by Moody, David
‘Just keep driving,’ Roy said. Steven had no intention of doing anything else. As he pulled level with the accident he heard the Citroen driver, in tears now, yell a foul, obscenity-ridden tirade at the helpless woman lying in the road with her kids, then he lunged at her. Steven could only see for a couple more seconds before reaching the brow of the hill and having to slam on his brakes to avoid an accident of his own, but he was sure he’d seen the man go to punch her. ‘Fuck me,’ Roy mumbled. ‘Whole frigging world’s falling apart.’
12
It was the hottest part of the hottest day, not that the increase in the already unbearable heat mattered. Steven remained quiet, concentrating on the miserably slow traffic and trying not to think about what kind of reaction he might get when he turned up at Norman Hill’s house later. Would he even make it there by tonight? At this speed it was looking increasingly unlikely.
It was difficult to stay focused with Roy’s constant chatter. The noise grated on his nerves, wearing him down, and he was beginning to regret giving him a lift. He’d have got rid of him if he could have come up with a viable way of doing so. Even if he physically manhandled him out of the car, the queue of traffic was moving so painfully slowly that Roy would be able to just amble along and get back in again.
‘You got the air conditioning on?’
‘Of course I’ve got the bloody air conditioning on,’ Steven snapped at him. ‘Fuck’s sake. The temperature’s in the mid-thirties out there. Do you think I wouldn’t have it on?’
‘Is it on full then?’
‘Yes it’s on full. And all the windows are open and the fans are on full too. There’s nothing more I can do. It’s fucking hot. Deal with it.’
‘Alright, calm down. Jesus, no need to be so bloody touchy.’
‘You think? Take a look around you, Roy. I think I’ve got every bloody reason to be touchy. We’ve been in the car for hours and we’ve not even reached the bloody A14 yet.’
‘It’s not far though, is it?’
‘No, it’s not far, but when you’re going this slow everything takes a bloody age. Besides, I’ve still got a couple of hundred miles to go once we’re on the bloody A14.’
Everything was annoying Steven now, Roy especially. Whilst the sun blind kept the majority of the light out of his face, it did little to shade the rest of his body. He could feel his forearms burning as he gripped the wheel. Fortunately a month and a half of uninterrupted sun had helped. If he’d not been heavily tanned already, he’d have been red raw and blistered by now.
Another crash. Four cars this time, all of them shunted up onto the grass verge out of the way, all of them unable to go any further. One had a shredded rear tyre, and though the crumpled bonnet of one of the other vehicles was propped open, no one seemed to be doing anything to try and get it restarted. Strange how sights like this were already commonplace, barely even worth looking at. Two of the cars appeared to have been abandoned whilst all of the windows of another had been covered with sheets, towels and clothes to block out the unyielding sun. As they approached, Steven watched the family who’d been travelling in the fourth car give up on it. A mom and dad walked dejectedly away from the scene, heads down, trudging back towards the centre of the city. A young lad – not even two years old, Steven thought – was perched on his dad’s shoulders, clinging on with real effort. Draped in sheets, to all intents and purposes he looked like a miniature Bedouin riding a camel across the endless Cambridge dunes.
‘That’s never a cloud, is it?’ Roy asked when the curve of the road took them in a different direction for the first time in an age. Steven briefly lowered his sunglasses to look. The sky had been uninterrupted blue for as long as either of them could remember, but there was definitely something there now. A dirty black smudge, spreading slowly.
‘Can’t be, can it?’ Steven said, feeling unexpectedly excited. ‘Can’t remember when I last saw a cloud.’
Their optimism was short lived. It was nothing more than a house fire. Several houses, in fact. They could see it through a gap between two rows of buildings. All they saw was another gap: a dirty, smouldering, uneven hole in the middle of a housing estate. It was little more than a pile of rubble now, the remains of blackened roof joists jutting out at awkward angles like broken bones. Steven thought it looked like someone, something, had started taking bites out of the city.
‘Doubt there’s anyone left manning the fire stations,’ Roy said.
‘Come on, things aren’t that bad.’
‘You reckon? Would you still be hanging around the fire station if it was your job? I wouldn’t. No bloody point. You can’t get anywhere in this traffic and even if you could, how you gonna put fires out? Not enough water...’
He was right. Steven hadn’t thought about it like that. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to. ‘Two hundred bloody miles of this...’ he moaned to himself.
‘Where is it you’re heading again?’
‘My father-in-law’s.’
‘That where your missus is?’
‘Yep, worst luck.’
‘Like that, is it?’
‘Exactly like that. Her dad’s a prick. He’s never forgiven me for dragging his precious daughter all the way to Cambridge. I wouldn’t mind, but he was only living in Bedford at the time.’
‘Bad blood between you?’
‘He’s an insufferable arsehole.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
‘He wanted Sam to marry a doctor or a lawyer, someone with a bit of influence and potential. But instead he got me.’
‘You’re doing all right, though. Nice house, nice car...’
