The man at the passing place

Text 1: As Far as the Bridge, by Declan Muir

An original short story extract.

Maeve had never picked up a hitchhiker in her life. Her father had made her promise, years ago, in the voice he used for promises that mattered. So afterwards she could never quite explain why, on that empty stretch of road above the loch, with the rain coming sideways and the light already going, she slowed down for the figure standing at the passing place with one arm out.

He was older than she had thought from a distance. Sixty, perhaps. He wore a long waxed coat dark with rain and carried nothing, no bag, no rucksack, which bothered her more than anything else. Who walked these hills with nothing?

“Thank you,” he said, folding himself into the passenger seat. Water ran off him onto the mat. “I’m only going as far as the bridge.”

There was no bridge for twenty miles. She knew that. She drove on.

For a while neither of them spoke. The wipers swung and thudded. The heater roared and filled the car with the smell of wet wool and something else, peat, or smoke, an old outdoor smell. She watched him from the corner of her eye. He sat very upright with his hands on his knees, looking straight ahead at the road unrolling in the headlights, and his face was calm, almost contented, the face of a man on his way somewhere he had been before.

“You’ll be Tom Fraser’s girl,” he said.

Her hands tightened on the wheel. Nobody had called her that for eleven years. Nobody had called her that since the funeral.

“How do you know my father?”

He did not answer straight away. He was looking out at the loch, black and enormous on their left, with one light burning on the far shore. “We fished together,” he said at last. “A long time ago. He was a terrible fisherman.” He smiled. “He talked too much. Frightened them all off.”

Maeve laughed before she could stop herself, because it was true, because it was exactly true, and the laugh hurt somewhere under her ribs.

At the bridge, which was there after all, small and stone and old, he asked her to stop. He got out into the rain and bent down to the open door and looked at her for a long moment.

“He was proud of you,” he said. “Drive carefully now.”

When she looked in the mirror the road behind her was empty.

Explore how Declan Muir uses language and structure to present the stranger and Maeve’s reactions to him.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.