Incompetence

by Rob Grant

  I was overcooking, now. English may be the legally enforced lingua franca of Europe, but the English use of irony has failed to travel beyond the shores of its birthplace. Il Duce just stared at me blankly, and wiped and wiped his hands.

  I broadened my smile and tried again. 'How did you expect me to move it?'

  'I didn't. That's why I went to get the clamp.'

  I lowered my voice even further, and cranked up the smile one final notch. 'I see.' My teeth were so fiercely gritted by now, and my vocal volume so low, I was probably only audible to blue whales. I fought off a mental image of me using the mechanic's teeth as a xylophone and the fascia as a mallet to thrash out the 'Flight of the Bumblebee' in its entirety.

  I leaned into the car and clicked the fascia onto the dashboard to buy some time to compose myself.

  My investment failed, because when I straightened up to face him, I had a heart full of colourfully murderous plans, and a mind all ready to act them out.

  'Okayyyyyy...' I wound the long tube of bubble wrap around my fists, making what I hoped were eyeball-popping sounds, 'all that remains is for you to remove that clamp, and I'll be on my way.'

  I must have looked like I meant business, because Benito's face dropped, its colour drained, and he took a shaky and involuntary step back. 'I can't do that.'

  'Of course you can,' I assured him, winding the bubble wrap tighter.

  'No, really, I can't remove the clamp.' He sounded genuinely apologetic, which was beginning to worry me.

  'I don't mind paying a fine.'

  'You don't understand. I can't remove the clamp; I don't have the key.'

  'You don't have the key?'

  He shook his head. 'The clamping firm, it's a private company.'

  'But you put the clamp on, did you not?'

  'Yes. You don't need the key to put the clamp on.'

  'So...' I kept my lips pursed in the 'O' formation for some considerable time. 'So. My threatening to strangle the life out of you, using this bubble wrap as a makeshift ligature, that's probably not going to get me anywhere in this particular instance?'

  'No,' he agreed, again apologetically. 'Probably not.'

  'Very well, then. Who do we call to get the clamp removed?'

  'You can't do it over the phone. You have to go in person.'

  'Why?' Pop, pop, pop. 'Why would that be?'

  'I think they want to maximise the inconvenience. Illegal parking is a major problem in Paris. They're really cracking down on it.'

  They? All of a sudden, this whole business was the fault of a faceless 'They'. The fascist mechanic no longer wanted to be my adversary, he wanted to be my friend. He wanted us to be just two innocent bystanders swept up in events beyond our control, instigated by nameless bureaucrats who spent their time making rules just to screw people like him and me over. 'Okayyyyyy...' I wound the bubble wrap tighter still. I was beginning to find it soothing. 'Soooooooo... where exactly is the clamping firm's Paris office?'

  'In Toulouse.'

  'Pardon me?'

  'They closed down the Paris office. It was too busy.'

  'Wait a minute.' Poppety, pippety, pip, pop, pop, pop. 'Are you saying they closed down the Paris office because it was too busy?'

  'That's what I'm saying.' He shook his head ruefully and made some 'tch' sounds.

  'So now I have to go to Toulouse to get my car unclamped in Paris?'

  He just carried on shaking his head, wiping his hands and doing the 'tch, tch, tch' thing.

  'And just bear with me, because I'm having a wee problem with this here: how the hell am I supposed to get to Toulouse, exactly?'

  He gave me a helpless, wide-eyed shrug. 'Bus, I guess. Or train. Or...'

  He had nowhere to go from here. We both knew what we both knew about the public transport strike. 'Or...?'

  'Or, you could always hire another car.'

  'I could hire another car?'

  'Just a suggestion.'

  'Well, now. This is an interesting scenario. I lash out a fortune hiring yet another vehicle from you nice people at Rent-Ur-Car, and in the unlikely circumstance that this second vehicle actually goes, I then drive in it all the way to Toulouse, pay a fine, drive back to Paris, wait for the unclampers to show, then pick up the original hire car, and finally I can start to go where I actually wanted to go in the first place. Is that the new fucking master plan? Is that the genius scheme you're suggesting? Anyone spot a flaw in that proposal? No hurry. We appear to have all day.'

