The Man Who Travelled on Motorways

by Trevor Hoyle

  The drab moors under the shroud of mist were now safely behind them. The car was once again within Gorsey Dene’s control, proceeding sanely along lighted streets. They passed by closed and barred shops, passed darkened rows of terraced stone houses with the street lighting reflecting in their dead windows, passed garages with desolate forecourts: all of this silent under the yellow street lights; the stone, the tarmac, the concrete garage forecourt working hard at it just to exist. Behind and above the clean-paved well-lit streets the moors waited, biding their time.

  Gorsey Dene said with plainly-felt relief, ‘Nearly there.’

  She could see his hands on the wheel, illuminated by the passing lights, but not his head. Her back and buttocks were numb from the drive – encased, to all intents and purposes, in thick hard rubber which placed sensation at one remove, so to speak. The feeling reminded her of states of drunkenness when the face is foreign to the touch, almost as if one’s fingers were covered in woollen stuff and thus prevented from making naked contact. It brought to mind also her departure abroad: a snowblown airport carpark with the tip of her nose deadened and disembodied pressed into Creely’s icy cheek. Flakes of snow had scattered their lashes that day, making the world seem magical and wonderful, each of them enclosed in warm clothing, huggable and bulky. (Three days later he was off to Spain.) Then standing at the broad slanting windows they had looked out to the aircraft semi-obscured by the flurries of snow; and Jay had started to cry even while telling herself that his callous, shallow heart was undeserving of it. It was the end of an era, the close of a chapter: that was what made her cry. She would never see him again, or, if she did, he would be different, not the same, unrecognisable, another person.

  ‘This is Saddleworth,’ Gorsey Dene said inconsequentially.

  ‘Is it really,’ Jay said. ‘Well I never. Would you believe it. I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs.’

  ‘We didn’t manage to get an hotel after all.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Jay said, opening a new packet of menthol cigarettes. She felt utterly depressed. When the nightdrive had begun it had been exciting, a fast mysterious ride in the dark, a man close enough to touch; but now it was merely the end of another era, the close of another chapter.

  His letters too (Gorsey Dene’s letters) had been, like him, inconsequential. They had been so pathetic in fact that she had burnt them after only a cursory scan. In lieu of a sense of humour and native wit he had taken to calling her by the names of certain popular film stars as though by so doing she would be endowed with their qualities and flattered by the comparison. In truth the gimmick bored her stiff. It was weak, mean-minded, and devoid of any innate natural charm. For a start she didn’t look anything like Kim Novak, having the wrong eye-colour, hair-colour, height and build. Just who did he think he was trying to fool?

  Now with Dmitri it had been very different. She could see his brown face with the gentle mocking sneer, the indifferent eyes, the restless hands with the square-cut nails. He had known what he was about, treating her as capably as he handled the Pentax and Nikon. When she had had to leave (or felt that she should leave) he had seen her on her way under suffrance: the epitome of self-assured callousness. And that was how Jay liked to be treated. What was the point of a soft-as-shit man?

  RK – as she preferred to call him – had had more than a taint of the bastard in him too. They had met in Trieste Station as the Trans-Orient Express squealed and rattled over the points on the start of its thirty-two hour journey to Calais. By the time it had reached Milan Central they had established an easy, bordering on the intimate, relationship; Jay had been glad initially to have someone to talk to, though it wasn’t long before the snide, flippant, insidious streak in his nature began to attract her deeply. They shared a lunch pack that RK had bought, galloping down the platform the full length of the train to a man in a white coat and striped hat pushing a trolley: bread, chicken, fruit, cheese, jam, a curious kind of compressed meat which neither of them wanted, and a small bottle of weak red wine. In Brig they were joined in the 2nd Class compartment by three Swiss and one French, all women. The French woman was merry with drink and made certain remarks about one of the Swiss ladies who, it transpired, was a devout Catholic. She produced from her valise a brilliantly-coloured picture of the Archangel Michael whom the French lady insisted on confusing with Michelangelo, a wicked glint in her eye. The Catholic woman’s companion was a girl of tremendous proportions who sat with arms massively folded and scowled straight ahead from beneath glowering brows. Throughout this exchange Jay and RK, seated opposite one another by the window, had secretly smiled into each other’s eyes, a conspiracy of amusement, and, approaching Lausanne, two minutes precisely before eleven o’clock, had walked together along the swaying corridor in search of a couchette.

