Life Goes On (19 page)

Though his story seemed banal, his complaints might have been justified. Dismal and I stayed by the counter. ‘Well,' I said, ‘I have to go.'

When he rolled up his sleeve I actually thought he was going to start work. But he lit a cigarette. ‘Why can't you be like Charlie over there? He's never in a hurry.'

‘That's because I'm on the dole.' Charlie was a fair-haired blue-eyed relaxed sort of chap in his middle thirties. ‘Been on the dole seven years.'

I sympathised. ‘It must be awful.'

He looked up from his tea. ‘It's a lot better than getting up at six every morning and going out into the rain and cold five days a week, month in and month out. I pushed loaded cartons from one department of the warehouse to another, but then they got fork-lift trucks and six of us got the push. I thought the end of the world had come when I couldn't get another job, but I also saw that it was marvellous not having to go to work. I could do bits and bobs around the house, talk to my mates, go out on my bike, or sit in the public library reading dirty books. The dole's a lovely system. If we got a few more quid a week we'd be in heaven. I often help here in the café and earn a few quid, and I don't mind that because it don't seem like work. And I vote Tory now, instead of Labour.'

I was aghast. ‘Tory?'

He laughed. ‘Sure. Think what the Tories have done for the unemployed. Got millions of us on the dole. All you hear them Labour bleeders go on about is getting us back to work. Back to work! They want us building motorways, I expect, though I'm sure that lot wouldn't want to dirty their lily-white hands. If they ever did any work it was so long ago they don't remember what it was like.'

He amazed me so much, I bought him a cup of tea and six cakes. ‘You're a bit of a philosopher.'

That pleased him. ‘I never would have been if I hadn't got on the dole. I've had time to think. Labour don't want you to think. They think that if you do, you'll vote Tory, and how right they are. Thinking's always been the prerogative of the idle rich, but now it's within reach of everyone, and it's no thanks to Labour. The only time you'll catch me voting Labour is when they promise to double the dole money and stop talking about getting us back to work. I only wish the Tories would give us more money, but I expect they will as soon as they can afford it.'

The light in his blue eyes changed intensity, an increase in candlepower that almost turned them grey. ‘I was thinking the other day what a nice place it would be if the whole world was on the dole. That's the sort of future we ought to aim for. Work is the cause of all evil, and it'll be heaven on earth when there's no such thing. Universal unemployment is what we want, and England will be the envy of the world when we've brought it about.'

Weary as I was, I did my best to point out his errors. Most people were driven mad by being out of work, I told him, apart from the fact that they had to live in poverty. They lost their self-respect, and the respect of their children. They lost the respect of their wives. They became prematurely old. They sat at home wrapped in self-hatred, a feeling of uselessness paralysing them body and soul. They deteriorated physically, and in a year became unrecognisable to what they had been. The houses they lived in fell to pieces around them. Their wives left them and their kids were taken into care by social workers who'd been hovering around rubbing their hands for just such a thing.

‘That's as maybe,' he said, when I could say no more, ‘but my mates don't think like that. As soon as they get the push they're like Robinson Crusoe who's just landed on that island after his shipwreck. They're a bit dazed, but they start picking up the pieces and learning to live with what they've got. In no time at all, they're happy, like me.'

A trio of white-faced young lorry drivers came in, and Dismal made a run for one in his capacity as a sniffer dog, but when threatened by a cowboy boot with glinting spurs, he ran after me to the door, changing his mind about whatever he knew to be in the man's pockets. He was learning fast, and I sincerely hoped I would break him of such habits before getting to London.

‘Fucking dog,' one driver shouted. ‘I'll have it on fucking toast if it shows its fucking snout in here again.' Such a crew must have cheered the place up no end, though I didn't suppose bone-idle Charlie buttonholed them with his nirvana of unemployment as they shared their joints with him.

I only felt safe in the car. We steamed along the great dual carriageways of the A5, under streams of orange or white sodiums, with occasional traffic lights to break the monotony. To the south lay the Black Country, a desolate sprawl of industrial ruination and high-rise hencoops. Traffic multiplied, mostly private cars, though a fair number of HGVs were pushing on in both directions. I sometimes thought that most of the lorries and pantechnicons were empty – Potemkin pantechnicons in fact, whose drivers were paid to steam up and down the main roads to persuade visiting Japanese industrialists that the country was in better nick than it was.

