RAY LARCH OFTEN marvelled at the amount of traffic accidents that were possible. Their consequences he didn’t choose to think about, but such a consideration was inevitable once his mind turned in this direction. Such thoughts mostly occurred in the few hours when he wasn’t driving a taxi.
If he turned too quickly on a wet road, or failed to execute an emergency stop in time when a child ran into the road, or lost concentration and plunged into oncoming headlights, or drove recklessly while too close to the vehicle in front, or fell asleep on a motorway at night, or reversed over a toddler not visible in his rear view mirrors... The opportunities appeared infinite. And as a mere speck among millions of other motorists, from the moment he turned the ignition key he knew he risked an involvement in any number of incidents, at any time, as did every other motorist. It was a lottery, and every motorist had a ticket.
He guessed the clincher about the outcome of a potential accident involving him came down to his decisions and reactions, often made in less than a second, compounded by the decisions and reactions made by other motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. Considering the outcome of the wrong choice in either respect, there wasn’t much time to make a crucial choice of stop, accelerate, swerve or jump.
When he thought of the deaths, the disability, the physical torment and human misery of long term physical rehabilitation, the lifelong grief or invalidity that he could inflict through a traffic accident (in the amount of time it took a person to realise they were having an accident), he often wondered why he was even allowed to drive a car at all. Or why anyone else was allowed to drive one either.
He’d still had near misses. He had them all the time. He drove a private hire car seven days a week. He never slept more than five hours in any night and would haul himself, baffled and blinking, out of bed at 3am for an airport fare, or to pick up drunken girls in short skirts at the weekend when the clubs closed. The upskirt potential alone on those latter jobs could be the cause of any number of accidents, because every time he looked in the rear view mirror he wasn’t checking the traffic behind his car; while he endeavoured to glimpse gusset it would be so easy to jack-knife a tipsy pedestrian over the bonnet and bring an end to their days of unassisted mobility.
The more he thought about accidents, the more he also wondered why more vehicles out there were not suddenly crashing. Or why the entire network of roads did not become a long sequence of traffic accidents. Should drivers undergo the same fallibility assessments as train drivers and airline pilots? Or did that come down to a matter of scale?
We drive because we forget, he’d decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold paralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability: the very fragility of our bodies, of our wobbling heads packed with brain matter, mounted on a thin spinal column, the weakest link in the entire animal kingdom. And we forget how we are dependent upon those miniscule threads of nerve tissue that – once severed – lead to legs incapable of sensation, or wheezing apparatus standing sentinel at our white-sheeted bedsides. We forget the picture of the car smashed beneath the truck on the hard shoulder, and the blackened silhouette of a figure burned into its seat in a motorway pileup. We forget the vestiges of wreckage in a newspaper picture in which four teenagers died. We look away from the dirty, wilting flowers tied to metal railings on that corner you have to slow down for, if you know the road. In time, we even forget how we felt at the funeral of a child.
Our entire existence is contingent on forgetting horror. Maybe all of our repeat infractions as a species are based on not remembering the horror of past infractions. And Ray had even begun to forget the time he clipped a cyclist on Rocky Lane two years before.
He never stopped his car and after a sudden, metallic thunk against one of the passenger side doors, he barely heard anything else because of the volume of his radio. At the edge of his hearing, as he passed, there was a suggestion of keys being dropped onto the tarmac somewhere behind his car.
Ray had been doing at least forty miles per hour in a thirty, and weaving around a row of cars badly parked at the curb. But he never noticed the cyclist until the back of his jacket seemed to fill the windscreen.
The kid was black, he thought, though wasn’t sure. But he’d glanced into his rear view mirror and there was absolutely no cyclist in the road anymore. He’d put his foot down because he barely touched the guy, or so he told himself later. Not for a fraction of a second had he thought of stopping. Getting away had been the only conscious consideration.
When he decided against buying the next day’s Mail, Ray realised he did not want to know anything about the night before. He avoided television too and left the radio switched off for three entire weeks. By avoiding all local news, he felt he had not been involved in what might have happened to the cyclist. By the end of his self-imposed news blackout, he was nearly certain that only the cyclist’s knee had, in fact, been grazed by his car. The kid must have quickly turned his bicycle onto the pavement, which is why he had vanished from Ray’s rear view of the road. Ray told himself this so many times he almost believed it was the truth.
Three weeks after the incident, and long after the paint job on his car had dried, Ray was compelled to return to Rocky Lane on his way to a fare at Alexandra Stadium. There was still a great mound of flowers at the roadside at more or less the same place he had met the cyclist so unexpectedly.
When Ray made an offhand mention of the flowers on Rocky Lane at the taxi rank on Colmore Row, as he fiddled with his phone, he learned from another driver that he had indeed killed a teenager, who had been riding a mountain bike to the Hamstead chip shop, without a helmet or lights. The other driver wasn’t sure, but didn’t think there were any witnesses. “Fucking cyclists,” they’d both agreed, and rolled their eyes knowingly.
