The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Page 10
‘Would you like something to eat before you go?’
‘No,’ I replied, remembering the hard fried eggs. Her smell was very strong now. Her harsh hair rustled against my cheek. Her invisible eyes stared sightlessly into the anonymous room. When I kissed her and threaded my tongue between her lips I felt her suppress a dry choking sob at the back of her throat: she held it intact with her stomach muscles, entering into the kiss with her head thrown back – silently screaming as it were. ‘Oh,’ Tee said, speaking my name. Again I kissed her, her lips flattening against my teeth; then her mouth was fully open and eager to accept whatever silky explorations I might devise. Nothing tastes so sweet as the saliva of a nubile girl.
‘Oh,’ Tee said again, her mouth half smothered. Sparks were presumably flashing behind her shut eyelids; she was experiencing the wet probing of my tongue everywhere throughout her mouth; the dull hot growth was spreading between her thighs and inching its way up inside her belly; her limbs were uncontrollable; her backbone might at any second dissolve, leaving an open, inviting, defenceless receptacle, shapeless, yielding, ready. ‘Oh,’ she said.
A sombre groan intercepted my next ploy: it was the old lady turning in troubled sleep. Our huddled shapes sat motionless, silhouetted against the night window through which the anaemic lamplight cascaded as in a dream. Tee uncoiled her limbs gracefully and set the needle in a new groove. Percy Sledge began to sing ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, a sound that to this day recreates Tee, that room, the house on Oxford Road, the smudged smiling children in their silver frames, the old lady amidst crumpled sheets, and the smooth tarmac snake outside upon which the lights looked down like yellow eyes on arching concrete stalks.
‘I love you,’ Tee said softly, back in my arms. Or perhaps it was my imagination that had uttered the sacred words. Perhaps it was the sly winking children. Perhaps, even, it was the giggling gasping eavesdroppers in the passageway, convulsing soundlessly over a joke at my expense. But one thing for certain: it couldn’t have been the sick old lady muttering and twisting in pain-filled sleep. Or could it? Everything is possible: nothing can be proven, only falsified.
In any event it was time to leave. I had difficulty in tearing myself away from her grasp, which was only to be expected. It is always a wrench at the best of times. Tee clasped me lovingly, and then, in the depths of the darkened room, disappeared like a puff of smoke. I sat on apprehensively, the hissing record scribing a scar on the delicate tissue of my brain. It was almost feasible to believe that I was a ghost inhabiting an alien time zone and that it was not Tee who had vanished, but me, and the room I now perceived was a trick, an illusion, a blurry error left behind like the residue in an empty wine bottle. But no, I was here; the sofa was solid and substantial beneath my fingers, the record was crackling, the articulated lorries were lumbering past, the silver frames were glinting viciously. Then where was Tee, and by what magic had she removed her physical presence from the darkened room? Could it be that certain people had received instruction in the art of molecular displacement while my briefing had been woefully inadequate? Had I missed a vital parade? Had my number been called when I was absent offstage?
Later it was to seem to my scrambled memory circuits that the scene had been snatched intact from a novel. The Exhibition, Catford, and the coming nightdrive were too fantastic to have taken place as a random series of events, experiences, happenings. Of course Tee wasn’t a real person; of course her mother was not dying in fitful agonised sleep. And as for the watchers in the passageway I did not believe in them for the simple reason that two gasping laughers such as they could not have remained so silent during the preceding conversation. (Besides, they would have wakened the mother, and Tee would have created an awful fuss.)
Straightening my limbs and feeling the tingle of fresh blood in my buttocks I set the playing arm to one side and slowed the record with the tips of my fingers. The machine emitted a mechanical protesting whirr.
‘I’ll see you to the door,’ Tee said. In fact she came and sat next to me in the car, crying, leaving my face wet and smarting. I was never going to see her again. No more. Never again. Driving along Oxford Road I tried to purse my lips into the shape of a whistle.
