Car Wheel

When I was a teenager I didn’t think much about other people.

One night I was at a party in a village close to my home town. I can’t remember very much about it but I do remember it not being good. I was with a crowd of people that I didn’t usually spend time with. Seamus and Paul, Darren, who they called Spooner and Robert, who they called Pieface. Paul was later to get married to his co contestant after appearing on Cilla Black’s Blind Date. I liked Robert very much, he was thoughtful and good natured. He surprised me when I discovered that he wrote poetry. Darren had this amazing skill of reciting television adverts word for word, one after the other. In fact, the only thing that I remember about this night was him exercising his talent, staring straight ahead, grinning, reeling the adverts off in a monotonous voice. It was a good party trick, it really was.

I left in the early hours. I can’t remember him being at the party but somehow a boy called Simon came to be sitting beside me in my car, perhaps I picked him up en route? I’d first met him on the school bus a few years before and found him a little intimidating. He was very bright but quite introverted and surly. He was a non conformist. He had long hair. One time I copied him a tape of the band Spacemen 3, who I really, really loved. He wasn’t that enthusiastic although he did like a song called ‘Losing Touch With My Mind.’ A line on it goes ‘I'm shooting, shooting off my gun. It's too bad now babe, but it's a lot of fun.’ He explained that he empathised with that and imagined walking into a shopping centre and ‘going crazy with a gun’.

We were driving through the town when disaster struck! To avoid a fox trotting across the ring road, I swerved, hitting the curb. That put everything out of kilter and the car shot from one side of the (deserted) ring road to the other, and I pulled into a small car park in front of a small, single story 1950s building marked ‘British Red Cross.’

We stood under the stars staring at the car. ‘Well, the wheel’s fucked’ I decided. I announced my intention, after a quick think, to go and find a similar car and get a new wheel. I didn’t use the word ‘steal.’ I took the jack and socket spanner from the boot.

Dawn was breaking as we crossed town, walking through the estate there. Simon suggested that since it was now tomorrow morning we may as well give up. He would later say that he never believed that I was for real, but I spotted a similar car to mine and approached it with my jack. Goodness knows how my mind worked in those days, I would never dream of doing such a thing today. Like I say, I didn’t care about people when I was a teenager, although today even a sad story in the newspaper can make me cry with empathy. I have gone from one extreme to another.

I worked fast, and I soon had the bolts out of the wheel and the car jacked up. I was disturbed when the front door opened of the little terraced house in whose driveway I crouched. A ten year old girl dressed in a pink nightie, holding a cup of tea stood blinking at me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello’ I replied. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked ‘I’m just getting this wheel off the car’ I explained. She stared at me momentarily as I worked, I just had to raise the car a little more so that the wheel would clear the pavement completely, and then she shut the door.

So there it was, I had the wheel from the car lying beside me, free to carry away and I knew that I ought to have run. But the jack, I had to get the jack, somehow I reasoned that if I didn’t leave the jack behind then I wouldn’t have done a bad thing. It was somehow an expression of how I often approach things in my life, where I will stake all risking everything. I reasoned that if I had the jack the business would be neatly resolved and therefore, somehow, I would be free of guilt.

It took forever to wind that jack down. I looked over my shoulder and saw Simon hiding behind the wall of a churchyard some way down the road. The possibility of finding myself explaining what I was doing to the girl's father was real and I contemplated abandoning the jack more than once. But I could not leave without it! Nobody else did come to the door and soon I was passing Simon the jack and spanner as we jogged down the road.

We returned to my car, changed the wheel (hiding the old one in what was perhaps an old coal bunker) but, of course, the car's steering was completely out of alignment. So it had all been a great waste of time.

Behind the car park and the Red Cross building was a funeral home (where, in 2005 I would see my grandmother lying, I wish I hadn’t been invited in to see the terrible sight of her lying there,) and behind that was a local landmark called ‘Castle Hill’. A small hill where there once, or so they say, stood a castle. When I was sixteen a friend called Russell and myself and a few others (including Jamie Lidderdale who is now a crooner on Warp records going by the name of ‘Jamie Liddell’) invented a great game after an evening in the Waterloo pub which involved hurtling down the hill in a shopping trolley. We returned to play that game night after night. Terrible really what you have to resort to when life can be so (actually, not seemingly) meaningless as teenage life in a small town is.

Well, I fell asleep on Castle Hill and awoke a few hours later with a very sun burnt face. That evening I had Howard return me to the scene of the crime in his car where I left the wheel at the end of their driveway with a post-it sticker attached which read ‘sorry.’

Incidentally, Robert Pieface and Darren Spooner also both crashed their cars that night on the way home from the party.