by A. L. Barker
She was looking into the funnel of light as if she could see him at the other end. He got out of the car and went round to her. “What do you want?”
“Nothing I could get here.”
“Then what did you come for?”
She was gazing into the lamps, tipping her head sideways as if they were mirrors. “It’s black now where I’m looking. Light’s dark in the middle—did you know that?”
He hated the little grown smile she had for herself.
“There was a man at Candover used to get rabbits with a torch, he dazzled them and broke their backs.”
“What did you come for?”
“No reason.” To his amazement she began turning dreamily on her toes in the blaze of the headlamps, dreaming she was in a spotlime.
“I’ve got to lock up.” He ran and switched off the lights so that she sprang back into darkness. Even after he had crossed the workshop and taken his jacket from the peg he could see a sort of luminous scab over everything, so she was right in a general way with her darkness in the middle of light because here was light in the middle of the dark.
“Is this where you work?” She came behind him as he groped for the flicker switch. “In this dirty cold place?”
“What do you expect? I’m a garage-hand, not a cinema flunkey.”
“Are you going to stay?”
“I’ve got to lock up and tidy.” He started hauling the jack away into a corner.
“I mean always.”
“Why not?”
She leaned on the bench, humming under her breath, and with a touch of her finger set a pile of ball bearings rolling.
“Here, stop that.” He managed to catch them before they dropped into the sump. “This isn’t a pin alley.”
“I couldn’t marry a man with smelly hands, not even a butcher or a fishmonger. I couldn’t bear it.”
He didn’t know anyone else who could make him so stupid angry. “I’ll stay as long as it suits me to. I never think about the future, it’ll fit in somewhere.”
She shrugged one shoulder and he shouted, “I’ve got a good job, we’re a partnership now, we’re opening up the premises and taking new business. I’ve got prospects—”
“Those with the least cause are the best pleased with themselves.”
“Do you think they’d leave me in charge if I was only a greaser? Single-handed, with the pumps and the takings, the repair shop and the spares service?”
“It’s closed—everything is.” She giggled. “I could run it like that.”
He thought he was right not to let up and be charitable, she wasn’t as bad as she looked, she had this needling nature that made her worse. He said again, “What did you come here for?”
“I was passing. We could walk home, couldn’t we?”
“I’m not going home, I’ve got work to do.”
“What work?”
“None of your business.”
She came close and he could see that she was really feeling something by the way it struggled to get off her chest. “You’re a liar, Joe Munn, you’re so full of lies they come out of your ears. I know what you are, I’ve seen you sweeping the street with a bucket and broom. You look like Mrs Stogumber then. Old Mrs Stogumber washing out the hall!” She started laughing, not the usual little creak but shrill and piping. “Once I was walking by and I heard them tell you to clean out the you-know-what.” She dug with her elbow as if there was someone else to nudge. “You know what, don’t you?”
Joe did know. Occasionally it was his job and it had never seemed a joke before.
“Get your broom,” she said, “don’t let me hinder you.”
His fury welled up so that he felt it would split him. His throat was thick with it, he couldn’t speak, but he saw Esther with the clarity of hate. If the one bulb, high up and fretting in the draught, had been an arc-lamp he couldn’t have had a more scrupulous sight of her, the way she panted when she laughed and her lip caught back on her long side teeth.
He took a step towards her, itching to be in the middle of that laugh, stubbing it out. If he could have said something, anything to beat her at her own game—but his tongue was too big for words. He tried to think of something that would show her—
“Can’t all go to the top, can we?” she said, nudging the air. “Some of us have to stay and sweep the bottom.”
He couldn’t think why it should matter. He only knew she blistered him and there had to be something to take out the sting. He walked past her down the shop. He had no ideas, he moved to get away from her. When she wasn’t there in front of him he saw something that had been behind her all the time, something she had blocked out of his mind.
He didn’t stop to know what he was doing, he did it from second to second with no pause to weigh a single consideration or foresee a solitary result. First he rolled back the doors of the workshop, then he climbed into Brind’s car, switched on the ignition and pressed the starter.
The roar of the engine and the sudden huge pulse of the car would have sobered him, but he was too far above himself to be shaken down. He was aware only of the need for violence, and when Esther ran to the side of the car hardly remembered that she was the cause of it.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.” He rammed home the gear lever and trod on the accelerator.
“Wait, I’m coming with you!”
She got the door open as the car was moving. He felt her fall against him and forgot her immediately.
Going out into the bay too fast he scorched round the pumps and hauled to a stop.
“This as far as we’re going?”
Her voice did not reach him, he got out and went back to shut the workshop doors. There was something overlaying his excitement, a feeling that this new thing wasn’t new at all. The car was standing at the kerb, two minutes ago he wasn’t even thinking about it, now he was going to take it on the road, he was walking towards it and the moment had been happening since the time he first saw it in the bay.
“Where are we going?”
It shocked him to see her there, she wasn’t relevant. He engaged gear and tried to gentle forward but his boot was oily from the garage floor. It slid off the clutch and stalled the engine.
“I don’t believe you can drive at all.”
