The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Read online

  It may be added that the ‘Confessions’ of this dealer in paradoxes did not end here, since the writer could not forbear continuing them; but I who have been responsible for their transcription choose no longer to perform the task.

  HOPE HOSPITAL

  PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

  Having rid myself of burdensome thoughts, I feel that now is the time to embark on a more lucid tale, leaving behind the occasional jottings and note-takings that have hitherto served to convey my attitudes towards life. Yet it is not a tale in the accepted sense of the word, neither is it written in the form of the ‘Confessions’ that have gone before. However, you should know that it has taken me in excess of two months to write, and therefore I hope you will bear with me. I earnestly crave your indulgence.

  No, it is not a story, nor does it have a plot, nor is it in any sense ‘realistic’ – so what is it? you may legitimately inquire. Well: I ask you to suppose that a man sits in a car in a place which has the powerful effect of nostalgia upon him; it is evening and the environment recalls to his mind a certain person with whom he once had an intimate and deeply-felt relationship. He recalls too the despicable way she was treated, and feels an aching sadness because time is irretrievable, their past lives are gone forever, and yet this memory, to him, remains the most real and vital aspect of his present-day existence. Naturally, his thoughts are not coherent, as he is a man like any other, but had it been possible to somehow capture his thoughts intact and transpose them to the printed page I doubt whether they would have emerged any the less coherent, and possibly a good deal more so: yet, for me, their psychological order would have remained unaltered. As for his being consistent or consecutive, both in thought and deed, I do not believe it matters that this is not the case; rather I would insist that his inner confusion, his hotch-potch mixture of memories, requires just such a method of transposition. Thus he sits, sunk in retrospection, living vicariously his past life and seeking to make order of it, to wring some sense out of it, just as a child repeatedly shakes a kaleidoscope in an attempt to achieve a prettier pattern or one that pleases him the more by its comforting juxtaposition of irregularly-shaped coloured bits and pieces. By degrees he begins to understand better (this, at least, his subjective impression), and towards the close of the story thinks he has perceived the reality or truth of things – or what he conceives to be such.

  These are the bare bones of my tale. It goes without saying that whereas the actual transcription of these reminiscences has taken a lengthy period of time, the human mind is so constructed that it skips lightly and artfully from thought to thought in the merest fraction of an instant. A single image generates an entire sequence of brain-pictures; a flashing wisp of thought acts as a catalyst for the simultaneous reincarnation of myriad sights, sounds and smells from the past – which is our human term for the collective backlog of experience contained within our minds. So, while the man appears to dwell to the point of wearisome self-indulgence on quite worthless topics, the topics themselves are in fact dealt with summarily and in a twinkling. The passage of time can be no more than a matter of hours, yet he spans the wave-peaks, troughs and undulations of a complete relationship, reviewing, as it were, the catalogue of an entire human personality. The same thing has been done before in Art. For example, Vladimir Nabakov employed a similar method in his novel Glory, in which the backward and forward shuttling of time and experience produces a dizzying effect. Of course, this re-arrangement is only made possible with hindsight, a quality absent at the moment of involvement: yet had not Vladimir Nabakov permitted himself this licence, there would never have resulted what constitutes at once the most fascinating and the most successfully achieved of all his writings.

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  THE NIGHTDRIVE BEGINS

  The central pivot around which my thoughts dip and sway is indeed Hope Hospital (that bleak, featureless, forbidding place!), yet oddly enough none of the events which follow, and which are crammed with special significance for me, actually took place there. It is as though its existence in my memory is a key, a cypher, unlocking an entire chestful of dusty, half-shadowed reminiscences dating back to prehistory. Thinking back on it, the Hospital was instrumental in triggering off this chain of events, for it was there that Tee worked, and had I not met her none of this would have happened.

  We had been lovers, Tee and I, for a period of time not exceeding two years. Or would it be more correct to say that she had been my mistress? At any rate we had been frequently physically intimate. To employ a worn cliché, Tee was the most alive person I had ever known; it did not seem feasible that any man would not be immediately and catastrophically entranced by her, nor that he – fortunate fellow – would have the power or stupidity to restrain himself from falling in love with her. It goes without saying that I was infatuated and flattered to be the chosen one. I kept looking over my shoulder to see who could be the recipient of such a dazzling, loving smile. Standing under a black stone railway bridge in the countryside, somewhere in the past, we had held each other very tightly, the entire world in our hard pressing lips as our hearts thundered in tune with the train passing overhead, and had the universe blinked out like a light at that precise moment it would have been a fulfilling climax to the whole sorry charade. The fact that we did not, could not, belong wholly to each other made our being together all the more poignantly tender; an incredible aching bitter-sweetness. One is only truly alive at such moments …

