The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Page 13

  ‘To your death,’ Gorsey Dene interjected, thrilled – indeed quivering inside – to be engaged in natural conversation with this fantastic person: she had said something and he had responded, both of them perfectly at ease. Could it be that she considered him worthy of such attentive respect? Could she not see the hollowness behind the eyes? Apparently not!

  ‘To my death; possibly.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Her eyes flicked across his face, and instantly Gorsey Dene manufactured a white, widening smile of good-natured self-assurance which checked any reproof she might have considered necessary. Nevertheless he had committed an error and it was as well to remember that white, widening smiles were not in endless supply; or, if they were, could not be expected to retain their potency indefinitely. ‘You were saying,’ said Gorsey Dene.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jay with unnecessary emphasis, altering her position so as to lie more favourably amongst the several cluttered bodies on the couch. (What would be her reaction, he wondered, were he to …) Smoke filled the air and incessant chatter mounted in waves to lap against the ceiling. (Now: what if he were to put his hand there …) Jay laid the desirable object of her head on the cover and looked at him from beneath silken eyelashes.

  ‘There are not all that many genuine people about these days,’ Gorsey Dene said, surprising them both with the thought.

  ‘Even fewer in this room,’ Jay responded, making them both smile into each other’s face in sudden delight at a shared private joke. They were going to get on well together; it was on the cards or in the stars or wherever it was written. Thereupon they started talking about people and about the common experience of being born in a Northern industrial town and of their lives (GD revealing at the correct psychological moment that he was ten years her senior) up to this point – all of which lifted Gorsey Dene to rare heights of volubility until he became quite drunk with the intoxicating splendour of his own wit, charm, astuteness of insight and powers of didactic reasoning. She was dazzled, flushed, and silent.

  ‘Then after the juvenile drug scene I started going to the Coach with Viv, which is where—’

  ‘We met.’

  ‘I first saw you.’

  ‘Yes.’ A grin.

  ‘You didn’t say much that night.’

  ‘The bloke you were with put me off.’

  ‘Alan.’

  ‘He kept lifting his leg and farting.’

  ‘You get used to Alan.’

  ‘But not to the smell.’

  Now Jay grinned. ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘He wasn’t – or isn’t – a boyfriend or anything?’

  ‘No.’ A tiny frown. It puckered the smooth texture of her forehead. Had he strayed over the boundary? If so it might mean a swift return to wit, charm, astute insight and didactic reasoning. ‘Why did you ask that?’

  ‘Why did you frown?’

  Jay’s slate-blue eyes, downcast (for she would not meet his look) and pensive, were adorable to him. He wanted to see them tightening with pain as he—

  ‘Do you think that someone like that would be attractive to me?’

  ‘I fail to see what is attractive in any man to any woman; no – I mean I do not know what it is women find attractive in men. I was once told that it was the set of the buttocks but I refuse to believe that women notice such things; if they do it is out of pure detached scientific interest. Their minds do not conform to the masculine pattern.’

  ‘A woman – if it’s any consolation – doesn’t know what it is she finds attractive in a man.’

  ‘I know,’ Gorsey Dene replied. ‘That is the entire trouble.’

  ‘Why is it the entire trouble?’ Jay asked, faithfully making up the other half of the dialogue.

  ‘The entire trouble is that women do not know’ Gorsey Dene said heatedly. He was lying beside her, cramped and hampered by other bodies. Little, if any, room for manoeuvre. ‘If they did know, then by hook or by crook I should find out what it is about men that attracts them.’

  ‘It is an indefinable something.’

  ‘I know that.’ He was leaning on one elbow, his face overlooking hers. Her dark hair was spread out on the cover. Her eyes were avoiding his. ‘The trouble is that it’s indefinable. Supposing that it were not, then I should be able to ask a woman and she would be able to tell me. But as it is no woman can define the indefinable.’

  ‘What she finds attractive in a man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is the entire trouble.’

