Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  Keep your eyes on the road, Sue!

  Me:

  Fuck’s SAKE!

  Anna:

  Just concentrate on driving!

  Me:

  Jesus Christ, that bloody dog!

  Anna:

  Is her arse supposed to be blue?

  TAUNTON DEANE SERVICES

  is a civilized bijou outlet – a series of dark low-rise buildings accessible through a cobbled entranceway lined with picnic benches for the discerning outdoors eater. By the time I pulled in, Parker was standing in her seat, a long thread of greenish saliva hanging from her mouth. I unclipped her and took her for a walk, whereupon she threw up again and shot out about a litre of sand-coloured diarrhoea. I cleaned her with a pack of moist fragranced toilet tissues while enjoying the chorus of ‘Bake!’ that greeted me from my fellow motorists. ‘Yes! Bake!’ I shouted back weakly, dabbing at my pet’s weeping arsehole.

  Half an hour later I returned to the car. Anna was listening to something on Radio 4, eyes closed, with all the windows open. I popped Parker on a fresh blanket, clipped her back into her seat belt and we headed off again.

  EXETER SERVICES

  is, I think, out of all the services on the M5, my favourite. Not only is it large, with a children’s play area, grassy knoll and multiple fast-food outlets, it also has a Ladbrokes, should you wish to place a bet on whether the A30 will be gridlocked all the way to Land’s End. By the time we reached it the day was fading, and with it our hopes of making it down much further west. The back seat was coated in a toxic combination of poo and puke – pooke, if you will – and the footwell in front of it was swilling with gob. Anna had gone into shock and was now silent, trying to get her head around the fact her beloved car was being destroyed, slowly, from the inside out. It was the same routine as the other services: dog out, moist towelette, water if she wanted it, more shit/sick, moist towelette, ‘Oi, isn’t that Mel from Bake Off?’ vomit, moist towelette, ‘Oi, Mel, BAKE!’ buckle her up and off.

  It was pitch black by the time we neared Exeter. All plans had been abandoned. Anna was starting to get a headache from the smell and we both felt distinctly nauseous. We had rowed ourselves hoarse and now fell back into a tense silence.

  It was then that Parker detonated.

  Yes, detonated. I really don’t have another word for it. She went off like a canine grenade. It was an eruption the like of which I have never seen before or since. Every pore in her body leaked something foul. It hit the windows, the driver’s seat, the passenger seat – it sprayed every conceivable corner of the car.

  Anna broke the silence.

  Anna:

  I’m going to stay in a hotel. Drive me to a hotel.

  Me:

  Please, don’t do that. We’ll go to our mate Michele’s. She’s nearby. She’ll help.

  Anna:

  Fine. Don’t talk to me.

  Me:

  OK.

  Anna:

  I said don’t talk to me.

  I pulled over. I unbuckled the dog and let her pad around the pavement.

  ‘On your marks, get set …’ shouted a passing motorist.

  ‘BAKE!’ I hollered back, before turning once more to my sopping hound.

  ‘Is there anywhere on or in this car – anywhere AT ALL – you haven’t shat?’ I screamed partly to the dog and partly to the heavens.

  Almost as if in response, Parker turned a rheumy eye towards me and fired a cannon of liquid shit against the wheel arch. It went on and on and on – like something out of a Little Britain sketch. Then all went quiet again.

  Suddenly I noticed that there were spots of blood all over the pavement, blood over the wheel, blood over the dog. I panicked. I popped her back in her seat and shut the door and drove off like a nutter in search of an emergency vet.

  What I didn’t do was buckle up the dog.

  By now it was raining – driving, driving rain. Parker was retching in time to the windscreen wipers. I felt exhausted and teary, but I stayed focused. Just a few more miles until we reached our mate – I could drop Anna off, then get the dog to a vet.

  The motorway was busy with all the erratic stop-and-start stuff you get with bad weather. We were going at around sixty miles an hour when Parker, fresh from another rectal sneeze, decided she had had enough. She was ill and upset and she wanted to sit with her mum.

  So she did.

  Unfettered by a seat belt, she clambered between the two front seats and thence made the attempt to get onto my lap. In doing so, she kicked the gearbox into sudden and shocking neutral. There was a roar, a loss of power, and I struggled to pull us over onto the hard shoulder amid the traffic.

  The engine stalled. I tried the ignition. Nothing. Again. This time it turned over. I crawled the rest of the way – power steering ripped, the electrics erratic, the clutch – don’t go there.

  I don’t know exactly what happens when your clutch burns out on a motorway, but I do know how much it costs.

  £2,500 (and counting).

  There was also £300 on valeting, though some days you can still catch the odd whiff in the air.

  As for Parker, she had colitis. I don’t know exactly what colitis is, but I do know how much it costs.

  £1,200 for a weekend stay at the vet’s on a drip. (She is now, thankfully, right as rain.)

  And now, whenever we go anywhere, wherever we go – we take my car.

  It’s not only my poor eyesight and tendency towards the erratic which make my driving less than perfect. I also suffer from road rage. Outside a car I pride myself on being a reasonable, tolerant, empathetic human being. Inside one I am an animal. A vile, invective-spewing animal. I have been run off the road. I have stood, nose to nose, screaming at a fellow motorist in the middle of the A406. I am not proud of these things.

