At the same time she realizes that a motoring journalist who has been banned from driving is a luxury that Cult Car would probably force itself to do without.
‘I need a drink,’ she says.
‘And I need that editorial,’ says Terry.
♦
A stop on the motorway, Ishmael reasoned, ought to be a chance to stop and reflect on the finer things, a chance to sniff the air, to look at the grass. Yet here in the foyer of the services were kids whose only break from the road was a chance to dice with electronic imitations of death.
Ishmael started to get angry.
What base form of philistinism offers games of death as entertainment? Why couldn’t service stations have foyers full of Blake’s paintings? There need be no musak — there could be Bach and Bartok playing. Travellers could stand in informal groups and discuss art and philosophy.
He went to a tall youth playing one of the games and tried to explain all this to him. He was about seventeen, skinny, failing to grow a moustache. He had on a studded leather jacket, his breath smelled of juicy fruit gum and he had a ghetto-blaster at his feet.
At first he didn’t seem to catch Ishmael’s drift so Ishmael held him firmly by the shoulder and tried to take him into the clear morning air where the point could be made with fewer distractions.
They didn’t get as far as the clear morning air. The moment Ishmael placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder he sprang from the machine and confronted Ishmael in a martial-arts pose.
‘Don’t ever lay a finger on me,’ he said very loudly. ‘Don’t you ever touch me, you wanker. Nobody ever touches me.’
Ishmael was unsure of his next move. A crowd of youthful low-life was gathering round them. Someone shouted, ‘Go on son, hit him. Don’t let him get away with it.’
‘You see,’ Ishmael said after some consideration, ‘violence begets violence. You play on that infernal machine and then you transfer that mindless set of violent reactions to real life. You wouldn’t have reacted like this if you’d just spent the last ten minutes contemplating Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’.’
‘Go on, stick one on him. He’s yellow and he talks funny.’
The youth relaxed slightly but the general body language still spoke of alert aggression.
‘What’s your name?’ Ishmael asked him.
‘Davey.’
‘Mine’s Ishmael.’
There was a whoop of derision from the crowd. It came from the person who had been egging Davey on. He looked old enough to know better. He was wearing a yellow cardigan.
‘I think you must be tired of living,’ he said to Ishmael. ‘I reckon this boy’s got deadly weapons for hands.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Ishmael snapped. ‘He seems to have dead matter for brains.’
‘You shouldn’t talk to a martial-arts expert like that,’ said yellow cardigan.
‘Be reasonable,’ Ishmael said. ‘I put my hand on somebody’s shoulder to show him that there’s a world of truth and beauty waiting for him out there and he reacts like a brute beast. What happened to reason? What happened to human fellowship?’
Davey shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
‘A lot of people forget there’s a large spiritual dimension to the martial arts,’ he said.
He slipped his hands into the side pockets of his jacket. Ishmael wondered briefly if he was going to pull a knife. The crowd looked at him expectantly.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you might have a point. Come on.’
He jerked his head to indicate that Ishmael should follow him outside. They went together.
♦
Terry is probably ten years Renata’s junior. He has been performing major surgery on cars since he was ten or eleven, been driving them since long before then, and he has one A-level, though admittedly it is in English.
Renata, by contrast, has an English degree and aborted careers in advertising, radio journalism and arts administration behind her. She wrote her first motoring article after a holiday in Mexico, three years ago.
As your flight touches down in Mexico, as you put aside your copy of The Boys from Brazil, and as you gaze out of your aircraft window, your first thought is that you have landed in the centre of a Mexican Volkswagen enthusiasts’ meeting.
Teams of cleaners, mechanics, security men and customs officials are ferried to and fro in Beetles that would be thrown out of the average English scrapyard for making the place look untidy.
All the taxis in Mexico City are Beetles, or at least nearly Beetles. Most of them lack what you would take to be some vital part — like wings, or a driver’s door, or lights, indicators and windscreen. They are held together, not so much with string and chewing gum, more with frayed bootlaces and spit, but under those battered, mutilated, sometimes barely recognizable, exteriors there beats the unmistakable throb of Doc Porsche’s favourite flat-four engine…
And so on. She met an American with a good suntan and a good camera who took slides of the more spectacularly ruined cars, and on her return to England she sold the article to Classic Motoring magazine.
♦
Ishmael and Davey stood in the car-park. There were hills and trees in the distance. There was a grass verge.
‘England,’ said Davey. ‘God’s own country.’
Ishmael agreed. He asked where Davey was travelling to and discovered he was going to his married sister in Stoke. A friend of his mother was giving him a lift. The friend was still in the Gents. Davey didn’t like his married sister much but it was better than being at home with his mother.
‘I think I begin to understand,’ Ishmael said. ‘This violence you express towards the world, be it vented on an electronic game or on an innocent stranger who tries talking to you about higher realities, this is surely a displaced feeling of anger and resentment that you have for your mother.’
Davey thought long and hard.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I think it’s just a phase I’m going through.’
♦
Herr von Opel, head of the largest motor manufacturer in Germany, is present at the signing of the contract whereby Ferdinand Porsche agrees to produce three prototypes, one of which will be developed into the people’s car. Von Opel turns to Porsche and sneers, ‘What a wonderful contract. Ten months of highly paid futile labour, at the end of which you write a simple memorandum stating that the project is impossible, a fact that those of us with the least intelligence are aware of now. How I wish we all had such wonderful contracts.’
Porsche is furious, and that insult to his integrity concentrates the mind wonderfully. Or does he know that he is to be the director of a dream sequence in which everything is possible, except the bargain price? Perhaps the war, with its reshuffling of moral and financial values, will come as a welcome relief. What is unafford-able in times of peace becomes priceless in war, the restaurant menu without prices.
♦
Just to demonstrate good-will Ishmael let Davey show him how to play one of the electronic games, and Ishmael did seem to have a talent for it. First you’re driving a futuristic racing car round an intergalactic grand prix circuit, but at intervals the way is blocked by alien monsters and you have to shoot them out of the way, but at other intervals the monsters mutate, you find your weapons are useless and you have to plunge the car into hyperspace. Ishmael got a higher score than Davey. Then Davey’s mother’s friend came out of the Gents and Davey prepared to leave.
The fellow in the yellow cardigan had watched all this with disapproval.
‘I still think you should have stuck one on him, kid,’ he said to Davey.
‘Hey, do me a favour will you?’ Davey replied. ‘Piss off.’
Yellow cardigan took out his frustration on a pinball machine. Ishmael went into the dining-room for breakfast. He was feeling damn good at having beaten Davey on the machine. Then as he ate it slowly dawned on him that the little bastard might just possibly have let him win. He felt suddenly hollow.