This is the short story I wrote for the Australian Writers’ Centre’s Furious Fiction contest in August. As always, I like to post these up here to give them some form of existence.
I hadn’t written fiction in a little while, due a combination of focussing on other writing projects and Melbourne lockdown malaise. The last couple of stories I wrote ended up being a bit of a chore, and inevitably, I wasn’t happy with them. But I’m very happy with this one. It was fun to write and it fell into place easily. And that’s the feeling I’m chasing when I write anything.
The rules:
- Your story’s first sentence must contain only four words.
- Your story must include something being shared.
- Your story must include the words PAINT, SHIFT, WAVE and TOAST.
You pull up outside. The car is a real rust bucket.
Dented rear end, flaking paint,
broken CD player. But it’s nondescript,
has four wheels and a full petrol tank. It will do a job. It’s 8pm. The last shift ended two hours ago and the place
will be empty.
Three people exit the backseat and approach the
building. They wear boiler suits and woollen balaclavas. It’s thirty degrees
and ninety percent humidity. The car smells like a locker room. The two in
front crowd around the third as he futzes with the lock. If the alarm gets tripped you have ten minutes, easy, until the
cops arrive. Private security is another matter. They’ll be here in three, but
rent-a-cops don’t have the resources. Any half competent driver can evade them.
The head figure nods at you before they move inside. You wave back in acknowledgement. You’re all on the clock now.
Getaway driving isn’t easy. The movies glamourise the
profession. Every hot shot with a fast car and a faster attitude thinks he can
do it. Walking around with a hammer in his back pocket and toothpick poking out
the corner of his mouth, like a right dickhead. Or blasting a mix tape so loud
he doesn’t even hear the cops until he’s got a boot on the back of his neck and
a face full of asphalt.
There’s a skill set - inherent to doing it well - that
involves much more than driving. You need patience, observational skill and good
planning. There’s a lot of spontaneous decision making, but also a lot of
sitting around. A lot of musty, hot, stinky cars. A lot of close environments,
shared with the sort of terminal loser who thinks the world owes him. Every one of ‘em a degenerate gambler, betting
everything on their own deluded ego. No
sense to get out while they’re ahead, so the longer they keep coming back for
more, the smaller their options get. Every one of ‘em headed for a box in the
ground or a prison cell.
The other thing the movies always get wrong is the
dramatic escape. People getting shot on their way out, cops lying in wait, and
so forth. But if events go off book, the drama happens inside. Always. You hear
a dull thud. Might be a gunshot. Might be a cabinet tipping over. All you know
is, they’ve been inside nine minutes and thirty seconds, which means they’re toast.
So you drive to a deserted car park underneath the
river bridge and set fire to the rust bucket. You walk half an hour to a train
station on a different line and go home. You broke your only rule. You agreed
to a share this time. Always get paid
up front because, as the 11 o’clock news informs you, your share is sitting in
that building in a pool of blood, among the bullet ridden remains of three
gamblers who forgot to check for a security guard.
