Little Dipper

In which I drive into the night

The first time we went to London as a family, it was November 2008. We had just moved to this country and bought a car, with money my parents had given me. They had bought me a car after college, which they had done for my brother as well, an American down payment on a future, the one thing you need to succeed in the suburbs. But I didn’t know what I wanted then. I’d graduated college after only three years, which had been another down payment my parents had made on my future, sending us to community college in high school so we could graduate early and save money, but when it came around though, I was still only twenty. I had never had any alcohol, hadn’t had sex, and I felt like a runner in a marathon who had gone out too fast, and was so far ahead of the field, I couldn’t pace myself.

The car my parents had got me was a silver Saturn with leather seats and a manual transmission, which was rare in the US. My parents bought it without telling me, assuring me it would be perfect, and it was perfect, insomuch as anything bought for you can be perfect. It smelled like a new car, although it wasn’t new, and I remember feeling it like I felt everything at that time in my life, like it was a pair of shoes one size too big that I would grow into. I drove it for a month until the opportunity to go to Japan came up — I was torn between this American future that was opening up and going abroad to something completely unknown.

I ended up passing the car on to my sister who drove it for many years, and I never did get the promised graduation gift, despite my parents insistence that they eventually make everything equal among the siblings. For me, a nice car, a good car, a graduation car meant a commitment to a place and I was not yet committed to anywhere. This was the right impulse until we moved to the UK. I had plans for us to avoid having a car, a recurring theme in my overseas moves with my family, but this lasted a month and it became clear we needed something to survive in Milton Keynes. It was always raining and the buses were not consistent. We heard about a Nissan Almera that a man with a Japanese wife was trying to sell, and I went out to see it one afternoon. The car was fine, as far as I could tell, and when I told my parents about it, they were eager to right the wrong of never having provided me with a car and bought it for me.

We began driving in the UK, and a whole new world of possibility opened up, like going to London. You could drive a bit over an hour and there you would be, at Finchley Central and then in London, the London I remembered from my first trip to the UK in 2002, with the Houses of Parliament and the Thames and Hyde Park, only now with a wife and a child. I don’t remember precisely what we did on that trip — the pictures suggest we went to the Tate Modern, with Naomi in a backpack stroller, looking tired and annoyed the way little people are tired and annoyed when they have been promised ice cream, but are beginning to realise that they should have clarified when exactly the ice cream would be coming.

It's gotten harder to bribe the girls with ice cream as they've gotten older. The last couple of trips to London have featured meltdowns of different sorts. The last time we went, the car failed on the way down and I, famously, had to pee in a Costa coffee cup on a crowded train with no working toilets, but this was really only the capstone in a series of bad trips. The one previously ended in tears because we had gotten burgers at Burger King rather than Chipotle burritos. The trip before, one daughter got some item of clothing while another didn’t, leading to an imbalance in the universe of things that could not be immediately remedied and thus ruined that day, everyone’s energy sapped and me, rushing us along like not getting a table on the train would be the end of our lives. ‘London Stephen’, my kids call it, where I am ten paces ahead of everyone, rushing them to cross the road so we can wait on a platform for a delayed train.

The energy to go to London this last half term didn't gain much momentum and I’d mostly given up on it until Mei suggested we try to go to an F1 exhibition. I, for my part, am not particularly interested in F1, but I did want to be with Mei and eat Indian food and walk around and look at books. We debated taking the train or car, but decided in the end that taking the car would allow us the most time at the exhibition and now that I had sunk most of our savings into this Toyota Corolla, would be a good use of it, particularly with it’s adaptive speed control and lane assist, things forty-two year old me sees as important to a quiet, relaxed drive. I revel in the luxury, pointing it out in some imaginary dialogue with my own father, who I’m trying to impress and who quickly warns me to not trust the computers, you can’t trust the computers.

I am not interested in F1, but when I was slightly younger than Mei, I was into the Indy 500, and car racing in general. Days of Thunder too, that film with Tom Cruise which I think we were allowed to see once even though it had some sex in it, and the collectable cups from Hardees and the remote control cars. My favourite computer racing game was called The Duel, and featured Ferrari and Porsche competing with each other. I had a Ferrari poster on my wall, in fact, and loved Emerson Fittipaldi, who Google tells me won the Indy 500 in 1993, when I was eleven. I don’t know why I would have been interested in him exactly, except that I had to choose someone to like and I vaguely remember his car being red, and that would have been a good enough reason at that point in my life, I think.

Mei and I drove into London and ate Indian food in Finchley Central and looked at clothes and folding phones and spectacles and books and talked for the day about everything that we came across. There was little drama with just the two of us and we arrived at the Xcel Centre where the exhibition was taking place and we sat, waiting for entry time to come around, in the main building where there was the European Pokemon Championship and some Evangelical Christian group and a large Muslim retail group. We sat and people watched and Mei ate an overpriced sandwich that I managed to buy without hesitation, a moment of growth I marked, but couldn’t really celebrate: I could have been an asshole about this, but I wasn’t. I cat-napped and finally, our time came and we went into the exhibition.

