Vail

by Trevor Hoyle

  ‘Don’t WHISPER!’ Gene yelled, leaning forward over the tank and pointing his black gloved finger straight at us like the barrel of a gun. His curly hair was stuck with perspiration to his forehead. There was a kinda glazed look in his eyes.

  ‘We’d better just split,’ I suggested, turning towards the stairs, but Jimmy said no, come on through, so we did. Close to I could see that the fuel lines went into the femoral arteries on the insides of their thighs and that their shinbones were grafted onto the metal footrests. Part of the bikes’ electric starter system was incorporated into their left wrists: switches, knobs and dials. Neat.

  ‘Where ya truckin’, white trash?’ Elvis asked with his famous lopsided leer.

  I was about to answer and thought better of it. I said, ‘Frisco.’

  ‘Faggotsville,’ said Eddie with a lazy grin. ‘Jeez, we ain’t terrorised that burg in a long whiles.’

  So far Buddy Holly hadn’t said anything. He had the stereo speakers attached to his rear forks turned low and was nodding and clicking his fingers to Twenty Flight Rock.

  ‘Any chicks with you?’ Jerry Lee said, flicking the grease out of his comb.

  I shook my head. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Dope?’ (Gene)

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Gas?’ (Jimmy)

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Fresh out.’

  ‘What kinda wheels you got?’ Sal asked me.

  ‘Truck. Er, pick-up. Station wagon.’

  ‘Well which for goddamn fucksakes!’

  ‘Sort of a covered pick-up.’

  ‘What’s in the bundle?’ Jimmy asked, running his fingers through his shock of hair.

  ‘Radio equipment.’

  ‘You a ham?’ Eddie said to Brown, who nodded his matted head.

  ‘Looks more like a bum to me,’ Marlon said. There were grins, leers and smirks all round.

  ‘I vote we bounce these dudes round the parking lot,’ said Little Richard with a brilliant manic smile. ‘We’re due for some fun. What say?’

  With a twist of his left wrist Elvis gunned his machine into throaty life. Choking blue smoke swirled everywhere. I coughed and stepped back, covering my mouth. Brown retreated to the wall. Elvis blipped the throttle and the noise nearly lifted the roof off. Marlon waved his hand and Elvis cut the revs to an idling rumble. ‘We’ll check out their wheels first,’ Marlon said. He shrugged his ponderous shoulders. ‘Never can tell, they might have something stashed away. Booze, dope, chicks, gas.’ He jerked his thumb at me as an indication that we should precede them outside. When the rest of the pack started up you could hardly hear yourself think. In seconds the place was filled with thick blue fog. I lost sight of Brown and was barely able to grope my way to the stairs. My throat was burning and my lungs had seized up.

  The machines followed us down the stairs and out onto the pitted and rubbish-strewn concrete of the car park. I now knew why the stat was abandoned and deserted. This mob of prosthetic-implanted look-alikes had taken over Watford Gap and held sway over twenty or thirty miles of motorway. And what, I fumed, were the authorities doing about it? Bugger all.

  I leapt aside as Gene aimed the blazing headlamp of his Triumph Bonneville straight at me, his rawboned face and bulging brown eyes alive with drug-crazed glee. The pack had turned on their stereo systems and we were assailed by a rock ‘n’ roll cacophony of horrendous proportions.

  Sal swerved into Brown and pried his bundle loose. He rode off with it with a whoop and a holler, holding the prize above his head. Headlights zig-zagged back and forth, crossed and crisscrossed each other. The booming roar of engines obliterated the night.

  Marlon and Eddie and Jerry Lee were over by the van. I ran across with Brown scuttling crab-wise behind me, in time to see Eddie open the side door and stick his blond quiff inside. Jerry Lee held up a warning gloved hand and I slowed to a trot and stopped a few feet away. The others rode up and hemmed us in with idling machinery. Brown looked despairingly at the bundle in Sal’s grasp.

  ‘It’s a no-no,’ Eddie said, ducking back out and shaking his head.

  ‘Zilch?’ Marlon said, disbelief and disappointment in equal measure on his broad heavy features. He turned to me gloweringly. ‘What gives?’

