The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Read online

  ‘You are welcome to sleep here,’ Tee said, placing no particular emphasis on the word ‘sleep’, which emphasised it all the more. Did she expect a docile acquiescence to this remark? Was I merely a body to be accommodated for the night? Would she, in her heart of hearts, have preferred to see me walking the gutter – cold, hungry, roofless, without a friend in the whole of Hampstead? Such is the transience of sexual attraction, which, when the juices have ceased to stew and curdle, becomes an empty echo of itself, souring the heart and leaving the flesh in a state of repugnant flaccidity.

  Yet still I pressed forward, nuzzling the arch of her neck, almost in a fury of desperation, eagerly, foolishly, inveigling her torpid co-operation in an act which, at best, could only be described as perfunctory; for immediately afterwards I would dispose of her existence in a hidden pocket in my mind and turn over into a dreamless sleep.

  ‘You mustn’t do it; it’s perfectly all right for you to stay the night but other than that I can’t promise anything.’

  Why was lovely Tee saying these words? Had she forgotten so quickly the long sordid history of back rooms, hotel rooms, bathrooms? Why, we had even made love (inexpertly it is true) in the rear of a green van converted into a mobile touring home. Did none of this mean anything to her? Was she so spitefully heartless that she could deny our devious and intricately-woven association stretching back over two years and seven months?

  By degrees my nerveless fingers crept round the starched apron of her uniform: exploring imploring hands that were eloquent in their dumbness. The breath was solidifying in my throat, my pulse was tick-tocking madly, the blood was beginning to clot in the bulging arteries of my neck – soon the suffocating blanket of sexual heat would blot out the world of sane, civilised creatures, of sweetness and light, of intellect and reason, and I would be transformed into a rabid thing with a blood-red mist in front of its eyes. Tee’s cool dark hands held the sides of my face, yet it was a restraining gesture and not an endearment. ‘I don’t want to do it,’ she said quietly.

  Oh what was this? What was this? What was happening? What was going on?

  ‘You can stay here,’ she repeated. ‘I couldn’t be so unkind as to turn you out on a night like this. Besides,’ she added, ‘the commissionaire would almost certainly have his suspicions aroused if he saw you leaving at this hour.’

  This triggered something off in me. ‘He has a fairly common face,’ I ventured to say.

  ‘What do you mean, “a fairly common face”?’ Tee said, cradling my head in her two hands. The pads of her fingers supported the receptacle that contained a million possible universes.

  ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘that his face strikes a chord; it’s a face I’ve seen before. A familiar face.’

  ‘Possible,’ Tee conceded. ‘He hasn’t been here very long.’

  ‘Do you intend staying at this hospital yourself?’

  ‘What has that got to do with the commissionaire?’

  I said, ‘Nothing. Nothing. The one thought simply led to the other, that’s all. I didn’t mean to imply a connexion between the two.’

  ‘You are a silly boy,’ she said, and suddenly it was the old Tee, the laughing Tee, the sexy Tee, coming out from behind her mask of frigid indifference. Her great mouth split wide-open in a tremendous grin, her beautiful sparkling teeth flashing behind the stretched fleshy curvature of her lips. What had passed between those lips since last we met? Who had stood before her and inserted himself into that gaping maw?

  I pressed my forehead to her breastless chest and the thuds of her heart jarred my skull. I was alive, and Tee was with me, and of what consequence were all my other problems alongside these two statements of fact? If only we could die at such moments of lucidity perhaps we might be granted a brief insight into the true nature of all things.

  ‘Your body is brown,’ Tee said.

  ‘I’ve been to Spain.’

  ‘Look at this white mark round your waist!’ She was tracing its undulations with her fingers.

  ‘I thought you were going to throw me out,’ I said like a little lost puppy.

  ‘Silly boy,’ said Tee, slipping naked under the covers beside me. ‘But you realise that we can only sleep?’

  ‘Only sleep?’

  ‘Only sleep.’ Tee was quite definite: absolutely adamant.

  ‘But you were laughing; you were grinning all over your face. I thought it was a joke when you laughed, as though –’

  ‘What has grinning and laughing to do with anything?’ Tee said, puzzled in her turn.

  ‘Well, doesn’t it mean –?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought it meant –’

  ‘Since when did grinning and laughing mean anything?’

