Life Goes On (54 page)

It was a fantasy to get me through the worst of the shakes. Whoever was in that car, they had seen me for sure, especially in such light as they had generated. My guts were turning to Mazawattee, as my mother used to say, but my fatigue was forgotten for a while.

On the main road, I was flat out for Shrewsbury, with no thought of stopping. They could turn round and come after me, though I guessed it was more likely they would go first to the cottage to check on what I had deposited there. It didn't leave much time in which to lose myself. I explained the situation to Clegg, though he had guessed quite a bit already. ‘What would you do if you were in my shoes?'

‘We all are,' he replied, ‘including Dismal. But give me a minute or two.'

‘Be my guest.'

He let that pass. ‘From the point he saw you at, you could have been heading for London.' He spread the maps out like a general, or an examining engineer. ‘On the other hand, you could have been going north. They've only got one car, so they'll have to make a choice. They could make the wrong one. On the other hand, they could make the right one.'

‘Thanks.'

‘I'm doing my best. I said I needed a minute or two. On the other hand, we could turn back and go into Wales. But there's less road density, and you'd be spotted from afar, and then trapped. Steady as you go, and veer left at the next lane. After two miles you'll be on the main route to Shrewsbury. Then you can let rip. At Shrewsbury, or on the outskirts' – he lowered his voice – ‘put your passenger off, then head for the Manchester-Leeds-Sheffield triangle. Nobody will find you there. I'll navigate you via Stafford, Uttoxeter, Ashbourne and Matlock.'

The road climbed, higher hills to our left. ‘I'll never forget you.'

‘I haven't enjoyed myself so much for a long time,' he said. ‘Not for more than ten years, and that's a fact.'

‘What's happening to Wayland?'

‘The lucky chap's asleep. Turn left at this major road, and set your compass north.'

I felt better. ‘There's a box near your right foot. Open it and pass us a sandwich. And dish out the tea. We can feed on the trot. Take Wayland's blindfold off when he wakes up.' I wanted daylight to come, because though night conceals I felt that, at the moment, we would be less conspicuous in daytime. Headlights could betray you for miles, whereas in the confusion of extra traffic we'd be comparatively hidden. I explained this to Clegg.

‘You're learning.'

‘I'd have known it at five years of age, if I'd had a car.'

‘I mean you're sharing your thoughts.'

I decided to shut up. Yet it wasn't in me to stick to such a whim. I had always spoken what was on my mind. In any case, it was too often on my face. ‘We've come a long way in a few hours.'

He got out the map, and was even sarkier. ‘As the crow flies, it's forty miles.' He passed a bundle of sandwiches like a postman handing letters. The one I held for Dismal went in a single snap. I threw him another before managing to wolf one myself. Wayland woke up: ‘Do I sense food?'

Clegg undid the blindfold and gave him something.

‘I'm dropping you off in half an hour,' I said.

‘Thank you very much for the favour.'

I wasn't very good at taking sarcasm from someone I didn't like. Dismal nudged me for another bite. ‘No favour.'

‘And where will that dropping-off point be, in this benighted country, if you please, chauffeur?'

‘In the nearest fucking ditch if you don't shut up,' I said.

Glegg passed a plastic cup of scalding tea, otherwise I'd have carried out my intention, especially as it had just started to thrash down with rain. A post office van nearly hit us as it came round a bend. Then a Telecom wagon overtook me and almost skidded into a tree. They didn't dip lights in this part of the country. ‘You'll be set down in Cheltenham,' I said. Unfortunately the signposts would tell him where he was.

He made an attempt to laugh, and almost succeeded, then took another sandwich from the box. ‘I know exactly where Peppercorn Cottage is. Blemish is such a fool. His heart's full of steel wool. I'd have worked it out, anyway.'

‘Go back,' I said. ‘It'll be your funeral.'

‘I'll stay with you, after all.'

‘Think you'll get a new lead?' My laugh wasn't exactly hollow, but it was certainly concave. ‘It'll still be your funeral.'

‘Don't I have any choice?'

I avoided a hedgehog crossing the road. ‘How long is it since you walked five miles?'

‘I've forgotten.'

