Gridlock (12 page)

'What, you ask me, will the Government do with the railways?' shouted Digby, eyes wild now. Yes, yes, yes, they did ask him that, that was what they wanted to know.

'What this government intends to do with the railways . . .' said Digby, rising to a frothing, spitting, fist-thumbing crescendo, 'is . . .!!!!'

Digby froze. For a long moment the audience believed it was a dramatic pause. Then, by the look on his face, they thought he had got so excited about dismantling one of the country's greatest assets that he had had a heart attack. 'Good way to go,' some of them thought.

Then they realized that he had gone mad, because Digby's next word was . . .

'Nothing.'

Sandy sat down again. People had been concentrating so much on the Minister's speech that they had hardly noticed the young man in the middle of the fourth row getting quietly to his feet to hold up a handbag. Out of the bag he took a red wig and a tape recorder. He held them for a moment, and then sat down.

Digby had got the message. He remembered the confessions of the previous night, and he remembered the young man who had confronted him outside his hotel. Above all, he knew that he could not announce the setting up of BritTrak. So there he stood, facing 1,000 completely mystified and increasingly resentful delegates.

Where was the promised crescendo, they asked themselves? Where was the rousing bit of policy that would bring them to their feet? This was what they attended conference for, or at least why they bothered to turn up for the speeches. They had done their bit by laughing at his jokes, where was the crescendo?

Digby was thinking desperately. He knew what they expected of him, but he did not know how to deliver. The whole of the rest of his speech concerned BritTrak and on that he knew he must be silent. He could see the young Scot sitting quietly in the fourth row, gently stroking a handbag. How alone Digby felt up there, how terribly exposed. He
had
to say something.

As the seconds ticked by he wracked his brains desperately. He was Minister for Transport, there must be something he could rouse them with . . . Bollards would not excite them, he doubted if zebra crossings would get them going . . . A thousand pairs of eyes were on him. The cameras of the nation turned. Digby could almost hear the commentators licking their lips.

It was an appalling moment. Complete public humiliation in front of the entire nation is a prospect likely to make a man reckless, desperate even. So it was with Digby. Into his mind drifted a vision; a vision of great beauty; one that would excite and enthral as no dull railway policy ever could – it was the vision of a man stroking the model of a motorway flyover. And, suddenly, with the eyes of the world upon him, Digby threw caution to the winds and madness overtook him.

'What are we going to do?' he cried, breaking a silence that had lasted an eternity. 'I shall tell you what we are going to do. We are going to build roads! We are going to build roads, roads and then more roads! We are going to build roads to tunnel under roads, roads to fly over roads, roads to fly over roads flying over roads. Roads, roads, roads, roads, roads!!'

Digby could get no further. The conference was cheering and shouting, some even took up the chant, 'roads, roads, roads, roads . . .' In the television and press galleries the scribblers and wafflers went wild. This was news. This was controversial. This would split the country, it might even split the party. On the platform it was quite easy to see that there would be a split in the party, but only a small one, with Digby on one side and everybody else on the other. But that was something which Digby would face later. For the moment he was fired with evangelical fervour.

'I have plans,' he shouted. 'I have plans to make every city in Britain ten times more accessible to traffic, twenty times. Where will we put the cars, you ask?' They weren't asking, they were too excited, but Digby was going to tell them anyway. 'In the parks, that's where. They're called parks, aren't they? Let them live up to their name.' This also received a huge cheer, although one or two milder souls did begin to wonder. Certainly Ingmar Bresslaw wondered, as did the Prime Minister. They could see their carefully calculated plans disappearing in a wave of public protest. Digby, on the other hand, was completely intoxicated with the response he was receiving.

'Once the Channel Tunnel is fully working, people in the City, north of the Thames, are going to need ready access to that tunnel and the European Currency Units beyond. But they won't get it, will they? And why not? Because South London's in the way, that's why! Well not for long! I'm going to pave Brixton! I'm going to tarmac Wandsworth! I'm going to concrete Clapham! Every city centre in Britain is paralysed because you can't get your car into the shops, so what am I going to do? Shall I tell you what I am going to do? I shall knock down the shops, that's what. Then I shall build huge multi-storey car parks and put the shops on top of them.'

