Stop

I have a recurring dream.  I am driving my truck looking for somewhere to rest and replenish, but every time I find a cafe it`s full of cars and there`s no room for me. I keep going but everywhere I try it`s the same. 

The car people look happy, smiling with each other, gathered around little tables behind steamed up windows, stuffing their faces with thick, creamy buns or gorging on sausages and bacon with fat dripping down their chins.  They`re all ravenous and don`t seem to notice my truck as I slow down, desperate for rest.  Somehow all the places   have shops and malls and suddenly all the people are laughing: they have everything they`ll ever need. I start to panic: I am being forced to drive on and on, to keep going forever and ever.  I know I`ll never keep it up; and there are rules – I must stop.

I come across an old, run down restaurant on a deserted road.  I stop in the empty car park and walk into the building.  There`s a man sitting at a table with his head in his hands, all around everything is covered in dust and cobwebs. I walk back out to the car park, but now it`s no longer there and the whole area is newly built houses. People are gathered around my truck, waving their arms about.

I drive on and a lay-by appears. I pass through it slowly but see blood and broken glass, and eyes in the bushes.  I accelerate hard to get away.  I come across a high fence protecting an enormous concrete slab. German shepherd dogs line its perimeter, all evenly spaced and identical in every detail.  As I approach they stand as one and then stare as I move on by.

Then I`m in a desert.  It`s hot but I`m not uncomfortable.  I feel safe in the thought that nothing is out there for miles and miles; it`s just me and my Volvo, doing our work.  But then a small group appear in the sand ahead - a rag-tag bunch of women and children walking with a drooping donkey that has great patches of hair missing from its neck and raw fleshy sores down its sides.  They all look starved with bulging eyes and bones. I stop, and invigorated by our presence, they rush round to the back of the Volvo, to the trailer.  But we`re loaded with a dozer and they slump with disappointment.

I climb down from my cab and walk over to the woman standing nearest me.  Her back is turned as if she doesn`t know I`m there, but then she spins round and seeing me for the first time, grasps my wrists with long skinny claws. She looks up and towering above her, I see my nourished, fresh face in her dark eyes; my reflected images surrounded by her wrinkled, dying skin.  “The trucks”, she says, “they`ve all gone”.