  Still she would not look at him, but he was nearer now, the sides of their bodies in contact along most of their lengths. In fact all that was required of him was to—

  Since childhood Gorsey Dene had had a number of strange feelings, eg: there were times when he felt himself not to be inhabiting his own body; that by merely wishing he could make a growth appear on his face; he felt too that beneath the real world there existed another out-of-sight unacknowledged place – but this one non-spurious; he knew almost for a certainty that the whole of his mind was not contained within the bone construction of his head; when talking to people he would sometimes stand aside and observe what kind of a botch-up his husk was making of the job, or perhaps wander away across the room and leave the husk to get on with it; he had recurrent premonitions and was subject to hallucinatory coincidences that could not be explained in terms of the accepted rational sciences; there were times when he felt the whole of the world to be a vast, complex, incomprehensible dream through which he was floating, lost, alone, a single speck of consciousness in a medium of dark drifting shadows; on occasion he supposed himself to be inhabiting a small gloomy hole, huddled inside like a shivering, furry, frightened animal at bay, crouched with its back pressing against the soft moist earth; he was also prone to attacks of suicidal depression when it seemed that everything he turned his hand to was a wasted nihilistic emptiness; of late he had begun to receive visions of ravaged landscapes: desolate skylines upon whose hellish surfaces spurted gaseous jets of purple flame; and now – yes even now – his heart was bludgeoning the breath from his body, crashing like a mad trip-hammer until it was feasible that his rib-cage would splinter and shatter and the pulsing fist of his heart would punch gobs of blood directly into the face of Jay, who lay, innocent and lecherous, between the crushed bodies on the couch. The room was smokier than ever.

  Jay said, ‘Some people think that because you go in the Coach on Friday nights you’re loose and easy. They think that your virginity must have departed long ago.’

  ‘During the juvenile drug scene days perhaps,’ interjected Gorsey Dene. His eyes were ill-focused due to the smoke and the heat and the proximity of bodies. It came to him that the room was a hot white hollow cube, noisy and laughter-filled, surrounded on all sides by depressed industrial chaos. That his life should have arrived in this geographical location at this point in historical time was a quirk of fate requiring a certain amount of cogitation; it intrigued him; but it would have to wait for a spare bit of solitude.

  ‘For example,’ said Jay, turning her face sideways towards him yet still lowering her eyelashes so that they threw fringe-shadows down her cheeks, ‘you would expect me not to be one, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not to be one what?’ asked Gorsey Dene. He was being compressed, overpowered, intimated.

  ‘Not to be a virgin. Wouldn’t you? You would have expected me perhaps to have had relations with a man. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yeeees –’ The heat. The smoke. The noise. The light.

  ‘And not being a virgin – so you think – would automatically classify me as loose and easy. Yes?’

  There was a dead tingling in Gorsey Dene’s right arm and shoulder: caused by the unremitting pressure of leaning at just such an angle for so long a period. He adjusted the triangle formed by his forearm, upper arm and torso, and a shock ripped from his shoulder to his fingertips.

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘How not so?’ And this time her blue slate eye
s did look at him, unflinchingly. What wouldn’t he have given to put his—

  ‘Because I think you are.’

  ‘Are what?’

  ‘A virgin.’

  She smiled (or was about to smile) just as a number of additional bodies were crammed onto the heap, and it really was becoming quite intolerable; though, in its favour, he now found himself forced to lie half on top of her, one leg – the left – astride both of hers. A thump between his shoulder blades was followed by a voice complaining of inadequate space.

  ‘Alan’ Jay said, her cheeks flushing in annoyance.

  The head of the boy turned: a big, red, beer-dazed face with startled fair eyebrows. A gangrenous grin appeared, gap-toothed, accompanied by a forced, squealing, flesh-rippling emission of wind. It infiltrated softly, the dull heavy odour, rising sluggishly in contoured streamers of varying strengths, pressing its sweetish fetid breath to their faces and wrapping the heads in smell. Gorsey Dene had circumspectly allowed his hand to rest on Jay’s stomach, feeling the swell and fall of her diaphragm, the tensing and releasing of her abdominal muscles. He could hardly believe his own good fortune.

  ‘Jay – mean as hell with her touches,’ Alan said. ‘Mean as fuck.’

