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"Some say," Richard started, arching his eyebrow conspiratorially at the camera, "that he owns only three socks. And that at night, he cuddles with a stuffed cabbage he calls Louie." He paused to let the audience laugh, then delivered the final line flawlessly. "All we know is, he's called the Stig."
Hours later and Richard was alone in the Portakabin, scribbling script ideas (read: doodling a cock) onto a napkin, when the Stig walked in. Richard grunted a vague greeting, and didn’t look up until the Stig sat down across from him.
Richard frowned, squinted at him. “Um, hel–“
The Stig held up a hand, flat-palmed: Stop. He pushed a mug of tea across the table, pointed at it emphatically.
“Thanks,” Richard said, but it came out as a question. He toyed with the handle, not really wanting it, but not wanting to be rude. The Stig pointed again, mimed drinking, then made a distinctly Stiggish gesture that translated loosely into Drink it or I will destroy everything that you love, up to and including your cowboy boots.
Richard obediently took a sip, and then several more at the Stig’s continued, and increasingly violent, gesturing. Finally he just tilted his head back and swallowed it all down, trying not to make a face. Christ. It wasn’t even warm.
Setting the mug down on the table with a thunk, Richard risked raising a cheeky eyebrow at the Stig. “Okay?”
The Stig nodded, snagged the handle, and pulled the mug back. Setting it on his open palm, he placed his other hand flat over the top and pushed. There was a moment of resistance, and then the mug was shrinking, disappearing as his hands met.
Richard, as used to these sorts of things as a chap could be, only shook his head. “What was that all about?”
The Stig pulled a sheet of paper out of… somewhere, and slid it across the table.
You said you would not tell. You said, “I will not tell anyone, Stig.” And I said, “Thank you Richard. I appreciate your discretion in this matter.”
“Wouldn’t tell what?” Richard asked, squinting. He had no idea what the Stig was talking about, but he was reasonably confident he’d never spoke those words aloud in his life.
The Stig pulled the sheet towards himself, and immediately shoved it back at Richard without actually writing anything.
About the Dark.
Starting to feel faintly queasy, Richard shook his head. “I didn’t tell anyone about that. Not even May.”
The paper whipped back and forth again. You told everyone about my fear of the Dark. You said I slept with a cabbage at night. You said I call it Louie. But I do not sleep with a cabbage, regardless of its name. I sleep with a nightlight, and there is nothing wrong with that!
“I– Stig. That was a joke. For the show,” Richard protested. His head wasn’t working properly, and for the first time it occurred to him to wonder why the Stig had made him drink that tea. “I didn’t say anything about… About the dark.”
You broke a promise, Richard. I am very upset.
“Stig!”
But the Stig was already pushing back from the table, the paper gone, tucked back into whatever mysterious pocket it had come from. Richard had to crane his head back to look at him; the Stig just kept getting bigger and bigger and he was reaching for Richard, his gloved hand massive, and as it closed around Richard everything went black.
When Richard woke up it was dark, and he was cold, spread-eagle, and naked. Not a new experience, but certainly one that hadn’t happened in a while.
Gingerly, he pushed himself into a vaguely upright position. His mouth tasted like the footwell of one of Jeremy’s (truly filthy) cars, and the floor under his arse was freezing. And slightly sticky.
“Er,” Richard started, wincing at how high his voice sounded. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “Stig?”
His thin, reedy call was swallowed up by the room. Richard struggled to his feet and called out again, voice still high and getting higher as his unease grew. Peering about, eyes squinted as if that would somehow grant him bat-like night vision, he took a few tottering steps.
As his eyes – still tragically not-very-bat-like at all – adjusted to the gloom, he made out a light-coloured blob on the floor. Richard trotted over, grimacing as he stepped in something wet.
He dearly hoped that this wasn’t some sort of joke, and that Iain and Charlie weren’t hidden behind an as-yet-unseen potted plant, sniggering as Richard’s todger bounced around in the dark. It seemed like the sort of thing Clarkson would find hilarious, and that the Stig, if he truly thought Richard had betrayed him, might aid and abet.
