What Didn't Happen

We had been overcharged for a cab and so Hugh stole the driver’s diary. I hadn’t noticed what he was doing until it was tucked away under his shirt. I began to panic immediately. Yes, the driver had been unreasonable. He had seen that we were lost, and that it was too late for us to expect to find another cab. He capitalized on our despair, weaving it around our necks like nooses and then threatening to pull the chair away. But Hugh had gone too far, and he had dragged us all into dangers mouth.

The driver did not check for his diary, and we made it home without incident. The morning sky was pink and yellow, so we went to sit in a field. The grass was still a cool dark blue, despite the growing light above us. The driver had gone, but I couldn’t shake the fear of him for a long time. The grass we sat on is in the centre of North London; it is one of the few reliefs that we have from the chaos of the City.

We sat there, the four of us. Sasha was sleeping on the grass. If you spoke to him, he would reply, but he wouldn’t move or open his eyes. Hugh had started smoking. I expected that he was planning to fumigate his system until his body simply shut down and he could sleep at last.  Shaqs was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest; his eyes were wide open, and his pupils darted to and fro. Sometimes he would start violently, and then madly swat the air, and then he would stand up, breathing heavily, before sitting down again with suspicious eyes. I couldn’t really understand why he was doing it, and I thought that he was starting to go a bit nuts, until he stood up, said                                   “these mosquitos are rinsing me” and set off to buy some insect repellent.

I felt that we should make some use of the taxi driver’s diary. Most of the pages were filled with scribbled numbers and dates. I saw bank account details, passwords, memorable words and dates. I read on, through a matrix of records and personal information, looking for something that might make this crime even remotely worth the time. Sometimes there would be names, or single words; he wrote “Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six”. I guess he thought it was clever.

I massaged my temples and rubbed my eyes. Hugh made me a cigarette, and I tried to smoke with dry, cracked lips, even though every drag made me feel like they would catch fire. I searched on, desperate for some author’s notes, or a short introduction. At last I found something concrete:

 “When I saw her in school, I must have confused her a lot, because I was trying to immediately play it down like I didn’t care. She mentioned to Ben that I took it well, which I liked to hear. I had a very long bus journey with her and Lawrence, on the first day back at school, after sending her the flowers. I remember trying to play it down so much. I didn’t look upset at all, but I remember her looking at me with a mix of confusion and resentment. It wasn’t enough to just not care, there was nothing I could say or do that would make it a casual thing. If I seemingly didn’t care, then it simply begged the question of why did I do it in the first place? It’s a question I knew the answer to at the time, I couldn’t tell you now. A couple of times initially I annoyed her so much after the flowers, that she would ignore me, or walk with some boy in her year, or even get her friend to take the bus route with her. Mainly she just bore the pain of the whole situation. I initially continued to ask Ben what she was saying on the bus, trying to gauge how angry she was at me, but gradually I stopped asking. The bus journeys home with her were something I still enjoyed, as I genuinely thought she was very interesting and good company. I’m sure that she must have seen them as surreal, if not utterly bizarre, given the nature of what had transpired between us.”

Shaqs returned with some insect repellent spray. Hugh suggested that we should burn the diary. Seeing as we had nothing else to do, Shaqs used his insect spray to create a small flamethrower, and he began to torch it into oblivion. It didn’t burn very well, as it had a hardback, and the most he accomplished was to singe the edges. As the day grew older, and people started to appear all around us, on the streets, in the park, we picked ourselves up and walked home.