Extract from a new novel by Ian Richards, published by Atuanui Press and entitled, Drongo: A Kiwi Road Novel.

In which the hero, Andy, has hitched a ride with Mrs Macalister and her cat Silky. Though he has no license, Andy has convinced her to let him drive her car. Andy is 18 years old, wants to be a writer, and is carrying about his portable typewriter (nicknamed Half-Arse).

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We were swinging a little leftwards…I swung us back harder to the right…it meant we started into a turn, so I thought we might as well go on heading that way anyhow…I thought there were lots of small, interesting-looking cross streets coming up, and we’d probably get into one or other of them…it might even be a good idea to pull over someplace. There was a bad, dull thud around us which reverberated throughout the car…everything jumped and skidded, and I heard a mysterious, long squeal…then I realised that the squeal was coming from me, because my hands and shoulders were being showered with glass…something had slammed into the edge of my side of the car, up near the engine, and we’d been shoved hard over towards the left half of the road…the car had stopped moving, which was just as well since I wasn’t driving it anymore…I wasn’t doing much of anything, except for thinking how my head felt rattled and a bit twitchy on my neck. The truck that appeared to have hit us was coming to a halt just a little further up the street…I noticed its wing-mirror was half torn off, and the left side along the cab looked pretty well smashed…I could scarcely believe the whole event was all over, and I seemed to have missed a lot of it. So, I thought, this is a traffic accident. I glanced across at Mrs Macalister…she was still there, sitting almost motionless, with Silky still clasped in her lap…she had her face craned forward and was staring at the intricate cracks in what remained of the front windscreen… her features had settled into a peculiar, frightened smile that suggested nothing was wrong. With an effort I pushed open the damaged door next to me…I stepped out into the street, and thought the whole car looked as if a giant had tried using it to make a milkshake…underfoot there were bright, slippery globules of safety glass spread out on the tarseal in a beautiful twinkling sheet…I could see that the truck driver was already hurrying towards me around the side of his cab…he was a big, rough-faced man dressed in loose, grease-smudged olive-green overalls, and he was stamping on the road with each step in heavy steel-capped boots. ‘What the bloody hell were you doing?’ the truckie yelled at me as he approached. He was trembling from anger and perhaps from shock…I raised both hands with my palms up and out to show that I didn’t want any fuss…I opened my mouth to apologise. The truckie moved closer and caught me on the jaw with his fist…the blow was solid…it flung me back against the bonnet of Mrs Macalister’s car…I sank downwards to the road and spent a moment taking in what had happened. The urgent panting of the truckie’s breathing was just above my head…I glanced up and saw he was standing almost right over me, glaring down, and so I started getting to my feet…I had to use the car’s tyre as support…my sandshoes slid amongst the safety glass…without waiting for me to be properly upright in front of him, the truckie swung at me again…his blow brushed past the edge of my cheek. ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’ he yelled. He seemed sincere…after all, my face hurt, and he’d already had one good try at running me over…but while I was considering this, the truckie collected me with a solid punch once more…my entire body jerked from the impact. ‘You bloody little, fucking, bloody bastard!’ the truckie was yelling. At least, he was probably shouting something like that, because by now I’d straightened up and was too hell-bent on escaping to pay careful attention…I concentrated on circling round the rear of the car to keep some space between myself and another attack, but the truckie was coming after me fast…I skirted along the passenger’s side in an effort to put still more of the car between us…within the vehicle’s interior Mrs Macalister’s head and shoulders suddenly came into view nearby through the windows…I saw she’d reached up with one arm to clutch in desperation at the top of her seatbelt strap, next to her cheek…her lips were moving as if she was repeating some sort of phrase and I thought it might be ‘oh dear,’ since that was the gist of the message on her face.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Macalister,’ I called to her.
The truckie was still coming for me gamely…he was still shouting, but I was glad to see his heavy boots were slowing him down…I kept scrabbling and circling round the corners of the car to try and hold him at a distance, and within a moment or two I got to the open, shattered door on the driver’s side again…quickly I dived in and reached past the front seat for the rear of the vehicle…I lunged for my bag and Half-Arse…Mrs Macalister shrank away, and from her lap Silky astonished me by hissing at me in fury.
‘I really am sorry, Mrs Macalister,’ I yelped.
I wriggled myself out of the car and found the truckie had managed to get close again…this time I swung hard at him with Half-Arse and backed him off…it felt like a small victory for literature…then I started to run pell-mell up the road with my duffle-bag and the typewriter…the truckie responded by chasing me some more…evidently he hadn’t finished trying to kill me and believed there was hope. The thought popped into my mind that it was morally wrong to turn tail…it was possibly illegal, but I was an artist and I felt an obligation to future readers to keep myself safe…even so, I’d never heard of a major author who’d fled for safety from a long-distance truck driver before…for a few instants I thought he was actually going to catch me…but I ran as if my life depended on it, which it probably did…gradually he seemed to tire, and I just kept right on going. I reached the ferry terminal at a determined jog-trot…my lungs were burning and the sensation went all the way up into my windpipe, and it took me some considerable while to recover my breath…I still felt bad about leaving Mrs Macalister, but the feeling didn’t last for long…she struck me as the sort of over-cautious person who had miles of insurance…now she was going to be glad of it.

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Ian Richards hails from New Zealand is an Associate Professor of English literature at Osaka City University. His first book Everyday Life in Paradise was a finalist in the 1991 Heinemann Reed Award for best book of fiction. His biography To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan (Auckland University Press, 1997) was nominated for the Montana Best Book Award. Richards’ stories have been broadcast on Radio New Zealand and appeared in numerous magazines including Landfall, the NZ Listener and North and South. Richards was born and raised in Palmerston North and received his PhD in English from Massey University.   

To listen to an interview with him on Radio New Zealand about the writing of Drongo, please click here.