by Steve Rudd

Susie couldn’t believe her eyes: another Amazon van—the second in two minutes—running a red where Cottingham Road and Newland Avenue intersected. Pre-Covid, she’d walked along Newland every day, savouring the aromas of grilled octopus and pretzels wafting from The Aegean and Karpaty Bakery, striding into Planet Coffee at 9 a.m. for the best window seat. Pacing past the coffee shop, she looked the other way, fingering the crucifix earring swaying beneath her right lobe. Her dad used to shout ‘Dinosaur!’ while pointing to the far side of the road whenever they sped past a McDonald’s en route to footie—anything to save a few quid on Happy Meals and their gifts.

‘Plastic tat,’ he’d say. ‘And don’t get me started on the toys.’ He’d never been much of a talker, so if he spoke, people listened, especially when he spouted stuff like ‘Life stampedes on’, and ‘If you can be yourself, it’s easier to be by yourself.’

The smell of Dirty Bird’s fried chicken turned Susie’s stomach. Creme egg ads covered Tesco’s boarded-up windows, reminding her that her course would soon be over: only four weeks of seminars remained on her English MA. She’d stopped reading emails from her supervisor. Most of Susie’s peers were already plunging into 10,000-word dissertations, some drafting commentaries, others proofreading bibliographies. She’d not even decided on a subject. Where to begin? How? With a single word.

Susie had left her two housemates squashing clothes into wheelie cases for the long weekend. She’d told her mum that she couldn’t even spare the Sunday, the day her sister Chelsea’s kids would be tearing round their mum’s bungalow on Kingswood, ransacking raised planters for mini eggs, foraging beneath grounded white magnolia leaves that resembled giant chocolate shavings.

Susie’s mind lay three-thousand miles away, over the Atlantic. On the American. The one she’d kissed on Atik’s sticky dancefloor beneath fake mistletoe; the one she’d slipped two fingers inside, then two more; the one who’d licked her like a Calippo as exploding silver-tailed Banshees silhouetted their bodies against Susie’s bedroom wall. The American who’d never been seen again, despite needing another 120 credits to complete her linguistics MA. Christ. Christa. All remained quiet on the Facebook front. Double-ticked WhatsApp messages still hadn’t turned blue.

    Susie stomped past Bargain Booze and Downtown Doughnuts, the sky a layer cake of upwardly darkening clouds. Avoiding a scabby-faced man begging for money, she stepped into the road, forcing a 105 driver to screech to a stop. Susie could do without the guilt of refusing change.

    Scraping open Oxfam’s door, she recognised the skinny female cashier. An ex-tutor? Another do-gooder. Susie ground her teeth, thinking of Chelsea and her two first-class Oxford degrees, her financial analyst hubby, her Law career in London—‘Chelsea by name, Chelsea by address!’—and now her latest compact bump growing beneath JoJo Maman Bébé maternity wear. Box-ticking bitch. She could make picking up dog shit look sexy!

Chelsea had experienced night terrors well into her teens. Now it was Susie’s turn. She rarely slept for more than three hours straight. Two nights back, exhausted, she’d shoved her tea-stained Be Yourself mug in the washing machine, then tried to hang her cardigan in the fridge. She dreaded applying mascara in the mirror now bloodshot eyes glared back.

Susie usually avoided charity shops. At thirteen, a friend of hers had refused to accompany her into Scope when Susie spotted a family of Ty Beanie Babies in the window. But loans only stretched so far. January’s payment had been ravaged by an E.ON bill. (She’d not told her mum about the £99 Taylor Swift concert ticket.) OD’ing on her overdraft, she’d resorted to nicking bog rolls from library toilets.

Stopping at Oxfam’s back wall, Susie noticed a multimedia canvas depicting long-legged mustangs charging through a valley, mountain lion in pursuit. Shelved black-spined Classics sat tight at head-height. Scouring shop bookshelves felt akin to visiting museums for her, generating the same thrill, not knowing what might be discovered. But Austen, the Brontes, Dickens? She couldn’t imagine anything worse than applying analytical models to Persuasion, Wuthering Heights, or Oliver Twist. She couldn’t relate to the authors, or their characters. Though her tutors raved about such stories’ timeless, universal themes, Susie had never experienced love like Anne Elliot (not really), loss like Catherine Earnshaw (goldfishes didn’t count), or poverty like Twist’s Nancy. Spotting Carrie beside The Water-Babies, Susie bristled. Reshelving Stephen King in Horror, she baulked at the number of Dean Koontz novels. To her, Koontz personified ‘prolific’—helped, no doubt, because he’d never had kids. Kids. Headshaking away an image of her mum—‘Granny Gabby’ to Chelsea’s kids, ‘Gobby Gabby’ to Cross Keys regulars—Susie noticed Roddy Doyle’s Smile suffocated by two C. J. Sansom tomes. If only she possessed the patience to become a librarian.

