Excerpt: On Four Wheels

The sounds of the small motorised karts whizzing around the equally scaled down race track barely penetrated the cheap earphones that Kyle Wheeler had plugged into his MP3 player. The sound of the April shower falling around the track barely bothered him either as he sat under a wooden cover trying to work out what the question on his maths homework was actually asking him to work out. The noises produced by the crowd of jacketed spectators in front of him – two deep along the edge of the track – didn’t distract him at all from working out the complicated transaction taking place between ‘Ahmed’ and ‘Betty’ in the fictional cake shop.

What Kyle did find distracting was the smells. Fumes of oil and petrol escaped from the track and easily squeezed through the crowd of giggling teenage girls that formed the crowd in front of him. It didn’t help that the refuelling station was just beside where he had sat out of the rain, and that two swarthy middle-aged men with arms like tree-trunks were dripping fuel from a short hose as they poured it into the tanks of karts preparing for the next stage of the race.

Kyle scrawled down the figure 8 on the paper in front of him in the hope that he had worked out the number of iced buns correctly as the crowd erupted in a loud whooping noise in front of him. Begrudgingly he gently rested his pencil in the groove between the slats which made up the surface of the picnic table he had claimed earlier in the day and swung his stiffening legs back over the bench and stood up, stretching his limbs. He hit the stop button on his player and tugged out his earphones, dropping them next to his pencil.

Kyle followed his sister’s grating high pitched squeals of delight towards the edge of the track and spotted her jumping up and down at the front, the hood on the back of her jumper bouncing up and down in opposition. Kyle forced his way through the crowd, helped by his small stature – at eleven years old he could easily fit through the gaps between his sister’s friends.

Another cheer went up as a green kart slowly trundled past where he now stood, chin resting on the barrier that blocked the spectators from getting too close to the track. The rain was clearing up as Kyle wiped a drip of water from the back of his neck. The helmeted driver gave a small wave of a thick white glove from the track and the girls went wild waving back.