  The eyes of the girl Jay flashed momentarily; she was about to retort, but now Gorsey Dene was close, above her, bearing down on her, his heart thumping madly, with an inside chance of dipping his wick.

  ‘Alan,’ Jay said again, as once more the offending party released a fart whose sound and smell disrupted the several erotic overtures taking place on the couch. (I see, Gorsey Dene realised immediately, his insight compounded by anger, you’re one of those who because he can’t get it seeks to spoil everyone else’s fun.)

  Alan said, ‘She pretends to be a real goer, yet she’s a virgin.’ He jammed his elbow into the back of Gorsey Dene. ‘Hear that, matey? Didn’t know it, eh? A real goer who’s a fucking virgin.’

  Gorsey Dene half turned, smiling conspiratorially as one male to another. His look implied: We all know what women are like, don’t we, matey? They’re only there to be got stuck into. We both know that, you and me. Eh, matey? Not that I would stick it into her – not if she’s yours, that is. If she’s yours I’m just chatting, aren’t I? If she’s yours she’s yours. Say no more. If she’s not yours, though, I’d just as soon stick it into her as go for a quick crap. What else is she there for? What other use has she except to be got stuck into? And don’t worry, I will, leave it to me. If, that is, she isn’t yours, in which case I’ll stick it right up her, way up, as far as it will go, till she coughs; get her crying for mercy, eh? Matey. Unless you want to stick her, do her, exercise the old ferret, in which case again, matey, you can have her and welcome. You can step right in and stick her, stick it up her, hard; I’ll not interfere; she’s all yours. Just chatting, that’s all. Close to her because I can’t help it, what with the overcrowding and everything. All right? Matey. No offence. Never come between a bloke and his bird. Eh? Matey. Too fucking true.

  ‘He’s a foul pig,’ Jay said, hard-eyed and stiff-lipped.

  Christ, Gorsey Dene thought tremulously, keep your voice low.

  ‘I don’t care if he does hear me,’ Jay said. ‘He’s no right to call me that.’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘A virgin.’

  The very word made bells clang inside the head of Gorsey Dene. Virgin. Jesus. What a wick-dipping thought. Just looking at her you could tell she was the type who would open her –

  Their heads were close, his shadowing hers, and eye-locked-to-eye he lowered his lips swiftly onto hers, their coming together so perfect that it was the first time the first time the first time without doubt – with all the associations of new kissing flesh. Bubbles burst in his eyeballs and he held a deep-drawn breath, his lips urging, moulding, shaping themselves in ways he knew would please and impress her. The room went. His hand rummaged between packed bodies to slide underneath her spine. The bulk – the actual warm solid bulk of her was under him, responding to his lips. Envious others (Alan included) were all around, but Jay and he were divorced from their surroundings, oblivious to everything except squashing pink ridges of yielding muscle. When later his sweeping right hand grappled – as if by accident – with her left breast, passed on above and below, and then returned to grasp and knead the provocative self-supporting mound, there was a minimum of adverse reaction … save that she slid bottom-forward in the passenger seat and gurgled the air in her throat; by this time the windows were clouded and they were safe from parents’ and neighbours’ eyes behind their rectangles of council house glass. Then, because he had inserted his longest finger into her vagina, she swung her fist and hit him on the ear. She did this several more times in the weeks, and evenutally the months, that followed; always after he had stuck his vicarious wick into her and brought her to the point of orgasm. Gorsey Dene came to the conclusion, painfully arrived at, that this was not because she did not enjoy being digitized (far from it) but, rather, that she was being led along a path of emotional heat until, as a virgin, she could do one of two things: either submit to further digitizing and ultimately wick-dipping, or, to release and displace her natural sexual propensity, hit him on the ear with her coiled fist. Usually she burst into tears after the blow, the second part of the catharsis, upon which Gorsey Dene would slump back in his seat and smoke a crumpled cigarette. Once he went too far and her hymen came away in his hand. As was their custom, he complained:

  ‘If you don’t want me to do it you don’t want me to do it. And if you don’t want me to do it you shouldn’t allow me to continue doing it.’ He put the cigarette to his mouth but it remained stuck to his fingers.

