Moggerhanger

by Alan Sillitoe

  As I sat for what I hoped would not be my last cup of coffee in the house, Clegg said with a worried look: “I don’t like you going off into the blue like this.”

  “Neither do I, but you saw that threatening note. I’ve got to take it seriously.”

  “You could pass it on to the police.”

  “I could, and I’ve nothing against them, but the only thing I wouldn’t be able to stand when we came face to face would be their laughter after I’d told them why the Green Toe Gang were after my guts. Oh, I appreciate your concern, Cleggie, but I’m on my own. If I give them the runaround for long enough maybe they’ll get fed up and leave me alone.”

  “I hope that’ll be the case.”

  “I’ve been in tighter spots.” I told him about the shoot-out in Jack Leningrad’s Knightsbridge flat before I was picked up at London Airport by Chief Inspector Lanthorn. “At least it was quick, mind you, or seemed so at the time.”

  We shook hands by the door. “Where’s Dismal? I ought to say good bye to him, even though he’s only a dog. He’ll brood for days if I don’t.”

  That he was high enough up on the evolutionary scale to be useful as well as clever was proved by the fact that whenever a passerby came to the beginning of the property he kept up a deep and threatening growl, till whoever it was had reached the other end, often stopping in mid-tone so as not to waste more breath than necessary, or none at all should the person be Clegg or myself.

  Clegg smiled. “He’s probably playing with the levers in the signal box, trying to lure a goods’ train from the main line. I once caught him reaching for my cap so as to look the part. I’ll worry about you every minute, though.”

  I reached for my jacket. “Have faith. You know I’m indestructible.”

  At fourteen-hundred hours I strapped myself into the cockpit, sorry as always to leave Upper Mayhem and the countryside smell, even when it reeked of shit. Except for Nottingham I belonged there more than anywhere else, because it was where my children had grown up, though if I’m honest—and when wasn’t I?—I recall that every morning of my ten-year stretch there I woke determined to pack the car and flee, vowing to be well away by nightfall, but the enormous Dutch breakfast spread on the table by my smiling and full-bosomed wife would not allow me to flee, and when the hunger clock chimed for lunch I mellowed back into the dissipation of peace, till the day came when she was the one who left.

  Driving out of the gate, I set a southwesterly course for Huntingdon, to connect with the dual carriageway trunk road that ran between Harwich and the Midlands. With petrol fumes and the smell of burnt rubber coming through the window I knew I was back in my natural state of uncertainty and movement, the only regret being that Bill Straw wasn’t with me, whose advice had often been that it was always better to be on the road than bolted up in a house like a sitting duck. There were times when he seemed more an elder brother than a friend. “A car can also turn into a fortress,” he’d go on, “and very tempting it is to let it, but you have to know when to abandon it and move on foot,” a course that had no attraction for me, though who wouldn’t see the sense of it?

  Maybe I always felt more relaxed on going west, but after Huntingdon the road was clogged with traffic, and between an endless juggernaut and the central reservation a deep and pitiful yawn seemed to come from my own mouth, or more like as if someone below the rear seats was about to expire. I’d let no tramp on board since leaving home, but the sound made me speed up almost to a ton, and on to a service station signalled a mile ahead, so as to find out what it was. A scuffling behind was as if whoever it was had decided to hang a few hours longer onto life, but I daren’t turn my head in case a collision plunged us both into an inferno, so I overtook more lorries before cutting into the slipway and off the road.

  Dismal had pulled off his old trick of flattening into the well below the back seat so as not to be seen in the mirror, willing himself into invisibility.