CHAPTER VI
M6/EXIT 21/A57
The car hummed along, the needles quivering in their little green portholes, and soon illuminated Oxford Road gave way to twin pools of light fanning across the shiny black A34. Through villages I sped, the houses like scenic flats without substance, supported from behind by slats of soft yellow pine, criss-crossed and battened to make them stable. Two-dimensional people slept inside, stacked like flattened cardboard boxes in airless storerooms. Stratford-upon-Avon was grey and ethereal in the moonlight, the old stone bridge over the river made of papier mâché; and the river too contained a perfect simulacrum of the moon on the placid oily skin of its surface. Not a creature stirred in the dead town, and in vain I tried to hush the engine noise which thoughtlessly echoed and re-echoed, boomed and reverberated over the flat water.
Midnight ticked by: the planet swung like a blue-green pendulum in the starry void. England slept; I drove; the old lady moaned; the moon sank to meet its rising image in the slack waters of the Avon. On the smooth ebony-like wheel my hands performed exquisitely expressive gestures as they guided the heavy car across the bridge and through the slumbering town. In its ball-and-pinion socket the gear lever clucked with precision-engineered smugness, the cogs gliding into mutually-acceptable grooves as between the hedgerows the lone car with its single occupant followed the wavering line North on a memorable nightdrive!
Birmingham, in the early hours of the morning, had about it that quality of an unfinished pencil drawing whose outlines have not been shaded in with varying tones. The place left a taste of unreality in the mouth – a bitter taste reminiscent of aluminium saucepans containing zinc. The first light of dawn was drab and dead, washing all vitality away and draining the air of life: and the air itself was so still and calm that gossamer would have hung in it, transfixed as between two panes of glass. I will confess it: I was deathly tired. My eyelids kept drooping over my parched eyeballs, two leaden weights against which all my willpower was pitted. Goodness, what a struggle.
In a motorway self-service cafeteria on the M6 I ate bread and cheese and drank two cups of coffee. Other night travellers wandered about with eyes freshly hatched and wearing their clothes like pyjamas; at the moment I felt secure within myself, safe with the inner knowledge that I could come and go as I pleased, stand or sit, walk or run. The place was laid bare with flourescent lighting, as clinical and white as an operating theatre, yet so filthy that one’s hands became soiled from merely handling the cutlery. Under the table my feet shuffled in rubbish. A girl opposite me smiled as she poured sugar onto a spoon; it piled up in a small conical hill.
‘Aren’t these places awful?’ she said, and on ‘awful’ her nose ruckled up into several corrugations; yet she was smiling all the while. Her hands were rather chubby. The flesh hung underneath her fingers like furled sails. I noticed too that the lipstick had faded away from the corners of her mouth, and just below her left ear the grain of the fine fair down was most discernible, moving up the neck and then turning ninety degrees to follow the line of the jaw. Notwithstanding, she was extremely attractive: buxom, two slightly protruding front teeth giving her mouth a moist, provocative, faintly gasping look that was three-tenths on the way to a smile. (Some people cannot display their teeth, no matter how hard they try.) This was without doubt the reason why her lipstick had worn thin at the edges. It wasn’t every night one sat opposite an attractive girl in a motorway cafeteria. She picked up the cup in one hand, holding a paper handkerchief clawlike in the other – as such women do – and took tentative sips with pouting lips, then dabbed away the residue behind which hovered the glimmerings of a smile. She was the kind of woman upon whose body can be found a preponderance of moles. Her ankles would be slim, and she would tan easily, and in due cours
e would discover that short hair suited her best. At this point in my assumptions a man came up and said brusquely, ‘Ruth,’ and stood looking down at the two of us, shifting his gaze from one to the other. ‘Ruth?’ the girl said, shaking her head. She looked at me. I looked at the man. The man looked at the girl. The process reversed itself, like alternating current. ‘I’m Ryl,’ the girl said. She had very full lips. ‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Didn’t you teach primary schoolchildren in Oldham?’ ‘No,’ the girl (Ryl) said. ‘I’m not a teacher.’ ‘You’re not?’ ‘No.’ ‘You’re not from Oldham?’ ‘No.’ ‘Sorry,’ the man said, going. ‘Where are you from?’ I discovered I had asked. ‘Rusholme.’ The circle was tightening all right.