  Still sobbing, Jay banged her head on the window. The tangled impression of her hair was printed in the condensation. ‘I know, I know, I know. Is it my fault? Can I help it? Do you blame me? What can I do? Do you think I want to do it? Do you think I can help myself? Don’t you know that if I could I would?’

  ‘I understand very well,’ said Gorsey Dene. He revelled in the apologetic whine of her voice. It was a novelty for him to receive the weeping excuses of a virgin who was contrite because she would not allow herself to be taken. Were he not so magnanimous he might never have forgiven Jay for her inconsiderateness.

  ‘I want to,’ Jay said. ‘I do want to, you know I want to, I desperately want to—’

  ‘Yet you can’t.’ There was a sufficient strain of ennui in his voice to promote the idea that he was growing tired of her continual reluctance; she sensed it and became even more distraught, rocking sideways in the seat, her head buffeting the window, her fists clutched impotently on her thighs.

  From this they progressed in fits and starts to a blanket in the damp grass on a hill overlooking the bus depot. Underneath his bare knees, through the rough weave of the blanket, he could feel the crackly brush and squelchy earth, like kneeling in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Below them, beyond the precarious trees overhanging the rim, the steep valley was a bowl of yellow light with the miniscule buses to-ing and fro-ing through the zig-zagged black-and-yellow corrugated doors. Condition perfect: green and all set to go; but the operation was not a success. The raw night air set him shivering feverishly; clammy dew coated his drooping flanks, and Jay, a vague white lump of gooseflesh in the darkness, seemed not to possess that desirability which had obsessed his daylight fantasies.

  Gorsey Dene squatted again, guilt-ridden. Though he could not, incomprehensibly, dip his long-awaiting wick, there were other compensations, namely two: the fine breasts of Jay. Leaning towards him, avoiding the steering-wheel, she presented their palpable opulence over which he jerked himself, the oily spittle splattering hotly and draining away from the reddish, puckered, nippled areas. At such moments they were swollen with temptation – her breasts and nipples – the skin strained and tight – until it seemed they might explode with a dull, ponderous, slow-motion roar. Undeniably it was enjoyable; neither Gorsey Dene nor Jay could deny it, and yet
their consummation was delayed as if a process of contra-momentum had been set up against which they were powerless – indeed, their struggles served only to strengthen the intangible force of resistance confronting them:

  A law was operating somewhere in the universe.

  Gorsey Dene began to fall in love with her; though perhaps not as much as Jay had begun to fall in love with him. Nothing was revealed overtly, only hinted at. They would sit in the Coach amidst tables to whose surfaces beer-soaked cigarette packets clung, empty crisp bags crumpled in glittering cellophane fist-sized balls in the ashtrays, and speak politely and distantly to each other, the lust hidden in their eyes, awaiting with a thrilling rush of dark-blooded anticipation the car-borne finale of jerking spittle over palpable opulence.

  ‘Mean as fuck with her touches.’ Alan said, swaying back on his heels as he up-ended the glass of beer into his throat. The girl Jay jerked her head away and her breasts shook. Gorsey Dene smiled pleasantly, partly in appeasement and partly because his thoughts were several miles distant: he should not have been here.

  ‘Virgin kidder,’ Alan said, exchanging his empty glass for a full one. ‘She’s a frigid prick-teaser, GD.’

  ‘Alan,’ said Jay. Her colour rose. The door to the lavatory banged. The floor trembled. Somebody fought to reach the bar. The saloon, as big, or as small, as a railway compartment, reverberated with grunted snarls, snorted laughter, coughing gasps and choking sniggers. Gorsey Dene knew that he should not have been here.

  ‘What is she?’ Alan said. ‘What is she, What is she, What is she?’ He was bent at the waist, swivelling his startled face like the hook of a crane back and forth round the seated semi-circle. A glass smashed; a bottle spilled.

  Yet Gorsey Dene kept his eye on the clock. The day before, during the afternoon, he had arranged an assignation, intending full well to keep it, but it was quite a drive and here was Jay, large with promise, her downcast maidenly eyes suggesting that the night was ripe for wick-dipping. She said: