Night Trip

by Peter Ackers

"…THE CRIMINALS AND THE SLIMEBALLS…"

  I turned off the main road and drove through one of the rougher estates in the city, where everyone except the criminals and the slimeballs hated to live. Those guys didn't understand the concept of anti-social behaviour, didn't understand what it was like to fear your neighbours and to be scared to go out at night because of human vermin infesting the streets. What did scare people like that? I wondered. But I knew. Me, and people like me, the good guys.

  I knew this estate as a kid, when I had visited my Mum's brothers. I don't visit anymore; they're just images and back-story for those images now. I had had fun here, playing, oblivious to the state of the rest of the world outside my bubble.

  It looked like a place that the rest of the world had forgotten. Scruffy kids playing everywhere, abandoned vehicles, alarms always going off, people shouting from the tower blocks seemingly all day. Drive through some streets at less than 50mph and the thieves would have your wheels off. Despite being just an estate in a bustling city, Balloon Woods was like some village in the middle of nowhere: everyone knew everyone else. Who the bad eggs were, who could get cheap clothing, or drugs, or stolen watches; who threw the best parties, who was in jail, which girls were off-limits because they had a partner in jail. A TV documentary of the place would have appealed to the dark half of Heartbeat fans. World news didn’t really reach the people here, and when it did it was generally considered of less importance than local gossip, unless it involved England’s football affairs. When some guy went on the run from the police for car theft, people actually went to the local newsagent to find out daily updates, since shop owners got all the news first. Exam results, pregnancies, battles, injuries. Sometimes you could almost believe that if the rest of the world had vanished, Balloon Woods would have continued to thrive. Donald Bunks, the local grocer, supplied people’s fruit and vegetables and that was as far as people wanted to know; they didn’t care that unless he had banana trees and cabbage patches and such in his back yard, then he must have his own external supplier. As far as the people here were concerned, the local plumber had a gigantic water tank, the local electrical retailer built TVs from nothing, the newsagent wrote every article himself.

  Of course, sometimes things went wrong and when they did the local people got the blame. Like the time there was a binmen’s strike. Instead of conspiring to get someone to write letters and make phone calls to the local MP, people knocked on the door of Henry Sherman, the roadsweeper, perhaps believing it was all his fault. And the more rubbish that built up, the more hassle Sherman got. People posted rubbish through his door; they covered his car in it. The rubbish chutes that serviced the blocks got blocked, so people left their rubbish outside their doors or in the stairwells. After only two missed collections, the walkways of the blocks were so full that people started lobbing the bags over the wall and into the forecourt below, sometimes hitting cars, sometimes actually aiming for, but thankfully never hitting, people.

  That actually got the wheels greased. Not so much the growing pile of rubbish down in the carpark and the concreted area outside the row of shops, but the complaints of a little old woman living on the ground floor. The bomb-like detonation of each bag bursting on the concrete shook her poor nerves, but funnily she didn’t actually complain until after a pile of bags (one of many erected by conscientious locals who didn’t want to walk across a thick carpet of rubbish) got so big it obscured the view out her kitchen window. Her dog liked to sleep on a storm drain cover outside the butcher’s shop, probably because he enjoyed the meat-smell, and the bags started to block her view.

  Her name was Ms Jacobson and she’d lost her husband a few years earlier in some silly army training exercise. I heard she died peacefully in her sleep a couple of rainy summers ago, lounging in a deckchair just outside her door, watching her sleeping dog. The only time she ever seemed to be outside was when she was trekking to the post box (always vandalised during the Christmas period by kids who thought cards being sent to locals' relatives might contain money) to post her weekly collection of complaints to Parliament, blaming them for the death of her husband.

  Parliament. I remember hearing that name as a kid and thinking it was some guy, some killer. I was a little kid, of course. I remember being scared that this guy “Parliament” would want to do me harm.

  Parliament does us all harm, and we let it. We pay for their help, and like any cheeky employer, Parliament takes the odd liberty.

