The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Read online

  ‘There have been numerous rumours about you.’

  Gorsey Dene looked askance into her slate-blue stare. Her chest heaved and fell. Flattering, he reckoned, to have been the subject of numerous rumours; it proved too that he existed in the minds of others. Why, he could be dead and still they would perpetuate him in memoriam. ‘You go away a good deal, driving. Mostly you drive overnight the story goes.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone drive in this day and age?’ said Gorsey Dene. ‘It is an era of drivers. I don’t see much of a rumour in that.’

  ‘Depends,’ Jay said, for something to say.

  ‘Everything depends,’ Gorsey Dene promulgated, noticing how the slight bone structure of her shoulders supported the massive weight below. He bet that, were he to ask her, she would lick—

  ‘I might; yes, I might,’ Gorsey Dene said defensively, fractionally unhappy that she supposed him to be such a coward – for she had protested that if Alan went too far – as he frequently did – he (Gorsey Dene) would not be bold enough to take her (Jay’s) part; and in reply Gorsey Dene had ruminatively tapped the steering-wheel with his knuckles and cautiously made the addendum that ‘I might; yes, I might.’

  Jay was sceptical and scornful. Like most of her species, particularly the intelligent ones, she made the mistaken assumption that equality as a human being necessitated a streak of harsh and unyielding obduracy: as though the soft, subtle, feminine aspects of personality were not to be countenanced at any price. To this end she adopted a wilful cynicism and a deliberate – albeit childish – hardening of the gentler traits of an essentially sweet nature. (So Gorsey Dene reasoned to himself.)

  ‘And why,’ Jay interrupted, ‘were you continually looking at the clock? Isn’t it the height of rudeness to be forever checking the time?’

  ‘Depends,’ said Gorsey Dene.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Well, why should it be considered rude to look at a clock?’

  ‘It isn’t rude to look at a clock,’ the girl Jay said; ‘it’s the implication of what looking at a clock is. In other words you’re suggesting that the present company isn’t fit to be with.’

  (He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he oughtn’t to have been there – ‘there’ being the crowded smoky room of the Coach earlier that evening. By rights he should have been meeting the black girl at the Urmston flat, as planned and promised, but now the moment had fled, the opportunity lapsed, the contract negated.)

  Even now – driving through Yorkshire – Gorsey Dene couldn’t repress a pang of conscience at the recollection. Though, as it happened, Tee hadn’t reproved him when they had eventually met (several months later): almost seeming to imply that the incident, ie: his non-arrival, had been of little, if any, consequence. Knowing her as he did, however, Gorsey Dene suspected that this was a cover-up – for the sheer unbearable tensity of her life was such that she disguised any threadbare patch of existence with a devastating peal of laughter, dazzling herself and her onlookers with the vibrant immediacy of response. When the mouth is wide open with laughter the eyes cannot see very well.

  Having said this, at the same time it should be admitted that he had never thought her to be unintelligent. If anything she had amazed him with the list of achievements to her name; she read thick volumes in the course of her work which to him were meaningless tracts of vague mental disorders, abstruse in the extreme. Yet when questioned systematically she went quiet for a brief space of time and then out popped the answer, usually correct or very nearly so. No, she was not without brainpower – or, at any rate, a mechanically-sound retentive memory.

  In addition, her relatives were nice to Gorsey Dene. They fed him, bathed him, gave him cigarettes, fed him again, introduced their children to him, inquired after his health, allowed him to sleep in their homes, packed him (and her) off to dances, and all without bitterness, antagonism or prejudice. They were, the top and bottom of it, kindly people to whom he appeared as a pleasant, civil English boy, able and only too willing to observe the decent niceties of social etiquette, colour apart.

  ‘Well were you or weren’t you?’

  ‘Was I or wasn’t I what?’

  ‘Suggesting it by implication.’

  ‘No. I was looking to see what time it was.’

