I had agreed to meet a friend at the port of Dover in order to catch a specific ferry to France. I had left late from London and the hitchhike down there was not going too smoothly, short, bum lifts meant that I was considerably behind schedule.
I was standing at a junction halfway down the M2 when a rusty, white, Vauxhall nova pulled up and switched the engine off. I wasn’t sure whether it was stopping for me, so I wandered down the hard shoulder and came up parallel to the passenger side window. As I got there, it wound down and after a swift conversation I ascertained that the two men inside were heading in the right direction. They had a strange, quiet, numb kind of presence which I found disconcerting, normally I would have waited for another lift, but I was so late I figured it would probably be fine and got my ass and backpack onto the back seat. The engine started up and we were off down the motorway.
They were silent, just the noisy worn out engine with its slipping fan-belt whirring along. I was feeling a bit awkward so I spoke.
-How’s it going? Car’s not sounding too healthy.
No response, I could just see the side of the drivers face in his rear-view mirror. His face turned slightly towards the man in the passenger seat and he cracked a quarter of a grin. Then he looked at the road again and said nothing.
-So where are you two heading eventually? Reckon this car’s gonna make it?
-We’re going to Dover.
Then nothing more.
This time the man in the passenger seat turned his face to the driver. There were no headrests on the front seats of the car and I became aware of his neck. It was red and sore, like horrific sunburn and all over were small two inch long cuts. I looked over to the driver, his neck was the same. He was wearing a t-shirt, his arms exposed, all down his arms and the backs of his hands were similar tiny cuts. The cuts were random in position but all of the same size, surrounded by sore skin.
I was starting to find these two men slightly disturbing. The passenger then spoke without looking round.
-So do you have a job?
I explained to him that I had a job, a badly paid one, but sometimes I was forced to hitchhike if I was travelling long distances to save money.
-Our friend who lives down the road here is looking for some workers you know.
By this point we were right out in Kent, I told him again I had a job and I lived in London, so it’d be no good anyway.
-He lives out in the woods, he needs some workers there.
I re-examined the cuts on his neck in more detail, they were too regular in size and too randomly positioned over his skin to be caused by an accident or wear and tear from his work.
-Look, the woods are off the next junction up here, we’ll take you there now.
I caught the grin of the driver again in the rear view mirror as he looked across to the passenger. I told them again that I was in a hurry and I wasn’t looking for a job here or anywhere.
-The work’s too good, there’s no way you can turn it down, we’ll go now.
I said that if they wanted to go, then that was fine and they should just drop me off at the junction and we’d go our separate ways. This made no difference, we hit the next junction and duly took the slip-road.
A sense of panic kicked in, I realised that the situation was beyond control, thousands of miles of safe hitching and suddenly this was the one. I contemplated my options; the car was still doing about 50, I could jump out, I could attempt to wrestle the driver from behind and crash the car. It’s one of those situations where everyone except you knows what the plan is, I could try and guess where we were heading and what equipment these men were armed with, but I was really in the dark. I was left with the decision of how heavily I should respond, at this point crashing the car seemed so drastic, jumping out still wasn’t a good move. Did I want to be passively taken to my rendezvous in the woods?
I’ve never been happier to see a traffic jam on a slip-road in my life. The men mumbled something I couldn’t hear as they slowed up to join the queue. I tried the handle of the rear passenger door and was shocked to find that the child-locks weren’t operational. Before the car had stopped moving, I bundled out of the door, wrenching my bag out behind me and stood on the hard shoulder with some kind of cramp locking into my stomach.
After a few minutes, I walked over to the on-ramp and stuck my thumb out for Dover once again.