About a month ago, a grey Ford Siesta station wagon suddenly appeared in the woods across the street. It was in pretty bad shape, rusty and dented. The locks on the doors had been broken and the rear window was cracked. After the car had stood on the side of the road for a few days with no apparent intention of movement of any kind, my mother called the …car registration people… (you know what I’m talking about, I don’t know what the exact translation is) to find out to whom it belonged. Based on the licence plates, it was determined that the owner of the vehicle in question is a Mr. V, who lives down the street.
The gentleman in question, however, is either a total recluse or in jail (my mother’s wild guess), since he could never be reached. His cell phone would either be turned off or it would just ring and ring and no-one would answer. We started to suspect that Mr. V had reached some conclusions regarding his car (i.e. it was in an utterly embarrassing condition) and had disposed of it by driving/pushing it far enough from his own front yard so that he wouldn’t have to look at it every day.
Unfortunately, now we had to. We were desperate to get rid of the car; a heap of rusty metal across the street is not the most esthetically pleasing view, and it was leaking oil onto the grass. The police informed us that since the car had not been reported as stolen, the matter did not concern them. The city officials, when contacted, were quite condescending and aknowledged that, despite the fact that about 10 calls had been made about the Siesta, they were not going to do anything about it until fall. “Madam, you don’t really expect the city to respond that quickly during the summer? I mean, we have vacations too, you know.” And so the Mr. V’s car continued its derelict existence across the street, in the middle of a growing thicket of grass and weeds. My mother planted a climbing plant beside the right back wheel; our aim is to see how far it has reached by the time they come to tow the car away. It was the only fun part about the car for a long time.
Until this morning.
I had let the dog out for a roll in the grass and was standing on the patio when, suddenly, a small blond boy came running down the street. He had some sort of towel tied around his shoulders and was carrying a tapered stick in one hand. He was followed by another boy, decked out in similar garb, with his stick under one arm, dragging a large suitcase behind him. They stopped in front of Mr. V’s car. The blond boy pointed his stick at the door and made a “tzzzingggg”-like noise. Then he opened the door and shouted “Harry, quick! Get in!” The boy dragging the suitcase threw it into the back seat of the Siesta and climbed into the passenger’s seat. The blond boy got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. Then he started making mysterious gestures over the steering wheel with his stick, and both of the boys started swaying back and forth inside the car. Faintly discernible discussion drifted out from the half-open front window: “Look! There’s the Hogwarts Express!.. We have to watch out for Malfoy again this year…”
Not quite a flying Anglia, but hey, at least it was a Ford.
