The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Read online

  The temperature had risen with the afternoon. Jay worked the louvred discs to direct cooling air into her face. She hummed along with Percy Sledge, dissipating the nervousness of forthcoming departure with gum-chewing/cigarette-smoking/nail-polishing/song-humming activity.

  At the sign which read Luton & Dunstable the car came off the motorway and plunged into the English countryside. On a rutted track in the shadow of some trees it stopped. Gorsey Dene got out, the tingle of renewed circulation prickling his buttocks, and stretched in the sunshine; Jay jumped up and down, grateful to be released, her long hair swirling and undulating in glossy rivers of reflected light. They walked through a tunnel of arching trees, the ground moist with carpeted leaves, holding hands at arm’s length to savour their freedom and independence. Mossy logs slumbered in the undergrowth, shaded by vivid green ferns whose tracery of patterns stirred with their passing. Gorsey Dene had heard of such dells but never seen one: in the near distance the tunnel’s exit was confronted by a blazing field of ripening corn bearing the full brunt of the sun. They walked carefully along the perimeter, then struck inwards, the dry stalks squeaking and groaning underfoot, their feathered heads clashing back in successive layers with the passage of trousered and nyloned limbs.

  When far enough, deep enough, in enough, they lay down and had sexual intercourse. It was, to Gorsey Dene, like lying in a golden bowl on the top of which was a blue lid. Jay straddled him, working diligently at a uniquely meaningful experience, the drops of perspiration under her eyes and the wet ends of her hair licking his shoulders. She was enjoying his penetration into her, gasping on the inward stroke and shuddering on withdrawal, her eyes half-closed and clouded with pleasureful pain, generating the sensation to the point where she wanted the full length of him to pass through her belly and into her chest, legs split wide apart and gaping orifice vulnerable to the greatest thrust-power in the world. It occurred to Gorsey Dene that her energy, transmitted through him to the earth below, was sufficient to alter, if only fractionally, the orbit of the planet in the context of the solar system. And, being thus altered, the solar system itself would deviate in relation to its galaxy; and of course the galaxy would transmit this shift from the norm to the universe at large. So it was conceivable (at least to Gorsey Dene) that the energy Jay was expending was instrumental in the development of the whole of creation. The mechanical consequences of this simple act reverberated to the far ends of existing time and space: she had made a contribution to the entire grand work, and, far from being worthless, her life had served its purpose and been given meaning.

  Gorsey Dene ejected his product into her, the tremors of climax expanding him so that she knew what had happened and, replying to his question, repeated incessantly, ‘Yes.’

  Rising slowly off him, the flaccid tender hurt now removed from inside her, Jay lay down on the crushed corn and allowed the sun to stroke her; the imperturbable light stared at her inquisitively, blameless and amoral. In the green distance a train tooted a double note. Gorsey Dene knew that he would remember this field of corn for ever. Already he had scanned and stored the available data, holding it for instant retrieval at some past or future date. The high blue sky curved over him, its faultless weight pressing him to the ground, and in the stalks of corn near at hand invisible insects frittered and whirred, pursuing their lives in selfish and oblivious blindness. Birds chattered insatiably.

  ‘Do you suppose that your life – our lives – were so engineered as to culminate here and now at this time and in this place?’ Gorsey Dene asked.

  ‘Fuck knows,’ Jay said. She was like a languorous white slug, fat with appeasement. ‘You only pose these questions to imbue with significance what is essentially a common-place event. Who cares what other inferences one might draw from two people lying in a cornfield? Just because you think you have a so-called intellect, untapped and unexploited, you feel it necessary – I might almost say obliged – to spout pseudo-philosophical gibberish—’

  ‘Contradiction in terms,’ said Gorsey Dene.

  ‘Balls. You stick your dick in me and think it a symbolic act with far-reaching, deep-rooted implications pertinent to the whole of mankind.’

  (What had happened to her maidenly blushes? Gorsey Dene wondered.)

  ‘All I said was—’

  ‘Your trouble,’ Jay said fiercely, ‘is that you have a personality defect; you feed off imagined slights. You bend double eating your own pitiful entrails. As some disgusting furry vermin, tiny-eyed and with sharp pointed teeth, gnawing at its own anus, burrowing upwards with self-destroying greed and pity.’