He had the wheel in his hands and the pulse of the engine in his bones, he wasn’t in the same class with her any more.
Rain rolled slow and sugary down the windscreen and the traffic suddenly caked solid along Shop Street. He got into the main stream, awkwardly nursing the gears and fretting because he had to wait in front of Evie’s. Once the shop bell rang and he was heart in mouth, but it was only old Charley, and the walls were so thick with steam no one could see in or out.
The block slowly petered away, he edged out of the danger zone and into Recovery Road. Now he was feeling the car. It began to break out, slewing wide on corners and jibbing under his unaccustomed hands. Holding the wheel was like being on the back of a tiger, the power of it let some of the gas out of his own violence. There was no time for qualms. This might be a challenge, but it wasn’t a fight. What he had to do was use the car, use everything and not mosey along in low gear all the time. He got into top, his right foot came gently down and the car leapt at the back of a bus.
“I suppose you know what you’re doing,” said Esther when they came out of the skid.
Joe slammed back into third. “I’m testing.”
“I suppose you’ve got a licence.”
“I didn’t ask you to come, I told you I’d got work to do—this is a try-out. Did you think it was a joy-ride?”
“Not any more.”
He didn’t doubt he could manage the car, but there was no margin for error. Over Battersea Bridge he got into a wrong stream and pulled out under the grid of a diesel lorry. The lorry stopped ungracefully, backside out, damming the flow across the bridge. Traffic hooted and bleated all round and Joe sweated for fear a policeman would mix in.
The lorry driver leaned down to Joe. “If I catch you at that again I’ll mash you smaller than a mouse can spit.”
Joe saw a space and took his chance of getting away into it.
“Vulgar,” said Esther, “he was vulgar. But of course if you had an ‘L’ for Learner they’d know what to expect.” She had started rummaging in the glove compartment under the dash and brought out a silk scarf of Brind’s. “This is nice—”
“Put it back.”
He was turning into Fulham Road, but he felt her antics beside him, shaking the scarf out, spreading it on her lap, putting it to her nose and sniffing it, to her cheek and stroking it. “It’s a man’s. I can tell.”
“Put it back!”
It shouldn’t have mattered what she did. The car was eating up bits of the Brompton Road and they were going fast into Knightsbridge. He shouldn’t have cared if she choked herself.
She was putting it round her neck—Brind’s scarf—drawing it close, smoothing it over the little chickenbones and warming it on her skin—he knew every move as if it were his neck.
“It’s real silk. Feel—” she flicked his jaw sharply with a corner of it. Startled, his head came up and the car with it, they waltzed through the Park entrance on to the Ring Road.
“Do that again and you’ll feel real bone.”
She laughed in an irksome sort of way. “You wouldn’t dare,” and started chirping and bobbing at the window. “Look, there’s trees and grass and railings—where are we, are we at the Zoo?” When they passed Marble Arch she cried out, “Oh, where’s Nelson? I want to see the pigeons!”
He would have given the world not to have brought her. This was to have been a big event in his life, taking the car, handling it on the road was to have been the biggest yet, all his expectations ended there. Now it wouldn’t be there to live for, nor to look back on because she was taking the middle out of everything.
He thought of turning and going home. But with nothing ventured except duck-shoving through the traffic he couldn’t have stood up to his expectation of himself. He always knew what he would do when he got control of Brind’s car and there was a good chance of its shutting Esther Munn up for a bit.
He didn’t show her Lords as they cut past. All the way up Finchley Road as far as the Clock Tower he was able to let out a little and dodge round the buses. He was beginning to feel the car and be ready for it, but he also felt the check in his bones every time he had to slow down.
“Look,” she said, “if you’re not going anywhere I don’t want to come.” She mooned about, picking at a split in the leather. “I might as well be on a bus.”
“A bus! Maybe you think they put blowers on buses, maybe you think a bus has a top speed of one hundred and thirty miles an hour, maybe—”
“I want to stop. If you keep on riding you’re not even real.”
It struck him as odd she should say that, she who had never been real. He got clumsily into second gear for the turn into the bypass. She thought she was real and she tried to make him think it too, but he was going to crumple her up and pitch her away like a ball of paper. Some day, in his good time. Just now it didn’t matter because he was on the bypass and she was nowhere.
This was what he had been making for since he left the garage, what he had dreamed of doing since he first saw the car. He had never thought much about the future, but if he had had an ambition this was it—to have the car under him and a fast road under the car.
The sky had darkened, but when he switched off the wipers a fan of clear glass remained and he knew the rain had stopped. He looked as far as he could along the road where the red scuts bobbed ahead and the yellow eyes rolled to meet them. He passed two crossroads, at the second a van dribbled across, pinned like a beetle in his headlights.