The blob was a sheet, as it turned out. A sheet made of paper. A sheet made of paper, with some huge, apparently hand-written notes about BMWs and explosions on it, and a giant drawing of a gentleman’s sausage wearing sunglasses. A sheet that looked suspiciously like the napkin he’d been responsibly brainstorming on earlier.
Scared, and therefore incredibly angry, Richard planted his hands on his hips and swung angrily around. “Right,” he shouted, ignoring his own nudity and the mousey quality of his voice. “What fucking, cocksucking wanker thought this would be funny? Eh? Drugging me, stealing my fucking clothes, making my fucking napkin into a fucking sheet?”
He glared into the dark, hands fisted hard enough to hurt.
In the silence, there was a soft rustling. Richard whipped around, fists leading the way, and saw nothing but darkness, and the fucking sheet.
Which had changed, slightly.
There was a piece of paper drifting gently to a stop on top of it. Richard picked it up, glancing suspiciously around for the camera that he had no doubt was recording this entire farce.
Dear Richard Hammond,
Now you are a hamster-sized Hamster.
Regards,
The Stig
P.S. You are not a good friend.
P.P.S. You are on the table. Be careful getting down.
P.P.P.S. If you hurt yourself, I will not even care because I am that mad.
P.P.P.P.S. I will come and get you in the morning. You had better learn your lesson before then, because you promised I could sleep over this weekend.
P.P.P.P.P.S. I am very excited, Richard. I am going to bring my bathing suit. It is new, and it has racing cars on it. Andrew Wilman gave it to me. I said, “Thank you, Andrew Wilman,” and he said, “You are welcome, Stig.”
“Christ,” Richard said, rubbing a hand over his face. The Stig was behind all of this, though admittedly not in quite the way he’d thought.
He looked down at the floor – the tabletop, rather – and, now that he knew what he was looking at, it was all very obvious. Just a few feet (inches?) to his left was the heart with JC + WY in the middle that James had carved into the table during a meeting. Richard’s napkin was there, and if he squinted, he could just make out the spoon Jeremy had left behind after lunch (because he was an utter, utter pig of a man, as James told him often and with relish).
There was nothing for it, then. He’d best get started on “learning his lesson,” and tomorrow morning he’d be back to normal. Or as normal as a man could be with an enthusiastic Stig running around the paddock, chasing the horses.
Sighing, Richard bent over the napkin and got to work trying to make some trousers out of it.
:::
Richard and the Stig were, despite their many, many differences, friends. Quite good friends, actually, once Richard had been able to get past the whole the-Stig-is-not-human-and-oh-by-the-way-he-is-magical-or-an-alien-or-something-look-don’t-think-about-it-or-ask-questions-just-accept-it-and-move-on thing. Yes, the Stig did weird things, and yes, he communicated by writing on a piece of paper without ever actually writing on it, and yes, he very occasionally derived so much pleasure from driving that he vibrated and hummed. But he was kind, and loyal, and every so often he’d bring Richard a bit of engine or motorbike that he’d been looking for for ages.
He lived at the track, or so Jeremy had faithfully maintained. Truthfully, Richard had never seen him coming or going, so there was a good chance that, for once in his life, Jeremy and his fat gob had something right. After a couple of years of casually waving goodbye, he’d started to notice how slumped the Stig would look as the entire crew drove off and left him alone.
So Richard had invited him over one weekend.
The Stig was immediately enamoured with the horses, though he’d been appalled by the idea of actually riding one. They’d taken the dogs for a walk (or, rather, Richard, Mindy and the girls had taken the dogs for a walk, while the Stig had frolicked happily through a meadow until he fell into a mud puddle, at which point he’d sulked prolifically and demanded to be taken back to the house). Having hosed the Stig off, they tried to get him into the pool, which ended badly when it was discovered that the Stiggish version of a bathing suit differed greatly from what was considered polite at the Hammonds’. The Stig had dragged the girls off to play chase-the-Stig, and he wrote them strange and rambling stories about horse-princesses who lived on the moon.
And at the end of the day, he’d learned that the Stig was horribly, tortuously, obscenely afraid of the dark.
