I pulled in at the first possible place. A pause in our flight was necessary so that we could rest. While the others drank more tea I stayed in the front seat and wondered what to do. At half past three we were near a place called Pox Green. Nobody was following us at the moment, but the thought of daylight showing us plainly from every hill seemed like a promise of death – an adventure all the same, but how long could it go on?
Clegg was happy, Dismal carefree, Wayland Smith apparently content, while no word would tell me what I was. What was I? Don’t ask. I knew who I was, and that was a fact, but as to what I was, no answer suggested itself until I was behind the car taking what seemed an endless piss. I was as rotten as ever. Would I piss myself to death and end up clean, but dead? I was as much of a bastard as ever, in spite of (or even because of) the fact that my father had eventually married my mother. Once a bastard, always a bastard. Moggerhanger was as straight as a thief could be, and generous after his fashion, but I was out to cause him trouble from which he would be lucky to recover. There was no one left except this bacillus-colony of a car moving at random over the dripping bosom of green England.
Bridgitte had left me, and with good cause. The only injustice was to herself – in that she hadn’t done it sooner. I wanted to change, but it was impossible to reverse the flow of the stars, or my star at least. I got back into the car, beginning to think, not without a shaft of fear through my liver, that I was the sort who never changed from within. That being so, I could only invite the world outside to do its worst.
A sudden revelation suggested that, in such a situation, recklessness pays. From this point on, I thought, anything deviously plotted will only land me in a bag of chips over which someone is pouring blood sauce. Planning would deny me the benefits of my deepest and most life-saving feelings – which are epitomised by recklessness. Every full breath was a landmark, no more than that. I got out my hip flask and celebrated my surrender to a new-found life-saving recklessness by a long swallow of delicious whisky. I passed it to Clegg.
He took some. ‘I haven’t had more than half a pint of beer in years.’
Wayland drained it, which was just as well. ‘Next time I hope they hold me hostage in a pub. Cheers!’
I went to the back of the car with a torch and a knife, opened the boot and slit packet after packet of paper till I came to a bundle of five-pound notes. When we got back inside, out of the rain, I gave a wad to Clegg.
‘Do you mean it?’
‘All yours.’
He counted. ‘Must be a hundred.’
‘I’ve paid you back that hundred and fifty pounds from long ago. I always pay my debts.’
‘I didn’t lend it to you. I gave it.’
‘Please don’t argue. I’m too tired.’
Wayland pocketed his wad after a short hysterical laugh.
‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘We’re rich.’
Dismal sat on the driver’s seat, paws at the steering wheel. He caught a bundle of fivers in his mouth on turning round, then got down on the floor to play Monopoly with himself. I stuffed mine, the biggest part, into my briefcase with the air pistol. ‘Are you happy now?’
The miracle was, they were. So was I. We laughed like kids just landed on Treasure Island. I couldn’t understand why I had been so careful. Somewhere along the way, with all the planning and calculation, I had stopped being myself, and that was bad. Look where it had got me. I’d even starved myself of adequate running expenses. You couldn’t fund the operation I had in mind on a shoestring. Interpol would see my point absolutely. All we needed was to stock up on food, petrol, booze and a trio of hitch-hiking girls. The rain drummed so heavily that, without knowing how or why, I dropped into sleep. So did my highway companions, including Dismal, who bedded down with Wayland’s Russian-style fur hat between his paws as if it was a dying orphan which had crept in from the rainstorm and needed bringing back to life. The rhythm of falling rain on the roof rocked us to sleep.
Twenty-Six
Clegg woke me. ‘I don’t know how aware you are of the fact, Michael, but it’s nine o’clock.’
‘What?’
‘The sun’s up – a bit of it, anyway.’
It was so late I got the horrors, until I remembered that the password was recklessness. ‘Is that all?’
‘I didn’t know you wanted a lie-in, or I’d have left you till this afternoon.’
We formed a row and pissed into the hedge. Dismal endeavoured to stand up but didn’t quite manage, though if he persisted I might have sold him to a circus. ‘We’d better find a place for breakfast. I need a bucket of tea to swill the sleep out of my gorge.’
Dismal got back on four legs and barked into the mist. ‘Are we going to drop you at a railway station, Wayland, or are you coming with us.’