  I opened the door. Calling him sheepish was just about right, as he flopped his big body out to do a piss against the very expensive car next to mine, letting go so copiously I was forced to hold my right foot back from giving him the sharpest kick of his pampered experience. All I could think of was that I must drive back to Upper Mayhem and put him into the care of Clegg where he belonged. But the place was too far away by now, and the delay might stop me getting to Peppercorn Cottage before nightfall, apart from me being too superstitious to turn on my tracks. On the other hand, taking such a huge dog with me would cut the food supplies by half, if not two-thirds. If I turned him loose he would fend for himself at the dustbins behind the cafeteria before setting out. Or maybe a kind animal lover would take him home for a huge meal, before setting him free to find his way back. Even better if the dog lover had a conscience and, seeing Dismal’s name and phone number on his collar, drove him home in the style to which he had too long been accustomed. I thought of driving off, but the picture of him charging after me on the motorway and getting mangled by a white van was more than I could bear.

  Even so, had anyone heard of a man on the run with a nodding and farting dog that weighed at least a hundred pounds in the back of his car that wasn’t made of rubber? Having long since decided to accept whatever came by chance or destiny I looped a length of thin chain through his collar and tied him to the dog post while I went inside for a cup of tea, hoping he’d be shanghaied in the interim.

  No such luck. He snapped up one of the cupcakes I’d intended eating later, paper and all. If I served him swamp cabbage and crow I don’t think he’d know the difference. “Dismal,” I said sternly, “get in.”

  With an expression that managed to be both sly and sad, he laughed himself into comfort along the whole of the back seat as if in his rightful home at last.

  I drove onto the road and, like the captain of a ship trying to get around Cape Horn, went on making westing. The weather was fine, high cloud up ahead and not too thick at that, a day for travelling dry and covering distance. After crossing the M1 I noticed a black hatchback on my tail, an English model, with the same advantage as me from the driving seat. “Dismal, we’re in trouble.” The only response was a long yawn and simultaneous fart, as if the two motions were controlled by the same press button somewhere in his stomach.

  I doodled along to make sure the hatchback stayed with me. He wasn’t always right behind, though rarely where I was out of his sight. I placed myself like an old aged pensioner between two juggernauts, the gap in both directions too small for my pursuer to interpose. He couldn’t stay side on because there was always a white van to hustle him along, so he had to get some way up front. Unless it was a manoeuvre to deceive me into thinking I was no longer followed. Either way, it allowed me to fork left at Exit One onto a dual carriageway signposted Rugby, by when he was too far ahead to follow.

  A few miles later I swung right at a big island onto a B road, pulling up when it was safe to find out from the map where I was. Turf had been skinned off a field and stacked at the edge like chocolate rolls. Bees at the hedge blossom weren’t fighting over a flower, one waiting outside until the other had taken a look, before going in for its own portion. If only people could be as civilised, I thought, but on the other hand how dull life would be if they were.

  Right once more on threading a village, I got over the M6 recently forked from, and at a roundabout set off on Watling Street to do a wide sweep west-north-west through the heart of the Midlands, which road I should have taken in the first place, because I’d long been familiar with it.

  I considered myself sufficiently safe from the black hatchback to stop at a service compound and feed myself, as well as my passenger who, unrolling from the car, nudged my left ankle with his box-like snout to indicate that the hunger was mutual.

  Another of Bill’s precepts was that subordinates should always be fed first (especially, I supposed, when it had concerned himself) so I went into the café for a
ration of chips, half a dozen bangers, an eccles cake, and a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock for Dismal which I poured into one of my camping mess tins, then laid the food out for him on the ground. He was too busy scoffing to take a blind bit of notice but I said: “Dismal, you’ll be on short commons from now on. You’ve had it too soft in the last three years.”

  Either he couldn’t believe I’d be so callous, or was too engrossed in lapping and slurping to care. After his piss had scorched the paint off a smart new Peugeot I smacked him back in the car and, because it was getting on for four and my guts were hollow, went in to feed myself on a teatime breakfast and pot of coffee at a table littered with cake packets, fag ends and crumbs.

  I made Dismal give up his luxury couch and sit in the front passenger seat so as to fox any hatchback driver into thinking twice before tackling two grown men, especially one as ugly and menacing as my favourite dog.

