Driven

скачать книгу бесплатно


At first I’d gone at it with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. I managed to crack the plastic glass of the back windscreen with the screwdriver and then bent the roof back with the pliers, but to get the roof off was going to require something a little more lethal. So I got out the Stanley knife and started sawing away at the uprights on the back. I was sawing away, sawing away, sawing away and I sawed straight through the metal and into my thumb. When I went running into the house shouting ‘Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep!’ and holding up my spouting hand to show my mum, my thumb was literally hanging off. It took seven stitches to put it back on. I can’t remember what I told my mum I’d been doing. I don’t think she cared: she was too busy worrying about the fact that my thumb was hanging off and my blood was going everywhere. My dad knew what I’d been doing though. He didn’t say anything, but he knew. My dad’s of the opinion that most parents can be too protective of kids. Instead of trying to stop me from doing dangerous things, my dad would say, ‘He’s going to hurt himself in a minute, watch this.’ When I did, he’d turn round and say, ‘Told you.’ He always claimed it was the best way to learn, and, painful though the lessons were, he was usually right.

Remote control cars were the ultimate toy. I used to have remote control buggies and me and my mates would build race tracks and jumps for them and we’d drive them all over the farm. They were proper little all-terrain things and they could really go. They were toys, but they were quick little things. I never had Scalextric though. That was always too expensive. But it was okay because I used to save up and buy these remote control cars, a cross between a beach buggy and a stock car. They came in a kit that you’d build, and which I then used to modify – no surprise there. Like a junior remote control Pimp My Ride I’d sticker them up and paint the wheels and the rims, always trying to make them better. My mates never really used to bother tricking theirs out, so they were never quite as good as mine. Well, I didn’t think so. My modifications didn’t usually make them go any quicker, but they looked cooler.

The important thing, though – and this has really stuck with me – is that I always used to look after them well. Whereas most kids would use them and trash them, I would use them then maintain them and keep them in mint condition. Even now I can’t stand it if something happens to one of my cars. If I kerb a wheel, that’s it, it has to go straight off to have the wheels sorted out. These dings you get when some idiot in a Volvo opens his door on to yours; the little chips you get when gravel kicks up and nicks the paintwork – I can’t stand to look at them. The second I spot something like that, that’s it, it’s got to be a respray straight away. I don’t care how much it costs, I can’t look at it. It’s the one thing that really, really bugs me, and I was the same way about my cars even when they came with batteries and a little crystal radio control unit.

The other thing that’s stuck with me since the days when I used to zoom my little tricked-out buggy around the hard standing out the back of our house is the ambition one day to have a proper track to race them on. When I was a kid, I used to dream of having a garden of my own. I decided that when I had my own house I was going to build a race track for my remote control cars, a proper track with little humps and jumps and everything. It was going to be ace. It never happened of course. You get older, you grow up, you pack away your childhood toys and your dreams change. Now I want a proper full-size track in my back garden. A proper tarmacked go-kart track to go all the way round the house and my back garden, for me and my mates to drive proper full-size go-karts around. I don’t think the neighbours would be too happy, but it would be bloody cool.