One of those typically miserable winter evenings – subzero temperature and sheets of rain absolutely pissing down. If God existed he’d be taking a shower. Piano lesson over for the week, Daddy Dearest and I race through the semi-utter darkness (suburbia sucks without streetlights) and dive into the car, slamming the door before both of us are completely drenched. He turns the key in the ignition.

A splutter. The engine dies.

DD tries again. This time, the dashboard flickers for a second before blinking out. Then nothing. We look at each other.

“Shit,” says DD. (Rather unnecessarily I think.)

Let me give you some background information on our car. Manufactured in the heady days when oversized shoulder pads were the height of fashion and Michael Jackson still had his original face – i.e., before I was even alive – this shining example of nondescript bland would blend completely into the crowd were it not for its ancientness and sheer ugliness. In possibly the cheapest shade of white available, with a carpet so hygienically doubtful I don’t even want to know what’s living at the bottom of it and noxious fumes pouring out the back – this is a car that wasn’t even cool back in its heyday. In fact, it’s so pathetic that one time, when we accidentally parked it with a door open, no one even bothered to rifle through the glove box. My mother and I have been lobbying DD for the last five years to just for Christ’s sake get a new car. “A new car? What on earth for?” he replies, patting the bonnet affectionately, “she’s still got a few years left in her.” But doesn’t it suck, we implore, to spend hours on end on forty-degree days in a vehicle without air-conditioning? My father, the eternal cheapskate, laments the fact that, when we do eventually get around to trading up, such a “prime-condition vehicle” will fetch next to nothing, which means he will keep postponing the purchase of a new car until the old bomb’s wheels fall off and it literally collapses onto itself and is rendered completely undrivable.

Anyway. A new car battery had been recently purchased for the bomb and some way or another there’s been a leak in the system and now DD has to disconnect the battery every evening or else it just refuses to start the next morning. That’s all fine when you’re five metres from a warm, snug house and there’s always another way to reach your destination. Not so fine when you’re virtually in the middle of nowhere and the stars are out and it’s bucketing.

Raindrops are still splattering painful deaths on the windscreen so DD attempts once again to shock the car into jump-starting by revving the engine and hitting the gas simultaneously. Alas, it just wasn’t going to happen as the vehicle veers crazily across the street, does a 180-degree donut, bunny hops in reverse up some poor sod’s driveway and dies just before it smashes into the garage door. (The poor sod in question immediately switches off his living room lights and double-bolts the front door.) DD eventually manages to steer us back onto the middle of the street but the slight problem of the car being completely useless still remains. DD glances at me sheepishly. “I think we’re going to have to push.”

So I’m out on a deserted, freezing street pushing the bomb uphill in a flimsy jacket, wincing as my pristine corduroys drag along in the mud. The ground squelches in a most ungodly manner and I give a mental apology to my poor pink flats that so weren’t made for that purpose. Just as we pass under a particularly leafy tree a really opportune gust of wind transfers all the rain on its branches in a bird-shit-like manner onto my head and thoroughly down my back and shoulders. A perfect ending to my perfect evening.

At last, after huffing and puffing the entire neighborhood down the car reaches the precipice of the rise. In the five-second opening we have of getting it to start I race back inside and pray like hell that tipping it downhill had worked and we wouldn’t have to spend the whole evening camped out like stalkers in front of my piano teacher’s house. DD revs the ignition and the whole city holds its breath as we wait for…

…the sweet, sweet purr of the engine and we are as ready to go as we’ll ever be. I collapse into the seat with relief and we sit in silence but for the engine for a little while, warming it up so there’s absolutely no chance it’ll stall on us again. In the glow of the headlights I can hear DD breathing deeply in the driver’s seat.

“I think it’s time to get a new car,” he says.

0Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home