by Lisa Blower
Drive
[in 17 meanings]
#1
Whilst she drives, your mother whimpers. She isn’t drunk but she has been drinking. Your father is wearing his pyjamas and it is all very normal until your mother hits the back-end of a transit and shunts the car onto the other side of the road.
—Christ! Buckle him in! Buckle him in!
You watch your father lurch towards the dash.
—Help me, Juke. Buckle him in!
But there’s blood. More blood. This time from his nose. It isn’t as thick as the other blood, the blood that’s pooled about his kidneys, and it isn’t as red either. You think this is strange. You didn’t know that you could bleed different colours from different parts of your body.
—Juke! For crying out loud! Will you buckle him in?
You can see that your mother’s left arm is blotted with your father’s blood and you hope it leaves a stain. She’s been careless. She’s making mistakes already. If it were up to you, you would’ve called Moth. He wouldn’t have believed you at first. He’d have said—Shit, man? For real? And you’d have said—Yeah man. Like the woman is da-ranged. And he’d have sent round his people and you would’ve seen how it’s done properly. But now your mother’s swerving to avoid something in the middle of the road. A bollard? A traffic cone? You sway about in the back seat. No. It’s roadkill. Just roadkill. A fox. You think it’s a fox anyway. Animals dead on the road in the dark all look the same. And when you look behind you, in the rear window, you see there’s blood on the road. Not much. But enough to assure you that the fox is dead.
#2
The car you are in is a blood-red three-door Volkswagen Polo with no four-wheel drive doing 80 mph in a 30 zone. It’s not very well looked after and it’s not a getaway car either. The windows are dirty and there’s no water in the tank. There’s barely any petrol and no one has checked the oil. This is the only car your parents own. It makes small journeys here and there and it is, like you, fifteen years old. Your mother learnt to drive in this car. Hang around long enough and so will you. She says it again:
—Juke, please! Buckle him in!
You notice that there’s your father’s blood under your fingernails. You don’t know how it got there. You didn’t put him in the car.
#3
You were standing by the car with your hood up when your mother shouted at you to drive. She was carrying your father out of the house as if carting off a pig to the slaughter. His feet were dragging on the ground and blunting his toes. You had to remind your mother that you were fifteen years old and did not have a licence. She reminded you that it hadn’t bothered you before—joy driver she called you—and to get in the fucking car and drive. You do not enjoy your mother’s temper, so you’d folded your arms and said no. You drive. And you’d got into the back of the car.
#4
Your mother stalls the car right in front of the Jet King Drive Thru Car Wash. You’ve robbed this place once or twice because you know where the idiot who owns the place keeps the keys. It’s bought you fags. Cans. Call of Duty 4. You stopped robbing it in the end because it was too easy. As your mother stalls, the glovebox shoots open. Most of what was in the glovebox is now on your father’s lap. Headphones, tissues, cough sweets, road map, fags, fag-butts. That means one of them is smoking again which means one of them will have driven the other one to it.
You say—You’re not really going to dump him here, are you?—and you need to get your mother to drive.
—Drive! you shout. Drive!
But your mother is busy smoking a cigarette and telling your father that this is all his fault.
#5
You think about your mother while she smokes her cigarette. She is forty-four years old but could pass for someone thirty and this, you want to remind her, is exactly what she wants. She has crayon-brown eyes and copper-dyed hair that sticks to her cheeks when she cries—hair and tears are like paper and glue—and you are fascinated by the baby size of her feet, how her fingers look as if they should be served up in soup, how when she meets your friends she sucks upon strands of that copper-dyed hair and asks them—Are you cruel to your mothers too?
Because your mother speaks of everything in plurals. Still brings rude words to the table and asks you what they mean. She was driven here by plane sixteen years ago when she was part of a beauty crew serving red or white, chicken or beef, yet spent a long time calming down the man in Seat 36 Row D as he blew into a paper bag and asked if she might be kind enough to hold his hand.
Your father said he was smitten within seconds of her flushing his sick into the sky. He swears on his life that he was out there on conference, back in the day when your father was the conference, but you’re not sure about this and neither is Moth. He has told you why men go to Asia and Moth snots on his sleeve and says you have to take him there man, cos you got family there, right? Breakfast and a lot of fucking bed. And you laugh at that because that’s a joke, right? And Moth is the man with his thick fists and inked neck that’s saving you from being laughed at for having hair that’s as long as a girl’s.
But you’re still their product—from when your mother met your sick old man in the sky: they did the nasty and out came you. But different don’t work round here, different don’t fit. So you got to stick to the plan, man. See it through.
Connect 4. You remember how your mum and dad used to play endless games of Connect 4.
