Vail Page 5

  ‘We never close, sir,’ I told him sternly. ‘Or madam.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ came the humble response.

  Conjecturing that a tray being carried out to the parking area might be noticed and remarked upon, I scouted round for a cardboard box or similar receptacle. There was plenty of rubbish lying about but it all belonged to somebody. One box filled with boots and shoes would do admirably, and I approached the owner.

  ‘Your empty box for a packet of sweet digestives,’ I bartered.

  ‘What else have you got?’ said the woman greedily, raising herself up to look at my tray of goodies.

  ‘You can have a packet of biscuits or a can of Coke. I just want the box. You can keep the shoes.’

  ‘I’ll have those shortcakes.’ She tipped the box and emptied it.

  The man next to her on the floor, knees drawn up inside a circle of territorially arranged possessions, face the colour of old cheese, said eagerly, ‘Two empty boxes for a packet of biscuits, any kind.’

  ‘I don’t need two boxes,’ I said. ‘This one will do.’

  ‘Keep your nose out,’ the woman warned him. ‘We’ve done a deal.’

  ‘Fuck off, you old lesbian,’ the man retorted.

  An old woman behind me said, ‘This coat for that packet of egg sandwiches. The collar’s real fur, feel it.’

  ‘In this weather?’ I said. ‘I don’t need a coat with a real fur collar.’ I took the box and transferred the food and drink to it.

  ‘Anything else you need?’ asked the woman who had done the deal.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I have a bracelet. Platinum …’

  The man said, ‘You’ve got yours, ratbag, give somebody else a chance. How about a cashmere scarf?’ he said to me, rummaging for the item in question. ‘Hardly worn, sir. Good as new.’

  Somebody thrust a pair of tan brogue shoes under my nose. ‘Two packets of sandwiches and that can of orange squash. Look at them! They’re your size.’

  I struggled to stand up, holding my box protectively under my arm. I could hardly move for the press of bodies. Somebody got hold of my T-shirt and I yanked free.

  ‘All right then, one packet of sandwiches and a can of orange.’

  ‘I don’t want your shoes.’ I tried to get out and tripped over legs and feet.

  ‘Real platinum …’

  ‘Cashmere …’

  ‘Hardly worn …’

  ‘Get-that-box,’ said another, younger, harder voice.

  Head down I went for the door, the pack after me, stepping on things and people in a mad headlong rush. Somebody got a hand on my box and I kicked backwards with my heel. I collided with some people coming in through the swing doors and there was a general mêlée of confusion: curses, shouts, screams and shocks.

  Outside in the sunshine I ran a few paces and then slowed to get my breath back and not attract attention. Petrol.

  I got my hose and two-gallon can and did a casual walkabout on the outskirts of the parking area. A car with DISABLED DRIVER NO HAND SIGNALS in the back window looked promising. If the driver was thalidomide with rudimentary limbs and knobbly stumps for fingers it could mean that his petrol cap was of the press-on non-locking type. So it proved. In went the hose, a quick suck on the end to draw the petrol below the level of the tank, and gravity and the law of fluid displacement did the rest. Easy-peasy. Just as I was removing the hose a thin boy, – a youth I suppose you’d call him, – sidled round the back of the car and stared at me from the corner of his bloodshot eye. He wore a holey yellow T-shirt with the legend NUKE ARGIE SCUM on a mushroom cloud printed across the chest and denims cut down to shorts with frayed bottoms. Grimy bare feet in laceless Adidas training shoes with the stitching coming undone. I clenched my fists to hit him.

  ‘Heading for the Smoke, squire?’ he inquired softly. His teeth had never heard of Pepsodent.

  ‘No, Timbuktu.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Just south of Leicester.’

  ‘Got a melyn cribo?’

  This was underground argot for a yellow card. ‘No, why, do I need one?’

  ‘If you’re going to the Smoke you do. No melyn cribo, no work.’

  ‘I’m not looking for work.’

  ‘How about a Resident Alien permit?’

  ‘You sell those too?’

  ‘Anything you need, sunshine.’

