Dillon Drives

Dillon Drives

Dillon sat alone in his car, stuck in the gridlocked traffic, unable to move forwards or backwards, wishing that whichever idiots up ahead were causing this would sort themselves out and set him free. He wanted to reach the open road and put his foot down. He needed to be moving.

Once upon a time, just sitting in his car would have been enough to make him stupidly happy, even in a traffic jam. It wasn’t like it was a new car, which he could never have afforded, but it was new to him. His first ever car. A six year old Fiat 500 with a radio that never worked and a dodgy gearbox that he couldn’t afford to replace. He was 19 when he bought it. He’d left school the previous summer and got a job as a junior at the garage across from his gran’s house. He’d saved up all his wages, still living at home and not paying much rent yet, and he’d been able to afford the car by that first Christmas.

His Dad had offered him some money towards it, but Dillon had said no. He still treated his Dad as his primary model for how not to live a life. He had put up with the monthly weekends away all through his childhood, but more because his Mum deserved the break from his brothers and him than because he wanted anything to do with the man who’d abandoned them, or with his new wife and family in their lovely new house. His step-sister’s car was brand new, of course. No surprise there.

Every kid loves their first car, but Dillon was maybe an extreme case. He was still sharing a bedroom with a younger brother, had never had a room of his own in his whole life, but he could sit in that car and it was his. He owned it, fair and square, and nobody could tell him what to do while he was sat in that driving seat.

But that all seemed like a long time ago. Less than five years, in fact, but he looked back at his younger self now as a child. Full of strut, feeling so much more grown up than his mates who’d gone to uni, with his pay packet and a car of his own, but still nipping over to his Gran’s and letting her cook his lunch most days. Before she got sick. Before they moved her to the care home.

He’d still been with Susan back then. They’d got together at fifteen, and she’d been convinced that he’d fall for someone else when she was off at uni. He’d told her a hundred times that he would never do that to her. She needed to go and get qualified or whatever and then she could come back and he would have been earning enough that they could move in together and get married. And he’d been right about one thing. It wasn’t him who’d fallen for someone else.

It was only then he’d met Molly. She was older than him, already finished at uni and back home and working at the chemist. She knew already what she wanted from life, and back then what she’d wanted was him.

He’d had a whole plan. He knew that he liked her, straight away, but he also knew that he might spook her if she thought he was just on the rebound, not reliable. He would take her on at least three or four different dates, he decided. Take it slow. Let her get to see that he wasn’t just talk. But he was dropping her back home after only the second date and he’d parked in front of her house and then he just abandoned all of that and blurted it out. How much he really liked her, and wanted to go out with her. Sitting side by side in the front of this car, twisted around to look at each other. And she’d said yes.

It was obvious to the friends who really knew Dillon that he was punching above his weight with Molly. She was a real catch, smart and warm and generous and funny. It wasn’t that she was loads prettier than Susan had been, not in photographs, but Susan had been younger, still wearing her beauty like a mask. Molly was actually a grown up, like she wasn’t just pretending. She felt real, and she pushed Dillon to be real as well. He’d gone for a promotion at work, and got it, for no real reason but that he wanted to be good enough to hang on to a woman who he could see had more ambition than he had. If he’d been with someone who wasn’t so clearly out of his league then he might not have tried so hard to be the best version of himself.

That promotion meant that he was earning more than she was, but neither of them really cared about stuff like that. He’d never had a chip on his shoulder about her having been to uni, or wanting to be a pharmacist when she could afford to cut her hours to study for that. He liked that she was smarter than he was. He was proud of her, and he wasn’t trying to outdo her with his pay raise. He was just trying to hold on to her, that was all.

Not all of his mates understood what he saw in her. Molly didn’t have the edge of hard drinking crazy that they looked for in a girl. They told him he was getting old, slowing down, and pretty soon he drifted away from their antics and their clubbing and saw less and less of them, then none at all. He had to clean less beer off his seat leather that way, after all, which suited him fine. They missed him, certainly, but not really more than they would have done anyone still fit to drive them home.

The traffic was at least moving now, albeit fitfully. The Vauxhall in front of him couldn’t possibly have a valid MOT, not with fumes that nasty coming out of its exhaust pipe. Shoddy work like that offended him. He’d be ashamed to drive a toxic hazard like that, forcing any car behind him to wind up their windows tight and switch to internal air. There was literally a law against it, but idiots like this still seemed to get away with it. He longed for clean air and a clear road, no one in front of or behind him.

