Out they dropped. “Fucking Motor Show,” said Fat Lol. And it was true: the chrome heraldry, the galvannealed paintwork. They hesitated as a family saloon swung down from Level 3.
“Let’s do it.”
Disappointingly, only four vehicles were adjudged by Fat Lol to have outstepped their prescribed boundaries. But he soon saw another way.
“Okay. Let’s do them if they’re touching the white lines.”
“In tennis,” said Mal moderately, “the white lines count in.”
“Well in clamping,” said Fat Lol, in a tight voice, bending low, “the white lines count out.”
It was warm and heavy work. These ancient gadgets, the clamps—they were like fucking steamrollers. You had to free them from the van and from each other and hump them into position. Next you got down there—A!—and worked the pipe wrench on the snap ratchet. Then: thwock. There was the clamp with its jaw fast on the car’s wheel. One bit was quite satisfying: spreading the gummy white sticker all over the windscreen.
Fat Lol was down there doing a K-reg. Jag when Mal said, “Oi. I can see your bum crack.”
“Bend down.” Fat Lol stood up. “I can see yourn.”
“You said dress casual.”
“With a car like this,” Fat Lol announced huskily, “it tears you apart. I mean, with a car like this, you don’t want to clamp it.”
“You want to nick it.”
“Nah. To clamp a motor such as this, it’s…”
“Sacrilege.”
“Yeah. It’s fucking sacrilege to mess with a motor such as this.”
Mal heard it first. Like something detaching itself from the siren song of Leicester Square, where the old sounds of various thrashed and envassaled machines contended with the sound of the new, its pings, pips, peeps, beeps, bleeps, tweets and squawks and yawps… Big Mal heard it first, and paused there, down on one knee with his pipe wrench. A concentrated body of purposeful human conversation was moving toward them, the sopranos and contraltos of the women, the sterling trebles and barrelly baritones of the men, coming up round the corner now, like a ballroom, like civilization, uniforms of tuxedo and then streaks and plumes of turquoise, emerald, taffeta, dimity.
“Lol mate,” said Mal.
Fat Lol was a couple of cars further in, doing a Range Rover and tightly swearing to himself.
“Lol!”
You know what it was like? A revolution in reverse—that’s what it was like. Two bum-crack cowboys scragged and cudgelled by the quality. Jesus: strung up by the upper classes. What seemed most amazing, looking back, was how totally they folded, the two big lads, how their bottom, their legitimacy, just evaporated on them there and then. Fat Lol managed to get to his feet and splutter something about these vehicles being parked illegally. Or parked improperly. Or plain parked bad. And that was the extent of their resistance. Big Mal and Fat Lol, those bottle-ripped veterans of ruck and maul, dispensing the leather in cross alleys and on walkways, on dance-hall staircases, elbowing their way out of bowling alleys and snooker-hall toilets, crouching and panting by dully shining exit doors—they just rolled over. We didn’t want to know… Mal tried to wriggle in under the Lotus he was doing but they were on him like the SAS. The first blow he took from the pipe wrench knocked him spark-out. Soon afterwards he awoke and, leaning on an elbow in a pool of blood and oil watched Fat Lol being slowly hauled by the hair from car to car, with the ladies queuing and jockeying to give him another kick up the arse, as best they could, in their gowns. The ladies! The language! Then they were on Mal again, and he stopped another one from the pipe wrench. I’ve copped it in the back, sir. Nigger’s dead, sir… No rest for the wicked. And ain’t that the fucking truth. They hoisted Mal upright, giving his mouth a nice smack on the headlight frame, and had him slewing from bonnet to bonnet, prising at the windscreen stickers with his cold white fingers. This vehicle is illegally. For prompt assistance. All major… And after a last round of kicks and taunts their cars were chirruping and wincing and whirring into life; they were gone, leaving Fat Lol and Big Mal groping toward each other through the fumes and echoes and the heap of cheap clamps, gasping, dripping, jetsam of the machine age.
7. SAD SPRINTER
“Operagoers.”
Sheilagh said, “Operagoers?”
“Operagoers. Okay, it was a bit of a liberty, me and Fat Lol. You could argue we was out of order…”
“You sure it was operagoers?”
“Yeah. I thought it might have been a premiere crowd. Been to a Royal Premiere or something.” Mal and Linzi had recently attended a Royal Premiere, at considerable expense. And he thought it must have been decades since he had been with a rougher crew: fifteen hundred trogs in dinner jackets, plus their molls. “No, they left programs. The Coliseum. They ain’t nice, you know, She,” he cautioned her. Sheilagh had a weakness for films in which the aristocracy played cute. “The contempt. They were like vicious.”
“I’ve been to the Coliseum. They do it in English. It’s better because you can tell what’s going on.”
Mal nodded long-sufferingly.
“You can follow the story.”
He nodded a second time.
“You doing the dads’ race?”
“Well I got to now.”
“With your face in that state? You’re no good on your own, Mal. You’re no good on your own.”
Mal turned away. The shrubs, the falling leaves—the trees: what kind were they? Even in California… Even in California all he knew of nature was the mild reek of rest stops when he pulled over, in his chauffeur’s cap, for leaks between cities (a can made of nature and butts and book matches), or lagoon-style restaurants where mobsters ate lobsters; one year She came out with little Jet for a whole term (not a success) and Mal learned that American schools regarded tomato ketchup as a vegetable. And throughout his life there had been symbols, like fruit machines and hospital fruit salads and the plastic fruit on his mother’s hat, forty years ago, at his Sports Day. And his dad’s curt haircut and Sunday best. Say what you like about forty years ago. Say what you like about his parents, and everyone else’s, then, but the main thing about them was that they were married, and looked it, and dressed it, and meant it.
She said, “If you come back—don’t do it if you don’t mean it.”
“No way,” he said. “No way, no day. No shape, no form…”
With a nod she started off, and Mal followed. Mal followed, watching the rhythmic but asymmetrical rearrangements of her big womanly backside, where all her strength and virtue seemed to live, her character, her fathom. And he could see it all. Coming through the door for the bear hug with Jet, and then the hug of Momma Bear and Poppa Bear. The deep-breathing assessment of all he had left behind. And the smile coagulating on his face. Knowing that in ten minutes, twenty, two hours, twenty-four, he would be back out the door with Jet’s arms round his knees, his ankles, like a sliding tackle, and She behind him somewhere, flushed, tousled, in a light sweat of readiness to continue with the next fuck or fight, to continue, to continue. And Mal’d be out the door, across the street at Linzi’s, watching Asian Babes and freeing his mind of all thoughts about the future… As he stepped over the fence he looked toward the car park and—whoops—there she was, Linzi, his Asian babe, perched on the low boot of her MG Midget. Sheilagh paused. Linzi on her car boot, She in her boiler suit. Boots and boilers. Where was transformation? If Linzi wanted new breasts, a new bum—if she wanted to climb into a catsuit made out of a teenager—then it was absolutely A-okay with Mal.