I'Ll Go Home Then, It's Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails. - (19 page)

Step 3

Roll a blob of poster-putty around the horn. I had originally written the product name Blutac® in place of poster-putty but Americans have different names for things so I changed it to Plasticine but then I wasn’t sure if that was even a real word so I wrote poster-putty instead.

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Step 3

Squeeze the blob encircled horn/whistle, with the end you blow into facing outwards, into the front grill of a car belonging to somebody that has annoyed you / likes Nickelback. 

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Step 4

Check the horn is not visible. When the driver of the vehicle reaches a speed of around fifty, air flowing into the horn opening will cause it to make the noise until the vehicle slows down.

When they get out to check where the noise is coming from, it will have stopped. 

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Ten reasons I probably shouldn’t be alive: stuffed animals

I have never really been ‘into’ fast cars. I can appreciate the  ‘design icon’ merits of the Porche 911 and the sophistication of cars like BMW and Mercedes, but I would feel like a complete prat driving one. I’m not pretending I’m a safe or patient driver, quite the opposite, I passed my driving test by bribing the test officer with a hundred dollars and the knowledge that others on the road might be as an unqualified as I am results in not respect and courtesy for other drivers, but  fear. Practically everyone I know owns a driver’s license and not one of them should realistically be allowed to operate a tap unsurpervised let alone heavy mobile machinery.  If I was rich, I would drive a tank to work. 

At the last agency I worked for, my boss Thomas drove a ridiculously small convertible sports car, called a Smart® Roadster, and I would refuse to go to with client meetings with him unless the roof was up. He told me once that girls throw their numbers into his car at traffic lights but the only time I drove with him with the top down, in minus degree weather with his scarf flapping, people at traffic lights looked down at us from their normal sized vehicles and laughed. We pulled up next to a school bus at one stage and a child wrote ‘Gay’ on a piece of paper and held it up to the window.

I have been in a total of four vehicle accidents. The first occurred when I was driving on a dirt road in the rain, lost control and hit a cow. The second involved forgetting to set the handbrake and a river. The third occurred while driving home from a friend’s house. While there for a coffee, I had attached a black rubber spider on string to the inside of his cupboard with sticky tape so that the next time he opened it to grab a coffee mug, the spider swung out at him. The reaction was more than expected as he screamed, threw himself backwards onto the floor and actually sobbed a little. Later that afternoon as I was driving home, I lowered the sun visor and the rubber spider, which my friend had placed there in what he felt was appropriate retaliation, fell forward onto my lap.

My immediate reaction was to press hard on the brake and turn the steering wheel which sent the vehicle into a spin before clipping a white Mercedes and ending up in an elderly man's front hedge.

My most recent vehicle accident occured in a hospital carpark which, if you are going to have an accident, is probably the most convenient place to have it. I was visiting my grandmother, Mavis, in the Tea Tree Gully Memorial Hospital.

Mavis had experienced a stroke several months previously which affected her brain to such an extent that her memory was completely shot and she would wake up each day thinking it was the morning before the stroke. Her husband Henry, my grandfather, had died a few months after Mavis had the stroke so every day she would ask “Where’s Henry” and have to be told again that Henry had died. She would then spend the day crying, fall asleep, wake up, and ask, “Where’s Henry?”

The only positive part about the whole thing is that I had visited Mavis the night before the stroke so every day she would tell people “David came to visit me last night, he bought me in something called an iPod and a packet of Werther's Original Caramels.” This meant no matter how often I bothered to visit her, which I admitedly rarely did as it seemed slightly pointless if she wasn’t going to remember, she thought I had just done so. If I did bother, she was pleasantly suprised that I had done so twice in a row. This made me her favourite grandson.

When I did bother to visit, I visited the hospital shop and bought her a packet of Werther's Original Caramels before going up the elevator to her floor. In addition to horrible sweets only old people like, the shop sold flowers, stuffed animals, and suprisingly good coffee.

The last time I visited Mavis, I entered the shop and noticed a stuffed toy that I thought my son would like. It was a life-size and realistic looking black dog with glass eyes. Purchasing it, along with a packet of Werther's Original Caramels, I did not want to carry the stuffed animal around, or take it to her room in case she thought it was a present for her, so I went back out to the car and sat it on the backseat before returning into the hospital and taking the elevator up to her floor.

After an hour of listening to her go on about how nice I was to visit two nights in a row and questioning why Henry would be outside gardening in the dark between gobfulls of caramel, I made my farewells.

Stepping out of the elevator on the ground floor, I decided to buy a coffee ‘to go’ from the shop for the long drive home as it was fairly late in the evening. Entering my vehicle, I placed the large triple shot latté between my legs, started the engine, placed the gear in reverse and looked in the rear-view mirror.  Forgetting that I had purchased the stuffed animal, I saw two shiny eyes staring back at me from the back seat.

I read once that the first second of how you react to a frightening situation dictates your chances of survival should a real life and death situation ever occur. The sentence made no sense to me at the time and nothing has changed. I do know, however, that if I get into a car at night, look into the rear-vision mirror, and find two shiny eyes are staring at me from the back seat, my immediate reaction is to tense up and squeeze my legs together, sending hot coffee exploding up my chest and face, while planting my foot down on the accelerator. The car hurtled backwards, over a curb, and down a steep grassy incline towards the hospital’s glass entrance doors. Luckily, an ambulance was parked in front of them.

Mavis died in her sleep that night. Photographs from the family gathering after her funeral a few days later show me wearing a neck brace and third degree burns to my neck and lower face. During her eulogy, I was described as “her favourite grandson who visited her every night while she was in the hospital and always took her in Werther's Original Caramels.”