Her thoughts U-turned to university, to the night she’d heard poetry being recited behind a closed door. The poshly spoken line, ‘Loneliness clarifies… silence stands’, had prompted Susie to knock. When no one answered, she’d tried the handle. Locked. Curious, she’d enquired at Reception, where the admin assistant frowned. ‘That room hasn’t been used for decades. It used to be Philip Larkin’s office.’

Pivoting, Susie found herself in an alcove of travel books. She was straight into America, scanning DK state guides. Her dad had crisscrossed the US and Canada before she’d been born. She remembered him raving about New York, Vegas and San Francisco one night while they watched Brokeback Mountain as a family. One minute, he was talking about the Golden Gate Bridge, the next Susie’s mum was storming out as the two male characters on screen started kissing. Cowboys! Susie had looked at her dad, surprised to see his blue eyes welling.

Where had Christa said she lived? Shutting her eyes, Susie massaged her temples, something she’d seen Derren Brown do on TV. Susie suddenly visualised mountains. Montana! Then a leafy town, encircled by peaks, buzzing with smiling, textbook-hugging twenty-somethings. Missoula!

Sensing someone behind her, Susie turned.

A bearded guy with spiky black hair loomed. ‘Planning a trip?’

‘No,’ she said, stumbling over a trailing extension lead.

‘You were saying.’ The guy caught Susie, set her straight, then relayed a battered book. On the Road. ‘Should be in Classics.’

‘Er…’

‘No. Ou,’ he said. ‘Ker-ou-ac. Though Jack used a pseudonym. Sal Paradise. It’s a novel about ‘finding’ himself, based on his drink and drug-fuelled exploits across the US with best mate Cassady, A.K.A. Moriarty. I can quote Kerouac all day. My favourite: “My story is endless”. Like it or not, life stampedes on.’

Susie still didn’t know what to say. The cover looked familiar, its photo showing shiny cars on a near-deserted highway, mountains in the distance.

Perhaps taking her for a deaf-mute, the guy shrugged and walked away.

Though in no way attracted to him, Susie dashed out of Oxfam ten seconds later, scanning up and down Newland Avenue for his spiky black hair. Unpaid-for book in hand, she started marching back towards Cottingham Road, head held high, pretending to text when reapproached by the scabby-faced man, still begging for change.

*

Read On the Road on flight, cover to cover. Eight hours’ escapism. If I follow in Kerouac’s footsteps, what’ll that make me? Could it break me? Whatever. So glad to be out of Hull, away from fam, but missing Curtis. Shuttle bus dropped me outside Grand Central. Would have taken subway if cheaper, but two-grand life savings must last. Once they’re gone, I’m done. Walked to hostel. Three miles… up Fifth Ave, through Columbus Circle, past Central Park. Feet blistered to fuck ’cause of tonne-weight backpack. Still forgot toothbrush! Will head west at weekend. Might hitchhike, but will prob ride Greyhound.

*

Susie’s flatmates, Adam and Veejay, had become an item. Though they rented separate rooms in their shared terraced house on Cranbrook, Adam spent all his time in Veejay’s permanently blacked-out bedroom.

Unable to focus on assignments for groans perpetually penetrating her damp-stained walls, Susie had found herself in the university library more and more, on the observation deck. She’d boycotted Floor 6, with its wealth of English Lit books: she hated bumping into peers from modules past, gloating about exemplary firsts, well-paid part-time jobs, approved PhD applications.

The top floor view counted for something. It made her feel like she could transcend her stresses… so long as her gaze didn’t settle on MKM Stadium, where she and Christa had watched City’s preseason friendlies—best buds with bean burgers and Bavarian beer. Or the twin-towered Humber Bridge, which they’d run over, hand in hand, at the end of Hull 10K. Hull may have been voted ‘UK’s Crappest City’ in 2003, but it shocked Susie how green it appeared from above. She promised to pay more attention to the parade of budding birches between campus and home, the greening oaks in Pearson Park, the lone rowan flowering in their briar-strangled garden.

*

Lowell unavoidable. Kerouac’s birthplace: a small Mass. town, half-hour from Boston. Visited his grave. Toasted God with whiskey. Tombstone had neither birthdate nor deathdate. Just a quote: ‘The road is life.’ Couldn’t help but cry—first time since mam chucked me out. Now I’m here, not sure where I’m at. I like Gabriela as well as Curtis. Used to enjoy smoking with her on edge of college sports field, in verge of white lilies. She’s first person to ask about what I’m into, my ambitions, how I feel. Fucking her in woods on her back felt good… but even better when I got her on knees and closed my eyes and imagined Curt in front of me.