His phone rang, and its screen lit up on his dashboard to announce that this was Claire. He didn’t answer it. Claire would be calling to check up on him, because Claire was Molly’s best mate and Molly would have asked her to. He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. Not yet. He needed more time, before he’d be ready to talk about this.

Lawrence, the brother that he still shared his room at home with, was every bit as bad. He’d been in a fight last year, in a nightclub, and the magistrate had made him do an anger management course, which was just stupid ‘cause he hadn’t even started it. Only Lawrence had got really into it, like obsessively, and was now a real convert to counselling. Everything should be talked about immediately, in Lawrence’s book, and there were several actual books that he had left in a little pile on Dillon’s bedside table against all objections.

But Dillon stuck firmly to his old ways. Work it out in your head, first. Talk about it later, yes, but only when you’ve had time to think of what to actually say.

A month ago, if he’d been sitting in his car, he would have been able to feel Molly’s presence in the seat next to him, even when she wasn’t really there. It was where she belonged, right beside him. Her rightful place. Sometimes they swapped seats, because she was practising for her test, and she joked that he had never shown her greater love than when he let her drive his car, and promised that she’d get her own car once she’d passed. The secret truth was, though, that he’d happily have given her this one. He couldn’t imagine a more conclusive way to prove to her that she really was the most important thing in his life. He’d had the idea over a year ago, and only the fact that she hadn’t passed her test yet had stopped him.

Her phantom presence to the left of him had been built up over time, through all those key moments between them that had happened here. Her saying yes to going out with him. Her telling him she loved him for the first time. All the plans they’d made and the dreams they’d shared.

He could still feel her there, even today, but now the image was distorted by pain and confusion. She’d sat in that chair to tell him she was breaking up with him.

Inching around the next corner, he glimpsed a circle of red light through the cars ahead of him. Temporary traffic lights. That explained it. He couldn’t tell yet which bits of the junction they were digging up, but at least the end was finally in sight.

“It doesn’t feel like it used to anymore,” she said, “and it’s not fair of me to pretend I’m still in love with you when I’m not sure I really am.”

“This isn’t your fault,” she said. “There’s nothing you could have done different. I’ve just changed. What I feel has changed, and I don’t know how to change it back.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t want to give it a few months. I’ve been feeling like this for a while, to be honest. I hoped I was just getting the jitters or something. I hoped it would get better and you’d never have to even know. But it’s only getting worse.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you. I wish this hadn’t happened. But it has.”

As for him, he’d gone through a pantomime speedrun of denial and anger and bargaining, testing each of them out to try to change her mind, and then trying them again in a different order to see if that would be any more effective. He had no time that evening for depression or acceptance. He could see that neither of those would help him get her back.

But she’d climbed out of his car and she’d left him. Left him to fail to fight back his tears. Left him spinning and nauseous and hopeless and lost.

He knew she was lying. Of course there were things he could have done different. He could have found a way for them to move in together, back when they’d first talked about it. Borrowed the money or found a better job to afford it. He could have been less comfortable with things just staying as they were for a while longer. If she’d have been honest, earlier, about how she was feeling, then that would have made him less comfortable, pushed him to try to fix the problem. But he hadn’t even known about the problem. And that was the most damning part of all, although she’d never admit to it. He really should have known, was what he knew she secretly believed. He should have been able to tell, without having to be told. Having to be told was part of his not good enough.

Almost a month ago, now, and he’d failed to wear her down or change her mind. He’d worked through his depression and come out the other side. He was working through acceptance, and wondering what the other side of that would be. Redoubling his efforts, is what it probably would have been, but all of that was changed now. Last night had changed everything.

Finally, he was through the four way control at the junction and the road in front of him was clear. Still thirty for a little while longer, but the ring road was close now. Soon he could put his foot to the floor and clear his head.

Last night Molly had wanted to meet, to give him some news, and of course he’d said yes. Hoping that she wasn’t finding life without him as good as she’d expected. Hoping she was at least considering some chance of getting back together. They’d sat in a pub, in a neutral public space, but in a quiet corner. She’d let him buy her an orange juice, and they’d made the awkward small talk that recent exes do, and then she’d told him she was pregnant.

