by Trevor Hoyle
THE MAN WHO TRAVELLED ON MOTORWAYS
Trevor Hoyle
First published in Great Britain in 1979 by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.,
and in the United States of America in 1979 by Riverrun Press Inc.
This ebook edition published in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
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7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 1979 by Trevor Hoyle
The moral right of Trevor Hoyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84866 928 4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Contents
A VISIT TO A PAPER MILL
HOPE HOSPITAL
Preface by the Author
Part I
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Part II
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
THE IMMINGHAM DRIVE
Part I
Part II
The form and technique of the following were suggested to me by Letters From The Underworld in the volume also containing The Gentle Maiden and The Landlady by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (in the translation by C. J. Hogarth published by Everyman’s Library in 1913), to whose memory I tender my grateful thanks.
TH
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.
Graham Greene
A VISIT TO A PAPER MILL
With every piece of knowledge gained
(An additional neutrino sparks our brain)
We reckon to become better, improved men,
As in preparation for a second game.
Staring into space, the shock
Cracks home that this place,
This time, the only place and time –
And this our only face.
Then do we, anguished, contemplate
The secrets of the past:
One instant is all eternity,
This same instant is our last.
Anon.
I
I was then thirty years old, and so far, had lived a dull, ill-regulated existence, and I was called upon one day to investigate the goings-on in a paper mill. This paper mill was situated at the bottom of a street called, of all things, Cock Clod Street. I arrived there, and on the first day, which was a Sunday, they let me park my car inside the green wrought-iron gates because the workers were off and there was room to move about, park cars, etc., without getting trampled underfoot or in anybody’s way. I saw that the Mini belonging to Eloise and Dmitri Zeilnski was already there. The inside of this car was in a dreadful state: Dmitri Zeilnski was a photographer and he kept the car littered with discarded 35mm canisters and cartons. Dmitri Zeilnski inhabited life like a suit of second-hand clothes; that’s to say he was in a different spacetime continuum to the rest of us. One got the feeling that at any moment he would flicker before one’s eyes into nothingness, slipping stealthily into the past or the future, reappearing at some other time – yet so preoccupied with his work as to be completely oblivous to any change in himself or his surroundings.
I went inside the huge building. It was quiet, except for the sound of splashing water somewhere. The Millspaugh papermaking machine was stopped: 215 feet long, a massive lump of machinery with huge drum rolls in the centre section which must be each, at least, ten feet in diameter. It’s the kind of machine that makes a good analogy for life. Having been sucked in and spawned at the ‘wet end’ the victim is stretched, scalded, filtered, flattened, starched, smoothed and wound tightly onto a drum, weighed, trimmed, stamped and consigned to oblivion. The atmosphere in the long machine-room was close, the humidity catching the back of the throat with a cloying dryness. Steam drifted out of the guts of the monster, water splashed underfoot into gratings; there was a kind of concealed violence in the long silent-pounding room as though at any moment it might unleash a terrible mechanical power. Naturally it was the machine itself that was responsible for giving this impression.
Dmitri Zeilnski and his wife Eloise were on the gantry setting up their equipment. I hadn’t realised until now how much they hated each other. Coming upon them like this, from below the gantry, unnoticed, I both saw and heard their bickering long before they heard my footsteps on the metal stair. As usual, Dmitri was totally preoccupied with his lenses and filters and other bits of accessories. Perhaps two-thirds of him was present in the spacetime vortex we were inhabiting.
Eloise, disgusting creature, was snuffling round his feet like a mangy animal, craven, subservient, utterly abject. She spat back, of course, but it was no kind of defence at all. If anything it betrayed the fact that her life was dependent on and dedicated to his. It is ghastly to see someone existing out of someone else: that if that life should fail their life too would go with it. It’s parasitical.
Dmitri Zeilnski shouted something furious at his wife as I came up the steps, and she was about to deliver some absolutely cutting sliver of invective when she saw me and smiled in her ragged toothless way. (Eloise Zeilnski isn’t toothless but she gives one that impression.)
Dmitri immediately grasped my arm, pushing his wife out of the way, and ordered me to help him set up the equipment. I was embarrassed because he had so crudely shown her up in front of me, though to tell the truth I didn’t like her any more than he did. I was glad to be in the huge, warm machine-room with Dmitri, assisting him, because one got the feeling that this was the centre of something, i.e: things were happening here as opposed to somewhere else. As I’ve said, this was a Sunday, and Sundays are always so quiet and dead that surely (I imagine) there is a monstrous party going on not far away if only one knew where to find it. One does not, of course, ever find it. The monstrous party with its boisterous people remains forever hidden.
