Minimalist Gossip Magazine Cover (49).pdf (23) - Flipbook - Page 84
waste into the river and crack my window to let in the fumes — only a smidge. It’s the
coldest night of the year, and brown ice nudges the banks. I’ll sleep here tonight.
Later, almost midnight, the motion-activated lights of the compound blaze. I wake
up and scan the riverbank, thinking: am I in trouble? Then I see—
Oh my god. Jesus Christ.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Where’s my scarf? Jesus, oh my god.
“Catch it! Catch the end!”
Oh my god oh my god please.
Hrrrgh.
Oh my god Jesus.
Hrrrrgh.
Oh my god Jesus he’s so cold. He should be shivering. God what do I do. Push his
chest. Hand over hand. Ha ha ha ha staying alive. The whole song or just the chorus? Please
god, I only know the chorus. With a spasm, the young man barfs himself alive. He lies back
and pulls the scarf that saved him tightly over his eyes.
I pile Jim and Marcus on the backseat, Maud and Steve on top of them, then the
young man into Mr Car and set off for the hospital, at which point he rouses, pulls out a
drowned lighter and starts flicking.
“Hey, come on,” I say, “The fertiliser in here is highly flammable.”
He tosses out a drowned pack of cigarettes. “Buggered anyway.”
Then he stares at the hedges, curled under the seatbelt like a blanket, putting his
back to me. After a while he mutters, “I only meant to scare them.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t think the whole house would go up. He should’ve kept away. I told him, my
sister isn’t made for his harem. And now my life’s over, because he wouldn’t keep away,
now I’m dead and where’s my 72 virgins, because he wouldn’t keep away?” He coughs.
“Stinks in here.”
“Sorry. It’s the fertiliser.”
He begins to notice - and be impressed by - the sheer volume of plantlife inside the
vehicle. “You a druggie?”
“Far from it,” I laugh. “The one you’re squashing is Mrs Hayes, my old Geography
teacher. By your elbow is Megan, my aunt who slipped me a fiver every Christmas. I keep
them going and they keep me going. I matter to them. It makes you glad to live when you
matter to this bunch, believe me.”
“That works?”
“Of course it works. Why even ask that? Of course it works. I’m not the unhappy
one, am I?”
At that, he flings off his seatbelt. “Pull over. Stop the car.”
“I don’t think I’m allowed.”
“Stop the car or I’ll set these buggers on fire one by one.”
I pull over on the hardened slough of a gulley. Dark fields hollow out the moonlight,
vast and quiet as the ocean floor.
He curses, “The handle’s covered in something.”
77
32