Digby received a wonderful ovation, and, feeling rather naughty but fully justified by the response he had received, he returned to his seat on the platform. Except he didn't because there was no seat to return to – it was gone. The place was still there, between the Ministers for Housing and Health, but the chair had been removed.

'I say, have you seen my chair?' said Digby to the Minister for Housing.

Perhaps it was the noise of Digby's ovation, but the Minister for Housing did not seem to hear . . . 'My chair, have you seen it at all?' Digby shouted at the Minister for Health, but again he received no reply. Neither of his colleagues even looked at him, it was as if he was not even there.

Digby had no other choice but to leave the platform, he could not very well hang about like the last turkey in the shop. He gathered up his papers and walked with brisk dignity towards the steps that led down from the platform. He attempted in his manner to appear that he had other more urgent business to attend to and could not afford to sit about all day. Whatever impression Digby was trying to give, the one he actually gave was one of a bumbling loser . . .

He did not notice how he came to trip up, it might have been a ruck in the carpet, it might possibly have been an outstretched foot, but there he was, face planted in one of the tasteful potted plants that had been placed about the stage as the central initiative of the party's green policy.

Digby's ovation was over and the chairperson was moving on to other business as Digby struggled to his feet, grinning weakly. He reached for his briefcase. Digby distinctly remembered shutting the clips, but they were open now, and, as he picked up the case, his papers, along with a Mars bar, a little pack of tissues and a biography of Joan Crawford, flew about the platform. The chairperson ignored the kerfuffle Digby was making as he scrabbled about on the floor in front of a thousand delegates. Indeed, everybody on the platform ignored him, for Digby was now a non-person. The party's revenge for boat-rocking is swift and terrible. Without a word being said, all of Digby's colleagues knew that the oily little shit, Parkhurst, was no longer 'a member of the club'. He had opted for the wilderness and he was to be treated as a pariah.

As Digby struggled to retrieve his Mars bar, he felt a painful kick in the behind. Nobody saw it happen, the Minister for Health who delivered the blow had, like the rest of the Cabinet, been to a good school and was hence highly skilled in the secret art of kicking an oik without authority being aware of it.

Digby got to his feet, his half-closed briefcase under his arm, and managed to leave the platform without further incident. At the bottom of the steps Ingmar Bresslaw was waiting in terrifying silence. Ingmar's large, boozy face was red with rage. He nodded towards a small interview room just off the main hall. As Digby scuttled towards it, he began to consider for the first time just how serious his situation might be. In the heat of the moment, with a thousand delegates, first staring at him in disbelief, and then cheering him to the rafters, the size of his crime had genuinely eluded Digby. One look at Bresslaw's twitching, whisky-fied face had put him right.

'You stupid little shit,' said the Prime Minister's top henchman as he closed the door on Digby's condemned cell. 'Do you really think you can steamroller us?'

'No really, Ingmar, it's not like that,' pleaded Digby. 'You see, I uhm . . . I lost my notes about BritTrak so I . . . I just filled in with a bit of harmless waffle about roads . . . Went rather well I thought.'

'Harmless waffle! You ruddy fool.' Ingmar's big bushy eyebrows quivered with indignation like two chilly black mice. Digby thought he could actually see blood vessels bursting on the man's nose as he spoke. 'That roads policy is absolute political dynamite. Half of our own party are going to be bloody uneasy about it.'

'But they—' Digby tried to protest.

'Cheered?' barked Ingmar Bresslaw. 'Is that what you were going to say? Cheered? Of course they cheered! This is a party conference, you ruddy arse! They're supposed to bloody cheer. But wait till they start seeing lorries tearing past their garden gates. They won't all be cheering then.' Ingmar suddenly threw out two great hairy hands and grabbed Digby's lapels. Digby was almost too astonished to be scared.

