THE DRIVE HOME
by Tim Cooke
I sit here now, aged thirty and a father of one, thinking back over time
to the person I was then. My hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, the people
I loved. I remember, with good reason, a journey home from visiting my sister
in London. She was living with her husband in Golders Green, and my brother and
I had spent the day playing FIFA in a kitchen I now recall, perhaps
incorrectly, to have been tired and covered in dirt. We left the capital via
the M4 and whilst driving between Swindon and Bristol darkness descended. It
came in an instant, like a flash, as if a bulb had burst.
I always felt extraordinary warmth and comfort in the busy, familial
space of the car; there was tranquillity to the intermittent clusters of passing
lights – vehicles, lamps, occasional sirens; red, white, orange and gold. But I
had long feared, since an indescribably terrifying nightmare years before,
something lurking behind the guardrail and hedgerows, deep in the gloom. A
presence without shape or matter but equipped with incredible speed and
agility. On this winter evening, it seemed to be tracking us, racing alongside
the car and reaching, like a spectre, for the door handle.
The bridge over to Wales was lit up like a beacon. The waters of the
River Severn raged in a way I had not previously seen. Peering into the blue
murk, forcing my eyes to adjust to the estuary like a fixed-focal-length lens,
I watched grey waves rise and fall as if leviathans lunging at low-flying
gulls. Furious winds whipped silver spray into wrathful swirls, like dust
devils in the desert. The wind beat hard at the body of the car. It was at this
moment that, I think, I first appreciated the volatility and indifference, the
aggression, of the natural world. I longed to touch it. I wound down the window
and let cold air and rain gush in. My parents began to shout and my brother’s
face turned ugly, grotesque: ‘What the hell
are you doing?’
I felt something enter, something sinister. My sense of security, my
very sense of the world, was compromised; things were changing and my chronic
fear of sleep rose to the surface.
We drove further into the night, passing two cities and evading the
valleys, before emerging from the darkness onto a bright dual carriageway. We
ran over two or three roundabouts – I can’t claim to recall with total accuracy
the lay of the roads at that time – and hit a strange intersection, where roads
from the town met those from the coast. Warehouses, car parks and a pub spilled
from an adjacent industrial estate – my dad owned an electrical wholesale firm
there.
We slipped onto another A-road, passed a new McDonald’s and a KFC and
slid into a strip of suburbia separating the town from the surrounding
countryside. We drove along the road on which my second eldest brother and his
wife had recently bought their first house, past the huge secondary school I
had attended for the previous term and across the T-junction onto the street
that had been my home since birth. We rolled down the slope, past two of our
closest friends’ houses and the turning to the cul-de-sac where my grandparents
once lived, and arrived finally at ours, plunging into the driveway and
activating the security lights. We were not alone.
*
That night, we ate beans on toast and probably watched Last of the Summer Wine. My brother and
I played table tennis and PlayStation, our bare feet pressed deep into thick
carpet, and the clock ticked on, gathering speed. I observed with dread as the
final hour neared. I went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water, and the
sight of the open door gaping into the back corridor sent a ripple through my
body – an after-effect of another petrifying nightmare. The blind had not been
pulled over the large window above the sink; I peered at my reflection, half
swallowed by the pitch black behind, and listened as the wind howled across the
wide expanse of playing fields that stretched from our rear garden fence right
up to the river running beneath Bluebells Wood.
I had never slept with ease, not for as long as I could remember. I had
a complicated relationship with the dark and, more profoundly, with silence.
From a young age, I’d experienced recurring nightmares of waking up in the
fields in the dead of night. I could see blue flashing lights in the living room,
but no matter how hard I ran, the distance would only expand and I’d sink back
towards the river winding away to the castle and the coast, squirming with eels
and trout. Sometimes I would see a figure – nebulous, inhuman – creeping from
room to room as my parents sat in front of the TV. I’d try to shout but nothing
would come. I’d watch paralysed with horror as death drew near, totally silent.
When I couldn’t sleep, which was often, I’d listen to Just William and Narnia audiocassettes, fearing the end of each chapter or story, as
that would tell me how long I had lain awake for and seemed to confirm that I
would do so for hours to come. I would let the tapes click out and then lie in
silence, unable to stand any more of time’s cruelty. I’d try to imagine nice
things: music, rugby, holidays and barbeques. Nothing worked, ever. Knowing
that everyone else in the house was asleep was the worst feeling of all – I
have never since felt so alone.
If my parents were still up, I would sit at the top of the stairs and
cough. Sometimes they would come with kindness and sympathy, other times
exasperation. They could not help me. Nevertheless, I longed for their presence
and would beg them to ascend the stairs and kiss me goodnight just once more.
When going to bed each evening, having brushed my teeth, I would expect them
both to come and reassure me with a simple peck that I would see them the next
day. They invariably did so, unless one of them was out for the evening or
away, which was hell. Once they had left my room, I would call over and over, ‘Love
you, see you in the morning,’ until they were out of earshot, or simply chose
not to respond. I was reminded emphatically of how all this felt when years
later I read Proust for the first time.
This occasion, however, was different. It wasn’t just about sleep and
night-time insecurities – this was about the stability of the waking world, the
atomic structure of everything and everyone. Nothing would be the same, I could
feel it in my bones.
For some reason, it occurred to me that we should go to a supermarket,
where it was light and busy and, perhaps, safe. ‘Shall we go to Tesco?’ There
was a large Tesco near the KFC and McDonald’s, just out of town, or there was a
smaller one closer in, near the bus station. Alternatively, we could go to the
Sainsbury’s by the new outlet store next to the motorway junction on the other
side of town. I didn’t care. ‘What is wrong
with you?’ my brother replied.
I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror and listened again to the whistling
gusts hurtling back and forth over the fields. Rain had begun to spatter the
bathroom window, double-glazed and iridescent in the weather and the glow from
the streetlights at the front of the house. I sat on the toilet and shivered. I
left the bathroom, passed my brother at the top of the stairs – ‘freak’ – and called to my mum and dad: ‘I’m
going to bed.’ Ten minutes later, she came into my room. ‘Goodnight.’ She
kissed me on the cheek and ran her hand through my hair. ‘See you in the
morning.’ As she creaked down the stairs, having switched off the main light
and turned on a small lamp by my sister’s old room, I called out to her. It
wasn’t a word, but rather a noise – base, primitive and pleading. ‘Sleep well,’
she called back and disappeared into the lounge below. He came in after her and
said four clinical prayers; he kissed my forehead and left, too.
Finally, I closed my eyes, faces warped and broken whirling around me,
pale breasts oscillating in the dark. Fires began to blaze and the crowns of
trees lurched to and fro. The river ran from behind our house up to my bedroom
door, seeping underneath – the bones of animals somersaulting in the flow,
leaving carcasses on the carpet. This was not a dream. For the first and only
time in my life, the attic trapdoor in the ceiling outside my room broke and
the ladder dropped down with a thud onto the landing. The whole house shook.
Like a small child, I longed to flee into my parents’ arms, but I chose instead
to stay put.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Cooke is a teacher and freelance journalist. He's written about film, literature and place for various publications, including The Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, Ernest Journal, The Nightwatchman and the Hackney Citizen. His creative work has appeared in Elsewhere Journal, the Lampeter Review, Drain Magazine, Foxhole Magazine, Stepz, Storgy, Particulations, Glove Magazine and Litro Magazine, among others. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2.
Photo at top: Ryan Hallock
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