The Man Who Travelled on Motorways

by Trevor Hoyle

  ‘He was dumb; Rhet Karachi made that plain.’

  ‘Not that dumb,’ said Gorsey Dene. ‘Nobody’s that dumb.’

  ‘Oh well, the room must have been in semi-darkness then.’

  ‘That’s better.’

  ‘So okay, the room was in semi-darkness. But just think of it: this poor schmuck sitting there all alone thinking the girl was in there with him when all the time she was in the corridor laughing with Rhet Karachi and his friend.’

  ‘You might think it funny,’ Gorsey Dene said, ‘but I don’t,’ his previous good humour disappearing.

  ‘It wasn’t my story,’ Jay reminded him.

  ‘You think it funny though.’

  ‘Vaguely amusing, yes. It is, you can’t deny it.’

  ‘Depends from whose point of view you’re looking at it.’ Gorsey Dene lapsed into slience, struggling with the wheel for a while. Why was it that women were attracted by the cheap, the instant, the sensational? He felt a black mood engulf him. His own past was littered with experiences that would have knocked Rhet Karachi’s into a cocked hat, but he didn’t go round boasting about them. No, it wasn’t his way; he preferred to keep them to himself.

  The moorland dividing Yorkshire from Lancashire began to rise up before them. The late-night air had turned chill and wraiths of mist slid about in the headlights, parting with a flurry as the car passed through them. The red tail-lights glowed redly in the flurrying mist as the car ascended the tops. More memories awaited him.

  Jay slumped sullenly smoking, her massive thighs flattened into ovals against the edge of the low seat. Doubtless she was thinking of the photographer, wishing she was back lying on the soft white sand with the azureblue wavelets lapping her ankles. Or could she be imagining herself as the girl in the semi-darkened room, sneaking out to press her choking face into Rhet Karachi’s quivering shirt-front while the bloke sat staring into gloom and listening to the hiss and crackle of some old 78?

  More and more did it seem to Gorsey Dene that life was a non sequitur. Occasionally, every once in a while, he might catch a glimpse of … something – a sudden shaft of illumination revealing a crazy pattern of logic – but more often than not it was a dark, murky, impenetrable mystery. Was it that he was blind and they could see, or the other way around? If he did have sight, what was he able to see? Only the mystery apparently. And they, in their blindness; what did they see? He put his hand to his face in the darkness and felt the lump growing.

  II

  The ice and fog got worse the higher they went. The car slithered about on black glassy patches, and Gorsey Dene experienced little tugs of fear at his heart. Up here in the clouds it was easy to forget that the rest of the world existed – indeed, it required an effort of imagination to realise that it did exist. He was all alone with Jay, enclosed in a foggy cocoon, while below in the valleys was an improbable world filled with spurious memory traces and doubtful happenings. For example, behind them, Immingham; ahead, the Corn Exchange. And if he were not extremely careful the whole dreary charade would begin all over again.

  It seemed to Gorsey Dene that he had inhabited many lives. He was a host of different people – each one a self-contained legend. His childhood, adolescence, young adulthood were old crackling newsreels forever being re-run for the benefit of somebody or other (probably the participants). They were outside of him, separate, so that somewhere in the universe an endless succession of Gorsey Denes was enacting his past, present and future. At the moment he was fulfilling one such role. Elsewhere another Gorsey Dene was lying in a cornfield with a train in the green distance; yet another was sitting at the bar of an Islington pub listening to a fantastic yarn. And still another was kneeling in damp grass with shivering flanks waiting to pierce an object in the darkness. One more was at this instant in the Corn Exchange recovering from a long fitful drive, and several were engaged simultaneously in unspeakable activities.

  Even these moors contained his ghost: those idyllic summer days roaming the tops with the girl of his dreams, pausing in the hollows to kiss and cuddle and exchange lovers’ confidences. She was red-haired, or to be more precise, gingerish. She wore thick glasses; her body was large and ample, and to please him was in the habit of wearing a dress without underclothes. Now the moors were covered in hoar-frost but then they burned under the sun and the tough grasses were flattened by the horizontal breeze: it gusted the dry bracken and made patterns as it scurried over the subtle undulations. Gorsey Dene loved to watch the wind chasing itself, planting huge invisible footsteps to the horizon. He often liked to note inwardly the fact that the terrain suited the people hereabouts, matched them in mood and termperament, just as it made an ideal backdrop for his bleak and empty personality.