  A Resident Alien permit would be useful. Without one I wouldn’t be able to get medical treatment for Bev. Hospitals were strict about who they admitted these days. ‘How much?’

  ‘What have you got?’ The boy or youth motioned with a scrawny undernourished hand that we ought to move away from the car in case the owner lurched up. His forearms, I noticed, were hard and shiny and lumpy with old puncture marks and scar tissue.

  ‘Not a lot of anything,’ I said. ‘Petrol any good to you?’ The boy or youth shook his head. ‘What then?’

  ‘Wife? Daughter?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘A double-header for a Resident Alien permit while you watch.’

  ‘Suck my cock instead,’ I said.

  ‘Suck mine for a melyn cribo.’

  ‘It’s probably pox-ridden.’

  ‘No blood, just a clear discharge. You could rinse your mouth out with petrol after.’

  I toyed with the idea of battering him senseless and taking everything he had. Dump his body along the motorway somewhere and let the crows have him. Was he too smart to carry the stuff on him?

  ‘I’ll do without it,’ I said. ‘You’ll give them both a dose.’

  He shrugged. ‘A guy’s gotta live.’ He grinned with his melyn teeth. ‘I’ve got something else you need even more if you’re travelling past Watford Gap.’

  ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘Trouble.’

  ‘In the form of, – ?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ He pulled out a foil strip enclosing tablets or capsules in individual blisters on which the brand name Temporal in tiny letters was overprinted a hundred times. ‘This does the trick. Take one each an hour before you hit the Gap and you won’t feel a thing.’ He aquaplaned his flat hand up into the air like a jet taking off. ‘Like sliding on cream.’

  ‘What does it do?’ The mêlée in the entrance hall had spilled onto the forecourt. People beaten and trampled. Some blood too. Few curdling screams.

  ‘Operates like the fast-forward on a video recorder,’ the boy or youth said, holding up the foil strip enticingly between thumb and forefinger. ‘Shrinks time subjectively from two hours into five minutes. On this stuff you could be in London in less than twenty minutes, half-an-hour at most.’

  ‘Subjectively.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Where would I be objectively?’

  ‘Same place, buddy-boy. The Smoke.’

  I wasn’t sure I was following this. I asked, ‘And how exactly is it going to keep us out of trouble at Watford Gap?’

  ‘You’ll go past it like that.’ He snapped his fingers, pitifully frail.

  ‘In no time at all.’

  ‘Ri-i-ight! In no time at all. You said it.’

  ‘I don’t …’ I frowned.

  ‘Never heard of Einstein? Everything is subjectively relative. Five minutes in a dentist’s waiting-room seems like three hours. This stuff operates in reverse. If you lived on Temporal every day of your life you’d die of old age within a week. You want some, don’t you?’ he grinned knowingly.

  ‘Not if it’s the same deal as before.’ I put the can of petrol down, which was getting heavy. The sun was low in the sky, striking pointed shadows across the asphalt. A tremor of unease shook me as I thought about the impending curfew. What would it be like to be stopped by the police while flying on Temporal? Perhaps they’d be talking to someone who’d already gone.

  ‘I’ll make you another proposition,’ the boy or youth said. ‘Contact a friend of mine in London called Fully Olbin. He’ll ask you to do him a favour. Do the favour in exchan
ge for the Temporal.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable.’ I didn’t smile. ‘How do I meet him?’

  ‘You’ll meet him, don’t worry.’

  ‘How will you know I’ve kept to my side of the bargain?’

  ‘You’ll have used the Temporal.’

  ‘But suppose I change my mind when I get to London?’

  ‘You won’t have used the Temporal.’

  ‘I will if I’ve used it already.’

  ‘You won’t have used it if you don’t follow through with the favour,’ the boy or youth said.

  ‘You mean if I do the favour I’ll have used the Temporal and if I decide not to do the favour I won’t have used the Temporal.’

  ‘Got it in one,’ he smiled yellowly.

  ‘But the favour follows the Temporal,’ I said, ‘not the other way round. You give me the Temporal now and you won’t know whether I follow through with the favour in London till later.’

