Getting Away With It

Dan looked out of the side window of the car. It was a necessarily fleeting glance that lingered for an alarming age. He knew he shouldn’t have. He was driving and his attention should have been on the road ahead and the many hazards queueing up to happen in front of him. Those hazards were awaiting such a lapse. But he did it all the same. Couldn’t help himself. It was a regression. A recreation of a childhood memory. Wiping the condensation from the window and looking out of the smudged glass at a world he was not a part of. Instead he was trapped inside a jar of his  parents’ oppressive anger. The pressure of the atmosphere crushing his heart. As his parents argued in silence, he knew it was not supposed to be this way. But he had no idea of what it could be like. The fairy tales he’d heard spoke of a happily ever after, but there was never a description of what that looked like, let alone a route map there.

The place he’d seen through the side window of the car was another choice. Maybe even another chance. Through that portal was another version of his life. He should want to go in that direction. Stop the car and walk towards a brave new world. But he could not. He was the obstacle to that eventuality. He was the reason for his own demise whether he liked it ot not.

Laura sat next to him. Riding shotgun. There was no shotgun though and he was glad of that. There would be no covering fire. The threat was focused inwards. He smiled secretly to himself. They gave an appearance of unity. The passive, unresolved conflict that simmered under the surface of them was a bond of sorts. The heat of it could be mistaken for passion if there was no real attention paid.

The road ahead was compelling and hypnotic. It would not be denied. Dan wondered whether it was the snake’s head or its tail that he’d find at journey’s end. This was how most of life was lived. A beginning required a long and arduous middle. The midst of the tale was a fight between good and evil. The prize a mystery. You never knew what you were getting, even if you kept your eye on the prize.

The silence in the car was not his own. It was, he realised, his parents’ legacy. The legacy of lack. A lack of resolution. If he were to break into this silence, it could only be with further evidence of the conflict or the lift muzak of the humdrum. The grating noise of superfluous detail. Likely a commentary on the state of the roads or the declining standards of driving. Remarks on the decay of lives not lived. A sordid reflection of their own decrepit  state.

And still, he did not know why he had communed with the sad little boy he had once been at the window of an oppressive car. Surely he was different now. This was different. Why had he been haunted by the ghost of a past life that he’d been running from all his life? He was not that boy. His parents were not here. Not anymore. He was older now. Bigger somehow.

He was entirely right, and yet in his correctness he could not be further from the truth of it. His parents were indeed elsewhere. The problem was that was that what dwelt within this car was an echo of his childhood. A chaotic echo which he had never bothered to polish or maintain, let alone replace with something more fitting.

Feeling the truth of it, he blamed himself entirely. His method of blame was a brutal torture. A sergeant major yelling in his face, pockmarking his cheeks and mouth and eyelids with yellowed spittle. Dizzied and deafened, he wept inwardly as he agreed with every degradation and insult. He was worthless and there was no way out of the drudgery he had woven into this life of his.

They drove on in the crushing silence. A silence that stifled and smothered the music emanating from the radio. He dared not increase the volume for fear that it highlighted the ominous quality of the emptiness within the car. He dared not look at Laura for fear of accepting the consequences of a spell he had inadvertently incanted whilst distracted by the car that had stopped in front of them at the empty roundabout. The adrenaline surge that he'd experienced as he’d had to jam the brakes on had left him disoriented and weak. Any anticipation or excitement he held for their holiday together had slipped from him and rolled under his seat to join the loose change and hairy boiled sweets that had escaped their fate and begun a new life in an inferior exile.

There was a message here. The little boy had whispered it into the wonders of an unknown future all those years ago as he looked out upon the mysteries of blurred lands beyond the smeared window. That child had not wished for escape, only a return. He had wanted his Dad to turn back. The boy had just wanted to go home. And his wish seemed to be in within a hair’s breadth of a chance of being granted when his mother had gasped as though their lives were in imminent peril before telling an invisible pal, “we’ve left the toothbrushes!” Of course they had. You couldn’t pack toothbrushes the night before. They were needed in the morning, and back they went to the glass where they belonged. 

“We’ll buy some when we’re there,” said his Dad firmly and stoically.

Dan had seen the look his mother had given his father in that moment. Knew that she did not love him for providing a solution. Failed to see the love she held for him for a long while after that. By then, the damage was done. His brand of love, the love that he knew only too well, was widely available, and it hurt like hell. Not a surprise, when it was manufactured in hell.

He’d wanted to go home because anything was better than this glasshouse where the world closed in and left no place to hide. Now, in his desire to run back to his safe space he understood what the little boy was telling him. He now knew the truth that he had waited thirty years to impart to himself.

He’d left something behind.

It wasn’t about the toothbrushes. The toothbrushes had been a fleeting symbol of hope. A unicorn of change that had withered in the harsh light of an unbelieving reality. This was about being in his safe place. Only, there was no safety to had there anymore.

When he eventually looked at Laura, there was no need for courage. This was now only about curiosity. A confirmation of the conclusion of the experiment that had been performed in this laboratory. In this sealed environment, he felt the crushing truth and it made him want to die. To cease this existence painful existence of his.

As he gazed upon the figure seated beside him, he realised that he’d left Laura behind. Only this version of her was the real Laura. And he didn’t know who the real Laura was. He suddenly doubted that she’d let him do such a thing as know her. And all the while he’d blamed himself for not doing enough, for not being enough. And in his victimisation of self, he had been blinded to his clandestine construction of his Laura. He had aided and abetted everything in the pursuit of a fantasy that allowed them both to co-exist without any meaningful reciprocation. 

Theirs was a one way trip.

Dan stared out of the windscreen and began to grieve. He grieved for what, he did not yet know. All he knew was that he’d been on a journey to nowhere for such a long time and right now, he knew that even if he were to turn back, he’d be going to exactly the same destination. He grieved his loss, but more so he lamented his being lost and the prospect of his never finding his way back.