damage, the other taking down some notes. I watch, willing for the car to be left alone. Jenny is reading the number plate aloud, speaking into her radio. Her partner looks at the bonnet, the perfect undamaged bonnet, rain water its only enemy.
‘I didn’t mean to park it there,’ I say, indicating the weather by holding out my palms, a prayer for it to let me off the hook. ‘Desperate times, you know …’
‘So this is your car?’ the policeman asks.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. They’re not going to take it away, are they?
‘I’m just running some checks,’ Jenny says.
She’s mid twenty-something, I reckon, but could pass for sixteen, the sort who gets annoyed that she still gets asked for ID buying a bottle of prosecco in the Asda. It’s not cool or attractive being as cute as a squirrel, and this girl must’ve fought hard to get her warrant card and wear that hat. But, I can’t feel sorry for her. She’s making me take a breath test, standard procedure, apparently. Twelve hours have passed since my binge, but my nervous system isn’t enjoying having to comply, to wait, to wonder if today’s truly going to become much, much worse.
‘You passed,’ Jenny’s partner, the policeman confirms.
That sounds like good news. Yet I pause, afraid to get excited by an answer that I maybe misunderstood. If I passed, what does that actually mean? That I passed and I’m drunk? Or I passed, meaning I’m not drunk?
‘You’re fine,’ the policeman says, kindly.
I embrace the rainfall. But Jenny’s still checking my number plate.
She tells me she’s just discovered that this BMW M3 isn’t insured. Okay, I know I never read the small print when I signed for the car yesterday, but for fuck’s sake, who reads the small print? I’m buggered, aren’t I? It’s over.
‘Keys,’ she says, holding out her hand. And she confiscates them like a swiss army knife being taken from the bad boy in school.
‘You’ll get it back,’ she says now, daring to tap my arm. ‘Once you get some insurance and pay the impounding fee. It’s only two hundred pounds.’
‘Just bear in mind,’ the policeman adds, ‘it’s twenty quid a day on top of the release fee, so you mightn’t wanna leave it too long. Got it?’
‘Loud and fucking clear,’ I say, then, ‘sorry.’
The penultimate scene from a horror movie is more pleasant than watching the recovery truck arrive, the monstrosity taking over the whole street. A man shorter than Zara rubs his hands together with glee as he takes my place – MY PLACE – in the driver’s seat. He manoeuvres the BMW onto the truck, the hazard lights flashing a burnt orange, a burst of colour too intense for such a miserable afternoon.
I know my lip is quivering. ‘Bye,’ I mumble.
The truck slowly turns right past the Empire Theatre and as the mangled boot begins to disappear from sight, I fall to my knees in the empty spot where my car had once been. I squeeze my fists, my eyes, every muscle keeping my torso warm to save myself from screaming. Christ, even at my dad’s funeral I kept my shit together, giving my ma and my sisters the freedom to cry as much as they needed to. But, honest to God, I feel like crying now.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mutter aloud, perhaps in preparation for what I’ll have to tell my ma. The distance to Florida is now so much further than a mere 4,200 miles away. So much fucking further.
And, where the hell am I going to find two hundred quid? Or more! Not to mention the cost to get the bloody thing insured and fixed up? Winning this car has become a financial catastrophe on a scale that me and my humble life can’t handle. Bloody hell, I’m sobbing. I am. I’m sobbing! It feels weirdly good for a split second, a quick release. What had my ma said about winning?
‘… And all those lottery winners in the paper, they go on about how winning was the worst thing that ever happened to them.’
How right she was, and how quickly I’d dismissed her.
My jeans are soaked with rain, the pavement rough beneath my knees. Fucking hell, I’m in the gutter, quite literally. I can’t blame Jenny. The young girl’s only doing her job, which is more than I can say for that bloody taxi driver. I like people who work hard, live an honest life, like my dad did. So I can only blame one