The Hesitation Factor - Short Story

The Hesitation Factor - Endymion 2338 words

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I don't know if you've ever stolen a car. If you have, you'll know what I mean when I say that the first time you do it, there's hesitation. I saw it in Charlie that night. Just for a second, as we were approaching the vehicle. Moving beyond the familiar and zooming in on a classic.
A Saab 900.
He always had to be different, Charlie.

I was sixteen years old and although I'd tangled with the police once or twice, it had been for nothing more serious than stealing a pair of jeans from Top Man - or 'poT naM' as we (in our stupidity) called it. Charlie, at twenty-one, was a regular thieving gang-sta compared to me.
"I don't like it." I told him.
"What's not to like?" He threw his arms out wide, like an insane preacher or car-salesman.
"It's only got two doors." I pointed out.
Charlie's arms dropped slowly. He managed to take his eyes from mine for a moment, to glance at the white Saab.
"So? How many f*cking doors d'you need?"
"It's not safe." I said.
He started to laugh, but it was ugly.

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Three years before the Saab, when I was still thirteen, Charlie took me for a ride in his new 'company car' - a five-gear saloon that some idiot in Furniture Sales had managed to hand over to an eighteen year old speed-freak with a drink problem.
We drove out of London on the M4, listening to Led Zep at full volume, with Charlie standing on the accelerator and whooping like a cowboy.
The Police had us boxed-in on the hard shoulder and were busy taking down our details before the end of the seventh track.
Charlie was mad. I was sick in the verge, propped against a farmer's fence. The Police were hysterical about us not wearing our seatbelts. They breathalysed Charlie, but he was clean. I couldn't believe it.
As I stood my distance, buffeted by motorway traffic and trying not to get vomit on my boots, I could see Charlie remonstrating, probably telling them about his new job and how he would lose it if they charged him. The officers remained noncommittal, their straight faces and polite address only infuriating him further.
A blackbird landed on the fence close by, looking at me with one untrusting yellow eye.

"Are you alright, son?"

That evening, sitting out in the garden at the back of the terraced house, Charlie asked me if I'd been scared at all. He wasn't referring to us being pulled over and I knew it. He was talking about the physical fear of death. He seemed obsessed with it.
I wanted to be truthful, so I thought about his question seriously, while he pulled the tab on another can of lager and sucked foam off the rim.
How scared had I been? Very.
Watching that needle creep past 120 mph, I had more or less accepted that I was going to die… but it was the expectation, the prospect of sudden, unstoppable physical damage that had really paralysed me while we rocketed passed cars that were pushing ninety in the middle lane.
Although I tried to put it out of my mind, I kept thinking back to when I'd first got in the car and reached for my seatbelt.
How Charlie's hand had clamped down on mine.
"Nah, it's no fun that way." He'd said.
"If you wear the belt you're a wimp. No excuses. You don't wan'a be a f*cking wimp do you?"
I was thirteen… so of course, I didn't.

"So, you were scared, yeah?" Charlie asked me.
He was genuinely interested - as if fear was something he could only learn about and never fully experience for himself.
I slapped gnats away from my head and listened for a moment to the hum of traffic speeding by on the A3, two streets away. Someone inside the house switched on the kitchen light and I saw that Charlie was smiling. He had one eye shut and was staring down into his beer can.
"I was frightened," I admitted. "When you missed that MG by nothing…"
The familiar smile disappeared, "F*cking thing shouldn't 'ave been on the motorway," he said.

We'd come upon the MG cruising in the fast lane, on the stretch between Maidenhead and Reading. By then, we were into the guitar solo on 'Heartbreaker' and Charlie was rocking back and forth in his seat. The MG didn't see us coming and we ate up the road behind it so fast, that even with Charlie tapping the brakes from a good distance back, I thought that we were going to plough right over the top of it.
"…and when they were breathalysing you." I said.
Charlie threw back his head and swallowed the last few drops of beer, then lobbed the can towards the dustbins. He sat back in the mouldy, broken-up chair, with his hands folded behind his head, looking smug. Not at all like someone facing a hefty speeding fine… and maybe even a driving ban.
"They couldn't get me for that," he said, "I never touched a drop."
"I know. But if you had…"
"If I had…"
He leant in. Put his face up close to mine.
"If I had, they wouldn't have caught me. Get it?"

"Are you alright, son?"

The copper was older than Charlie, but not by much. He was standing with one black-gloved-hand pressed against the fence. He had trampled through a blackberry bush to get to me and seemed human enough, watching me with a mild frown on his face.
I looked over to where Charlie stood by the car, arguing with a policewoman.
"He doesn't mean it." I said.
"Charlie?"
"Yeah, its not his fault."
"And if he gets you killed… will it be his fault then?"
I shrugged. I didn't know.
The blackbird took off and we both turned to watch it circle away from us, towards some trees and better company.

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Two days after my eleventh birthday, Charlie took me out with him 'Paki-bashing'. That's what he called it, plain as day. No pretence and no excuses.

We saw an old, brown-skinned man with a turban on his head, waiting at a bus stop. Charlie started saying stuff like, "Go back to your own country and stop taking our jobs."
You know, the age-old clichés.
When he got no reaction, he turned nasty, quickly.
His insults became more and more personal, as he set out to ridicule and then threaten the old pensioner, who remained mute and defiant, waiting outside the park gates for his bus.
It occurred to me that if he wanted to, Charlie could snuff out the life of this man in a few seconds and I think the old man sensed it too, because I saw primitive fear in his eyes and understood that he was not ignorant. Only brave. Perhaps the first really brave man I'd ever met.
At this point, I tried to intervene. Timidly, you understand. Not with angry indignation, or even very much hope, but because I wanted to stop what was happening before Charlie made a terrible mistake. This old man wasn't the one that he really wanted to attack. This man was nothing to do with anything.

