It was all weighing me down. You know the old saying about packing your troubles up in your old kit bag? Well, that was me. I'd been carrying my problems around for weeks, now, like some sort of urban backpacker - the mortgage, the credit cards, the promotion I wasn't going to get, the boss I hated, the holiday I couldn't afford the time or money to give my wife and kids...
The minute I woke up, my problems landed on my shoulders like so many big black crows, and although I tried to shrug them off they clung on determinedly. I went down to breakfast that morning feeling like Richard the Third. The kids, slurping soggy, sugar-laden cereals from a selection of mismatched bowls, peered cautiously up at me, gauging my mood. They'd learned, lately, not to come out with any smart remarks unless they wanted to be snapped at. I tried to smile at them in a benign, fatherly sort of way, but they'd learned not to trust my crocodile grin, and they stared solemnly back.
Sarah wasn't even speaking to me - and who could blame her. I'd stayed up late the night before - finishing a report for the boss, I told her. Once the rest of them were asleep, though, I'd made myself a cup of very strong coffee and sat down at the kitchen table again, going over and over the bank statements and bills, trying to see my way through to next month's payday.
Sarah came down at about three o'clock. She came to be supportive, to show her solidarity with my state of nervous stress and disappointment. She came to try and be a good wife, slipping around behind my chair and kneading my aching shoulders. She meant well, I know, but it felt like the claws of those damn crows, digging in deeper, hanging on tighter.
'How the hell do you manage to spend so much at the supermarket every week?' I demanded, brandishing the Visa bill in her face. 'It's not as though we're eating cordon bleu every night, is it?'
It was out of order - seriously unfair. I knew that; I knew how hard she'd tried to make ends meet. I could visualize her, sometimes, tugging those ten pound notes to try and stitch them together into some semblance of a decent income. She's even talked about going back to work, but she knew she wouldn't be able to earn enough to cover the childcare costs.
So here I was, driving home at the end of an awful day which had got off to a more than usually awful start. I'd marched out of my silent, miserable house without even saying goodbye to the four people I loved most in the world, the four people my heart kept beating for, the four people who just about made it worth my while to make this same wretched journey to the same wretched office every day.
I was in a foul mood, my shoulders rigid with pain and my head full of vicious little voices telling me what a failure I was, asking me what I was going to do about it, how I was ever going to put right whatever had gone so disastrously wrong. I was gripping the steering wheel so hard,I could barely feel my fingers. I was rushing - not to get home, but just to get from one lousy minute of my life to the next, without any expectation of things miraculously improving en route.
He came out of nowhere, looming up in my mirror, flashing his oh-so-slinky headlights to tell me I was in his way. Unlike me, he was going places - going somewhere with meaning and purpose; he didn't want to be late. For a moment I toyed with the idea of holding him up - of making someone else's life just ever so slightly more irritating, in the hope that it would magically ease some of the pain in my own. I moved, though - I didn't care enough not to. I felt a passing stab of envy as the flat red convertible sped past me and disappeared into the lowering sun on the horizon.
I'd gone about five or six miles before I caught him up. I saw the cars ahead with their hazard lights winking, the drivers craning their necks. One or two were talking animatedly into mobile phones - I wondered afterwards whether they were summoning help or just updating their friends on Facebook.
The red car was upside down, about halfway up the embankment. There was no way of knowing what had happened to the driver, and whatever my many faults and failures may be, I'm still enough of a human being not to hang around and gloat at another's disaster. I don't suppose an accident like that in an open-top car would be likely to have a happy outcome, though.
I couldn't get it out of my mind, driving the remaining ten or fifteen miles back to my heavily mortgaged house, my cowed children and my lonely wife.
'You can still put it all right,' I said to myself - and for some reason I believed it, this time. Perhaps it was because in that moment I realised how irrevocable some mistakes are. There was a narrow line between his kind of impatience and my kind of desperation.
Life is a race, but the winners aren't always the ones who get there first - that's what my Dad used to say. My race isn't going to be easy - I know that. But I'll travel lighter without the kitbag, or the crows on my shoulder. So I left all that behind, and drove on up the motorway, to apologise to my wife and get on with living.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.