#6
Your mother has cleaned at the university for as long as you can remember and remains there by the skin of her teeth. Because everyone knows she took those papers and gave them to you so you’d know all the answers and pass the exam. But no one knows this for sure because there’s not enough proof and no CCTV. So your mother goes to work and comes back even later and when your father asks her where she’s been all this time she glares at you both with those crayon-brown eyes and uses some words she has learnt at her class.
—Culprits, she says. You culpables. You criminals.
And more words like—You’re driving me up the wall, Juke. You’re driving me round the bluddy bend.
But you know that your mother’s drive to be an English is what’s driven your father away and that your father hasn’t really gone any further than his computer drive. That when you went to look at the emails again, the pictures and the messages from Bangkok weren’t there. Your father had deleted everything but you were still the talk of the town.
#7
Your father quit the university to set up the Jet King Drive Thru Car Wash because he was sick of the demands, the need to publish unnecessary work. This has outraged your mother, driven her mad with shame. Yet your father has never looked happier. He is two stone less, he smiles and he laughs, asks you about the football scores, wears trainers instead of smart shoes.
You tell this to Moth. Your dad’s alright, you say, but my mum, she’s like da-ranged. You’re sat on your bed with your Xbox in your room with its lemon punch walls and Moth tells you that you’re going to need to learn to drive. You get nothing in this life on foot, he says. So he’s got a challenge, right? Got to engineer a situ-a-shon. And it’s something only you can do for him. Then he gets up from your bed and rips the Xbox leads from the socket. It’s his now, he says. Collateral. And that you sleep in a little kid’s room. Fucking chink baby with golden hair.
—I’m Thai, you correct.
—You’re all the same to me, he corrects. And he punches you anyway and busts your lip.
#8
You remember the first time you met Moth. He came and called for you one night but you didn’t see who was calling and you didn’t see the fist either. But it connected and it hurt and you staggered and dropped to the floor. That’s when someone else’s hand grabbed you by your hair and dragged you out into the backyard where your jawbone slammed against concrete. You remember it smelt of petrol and dead matches down there and that the bloodstain that appeared on the paving slab is not dissimilar to the bloodstain your fathe
r now has pooled about his kidneys. You remember the blows to the ribs (sixteen), the bruised cheek, the black eye, and everything else that happened or might not have happened as you curled up into a ball on your parents’ patio where they sometimes came out to smoke and argue and slug down wine.
Except that night you were all on your own. Your mother was at the university. Your father, you have no idea. But what you remember most is the way Moth spat in your face and then smeared it into your thin little eyes. Look at me or I’ll rip your fucking head off chink-boy. You don’t remember what you said. Probably that you were Thai. But after you’d took the beating and they’d taken all that you had, Moth sat on your shins and got out his penknife. And while you thought of your next-door neighbour’s black Mini Sport with its two exhausts and sixth gear, Moth carved his name into your arm.
—Now you’re in, he said, and you’d felt chuffed to bits.
The next morning you buried your head in the pillow and told your mother you were sick. She did not look at your face for two days. Then when she did she said—I knew you were too good for that school—and she and your father argued about sending you private and preferably, said your mother, to board.
You have never shown your mother or your father your arm. You wear long sleeves always. But penknives don’t scar like Moth thinks. And he doesn’t spell very well either. He says you had to go through that—like an initi-ation man—and everyone who’s in goes through it too. When he introduces you to a few of his people it’s what you talk about and you compare scars like boxers, warriors, vigilantes of the night. You talk about guns too, bows and arrows, of knives and knuckledusters and samurai swords. And what you’re made of, what’s driven you to do what you’re going to do. You talk about that a lot.
#9
Some time ago your mother replaced your father with her computer. Even when your school wrote her that first letter to tell her they hadn’t seen you in two weeks, and even when they called her up at work and asked her to come in because it’d been over a month since you’d attended, she still carried on typing her words. When the police found you roughing up that kid for his trainers and you got chucked in a cell for two hours and they gave you a bowl of something that looked like dog-meat, your mother just shook her head and bailed you out and told you not to get a girl pregnant like English man do before she carried on typing her words. And when you did bring a girl home and buried yourself inside of her with your socks still on, you took your bed sheets into your mother’s study and left them on her desk for her to see. Even then, she washed the sheets and ironed them dry and said nothing about the blood specks and the semen and the mascara that was all over your pillows. So you stole the car you’d had your eye on from over the road—an Audi TT, three door, black leather heated seats—and you drove it up the Roaches where you torched it with Moth, and all the while it burned, you thought of your mother and that sign that hangs above her computer that says,
Why walk when you can drive
So when you got back home—when it was past two in the morning and she was still on her computer—you’d flung open her door and shouted—fuck you for ever—and meant it, because you felt like you should never have been born.
You had no idea what she was writing. You often wish you still don’t. Your father pleads with her not to publish those words—it is breaking him, he says, tearing us apart—but she does, every day. She cleans up the university then blogs all about you and it’s made you the talk of the town. She has warned you that you can’t stop her:
—Take my computer, I go cafés. I find ways to get to my friends—because your mother talks in viral now. She is famous because of you.