  Obviously it would be wise for me to desist, otherwise her perturbations might increase out of all proportion. I lay down, pulled the covers over me, shut my eyes, felt Tee’s bony knees against the backs of my legs, and pretended to sleep. But in a little while, having edged and wriggled and squirmed under the covers to the foot of the bed, I found myself between her legs, my mouth against her furry pubis, my tongue inserting itself between the several soft layers of lips, flicking, darting, trilling, so that Tee muttered in her sleep and came drowsily, deliciously awake with a sensation that was balanced between ecstasy and agony, on the verge of a scream, a long-drawn-out whine of endurance as though someone or something had touched the raw nerve-endings of the tender root that was the central growth from which the whole of her being sprang; and to my ears came the familiar, welcome gutteral sounds of pleasure, while of their own accord her legs stiffened outwards, quivering like a water-diviner’s rods, her toes curling and flexing as the hot quick thrill rose up inside her belly and set her thighs a-tingling.

  In the morning I rode down, haggard but proud, in the lift, emerging to face the seated commissionaire, and with a flash of instantaneous recognition knew him to be a cleaner who had once worked at the Corn Exchange.

  CHAPTER II

  THE REPETITIVE NIGHTMARE

  I never saw Tee again, and haven’t seen her to this day – to this moment, if the truth be known.

  But now we must hasten backwards in time to the scene of rather a remarkable coincidence: bowling along the motorway in a green van converted into a four-berth camper, my spirits were as heavy as lead weights, unremittingly oppressive, because no matter how hard I pressed the accelerator to the floor the vehicle refused to exceed twenty-eight miles per hour. This was so tiring that I took to using alternate feet, crossing my left over my right and sitting side-saddle on the seat facing the open window. The other three occupants, in the rear, suspected nothing. We proceeded in this ridiculous, exhausting fashion as far as the northern outskirts of Birmingham where total reluctance overcame the beast and it slumped sullenly at the side of the road, spitting and hissing with ugly spite. I was very near suicide at this point, or if not suicide, tears. Would we ever reach Spain in this condition? Would we ever reach Southampton? Would we ever reach Abingdon? The beast thrutched forward a couple of miles and failed again. It repeated this magnanimous gesture several times until – the engine smouldering in hot black rage – I decided to let it subside peacefully in a convenient layby while the four of us ate fish and chips with our fingers. The two children were tired but excited, and grimy from doing nothing. Sitting at the formica table propped on its single strut I happened to look out at the lighted shops bordering the main road; I happened casually, disinterestedly, to assimilate the streaking metal shapes of cars with their cruel, fiery, vanishing tail-lights: and by pure chance I came to recognise this as the very place where Tee and I had sat eating hot crumbly fish and she had sensuously licked my fingers one by one. I found it difficult to believe; it was verging on the unbelievable.

  My life was a vicious circle. The atoms were circular, the molecules were circular, the planet was circular, the solar system was circular, the galaxy was circular, our local cluster was circular, the universe was circular, life itself w
as circular, time was circular … which explained, in part, why wherever I went I met mirror-images of myself going to or returning from Somewhere. At will, it seemed, I could walk out of one scene and step into another; life was a circular stage divided into sets like the segments of a cake, and there stood I, watching them twirl by, each brightly-lit fully-contained fragment a separate, independent and yet integral part of my life. Some of them had inter-connecting doors, while others (on opposite sides of the circle) were inverted replicas: exact inside-out-upside-down-back-to-front mirror-images of past or future existences.

  Thus the flashing black road with its shrieking imbeciles was in direct communion with the winding midnight snake (and its squashed animals) of several months previous. The two were the same and I would not have been unduly surprised, or disturbed even, to find Tee’s laughing eyes twinkling mischievously up at me, the hot grease shining on her lips and fingertips and running down her wrist. Had I turned to my left, there she would have been: had I turned to my right – as I did – there would sit Wife and Children. Yes, there they were: travel-tired, a little upset at these enforced halts, a little frightened too by the violent, unfamiliar environment into which they had been thrust. The sand-coloured hills of Spain wreathed in distorting layers of light were far away in time and space, as yet unexperienced and therefore unreal, fictitious. The reality of the moment was confined to the cold interior of a van, a piece of suicidal road, the oncoming night, and a fluttering fear that left the thick batter and fish part-digested.