  However, this is an old, outdated memory, a flickering movie image on the concave wall of my brain: really I should be telling you about my guilt-stricken ride to visit her, at a flat in Urmston, where I knew very well she was not to be found. How often do we make these futile journeys, just to complete a formal pattern, as though life were a jigsaw? I arrived in the courtyard of the flats, blurred cubes of pale concrete in the twilight, and went up the viciously sharp steps to the thin, warped door upon which I knocked timidly, afraid that someone might be in but knowing full well that the flat was empty, its square rooms floodlit by streetlamps through the uncurtained windows. When, having knocked again, there was no answer, I retreated to the courtyard and sat in my car smoking a reflective cigarette. At such moments I feel uniquely alone: the leading player in a tragedy of epic proportions. I recalled, painfully and with clarity, my previous visit to the flat, when those same uncurtained windows had, on that occasion, hampered and ultimately wilted my anticipated performance. Tee never took it amiss; she was generous and understanding to a fault. We sweated for a while, attempting to succeed with our eyes mentally averted; and then, pretending that the two bodies locked in heaving combat were not ours, watched disinterestedly from a distance as we sat in chairs drinking coffee and smoking. Always it seems that my finales are anti-climaxes.

  In actual fact the daylight intimidated me. Tee and I were dark people (Tee especially) and to have the grey, tumbling, unwashed clouds – and perhaps the head of a windowcleaner – witness our mindless indulgence brought rushing to the surface all my latent Anglo-Saxon paranoia. Her boyfriend at the time, Desmond, whose flat this was, was again not a steadying influence; for while ostensibly on a business trip to London it seemed appropriate that he could, would, burst in at any second, eyes bulging, nostrils flared, his thick lips drawn back in snarling rage. Obviously I did not want to be present when such an entrance took place. After much groaning and cursing, and following a number of self-disgusted sighs, eventually I accomplished my side of the bargain and sank back – shrank away – from the pitiless, unyielding light.

  It was this uncomfortable, not to say disturbing, experience which decided me not to visit Tee at the flat again. In the cold box-shaped living-room, with its exposed plastic-topped table and four vulnerable straight-backed chairs, we made polite, inconsequential conversation, at a loss what to do with our eyes, hands and bodies now that the rush of hot quick blood had dispersed and resumed its prosaic function of keeping us alive. Something else that I had noticed:
the ever-present aliveness of her personality wore rather thin, became cheapened and threadbare, when not clothed in the richly textured tapestry of night. Her eyes were too bright, her teeth too white; like an actress who had strayed into an ordinary room wearing stage make-up and displaying the full gamut of theatrical mannerisms and emotions. It was tiresome, and not a little embarrassing.

  Thus two weeks went by and here I was, sitting in my car, looking out at the dim deserted courtyard and feeling – what? Mixed up in my memory, in addition to Hope Hospital, was another hospital, this one in Hampstead, and some more flats, two square concrete towers with swiftly-rising lifts rushing one to Tee’s tiny apartment on the top floor. Further back again: the loading of her belongings, suitcases, trunks, carrier-bags, and three years’ accumulated paraphernalia into the car, then driving towards a westward-sinking sun marred, yet made beautiful, by rainbow-coloured streamers of smoke from the CWS Soap Works, drifting wisps held in suspension in the clear, warm, rose-tinted sky. The evening air was very still.

  And as I drove I had the most peculiar feeling: that I was a dwarf. Crouched, hunched, squat behind the wheel, my chin near my knee, my entire body capable of being wrapped in a round, lumpish parcel. Tee was wearing a short skirt from which her long black legs protruded; she carried with her a musky smell – whether it was the soap she used or the natural odour of her body I do not know – and her eyes and teeth flashed brighter as the motorway merged into night. Not at any time did I touch her, or feel like touching her, as the miles sped by; and as for talking, that dreary chore of making polite conversation, Tee saw to that. She was indefatigably cheerful, always grinning, chattering incessantly (to herself) so that the narrow humming air-conditioned compartment was filled with the dark-brown drone of her husky voice. I smoked, and nodded; nodded, and smoked. The ribbon of grey asphalt disappeared under the car. We began to get hungry. Somewhere on the southern outskirts of Birmingham I stopped and we ate fish and chips out of newspaper with our fingers. The fish was hot and greasy, breaking into pieces and scorching our fingertips; it was delicious on the tongue to lick away the salt – Tee laughingly inserting my fingers into her warm mouth to cleanse them.

  What I liked about Tee was her wonderful directness, her warm-hearted naivete, and not least her unfailing good disposition. To these attributes must be added an extremely attractive appearance: wherever we went men would stop and stare, mentally straighten their shoulders and comb their hair. I would feel both proud and uneasy, yet displayed an outward nonchalance that relied on her being with me for its success. Sitting alongside her inside our little den, smelling her musky perfume, was in many ways the fulfilment of all my dreams. She had black, tightly compacted hair, inclined to frizziness, and a fine broad nose whose nostrils flattened outwards when she laughed. I remember her face as the embodiment of her personality; open, outgoing, relaxed, expansive.