The girls (and Mindy, exhausted from worrying about the state of her poor, beleaguered horses, who the Stig had been chasing happily for most of the afternoon) were in bed, and the Stig had gone into the guest room easily enough. Richard had turned off the hall light, shucked out of his clothes and into his pyjamas, and was just curling up to Mindy when the bedroom door opened.
“Darling,” Richard grumbled, turning over to gently and caringly tell whichever girl it was to go the hell back to her own room, “you can’t-“
The rest of his sentence was cut short as the very light, but very bony, body of the Stig (complete with ruddy helmet, Christ) crashed bodily into him.
Richard’s manfully-muffled shriek woke Mindy, who reacted to the sight of a white-suited man grappling frantically with her husband by belting him quite soundly in the ribs. The Stig wailed, a completely horrifying sound that sent the dogs fleeing from the room, and wrapped himself around Richard like a very sharp octopus.
“Stig?” Richard squeaked – again, very manfully – into the Stig’s shoulder. “What on earth are you doing?”
The Stig unwrapped one arm just long enough to shove his paper at Mindy.
“He says he’s come to check on us,” Mindy said, reading.
“Hmmpsahdsd,” Richard managed, which meant something along the lines of, “What the hell are you on about?”
“He’s worried that… Oh dear, I can’t read this. Hold on,” Mindy said, and reached over to flick on the bedside light.
The tension oozed out of the Stig all at once, until he was lying on Richard like a very shaky blanket.
“Are you afraid of the dark?” Richard asked, incredulous.
The Stig nodded gently. His visor squeaked against Richard’s neck.
“Well,” Richard said, at a loss.
“We can get you a nightlight for the guest room,” Mindy said, mothering-mode fully engaged. She rubbed gentle circles on the Stig’s back. The paper rustled, and she looked down. “Oh, he wants to stay in here. Stig, you can’t stay in here.”
“Aw, Minds,” Richard said, as the Stig’s shaking increased. “He’s scared. He just needs someone with him until he falls asleep.”
“He can stay with us, Daddy,” came Willow’s small voice from the doorway.
“We don’t mind,” Izzy said.
“He will not,” Mindy said firmly. “And he’s not staying in here, either. There’s no room, Richard.” She began to pry them apart, shoving the Stig down the bed.
The Stig clutched at Richard’s knees, trembling.
“Look, I’ll sit in with him until he falls asleep,” Richard said. He eeled out of the Stig’s grasp and stood, trying to pull the Stig off the bed. The Stig lay in a tragic, tremulous heap. “Come on, girls, let’s help the Stig get to bed.”
Between the three of them, they managed to get the Stig back into the guest bedroom and into bed. Izzy tucked the sheets up around his ears (or where his ears would be if the helmet hadn’t been on), and Willow ran and got Mr. Bear (who was, she informed the Stig solemnly, a mighty protector against The Dark). TG was lying under the nightlight, snoring lightly. Richard sat on the other side of the bed and talked about bikes, the Stig’s visor turned attentively his way.
Eventually, figuring the Stig had finally drifted off (because surely only James May could stay interested in the valves designs of a four-stroke cylinder head), Richard eased himself off the edge of the bed.
The Stig’s hand whipped out from under the blankets and clamped on to Richard’s wrist.
“Stig,” Richard said, trying to be nice, “I’m chuffing exhausted. It’s three in the bloody morning. I need to get some sleep. You’ve got the nightlight on; you’ll be fine.”
The Stig shook his head and let go of Richard’s wrist to pat the bed beside him. He pulled down the covers and patted again. When Richard didn’t move, he shuffled over and grabbed Richard by the waistband of his pjs and pulled him down.
Richard, too tired to protest, let the Stig cover him up and curl around him. There was a familiar rustle of paper, which Richard read by the dim glow of the nightlight.
You will not tell the others?
“Absolutely not,” Richard said. What the hell would he say? The Stig still looked worried, so he added, “I promise. Now, let’s get some sleep.”
The Stig cuddled (because that was undoubtedly what he was doing) closer, and Richard let his eyes drift shut. He fell asleep to the sound of the Stig’s gentle purring.