I’m not sure what it was about car racing that I enjoyed as a child, before I understood risk and danger in a real way, when burning cars were exciting, but much of it came back, thinking of my father taking us to Gasoline Alley in the suburbs of Minneapolis for my birthday, before Trump, before I questioned my faith, before I wasn't on the team anymore, and I can think of my father smiling, happy, giving. We walked through the exhibition and Mei went ahead to see all the things she’d seen online and I watched videos about rivalries between racers I’d never heard of, interested more in the massive Marlboro baseball caps and the moustaches. We saw a car that had been burned out in some race and the video with it, and I thought about how human all of this is, actually, to want to go as fast as possible, to win, to see someone we support win.

We were the last cohort of the day going through the exhibition, the gift shop closing, and I felt a strange satisfaction the way you do sometimes in the UK when you pay for something and expect little of it and it turns out to be okay. I asked Mei about the races and she told me about everything and I wondered if this was the hobby I should try on, something I could just watch without having to get involved, but as we left and headed to the underground, the feeling passed. We rode the Elisabeth Line to the Northern Line and looking at my reflection in the window, I remembered the years I had spent commuting to Middlesex University when I was doing my PhD, to teach and supplement my bursary, when I couldn’t believe that I was working in London, when everything had just started to work out.

Mei and I ran to Tesco at Finchley Central to get energy drinks and meal deals, and I put the home address in the GPS, planning to have to stop at some point, but as we got on the road, I put on Hum, the late night road trip music when I was seventeen: If we both stand with paths on high, and sink without the oceans, watch 'em dry. We can see far to the other side; it's you and I forever, we don't have to hide, so strangely reread when you are travelling with your own child, rather than your girlfriend. We got out of London, past the M25, I drove and drove, up the M1, towards The North with the determiner, then the M6, passing services after services with no need to stop.

The digital clock ticked past midnight and we came into the city and I felt the projections of the next day beginning to come into reach. How you simulate getting into bed and sleeping and waking up the next day to run. I changed lanes into the exit, slowed over the ramp and just as the road began to descend, I felt the car hit something on the passenger side in the front and then the back and the moment opened up with a series of thoughts: I’d hit something, what was it, it must have been small. Was the car okay, where could we pull off, shit. No, the car was not okay, we were slowing and the left front tyre was deflated. I need to pull over, where can I pull over, there’s a shoulder, but we’re on the ramp, maybe I can go further. No, there’s something seriously wrong, the tyre is very flat, how far should you drive on a flat tyre before it hurts the car.

I got over, thankfully, no one was immediately behind us. On the shoulder, I asked if Mei was okay — she was. I took a breath, tried to stop to think. I saw a phone box ahead that I could drive the car up to, slowly. Cars were flying past, it being the downhill ramp, and I looked behind me to see if there was a gap, so I could get out and look at the damage. I got around the car and saw that both tyres were flat on the passenger side. I went to the phone box and picked it up and listened as it rang for at least a minute, no one picking up. I got back in the car and googled AA, did the online form and then was on hold, waiting, and then called RAC on Mei’s phone, waiting for someone to help us.

A woman picked up on Mei’s phone and we went through the description of what had happened, where we were, what we needed. I performed calmness, the best I could, but was short with the woman on the phone, and felt the pressure of being Dad, to not lose it in any way, to not appear worried, despite the lorries barrelling past, and shaking the car, and the feeling that some kid on nitrous gas would come over the ramp and not see us and plow into the back. I repeated my phone number several times to the woman and was then on WhatsApp with Leo, the mobile tyre repair man, after giving my credit card to the woman and trying to not think about the £360 this was going to cost, after meticulously doing the day in the most financially efficient way. We needed new tyres anyway, didn’t we.

The cars coming past kept the tension high until finally, thirty minutes after the call disconnected, as promised, Leo came up, and I felt the security of a van behind our car, that anyone would hit him first, before hitting us. Leo came up on the passenger side, friendly and energetic for nearly one in the morning, and said we could stay in the car, and after having me pull up a bit, set out to work with amazing efficiency. Both tyres were removed, and then reinstalled and then I was out behind the car, with the confidence of Leo who had no hint of fear, showing cuts in the tyre sidewalls, two in the same place, and saying it was a problem in the road and I could almost certainly claim for it, if I took pictures, which I did. Leo had a soft eastern European accent, and his phone screen lock was a photo of a young woman with a heavy filter, and I imagined a whole life for him as I waited for the bank transfer to go through and we talked about how bad the roads were and how common this was.

I thanked Leo and got into the Corolla and cautiously pulled out into traffic. The car was fine, miraculously, as though nothing had happened. I waited for some wobble, some misalignment, but nothing came and we drove through the city to the house. It was all done then, only an hour later than planned, all the adrenaline worked through my body and laid next to my sleeping wife. I said to Mei when it happened, as we were waiting, that these experiences should make us thankful, and aware of all we’ve been given. How much worse could it be, death comes like this sometimes, sometimes things just change fundamentally and it’s not an uncomfortable forty minutes waiting for an Eastern European man in a van, but it’s the rest of your life. We should be thankful for all of it, for each other, for this one more day we’ve had together. Dad as dad, but Dad who had some other life under the surface of it all, who had another flicker of memories when he was your age, that line We won't let them take you, we won't let you die falling into the loudest guitars you’d ever heard live. I was there, I say as we drive further into the night, At their reunion show in Alabama in, it must have been 2003. The lead singer, Matt, said they didn’t want to play shows anymore. It was so loud.