  If the Green Toe Gang did know of Moggerhanger’s hideout at Peppercorn Cottage (and I was sure they did) they would have realised on losing me that I was heading in that direction, so I changed my mind about getting there by nightfall, since some of the gang might already be in residence and waiting for my arrival. I was beyond Tamworth by the time this thought hit me, showing how empty the brain can become while driving, though it had been necessary to treat the road with caution, with occasional young bloods shooting by at over a hundred.

  Where he came from I’ll never know, but the black hatchback was behind me again. Nor was I sure how long he had been. Maybe it wasn’t the same one as before, but part of a radio controlled screen spread across the Midlands to keep track and relay my progress back to headquarters, meanwhile passing me from one to the other and pissing themselves at my inability to lose them.

  South of Lichfield I turned off for the middle of Birmingham. The one on my tail followed, of course, as I kept to the minor road through Sutton Coldfield and went on to the centre of the connurbation, Dismal nodding at my wisdom and cunning. Overtakers on a bit of motorway risked their necks, and sometimes mine, in trying to find out whether or not he was really made of rubber. Dismal was doing the part so well he must have seen such a dog in another car, and was now trying to imitate it.

  A ring road strangulated the small centre of Birmingham, a Ben Hur racing track of about three miles. I knew it from driving Frances to a medical conference, her hotel right in the tight knot of the middle. I couldn’t find out how to get into it, and lost count of the times I had to slog around the circuit, but chuffed at having got there at last. “After more swearing than Uncle Toby ever did in Flanders,” she had said, disliking my curses. “I don’t know who this Uncle Toby was,” I said, “but he’d have cursed more blind than me if he’d had to find this place.” Anyway, she was not ungrateful when I finally pulled up at the hotel.

  I knew the system better now, but still did the round several times to make sure the hatchback stayed behind. It did. He was lulled. I noted each set of traffic lights, and supposed that sooner or later the glow would be on green for me, and red for my pursuer. Then I’d lose him.

  It took time to do each lap, since the evening rush hour seemed to start in the afternoon, but this was good because now and again I put another car behind me, so nippy was I with the Picaro, though the hatchback driver stuck to me like you-know-what to a blanket, and resumed his place.

  I led him on what might be called a dance, and enjoyed it. Why was he chasing me? To kill me? Wait to get me on a remote lane and let me have a bullet in the head? I thought not. They were after Moggerhanger, and since Greece assumed that every motor trip I did was on his business. Now they were tracking me to find out not only where I was going but what load I would pick up, so as to get their hands on it and, at the same time, put the kibosh on me.

  Not if I knew it. I was in my element. I clipped a red light, and the hatchback had to stay behind. I ignored the next left turn into the middle, but took the one after, soon out and unfollowed to the far side of the ring road. In a few minutes I was belting through the urban jungle of Smethwick.

  It was immaterial where I went. In fact I got enjoyably lost till I came to Tipton, and though a right tip it looked, the smell of smoke and curry made me salivate. In Wolverhampton I picked up the A41 and headed north. No more hatchback.

  By half past six, after a few stops for Dismal to do what a dog had to do, and knowing that all I needed to do was eat and sleep, I decided to get bed and breakfast at a small town called Blackchapel. I walked into a pub-hotel with Dismal on his lead, telling the woman behind the bar that I wanted a room for me and my dog.

  Her features screwed up, as if he’d had already done a good job by her feet and she’d been told to carry it away. I calmed her anxiety. “He’s house trained. You don’t need to worry about him on that score.”

  “It’s fourteen pounds bed and breakfast, per person,” she said. “I can’t think what to charge for the dog.”

  “You’d better make it the same. He’ll eat at least one breakfast.”

  She smiled, as I peeled off six fivers and told her to keep the change. “He looks a lovely dog, though. Is he yours?”

  “I didn’t kidnap him.”

  “That’d take some doing, a big thing like that.”

  The room, with two single beds, overlooked the high street, and Dismal, who to my knowledge hadn’t been in a hotel before, was finding it full of marvels, plodding around the bathroom, sniffing under each bed, and finally banging his weighty tail against the wardrobe door until, looking as tired as I was, though he’d done nothing to reach that state, stretched on one of the beds with a sigh and a yawn, while I lay for an hour on the other, knackered after my first day on the run, well pleased at my success in having survived this far.