  I found a thickly packed residential street and cruised down it. I drove towards one house from which loud dance music was throbbing. I wound down my window to fully judge the volume of the noise. I don't know, maybe as a person loses morals and intelligence, he loses hearing, too. The only people who seem to like loud music in the house are the dickheads. I wanted to pull over and kick in his door and strangle him with the cable feeding his box of thuds mains electricity. But how did I know some guy wasn't in there having sex and using the loud music to cover the noise of bedsprings and groaning? Or maybe he knew his immediate neighbours were out, so wouldn‘t care about the volume. Maybe his neighbours also enjoyed the music. Maybe the guy was old and a bit deaf. Truth was, I didn't know enough about the situation to go striding in with my big boots.

  Some dirty kid on the pavement poked his toy gun at me and fired it with a pop. I swerved the van, playing along, but the kid turned and legged it, perhaps fearing he'd shocked me into almost crashing. But then why do it? Kids're mental masochists. I drove on.

  Further along, some guys in yob-regulation sports clothing and baseball caps loitered around a car with mirrored windows and an exhaust pipe like a rocket launcher. I thought about stopping. But should I really judge people by their dress? Did I look like a typical superhero, or the sort of guy you wanted to avoid in the street? The car was outside a shop; maybe their friend was inside, buying milk for his kids. I drove on.

  Some of the houses were boarded up and in a bad state; others with occupants looked no better. I saw gardens full of rubbish and car parts and unkempt grass. I saw dirty kids and graffiti and souped-up cars. There was no money here, but poverty wasn't a crime. I began to feel I was in the wrong place. I drove on.

  Back on the main road, I headed for my girl's house. She lived in a decent area, whatever "decent" meant. For sure it wasn't an environment oblivious to bad weather and illness, and wasn't comfort relative, anyway? A lump of dogshit on the pavement here would abhor the locals as much as a fire-gutted car abandoned on the road back at the estate I just left. Back there, people had no money, and they scraped along, made do. Sometimes crime was the only option, I guess. Here, though, there was no reason for the residents to commit crimes. None that I could fathom, anyway. So I would hunt here.

  Here, look. A slick silver Jaguar, like a car from a science-fiction film, sat right in the yellow painted rectangle allocated to as a bus stop. Beside it, on the pavement, an old lady stood at that bus stop, waiting. I saw movement in the car and realized some guy was in there, just sitting there. I pulled up alongside and stopped. I was blocking the road, but traffic here was light. I clambered across the passenger seat, reached through the open window, and rapped on his.

  Despite my appearance, the chubby guy inside - mid-forties, soft-faced, wearing a woolly fleece over shirt and tie - wound his window down immediately. He didn't look surprised or fearful; he looked like a guy getting ready to give directions, if anything.

  "This is a bus stop, but I guess you know that-"

  "My wife's just paying a deposit -" he began. I cut him off, telling him that I knew the reason why he was parked here. He raised his eyebrows. He didn't seem to sense his peril.

  I looked up at a row of shops. One was a travel agent's and there was a slim woman inside. Probably his wife. Probably paying a deposit for their next luxurious holiday. I disliked this guy more. He could have parked further down, or across the street. But no. The wealthy and influential sometimes have big egos and a bloated sense of self-importance to match the
ir swelling bank accounts.

  "Hey, girl," I called to the old lady at the bus stop. She was small, so small that despite my elevated vantage point in the taller van, I could see only her head above the roof of the wealthy guy's futuristic car. "Get in the car, he'll take you where you want."

  The chubby guy nose wrinkled like a cat's, but rather than a physical aroma, it was the smell of danger that he was caught by.

  "What do you mean? What's happening here?" He turned away from me as the old lady yanked the passenger door and got in, already talking at the speed of light, as if she had known him for years. I saw his hands go up defensively towards her, as if he meant to push her back out. He was saying NO, NO, NO, NO and shaking his head. I rapped his roof and his head turned back my way so fast I thought his lower jaw was going to swing out like a conker on a piece of string and smash the partially open side window.

