I waved across the college car park as my classmates got into their cars and drove away. A few offered me a lift, but I had already called a taxi. It was just after nine. The sun had been down for four hours already and a light rain was starting to harden into fine snow.
When the taxi arrived, I climbed in, told the driver the name of my street and he pulled away from the college.
‘Teacher or student?’ he said.
‘Student.’
‘What are you studying?’
The driver sat low in his seat. There was a lethargic quality to the way he turned the wheel, the way he changed gear. Hanging from his rear-view mirror was a pine tree air freshener that smelt of absolutely nothing.
‘Counselling,’ I said.
I had started taking evening classes about two months before. During the day I worked in a laboratory, testing samples of water, working out whether there was lead or arsenic or nitrates in them, but recently I had stopped enjoying it. I started thinking how good it would be to reorient my life before the foundations dug in too deeply. I liked the idea of counselling, helping people with their problems fifty minutes at a time.
‘I’ve got some thoughts about that,’ the driver said. ‘Like potholes.’
‘Potholes?’
‘The roads around here are so bad you could blow a tyre. One of my friends blew a tyre the other day. When you’re a councillor, you have to do something about it.’
The snow thickened and the driver put his wipers on with a lazy flick of one finger. I decided not to correct him.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘when I’m a councillor.’
‘So why do you want work for the council?’
‘I’m just tired of some of the people I work with now.’
I was more than tired of them. They thought very highly of themselves and had a habit of making everyone else feel worthless. They liked to make fun of Rodger in particular. Rodger was in his fifties, single, wore cheap shirts and heavy cardigans. He was a quiet, awkward sort of man. They used to call him ‘Rodg’ even though it was obvious he didn’t like it. Rodger had a PhD in chemistry, was a member of the royal society, and had a drinking problem. He often came in smelling of last nights alcohol and looking like he had only slept a few hours. They gave him a hard time about it, making unsubtle remarks and actively trying to get him fired. It might have been unsafe, I suppose, if he were drunk in the lab, but they didn’t have to be so awful about it.
One Friday afternoon, Rodger went into the storeroom, opened the lockable cabinet where we kept the barbiturates and the poisons, removed a small tub of potassium cyanide, and took it home with him. It was Monday afternoon before anyone noticed he wasn’t around.
‘You should be a taxi driver, you don’t have time to get tired of anyone,’ the driver said, then he swerved around a pothole so deep I couldn’t see the bottom of it.
‘See what I mean?’ he said, gesturing.
‘I do.’
The counselling classes felt like a good step away but now I wasn’t so sure. Counselling sounds simple, listen without telling people what you think or what to do, until you realise that is about ninety percent of what we say to each other. We spend half of each class practicing that one thing in small groups. The instructor told us to be careful about what we choose to talk about during the classes, making sure not to bring anything too heavy. I have tried talking about the people I work with, how small they make me feel, but for my classmates this hasn’t been good enough. They want something weightier.
‘What if instead of that you were having an affair with one of these other chemists?’ Sandra, one of my discussion group, had said that night, as though this were an improv acting class. ‘You’re having an affair and maybe her husband has found out, and that’s why you’re in counselling?’
‘But that’s not true,’ I had said.
‘It is more interesting though,’ Sandra said, and the other two members of the group agreed.
I turned to look out of the taxi’s window. Outside an off-licence two men were trying to start a fight with each other but neither seemed willing to throw the first punch. A woman waited for them to finish, tired of it all.
I had refused to pretend to be having an affair and Sandra, a little exasperated with me, tried to come up with other ideas. ‘I don’t know,’ she had said, ‘maybe someone close to you has died or something?’
The day that Rodger had taken the small pot of potassium cyanide, he had also taken two chemical hazard warning signs. Skull and crossbones that might have looked like a Halloween novelty if they hadn’t been set over a serious yellow and black triangle, the words Danger Toxic Hazard below in a no-nonsense typeface. He had attached one of them to his front door, and one to his back door. He hadn’t wanted anyone else to get hurt.
I decided I preferred the affair and spent twenty minutes detailing my fictitious illicit romance, and even though I felt thoroughly ignored, Sandra did a good job of appearing to listen to what I was saying.
The taxi driver pulled up outside my house. I gave him a five pound note and told him to keep the change, even though the fare was only four-sixty.
‘Sorry it isn’t more,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
I got out of the car. The snow had condensed back into cold rain. The driver leaned across the passenger seat and looked up at me.
‘Just do something about those potholes,’ he said.
I told him I’d see what I could do.
