The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Read online

  We walked, Tee and I, past the giant Honda stand on our way to the exit, and I was stalked by the old, depressing notion of the futility of all this glitter and glamour, this helter-skelter toil and frantic preparation which in the final analysis would advance civilisation no further than the depth of a micro-dot. The street outside affected me the same way, as did the hoardings on the buses; it was no good pretending any longer. If man had a purpose, and if I by fantastic good fortune had succeeded in detecting it, then my so-called existence might have soared to the sublime instead of descending to the bathetic.

  CHAPTER IV

  POINTING A CATFORD WALL

  Catford is an outlying district of London and it was there, down a backstreet of crumbling red-brick terraced houses, that I parked the car and accompanied Tee to a door in which two elongated frosted-glass panels were separated by a strip of bubbled, pitted paintwork: the result, doubtless, of years of continual action by a sun whose rays had penetrated the ninety-three million miles of black dead space with no other purpose (presumably) than to cause this unsightly disfiguration of a door in the backstreets of Catford. One might almost suppose this to be an analogy for all life-forms. Whether or not it is I’m not qualified to say. It will come as no surprise, though, when I remark that this too echoed the purposelessness of the Exhibition to which I have just made reference.

  Tee held my hand tightly as the door opened. Life was turning into a play again. Could it be Gary Cooper opening the door, or Marilyn Monroe, or Kim Novak? I felt distinctly queasy and was aware – as at all such moments of fear or excitement – that my penis had shrunk. It had withdrawn into my belly as a snail into its shell. Liquid gurgled in the depths of my stomach and, much to my discomfort, the load in my bowels shifted, creating a hot vacuum down below. The passage along which we were led opened into a small square room in the centre of which stood a table and four chairs; there was margarine, a pot of jam, and a packet of cream crackers, fragments of them scattered round its base, others adhering to the coating of jam on the blade of a yellow-handled knife. It struck me as odd that cream crackers should be in the process of being consumed at this hour of the day. However, I never – ever – comment or make any observation that could be construed as criticism. It is not in my nature.

  The girl to whom I was introduced turned out to be Tee’s cousin; and indeed, there were certain physical similarities that struck one immediately the relationship was made known. She was more buxom, it is true, and generally fatter, but essentially of the same genetic strain. Chatting as they were, it brought about a situation where I was standing idly near the table, my left hand resting on the back of a chair, my right half-in, half-out of my pocket, and both legs aching from the awkward stance a man adopts whilst listening with polite if feigned interest to a conversation between two women. I used my facial muscles to smile, and I occasionally nodded, and once even raised my eyebrows at something Tee’s cousin said, although it would have necessitated a Divine Forefinger crashing through the flaking plaster ceiling to have evoked an unsimulated gesture or expression of surprise from me, so certain was I that the Heavens were in chaos and God nothing more nor less than a bottomless black hole in space. On the buckled flagstones in the tiny backyard stood a ladder, at the top of which a man was pointing the corroding brick ruin. His strong, capable hands wielded the trowel, cutting a criss-cross in the mortar, patting it, taking a triangular portion, and buttering up the cracks with smooth, firm, clean strokes – like putting grey ice-cream between thick red wafers. He was friendly enough, smiling down at me, acknowledging my existence, uttering a monosyllabic greeting; and at the foot of the ladder I returned his smile and offered his compatriot a cigarette as a stranger’s confirmatory token of being in the subservient position of a guest in the house of friends of a friend.