I was doing sixty on the inside lane when an armoured juggernaut overtook me at ninety, Mad Jack from Doncaster blasting ten horns as he did so. I watched him for miles weaving in and out of the traffic with a degree of manoeuvrability that could only be done by an artist at the game. He was laughing his head off, I supposed, open shirt showing a tea-stained vest, glorying in his fancy footwork as he told his younger mate to watch how it was done. ‘All you've got to do is keep your eyes glued to the rear mirror for a jam sandwich.'

That, I explained to Dismal (in case he didn't know), is the name we road-busters give to a cop car with yellow and red streaks on its side. In the mirror I saw him yawn, bored out of his canine mind, but contented at the same time, while I got us mile by mile along the wonderful flarepath, also keeping a lookout for any jam sandwich drifting up on the starboard bow. If it never got light we would steam happily and forever along this lit-up dual carriageway through the enchanted Land of the Midlands at night.

No such luck. ‘Down, Dismal!'

A blue flash worked overtime behind, as if to push me forward because I had strayed onto a runway at London Airport and a 747 was coming in to land. I looked at my speed, but the needle was pegged at sixty. Mad Jack had gone into the distance, so they weren't chasing him. The game was up. ‘Get down, you melancholy bastard, or you'll give me away, and you'll be confined to barracks for fourteen days.'

He flopped off the seat, then began to howl at the flashing light, his perfect silhouette unmistakable even from a satellite wheeling in space. There was nothing I could do except stay calm, get ahead, whistle a tune, and wait for the four cops inside their Rover to overtake and slow down till I had to stop as well.

Dismal looked into their car. What other evidence did they need? They swung side-on, and I glimpsed their faces: fresh young lads out on patrol, the cream of the Staffordshire force, who seemed amused when Dismal flattened himself at the window as if pleading to be taken back to his air-conditioned kennel and ten pounds of gristle a day. I had looked after the ungrateful hound like my only begotten son, when I should have left him to live on raw rat and cold water at Peppercorn Cottage.

The jam sandwich slid ahead and was lost in other traffic. It seemed obvious, as Dismal lay on the seat and sobbed himself to sleep (or maybe it was indigestion after scoffing fish and chips, lemonade, chocky bars, several dishes of tea and three Eccles cakes), that they had got my number, if not my name and, radio communications being what they were, could afford to wait in a darker spot a few miles ahead, or pass me on to some of their more boisterous mates in Northamptonshire when I turned south for London.

But at this late stage I began to consider whether they really were after me. One of the coppers who had raided Peppercorn Cottage, on going in to search the dresser, had called out that there were only four boxes. At the time I thought maybe the rats had eaten one, but then the inspector answered that there should be five, and I was so numbed by their presence that it never occurred to me to wonder how he could have known what number there were. My brain, if it could be called one, spun like a millwheel. Questions came along on a conveyer belt like cars with one door missing. Who told them there were five boxes? There had been ten, until Peter and John – Peter and John, my arse! – paddled away with their half share in the canoe. The police had parked at the top of the slope and no doubt trained their binoculars to watch them paddling away, and only then came down to frighten the guts out of me and make off with the other five handipacks.

The only explanation was that the lads who had pinned me against the wall at Peppercorn Cottage hadn't been policemen at all. If they had, they would have left no roadblock unmanned to get their purloined dog back to base. To lie, perjure, resist arrest, even steal and murder, or hijack one of their cars and drive it the wrong way up and down the M1 shouting obscene defiance through their radio so that even the policewomen operators back at base shivered with rage and horror, was all part of the game, but to drive off with a superbly trained and well-nurtured poodle was asking for trouble. The fact was that the Peppercorn Cottage task force had been as much hoaxers as those two canoeists who had made off with their share of the loot half an hour before.