Ahead the early light was shining through the mist, and the air became colder as the motorway screamed North: a concrete stripe obeying the contours of soft green velvet. At Exit 21 I followed the full circular sweep leading to the A57, the road Tee and I had driven along not many days before. Now the passenger seat was empty, her luggage gone, and the nightdrive with its squashed animals a segment of instant nostalgia. I looked at my watch; at this pace the Corn Exchange would be open – just – to admit the cleaning staff. It was a vast, ornate building with dank corridors and antiquated lifts. Wrought ironwork protected the greasy litter-strewn lift shafts – although few suicides had been recorded of late. I had it on reliable authority that the building was good for another ten years.
In the clear sky of morning it seemed that the world had reassembled itself into some semblance of order; perhaps it was the lack of people, or maybe the quiet beauty of a new sky, or the disquieting knowledge that despite all setbacks and doubts and horrifying premonitions I was, incredibly, still alive … and the fact that I could think of myself as being alive was the most incredible self-knowledge of all. I had come through to a new world, surfaced in a fresh day, and the dark, mysterious, unreal events of night had ceased to exist. The girl in the motorway cafeteria was a blur of hieroglyphics on the opposite page. Catford was a dying sunset. The Exhibition a laughable paranoiac exercise. Tee’s cousin, Tee’s mother, Tee herself, and all the other invented characters safely behind me on numbered pages. And, even more of a jolt to the imagination, had but one atom been displaced at the beginning of time none of this would have happened; nor, more than likely, would any of us have inhabited the planet. We are but a single possibility in a universe of accidents, a freak draw in any one of ten trillion permutations. There was no plan – unless it could be conceived that a random, haphazard scheme was predictable in its very unpredictability. But after the next cataclysm when the exploding fragments of matter have ceased to be expelled and begin to fall inwards to the central molten core … when time has run backwards and we are born old and age to embryos … when elements are created anew and gravity becomes a racial memory … after this – what? Some might suppose that 312 Oxford Road was destined to exist (and some might even doubt its present existence), as though time possesses its own irrefutability; they might also be inclined to believe that the lives we inhabit like pips inside a grape are nothing more than line-learning dress rehearsals preparing us for the Oxford Road of our dreams. The fact that Tee and her entourage were, are, real to me is no guarantee of their reality. This is not to say that I have imagined them, but rather that memory has the irritating trick of turning into fiction, just as experience becomes transmuted into myth even at the point of being experienced. Would it be nearer the truth, or further from it, to regard an imagined future as having more substance than the remembered past? Is it at all possible that, as I sit here in the courtyard at dusk looking out at the cubed concrete shapes and recalling all that has supposedly gone before … is it within the bounds of human credibility that, unknown to the narrator, I inadvertantly swapped places with another persona and am not now who I think I am?
PART II
CHAPTER I
‘I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE YOU AGAIN’
Hope Hospital must once again be the focal point of my memories, even though nothing happened there that is worth recounting. But how many evenings have I sat alone in the car watching the cloaked nurses hurrying back from duty, waiting to catch a glimpse of those flashing eyes and teeth!
When I returned from abroad Tee had been in London several months, living and working in Hampstead. On the train I wrote a shaky letter to Jay, posted it in London, and went in search of Tee: at length I found her in charge of a small psychiatric ward; we kissed furtively in the office and she gave me the key to her flat which was at the top of a tower block guarded by a decrepit commissionaire. The flat was small, modern, delightfully compact, and clean; the communal kitchen was along the hallway, and I saw not another soul (except the commissionaire) as I took the lift to the fourteenth floor and let myself in to the one room in which everything was thoughtfully provided. Everything I saw and touched reminded me of the Urmston experience. The rooms and hallways were the same box-like cavities and the light was merciless, unfeeling, drab. Even the plain cream walls, with an eggshell sheen on them, were featureless monstrosities upon whose surface a fly would not have dared to leave its droppings.
