The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Page 12

  The occupants of the café were scavengers of the night. They had wandered in from the Friday night streets to this Saturday morning oasis of warmth, food, music and friendly yellow fluorescent light. I sat luxuriously happy in my wellbeing, surveying these dregs of misfortune with a semi-fearful and not unsympathetic eye. Their feet were tied up in bundles of discoloured rags. Their eyes were bloodshot, befuddled, and caked in the inner corners with dirt. They inclined themselves over the tables, bent from the hips, under the impression they were upright and behaving with absolute decorum: the studied impossible equilibrium of the habitual drunkard who maintains a position of untenable imbalance in blithe disregard of the law of gravity. What would, could, they do till nightfall? This was the end of their day, the beginning of mine; the the daylight must have stretched ahead like an innumerable number of elastic hours, leaving them mercilessly exposed as a man stranded in the middle of a desert under the white disc of a noon sun. This living evidence of the nearness of the abyss clamped my mind in freezing fear – it was reminiscent of back rooms from which one could view sinking blood-red suns through dust-laden Venetian blinds; it brought cascading into the mind unruly images of isolated pubs in wastelands of rubble and leaning, leaking gaslamps. It shattered in an instant the sensible façade of clean, well-adjusted, odourless living behind which we shelter in cowering timidity. (Does it disturb you to know that this café exists? That at this moment it is open for business? Is it like reading smugly about a fictional murder, only to realise afterwards with a sickening shock that the murderer is real, exists, is living and breathing at this moment in time?)

  In any event, the denizens of the café speckled my mind with uncertainty: made me conscious of the dreadful pit forever waiting with a black gape, eager to suck me in and swallow me down. A relatively untainted body and moderately clean clothes were all that kept me from sinking into the foul depths – my mind was no saving grace. And what, should it happen, would await me in that twilit half-world of perpetual dampness and decay? Would it, for example, assume the hellish landscape of silver towers and spheres with slim metal chimneys sending forth pluming jets of flame? Or a maze-like series of corridors, passageways and tunnels leading to galleries of slapping pulleys on whose walls indecipherable hieroglyphics had been scrawled by long-forgotten hands? Conceivably it could be a darkened room in which tinted photographs grinned and grimaced in silver frames, party to a private joke shared only by the silent laughers in the corridor outside. Any of these imagined hells was real, existed as valid alternatives in a stratum normally excluded from my sight. Just as the neutrinos inhabit a different kind of space, ungoverned by the mundane rules of Newtonian physics, so there lurk impulses of subterranean mindpower which can conjure up the most beastly visions foreign to the everyday functioning of our brains; yet just as real for all that. The fact that none of us exist – except as tiny spurts of energy – makes everything possible and impossible at one and the same time. Just as entire galaxies of anti-matter are adrift in space, a complete reversal of known and accepted physical laws, so in fiction we have the anti-hero, a negation of positive values, whose very being is diametrically placed in relation to the time-honoured concepts of empirical and materialistic man. Thus the anti-hero has the properties of anti-particles: negative mass, negative energy, and the facility to move backwards and forwards in time.

  The road home (the Corn Exchange behind me) lay cleanly and hygienically before me like a path towards sanity, respectability and order. I had departed on so many previous occasions, driving headlong into a westward-sinking sun, and returned just as often to seek and dwell in comfort and warmth. She had been left alone, unmourned, for a considerable time now, and I was undecided as to whether joy or humble humility should strut or wander despondently across my face (the age of spontaneous emotion being long gone). It was a political decision. Receding freshly from my mind were the cornfield and the green train in the green distance, the harsh indentations on soft warm flesh, and not least the odd evening of drunkenness in the Islington pub, surrounded by respectable-looking men and lecherous women. All the while this loving woman had been going about her business as a simple, unsuspecting soul, full to the brim with brave good cheer and a stoical sense of duty. I resolved to generate a feeling of genuine abashment, of contrition even; I would go down on my knees and beg her forgiveness, plead to have my sins forgiven (that is, supposing her to be aware of them).

  At the door, a suitcase in either hand, I paused, debating between joy, humility, abashment and contrition. A mixture of all four perhaps? She came directly down from the bedroom, dressed in a house-coat, her hair pinned up and creases of sleep on her face like crumpled paper. Her large round eyes, recently opened on a new day, asked beseechingly if my return was permanent or a transitory practical joke. Yet it was not she who should have abased herself, but I! This sick irony was the first proper intimation of what I now conceive to be the true horror of my debased personality. To knowingly and deliberately wreck an honest human heart – to wring the final drop of blood from it as though it were no more than a dishrag, used and done with, having served its purpose …

  She said, ‘You must be tired, not having slept.’ We were drinking coffee in the living-room, holding the cups between our crescent hands and staring at the dead bits of coal in the grate.

  ‘I don’t feel tired.’ The two young ones were still asleep.

  ‘Was it a very long drive?’ she asked, seeming to ask the question out of interest rather than prying curiosity.

  ‘Yes.’