  "That's what buses do, they take people where they want. And you're in the bus stop, so you must be a bus, so today you're a bus, and this lady's waiting for one, and so you're gonna take her right where she wants to go, or I'll see your name gets in the child molestors' register, and that my neo-Nazi skinhead friends get a copy."

  I had started to lean out my window. Now, I was sure, he could clearly see the decorated face of his assailant, and sense the power in the mind behind it.

  "Okay…okay…" the guy was muttering. I could see his eyes darting back and forth, as his brain tried to work a way out of this.

  "And after this, will you be wanting to play at being a bus again?"

  He shook his head. His hand was reaching for the ignition. He started it. I got a last line in ("Don't park in bus stops again, and you won't ever see the Avenger again.") before he drove off. He pulled out into a free road because I was holding up the traffic. I checked the wing mirror and saw three cars waiting behind me, but nobody had beeped a horn. Maybe they didn't trust the black van, which, although dirty, looked as if it might belong to gangsters or government agents. His wife was over in a shop doorway, watching in disbelief as her husband drove away with another woman in the car.

  I pulled away, my job here done.

  Ahead, just past an approaching petrol station, I saw two kids running in the direction I was headed. One boy with his hand in his bigger sister's. They came to a side street and the sister stopped abruptly at the kerb, and yanked the boy back when he raced past and almost out into the road. She pointed and I looked. A taxi was coming towards the corner, indicating that it wished to turn left down the side street. Like good pedestrians, the kids waited. But the taxi floated past the corner and stopped in the road, still indicating to go left. He was waiting for oncoming traffic to free a space so he could swing right, across the opposite lane and into the petrol station. When my van passed the station's entrance, I slammed on the brakes. This time there was a chorus of honking horns from behind me as drivers were forced to stop. And traffic was building up behind the taxi now, too. But I was blocking his path. He leaned out his window and told me so.

  "I can't be blocking your path," I called back, head out the window. I could sense that people were staring at my spiked blue hair, the studs in my face. It felt good. I almost felt like a model showing off a new look. A month from now, maybe lots of people would be walking round, looking like me. Ah, but cool as that would be, I'd need a new outfit for sure, to keep my originality. "Because I'm blocking the entrance to the garage, and you indicated left. So that must be the turn you want, and it's free. So away down there you go. Back up and go left."

  The driver exited his vehicle. He was old, I'd say late fifties, but he looked well built, as you might imagine a retired pit worker to look. He had a big grey moustache and grey hair and I thought he'd look good in a monotone photo. And rings and rings on his fingers, enough that I'd be surprised if he didn't walk with his knuckles dragging on the ground and his back bent.

  "Move that sack of shit," he called out, pointing at my van just in case I got confused about which sack of shit he might mean.

  I exited my own vehicle. We stood by our steeds like a couple of fighter pilots, missing only the helmet tucked under one arm. I pointed at the side street, to avoid similar confusion, when I shouted back, "Get down that bloody street, now."

  Like a couple of gunslingers, we reached for our weapons at the same time. The taxi driver had his head through the window, still fumbling for something, when I launched a marble right at his windscreen. The marble careened off and into the sky, and left behind a little crater in the glass. The taxi driver bolted from the vehicle, his hand clutching a sawn-off baseball bat. Sawn off baseball bat?

  But he looked scared, because there was a guy in a boiler suit with studs in his head and blue hair and something metal and black in his hand, and a just a moment ago a small missile had just smashed into his taxi, and each day the newspapers told him about the violent carnage people with fucked-up minds got up to. Suddenly his sawn-off baseball bat didn't feel like much of a weapon.

  "Someone's calling the cops right now," he called over. Only about fifteen feet separated us; I think he was wondering if he could get in his car and drive away before I got to him or shot at him again.

  I pointed at the road again, the one I wanted him to take. The one he had indicated he was going to take. I'll have to take your first answer, didn't they say on gameshows? Same here. And the prize was better here: life.

