The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Page 2

  The problem with Dmitri Zeilnski is that just when you think you have him pinned by the proverbials he fades into another spacetime continuum, his Nikon and Pentax slung over his shoulder. He is a swarthy man with heavy brows and dense black wavy hair. He wears thick-rimmed spectacles and his fingernails are cut very short and square. One of the most noticeable things about him is that his car is always in a mess. A conversation with him consists of not asking direct questions followed by his not replying. Nevertheless he is a fine chap, always providing that one doesn’t do a tenth of what he asks. Eloise, of course, is a much more definitive figure. Servile, cringing, subservient, she is the kind of woman who would drive any man, not least her husband, to wander the world. A fact about the pair of them which has often perplexed me is their utter disregard for money. They spend money yet never seem to earn any. I should like to know how they do this, because it is a trick worth cultivating. Dmitri always has at least a pound in his pocket: perhaps it is always the same pound, which immediately it is spent reappears in his back pocket as if by magic. One has all the money in the world if one has just one pound note and that keeps reappearing in one’s pocket.

  We did a number of assignments together, in addition to the paper mill. Admittedly this was the most interesting, for the reasons I have explained. We even had plans to travel abroad but these came to nothing. He went and I stayed, and as you see I’m still here. What happened to Eloise Zeilnski is anybody’s guess. (I heard the other day, on the phone, that after a suitable lapse of time she had followed him; what the current state of their relationship is I do not know.)

  I come upon them, Dmitri and an Italian friend of his, in the saloon bar of a pub. Weak sunlight through the decorative windows of thickened glass, their lower parts opaque, gives their two faces a raw, fresh-washed look and makes their eyes appear amazingly translucent. Dmitri introduces me to his friend: I sit down. From the moment I do sit down there is a battle of wits, a contest of egos. Dmitri delights in asking me what I am doing so that he can knock me down; naturally the Italian is his ally. They drink halves of mild beer from dirty, lipstick-smeared glasses; I drink Guinness. It is midday and the pub is comparatively empty.

  ‘So when are you going abroad?’ Dmitri asks me. He asks me this in a friendly, interested tone of voice but he is waiting, just waiting, to knock me down.

  ‘It will be sometime next year now,’ I reply. He doesn’t believe I will go; I am determined to go but I share his doubt.

  He then launches into a long string of advice: his speciality. How to travel, where to go, who to see. I nod and look serious. I like him, though I hate him when he acts like this. His attitude is insulting. He is good at his job but not that good.

  ‘My friend here knows of a cheap farmhouse you could stay at in northern Italy.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  The Italian says in quite good but imperfect English: ‘There is a small village twenty kilometres and more from the sea. My brother and his family live in a house next to the village. The rents are cheap.’

  ‘The sea is the Adriatic?’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ the Italian says solemnly.

  ‘Give him the address,’ Dmitri says. ‘I’ll write it down and give you directions.’ He is trying to be helpful and it would be churlish of me to refuse his help. Besides, perhaps one distant day I will indeed stay at a cheap farmhouse in an Italian village.

  At this point we had very recently completed the paper mill assignment.

  Dmitri writes down the address and draws a little map of how to get there. I thank them both for their advice and kindness. Dmitri Zeilnski has capable brown hands and I resent this. He travels all over the world while I’m stuck here with an emotional deadweight of guilt round my neck. The Italian is smiling faintly and I begin to feel I am losing control of the situation. After all, what is the Italian? What more has he to offer than me? People with nothing to offer are so insufferably, illogically superior.

  Dmitri says, ‘We must meet up when you’re abroad.’

  ‘We might even do a job together,’ I say hopelessly.

  ‘There are too many doing jobs like that,’ Dmitri answers. He has found the chink he has been looking for. It is practically an open invitation. He is going to knock me down. The Italian grins. Dmitri says, ‘To do a job like that you need an entirely new approach, something never tried before.’

  ‘An angle,’ is all my cliché-ridden mind can think to say.

