The Squeaky Wheel

The trouble with life was it never stopped. Everything moved on whether a person liked it or not. Harry grizzled about this fact of his existence as he clambered into his car. The clambering had crept up on him as many things seemed to. Earlier he’d absentmindedly stretched in bed as he awoke and regretted it the instant the cramp kicked in. Muscles complaining at being so rudely awakened. 

Once he was in the driving seat he paused for a moment and patted the steering wheel, “at least you’re one reliable thing in my life,” he said this soothingly then smiled, “but let’s not tempt providence, eh!?” The engine started first time, but Harry thought he detected a slight rattle under the usual engine tone. Could be something. Could be nothing. Everything wore out. He was fighting a losing battle with his patience.

Sally waved as he drove by. She was standing next to her own car. On her way to work no doubt. He wasn’t quite sure what she did. Wondered whether she knew. Worked for the NHS but not as a doctor or nurse. One of the army of admins that cost so much that there was a shortage of beds. Priorities all askew. People dying in corridors or sent home without their cancer being diagnosed in time. And that in spite of the campaigns they spent money on to encourage people to check for lumps and anomalies with their anatomy. 

Harry smiled and waved back. Most of the state of the world wasn’t Sally’s fault and those things she might be making worse were unlikely to ever hit anyone’s radar. Just like cancer. The rot set in secretly and by the time there was any noise the engine was screwed. Living on borrowed time as it chewed itself up and worked its way towards a fatal seizure.

The drive was unremarkable in the low-level pain it provided Harry. An ageing population meant that he regularly encountered small cars meandering the roads at speeds that required a well-dressed gentleman to proceed the motorised carriage waving a flag. Then there were the surreptitious speed limit reductions. Ten miles an hour taken off the signs and those signs encroaching further and further out into the glorious countryside. 

The twenty limits hit Harry hard. How was this unwarranted stagnation progress? Bimbling about through towns and villages at walking pace was a torture. Boring was what it was. No wonder people switched off from driving, bent their heads towards their phones and played games or watched people with sprayed on smiles playing games and calling it life.

He couldn’t help but grumble as he crawled through yet another village. This spiteful punctuation of his journey added insult to injury as he then accelerated along a rare beautiful ribbon of tarmac that wasn’t decaying and pock marked with potholes, only to end up behind some crusty old fart who was incapable of getting their car out of the first two gears and going any faster than that cursed twenty miles an hour. The worst of them punctuated the protracted journey with the incessant dabbing of the brake pedal.

Harry had never worked out what ailment these brake obsessed people had. There was however, a subset of this group who panicked every time they saw a vehicle approaching from the opposite direction and jammed the anchors on. He imagined them screaming in mortal peril of their lives. And yet they persevered in this life. The stress of the most terrifying of car journeys had not ended them. There was a perversion to the rules of life. The best people died young. The interminably boring and the awfully irredeemable gave Methuselah a run for his money giving the lie to the advice for people to lead a good life.

Sometimes Harry would indulge his irreverent thoughts. He liked to think he did this far more than he really did. Even at the modest level he maintained, his rebellion was quite tiring. Right now he was considering Methuselah and how miffed he must have been to have fallen short of a thousand years of life, “rounding up doesn’t count, mate!” This made Harry chuckle, “how did you do it? Did you have to cut all the joy out of life? Like those pointy eared sorts from Star Trek? The ones from planet Vege?” he chuckled again. This time the word vegan amused him. Even words could be contrary. Vegan sounded really cool. At least Spock level cool which was the alternate cool to Kirk. But Harry had never knowingly met a cool vegan and didn’t think it possible that he could ever have met a vegan who didn’t announce their strange proclivities to the room.

“Bacon,” he said to himself. That single word was one of the talismans that had kept him on the straight and narrow. Because a world with bacon couldn’t be all bad.

The magic of the word bacon did not stave off his thoughts on those who proclaimed their state of being to all and sundry. The long freight train of these thoughts began with the innocuous diesel engine chugging along, I don’t make a point of telling everyone I meet that I eat bacon. Things spiralled from there. Carriage after carriage carrying thoughts that made sense to him but didn’t seem acceptable in the world around him.

