The Fast Lane

Sometimes, but not very often, adversity brings out the best in us.
Joey was a fair man, perhaps over-sensitive to criticism and a faulty perfectionist at heart, but fair. Mercurial in communication and with the appetite of a shark for the frozen-food business he set up twelve years ago, he had outgrown his own expectations. This, in turn, left him wanting and aimless. He became angry and introverted, so he sold the business.
A new challenge meant new goals in a different sort of game, and he went to live abroad.
Since moving to Barbados, where his lifelong dream of building his very own house had just been realised, his temper had only exposed itself on two occasions, both with his architect on matters of minute detail regarding the turret on the front left-hand side of the house. Aside from that, Joey was a different person from the one that left Britain three years ago.
Before emigrating, his doctor had helped ease his mental state in diagnosing him as ‘an energetic depressive without need for external addictions, but prone to severe changes of heartbeat brought on by stress’.
Barbados had helped by allowing him the time and clime to enjoy life without constantly thinking about stock prices, takeover bids, quality of air and drivers who stayed in the fast lane when there was no need.
It had been the drivers that had given his heart the biggest beating during his heady days as a commuter from Cambridge. He’d often wanted to kill those that sat in the fast lane, and I mean literally kill them.
If people did seventy in the fast lane, why couldn’t they do it in the middle lane or, even better, the slow lane? Just tucking themselves in once in a while would have saved Joey much trauma.
He had always shown his frustration in the same way; hooting, flashing and going up to the road-abuser’s rear-bumper. Once a clear path presented itself, he would then zoom past. On passing, he would return to the middle or slow lane and gaze into his rear-view mirror to monitor whether they’d learnt their lesson.
Sometimes, he’d slow back down if a driver remained in the fast lane after he’d passed by. At the time of drawing level again with the driver, he’d flick V-signs at them and, once they’d done as they were told, he’d make out to shoot them with an imaginary gun and blast off into the foreground.
Ever since childhood, Joey had always wanted to be a getaway-driver or a police pursuit-driver. But he'd done neither. All he’d done was watch it on late-night telly.
Perhaps as a result of losing his mother to cancer when he was seven, Joey unconsciously held all the confusion and rage of an unsettled child on his first day at a new school.
When he got in his car, his past caught up quickly. Having never married and without children, he’d never had to grow up, and his malaise always took a turn for the worse from behind the wheel on British roads.
It had been a completely different story on the roads of Barbados, where he’d actually begun to enjoy driving. There were no traffic-cameras and the few restrictions in place could be largely abused on a daily basis. Nobody seemed to care, and with that carelessness came ease and freedom.
A parking ticket in Barbados was a pittance and infinitely less likely to be issued in comparison to Britain.
Having completed his dream home within budget and time, Joey decided to return to England. He didn’t know why he wanted to go back. It seemed a ridiculous idea. There was nothing and no one to see there. He’d met some lovely people in Barbados and regarded them as his first true friends. These were people who had time to care. In England, care was a private matter, a family thing, and Joey had never shared that experience. All he’d ever known there was despair, struggle and the constant need to compete.
He decided that a fortnight in France might soften the blow, and if he didn’t want to see England after that, he could return straight home to Barbados.
During those two weeks, he travelled the length and breadth of the world’s most beautiful and diverse region in a rented Lexus.
Having landed at Nice, Joey traversed along the autoroute du soleil to Biarritz and then zigzagged through Toulouse, Lyon and Strasbourg, back to Bordeaux and La Rochelle, before enjoying a well deserved sojourn at Le Crillon in Paris, from where he made his way up to Calais for Dover.
He had resented the peage at first, but as he pelted along at high speed without interruption he was quick to realise just how well the European system worked.
The French equivalent to Joey would easily despatch of mindless road-abusers without fuss, whereas, in England, the middling fast lane driver was a much more determined soul that stood his ground with a firmer hand.
He could undertake and overtake on French roads without feeling in the wrong. Built for high speed, the views were glorious and the angles were sublime. Even the motorway-food warranted light praise.
The magnificence of the Pyrenees had held him in awe of the world and its greatness. The arsenal of mountains had a strange effect on Joey and the thought of all that untenable land had him singing with wonderment as he purred along the slick carpet of tarmac at 125mph.
He experienced one traffic jam in all his time there. On entering Paris, the peripherique moved slowly. It took fifty minutes to worm his way along and out at Porte de Chaillot, but it was still a million miles from bringing out his dark side. In fact, it was such an unusual occurrence that he actually enjoyed the jam for its novelty value.