Ray had never again driven along Rocky Lane and still circumnavigated that entire estate if ever asked to pick-up or drop-off close to it. He’d also arrived at the conclusion that if we vividly remembered the misery of every cold, cut, and bruise, in anticipation of the next illness or misfortune, we would all go mad. Or we would all become inactive and unable to function. The ability to forget was a kind of advance braking system of the mind, and the effectiveness of his own surprised him.
So did the mad have perfect recall, or the ability to imagine the full horror of the consequences of existence? Now there is a thought, Ray thought, and turned into the street to pick up his next fare.
Ray had never made a pickup from this area of North Birmingham, and was unaware there were even houses standing in the area where Hockley became Aston and the Jewellery Quarter. The area was close to the city centre and remained a labyrinth of closed redbrick warehouses, revived industrial estates, hole-in-the-wall commercial interests attached to broader industries, interspersed with cash and carries, mostly closed retail units, developments of unsold flats, barely functioning churches and one or two old school Midlands pubs. But his satnav brought him to a small settlement of houses attached to a wall of Victorian red brick that had once been home to a local industry; the houses were opposite a patch of waste ground used for storing white commercial vans.
The residential side of the street was typical of a Midlands terraced row; permanently in shadow, slouched at the curb as unappealingly as a group of scruffy labourers stood in line for something soul destroying and poorly paid. This street had somehow escaped clearances, Luftwaffe bombs and gentrification.
The eight terraced houses also looked as though they had shuffled back from the road, as if they didn’t want to meet the eye of any passing motorist. Their dark, traffic-grimed windows and peeling window frames didn’t give much away about their interiors, and Ray would have guessed, at a glance, that they were unoccupied. From the rear of one of the properties, dirty black smoke rose into the sky suggesting a bonfire.
The man who came out of the terraced house numbered 129 came out with a smile that Ray found disproportionate to the prompt arrival of a ta
xi at his address. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and his feet looked too big for the pair of brown slippers he wore, which was odd because it was raining.
The tiny front garden of 129 was a wreck; filled with sodden cardboard boxes containing bottles, rusting tins, what looked like garden waste, and a kind of bracken that sprouted so high it obscured the ground floor sash window.
The call from the controller listed this address, the name John, and a landline phone number. “Wants taking to various places” was the only instruction. Beside the last piece of information, it was an ordinary enough job.
Ray watched the grinning elderly man make his way to the driver’s side window.
“Afternoon!” the man said, and then looked at a sky glooming towards a rainy dusk.
Ray nodded, and looked about the man’s person as if querying the lack of a jacket. “John, is it?”
“She’ll be out soon,” John said.
Perhaps the tatty bastard in slippers was not the passenger. Ray hoped so; he disliked the man’s half-smiling face. Unless they were attractive and female, or it was an airport fare, Ray found it hard not to greet every passenger with an attitude of weary, surly impatience. He didn’t particularly like this about his customer service, but he couldn’t help it. It is what working from seven until eleven did to those who provided a service to the general public.
Behind the thick spectacle’s lenses John’s eyes were alight with excitement. “I’ll need a hand with her.” He seemed surprised that Ray didn’t share his enthusiasm for the task.
Not a fucking wheelchair.
“You’ve a very special passenger this evening. You’re going all over. But she’ll look after you eventually.” The man winked to embellish this tantalising suggestion of a generous tip.
“Where to first, mate?” Ray climbed out of the car and wanted to hurry up the overgrown path to the house to escape the rain, which didn’t bother John at all. “How many places does she want to go?”
The man stopped and in a show of exuberance spread his arms wide as if to indicate vastness. “She knows where to take us. Where to start and where to finish.”
Ray took a second desultory inspection of the elderly man’s grey slacks, which looked to have once belonged to a suit, and were now held above his navel by a white plastic belt. A diamond patterned pullover was tucked into the waistband of the trousers. An oddball with an elderly relative, and the fare would probably be paid out of a mobility allowance. But he would have preferred clarification on both the destinations of the journey and an assurance that this man had enough money to pay for it. He adopted a quizzical facial expression as he waited for the man in the slippers to catch up with him on the front path.
“Yes, yes, she’s in there, waiting.” The man said, misreading Ray’s yearning for reassurance, while jabbing a stubby forefinger, yellowed with nicotine, at a black doorway. The man’s pullover stank of sweat. The front of his trousers were greasy.
Even now, Ray still came across pockets of the world that hadn’t changed and that reminded him of old films. This was one of them. And for good or ill, he knew houses were like people. Just as you never really know what goes on behind a face, you also have no idea what a home really looks like behind the façade.
“Takes me time to get her up. Taken me an age this year,” John said. “But she is raring to go now, I can tell you. And a lot of people are waiting for us.”
Ray didn’t ask what they were waiting for, because he wasn’t interested and had already decided to keep conversation to a minimum. Just get the job done. He wondered if his disgust at the living conditions inside the house were obvious, but then realised that he didn’t care if they were.
The house was cold and smelled of old bin bags and gas. And something else, like the odour that gathers around thunderstorms, which was stronger than the underlying smells of gas and waste.
