Stephen’s fiction has previously been published in Thirteen, Dark of Night, Albedo One and on the Wicked Stories website.
Nathan’s Last Lift
by Stephen Owen
“Getting darker in the mornings now, huh?” Nathan said. “And colder.”
I didn’t even consider responding.
He scratched between his legs and leaned forward. The seat belt locked, but he reached out, tapping the clock face twice.
“Still ten minutes fast then?”
He’d said it every day since he’d put it forward last Monday.
“Yeah,” I grunted. Stating the obvious was Nathan’s specialty. It was one of the million reasons I hated him so much.
“So, is it working?” he said.
“What’s it supposed to prove?”
“You’re meant to think you’re running late…”
“Yeah, I sort of guessed that,” I said.
“So you rush to work as fast as you can…”
“Why?”
“Well, when you get there and find out that you’re not really late at all and you’ve actually gained ten minutes to what you thought you had, you feel so… what’s the word? Well, whatever it is, at least you’ve still got time to put the kettle on and make yourself a nice cup of tea before you start work.”
“I have a cup of tea before I start work no matter what time I arrive - where did you get this from?”
“Um, I read it in one of my mum’s magazines, I think. Does it work?”
“Not really.”
Nathan looked at me with arched eyebrows and pursed lips. He folded his arms and tilted his head. Why didn’t he just ask me why not, instead of going all gay on me?
“If I was a goldfish with a memory span of about five seconds,” I said, “I guess it might, but unfortunately I’m not. I remember the clock’s fast all the time, so it doesn’t work.”
“Oh,” Nathan said, as if I’d said the most hurtful thing in the world. He turned to look out the window and stared into the darkness beyond his dopey reflection.
I sighed, fumbling for the radio switch. Bloody Nathan. He was Debbie’s idea.
***
“You could give him a lift,” she called up the stairs one morning. “He’d appreciate that.”
“Appreciate it? He’ll love it!” I screamed back through a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.
“Now that’s not fair – that poor man hasn’t got any friends…”
“Ah… ah…ah…let me stop you right there, Debbie.” I raised my right hand like a traffic cop to my reflection in the bathroom mirror and looked myself in the eye. “There’s a reason why people like Nathan don’t have any friends…”
“And what’s that?” said Debbie.
“Because nobody likes them…and you wanna know why?”
“Well, you’re going to tell me anyway,” she said, in the kitchen now judging by the sound of clattering cutlery.
“Because they are usually the most boring bastards in the world,” I yelled. “People like Nathan Cox have ended up in social solitary confinement for a reason--and what’s worse, they put themselves there--I don’t feel sorry for him at all.”
I thought I heard a plate smash somewhere downstairs.
***
Hotel California by the Eagles was playing on my car radio. It used to be a good track, you know. Probably still is, but I’ve heard it too many times now. When you hear something a million times, the novelty wears off.
Nathan sat there playing bet you blink first with his reflection, stroking his lunch box on his lap, like it was a big square plastic cat.
“That’s the bus stop you used to wait at isn’t it?” I nodded toward a queue of faceless people on his side of the street.
“Yes, that’s right--twenty-eight minutes past six it was meant to arrive, but it was never there before twenty-five to seven. I had to be at the train station for six forty-five to make the connection.”
“Yeah?” I felt a yawn coming on.
“Yes. One morning, I got so angry, I told the driver this was supposed to be the six twenty-eight not the six thirty-five and if he didn’t pull his socks up I’d be reporting him.”
“Did you?”
Christ, this wasn’t just any old yawn brewing here. It was a really big please-shut-up-and-die-Nathan-you’re-just-about-the-most-boring-bastard-I-ever-met yawn. Resistance was useless. I had to let it out.
Nathan looked at me.
“Do you know what a yawn actually is?” he said.
“Hmmm? No… I don’t.”
“It means you’re about to fall asleep.”
“Yeah?” My eyes were starting to go bleary now.
“The brain sends a message to the lungs requesting an emergency boost of oxygen so it can wake up again.”
“Does it?” My voice sounded flat and uninterested.
“Yes, it does.”
“Amazing,” I said, then yawned again.
This one was even bigger than the last.
***
The first time he called at twenty minutes past six. Call me naïve, but I thought it was safe to have a shit at that time in the morning without being disturbed.
“Oh, that’ll be Nathan,” Debbie said. “I told him you’d give him a lift today.”
“Tell him to wait in the hallway whilst I wipe my ass,” I yelled. Unfortunately, my bathroom is at the front of the house and the window was open. Nathan heard me.
Of course, Debbie had to apologize. “Take no notice of him Nathan--he’s always grumpy in the morning.”