  Sitting and thinking about this – in addition to several million other thoughts at any given nano-second of time – and staring out at the aforementioned roadway, I was struck by the absurd repetition of circumstances that so far had been the outstanding characteristic of the trip. First, we had ridden singing past the entrance to Hope Hospital, that repository of all my phobias and fetishes; then the Soap Works and its attendant rainbows had jolted into view, illustrating the thesis that pollution can be beautiful; then followed the countrified A57 curving finally into a concrete arc which slid into the motorway like a tributary joining a great river; and now, would you believe, hot greasy fish at the side of a road that had become part of the folk-lore of my head. This chain of coincidences was dizzying: no doubt a bell-boy with a pock-marked face was at this instant preparing a meal or making a bed in an as-yet-unspecified hotel. How far could one’s credulity be stretched? To what degree was I willing to suspend my sanity and abandon myself to these fantastic delusions? Was life in actuality a spool of film, so many frames per second that could be run, re-run, rewound, stopped, run backwards, run upside down, inverted, projected in negative, made blurred, sharpened into focus, slowed down, speeded up, edited, spliced, dubbed, colour-heightened, tone-eliminated, and then re-re-re-run till the actors wearied of parodying a pastiche of a parody of a shadow of an image, etc? It was conceivable that such interminable convolutions were the very stuff of living matter, that the humdrum, everyday world was gloss, static, the spume of a wave, while in nightmares was to be found – not truth! – but the wonderful total meaninglessness and horror which is the interpretation of the human brain – the reaction of the primitive human mind – to events, happenings and experiences in a particular stratum of the space time continuum.

  After putting out a tractor fire with our extinguisher we arrived in Abingdon and sought an hotel. We sat in the lounge eating sandwiches and watching late-night news. Strange, but these mass media events too, without the framework of a familiar environment, were make-believe fairytales cooked up moments before to make us feel at home: a semblance, if you like, of comfortable disasters and reassuring catastrophes which told us all was well with the tired old planet.

  The children were falling asleep with their mouths full. They were tucked up in bed between strange white sheets stiff with too much laundering; and we too fell soundlessly asleep, our limbs entwined in embryonic knots of self-defence. We breakfasted together, the four of us, our nerves on tip-toe because a) it was a bright, glorious, late-spring day, b) would the van start and c) once started keep going? d) would we reach Southampton in time to catch the boat? e) what lay ahead of us in that vast foreign country with nothing between us and unimaginable terrors but a sheet of steel and four worn tyres?

  ‘Would you like porridge or cereal?’ the Wife asked, her slate-grey eyes preoccupied with the minutiae of motherly concern.

  ‘Porridge,’ the Boy replied, resting his jaw on the table and feeling the texture of the white cloth with his chin. The orbs of his eyes had been washed perfectly clean by sleep; those eyes sucked in the vivid images of morning: the sunlit dining-room, the black-clad ghosting waiters, the reflections of the marmalade dish on the ceiling – accepted them all with marvellous incomprehension. It was to him a day like any other: ordinary, unexceptional, a positive miracle.

  The Girl, being older, had erected a barrier of composure which was a prelude to becoming an adult. With an ultra-delicate air she surveyed the world (and her parents) as from a great distance, peering at life long-sightedly, as it were. Her beautiful slim hands conveyed toast to her mouth by means of suggestion rather than actual physical movement. Everything was just so: had to be … just so. Bodily functions were a matter of extreme indelicacy and were not to be spoken of, referred to, or in any way hinted at. We were all of us gross creatures, her look implied, so better not to harp on the unpleasant albeit unavoidable fact.

  The Wife busied herself with trivialities in order to displace the fear that was nibbling at the edges of her heart. She had been torn out of her environment and forced to participate in a nerve-racking nomadic life-style that had begun disastrously and looked like getting worse. Not to have a house, with walls, doors and windows; not to have a fixed point of reference but to be an aimless wanderer; not even to have a bed or lavatory one could call one’s own: these were terrifying alien concepts which transformed peaceful, humdrum normality into a weirdly wild and uncontrollable landscape. Demons lurked everywhere and in the most unexpected places; even the faces of people (all of them strangers) took on grotesque aspects which suggested hitherto unguessed-at depths of alienness.

