Driver, who are you?
You are a driver, the only thing you ever wanted to be. Growing up, you held and manoeuvred a cheap plastic rendition of the machine you now inhabit. It was always about the freedom, the ability to go anywhere if you so intended. There’s a road down there, you wonder where it might lead and there’s nothing holding you back from finding out. The world seems so much bigger when you’re a child, full of endless possibilities; nowadays you start the engine, it purrs, and you know that given minimal traffic you can move your lorry to one side of the country to the other within the best part of a day. The freedom is gone, everything is so small.
You’re not sure why you do what you do anymore, the mystery is gone. A loaded trailer hangs from the back of your truck, that’s the reason you’ve been told. Deliver these goods, get paid, drive back, the repetition of it is numbing your brain to what’s happening around you. The road is before you, that’s all there is. The velvet blackness of the concrete opening out in your headlights.
The night is dark tonight and the air thick, the worst kind for driving. Your fog lights are blaring on, and quiten down when vehicles (mostly other lorries at this hour) pass in the other direction. The rain patters on the hood like steel drums. Visibility is low, so damn low. There’ll be crashes tonight, you think. Actually, you know it, the kind of knowing that comes with the years of experience worn on your face and in the dreams of a child who only wanted this, or some glorified version of this. Maybe it will be you that dies tonight. Maybe.
You ease off the accelerator a little, now you’re cruising.
It’s the motorway, the veins of the country. Cars speeding by in the fast lane while your lorry lumbers on, dragging up the rear. You feel the weight of the machine, the lack of friction on the slick roads ahead. Your hands tighten around the wheel.
Hours go by and you’re unaware of them passing. Despite the potential danger, there’s a regularity to the journey that allows your mind to fog like the air around you. You’re experienced in this kind of thing — hell, it’s what you always wanted. But it’s exactly that kind of fog that allows phantoms of thoughts to shift in front of your mind’s eye. The questions that you never allow yourself to ask. Am I happy?
THUMP.
Something falls and hits the road. It snaps your eyes back into focus. Brakes slam on. Your tires let out a horrible squeal, the trailer slams into the lorry, your head whacks back into your seat and lurches forward again as the speed slows. Jets of rainwater spray from either side of the vehicle. There’s no friction, you’re skidding, no, sliding. Whatever lays ahead, a dark sprawling shape, you’re going to hit it.
A car zooms past you, not seeing what’s ahead and blares a horn as it goes by.
Then there’s the worst moment of all. Your wheels hit it and you try not to think of what it might be. There’s a crunch, an oh-so-horrible crunch, that you feel more than you hear, and the lorry noticeably lifts and falls, like going over a speed bump. That last bit of friction, however awfully phrased, was what you needed: the lorry has stopped.
Silence now, all except the hum of the engine and the rattling of the rain. You look out your window to check if you managed to swerve correctly and yes, you’re on the hard shoulder. At least no one should hit you.
The fog outside makes everything so damn hard to see but you can just make out a bridge arching over you. Then it makes sense. Whatever was in the road must have fallen from the bridge.
But the realisation only makes things worse. Maybe it’s a jumper, someone at the end of their tether. You thought that someone might die tonight, and maybe someone just did.
Your phone is resting in a holder on your dashboard and connects to the lorry via an auxiliary cord. The police need to be called but for some reason your hands refuse to move. Another car zooms by and disappears into the fog. No one can see a thing out here and to them you’re just another lorry taking a few to get some sleep before the journey ahead. You were meant to be taking the long stretch from Dover to Aberdeen, as far as it gets. Around is only countryside, the wide open spaces which are coated in this impenetrable fog.