  Today she was leaving Hope for good, and no doubt there was an element of sadness in the departure, but her fun-loving nature refused to acknowledge its existence. Life was a never-ending series of gay introductions and sad partings, so why be upset? why not just accept the fact? her attitude seemed to imply.

  After our makeshift meal we continued the drive. It was very dark now, the road a black insidious snake undulating through the rolling undergrowth of the countryside. Lights flashed, villages whizzed by, and empty crossroads, while we reclined snugly on cupped seats, safe inside behind the fascia’s greenish glow. At one point the headlights picked out the squashed remains, with blood like black oil, of some creature or other.

  ‘Do you think your mother will be surprised to see me, or will she welcome me?’ I asked Tee, my left hand having recently withdrawn from her thigh, and her right one from mine.

  ‘She won’t mind; she’ll be glad to see you. Don’t worry about that, if that’s what’s bothering you. She will thank you, I’m sure, for having brought me all this way.’

  ‘I hate imposing on people,’ I said, ‘especially under the circumstances. Won’t she wonder who I am or where I come from or what I do?’

  ‘She won’t think of you as a ghost, if that’s what you mean,’ Tee said, showing all her sparkling teeth in a wide-mouthed smile that was turned like a horizontal crescent moon in my direction. How many people had been the recipient of such a smile, a beaming flash of light that envelops one in a laser ray of human love and understanding?

  Doubtless she took me at face value – being the handsome spectacle that I am – and was far too simple a soul to guess at the strange metaphysical idiosyncracies lurking behind the bland convex outline of features I presented to the world. She thought of me, perhaps, as being ‘mysterious’; certainly she credited me with more real depth than I possessed, and I was not so foolish as to disenchant her with a true version of my secret underlife. (That such a creature existed would, in any event, have been incomprehensible to her.)

  Having parked and locked the car we carried our suitcases into the hotel via the rear entrance, finding ourselves in a narrow, unhealthily-lit passage leading to a tiny semi-circular segment – the reception desk – from behind which a somewhat austere middle-aged woman appraised our arrival with hard, colourless eyes. Many years of managing an hotel had made it childishly simple for her to recognise instantly those who were married and those who were not; a glance at Tee merely confirmed what she already knew. I signed the book, with those dead eyes upon me, and the proprietress instructed the bell-boy, a dark-skinned youth of foreign origin, to conduct us to our room.

  It crossed my mind to wonder then, as now, why he, of all people, should be lying in wait at the end of a long, haphazard journey down an indistinguished road: for a suspicion entered my head that we had met before. Was he not a photographer, or a dancer, or something? You can imagine how carefully I kept him in my sights. Never once did he have the opportunity of looking at – much less communicating with – Tee when my back was turned. This stems from a nasty childhood experience, an emotional mishap which inhibited my natural development but failed to stunt my imagination.

  I tipped him a shilling (this being before the introduction of profit-mongering decimalised coinage) and he backed out of the room, bending slyly forward with an obsequious yet vaguely threatening motion.

  The room was an old-fashioned hotel room, nothing more; with twin beds. Exhausted after our long drive, eyelids bloated with fatigue, we nevertheless fell fully-clothed on top of the bed, clasped in each other’s arms, and began immediately, and without any further thought, to make love. Tee seemed very close to me physically, warm, solid, her body and limbs substantial underneath the stuff of her blouse and skirt, yet because of the tiredness it was as if I were dreaming the episode; as if each of us was encased in a layer of transparent jelly through which we had to swim blindly.

  Without quite knowing how, we were naked, her long-legged boyish body next to mine on the bed covers. As usual her head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth open, white teeth, pink gums and protruding tongue, uttering unintelligible gutteral sounds. Then, at a certain point, she would raise her awkward head, open her eyes and look straight into mine, reproachful, almost in pain, almost accusing me of hurting her; and again – a sullen animal desire in her eyes that perfectly accompanied the croaking grunts issuing in rhythm from the back of her throat. Thus she would stare at me, her eyes clouded with pain, until the final long-drawn-out whine and fall of the head: creases of sweat shining on her neck.

  I breakfasted alone in the dining room next morning. The proprietress nodded curtly on some professional errand or other. I heard her call out to the bell-boy, ‘Brett’, or something that rhymed with it, but the dark, pock-marked youth was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was in the kitchen; perhaps, indeed, he had just cooked the bacon, eggs and fried tomato that lay on the plate before me, and which I mopped up with soft brown bread and alacrity.