Vail (7 page)

‘That all depends on whether you do the favour or not.'

‘But you won't know till later.'

‘So that's when I'll decide.'

‘How can you decide later whether or not to give me the
Temporal
now?'

‘Simple. I won't have given it to you if you don't do the favour and I will have given it to you if you have.'

‘You call that simple?'

‘Is to me, squire.'

‘All right.' I'd made up my mind. ‘Give me the
Temporal
and I'll do you the favour, how's that? Happy?'

‘I thought you'd say that,' he said, handing me the foil strip. ‘That's more than I did.'

He was gone, but the evidence that the boy or youth existed was in my hand. I had the
Temporal
. What good it would do remained to be seen. And whether or not I would do the favour ditto.

I suspected that Brown had made love to Mira while I had been away but I had no means of corroborating it. At one time I might have got angry and flown into a jealous rage but now it hardly seemed worth the effort. And I could have been wrong. I didn't want to appear foolish by accusing her of something she hadn't done.

By the time darkness came on we had passed Keele (Trusthouse Forte) and Hilton Park (Rank) and weren't far from Corley (Trusthouse Forte) when the tedious petrol problem was upon us once again.

To fill the mindless hours of driving, with my foot jammed hard against the accelerator, I used to imagine that Shakespeare was sitting next to me and I had the double pleasure of listening to his comments on this (to him) bizarre modern world and explaining to him such mysteries as the square iron boxes which apparently moved of their own volition but were actually powered by Engines burning a refined derivative of crude oil and the principle on which the steady baffling unflickering glow of the motorway lights on their fabricated steel stalks operated.

He marvelled at the smoothness of the carriageways and the ultra neatness of everything. He could understand the signs with their arrows, numbers and other graphic symbols (though not the sign for the disabled, which he took to be a man sitting on a boulder) and after a little initial difficulty was able to read the place-names in their brutal modern script. Being a genius, much of it came as no real surprise to him, though what did surprise him was that while the external world had altered so drastically, being filled with unblemished concrete and moving iron boxes and unflickering illumination, human beings had hardly changed one whit: in fact physically they were exactly the same. He would have conjectured, he told me, that they would have advanced to keep pace with scientific progress, and almost expected to see forms of mutation such as puny hairless bodies and huge swollen brains. And what totally amazed him was when I explained that most people living today hadn't the faintest notion of how the modern world functioned. They had heard at school and through the
media about scientific achievements and discoveries, and they used mechanical contrivances every day of their lives, yet few of them knew what these achievements and discoveries meant or of their importance, nor how the machines they depended on worked. As Shakespeare pointed out, most of them had the physical, mental and emotional attributes of people living in his own time. Indeed they might as well have been living in the Middle Ages, – preferably so, – because they were still several hundred years behind the times.

I found these comments and conclusions interesting and spent many a pleasurable hour listening to them, interspersed with my attempting to answer his questions in terms an Elizabethan would understand. The dashboard, I remember, its coloured gauges and vibrating needles in illuminated dials, especially fascinated him. I had the devil's own job trying to explain what stored electricity was.

At Corley a large curved screen dominated the car park on which a free non-stop programme of pop music, news headlines, commercials and soft porn was displayed. When we arrived in darkness they were showing a Selina Southorn quickie, which featured Selina in gymslip and stocking-tops being chastised by a middle-aged schoolmaster in gown and mortar-board, who spanked her bare bottom with a flat ruler.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
It was fairly mild, because it was illegal to show an erect penis in a public place. For that you had to go into a video booth and put a £1 coin in the machine.

‘How's Bev?' I asked Mira. I was feeling pretty knackered: I had a sultry thumping headache and my right leg was completely dead. It took me a minute or two to manoeuvre myself out of the seat and into the back.

‘Urb thinks she has radiation sickness. Either that or toxic waste poisoning.'

‘Who?'

‘Bev. You just asked me about her.'

‘No, I meant who thinks that?'

Mira indicated Brown. Urb. They
were
getting on well together.

