I know where Teddy gets it from now!
‘Oh great!’ says Dad. A car is coming from the other direction and it stops right in front of us. It’s a big black Range Rover carrying a big man in red braces. Dad has to drive the car on to the grass by a gate to let the bigger guy in the bigger car pass, and it doesn’t make him happy.
‘You don’t want to head for the A30!’ shouts the man from his window as he squeezes past.
I notice Teddy trying to hide his face in the corner of his child seat. He can be quite shy around strangers, whereas I find them interesting.
‘Oh yeah?’ says Dad. ‘What’s wrong with the A30?’
Dad always pretends he knows more about roads when he talks with other men.
‘Tailbacks, mate. Both sides. Absolute ’mare.’
‘Your screens working, mate?’ says Dad, making his voice weirdly low, and the other man shakes his head.
‘Stay at home if I were you, mate,’ he goes. ‘Turn the telly on and wait for it to come back.’
And then he roars off, way too quickly, scaring all the cows in the field next to us.
‘Tsk. “Turn the telly on”,’ says Dad. ‘Then what? Stare at nothing?’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ says Mum, and Dad tries, but something’s wrong.
The problem with driving on to the grass at the side of the road is that, with all the rain, the ground is now really, really soft.
The tyres on both sides have squidged into the mud, and the car won’t go forward.
‘Brilliant!’ says Dad, unbuckling his seatbelt and opening the door, but I can tell he actually means the opposite. ‘I’ll have to push!’
Mum slides across to the driver’s side and already this is exciting because Mum is a very different driver to Dad. She gets really aggressive and screams at people, which is why it’s best if Dad drives. I have learned six of the seven bad words I know from driving to the shops with Mum.
She starts to rev the engine and Dad yells at her not to. He says she’s only to step on the accelerator thing very gently when he starts to push. On NO ACCOUNT is she to do ANYTHING ELSE. She should NOT do it AGGRESSIVELY. She should do it the way a KITTEN would.
Mum rolls her eyes and Dad gets behind the car and tells her to, ‘RELEASE THE HANDBRAKE!’
Mum does that and then IMMEDIATELY jams her foot down, which even I know was NOT what he said to do.
The back of the car slides about as the wheels spin madly and the whole thing revs like crazy.
From my seat I get a perfect view as Dad gets…
COVERED!
IN!
MUD!
When we look at him from the back window, I have to honestly say it looks like someone’s made a bad statue of him out of chocolate.
Me and Mum and Teddy stay completely quiet.
I watch Dad slowly squelch to the side of the car.
He inspects the wheels.
He opens the front door and Mum quietly slides back into her seat.
We all look at him because he CAN’T be about to sit back down, can he?
But he sits down in his seat with a SQUISH, repositions the mirror, and says, ‘On we go.’
About one minute after Dad sat back down in the car, we start to realize that he didn’t just get covered in mud.
We all have our hands over our mouths and noses because Dad stinks exactly like what comes out of cows.
It smells like a farm in here.
But we can all tell that it wouldn’t be a good idea for anyone to point this out to Dad, who seems to be ignoring the smell.
‘We could always stop at a hotel on the way,’ says Mum, casually. ‘Maybe have a shower, you know.’
‘We are going straight to Grandma’s,’ says Dad. ‘We are not stopping. Not for anything.’
Mum gives us a Look, then quietly lowers her window to let some air in.
Then she lowers my window and Teddy’s too, and winks at us.
Dad is going pretty fast now, compared to how he usually drives. The wind is whipping around, taking the smell with it, thank goodness.
But then the wind takes something else from the car… I look at Mum with horror as the small piece of paper with the directions on it suddenly flies out of her hand and is sucked out of the window.
She turns round and for a moment we just stare at each other with big wide eyes. I don’t know whether to tell Dad.
She shakes her head at me and I shake my head at her.
But then we realize how annoyed he’ll be if we don’t know where we’re going so we both suddenly scream, ‘STOOOOOP THE CAAAAR!’
Since Dad hit the hedge, we can’t turn the horn off. It keeps beeping on its own every few seconds, like an alarm.
Mum inspects the damage. The whole bonnet is hidden by leaves.
Dad is halfway down the road, looking in puddles. He has remained remarkably calm. Like, if he doesn’t admit out loud that this happened, it hasn’t happened.
‘Was it about here?’ he shouts to us.
‘Further!’ I yell back.
‘Here?’ he yells, a moment later.
I have no idea. I mean, it could be anywhere. It was a small piece of paper, and this is… well, it’s the entire countryside!
Up ahead, a tractor is coming very fast down the road, bouncing along with a farmer on top.
‘Ah!’ shouts Dad. ‘I’ll ask the farmer!’
What’s he going to ask him? ‘Have you seen a minuscule scrap of paper with mad numbers on it?’
Dad stands to one side and raises his arm to stop the tractor.
‘Excuse me!’ shouts Dad, with a big friendly smile.
But the farmer’s wearing ear defenders