‘Well, watch those Shrewsbury signposts, because when it says five, you're out. If your legs give way you can walk on your arse.'

Clegg asked if he had any money for the train.

‘Some.'

‘Drop him at the station, Michael.'

Since I'd had the foresight to load up with grub and feed everyone so well, I supposed I was captain of the ship. I also happened to be driving. Even Dismal had no cause to get broody, though the only disadvantage of topping him up as much as it pleased me to was that the car became filled with odours suggesting that we were passing an endless gasworks on one side of the road, and an extensive rotten egg plant on the other. No air-conditioning system could deal with the clouds of his guileless effusions. To open a window would set the rain against us. The only solution was to stop and let him out, otherwise we'd choke. ‘Three men in a car found dead in mysterious circumstances,' people would read in
Offa's Mirror
.

I pulled in at the first possible place. A pause in our flight was necessary so that we could rest. While the others drank more tea I stayed in the front seat and wondered what to do. At half past three we were near a place called Pox Green. Nobody was following us at the moment, but the thought of daylight showing us plainly from every hill seemed like a promise of death – an adventure all the same, but how long could it go on?

Clegg was happy, Dismal carefree, Wayland Smith apparently content, while no word would tell me what I was. What was I? Don't ask. I knew who I was, and that was a fact, but as to what I was, no answer suggested itself until I was behind the car taking what seemed an endless piss. I was as rotten as ever. Would I piss myself to death and end up clean, but dead? I was as much of a bastard as ever, in spite of (or even because of) the fact that my father had eventually married my mother. Once a bastard, always a bastard. Moggerhanger was as straight as a thief could be, and generous after his fashion, but I was out to cause him trouble from which he would be lucky to recover. There was no one left except this bacillus-colony of a car moving at random over the dripping bosom of green England.

Bridgitte had left me, and with good cause. The only injustice was to herself – in that she hadn't done it sooner. I wanted to change, but it was impossible to reverse the flow of the stars, or my star at least. I got back into the car, beginning to think, not without a shaft of fear through my liver, that I was the sort who never changed from within. That being so, I could only invite the world outside to do its worst.

A sudden revelation suggested that, in such a situation, recklessness pays. From this point on, I thought, anything deviously plotted will only land me in a bag of chips over which someone is pouring blood sauce. Planning would deny me the benefits of my deepest and most life-saving feelings – which are epitomised by recklessness. Every full breath was a landmark, no more than that. I got out my hip flask and celebrated my surrender to a new-found life-saving recklessness by a long swallow of delicious whisky. I passed it to Clegg.

He took some. ‘I haven't had more than half a pint of beer in years.'

Wayland drained it, which was just as well. ‘Next time I hope they hold me hostage in a pub. Cheers!'

I went to the back of the car with a torch and a knife, opened the boot and slit packet after packet of paper till I came to a bundle of five-pound notes. When we got back inside, out of the rain, I gave a wad to Clegg.

‘Do you mean it?'

‘All yours.'

He counted. ‘Must be a hundred.'

‘I've paid you back that hundred and fifty pounds from long ago. I always pay my debts.'

‘I didn't lend it to you. I gave it.'

‘Please don't argue. I'm too tired.'

Wayland pocketed his wad after a short hysterical laugh.

‘Fuck it,' I said. ‘We're rich.'

Dismal sat on the driver's seat, paws at the steering wheel. He caught a bundle of fivers in his mouth on turning round, then got down on the floor to play Monopoly with himself. I stuffed mine, the biggest part, into my briefcase with the air pistol. ‘Are you happy now?'

The miracle was, they were. So was I. We laughed like kids just landed on Treasure Island. I couldn't understand why I had been so careful. Somewhere along the way, with all the planning and calculation, I had stopped being myself, and that was bad. Look where it had got me. I'd even starved myself of adequate running expenses. You couldn't fund the operation I had in mind on a shoestring. Interpol would see my point absolutely. All we needed was to stock up on food, petrol, booze and a trio of hitch-hiking girls. The rain drummed so heavily that, without knowing how or why, I dropped into sleep. So did my highway companions, including Dismal, who bedded down with Wayland's Russian-style fur hat between his paws as if it was a dying orphan which had crept in from the rainstorm and needed bringing back to life. The rhythm of falling rain on the roof rocked us to sleep.