Then they were clear. He eased himself forward, rubbed his thumbs round the wheel and suddenly felt his heart knocking in his throat. ‘Here,’ he thought—the road, a long empty pocket of it, opened before him, luminous with the skin of rain. ‘Now—’
It wasn’t like anything else on earth, if he never had anything else to remember, he would have this. The moment would kindle for him as long as he lived, though never so fiercely as now. When the car surged forward with a banshee scream from the supercharger, his whole body fired with it, there was nothing to choose between the sparking metal and his flesh. He had felt every check, now he felt the power thrusting up through his bones. His blood sang with the new liquid note of the engine, the speedometer needle was rising eighty, an acceleration of over two miles a second. Everything started to slam at them, lights, then slabs of dark, and the road like a conveyor belt scudded under the muzzle of the car.
A red tail lamp and the flapping curtains of a lorry suddenly dangled over the offside front wing. Joe hauled on the wheel and with tyres screaming skimmed by even as the lorry slewed sideways like a frightened elephant.
On the clear stretch beyond, the needle began climbing again, passed eighty, eighty-five, and moved on soberly towards ninety. Joe edged forward further in his seat. There was a sharper, shriller note to the engine now, it made his mouth water, he was filled with hunger, a kind of greed that grew as it was fed.
He had forgotten Esther. She ceased to exist when they touched the bypass. Probably she’d been screaming all the time and pressing back in her seat as if she wanted to back out through the boot, but it wasn’t until she started pulling his arm that he thought of her.
He shouted, “Stop that! Stop it, you fool—” but she wouldn’t. She was mad or something, and he had to slacken speed. The needle dropped and it hurt as if someone was knocking the wind out of him. “What’s the matter with you? Do you want us to crash?”
“I want to get out!”
He risked a hand from the wheel and shoved her back in her seat.
“Let me out! I’ve had enough of you—”
He was pleased that she was frightened. “You haven’t seen anything. I’m going to turn up the wick.”
He never did. He was down to thirty, it had begun raining again and he was thinking of switching on the wipers when something swam out of the dark and after that there wasn’t a real moment. Everything started happening on the outside, following a pattern that was as familiar as the back of his hand and where it should have touched him he was tied up tight. He did what he had to do without fear or any sense of shock.
There wasn’t much he could do. The woman came across the offside front wing and they only saw her face: for a split second it seemed to be pressed against the windscreen like a white fish in a tank. In the same second there was a slight thud on the side of the bonnet and the face dropped out of sight. The car, with Joe braking and dragging on the wheel, shied across the road. They hit the opposite verge and swarmed over it. A thorn hedge broke out of the dark and they stopped with the twigs thrusting into the fenders.
It was quiet. The engine stalled and Esther was shoved down in her seat with both arms over her face as if she was waiting for someone to hit her. Even the road was empty. A train clattered somewhere along the line and that was all.
Joe got out into the feathering rain and started to walk. More than ever now he felt that this had been tried over a dozen times already, he couldn’t be sure this wasn’t just another dummy run.
Esther came after him. The lull was over, she was whickering with fright. If there was anything unrehearsed, it was her. She had no part in this. She kept crying, “Joe—don’t leave me! Joe—don’t go back—”
All this while the road was empty. The nearest lights were a mile away across the fields and Joe walked along not knowing what he was looking for but knowing he would find it.
The woman was about two hundred yards back, lying where she had bounced off the bonnet of the car. She was spreadeagled over the verge with her face in the gutter.
Joe stood looking down at her. There was only one thing more to do. He stooped
and a pair of headlights came weaving over the crown of the road. Esther stopped in her tracks, Joe crouched low and the lights winkled them out. For a moment they were larger than life and the woman on the ground was the largest of all.
Then the car was past, drawing the dark down with it. Its tail lamps blinked and were snuffed out by a bend in the road. Joe turned the woman on her back. She was limp and not too solid. Her limbs slid away, splayed as she was moved, one arm rolled from the shoulder until the hand hung over the gutter.
Joe heard Esther catch her breath in a dry little scrape. It was too dark to see the woman’s face clearly, there was a pale blur with a hole in it where her mouth had fallen open.
“She’s dead, Joe!” Esther stifled her own scream. “Don’t touch her—she’s dead!”
Joe got down on his knees. He put a hand under the woman’s coat, there didn’t seem to be any movement; the coat was clammy from the wet ground. He tried holding his ear close to her mouth. He couldn’t feel breath coming out and he couldn’t hear anything because Esther was whimpering.
There was nothing else to do. He knelt there, rubbing his hands over his thighs.
“She’s dead.” The breathiness went out of Esther’s voice, it became sharp and tidy. “I’ve seen dead people before.”
“I killed her,” said Joe.
“It doesn’t matter who killed her. Get up.”
“Doesn’t matter?”
“Nobody knows. Now get up!”
Joe got to his feet and she snatched at his hand. “Quick, run!”
“Run?”
“To the car—we’ve got to get away. Oh, come on!”
He went a few steps with her dragging at his hand. “We can’t leave her like that.”
“Like what? What are you going to do—bring her back to life?” She dug her nails into his palm, pulling and pushing and crying, “Come on, will you, come on!”
So they went, not moving as she wanted, but at his own pace, shambling, one foot before the other, feeling each prick of rain on their faces. When the lights of a car swung over them she put her arms round him and her head on his shoulder to make it look as if they only had that to think about.
