I blink hard, like a camera shutter.
Also, while I’m on the subject, there’s like zero videos of my parents as kids. It’s like they didn’t start to exist until they were about twenty. That’s mad, right? All I have to do is eat a cupcake or kick a ball and it’s like my parents think they’re a TV news crew. Every single Christmas concert at school I’ve ever done is recorded for the full two hours in high resolution, which is great, but also like the last thing anyone wants to watch ever again in their lives. But, if a thing isn’t recorded, how do you know it even took place? I mean, if you can’t remember watching it through a screen, did it ever happen? I think that’s what I took for granted just now, until I blinked at my mum, and made a memory.
It’s hard to imagine my dad as a kid. It’s hard to imagine him not worried, or not in a tie, or not sitting at a desk, staring.
‘Oh, wait!’ says Trucker Terry, suddenly, and then he turns the map on to its side and both him and Dad, ‘Ohhhhh!’ and seem to understand it better now.
‘There!’ says Mum, wiping the sweat off her forehead. ‘All done. So where are you headed, Terry?’
‘Oh,’ says Terry. ‘Well, staying local. Avoiding London and the cities because of all the…’
He looks at me and Teddy.
‘Because of all the obvious reasons,’ he says. ‘You know, they’re saying it’s the tech firms what done this. This screens business.’
‘The tech firms?’ says Dad.
‘Well, they make so many screens, don’t they?’ says Terry. ‘Rumour is they wanted all our screens to break so they could make loads of new ones for everyone to buy. Anyway, I was supposed to be volunteering, delivering a whole load of fruit and veg to the charities and foodbanks and so on. But the supermarkets got their orders all wrong and then there was the panic buying, so in the end there was nothing to pick up or deliver.’
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘So some people can’t get food?’
‘It’s the ones without much money,’ says Terry. ‘People got in a panic and cleared the shelves. Especially in the little villages. Anyone who’s selling any food is realizing they can sell it for more money! Everyone turns into pirates in a crisis, don’t they?’
‘My daddy made us leave a restaurant without paying,’ says Teddy.
‘But you can’t get any food to people?’ I say, and Terry says no. He says normally he’d just go home and watch TV or something, but he can’t even do that.
Mum and Dad start to talk to Terry about how awful it is that we live in a world that could even need foodbanks and that no one should have to rely on one, but I don’t feel like just talking about it is doing anything so I decide to speak up with an idea.
‘Have you heard of Angry Woods Farm?’ I say.
‘No,’ says Terry.
So I take the map and show him where our route began.
‘It’s there,’ I say. ‘Uncle Tony’s got loads of food but he needs help picking it. And he will definitely want it to go to the right places. You could deliver some! But I guess your phone doesn’t work so you can’t call anyone to help?’
We wave Terry off after about half an hour.
We’d all sat in the cabin of his truck as he put the word out. Terry still had CB radio. It’s sort of the same as a really powerful walkie-talkie. Apparently, Dad had always wanted one as a kid. Terry already had it tuned into Channel 19, he said, so all he had to do was press a button and any other truckers listening could join the conversation. They were all saying things like ‘10-4, understood’ and ‘10–22 Angry Woods Farm’ and so on. Terry said that since the screens went down, lots of minicab drivers and farmers and people on Harley-Davidson motorbikes had also started to use Channel 19. He said he would try and get as many as possible to come along and help get food from Uncle Tony and then make sure it got where it needed to go.
So we stand there as Terry slowly reverses his massive lorry back down the road on his way to Angry Woods Farm, and we jump back in the car. None of us knows what time it is, but from my tummy I guess I’d say it feels about three o’clock.
Wait. Maybe ten past.
I now realize just how scratched, dented and dirty our car really is. And, while Mum did a good job with the wheel, it’s still bumping around and rattling. We’re all thinking about what Terry said about food.
‘Do you think it’ll work?’ says Mum, finding an ancient pack of Ritz crackers in the glove compartment and throwing it towards me and Teddy. We rip it open and start devouring them like cracker-piranhas. Dad sighs and shrugs his shoulders.
‘I mean, it’s a long shot,’ he says. ‘But better than doing nothing.’
I don’t get why they think it’s a long shot. We hatched a plan, we did the plan, now we will see the plan work. That’s my take on it anyway. I’m the sort of person who thinks there’s no point in having a plan if the plan doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean there won’t be surprises. I mean, take this trip, for example. The plan was to drive to Grandma’s. And yes, there have been surprises. For example, Dad still smells and this morning he was chased by a pig. But we are still doing the plan.
