Life Goes On (55 page)

‘I don't think it's any use talking to you,' Wayland said, as if I was no better than the sods in front. The van stopped on some spare ground at a row of cottages, and I went by without even giving them the satisfaction of a blast on my horn. ‘That'll teach 'em,' I said, ‘if anything will.'

There wasn't much traffic, and we made good time, though every car that floated up behind had me nervously expecting to be topped and tailed or have the windscreen flaked to pieces from the blast of a shotgun as they overtook. I was glad when Clegg gave the right fork which took us onto the lanes, where we met nothing but tractors and the occasional Volvo Estate.

‘It's glorious country.' Clegg was in raptures. ‘I'm glad we came this way. What a coincidence, Michael, to meet you again after all these years!' I thought it was fate, and fate was often worse than death, I told him. ‘Not with me,' he said, ‘or so I hope.'

Nobody could have tailed us through such a zig-zag of lanes. Every half mile at a fork or crossroads Clegg gave out his cool instructions of left, right or straight on. Dismal didn't like staying in the back seat with offended Wayland, and every so often, usually when Clegg spoke and we made a turn, he bit me – just about playfully – in the neck, but almost immediately his long fat tongue came out and the big soft thing licked the hurt better. Then he smiled, as much as a dog can smile.

We got something to eat at a café on the main road, of sufficiently good quality to keep us alert and fit. We were reluctant to feed the white bread to Dismal, however, in case it sent him mad, so apart from the odd bacon rind and end of sausage, it was back to tins of Bogie in the parking lot. I didn't envy anyone trying to do an emergency stop after he'd used the place. While waiting for the others to terminate their ablutions I sorted out a 50p piece to telephone Blaskin.

‘This is Gilbert Blaskin speaking,' his automatic answering device said. ‘Point One: if you are a publisher, send the money. If you don't pay within three days I shall come around with a bomb and blast you out of your office. If you report this threat to the police, don't forget that all characters in this novel are fictitious and bear no likeness to anyone dead or alive. Point Two: if you edit a magazine and want me to write something, treble the price you have in mind and meet me in The Hair of the Dog. Point Three: if you are my publisher's editor and want me to alter my novel because it is too obscene, incoherent or inflammatory, get psychoanalysed somewhere else. Point Four: if you are a female student who wishes to talk about my work, take off your knickers as you get out of the lift. Point Five: if you are under the delusion that I owe you money, I suggest that you masturbate on the steps of the Wedlock Advisory Association, for it will do you just as much good as trying to get a bent stiver out of me. Point Six: if you are a member of my family, put your head under the cold tap and think again, unless the caller happens to be my only acknowledged offspring Michael Cullen, to whom I say, phone back later, because I have news for you, you eternal bastard.' He gave a five-second donkey laugh, and the machine clicked off.

Dismal had run back into the front seat, while Clegg was taking in the view, and we didn't have the heart or the strength to pull him out. Because we were going onto fast roads I put him into the safety belt, not wanting him to fly through the windscreen if I pulled up dead. But, like Houdini, he got out of it before we'd done a mile. Clegg continued his navigation, though from then on it was easy going. We crossed the M6 and went through Stafford to Uttoxeter. Beyond Ashbourne we got into the Derbyshire hills, by which time we were famished. There was nothing like being on the run to make you hungry as if, should our pursuers suddenly strike, death would be more agreeable on full bellies. Wayland hummed a pop tune and tapped out its rhythm on the window. ‘You can say that again,' he exclaimed, when I spread my thoughts around like Marmite.

We walked into a hotel near Matlock, and sat by the dining room window looking onto the hills. I ordered four meals. Dismal was chained to the fender in case some light-fingered bastard should think to open the boot and make off with a few million pounds' worth of goods.

‘Four, sir?' Seeing three of us, the waiter wasn't able to put two and two together. What worried me was that I had seen his face before, and couldn't fathom where.

‘I've got my chauffeur in the car. Just deliver four of each course as they come up, and I'll take his out to him.' The waiter was about forty, with thick black hair and large hands, and I was certain I had seen him in prison. He seemed offended that we hadn't let our chauffeur dine with us. Were we communists, or something? Or big trade union nobs?

