Read Online Sing Like You Know the Words by martin sowery - Free Book Online
Authors: martin sowery
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over
the humps of the country roads.
David was musing about Patricia,
considering what would be the right way to tell her of his feelings
and plans. He supposed that a girl would be more receptive to a
proposal when her friend was already getting engaged. All the girls
had seemed to glow with excitement when wedding plans were being
discussed. Thoughts and impressions from the party and plans for
the future were washing back and forth in his mind as the darkness
enveloped them. His attention drifted.
Suddenly, he was called back to
the moment. It happened so quickly that the boundary between
reality and imagination seemed not to exist.
The car had been accelerating
gradually without David noticing. Now he saw that they were
travelling much too fast for the condition of the road. After that
everything happened in a blur.
For some reason he looked first
to the back seat where Ali Abbas was sitting very upright. The
boy’s face only wore the same expression of resigned terror that he
had shown on the way to the party. When it came to driving, Abbas
had no way to differentiate between too fast, and certain to
crash.
Next David turned to his right
and was shocked to see Tim holding the steering wheel loosely,
eyelids half closed, his shoulders sagging forward against the
resistance of the seatbelt.
-Tim, are you asleep?
There was no time to grab the
wheel. They heard and felt a hard impact. David whirled round to
face the road in front of them and thought he saw something big
that could have been a body thump into the windscreen and over the
roof.
It was already too late to save
the car. Tim came to with a start and pressed all the pedals hard,
dragging the wheel hard to his left, but the car steered itself
neatly into the ditch running alongside the road on the driver’s
side, the nearside wheels remaining on the tarmac and the underside
of the car scraping along the ground and complaining horribly. A
combination of road camber, the depth of the ditch, and the
absolute lack of further intervention by the driver, who seemed to
have passed out, ensured that by great good fortune the car skidded
to a halt, half buried in undergrowth, but without turning over or
hitting one of the many trees that lined the way.
The engine had stalled and for a
moment the night was very quiet; impossibly so after the noise of
the previous moments.
-Tim, you fucking stupid fuck
up. Tell me you’re not dead.
-No
-Good, I’m going to kill you
now.
-I’m okay, said Ali Abbas, from
the back. We should get out now though. I think the wheel at my
side came off and the bottom was scraping along the road. There
could be a leak in the fuel tank.
He did know something about cars
after all or at least about the theory of them.
They dragged Tim, still
semi-conscious, away from the vehicle to what felt like a safe
distance. David checked his friend’s pulse, which was racing. His
eyes looked funny, but it was difficult to see them properly in the
moonlight. David thought that he might have had some kind of fit.
He was grinding his teeth and now David remembered that he’d
started doing that earlier in the journey home.
-I thought he’d had a heart
attack.
Ali Abbas shrugged
helplessly.
-We need to find him a
doctor.
Tim put a hand on David’s
arm.
-No Doctor. Speed, he said.
-What?
-Pills, speed.
-You’ve taken drugs? Tim
nodded.
David looked at him with
disgust.
-Well you’re more stupid than I
thought, and you’ve wrecked your friend’s car and almost killed
us.
-We should find some water for
him, suggested Abbas.
-And drown him in it, David
agreed.
-Not friend’s car, Tim struggled
to say.
Tim wasn’t making any sense. Ali
Abbas was in the habit of carrying mineral water wherever he went.
He jogged back to the car to retrieve the bottle. Tim drank
greedily once they had forced the bottle to his lips, and gradually
they were able to piece together the story of the night from his
fragments of coherent speech: how he’d
the humps of the country roads.
David was musing about Patricia,
considering what would be the right way to tell her of his feelings
and plans. He supposed that a girl would be more receptive to a
proposal when her friend was already getting engaged. All the girls
had seemed to glow with excitement when wedding plans were being
discussed. Thoughts and impressions from the party and plans for
the future were washing back and forth in his mind as the darkness
enveloped them. His attention drifted.
Suddenly, he was called back to
the moment. It happened so quickly that the boundary between
reality and imagination seemed not to exist.
The car had been accelerating
gradually without David noticing. Now he saw that they were
travelling much too fast for the condition of the road. After that
everything happened in a blur.
For some reason he looked first
to the back seat where Ali Abbas was sitting very upright. The
boy’s face only wore the same expression of resigned terror that he
had shown on the way to the party. When it came to driving, Abbas
had no way to differentiate between too fast, and certain to
crash.
Next David turned to his right
and was shocked to see Tim holding the steering wheel loosely,
eyelids half closed, his shoulders sagging forward against the
resistance of the seatbelt.
-Tim, are you asleep?
There was no time to grab the
wheel. They heard and felt a hard impact. David whirled round to
face the road in front of them and thought he saw something big
that could have been a body thump into the windscreen and over the
roof.
It was already too late to save
the car. Tim came to with a start and pressed all the pedals hard,
dragging the wheel hard to his left, but the car steered itself
neatly into the ditch running alongside the road on the driver’s
side, the nearside wheels remaining on the tarmac and the underside
of the car scraping along the ground and complaining horribly. A
combination of road camber, the depth of the ditch, and the
absolute lack of further intervention by the driver, who seemed to
have passed out, ensured that by great good fortune the car skidded
to a halt, half buried in undergrowth, but without turning over or
hitting one of the many trees that lined the way.
The engine had stalled and for a
moment the night was very quiet; impossibly so after the noise of
the previous moments.
-Tim, you fucking stupid fuck
up. Tell me you’re not dead.
-No
-Good, I’m going to kill you
now.
-I’m okay, said Ali Abbas, from
the back. We should get out now though. I think the wheel at my
side came off and the bottom was scraping along the road. There
could be a leak in the fuel tank.
He did know something about cars
after all or at least about the theory of them.
They dragged Tim, still
semi-conscious, away from the vehicle to what felt like a safe
distance. David checked his friend’s pulse, which was racing. His
eyes looked funny, but it was difficult to see them properly in the
moonlight. David thought that he might have had some kind of fit.
He was grinding his teeth and now David remembered that he’d
started doing that earlier in the journey home.
-I thought he’d had a heart
attack.
Ali Abbas shrugged
helplessly.
-We need to find him a
doctor.
Tim put a hand on David’s
arm.
-No Doctor. Speed, he said.
-What?
-Pills, speed.
-You’ve taken drugs? Tim
nodded.
David looked at him with
disgust.
-Well you’re more stupid than I
thought, and you’ve wrecked your friend’s car and almost killed
us.
-We should find some water for
him, suggested Abbas.
-And drown him in it, David
agreed.
-Not friend’s car, Tim struggled
to say.
Tim wasn’t making any sense. Ali
Abbas was in the habit of carrying mineral water wherever he went.
He jogged back to the car to retrieve the bottle. Tim drank
greedily once they had forced the bottle to his lips, and gradually
they were able to piece together the story of the night from his
fragments of coherent speech: how he’d
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