Driving Lessons

“Green! Slam it!!”

When it finally hit Ant that these would be last words he would ever hear his brother say, he creased into breathless sobs. Then he thought about what his brother would say if he saw him right now, and swallowed them all back in.

Vic had been “the man of the house” from fourteen years old. When he had to kick his own father out to protect the family from his alcoholic rage.

Vic taught his younger brother Anton everything he knew about “being a man”.

Anton - who could no longer remember a time when his name had not been shortened to Ant - had understood the unspoken challenge when the red Subaru WRX pulled up beside them at traffic lights just over two months ago.

The guy had rocked up with rich kid smugness and a turbo charged smirk, barely much older than Ant. Vic and Ant knew his type right away - “thinks he’s ‘the Man’ even though Daddy paid for the car”. ‘The Man’ sized up his competition with a sneer, and revved a taunt at them.

Vic was used to people underestimating his 1991 Nissan Skyline. The money he had spent working it up was not spent on appearances.

Ant knew exactly what was expected from him well before Vic had uttered it aloud.

So the split second that light turned green, “slam it” he did.

They screeched away into a glorious blur, with a speed that told ‘the Man’ this was on.

There was nothing like the rush when they pulled away from him, and kept pulling away from him, for all his burning ,whirring and blasting to them catch up.

Never before in his life had Ant felt this free, this alive.

Until, out of nowhere, SLAM. Darkness, silence.

In the distance Ant now heard a different sound, a faint repetitive beep, gradually getting louder and closer.

A white light appeared, then grew brighter, then was everywhere. He turned his head to see lines of colour dancing across a screen to one side of him.

Anton woke up five weeks ago in ICU. It was becoming clearer with each passing day that Vic never would.

Their mother had always feared Vic’s “wild streak”. It was just a streak, she knew that, he was so responsible in lots of ways. He worked hard and never missed a day of work. He never drank. Never.

Yet something about cars made him lose his mind. He somehow thought he could drive like he was … indestructible, and she couldn’t make him see sense.

That was why she insisted on being the one to teach Ant to drive. In her car, and according to the proper road rules.

Her rule number one was “drive safely, above all else.”

For Ant, this was sometimes easier said than done, and his mother’s driving lessons could feel like a handicap.

Once when Ant was having a driving lesson with his mother a group of morons he knew from highschool pulled up beside them at traffic lights, jeering and gesturing at him through their open windows.

“Ignore them. Don’t even make eye contact.” was his mother’s advice.

So he tried. Really hard. To ignore them. Their jibes about the car. Their jibes about him. Their obscene jibes about his mother that they both pretended not to hear.

The light took an eternity to change, but he was grateful that the clown car beside them peeled away the second it did.

Only they saw them again, stopped at the next red light.

“Stay half a car length behind back from them.” his mother advised him, to thwart their eye line.

But the car just reversed, parallel with them again. This time they made no sound. Just stared.

Ant fixed his sights on the road ahead, with full determination to avoid their eyes, but he could feel them locked on him and his mother.

He could feel his heart racing, too, and a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face from his temple.

Goddam light. Come on, change.

Finally, the light turned green. Ant waited for the car beside them to spin off again, but it did not move.

He hesitated for another confused moment, then nervously started to pull away from the lights.

That was when a half eaten hamburger sailed through his open window and exploded onto the dashboard, and the car beside them erupted into raucous howling and hooting, before tearing away again.

“Are you okay?” Ant’s mother had asked him.

He wasn’t. He was weeping. Smeared in lettuce, ketchup and burning humiliation.

His mother told him to turn the corner and pull over. She hugged him back together by side of the road before she drove him home. She told him she was really proud of him for not losing his cool. She said she didn’t know what the hell was wrong with people like that.

When Vic heard about what happened he vowed to find the assailants and “teach them a lesson”, but his mother made it clear she wanted him to do nothing of the kind.

“Just leave it alone.” she demanded.

Vic told her she didn’t understand, there could be no “leaving this alone”. It was far more than a dumb prank, he explained, it was a test to see how much they could get away with. This was not about throwing a half eaten hamburger, it was about throwing down the gauntlet. A man had no choice but to defend himself in answer to a challenge like that. Otherwise he would have no pride, no respect, no nothing.

His mother was furious. She told Vic he had no idea how often she had to hold her tongue and swallow her pride for survival. Afforded no pride, no respect, no nothing by men who thought they had “no choice” but to “defend themselves” against any “challenge” they perceived from her.

When Vic tried to argue, she yelled at him. She told him she was putting her foot down about this, because she was the parent here, and he was still living under her roof.

Vic demanded to know why his mother had never learnt to put her foot down about things while his father was still living under her roof.

It was a low blow and he knew it. Such low hanging fruit, his mother’s shame about her failure to protect her sons from their father’s harm. She was soaked in it. Always.

Vic never told her, even later, how ashamed he had felt about pulling that card from the deck to win the the last word. Because there was no room, in his mind, for the word sorry. Not if you wanted to hold your ground.

Though he was seven years old when his father left, Ant had only vague recollections of him. Of the man he used to be a decade ago anyhow.

He was a “changed man” these days. Clean and sober and “taking life one day at a time”. A new man, with a brand new family, who was starting to heal from his painful past. How nice for him.

Victor Gerard Senior was not one for saying sorry either. He said he used to be “in a bad place”. He said he “had an addiction” which was “like an illness” he had to manage. And he said he couldn’t have conversations that might “compromise his sobriety.”

It was because he refused to use the words “I’m sorry” that Vic refused to speak to him. He said he wanted to forget all about the man.

Ant often wondered how that could even be possible for Vic. He not only had his father’s name, but it was an almost perfect copy of his father’s face he saw in the mirror each morning. Physically, he was his father’s son, whether he wanted to be or not.

His mother was talking to the doctor again. Ant knew it was bad news without hearing a word.

Her creviced forehead, and the welling in her eyes attested to the fact that her worst fears were now being confirmed.

Her son had no hope of recovery, It was time to take him off life support.

Ant could not cry. He felt a numbness in his body down to cellular level.

His mother was a bursting damn. Overflowing like it was her job to do the crying for her whole family. Because somehow it always had been.

Ant knew all of this was his fault. Because he didn’t want to learn to drive from his mother.

He loved her, of course he did, but he honestly had no memory of a time when his mother had ever been … fun. She was the one who always wanted him to be careful.

To slow down, to think harder, to hold back. To be safe.

Vic was the one who gave him his real driving lessons, and taught him to do burnt outs and donuts, and “slam it” into the kind of speed that would get him taken seriously.

He meant no betrayal to his mother by learning to drive with Vic behind her back. He loved them both, but somehow his older brother’s approval had always meant more to him.

And that’s why when a red Subaru WRX revved beside them at traffic lights, dropping the neon lit drag racing gantlet, the last thing Ant could possibly say to himself was “Just leave it alone”.

He accepted the challenge, because to do otherwise would make him “a pussy”. Something neither he nor his brother were ever allowed to be, even if their mother could never understand that.

They both knew the unwritten rule in this situation - “give yourself a green light to slam it”.

Now the green light that traced the line of his brother’s heart rate was the last measure of his “life”. And the unwritten rule within the unwritten rule had become painfully clear to Ant - “never think about who picks up the pieces when the lights go out altogether.”