  "You're a dickfuck," the taxi driver snarled, and spat at me. The glob of spit didn't even nearly reach me, but his point had already been made.

  He tossed his bat into his car and followed it in. I moved backwards, along the length of my van, towards the back, ready to dart behind the vehicle if the taxi driver didn't reverse but came forward, maybe hoping to crush me.

  A screech of tires as the car shot forward. As feared, I had to jump behind the van just as the taxi booted past with barely ten inches between the two vehicles. I turned to watch the car go past, to stare at the taxi driver's angry face. He slowed just metres past me and stuck his head out, looking back. A hand exited the window, gave me the finger, and then he stuck his tongue out at me. None of that bothered me, but what happened next did. He cut right across the oncoming traffic, over the lane and neatly through the other entrance to the petrol station. His car juddered over a speedbump and skidded to a halt right beside a diesel pump. The driver got out, slammed his door with an exaggerated swing of the arm, and set about preparing the diesel pump for filling his car. And he kept looking at me all the while across a low wooden fence and flat-topped bushes stretched between the two entrances-exits. Behind my van, the drivers I'd held up had ceased waiting: some had used the petrol station as a bypass, while others began to pull out onto the pavement and even into the oncoming traffic to get around my stationary van. I barely noticed because I was fixed on that man, that man who had defied me in front of everybody, defied me right to my face.

  Pedestrians were shouting things now. Mostly the younger ones; the older people continued about their business. I ignored them all. Tunnel vision.

  "Fuckin' Judas!" the taxi driver yelped as glass from his exploding rear side window nicked his hand and covered his shoes. He released the trigger on the petrol pump, dropped the pump and scarpered behind his car as the next marble twanged off a wing mirror, veered off towards 2 o'clock and the row of pumps beyond, and bored through a pre-cut packaged sandwich some woman had left on the roof of her car while she put her purse away in her handbag. She looked at the sandwich, puzzled; she had heard the rattle of the plastic packaging but was unable to see the hole through her chargrilled chicken. The taxi driver hid behind his car and lobbed more insults at me. And now everyone in the forecourt was aware of what was happening.

  He kept poking his head up so he could look at me through the window. I aimed again and popped the driver's side window when he stuck his face up again. The far window remained intact under the lessened momentum of the missile. My next shot took it out. The taxi driver stuck his head up again
and cursed me. I saw safety glass in his hair. The next time he poked his head up, it was from a position further back along the car, where the rear side window on his side was still undamaged.

  After I'd popped that one, maybe money entered the taxi driver's head - all those busted windows. He yanked open a door and slipped inside. I thought he was going for the baseball bat, but then the engine roared into life and the car pulled away, with seemingly no driver except a pair of hands and a tuft of wavy black hair visible through the holes where the windows used to be.

  The car lurched past two others waiting to pull out - waiting but halted because of what was happening and the fact that my van blocked the exit - and leaped out of the forecourt, smashing my van in the front left as it curved a messy arc out onto the road. The way ahead was clear, yet the taxi driver didn't race away that way; instead, he screeched down the first left turn, which, incidentally, was the very road I had been trying to force this guy down.

  The sound of his engine quickly faded. In its place, the hum of car engines and the chatter of gawkers. I could feel thirty pairs of eyes on me. I saw more than one person talking on a mobile phone. People and eyes were everywhere - in passing vehicles, in shops across the road from the petrol station, all along the street. They looked scared. There was a vast area that was free of people except for me; even the people filling their cars had either retreated into the petrol, station shop or had run away from the scene, to lurk and watch from behind a lamppost or another car.

  They didn't understand what had just happened. I knew that. But it wasn't my place to educate them, unless they crossed that line and had to learn their error the hard way.

  How to exit the scene? Arms raised like a victorious fighter? Quiet and surreptitious, like a true superhero?

  I chose a middle ground: quiet and quick into the van, with a wheelspin to bid all farewell.

  No more delays now. Onward to Fate.