Even though I couldn’t see him, I knew he’d be nodding his head, frowning and giving her that ever-so-concerned look. “I know exactly what you mean,” he’d whisper, his understanding fingers resting gently on her shoulder. “He’s just the same at work.”
That was over three months ago. He never called at twenty past six again, thanks to Debbie’s amazing decorum. Christ, that silly woman has a way with words.
“He always takes a dump around quarter past and doesn’t come out for at least ten minutes,” she told him. “So it’s not a good time. He stinks the place out.”
“Oh, fine,” Nathan said, grinning from ear to ear, bucked teeth sticking out of his mouth like a deck of blank playing cards. “I’ll remember that.”
So he used his initiative. The following morning he arrived at six o’clock, smashing the shit out of my front door like an over-enthusiastic cop with a sledgehammer out on his first dawn raid.
“Someone at the door!” she shouted.
“Oh right…you don’t say? I’ll get it then, shall I?”
Nathan grinned as I opened the door.
“Morning,” he said, squeezing past me. “Have you heard the news?”
“No--what’s happened?”
“I don’t know--I haven’t seen it yet…all right if I turn the TV on?”
I grimaced, closed the front door and slowly turned around. He was already sitting in my chair, with my remote control, flicking through the programs. I gritted my teeth and walked over to the chair by the window.
“This digital TV is great isn’t it?” he said.
“It’s rubbish,” I said. “I’m thinking about having it taken out.”
Nathan didn’t hear me. He was too busy changing channels, looking for the news.
In the end we saw about five seconds of it, same as we did every other channel. Nathan was enjoying himself so much, he spent the next quarter hour pressing buttons on the control and chuckling.
“Would you like some tea and toast, Nathan?” Debbie called from the kitchen.
“Oh, yes please, that would be lovely.” He beamed at me as if I’d asked him the question.
“I’m not a ventriloquist or a female impersonator,” I said. “So don’t bloody look at me.”
Nathan looked perplexed.
“Anyway.” I stood up and patted my ass. “You help yourself to anything you want down here mate, I’m going upstairs now for my shit – but, of course, you know that don’t you?”
As I walked toward the stairs he suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh very good.” He guffawed like a donkey. “Very good…very good…”
***
The never-ending Hotel California defied all the laws of physics and finally finished. I’d managed to stop yawning. “I guess my brain’s got enough oxygen now, huh?” I said without taking my eyes of the road.
Nathan ignored me and folded his arms.
A voice on the radio warned of an accident a few miles ahead, on the M40 near the Polish War Memorial. Apparently, a mile-long backup had formed and it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.
I sighed and shook my head. I didn’t mind being stuck in a traffic jam and I certainly didn’t give a shit about being late for work, but I did care about being stuck inside this car with only Nathan to talk to for the next couple of hours.
In the distance a golden sun crawled over the horizon in a peach-colored sky. It looked beautiful, it really did, but I never saw it that way anymore. These days, first light meant only one thing: Nathan’s bloody weather forecast.
His face glistened with anticipation in the amber light as he unfolded his arms. “Yes, it’s definitely getting colder,” he said.
“Is it? I hadn’t noticed,” I mumbled.
“Oh yes, winter’s on the way.”
“Really?” Another yawn was on its way.
“Yes, I shouldn’t be surprised if we get snow, you know.”
I was dying to repeat “snow” in his girly-gay voice, but I was too busy wrestling with another monster yawn slowly squeezing its way up my esophagus toward my dying brain.
Nathan noticed. “How much did you have to drink last night?”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.” He tilted his head again. “Don’t think I haven’t smelled your breath in the mornings.”
“Eh? What are you going on about?”
Nathan looked back at the sky; his eyes glinted red.
“You can still be drunk the morning afterwards, you know. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.”
There was a pause.
Somewhere in the distance a police siren wailed.
“Not to mention…illegal.” He smiled.
I shook my head and stuck my indicator on. We were approaching the M40.
Were all the bus stop people like Nathan? Or was I just unlucky here? If I’d been able to take my pick out of that queue of people, would the result have been any different? Or did God create thousands of bus stop people who had no choice but to talk complete shit to each other while they waited for the six-twenty eight which never arrived before twenty-five to seven? Perhaps mind-numbing conversations about the weather and the stench of each other’s breath in the mornings were all part of these people’s programming; they were like those dolls with cords hanging out the back of their necks who say the same things over and over again.
“Don’t go down there, you’ll end up in High Wycombe again.” He giggled and waved his stupid skinny arms all over the place.