'This was a back-door initiative, Parkhurst; a Civil Service operation! The politics of confusion and deceit, a nod here, a wink there. Now you've told the entire bloody world and we will have every shitty little protest group in the country on to us. Even our own wets will summon up the courage to table a question or two. There will be protests, commissions of inquiry, the whole thing will take decades, if it ever happens at all.'

'I . . . I just thought . . . a few hints, for the faithful,' muttered Digby.

'Shut up, Parkhurst,' snarled Ingmar, his big frame tensing up so that Digby thought he might be about to be punched. 'I've heard enough of your bloody girl's voice to last me a lifetime. I never want to hear it again, do you hear? For God's sake, man, what came over you? Acting independently of the party line? Who do you think you are? Winston Churchill? You got the job because the Prime Minister needed a faceless bloody nobody to front up a very delicate, and secret operation, but you got delusions, didn't you? You . . . you utter . . .' he struggled for a fitting expletive . . . 'turd.'

Ingmar was truly offended by Digby's stupidity. After all, if you couldn't trust a talentless, featureless, arse-kissing git with a government ministry, who could you trust? Ingmar hauled Digby almost up onto his toes and delivered the final chop.

'You've let us down, Parkhurst, and you're finished. The Prime Minister wants your resignation by midnight, all right? Now crawl away and die.'

The big man released Digby's lapels, turned on his heels and went off in search of whisky, leaving Digby stunned.

It was so brutal, so sudden. Surely he had not given away all that much of the road plans, he had only been playing to the gallery, pleasing the troops so to speak. But a couple of hours later in his hotel room, he knew, he saw the extent of his madness. His speech was the number one story of the day, it was described as 'extraordinary' and 'maverick'.

There he stood again upon the platform, 'destroy, knock down, demolish . . . Pave, concrete, tarmac,' he shouted out of the television screen, fist thumping the air. Sitting watching it Digby was forced to confess that it did sound rather radical. Worse was to come. The Prime Minister appeared extremely cross, denying everything and deliberately getting the interviewer's name wrong. For the Prime Minister to be personally involved in the damage control operation showed just how seriously Digby had screwed up.

The story the party were offering was that Digby was a brilliant but erratic personality. His deep sense of public duty and extraordinary political flair had, perhaps, combined to create a slight imbalance in his political outlook. The opposition of course were not buying it. They claimed, as did all the environmental groups, that there was no smoke without fire and that the Government should come clean about its plans. This time it was Ingmar Bresslaw who appeared, admitting that of course there were road-building plans, but nothing on the scale . . .

Digby would have liked to have wept for the fate of his beautiful models but he had no tears to spare, he was weeping for himself.

Back in London, Deborah's TV was tuned to the same news broadcast that Digby was weeping over. Deborah wasn't really watching it though, she was more concerned with why Geoffrey had lain down on the carpet and was tinkering with her chair.

'What are you doing, Geoffrey?' enquired Deborah. 'In fact, don't tell me what you're doing, just get the hell away from my chair, all right?'

Deborah was rather sensitive about people touching and fiddling with her wheelchair as if it was an ordinary piece of furniture. She had noticed in pubs and crowds that friends sometimes used it as a coat-hanger. She knew that they meant well, they wanted to show that the chair was not an issue to them and that it did not make them feel uncomfortable, but they were also glad of somewhere to put their coats while they went off to dance. Deborah hated the way she always became the receptacle and guardian of everybody's property at a disco and she knew it was the solid fact of her chair that created this position. Another thing she had noticed was that at pub gigs, whilst watching a band or perhaps a comic, if it was a crowded, standing gig, little knots of people formed behind her, the chair (and Deborah in it) providing breathing space in an otherwise crushed room. All this was OK within reason, but Deborah's chair was not a part of the furniture, it was a part of Deborah and she didn't like it being fiddled with.