Twenty-Six

Clegg woke me. ‘I don't know how aware you are of the fact, Michael, but it's nine o'clock.'

‘What?'

‘The sun's up – a bit of it, anyway.'

It was so late I got the horrors, until I remembered that the password was recklessness. ‘Is that all?'

‘I didn't know you wanted a lie-in, or I'd have left you till this afternoon.'

We formed a row and pissed into the hedge. Dismal endeavoured to stand up but didn't quite manage, though if he persisted I might have sold him to a circus. ‘We'd better find a place for breakfast. I need a bucket of tea to swill the sleep out of my gorge.'

Dismal got back on four legs and barked into the mist. ‘Are we going to drop you at a railway station, Wayland, or are you coming with us.'

He looked too scruffy to be seen in a Rolls-Royce – bleary-eyed, beard untrimmed, face pale and lined, and hair hanging raggedly around his bald head. He wore a billowing jersey and stained trousers and stank as if he hadn't had a bath for weeks. Luckily he couldn't get the fur hat away from Dismal, because he looked even worse in that. ‘I'll stay, if you don't mind.'

‘In that case, maybe you wouldn't mind having a wash-and-brush-up at the next place we stop at.'

He turned sulky. ‘Who the hell are you to tell me to get a wash?'

I hadn't meant to scorch his pride to the roots, but at least he was no longer pale. ‘We'll be crossing the Severn soon. Maybe you'd like a dip in that?'

‘You're just a driver.' He was fit to burst. ‘And you're telling me to get a wash, boyo? What's the idea?'

It was hard not to laugh, which was lucky for him. ‘We all need a wash, I suppose. But if you'd like to walk' – I opened the door – ‘feel free.'

‘I'd enjoy one,' said Clegg, ‘but I don't like the idea of having to dress for dinner.'

Wayland sat like a graven image. As I got back into the driver's seat I noticed that someone had picked up Dismal's fivers. ‘I put 'em in the glove box,' said Clegg. ‘The saliva will dry off in no time.' To give more visibility for his navigation I invited him onto the flight deck, and Dismal could hardly believe it when I ordered him to the back, but a thump on his great flank helped his understanding. God knows why he had to feel so humiliated. To offset it he kept trying to sit on the armrest between the two seats, an impossible task, you might have thought, especially in the swaying car, but he managed it after a while, balancing with a forlorn and suffering face. When he had made his point (whatever it was) he got down and sat on the seat, to look over my shoulder at the instrument panel.

A toytown fairytale valley rolled to our left as we went downhill. ‘We'll give Shrewsbury a wide berth,' Clegg said. ‘The ring road's too close in. It'll mean about fifteen miles of winding lanes, but if you listen to my directions we'll be across the Severn at Atcham in half an hour.'

I took three Monte Cristos from the glove box and handed them around, but there were no takers except myself. Clegg pulled it out of the tube for me, and I lit up. ‘Which direction, Navigator?'

‘East-north-east, then northerly. Fork right after the next village. I'll tell you when.' A bread van slowed us down for a mile or two. I played it cool. The driver and his mate were pissing themselves at delaying a Rolls-Royce. It was a highpoint of their lives which they would talk about for months, if not years – heroes of the public bar.

‘This country'll never get back on the rails,' Clegg said, ‘while this sort of thing goes on.'

‘What can you expect?' Wayland piped up. ‘They've been crushed and exploited since the day they were born.'

I don't know why, but I was more mad on hearing that than at the lads in front. After all, they were only having a bit of fun. I might have done the same in their place fifteen years ago – though I was tempted to get the shotgun out and blast their tyres. ‘Crushed and exploited, my arse.' We were going about fifteen miles an hour, so I couldn't lose my temper without matters becoming dangerous. ‘They've had the time of their lives, the idle bastards. They've been pampered from the word go. If ever they feel crushed and exploited it's only because pratts like you tell 'em they are – because you
really
want to crush and exploit them.'