The Sports Car by Janus

Paul was sitting in the pub at the top of the mountain, enjoying a drink and the intoxicating panoramic mountain views with his young female companion, Joanne. They were relaxed, chatting warmly, yet casually. After their third drink Joanne said she needed to use the bathroom. Paul nodded and then slipped almost unconsciously into an habitual dark reverie—remembering the strange, shocking circumstances that had led to his mother’s death, which remained disturbingly fresh in his mind, even though it had occurred a few years ago, and she had been quite elderly.

He recalled riding in the musty old lift up to the fifth floor in the rundown red brick block of flats where his mother was living. It was a routine weekly visit, and he had ridden that elevator so often over the past fifteen years or so, that it had seemed no more dilapidated now than it had the first time he visited his mum in the housing commission flat she had just moved into. The small, semi-detached house in the inner suburbs, where he had been raised by his mother, a single parent, had been rented out, providing her with a very decent supplement to her aged pension.

He remembered opening the door, after fumbling with his collection of keys in the ill-lit hallway that smelled of ancient dust and mould, and how, as he had stepped across the threshold to find her flat cold, dark, and somehow eerily silent, the thick curtains drawn, he had for a very brief instant entertained the very disturbing thought that she was not home.
“ No, that’s absurd!” he had thought, “she has her groceries delivered and only ever goes out in the middle of the day to join her lady friends playing ‘bingo’ at the club, or on the very rare occasion that she runs out of cigarettes, coffee, sugar or milk, and then only for five minutes down to the corner shop”. He remembered the lonely sound of the fridge rumbling as he called out “Mum, are you home?” Turning back towards the door, he had seen that her keys were not on the hook where she habitually kept them, and her handbag was not on the table. Then he saw the unwashed cup with a bright red lipstick stain on its rim and half an inch of cold coffee sitting right in front of the chair she always sat in —which seemed uncanny since she had not worn lipstick for years, and never failed to finish her coffee, even if it had gone cold and she had to rewarm it in the microwave.

He had checked her bedroom next still hoping to find her, while dreading the possibility that she might be terribly ill or even dead. But she was not there, and he felt a mixture of relief, anxiety and confusion as to what to do next. He decided to call her local club, and was told that she had not been there that day. The corner shop was closed a couple of hours ago, he had realised. Having no idea what else to do, he had decided to wait there for a while before calling the police.

His mum had returned home an hour or so later, accompanied by two policemen, in an extremely dishevelled and confused state. She seemed to have lost touch with her normal life, not even seeming to recognise her son at first, but then regaining it again when Paul made her a fresh cup of coffee and she looked up at his face; tears of recognition and relief beginning to flow. Immediately she had begun to sob, shaking with emotion, and it was then that what she had been doing and the whole story about her earlier life of homelessness and frequenting bars had come out. She was obviously ashamed and feeling all the more guilty on account of never having divulged her dark secret to her son.

It was during this time of his mother’s clarity and confession, that he had discovered that she had become fixated on certain memories of her youth; of her former state of homeless and her practice of picking up men in bars in order to receive meals and some small coinage in return for sexual favours. In the better cases, he heard, she had relied on her physical attractiveness to seduce men even into looking after all her needs for the usually brief times that she remained with them. Some of the men she attracted would provide her with accommodation, food, drink, sometimes new clothes and some semblance of companionship, and even love, until she moved on to the next one, which her restless spirit at that time of her life usually dictated would happen fairly quickly.

Having become lost in memory, obsessed, with this previous difficult but, apparently, exciting phase of her life, it seemed she had lost, for a time, a sense of her actual age and of belonging in her relatively comfortable, even if somewhat dingy, circumstances. (She was at this time in her late seventies, and, being supported by the aged pension, as well as receiving money from renting her old house, was able to easily afford the rundown, government-subsidised flat).

It seemed that earlier that day she had stepped all the way back into her youthful, homeless persona, and not understanding how she happened to be in the place she would have normally called home, she had ventured out into the streets, to her old haunts, and had been trying to pick up young and middle-aged men in bars. Strangely and luckily, though, she had somehow remembered to lock the door, take her key and handbag, with her pension card, which had enabled the police to ascertain her address and return her home.

Of course she had met with little success, and the whole story, it turned out later, had already come out when she had been picked up by the police, who had been called by a concerned bartender at what had been many years ago, her favourite bar. Paul had been able to fill out some more details, which remained obscure in her account to him, from the policemen who had heard her earlier account. It seemed that she had been in the grip of the desire for full confession, when she had returned to her senses. It also seemed that she was still slipping in and out of reality, with alternating moments of confusion and clarity.

At leisure now in the mountain hotel, Paul recalled how he had felt when, sitting with his upset and confused mum, he had first heard about any of this secret life of hers. Strangely, he did not feel as though he had been deceived or had his trust betrayed; all he felt was warm empathy and love for the mother who had worked so hard to pay his way through university, where he was currently a professor of philosophy.

He recalled how he had begged her not to go out on any of these kinds of escapades again, but he reflected on the fact that he was not naive enough to think that she had any control over her actions when her mind slipped back into its past life, and she had lost a sense of her present life. Paul’s thoughts then turned darkly to the events that had transpired only a couple of weeks after this initial lapse: she had apparently fallen again into her old life, gone out to her favourite bar, drunk way too much alcohol, and collapsed in a deserted lane, where she was found next morning. An ambulance had been called, and she was taken to hospital, where she died from hypothermia a few hours later; it had been mid-winter.

