Riding with the Wind

1. Reckless Fruit


They say fruit is good for you. Sitting in the police station on an uncomfortable plastic chair Phineas was prepared to call that entire concept into question. It certainly hadn’t proven good for him, nor had it proven good for the other person involved in the incident leading him to be sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in the police station. He gazed around the grim interior of the interview room, his guts churning with sick nerves.

He wouldn’t have minded so much, but the fruit in question, an orange, wasn’t even his. Person or persons unknown had left it on the driver’s seat of the car he had been driving. He hadn’t noticed it when he got into the car. He was in too much of a state. Its presence had dawned on him gradually; a growing discomfort in the region of his lower back as the journey progressed. On discovering the source of his coccyx pain his simmering temper had finally boiled over.

Phin groaned, leaning forwards over the desk, pressing trembling hands to his face. On reflection it would have been healthier and wiser to eat the bloody orange rather than doing what he did with it. Cold sweat trickled down his back as the incident replayed in his mind. “Fucking idiot,” he cursed himself, “you fucking, fucking idiot.” He sat up straight, folding his arms, taking deep breaths in an effort to ward off nausea.

Phin ought not to have been driving at all and he knew it. He was in no fit state. Long weeks of emotional stress and a night of dossing down on someone’s grubby bedsit floor had taken a toll. He was a strung out wreck with the reflexes of a blamange, not fit to be riding a pushbike, let alone to be behind the wheel of a potentially lethal weapon, a stolen weapon at that. As well as not owning the orange he didn’t own the car it came partnered with either.

Oh Dear God in Heaven! Phin leaned forward yet again covering his face with his hands, his hair flopping forwards. What had he done, what had he done? Shame replaced the blood coursing through his veins. His heart pounded echoing a throbbing refrain in his skull. This was an all time low, even for him. He wasn’t a kid anymore for Christ’s sake. He was supposed to know better, he was supposed to be able to control himself.

Andy Fucking Blakelock! The name flashed into Phin’s mind. All this was his fault, the treacherous bastard. After waking up late and shaking off the remnants of a heavy night on the booze Phin discovered he’d been robbed. His so called friend had pissed off taking Phin’s mobile phone, his wallet and credit cards, and worse of all worsts, his beautiful state of the art, ransomed his soul to pay for it, motorbike. The scumbag also forgot to mention the rent on his grotty little bedsit was slightly overdue, by some six months, and the landlord was due to call and collect. In lieu of the preferred hard cash he was prepared to take payment in blood, apparently regardless of whether or not it belonged to Andy.

Phin had opted to take his chances on the rusted life-endangering fire escape rather than try and reason with the terrifying landlord and his Neanderthal mates. He was streetwise enough to know that men who were using homemade weapons to break down a door were hardly likely to be in the mood for calm discussion. They wanted money or blood. Phin didn’t have money, but he had plenty of blood and he didn’t fancy losing a few pints of it. He made a hasty exit, finding himself on the street with nothing but a headache to call his own. He hadn’t even had time to shove his feet into trainers, another reason why driving was inadvisable, but by then his common sense had gone on a long holiday abroad, leaving no contacting address.

The car was there in front of him and next thing he knew he was inside of it reverting to a trick he hadn’t performed in some considerable time. Like riding a bike hotwiring a car is something that once learned is never forgotten, once a twocker always a twocker. Phin performed the deed with frightening ease and perhaps even more frightening he got a kick out of doing it. Despite the circumstances he had experienced a full-scale adrenaline fix, even the memory of it brought a flicker of renewed excitement, a tightening in his balls. Phin guiltily chewed his lip. It just went to prove that while you could learn to moderate a pattern of behaviour, you could never completely kill the impulses that drove you to perform it in the first place. As the old adage said, leopards can’t change their spots. At best they can camouflage them under heavy makeup, but in the end nature will out.

Phin’s main plan had been to drive away from Ugg and friends, other than that he had no real idea of destination. Some vague notion of finding Andy was flitting through the reactive grey matter posing as his brain, but where it might be he had no real clue. Where he should have gone was home, to Adam. It was the adult thing to do.

However, being an adult doesn’t necessarily mean you make the right choices in every given situation. Making choices suggests being involved in some sort of rational cognitive process and from the moment Phin had left Adam the day before, rational thought was about as far from his brain as the moon from earth. He was in the grip of a chain reaction situation, driven not by reasoned thought, but by pure emotion. He wasn’t thinking in any sense of the word. He was in crisis and acting on impulse.