  Dmitri smiles. It is obvious that he believes me incapable of dreaming up such an angle. He considers me young, naive, and foolish. This despite the paper mill experience.

  ‘When are you leaving?’ I ask.

  Dmitri smiles his smugly confident brown-faced smile. (I do him a disservice; he isn’t really smug at all, just so damn knowing.) ‘I have a few things to finalise in London and then I’ll be away. I’m expecting mail from the States.’

  Big deal, I almost say.

  I cannot help wondering how the hell Dmitri came to meet the Italian in the first place. Was he passing through the Italian’s village and happened to stop and they got into conversation? It was possible but hardly likely. Meeting an English-speaking Italian in a remote village in the depths of the Italian countryside was too much of a coincidence. Something else was bothering me: the Italian was expensively dressed. I had been led to believe that Italy was a poor country, yet here was a native of that country wearing better and more modern clothes than I. I felt like asking, ‘Where did you get your money from?’

  At this precise moment Dmitri says, ‘He owned a large garage in a big town in Italy and has just sold it,’ answering my unspoken query as to how the Italian comes to be dressed so expensively and in such good, modern taste. One would think this a coincidence; in fact one would think the world to be full of coincidences, to be choc-a-bloc with them, for million upon million of coincidences like this one to be happening all the time. But there is no such thing as coincidence.

  I notice that the floor of the saloon bar hasn’t been swept, probably for days, possibly for weeks. It is thick with litter: cigarette packets, cellophane wrappers, tobacco ash, broken beer mats, torn newspapers, ripped crisp packets, all mixed with gobs of spit and spilled beer. I look with disgust at the floor.

  ‘Does nobody ever sweep up these days?’ I ask abstractedly.

  The Italian shoots his immaculate cream cuffs and I notice on his genuine gold cuff-links the initials RK.

  ‘Well,’ Dmitri smiles, ‘so when are you going then?’

  ‘Do you mean abroad?’

  ‘Where else?’ Dmitri continues to smile.

  ‘Oh not too long, perhaps in a month or so. I’m waiting for the money to come through and then I shall be off.’

  The Italian won’t stop staring at me with his dark-irised eyes, and he is beginning to make me feel nervous. I don’t like people staring at me with dark-irised eyes.

  ‘Well,’ Dmitri says, there being nothing further to say at this point.

  ‘How is Eloise?’ I ask, making my attempt to knock him down.

  Dmitri’s face crinkles in a brown grimace. ‘We are still together – that is I stay with her when I am in the country. But…’ He grimaces once more. ‘Did nothing ever come of the paper mill project?’

  ‘How do you mean, “come of it”?’

  This pendantry annoys Dmitri: I can see it in his brown face. All he wants is a straight answer to a straight question. Ha-ha, never! If he thinks me a fool then I shall play the fool.

  ‘Has the material been made into anything?’ Dmitri says patiently.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I reply, and it is evident that this non-answer angers Dmitri even more.

  I go home feeling pleased with myself. Dmitri and his Italian friend have departed for South Wales, following my directions. They could end up in Glasgow. I need not tell you how I spent the next three days. Later, Dmitri went abroad and it is over a year since I last saw him. What has become of him? Whom is he now bullying?


  II

  We get many glimpses of a secret underlife during our years as thinking beings, yet we choose to ignore them. For myself, I find that more and more I am drifting, or rather sinking, deeper and deeper into a fantastic half-shadowed world of memory, reminiscence, nostalgia and the like which seems more ‘real’ than this everyday outside world I am forced to inhabit in order to make a living. This is badly put. I shall make another attempt: at certain times I feel I am living surrounded by a great stillness. I feel that events that have happened will happen again. Indeed, I’m convinced that once an event has happened it continues to repeat itself endlessly, like the continuous loop of a cassette tape or a never-ending series of television action-replays. So that we foresee events before they happen (because they have already happened) – and after our instant-self has passed through the spacetime in which the event is happening the event then continues to happen, as I’ve said, ad infinitum. Thus I am still sitting at the table in the pub with the weak sunlight pouring over me as through half-frosted windows. I shall continue to sit there for all eternity. Dmitri will continue to ask me questions, and I shall forever evade answering them.

