You, Plural
You start the car and drive slowly, carefully. It is something-very-late-o’clock, you think. But, she is pregnant, and she needs—she says she needs—ice cream and pickled beetroot. You’re tired, but you’re a good person, you think, and anyway, when the baby is here, this time of day will be normal, won’t it? There is a layer of frost on the windscreen that you don’t have the time, or the gumption, to scrape off, so you flick on the wipers, which grind across the glass, clearing it in imperfect semi-circles. The road is a long, narrow, black tunnel because there are no streetlights where you live now, and the trees glisten, the leaves do, and the tarmac does, under the glare of the full beam. You yawn, not quite awake. This last trimester is a trial and you were up late, grading papers. You’re bored by all of that, the admin, the inevitability of the angst of the students, the drudgery of it all. Some days, you hate it. But you have to keep your job at the university. You have to keep going, especially now that she is—that you, plural, are—pregnant.
Your phone vibrates. You know you shouldn’t, but you read it, you take your eyes off the road for a second, two seconds: ‘Mint choc chip ☺,’ it says. Of course it does. It’s her favourite at the moment. You smile when you think of her enjoying the taste so much. You think it’s gross, like toothpaste. And it’s when you look back at the road that you see it, or rather, you notice it: something maybe greenish, flash from the side of the road, from the left side there. You think it’s a fox, or perhaps a dog, and your instinct is to slow down, your foot eases onto the brake. And it’s then that you see it’s a person with a torch. It’s the light from the torch you can see. And it’s a man, waving you down with the torch. You stop, of course you do, you’re a good person, you pull over ahead of him, and the tyres crackle against the frost. The engine idles, but it is an abrupt kind of quiet, and that, and the dark, and the way the air in the car has warmed only slightly makes you feel as though you’re in a sensory deprivation tank, or might actually still be asleep. You watch the man approach in your rear view mirror. He lumbers, the man does, he doesn’t rush. His torch flickers circles into the frost on the path. You press the switch that locks all the doors because you can’t be too sure these days, and you’re about to become a father, after all. You keep the engine running and turn down the heater. The man stands, then stoops next to the passenger-side window but his head is covered by a hood and the light is bad so you can’t make out his face. He holds up a petrol can and shakes it. You push the button and the window slides down an inch, maybe two. The sounds of the night seep in and straight away the tang of the man’s breath, the white ribbon of it, reminds you of that time, before she was pregnant—way before—and you and she were backpacking across Australia and she got smashed on two buck chuck and you had to tell the hostel people she was on medication, and you left without paying, partly because of the cockroaches and the Norman Bates vibe.
‘Thanks for stopping, mate,’ the man says. ‘I ran out of petrol.’
You slide on the interior light so that you might see his face. He’s trembling, is what you see, but you’re not sure if it’s because of the weather, or something else. You’re not sure how sober he is. You’re not sure where his accent is from. You can’t see another car.
Like he can read your mind, the man says, ‘My car’s up there, in a side road. I’ve walked through the woods. I’ve run out of petrol.’
He points, then stands, fully stands then, slowly, as if there’s something going on with his back, and his hoody gapes open, unzipped. You see the words on his T-shirt, reflected white: ‘This Is What An Awesome Dad Looks Like’.
You notice, for the first time, the clock on the dashboard, glowing 3:12 in red, and you wonder which petrol stations will be open anyway. Are there any 24-hour ones any more? Should there be, what with climate change and environmental issues and the prospect of human extinction? Your unborn child, or an appropriation of them, flashes into your mind. You’ve only ever seen a couple of grainy images of them on an ultrasound computer screen that, to you, were more like a map of an unknown place, another planet, than a human being. You’ve only ever felt what she tells you must be an elbow or a hand, or individual fingertips leaning out, gloved against the flesh of the belly you know so well. She lets you do that, put your own hands on her belly, and even now you cannot explain how that makes you feel, why it makes you feel the way it does. You don’t know the sex, the gender. You’d have liked to have known but you were outvoted. People were never told back in the day, and anyway, sometimes the sonographer gets it wrong, apparently, and then what? What then? Surprises are good, apparently, and you are a good person, but you wanted to know, you wanted to somehow give yourself a proper responsibility, give a name, an identity. You wanted to be prepared, not surprised. To you, as it is, not knowing means the baby, the foetus, is a captive, somehow strangely non-existent; a nobody.
The man taps on the window with his fingertips. You still can’t make out his face. You check the dials on the dashboard. The clock still says 3.12. Time has, in fact, stood still.
You have a full tank of petrol. You’re prepared in case you have to take her to the hospital at short notice. The thought of that makes you feel brave. She wants a home birth. She says she does, but things go wrong, don’t they? Emergencies happen. You’d have to take responsibility.
You wonder how this man ran out of petrol. You lower the window an inch more. You feel brave doing that.
‘Why don’t you give me the can?’ you say. ‘I’ll get some petrol for you and meet you back here with it.’
The man exhales, and there’s that smell again. His breath. Sour, sweet, vinegary. You can taste it.
‘Mate,’ he says. ‘It’s freezing.’
You can make out the shape of his mouth—his teeth, at least, the spider web glint of saliva. Your phone vibrates. You don’t look at it, but you want to.
Moths, or some such winged critters seem to drift towards the beam of your headlights. They look like snowflakes and it makes you feel bad to think of them drawn by instinct to something that is ultimately fatal like that.
The man is saying something, but he’s stepped back. His hand, the hand not holding the petrol can is limp by his side, ungloved, bluish in that light. If you could just see his face, if you would just lower the window a bit more, you could hear what he’s saying.
It’s cold in the car now, and you don’t look at the man as you close the window. That sense of vacuum it creates ought to offer some safety. Your hand hesitates over the switch that unlocks all the doors. The man dips his body down and looks at you through the window. If you were to turn, you’d see his face clearly. Your phone vibrates again, but you leave it.
Kerry Hadley-Pryce is a British writer and academic. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, and teaches at the University of Wolverhampton. Her three novels are published by Salt Publishing, and her short stories are available in print and online at Fictive Dream, The Incubator, and Brum Radio.