Free Gurriers by Kevin Brennan Page B

him.
    “Always,” I mumbled aloud in a less angry tone, solely for his benefit, as I looked away from him while returning my bag to the back.
    I put the bike into gear and sped away, my face a burning red colour with embarrassment.
    “Left at the other side of the Pepper Canister, up…aha! Herbert Street!” I said in the hope that it would bring me back up to Baggot Street, which it did.
    Nice one, Sean! Logic and good sense of direction combined. That’s the job! I proudly commended myself in my mind. I smiled at the realisation that I had quite specifically kept this rhetoric unspoken despite the fact that it’s perfectly safe to speak to yourself when on a moving bike!
    “Roger, Mick, give ih five there,” It felt odd having the radio on my shoulder with Aidan’s constant communication with the couriers in my ear as work, instructions and directions were given out. It felt strange hearing only one side of the proceedings and I couldn’t help myself trying to deduce what was being said to Aidan to get the responses that I heard.
    “Fifteen John, go ahead”, “Are you definitely at the right address?” and
    “Okay, stand by one second.”
    I had to panic brake to avoid going into the back of a van because of the amount of attention that I was giving to the radio instead of the road in my attempts to work out that situation. I had pulled myself together and scolded myself appropriately by the time Aidan came back to John.
    “Fifteen John, letterbox that and carry on.”
    Aha! John was obviously delivering something to an address where he wasn’t getting an answer, which meant no signature. He therefore needed permission from the sender to put it in the letterbox, which Aidan got by phoning them. All perfectly logical, and logic was always a friend of mine.
    I was feeling so clever about my powers of deduction that I lost track of what I was doing and sped, grinning smugly to myself, past the building that I was supposed to be delivering to.
    I slammed on the brakes while indicating left, found a gap in the line of parked cars and pulled in. A motorist beeped as he swerved around me wider than he had to - exaggerating the extent of the inconvenience inflicted upon him. Instinctively, I looked at the motorist, making brief eye contact with him as he swerved back in.
    His face was gnarled and distorted in the most horrible twisted expression of pure hatred that I had ever seen. His eyes burned like hot coal from behind the extended middle finger of his left hand, as the sneering mouth viciously snarled the word “wanker” before the whole evil visage had to (thankfully) be dragged away to concentrate on the road ahead. As soon as the head was pointed forward, the powerful Mitsubishi accelerated at full throttle in a roar of anger induced mechanical gusto and departed at speed.
    This was more than a little bit silly, since he had to brake hard a hundred metres or so up the road when he met the rest of the traffic, exactly where he would have been had I not been on the road at all.
    Even though I had caused this horrible person to brake, I had not delayed him one second, and he treated me with such a lack of tolerance as I had never before experienced. I was gutted. I felt like the victim of a hate crime. A lump appeared in my throat as the full injustice of the incident hit home. No way, by any stretch of the imagination, did I deserve that. It was bad enough that I had gone miles past where I was supposed to be (about 12 buildings) without having to deal with that sort of nastiness.
    I took a deep breath and exhaled with a heavy sigh, hoping to shed the bad feelings with a little bit of relaxation, but ignorant, vicious people tend to leave a permanent impression of their nastiness on good people.
    “Go ahead, Vinno.” Aidan’s voice over the air reminded me that I was at work and had a job to do.
    Baggot Street has a dividing island between the different directions of traffic, and not a little step type