When Dismal had finished and I was having a smoke, we heard footsteps between the lion-roar of a lorry and the gazelle-purr of a car. Someone trod wearily into the layby as if about to fall after a very long walk. Dismal growled and I told him to hold back in language he was coming more and more to understand. The man was out of breath. ‘Is the dog safe?’
‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘I don’t expect he would, but a chap like me can’t afford to tek chances.’ He leaned against the car, and in the dim light I saw the unshaven face of someone about sixty. He had a rucksack on his back, but there didn’t seem to be much in it. The open neck of a white shirt came over his sports-jacket collar. He wore a pullover, flannels, black boots and a cap, more like a traveller than a hiker.
‘What are you doing out at this time of night?’
‘You might well ask.’
I took his response to mean he had no option, so got the flask and gave him a cup of coffee. He drank it straight down. ‘Good Lord, I don’t think I’ve had one like that in years. It’s nectar!’
I passed him a couple of cheese sandwiches. ‘Where are you going.’
‘The next town.’
‘You’re hungry.’
He glared. ‘It’s the human condition, for somebody like me. Or it has been for ten years. Before that it was another matter.’ He stopped talking so as to eat.
‘I’ll give you a lift, if you like.’
Humour just outweighed the bitterness. ‘I had a damned good car once. I had a house, a wife, a job — the lot, and I loved it. When you’re sitting pretty you don’t know what’s going to strike in the next year or two, or even the next ten.’
His look made me uncomfortable. ‘Whoever did?’
‘Thanks for being kind to a bloke on tramp, anyway. They were excellent sandwiches. Don’t think I can’t appreciate it. It gets harder for a bloke in my position to explain himself properly. I’ve had more tribulations in the last ten years than Israel ever did in Egypt. Or so it felt, though I don’t like to complain.’
‘Another coffee?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, please.’
I gave him more sandwiches and a bar of chocolate. ‘I have to be going now.’ I opened the door. ‘So if you’d like to get in.’
‘What time is it?’
I went to the headlight and looked at my half-hunter pocket watch. ‘Five to eleven.’
He leaned close. ‘I had a watch like that once, but I lost it. Or it got stolen, probably by the removal men. Such things happened to me in those days, when I still had a watch to lose. I was far too careless.’
We settled ourselves in, and I offered him one of Moggerhanger’s prime cigars on the assumption that all fugitives were born equal.
‘I’d better not, but thanks all the same. That supper was a treat. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.’
I waited for a car to pass, then drifted onto the road. ‘Haven’t you got any money?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve allus got a bit. Don’t want to get pulled in for a vagrant. It happened once, so I never have less than five pounds in my pocket, though that ain’t worth a sight these days. But I’m always economising. I set myself to spend so much a day, and I even try to save a copper or two out of that. It’s a rigorous regime, but I never go really hungry. I think a Spartan existence does a man good, don’t you?’
‘No,’ I said.
He pulled out a tattered map. ‘I intended getting some fish and chips at the next town. Bromsgrove, ain’t it?’
‘I hope so.’ I saw the glow of lights in the distance. He asked if I owned the car. ‘I’m taking some stuff to a place in Shropshire. I’m the chauffeur.’
He settled back. ‘I’ll have that cigar now, if you don’t mind.’ He stroked Dismal’s head, and if there was one thing Dismal liked more than having one person to fuss over him, it was having two. ‘Lovely dog, this one.’
‘He’s my best friend.’
‘Looks like a cross between a Newfoundland and a St Bernard.’
‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Where are you going after Bromsgrove?’
‘It’s anybody’s guess. I keep on the move. I come from Nottinghamshire originally, and funnily enough I never seem to get more than a hundred miles away from the place. I go in ever increasing circles for a while, then in ever decreasing circles till I hit Slab Square, when I start my ever increasing circles once more. I suppose it comes from having been an engineer. I was a mining engineer, but I retired early because I came into some money. It wasn’t much, so I don’t know why I did retire. Stupid, it was. I let it go to my head. But my wife had left me the year before, though the time had come for us to go our separate ways in any case. We’d been together so long we were like two maiden ladies living together. When she’d gone I sold my house and moved to Leicester. I was fifty then. It was just over ten years ago. Seems like the ice age has come and gone. But I was happy enough to sell my house at the time. I got £4,600 for it, which was fair enough in those days.’
He settled himself more comfortably. ‘In Leicester I bought a small flat, took it on a kind of cooperative basis, organised by a man who said he had been a socialist all his life and wanted to put his principles into practice. I don’t know who you are, but never have anything to do with anything like that, no matter what the principles are. If ever you get close to anybody who starts talking about the future, run for your life. But I fell for it, in reply to an advertisement. Never fall for an advertisement, because they are just a mirror to what’s in the rest of the newspaper. Anyway, this smiling damned villain with his blond locks, fisherman’s sweater, army boots and pigskin briefcase vanished one day, and the next morning the council moved in to demolish the house. I just managed to get out before the ball and chain came through my window. As it was I lost my books and records.’
A tearfulness came into his voice, but he checked it firmly, which endeared me to him. ‘I went mad. What money I had left I spent trying to sue them. In the end I was penniless. I had some family in Leicester, but from then on they wouldn’t even speak when they passed me in the street in case I asked ’em for the price of a pack of fags. Even their children snubbed me. I got ulcers, and then I was in an asylum for a few months because — so they said, but I didn’t remember — I threw a ten-inch nut and bolt through the windscreen of a councillor’s car. Doughty props were giving way all round me.
‘The only thing I could do was take to the road. That was the saving of me. Every few weeks I pick up a bit of money from national this and national that. They all know me in the offices at Nottingham and Leicester, and it’s not much money but it keeps me going. I’m lucky it’s this world and not in Russia where a bloke like me would be put in jail as a parasite. But I’ve never felt so healthy since taking to the road. Summer or winter, I’m out in all weathers. Sometimes I get a bed, but often I sleep rough, inside a sewage pipe, or a barn, or under a hedge, or in an old car, or a derelict building — of which there’s usually one round about. I never get colds, nor any aches and pains. My feet hardened after the first fortnight. I get a bit forgetful, that’s the only thing. Ever since I set out, though, I’ve kept a Level Book to record my ups and downs.’