We ordered a pint of ale, then salami salad, followed by roast lamb, peas, cauliflower and potatoes. This was backed up by a grisly trifle made out of sugar, lard and turpentine. Dismal even gobbled the vegetables, and then licked the ale from his dog bowl. He sat dizzily belching while we had our coffee, brandy and cigars at a table in the sun. The meal cost twenty-five quid, and none of us complained as we stumbled back to the car.

Five miles up the road, and well over the hills out of Matlock, I realised that the hotel waiter had been Bill Ramage, who I had worked with smuggling gold for the Jack Leningrad organisation in the late sixties. He'd given no sign of recognising me, but gold smugglers were always too cunning to share their thoughts, and it was hard to think I'd altered so much. If Ramage was going straight we were safe, and if he wasn't and suspected me to be on a job he might easily phone Moggerhanger and report my presence.

Clegg worked his slide rule and played with the maps like a kid with toys at Christmas. ‘I know Derbyshire so well I don't need to look at the scenery. I was brought up only a few miles from here, over at Tibshelf. It was a close-knit mining community in those days. God knows what it is now. Like the ruins of Pompeii, I expect.'

‘I suppose the Tories have broken their spirit,' Wayland said. I drove in my own dreamworld, unable to chip in on their talk.

‘The spirit of Tibshelf would take some breaking,' Clegg said. ‘My father was a collier, but he died at forty in an accident. Then my mother married a clerk at the pit who made me stay at school after I was fourteen. He only earned seventy shillings a week, but you could manage on that in those days. He'd had a bullet through his face in the Great War, and if he spoke too quickly a whistle came into his voice. At first I thought it was funny, but I learned different, though he was never cruel or unjust. I didn't much like him, but I respected him. If he'd had a sense of humour I'd have been a bit happier, but you didn't think much about happiness in those days. Now, you hear it mentioned so often on the wireless and the telly that it's got no meaning. One winter's evening I asked him a question about Napoleon that he couldn't answer, so he gave me a pencil and a notebook and sent me to the reference section at the public library to find out. Libraries stayed open late in those days, but the only thing was that it was two miles away, and it was snowing a blizzard. I got back all right, but only just! Talk about gaining a respect for knowledge! He sent for me when he was dying, during the war. It was only then that I realised he actually loved me. Life's a hell of a funny country. The strange thing was – or is it? – my mother loved him, and only survived him by two weeks. She was fifty, but she was worn out.'

In the Town of the Crooked Spire there were roadworks all over the place. ‘We'll soon be safe,' Clegg said, ‘in the Leeds-Manchester-Sheffield triangle. A real jungle. We'll have six hundred and forty-eight square miles of towns, dales and villages to get lost in.'

‘How do you make that out?'

‘Well, it's an equilateral triangle, each side measuring thirty-six miles. Half the base multiplied by the height, or the length of one side multiplied by another, and the total divided by two, gives you six hundred and forty-eight.' He held up his slide rule. ‘Simple. Or if you don't feel safe enough in that, you can make it the Leeds-Blackpool-Liverpool-Sheffield Equilateral. That gives you sixty miles from east to west and thirty miles from north to south, making an area of eighteen hundred square miles. And believe me, Michael, with that kind of space to play about in, and the money you seem able to get your hands on, you can drive around in safety forever. All you have to do from time to time is stop for petrol, food, some new maps, and to answer the calls of nature. You can get in the
Guinness Book of Records
as the first man to grow old on the run. It wouldn't be a bad life, when you think of some.'

‘Count me out,' said Wayland.

For a joke, I stopped the car. ‘You're counted out.'

‘I'm not quite ready,' he said, in a reasonable tone I'd not heard up to then.

I started off. ‘Cheer up, Wayland. If you don't have a sense of humour, cultivate self-control. It's only sensible, in the circumstances.'

On the dual carriageway which spaced itself out towards Sheffield Clegg said: ‘We'd better have our passports ready for going into Yorkshire. We should have got visas at their legation in Stafford, but maybe they'll let us in. Dismal will be turned back as an undesirable immigrant, though.'

