However, by the time we reached the A45, things had begun to change. It was as if we were being sucked into some giant vortex of traffic. Although we were still over fifty miles from London I could feel the magnetic pull of the city. The cars that passed and repassed one another along the sections of dual carriageway were like iron filings, unwillingly coerced into flowing lines, all heading in the same ultimate direction. It felt as if we were no longer in a car at all, but in some miniature, mono-carriaged train. The track was laid out ahead of us. We could increase or decrease speed, but it was impossible to change direction. And when we reached junctions or roundabouts all the points had been switched in advance. We howled through the tight curves, wheel rims straining against the track, and on.
Thirty minutes later we pulled off the All into a petrol station. As Jim filled up the tank I continued to stare blankly through the windscreen. The forecourt was brightly lit. A sales display of garden furniture was set out near the cashier’s window, flower-patterned chairs and recliners with frosted aluminium arms and legs. There was a coming and going of leisure wear and Bermudas. A high octane stench combined with the wash of orange halogen light, spreading across the stained concrete pan. It was like some parody of recreation.
Jim paid with his company petrol card. He threw the crumpled-up counterfoil into the back seat where our jackets lay and we wheeled out on to the road. He let the Sierra pull us up quickly through the five long, low gear ratios and then hunkered down into his seat again.
We had long since ceased to speak when we neared the intersection of the Mil and the M25. I could feel Jim’s indecision in the way the car held the road. He was calculating routes back to south-west London. I knew he hated the M25, ‘The stupidest thing about it is its name. If a road is described as “orbital”, it’s a sure-fire guarantee that when you get on to the thing you’re bound to feel as if you’re in outer space.’
The alternative to the M25 was to keep straight on and join the North Circular at Gants Hill. Jim tensed at the wheel in a peculiar way. A body tenses up before receiving an expected blow. Jim tensed as if to ward off the heavy traffic congestion at the roundabout where the A404 meets the Great North Road. The Sierra skittered a little, and then it was done, we plopped off on to the exit road. There were two seconds when it was too late: one when we were on the exit road and the next when we saw the great yellow hoarding with its familiar legend, ‘Delays possible until late ‘91’. There was nothing for it now. It was as if we had been determined. The Cynics were correct, the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us. Nothing for it now, but to regard the motorway furniture with a baleful eye as we cruised gently to a halt and rocked into stasis at the back of the stack of cars snaking through the long, low, flat chicane.
‘A three-lane jam at midnight on a Sunday! I can’t fucking well believe it. I can’t believe it. I do not believe it. Look at these people.’ Jim gestured wildly at the yellow profiles receding into the distance like a frieze of minor Assyrians. ‘They simply don’t know what they are doing. They are waiting. Do you understand me? Waiting. And while they wait nothing is happening, and when they stop waiting nothing will happen either, and while they have waited nothing will have occurred — except, perhaps, for the collapse of some more carbon molecules. Mmmmm! Breathe it in, man.’ Jim encompassed some air with another ham gesture and drew it into his nose and mouth. ‘Finest destruction of the ionosphere, most perfect winding down of fossil fuel reserves. I love it! I love it! God speed, you future patina of grey chemical soot on the leaves of municipal gardens in Osterley, Egham, and for that matter, Stockholm! Mmm, my air sacs have never felt so good!
‘Hello! Hello! How are you? How about a little personal interaction here. After all, we’re all stuck in this together. Why don’t we break down some barriers here? My name is Jim. What’s yours?’ Jim was talking to the profiles, but they wouldn’t hear him, they sat on, acquiring verdigris in the wash of light from their fascia. ‘Hi kids, wanna play? Why don’t we start a game of cricket on the central reservation? Six runs if you can hit the ball off the motorway.’ But the kids didn’t want to play cricket. Their little budding mouths were glued to parental shoulders, grouted with congealed Tango and Sprite. And the parental shoulders were set square towards the future. Whenever the steel testudo unbuckled and coiled its way forward a few feet, all the drivers reverted to form and tried to switch lanes to gain the tiniest advantage available — because it was there.
Jim gave up on his attempts to foster communication. He took out his camera and rested it on top of the steering wheel. He squinted through the viewfinder while continuing to murmur under his breath, ‘Very slow exposure and we should get the picture. I’ll be damned, a three-lane jam on the M25 at midnight; this is it. This-is-it. Strained and ruckled, bumper to bumper, immanence and imminence. It’s all here. It’s all here …’ He was clicking away, his voice tending towards falsetto.
I swivelled in my seat and looked back. We had reached the bottom of the depression that the chicane had snaked through and there were as many cars piled up behind as in front of us. I had the strange feeling that there was absolutely no depth to what I could see. In both directions there was simply the flat pattern formed by car shapes. The traffic in the oncoming carriageway grew larger and diminished without extension. The cars were so many globs of multicoloured oil, expanding and contracting in a giant version of one of those risible Sixties lamps. Jim and I were the tiniest slivers of humanity, pressed in the microscope slide of the Sierra.
Jim turned to me, ‘You know why I like this car so much?’ The question was rhetorical. ‘Because of its quiddity, its whatness. It has no other quality; it is. It has no need to come into being — it is already utterly mediocre. They’ve sold 25,000 of these cars in the past year. Twenty-Five thousand! We could be in any one of them. We could still be on the production line inching forward. Any moment now an operative is going to come along and start bolting new prostheses on to you, new forms of biological engineering that you could never imagine. This car is not waiting. Do you understand that? This car has already arrived. We are where we’re going, this …’ He gestured at the Assyrians, the Daihatsus, the Passats, the orange night, ‘is home.’
He sat cradling the wheel for a while, inching forward with the rest. Tirelessly performing the heel-toe dance step of slow locomotion, and then: ‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m getting out of here,’ and he was gone.
I worked about two streets away from Jim and the following day I walked over to his office during my lunch hour. I was determined to confront him over his behaviour of the night before. Everybody has a certain leeway with everyone else. Everyone is entitled to the odd bout of craziness. But Jim’s stunts were becoming habitual. I had witnessed his preoccupation with ‘waiting’ grow from the occasional rant — always amusing and good value as a party piece — into a full-blown obsession, and like all kinds of obsessional behaviour it was beginning to hurt other people. Jim was becoming a self-centred and destructive egotist. If our relationship was to continue he was going to have to recognise last night for what it really was: a neurotic, knee-jerk reaction. Rather than for what he would have it be: some profound statement concerning The Way We Are and The Way In Which We Live.