  This answer stumped her, and she sat slumped in a position of resentful indolence, desiring him and at the same time sick with jealousy. Jay’s character was like this: guarded, eager, and open to hurt. Her face adopted a stubborn, obtuse expression as she realised that his past contained an infinitely greater number of people than her own – just as when we enter a room wherein a party has been a long time in progress and, as a stranger amongst drunken friends, feel that an entire intimate history has gone before from which we are excluded, mistaking unfamiliar speech patterns and private idiosyncratic references for erudition. So Jay felt alienated from the wondrous events of Gorsey Dene’s mysterious past. His long-standing affair with a black girl had been made known to her, and it was the fact of the blackness that knocked her askew … that he should have lived such a magical life as to have been ensnared by the broad-nosed, thick-lipped wiles of an Afro-Caribbean culture!

  Thus: while she felt to have him in secure possession as he ejaculated over her, the rest of the time she was – as stated – guarded, eager, and open to hurt.

  The car was parked near some garages. They were made of white concrete and reminded Gorsey Dene of flats which from time to time he had cause to visit. In fact everything he looked at reminded him of something.

  Jay suddenly leaned right over to his side of the car and thrust her mouth against his. (This happened not infrequently.) She had come far enough along the road of sexual emancipation to enable her to do this. Gorsey Dene acted surprised, though wasn’t, and they fell to smearing their wet lips through which their tongues worked, and his hands pulled and pawed at her top-heaviness while hers rummaged between his legs. Jay had been initiated into the secrets of male anatomy, regarding the ultimate symbol of sensual pleasure as a deadly plaything which, to her surprise, she was allowed to control and manipulate. Her incipient fear and thrilling terror had been replaced by a childlike sense of power and accomplishment.

  The moon rode hugely through the branches of the trees, its anaemic light falling softly like snow. The garages, the trees, the grass plane of the golf-course were silent under the weight of the hard white light. Everything was clearly visible; but to Gorsey Dene came again the wearisome sickness of guilt, as though his bowels were made of lead, that he had further betrayed those things called love, trust and human consideration. And so he resolved, opening the buttons on Jay’s blouse, the very next week to visit the cold box flat at Urmston and present his apology in person.

  II

  A violent horizon greeted Gorsey Dene on his arrival in Immingham, casting his mind back to corridors, alleyways, chambers and to the rooms of slapping pulleys. He had never before seen a landscape like it: shining aluminium towers and spheres circumnavigated by spiral stairways, score upon score, separated by wire-netted perimeter fences into which slim concrete posts intruded at intervals. The entire layout was most bizarre. The road went through, not curving but turning abruptly at right-angles to skirt this towered complex, or that. And – along the further horizon – a number of ragged sheets of purple flame spurting fiercely against the sky over the North Sea, its grey-green bleakness compounded by the fall of evening and the gathering of a storm. The light was unearthly: as artificial as a stage-set, so that the shiny towers and spheres, the flame and the fences, were illuminated from below as it were; from the footlights. The daylight colours were now gone, replaced in this sameness and evenness of drab light by mysterious sombre blues, browns and reds, the former the reflection of Gorsey Dene’s car as it scuttled between the monsters. Still the flames leapt, evaporating into curling black smoke which lost itself in the dark stormy air.

  In the forecourt on the edge of the dock he left the car and drank several cups of c
offee in the reception building, until eventually the moving iron side of the ship filled the window-frame and it seemed that he was moving and the ship was stationary. Running lightly down the steps and through the doors into the forecourt he ran into the arms of Jay, her big solid body buffeting the air from his lungs, her arms crushing the excitement out of him. She was real, she was here, she was his! Their lips were pressed together but it was as yet token affection, a mere greeting kiss. The slow blood-pulse had not yet begun to beat; but were he to think ahead he could feel its slow quivering throb in his throat and deep in his chest. Jay too was out of breath with anticipation. On first impact Gorsey Dene had noticed a new smell about her, a different kind of bulk in his arms. They sat in the car not looking at each other, overcome with shyness and a strangeness that in itself was strange: after all, he had been the first to penetrate her.