  The boy or youth sighed wearily. ‘Where have you been living? Never heard of Heisenberg?’

  ‘A new Bavarian lager?’

  ‘Cause can precede effect and effect can precede cause at one and the same time. What you do later affects what you do now, – it’s all the same.’

  ‘Not in my world,’ I said, shifting feet.

  ‘Sure. Remember what Max Born said: ‘I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy’.’

  Two in one day. First a terrorist loonie and now a mad quantum mechanic. Which of us was going off our rocker, the world or me?

  ‘Suppose I say I’m not going to do the favour, – will you still give me the Temporal?’

  ‘That all depends on whether you do the favour or not.’

  ‘But you won’t know till later.’

  ‘So that’s when I’ll decide.’

  ‘How can you decide later whether or not to give me the Temporal now?’

  ‘Simple. I won’t have given it to you if you don’t do the favour and I will have given it to you if you have.’

  ‘You call that simple?’

  ‘Is to me, squire.’

  ‘All right.’ I’d made up my mind. ‘Give me the Temporal and I’ll do you the favour, how’s that? Happy?’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ he said, handing me the foil strip. ‘That’s more than I did.’

  He was gone, but the evidence that the boy or youth existed was in my hand. I had the Temporal. What good it would do remained to be seen. And whether or not I would do the favour ditto.

  I suspected that Brown had made love to Mira while I had been away but I had no means of corroborating it. At one time I might have got angry and flown into a jealous rage but now it hardly seemed worth the effort. And I could have been wrong. I didn’t want to appear foolish by accusing her of something she hadn’t done.

  By the time darkness came on we had passed Keele (Trusthouse Forte) and Hilton Park (Rank) and weren’t far from Corley (Trusthouse Forte) when the tedious petrol problem was upon us once again.

  To fill the mindless hours of driving, with my foot jammed hard against the accelerator, I used to imagine that Shakespeare was sitting next to me and I had the double pleasure of listening to his comments on this (to him) bizarre modern world and explaining to him such mysteries as the square iron boxes which apparently moved of their own volition but were actually powered by Engines burning a refined derivative of crude oil and the principle on which the steady baffling unflickering glow of the motorway lights on their fabricated steel stalks operated.

  He marvelled at the smoothness of the carriageways and the ultra neatness of everything. He could understand the signs with their arrows, numbers and other graphic symbols (though not the sign for the disabled, which he took to be a man sitting on a boulder) and after a little initial difficulty was able to read the place-names in their brutal modern script. Being a genius, much of it came as no real surprise to him, though what did surprise him was that while the external world had altered so drastically, being filled with unblemished concrete and moving iron boxes and unflickering illumination, human beings had hardly changed one whit: in fact physically they were exactly the same. He would have conjectured, he told me, that they would have advanced to keep pace with scientific progress, and almost expected to see forms of mutation such as puny hairless bodies and huge swollen brains. And what totally amazed him was when I explained that most people living today hadn’t the faintest notion of how the modern world functioned. They had heard at school and through the media about scientific achievements and discoveries, and they used mechanical contrivances every day of their lives, yet few of them knew what these achievements and discoveries meant or of their importance, nor how the machines they depended on worked. As Shakespeare pointed out, most of them had the physical, mental and emotional attributes of people living in his own time. Indeed they might as well have been living in the Middle Ages, – preferably so, – because they were still several hundred years behind the times.

  I found these comments and conclusions interesting and spent many a pleasurable hour listening to them, interspersed with my attempting to answer his questions in terms an Elizabethan would understand. The dashboard, I remember, its coloured gauges and vibrating needles in illuminated dials, especially fascinated him. I had the devil’s own job trying to explain what stored electricity was.

  At Corley a large curved screen dominated the car park on which a free non-stop programme of pop music, news headlines, commercials and soft porn was displayed. When we arrived in darkness they were showing a Selina Southorn quickie, which featured Selina in gymslip and stocking-tops being chastised by a middle-aged schoolmaster in gown and mortar-board, who spanked her bare bottom with a flat ruler. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! It was fairly mild, because it was illegal to show an erect penis in a public place. For that you had to go into a video booth and put a £1 coin in the machine.