  I assumed what I thought was a reasonably creditable expression of innocence and said, ‘Like I told you. Zeroesville. My buddy and me were just passing through, heading for Frisco. We don’t have a red cent between us.’

  ‘Listen, meathead,’ Marlon snarled. ‘This is our ground and we don’t take kindly to goddamn fucking spics and wetbacks crashing in without paying their dues.’

  ‘Easy on that,’ Sal said, stiffening.

  ‘Present company excepted,’ Marlon said, his attention still fixed on me. ‘We want. What you got?’

  I took the strip of Temporal from my back pocket and handed it over.

  ‘You can have this. It isn’t much good. I tried it and nothing happened. But feel free.’

  ‘You lying crud!’ Gene exploded. ‘You had a fix all along and you held out!’

  Before I knew what was happening he lashed out and the sharpened studs on his jacket sleeve gouged chunks from my cheek and neck.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Marlon soothed him. ‘Don’t get uptight. Now we’ve got the stuff we can take care of them in our own sweet time.’

  Brown said, rather foolishly I thought, ‘Cut the crap you punks and let me have my bundle back.’ (At least he was getting the hang of the jargon.) ‘If you don’t you might live to regret it.’

  ‘Sez who?’ Elvis said, and aimed a vicious karate chop at Brown, ineffectual as it happened, because Brown was out of reach.

  ‘Nobody takes this from me,’ Sal said, clutching the bundle. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘All right,’ said Brown, ‘if that’s how you want to play it,’ and seemed to lose all further interest in the proceedings.

  I was still busy sopping up blood from my face and neck. The pain should start any second now, I reckoned. The cuts were good and deep.

  ‘I’m getting bored, let’s finish it,’ Buddy complained, and for the first time I noticed another mistake: his thick black-framed glasses weren’t real but painted onto his head like Groucho’s moustache.

  Jimmy yawned. ‘He’s right. Let’s wishbone the creeps.’

  ‘Wishbone?’ I glanced round vaguely.

  ‘Where ya bin living?’ Eddie said, and suddenly grinned like a lighthouse beam. ‘Never heard of wishboning?’ He guffawed.

  Everybody was smiling and nodding now, – even Marlon. The atmosphere was quite jolly. I said, ‘No, never have,’ and grinned too to show that I was a good sport, could take a joke with the best of them.

  ‘What we do,’ Gene confided, watery brown eyes alight, ‘is we wrap a chain around your left leg and a chain around your right leg. Following me so far? We fasten one of the chains to his bike and the other chain to my bike. Then Eddie and me, we say ‘So long’, and we go our separate ways. Me this way, him that way. Get it? And you come with the both of us. Some of you comes with me and some of you with him. If you get my drift. Then we decide the winner.’

  ‘What winner?’

  ‘Whoever’s got the biggest piece. Why you think it’s called ‘wishboning’, schmuck? You mentally retarded or something’?’

  I found it hard to believe that they really intended to do this. What was the point? We’d given them all we had to give, which was precious little, admittedly. Was this how they got their ‘kicks’, by murdering innocent people? I looked helplessly at Brown, but he was staring off into space, or rather into the surrounding darkness beyond the halo of light, as if none of this concerned him. I wrung the blood out of my handkerchief and swabbed some more.

  Then Little Richard had a wonderful idea. As a preamble to the main event, how about setting fire to the van and watching her blow? Jimmy, both arms draped over the handlebars, fingers loosely spread, gave a twitch of a shrug, which was his way of expressing approval. Elvis leered his, while Gene’s pers
piring face lit up, and Eddie growled, ‘Right on.’

  Buddy was clicking away to Blue Jean Baby, Jerry Lee combing his locks, and Sal muttering darkly about guys who let their mouths run away with them shouldn’t be surprised to find a spic knife between their shoulderblades one dark night. Marlon said, ‘Like it. Let’s do it,’ and thus it was decided.

  Watching the interior of the van brighten and flicker with flame, I couldn’t help thinking of Mira and Bev in the long drawer underneath the bunk, which was where they had presumably concealed themselves when Eddie poked his head inside and found it empty.