No, she did not want to get back together, but yes she was pregnant. It all flowed out of her like a flood, probably because she had been thinking and rethinking all day about how to tell him, but probably also because he was struck dumb and not really doing his best to hold up his side of the conversation.

She did not know what she was going to do yet. Her Mum and Claire were the only ones who knew so far. Dillon was the fourth. Her Mum had said to not even tell Dillon, but she’d wanted to. For the last few years he’d always been the person that she talked to first, she said, about big things and trivial things and all the things in between.

He didn’t say “Except for not loving me anymore”. Partly that was because he didn’t think of it until later. He was used to that. That was the curse of getting together with a girl who was smarter than you were. Partly, also, of course, because he wasn’t capable of speech yet at that point.

It was probably a good thing, actually, that he was so profoundly pole-axed by the news. It saved him, in hindsight, from saying any of the wrong things. The things that would have made the evening end in disaster.

He didn’t say “Well now we have to get back together!”

He didn’t say “We should probably get married then, yes?”

He didn’t say “I am in no way ready to be a father!”

He didn’t say “You must have this baby” or “You must not have this baby” or even “You must consult me about whether or not to have this baby”.

He thought about saying all of those things, and many more besides, but all of the many things that he might say were whirling around inside his head and none of them had access to his mouth. He kept his mouth tightly closed until he had had some time to think.

“You’re being very quiet,” she said in the end. “Are you okay?”

“Are you?” he managed.

“I don’t know yet,” she admitted, and then went back down the spiral of repeating things that she’d already told him. Her brain was barely in better shape than his was.

By the end of the evening he’d managed to cautiously become more talkative. He did his best to vet everything that came out of his mouth, and he thought he’d mostly avoided anything too damaging.

“What can I do to help?” was a line he was particularly pleased with.

“I’m gonna do what I can to support you, whatever you decide,” was one he saved for the end of the evening. He wanted her to go home with that still fresh in her brain.

It wasn’t that he didn’t sincerely mean each of those lines, because he did. He just also believed a lot of other more complicated stuff that was still spinning around in his brain.

“I know you feel strongly about people having kids,” she had said. “That they shouldn’t do it if they’re not willing to properly commit to it.”

“You used to agree, when I said that,” he reminded her.

“I did. I do!” she said. “It just feels a little different, right now. You know? Like I’ve already let them down, before I’ve even started.”

“Everyone in your position must go through all this exactly the same,” he said. “Feeling confused about this stuff isn’t you failing.”

He didn’t say “You’ll be a great Mum,” because that felt like a trap. Like a hole in the floor that needed to be carefully edged around.

And now he was doing seventy, at last, zooming along the ring road, circling the town going nowhere in particular but just needing to drive. Needing to think.

Was he ready to be a Dad? He didn’t feel ready. Maybe that was the point, though. Maybe people who thought it would be easy were the ones most likely to mess it all up when things got tough.

Should he and Molly try to get back together? Less than a day ago he would have been overjoyed at that idea, but everything was more complicated now.

If he used the baby, if there was even going to be a baby, as leverage to get Molly to take him back, to help her cope, to be there for the nights and the mornings and all of it, to pull his weight and really be there, then that felt like a trap. She’d be with him for the wrong reasons. She’d resent that, in the end. It would mess everything up.

But at the same time, things were already messed up. There was no world in which they’d ever go back to how they’d been before.

Better then, surely, to explicitly remove “getting back together for the baby” as an option, and let her know that.

That way, he could legitimately say that he was there to support her, whatever choice she made. And if there was a baby, he wanted to pull his weight as best he could as a father. They could both be parents without being partners.

That would leave him right there in her life, at a time when she was less likely than he’d been afraid of to hook up with someone new. And everything he wanted to do to be a great dad and be everything his child might need was also the last thing she might have seen coming from the boy he’d been last week.

For this to work, though, to have any hope of finding himself back with the woman that he loved, it would have to be real. If he was going to pretend to be okay with this to trick her into getting back with him, she would smell that on him like a stink. The only way to leave that possibility alive was to let go of it. To let go of her, and genuinely commit to this acceptance.

Could he really do that? Could he really let her go, and maybe be a better father that way?

He wasn’t sure yet, but he was already thinking more clearly, and the road stretched out ahead of him.