the shipping container

“What,” George asked, deadpan, pulling off his headphones and pausing the video of a Silverstone pole lap on his laptop. Max’s pole lap, from last year, but he didn’t have to know that.

“Doesn’t the river Tyne look a bit like Silverstone?” 

Max stated again, drawing out an invisible line with his finger in the air, eyes to the ceiling.

“Mate, I’ve never been to the river Tyne.”

“Neither have I.”

George sighed, but he would indulge Max just this once.

“Where is the river Tyne?”

Max flipped around so that he was resting on his elbows, laying on his stomach, looking up at George with a sparkle in his eye.

“Northumberland,” Max replied, “I’ve been thinking about it, the right turn at Haltwhistle looks a lot like Copse, doesn’t it?”

George laughed, he couldn’t help himself.

“Mate, I literally cannot visualise the river right now, I’ve never seen it.”

Max rolled his eyes, but he continued, as if George hadn’t spoken.

“Warden then to Wylam is a bit like Maggots and Becketts, I think, though then Chapel and the Hangar Straight just leads straight into the sea.”

Max pursed his lips, thinking.

“Maybe there aren’t that many similarities,” He said with finality, as if this was a perfectly rational conversation to have. Just as rational as Max Verstappen in his bed, George supposed.

He ignored Max, restarting the onboard, though he left his headphones off, listening mutely to the sound of Max’s soft breathing, his mouth moving as he chewed his lip, deep in thought. It was a sight indeed, and George couldn’t help but smile. Max raised his gaze from where he had been mindlessly staring at the bedsheets to lock eyes with George.

“A riverbed’s called a "bed" because it physically contains the flowing water of a river, much like a mattress supports a sleeping person,” Max said, as if that meant anything at all.

“And…?” George prompted, and Max shrugged, as well as he could laying in the position he was.

“I’ve just been thinking, circuits are a bit like rivers, no? The cars are like running water, always going in one direction.”

“Wouldn’t the cars be the boats? Surely we have more agency than that.”

“Maybe,” Max was silent for a few seconds, “But sometimes in the car you feel like you’re just following the current, no? A bit like… that bible story with the two animals, just going along into the boat where the car takes you.”

“Is it?”

“Isn’t it? It feels like it sometimes.”

George didn’t really have any response to that. Max changed positions again, crawling deeper into the mattress and turning to lay on his side, his head resting on his forearm.

Max asked airily, “Can I sleep here tonight? I can’t go back before they clean out… everything.”

George couldn’t say he was exactly surprised by the request. 

“Sure, why not.”

Max huffed out a laugh, soft and fond. 

“You’re watching the pole laps, aren’t you?” He teased, and George scrunched his nose, defensive.

“I don’t know why you aren’t, if you even want to take pole tomorrow.”

Max made a strangled noise, before he sighed, “Of course I want to, but it’s like… currents in a river, cars on a circuit. You can’t go faster than what the wind blows the sails to go.”

“Not if you bring paddles to row.”

“Are we the boat, though? I feel like I’m bobbing along the water.”

George didn’t respond, lost for words in Max’s convoluted metaphor, if it was a metaphor at all and not a thinly veiled thirst to be an England-based geographer. By the time George had finished watching the pole laps, Max was silent, his eyes shut and his breath fluttering out softly. He looked ordinary, almost, in George’s bed and George’s clothes and a car that didn’t answer him, one that tipped over and poured him out into the river, riding the waves of a fizzy drink engine.