  The girl’s name eluded him for a moment. Gorsey Dene frowned into the featureless night. He did recall – in the dim tangled past – an Oldham pub wherein they had sat clasping hands, her distorted eyes peering bulgingly out of the thick lenses of her spectacles. After a while a chap came in and sat with them, a peculiar little fellow with a sharp face and thin white hands. The fellow had been perturbed, Gorsey Dene recalled, about the incidence of violence in the town-centre: something to do with wrecked flower-beds and splintered benches. Though why this should concern him more than the rest of them had never been satisfactorily explained; he had not been coerced into becoming everybody’s social conscience. That the chap was paranoiac there was little doubt. The way he slunk in avoiding the eyes of the people and sat staring into his glass as if too timid to straighten his spine and square his shoulders. Gorsey Dene had felt very superior that evening, and Sharl or Merl (Vyl? Ral?) or whatever her name was had teased the poor wretch unmercifully, hinting that he should have visited her and had failed to do so. He gaped at her like a stranded grouper, lifting and lowering his eyes, grasping and ungrasping his glass, alternately flushing and growing pale. His shocked face remained clear in Gorsey Dene’s memory to this day.

  (Jay was singing in a low untuneful voice, obliterated by the car’s hum. The underside of her face was lit by the greenish dashboard glow. He felt himself becoming randy again.)

  It seemed that he was continually coming up against such half-formed people. Why, he hadn’t to think very hard to conjure up half-a-dozen empty vessels: spineless nutcases who needed attending to. Perhaps it was the circles in which he moved, for he did move in circles. This was why he had to make a conscious effort to alter the direction of his life; were he not eternally vigilant it was conceivable that very soon he would discover himself driving a green van towards a 2 a.m. destination, beer-wet around the knees and with a girl (Pee? Tat? He never could remember names) seated beside him. As if this particular nightdrive was not enough of a nightmare to be going on with.

  When he cast his mind back his number of trips and returns was phenomenal. Yet what struck him as most odd was that he couldn’t pinpoint the place where the switch had been made: where precisely had he been halted, shunted into sidings, and sent on his way in a new direction? The cypher eluded him. In an orderly world he would have progressed from A to B to C to D, but somewhere along the line a substitution had taken place, a swap had been made, and he now found himself with a mind and in a body he hadn’t set out with. So where, in fact, were his mind and his body now? In the pub later that same evening – to take a specific example – had he been the one to take Verl, Shyl, Mai, Rarl (or whatever) up on the moors and make love to her gross body? It couldn’t have been him after all, because his recollection was of the moors in sunlight. Or what about the occasion when he had lost his way in a maze of dirty chambers and mildewed passages with the low, hidden growl of plant machinery as an accompanying background noise? That had been him, hadn’t it? Yet he couldn’t remember ever having found his way out. Again, was it possible that the youth in the Manchester bar, the boy in the Islington pub, and the man in the Oldham pub were one and the same? But no – they had had different experiences, had told different stories. Then was it feasible that one of
them was really himself? Which one of the many characters he had encountered was really himself? At present he was heading towards a destiny that belonged to somebody else, and presumably somewhere (in the past or future) that somebody else was employing his mind and inhabiting his body. The trouble was, it was going to be extremely difficult to locate that certain person. How did one go about it? Where to begin the search?

  It was with a sudden spurt of nervous shock, a cold tightening of the heart, that Gorsey Dene realised something else. Were it to be totally and factually true that he wasn’t himself, then none of the things he recollected as having happened to him had actually happened to him: they belonged to somebody else. The entire box of tricks, the whole charade, the complete mess – none of it appertained to him at all. He should never have undertaken the Immingham Drive; Jay was a stranger to him; none of his memories were memories at all, but transposed fabrications. Was his name really Gorsey Dene?

  Perhaps the only way to solve the mystery was to spot a slip, a mistake, a snagged thread in the weave. At some stage he must have abruptly (and without realising it) found himself in a predicament that didn’t make sense. Somewhere or other there was a threadbare patch, the frayed strands of which permitted access – or at least gave a clue – to his real life in the real world …

  They were still in the clouds. The banks of mist rolled against the windscreen: the beams of the headlights struck the palpable white stuff and were swallowed up by the myriad billowing specks of moisture. Jay was sitting numbed and inscrutable. Gorsey Dene didn’t love her after all; he didn’t love any of them. His flawed personality subsisted on imagined slights. He prayed that Jay would not speak, for he could no longer give any credence to anything that was said: she was sure to add to the confusion by trotting out what was expected of her. Words had no substance; neither had people’s emotions. Therefore – as the communication between people and the people themselves were vain tokens signifying nothing – his only recourse was to indulge himself in surface show, which he did. A bright word, a clever phrase, a mocking smile composed the sum total of his humanness.