The weather faded as he approached Calais. The presence of British number-plates unnerved him and thus came the all too familiar cardiac flutter of familiarity. Calais' smoke-belching furnaces of industry loomed in the sodden morning just as signs for the ferry became prominent.
‘Perhaps it’s changed for the better in good old England. Maybe they’ve learnt their lesson,’ he wondered, hopefully.
The crossing was choppy. He would have taken the tunnel but this was to be a meaningful return for Joey.
He wanted to see the white cliffs of Dover and the seagulls chasing debris spewed from the backside of the ferry. He wanted to smell the freshness of air and feel the clammy residues of salt in his hands.
He wanted to feel as if he was home.
When the Lexus crawled off the ferry and touched English land, a momentary wave of patriotic pride registered itself, but his malaise was close behind.
Customs took forever sifting the cars through so Joey soaked it all up, watching the plastic yellow-coated surveillance personnel rifle through one old couple’s caravanette while an Alsatian scurried around the feet of a tobacco smoker up ahead.
The look on the pensioners’ faces was one of utter horror. Their holiday had reached its end and any good feelings had been wiped away.
‘Poor sods,’ whispered Joey.
Having spent three years convincing himself that his driving malaise had been safely laid to rest, Joey now asked questions of himself.
As he drove away from passport-control, he decided that his dark side had merely been taken away from its aggressor, British roads, and that destiny was not far behind.
He may have reacted in a more orderly fashion if he had returned directly to Britain from Barbados, but he hadn’t. Besides, accidents don’t just happen. They’re meant to happen for reasons we only begin to understand years later.
There were three sets of road works on the A2 to London. When the traffic dispersed in between jams, middle lane drivers stuck to their guns and the slow lane was almost entirely empty, apart from the odd truck or two. The fast lane was thick with the seventy-three mph crew, each up the bumper of the other. The pattern of traffic looked like a French autoroute, in that British drivers used the fast lane as a slow lane. Joey didn’t react too badly because he had hatched a plan, a mad and dangerous plan that would change the face of motorways in Britain forever.
The idea came to him with the coincidental airing of Catatonia’s ‘Road Rage’ on the radio.
It went, ‘Cos you and I know, it’s all over the front page,
You give me road rage,
Racing through the best days.
And it’s you boy driving me crazy,
Thinking you may be losing your mind.
If all you’ve got to prove today is your innocence,
Calm down, you’re as guilty as can be,
If all you’ve got to lose alludes to yesterday,
Yesterday’s through,
Now do anything you please.’
It meant so much to him. In the song’s instant, he realised what he had needed to do for years.
When he arrived in London, he dropped off the Lexus at Avis in Vauxhall and was given a ride to his hotel.
Once there, he called a friend who came to the hotel and sold him two loaded pistols, each for £3,000.
The next day, he bought a hat and a large pair of sunglasses, and made his way over to the East End, where he purchased a ten-year old Mondeo without its registration document from an unsavoury character. From there, he travelled up to the Midlands.
He shot the first dallying fast lane driver through the head as he levelled with him in the middle lane. Joey accelerated with time to watch the car squirt into the hard shoulder and up the grass verge in his rear-view mirror.
On his way back to London, he shot another driver. He was going to settle for just the one killing, but this one had to go because she had stayed in the fast lane with no one for miles, even when he flashed her to pass by. It was a pleasure for Joey to kill this Freelander woman, although it saddened him that it wasn’t a man.
Again, he watched in his rear-view mirror as the car squirted across lanes, into the hard shoulder and up the grass verge.
Back at his hotel, he switched on the TV and watched the news. It was the leading story, as he had hoped. After a spot of supper, he bought two newspapers and cut out letters to say ‘I will continue to kill people who do not respect the British motorway system. Those that stay in the fast lane when they are not being challenged by others will be killed whenever I feel that the problem is worsening. I have done this for the good of those British motorists who do not abuse our national road system.’
He sent his anonymous note to the editor of Associated Newspapers, who published it on the front cover of all his national titles, and sold it on to the other papers.
The next day, Joey called BA and booked an early ride back to Barbados.
In the taxi on the M4 out of London towards Heathrow, it didn’t surprise him to see cars tucked in nicely, traffic flowing with ease, the quicker drivers able to use the fast lane at their discretion.
In one day, he had truly laid to rest his malaise, making the roads of Britain a safer place for however long it lasted.
Settling down in first-class with a glass of chilled champagne, Joey decided there was plenty more to be done at the house.