Middle of Nowhere

Stakes reached out and turned the ignition key savagely, slamming his car into gear and reversing with reckless abandon from his parking space, the old car's transmission protesting with a high-pitched whine. His lips trembled with the effort of holding himself together as he selected first gear and roared out of the factory grounds into the road, barely checking for oncoming traffic. Ramming his tired car through the gears, he banged the steering wheel hard with the knuckles of his fist, five, six, seven times, perversely enjoying the pain. Stakes could feel the scream of anguish coming like a juggernaut.

"FUUUUUCK!!" He howled. "FUUUUUUCK!!" His throat was raw and rough, and although these outbursts usually helped to take the razor edge off of his anger and frustration, he could still feel the sobs bubbling up inside him and threatening to overwhelm him completely. Stakes blinked away the moisture in his eyes as his vision suddenly became blurred, his chest heaving involuntarily for a few seconds until he regained a fragile shell of self-control. His jaw was clenched shut, his teeth jammed together in a grimace of hopeless rage.

I need to drive, thought Stakes, to get away from the concrete and impatience and mindless, invasive crowds of the town, to get out into the countryside and go for an unhurried drive through the quiet lanes. This almost always calmed him down just a little and restored some small sense of balance within him. Stakes turned onto the dual carriageway which he always used to get back to his small one-room apartment a few miles away, but this time he was not going straight there. He was exhausted from depression, but he knew he needed to push himself into taking this long detour. It was Saturday afternoon, and his work week was done... just in time. He was completely at the end of his tether. Again.

Presently, Stakes flicked on his indicator and turned onto the slip road leading off of the main carriageway, feeling his anxiety beginning to ease as he negotiated the roundabout and headed onto the quiet 'B' road he often used as a conduit to the local countryside. It would be several miles before he reached real isolation, but Stakes took a deep breath as he began to guide his little car through the gentle curves, allowing the decreasing density of houses and increasing prevalence of trees and fields to soothe his thrumming nerves. He crested the top of a small hill, catching brief sight of the open farmland stretching invitingly across the horizon, and as he often did at this moment Stakes' mind began to turn inwards, pondering on his life.

Stakes was in his thirties now, and for as long as he could remember he had been somehow at odds with the world around him. Visits to the kindly old family doctor with his mother were a frequent part of his childhood, usually after the young boy had spent most of the previous night crying for no reason that he or his parents could understand, or when his habitual stammer became so bad that he literally could not force the words from his mouth. Stakes was a very intelligent child, and words like 'depression', 'anxiety', 'personality disorder' and even 'insidious psychosis' made comprehensible sense to him long before either his parents or doctor realised he understood their quiet conversations. Later, as a young adolescent, Stakes' life seemed to consist of visits to several specialists interspersed with terrible bullying at school as the rank and file of male pupils saw him as an easy target on which to vent their own insecurities. Upon reaching his teens, Stakes' burgeoning interest in girls became another source of frustration as his homely appearance coupled to his low social standing in school society branded him as unsuitable potential dating material to the school's female population. His position in the top set of many subjects, far from adding to his status, instead saw him labelled as an eccentric geek and made him a further target of other pupils who needed him to be a failure in everything to justify their contempt of him. By the time he was sixteen, Stakes was taking a number of different medications to bolster his mental health, but still his by now entrenched depression, paranoia and low self-esteem meant that he was unable to respond to any hands of friendship or support offered by other pupils as they matured into young adults.