we work it out, she shows mercy. I’m in the right place.

“Thank you Sat, sorry if I was rude, it was tough, you know?”

“You have arrived at your destination.”

“Yea, thanks, I appreciate it, yer know.”

I weave through the concrete and pull into a slot which is designed to be three millimetres larger than the car. I turn sideways and squeeze myself out of the door, like a flattened cartoon character, desperately trying not to scratch the grey paintwork. I gather bag and keys and stand next to the groaning car rehearsing where I’m parked in my head a few times, noting what colour the car is and its registration number, the level, which car park. I’ve lost hire cars before. Then I wander through endless, illogically high, identical tiled halls till I find the right arrivals gate. Plodding legs and rubbernecking like a tourist in the Vatican. I am wishing Sat had come with me.

I’m early, of course. Idiot. I spend an hour drinking too much coffee and eating chocolate fudge cake somewhere where I can’t quite see the arrivals board. I’m sure I can hear Sat kindly telling me how many calories are in the cake; Dispassionately shaming me. I’d be grumpy if I wasn’t about to see Kelly again.

The first time I saw Kelly was in a studio in Nashville. I’d seen her online. I had begged for her for the session. I got my way, cos she wasn’t so well known then and was relatively cheap. She was sitting cross legged on a stool, wearing high tops and had a mess of dark hair which fell over everything, she had a cream guitar with four pickups and a scruffy worn shoulder strap. It was a fender I guess, but probably modified in some clever way. I think she was a couple of years older than me but looked younger. She smiled like a little kid and seemed nervous. I asked if I should teach her the song. ‘Nah’, she said, ‘I’ll pick it up.’

I felt stupid just launching into a new song she hadn’t ever heard. Except maybe my music teacher, David, I hadn’t met anyone like her before, any real musicians. She just sat grinning for a few bars. Then when she let loose it was sublime, like nothing I had ever heard. She knew what was coming and was ready for it in advance. Led me into the next section with a perfect line. How could those tiny pecking motions turn into something so beautiful?

I liked her even before she played. She had an infectious and beautiful smile and was open and sweet and happy. And I needed that happiness; it fed me for a while. And we had fun together. Joked and laughed a lot. Then the suits loved us. We were the new queens of the label and life was exciting and fast and we made the music we wanted and everyone loved it all. It was a dream.

She’s tall, so easy to spot. I bounce up and down when I see her, like a kid and she smiles her wide kid grin, despite looking wrecked by the flight. She’s wearing boho clothes and carrying a sack thing which makes her look a bit like a high fashion pirate. She has grey, no, not grey, silver, micro short hair now, but still the large dark eyebrows and soft caramel eyes. She doesn’t look the high school kid she did when I first met her.

As we weave through the crowd, I tell her, “loving the new look, you make the hottest LA lesbian.”

She has vaguely referred to problems in her relationship and I want to make her feel good, but ruin it by adding, honestly, “God you look wrecked.”

“You’ve seen me, like a week ago, online.”

“I know, but I didn’t see your legs, you look hotter in real life.”

“You might be the last person alive to notice I’m a hot lesbian.” She plants a kiss on my cheek. “I am totally, totally wrecked, have you got a bed?”

“I have a car, to drive you to one, will that do?”

“You. Driving. Jesus.”

“It’s a bigish car, with airbags and stuff, there’s a good chance we will survive.”

“I’m like too tired to care, lets die and become legends, lead on to immortality.”

She closes her eyes as soon as she hits the seat and only surfaces in the thick of traffic on the Westway. The car jolts forward in short dashes; my feet on the pedals like a heavy metal drummer. Car horns sound around us like an arguing jazz band.

In a slow dozy voice, she tells me, “You know, there’s this famous survey, they asked like loads of drivers about themselves, an' eighty percent said they were above average drivers. So, like at least thirty percent were totally deluded. And. all of them, all the people they asked had been injured in road accidents. So, like, it proves, all drivers are morons. Bare that in mind, OK.”

“Almost there,” I assure her, “only one or two life threatening experiences to go”

At that moment a motorbike pulls out and I have to hammer the breaks. I say, “still alive,” and we both break up laughing.

Irena is at home and looks like she’s going to jump up and down and scream to the others, “Kelly Pressburg’s in our living room!” but thankfully she just says, “Hi.”

 We drag Kelly’s sack upstairs and I embarrassingly show her the tiny room and bathroom. She looks at me apologetically and says, “I have to crash, sorry but I just got to.”

“No worries… no food?”

“Nah, sleep, you can force one of those English breakfast things on me in the morning, or whenever, what time is it anyway?”

“It’s nearly eleven, afternoon for you, bedtime here, I’ll join you in a bit, I’m going to grab food and a shower.”

“Cool.” She smiles and starts to strip her clothes off.

We have always shared a bed, like twelve year old besties. Hugging and giggling our way across the country, hotel to hotel. Except when I was away with the boyfriends. And after they left, I would just climb back in for consolatory hugs. I guess she slept with women, but I never saw them, they were always away games. I glimpsed odd pretty girls kissed and touched at the side of a stage or leaving a party, but they never stayed and were never named. Never seemed important.

It’s good to be held, familiar. We are used to each other and know how to fit together. Early morning, she wakes me and she’s back to normal, smiling her wide grin.

“If your fans could see you now, Pokémon pyjamas? Really? Are you going to torture me with English food or what?”

I check google maps for the café and it makes me think about Sat. I can’t explain why, but I think, maybe, when I take Kelly back I’ll upgrade to a BMW.