'I'm measuring it, Deborah,' stammered Geoffrey, his eyes a little hurt behind his thick glasses. 'I have to, I'm going to arm it.'

'Geoffrey,' said Deborah. 'It's a wheelchair, I don't want it to have arms, they'll get stuck in doorways.'

'I don't mean arms as in "arms",' Geoffrey replied firmly, although Deborah did not really register this firmness because Geoffrey's chin was bashing against his collarbone and she was having enough trouble following what he was saying without trying to work out the subtlety of his intonations.

'I mean arms as in arms dealer, arms race, arms treaty,' said Geoffrey.

'You mean guns?' said Deborah horrified.

'Well, guns might be difficult, but weapons certainly,' Geoffrey stuttered. 'Listen, Deborah, I mean really, listen. I'm putting you in a lot of danger here, those men really did try to kill me. Satan is dealing from a rigged deck and some sucker's going to draw the dead man's hand. I have to make sure that the sucker isn't you.'

'If you're going to keep saying "sucker", Geoffrey, go get a saucer. You can't say it without dribbling,' Deborah replied. 'Personally I think you're being melodramatic.'

'Well, maybe about Satan and the dead man's hand,' conceded Geoffrey, 'but not about the danger. It's real, Deborah, and it's coming for us . . .' He snapped shut his tape measure and, using his good hand, wrote down figures in a school exercise book which he had wedged under a wheel of Deborah's chair. Of course, on reflection, Deborah didn't really think it was that melodramatic either. After all, they did both seem to have been thrust into a web of murder and deception. She supposed it was not an entirely unreasonable thing to consider protecting oneself.

'OK, James Bond, so what are you going to give me, I'm all out of machine guns?' said Deborah.

'Oh there's lots of stuff around the house that I can improvise with.'

'Great,' said Deborah. 'What do I get? A mounted ballistic food processor, maybe I can blend them to death. Perhaps you could tune up the Hoover, I could suck the guns out of their hands. Listen, Geoffrey, if things really are this dangerous, I think we need to make some plans here. For instance, once you've designed the engine, what then?'

'I'm going to sneak out at dead of night, maybe in a raincoat and a homburg hat, and take it to Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth.'

'Why?' said Deborah.

'Well I just think that sneaking secret inventions around is very Dick Tracy and it's important to make the effort.'

'Not the hat and coat, why the green thing? What's it got to do with a bunch of lentil munchers?' Deborah said.

'Well, it's a pretty clear bet,' said Geoffrey con-spiratorially, 'that someday soon my stolen invention is going to be introduced to the world by a part of the car industry. When that happens it's going to revolutionize private motoring. It will be worth millions to whoever claims to have thought of it.'

Deborah still couldn't quite follow the green angle.

'So what you have to do,' she insisted, 'is to reinvent it double quick and sell it to the motor industry yourself, you could do with a few million. Believe me, bud, the rent on this place gets higher every minute.'

'If you do a deal with the devil,' said Geoffrey piously, 'you had better be ready to end up being impaled on fiery stakes and having your sweaty bits nibbled by his tiny crawling demons.'

'What?' enquired Deborah, not unreasonably.

'If I sold my engine to Dagenham or Detroit they would use it on private cars and nothing but private cars and, if it's as good as I think it is, which is bloody brilliant, twenty years from now we'd just have a world clogged up with hydrogen cars instead of petrol cars.'

'So bully for the world, Geoffrey,' insisted Deborah. 'You said yourself that these engines burn cleaner. Call me an earth mother and stick my face in a vegetarian casserole if you like, but that sounds like good news to me.'

'Oh yes, and where would that leave us?' asked Geoffrey.

'Rich.' Deborah was a practical girl.

'But you'd still be a prisoner in your own city,' Geoffrey said. 'People like you and me are the best example of how too many cars isolate people. You can't use a bus, it's tough to get on a train, a lot of taxis can't take chairs, and that's because all anybody cares about is cars, cars, bloody cars.'