  Dismal’s body resembled a relief model of the Malvern Hills, an occasional ripple along his backbone hinting of their long dead volcanic disturbance, though I knew it to be due to canine subterranean dreams. Having chosen the bed nearest the door, he would be shot first should anyone come into the room, his body forming a sufficient barricade for me to put in the second round and make my getaway.

  I washed, and took man’s best friend down to the bar for another pint of Dandelion and Burdock (or its equivalent) with a jar of the best bitter for me. A couple of locals at the counter, and a few at the tables close to mine, looked on Dismal slopping his favourite drink from the dog bowl. When he finished he laid his jaw-block onto my knees, and knowing what he meant, I took him to the gents in the backyard for what I needed as well.

  Blackchapel was quiet when we walked out to find a place for supper, except for a dozen women demonstrating with placards outside the public library saying: ‘Save our hospital’ and ‘No to the cuts’—a common sight in Thatcher’s Britain, or maybe it was only modern times, and people would soon be buying first aid kits and DIY surgery tools to operate on each other in the living room.

  A few youths looked on, as if they were, understandably, intending to rip up a few urinals and telephone boxes after the women had gone home. We came back almost to the hotel, and found an Indian restaurant across the road. Dismal didn’t have to be dragged in, because he loved curry, and with his penchant for beer he would have made a typical football hooligan. An appropriate scarf, and he would have been away.

  As it was, the waiters didn’t like the look of him, and I couldn’t blame them, but when I ordered a full meal for him as well as for myself, and told them to lay his by my chair, they did so willingly enough. The only other people in the place was a couple at the next table, the well-built man about fifty and the slender rather bony woman in her late thirties. “Nice animal you’ve got there.” He was just audible above the crackle of Dismal’s poppadoms.

  “He is,” I said, “and he’s as human as if he’s my brother. Do you live in this town?”

  “Good God, no. We’re on our way to North Wales. Going for a little holiday, aren’t we, pe
t?”

  “If you say so, George.” She didn’t seem to like the prospect, and fingered the multicoloured beads across her chest. “I still don’t know whether we’ve done the right thing.”

  “What right thing was that?” I asked the man.

  She turned her fully soured face onto me. “That’s it, ask him, you just ask him. Happen he’ll be able to tell you.”

  “You did want to come away, Edna, you know you did,” George said to her. “You can’t say you didn’t.”

  “I know I did.” She was uncertain, and peevish. “I can’t go back now, though, can I? Willy’s already home from work.”

  “Never mind, love, you’ll be all right with me.”

  They’d eaten little of their meal, and now held hands. “I know I shall,” Edna said, “but he’ll be ever so upset, coming home to an empty house.”

  “And he has every right to be, but that’s not my problem. Nor is it yours, either, is it, love? We’ve done it, haven’t we?”

  “We have,” she said, “but I just don’t like people to be upset, especially Willy. We did live together nearly twenty years, you know, so it’s bound to come as a bit of a shock to him.”

  This was better than looking at the telly in the hotel lounge, and they didn’t seem to care that I was listening. Even Dismal’s head went to and fro between his belches, at the same time eating every grain of rice and chunk of beef. Then he gazed sadly at the couple’s leftovers, as if he hadn’t been fed for a month, till George took the hint and laid them down. “I do love you, Edna,” he said. “More than Willy ever did.”

  “He didn’t know any better, did he? But he did his best, according to his lights. He hit me a time or two, though I never knew what for.”

  “He won’t do that to you anymore. A man should never hit a woman, not even now and again. But that’s all in the past now, love. We’ll find a council in Wales that’ll give me a job. I’ve already written off to a few, and I’ve got good prospects. We’ll get a room somewhere at first, then rent a nice little bungalow. And if your bloody Willy comes looking for us I’ll knock his block off. I’ll send him on his way all right. I never knew he’d hit you till you told me just now.”