  The train stopped in the station and fell silent. Outside it was deathly quiet (even the silence was muffled by the snow) and calmly beautiful. The hard clear station light bathed the snow-covered ground-level platform in perfectly even intensity. Jay leaned through the window, craning her neck to look along the train, and Rhet pressed his pelvis into her buttocks. She felt the hard lump grinding into her and the fluid of her bowels shifted. Then his hands went underneath her arms and clasped her breasts. His warm strange breath fluttered in her ear and she felt her chest straining for air; should she or shouldn’t she? The dilemma was academic, since Jay’s method of deciding whether to accept or reject an experience was to sample it first and decide later.

  The sampling completed, they lay and talked about their lives as the train passed through Vallorbe, Dole, Dijon and arrived in the dead morning light at Paris Lyon. It was during this period that she recounted the events of the previous months with Dmitri – a story that Rhet had scandalously re-told in the guise of an anecdote about a supposed photographer-friend. She might have blushed for shame (she wasn’t at all sure that she hadn’t blushed) had not Rhet’s manner of telling it tickled her sense of humour. Gorsey Dene’s very innocence made the incident that much more hilarious: the gingy dupe’s suspicions had been thoroughly off-beam and his ineffectual perturbations had been a sight to behold. But RK had sailed close to the wind in describing her in such detail – a single slip of the tongue would have been fatal, consigning the two of them to a miserable, lonely fate, stranded at the side of the road with nine pieces of luggage. As it was she was snugly ensconsed in the passenger seat, her travels intact and securely lodged in her brain: a series of events, happenings and experiences that she might return to again and again in future times.

  ‘Is it good to be back?’ Gorsey Dene asked, though she only just succeeded in deciphering the question; his voice was oddly muffled. Perhaps he was sickening for a cold.

  ‘Mm-mm,’ Jay replied inconclusively.

  ‘Of course you’ll be used to the cold, won’t you?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  They were stopped at traffic lights on a deserted street. The buildings seemed to be asleep, slumbering under their shadowed eaves. A solitary glow reflected on the polished floors behind the glass of Woolworths. Disjointed fragments of the traffic lights were smeared wetly on the tarmacadamed road: everything was still.

  Used to the cold, Jay thought with a secret silent tremor of humour. If only he could see the colour of my body … just as Creely had seen it in the depths of the cornfield on that sunshiny day with the insects whittering and hopping among the close-packed stalks. Marks and weals had remained on her back for a lengthy period of time, Joyful reminders of that day when – yes, she had to admit it – she had very nearly been in love with him. Any man who treated her as he had done deserved to be worshipped. The impact had been virtually instantaneous, from that first motorway cafeteria meeting in the early hours of the morning when she had found herself sitting opposite him. The look of his hands had made her desire him at once, and the soft, haunted, assured expression in his eyes had confirmed the lightness of her judgement. And yet it was neither of these things specifi
cally – nor any other specific thing – which gave him the intense attractiveness she felt for him. It was none of these things and in a sense all of them. Not the colour of his eyes nor the shape of his head nor the manner in which he conducted himself; very simply it was that when she looked into his eyes she knew immediately what he was, and what he was accorded with what she herself felt inside. At once she knew what to talk about, without any hesitation or uneasiness, and the way in which it should be expressed. Neither, at the same time, was it necessary to utter a word: they could have remained silent, nicely at ease, and yet maintained a communion of spirits. To this day she still retained a visual impression of the stark setting against which they had faced one another, the bare halls crowded with shuffling people moving forward half-a-shambling-step at a time, the cruel fluorescent lights, the dirt and rubbish of social transaction covering the grime-ingrained floor, the squares of the windows like shiny black mirrors reflecting the chaos inside – all of it a waking nightmare in which he had been a dream-image with beautiful hands and expressive eyes.

  Trust Gorsey Dene to spoil it.

  Blundering in like a drunken rhino (yet mole-like in his demeanor) he stood over the table and insisted that he knew her, or, more correctly, had known her, calling her Ryl, to which she would only respond with blank-eyed amazement. He trotted out some incoherent tale of their having lived in adjacent rooms, babbling away ten-to-the-dozen with flecked lips and flickering eyes, intent on convincing her that he was who he said he was and that she, sometime in the dim-remembered past, had occupied the room next to his.

  ‘I remember your room clearly,’ he had said, leaning earnestly over the table, his bloodless knuckles kneeling on the worn formica. ‘It was always so neat and bright, like a new pin. Cosy too. You had lots of warm colours and soft fabrics.’ He breathed excitedly. ‘There was a big bow window in your room that looked out over the main road. It faced east so that the sun came into it in the morning. It was a room that caught the morning sun; a morning-sun room. Mine was at the back,’ he ended lamely.