  In a car I think I am Jason Statham – although, I mean, I don’t put on the voice or anything weird like that.* In a car I become this totally focused tank of aggressive fervour. I’m a pedal-to-the-metal nut job. I’m a wheel-spinning high-revving hot-rodder. I steer with the palm of my hand and scream and shout at every single junction. I mean, I really think I am Jason Statham – although, I mean, I don’t invent scenarios or anything weird like that.† I don’t shout, ‘I’m the Transporter! Get out of my way, bitches – I’ve got to get a pint of skimmed milk from the garage before it closes!’

  One day around about four years ago I was in the car heading to the supermarket. Actually, in truth, I don’t remember where I was going or indeed if there was any urgency about the trip. It was broad daylight. The sun was shining. It was a bright day – a very, very bright day – the sheer, unforgiving brightness of it will become significant later.

  The arterial roads near my flat are narrow and lined with Audis. Every day is German Automotive Superiority Day in Hampstead, north London. It was the school run and I’d had a nightmare getting out of my road; I could feel the veins in my neck twisting like rope with the tension. My face flushed. In front of me appeared hazard after hazard – parking lorries, darting kids, dogs off leads.

  I started with a few generic ‘piss offs’, just to warm up, get my eye in. Then I proceeded to work through a couple of light-to-medium-grade slurs on parental legitimacy and IQ. The car in front of me failed to indicate – I let loose a smattering of what the 1970s British Board of Film Classification would deem ‘sexual swear words’.

  By the time I hit Downshire Hill, some three min
utes from my flat, I was ready to kill. I pulled in to let a lorry pass. The driver didn’t thank me. He got a middle finger and a ‘Screw you, mate’ for his trouble.

  Then I saw it, a showroom-fresh spanking-new Mercedes – top of the range and glinting in the sun. Its bonnet buffed by a thousand lackeys. From where I sat, engine idling, it appeared to fill the entire width of the road – towering over me at the top of the hill while I waited like a supplicant in an old banger at the bottom.

  It came upon me like an electrical storm, hard and fast – a potent mix of class war and pure envy. I was the last in a long line of Perkinses doffing their caps to their Lords and Masters in a daisy chain of generational oppression, and I wasn’t having it.

  I wasn’t having any of it.

  This was one game of chicken I could afford to lose, I thought. So what if my car got scratched? It was scratched already. So what if it got written off? Its resale value was maybe a couple of hundred quid. Who cares?

  I put the car into first and started up the hill. The Merc didn’t tuck in. The obstruction was their side of the road but they didn’t tuck in. I casually flicked some double digits and carried on. Second gear now, and still no sign of them backing down. I worked a combo of V-signs and F-bombs as I started to accelerate. They continued forward.

  Just one more chance for them to pull in, just one more space – I was now leaning forward, my boiled face randomly spewing every epithet I’d ever heard, like a four-letter fruit machine.

  You seismic shit-splat!

  You cock-juggling thunder-quim!

  You deliquescent dick-cheese!

  But they don’t take that chance. They’re coming straight for me.

  We were locked in. No backing down. We now had to try and pass one another on this bright, double-parked, German-lined street. I was slamming my fists on the wheel as our bonnets met … and then …

  Then I pulled out a combination move I’d never tried before – double bird, single bird and multiple Vs. I followed this with a fast-cut series of mimes – gun to the head, noose around neck, machine gun spraying, grenade launching, howitzer firing – and, just as our windows met, I slowly drew my finger across my neck as if slicing it, and said, ‘You …

  Both of our windows were open, nothing more than a cigarette paper’s worth of space between us. And there, at the wheel, Esther Rantzen.

  … cunt.’

  The word dropped into her lap like a hot angry baby.

  Esther’s face was, for a second, the very model of bland acknowledgement. She was, after all, merely passing another vehicle, slowly, in a London street. She saw me and registered two things. First that it was me, someone she knows from the TV, and second that the person she knows from the TV was miming cutting her throat while uttering possibly the most offensive and certainly the most visceral word in the English language. Something crossed her face – her eyes flickered a little, as if reacting to an alarm sounding in the distance. Later, I thought. Later she would process what had happened. Later she would realize what I’d said and what I’d done.

  My hand finished its action across my neck. It dropped to my knees like a stone.

  ‘Hi, Esther!’ I said, making the gear-change to jolly as our cars inched past. ‘Hi!’

  And then I was gone.*

  As I was finalizing the manuscript for this book, I was lent an entirely new perspective on cars, courtesy of the BBC show Top Gear. Top Gear isn’t a show I’ve ever really watched. For starters it’s about cars, so I’m only mildly interested from the get-go.

  Anyway, somebody, somewhere made up a story that I was in line to be the new presenter of Top Gear. If you didn’t already think that was a ridiculous idea, then hopefully the previous chapter has convinced you otherwise. Then the bookies got hold of the story and duly (even though it had no basis in truth) tipped me as favourite for the job. Suddenly, after years of peaceful existence on Twitter, my timeline was full of thick-necked white men in the twilight of their usefulness telling me that I should be dead. The general gist appeared to be, ‘Man do car, woman do cake.’ One tweeter even went as far as to say they’d like to see me set on fire.