  To give another example. Once I returned in the early hours of the morning from a long nightdrive (from whence I came I can’t remember). I went to the huge black ugly building where I had an office. It was early, about six o’clock, and the only people moving about were the cleaners, old charladies with grotesque hands and wrinkled stockings. I had a wash, made some coffee, and tried to make a flat place on which to lie down by placing two chairs together. Very ordinary events, you will agree, but the odd thing is that I am still having a wash, making coffee, and trying to make a flat place on which to lie down by placing two chairs together. At this moment I am doing these things. As I sit here writing I am doing them.

  I mention this specific time, place and event because I was very conscious of the great stillness previously referred to. Of course it was still, actually still, because there is little traffic about at six o’clock in the morning, even in the centre of Manchester. But the point I want to make is that the stillness was doom-laden. This silly phrase is the one that comes nearest to describing my awareness at that particular point in time. I felt – quite literally – that the fabric of the air was about to be ripped from end to end. As a drowning man I saw the skyline silhouette of an oil refinery, a cold featureless hospital corridor, an anonymous animal smashed flat on a midnight road, a girl with sparse red pubics, a black-faced man on a ladder pointing the side of a house, a harsh cornfield that left indentations on the skin, an hotel room to which I had been led by a slim, swarthy man with a disfigured face, a pub standing erect in the centre of a wilderness whose bars were slopping with Guinness, an enormous August sun beating through the windscreen directly into my eyes, a darkened room in which I danced naked with a black girl, an exhibition stand crammed with gleaming motorcycles, a flat through whose blank windows clinical light scoured everything white, an occasion with wife and family eating fish and chips in the lost middle of Birmingham.

  – All these events were happening at one and the same time. And I was participating in each of them. My entire life was enclosed in a series of giant glossy stills pinned to a cork board. The real events of my life had turned into photographs. More explictly, they had become fiction. My life was fiction; I myself was a fictitious character.

  (Apropos of this, the thought occurs to me that if people inhabit fiction how can they believe in fiction when they read it? The simple truth of the matter is that people do not believe in fiction today because they no longer believe in the validity of their own emotions or that they themselves have a separate reality. How the idea amuses me!)

  Round about this period in which I had the conversation with Dmitri Zeilnski and the Italian – whether or not this was before or after the experience in the office I cannot recall – I became heavily involved in a bizarre situation in a neighbouring town. I went to this town to drink; that is, to get drunk. As to why I should need to get drunk you can no doubt guess. The town in question reeks of beer. It is very easy to get beaten up in this certain town. It is noted for miles around as a town of sex and violence. If I were to describe it to you, which I shall, it sounds like this:

  The Town is both flourishing and decaying all at once. In the centre, at the apex of a hill, where four main roads meet, they have constructed massive concrete walkways and subways which circumnavigate the traffic flow. This configuration is not beautiful, neither is it ugly: it is so frightening that it is a threat to human existence. These walkways and subways, some of which include shopping precincts, are bleak draughty hells upon whose walls are smeared obscenities, excrement, blood from used and discarded sanitary towels, beer sick and advertising signs. Every breakable artefact has been broken. Every lamp behind its toughened wire-impregnated glass panel has been smashed. The steel ballustrading leans at weary attitudes as though resting from the nightly onslaught. The dedicated benches have been ripped out of the ground and lie splintered in the flower-beds. Slim aluminium poles carrying spiky remnants of white light globes have had their spines severely distorted. There is litter and dirt and soot everywhere, ushered into heaped corners by the perpetual gusting winds. Some of the paving stones have been wrenched up. No one is safe after dark. Above and below the walkways and subways the Christian traffic shatters past, the dim interiors of perfumed peace reflecting the glow from flickering green needles in hermetically-sealed stainless steel casings. This traffic moves under its own volition, and is its own and everything else’s justification for being. The tarmac of the roads is burnished to a deep brilliant black by the lisping tyres. It is truly an artery of the world – an artery that passes through a concrete bowel in less time than it takes to fart.