  No good worrying about that now, I told myself, as the fire reached the petrol tank and the van erupted in a spectacular orange fireball, buffeting our faces with a solid wall of heat even at a distance of thirty metres or so. I wrung out my sticky handkerchief.

  Brown sidled up and said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘What was the registration number?’

  I shook my head. ‘Won’t do any good. It wasn’t insured. Besides, the MOT had run out.’

  ‘The number,’ he said through clenched lips. ‘And lie flat.’

  I failed to see the connection between these two disparate requests. Still he stared at me. It took a moment or two to remember what it was. ‘FTJ 109V,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Brown said, kicking my legs from under me.

  He was crouching and fiddling with a small square black device with a short retractable antenna, and the next thing I knew there was a flash of light and a blast that nearly ruptured my eardrums and pieces of hot oily metal were showering down all around us. When I dared to look over the crook of my elbow there was a respectable crater where the pack, moments before, had been clustered; all that remained was a smoking junkyard and the odd twitching dismembered carcase.

  ‘I told them to give it back,’ Brown said, levering himself up. ‘They can’t say I didn’t warn them.’

  ‘I thought it was a radio,’ I said.

  ‘A radio with four pounds of gelignite inside it. Triggered by shortwave.’ He put the device back in his pocket. ‘They really ought to have listened. I did warn them.’

  ‘You did,’ I agreed, getting up and dusting myself down. ‘They can’t say you didn’t.’

  ‘They can’t say anything now,’ Brown said, giving me an impish sidelong glance. This was the one and only humorous remark I ever heard him utter.

  ‘Why did you want to know the registration number?’

  ‘I used it as the DFC.’

  I raised, then lowered my eyebrows.

  ‘Detonating Frequency Code. Then like a fool forgot it. Lucky you remembered.’

  ‘Lucky’s not the word,’ I said.

  ‘What is then?’

  ‘What is what?’

  ‘The word.’

  ‘What word?’

  ‘The word other than lucky.’

  ‘What other word other than lucky?’

  ‘You said ‘Lucky’s not the word’. I’m asking you what is.’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Then why say lucky wasn’t the word if it was?’

  ‘It’s an expression, ‘Lucky’s not the word’. It doesn’t mean there is another word. It’s a figure of speech.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it.’

  ‘Take my word for it.’

  ‘What word?’

  ‘My word. My assurance.’

  ‘‘Assurance’ is the word then?’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s just say it was lucky I remembered. Will that do?’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  ‘Swell.’

  This futile conversation had distracted me from the van, all ablaze. As we approached it the molten core beckoned enticingly, seething fingers of fire reaching up greedily like slow-motion lightning. A hot blast scorched my face, singeing my eyebrows and moustache. I fought for breath.

  We were on fire!

  We had stopped, slewed slantwise on the hard shoulder. I scrambled out and ran round to the side door, wrenched it open and dived inside, hands outstretched in the dark to where I knew the fire extinguisher to be. It was there all right, but it was rusted into its bracket.

  Mira screamed to know what was happening. I was out of breath with panic and exertion and couldn’t answer her. Fumes filled the interior.

  ‘Why are we on fire?’ Brown asked, which struck me as rather an irrelevant question under the circumstances.

  The engine hissed and spat as I smothered it with foam. It seemed positively angry about something, as if I had foiled its carefully-planned attempt at suicide. Engines can be such bad-tempered buggers. All along it had carried us grudgingly, just waiting for a chance to explode, and had chosen its moment well, – here in the dead-end of nowhere, – leaving me to cope with a sick child, an irascible wife and a terrorist loonie.

  I was so embittered I hadn’t the patience or the inclination to answer Shakespeare’s questions and told him to piss off; let him find out about the trials and tribulations of the modern world from somebody else for a change.

  Inside Brown’s bundle (you might have guessed) was a radio transceiver.

  He set it up behind some dusty bushes just off the hard shoulder and twiddled some knobs. There were a couple of squawks and a tinny voice spoke in a foreign accent. Brown asked questions about the ‘current situation’ and requested an ‘update’, the answers to which I didn’t understand, though apparently Brown did. Could we summon help? I asked Brown; no, we couldn’t. The authorities might be eavesdropping and if we mentioned our location over the airwaves (where was our location?) they would have not the slightest trouble in sending a squad to ‘take us out’.