  The sun was blinding hot.

  ‘Self-pitying greed and destruction,’ said Gorsey Dene correctively. ‘And would that certain furry vermin be a mole by any chance?’

  ‘Possibly. Why?’

  ‘A mole is a facial growth.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That makes the coincidence complete.’

  ‘You haven’t lain in this field with anyone else?’

  Gorsey Dene shook his head. ‘Not this field.’

  ‘Isn’t it hot?’

  ‘It is hot. Did you hear what I said? The mole is yet one more link in the chain.’

  ‘What fucking chain is that?’

  A green creature with legs hopped across Jay’s stomach. The earth swooned in the heat. It really was hot. Gorsey Dene was waiting for a farmer to loom over them at any moment, a deep-burnished blue-barrelled shotgun in the crook of his arm, and leer down at Jay’s white sluggish body with the black pubic vee. To obviate the possibility of this he stood up and found himself waist-high in a lake of rippling corn: and far away a thin green train slid silently through the lush countryside, a straight dark worm creeping in the undergrowth. Jay’s breasts were spread spongily on her chest, lapping her armpits, nipples floating on top like candle wicks on pools of oil. Gazing down at her he began to feel the tug of a returning erection, and knelt down beside her; she opened her eyes lazily and smiled. If only she would open her mouth wide he could—

  And yet still the sun beat down, right to the end of the day, when, in the early evening, they sat outdoors drinking beer beneath circular multicoloured canvas in the gravelled forecourt of a pub on the outskirts of London. There were cubes of melting ice in the glasses. Never before had Gorsey Dene drunk beer with ice. (He was to in Spain, however, the following year.) Expensive sports cars were parked a little distance away.

  They were to have a few drinks, a meal, and then Jay was to catch the boat train at Paddington. Life seemed very simple to Gorsey Dene; but as yet – as ever – there was the nightdrive ahead of him. This contrast between summer days and cold shrieking nights disturbed him, hinting as it did that he was on the trapdoor of insanity. Who would guess it to look at him! However, had he been certain that it was insanity (which he was not), it might have put his mind at rest, for the explainable is comforting. What so discomforted him was the fear that it might not be insanity, in which case he was living two lives: the positive and the negative, and under such conditions terms like sanity and insanity were meaningless. For example, insanity in the positive world might very well turn out to be sanity in the negative world, and the converse would be true. Now, at this moment, he felt self-contained and safe within himself, but he was not such a fool as to believe that this well-being might not splinter and disintegrate, and he would be drawn willy-nilly into those shadows of nostalgia which plagued and taunted him at odd, bleak, spiritless moments of his life. It occurred to him quite at once – as he was sipping the cold beer from the beaded glass – that he was on a steady downhill path towards unhappiness: that broken promises and fragmented dreams were littered behind him like smashed china, each one in its time a mortal blow, so that cynicism, disillusionment, and above all, fear, were now his major constituents. This fails to explain it. The more he had achieved, the less the satisfaction: yes, that was it. Starting off with the vision of a series of golden futures ahead of him … each, upon its fulfilment, had sho
wn itself to be a hollow sham, a despairing void. When very young he had known the power of these visions while not yet attaining them – and now that he had, found the promise more substantial than the achievement. The brilliant spheres of light glittering in the sky had seemed very desirable, but now those same spheres were dun-coloured leaden balls, some of them lodged in his belly and others at the base of his brain. He had achieved more and yet was more unhappy than at any time previously. The cracking-up of his personality made the situation worse, and the worsening of the situation expedited the cracking-up of his personality. Day by day he sank lower, floundered more, was less sure of his character (or indeed whether or not he possessed such a thing). As an ironical black joke the past had become golden and the future leaden, featureless, fearful.

  They ate a meal together at the dead hour of early evening, scooping tepid soup out of shallow metal bowls, and inflicted upon themselves a watery omelette that neither really wanted. It was a token last supper prior to departure, and when he stood with her outside the railway carriage the solemnity of the occasion weighed like iron on their shoulders and slowed the world to a series of jerking tableaux. Jay was dabbing her eyes in a parody of weeping; Gorsey Dene was thinking of the nightdrive.