  ‘How’s Bev?’ I asked Mira. I was feeling pretty knackered: I had a sultry thumping headache and my right leg was completely dead. It took me a minute or two to manoeuvre myself out of the seat and into the back.

  ‘Urb thinks she has radiation sickness. Either that or toxic waste poisoning.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bev. You just asked me about her.’

  ‘No, I meant who thinks that?’

  Mira indicated Brown. Urb. They were getting on well together.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ I said to Brown.

  ‘What do doctors know?’ he said with contempt.

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘A lot of things you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘I’m in the mood to believe anything,’ I said irritably. ‘What makes you think she has radiation sickness or toxic waste poisoning?’

  The light from a distant sodium lamp was so feeble that in the darkened interior of the van I could barely make out his humped shadow. Was he was still clutching his precious black bundle?

  ‘It’s all part of the plan,’ Brown answered cryptically.

  My pulse quickened. ‘Do you mean somebody’s already dropped the Bomb and they haven’t told us about it?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘I don’t think you really know yourself. You’re guessing. And what’s this about toxic waste?’

  ‘Deliberately dumped.’

  ‘Who by?’

  The humped shadow moved as he shrugged. ‘Companies.’

  ‘On instructions from the Govt?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Is there a war going on that we haven’t been told about?’

  ‘What war?’ Mira said. ‘Who with?’

  Brown said, ‘There’s a war going on right here and now. Why do you think the motorways are fenced in?’

  It hadn’t occurred to me why; they just were.

  ‘Why do you think the police are after me?’ he went on.

  ‘Because you’re a terrorist,’ I said.

  ‘You never told me that,’ Mira said hotly.

  I couldn’t see, and
therefore didn’t know, whether she was talking to Brown or me. At any rate, intimate as they might have been behind my back, he hadn’t told her everything.

  ‘Spit it out,’ I said, head throbbing. ‘Are our children being systematically poisoned or aren’t they? And if so, why, and by whom?’

  ‘That and worse,’ Brown said. ‘It’s an incredible story.’

  ‘It sounds it.’

  ‘I can’t see them doing that,’ Mira said matter-of-factly. ‘They might be misguided but they’re not evil. They’re not Nazis.’

  Brown laughed. The only time he ever did. From where I was sitting I could see Selina Southorn’s vast naked bottom with symmetrical welts like bloody ski marks on an alpine slope filling the giant screen and reflected on the shiny roofs of several hundred parked cars. The image faded and a commercial replaced it for Lyon’s Maid ice cream, fronted by Bob Monkhouse. He made a gesture with both arms outspread and smiled toothingly.

  ‘I can’t say any more, it’s too dangerous,’ Brown said.

  ‘You haven’t told us anything,’ I protested. ‘That was the deal, remember? Transport to London in exchange for secrets.’

  ‘Yes, but not here.’ His shadowed bulk was a deeper black than the darkened interior, which was the only indication I had that he was actually there. ‘I require updated information and if I get it here they’ll home in on us. We’re too exposed. Nearer Birmingham is safer.’

  ‘We’re near Birmingham now.’

  ‘Not near enough. Once we get to Spaghetti Junction the confluence of motorways will confuse them, – ’

  (Confluence!)

  ‘ – they won’t know whether we’re heading east on the M6, south on the M5, into the city itself, or the antithesis of all those, – ’

  (Antithesis!)

  ‘ – from there I can contact base in safety and get an update on the situation.’

  There were a number of questions I wanted to ask. What base and what situation was he referring to? How did he intend to contact this base? He kept using emotive words like ‘dangerous’ and ‘exposed’ and this unsettled me. Again I had the feeling that I had been precluded from knowing certain key facts, that things were going on all around me to which I was oblivious. He spoke of a war, but I knew of no such war, either here or in Urop, or anywhere come to that. He spoke of radiation and toxic waste, neither of which had ever impinged themselves on my consciousness.