Paul’s mum’s death had been four years ago now, but he still felt himself close to tears whenever he recalled his mother’s secret and the events that led to her death. He also felt a sense of guilt and helplessness that he had been unable to prevent what had happened, and even, quite irrationally, that he had been unable to prevent her from having had to endure such a difficult earlier life: a totally irrational sentiment, for fuck’s sake, he had not even existed then!

The only hint of solace for Paul was that her unlucky death had perhaps saved her from the suffering and confusion that her developing Alzheimer’s would inevitably bring, and the conclusion that it was therefore not entirely unlucky, It was small comfort though, and he still felt guilty that he had not responded with more urgency to what he had known must be coming, and done something, anything—changed her living circumstances somehow, to avoid the kinds of dangers which would inevitably present themselves if she continued to go out to bars in the night.

Paul suddenly realised that Joanne had returned from the bathroom. She was looking at her smartphone and didn’t seem the least concerned that he had not noticed her return. Joanne was one of his Post graduate students, and arguably the smartest of the lot. He found her very attractive both physically and mentally, but even though they had gone away for this weekend together into the mountains, he told himself that their friendship was nothing other than platonic, and that he just wanted someone, who was also good intellectual company, to share his excitement with the brand new Italian sports car, a Lamborghini, which his inheritance had enabled him to afford. “I just enjoy her company” he told himself.

Paul had never paid much attention to women, having had to work part time himself to supplement his mother’s financial support, and study hard for the rest of his spare time to achieve the academic honours he had enjoyed at university. That rigorous time was followed by publishing relentlessly to work his way up to full professorship. So, despite his intellectual prowess and very well cultivated understanding of both ancient and modern philosophy and literature, he was quite inexperienced regarding romantic liasons, and somewhat naive about women. He knew he was not adept at reading their body language, and at knowing what to say and when to say it. Basically a commonsense assessment of Paul’s general state of consciousness regarding women could be summed up in the old adage “You think too much”.

Paul looked at Joanne and, feeling a stirring in his genital area, he immediately pushed aside the idea that lurked in the recesses of his mind; the idea, the feeling, the realisation, that he wanted to seduce her, wanted to show and enjoy his animal lust, fuck her brains out, in the most tender and sensitive of ways, of course! However these thoughts barely rose to the surface of awareness: Paul was a very moral, it might even be said repressed, man, and he also somehow now associated the absurdity of his mother trying to pick up young men and the dark outcome of that venture, with any inkling that he, a professor in his mid-fifties, could possibly want to seduce a young student; it just wouldn’t be ethical!

They had enjoyed a couple more drinks and Paul was feeling somewhat warm and fuzzy and suffused with confident enthusiasm at the idea of further testing his new sports car on the winding mountain roads.
“Shall we continue on our way, Joanne”?
“Yes let’s, I’m looking forward to the mountain views and the cool wind in my hair”

Paul turned the key in the ignition and the car ‘vroomed’ into life, and they drove on. He felt easier and easier with the car, feeling that it responded to his deft and loving handling ever more willingly. The drinks and the warm clarity of the day made him to feel like the car was becoming a part of his body. His car’s responses to the slightly rough road and its vibrations were becoming his own responses and vibrations. He felt completely at ease with her and with Joanne; no need for conversation. Again he felt the blood rising in his loins. The bends were becoming sharper and more frequent, and he was taking them faster and easier while maintaining full control; it was exhilarating! He felt a vague boyish urge to impress Joanne with his prowess. As they continued down the long descent, with the cliffs rising sheer on the right and falling steeply on the left down to the valley far below, coming around a bend, the sun pierced and occluded his vision for a moment. Nonetheless, his body remained relaxed, feeling in complete command. They approached another even sharper bend, and Paul thought he would take this one with even greater skill and presence of body and mind.

As they approached the bend Paul experienced a very brief intimation that something momentous was about to happen, and the memory of having experienced that feeling when he had entered his mother’s house on the night of her first escapade flashed in his consciousness. When he saw the two cyclists he felt an instant of rising panic. It seemed unavoidable that they would collide with the cyclists. He heard Joanne scream “watch out”. He had felt he was in total control as they approached the tight bend, and now he glanced anxiously at the yawning ravine below and the looming cliffs above, and tried, in that dilated moment, to push down the panic and remain in command.

At the very last moment before impact the cyclists swerved to either side of the car, one towards the abyss and the other towards the sheer cliffs of stone. Paul slammed his foot on the brake and the car, now ahead of the cyclists, pulled sideways and careened towards the cutting, scraped against the rock momentarily, sending a shower of sparks, and then lurched towards the ravine, and came to a stop with one wheel over the edge.

Paul and Joanne were shaken, but immediately and with a sense of foreboding he thought of the cyclists and glanced back up along the road they had come. One was on the ground right near the edge of the cliff, and the other lay stunned, having run right into the stone wall. He got out of the car shakily, while his companion seemed insensible to what was happening. Paul went over to the unconscious rider, who was stirring slightly. The other rider had also risen and came over to see if his friend was alright.

The three mumbled together as if in a trance, all were in shock, and after several minutes of confusion, it was decided to work together to drag the car back from the edge of the abyss. This proved to be a difficult task which took more than an hour. Joanne, apparently in a much more extended state of shock than the rest, remained immobile in the car, No one thought to ask her to get out, and her slight weight would have made little difference to the difficulty of pulling the car back onto four wheels. As they worked, she was gradually rousing out of a state of shock and confusion into anger and resentment towards Paul for endangering her life so recklessly.

Joanne berated Paul for being so immature as to drive like a drunken teenager. The thought occurred to Paul that his virtually unconscious desire to impress her had, ironically, resulted in dissipating any chances he might have had of seducing her; and strangely he felt somehow relieved.