They began with where you might possibly put your sexual appendage were you to have one that protruded. There was a time when people didn’t feel the need to tell you about these activities, nor the intent to conduct these activities. And Harry felt that this had been a good and respectable state of affairs.

“Paul Dingle!” Harry exclaimed the name and grinned. There was a blast from the past! Paul was a nice lad but too eager at times. Tried too hard to please. There was one night on the beers when they’d all been children but believed themselves to be men. Paul had proudly boasted that he’d had sex the night before. Someone had told him that if you were on your own it didn’t really count. Undeterred he’d gone into sordid, mechanical detail and the group had rounded on him, telling him he was out of order and no one wanted to know. 

There was more to it than the defence of the principle what happened behind closed doors. Some things were private and there was respect for the other party or parties involved. There was less pressure that way too. No need to rush into things or attain impossible standards that may not have been true in the first place. Setting a publicised precedent at the outset of life was a cruel enterprise to be induced into.

Because at the ripe old age of nineteen Paul didn’t have a clue. None of them had much of a clue back then and wouldn’t for a long while yet. Your twenties were where you did your growing up and even then that was just the start. A bit like driving – passing the test was to the lowest possible standard of driving, you only really learned when you got out on the open road and got on with it.

There was a time when people could speak more freely. Harry knew that to be true. He’d been there and lived it. Those times were misrepresented now. An age of ignorance that was lit up by these enlightened times. He found that disrespectful. Silencing people using scare tactics was dangerous whoever was doing it. There was no good outcome when this was the weapon of choice.

They hadn’t silenced Paul. He was their mate. They’d gotten him to calm down by gently putting him in his place, and that wasn’t a euphemism for bullying, his place was as a good friend. He didn’t need to perform to fit in. Life wasn’t a competition when you were with your tribe. There was no need to prove your worth. You just had to be you.

Nowadays people were encouraged to perform. To define themselves in difference. Paul had wanted to boast using his man sausage as the vehicle of his boast. Now the gloves were off and there were people boasting about where they put that sausage of theirs. They wanted the world to know how they used it. Or they hated that appendage and that dissatisfaction for how they were became everything that they were and the reality of them was lost in that fantastical, escapist pursuit.

Where had this come from? No one seemed happy anymore. The matter of who a person was had become a gauntlet that beat brows and slapped cheeks before being thrown down to establish battle lines in a war of bleak attrition.

Harry was all for freedom of speech and expression, but this had once been tempered by respect and kindness. People were polite and thought before they spoke. And they were encouraged to be this way from childhood.

Kids these days were increasingly rude and disrespectful. No one was stopping the rot. It was like he had this tumour, but it was outside himself. An external lung that was filling up with filth and slowly drowning him. The world was infecting him with a madness it was actively cultivating and he couldn’t take it anymore.

Used to be that life was a series of choices. That people were a series of choices. Harry had made choices others may not agree with. Some of his choices he’d grown to dislike well after the fact. That was the running order of life. You lived and then you learnt. You had to keep choosing though because anything else was choosing to give up. He was choosing right now. You didn’t get to be anything you wanted because you had to work with what you’d got. Even this brave new world had restrictions on that one. All you got was to be you. And you were you from the very first day of this life. That was the simple truth of it. Harry was Harry. Always had been and always would be. He got to find out what that meant during the course of his life and anyone who was interested might get a sample of his unique flavour or maybe even make him one of their regular square meals. Other people were the seasoning that made us palatable. Balanced the dish and made for a better experience.

These were some of the thoughts that accompanied Harry on his drive out. The inner soundtrack that kept him company these days. He’d not visited this place in an age. Had a tag line he’d picked up somewhere but had no idea where it originated from; you can never go back. He understood that to mean that the choices you made now changed the forward course of life. There was no changing past decisions, and lamenting them was a waste of what was left of you. Maybe that was all it was. People were a toothpaste tube and choices squeezed them from the bottom until they were all used up and stopped making the world a cleaner and more pleasant smelling place. 