It hits you that it’s completely on you what happens next. There’s an urge, a slight tug in your mind, that whispers, Start up the engine and go. No one needs to know. You would reach your destination, the rain would have washed off whatever was on the lorry anyway, and no one would be any the wiser. And somewhere, deep in the British country, there’d be a corpse that too would wash away. Perhaps even blown away, the winds that’ve been happening lately. Something like this could go unnoticed and forgotten. You would drive home, flick on the lights, kick back in your chair and try to forget what happened. You’d even convince yourself that it was a squirrel or something, just a dumb squirrel that, yeah, it was sad it died but no one would lose sleep over it.
But then there’s the better part of you. The voice that tells you to at least go out and check what it was you hit, because you definitely hit something. It’s also this voice that is telling you to take an action. To not simply ignore what has occurred. The fog in your head has been letting you ignore things for too long.
[Are you happy?]
It’d be so easy to twist the key in the ignition again, press down on the accelerator, rejoin the motorway and leave. It’s also something you can’t bring yourself to do, there’s a little bit of that child left in you, the one that wants to take that turning just to see where it leads.
There’s a coat in the seat next to you, it’s not waterproof but it’ll do. You shimmy over to the passenger door and pop it open and immediately the rain hammers you. The hum like white noise that you’d get from a TV not properly tuned or the radio in your lorry. The coat is pulled over your head; it feels like a wet sponge and may as well not be there. Your keys are stuffed into your jeans, which are rapidly soddening to your legs, and you keep a hand there to make sure they don’t go tumbling away. The door slams shut.
Whatever you hit would be near the middle of the trailer, or a little behind it, depending on how far you slid. It’s a miracle you managed to stop at all, never mind coming to a halt completely within the hard shoulder.
You move down the body of the vehicle to find whatever is waiting. Just past the lorry’s wheels and the front of the trailer, is a dark, motionless shape. Rain slithers down the road, past the tyres and around this thing.
“Hello?” you call out hopelessly. You can’t tell what it is but it’s directly in the path of the tyres. You remember the crunch.
It’s so dark under there, you can barely see a thing, barely see the thing. You go back to the cabin to retrieve your phone and coat it in whatever remotely waterproof material you can find. You click the torch on and head back out.
The rain is hell and is getting worse by the second. Your hair sticks to you and feels like cables. Not even an umbrella would help as the wind hits at the right angle to smack you in the face, then it turns and slaps you from behind. Cars whizz by, none the wiser. You duck under the trailer, not only to get a better look at whatever is under there but to get out of the rain. You bring the phone torch up to it.
With the light you see the blood running the rain red, and the crushed skull split open like a clam. You nearly lose your lunch as your stomach squeezes. There’s a smell that wasn’t there before your mind had registered the sight. It stinks of dirty, metallic blood.
That was someone’s son, or daughter (there’s no way to tell, too much of them is gone). Their whole life gone, crushed under heavy wheels on a wet road. You turn the torch off, you don’t want to ever see that thing again and wish that you could take back ever seeing it. It haunts you to know that it’s a sight you will never forget; that when you go home and flick on the light, what you’ll see is that crushed skull with eyes oozing into a puddle staring back at you. No matter how much you wish you could unsee it, you can’t.
Do you call the police? In this fog, it’s unlikely that even a speed camera would catch a glimpse of you, and for all you know the body could take days to be discovered. In that time you will have completed your delivery, returned home, and faced the nightmares that await. You will be terrified of closing your eyes but it’s better than the potential alternative. Someone cares, cared, for this person or what’s left of them, this husk. That’s what frightens you most, more than the gore, more than the blood soaking your trailer inexorably tying you and the body together, more than losing pay for missing the delivery, you fear looking into the eyes of the person who cared for the former human cracked open under the weight of your lorry.
The rain pours on, marking the passage of time.
You make a choice in that moment and you’re not sure if it’s the right one. How can you be? The body will be discovered, and you’re carried away in a vehicle, thinking back on whether you did the right thing. Their whole life went in a moment but you’re still driving on through yours. Will your drive take you to a bridge like theirs on a foggy night? Will you smash into someone else’s drive, changing their destination forever while ending yours?
You are them, and they are you.
