When raindrops race

Strange details stick in your mind from childhood. A memory isn’t a linear thread that has a beginning, middle and end, it just floats into view uninvited, a moth exposed by a peculiar flame just for an instant.

Travelling as a family when I was a kid was a big deal. I don’t recall practical details – perhaps my dad filled up with petrol at the pump they had at the factory, and my mum packed our bags for us. In any event, the responsibilities I’d have would be to take along something to keep myself engaged for the trip.

Inevitably, this would involve looking aghast at the paper and pens I’d brought as I realised the bumps of the road made it impossible to create something meaningful, like a picture of Tarzan swinging on his impractical lianas from tree to tree (I’d tried that too many times with ropes and had the calloused palms and bruises to prove it), or maybe a knight with a broadsword like the one we’d seen another summer at that castle with the moat where swans drifted in their creamy arrogance.

No, drawing was out. My two brothers had brought things of their own. The eldest always seemed to get it right – after all, where he had the Lone Ranger action figure, I had Tonto. He got Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, while I got Han Solo and a stormtrooper. He’d have brought just the right toy and created a base in the corner of the back seat he’d claimed after much bickering and negotiated pleas from my mum. I want the window! I want the middle seat! I was here first! You rode there last time… My younger brother would probably have a stuffed toy of some sort – maybe the always-soggy bear he’d named, mystifyingly, Sophie Jesus. And a rusk – so bear and rusk would take alternate trips to his mouth.

The best trips happened at night, with cat’s eyes flickering out of the evening fog and street lights at regular intervals clocking out progress. It would still be possible (when it was early enough) to play I Spy with everyone until we got annoyed with each other and one of us would accuse the other of cheating.

Mum would offer us our travel food – her go-to meals would be hard-boiled eggs, ham rolls sweating in their containers and maybe an apple. Eggs would bring about a furious round of bickering about who let off a fart while my dad would grin fiendishly in the rear view mirror: guilty.

Each road sign would be the closest I’d ever get to some of these towns, and, if this was a trip we’d done before, I’d know which ones to watch out for. A personal favourite was the one for the town Darlingscott, a blip on the rural map that often passed us by with the stench of fields ablaze as farmers prepared the land for the next planting. There’d be cows to shout at from the car, murmurings that one of my brothers felt car sick and, if we were lucky, a tin of boiled sweets passed around (always try for the red sweet, don’t pick the… yellow… oh, man!).

I’d often get a runny nose, and mum would offer me a tissue that smelt like Chanel No. 5 from her handbag, but I’d mostly opt for my sleeve.

The real race was when it inevitably started raining, the wipers smearing the view ahead with rippling waves. On the side windows, two raindrops would judder into view, seeming to be held in space and weightless by the air currents that swept past the car. They’d twitch and zigzag their way down the glass, one darting ahead and then pausing to let the other gain ground. Too soon, they’d vanish into the rubber frame and I’d look for the next candidates to assert themselves.

My parents would be silent, mostly, occasionally squeezing each other’s thighs to remind themselves that we’d soon be wherever we were heading.

As we arrived, we’d be admonished to be on our best behaviour – and, with the prospect of fun on the cards, my brothers and I would call an unspoken truce, to be broken only on the trip back.

My parents have left on that trip forever now, and, like raindrops on a window pane, they’re always on the move, shifting into an increasingly blurry landscape that’s made up of fewer and fewer memories, memories that flutter unbidden like moths into view and then away again.