  The pointing continued apace. I was anxious to show that I knew nothing of it: that I could not distinguish one end of a trowel from the other, and more, could not have pointed a single brick had my life depended on it. To this end I gazed upwards with the wide-eyed totally preoccupied fixedness of a child or simpleton, as though the pointing of a wall at the rear of a house in the backstreets of Catford was a unique and wondrous revelation that would have had the world agog had the world but known about it. My brown-irised eyes were open to their fullest extent, my head had fallen back, my jaw partly drooped, my cigarette smouldered unheeded, and I maintained this ridiculous posture until a choking sensation at the back of my throat made me swallow saliva in order to lubricate the parched membranes. (The man up the ladder, I was later to learn, was called Darwin.) Why is it that such commonplace capsulets of time become fast in one’s mind, as the faded school photographs of one’s youth in which a face is forever turned towards the camera, half-smiling, with the sunlight casting a perpetual shadow from the nose across the cheekbone? Is God at work then? Has Eternity frozen? Is the Universe pinned to a piece of card like a butterfly, transfixed in a gelatine coating of absolute stillness and timelessness? For who is to say that Darwin is not at this very moment pointing that self-same wall, his honest, broad-palmed hands working the mortar, slicing it, extracting soft grey wedges to insert in the cracks of decaying red brick? To the inhabitants of a planet circling in one of the great starry arms of the Galaxy of Andromeda he will be seen to be performing this task two million years from now; and so, at some point beyond our solar system, the image of a man on a ladder and two men at the foot of it is proceeding this instant in accordance with Einsteins’s Theory of Relativity: timeless, eternal, infinite.

  Shadows lengthened in the yard; the crippled flagstones assumed an even drunker aspect, and I went through the kitchen to where Tee and her cousin were still in earnest discussion. The cream cracker crumbs remained on the table, their significance unnoticed, and there they lay throughout the meal that followed, which consisted of sausages, bacon, and beans. As will be assumed, quite rightly, the jammy yellow-handled knife too was left to its own devices.

  It was suggested later in the evening that I take a bath, and forgetting to lock the door was surprised to see Tee’s smiling head observing my splashing and scrubbing. Uninvited she entered the bathroom and dried me with a large, soft, white, fluffy towel, doing this carefully and professionally as befits a psychiatric nurse. Arousal was not long overdue, on both our parts, and my penis lifted its weary head and took a look at the same stale world it thought had expired once and for all following its last appearance; naturally the terrain was familiar to its greedy gaze. Tee was a devotee of male anatomy, in awe and fear of the consequences of her actions, fascinated as a child with a new, terrifying plaything. Matters were progressing as planned when the buxom cousin came in, another grinner, it transpired, who stared with unabashed curiosity at my now much-enlarged penis protruding in the air, the focal point of all our neuroses, standing there like a superior fourth personage who accepts as a matter of course his privileged position in an oligarchic society populated in the main by idiots, imbeciles and half-wits.

  The cousin placed her hand on my buttocks, holding one of them very firmly, and looked with downcast eyes, savouring both the visual and the tactile sensations that my hard and soft flesh made available to her. Meanwhile, Tee, whose breathing had become slack, was slowly lifting the hem of her quilted house-coat to facilitate the introduction of my erect penis – not into her, but against her, so that its blind probing head would feel the bristle of hair growing at the front and curling between her legs. She closed her eyes luxuriously and a slight sigh escaped her lips. Very shortly we were all three naked, I cushioned between their black bodies, their black bodies cushioning me. The cousin had fine ample breasts which she manoeuvred against my back, her two arms underneath mine, her fingertips skimming over my belly to touch, test, and finally to take hold of my swollen penis, at the same time licking the sensitive spot where my neck merged into my shoulder.

  Tee was kneeling before me, her nostrils dilated, loathing the thought of what she was about to do and y
et withholding the dreadful moment as if to extract from it the greatest possible amount of ecstatic terror. In such a nano-second do we perceive the true state of all things. Urged on by her cousin – who during this had manipulated the taut flesh to majestic proportions – Tee accepted the globular, moist end and, her mouth open to its widest extent, felt its increasing pressure at the back of her throat. Her breathing was nearly stopped; her eyes started to bulge; the skin of her face was tight and shiny as, being obliged to stretch to its utmost, it had far exceeded the accustomed facial pressure loading.

  A goodly portion remained unmouthed, so it came as no surprise when the cousin knelt at the side and wrapped her lips round the barrel. Thus they hung on to me: two terriers jaw-locked to a rat until the death of one or all three should intervene.