Well Harry’s days of stopping the rot were over. He felt that all the more as he returned to the place he’d made home. A home that had ceased to be on the day Poppy had ceased to be. He thought that was a choice too. This place contained too much of Poppy for him to continue to be here. His broken heart couldn’t hold that much of her. And no grave could contain her. Instead she was a part of this land. He felt her whisper brush his entire being as he killed the engine and climbed out of the car.

Sitting on the bench he always thought of as their bench. A thought that amused her when he voiced it. His eyes bathed in the sights across to the horizon. Somewhere off to his left was the house they’d shared. He’d chosen not to drive past it. There was nothing for him there anymore. Slowing to take a look would be like unboxing her wedding dress and making a desperate wish for her to fill it one last time. She was gone. He wasn’t stupid.

She was gone and his love for her remained. He’d lived with it as best he could. Honoured her with every waking breath. Continued to fulfil their wedding vows with the same fastidiousness he’d worked his job. He was retired now. Grown redundant by virtue of the number of his years. Age didn’t come into it, only the statistic accountants had worked to in order to keep the wheels turning. Time was a mechanism of control. A myth that hurt in the gentlest of ways. The caress of sand on wood until there was only dust. Dust that blew on the breeze and whispered Harry’s name with the sound of Poppy’s voice.

He loved this spot. Poppy may have been buried down the hill behind the cluster of trees that had never been allowed the latitude to become a wood let alone a forest, but here she was. Sitting beside him and gently chiding him for the choice he was about to make.

A choice that was no choice at all. Not really.

Never burn a bridge. You never know when you might need to cross to the other side again.

She’d been his constant. She’d reminded him of what counted. Because she was all that counted when he allowed himself the time and sense to see things for how they really were. She was the sensible calm in the storm of his passion. He’d thrown himself at life with little thought as to how he’d land. She’d taken his hand and given him the pause he needed. And when he’d jumped, she was always right there by his side. He always knew she’d be there, wherever they landed.

Now he was burning a bridge so he could cross to the other side and stay there. Whether it was with her or not he did not know. But he hoped so and he believed so. He could no longer bear to be in a world where belief had been eroded so callously and with nothing to replace it with other than the vengeful entitlement of the individual. Everyone was encouraged to point a finger and conveniently forget their part in the proceedings. There was no love in that. Love was a bridge you couldn’t burn down however hard you tried. But you could burn everything else away until there was no point left in crossing that bridge anymore.

“There’s something wrong,” he breathed the words out onto the breeze and knew she heard him. She always heard him, “truth is, I’m scared and I’m tired. Tired of being scared.” He drew in a breath that shook his body with both pain and emotion, “oiling this old machine isn’t sorting the squeaks anymore. I can’t fix this. No point going to the doctors for a misdiagnosis and I don’t want to be a burden. I never wanted to be a burden. With you I succeeded in that my dear Poppy.”

As he sits in the one place he truly belonged he feels the world beyond closing in. This is a familiar feeling of late. The clock on his time here has been doing double time since Poppy left. He’s done well to last this long. Beyond the horizon is a dark spectre of a future not meant for him. He’s reminded of his Granddad lamenting the horrors of modern times and this makes him smile at their comradery come-late. Maybe the old man saw the shape of things to come. Was gifted the sight in his twilight years, but not the voice to go with it. Suffering in silence whilst attempting to retain his dignity. 

He pulls the bottle of pills out of the left pocket of his jacket and the bottle of water from the right. He sits considering what will come next. Scoffs at the sin he is about to commit. As he allows his mind to wander, his body relaxes at last and the bottles both fall untouched from his hands as the end he is now ready for takes him with a care and a grace afforded to few. This is his reward for loving with all his heart, especially when his heart shattered under the weight of his grief for all that was best in him. As he slips into his final slumber he feels her hand slipping into his and he smiles. Complete at last. He’s still wearing that expression of bliss as the dogwalker finds him sitting on the bench and attempts to rouse him from a sleep that has no bridge back to wakefulness.