The Closed Circle (3 page)

So: back to my usual state of a fairs. The loneliness of the single woman. Too
much time, not enough company. What was I going to do? I had a sandwich and
something to drink at a pub on the Worcester Road, and in the afternoon I went
for a walk along the hills. It calmed me; cleared my head. Perhaps I'm someone
who only feels happy inside herself when she's halfway up a hill. Certainly I seem
to have spent a lot of time, these last few weeks, climbing up to
different  vantage
points. Maybe I'm at a point in my life where I need that Olympian perspective.
Maybe I lost my bearings so thoroughly when I got involved with Stefano that I
can only recover them by getting a sense of the bigger picture. The picture today
was pretty big, I must say. Would you remember that view, I wonder, Miriam, if
you were ever to see it again? We used to go there when we were kids, you, me,
Mum and Dad. Freezing cold picnics, ham sandwiches and thermos flasks, the
four of us tucked away behind some big rock on the escarpment for shelter, the
fields spread out below us, beneath grey Midlands skies. There was a little cave in a
hidden part of the hillside, I remember. We used to call it the Giant's Cave, and
somewhere I've got a picture of us, standing outside it, in our matching green
anoraks, hoods pulled up tight. I think Dad's thrown most of them away, the pictures of you, but I managed to hold on to some of them. Saved from the wreckage.
It seems to me now that we were both terribly scared of him, always, and it was
that fear that made us so close. But that doesn't make the memories unhappy.
Quite the opposite. They're so precious that I can hardly bear to think of them.

I don't believe you could have just walked away from all that. It makes no
sense. You wouldn't have done it, would you, Miriam? Left me to fend for myself?
I can't bring myself to believe it; even though the alternative's worse.

By half past three, it's getting dark. It's time to gather my strength and go
home and spend another evening with Dad. The last one, I've decided. I've been
thinking that if things had been better, we might have spent Christmas together,
but that's not going to happen. He and I are a lost cause. I'll have to find somewhere else to stay. Maybe Pat and I could go away together somewhere. We'll see.

So, anyway, I'm on my way home. I told Dad that I'd pick up something for
us to have for dinner, so I pop into Worcester, and I buy some steak. He likes steak.
Considers it his patriotic duty to eat it, in fact, as rare as possible and as often as
possible, now that the French have banned it. That's Dad for you. And I'm leaving the outskirts of Worcester and I've already had a bit of a skirmish with someone who tried to overtake me on a roundabout and I'm getting jumpy about it
again, getting that sense that everyone behind the wheel of a car these days is for
some reason on edge. And as I head further out of the city, there's a car in front of
me going very slowly. The streetlamps are lit by now and I can see that the driver
is a man, a man on his own, probably not very old; and the reason he's driving
slowly is that he's talking on his mobile. Otherwise he would probably be speeding
along because he has quite a fancy car—a Mazda sports. But this phone conversation, whatever it's about, is evidently quite distracting. He's driving with only one
hand on the wheel and keeps veering over to the left-hand side of the road. We're
in a forty-mile limit but he's doing about twenty-six. But it's not the fact that he's
slowing me down that's annoying me, so much: it's because what he's doing is so
unsafe, so incredibly irresponsible. Isn't it illegal, in this country? (It is in Italy—
not that anyone takes any notice.) What would happen if a child were to run out
in front of him? He speeds up for a moment and then slows down again, drastically
and for no reason, and I almost crash into his bumper. He has no idea that I'm
behind him, as far as I can see. I brake sharply and the plastic bag of shopping I've
put on the passenger seat next to me shoots off and spills its contents over the floor.
Great. And now he's picking up speed again. I think about pulling over and putting the food back in the bag but decide against it. I watch the driver ahead of me,
instead, fascinated in spite of myself. He's reached an animated point in the conversation and is making hand gestures to himself. He has no hands on the wheel at
all! I decide that I want to get away from this situation as quickly as possible: if
there's going to be an accident, I don't want anything to do with it. The road is
single-carriageway, at this point, passing through the outer suburbs, and there's a
window of opportunity with no other cars in sight. It's not the safest thing to do but
I've had enough of this joker: so I indicate, swing out to the right, and try to overtake him. He's slowed right down again so it should only take a few seconds.

But as I'm overtaking, he notices what I'm doing and he doesn't like it. Without dropping the phone, he puts his foot down and starts racing me. I'm the one
going faster, still, but Dad's Rover doesn't have a lot of power in it, and it's taking
me a lot longer to overtake than I'd like: and now there's a van coming in the
other direction. Swearing to myself at the sheer stubbornness of this macho idiot, I
change down to third gear, hammer down hard on the accelerator, and rev forward at forty-five, fifty miles an hour, just squeezing in ahead of him as the van
closes in, flashing its headlights on to full beam to tick me off.

And that was that. Or would have been, if I hadn't done two really stupid
things as I was in the middle of overtaking. I glanced over at the man on the telephone, making eye contact for a second or two. And I pipped my horn at him.

