Scot didn’t move, red-eyed and fried. Solomon had all the energy. “I’ve always wanted to pick up a hitchhiker!” He grinned. His accent was a perfect split between Yorkshire and Jamaica. “I never see them though, you know. I was talkin’ bout it the other day, wasn’t I Scot.”
He looked over at the passenger seat. The tip of Scot’s Trapstar flat cap moved up and down a tiny fraction. His head didn’t leave the headrest. He took another drag of his joint and filled the car with more smoke.
The pair had picked me up at a service station on the M1. They cruised past in a souped-up low-riding Golf, gold rims, racing stripes and all. The windows were tinted yellowish and it was dark and cramped inside, full of smoke. It felt like a backstreet club.
They were both mad about cars. They’d just got back from the Nürburgring and had plenty to say about it. Or at least Solomon did. Scot didn’t say anything.
Solomon spoke with big gesticulations, fighting invisible flies. It made me nervous. Not because I’ve got anything against big gesticulations, but because when he really went for it, he left nothing but his knees in charge of the wheel. The unlit joint in his left hand hardly eased my nerves. He seemed pretty comfortable driving like that. To be fair, I’d never seen anyone drive at rush hour down the M1 using just their knees. Turns out it can be done.
Solomon made his living from crypto, hanging on its hops and climbs. He said the recent crash had given him a hit but he wasn’t the least bit worried. He was still up. “It’s never gunna go back to as low as when I bought,” he assured me with confidence, backed by a wide flap of his right hand, “I’m in it for the long game, bro. If you look at the 3-5 year perspective, you’ll always make money.”
He was about to start an NFT range for fellow petrolheads. He handed control to his knees as he pulled out his phone to show me, scrolling through his pictures for a while.
Solomon could only take me one junction down the road and was sad about it. He had to pick up his daughter from school in Nottingham so there was nothing he could do. Nevertheless, he was still gassed to have finally picked up a hitchhiker. Scot remained unmoved, except for a raise of the hand and a tilt of the head as I took a picture of them.
“See ya, bro,” he croaked as he gave me a surprisingly nimble fist bump.
Three women took me on. The girl on the backseat pulled a giant white wreath from the spare seat and piled it up on the clobber in the middle. It was a party.
They were from Middlesborough and had the accents to prove it. Dawn, the mother of the two girls, was at the wheel, Amy, the elder daughter, sat in the front, and Abbey, the youngest, was in the back with me. They all had seashell eyes, jet-black hair and smiles to move a mountain. Amy tossed me a pink can of cocktail. It was a pornstar martini. Dawn said she was jealous as anything she couldn’t join. Abbey cracked hers with a fizz and a loud wooo.
“You know I bet ‘e’s gunna go and say he got a lift with these three lasses…” Amy joked from the front, “Will probably say they were pornstars!” Everyone howled with laughter.
Abbey hatched out a Greggs sausage roll and offered it to me. Amy whipped round from the front, “He’s hitchhiking Abbey! He’s not bloody homeless!”
The chit-chat was never dry. Whatever popped into their minds came out with a hoot and giggle. They told me how their neighbour had blocked Abbey’s phone because she complained about his loud sex, how Dawn’s old Astra had been replaced with this gasss guzzler, and all about their sister’s drunken antics. All about all of their drunken antics, in fact.
They were off to see their big sister. She was 26. When she was 17 she’d gone to Magaluf and come back with a baby. Gary the boyfriend was a proper Essex giza apparently. They’d stuck it out and had just had a second. That’s who the wreath was for. Dawn found it a pain having to drive 7 hours from Middlesborough to Bognor Regis all the time. But she was her daughter and they were her grandkids so what could she do?
The sisters were going to surprise her but it turned out that Amy, too excited by the prospect of the bottomless brunch, had ruined the surprise. “90 minutes of unlimited booze,” Dawn added with an approving tut, “You can imagine how that’s gunna go…” Up went the Pornstar Martinis with another woo from the girls.
Amy was on music which was mostly Rock. She joked about her recent death metal phase but spared us after just one track of it. Instead, she caught eyes with Abbey and put on Tenacious D’s “Fuck me gently.” Suddenly vapes metamorphosed into microphones, eyes shut, hair whipped through the car. The words were sung at full volume, “Sometimes you got to say hey…I’m gonna fuccckkk you, softly… I’m gonna screewww you, gently… I’m gonna hummmpp you, sweetly… I’m gonna balllll you, discreetly…”
Dawn looked at me through the rearview mirror and shook her head, “You wonder where these children come from! It’s not from me I can assure you that.”
The song ended and Amy, still giggling, remarked, “There’s a proppa difference between Northerners and Southerners isn’t there like?”
I said Northerners were significantly nicer. They all agreed. People from the south were arrogant they thought. Especially the Bognor Regis lot. They were the worst.