  ‘You will write long letters to me, won’t you?’ She looked at him from behind the handkerchief. Had he not known better it was conceivable that she could have been laughing.

  ‘Long letters about what?’

  ‘About the cornfield. About what you did to me there.’

  ‘I noticed the corn left marks on your back.’

  ‘I was on top.’

  ‘You lay down afterwards. When you got up there were marks on your back.’

  ‘You should have turned me over, face downwards, so that I was pressed right into the corn.’

  ‘It would have left marks on your breasts.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cuts and weals.’

  ‘You would have liked that, knowing you.’

  ‘Anyone would think I was a sadist.’

  ‘There were marks on your back too.’

  ‘You were on top, pressing me into the ground.’

  ‘I liked that: I really enjoyed that: sitting astride you. Write me a long letter about it. Tell me what it was like with me on top and the corn against your back.’

  ‘Did you feel you were split?’

  ‘I wish you had split me, clean in two. Right up the middle.’

  Perhaps when she returned she would lean over his loins and—

  ‘It seems incredible that you were once a virgin.’

  ‘Will you be taking girls in that van of yours while I’m away?’

  ‘No,’ Gorsey Dene replied truthfully. (She thought him better than he was.)

  ‘And no parties at the German student’s.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And no black stuff.’

  ‘No,’ – laughing.

  Jay’s pale, anxious, oval face hovered in his subconscious, haunting him, when, later, he sat at the bar of the Islington pub and relived those final moments of parting. She had boarded the train with a mournful expression, close to tears, and her sensuous mouth had trembled a little (that mouth!), the lower lip in a pout of stoical self-denial. Gorsey Dene, having misplaced his emotions at least a decade earlier, composed his features into a facsimile of responsible gloom; a fine intelligence sober, withdrawn, and harrowed. Settling herself into a corner of the compartment next to the window Jay had shrunk to a white blob as the train silently curved along the platform, its oiled wheels hauling the whole smooth bulk from beneath the overhanging iron lattice-work and into the gentle light of warm mid-evening.

  Jay had stood at the open window – Gorsey Dene having slammed the door shut – and leaned out to embrace him, stifled convulsions in her neck shuddering through the kiss, female guttural sounds issuing from her. He had felt flattered – indeed honoured – that someone should think him worthy of these deep, genuine responses; she must have been overly fond of him, he reasoned, staring at the creamy head of the Guinness and wondering at the viability of spontaneous human feeling. At his elbow a youth with thin pathetic wrists and watery brown eyes must have caught a nuance of the reflection in Gorsey Dene’s face, for he smiled wanly in the instant comradeship of lone drinkers, raising sparse eyebrows in a gesture of inquiry.

  ‘What would you say is the trouble with this day and age?’ the young man began. ‘Pollution, over-population, or sex?’

  Clearly the young man had a morbid preoccupation with sex, which Gorsey Dene wasn’t at all surprised to surmise, taking into account the other’s white, ravaged face and unbecoming appearance. He almost smiled at the ridiculous vision of this paltry specimen engaged in any kind of sexual interaction with a female, however desperate or decrepit she might be. But did he really expect an answer to the question? Gorsey Dene drank his Guinness and mentally groomed himself: his confidence and feeling of superiority had returned with the chance meeting. Poor deluded imbecile – alongside him the youth must have looked a wreck. Already certain women in the bar were turning and comparing the two.

  ‘Myself I would say it was sex,’ the youth said predictably, and Gorsey Dene nodded tolerantly, quite prepared to humour the pathetic fixations and long-felt yearnings of this deprived misfit.

  ‘Too little of it about, no doubt.’

  ‘Too much; far too much.’

  Gorsey Dene smiled easily, vastly amused by the apparent sincerity of this human disaster; he was pleased at his own ability to exercise broad-minded sympathy in the face of such blatant subterfuge.

  ‘I bet you knew a girl,’ Gorsey Dene said.

  ‘I knew many girls.’

  ‘Of course; of course you did.’

  ‘This one girl in particular I grew up with. We went to the same school together as tiny children.’

  ‘I bet you played with her,’ Gorsey Dene said with meaningful emphasis.