He looked too scruffy to be seen in a Rolls-Royce – bleary-eyed, beard untrimmed, face pale and lined, and hair hanging raggedly around his bald head. He wore a billowing jersey and stained trousers and stank as if he hadn’t had a bath for weeks. Luckily he couldn’t get the fur hat away from Dismal, because he looked even worse in that. ‘I’ll stay, if you don’t mind.’
‘In that case, maybe you wouldn’t mind having a wash-and-brush-up at the next place we stop at.’
He turned sulky. ‘Who the hell are you to tell me to get a wash?’
I hadn’t meant to scorch his pride to the roots, but at least he was no longer pale. ‘We’ll be crossing the Severn soon. Maybe you’d like a dip in that?’
‘You’re just a driver.’ He was fit to burst. ‘And you’re telling me to get a wash, boyo? What’s the idea?’
It was hard not to laugh, which was lucky for him. ‘We all need a wash, I suppose. But if you’d like to walk’ – I opened the door – ‘feel free.’
‘I’d enjoy one,’ said Clegg, ‘but I don’t like the idea of having to dress for dinner.’
Wayland sat like a graven image. As I got back into the driver’s seat I noticed that someone had picked up Dismal’s fivers. ‘I put ’em in the glove box,’ said Clegg. ‘The saliva will dry off in no time.’ To give more visibility for his navigation I invited him onto the flight deck, and Dismal could hardly believe it when I ordered him to the back, but a thump on his great flank helped his understanding. God knows why he had to feel so humiliated. To offset it he kept trying to sit on the armrest between the two seats, an impossible task, you might have thought, especially in the swaying car, but he managed it after a while, balancing with a forlorn and suffering face. When he had made his point (whatever it was) he got down and sat on the seat, to look over my shoulder at the instrument panel.
A toytown fairytale valley rolled to our left as we went downhill. ‘We’ll give Shrewsbury a wide berth,’ Clegg said. ‘The ring road’s too close in. It’ll mean about fifteen miles of winding lanes, but if you listen to my directions we’ll be across the Severn at Atcham in half an hour.’
I took three Monte Cristos from the glove box and handed them around, but there were no takers except myself. Clegg pulled it out of the tube for me, and I lit up. ‘Which direction, Navigator?’
‘East-north-east, then northerly. Fork right after the next village. I’ll tell you when.’ A bread van slowed us down for a mile or two. I played it cool. The driver and his mate were pissing themselves at delaying a Rolls-Royce. It was a highpoint of their lives which they would talk about for months, if not years – heroes of the public bar.
‘This country’ll never get back on the rails,’ Clegg said, ‘while this sort of thing goes on.’
‘What can you expect?’ Wayland piped up. ‘They’ve been crushed and exploited since the day they were born.’
I don’t know why, but I was more mad on hearing that than at the lads in front. After all, they were only having a bit of fun. I might have done the same in their place fifteen years ago – though I was tempted to get the shotgun out and blast their tyres. ‘Crushed and exploited, my arse.’ We were going about fifteen miles an hour, so I co
uldn’t lose my temper without matters becoming dangerous. ‘They’ve had the time of their lives, the idle bastards. They’ve been pampered from the word go. If ever they feel crushed and exploited it’s only because pratts like you tell ’em they are – because you really want to crush and exploit them.’
‘I don’t think it’s any use talking to you,’ Wayland said, as if I was no better than the sods in front. The van stopped on some spare ground at a row of cottages, and I went by without even giving them the satisfaction of a blast on my horn. ‘That’ll teach ’em,’ I said, ‘if anything will.’
There wasn’t much traffic, and we made good time, though every car that floated up behind had me nervously expecting to be topped and tailed or have the windscreen flaked to pieces from the blast of a shotgun as they overtook. I was glad when Clegg gave the right fork which took us onto the lanes, where we met nothing but tractors and the occasional Volvo Estate.
‘It’s glorious country.’ Clegg was in raptures. ‘I’m glad we came this way. What a coincidence, Michael, to meet you again after all these years!’ I thought it was fate, and fate was often worse than death, I told him. ‘Not with me,’ he said, ‘or so I hope.’
Nobody could have tailed us through such a zig-zag of lanes. Every half mile at a fork or crossroads Clegg gave out his cool instructions of left, right or straight on. Dismal didn’t like staying in the back seat with offended Wayland, and every so often, usually when Clegg spoke and we made a turn, he bit me – just about playfully – in the neck, but almost immediately his long fat tongue came out and the big soft thing licked the hurt better. Then he smiled, as much as a dog can smile.