  'Just trying to be helpful, Mister.'

  'You knew this when you put that clamp on, didn't you?'

  He looked at the clamp, then he looked back at me. 'I guess I wasn't thinking it through.'

  He guessed he wasn't thinking it through.

  'All right. All right. I'll do it. I'm not going to go to Toulouse, because that part is fucking madness. But I am prepared to hire another car. Can we do that? Can we do that very quickly, please, before I go into a psychopathic rage and kill everyone on the lot in a bubble wrap strangling frenzy?'

  Of course, there were no more cars to be hired. I knew it, and he knew it, and he knew and I knew we both knew we knew it. He finished wiping his hands and put the rag in his pocket. He hiked his thumb towards the office block. 'Why don't I go and check with the rental girl?' he offered, all chirrupy and helpful, now. 'See if anything's come in?'

  I let him go. I think that surprised him. I think he'd pictured spending the next few hours, which would be his last, dangling by a bubble wrap noose from the nearest lamp post. I watched him trying not to actually run away, but failing, then turned around and started looking around the lot.

  The truth was, I wanted him out of the way now, so I could just jemmy off the clamp and be on my way. I found a rusted tyre iron, which would probably do the trick. If it didn't, a certain yellow-overalled mechanic would find himself wearing it for the rest of his life, like a fairy wears a Christmas tree.

  I bent to the back wheel and prodded the clamp with the tyre iron. It split apart without any force being necessary. II Duce hadn't been lying. He really was a truly bad mechanic.

  I slid into the driver's seat and popped the keycard in its slot. The new dashboard lit up like a Las Vegas million-dollar slot machine -- fig. 8 all the way through to fig. 97 all present and correct. I don't mind telling you, I sang a little samba myself. I tapped in the four-digit pin code and the engine purred into life.

  As I cruised out of the lot, I spared a glance at the rental office window. The mechanic was peering out at me from behind the flimsy sanctuary of a grinning cardboard cutout of a fictionally helpful Rent-Ur-Car assistant. It was only when I gave an understated victory salute in his direction that I noticed the bubble wrap was still wound around my fist. Tightly, too. I could barely feel my fingers.

  If ever I'm called upon to rewrite the classics, I'll have a whole new list of labours for Hercules. Bringing Cerberus the Hellhound from the Kingdom of the Dead? That won't even make the top ten. That won't even be in the charts. Hiring a rental car from Paris? I'd like to see old Hercules try that.

  I'd like to see him try.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I'd been driving for six hours, and Vienna by Wednesday was beginning to seem a trifle ambitious. I was thinking perhaps I should lower my sights a tad, and just aim to get out of the Champs-Elysees before my pension was due.

  Cunningly, the city planners had chosen the day of an all-out public transport strike to introduce a super new one-way system to the city, and no matter which turn I took, I always seemed to be heading for the Arc de Triomphe. Today, all roads did not lead to Rome. Today all roads led to an Eiffel Tower souvenir stand with a red, white and blue striped awning. Well, it was certainly a radical new traffic concept, not without its merits. You force all the vehicles down exactly the same street, and free up the rest of the roads for pedestrians. It could catch on.

  The entire city was going nowhere, slowly. As planning cock-ups go, this was an average affair: at leas
t the traffic was actually moving. True, it was all moving in the same direction and down the same road, but even that was better than the total gridlocks we were getting used to. Three years ago, a new pilot road scheme had brought Madrid to a standstill for five days. Cars had to be airlifted out to Barcelona so they could start again from somewhere else.

  There were workmen at every junction frantically adjusting the signs as you drove past. It must have been hard and challenging work for the poor, beleaguered devils, and it wasn't made any easier by the legions of frustrated motorists pelting them with various projectiles, assertions about the validity of their lineage and threats of lethal violence en passant. I felt sorry for them, really I did, but that didn't stop me buying some rotten fruit from a roadside vendor and hurling a few tomatoes their way.

  I just stuck at it, stoically. They couldn't keep me driving down the Champs-Elysees for ever, could they?

