‘She’s haemorrhaging oil,’ Silas says from somewhere behind me.
I do not turn around. I have been standing in this exact position for what feels like a geological age, my hands braced against the warm metal of the wing, my duffel bag slumped against the tyre like a disappointed travelling companion. The garage smells of grease and rust and the faint, sweet undertone of coolant. Somewhere a radio plays a country song I do not recognise, all steel guitar and heartbreak.
‘Haemorrhaging,’ I repeat. The word tastes expensive.
Silas ambles into my peripheral vision. He is a man carved from leather and patience, his overalls bearing the kind of stains that come from decades of honest labour rather than a single dramatic mishap. A rag hangs from his back pocket like a flag of surrender. ‘Rear main seal’s gone. Could be the pan gasket too, but I won’t know till I get her up on the lift. Either way, she’s not driving to San Francisco tonight. Or tomorrow.’
I straighten up too fast. The blood rushes from my head and the garage swims for a moment – oil drums and tyre stacks and a calendar on the wall featuring a woman in a bikini holding a spanner, which strikes me as both impractical and unsanitary.
‘How long?’
Silas sucks his teeth. ‘Three days. Maybe four. Parts for a sixty-nine aren’t exactly sitting on the shelf at AutoZone.’
Three days. Maybe four. I do the arithmetic in my head, which is a mistake, because the arithmetic has been doing itself without my permission ever since I landed at LAX and watched my bank balance shrink with every transaction like a puddle evaporating in this relentless, foreign sun. The Mustang cost more than I budgeted. The insurance cost more than I budgeted. The motel outside Santa Barbara with its flickering neon and its shower that alternated between scalding and arctic – that cost more than I budgeted too.
I am, I realise with a clarity that sits cold and hard in my stomach, running out of money.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Right. Okay.’
I turn away from the car and walk to where I have propped my phone against a toolbox, its camera lens winking at me like a tiny, judgemental eye. I have been filming. Of course I have been filming. That is the entire point of this trip – to document, to capture, to transform every mundane disaster into content. The breakdown becomes a story. The story becomes a video. The video becomes views, and the views become validation, and the validation becomes something I can hold up to the world and say: see, I told you I was worth paying attention to.
I press record again.
‘Hey, guys,’ I say to the phone, and my voice comes out too bright, too brittle, a pane of glass stretched thin over a void. ‘So, uh, slight change of plans. The Mustang’s decided she needs a little spa day. Or three. Classic cars, am I right?’
I gesture at the open bonnet. The phone captures my hand, the grease already worked into the creases of my knuckles, the sweat darkening the collar of my shirt. I am performing for an audience that does not exist. My channel has forty-seven subscribers, and I am reasonably certain at least twelve of them are bots. The last video I posted – a tour of Borough Market filmed in the grey drizzle of a London afternoon – has eighty-three views. Eighty-three. I checked this morning in the motel car park, scrolling with my thumb while the Mustang coughed blue smoke into the California sky.
‘It’s all part of the adventure,’ I tell the lens. ‘You’ve got to embrace the unexpected, you know? That’s what travel’s all about.’
My smile hurts my face.
Silas, behind me, says nothing. I can feel his silence like a weight.
I stop recording. The phone screen goes dark and I am left staring at my own reflection – gangly, rumpled, the earnest blue eyes behind my spectacles looking back at me with an expression I cannot quite name. Disappointment, perhaps. Or recognition.
I scroll through Instagram. It is a compulsion now, a twitch I cannot control, like picking at a scab. A travel influencer I follow has posted a photograph of herself on a beach in Bali, her skin glowing, a coconut in her hand, the caption reading grateful for this journey with a heart emoji. Twelve thousand likes. Another creator – a man my age with better cheekbones, has uploaded a video of himself skydiving over Dubai. The comments are a cascade of fire emojis and praise.
I look at my own feed. My last post is a photograph of the Mustang from yesterday, taken at a petrol station outside Ventura, the light golden and forgiving. Twenty-three likes. One comment from a stranger that says nice car.
I lock the phone and shove it into my pocket.
‘You want a coffee?’ Silas asks. ‘Got a pot in the office. Tastes like diesel, but it’s hot.’
The office is a small room wedged between the service bay and a wall of tyres, its window opaque with grime. A desk buried under invoices. A mug tree with three mugs, each one bearing a different oil company logo. Silas pours black liquid into a chipped cup and hands it to me without ceremony.
‘First time in California?’ he asks.
‘First time in America.’
He nods slowly, as if this explains everything. ‘Hell of a place to break down.’
‘I’m beginning to appreciate that.’