'Yes but I'm disabled, Geoffrey, remember? Not everyone is like me.'

'Everybody is disabled by cars!' insisted Geoffrey.

'Geoffrey, excuse me, but did you leave a door open in your brain here? Cars carry people around, you know? They don't disable people, they
enable
them to get around – especially people like me. What's more, if you were rich you could buy me a great big car, a limo with a chair lift and a chauffeur and a bar and a swimming pool. So just cut the philosophy, OK? and hurry up and reinvent your stupid engine because the sooner I'm outta my converted Ford and into a stretch Mercedes the better.'

And with that, Deborah wheeled herself into the kitchen and filled the kettle from the hose attached to her tap. Her kettle could not move because it was attached to a clever little tilting platform that made pouring easier. Geoffrey followed Deborah into the kitchen.

'Do cars
enable
the woman with a ton of shopping waiting at the bus stop for the bus that never comes?' he shouted.

'So now he's onto communism already,' said an exasperated Deborah, struggling with the lid of a new coffee jar that would have given Mr Universe a limp wrist. 'They tried communism in Russia, Geoffrey, their buses were worse than ours and everybody had to eat cabbage for the rest of their lives.'

Geoffrey would not be sidetracked by red, red herrings.

'Do cars
enable
the people who live on main routes and have to listen to traffic all night? Do they
enable
old people who can't cross roads, or have to walk miles extra to find a crossing? Do they
enable
the five thousand people killed each year in Britain, or the forty thousand in the US? Above all, Deborah, do they
enable
the hundreds of thousands of people stuck in jams every day? I mean do they really? Or do people just think they do?'

Having finally got the lid off the coffee, Deborah was attempting very gently to penetrate the foil vacuum seal with her thumb. After she had done that she had to brush away all the coffee that had exploded into her lap . . . 'I think they spring-load these mothers!' she moaned before returning to the topic of the day. 'Listen, Geoffrey, get real, OK? People love cars, I love cars and if you manage to stop your engine being used, I'm here to tell ya, they'll just carry on making dirty old petrol ones.'

'Deborah, look at yourself,' said Geoffrey. 'You can't walk, and the reason you can't walk is because of a car that caught you at a pedestrian crossing. They called it a pedestrian crossing, but it wasn't built for people. It was built for cars, just like everything else. Whoever I sell my engine to—'

'Presuming you can reinvent it before these murderers get you, which isn't going to happen while you're delivering the sermon on the mount,' said Deborah. She was struggling with a milk carton and it was only after she'd had to resort to trying to chew it open that she realized that she'd been attacking the bit that says 'open other side'.

'Yes, always presuming that,' conceded Geoffrey. 'Whoever I sell it to is going to have to sign a contract saying that it will only be used to make buses—'

'What!' Deborah could not help but laugh.

'Or . . . or, I don't know . . . for every ten cars they make they've got to make a train coach, or at least that only one can be sold to each household, or that it can't be used in heavy freight lorries, I don't know, something. Don't you see, Deborah, it's a question of beginning to change people's attitudes.'

'Look, Geoffrey,' said Deborah, deciding to have a can of Diet Coke instead. 'You can't force people to build buses. This is the free world, they can build what they like.'

'Not with my bloody engine they can't,' announced Geoffrey. 'Have you ever heard of gridlock, Deborah?'

'Geoffrey, I come from New York, of course I've heard of gridlock,' she snapped. Gridlocks had indeed originally been a US phenomenon. They emerged for the first time in Los Angeles in the late Seventies and occur when the grids of roads (or spaghetti of roads as they are in towns like London) become jammed at a series of junctions, meaning that cars cannot escape. The jam then feeds back, blocking more junctions and hence causing further jams. The size of the gridlock is dependent only on the number of cars feeding into the jam and how quickly the police can close the roads leading into it.