  But eventually, as night began to fall, I began to believe they could. I began to believe I would spend the rest of my life in a Fiat Affordable, driving slowly towards Napoleon's great arch, then circling slowly around and driving slowly towards it again. If I ever wanted a family, I'd have to raise them in the back seat, and send them to school in the trunk.

  The weird thing was, there were hundreds of motorists who kept risking my life and theirs to push in front of me. What for? We were all going the same way round in a gigantic circle, for crying out loud. What was the point of hurrying to get one car closer to the Arc de Triomphe, so you could reach it for the twenty-fifth time in order to turn back and go round it again? Yet, for these crazy fruitcakes, it was a matter of life and death, and anyone who failed to let them pass the instant they blared their horns was subjected to a torrent of wild screams and threats and vividly sexual gesticulations. Really. Where's that bin bag full of faecal matter when you really need it?

  Eventually, somebody somewhere worked something out, after a fashion. And, likewise eventually, the car's GPS system actually caught up with the new traffic arrangements and managed to guide me out of the city and onto the open road.

  Just before the first stretch of motorway, I pulled into a service station and topped everything up: the batteries, the cooking oil, everything. I had planned to stop overnight in Germany, but I was so far behind schedule, I decided to opt for the motorway's automised lane. You pay a mileage fee, key your route into the central motorway computer and let it take over the driving for you. With a 56 kph upper speed limit, it wouldn't be the fastest way to travel, but at least I'd be moving while I slept. And after my single buttock's worth of human pyramid slobber slumber last night in the pens, I needed sleep badly. My right cheek was the only part of me that was fully rested.

  I stocked up on what few edible comestibles the services had to offer, with the Affordable's detachable fascia under my armpit at all times, and one eye over my shoulder for abseiling clampers. I truly was half expecting to be arrested by a clamping firm SWAT team from Toulouse. Maybe driving up the same road in Paris for fourteen straight hours had left my nerves a trifle jangly. But here's a little tip from me: people who tell you you're paranoid? They're almost certainly in on the plot.

  I slid the car into the auto lane and felt a gentle lurch as the system took over the controls. I searched out something light but offensive on the radio, and eased the driver's seat back as close to horizontal as it would go. I found a 'privacy' button on the dashboard control panel and pressed it. The windscreen and windows slowly filled with a translucent black liquid. Gradually, the tension began to seep out of my body. I shouldn't have let it. I should have hung onto that tension, because I was going to need it. Very soon.

  I hate people who dream sensible narrative dreams. I hate them most because they tell you all about those dreams. They love nothing better than to pin you down and recount every millisecond of their dreams in infinitesimally small detail. Because the bizarre thing is: these so-called dreams they dream are mind-numbingly dull. They're exactly like reality, only nothing interesting ever happens in them. Nothing at all. They are beyond mundane. There are no hobgoblins chasing anybody, no gravity-defying flights over skyscrapers, no familiar faces that melt into demons. Nothing. Their dreams are entirely made up of boring, awful ordinariness. They must surely be, in fact, even more boring than the boring dreamer's real life. Otherwise they'd blow their own brains out without a moment's hesitation, rather than face another morning. I can't see why anyone would bother dreaming these kinds of dreams in the first place, let alone boasting about them the next day.

  Me? My dreams are insane. They make no sense at all. One minute they're one thing, the next they're something else. I'll be in a strange room with a woman I've never met who seems to know me, then all of a sudden a band of rowdy itinerants will start climbing in through the window, and I realise I'm sitting on a toilet with no lock on the door and it's really an aeroplane and I'm running down the aisle. See what I mean? Unconnected nonsense. And that's just a small, nonsensical portion of just one of my insane dreams. But that's how dreams are supposed to be, isn't it? Melting clocks and burning giraffes? Isn't that where the word 'surreal' comes from in the first place? Can you imagine if Dali had dreamed those dull narratively sensible dreams? 'Oh, look -- a painting of a horse in a field. And look: the horse is eating some hay. Salvador, you are one weird motherfucker.'

  One day, I'm going to buttonhole some of those dull dreamers and force them to listen to a dream or two of mine. Maybe that will shut the boring suckers up.

  The random dream I'd been having had been broken by the buzzing of the doorbell on my friend the orang-utan's penny-farthing bicycle. As I jerked back to reality, the doorbell was still buzzing. Instinctively, I tried to get up to answer it, only to be snapped back immediately by some kind of restraint. My sleep-addled mind began racing away before sanity could catch up with it. Clearly I'd been shanghaied and strapped to a bed by persons unknown. What were they after, these wicked sons of bitches? Rape? Murder? Torture? Torture and then murder? And why were the evil bastards piping easy-listening music into the room?

  After these few small moments of dislocated panic, I managed to remember I was actually in a car.

  I don't know how long I'd been sleeping. Long enough to render every single joint in my body stiffer than a teenager's bed sheets. I swear, even my ears had rigor mortis. I rolled my poor, thick head around. My neck cracked, and just kept on cracking. It sounded like an army marching on gravel.

  I felt under the seat for the tilt control and raised myself back into the driving position. I massaged my eyes until I could focus on the dashboard readout. I'll be frank: if the display had indicated I was in Bratislava town centre, or heading pell-mell along the Sarajevo ring road, I would have been less than astonished. But no, as far as I could tell, I was pretty much where I ought to be, still heading in a Viennese direction, and making fine time, to boot.

  The doorbell started buzzing again. A red light was flashing on the fascia. It was the low fuel warning. Incredibly, I'd been sleeping for more than eight hours.

  I instructed the computer guidance system to pull into the next service station. I figured I could afford a short stopover for some breakfast and even a badly needed shower. There was a pretty ripe aroma in the car doing battle with the dangling car freshener that smelled like baby sick, and I had an awful suspicion the culprit might be me.

  I flicked the car out of autodrive and pulled into the service station car park. I opened the door. There was a glorious aroma of fresh baking. I cracked my sleep-ravaged body out of the vehicle and upright. I stretched all the parts of me I could legally stretch in public. I sounded like a barrage of photographic flashbulbs at a Leicester Square movie premiere. I was in pain and more than a little dishevelled, but on the plus side, I was scant minutes away from some fresh carrot juice and good French coffee. I wish I'd relished the moment a little more. Pain or not, this was as good as I was going to feel for some considerable time.

  I detached the fascia
. I didn't want to take it with me, in case the shower facilities in the service station were, by some miraculous accident, actually usable. I decided to risk leaving it in the boot. I walked round to the back of the car and popped it open.

  There was a man in the trunk.

  I didn't remember leaving him there.

  He looked fairly dead.

  I closed the hatchback.

  I glanced around the car park. It was busy, but no one was paying much attention to me, so I risked opening the boot again. Yes, he was still there. His eyes were open, but they weren't seeing much. I had to make sure, though. As nonchalantly as I could, I checked for a pulse. His wrist was colder than a woman's foot in a winter bed. He was more than fairly dead. He was quite exceptionally dead. I turned my head sideways to see if I recognised him. His face did seem familiar, somehow, but I couldn't quite place it.

  There was nothing in the car I could use to cover the body, so I rested the fascia on top of him, then closed the boot again and locked it.

  This was a problem. I decided against simply fuelling up and driving off. That wasn't going to make the problem go away. I needed to think this through. I went into the cafeteria, picked up a large jug of coffee and found a seat by a window I could watch the car from.

  There was a dead man in my car.

  I couldn't for the life of me work out how he'd got there.

  I hadn't actually left the vehicle since I picked it up in Paris. Had someone, some time in the night, leapt on my travelling car with a corpse over his shoulder, opened the boot, dumped the body inside, then closed the boot and leapt off again without me or anybody else noticing? Surely that would require a perpetrator with the combined super powers of Spiderman and Captain Invisible.

  Had the car been stopped, somewhere along the way, without my realising it?

  Had there been some kind of vastly improbable accident, where the poor victim had been propelled through his windscreen into my inexplicably open boot, which had then slammed shut on him, sealing his fate? That would certainly explain the expression on his face.