That night had set the pattern. The Stig would come over for the weekend and frolic, play with the girls, and stalk the horses. He’d help Richard in the garage, or help Mindy in the kitchen (the Stig, as it turned out, could make astoundingly delicious pies, a fact that Richard delighted in rubbing in May’s face at every available opportunity). He wrote them meandering stories of a homeland that seemed to change with each telling, and sat cross-legged on the floor, helmeted chin on hands, with the girls as Richard read them out loud.
At night, with the nightlight shining, he tucked himself into the guest bed and wrapped himself around Richard, who got used to sleeping with a helmet on his chest.
:::
Richard Hammond, hamster-sized, looked into Jeremy’s discarded spoon to survey his handiwork. He’d wound the napkin into a sort of skirt-thing (he’d put the bespectacled penis on the inside in an attempt to preserve his pride that made no sense, even to himself) that covered all of the important bits, and if he looked a bit of a twat, well. There was no helping it.
Hefting the spoon with both hands, Richard set off across the table. He had the feeling that the Stig wouldn’t think that sleeping on the tabletop counted as learning his lesson. He reached the edge of the table, and looked down.
Oh boy. Far.
He could… ride the spoon down? No. Stupid. He could make a rope out of the napkin? Right, because it would absolutely reach the ground.
Deep in thought, he felt the tabletop shake but didn’t really notice it until something caught the eye. Something flicking in and out of his peripheral vision. Slowly, he turned his head to look.
Settled low on its haunches, pupils blown wide, and tail lashing back and forth, was That Fucking Disgusting Cat That Probably Has Lupus (a name given to it by Jeremy), the mangy tomcat that prowled around the track. James was forever feeding it scraps, lying stretched out on his stomach to try and befriend it. Beyond it, he could see the door was opened slightly, letting in some light and, clearly, a great dirty cat.
Richard became very aware, very quickly, that he was standing on the edge of a very impressive fall.
He shifted slightly, trying to edge away from the drop. The tom yowled, the noise tapering off low in its flea-bitten throat, and took two almost-imperceptible steps forward.
“Uh,” Richard said. “Nice kitty?”
The cat gave one more violent twitch of its tail, and leapt. Richard had just barely enough time to take two rapid steps away from the ledge before the cat was on him.
The napkin skirt that he’d worked so bloody hard on was ripped off of him almost from the start, and the tom managed to swipe great ruddy gouges into the meat of his left shoulder before Richard actually remembered the spoon.
Shouting a terrifying battle-cry that consisted solely of vowels, he jabbed at the cat and managed to rap it on the conk, setting it yowling and backing away.
“Ha ha,” he shouted, “whaddya think of that?”
The cat responded by hissing and smacking him soundly on the back, its paw almost bigger than he was. Richard fell flat on his spoon, racking himself mightily on the handle as he did, and let out a pitiful whimper with the last of his breath.
The tom patted him on the back, as if to say “Well fought, mate. Quite the battle there, pip pip and whatnot,” only he said it with his great ruddy claws still out. If Richard could only breathe he’d be crying, because his back was in ribbons and his arm was bleeding everywhere, and his nadgers were throbbing with a pain so mindless and deep he thought he’d die from that alone.
Richard rolled over onto his back and sat up slowly, wincing as the skin on his back pulled tight. The cat had backed off to the other side of the table and crouched down low, its eyes fixed on Richard. He saw the cat’s tail whipping back and forth, saw it wiggle its mangy back end in preparation for a pounce. This was it; he was cornered with his only weapon underneath him and the great bloody beast knew it.
Richard screwed his eyes shut and braced himself for certain death-by-cat, and even more certain massive-amounts-of-posthumus-mocking-from-his-mates-once-they-found-out-how-he-died, but the killing blow never came.
He opened one eye and saw the cat’s bushed-out tail vanish over the far edge of the table. He heard the skittering of its claws on the linoleum floors and then it was gone, back out the way it came.
Now completely confused, and bleeding fairly worryingly, Richard closed his eyes and sighed. He thought maybe he’d die here, naked and beaten by a cat, and he didn’t really care. James and Jeremy would find him here in the morning, the size of a postage stamp, his cock exposed, and Richard honestly could not give a toss.
God, his plums hurt.