  I stood with my hands on my hips, lord-like, and felt the ripple of a thrill shudder into their mouths; at once there was a mute protest, and the cousin looked up at me beseechingly, afraid that I was about to expend everything without due consideration of her needs and desires. She stood up quickly, straddling Tee, and lifted her breasts for my inspection, hoping, possibly, that the sight of their fullness, the size and state of her nipples, and her general brazen attitude would induce me to withdraw my jerking penis and slide its full-grown length up her cunt. The proposition was tempting; I narrowed my eyes so that the eyelashes interlocked at the outermost corners and contemplated her lazily, deliberately lingering over the decision, Tee sucking on me, the cousin offering herself, the image of the three of us on its way to the Galaxy of Andromeda – and eventually came to the conclusion that, due to the size of her breasts, the cousin merited that which Tee was in the process of receiving. Whereupon I laid myself down on the floor, in a supine position, and had the cousin squat over me, thereby offering her most vulnerable parts to my tongue, lips, and mouth. Thus immersed in the hot blackness, and with Tee fighting for breath, struggling to contain me, I realised that my fantasy world was far more substantial than the material universe.

  The cousin was, in fact, very quick to come, and almost in the self-same instant I felt my bursting, pulsing penis discharge itself into Tee’s mouth, and to afford myself the optimum pleasure I reached up and grasped the cousin’s heavy breasts, fondling them, playing with them, squeezing them, vibrating my fingertips over the stiff nipples, manipulating them in every way until they had been exploited beyond the point of having any physical relationship with a human being, had ceased to be objects of sensual desire, and were merely non-associative appendages hanging in a black void. That the experience was real there was no doubt; and with the passage of time would become the subject of masturbatory release and, after that, would coil inwards, feeding on its own entrails. It is in this way that the masturbator masturbates on the memory of previous masturbations.

  CHAPTER V

  CONVERSATION IN A DARKENED ROOM

  Tee and I maintained a very beautiful relationship. There was nothing strained about it, or awkward, or in the slightest way uncomfortable. Occasionally, of course, we fell silent in each other’s company, wishing, for the moment, to stay locked inside our own minds. But these were far outnumbered by the times when I was glad to be with her, joyous in her presence and content to let life unroll before me like a series of unrehearsed scenes in a film. It was just as though someone had slackened the reins on my shoulders, released the strait-jacket, and I was free to drift through minutes, hours, days with no conscious destination, without a fixed point of reference to which I must always align myself.

  That evening, for example, we took a leisurely stroll in the warm, caressing air and Tee gently recalled some of the incidents that formed part of our lives – that is, our lives with one another. She held my hand strongly as we strolled along. People glanced askance but we were not to be deterred. They could think whatever they wished: we were living out our singular, unique lives and we knew that – supposing no new moments were being minted – these could be our last together, and therefore very precious. If everyone lived as if it were their last day the world would be a finer place. (The nightdrive from Reading was yet to come.)

  There were few people about, and soon a chill pierced the air, making us grin through our clenched teeth despite our hunched shoulders and quivering stomachs. Her hand was hard in mine and not at all feminine. Again, as so often in the past, I saw myself from the outside, as a complex, dithering mass of uncoordinated impulses shooting in all directions like the electrons in a nuclear reactor when the rods are withdrawn. That people should see a complete, fully-formed man when they looked at me was a source of wonder, practically endless. Tee ran laughingly, oblivious of the rule which says that everything, including life, is finite.

  That night we slept together in a narrow bed in the back room, the cousin at the last moment before lights out popping her head round the door, her face split in a brilliant crescent: an image that stayed with me till the following evening when Tee and I were in the front room of the house in Reading, waiting for the appointed hour when I would climb into my car and drive through the night to the North. The smudged colour photographs of the little girls stood looking at one another, eyes wide and staring but winking slyly when our backs were turned. The room gathered up the darkness and stored it in corners; the amber street lighting sent slanting trapeziums across the walls, and the deep mournful moan of a scratched 78 record entered one ear, while the silence entered the other. The singer was Percy Sledge.