  ‘Gingy,’ said Jay suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a gingy night. A real gingy night.’

  (If he had invented her she was fast getting out of hand.)

  So many things remained to be explained. He had lived up all his experiences and there was precious little more to tell. Yet in all this he had still not come close to the central core of his dilemma: an analysis of his moral cowardice in the face of humanity. Certainly it was unjustifiable, a sin, a shameful weakness, but the fact remained that had he not had a mind to comprehend such a condition and the sensibility to care about it he would not now be suffering the torture of self-despisedness.

  Surely somewhere – somewhere – there was a bright, windblown world of towering cumulus clouds and endless blue vistas, a world of sunshine imagination instead of never-ending purple-black horizons spewing flame? Did one really have to regress into childhood and its golden visions to escape the bleak, unrelenting present? He felt the future to be devoid of meaning, a hard blank wall; it was as if his nose was pressed against it, and behind him the weight of the past was crowding him, compressing him, pushing his nose against a hard blank wall. He was teetering forward on the balls of his feet, his arms circling backwards at ridiculous speed, grotesquely unbalanced and yet with nowhere to fall. A man attempting to walk on all-fours on water would not have demonstrated a more hopeless and untenable plight. And still, in the darkness ahead, unimaginable nightmares awaited him.

  They began to descend rapidly, slipping occasionally on the glassy patches – deadly black areas with the minimum coefficient of friction. Jay lit a cigarette from the stub of the old one and threw the stub out of the window. She could sense (perhaps by the smell) the ambivalent impulses working within him: desire and repulsion in direct confrontation. It brought to mind an occasion when she too had been engaged in civil war; hitting her knees with her fists and banging her head against the window leaving a tangled imprint had seemed the only viable course of action – or reaction. Creely had been unmoved that evening, she recalled, putting the car carefully into gear and driving with precise, unhurried movements along the motorway. She had never trusted him, not even then, and her suspicions had been confirmed by the letters Pat had written to her. Also he had been egotistical in the extreme, overbearingly confident that he had been the first. She had never disillusioned him, and, to the best of her knowledge, Alan – despite his habitual drunken loutishness and lack of tact – had never let the truth be known. She shuddered now at the memory (that night at the German student’s) when, whipped to a pitch of frenzy by his lewd comments and crude behaviour she had suffered herself to be taken from behind in the cold box bedroom (Creely was still downstairs): caught in the act of bending over the bed to pick up her coat, and Alan not even bothering to work her up but merely moving to one side with thumb and forefinger the thin strip of her knickers and sliding his burning cock right up. She had gasped and choked and been unable to move. With a few jerks and a final grunt he had finished her off. So much for virginity.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Gorsey Dene said.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ said Jay.

  ‘What about?’

  Jay smiled to herself in the darkness. ‘Things.’

  And what about this one, Gorsey Dene, Jay wondered; had he suspected – or was it a suspicion of a suspicion? – her dalliance abroad? The advertisement had been too good an opportunity to miss – though that was not to say that she had not had qualms. But the chance to travel, expenses paid, to the hottest countries in Europe had been the decisive factor, overriding all other considerations. At first he had overawed her: he was so knowledgeable and understated: the complete sophisticate. His tanned hair-covered hands with the square-cut nails thrilled her; and his authoritative manner and staccato mode of speech made it seem as if he knew precisely what he wanted out of life. He rarely, if ever, spoke of his ragged toothless wife back home in England, and this again was typical of him, sweeping from his mind with an impatient gesture anything which obtruded into the special spacetime warp he had perfected for himself. He spoke disparagingly of most people, not out of malice or envy, but because beside him they appeared to have no purpose in life – were motiveless creatures swayed by non-Euclidean tendencies and irrational whims. This had been new and exciting to Jay, fulfilling her wildest expectations that life could be, and was, a continuous miracle. His UNICEF assignment had left plenty of time for eating, drinking, lying on beaches and making love, all of which he accomplished with style and ease. It was he who had first taught her how to do a mouth job.