Something nudged him, gently, in the side. Richard considered for a moment before opening his eyes, and immediately regretted his decision. There was a giant white-gloved hand hovering beside him, attached to a white-suited arm that, if he squinted, Richard could see was attached to a white-suited Stig.
The hand nudged him again, and the giant, far-off Stig’s head cocked to the side as if concerned. He might well be, Richard reflected, seeing as Richard himself was naked and dying. He might even be dead, really, except that being dead probably didn’t hurt this much.
“I’ve learnt my lesson,” Richard said. His shoulder bled feebly, as if to back him up.
Very gently, the Stig scooped Richard into his hand. There was a tricky moment where it felt like he was flying on a shrinking hand-mattress, and then normal-sized Richard was propped up against normal-sized Stig.
Christ, but the Portakabin floor was dirty.
The Stig was crooning at him, the sound muffled by his helmet, as he poked at Richard’s various wounds. Thankfully, having apparently returned to normal-Hamster size, and not literal-hamster size, the fatal cat-induced gashes had become pathetic scratches. Of course Richard was pleased; who wanted great manly war wounds when you could have little cuts? Not Richard, surely. He didn’t want to look like he’d fought a lion with his bare hands and barely escaped with his life. Not at all.
“Stig,” Richard said, “where are my clothes?”
The Stig smoothed a hand down Richard’s arm, over the cuts. He did something complicated with his other hand, and was holding Richard’s clothes between one blink and the next.
“It’s a little bit exhausting trying to pretend that doesn’t bother me,” Richard told him, reaching for his pants with a groan. He got dressed quickly, happy that his bum was no longer a) exposed, and b) touching horrifying things.
As Richard pulled on his boot and straightened, the Stig handed him a piece of paper.
Richard, it read, I am glad to see you have learned your lesson.
“Yeah,” Richard said, scrubbing the hair at the back of his head. He still had no idea what lesson it was that he learned (Don’t tell the Stig’s secrets or a cat will eat you? Don’t ever do another Stig introduction or else weird things will happen? Be sure to clean the Portakabin more often, or at least wipe down the table?), but he was glad that he’s learned it.
The Stig watched him silently and, if Richard was right, rather knowingly.
The paper rustled in his hand. Richard, the lesson is: The Dark is a very scary place. Now let us proceed on the journey to Wales, and I shall wear my swimming trunks and calmly visit with the horses. When it is nighttime, you will turn on my nightlight and we will guard each other from the Dark. Okay?
“Okay,” Richard said, pushing open the door and stepping out, bow-legged and wincing, into the night air.
Also, I am sorry about your back and arm and testicles.
“That’s all right.”
I hope you are not mad at me.
“Nope. Why on earth would I be?” Richard kept his voice carefully neutral.
The Stig slid into the driver’s side of Richard’s Porsche without invitation. Which was fine, really. This way they’d get home faster and Richard could sleep. He was just settling in when the paper rustled again.
Richard.
He sighed. “What?”
Thank you for being my friend. You are the best at it.
“I– Well, thank you, Stig,” Richard said, touched and deliberately not thinking about the night he’d just had.
Sometimes Jeremy is mean to me. And James talks about strange things that I find difficult to understand, because I believe he holds half of his conversations in his own head. And Andrew Wilman is very rumpled and I find that bothersome. Does he not own an iron? Does he never wash his clothes? Richard, are we going to see the ponies? I would like to see the ponies again. There is one pony that I have named Buttscoot, although Willow has informed me that this is not the pony’s name. But Richard, I like the name Buttscoot. It is greatly amusing. Mindy promised we could have hot dogs for lunch. Do you like hot dogs? I do. They smell good. Jeremy said they are made out of pig anus. Is that true? I do not think it is. I cannot wait to try swimming again. I saw on the internet that you can do somersaults into the water! Can you do that? I bet you can. I also saw on the internet...
And so it went, through the night, the words scrolling endlessly up the page. Richard politely read by the light of the streetlights until he started nodding off, head jerking up as he tried to stay awake.
The Stig gently took his paper back and patted Richard on the shoulder.
With the headlamps cutting a swath through the night, the Stig took them home.