Driving from Cardiff to Swansea, Lloyd found a passenger in his car.
‘Who are you?’ he said, slowing.
‘Your inner self,’ came the reply.
The guy certainly looked like him: older, more haggard, greyer. It could be him.
‘You’re on the wrong road, Jim,’ the passenger said, ‘every day commuting a ton of miles to that vehicle licensing hole.’
‘It’s a job.’
‘So’s being a galley slave. How about jumping ship?’
Port Talbot steelworks skittered by, its Meccano limbs tangled against the grey sky as if in agony. The other Jim had vanished, gone in a spurt of yellow steelworks gas.
Work went badly. Workmates faces resembled those of ghouls. The phone calls, a hundred ways of asking the same thing about car tax, lapped in his brain with a disturbing echo. He felt outside everything.
At lunchtime on the near elliptical corridor on the third floor, he thought of its cousins on the floor below and above, then the duplicates on the first and ground floors, whorls, wheels within wheels, mazes stacked up on each other, closed circle above closed circle. Images of dizzying confusion zapped his brain.
In the canteen the other Jim stood at his side, shaking his head. ‘Twenty-four, only been here three years, and already feeling like a walnut being squeezed in a nut cracker. Forty more years, at least, of traffic jams and motorway travel. Decades of sitting on that bone hard seat, being polite to callers, when you want to scream at every one of them. Face it, you’re in jail and you loathe your existence. That university where you did your degree, where promise was richer than Bezos and Gates, seems light years away now, doesn’t it?’
‘So what do I do? Become a priest?’ he shouted angrily, at older Jim. ‘Advise me then, if you know so bloody much!’
Workmates were staring at him. He pulled out his mobile, put it to his ear, pretending he was talking to a caller.
‘They know Jim. You’re disintegrating. Your work-pals can see it.’
He put the phone away. He’d had enough of his older self’s goddam wisdom.
Throughout the afternoon in the open-plan office his other sat by his side. He was now squeezing the politeness to callers out of himself like toothpaste from an empty tube. He wanted some humanity, but it was nowhere to be found in the building.
During the long journey home, older Jim began to nag him again. He couldn’t take any more of his buzz. He was a gnat to crush in his hand. ‘So long Jim!’ he muttered, accelerating. Ahead was a footbridge over the motorway. He drove hard and fast into its supporting pillar. His head collided with the windscreen, the car collapsed at the front, his death was instant.
The traffic east hurried by, oblivious. Its drivers were focused on the evening break, before the monotony of morning when the return to work put an icepack around the warm hopes of their hearts.