Here we are then, Dmitri and Eloise Zeilnski and myself in the huge, long machine-room, on the green-painted gantry, setting up the equipment and waiting for something to happen. The atmosphere was humid. My sweater was scraping on my back. Dmitri was perspiring lightly. Eloise’s hair was a tangly mess.
‘What are we shooting here?’ Dmitri asked me. ‘Precisely what?’
Immediately I am on my guard; I know that I must behave professionally, and this means giving the impression of behaving professionally.
‘It isn’t so much the machine as the felts we require,’ I replied. ‘Admittedly they’re not very photogenic.’
‘No.’
Eloise Zeilnski looked pained at this. Anything which displeases her husband or constitutes any kind of annoyance to him is an irritant to her, a snag in the unbroken fabric of their life together. She apes his expression.
‘There
are two ways of doing this,’ I said. ‘One, we use unusual light angles of shade and shadow, thereby creating peculiar patterns so that the felts look like felts taken from various odd aspects. Second, colour filters, mixed, interchangeable and overlapped. The advertisements will be in colour, so we might as well take advantage of the fact.’
Dmitri Zeilnski conveys the impression of having taken in everything you’ve said without having heard or taken note of a single word. It is an annoying trait that I determine to practise and copy. Eloise is looking critically at the felts on the machine as though – Heaven forbid! – she might be capable of making a worthwhile contribution. Her husband glances at her with the keenest contempt and irritability. I’m beginning to get annoyed with her myself.
‘Will it make any difference, the machine being stopped?’ Dmitri asked.
I have to consider this. ‘No it won’t.’ In truth I don’t know whether or not it will make any difference, but I have learned that the essential thing in this business is never to show any hesitation. He Who Hesitates Is Lost; how true!
On a papermaking machine the felts are in effect long conveyor belts which support the ‘stuff’ – the slushy fibrous paper – while at the same time allowing the drainage of water. When the ‘stuff’ hits the first felt at the wet end it is 95.5 per cent water, and as you will appreciate the object is to drain this away, leaving behind the web of paper, now self-supporting, to run at speeds of around 1000 feet per minute through the machine. It was our job to photograph the felts.
I say ‘our job’ but in fact this was solely Dmitri Zeilnski’s task; my purpose was far more devious. I had to research, literally, the background to the plant. I was very anxious to know what went on ‘behind the scenes’. You see, I have always been intrigued by the unseen things that make other things happen. Do you understand this? In our twentieth century, when on the surface everything appears to happen quite smoothly, in reality there is a fantastic amount of activity going on ‘underground’, so to speak. The paper mill is a perfect example of this principle. For instance, at first sight the mammoth Millspaugh (beautiful name for a juggernaut!) seems to move under its own volition. The enormous drum reels spin majestically, laws unto themselves; the paper web screams through at an incredible speed; the lights on the control panel – green, orange and purple – flicker on and off seemingly at will; yet of course none of this happens without some other thing making it happen. The question naturally arises (to one with a mind like mine): what is making these things happen? Contrary to initial impressions these events are taking place because something unseen is providing the primeval motive power. Then what is it? Possibly this doesn’t fascinate you as it does me; I can only say that different things interest different people.
I was at this point in time anxious not to get too involved in the photographing of the felts. For this reason: Dmitri Zeilnski became so absorbed that he lost all sense of time and place, and if one were to assist him he came to take such assistance for granted. One’s hands became simply a pair of hands, without human attachment, which he regarded as his property to direct and dispose of as he thought fit. This is not flattering. It makes one feel ugly and small and disfigured; but more than this, it erodes the personality to a point where the self becomes a nothingness, a shadowy negative form without shape or substance. Antimatter if you like.
Anyway, I was determined not to become too involved. For my pains I would receive nothing: indeed less than nothing. To say that I hated Dmitri Zeilnski would be an overstatement. I neither hated nor despised him. His existence was a matter of complete indifference to me.
‘I can’t hang about for too long,’ I said. ‘I have other things to do.’
He sighed heavily. I knew he wanted me to stay so that he wouldn’t be left alone with his wife. However, the benefit of my not being married to her was that I could leave her any time I chose. That was his problem, as they say.
‘The electrician hasn’t connected the power,’ said Dmitri. It was my turn to sigh. For although it was his responsibility to take the photographs it was my responsibility to see to it that he had all the facilities he required in order to take such photographs.
‘Very well,’ I said despondently, ‘I’ll go and find the electrician.’ I was reluctant to do this for reasons you can probably imagine: have you ever tried to find an electrician in a closed paper mill on a Sunday afternoon? No? Well let me tell you it is no easy task. Neither is it a very pleasant one. I shan’t bore you with details of what it entails, you must take my word that my heart was like lead.
Evenutally I did find the electrician, who promised to connect the supply to the power points indicated to him by Dmitri. Having done this I made my way back to the machine-room by a different route so that I wouldn’t be spotted by either of the Zeilnskis. I was determined to find out what moved the plant.