The car swerved as one of his hands slapped my face. We screeched off the roundabout, cutting up Christ knows how many cars, the smell of burning rubber trailing behind us in a cloud of thick black smoke and blaring horns. Nathan’s precious lunch box crashed to the floor, its sacred contents spilling at his feet as the car zigzagged down the road towards the motorway. My hands clamped tightly round the steering wheel. It was either that or Nathan’s throat.
“Oh, I hope the peanut butter sandwich isn’t squashed,” he said.
“Fuck your peanut butter sandwich--you nearly killed us back there! This is your last lift Nathan--you got that? After today I’m never driving you to work again.”
Nathan’s bottom lip went out like a sulking kid.
“What about getting home today?” he said, shoveling his precious lunch back into its box.
I never answered.
We drove the next ten miles in complete silence.
***
Orange hazards and flashing blue lights twinkled and blinked in the hazy distance like fairy lights. The guy on the radio said somebody had fallen asleep at the wheel of a school bus. My lips tightened as I muttered something about the driver being an inconsiderate bastard. Lord Nathan cut me one of his pompous looks.
“Do you think anybody’s been killed?” he said.
“Probably.”
“Why do you think he fell asleep?”
“I don’t know and I don’t really care.”
Nathan sighed.
“Can I change radio stations?” he said. “I don’t like listening to this traffic report stuff.”
“Do what you like,” I said. “It’s your last lift.”
Nathan grinned. He looked like Goofy, the cartoon dog. He leaned forward and tapped the clock again.
“Still ten minutes fast,” he said, beaming. “You’re not going to be as late as you thought.”
***
Christ knows what station he’d tuned into. It was some kind of Country and Western shit, and worse still, he’d started wailing along with it. It was obvious he didn’t know the words or the tune, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. He just made it up as he went along. Out-of-time fingernails mindlessly rapping on his plastic lunch box, desperately trying to keep pace with his high-pitched warble.
It was like torture.
Nathan’s tuneless voice turned my stomach. It wasn’t just the ear-bending noise that was driving me nuts, it was the thick gooey way it was filling up my car, like deadly poisonous exhaust fumes pouring through his unsightly tombstone teeth.
Enough was enough. I closed my eyes and pressed my foot to the floor.
Nathan stopped singing.
“What are you doing?”
I ignored him.
“Is it something I said?” He raised his voice this time, above the roaring engine.
I nearly laughed at that; it was probably the most rhetorical question I’d ever heard.
I opened my eyes and saw the traffic queue hurtling toward us like a runaway train. It was less than thirty seconds away. My foot felt like it weighed a hundred pounds and stayed glued to the floor.
“I think it’s just about everything you said,” I said.
Then he was screaming, tugging at my leg in a desperate attempt to get it off the accelerator. I jabbed my elbow in his face and he fell backwards, yelping like a dog.
“You’re mad,” he shouted. “Bloody mad!”
“Shut the hell up--ouch!” Nathan’s lunch box smacked the back of my head.
“We’re going to crash!” he screamed.
That’s the idea Nathan--let’s slam into severe congestion and see what it feels like!
I never even heard what happened. I just remember a violent juddering noise before we plowed into cold silent darkness. In the end it was just like somebody turning off an electric light, or a TV set.
***
Thump… thump… thump…
There was that sound again, like an air lock in a water pipe. It was the same vicious vibrating noise I’d experienced just before I crashed the car.
Where was Nathan? This was his fault.
Somewhere inside my head was still juddering like a headache trying to smash its way out of my skull. I felt like I wanted to puke. Was this what it was like to be dead? Had I lived twenty-seven years for this?
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Christ, my head hurt.
I glared at an out-of-focus clock. Blurred green digital numbers glowing like cat’s eyes that looked like they said six o’clock, which really meant ten to six, didn’t it?
Where was Nathan? Was he dead too?
I fumbled aimlessly between my feet in search of my long lost boxers. My hand was working like one of those grabbing machines you get at the arcades, where there’s never quite enough grip to hold on to the prize. Forward. Sideways. Down and grab. Nope, no underpants here, just a load of cold empty beer cans clattering beneath my grasping fingers.
The radio was on. Somebody was talking about an accident on the M40, telling me to avoid the area, unless it was absolutely necessary.
I let out a long and desperate sigh.
The thumping noise wasn’t coming from inside my head at all. It was bloody Nathan hammering on my front door.
“Jesus… that was so real.”
Debbie rolled over and peeped out from beneath the bed covers. She looked at me in the darkness, her features almost non-existent apart from two black circles for eyes. She looked a bit like an alien.
“Your friend’s getting earlier and earlier,” she said. “Can’t you do something about him?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, reaching for my dressing gown. “I think I’ve got an idea…”
Copyright 2007 by Stephen Owen