‘Are you a doctor?' I said to Brown.

‘What do doctors know?' he said with contempt.

‘What do
you
know?'

‘A lot of things you wouldn't believe.'

‘I'm in the mood to believe anything,' I said irritably. ‘What makes you think she has radiation sickness or toxic waste poisoning?'

The light from a distant sodium lamp was so feeble that in the darkened interior of the van I could barely make out his humped shadow. Was he was still clutching his precious black bundle?

‘It's all part of the plan,' Brown answered cryptically.

My pulse quickened. ‘Do you mean somebody's already dropped the Bomb and they haven't told us about it?'

‘Could be.'

‘I don't think you really know yourself. You're guessing. And what's this about toxic waste?'

‘Deliberately dumped.'

‘Who by?'

The humped shadow moved as he shrugged. ‘Companies.'

‘On instructions from the Govt?'

‘Possibly.'

‘Is there a war going on that we haven't been told about?'

‘What war?' Mira said. ‘Who with?'

Brown said, ‘There's a war going on right here and now. Why do you think the motorways are fenced in?'

It hadn't occurred to me why; they just were.

‘Why do you think the police are after me?' he went on.

‘Because you're a terrorist,' I said.

‘You never told me that,' Mira said hotly.

I couldn't see, and therefore didn't know, whether she was talking to Brown or me. At any rate, intimate as they might have been behind my back, he hadn't told her everything.

‘Spit it out,' I said, head throbbing. ‘Are our children being systematically poisoned or aren't they? And if so, why, and by whom?'

‘That and worse,' Brown said. ‘It's an incredible story.'

‘It sounds it.'

‘I can't see them doing that,' Mira said matter-of-factly. ‘They might be misguided but they're not evil. They're not
Nazis.'

Brown laughed. The only time he ever did. From where I was sitting I could see Selina Southorn's vast naked bottom with symmetrical welts like bloody ski marks on an alpine slope filling the giant screen and reflected on the shiny roofs of several hundred parked cars. The image faded and a commercial replaced it for Lyon's Maid ice cream, fronted by Bob Monkhouse. He made a gesture with both arms outspread and smiled toothingly.

‘I can't say any more, it's too dangerous,' Brown said.

‘You haven't told us
anything
,' I protested. ‘That was the deal, remember? Transport to London in exchange for secrets.'

‘Yes, but not here.' His shadowed bulk was a deeper black than the darkened interior, which was the only indication I had that he was actually there. ‘I require updated information and if I get it here they'll home in on us. We're too exposed. Nearer Birmingham is safer.'

‘We're near Birmingham now.'

‘Not near enough. Once we get to Spaghetti Junction the confluence of motorways will confuse them, – '

(Confluence!)

‘ – they won't know whether we're heading east on the M6, south on the M5, into the city itself, or the antithesis of all those, – '

(Antithesis!)

‘ – from there I can contact base in safety and get an update on the situation.'

There were a number of questions I wanted to ask. What base and what situation was he referring to? How did he intend to contact this base? He kept using emotive words like ‘dangerous' and ‘exposed' and this unsettled me. Again I had the feeling that I had been precluded from knowing certain key facts, that things were going on all around me to which I was oblivious. He spoke of a war, but I knew of no such war, either here or in Urop, or
anywhere come to that. He spoke of radiation and toxic waste, neither of which had ever impinged themselves on my consciousness.

About Spaghetti Junction being ‘safe' he was probably right. This was a serpentine network of several hundred miles of motorway within a very small area which curled in on itself, – up and over other motorways, down and under yet others, winding tighter and tighter until becoming lost before it disappeared God-knows-where in umpteen directions.

Some of the sections had collapsed and finished in mid-air. Contractors still worked on stretches that hadn't been used in twenty years and probably never would be again. Yes, once inside Spaghetti Junction we would be ‘safe'; nobody could ‘home in on us' there, whatever that meant.