  Tee said, ‘How old is your little boy now?’ I answered her, asking in the same breath why she wanted to know. Questions can be so irritating; I dislike questions intensely. She had never met him (it would have been out of the question anyway) and it was approaching the point of futility to expend breath asking or answering.

  ‘I saw a photograph of him once,’ she remarked, and indeed she had, for some campaign or other.

  The darkness of the room was pressing heavily so that her face lost its features one by one. They dissolved into an amorphous black blob framed by hair on which the yellow light had gilded a vertical halo. We were sitting close together on the sofa under the window. The record scratched. She wasn’t laughing, or smiling even, any more.

  ‘Will you never leave her?’ she said in a low voice. An articulated lorry filled the pause.

  ‘What would we do if I did?’

  ‘We could live together,’ again in a low voice. ‘I will soon have a job and we could get a flat in London.’ She was simply making words with her low voice. The needle reached the centre groove and hissed round the label.

  ‘You’ve never been so blunt about it before,’ I said. Did I say that? Does one ever say that? Another lorry rumbled past and the trapeziums on the wall trembled. We sat with our arms holding the other, hugging tight, our hip-bones pressing hard. ‘You will have a good life,’ I hazarded to say. The road North, with its squashed animals, was beckoning me. The heat of her thigh had communicated itself to the full length of mine. The record continued to hiss.

  Tee held my left hand in hers, working the fingers as if they contained malleable rubber bones. The coarse muskiness of her perfume titillated the hairs in my nostrils; and with her next words came a slight catch in the voice:

  ‘If my mother dies I shall think of going back home.’

  ‘Is she going to die?’ I inquired politely. Was Tee’s mother, at this instant, labouring for breath in the next room? Was she indeed lying in the middle of the rumpled double-bed, gasping, her blind eyelids upturned to the ceiling? It is sobering, saddening, to reflect that some people live their lives in constant pain. It must be like having a great iron spike encased in one’s chest, belly and bowels, the cold malignant metal pressing against the warm vital organs. You cannot escape it, no matter what you do. The world revolves around an iron spike: the peoples of the earth are parasites spinning about an axis of cold metallic malignancy.

  The room had assumed complete anonymity; it could have been anywhere, and probably was. The silver frames of the p
hotographs glinted in the murky depths like little, bright-eyed, malicious winks. The likenesses of the children were gleefully eavesdropping. And still we pressed close, Tee and I, drowsily warm with the pain of leave-taking. A number of memories plagued me: the bell-boy at the hotel – Brett (?) something-or-other – and the similar-looking photographer at the Exhibition. Had she made a secret pact with them? Were they even now waiting, two gigglers, in the passageway outside, gasping soundlessly and digging each other in the ribs, biding their time?

  ‘Had we never met do you know that I might have married Darwin?’ Tee’s voice said in the gloom.

  ‘So the pattern would have been changed yet again,’ I said.

  ‘If I had met you before – before … Do you think we would have got married? Would you have asked me to marry you?’

  ‘I don’t know; probably; yes; I might have; I don’t know.’

  Tee’s breath shuddered in her chest. ‘I am going to miss you. Will you come and see me? You can come down, can’t you, once a month at least?’

  ‘Not every month; I’ll come and see you when I can. But I expect you’ll have plenty of friends, photographers and people.’

  Outside, the first pang of black night air had touched the metal door-knockers and bell-push surrounds. The traffic lumbered by, tail-lights flashing. The redness of these flicked like lighthouse beams across Tee’s face in the dimness of the room, and her large eyes appeared to be bathed in shining transparent oil, so deep and magical in their opalescence that her reality as another human existence, breathing, palpitating, became apparent to me. Conversely it made me aware of my own real existence, such as it was – an unusual occurence, for I do not, as a rule, believe in the existence of the material universe.