Life Goes On (68 page)

After the last exit to Baldock came the perilous dual carriageway of the Great North Road, and I muttered the highway's name on belting along. In spite of a good forecast, or maybe even because of it, grey clouds crowded in for the inevitable rain, though the countryside like a green plate told me it didn't matter whether or not I went to Nottingham, provided I put as much distance as possible between myself and London. Not certain where I was heading had never been any bother, going at the moment like an arrow.

Near St. Neot's I was tempted to fork northeast to my railway house at Upper Mayhem. Once in the fortress of warmth and plenty it would close around and never let go. Dismal my favourite and only dog was there, as was Clegg the elderly handyman who kept the place going. The freezer was stacked with food, the outside shed packed with fuel, and a made up bed was waiting for me to sink into with no will to get out. I scoffed the notion away, heaven being no life for a grown man.

I switched off the jungle music from Radio Deadhead, and a glance at fields and coppices to either side—a sleeve of spring green, and splashes of blossoming Queen Anne's lace—set me longing to be out of the car and walking among the perfume of mangel wurzels or early potatoes, fainting with pleasure at sprouting wheat and upstart refreshing hedges, sniffing bay rose and white daisies.

The reality was I would get stung by nettles, clawed at by brambles, drenched by rain (which was just beginning, but it had rained yesterday), my soles so jacked up with mud on crossing a field that after walking fifty yards I'd be on stilts. I was better off in the car.

Distances signposted up the Great North Road were laid out in penny packets of ten or twenty miles, as if the fact that it led to Edinburgh (or even Doncaster) was a state secret which foreigners weren't to know about. Whoever arranged them was afraid again of a German invasion, or wanted tourists sleeping their nights to Scotland in rathole hotels that charged twice as much as at far better places in France or Spain. It made me laugh that on coming the other way London would be signposted four hundred miles off, as if the policy was to get rid of tourists who by now had been robbed of their last penny. Dover might even be indicated from Inverness, though I've never been that far to find out.

A plastic bag flapped by the roadside like a crow in its final agony. Speed cut the scene short. A mile-long line of lorries on the inner lane set me charging to get clear, nowhere to go when a car behind flashed me to move in, but I let him overtake soonest possible, his face as enraged as one of Conrad's duellists in the film. I'd read the story, and much else, under the guidance of Frances, more than in my life before, which was supposed to make me a better person, she said, though whether it did I'll never know.

The mad driver was one of Moggerhanger's footpads, Kenny Dukes, and I wondered where he was going at such a spate, as I overtook a tinker's short arsed pick-up with smoking exhaust, loaded with old bathtubs and gas stoves. A big sleek rat jumped off it onto the green verge, as if sensing the vehicle would drop to bits in the next five minutes. I took it easy, and lost Kenny who was doing a ton in the distance. Having driven enough miles in my life to get to the moon and back I wanted to stay alive.

Moonshine Cross was a convenient place to stop for a piss, petrol, and another cigar. In spite of Frances's tearful demolition of my character she had packed a plastic bag of fruit and sandwiches, and filled two flasks with coffee. She may have come to dislike me—but only for the time being, I hoped—but didn't want me to die of stomach cramps at some arterial lane eatery.

In the toilets an old chap of over seventy in a thorn cloth three-piece suit and knitted tie, shining brown boots, and watchchain, was pumping packets of condoms out of a machine, his demented expression daring it to run out, in which case he would come back from his car with a cold chisel and give it what-for.

He was long jawed, had on a nicky brown hat with a darker brown band around the rim, and heavy spectacles. His teeth were obviously false, as he opened his mouth and fixed another pound in the slot. “I can't wait all day till the place is empty and there's nobody to see me, can I?” He saw my gaze of wonder, if not admiration. “I want my supplies, don't I, son? I can't afford to be embarrassed at my age, can I?”

“You could go to a chemist's and get them without all this effort.” I was horrified at another rubber tree in Malaya getting sucked white. “It would be more discreet.”