Bob Monkhouse had been replaced by The Pox, a revolutionary punk rock band (Bev thought they were ‘crisp') miming to their latest hit
Fire the Schools
, a scorching indictment of the educational system and the way it had betrayed the rising generation. Having been banned by the BBC the record had sold over half-a-million copies, and it was rumoured that a book, stage show and possibly a film based on the lyrics were in the offing. There had been calls from certain quarters not to allow the group back into the country after a recent tour abroad, but as they were UK citizens this was ruled legally out of the question, quite apart, of course, from the matter of their dollar earnings, said to be in seven figures.

‘Bev's suppurating,' Mira said wretchedly. ‘Is there nothing we can do?'

I switched on the dim yellow interior light and took a look at her. The scabs on her neck were leaking glutinous fluid. Her face was puffed and blotchy-red. Her eyes were slitted vents. She was scalding hot and pulsing with fever.

‘Do you have anything left you can give her?' I said. ‘Tablets. Anything.'

‘What tablets?' Mira snorted.

‘I thought the doctor gave you some tablets?'

‘She finished those weeks ago, before the sores started erupting. You
know
we haven't any tablets.'

I ripped off a corner square of foil and extruded a
Temporal
capsule with my thumb. It was pink and black, torpedo-shaped. There was a half-full can of Coke on the formica folding table which I used to swill the capsule down the constricted red maw of her throat. I wasn't expecting results, and in fact nothing happened. Bev was still with us, palpably here in the airless green van, not becoming transparent or entering another time zone or anything spookily supernatural like that.

Mira asked sharply, ‘What's that you've given her?'

‘Febrile depressant,' I said, tucking the foil strip out of sight before she could catch a glimpse of what was written on it.

‘
You
haven't any money to buy fancy drugs,' Mira said accusingly.

‘I've had them for some considerable time,' I said. ‘For use in an emergency.' I rummaged for the bottle and took a swig in full view of her. Mira blamed everything on me. True, I had no pride and no self-respect left. Next she would be ranting that I was trying to poison our daughter. Winning with some women, wives especially, is impossible. I thought of giving Bev a slug of whisky for good measure but rejected the notion.

‘And you,' I said to Brown, ‘had better start talking, and soon. Free transportation, free food and drink, and so far you haven't spilled a bean.' I felt like breaking the bottle and grinding the jagged end into his starved working-class face. Some people invite, positively demand, such treatment. And to think that I'd been scared of the little mangy sewer rat! I had thought him sly, dangerous, ruthless, – and so he was, but in the manner of a cornered rat, lips drawn back in a snarl of fake quivering ferocity.

I was in charge here, I was calling the shots, not some self-styled underground ‘subversive' snivelling in a dark corner, clutching his bundle as though it were a baby, under the delusion he was God Almighty because he claimed to know a couple of things of which the general populace was ignorant.

After the repeated petrol caper we were off again, the van
moving faster now that the sun had gone down and the air was cooler. I couldn't recall such a hot summer for many a long year. What with talk about ‘radiation sickness' and ‘toxic waste poisoning' the suspicion insinuated itself into my mind that the authorities were even tampering with the weather. I could even believe they had flown in experts from America to advise them on optimum temperatures to induce national well-being and generate a mood of dazed benevolence. This year a colonial war perhaps, next year a balmy summer; it was a cute and plausible ploy for universal pacification.

There are no signs for Spaghetti Junction and you won't find it on any map. In a sense it's folklore, but it exists all right, the Sargasso Sea of the motorway system. Except in the Sargasso Sea you're stuck in one spot all the time whereas in Spaghetti Junction you never stop moving even though you're going nowhere; same difference.

Another peculiarity is that you're never sure you're inside it until you actually are: there isn't a boundary or dividing line which allows you to make the definitive statement, ‘We are now in Spaghetti Junction'. For a long while you wonder when you're going to reach it and then discover you have. Rather like walking backwards into a warm quicksand you didn't know was there until it's gripped you by the knees and is tenderly sucking at your waist.