by Jupiter Jones
A flash of Jaffa amongst the dripping greenery, he grabbed my eye. A bald man draped in what looked like an orange curtain, thumbing a lift.
I was searching for a lonely place to live; I’d driven up a narrow lane with grass growing up the middle to see an overpriced, half-derelict Welsh long-house. I could imagine living there, alone, away from everything, everyone, but then I’ve always been a fantasist. Heading back down the valley, I saw him at the crossroads. There’s not much traffic up there on a damp weekday. Not everyone is comfortable picking up hitchhikers – even normal-looking ones. Lone women probably shouldn’t.
I rolled down the window. ‘Hiya. Er … where d’you want to go?’
‘Either way, forward or back, north or south, doesn’t matter which,’ he said and grinned. His thick scouse accent jolted me, incongruous around here, amongst the wet sheep and the wet bracken.
‘Oka-a-ay,’ I said, eyeing his tattooed knuckles and thinking in lurid tabloid headlines. ‘I’m heading back to town.’
He said I was kind, which just goes to show he was naïve, or optimistic, and he got in. Under the curtain, he wore what looked like pyjama bottoms, dyed orange and an orange t-shirt, tight across his biceps, and sturdy, worn-in work boots. I guessed his age at fortyish, but I could have been a decade out either way. His face suggested he’d had a hard life, but he seemed entirely tranquil. He told me his Buddhist name which I instantly forgot, but which apparently means something like hopeful glimmer. He said he was a novice, had not yet taken the vow of the 227 rules of the Prātimokṣa. Said he was house-sitting for a friend-of-a-friend who’d gone abroad. Said he liked the solitude.
I told him nothing, or nothing that was true.
My phone pinged five or six times as we got back into signal range.
He smoothed the orange cloth where it lay across his knee.
The thing I found most remarkable about my passenger wasn’t that he was hitching a lift in the middle of nowhere. Not that his head was shaved, nor that he was dressed as a Buddhist monk. Not the heft of him nor the gentle gratitude. It was the willingness to go somewhere, anywhere, buy a few simple groceries, dispose of his rubbish, and then walk back. From that crossroads, the nearest shop must be at least five miles in one direction, eight in the other. A little less as the crow flies. But to have a preference, he said – wanting one direction or the other – would be to suffer in this life.
My phone pinged again as I came to a stop.
He thanked me and got out, leaving – by agreement – a small bag of washed yoghurt pots and a quantity of orange peel in the footwell of my car.
Philip Hoare’s comment:
I really like the inconsequentiality of this piece of the writing, the randomness of the situation, perfectly encapsulated in poetic precision. The fact that almost nothing happens. That it is told in one breath – and it stays with you…
I feel wholly drawn into this world. I feel I am in this landscape, with those two people, on an encounter which is sort of inconsequential, but which reflects on the human and the natural world.
We meet there. There is an exchange. We feel the weight of these lives, and in just a snatched moment, in time and place, there’s a spark of optimism. That a resolution is possible, for all of us. The language is precision, unstrained; the imagery is subtle and precise.
Most of all, I feel I would like to hear more from this writer, and their world.
Philip Hoare Competition 