by Danny King
“We could stretch our legs.”
“But we’re almost home,” Sally pointed out.
This much was true. We were now only about four miles from home and due to take the next turning so there really wasn’t any reason to go to the Services.
“We could pop in anyway if you liked,” I said, but Sally wasn’t keen.
“Let’s just get home shall we?” she said, and that was that. We passed the Services without slowing and I felt the pang of regret at the lost opportunity.
“I might give Tom a call when we get home. See if he wants to go out for a drink tonight,” I said, causing Sally to glare at me all at once.
“I thought we were going to have a quiet night in?”
I was half-tempted to tell her that I wasn’t sure I fancied it this quiet, but I figured that would only fan the flames of this particular disagreement so I settled for looking bewildered.
“When did I say that?” I asked.
“Oh whatever. Go out if you want then, I don’t care,” she snarled, so I deliberately missed the subtext and played along as if I’d just been given the green light.
“Great,” I beamed, letting her know my emotional blinkers were on and that I could no longer read between the lines. I was pretty confident I’d get away with it too, because Sally hated putting her objections into actual words, so as long as I was prepared to pay the price (ie. two days of short shrift) then I’d get to have a couple of pints tonight.
And believe me, I was.
Well you might as well get hanged for a lamb as a sniff of the barmaid’s apron, as they say on the internet – somewhere probably.
I was just wondering how early I dared make a break for the pub when brake lights started filling the horizon. The traffic immediately thickened and before I knew it I was working my way through the gears and down to first. A few hundred cars tightened up to a crawl and all too inevitably we ground to a halt.
“Oh, what is this now?” I moaned, winding down the window and craning my head out when I saw some guy in front do something similar. I couldn’t see anything but then again neither could he, so we both ducked back into our cars and speculated with our respective partners as to what the problem could be.
“It’s probably a crash,” Sally said, underlining those few carefully considered words with a tone that didn’t make it past my emotional blinkers.
“Well I hope it’s nothing serious, we’re only half a mile from our turning.”
We sat in the same spot for another thirty frustrating minutes before a gradual trickle of movement started shifting cars from our view. I started up the engine and waited expectantly for the movement to reach us and when it did a clear stretch of motorway, roughly the size of a family saloon, opened up in front of us. I drove straight into it, and then another bit of motorway opened up, and so I drove into that one too and so on until three lanes merged into one and we circumvented a twisted heap of steel and glass that looked like it used to be several different cars. Astonishingly, no bits looked like they used to be attached to a BMW, which meant my finger-waving friend had been stuck in this same mess along with the rest of us, no doubt flashing his lights and hooting his horn at the logjam in front of him. Ambulance men and policemen were already on the scene and doing their best to clear the road and keep the traffic moving, though the wreckage was strewn right across three lanes, so we were having to be directed onto the hard shoulder.
The cars were already empty and I wondered how their occupants had faired. One of the wrecks looked as though it could’ve been walked away from, though I doubted the same could’ve been said of the Vauxhall Corsa wrapped around the central reservation barrier. That one was mess. A tin can crushed to bits by rampaging elephants.
“I hope they’re okay,” Sally said, looking past me as I steered my way around the accident.
“Yeah, me too,” I agreed, though I didn’t hold out much hope.
All at once the traffic cones and police tape ended and the motorway opened up in front of us again. I moved through the gears up to fourth, and then fifth, but stayed under 60mph for the last half a mile. Other cars sped past me like a hail of bullets but I wasn’t interested in keeping pace with them any more. The turning for Camberley soon appeared, so I checked my mirrors and pressed down the indicator, signalling an end to mine and Sally’s motorway adventure.
To tell the truth, it hadn’t been the best car journey of our lives.
But at least it hadn’t been the last.
Sally’s Diary: December 27th
The relief at being home again is tempered by yet another little niggling row. Andrew and I don’t have blazing rows. I wish we did because I bet they’re easier to patch up than our niggling ones. With niggling rows they’re almost always over something that’s so tiny, so petty that neither of us want to talk them through for fear of being thought of as tiny and petty ourselves. So what do we do to do? Well, I usually bite my tongue and try to keep the peace, but this rarely works as the niggling just ends up hanging in the air, drifting from one day to the next. I hate niggling rows, I really do, but they seem to just keep coming out of nowhere. Last week’s happened because Norman bought Andrew a bottle of wine for Christmas. Seriously, Norman got him a present, a lovely bottle of sparkling wine and told him to enjoy it with his Christmas dinner and Andrew launched into a rant about how it was some devious move to try and buy his respect. “Of course, now I’ve got to buy him something and how he’d like that, hey!” he fumed, working himself up into one.
Andrew’s not really one to listen to anyone when he’s in that sort of mood and he ended up roping me into his bad temper when I refused to condemn Norman for his gift (although he soon held out his glass when I cracked it open that evening). Silly, isn’t it?
Today we niggled over… over what? Some insane petulant nonsense on the motorway. God, why does he always have to be right about every little thing? Some other driver behind us wanted to get past and Andrew wouldn’t let him. It was like some sort of game to him. Ridiculous, isn’t it? It really is. In fact, as I’m sat here writing this, I can’t even understand how it all blew up again. Why couldn’t he just pull over? There you go, problem solved, next problem please. I mean, if he’s going to fall to pieces every time something this tiny inconveniences him, how the hell’s he ever going to cope if something serious goes wrong? And you know what, that’s my real frustration. I work with children all day long. I’m getting a little bit tired of having to come home to one.
