‘How do you make that out?’
‘Well, it’s an equilateral triangle, each side measuring thirty-six miles. Half the base multiplied by the height, or the length of one side multiplied by another, and the total divided by two, gives you six hundred and forty-eight.’ He held up his slide rule. ‘Simple. Or if you don’t feel safe enough in that, you can make it the Leeds-Blackpool-Liverpool-Sheffield Equilateral. That gives you sixty miles from east to west and thirty miles from north to south, making an area of eighteen hundred square miles. And believe me, Michael, with that kind of space to play about in, and the money you seem able to get your hands on, you can drive around in safety forever. All you have to do from time to time is stop for petrol, food, some new maps, and to answer the calls of nature. You can get in the Guinness Book of Records as the first man to grow old on the run. It wouldn’t be a bad life, when you think of some.’
‘Count me out,’ said Wayland.
For a joke, I stopped the car. ‘You’re counted out.’
‘I’m not quite ready,’ he said, in a reasonable tone I’d not heard up to then.
I started off. ‘Cheer up, Wayland. If you don’t have a sense of humour, cultivate self-control. It’s only sensible, in the circumstances.’
On the dual carriageway which spaced itself out towards Sheffield Clegg said: ‘We’d better have our passports ready for going into Yorkshire. We should have got visas at their legation in Stafford, but maybe they’ll let us in. Dismal will be turned back as an undesirable immigrant, though.’
I blessed the fact again that I had given him a lift. ‘It’s all right. He’s on my passport.’
Traffic was thick, coming and going. Dismal was having bad dreams after his hotel dinner. He reeked of beer more than any of us. Hot sun came through the windscreen, at which I thought we’d soon look as if we’d just got back from Benidorm. In spite of my recent onsurge of recklessness I was dead set on staying alive, however serious the misdemeanour I’d tangled with. In front of my eyes was the sky, a clump of bushes, the brick side of an inn advertising Real Food in big white letters half a mile away, and a broken white line down the middle of the road. But inside me, in no uncertain manner, was the vision of lovely Frances Malham. Her features haunted me as if they belonged to some maternal (or even paternal) aunt or grandmother from generations ago, though whether from the Cullen or Blaskin side I had no way of knowing. It was almost as if she was a long-lost sister, and because of this notion I had the feeling that falling in love is the nearest to incest that most of us get. Why, otherwise, her face affected me more positively than anyone else’s (I almost got a hard-on thinking about her) I didn’t know, especially having met her when she was fawning around that crackpot poet Ronald Delphick — one of his groupies, no less. Or was she? Now that I was in the north, heading into that vast equilateral, as Clegg designated our intended guerilla base, I decided to spy out Doggerel Bank, which was quite near, and see what sort of a place it was that Delphick inhabited, but also on the off-chance that Frances had lied about going to Oxford and was up there visiting him for a bit of hearthrug pie.
‘I want to go through Barnsley and Wakefield.’
Clegg looked at his map. ‘You’ll be skirting the rim of the safety area.’
‘I know. But I have to call at a house near Kirkby Malzeard called Doggerel Bank. It’s not far from Ripon.’
‘It’s a risk. Still, we won’t be much beyond half-an-hour from safety. We’ll run up on the M1 for a while, and then go through Leeds.’
I belted along, but kept my ears as wide apart as they’d go in anticipation of a Wailing Winnie with a flashing blue light. We skirted Sheffield and got onto the motorway, and since there was only one more service station before Leeds, I drove onto it. Why I wanted to phone Blaskin I don’t know, but in my reckless state perhaps some voice from the past might persuade me to believe that a future was in the offing.
I parked as near to the entrance as I could get, and Wayland ran in to get coffee. Clegg put Dismal on a lead and was last seen being pulled towards the dustbin area behind the kitchens. The phone was answered after five rings. ‘Mr Blaskin’s residence,’ a woman said.
‘This is his son. I want to speak to the shabby old wanker.’
‘Please moderate your language, Mr Cullen, while I see whether the eminent novelist is at home. He’s in rather a temper today.’
I didn’t have time to say a mantra before he came on.
‘Michael, is that really you? Last night I dreamed that you’d fallen into the mincer and was dead. I woke up laughing, it was so horrible. Where are you? Are you really alive? If you are, don’t come to within five miles of me, or I’ll blast you asunder. How could I have given birth to a monster who knows how to strike vitals which even I don’t know how to find and didn’t even know I’d got? How could you have done such a wicked unfilial thing? I can’t believe it.’
He would have gone on for three volumes, but I shouted him down. ‘What have I done now, fuck-face? You know I would do anything to hurt you, I love you so much, but I never thought I would succeed, you’re such a selfish, hard-bitten old bastard.’
‘Don’t swear,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s only an excuse for rotten English. Shows deplorable lack of style, and I don’t like that in a son of mine. Give me a moment, and I’ll tell you what you’ve done.’
I thought he’d hung up, and found myself getting worried, in spite of everything. He was robbing me of my recklessness, and I didn’t like that.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that you wrote me a trash novel?’
‘Of course I do. It was very trashy indeed. It was the best rubbish I could write.’
‘Maybe it was. I don’t know what’s what anymore. I thought it was putrid too. I couldn’t have done worse myself.’
‘I did it to get you out of a jam, if I remember. You wanted to leave your publishers, but were contracted to hand over one more novel. So I suggested you give them a rotten one that they would have to turn down. Out of the goodness of my heart I wrote it for you.’
I thought he was crying. ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘How the hell should I?’
‘He accepted it!’
I laughed. ‘You must be joking.’
‘You won’t laugh if you get a javelin through your throat. He says it’s the best thing I’ve done. It was “hats off”! He wants to put it in for the Windrush Prize. Michael, why did you do this to me? Where are you, so that I can kill you? Why did you write a prizewinning best seller, you awful abortion you?’
It was getting harder and harder to do the right thing in life. ‘I’ll never help you again,’ I said coldly. ‘But why don’t you calm down and look at the situation rationally? It won’t do you any harm, for a change. Ask your publisher for a twenty-thousand quid advance. He won’t pay it. You’re free. If he does cough up, give me half. It’ll only be fair.’
‘Never!’ he croaked, and I heard no more.
I was getting sleepy, and looking forward to a night’s kip on Delphick’s flagstoned floor, or at least an icy wash from his cold-water butt. After a quick swill of coffee I went out to see Clegg and Dismal coming back from their promenade around the dustbins. Dismal must have emptied at least three, because a fragment of plastic cup still adhered to his jowl. ‘You disgusting beast, don’t we feed you enough?’
He licked my hand lovingly, and left a streak of stale ketchup over the back. Wayland shuffled out of the cafeteria and got back on board. We soon put Leeds behind us (thank God) and headed for Harrogate. It was a very up and down highway, with nice views of the dales left and right, between the built-up ribbon of road. The scenery soothed me, and I soon forgot Blaskin’s insane maledictions. With a father like that, who needed friends? I pushed in a cassette for some music. Wayland said it was Brahms, so I turned it a bit louder for him. In Harrogate I dropped Clegg outside a supermarket, telling him to go in and buy everything, then get maps of the Ripon area from a bookshop. Because there was no parking I played Red Indians till he reappeared on the pavement with a trolley spilling over with food and booze. ‘There’s hardly room to sit,’ Wayland complained when he loaded it into the back. ‘Why do we need so many stores?’