*

Susie carried On the Road everywhere. Shame the small print gave her an instant headache. She’d accepted that her eyesight was worsening after misreading ‘Lidl deodorant’ as ‘little dead rodent’. If not for the hand-scrawled annotations, she’d have downloaded it on Kindle. But she couldn’t part with the paperback. It reeked of Golden Virginia tobacco, her dad’s go-to. Annotations adorned most pages, the cursive so tight that Susie photographed each one on her iPhone, zooming in like someone in Forensics.

*

Can see distant Rockies from Denver guesthouse through low skylight. Nice to see mountains after never-ending plains—something real on horizon other than lonesome wind vanes. Least I don’t feel so lonesome with Austin, my own Moriarty, in bed beside me. Met him in Mile High Billiards. Still sore from last night. Didn’t think of Gabriela once.

_________

‘Wondered if you were a student here,’ a voice booms from behind, early morning sunlight streaming through angled observation deck windows.

Susie turns so quick that she knocks into his coffee, spilling some over his black jeans.

‘You owe me.’ He grins. ‘Big time.’

He looks different. Susie can’t figure out why until he scratches his bare chin.

‘Your beard!’ She can’t help but grimace.

The last time she’d seen her dad, his beard had spilt over his chest, curly and white like sheep’s wool, Covid his excuse, Covid his—

‘Made me look older,’ he says. ‘Your hair looks nice, by the way. Fringe suits you.’

Covering her reddening cheeks, Susie smiles briefly yet brightly, then looks down at On the Road, splayed open on her round table. ‘The annotations…’

‘Already in there. I found the book in Oxfam just after restrictions lifted. Reread it, then regifted it.’

‘You kinda sound American.’

‘Spenta tonne o’ time there. Greyhounded right round the lower forty-eight myself.’ His rail-straight teeth are blinding.

Susie mirrors his smile more fully. ‘Must have been hell of a trip.’

‘Yeah—helped me find myself, too. Because when you’re byyourself, you gotta be yourself.’

Susie turns to the window, something catching in her throat.

‘Y’okay?’ he asks.

She rubs her eyes. ‘Hay fever.’

*

Austin used to live on outskirts & wanted to visit old baseball teammates. All met on Fremont Street. They seemed desperate to show me sights. I just wanted to sleep. Realised I hate crowds back in NYC. The Strip could be Tokyo for busyness, the pressure it puts on ppl to stay ‘on’ 24/7 with endless bar, casino & strip club ‘Happy Hours’. By time we reached Hoover Dam, I wanted to jump off. Austin accused me of embarrassing him. I shrugged, pissing him off further. Didn’t talk on hour-drive back. He later dragged me aside as I watched Fountains of Bellagio. Proposition time: he’d forgive me if I joined him in bed with friends. Felt used—and split. Stopped at internet cafe. Three emails from Gabriela. First said she understood experimentation was natural. Second begged me to come home. Last said she was late.

*

That afternoon, Susie goes to meet her dissertation supervisor—only the name on the door doesn’t tally with the emailed door number. Spotting a bald, bowlegged lecturer exiting the adjacent office, Susie asks after Dr Whittaker.

‘Left last Friday. No notice. Husband passed the week before. Dr Paradise is her replacement.’

Susie knocks. A deep male voice tells her to enter.

Inside, a man with spiky black hair swivels to face her.

‘Paradise?’ Susie splutters. ‘Talk about creative license.’

‘Let’s talk about your dissertation first.’

*

Made it to west coast! Renting apartment on Haight: Kerouac’s old writing-boozing-screwing ground. Doubt it’s changed much since 1950s. Tenements more soot-stained brick than gleaming glass. I walk across Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito every day, past hill covered in white lilies. Ground-pounding best way to deal with depression accept I like men and women. No shame, no gain. Life stampedes on. Gabriela’s had ultrasound: a girl! Don’t want daughter to have no dad, not know who she is, where she came from. Gabby’s a good woman. Honest. Reckon she’ll be a good mum. One way to find out.

Steve Rudd Biography

Steve hails from East Yorkshire in the UK. He writes short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He had a travel book called Pulse published by Valley Press in 2011. He gained a distinction in his BA in English & Creative Writing at Hull University, where is currently undertaking an MA in English & Creative Writing.

annotations desire freedom Identity memory rebellion road youth