  ‘But that’s what I want,’ I said. ‘To be taken out.’

  Brown shook his starved rat’s face impatiently. To ‘take us out’, he explained, was a euphemism for death by slaughter. We would be machine-gunned and left to decompose in the bushes. I replied that I found this somewhat fanciful, if not downright melodramatic.

  More unintelligible gabble came over the set and I thought I caught a reference to ‘Libyan logistical support’ which, I noticed, made Brown suck at his teeth excitedly. Was this, then, an international conspiracy? Who was banding together with whom, and for what purpose? In my mind’s eye I visualised the entire country alive with secret subversive cells, a grid or network of political plotters and social disrupters from coast to coast. Why were they never mentioned on any TV newscast? Why didn’t the Sun do an in-depth analytical exposé on them?

  It seemed incredible to me that all this underground activity was going on and nobody knew anything about it. At home on Zuttor Estate we were kept in ignorance of such matters. They might have been taking place on another planet.

  Brown retracted his antenna, switched off the set and wrapped it away in his thick black overcoat. He appeared mordantly pleased. His ravaged face creased in a grin. ‘Didn’t believe me, eh? You heard it for yourself: the big one is about to blow!’

  ‘The only thing I heard was a garbled reference to ‘Libyan logistical support’. Are they part of your outfit?’

  ‘Them and the INLA,’ Brown said. ‘And the Red Brigade and Black September.’

  These sounded to me, respectively, like the French national railway system and two heavy metal rock bands, but I didn’t betray my ignorance. Instead I asked, ‘What’s this big one that’s about to blow?’

  ‘Dungeness B.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A fast-breeder gas-cooled reactor.’

  ‘A nuclear power station?’ When he nodded alertly, eyes alive in his thin drab face, I said, ‘That’s going to cause a bit of a mess, isn’t it? Won’t it lay waste to large areas of the countryside?’

  ‘Towns and people too. You can say goodbye to Sussex and Kent for a start. If the wind’s in the right direction London might cop it.’

  I had never seen him so vibrant. He was positively brimming. It seemed to me that he didn’t so much want to change the social order as destroy it altoge
ther. He was motivated not by reforming zeal but by petty infantile spite. Either something horrible had happened to him in childhood, I surmised, or he had been born with a meanness of spirit, one of the world’s natural runts or recklings. Given wealth, power and prestige (and he would have to be given them, he could never have achieved them by his own efforts) he would have lorded it over the rest of us in the manner of the most aloof and disdainfully overbearing aristocrat imaginable.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ Mira said, cradling Bev in her arms. ‘That’s where we’re going. Hardly fair on us to wipe it out before we get there. Selfish if you ask me.’

  Brown made a motion of the shoulders. ‘It’s all to the good in the long term,’ he said. ‘We can’t pick and choose who gets it in the neck and who doesn’t. Personally I think wholesale carnage is the only way to bring them to their senses.’

  ‘That’s all very well for you to say,’ Mira expostulated, rocking Bev. ‘What happens to our sick child? The whole purpose of this journey is to seek proper medical attention and you have the nerve to inform us there won’t be a doctor left standing when we get there! Is this a sample of the ‘new social order’ you keep rabbiting on about? Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t think much of it!’

  ‘We didn’t start the war, they did,’ Brown said placidly. ‘We didn’t dump toxic chemicals adjacent to urban populations. It wasn’t us who turned a blind eye to environmental pollution and let the chemical companies get away with murder. We weren’t instrumental in allowing canisters of radioactive waste to be buried next to schools and council estates. Neither did we instigate the series of medical experiments on the children of the poor. Don’t lay these anomalies at our door. Lay them fair and square where they belong. You can’t blame your child’s condition on us.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, frowning. ‘If what you say is true, and all this is going on, I have two questions. One: what is the purpose, the objective, of this toxic and radioactive waste dumping policy or programme, and, two: how and why is what you’re doing any different?’

  The answers sprang instantly to Brown’s lips. ‘The objective is to reduce unnecessary and unproductive urban population, and what we’re doing is different in intent but not in kind.’