So I waited in yet another darkened room, waited for Tee to arrive, and imagined what I would do to her when she did. The radio was tuned to a popular station and music was playing. Lying on the bed, afloat at the peak of a concrete tower, I looked at the unblemished ceiling and visualised myself as the only man on earth thinking these certain thoughts. The visualisation exhilarated and frightened me, because from it followed the hypothesis that I was unique, and to be A Unique Man and yet a speck in infinitesimal time was a concept too overwhelming for my mind to encompass. Even the thought of the thought of it had to be kept at arm’s length, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, which is why I busy myself with inconsequential doings, fill my head with plans of action, in order to delay the fatal moment when I must reverse my eyeballs and stare into the murky contents of my brain.
Traffic noises faintly from below: subdued whine of the lift rising up the shaft: disturbed shadows on the ceiling: radio singing inanely to itself – audible and visual impressions of being alive in the latter half of the twentieth century. The fact that I was alive was confirmed by the beating of my heart. It thumped inside my chest causing the material of my shirt to vibrate in tiny spasms, and when I held my breath and raised my head to witness this miracle it thumped all the harder. The little pearl buttons trembled with each reverberation. It was terrifying to imagine what would happen if the blood ceased to flow: the skin becoming cold and clammy, the eyes fixed like dead marbles, and the stiffness creeping through the trunk and limbs until a statue lay on the bed like an effigy on a tomb. Desperately I sought to keep this from happening, urging the hot body flow, encouraging the heart muscle to clench and release, willing the liver, pancreas, bladder, bowels and other organs to continue their functions unabated – all this to little avail, because the machine went its own sweet way unheedful of my frantic attentions; it might not have belonged to me. Gradually, imperceptibly, my heart returned to its accustomed rhythm and I relaxed inside myself (as it were), lay down at ease within my own body, a small timid creature trapped inside a mechanical husk.
At several minutes before eleven Tee returned from duty, moving briskly about the tiny flat as though unaware of my presence, ignoring the supine figure in the corner underneath the window. She made coffee and brought it to the bed. There was something different about her. I had detected it in the office adjoining the psychiatric ward, and now the feeling came over even more strongly. She was not the Tee of previous times, not the girl who had pressed her hard body against mine and whispered sexy innuendos, not the girl beneath the stone railway bridge who had almost crushed the air out of my lungs with the fierceness of her long-armed embrace. And her hairstyle too was changed: encircling her head in a black frizzy mop. She sat down and, in characteristic fashion, rested her hand on my palpitating shirt. This was in the nature of a friendly reassurance, though it w
as obviously nothing more or less than a token gesture. The spark had gone out of our relationship, that much was clear. What had happened? Was she married to Desmond? Had Darwin recaptured her love? Was her mother deceased? Had she become acquainted with the photographer? Had my charm lost its magic appeal? When a girl loses interest nothing in the world can revitalise it. Her opening remark confirmed my doubts and suspicions.
‘I never expected to see you again.’ Yes, even the tone of her voice was altered. She had lost her laughing manner and was now hard-eyed and utterly business-like. Nothing remained of the tender girl of sweet temperament with whom I had been intimate on at least six hundred occasions.
Tee took up the cup in both hands and lost her face in it, either deep in her own thoughts or perhaps wishing to avoid my gaze. Possibly she was finding my unexpected visit inopportune – at any rate she had firmly set her mind against any welcome. Of course, I realised belatedly, the girl was not entirely to blame: an appointment I had promised faithfully to keep (at the Urmston flat) several months before I had wilfully let slip, being concerned at the time with another person who, still a virgin, held more promise of spicy adventure. To make amends I apologised for my nonappearance.
‘When was that?’ Tee asked, lowering the cup. ‘I had forgotten. And anyway’ – she shrugged – ‘it doesn’t matter,’ and the old grin came back for a bare instant. I propped myself up to drink the warm, sticky coffee. A muskiness from the hot folds of her neck hit me below the belt like a sledgehammer whiff of nostalgia. I leaned forward and kissed her cheek, the side of her jaw, and the soft part of her neck, in shadow, from whence the wonderful hot fragrance emanated. There was a new tensity about her whole being, a finely concealed reluctance which disappointed, saddened, and finally angered me. When a man is thwarted his spirit wilts as well.