  She had looked into Creely’s eyes and smiled gently, dismissively, and he too had smiled, reading her thoughts. The clatter and bustle of the cafeteria continued, surrounding the two of them in a cocoon of tranquility. Gorsey Dene had – typically – appeared not to notice it, neither did he seem aware of the effect his lumbering intrusion had had. With flushed face and soft lips a-tremble he stood waiting for further response far longer than any reasonable hope might have led him to expect. In short he was a plain nuisance. But being a person on whom the ground rules of behaviour and decorum were completely lost it was futile (they both knew it) to raise the point or press it home. Anything less than an especially deadly bomb would not have achieved the desired effect.

  Eventually he did go, and it was to be several months before Jay came into contact with him.

  She watched his puny hands on the wheel; had it not been for their control of the car they (the hands) would have been powerless. The wrists were thin and hairless. Above them his head seemed a dark shadowed bulk, disproportionate to the rest of his body. What a queer specimen to have become embroiled with. Never, in all the time of their acquaintance, had she experienced the magic thrill, the breathless battering-ram shock of absolute oneness with him. Even the small private jokes were passed carefully from hand to hand, levity measured out in prescribed doses. He was totally alien, this Gorsey Dene, an unknown entity, an android. She doubted, sometimes, whether he was really human. While others communicated directly he did so via an unseen gallery of appreciative wags who greeted his sallies with unheard applause and bestowed adoring and unqualified approval. Thus the second party, the recipient of these gems, was merely a tiresome adjunct, a conversational appendage to the main proceedings, ie: Gorsey Dene talking for the benefit of his own self, the role of the other person being that of the butt, the sounding-board, the foil. Were she this instant to feed him a line he would strive mightily to turn a triple somersault, confusing himself and confounding them both with a dazzling pyrotechnic display signifying nought.

  The lights changed from red to green. The question was, where was Creely now? As last reported he had left his wife and children and driven off, never to return, and knowing him he would almost certainly stick by his resolve. Perhaps he had looked in the evening paper and found a flat on the south side of town and was even at this moment preparing a makeshift meal in a grotty basement where the sun never shone. Did that fit the pattern? Jay asked herself. Was he likely to shut himself away from the light like a ground-burrowing mammal? Strange things happened to the human mind under stress. Perhaps (it was feasible) he had gone clean off the rails, was now a hopeless psychiatric case in desperate need of care and attention. For it was an odd thing that as she had grown in confidence and aggressiveness he had faded into insignificance, become a pallid simulacrum of his former self, almost as if he had deliberately effaced himself and lost all traces of personality. In some respects, towards the end, he had become so insignificant and featureless as to resemble a grease spot. But where was he now? Jay wondered, worrying the question as though an answer might materialise out of the thin, dark, rushing air. Would it ever be possible to find him in the outer suburbs of Manchester or wherever he had scuttled to? Indeed, were she to locate him, would he still be recognisable? Tales of people disappearing without trace, of changing shape, of being lost in a sterile limbo were not uncommon –

  They were passing now through Oldham. The quiet streets were interrupted by the scudding roar of the exhaust banging back and forth from building to building. The night sky seemed very low, a matter of a few feet above the tunnel of yellow light in which they were travelling. Jay said:

  ‘You must be tired after the long nightdrive.’

  There was barely a flicker of response; a grunt perhaps; nothing more. Jay said again:

  ‘You must be tired after the long nightdrive.’

  This time a definite movement of the shadowed bulk of the head and a sort of a croaking form of reply – in the affirmative. He must be tired, Jay thought, after the long nightdrive. Several minutes passed without further sound. There was nothing more to say. Then, so faint as to make her doubt her hearing, Jay thought she heard something. Out of the corner of her eye she tried to watch him without his being aware of it but all she could see was a vague black bulk merged with the dark interior of the car. She turned her head fully to stare but could see no more. She had the feeling that something was crouching there in the darkness, waiting, and occasionally whimpering to itself.

  III

  But how was he to make sense of all this? Of course he had a plan (who didn’t have a plan!) but the trouble was he didn’t believe in plans. He believed in very little, in fact; hardly anything at all if the truth were known. He had once believed in success – until he had had a taste of it – but it soured the mouth, as it must do of all those who aspire to rise above the level of the merely superficial or do not seek the tedious thrill of continuous masturbation. But yes, on reflection, and to be honest, he did believe in some things: loneliness and despair, both of which he had experienced one Friday evening last summer. Come to think of it, the events of last summer had been terrible – because he realised for the first time in his life that his life was finite. Strangely enough, what made him realise this was that on that certain Friday evening his life had stretched away endlessly into the infinite distance: featureless, grey, without hope. That was what made him realise his life was finite.