We got something to eat at a café on the main road, of sufficiently good quality to keep us alert and fit. We were reluctant to feed the white bread to Dismal, however, in case it sent him mad, so apart from the odd bacon rind and end of sausage, it was back to tins of Bogie in the parking lot. I didn’t envy anyone trying to do an emergency stop after he’d used the place. While waiting for the others to terminate their ablutions I sorted out a 50p piece to telephone Blaskin.
‘This is Gilbert Blaskin speaking,’ his automatic answering device said. ‘Point One: if you are a publisher, send the money. If you don’t pay within three days I shall come around with a bomb and blast you out of your office. If you report this threat to the police, don’t forget that all characters in this novel are fictitious and bear no likeness to anyone dead or alive. Point Two: if you edit a magazine and want me to write something, treble the price you have in mind and meet me in The Hair of the Dog. Point Three: if you are my publisher’s editor and want me to alter my novel because it is too obscene, incoherent or inflammatory, get psychoanalysed somewhere else. Point Four: if you are a female student who wishes to talk about my work, take off your knickers as you get out of the lift. Point Five: if you are under the delusion that I owe you money, I suggest that you masturbate on the steps of the Wedlock Advisory Association, for it will do you just as much good as trying to get a bent stiver out of me. Point Six: if you are a member of my family, put your head under the cold tap and think again, unless the caller happens to be my only acknowledged offspring Michael Cullen, to whom I say, phone back later, because I have news for you, you eternal bastard.’ He gave a five-second donkey laugh, and the machine clicked off.
Dismal had run back into the front seat, while Clegg was taking in the view, and we didn’t have the heart or the strength to pull him out. Because we were going onto fast roads I put him into the safety belt, not wanting him to fly through the windscreen if I pulled up dead. But, like Houdini, he got out of it before we’d done a mile. Clegg continued his navigation, though from then on it was easy going. We crossed the M6 and went through Stafford to Uttoxeter. Beyond Ashbourne we got into the Derbyshire hills, by which time we were famished. There was nothing like being on the run to make you hungry as if, should our pursuers suddenly strike, death would be more agreeable on full bellies. Wayland hummed a pop tune and tapped out its rhythm on the window. ‘You can say that again,’ he exclaimed, when I spread my thoughts around like Marmite.
We walked into a hotel near Matlock, and sat by the dining room window looking onto the hills. I ordered four meals. Dismal was chained to the fender in case some light-fingered bastard should think to open the boot and make off with a few million pounds’ worth of goods.
‘Four, sir?’ Seeing three of us, the waiter wasn’t able to put two and two together. What worried me was that I had seen his face before, and couldn’t fathom where.
‘I’ve got my chauffeur in the car. Just deliver four of each course as they come up, and I’ll take his out to him.’ The waiter was about forty, with thick black hair and large hands, and I was certain I had seen him in prison. He seemed offended that we hadn’t let our chauffeur dine with us. Were we communists, or something? Or big trade union nobs?
We ordered a pint of ale, then salami salad, followed by roast lamb, peas, cauliflower and potatoes. This was backed up by a grisly trifle made out of sugar, lard and turpentine. Dismal even gobbled the vegetables, and then licked the ale from his dog bowl. He sat dizzily belching while we had our coffee, brandy and cigars at a table in the sun. The meal cost twenty-five quid, and none of us complained as we stumbled back to the car.
Five miles up the road, and well over the hills out of Matlock, I realised that the hotel waiter had been Bill Ramage, who I had worked with smuggling gold for the Jack Leningrad organisation in the late sixties. He’d given no sign of recognising me, but gold smugglers were always too cunning to share their thoughts, and it was hard to think I’d altered so much. If Ramage was going straight we were safe, and if he wasn’t and suspected me to be on a job he might easily phone Moggerhanger and report my presence.
Clegg worked his slide rule and played with the maps like a kid with toys at Christmas. ‘I know Derbyshire so well I don’t need to look at the scenery. I was brought up only a few miles from here, over at Tibshelf. It was a close-knit mining community in those days. God knows what it is now. Like the ruins of Pompeii, I expect.’
‘I suppose the Tories have broken their spirit,’ Wayland said. I drove in my own dreamworld, unable to chip in on their talk.
