I have everything assembled now. Lain out in a pattern on the table top. One question remains … how to eat it. Oral intake is inconceivable. For one thing there is the flatness … the wart’s fault … and for another the gorge which continually deposits freight lift-loads of metallic saliva in my mouth. No, I’ll have to absorb the potion through my skin. Sandwich a spicy mushroom between two invoices, package it like some strange dim sum and press it into the hollow of my neck, rub down its crinkly, greasy softness. Open my tired shirt … take squares of processed cheese and feel them bind into the spindly hairs on my chest … not long now … stale bagels are to be ground up in the hand and the crumbs dropped down the front of my trousers, together with torn squares of laminated 275 gsm art board … morello cherry conserve on my forehead … nothing is sticky when you immerse yourself in it … plaster the triple-leaved invoice on to the gungy mess … the best till last … the wart itself… the chicken wing… like a foetal arm … roll up the sleeve and spread the turmeric paste on to the wart … Jesus, that hurts! But yes it feels good … it feels good … What’s that! A trill in the living-room … a ‘spung’ and then a trill… the phone is ringing … it worked … I rush out of the kitchen … I can feel crumbs falling down around my crotch … the conserve gums up my eyes … emulsifiers and E207 additives are speedily imploding into the wart … I only have a limited amount of time …in the livingroom the first peal is sharp, hectoring, insistent … that was quick! I made it from the kitchen to the living-room in the time it took the phone to fully connect … but where is the phone … Where is the phone! … I can’t see it anywhere … I haven’t used it for two days… I don’t know where it is… Stop. Where’s the ringing coming from … Not in here at all … I can hear it through the floorboards … It’s coming from the bedroom upstairs … And I’m up there before the thought has even taken form … but I can’t find the phone anywhere … The ringing is coming from the testudo that covers the bed … it’s one of the children! I tear the packaging from its sylvan form with scrabbling nails, the plastic bubbles pop between my fingers … the corrugated cardboard is strangely slick … My Children … with their buttons and their bows … with their little rubberised penises … one of them is calling to me … But which one? Not this one … not this one … not this one … I tear off jacket after jacket … And now another one starts … and another … and another … Upstairs and downstairs … in the living-room … in the kitchen … in the hall … in the back bedroom … until all hundred gross of them are pealing away in a synchronous cacophony … pulsing like some insane electronic cicadas … pulsing in and out … expanding and contracting … expanding …
Waiting
‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m getting out of here.’ Jim was cradling the plastic rim of the Ford Sierra’s steering wheel in his forearms and staring blankly through the windscreen. I noticed, completely inconsequentially, that his forearms were angled as if they were part of the car’s controls — perhaps some kind of overarching indicator levers. And then he was gone; he elbowed the door open, slid sideways and jack-knifed his feet out of the car with a suddenness that sent the rest of his body pivoting after them. After that he was off and running. He vaulted the grooved steel barrier that divided the carriageways and bolted across the eastbound side of the motorway, narrowly evading the oncoming traffic which was whipping through the long, low chicane as if to purposefully taunt the banked-up vehicles not heading west. There was a chorus of Dopplered hoots which rose and then fell and he was gone into the close darkness.
The door rocked gently on its hinges and wafted a little more petrol and diesel fumes into the passenger compartment. The night was as warm and as vinyl as the interior of the car. It was as if the motorway, the central reservation, the screed, unfinished banks — all of it — were enclosed in some larger, staler, automotive interior. The sky was flatly two-dimensional; an all-encompassing, bug-smeared windscreen, stippled with dried, dirty droplets.
For a full three minutes after Jim had got fed up with waiting I thought that things might still pan out. By rights in a situation such as this, left, unable to drive, in the passenger seat of a car hopelessly jammed on the M25 in the middle of the night, the scene ought to fade out. It was a natural ending. But after three minutes the traffic started to edge forward and I panicked. Eventually, irate fellow motorists — family men, stock controllers and solicitors’ clerks — in beige leisure wear and patterned Bermudas, got out of their cars and pushed the Sierra across the two nearside lanes and on to the hard shoulder. Then they got back into their hatchback Daihatsus and Passat estates and ground off, with infinite pains, towards the tangle of striped cones and panting JCBs which marked the genesis of the jam.
I was left sitting. The knob atop the steering column of the Sierra clicked on and then off — what a drama queen — sending a false message of hopeful hazard, nowhere.
Two hours later a truly fat man buckled the belts round the car’s axles, pulled the lever on the back of the pick-up and an electric motor whined. The cable pulled taut and yanked the front of the Sierra up in the air. We got into the cab and started off towards scored and grooved exit roads, ranged around the orbital road like the revetments of some modern hill fort, marking our way back into the Great Wen. The AA were unsympathetic; the nominated garage man wanted cash. It was almost 3.00 in the morning when I woke Jim’s wife up. The source of the trouble was crouched, looking crippled on the steep camber of the road, its knob still clicking. To give her credit she paid up without a murmur. The truly fat garage man went on his way. Jim’s wife, Carol, gave me a blank look of sad resignation and shut the door quietly in my face.
Jim and I had spent the day up in Norfolk. ‘I like flat places,’ said Jim, ‘places where the sky has a chance to define the land. I’m fed up with the tiny proscenium arch of the Home Counties. If I wanted to act on my day off I’d join an amateur theatre company.’ He tended to talk like this — in the form of a series of observations, which hammered out a Point Of View. One that couldn’t be argued with, only acknowledged, or assented to. We had spent the afternoon wandering from village to village. Jim took a lot of photographs with his new camera. He was a good photographer, his photographs were always artfully uncomposed; they were visual asides. He only took pictures where objects in the foreground could insidiously dominate the scene. He wasn’t interested in people, or nature for that matter. Naturally enough, Jim had a view on photography as welclass="underline" ‘It doesn’t mean fuck all. It’s a toy — that’s all — not some potent weapon for transforming reality. You point it at an object, you press the button, and a few days later you see the “thing”, and can’t resist a little gasp of wonderment.’
We started the drive back at about 10.00. As darkness fell, the promised cool of the evening failed to materialise. Instead, the sticky, humid afternoon gave way to a hot, close night-time. The first part of the drive was relaxing and apt. We swished across the Norfolk plain, our tyres whispering to the tangled verges, the Sierra’s boxy suspension flatly reporting over the potholes.
I sat rocking on the car’s offside, absorbed by Jim’s concentration as he drove. He sat low, the car seat raked backwards and at an angle. His disproportionately long arms gripped the bottom of the wheel at the unrecommended position of twenty-five minutes past seven. His eyes seemed to be roughly at the level of the top of the instrument panel. He was more intent on the green and red lights inside the car than those ahead. But he drove well, with an unforced and intuitive ease, as if the car’s controls were natural extensions of his own limbs.