One ceiling light was on in a rear room of the house and all of the curtains were drawn. What yellowy illumination existed was sufficient to indicate that John hadn’t taken the rubbish out of his dismal home in a while.
Following the shabby figure, Ray saw that a narrow track had been made in the living room, fashioned between bulging rubbish sacks and cardboard boxes packed with what looked like old clothes. Perhaps the man was in the rag trade.
Ray peered inside a box. A little girl’s dress and a pair of brown sandals were placed on top of other clothes inside pink plastic bags. The evidence of juvenilia in the man’s house inspired Ray to look about a bit more carefully. He peered into a second box and was relieved to see an adult man’s suede coat, a pair of broken glasses and some scuffed shoes.
The second room may once have been intended as a dining room, though any indication of the room’s former function had been obliterated by what looked a collection of every free paper printed in Birmingham within the old man’s lifetime.
“I’ll get her out the kitchen,” John said.
The entrance from the dining room to the kitchen was missing a door, and through the doorway Ray glimpsed a dark silhouette, as small as a child, soundlessly turn away from a counter before slipping deeper into the unlit kitchen. John vanished into the darkness as if in pursuit, but never switched on the light.
While John messed around in the kitchen out of sight, Ray peered about the dining room. In the background, he heard the old man say, “Your carriage awaits, your Highness.”
Ray thought about taking a picture of the room on his mobile phone for the other drivers at the coffee stand, but his anxiety about not being paid swamped any other inclination or thought. “Alright in there?” he asked the darkness. “Minimum fare is a fiver, mate.”
“Yes. Yes. Why wouldn’t it be? A lot of preparation has gone into this evening, so we don’t want any snags. And you’ll do a lot better than a fiver too, driver. You will be justly compensated.” This was said from inside the unlit kitchen with a tinge of sarcasm that made Ray suffer a sight disorientation at the man’s tone.
“Ain’t me that’s not ready,” he fired into the darkness. There was no reply.
A series of framed pictures on the dining room wall, half concealed by a bale of newspapers, caught Ray’s eye. There were two framed photographs of a middle-aged woman; the second picture featured John, though better dressed and well-groomed than he was now, sat beside the woman at what looked like a table in a restaurant. Dead wife, Ray thought without a trace of emotion. It was hard to see what the middle picture depicted, a painting that gave nothing away beside an impression of black smoke billowing up from something that burned in the section of the picture that was concealed. The smoke moved across a grey sky.
John returned from the kitchen wearing an anorak, with the hood pulled tight around his face, which made him look imbecilic. Held in his arms, the lid tucked beneath his chin, was a cane-work laundry basket painted yellow. “If you get the other side, I think we can manage.” The lid was secured to the bottom with green gardener’s twine.
“What is...?” Ray started to ask, but didn’t know how to finish.
“It’s all I’ve got that’s big enough. And it will suffice. Now, you must drive very carefully, you understand? I hope that was explained to you.”
“We going to the laundrette?”
What he’d suggested was offensive enough for the elderly man’s face to darken with rage, before he said, “Just get the other side!”
Ray soon felt like he was carrying the entire weight of the heavy basket on his back, while John muttered instructions – “Be careful. Careful! That’s it. Careful” – as they picked a path through the rubbish on the floor. Whatever was inside the basket was also living. Maybe some kind of animal. Ray felt it skittering around inside the cane basket; perhaps seeking a way out, or a stable surface, in the way animals do in transit. Probably a dog. Was that what he had seen in the kitchen? A dog?
“This a rare breed or something, mate?”
“You have no idea of her value.”
“Ain’t yo
u got no cage?”
John ignored the question.
Outside at the car, after much fussing, the old man clipped himself and the wicker basket into respective seat belts in the rear of Ray’s car, which quickly filled with the odour of the old man’s sweat. Ray climbed into the driving seat and cracked a window.
“Please close that, in case she... it’s cold out, you know,” his passenger said.
Ray sighed and started the car. “Where to, mate?”
“I have the first address.”
“Let’s have it.”
The first three digits of the post code, B20, indicated Handsworth Wood, a mostly affluent Sikh area. And the satnav quickly found Somerset Road, a place Ray was familiar with; a long, quiet road flanked by large Victorian houses.
“A vets, is it? Or you breeding her or what?” Ray asked, while eyeing the cheap, yellow basket in the rear view mirror. “Sure you ain’t got one of them carry cases? Can’t be very comfortable for the animal. Dog, is it?”
The old man sat close to the basket and rested one arm across the front as if to protect the cargo if the car should stop suddenly. He said nothing to Ray and seemed content to grin at the rear view mirror in a way that started to make Ray feel uncomfortable.
“What is it?” Ray repeated.
The man’s mouth loosened into a sneer. “Maybe you had better just continue with the role you have been assigned, driver.” The way he said driver was oddly formal, and old fashioned, but not without a trace of condescension either.
“Some manners never go amiss, mate.”
End of the Road Page 22