I blessed the fact again that I had given him a lift. ‘It's all right. He's on my passport.'

Traffic was thick, coming and going. Dismal was having bad dreams after his hotel dinner. He reeked of beer more than any of us. Hot sun came through the windscreen, at which I thought we'd soon look as if we'd just got back from Benidorm. In spite of my recent onsurge of recklessness I was dead set on staying alive, however serious the misdemeanour I'd tangled with. In front of my eyes was the sky, a clump of bushes, the brick side of an inn advertising Real Food in big white letters half a mile away, and a broken white line down the middle of the road. But inside me, in no uncertain manner, was the vision of lovely Frances Malham. Her features haunted me as if they belonged to some maternal (or even paternal) aunt or grandmother from generations ago, though whether from the Cullen or Blaskin side I had no way of knowing. It was almost as if she was a long-lost sister, and because of this notion I had the feeling that falling in love is the nearest to incest that most of us get. Why, otherwise, her face affected me more positively than anyone else's (I almost got a hard-on thinking about her) I didn't know, especially having met her when she was fawning around that crackpot poet Ronald Delphick – one of his groupies, no less. Or was she? Now that I was in the north, heading into that vast equilateral, as Clegg designated our intended guerilla base, I decided to spy out Doggerel Bank, which was quite near, and see what sort of a place it was that Delphick inhabited, but also on the off-chance that Frances had lied about going to Oxford and was up there visiting him for a bit of hearthrug pie.

‘I want to go through Barnsley and Wakefield.'

Clegg looked at his map. ‘You'll be skirting the rim of the safety area.'

‘I know. But I have to call at a house near Kirkby Malzeard called Doggerel Bank. It's not far from Ripon.'

‘It's a risk. Still, we won't be much beyond half-an-hour from safety. We'll run up on the M1 for a while, and then go through Leeds.'

I belted along, but kept my ears as wide apart as they'd go in anticipation of a Wailing Winnie with a flashing blue light. We skirted Sheffield and got onto the motorway, and since there was only one more service station before Leeds, I drove onto it. Why I wanted to phone Blaskin I don't know, but in my reckless state perhaps some voice from the past might persuade me to believe that a future was in the offing.

I parked as near to the entrance as I could get, and Wayland ran in to get coffee. Clegg put Dismal on a lead and was last seen being pulled towards the dustbin area behind the kitchens. The phone was answered after five rings. ‘Mr Blaskin's residence,' a woman said.

‘This is his son. I want to speak to the shabby old wanker.'

‘Please moderate your language, Mr Cullen, while I see whether the eminent novelist is at home. He's in rather a temper today.'

I didn't have time to say a mantra before he came on.

‘Michael, is that really you? Last night I dreamed that you'd fallen into the mincer and was dead. I woke up laughing, it was so horrible. Where are you? Are you really alive? If you are, don't come to within five miles of me, or I'll blast you asunder. How could I have given birth to a monster who knows how to strike vitals which even I don't know how to find and didn't even know I'd got? How could you have done such a wicked unfilial thing? I can't believe it.'

He would have gone on for three volumes, but I shouted him down. ‘What have I done now, fuck-face? You know I would do anything to hurt you, I love you so much, but I never thought I would succeed, you're such a selfish, hard-bitten old bastard.'

‘Don't swear,' he said calmly. ‘It's only an excuse for rotten English. Shows deplorable lack of style, and I don't like that in a son of mine. Give me a moment, and I'll tell you what you've done.'

I thought he'd hung up, and found myself getting worried, in spite of everything. He was robbing me of my recklessness, and I didn't like that.

‘Do you remember,' he said, ‘that you wrote me a trash novel?'

‘Of course I do. It was very trashy indeed. It was the best rubbish I could write.'

‘Maybe it was. I don't know what's what anymore. I thought it was putrid too. I couldn't have done worse myself.'

‘I did it to get you out of a jam, if I remember. You wanted to leave your publishers, but were contracted to hand over one more novel. So I suggested you give them a rotten one that they would have to turn down. Out of the goodness of my heart I wrote it for you.'

I thought he was crying. ‘Do you know what happened?'