  Jay’s luggage filled the small car so that they were hemmed in on all sides, two bodies in a cubby-hole. She was expansive with the newness of arrival, scattering cigarettes everywhere, rings and bracelets jangling, flouncy arms fluttering like enormous butterflies, her unpredictable smell and foreign perfume making his senses dense. Now with the night-time the car was a tiny speck, shooting light ahead. The storm just waited, unexpended; on the main roads the leaping headlights of oncoming vehicles – not many – lit up their white faces in a quick rushing glare. Gorsey Dene glimpsed her black lips. She was smoking and talking together, gusts of smoke and words hitting the windscreen. Gorsey Dene listened, nodded, smiled, shook his head, widened his eyes, compressed his lips, occasionally smirked. He was wondering whether they ought to accomplish the greater part of the journey or stop soon for a drink. The drink would speed the inevitable.

  ‘I’m really back with you.’

  ‘You are,’ Gorsey Dene agreed, ‘really back with me.’

  The shyness hadn’t altogether departed: this was also why they needed to drink. But he was very happy; it was a time when he knew himself to be happy. He smiled with happiness.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ asked Jay.

  ‘You’re always asking me why I’m doing things,’ Gorsey Dene said good-humouredly.

  ‘I want to know everything in your head. If I know everything in your head I know I have you.’

  This made Gorsey Dene laugh. The drive continued into the night. Not very far along the road he pulled off and parked the car with the bonnet butting up to a pub wall: the engine ticked for a moment, then fell silent. The room in which they found themselves was semi-deserted, it being early. The landlord had upon his wall a coloured cutaway section in isometric projection of a Posi-Force lubrication system (which Gorsey Dene immediately noticed) and he commented on the fact to Jay, who did not know what he was talking about. Whereupon he explained to her his theory: that by inadvertant mischance he had inherited a whole series of coincidences belonging to someone else. Jay asked him who this someone else was, but he did not know.

  They sat thigh to thigh on the supposedly comfortable seat taking deep draughts of their first drink together for many months. It didn’t take long for her to kiss his neck, burrowing her cold nose into the warm crevice beneath his collar. Gorsey Dene shivered at the tactile contact.

  ‘Are you earning any money?’

  ‘A bit,’ he admitted.

  ‘Have you undertaken any assignments recently?’

  ‘There’s one coming up in January.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A paper mill.’

  ‘What do you know about paper mills?’ Jay said good-naturedly.

  ‘Nothing as yet.’

  ‘It could be interesting—’

  ‘If the photographs come out,’ Gorsey Dene finished off for her, and they laughed together. He looked into her mouth and supposed that she might be persuaded to suck—

  ‘Do you think if you hadn’t met me—’

  ‘But I did.’

  ‘Yes, I know; but if you hadn’t do you think you would have ever gone away?’

  ‘You went away too.’

  ‘I know,’ said Gorsey Dene. ‘But would you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it likely you wouldn’t have?’

  ‘Possible.’

  ‘If not probable.’

  Jay sighed. She quickly wearied of his attempts at coercion. Gorsey Dene needed all the time to feel that he affected the way in which people lived their lives: it gave him a sense of importance. Also (though this had no direct connexion), he was experimenting with a method of making a growth appear on his face by means of thought control. The area he had selected was just below his left cheekbone, and in time, with luck, might gradually extend to envelop his entire head … but as yet there was nothing to show for his concentrated efforts. It would prove (should he succeed) that a separate underlying reality was abroad in the universe, unbeknown to men: he was forever searching for the ultramundane. Just as when, taking Jay to the train, he had deliberately opted for a route unfamiliar to him in order to avoid any repetition of scenes from a previous life. Then, if such scenes did occur, it would prove once and for all that he was an actor in a screenplay, obeying the directions and repeating the lines as per printed script.