I turned left at the Cross-in-Hand roundabout for Lutterworth, and went over the M1 knowing that soon I would have to find a suitable parking place and bed down for a few hours, unless I wasn't to nod off at the wheel and wake up to find a policeman at my hospital traction-cot threatening to turn off my life-support machine if I didn't talk.

There was never anywhere to stop on the twisting arterial lane without fear of being hit from behind, so I drove on, always expecting to see something interesting around the next corner, such as trestle tables under colourful medieval awnings, laden with real food served by nubile wenches. Instead, I barged into a grim pub, and was stared at by drinkers who went silent at my advent. Even the one-armed bandit, a coin already in and the handle pulled, stopped working while the surly and ulcerous landlord asked what I wanted. I debated taking Dismal a tin of beer, but settled on lemonade, a bag of onion crisps and some peanuts. He certainly appreciated the attention I paid him, but it wasn't every day that I had a fully paid up member of the police force in my car.

Rain slowed me down, and the hypnotic rhythm of the wipers lulled me perilously. I rubbed my eyes so hard I almost mashed them back into my head and lost the sight of them altogether. When I switched off the engine and headlights beyond Corby, the sound of rain pounding on the roof was comforting. ‘Dismal,' I said, ‘we're on the loose. You've been abandoned by the world, but I'll look after you. As for me, if I survive explaining to Lord Moggerhanger how I let his precious packages slip through my fingers to the wrong people, I'll live forever, or for as long as makes no difference.'

A passing car lit up our habitation. Dismal yawned, and I let us both out, hoping dog piss wouldn't burn the rubber off the tyres. We farted, and got back inside. Dismal slept on the spare seat in front, while I stretched my legs in the back.

Twelve

Dismal's tongue felt like wet pumice on the back of my neck, and I came out of sleep as from a near fatal wound that needed a decent period of convalescence before I could consider myself halfway ready for the front line. I pushed him away. ‘It's too early. Leave me alone.'

Crimson rags of cloud did not inspire me to be on the move, and for springtime it was as cold as winter. I lit a cigarette, glad I didn't have to share it with anyone, though Dismal looked as if expecting a puff. We weren't in the trenches yet, so I refused. To get him out of his sulk I threw a few scraps onto a sheet of newspaper and while he gobbled I looked at the map and listened to the weather forecast, which again was rattled off so quickly that I understood nothing, though perhaps I didn't want to, because today would be the day of reckoning, and the future state of the heavens seemed irrelevant. No matter how much I dawdled down the A1, I would be face to face with Moggerhanger by the end of it.

I was happy in a manic and probably dangerous kind of way, as I walked along the road breathing deeply. To the wonder of passing motorists I trotted back to the car and jumped up and down a hundred times to get my sluggish blood flowing. Rummaging in the boot, I found a length of rope. Did Moggerhanger keep it so as to hang himself when news of his financial collapse came over on Radio Two? Or was it to strangle somebody else who had displeased him by losing a valuable consignment of drugs? I looped it through Dismal's collar and took him for a walk, but it was too muddy underfoot to go far. He saw a rabbit, and almost pulled me face-down among the primroses and wood sorrel. A pigeon broke cover and climbed over the sheen of a bank of bluebells.

We floated down the ramp and joined the A1, and Dismal gave a half smile as I moved to the outer lane and overtook a macadam-breaking juggernaut. The sun polished my unshaven face through the windscreen, and instead of enjoying my run down the eighty-mile funnel to the Smoke I sweated at the prospect of getting there. Freedom ends where responsibility begins – or so I'd heard – but I would much rather have stayed in the muddy wood listening to the collared dove warbling mindlessly for its mate than come up against the Moggerhanger gang. In my feckless way I had fallen into the same mess that had forced Bill Straw to take refuge in the rafters of Blaskin's flat, and little did he know that I might be joining him.

Insanity was my companion and I stopped in the next layby to consider the feasibility of driving to Athens or Lisbon. Even if I didn't put the idea into operation, at least I would be delayed half an hour thinking about it. I stared at the map till its colours sent me boggle-eyed, then threw it flapping into the back, where Dismal, thinking it was some kind of toy, chewed it into tatters.