Sleet filled the air and obscured the countryside.
He knew he was driving too fast. He was angry enough to kill or be killed. The road was wet and the metal signposts ahead warned him of hazardous corners and sharp bends, but he wouldn’t slow down and neither would he turn his headlights on, even though dusk was falling.
Why ask him to sweep the snow off the fucking carpark? It wasn’t his job was it? He was employed as a driver. Though why the fuck he was driving a van for a living, he didn’t know. He had a degree in business studies. Three years of hard fucking graft. By rights he should have had at least one foot on the corporate ladder by now. He should be washing his hands with executive soap in a hotel somewhere abroad. He should be doing business, wearing the Paul Smith suit he was still paying for. Paul Smith and for six days a week it hangs in the poxy wardrobe. I’m twenty-seven, he thought. I should have my own fax number by now, I shouldn’t be driving a van for a fucking nursing home, for three pounds seventy-five pence a poxy hour.
There was a red Audi ahead of him, crawling it was, crawling. It was a woman behind the wheel. He drew closer until he was tail-gating her, and saw that she was young, his age. She had a proper job, he could tell. Nobody would ask her to push a fucking brush around a carpark.
She looked like the fucking tadpole carriers he ferried to the railway station in the nursing home mini-bus, three times a week. Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. No overtime for Sunday, and they wouldn’t let him take the van or the mini-bus home with him. He had to stand at the fucking bus stop after work with the fucking muppets who worked in the kitchen. He’d worked out which car he’d have when he got a job commensurate with his qualifications. It was a BMW 325i, with veneer trim and leather upholstery. The doctors’ carpark at the nursing home was full of BMWs. Killing tadpoles was fucking good business. He should have studied medicine.
She was mouthing something at him, her face was angry and frightened. To punish her he switched his headlights full on, then, although he couldn’t see the road ahead through the sleeting sky, he accelerated and passed her. Looking back he saw that she had pulled into the side of the road against a bank of dirty snow. She was speaking into a mobile phone. He hoped she hadn’t noticed the name of the nursing home on the side of the van. The bastards are not going to sack me, he thought. I’ll resign. I’ll take the van back tonight and I’ll tell them I’ve been head-hunted by ICI. And there’s no way I’m driving all the way across town to the incinerator and getting caught up in all that traffic, not now.
He turned on to the A6, and drove through villages where the old houses teetered on the very edge of the narrow road. He was calmer now that he had made a decision. As he drove he kept a look-out for a place where he could dump the bag which lay behind him on the floor of the van. About four miles out of the city he remembered that the heath lay ahead. He had taken a girl there once for a picnic. The sun was shining, and there were people about walking their dogs, but she had complained that the place made her flesh creep, so they had gone somewhere else.
The heath was in darkness now. He drove off the dual carriageway and parked alongside a hawthorn hedge. He switched the engine and van lights off, and sat for a while to allow his eyes to get accustomed to the blackness of the night He got out and stood for a moment, looking and listening. It had stopped sleeting but the night was full of dripping and trickling sounds. A grey mist hung a foot from the ground. As a child he had been afraid of the dark and his childhood terror returned to him. He saw human shapes amongst the bushes and unmentionable horrors in the branches of the trees.
He went to the back of the van, squelching in the spongy ground. Wetness seeped over the tops of his shoes and he cried out in disgust. Ice-cold raindrops began to fall, soaking his hair and trickling down the back of his neck. He heard them drumming on the roof of the van. He fumbled with the lock on the back door. A harsh cry came from the black interior of the heath; a bird, or an animal. He waited, frozen, for the creature to cry out again, but the sound was not repeated. He opened the back door and groped in the dark for the bag. His hand touched the thick plastic and he recoiled from the wobbling sensation as the contents shifted slightly. He found the neck of the bag and lifted it out. He had planned to take the bag into the middle of the heath, but after only twenty yards of blind stumbling he heard a gurgle of water and threw the bag towards it. He heard it drop and settle.
When he turned around he was surrounded by a swaying mist of moisture. He could no longer see the trees or the van. He felt as though he was being sucked into the saturated ground. There was nothing he could grab on to to save himself. He turned around in a circle, stretching his hands out in front of him in a frantic attempt to feel something solid. A dark shape loomed ahead. He stumbled towards it and fell among the painful thorns of a hawthorn hedge.
When he eventually reached the safety of the van he saw that the thorns of the hedge had marked his face with bloody scratches. The rain on the roof sounded like an enemy trying to beat its way inside to drown him.
He started the engine and turned on the windscreen wipers, but they were useless against the relentless torrent. When he tried to drive away the wheels spun on the soaking ground beneath him and it seemed to take a lifetime before he was able to manoeuvre the van away from the vile place and towards the safety of the road.