The Passenger

It’s so long down the track now that few remember his name, or how he fell from notice. I found him by the side of the road from Portsea, cold, wet and shivering, all he had on was a wetsuit with short legs and a hunted look that he tried to hide behind his eyes.

I don’t pick up people on the road, mainly at truck stops and cafes. But he was just there, in the dark and cold with no bags or even warm clothes, a black wetsuit in the black of night. I might have passed him by, except for the lily-white legs. I couldn’t just leave him there.

You can’t know these people that spend their lives alongside the highways, that live this shadowy life where no one, except the truckie that takes them wherever they go, marks their passage. You see them all the time, hunkered by the side of the road or hunched into foetal curls in the dark corners of truck stops and roadhouses, but long-haul trucking can be bloody boring and even bad company is sometimes better than no company at all.

I…