The making of paper is a fascinating business. During that winter I went on several occasions to the paper mill, each time becoming a little more fully aware of the magical way in which the raw wood pulp and esparto grass is transformed into smooth, unblemished, unbroken bands of pure white paper. In essence the process is simple enough; it starts to get complicated because nothing can be seen – everything happens inside vats, tanks, pipes, conduits, chambers, ducting, etc. In fact the whole complex assembly is one vast conglomeration of oddly-shaped metal containers, each with a specific if mysterious function. Can you see why it intrigued me?
Yet even the hardware described isn’t the full story. I found this out by going off alone into the uttermost depths of the plant, climbing over hot blistering pipes and squeezing my tiny bulk through crude holes that had been knocked in the walls to permit the access of the pipes. Inside some of the vast subterranean rooms were the familiar throbbing vats and mildewed pipes, and these rooms led to other rooms, equally large, in which more vats throbbed and their pipes wound this way and that, feeding stuff into the vats and taking it away again. Yet still I wasn’t satisfied. There must be more to it than this, I can remember telling myself. ‘What is the secret of the plant’s volition; what is going on within the paper mill to give it the force of life?’ These questions, I knew, were very important and needed answering.
Before I could progress any further, however, a distant hooter rasped faintly, and in the semi-twilight I could just make out the time by my watch. The problem now was how to return to the machine-room where I supposed Dmitri and Eloise Zeilnski would be taking down their equipment in preparation for going home. It was difficult to retrace my steps, for the rooms were to all intents and purposes identical, the vats and pipes too so similar as to defy individual identification. How, I wondered, could the people who worked here find their way about? Presumably the rooms were numbered, in case a breakdown occurred, to enable the repair team to locate the particular room in which the fault had taken place. Fortunately I had a gas lighter in my pocket and with this I began to search the rough brick walls for signs of a number or symbol – for anything that might give me a clue as to my position within the plant.
I don’t suppose you have ever had to search for a number or symbol on a wall inside a paper mill: it is not an occupation I would recommend, I can tell you. It is so easy, so easy, to mistake a smear of concrete dust, or some white crumbling cement, for a sensible and decipherable legend. Oh how many times I held up the lighter, catching a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, stumbling towards it gratefully, straining my eyes upwards to see it, only to find I had been cheated by pale dust markings, shiny dripping water patches, or simply tricks of the unsteady light. It is no wonder men go mad when all their efforts are made an absolute mockery of.
Outside, without question, it was cold and blustery, for this was January, and January in Lancashire is an unwelcome experience. For no reason at all (at least none that I could fathom) the climate at this certain point in time reminded me of a cold, bleak drive through an oil refinery that I was to undertake, with the wind blowing the flaming jets to
and fro, hither and thither, from side to side: lazy silent flames evaporating in the grey air. An oil refinery! Now there’s a place to conjure with! What else has the atmosphere of foreboding, of a threatening world cataclysm? It is the end of all existence as we know it, a desolate burning hell with streamers of sulphurous smoke obscuring an eternal scudding sky. Do not think I am imagining such a place: I was to witness it with my very own eyes, and what’s more it was devoid of human beings! That is my vision of hell on earth – a place bare of life, occupied only by a landscape of burning towers, erupting fire and smoke, uncontrolled by an intelligence!
I see a strained smile playing about your features. You think I am on the verge of sanity, that I’m skating on very thin ice. My answer to this is simple: doesn’t life in our twentieth century push us all to the extremes of our minds? For myself, I try to lead a quiet life, I cultivate the calm pleasures, I refuse to read newspapers and magazines, yet even so the high-pitched scream of modern life penetrates my defences and strikes right into my skull. The scream is inside me, trying to get out – and I, who divorce myself from the world’s harsh realities …
People today must perforce have the minds of oxen. If they do not they break, crack apart. I have been giving a good deal of thought recently to mental health. How can it be improved? If one is anxious to build up a good stout physique the body doctors have the answer. Eat the right food, take exercise, refrain from over-indulgence in smoking, drinking and other abuses of the constitution. Breathe deeply, perhaps, and get a sound eight hours’ sleep every night. All of which a sensible person can follow if he so chooses. Now tell me how to achieve the equivalent in and for the mind. Exercise of the mind? It seems to me that the more one exercises the mind the more neurotic one becomes. Food for the mind? What kind of food is best for the mind? The theologian would answer: the spiritual kind, my son. Possibly true; but if in the exercise of the mind one comes to the conclusion that religion is a falsity, what course is to be taken? We can reject the evidence of the mind, embrace religion, and live our life through lies, or we can respect the power of our minds, throw God to one side, and thereafter go gradually mad with the thought of a barren universe.