He stuffed the supplies into his pocket. “It's all very well for you to say so, but there's only one chemist in our little town, and my wife goes into it for all her medicines. She might see me. Or there might be talk, if one of the neighbours did. I wasn't born yesterday, was I?”

I didn't want to speculate on how many yesterdays ago he had been born, yet I was taken by his brash confidence as I stood at the urinal for a splash at Shanks's adamant. “Isn't your girlfriend on the pill?”

Two other men came in, so he said: “Let's go outside, and I'll tell you. We stood outside and he gripped me by the elbow. “I'm glad you enquired. She did go on it for a while, but she didn't like the side effects, though going in raw was a treat for me, just like when I was a lad.”

Over the fence was a field of placid Friesian cows, a sight making me want to start loving old England again. I didn't like the thought of the poor beasts flying around the grassland in terror should my companion of the road run among them with a trail of cheese and onion condoms spraying out of his pockets. A lizard tongue went over his lips, as if he followed my thoughts. “She's a vegetarian as well, though that doesn't bother me.”

“Is she young?”

“She's nineteen, if you call that young, these days. Her name's Betty.”

It's no use denying my interest in his naive revelations. “I still can't see why you'll need all those rubbers.”

“Can't you?” He scanned the parking lot, as if he had forgotten in which row he'd left his car, or was fearful that someone had hotwired it and driven away. “It's better to have too many than too few, that's all I know. I haven't seen her for a couple of months.”

“Why not sooner?”

“Her husband isn't away all the time.”

“She's married, at nineteen?”

“I appreciate that you're very inquisitive, because I am as well. The inquisitive shall inherit the earth, eh?” He sent a sharp elbow at my ribs, and I was afraid to give him one back in case he turned out to be nothing more than brown paper and sawdust. “She got married at sixteen, then had another child to prove the first was no accident. So she got a council house. Her mother lives with her, and looks after the kids. They take it in turns doing it, because I have a go at the mother as well whenever I can. She's not much above thirty, after all. Putting you in the picture, am I?”

Too right he was. A man of his age, and he had a nineteen-year-old married woman with two kids hot for him, and access to her mother. What was the country coming to? It was enough to make me sweat, not to say envious.

I can't think why, but people often confided their foibles to me, and told stories with little if any encouragement, which was good when it entertained me, and bad when it bored me. And they still do it, perhaps deceived by the honest face I'm forced to wear so as to hide the seething villainy within. Or I catch them at the point when, if they don't talk about what's worrying them, they'll either burst into flames or go out and do a murder. Maybe so many people opened their mouths to me as if I were a ghost, assuming that what information they spilled would not be passed on. If they had known of my relationship to the novelist Gilbert Blaskin they would have held back. Or they would have been even more forthcoming.

Maybe in spite of this old man's lambent intentions he somehow sensed he had only half an hour to live, and I would see his burnt-out car a few miles up the road. I hoped not. “You're looking a bit worried,” he said.

“I am. What if the husband catches you?” I put out my hand, which he shook vigorously, and introduced myself.

“Horace Hawksley, me. But what I say, Michael, is this: what's life all about if you're not prepared to take a risk? Life can be very monotonous after you're retired, and being seventy-five what do I have to lose?”

“I can see you're too old to die young,” I said, “but what if, Horace, for instance”—recalling Blaskin's misadventure—“what if, say, Betty's husband went to the airport, and found the plane wouldn't take off for five hours; or he went to the station and saw that the rails had so many leaves on them that trains wouldn't be running to London for another week? In view of such a delay he would come home and catch you in bed with his wife. He'd be so devastated he'd choose a chopper from the coalhouse and split your head from top to bottom.”

His face turned all shades from healthy pink to graveyard white. Then he smiled so widely I hoped his teeth wouldn't fall out. “Michael, if I looked at it that way I'd never get anywhere, would I? Even though I expect to live forever, life's too short to think like that.”

“But your life could be cruelly cut short if you don't use caution.”

Anger sparked behind his glasses. “I'm not a bloody fool, am I?” The maniacal smile his girlfriend found such a come-on lit his clock. “I must be going. Never be late is my golden rule.” He winked, and gave another stab at my ribs. “Next stop Grantham! Wish me luck!”

