Chase the Morning

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I braked hard and pulled up; but the car in front of me shot through the lights just as they changed. I sat cursing myself as I watched those tail-lights dwindle away into the gathering gloom, and the other endless lanes of traffic come swarming out after them. The idiot in the flash German sport behind me beeped his horn, but I was too irritated with myself to pay any attention to him. There had been time, the half-second or so before the other lights changed; I could have put my foot flat down and raced through. I’d been close enough to the lights to get away with it, but this was a difficult, twisty junction, with lousy visibility on all four sides. All it would need was somebody else as impatient as me … Damn it to hell, I’d done the safe thing! But then that was me all over, wasn’t it? Safe driver; safe car; safe job; safe life …

Then why was I so furious? At work it hadn’t been the sort of day that leaves you snarling; it rarely was. Momentarily, idiotically, I found myself wishing it had been, that I’d had something to snarl at, to tussle with, to put a sharper flavour into the day. I raised my eyes to the skies, and at once forgot all my irritation. The sun had already left the ground in gloom, but it was lighting up a whole new landscape among the lowering clouds, one of those rare fantastic sunset coasts of rolling hills, deep bays, stretches of tidal sands, endless archipelagoes of islands in a calm estuary of molten gold. This one was made even more convincing by the shallow slope of the road; I might have been looking down from some steeper hill onto the real estuary. Except that that was far less picturesque, a flat, grim industrial riverside first laid waste when ships and shipbuilding boomed, then stricken a second time when they collapsed.

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