  Surely our words should not be at this low-level intensity? We were discussing our lives and futures – or would have been had the world contained a single grain of sense. As it was we exchanged platitudes and sipped the cooling liquid. The sun described a lazy parabola, its morning rays striking into the room and glancing off the corners of hard objects. I noticed a toy underneath a chair.

  ‘I’ve painted the bathroom,’ she said. Her bare knees protruded fron the house-coat.

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Purple. But I mixed white with it. To occupy my mind.’

  ‘You mixed white with it to occupy your mind?’ Had I missed an inference somewhere or perhaps a qualification?

  ‘I painted the bathroom.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘To occupy my mind.’

  ‘That makes more sense. Yes, I’m with you now. You occupied your mind—’

  ‘By painting the bathroom.’

  ‘Purple.’

  ‘With white mixed in with it. Did you stop for a meal on the motorway? You must be hungry too.’

  ‘No, I had a sandwich in a café. Horrible place.’

  ‘You spend a lot of your life driving from here to there.’

  She really was gentle and I detested myself. The figure I had dreamed up to bear the brunt of my detestation was not at all strong enough to maintain the pose of scapegoat throughout the long history of my insufferable behaviour. He had been made to do things I myself had done, as if I might expiate my guilt in fictional comings and goings. But none of it was, or is, fiction. That is the trouble! If only I could invent terrible visions instead of having to live them, the possibility could exist of my being a real person writing about a world of make-believe – but, as I have said, I am an imaginary being writing about the pragmatic world of surface realities. If I exist at all it is in these symbols you see before you; my name, as you will have guessed, is not even Creely. I hid behind it, held a mask in front of my face to pretend that behind this despicable rogue of a character lay a wise and benevolent Narrator, full of insights and sympathies which, in truth, I do not possess. And if I am being totally honest I should at the same time confess that the Narrator does not exist, or, to be precise, I am not he. (That he could exist – as he might – in some nebulous cloud of mind-stuff or ‘wave of readiness’ is a matter of futile conjecture.) And behind him too – yes, yet another trapdoor – lies the shadowy, mysterious, omnipresence of the Author, w
ho, one presumes, is penning these words crouched in his little dark hole. But neither is he real. Thus you see the merry dance I have led myself: the innumerable charades, illusions, deceptions and graven images perpetuated in the name of seeking a glimpse of the truth. As made clear by Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy, however – that bane of science – my feeble efforts were destined from the start to result in failure; that we are fated to know less and less about more and more is the only lesson of any worth to have emerged. Ah, but in very truth, why were we given minds at all, and by whom, and what will become of me?

  THE IMMINGHAM DRIVE

  PART I

  THE MYTHICAL FUTURE

  I

  At long last Gorsey Dene found himself on the way to Immingham, a drive he had been keen on undertaking ever since he had received Jay’s letter informing him that she was to return from Sweden during the winter months, and suggesting – or rather hinting – that he might travel across the country to meet her at the dock and bring her home. As the young man was anxious to see her, for sexually hedonistic reasons, he immediately wrote back pledging his part of the rendezvous at the specified time and date. It was a brilliant, cold and endlessly blue day, the sort of day when the air is described as ‘crystal clear’: a perfect fusion of hard pure light and cold crisp fields lying open and bare with their worn green cheeks turned heavenwards. It was possible to imagine the sky as clean empty space, which was how Gorsey Dene thought of it as he drove the small blue car up the curving road rising from the valley to the moor. The close-cropped greenness turned to brown and purple patches of coarse, brackenish growth at a certain exact point – a topographical oddity he had noted before. On the tops the air was rushing coldly – he knew this from the slanting stalks of grass and buffeting brambles – but inside the metal/glass casing he was snug, smug and beautifully content. He was going to meet Jay; and yet, as usual, within his flesh/bone head abided the worm of disquiet, of trepidation, as if a giant from above were scrutinising his puny progress, allowing him to go so far and no further: until the dreadful moment when a monstrous hand would reach down and pluck him off the road, wrench him out of the dream, and toss him in his metal/glass/flesh/bone environment into the pit. It was the turmoil of a deluded mind but nonetheless terrifying for all that. Supposing, for example, that Jay had developed a growth on her face? It was entirely possible. Or, if not a facial disfigurement, had been party to a cancerous breast, having had the offending portion removed, so that now she lurched lop-sidedly along with but one breast to call her own? Her hair could have fallen out: head hair, underarm hair, pubis. What would that imply – some dreadful Swedish disease? But, Gorsey Dene realised, he was just being silly. As a child he had suffered from hallucinations and ever since had been especially wary of those occasions when it seems that life is wearing thin – when, in fact, the canvas backing begins to show through the decorative embroidery. Of course she would be all right; of course. But, then again, he had often suspected her of being unfaithful. There had never been any proof of this – rather, he had had the nasty idea that secretly she thought him a fool, a dupe, a weak and worthless charlatan, and at the first opportunity would not hesitate to ‘make eyes’ at friends, acquaintances, strangers, entering with them into a privileged and covert understanding, establishing a rapport which he, Gorsey Dene, and she, Jay, had never managed to achieve. The fault, perhaps, was his, for her image in his eyes had always been of a pair of large breasts and a desirable cunt. Never had he seen her as a person. And in truth he had never once understood or even faintly grasped the nature of that thing which is said to constitute a relationshop between a man and a woman. The fault resided in him: it was, to put it simply, an inability to look into her, or any woman’s, eyes. Young lovers gazed one into the other, locked eye-to-eye, and delivered up ‘the secrets of the soul’; stupid brooding youths and ductile empty-headed girls possessed this quality, this innocence and sterling worth, while in his own depths – as deep as the reflection in a mirror – all that could be seen was what the reflection in any mirror yields up to the onlooker: their own frightened eyes and palsied complexion in mirrored reverse. With Jay he had had intercourse in cars, in beds, in armchairs, on living-room carpets, and had fucked her well and properly as a substitute for feeling. He was now driving desperately towards her, across the country from west to east, with just the singular hot intention of lying on top of her and inserting his rod and being made to feel, if only for the transient ejaculatory moment, that he was more substance than shadow.

