Wheels

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‘Wheels’ was shortlisted for this year’s Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. 

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A glowing sign spikes the grey sky, yellow arches burning through the downpour. This, and the way the rain renders everything fuzzy, cascading down the car’s windows in overlapping sheets, sends me somewhere else. It’s a memory of the boys, ten and twelve or thereabouts, landing punches on each other’s arms in the backseat of the Corolla. They’re yelping so loudly I can hardly make out the crackling voice repeating our order through the intercom.

I pass back a pair of brightly coloured cardboard boxes, and a hush falls. There’s only the rustle of paper, Colm’s open-mouthed chewing. We pull into a petrol station beside the drive-through and eat in the bowels of the car-wash machine.

When the spinning brushes bear down, I look over my shoulder and watch them stare out opposite windows, their cheeks stuffed with chips. Stephen whoops and claps. Colm’s mouth is pulled taut, but his eyes are like saucers. He’s at that age: the age when joy is beginning to feel embarrassing.

Then, darkness.

Soon, the Corolla is buffed and dried, spat out gleaming. The rubbish goes in the forecourt bin. We take the long way home with the windows rolled down, ushering out wafts of grease and vinegary ketchup. Before we go inside, I turn back to them, draw an invisible zip over my lips.

‘Accomplices,’ I say, which is our shorthand for, your mother can never know.

They nod in unison.

*

But Stephen is beside me now, in the driver’s seat of a new Volkswagen Golf. He presses a button and the engine purrs. He flexes his fingers around the leather of the steering wheel. A salesman leans over the bonnet, lifts a sign off the windscreen and tucks it under his arm. He salutes us before running back towards the dry showroom.

‘Where to?’ Stephen asks.

‘Captain’s choice. Just no motorways.’

The lad hardly has his licence a wet week, but he pulls out of the space as if he’s done it a thousand times. No sooner has the Golf started moving than my heart begins to thud. I count to ten, try to focus on my breathing. In, out. In, out.

Ann’s voice interrupts the counting. She’s at home, but I can feel her warm fingers squeeze my hand.

‘Stephen has an old head on his shoulders,’ she says. ‘He’ll be grand.’

Which is her shorthand for, he’s not his brother.

*

The minor miracle of Colm passing his test on the second go. I ceded the Corolla to him and took over Ann’s Fiat Punto – she wasn’t putting many miles on it anyway, and Colm wouldn’t have been caught dead in the thing.

He was a sparky’s apprentice, then, shuttling from job to job and to the Screwfix every five minutes for some widget his boss, Eric Meyler, invariably forgot. That Meyler fella would lose his head if it wasn’t attached to his neck. Colm was the one making sure invoices were paid, even got business cards printed on seeded paper. The Corolla was full of them; thick bales, secured with elastic bands, fell out whenever I opened the glovebox. The front bore Meyler’s name, number and the address for the website Colm had set up. On the back, instructions. If you tossed the card into a patch of soil or grass instead of the recycling bin, within a matter of months you’d have a dazzling wildflower meadow, one you couldn’t enjoy without thinking about your dodgy wiring, or the flickering dimmer switch in the kitchen.

He gave them to his friends, who gave them to their mothers, who gave them to their friends. They all thought it was charming, clever. Soon, Meyler had to forward all his calls to Colm’s number. Dinner each night was interrupted by his chair screeching across the floor, the soft voice he only used with customers drifting through the wall.

There were burger wrappers hiding in the Corolla, too; the faint, salty smell of the Eurosaver Menu. Whenever I was in it, I gathered up and disposed of the evidence, always with a twinge of sorrow. My boy had grown up. He didn’t need an accomplice anymore.

*

Now we’ve passed McDonald’s, cruising on the national road that’ll soon morph into the motorway. I glance at Stephen.

‘I know, Dad,’ he says, rolling his eyes. ‘I’ll turn off at Smiley’s.’

*

Smiley was the nickname we had for my bachelor uncle, my late mother’s only brother. To meet him you’d think he might be a few apples short of a bushel, his vocabulary limited to grunts and curses, but that was only until he got started on our family tree, or local history. You could humour him this way for hours, if you had the patience. Better than whole evenings spent, like the rest of my relatives, dragging small talk out of him.

Through some mixture of inheritance, thrift and sheer bullheadedness, Smiley had accumulated a hundred acres of farm beside the motorway. He died of a heart attack two years ago. After the funeral, I got a phone call from a solicitor who said Smiley had left everything to me. In the end, I suppose all he ever wanted was for someone to listen to him shite on about the relation who barricaded himself in the cathedral when Cromwell came knocking.