  This is the flourishing part.

  In the decaying part discarded hulks of cotton mills are strewn along the embankments of rusting railway tracks. Worthwhile slum clearance schemes have gone full ahead (to make more room for the Concrete Bowel) and now acres of family streets are piles of dust-laden nostalgia.

  The Town is no more violent than it used to be but now the violence is openly on the streets. The people have finally learned – after many years of painstaking and expensive teaching, not to mention daily media conditioning – that materialism should be placed before and above everything while material objects themselves are worth nothing. It is a beautiful system, self-perpetuating, mutually sustaining, leading slowly but surely to its ultimate pinnacle of perfection: a factory where they make and smash objects on the same conveyor-belt.

  In this environment I felt at home, because inside my head I too have a making-smashing device that keeps me company as I walk through this desolate society of ours. This device makes and smashes thoughts, ideas, hopes, aspirations, emotions even before they’re fully formed. They are aborted; stillborn.

  It was on a Thursday that I decided to visit the Town. Needless to say I detested myself for having insufficient will power to resist the ugly temptations that were luring me there. As usual most of the street lighting was off, having failed or been broken. Gangs of youths roamed about, clomping their heavy boots up and down the walk-ways and subways. I hurried on quickly to the Pub. I remember particularly that there was a nasty stinging wind blowing ice-cold from the moors, sweeping down the street, gusting muck and grit into your eyes. ‘If this is the best they can do …’ I remember thinking.

  As I approached the door of the Pub my mind was in a turmoil of indecision. Was it right, because one felt superior to certain people, to use them as a means of sating one’s perverse desires? (Not that this really bothered me.) And what if she penetrated my flimsy disguise and caught a glimpse – only a glimpse! – of the person that was supposed to be underneath? It was a chance I would have to take. Other questions too assailed me, but these could wait.

  III

  As I entered the Pub I had a strange feeling that I wouldn’t be very welcome. However, as I have this feeling whe
rever I go it was not something to take me by surprise. Rather, I was prepared for it – or, rather, I prepared myself for it. She wasn’t at the bar or behind the bar, so I seated myself in rather a dejected mood and waited to see what went on around me. After a while a girl entered whom I knew: she had told me in the past that her name was Shirl, and I had no reason to doubt this. With her was a tiny man, diminutive in fact, whose name I didn’t catch, but who bit his fingernails. This was something that gave me great personal satisfaction. Almost immediately Shirl began to talk directly to me, ignoring the tiny man, which, if the truth were known, had the effect of unsettling me. I like to know where I am with people; I like to feel that everyone has a proper station in life. Now by rights she should have been engaging both of us in conversation equally – if not the tiny man more than me, seeing that he was her companion – yet her biased attentions hinted that their relationship was not as it appeared. This, as you will agree, can be most disturbing, especially to someone of such tender sensibilities as myself. At first the tiny man seemed oblivious of this discrepancy, sitting back quietly in his chair and now and then sipping his beer. Slowly I began to detect in him a certain impatience, annoyance even, and endeavoured to draw him into the conversation, occasionally dropping the odd remark which perhaps he might seize upon and thus insinuate himself into the discussion. Though whenever I did this Shirl instantly snatched at the phrase or question or whatever it was and once more directed her reply to me, all but turning her back on him. Indeed, he was an odd creature. Shirl herself was highly attractive, physically, and her attractiveness was enhanced by the unavoidable comparison between the two of them. As stated, he was tiny, and amazingly thin. His face was very pale, and in it his eyes gleamed like pieces of polished coal. Was it my imagination that he never blinked? He gave the impression of being innocuous, yet there was a hidden streak of restrained obscenity somewhere inside that chilled the blood. He was the type of man that fascinates women.