The Black Audi on the Pavement

 It started because of a car, parked right the way across the pavement. A black Audi, leaving not enough of a gap to walk past.

It was a minor nuisance, it was a quiet residential street, and he wasn't endangered by stepping out to go around it. But that wasn't the point, was it? He walked round it, peering inside, as if for clues to the owner's identity. He thought about writing a note and leaving it on the windscreen., But a brief check of his pockets revealed that he didn't have a pen.

When he got home, the car was still on his mind. It was just so thoughtless. So inconsiderate. By lunchtime it had come to stand for everything that was wrong with modern society. Dog mess. Litter. People parking their cars right the way across the pavement. It was all of a piece.

People just didn't care enough, he decided. This was why the country was in a mess. people like that. He stewed about it for most of the day, getting angrier by degrees, he wondered what he could do about it.

In the end, he wrote a letter to the local newspaper. In doing so he felt a weight lift from him, and by the time he'd finished writing, he was back to his normal, equable self. He re-read his letter. it was pretty good example of its type, he thought. It hinted that thoughtless parking was the thin end of the wedge, it implied that if this were allowed to stand, worse behaviour may yet be normalised, that the fabric of society would fray. But it wasn't vitriolic in tone, he didn't sound hysterical. he'd aimed for wry and amused rather than angry and, on the whole, thought he'd pulled it off.

He went to sleep a satisfied man, and dreamed of clean pavements.

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This sense of satisfaction lasted for a full week and a half. His letter ran in the local paper, and he was pleased to note that his morning walk wasn't obstructed again. Maybe, he thought, they'd read it and realised. Maybe they'd mended their ways. Maybe they were also a serial litter-dropper and had stopped that too. He felt the glow of a job well done, he had, in a small way, made the world a better place.

So it came as a nasty shock to read the letters page of the following week's paper. Which contained a response to his. It was a shame, the letter said, that society was becoming so judgemental He didn't know the circumstances behind the parking. Maybe they were in a rush. Maybe they were afraid to step too far into the road when opening the driver's door. There was a brief homily about how we all need to show a bit more understanding of other people's lives and ended, rather piously he thought, with a call for people to show "more kindness".

This scraped at his very soul. The thought that his civic-minded cri de couer had somehow been interpreted as petty and mean completely ruined his day. He wanted only to improve things , he said to himself, he wanted only to elevate his fellow man, to make a world more pleasant for everyone to live in. That was nothing else for it. He was going to have to write another letter.

He took time over it. He didn't want to leave any chinks in his armour for his interlocutor to get in. he touched briefly on Thomas More's Utopia, referenced Karl Marx's theory of human nature as formed by a totality of social relations and ended with what he felt was an uplifting plea for people to look out for each other, to the betterment of society as a whole. It was, he felt, a bloody masterpiece.

Things escalated fairly quickly after this. The reply ran the following week, wondering out loud if people didn't have anything better to do with their lives other than interfere in the freedoms of others, with a brief digression into the nature Hobbesian self-determination. It furthermore described such people as "busybodies" an accusation which stung him to the quick. Granted, it didn't reference him directly (he's been careful to sign his initial letter "a concerned citizen"), but the inference was pretty clear. He picked his pen up, clicking the barrel as though it were a safety catch.

                                                        

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Over at the letters page of the Adbury Advertiser the letters editor wan't quite sure what to make of it all. This was pretty heady stuff for a paper which generally only received a trickle of correspondence, mostly complaining about untidily maintained verges. There had a been a brief flurry of argument around Brexit, but it had subsided pretty quickly. This, on the other hand, was getting quite lively. One respondent cited the stoics, and insisted we all just had to make the best of it, another asked obliquely what they thought Marcus Rashford would make of it all. The response was so big he went to an extra page. But cutting through the noise, the silver thread running through it all, was the call and response of the first two writers. The one who thought people were thoughtless, and the one who advocated more understanding. The Yin and Yang of the letters page. 

They fired back and forth it each other for over a year, and each grew more cunning as they did so. Each now anticipated the arguments of the other, and rather than wait for a response, were firing off a letter a week, appearing alongside each other. The letters grew in length and verbosity, until he was reluctantly forced to exclude all but the shortest letters to appear alongside them. Other readers complained. One wrote that: "The essential dichotomy of the human condition is all well and good, but who's going to open this year's fete?". The verge-complainers, aggrieved at their sidelining,  muttered darkly that it was all a conspiracy by Extinction Rebellion to make the council forget that the roundabout by the fire station needed strimming. The advertisers, on the other hand, loved it, and the paper was selling more than it had in years. There was a jokey column written about it in the Guardian. And still the letters continued.

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Three years later, the first letter writer, having given up his job the better to marshal his arguments, was out for his usual morning walk. It was a sunny morning, a little fresh for the time of year but perfectly pleasant. From a distance he could see that pavement was blocked by a car parked right across it. As he got closer he realised with a deepening feeling of disquiet that it was a black Audi. He stopped and looked at it for a while. He couldn't put a name to his feelings. A passer by would have remarked on how he looked peaceful, serene, even. A slight smile played about his lips. Rather than walk round it he turned and retraced his steps, went home and wrote one last letter. Then he packed a few things, walked out of the front door and was never seen in the town again.