Charlie took no more notice of me than he did the cars that sped by periodically. Sooner or later someone would call the Police and then things could get very ugly. The mood he was in, why, Charlie might stop terrorising this OAP and do something really stupid. Like calling a bluey a pig. Then they'd go after him.
For the next few minutes I watched Charlie with a certain amount of contempt as he started in on the man's family… (simply presuming that the old man had one) explaining in detail what he was going to do to each one of them individually …especially the man's wife and daughters. And granddaughters.
Throughout Charlie's ranting, the man remained seemingly unmoved, keeping his eyes on the on-coming traffic and probably praying for a bus. Charlie demanded to know if he was under-f*cking-standing-da-f*cking-English, or if he was f*cking deaf?
I knew better. I couldn't pretend that I wasn't seeing the old man's show of bravery. As Charlie started cursing every Asian country's name he could drag up from his undereducated brain, I went and sat down on a wall and looked away. I understood that I would always remember my feelings at that moment, my shame threatening to burn me up.

The brown-skinned man was proud and tried to ignore Charlie, a cruel looking sixteen-year-old, wearing a black bomber jacket, jeans and steel-capped boots.
When the bus finally came and the old man climbed on board without uttering a single word, Charlie went crazy and started smacking-up the bus shelter.
I left him and went into the park. It was autumn and there were leaves on the ground. He found me sitting on a bench watching ducks on a pond. He was angry with me.
When I admitted feeling sorry for the old man, Charlie sneered and called me a Paki-lover, so I asked him why he wanted to be a Nazi and he punched me in the face and broke my nose.

I had to stay over-night in the kid's ward at the hospital, laid out with a tube stuck down my throat. Charlie came to see me and brought my lucky charm with him - a glow-in-the-dark spider I always kept beside my bed at home. He propped it against the hospital water jug and sat down in a chair beside me. Across the ward a boy who'd had his sinuses drilled out that morning was being sick into a bowl held by a young, Chinese-looking nurse. Charlie got up and pulled the screens around my bed.
After he'd sat back down, I started feeling uncomfortable. He was staring at me hard and not saying anything. I was afraid, but not of Charlie, not then… only of crying in front of him.
But, like everything else, he beat me to it.

Charlie reached up and covered his face with his hands.
I watched him while the nurse whispered soft words of comfort and reassurance to the kid across the way. I watched him even though it hurt me badly, in a way I cannot describe. I'd never seen Charlie cry before. It shocked and frightened me even more than the punch in the face had.
He didn't cry easily.
Despite its enormity, his grief was mute, so that if I hadn't been able to see his body flinching against the pain, or the tears dripping through his hands onto the bed cover - I never would have known.

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When I was nine, I stood inside the back door and watched my foster father, high on pills and alcohol, beat up the fourteen-year-old boy I had come to think of as my brother. Every time Charlie tried to get up, the son-of-a-bitch would knock him back down again. I watched Charlie crash into chairs, shelves and kitchen cabinets. I saw him slammed into the table and heared his scream of pain.
The man was terrifying to look at, his face twisted with hate and determination. He knew what he was doing and he took his time about it.
The stereo was on and blasting rave, the fast beat thudding in my chest…but the man went slowly, carefully. Stalking.
Together they moved around the kitchen, without words, the man kicking or punching Charlie onto the floor and then standing over him as he tried to crawl away.
Sometimes the man would let the boy get to his feet and sometimes he wouldn't, but always he was ready, waiting to knock him down again.
Soon they had moved around the table, closer to where I stood.
Charlie was trying to escape, his movements weak and slow. I watched the man knee him, hard, in the small of his back, sending him sliding across the lino floor to collapse against my feet.
I didn't want to look at Charlie, but I couldn't help myself. The sound of his harsh, gasping breath terrified me. He was struggling to speak, even as the man reached for him again.
"Go into the garden," Charlie said, his eyes pleading with me.

Those words were bloody, pouring from his broken mouth.

I turned and ran as fast as I could. I ran out of the house. I ran across the small lawn and into some bushes where I hid, crouching.
The loud, booming music seemed far away as evening drew in.

When it was over, the man took Charlie to the hospital and told anyone who asked, that the boy had been set upon and beaten by a gang of crazy black men.
The Police must have believed him, because they didn't lock him up.

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"So, you getting in, or what?"
Charlie's in the driving seat and he's got the engine revving.
I stand there, remembering.
Cleaning his bloody handprints from the lino floor.
His hand clamped over mine as I reach for a seatbelt.
He looks desperate, sitting in the Saab and grinning out at me.

We're alone in the pub car park and the sun is getting ready to sink below the rooftops. Charlie's not long had his twenty-first birthday and he's still hung over from it, but he manages to laugh as he leans across the passenger seat to grab the open door.
"Hey, come on. Let's go!"

A cat darts across the tarmac and scrambles noisily over a fence. Streetlights start to flicker on around us. Behind me, laughter drifts out from the pub lounge and is taken off on the wind.
He says my name, once.

We look at each other and I can feel it. The hesitation. It holds me there for a moment longer than Charlie can endure. I watch the light fade slowly into the darkening of his eyes.
He slams the door shut, puts the gear-stick into first and doesn't look back.

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Endymion 2005