The drive to school seemed to be taking longer than usual, perhaps due to the renewal of the previous day's heat, or perhaps simply because of my own nervousness. I repeated that I had no reason to be nervous. It was just another Monday morning, just another meeting, but by the time I got through the queues and out on to the bypass I was ready to curse anything that crossed my path. There was nothing more I could do. There had been mistakes but they had been small ones, misconceived actions, not deserving of such a vicious response.
The car window was wound down so that the warm air could whip over my face. I no longer had enough energy to feed the full extent of my anger. The weekend had seen to that. Sheila had finally decided to discuss our bad luck. She off-loaded all the advice she had been carrying for the last few weeks. Her four closest friends were either pregnant or already had children. I had tried to remain optimistic but she wore me down. I didn't tell her what I was facing. There wasn't a chance. She was in no mood to listen. I just had to drive there, arrive on time, and get it over with. I turned off the song on the radio and crunched down through the gears as I approached the next junction.
I jabbed at the radio button and there was instant recognition. The sound of distant thunder, and organ notes descending, then Jim Morrison singing: "...give that man a ride, and your family will die. Killer on the road. There's a killer on the road...." Every aspect of the song was so familiar, but I'd never noticed its bleakness before.I had never seen a hitch-hiker on that roundabout before. I had never seen a hitch-hiker on the road so early in the morning. He was about twenty, with shoulder length blonde hair, and a battered rucksack tucked against his knees. The scrawled cardboard sign he held up spelt out "South". Good and vague, I thought. He raised the card in my direction as I approached. I made the pointing gesture that suggested I was turning off. It was not true. I was going another twenty miles. He nodded his understanding, grateful for some contact with the driver's world. I watched him receding in my mirror, raising his card again for the car behind mine. He was not choosy. Any driver would do.
I must have looked very much like that when I hitched; rucksack and long blonde hair. A bit dirty but never stinking. I never used a card, because I didn't want to give a driver an excuse to pass. A destination card gave the driver the opportunity to think; "I'm not going far enough to make it worth his while". To a hitcher, any distance was worthwhile. Just a few minutes of warmth out of the rain. Just a change of view from the one you had been staring at for the last few hours. Just the knowledge that you had already had one lift that day and that surely meant that there would be others.
I had sped past the boy with the rucksack, and made a gesture to try and convince him that I was not selfish. It was the old gesture that tried to say, "it's just that I'm not going far enough, otherwise I would certainly have stopped". It was still a lie. But the other excuses readily flowed: there was no time for me to stop that morning, and all my paperwork was spread out on the seat. And, anyway, he was standing in a spot where it would have been difficult to stop safely. None of these was the real reason why I did not give him a lift.
How many cars had stopped for me during the year I spent travelling? I remembered that any lift was a good lift, and how I would have been more than happy to have been given a lift for few miles by someone like me. Just a friendly face in a foreign country. When I hitched, I believed that all driver's fell into one of three categories. There were those that ignored you, those that pretended there wasn't room in the back, and those that pretended they were turning off soon. It was a question of their personal level of guilt, and whether they had accidentally made eye contact with you. There was more respect for those that ignored you because at least they made it clear that they didn't care.
At the next roundabout I found myself looking out for another hitch-hiker. The guilt at passing the boy with the rucksack had seemed stronger than usual. I had always promised myself that when I had a car I would stop whenever I could and pay back a little of what was owed. But I realised that the main reason for thinking about it that morning was that I had needed a distraction, someone to talk to about the weather, so that I would stop dwelling on what awaited me at the end of the drive. It was another selfish act. Drivers do not stop to do the hitcher a favour but to break up their own routine. The chance had been there and I had passed it by. There was not time to go back. There was nobody standing at the next roundabout.