  It had not always been so. On first meeting, when his quite-normal-looking exterior had sufficiently camouflaged his actor’s inner vacuum, Gorsey Dene had fixed her with a steely-eyed stare, slitted and sexy, to which she had (almost) immediately responded. Being a man full of tricks, surfeited with trickery, a trickster, he had bedevilled, bewitched and bedazzled her with his steadfast gaze until the fluid had gurgled in her belly and her bowels had creaked – undergone that discomforting shift which signifies abrupt emotional excitement. On that occasion he had been with a friend – the mutual intruder – who had gabbled with such innanity as to deceive Jay into mistaking Gorsey Dene’s introspective silence for depth of character, durable spirit, and an intelligence worthy of respect. (It is a fact that all Negroes’ teeth appear exceptionally white against their contrastingly darker skin tone.) Later she had confirmed this impression – an admission he had exultantly chortled over – remarking that in all the din and bustle he alone, in his self-contained quietude and isolation, had possessed a distinctive presence, an aura that was almost tangible and which set him apart from the rowdy company. This first meeting had been in the small back room of a public house, a room with varnished wooden benches fixed to the walls and a floor of ragged linoleum. Young men, his own age, had swaggered about belching and farting with masculine disdain while his own bodily excrescences had been neither seen or heard, discreetly emitted behind a raised hand or beneath muffling clothing. The human race was a collection of mindless brutes, and as he had no desire to join it he would go out of his way to remain alien to it, separated by as great a gap as possible. The truth was it revolted him. That he too from time to time was obliged to belch and fart was a distasteful biological prank.

  (1) The girl Jay had long dark hair; her face was a pale oval with exaggerated eyes, big and dark, and with finely delineated full lips which now and then formed themselves into a softly cynical shape – a habit indicating unease and a lack of assurance. She had good teeth, a nicely proportioned nose, and her fingernails were clean, trimmed, and unpainted. Her figure was pleasantly rounded and she had not outworn the antiquated convention of lowering her eyes mutely as maidens were once instructed to do. She was strikingly beautiful; and the more he stared at her the faster Gorsey Dene’s heart started to beat.

  (2) The face of the girl Jay shone palely, reflecting the room’s crude, dim lighting. Her forehead was shadowed by the long dark-brown hair which fell straight on either side, separated by the tracery of a fine white parting; her eyes were large and round, thickly made-up, and her lips were full, sensuous, yet occasionally unsure. With the certainty that she was looking at him Gorsey Dene kept his eyes studiously averted, projecting a wearied indifference that was the antithesis of his inwardly churning processes and deranged bodily functions. That she was deceived by this paltry subterfuge is indicative of her own insecurity and world-innocence generally.

  Looking down on her – his feet wide apart – with a pleasant drunken torpor weighing on his eyelids, Gorsey Dene next came into contact with her as Jay lay with several others on the studio couch in the flat of a German student, and, not yet familiar enough to engage her in direct conversation, had taken to observing the proceedings from a distance and on a slightly higher plane, as if this self-imposed objectivity and elegant aloofness were sufficient in themselves to mark him off from the common herd and even conceivably suggest a depth of character which did not exist. Later that evening (or it might have been the
early hours of the morning) Gorsey Dene found himself lying alongside her on that same studio couch, in the company of others, and discovering to his delight and relief that they had at least one interest in common. And when she castigated the poor German student for his meekness and gullibility Gorsey Dene was only too ready to agree: it united them in a shared dislike (which on his part was created instantaneously for just that purpose).

  The student’s rooms were mean and shabby: bare walls to which were affixed tattered posters: but his few possessions were precious in their shabbiness, and for once Gorsey Dene felt a cheap pang of guilt and, very nearly, contrition. But after all, he reminded himself, Jay merited first consideration, above any misguided sympathy for a poor foreign student. And what the hell, the guy was a kraut.

  ‘I left school last year,’ Jay said in answer to a question. ‘For a while I took drugs but not any more. They were little blue cylindrically-shaped tablets which, when taken with alcohol, were supposed to induce an hallucinatory effect. Once I stood on the balcony of a high flat and thought seriously of jumping.’