‘The spirit of Tibshelf would take some breaking,’ Clegg said. ‘My father was a collier, but he died at forty in an accident. Then my mother married a clerk at the pit who made me stay at school after I was fourteen. He only earned seventy shillings a week, but you could manage on that in those days. He’d had a bullet through his face in the Great War, and if he spoke too quickly a whistle came into his voice. At first I thought it was funny, but I learned different, though he was never cruel or unjust. I didn’t much like him, but I respected him. If he’d had a sense of humour I’d have been a bit happier, but you didn’t think much about happiness in those days. Now, you hear it mentioned so often on the wireless and the telly that it’s got no meaning. One winter’s evening I asked him a question about Napoleon that he couldn’t answer, so he gave me a pencil and a notebook and sent me to the reference section at the public library to find out. Libraries stayed open late in those days, but the only thing was that it was two miles away, and it was snowing a blizzard. I got back all right, but only just! Talk about gaining a respect for knowledge! He sent for me when he was dying, during the war. It was only then that I realised he actually loved me. Life’s a hell of a funny country. The strange thing was – or is it? – my mother loved him, and only survived him by two weeks. She was fifty, but she was worn out.’
In the Town of the Crooked Spire there were roadworks all over the place. ‘We’ll soon be safe,’ Clegg said, ‘in the Leeds-Manchester-Sheffield triangle. A real jungle. We’ll have six hundred and forty-eight square miles of towns, dales and villages to get lost in.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Well, it’s an equilateral triangle, each side measuring thirty-six miles. Half the base multiplied by the height, or the length of one side multiplied by another, a
nd the total divided by two, gives you six hundred and forty-eight.’ He held up his slide rule. ‘Simple. Or if you don’t feel safe enough in that, you can make it the Leeds-Blackpool-Liverpool-Sheffield Equilateral. That gives you sixty miles from east to west and thirty miles from north to south, making an area of eighteen hundred square miles. And believe me, Michael, with that kind of space to play about in, and the money you seem able to get your hands on, you can drive around in safety forever. All you have to do from time to time is stop for petrol, food, some new maps, and to answer the calls of nature. You can get in the Guinness Book of Records as the first man to grow old on the run. It wouldn’t be a bad life, when you think of some.’
‘Count me out,’ said Wayland.
For a joke, I stopped the car. ‘You’re counted out.’
‘I’m not quite ready,’ he said, in a reasonable tone I’d not heard up to then.
I started off. ‘Cheer up, Wayland. If you don’t have a sense of humour, cultivate self-control. It’s only sensible, in the circumstances.’
On the dual carriageway which spaced itself out towards Sheffield Clegg said: ‘We’d better have our passports ready for going into Yorkshire. We should have got visas at their legation in Stafford, but maybe they’ll let us in. Dismal will be turned back as an undesirable immigrant, though.’
I blessed the fact again that I had given him a lift. ‘It’s all right. He’s on my passport.’
Traffic was thick, coming and going. Dismal was having bad dreams after his hotel dinner. He reeked of beer more than any of us. Hot sun came through the windscreen, at which I thought we’d soon look as if we’d just got back from Benidorm. In spite of my recent onsurge of recklessness I was dead set on staying alive, however serious the misdemeanour I’d tangled with. In front of my eyes was the sky, a clump of bushes, the brick side of an inn advertising Real Food in big white letters half a mile away, and a broken white line down the middle of the road. But inside me, in no uncertain manner, was the vision of lovely Frances Malham. Her features haunted me as if they belonged to some maternal (or even paternal) aunt or grandmother from generations ago, though whether from the Cullen or Blaskin side I had no way of knowing. It was almost as if she was a long-lost sister, and because of this notion I had the feeling that falling in love is the nearest to incest that most of us get. Why, otherwise, her face affected me more positively than anyone else’s (I almost got a hard-on thinking about her) I didn’t know, especially having met her when she was fawning around that crackpot poet Ronald Delphick – one of his groupies, no less. Or was she? Now that I was in the north, heading into that vast equilateral, as Clegg designated our intended guerilla base, I decided to spy out Doggerel Bank, which was quite near, and see what sort of a place it was that Delphick inhabited, but also on the off-chance that Frances had lied about going to Oxford and was up there visiting him for a bit of hearthrug pie.
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