Multinationals were crawling all over Smiley before he passed, suits showing up in the yard looking to slap a data centre or an Amazon warehouse on the land. He’d tell me about them: the pleading letters they sent before turning up, how he’d barge out brandishing a shotgun and they’d nearly wet their Italian slacks, tripping in the muck as they scarpered back to their Mercs. He wasn’t interested in their money, he said. They could find some other sucker.

So, you could say I knew it was worth something, but I nearly went into cardiac arrest myself when I saw the valuation.

*

Until then, we’d been careful with money. Ann left work when Stephen was born, and we were lucky to eke out a camping holiday every couple of years. When the offers came rolling in, we booked a cruise, leaving Colm in charge of the house and Stephen knuckling down for his summer exams. We landed home one Sunday afternoon, jet-lagged and irritable, and there was a young one on the couch. She was fake tanned and bottle-blonde. Nails dripping from her fingers like icicles. She and I were staring at each other when Colm wandered out of the kitchen, eating a breakfast roll, wearing nothing but his jocks.

‘Back so soon?’ he said. His voice was a few octaves higher than usual.

There was a precarious tower of pizza boxes beside the telly. Every cup we owned had migrated to the coffee table, their insides ringed brown with tea. I dreaded to think what the kitchen looked like.

Putting the suitcases down and gritting my teeth, I glowered at Colm, then turned to the girl. ‘And who do we have here?’

‘Oh, eh, this is Ruth. My …’ Colm paused, looked down at his feet. Then he cleared his throat. ‘My girlfriend.’

‘Girlfriend!’ I cackled. ‘What are you doing with this fella? Sure, look at the state of him. Nearly three o’clock in the afternoon and he hasn’t even put his trousers on.’

It came out funny, like every syllable had been dipped in a vat of acid. Head to toe, Colm turned salmon-pink. Ruth stared at her manicured hands. Ann elbowed me towards the stairs and up I went, huffing, with the bags.

‘For once, can you please just leave it?’ Ann, having followed me, was eyeing our unmade bed. She started tearing off the sheets.

‘What? It was a joke.’

‘Didn’t sound like one. Poor Colm, humiliated like that in front of the girl.’

‘Serves him right,’ I said. ‘Can’t even leave for two weeks without him turning the house into a pigsty. Once she’s gone, I’ll have a word.’

Ann shook her head. ‘What’s the point? You’re as stubborn as each other. Before we know it, he’ll be moving out—’

‘That’ll be the day.’

‘—and Stephen will be off to college. Then what?’

‘Peace at last?’

Ann stood there, ashen-faced, pillowcase in hand. Then, solemnly, she said, ‘We’ll wish we didn’t make a fuss over the small things.’

*

For her sake, I held my tongue, but it didn’t matter. Colm knew well I was bulling and gave me a wide berth. He started staying out until all hours. We never saw Ruth again.

*

A cage of concrete and steel rises out of the landscape ahead of us, like the carcass of some futuristic beast. Soon, it’ll house hundreds of polycarbonate twin wall cells, each one humming as loud as a beehive, answering all the questions of the world.

Stephen steers the Golf around Smiley’s perimeter, loops us back towards the dealership. He knows these roads; Colm often brought him to the deserted farmyard to practice his three-point turn. He takes a sharp corner too quickly for my liking but, when I shoot him a worried look, I see that all the colour has left his face. He’s peering ahead with an eerie focus. The rain has picked up, the road a murky, greyish brown, but I follow his gaze to a burst of yellow, pink and white on the roadside. A bouquet – sunflowers and gerberas in plastic wrap – slouches against the base of an oak tree.

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Stephen says. ‘I forgot. I can’t believe I forgot.’

‘Muscle memory,’ I say. Or, I think I do. The sound of my blood pumping around my ears drowns out the words. I lower the window, and the car is flooded with the smell of damp grass, the sweet tang of sodden earth. ‘Pull over, will you?’

*

It’s a year since I was last on this stretch, or anywhere near it. The dead of night. A neighbour of Smiley’s came out to the road when she heard the commotion and rang me, breathless, stammering. She recognised my Corolla. It happened before the sale was final, when Smiley’s land was clear except for his crumbling house, the fields grown wild and crawling with mice.

The darkness was thick as tar, the ambulance already gone, but the woman stood, shivering, by her gate. I had to ask her twice to repeat the name of the hospital, too distracted by the black road littered with bits of car. A hubcap lay idly on the ground, glinting in the Punto’s headlights.