  They had taken the moor road, hitting the motorway north of Sheffield, and swept down to London through the heat of a July day. Her luggage filled the car, heavy suitcases presenting a formidable bulk on the back seat. As usual she was smoking ten to the dozen, shaky puffs whiling away the minutes as though this life was in preparation for another, squeezing out the slow hours like toothpaste from a tube. In a motorway cafeteria – bright slats of sunlight slanting through the broad windows – they had dunked toast in oxtail soup. Music oozed along the ceiling and dripped onto their heads. There was the hushed expectant bustle of people going somewhere; of people actually with a purpose. And to know that the car was loaded and waiting for them outside was the greatest thrill of all.

  ‘You will write to me, won’t you?’ This was said with a hardness that concealed a soft underbelly of trepidation.

  ‘Yes.’ (He was much more an uncomplicated person then.)

  ‘I’ll send you my address.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Do you think I’m leaving because of you?’

  ‘Do you mean am I instrumental in your leaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s to say I should have left anyway.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  It was rare for her to look directly at him, into his eyes; and if he happened to glance momentarily into hers a shadow of embarrassment or inadequacy dropped quickly over them: a lurking heaviness in the eyelids. At other times they became glazed with feigned ennui, accompanied invariably by a slick remark or deadpan statement. But Gorsey Dene was not deceived. The main compensation for his repellent appearance was a hyper-sensitivity to the reactions generated in others by his presence. Being himself a manipulative magician he could detect the waverings and shifts of social emphasis by a hair’s breadth of anyone with whose mind he came into contact. Jay was easy meat; he met stiffer opposition every day of the week.

  Heat shivered up from the motorway, the perspective converging in a broken haze of black tarmac and coloured dots of cars. Wind rushed in through a quarter-inch gap above the window; insects flattened themselves selflessly against the windscreen; the radio was playing ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’; Jay was blowing smoke out, aiming her nostrils in such a way that the slipstream sucked it in blue-grey shafts through the long rectangular slit.

  ‘When you return,’ Gorsey Dene said, ‘we’ll go to Cyprus. Think of the white sand beaches, the olive trees, the cicadas, the ancient ruins, the bubbling surf…’

  ‘I haven’t gone yet,’ Jay said.

  ‘I realise that; I’m talking about when you come back.’

  ‘But I haven’t gone,’ Jay said, her cheeks deepening in colour. ‘I’m going to a cold country and you’re talking about white beaches.’

/>   ‘There’s nothing to prevent me talking about them; talking about something never did anyone any harm.’

  ‘It isn’t very tactful all the same.’

  Gorsey Dene despaired of women.

  He was talking to speed the waning miles.

  His hands were getting hot on the wheel. He moved them around, seeking a cool spot. The sun was keeping pace with them, rushing through the leaf-filled trees. Other cars went past, torn polythene crackling on their roof-racks. Jay said:

  ‘Will you go with anyone else while I’m away?’

  ‘Who else would have me?’ Gorsey Dene responded egotistically.

  ‘People come to your office.’

  ‘Cleaners,’ Gorsey Dene replied enigmatically.

  ‘And you go to Oldham. Don’t tell me that cleaners go to Oldham.’

  ‘They must do, otherwise the place would remain dirty.’

  ‘It’s a dirty place to start with.’

  ‘Then possibly cleaners don’t go.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘who’s to say what you’ll be up to.’

  Jay released a brief, sharp laugh. A ball of smoke hit the windscreen. Gorsey Dene turned inwards on himself for a moment to examine introspectively his feelings towards Jay since her sexual enlightenment: the pre- and post-virginal Jay. Now that she had, and liked it, she probably would again. Did this chum him up inside? Wouldn’t this affect him, having fallen (so he said) in love with her? He fixed his eyes directly on the road ahead and felt the thumping in his chest: his blood should have told him what to feel but it didn’t. With women Gorsey Dene never knew whether he was on his head or his arse. Their first proper attempt had been in the back of a car, awkwardly perspiring amongst tangled aspirations. Then in bed at the house of a friend – the chill night air misting the corners of the window-panes; a husk around the moon. Since then she had been his, replete with young womanly confidences, intimacies, and tentative experiments. But how would he feel to have her lying under somebody else? The thought was just beginning to nag when Gorsey Dene snapped his mind shut.