I did, and as I relished the ambrosial inhalations of another cigar, I watched him peering at the number plate of almost every car before coming to his own, certain that Alzheimer's would get him before priapic decline, and then where would he be? I'd scour the tabloids for news of his trial. Then I spat tacks at not asking him what he took to keep himself banging away, which I might need in the not far distant future.

I let him get well ahead, from an encounter which had touched my nerves unduly, felt myself sickening for either a cold or the flu. Frances never caught either, so many gunged up people in her pokey surgery that she was immune to all they could sneeze at her. Yet she frequently carried one home which I caught, and hid on going to work, in order to ravage the advertising agency. By the time I admitted to a cold all the others had it, and I claimed to have got it from them.

I'd heard it said that you shouldn't drive with a cold, but I was safer than otherwise, in knowing I had to be dead careful. It's when I'm feeling the fittest man in the world that I splinter the tailgate against the only concrete post in sight in an almost empty car park.

Driving along, I craved an alcoholic drink. A full leatherbound flask of prime malt lay in the glovebox, but I didn't take it while at the wheel, in spite of knowing that if I supped a drop or two I wouldn't be any less safe.

The sky turned glum, as it tends to on going north. I thought of wheeling south but told myself not to be a coward. Raindrops at the windscreen made me want to piss again, so I swerved into a lay-by to let go, careful to avoid stinging my knob on tall fresh nettles. Fancying closer contact with the fields, and to get away from pools of diesel, old tyres, and things worse that went squish underfoot, I leapt over a ditch and ran up a bank into an open stretch of green ending at an enormous creosote-painted barn that seemed about to fall in the next feeble breeze.

Why my legs carried me that way I'll never know. Actions which alter the peace and quiet of life are never realised at such a time. My turn-ups were soaked after bending double to get between strands of barbed wire without snagging my jacket. I picked open a slit of the barn with my faithful Leatherhead toolknife and looked inside, at some kind of furniture assembly depot. Workmen were scraping, polishing, buffing up, sawing and hammering industriously at various specimens of antique pieces, their trannies jingling the same tune from each corner while they worked, everyone busy and contented, though I wouldn't have been happy with most of them smoking among shavings, sawdust and glue.

At the front of the barn two pantechnicons were parked on the black cindered earth. A couple of subsidiary sheds were used as toilets, and a burly bloke who came from the nearest buttoning his dungarees ran towards me with both fists up. “You fucking snooper. I'll blind you.”

His curses I give were troy weight compared to the amount that came filthily out but, as Blaskin said, when dealing with obscenities which a character expletes you must never reproduce the full measure, because a careful rationing on paper gives sufficient indication of what is used to satisfy any reader.

It was my advantage to recognise him first, and I stood with fists so ready that his halt gave time to say: “You touch me, Kenny Dukes, and I'll drag you inside that barn and push your head into a bandsaw, even though you'd look a lot prettier with it off.”

He drew back the longest arms of any man, which I'd once trapped in my car window when he was in Moggerhanger's Rolls Royce driving parallel and trying to fire his gun at my brains. He must have remembered the incident, because his smile showed cracked teeth, such a ripple at the mouth that a scar on the upper lip began to redden. He rubbed it with a clean handkerchief. “Oh, it's you, Michael Cullen. I thought you was a nark looking around. If it had been I'd have split all his works and sent him back to his mother in a black plastic bin liner. That's what we usually do to 'em.” He took my arm, and led me towards the main door. “Did Lord Moggerhanger send you?”

“I haven't had any contact with him for a while.”

A fragment of suspicion flickered at his eyes. “You found the place, though, didn't you?”

“Only by accident.”

I knew him as a greedy reader of Sidney Blood novels, some pseudonymously penned by Blaskin, though even Bill Straw had done one, as I had as well. Kenny read them over and over, as much as three times, without knowing he'd read them before, wallowing in the violence, gore, bestial fuckery, and the quick running crazy plots. I offered a cigar. “I'm doing research for the next Sidney Blood novel.”