The Monologue of the Pickup Truck Man

Crushed Cars. Credit: Chris Jordan.

Yesterday I drove into the back of a white van in a company car. It was his fault as much as mine, but that’s bye-the-bye. The bonnet of the new Fiesta concertinaed toward me in slow motion and the airbag punched me back in my seat, white dust exploding in happy release.

I sat there for a few seconds, stunned, then struggled to open the driver’s door as smoke filled the cabin. Crumpled panels croaked in protest as I forced the door open and contorted out onto the road. A melancholy policeman looked at me with knowing eyes.

“Are you okay?”

I patted myself gingerly, stepped off the road. Nodded my affirmation.

“Looks like it!” He said wryly. “And look on the bright side; rather the car look like that than your face. It’s only a lump of metal after all!” He stepped back into his waiting car, unconcerned about apportioning blame.

Insurance details swapped with the other party, much pacing and waiting and one portion of life-enhancing, steaming hot and vinegary fish and chips later, the pick-up van man arrived: Fat, twinkly-eyed and ready to tell me that this ain’t nothing, kid. His cheerfully morbid monologue seemed worth recording for posterity’s sake.

“Twenty-five years I’ve done in this job, I’ve seen it all. Car crashes, your standard keys breaking off in the ignition, people late for work, accident, injury, engines exploding, blood, death, destruction. You name it, I’ve seen it!

“Suicides are the worst. You wouldn’t believe all the ways people will kill themselves in their cars, or the different styles of gassing themselves. Did you know when you gas yourself in your car your stomach explodes? Yeah, bits go all over the place.

“I remember, must have been seven years back, one of those. The old Bill, they told me it would be a mess when I went to pick up the motor so at least I was warned. This bloke, he’d put a gas mask on, wired the exhaust pipe directly to it and closed the windows. His stomach exploded. What a mess. What a thing to do… He’d swallowed a bottle of pills and they’d bounced all out of his stomach.

“Another time this bloke drove his car into a lake. Yeah. He did. Nobody knew, then a few days later a lady walking her dog spotted the aerial sticking out. She called the police and they called us. So the lads, they put a ladder down across the water and onto its roof. I crawled over, smashed the front windows, hooked the straps round and was getting ready to winch it out when – fucking holy smoke – there he was, this white dead face lolling at me.

“This bloke, you know what he’d done? He’d handcuffed himself to the steering wheel, put his foot on the pedal and driven in. I didn’t expect that. A cold dead white face staring at me in the middle of this bloody lake!”

He scratched himself cheerfully on the belly and shifted up a gear, the trunk roaring as he flung it down the narrow back roads, branches reaching out to scratch the side of the great steel machine and its crumpled load.

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