‘Try telling him. I scraped a bog-standard degree from a bog-standard university. Wouldn’t matter if I’d been a bloody millionaire, it still wouldn’t have been good enough. I held his daughter back, he told me.’
The A14 finally came into view. At once both re-energising and depressing, it looked pretty much as Steven had expected: solid lanes of traffic crawling in either direction. Maybe it was just his mind playing tricks, but the traffic actually seemed to be moving steadily, albeit at a fraction of the speed it usually moved at. ‘We’ll be all right when we get onto that,’ Roy said, doing his best to sound optimistic. Steven didn’t reply. He felt himself tensing up as they approached a junction. With each passing mile this morning, the rules of the road seemed to have been increasingly disregarded, frustration getting the better of exhausted drivers. Give Way lines had become mini-battlegrounds, filter lanes ignored. A lapse of concentration or a badly-timed glance in the wrong direction could cost dearly. Whilst some civility remained, it was in short supply. Some drivers simply swung their overloaded vehicles out of the traffic queues and drove down pavements or along verges. Steven didn’t dare risk it, despite Roy constantly egging him on.
‘Give it a break,’ he told him. ‘One wrong move and we’re fucked. Look. You want that to be us?’
He pointed at a stranded Toyota going the opposite way. It had tried to follow another smaller vehicle along the pavement, its driver realising too late that she wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the gap between a lamppost and wall which the other car, a battered, boxy little Fiat, had slipped through with ease. But she’d been committed, and now there was nowhere for her to go. Her space in the line had been filled instantly. She couldn’t go forward, and the driver of another car had had the same idea and followed her off the road, preventing her from reversing back. She was stranded. As good as parked.
‘Jesus, see that?’ Roy exclaimed as a silver Vauxhall Astra, overloaded with an entire family, their pets, and an unsteady-looking roof-rack full of luggage, pulled out from behind them, shot through an impossible gap between two lanes of traffic, then drove straight down a steep embankment, disappearing from view as if it had been driven over a cliff. ‘Bloody suicidal.’
Steven waited to hear the sounds of the Astra crashing, but other than engines straining, a screech of tyres and a few more horn blasts, there was nothin
g. He looked ahead and saw the Astra had, miraculously, managed to join the traffic unscathed. It looked precarious for a few seconds as the driver struggled to keep control, tipping one way then the other, almost overbalancing, but it was soon matching the pace of the other vehicles around it, absorbed into the treacle-slow flow. Steven caught Roy’s eye. ‘No fucking way,’ he said.
‘Come on. If he can do it, you can.’
‘I’m not doing it.’
‘I would. If I was driving I’d—’
‘You’re not. We’re not. Shut up.’
It seemed that more drivers were siding with Roy than Steven. Chaos erupted as cars raced to follow the same route as the Astra and take the short-cut down the embankment. Two shot through quickly before another three cars all went for the same space at the exact same time, two of them colliding. But even that didn’t stop many more from trying to do the same, and in less than a minute a large proportion of the queue ahead of Steven had swerved out of his way and joined the line for the leap into the unknown. ‘Do it,’ Roy said again. Steven ignored him and accelerated, racing into the gaps left behind by those drivers who’d changed direction.
‘Do you know nothing? It’s supermarket politics.’
‘Now you’re just talking bollocks.’
‘I’m not,’ he said, gritting his teeth and locking his arms as he shot through the deceptively narrow gap between the back-end of a van and the kerb. ‘You see it all the time. You’re queuing up at the only checkout with about ten other people, then they open another till. Everybody goes to the other till. Stay where you are, you’ll get through faster.’
‘I was right, you are talking bollocks. End of the fucking world and you’re talking about going shopping...’
‘If you don’t like it you can piss off. I’ll drop you off here.’
‘Nah, you’re all right.’
Steven shook his head and did what he could to block out the other man’s noise as they finally crossed the dotted line and merged onto the slothful A14.
13
‘Forty miles in six hours. That’s got to be some kind of crappy record,’ Roy grumbled.
‘Well what do you want me to do about it? I can’t go any faster.’
‘I wasn’t complaining, I was just saying... that’s like less than seven miles an hour. I could walk faster.’
‘You could if you want... I don’t mind.’
‘In this heat? You’re having a laugh, ain’t you?’
‘Do I look like I’m laughing?’
Roy said nothing. Steven glanced over, trying to work out why he’d ever agreed to give this man a lift. He still wasn’t entirely sure who he even was; just a friend of a friend, not that it mattered anymore. Still, he thought, the irritation of his unwanted passenger was at least a distraction. Roy’s never-ending tirade of bullshit was actually helping Steven forget about everything else temporarily... the endless journey still ahead of him, the uncertainty over what he’d find when he reached his destination, the deteriorating weather conditions, the end of the world as he knew it... He almost laughed to himself when he thought that, but the apparent inevitability of their grim situation increased with each mile they crawled along the red-hot road. The further he travelled from home, the weaker his grip on normality seemed to become. He tried to call Sam once or twice, hoping that hearing her voice would bring some clarity to this bizarre and nightmarish day no matter what she might say, but the fact he was unable to get through just served to increase the disconnection. Roy tried to call the folks he was trying to reach near Stoke, but he couldn’t make contact either. The networks were either clogged or down.