  I’d never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member, said Woody Allen, paraphrasing Groucho Marx. Let me add to that. I’d never join a club that would like to see me burned to death, because that club sounds AWFUL.

  So I took myself off social media for a bit.

  Then the trolling story became front-page news. I said nothing. I just assumed that somebody, somewhere would say, ‘Don’t be silly, of course she isn’t the next presenter. Have you seen her? She can barely stand up straight, let alone operate machinery.’ But nobody did. So the more I appeared on the front pages, the more people thought I was indeed the next Top Gear presenter, and the more venom came my way. It became a Möbius strip of indignation.

  Sometimes I comforted myself by having imaginary conversations with those journalists in my head.

  Me:

  The thing is, this has all been rather upsetting.

  Journo:

  IT’S DISGUSTING. IT’S PC GONE MAD. YOU’RE A WOMAN, FOR GOD’S SAKE.

  Me:

  Yes. Yes I am.

  Journo:

  ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE METROPOLITAN LIBERAL ELITE USING POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION.

  Me:

  Listen …

  Journo:

  YET MORE BED-WETTING PINKOS DRIVING A RADICAL LESBIAN LEFTIST AGENDA.

  Me:

  The thing is –

  Journo:

  WOMEN CAN’T EVEN DRIVE! EVERYBODY KNOWS THEY DON’T HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS!!

  Me:

  Please …

  Journo:

  COME ON, SHOW ME YOUR THUMBS! SHOW ME YOUR THUMBS!

  A month later it all died down. Now all is quiet on my timeline again.

  So …

  I’m putting it out there. I’m the new presenter of Songs of Praise.

  Come and get me.

  I Am Become Cake, the Destroyer of Midriffs

  This is a photocopy of a project I did when I was a girl. I would like to start by addressing some comments to the teacher who marked it.

  Dear Teacher,

  Thank you so much for your feedback on my project. Here are some of my own notes, made some thirty-eight years after your markings.

  Firstly – disappointed? Really? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? My baker is making bread on a levitating bench!!!! How many of those do you see in catering situations? Plus, he/she is doing so while wearing a hat larger than their own torso. Those are tough conditions in which to create the perfect crusty cob.

  As for ‘Pictures would improve your project’ – well, Lady-Whose-Name-I-Can-No-Longer-Remember, you might want to take a look at all those funny things above your comments. Can you see them? They look suspiciously like pictures, don’t they? They do to me.

  Finally, on the ‘interesting’ front. You see that bird in the foreground? The picture of the bird? Well, it’s not going ‘cluck-cluck’ is it? If it was, it would be a chicken. But no, this bird is going ‘quack-quack’ because it is a duck. I am using DUCK’s eggs instead of common or garden HEN’s eggs. That is one hell of an enriched dough going on there FYI, lady …

  Anyhow, I do hope you are enjoying your retirement, which I have done a project on below. I’m sorry it doesn’t i
nclude any pictures.

  Yours,

  Susan Perkins, aged 45

  I was six years old when I did that project. We made bread at school, and I LIKED it. I liked it not only because it was messy, but messy in the best possible way – because you could actually eat the mess after you’d made it.

  I certainly didn’t need to do a project about cake to alert my senses to the thrill of sponge. I loved it. I loved it raw, I loved it cooked, I loved it warm, I loved it stale. I loved it so much that Granddad Smith used to trick me by holding out a teaspoon of pale brown goo for me to taste while Mum was baking, only for me to discover upon eating it that it wasn’t cake mix at all, but pokey English mustard.

  My earliest culinary experience was a batch of rock cakes I baked for my mum in the mid-1970s. The best thing one could say about those cakes was that they didn’t breach the Trade Descriptions Act, resembling, as they did, something you might get hit with should you lose your way in an asteroid belt. I had made a schoolgirl error – forgivable only by the fact I was actually a schoolgirl at the time. I had made the mixture according to the recipe, baked it until golden, but then failed to let the cakes cool. Instead, I slung them, piping hot, into a tin and Sellotaped the sides in preparation for Mother’s Day morning. I was thirty minutes and one wire rack short of perfection.

  My mother welled with pride as she opened the tin – she’s always been a fan of the home-made present. That pride lasted right up to the point her teeth started to fracture against the granite-like intensity of the bake.

  I didn’t need to be any good at baking, since Mum was such a good pragmatic cook – brought up on the commonsensical recipes of the late, great Marguerite Patten and Mary Berry (whatever happened to her?). Mum was, it’s fair to say, a master of mass catering – vast tray bakes, bubbling batter puddings the size of double duvets and undulating sheets of lasagne without end. There were usually only the five of us sitting down to eat, but I think the huge volumes of food were pre-emptive, precautionary – in case a coach full of starving football supporters happened to break down right outside the house. In which case, she, Ann Perkins, was ready to serve a piping-hot linear metre of cannelloni directly into the chops of a needy centre forward.