by Mark Sheerin
He was on the road when they picked him up and it was night. There he was, large as life, in outsize Day-Glo, a coat like they used working on the motorways, except he worked for a fashion magazine.
The coat was bought second-hand.
“Can I ask you where you’re going?”
The police had the car window down. From all the vehicular markings and the lights he could tell this was a serious business..
“To the station,” he said.
He did not say he was leaving the country. That was surely understood.
“At this time?”
There was no mirth in the car, no flexibility, no grounds for argument.
“I was heading down there on the off-chance.”
“You’ve missed the last train now.”
The police said so with a kind of omniscient clarity.
“There’s always tomorrow’s first train.”
Said with a shrug, but they did not take kindly to him waiting for dawn, even though there had been a lot of that recently, a lot of nights spent vigilant against an enemy. It got so he was happy only on the move, remaining one step ahead of police, doctors, parents, special agents, white slave traders. Which is where this coat might really have helped, a high-visibility anti-kidnap strategy, in theory if not in fact.
“Where d’you live?”
He was not in the habit of fighting or lying. His strain of delinquency wasn’t up to it.
“You’d better get in, son.”
Son, he thought, Sonny Jim, Sunbeam. So let the re-oedipalisation process begin, he thought, then opened the passenger door like a lamb. The rear seat smelled of leather and he thought once again of the minotaur and his labyrinth and the darkness with which he was locked in combat. The radio crackled as the police upfront called in their report.
“Caucasian male. Aged around 20”
By god though, he was alive. While parents and peers slept he was under arrest, the subject of a radio report.
“Inappropriately dressed,” came the voice.
And he could never understand that final comment. There he was, on his way to Europe, where the jacket would make him famous. Tell me officer, he wanted to say, is that really such a crime?
Mark Sheerin is a journalist from Brighton, UK. He covers art for, among others, Culture24, Hyperallergic and his own blog criticismism. His fiction has appeared in Litro, Metazen and Pages Of magazine. He also runs a spoken word event in local gallery CAC.