A McDonald’s wrapper rolled off towards the undergrowth like tumbleweed.

‘I’m sorry to say it didn’t look good,’ Smiley’s neighbour said. ‘For either of them.’

Even now, I’m convinced I can make out the imprint of the fender in the bark. We haven’t been out here since the land was sold, but the flowers are fresh. Ruth’s people, maybe? Afterwards, Stephen told us that her parents weren’t keen on Colm coming around. He had been bringing her to Smiley’s, canoodling by the lit stove in the soon-to-be-demolished bungalow.

*

‘Dad? Is it happening again?’ Stephen’s voice is distant, distorted. I’m looking beyond the store-bought bouquet to a dishevelled clump of poppies, marigolds and cornflowers on the far side of the tree, drooping in the rain.

*

For months, Ann cried herself to sleep. I’d find her curled in Colm’s single bed, wearing his Manchester United jersey. She wailed when I touched her, clutched his pillow as though I meant to take it away. As if it was all my fault.

In the spring, she marched out of the room with a determined expression, started going on long power-walks in her Road Safety Authority high-vis. She took up yoga. She said Colm spoke to her in a dream, that he wanted her to get on with life.

Colm didn’t need to visit my dreams; I saw him everywhere. Hovering by the deli counter, or in the stands at a football match. Those eyes, the face I wanted so desperately to see again, fixed on me in wordless accusation. We were due a row.

My first panic attack happened on the way to the hospital. A darkness like the one in the belly of the car wash. A feeling like falling, endlessly, through an airless abyss.

It didn’t look good.

I pulled into a lay by and slurped air through the open window until my pulse steadied, until my hands stopped shaking. It happened again during the eulogy, whenever I thought of the Corolla concertina’d against the oak, wherever I saw Colm’s angry ghost. Ann insisted I see someone about it, a professional. According to her, I needed to ‘process my grief’. It was that, she said, or I had to join her at yoga.

And two weeks ago, the Leaving Cert results came out. Stephen swept the board with H1s, a shoo-in for university in Dublin. I thought what happened last summer would derail him, that he’d have to repeat. Maybe he’d get enough points for Maynooth but not for Trinity.

At dinner, after Ann worried aloud about the student accommodation shortage, he declared he wanted to commute.

‘Are you mad? That’s an hour each way. On a good day.’

‘I’ll do it for first year,’ Stephen said. ‘See how it goes.’

Ann reached across the table for his hand. She looked at him with those intense, forlorn eyes of hers. ‘You don’t need to do this, pet. We’ll be fine.’

He shook his head. ‘I want to do it. I want to stay here.’

Silence. Ann’s sad eyes flickered towards me, then back at Stephen. Neither of us believed him, but we wanted him where we could see him. Where we could keep him safe.

‘Well then.’ I pushed my fingertips into the table. ‘You’re going to need a decent set of wheels.’

*

The shrink Ann set me up with was expensive and useless, but he gave me some ‘tools’ for the panic attacks. Counting, mainly. Some deep breathing. It was nothing Ann’s yoga instructor wouldn’t have come up with. They worked for a bit, then lost their potency like overused weapons in a video game. But I saved one for emergencies, search my mind for it now.

Move three parts of your body.

Too easy. My shoulders are trembling of their own accord. I bring both hands to my face and squeeze my eyelids shut, but it’s too late. Teardrops roll down my cheeks, leap from my jaw. They paint black circles on the leather seat.

Name three things you can hear.

The wipers can hardly keep up with the rain, coming down in biblical torrents, making a river of the road. The Golf’s engine makes a low, throbbing sound. And then, above all that, I hear loud, strangled noises, like a dying animal. It’s not until a dollop of snot crawls over my lips that I recognise the noises as my own shuddering sobs.

Name three things you can see.

Between flicks of the wipers, there’s that damned tree again: damaged but still standing. The wildflowers bloom at its base, painting brushstrokes around it. Purply blue. Sunshine yellow. Bloody red.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Stephen’s fingers undoing my seatbelt, then his. I see the fingers press the shouty little triangle that turns on the hazards, and then they’re coming towards me, the fingers, the arms around me now, the arms of the only son I have left.

And I look over his shoulder to see them both, even younger this time and wide-eyed in the backseat, clapping as the world outside is smothered by the rollers, and Colm is squealing:

‘Again, Daddy! Let’s go again!’

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