The coffee does indeed taste like diesel. I drink it anyway, because it gives my hands something to do. Silas leans against the doorframe and watches me with the patient, unreadable expression of a man who has seen a thousand travellers pass through his garage and has long since stopped being impressed by any of them.
‘Heard on the radio,’ he says after a moment. ‘Big party up in San Francisco tonight. Some movie premiere thing. They’re shutting down half of Union Street for it.’
I look up. ‘What movie?’
‘Something with that actress. The British one. Beatrice something.’ He waves a hand vaguely. ‘You know the one. She’s in everything. Got that face.’
I know the one. Of course I know the one. Beatrice is not merely famous, she is a constellation, a fixed point in the cultural sky that everyone navigates by whether they admit it or not. Her face has graced the covers of magazines I have thumbed through in Tesco while waiting for my meal-deal sandwich. Her interviews have autoplayed on YouTube while I was supposed to be editing my own videos. She is talented and beautiful and untouchably distant, a woman who exists on screens and billboards and in the collective imagination of millions.
‘A launch party,’ I say.
‘That’s what they called it.’
Something shifts inside me. A spark, small but insistent, catching on the dry tinder of my desperation. I think about my phone, my forty-seven subscribers, the eighty-three views on my last video. I think about the Mustang bleeding oil onto the concrete floor of a garage in a town whose name I have already forgotten. I think about the bank balance dwindling, the motel rooms, the petrol receipts, the slow, grinding collapse of a dream that was, perhaps, always too fragile to survive contact with reality.
And then I think about a party in San Francisco. A launch party. A red carpet. A globally famous actress. A moment that, if captured correctly, could be the kind of content that breaks through the noise, the kind of video that gets shared, commented on, picked up by algorithms that have, until now, ignored my existence entirely.
‘You know where exactly?’ I ask, trying to keep my voice casual. ‘The party?’
Silas shrugs. ‘Some hotel. The Fairmont, I think they said. Up on Nob Hill.’
The Fairmont. Nob Hill. I file the names away like ammunition.
‘How far’s San Francisco from here?’
‘Five, six hours. Depends on traffic.’ He eyes me. ‘You’re not driving that Mustang anywhere, son. Not till I get the seal replaced.’
‘Is there any way it can be patched up?’ I ask.
Silas laughs, a short, dry sound like gravel shifting. ‘I can try. It might be enough to get you to San Francisco, but after that, I can't say.’
I consider my options. Do I let him try a bodge job, or is there another way of getting to San Francisco?
‘A patch-up job then,’ Silas says, watching me.
‘A patch-up job.’
He shakes his head, but there is something almost like respect in the set of his jaw. ‘You know they’re not going to let you into that party. No offence, but you don’t exactly look like you’re on the guest list.’
I look down at myself, the rumpled shirt, the jeans with the grease stain on the knee, the spectacles sliding down my nose. He is right, of course. I look like exactly what I am: a failed YouTuber from London who has staked his entire sense of self-worth on a road trip that is already unravelling.
But I have talked my way into things before. I have bluffed and charmed and smiled my way past obstacles that should have stopped me cold. It is, perhaps, the only skill I possess that has any practical application in the world.
‘I’ll figure it out,’ I say.
Silas sets to work on the old Mustang while I pull out my phone one more time and open the camera. I angle it upward, catching my face against the backdrop of the garage, the Mustang a blur of blue in the background.
‘Sometimes,’ I say to the lens, ‘the journey doesn’t go the way you planned. Sometimes the car breaks down and you’re stuck in a town you didn’t mean to visit and you have to make a choice. Give up, or adapt.’ I pause, and I let the smile fade, let the exhaustion show through. ‘I’m choosing to adapt. There’s an opportunity in San Francisco, something I never could have predicted. And I’m going to chase it. Because that’s what this trip is about. Chasing the unexpected.’
I stop recording. The footage sits in my phone’s memory, raw and unedited, waiting for a future version of me to shape it into something coherent. I do not know if I will ever post it. I do not know if any of this will ever see the light of a screen.
But the spark is still burning. The party. The actress. The chance.
I sit and watch as Silas tries to achieve the impossible. Somewhere north of here, in a hotel on a hill, a woman whose face I have seen a thousand times is preparing for an evening she will probably not remember. She does not know I exist. She does not know I am coming.
But I am coming.
I'm still waiting for Silas to finish an hour later. I check my phone for directions to San Francisco, and my thumb hovers for a moment over the YouTube app. I do not open it. I do not check my subscriber count. For the first time since I left London, I do not need to know the numbers.
What I need is a story.
And I am going to find one.
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