Dawn told me once they’d been in a caravan park down there and someone had called them “Northern monkeys.” I was shocked but none of them seemed all that bothered. They knew what they were about and that kind of thing didn’t worry them too much. Nevertheless, it must have been horrible to hear. Amy shrugged and moving on, pointed at her sister telling me she was recently single.
“Yeah,” Abbey said with a lift of her shoulder and a wink, “You better watch out!”
She’d had a boyfriend for 6 years. “I only had one boyfriend. Now I’ve only had one ex!” She thought it was pretty amusing. “I keep standing people up for dates though. I get too scared! You think I’m joking…”
“That’s why the car’s so hot,” Amy chimed again, “All that single heat! We actually just kidnapped you for ‘er husband.”
By now we were approaching the M40 services. We’d taken a bit of a detour from London but I didn’t mind. I told them it had been the most fun ride I’d had.
“Bet you say that to all the ladies that pick you up,” Abbey quipped.
“Well, we may be fun,” Amy added, “But we’re not very interesting. There’s absolutely nout to us. You get what ya see!”
I didn’t have to hang around long. A lorry chugged to a stop, holding up the traffic behind. I shouted London, he shouted something similar. I ran round the side and climbed up the ladder.
It’s always exciting getting in a lorry. It’s so high up, there’s so much space in there and the chairs are spongey, bouncing around with every bump. It makes your head loll.
The driver was on the left-hand side. He was Ukrainian, spoke no English and was called Volodymyr. He beamed, “Like Volodymyr Zelensky!”
That was as far as our conversation went. We spent a good chunk of the journey trying to work out where I should be dropped which was tricky using only hand gestures. I managed to gather that his PYT tracker meant he could only stop at the Sevenoaks service station, well round the M25. We wouldn’t get there until at least 7, after dark, and it was 4 miles from the nearest train station. Plus I had to get to the pub for a birthday.
In the end, I came up with a solution. Volodymyr would pull off at a junction, I’d jump out at the roundabout and he’d go straight on without having to stop. I found a suitable junction not too far from a train station and tried to draw the plan on my whiteboard, covering it in lines and arrows and motorway signs. An X marked the point of release. It couldn’t be clearer. Volodymyr disagreed. He looked at me blankly. We slid past the junction.
“Polizia,” he protested, suggesting maybe he had understood the plan after all. Looked like I’d be walking from the Sevenoaks service station. A while later we hit traffic. I saw a lorry parked on the hard shoulder. Spotting an opportunity, I pointed emphatically to the side of the road. He got this one. We pulled over. I opened the door into the incoming traffic and lowered myself down the ladder, pressed against the chassis to avoid a passing wing mirror. With a wave and a “spasibo” I was out. Only half an hour's walk to the station. Perfect.
It wasn’t perfect. It turned out I’d been dropped in the middle of the M3/M25 junction. There were no traffic lights or roundabouts, it was all slip roads and full-speed traffic, two motorways merging. I was surrounded by 4 lanes on all sides. Making a sprint was my only option. Even if I made that, I’d have to climb over those fence-walls that line the M25, specially designed to stop people climbing onto the motorway. It was probably the worst place I could have got out, possibly in the country…
I traipsed along the hard shoulder looking at the rushing traffic feeling foolish and a little hopeless. Cars, cars everywhere, and not one to give me a lift, I thought. Suddenly there was a loud, sharp horn, right in my ear. I jumped about a meter. It was the police.
The driver wound down the window of his fluorescent BMW. “What the hell are you doing?” He barked.
“Err, hitchhiking,” I was a little nervous I’d get booked.
“Do you realise you’re in the middle of a motorway junction? How the hell did you get here?”
“There was a slight miscommunication…”
The policeman looked cross. He asked which vehicle had dropped me but I wasn’t going to dob in Volodymyr. Anyway, his big yellow lorry had disappeared in the current.
The policeman told me to wait a moment while he went back to ticket the lorry still in the hard shoulder. I thought about making a run for it but then remembered I was in the transport equivalent of Alcatraz. The policeman was my only way out. He came back and begrudgingly told me to get in. We set off up the hard shoulder.
None of the dozens of rides I’ve had have been awkward. That one was.
“So…” I said, “Are you in the Met?”
“No,” he replied grumpily, “Not yet.”
“The traffic police?”
“Yep.”
“Do you want to go into the Met then?”
“No definitely not.”
“What do you mean ‘yet’? What do you want to do?”
“Stay doing this probably.”
“Ah nice…” We twiddled our thumbs. “So… what does your typical day look like?” I was looking for something, anything.
“There isn’t one. Every day’s different.”
“Ever had to pick up a hitchhiker?”
“No. You don’t see them anymore.”
I gave up.
Eventually, we were off the motorway and in a cul-de-sac. “That’s as far as your lift with me goes.” He said nasally.
I thanked him and as I hopped out I realised I’d forgotten to take a picture of him. I called back.
“NOOO!” he barked back, “Not right now!” I don’t know why I bothered.
It was only half an hour’s walk to the station, down a narrow track beside the railway. The train didn’t take too long. Within an hour I was in the pub. Just in time.