Now, it was only a little, frail, girly sort of pip. I'm not even sure what I
meant by it. It was just my feeble way of saying, “You wanker!,” I suppose. But it
had the most amazing, instantaneous effect. He must have finished that call and
chucked his phone on to the passenger seat immediately because a couple of seconds
later this car is
right
up behind me—about six inches away, I reckon—and his
lights are on full beam, blinding me in the rear-view mirror, and I can hear his
engine screaming. A real howl of anger. And suddenly I'm scared. Terrified, actually. So I try to accelerate away from him—quickly reaching some ridiculous speed,
like sixty miles an hour or something—and he doesn't give any one of those inches.
He's still coming up behind me, bumper to bumper. I wonder if I dare try flicking
the brakes on, just to give him a shock, just to make him pull back a little, but I
daren't do it, because I don't think it would work. I think it just means he would
crash into the back of me.

I suppose this can only go on for a few seconds, although it feels much longer.
Anyway, then I'm out of luck. We come to a set of traffic lights where the road
splits into two lanes, and the lights are on red. So I pull to a halt on the inside lane,
and Mazda man screeches up next to me and jerks the handbrake on and next
thing I know, he's getting out of his car. I'm expecting some lumbering oaf with a
neck thicker than his head, but in fact he's a scrawny little thing, only about five
foot four. I can't remember anything else about him because what happened next is
all a blur. First of all he starts hammering on my window. I glimpse his face for a
horrible, stretched moment and then I stare straight ahead, willing the lights to
change, my heart pounding as if it's going to burst. Now he's shouting—the usual
sort of
stuff, fucking bitch, fucking slag, I'm not really taking it in, it all sounds
like white noise to me—and then I can't stand waiting for the lights to change
again so I go straight across on a red light, thinking that it's clear, only another car
is coming at me all of a sudden from the left, and it has to swerve to avoid me and
slam on the brakes with a screech and then its horn starts blaring as well but soon
that's faded away because I'm driving off like a maniac, no idea what speed I'm
doing, and it's not until I've gone about a mile and left the city well behind that I
wonder why my side of the windscreen is wet when it's not raining and then I
realize it's because the guy managed to spit all over it before I drove off. His parting shot.

There were quite a few lay-bys before I got to the motorway but I didn't stop
in any of them because I was scared that he might be following and if he saw me
there he'd pull over too and try to complete his unfinished business. So I drove on,
which was a crazy thing to do because I was crying and shaking all the way back
into Birmingham, and endlessly looking around to see if there was a Mazda sports
coming up behind me on the outside lane, headlights flashing, guns blazing for
battle.

Maybe some women would have turned around and given him the same
treatment in return. But I genuinely think that if I'd wound the window down he
would have attacked me. He was beside himself, completely out of control. I've
never seen—

I stopped there because I was about to say I'd never seen a man look that way
before. But that isn't true. As I said, I only glimpsed his face for a moment, but
that was enough to see into his eyes, and yes, I
have
seen that kind of hatred in a
man's eyes—just one other time. I saw it a few months ago, in Italy. But that's
another story, and I should save it for another day because my hands are already
stiff from all this writing.

How quiet this house is. I really noticed it then. I realized that the scratching
of my pen had been the only sound.

Good night, sweet Miriam. More tomorrow.

In my old bedroom
St. Laurence Road
Northfield
Sunday, 12th December, 1999
Late morning

So, big sis, can you guess where Dad is, and why I've got the house to myself
for an hour or two? Of course you can. He's in church! Making himself a better
person. Which would be a wonderful idea, in his case, if there was only the slightest prospect of it working. But he's been doing this, week in, week out for about
sixty years now (as he was reminding me over breakfast only this morning), and if
you ask me, the results haven't exactly been outstanding so far. To be honest, if
that's the best the church can do after sixty years, I think we should ask for our
money back right now.

But no—he's not worth thinking about. And besides, I've only got one more
meal to sit through with him—the dreaded Sunday lunch—and after that I'm
out of here. I've decided to spoil myself, and I've booked in to the Hyatt Regency
for two nights. It's the poshest new hotel in Birmingham: more than twenty
floors, right next to the new Symphony Hall and Brindley Place. I was walking
round that part of town on Friday and I could barely recognize it, it's changed so
much since the 1970s. All that area around the canals used to be deserted, a waste-land. Now it's wall-to-wall bars and cafés, and every one of them was jumping.
More of that mysterious meeting and talking that I've noticed springing up everywhere.

But maybe you know all this. Maybe you've been there yourself, in the last
year or two. Maybe you were there on Friday morning, having a coffee with some
friends in All Bar One. Who can say?

Even though I only saw it for a fraction of a second, I keep thinking of the face
of that man who swore and spat at me yesterday because I pipped my horn at him.
I told you, didn't I, that it reminded me of something that happened in Italy this
summer. It was the only other time I've seen a man lose his temper like that. It
was a terrible thing to see (in fact I did more than see it, I was caught up right in
the middle of it), but in a way the consequences were even worse, because it led
directly to me becoming involved with Stefano. And look where that got me.

It seems like a lifetime ago, already.

Lucca is surrounded by hills, but it's the ones to the north-west that are the
loveliest, I think. High on a hillside there, in open countryside but with a fabulous
view of the city (which is one of the most beautiful in Italy), an old farmhouse was
being restored, from top to bottom, inside and out. It was being restored by a
British businessman by the name of Murray—or at least, he was the one who was
footing the bill. The person supervising all the work was his wife, Liz, and the
architect and project manager was called Stefano. Liz didn't speak any Italian and
Stefano didn't speak any English and that was where I came in. I was brought in
to do all the translating—in person and on paper—and so for six months Liz
Murray became my employer.