—He’s Triad, is what people even think.
#10
When you look out of the car window, you realise that you’re moving again and that your mother is not going to dump your father in the Portakabin at the Jet King Drive Thru Car Wash, though you can tell by her face that she’d thought about it. You know how much your mother detests the Jet King Drive Thru Car Wash because she did not run away to England to be the wife of a man who washes other people’s cars. And she reminds your father how she left a man of no worth and drive back in Hong Kong. Though now he is successful businessman. Export. Import. Made in China.
—He still wants me, your mother goads. Leave all his family for me. But your father ignores her because he’s still passed out.
If your father could speak he would tell her about the necessity for waxing the bonnet after rain, about the things he finds in other people’s car boots when he valets. You are reminded of the time he came home and told you he’d found three dead cats in the boot of a silver Astra. All Siamese. Your mother raged at him—What are you driving at, Joel? What is your point? And he said nothing. There were just three dead cats in the boot of a silver Astra. All Siamese. That’s all.
#11
Your mother is driving very fast for someone who’s banned. You remember when she got banned because when the police came to the door she instantly assumed it was because of you and she told them to take you away.—Teach him a lesson, she said. Throw away the key. I am done with him. He is not my son.
He was a pig with an upturned nose and a bottle-shaped face and cigarette smoke lingered on his clothes. He looked unhappy you thought, like he’d had enough of it all too, and he asked your mother to step outside and breathe into the pipe. She’d been on the vodka most of the morning. She had that desperate look in her eyes that you see far too often for someone of your age. Like she wants you to look after her. But you don’t. It’s not your job. So she drinks her vodka and types her words and still gets into a car every day to drive you to school. It’s the only time you ever get any time with her and even then you don’t say a word because she doesn’t talk to you either. She just drives. The only thing you like about that journey is that it’s just you two in the car and she sometimes jumps the lights.
#12
You have still not asked your mother where you are going but this is definitely not the route to the hospital. She shouts at you:
—When we there you say nothing, you hear?
And then, because you don’t answer her:
—I mean it, Juke. You don’t breathe any words.
But this is fine by you because you can’t remember if it was you fighting the knife off your mother or your mother fighting the knife off you or if you’d gone into their bedroom because they were fighting and if you took the knife in with you to give to her, to give to him, just that you know that the knife had tomato ketchup on it because you’d been making a crisp sandwich at the time.
#13
Your mother has stopped the car on your aunt’s tarmac drive. Your mother has not thought this through. Your father needs a hospital. Accident and Emergency. Doctors expert in knife wounds. Your aunt is married to a GP who prescribes painkillers and feels your glands. Your mother is involving family and that is no good. Moth has told you that. Family can’t help but tell. You get me chink-boy? And you nod at Moth and do that thing you have to do with your fist and draw blood. Then you tell him again that you’re Thai.
#14
Your mother is still in the driver’s seat. She has twisted her body to the left so she can look at your father. You wonder what she thinks of him right now, if this has made anything change. His chin is set deep into his neck and the blood, which has started to smell, has leaked into the car. You notice that your mother is muttering at him—you can’t hear what exactly—but you know that’s she’s getting her story straight. Your mother is all about the words and how they appear in straight lines. She’d much rather her words than him. And even you. When you listen closely, your mother is speaking in a dialect you don’t understand. You cannot Google that.
You see that your mother is wearing her dark blue knee-length T-shirt that she wears when typing her blogs that she posts out to the world about the son she cannot love. That the bloodstains, in this light, could easily be mistaken for sweat. That she’d rece
ntly cut off her hair and had threads of copper put through which would, if there’d been a moon, have glimmered. That you were making a sandwich when you heard them arguing.
He called her a drunk.
She called him an old bore.
The other said you’ve driven me to it while the other said no. You drove me.
He said he was fed up of wringing her out.
She said go wash your stupid cars and wring them out.
I will, he said.
For good, she said. And take him with you. I am done with the pleasings. I am done with this shammy.
And your father had laughed like a drain.
But you know your mother drove your father to it. It’s not like these things don’t happen. As you know exactly why your mother has driven here. Not because her sister was married to a GP, but because her sister was welcome to him.
#15
Your father has been bleeding for thirty-six minutes. He is wounded, no two ways about it, but you know that the wound is not huge because the knife wasn’t driven in that far if it went in at all because the knife was blunt. His unconsciousness, therefore, is not because he is in the middle of bleeding to death, but because he is a wuss when it comes to the sight of blood. Still, thirty-six minutes of blood loss is not ideal.
—You go in, Juke. You tell them. They believes in you.
Your mother is talking to you, Juke.
—Please, Juke. Go in there and tell them what happened.