from a work in progress
Towns at rest, people going home, intermittent patches of glitter and dark everywhere – life, dear life was happening all around her, dancing restlessly through her lashes. Head leaning against the car window, Kara felt wide awake with fear and curiosity. Houses rolled past her like a tracking shot in a film, blurring and disappearing from view the very next moment, as if reminding her not to bother because everything was difficult, and everything was also fleeting.
The houses didn’t hold her interest for long. The passenger seat – the safe haven, and speed – a delicious break from the reality of the moment, were half-assing their jobs too. On the other side of the car Tomás kept giving sighs of helpless irritation, distracting her from her attempt to stay distracted.
‘Damn you,’ she mouthed silently to herself, and buried her face in her coat.
He wouldn’t look at her. Driving fast without saying a word, he only huffed and puffed now and then. The car was saturated with him and she still couldn’t tell a thought from the other. It was dark, musty and cold in there, and terribly lonely. If only she knew what he saw through those quiet eyes of his.
If only he’d stroke her hair and said it was alright.
But his eyes were nothing like silence. Bright and alert, like a small animal that just realised a much bigger one is close, his mind was racing around her, circling yet unable to confine. Now she knew, and she wouldn’t keep quiet. He had to show her things he was not allowed to show anyone, because now she would go back and question everything out loud. If only he could drive fast enough to lose himself in a vortex. Anything bigger than him would do, because for once, Tomás did not want the blame, the trouble, the girl.
Fidgeting in her seat, she finally turned to him. He looked tormented. She did not like real life complications much, and would have been happy to forget about this story if only he asked; if only he asked for anything at all.
Life in the New World was simple, and that quality got to her in time. Her mind was a myriad of thoughts, all revolving around the insane things his mind seemed to believe, and whether they were due to heavy drinking or never receiving the treatment. But she’d have pulled down the blinds and shut them out if he wanted. After all, she was sick enough with storytelling to carry yet another’s burden.
From life, she had picked a few things to like, but they did not have tormented faces: highways, rooftops, public swimming pools – all at night, houses with big gardens, flats up high on the last level, oranges, tea, red flowers, coloured lighters, sitting by the fire, large windows and larger beds, sundown, sunrise and sometimes, not going to bed at all, electric people, and the lives she could live if nobody loved her enough to tie her down. But a sad man, she did not know how to handle, for she had never seen one before.
She finally let the alcohol kick in and her thoughts disperse, and shut her eyes.
☾
Much later, when she opened her eyes, Kara realised they weren’t up in the mountains anymore. They were driving across a vast, windy field with no trees or houses on either side of the road, at what seemed like speed of light and straight into nowhere.
Her lips were dark and dry and she craved a glass of water and an explanation for where she was being taken, and if it wasn’t too much to ask, why. She had barely muttered a few words when she remembered he would not tell a thing. That was what it would be like. He would not talk, and she could not fight.
To hell with it. He was breaking every other rule anyway.
‘Pull over!’
‘Oh no I won’t,’ he said as if he had had the answer ready for her the whole time. ‘There is nothing to do here. If you’re going to report me, I might as well drive you all the way up and let you have a good look at what you’ve done first.’
‘Up where?’
‘Kara, you’ll have to trust me on this one, alright?’
‘Listen, I wouldn’t… why would I report you, if you actually stop driving like an animal, and putting me at risk?’
He slowed down.
‘Damn your professionalism, Tomás! Just tell me what the heck is going on! Listen, I’d be crazy to report you for having a couple of beers with me! Now stop this stupid car and let me catch my brea –’
‘What?’
Tomás stopped the car as he spoke, and looked her up and down with wide, inquisitive eyes.
‘Thanks for stopping the car,’ she smiled.
She was frightened as all hell. He would not know that.
‘Cigarette?’
He waited a couple of seconds before nodding slowly in her direction, and taking one out of her pack.
‘Why do you think I’d’ – she lit up, then passed the lighter, watching his every move in hope for clues – ‘report you? You didn’t take me out drinking. I sneaked out on you. I wouldn’t report on my own bad behaviour.’
Tomás laughed to himself, shaking his head slowly in disbelief.
‘If this is the case, what if I reported you, then?’
‘Roles reversed?’ she smiled. ‘I’d lie and say you lied, I guess.’
Tomás took a deep drag and opened the window to let in the crisp, cold night air. Smiling his sad little smile, but visibly calmer, he was the most good looking man Kara had ever seen. Partly because of his gentle, melancholic ways, and partly because she hadn’t looked at many men like she looked at him before they met. There were troubled waters beneath the surface, and she would never swim in them, and neither would others, ever. But he would dive deep. She knew, because despite the hide-and-seek games, there was more depth in Tomás than she could make sense of. That in itself was incredibly exciting for somebody who had imagined people like him their entire life while devouring book after book.
She felt slightly shy and self-conscious, yes. After all, it was his job to dive deep into her world and not the other way round, but the whole thing was whirling nicely round in her head, for it meant she’d get to see him a little while longer.
He seemed to think about it for some time, but eventually put his arm through hers. She could feel him shivering.
‘Radio on?’
‘Please.’
His voice, like everything else up there, was chilling and unfamiliar, but surprisingly moving. ‘Love at first listen,’ she thought.
Rearranging herself in her seat, she let her head back and closed her eyes. Hell or the closest to Heaven she’d ever been, she was in for the thrill, for this was one of those moments she read about in her grandmother’s books from what seemed – no, was – another world, the Old World. It was her and this man and their complicity and their bodies, and fingers, and thoughts intertwined in the night, the cigarettes and alcohol and the lies they’d just promised each other to tell to save their skins; the bad and the badder, the sense of being alive with each other far away from home, a place that felt home to neither, last night, tonight, tomorrow night…
A wave of warmth washed over her, then a cold shiver, then more, many, many more. To no surprise, smoking his cigarette in perfect silence, Tomás was waiting for this moment to come. His dark eyes watched closely as she suddenly jumped from her seat, coming to where he was. ‘I’ve been waiting,’ they seemed to say.
‘My God, you weren’t joking. I didn’t take you seriously back there. I should have – right? Oh, please tell me that I shouldn’t have.’
The night walked in, dark powerful, magical.
‘Well, if I knew you couldn’t tell when I mean something, I wouldn’t have bothered driving you all the way up here. But now that we got this far, what do you say, shall I show you what your imagination has given birth to?’
The principle the New World worked on was very simple, yet it proved to have countless unexpected implications: the bad had to be eradicated. It was a very noble idea and it had been around ever since Eve ate the beautiful apple. Except, of course, it never worked. The bad could be swept under the carpet, no doubt, but the carpet was still in the house. As the good flourished, the bad was only just around the corner, the shadow on the wall in the dark, the bump under the covers, the one thing nobody would have guessed from under the cleverly layered, multi-stranded stories. In Kara’s case, the bad was – surprise, surprise – not inside her, but out there. Up there. Upper. ‘There we go,’ his eyes confirmed.
She gasped in horror when he put his hand on her knee.
‘Welcome to everything the world has kept from you.’