  ‘I played with her,’ the youth said innocently, ‘all right. We grew up together in the same town, as neighbours, and when we got older went for long walks. Anyway, later on the word got around – I heard it from several people – that she was handing it out. You know – you know –’he stammered.

  ‘I know,’ Gorsey Dene said patiently.

  ‘Well, we hadn’t seen each other for a long time … a few years at least, when I happened to meet her in the street one day and she told me she shared a flat with a friend.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Gorsey Dene said, midly interested.

  The youth’s eyes had become abstracted and his hand slipped on his glass, almost spilling it. ‘She invited me to go and see her, telling me when she was most likely to be in. Evenutally I did go to see her, not straight away, but several weeks later. I knocked on the door of her flat,’ the youth said, ‘but there was no answer. At first I thought of going away, the flat being empty, but just then I thought I heard a sound – or sounds. I tried the door and it was open.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Gorsey Dene.

  ‘As I opened the door I heard the sound of splashing water and almost immediately Shirley called out, “Who’s there?” and I said, “It’s me,” and she said, “I’m in the bath, come through.” I walked through the living-room into the bathroom and there she was, in the bath, lying back in the water. When she saw me she said, “Oh it’s you.”’

  ‘Could you see anything in the water?’

  ‘Could I see anything in the water?’ the young man said, his stricken eyes staring out of a paper-white face.

  ‘You know: any thing …’

  ‘Do you mean –?’

  Gorsey Dene nodded.

  ‘The water was soapy; the surface was covered in opaque bubbles.’ He caught Gorsey Dene’s questioning look. ‘But she was a big girl, all right. I knew that from before.’

  ‘You hadn’t mentioned it.’

  ‘No, but she was.’

  He was lying through his teeth. Gorsey Dene didn’t believe a word of it. There was nothing
whatsoever about the youth that would attract a girl, much less a big one. But there could be no harm in listening to the rest of the story, ludicrously fanciful as it was.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Well … nothing much happened after that,’ the young man said. ‘She lay in the bath under the water and I talked to her for a while. Later the water started to get cold and she asked me to reach her a towel. I stood up with the towel, holding it in front of me, and she rose up out of the water, big, wet, glistening, the water running off her. She stepped out of the bath and put her arms round my neck and, clinging on, wrapped her legs around my waist. You can imagine what I was feeling.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Gorsey Dene said sceptically. ‘Then what?’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening, of course, but it was. Well, I mean, what would you have done? So I began to kiss her, my hands under her buttocks to support her in this awkward position—’

  ‘What about the towel?’ asked Gorsey Dene, a stickler for detail.

  ‘The towel had dropped to the floor,’ the young man said. ‘She was wet and naked against my clothing.’

  Gorsey Dene nodded, satisfied.

  ‘– but no sooner had we begun in earnest, and we were both becoming rather excited, than she suddenly, all at once, for no apparent reason, without warning, burst into tears.’

  ‘Still hanging –?’

  ‘Still hanging on me, burst into tears,’ the youth affirmed.

  A pack of lies, obviously. Delusions of a tormented mind. Who did he think he was trying to kid? Gorsey Dene felt sick at the sham of it all but reasoned that as he was here he might as well hear the end.

  ‘I thought at first that she was getting worked-up – other women I’ve had have behaved in a similar way –’

  (Other women!)

  ‘– but she wasn’t, just very upset. She clung to me, this big girl, her arms and legs round me, sobbing her heart out. I asked her what was the matter, thinking that she was contrite about being so forward and throwing herself at me in so shameful a manner. Her face was pressed into my shoulder, her weight was getting heavier and heavier, and I had to ask her again why she was crying. She mumbled something into my collar and I had to ask her to repeat it, and when she did it was, “I’m three months pregnant.” My desire vanished instantly. You’ve probably been in that kind of situation yourself, so you’ll know. Anyway, I just wanted to go away and leave her but it seems that I was the only person she could confide in: she had to unburden herself to someone and it happened to be me. And then it all flooded out, about how afraid she was, how her mother was sure to have fits, what her father would say, whether she could get enough money together for an abortion, what she was going to do about her job, how she could afford to keep the flat, what had happened to Creely in recent weeks, whether or not she should commit suicide –’