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It doesn’t seem like it’s properly light yet. Everything’s still dim through my eyelids, dreams fading into a happy warmth and bliss. But there’s stuff leaking through. Noise, and… Oh, god, my neck. Something hard digging into my hip, and an odd, soft ridge just at the bottom of my ribcage. Sand between my toes, wedged against something leather and vertical, cramped and curled.
I groan, and try to roll over. Nothing. I’m hemmed in, tangled up in soft fleece.
Wait… Still only semi-conscious, the question of where I actually am floats across my mind.
And I really have no clue. I do remember that there was something the previous night involving a violin-shaped bottle, James, some really good and sugary, Jeremy, and…
Oh, that was it.
I open my eyes to the roof of a Ferrari, and it all comes flooding back, along with a stomping headache leaping to the front of my skull.
I’m splayed out across the front seats of the California, after a late night and uncomfortable sleep and I have a pressing need to pee.
“Auuugh” I think I make a noise similar to a sort of troll, and struggle to sit up. I end up with my bum on the seat where my head had been – I shove my bunched-up jumper out of the way and pull my feet up, flexing my back and pulling my shoulders back, shoving off the blanket over me into the passenger footwell.
And then Jeremy opens the door behind me and I basically fall out backwards onto the road.
I lie there, back which was previously pressed into the softest Italian leather now pressed into gritty gravel and worn tarmac, and gawk.
Jeremy smirks at me from where he stands, hair completely messed up and the clothes he must have slept in that’re the same from last night, and offers me a hand. I refuse it, and, without the slightest trace of dignity, scramble to my feet. I turn to glare at Jeremy.
“Clarkson, you IDIOT!” I yell at him. The sun hasn’t yet reached this far down into what only can now in the light of day be called a chasm and part of me thinks that if I strangled him now, I could have him buried and cremated by the time the sun shone upon the red paintwork of the Fezza again.
The dam – I can’t imagine what the hell else it could be – towers over absolutely everything in a sheer wall of concrete. If I concentrated, I think I might be able to hear it creaking.
Jeremy shrugs at me.
“It’s impressive, isn’t it? I thought it’d be something to wake up to. But then I got drunk, and forgot about it until I woke up and thought, now where am I? And then I realized. In an Aston Martin, under a Romanian dam.”
“That’s a different answer to most days…” The sarcasm of my tone falls short of truly abrasive, and with a glare at him that is more due to his idiocy than my annoyance – even if it was a terrible surprise – I go to wake James while the crew slowly stir.
God. It’s so typical of the lifestyle that we’re leading. Never knowing what hotel you’ll wake up in next, or when the next meal is coming because it’ll only ever happen when someone says, ‘Chaps, have we had lunch yet?’ and then it’ll be a scramble to find the nearest place selling fried food. Home’s sometimes nothing more than a concept to us.