  As for me I was, as usual, myself.

  ‘Would you like some more coffee?’ the Wife asked me, wielding the silver-spouted pot like a talisman.

  The Boy was scooping toast crumbs off his plate and into his mouth, his eyes swivelling from plate to ceiling to waiters to coffee-pot to parents to plate. Nothing was spared; everything was devoured, toast crumbs and all.

  ‘We should be moving,’ I said, the clichéd man-of-action. At such moments I was fond of my wife. Together we were the dual poles that gave a framework of sorts to an unimaginable nightmare.

  ‘Can I have some more toast?’ the Girl said.

  ‘How far have we to go?’ the Wife said.

  ‘Can I have some more toast?’ the Boy said.

  Waiters came and went. Toast appeared on the table and stood like triangular records in racks. The sunlight shifted imperceptibly across the white cloth, and the miniature contents of the table were twice reflected in the Boy’s round shining eyes, complete with tiny crucifixes – the window-frame.

  ‘If only they could see us now,’ the Wife said, attempting bravado. ‘You know, we should be all right: we put out that fire.’

  ‘Why should putting out that fire make us, or see us, all right?’

  ‘Well… it’s one favour owing, surely?’

  ‘From who to whom?’

  ‘If there’s any justice we should be all right.’ This was said fiercely, which were you to know her is quite out of character. It must have been fear or perhaps a residue of naive belief in Christian ethics. And I thought I had knocked it out of her head.

  ‘How do you feel this morning?’ I felt it incumbent upon me to ask this, as a monk mumbling an ancient liturgy; and besides, the Wife believed and found comfort in the balm of tame words.

  ‘I feel better this morning than I did last night’ – again
the soothing familiarity of the bland reply. Had it been raining we should have remarked on the weather, but it was disconcertingly sunny.

  ‘I want to go now,’ the Boy said, or ‘announced’ as novelists say.

  I beckoned to the waiter who stood motionless near the door, like a black lizard sunning itself, oblivious yet at the same time attentive to its surroundings. He swept away the tray containing the money and returned with a few coins glued to their silver images. Afterwards the four of us walked across the sunlit car park and positioned ourselves in the van. I was experiencing a mixture of elation and despair: I was glad we were together, a unit, a joyous family, and yet the dark side (everything has a dark side) would not relinquish my thoughts and let them fly up like seagulls. Why is it, I asked myself, that my nature will not allow the undiluted pleasure of the senses, of the moment in which I am living? Why should it be that I live life holding my breath? Who or what is pulling me back, its claws taking up all the slack so that my life has the texture, consistency, volatility and vulnerability of a taut balloon?

  It is as stupid to expect answers to these questions as it is to ask them. Surely I worry unduly; undoubtedly I panic at nonsensical notions which lesser men rise above because they do not entertain morbid reflections on the nature of things. The sulking black engine burped and farted into reciprocating motion, diverting my attention from the ridiculous to the expedient.

  CHAPTER III

  THE PRINCIPLE OF INDETERMINACY

  Having spent the night driving, with only one short rest midway between the M1 and M6, I was eager for sleep and hungry for food. It would be too early to gain access to the Corn Exchange – the cleaners not yet on the premises – and so I drove about the city’s quiet antiseptic streets, grey in the encroaching dawn, and came upon an all-night café where a woman in a dirty apron put fresh bacon and egg between two slabs of bread. The coffee was the first to go, scalding the fur off my tongue and burning the tubes in my chest right down to my belly, and then I opened my mouth wide and bit cleanly and ravenously through the bread, the bacon, the egg, clamping my teeth hard and shuffling the delicious stuff round and round my palate. A man rescued from drowning could not have sucked his first gulp of air more gratefully. The second mouthful was, if anything, even better: the hot molten egg-yolk mingling with the salty tooth-clogging strips of bacon, counter-pointed by the soft bread into which the butter had seeped, melted by those contents only recently scooped from the sizzling frying-pan. A further cup of coffee, the sandwich having vanished, constituted the ultimate pinnacle of perfection, and I subsided blissfully into a warm-bellied doze, a cigarette held lightly between my fingers.