  Through the mist to the left there appeared a necklace of lights, fading, becoming brighter, fading, becoming brighter again. It was a mill in the valley – or what had been a mill and was now a dye works. To Gorsey Dene it signalled home: the first outpost on the Lancashire side of the Pennines. To Jay it was simply a scattering of fading, brightening points of light down there in the darkling valley. She was not conscious of their meaning anything; the cold curling mist, wisping at the edges, had lulled her into a dreamlike state in which the real world was a transient, lightly-blown phantasm. It was similar to the feeling she had had when reading Creely’s letters specifying his experiences with various girls: hearing of them at a distance in a sunny land had made them seem unreal, though she did not need to be convinced of their authenticity. Indeed, it was just like him to have stumbled on a situation where a girl taking a bath should invite him inside and wrap her legs, wet and faintly steaming, around his thin, surprised body, pressing her shiny naked breasts against his palpitating chest and start to sob and gurgle the whole sorry story of how she had been left in the lurch, unloved, uncared for, the thread worn clean away, and the only constructive plan in her head that of suicide.

  ‘You are quiet,’ Gorsey Dene interposed.

  ‘Is there an obligation to talk?’

  �
�No, no,’ he amended hurriedly.

  The car slithered downwards in the silence.

  A little later Gorsey Dene said, ‘The moors send chills through me.’

  The moors, Jay thought, remembering another letter in which he had recounted a daylight experience: rambling with a girl and her beau – the jerk of a boyfriend going off alone into the brown-grey distance whereupon the girl had forced herself upon him, murmuring lewd phrases as she unbuttoned her blouse. Jay wished that she could have been that girl, imagining herself taking the initiative as the gingy schmuck trudged haplessly through the bracken and stubborn grass. She always felt that a slight release of tension at the base of her brain would enable her to be far more ambitious and outgoing in her attitude and approach to life; an instantaneous slackening of moral inhibitions would allow her to undertake quite dazzling projects of staggering proportions, opening up a whole new realm of exciting possibilities in which she was the leader and not the led. And she could clearly visualise Creely lying back as the girl (whoever she was) lay atop him, the two of them smirking and sniggering as the speck of the boyfriend vanished beyond the undulating horizon, the hot contact of their flesh all the hotter because of their illicit coupling and because the moorland breeze was always cool even at the height of summer.

  The car juddered over potholes, scrambling her thoughts. How far must Gorsey Dene have walked that day? Had his legs refused to stop, ploughing steadily onward over hill and down dale? Inconceivable, of course, that anyone else could have found themselves in such a ridiculous plight; but as for him –? Her two girlfriends, it was true, had never seen anything the least bit worthy in him. He had been a laughing stock, what with his burning eyes and petulant mouth, and they had hidden their collective amusement behind glasses of port and lemon, occasionally digging the other in the ribs in girlish complicity. But then that was typical of them: their wide and varied sexual experience had hardened their sensibilities to the point of crude insensitivity, and it wasn’t to be wondereds that both Val and Shirl invariably fell about when confronted with a particularly ludicrous and despicable specimen of the male species. Women, Jay had come to realise, were the toughies. Gorsey Dene might regard himself as attractively virile but she had inside information. Pat’s letter telling of his clumsy attempts that night in the flat she had read with smug satisfaction, showing it to Dmitri who passed his eyes lightly along it and smiled once, the implication being that one could not be too much concerned with the abortive fumblings of other, lesser persons. He had, it appeared, cornered her in the pub – probably the Coach, Jay surmised – and trailed meekly after her to a party, boring her with infantile sexual innuendo and plying her with neat whisky (an obvious ploy) from a pint bottle. During this time Pat had made a number of desultory rejoinders, seeking escape in vain. Later, practically having coerced her into accepting generous measures of liquor, he inveigled her into a position of extreme indelicacy, thrusting his knee between her thighs and moving it backwards and forwards with increasing rapidity, Pat’s response being one of astonishment mingled with derision: she had never been ‘made’ in her life and didn’t intend to relinquish her good name and reputation to a man with a petulant mouth. However, worse was to come. The whisky had begun – in spite of her watchful and defensive posture – to have the desired effect, and almost without realising it she found herself grappling with him in the pitch-black confines of, of all places, the bathroom. She could not remember how they came to be there, only that he used brute strength to push her to the floor, wet and slimy with rubber-soled imprints, and attempted to wrench loose her suspenders, in the process tearing her underclothes. All might have been lost – all very nearly was lost – but for the intervention of the others who hammered on the door in answer to her cries for help. They grasped him powerfully, his trousers round his ankles, his white pimply flanks quivering, and threw him into the hallway. From the fourteenth floor balcony they had leaned over and watched him limp away, Pat wrote, while she herself in a state of near collapse had been administered to by a man with cold, creased eyes and snarling nostrils. Where he had got to since was not of the slightest interest; she had written only out of a sense of duty and a desire to have the truth made known. No doubt Jay would know what inference to draw and conclusions to arrive at from these events.