Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

20. Taxi Ride

They walked back through the knotweed and the dodder to where Adrian had parked his car. The plan was that he would drive him to a few blocks shy of Carleton and they would split up. He would go to his art exhibition and he would pick up the suits from Graydon who would also drive him home.

Adrian realised immediately that something was not right. The car was sitting too low. He checked the wheels, in the long grass. Four slashed tires. The Jag was not going anywhere fast. "Ah fuck," He muttered under his breath.

"That's not good," Brendan said, somewhat unhelpfully."

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Adrian pulled his phone out. "I need to be there in 30 minutes."

"Where?"

"The gallery. Same one where the conference was. The exhibition. I need to be there." "Can't you afford to be a little late? Just to show the kiddos you're just a person like them." "Well, I could do that, but I have a bunch of their work in my car. It needs to get there asap. Otherwise everything's ruined. This could be the difference between them wanting to drop out or not."

"Look at me. I dropped out and I'm fine. OK, I am the family disappointment and I should probably be seeing a therapist, but overall I'm doing pretty okay."

"We need to get there. I need to be there for my students. We've worked hard together all semester, and I'll be damned if something comes between us. Dude. Do something. We have half an hour left." Adrian checked his watch. "Not even half an hour. A go faster spell. Anything." Brendan let out a fart he didn't even know he'd been holding in. "Well, if we need a go faster spell we need a vehicle first, in working condition. Which we don't have." "Would it work on us?"

"I wish I had that much magic in me. I don't think anyone has. The amount of potions you would have to drink for that to happen would kill someone stone dead. The only way it could possibly work is if it was midnight on full moon and we were both in wolf form, which we are not."

"So what do we do?"

"Well, we only have one option." That was not exactly true, as Brendan was still running through the other options in his mind. The M2 Express bus would take too long, and catching a train was out of the question. OK. There was only one.

"Adrian looked at him. "Hitch onto a high-speed train? I'm not getting you."

"No." Brendan peered over the train line. The nearest main road would be about five minutes' walk away. "Get your stuff out of the boot."

"An Uber?" Adrian pulled out a bunch of canvases with one deft hand movement, then a sculpture with the other.

"No. They're too slow." Brendan motioned for him to hand a bunch of his cargo over. Adrian obliged. "What then?"

***

Traffic was bumper to bumper on the Ring Road, but still fluid.

"It's a fucking waste of money," the taxi driver yelled, at nobody in particular, two fingers on the wheel. "Look at this. It's not even peak hour and it's a fucking disaster. You know when they opened this? 1975! It had three lanes. And look at it now! Still three lanes. 45 fucking years later. It needs five lanes, at least! I don't know what they're doing. Do you have any idea how much we're fucking paying them to sit around and do fuck-all. Look, I'm not a fan of those people over the border, but at least they get things done when they need to."

There was an opening, to their left. The taxi driver took it without a moment's hesitation, nailing the throttle. The left lane was flowing at the same speed as the one they had just left, and they soon settled back to a more sedate speed. But now they were next to the bus lane at the hard shoulder of the freeway.