Oh dear (in headlights)

Just a quick (sick) one

A white BMW lets me go at the pedestrian crossing. That is its first mistake. 

The Woolworths carpark is floodlit, obscuring the haunting winter dusk. I look like death warmed up but cooled down again, waddling penguinishly in as many as five thick layers. My nose is Demazin-commercial pink. God bless me. I crank my neck a few degrees towards the Beamer in thanks and see its headlights aren’t on. Mistake number two.

Three nights ago, around 3 a.m., I literally woke myself up with a deep, wet sneeze. Do you have any idea the volume and viscosity of mucus required to—sorry. That’s gross. And we all get colds, no need for me to brag. I’ll swap out all the gross words with ‘rainbows’ for you. Starting now. 

The gig economy has been my friend while bedridden, but UberEats doesn't deliver Betadine Sore Throat Gargle Value Packs to your door. So. Here I am. The man himself. In the flesh. Big fluffy socks jammed into my crocs, a puffer jacket pulled taut over a puffer vest, tissues rich with rainbows scrunched in the pockets of every last layer. I will find out when I get home that my trackie daks are on the wrong way around. My trolley—which has become increasingly weight-bearing—doth overflow with vegetables and fluids and lozenges and this month’s Women's Weekly (it seemed like a good idea at the register). 

I cling tightly to my trolley and I breathe loudly through my mouth. 

I stand for a while trying to remember why I’d stopped. The pseudoephedrine has left the building. I’m imagining how nice it would be to put a kilogram of vaporub in our neighbour’s hot tub and expire in the fumes. Slowly, I remember. I keep my feet and trolley facing forward and turn the top half of me ninety degrees towards the car. Since my left ear and nostril are heavy and aching with virulent rainbows, my head is tilted a bit to the side. Like a zombie. I look at the driver with wet, droopy eyes and hoarsely whisper, ‘Liiiiights.’

Nothing doing. 

Did you know that there is no universal hand signal for headlights? One of the biggest oversights of the human race. I peel my right hand off the trolley and start to limply blink my fingers, as if to flick the air in five different directions all at once. Ineffective. I wrench my left hand off the trolley to join in on the blinking but, due to the body aches, I’m doing T-Rex arms. I close my eyes to funnel more energy to my fingers. Remember also that my pants are on backwards, I’m only rotated at the torso, and my head is cocked at a forty five degree angle. 

Now, to you and me, this might be a funny tableau bordering on performance art. To the poor driver, it looks like I’m trying to place a curse on their BMW.

I feel myself losing control of the situation and decide to change tack. I shuffle my feet around and face the car head on, allowing the trolley to drift away to wherever trolleys are always trying to go. I point right at the problem. With gusto. With feeling.

The line between helpfully gesturing to a car’s headlights and pointing maniacally at the terrified driver of said car suddenly seems to be very thin. I guess I am not alone in that feeling.

The driver, God bless them, reverses. 

It’s so shocking that it seems to break my fever and I become truly aware of the ridiculousness of the situation for the first time. I laugh. Well it’s more like a cackle, really, since most of my critical airways are blocked. It is a delirious, lung-shaking belly laugh and the noise that I actually emit is a demonic hiss. 

Then, a beep. In its desperation to flee my pointing, the Beamer almost reversed right into a horn-happy Toyota Camry. The BMW’s driver is so indignant at this near-miss that they decide to beep me. This strikes me as unfair. 

Members of the public are now stopping to look at me, and my blinking fingers, and the rivers of glistening rainbows dribbling down my chin, trying to work out if they need to intervene. ‘Liiiigghhts,’ I howl, between bouts of literally suffocating laughter. Some in the crowd, and God bless them, start to join in my pointing. 

I haven’t read the scriptures for a while, but I think I remember God being pretty jazzed when the lights finally turned on. Let there be headlights, we said, and there was, and it was good, but there isn’t much time to celebrate. I have to shuffle with haste to get out of the screaming path of the BMW, lest it smite me on its way out of the carpark.

‘Jefuf Chrid,’ I say, it feels, through my right nostril.

I wrench my trolley’s crazy wheel out of a drain. It’s hard. I bought too many vegetables and fluids and the weight of the world threatens to crush me—I hiss. I pray it will be over soon. Finally I fish the car keys out of my bottom-most jumper’s pocket and look around. The floodlights glare. June chill presses down upon me from all sides. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and realise I have no earthly idea where I parked.

Classic.

After a lot of aimless shuffling, and a carrot quickly gulped down to improve my night vision, I locate the vehicle. The lozenges will get me through the night, and I feel much better now thanks for asking.