He turned to me.
‘How good is your knowledge?’ I was taken aback.
‘Good enough, I suppose. I know my way around.’
‘How quickly do you think you could drive from here to the Hornimans Museum via Shootup Hill?’
‘Well…’ I looked around me. It was nearly 1.00 and the streets were thick with lunch-time traffic. The stodgy air boiled with blue exhaust. I computed routes, thought about the ebb and flow of cars, transit vans, lorries and buses. I tried to visualise the roads I would travel down. ‘If you were lucky you might do it in an hour and twenty minutes, but I’d allow an hour and a half.’
‘We’ll do it in forty-five minutes.’ Carlos was emphatic. He wiped his temples with a big red handkerchief and turned on his heel. Jim and I followed him back to the square. A traffic warden, neat in dark uniform and fluorescent sash, was tucking a ticket behind the Sierra’s windscreen wiper. As Carlos mounted his MZ Jim tore it off and shredded it. The traffic warden shrugged. The central locking chonked and I took my place in the passenger seat, immediately conscious of the interior of the car as another, separate place.
We peeled away from the kerb and followed Carlos off round the square, turning left into the alley that leads to Charing Cross Road.
‘Pay no attention to the Secret Police of Waiting.’ It was a flat statement. Jim made it through hard-pressed teeth. I paid no attention. I was stuck in a kind of torpor, all I could focus on were the flapping sides of Carlos’s corduroy trousers as he moved ahead of us through the traffic.
Jim drove with his habitual, flattened ease. The boxy modern car clumped and tchocked through the streets. Carlos hovered ahead on his bike. It was as if he were attached to us by some invisible, umbilical cord. He didn’t lead us through the traffic, we moved in concert.
Across Gower Street and then right, past the Royal Ear Hospital, to the top and then left and right, on to Tottenham Court Road. There was no delay at the Euston Road lights, we went straight up through the estates behind Hampstead Road. I noticed idly that the council, instead of pointing some of the older blocks, had taken to cladding them with caramel slabs. Our little convoy accelerated through the half-circuit of the Outer Circle. Nash terraces were reduced by speed to a single, tall, thin house. We skittered across the bridge that led out of Regent’s Park. Down Belsize Road; for a moment we were poised alongside an old Datsun 180D, bulbous, red and rusting. It plunged with us towards the elbowed bend, where the road narrows to one lane. The cord tightened between the MZ and the Sierra. We pulled ahead of the Datsun. In the wing mirror, the surrounds of its blind headlights, conjunctival with rust, were sharp and then gone. We tore through the aggressive signing of the one-way system between Finchley Road and West End Lane. Then dropped down the other side into a trough of squats and second-hand furniture shops that in turn disgorged us on to the great, raddled, calloused, Kilburn High Road.
I registered all these junctures, but only vaguely. There was an unreal, static sensation to the journey. The long London roads were panoramic scenery wound back behind us to provide the illusion of movement. The MZ and the Sierra stood still, occupying a different zone.
We reached Shootup Hill in about seventeen minutes. The facility with which Carlos had led us was unnatural. At every juncture where there was an opportunity for a choice, he took the right one. Time and again we turned one way and I saw in the rear-view mirror that if we had gone the other, more obvious way, we would have been frozen in a tail-back, eroding synchromesh for five minutes or more. Even stranger than that was the realisation that the idiosyncratic directions we did take, always took time off our journey. Carlos had not only apprehended every road, he had anticipated every alleyway, every mews, every garage forecourt and the position and synchronisation of every traffic light. He could not possibly know what he seemed to know — the only way he could have seen the route we took was from the air, and even then he would have had to have made constant trigonometric calculations to figure out the angles we seemed to have followed intuitively.
We were going up Shootup Hill towards Kilburn doing about forty, when suddenly Carlos put his right leg down and yanked the bike round in a tight turn. Jim followed suit, without even looking at the oncoming traffic, and before I’d had time to register the extent of the risk we’d run, we were heading back down and under the railway bridge.
The swish of an underpass, the whirr of an overpass, a long row of wing mirrors reaching out to us, the rise and fall of identically gabled roofs. Jim’s arms — the inside of the forearm pressed against the wheel — insectoid and manipulative. The child’s counterpane world of London’s roads — where a turned corner can mean a distant prospect, a sudden impression of pillows in the distance, or a dip into a hollow can completely enclose you in a tiny world where the light quality never changes and spindrifts of sweet-wrappers chase one another in a tireless pavane.
As we crossed Blackfriars Bridge, the water glinted for a second; to the right a glimpse of banked-up buildings, circumstantially pompous — an encrustation of administration which could belong to any city on earth — and then gone, back into the homogeneous, the undifferentiated London, where twee shopping parade succeeds arterial road, in turn flanked by the dusty parade ground of a municipal park where single, silent figures stand, tied to stuffed dogs.
No frenzy, no hurry. No giving anyone the finger. Carlos weaved and we weaved with him, cutting up whole files of traffic, ignoring feeder lights, insinuating ourselves on to roundabouts. The outward stretch to Shootup Hill had presented itself as an elegant piece of geometry. The downward swipe to Horniman’s Gardens was guile and outrageous nerve. I felt chilly in the stuffy, corrupted car. Chilly and scared.
Through Dulwich Park the Sierra’s engine phutted into the cleaner air and Carlos’s trousers dappled in the sunlight that fell through the trees.
We pulled up at the Hornimans Museum exactly forty-five minutes after we had started from Soho Square. Carlos banked his bike on to the tarmac lip that curled up from the road and we followed suit. Behind us the prospect opened out for the first time since we had crossed the river. In the middle distance a ridge of crenellated, oblong buildings stood out above the sea of tree- and rooftops. Beyond them London washed away towards the northern horizon, bluer and greyer.
Carlos was pulling off his gloves as I jack-knifed myself out of the door of the Sierra in an attempt to jerk myself out of the strange trance. Carlos wore two gloves on each hand. The cheap vinyl of the outer glove had worn away exposing the tufts of the wool gloves inside. For some reason these worn patches fixated me, they were somehow anatomical. The blood rushed to my temples — I stared at the gloves. I felt sick. Carlos leant up against the signboard advertising the museum’s exhibits.
The irritating Welsh voice: ‘You see boy, when I trance like that,’ he rolled his eyes back in his head exposing a network of veins under the pink ball, ‘I assess the flow, at one location, for one brief moment. But because I know, you see, I know so much about this,’ he gestured towards the horizon, ‘it means that all the movement stands still. I know ev-ery-thing.’ He rolled out the syllables with fluting emphasis. ‘All the tail-backs, all the hold-ups, every burst water-main and dropped lorry load in the metropolis — at that moment I realise them all. Take me to any street, any street in London whatsoever where there is a constant traffic stream and just by looking at it I can know the state of every other road in the city. Then there’s no waiting. You understand? I never have to wait.’