The road remained overcrowded but relatively well-ordered, problems only encountered when they arrived at junctions where more traffic inevitably joined the road than left. People all had the same overall aim, Steven decided, to reach their destination without incident. The two lanes in either direction appeared to be moving relatively smoothly. On occasion people used the hard shoulder, but it rarely gave them the advantage they’d hoped. The rescue lane was increasingly filled with the detritus of this aimless mass exodus. Broken down cars, discarded luggage and possessions... the non-essential remains of people’s lives. For a moment Steven allowed himself to daydream, imagining a time when normality had returned and the clouds had rolled in, all these people making this same journey again to try and reclaim the things they’d abandoned at the roadside, moaning about the miserable weather as they fought through the rain and the wind.
‘Tell you what we need,’ Roy said. He’d been quiet for a few minutes. It had been bliss.
‘I know what I need,’ Steven grumbled.
‘We need to find one of them supermarket delivery trucks. You know the ones? Imagine it, Steve... open up the back and it’ll be all refrigerated and full of food.’
‘Jeez, I’d settle for the refrigeration.’
‘Ice cream and beer, that’d do me. Remember that barbecue at Yvonne’s?’
‘I remember.’
‘That was the last time I had ice cream. Last time I had ice anything, come to think about it.’ He turned his head away from Steven and looked out of his window, watching the world pass at an infuriatingly sedate pace. Then he spoke again, the tone of his voice different. ‘What’s the date?’
‘Seventeenth of October.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yep.’
‘Thought it was the sixteenth.’
‘Nope. Definitely the seventeenth. Why?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘This time last year. Sixteenth of October last year I was helping out a mate. We hired a truck and drove up to Hull to shift some junk from his granddad’s house.’
Steven looked at him, expecting more. ‘And?’
Roy smiled to himself and looked down at his feet. ‘I was just remembering the day. Freezing cold, it was. You remember what it used to be like? Bloody pitch perfect autumn day. It was still dark when we set out, but by the time we got to Hull it was mid-morning. The fog was unbelievable. Couldn’t see the Humber bridge on the way up there. Couldn’t see anything much, come to think of it. Then when we finally got to his granddad’s house, everything just changed. It was like he’d flicked a switch. The fog all burned away and we were left with this perfect blue sky, clear as anything. The air was so cold you could feel it in your lungs, you know? And the grass was soaked with dew, and the leaves on the trees... Jesus, I’d never seen anything like it. Coming out of the grey there was just so much colour. All these shades of red and browns and yellows...’
Roy’s voice trailed into silence. Steven watched him nonchalantly wipe his eye, trying not to be noticed. Steven thought about the world Roy had described, and the memory was so clear he could almost smell it: the damp, cool air... the stark contrast with the aridity of today.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Roy said, clearing his throat and composing himself. ‘Got a bit emotional for a sec. Don’t know what came over me.’
✽✽✽
‘Here he goes again,’ Steven said. They’d been playing a tediously slow-paced game of cat-and-mouse with the driver in the right hand lane since midday. Most people were content – as content as they could be – to stick to the same lane and just keep moving forward, albeit at a frustratingly miserable pace. Not this dick. This idiot in his hilariously small and impractical two-seater sports car thought he was more important than everyone else. He’d nudge and weave, pushing his way into one queue and then the other, eyes hidden behind designer shades, impervious to the shouted abuse which was frequently hurled at him from the rolled-down windows of the cars he overtook. ‘Thing is,’ Steven continued, ‘he’s not gaining anything. All he’s doing is pissing everyone else off.’
‘He thinks he’s getting one over on the rest of us.’
‘Then he’s wrong. Bloody hell, that should be obvious. He’s been doing all this ducking and weaving for miles. We’ve stuck to the same lane yet he’s only just
ahead of us.’
The traffic bunched up, allowing Steven to catch up with a tired-looking saloon car in the outside lane. This car, they’d established, was the lead car in a three vehicle family convoy. Whenever the pace slowed like this – as it had several times in the last half hour – the woman in the passenger seat would get out and check on those in the cars behind, leaving her husband and two complaining kids temporarily. She’d no need to panic or rush – even if the traffic started moving again, she barely needed to jog to catch up. The second car of the three, a Ford Galaxy, was almost completely full of luggage, a young lad’s face peeking out from the midst of the suitcases, bags and boxes like he’d been buried by an avalanche. In the back of the final car were an elderly couple with a baby wedged between them in a throne-like chair. The old fellow, sitting behind the driver, thinning grey hair slicked back with sweat, looked around anxiously, frequently leaning forward to give unnecessary advice to the woman behind the wheel. His wife, Steven presumed, was somehow managing to stay asleep. She rested with the side of her face pressed against the window, the glass smoothing out her wrinkles, mouth hanging open. And it occurred to Steven as he watched the family, that no one was immune to the trials of these unnaturally harsh conditions. Young or old, fit or unhealthy... everyone was suffering.