'London is heading for a super-jam,' said Geoffrey, 'so is every car city in the world. It would only take a couple of accidents to happen at the same time in peak traffic; a jackknife on the Cromwell Road, a couple of smashes on the bridges, a pile-up at the mouth of the Ml or Shepherds Bush maybe – virtually anywhere actually. It would only take a coincidence and the whole city would be massively disabled. Just like us, eh?'

'Very funny,' said Deborah.

At that point the front door slammed and a footfall was heard in the hall. 'It's only Toss, Geoffrey,' said Deborah. 'Come out from behind the sofa.'

The door opened and in walked Toss in his traffic warden uniform. 'I have to tell you, guy, that I was wicked today.' He threw his traffic warden cap onto a hook and put on a baseball cap – actually he missed the hook and the cap hit the ground.

'Toss,' said Deborah, 'pick the damn hat up.'

'OK, guy, it's happening, y'nah what I mean?' replied an aggrieved Toss. 'But like you know, it's only my warden lid, it's not a bomb or nuffink, right, Spas?'

'Right, Toss,' replied Geoffrey, emerging from behind the sofa. 'Personally I'm into spatial anarchy. Mess is God's way of telling us we have too much stuff.'

'Totally good point, Spas,' said Toss, getting a litre of juice from the fridge. 'You're a philosopher, you know that? You should have your own show on Channel Four.'

'What am I talking to, the three wise monkeys here? Listen, Toss,' said Deborah with quiet menace, 'I have told you till my tonsils have worn out that the reason I don't want your stupid stuff on the floor is because it snags my stupid wheelchair. If you left a hat and a coat on the floor in every room of this stupid flat I would not be able to fuck'n' well move!' Deborah's voice was rising to a crescendo. 'I don't
enjoy
having to talk like I'm your fuck'n' mother, Toss! I'm only twenty-one years old! Twenty-one-year-olds should not have to spend their time worrying about whether little scheisters like you pick their hats up or not, but I do have to worry about it because otherwise I shall become trapped for ever in a cave made entirely of your socks and stinking underwear! So
pick things up
! Or I swear I shall personally get two shoeboxes full of wet cement and stick them on your feet when you're asleep. See how you like being anchored to the carpet!'

Toss picked up his hat. 'Nice speech, Debbo, happening. I appreciate the point, although, right, it's not necessary to chuck a total mental.'

Toss was Deborah's lodger, he had been home to his mother's for the weekend, which was why he had not been there the previous night.

Deborah had taken a lodger the moment she found her place. She knew that her compensation would take years, and money was tight. Money is incredibly important to people with disabilities. You will never ever hear a person with disabilities say 'money doesn't mean much to me'. Money means mobility, money means independence and personal dignity. Yet, for a person with disabilities, money is much more difficult to come by. Toss had been a lucky find. A year younger than Deborah, he was kind and easy-going.

His job had surprised Deborah at first.

'What do you do?' she had asked.

'I hang out, girl. I chill,' replied Toss.

'No, I mean for a living,' said Deborah, wondering about somebody who hung out and chilled's ability to pay the rent.

'Oh that, right? I'm a traffic warden, and I am
wicked with a ticket,
girl, all right? Just the best. Don't mess with Toss when he's got his cap on because I take no prisoners!' said Toss proudly.

'A traffic warden?' This had not been what Deborah had expected at all.

'You have a problem, girl? Are you some kind of libertarian geezer who reckons it is her democratic right to park on top of babies' heads? Is that it? Because then I am your enemy, girl, and you'd better hide right now, because the ticket of Toss has your number on it,' said Toss.

Actually, being a person who could not walk and who lived in one of the busiest cities in the world, Deborah had good reason to support those who enforced the parking laws, particularly those laws concerning disabled parking places which people often pinch. It is, however, important to remember that they do not do this out of any desire to nab a convenient space. Of course not, no, they do it out of a morally courageous desire to pay back the charlatans, scroungers and malingerers who they personally
know
to be in possession of 90 per cent of all disabled car stickers.