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Great Writing - Home > Short S. > Time is Tight
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Shorts
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| Time is Tight | |
| By Loz | ||||||||||||
| 03 January 2008 | ||||||||||||
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This short piece about a road trip was inspired by one of my favourite instrumental tracks by Booker T and the MGs We rent a cherry-red Torino convertible, Shannon and I, and head for Cape Hatteras, the string of brave little islands that cock a dog-leg into the Atlantic Ocean. I drive with the top down and Shannon’s blue-black hair whips the hot summer air and tangles with her laughter. My love for her is unspoken; the words have yet to slip from my lips. Our fingers meet on the press-button of the radio. The melodic bass of Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn rises above the drone of the Ford’s engine and we share a smug smile, an in-joke which aligns her Stars and Stripes with my Union Jack. “Book a Table and the Maitre D's,” she says, impersonating my accent, her bare knees almost meeting her chin, her toes wriggling on the dashboard. We bowl across the flat land, passing billboards advertising salt water taffy, shop-fronts that could be mistaken for cinemas and leggy water towers which fool me into believing that Martians have landed beside the North Carolina highway. And the telegraph poles pace out the space between here and there, approaching and departing, bearing their parabolas of wire to somewhere beyond the horizon. When the dusty sun looks exhausted we pull up at a motel where a clutch of cabins gather themselves around a small car park. Our room is perfect; little more than a double bed. Afterwards we lie like spoons in the night and I cup her left breast in my left hand; the hard nub of her nipple against my palm. Time is Tight runs through my head on a continuous loop. We stop at a diner and my black coffee goes cold while I watch Shannon’s stack of syrup pancakes disappear, a delicately sliced wedge at a time. She feeds my hungry eyes and I know that her toes are curling with pleasure, unseen beneath the table. By mid-day there’s sand invading the edges of the grey tarmac and black-headed gulls squabble above our heads. I point across a field that is cluttered with convolvulus, towards the hump of Pasquotank Bridge and beyond to Kitty Hawk and the Outer Banks. Shannon stands on the car seat, one hand on the rim of the windscreen; with the other she shields the sun from her eyes like a salute as she seeks out the glint of the ocean. Later, climbing the black and white striped lighthouse that sits in the dunes beyond the hamlet of Whalebone, we arrive at the top, breathless. The beach below us snakes away up the coast between the green of the scrub and the foam of the breakers. The sea twinkles playfully and there’s the purifying scent of ozone on the breeze. Shannon presses herself against my back and I feel warm breath on my neck. “I love you Beth,” she whispers.And it’s now that I break my silence, here on the edge, on the cusp of everything. “I love you too.”
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