Chapter 5. The Green Green Grass of Tom
“This bastard was right up my arse; hooting and trying to flash me off the road. I tell you, some people,” I said, draining the last of my pint.
“Blimey, you thirsty or something?” Tom asked, half a pint behind me.
“First one I’ve had since… well, before Christmas I think.”
“Really, you haven’t had anything at all over Christmas?”
“No, just scotch and wine.”
Tom angled his eyebrows. “That counts. I thought you meant you hadn’t had any booze, full stop.”
“Oh no, God no. Three days at mine and Sally’s parents? Christ, I couldn’t do that sober,” I shuddered.
“Go on then, what did matey do?”
“Well, he was just there wasn’t he, hanging off my arse and trying to intimidate me into the central reservation.”
“Cunt!”
“Yeah, that’s right. He was like a maniac he was, a total fucking nutcase. I thought he was going to kill someone.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well I wasn’t going to let him past, was I, so I let the bastard stew.”
Tom gave a considered nod and took the penultimate sip of his pint. “In your own time, Tom,” I said, nudging his arm along.
“What? Oh yeah, sorry,” said Tom, downing the dregs and summoning the barman away from his Take a Break magazine.
“Same again, Tom?” the barman asked, hovering a couple of fresh glasses under the J
ohn Smiths.
“Please Graham. And have one for yourself?”
“Thanks. I’ll have it for later, yeah?”
“No problem,” Tom nodded, all pleased with himself at being so flash. Still, that was Tom and Tom liked being flash. He wasn’t flash in a ‘in-your-face’ ‘Jack-the-lad’ ‘utter-wanker’ sort of way. It was more a languid, unconcerned, look at me, aren’t I cool, sort of thing. I was never sure where he got it from, whether it was Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Michael Caine in Alfie, or Regan out of The Sweeney but he’d definitely got it from somewhere because when I first met him he couldn’t even open a door without knocking his glasses off.
Still, he seemed to enjoy doing it and it also seemed to work too, so I stopped pulling him up on it whenever I caught him smoking out of the corner of his mouth or winking when he thought he’d said something clever, and let him just get on with it these days.
“So what’s Sally’s problem?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You know her, she’s always upset about something. I can’t seem to do anything right these days.” I took a big gulp of my new pint, wiped the bubbles from my top lip and let that sentiment have some time by itself.
“Probably her period or something I suspect. That’s usually what’s the matter,” Tom guessed, making the barman roll his eyes.
“No, I don’t know. Maybe it was all a bit stupid but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Ah, women they don’t understand these things. It’s just easier to blame stuff on their blokes because they’re the ones at hand. Try doing something to a bird that they don’t like and see how much they like it,” Tom winked.
I met Tom at University. In fact, that’s where I’d met Sally too. She’d been in the year below us both, but we’d all worked on, or at least contributed to, the University paper, so we’d ended up getting to know each other. This was also how me and Tom had started in journalism and how I’d ended up on Caravan Enthusiast and Tom had ended up on Camper Van Magazine (Sally saw mine and Tom’s dreadful career fates and immediately took the decision to do something useful with her life, sparing herself forty-odd years of media tedium).
Oddly, if a little unsettlingly, Sally had dated Tom before me for about a week or so before realising [Sally’s words] “what a dreadful mistake I was making” and [Tom’s words] “dropping me like a hot turd.” I’ve never understood how a woman can like a bloke enough to go out with them, see them two or three times and even sleep with them (as happened on this occasion), only to then realise what an utter dork they are and chuck them? I’ve never understood this.
“Come on, you have to admit, he is a bit of a knob,” she once said.
“Well you fucked him darling,” I unwisely retorted.
I’ve often wondered what went on the night Sally realised her “dreadful mistake” because it was one specific particular night, but neither of them have ever talked about it so I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. I’m certainly never going to ask. The curiosity did occasionally grip me, but what if I found out they’d worn each other’s pants or spanked each other with hair brushes?
Then again perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps it was nothing at all. After all they were both young, naïve and inexperienced at the time, so how deranged could’ve things got? Perhaps Sally just woke up the next morning, rolled over and thought, “So this is what hitting rock bottom feels like is it?” or perhaps she just figured she could do better. I like to believe the latter as it flatters me at the same time, though I reckon the real reason’s probably something a bit more embarrassing because Tom’s never talked about it either.
“So, is she in a big sulk with you then is she?” Tom asked, taking three attempts to flick a fag into his mouth before finally succeeding.
“No, it’s nothing. I’ll just keep my head down and it’ll be fine in a day or so. It’s just annoying that everything’s always my fault. I just wish one day she’d support me, I mean, I thought that was what marriage was all about – two people supporting each other.”
“Really? Who gave you that idea, Ghandi?” he winked.
“Stop doing that.”
“Despite everything everyone says these days, women actually just want to be looked after. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it’ll always be. The blokes do the giving, the women do the needing,” Tom sermonised.
“You don’t half talk a load of rubbish sometimes.”
“Believe what you like, but you tell me this; you’re always going on about this argument with Sally or that argument with Sally but when was the last time she admitted she was wrong about something and said sorry?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, doing a quick Ctrl + F on my memory but coming up short.
“So when was the last time you did it?” he then asked.
“Well, tonight obviously,” I admitted.
“And the time before that?”
“I don’t know, just before Christmas, I guess.”
“And the time before that?”
“A few weeks earlier probably.”
“And the time before that?”
“Is your record stuck?”
“I’m just making a point here,” Tom said.
“Which is?”
“Which is, we’re the ones who have to do all the supporting, not women. We support them, we look after them, and we’re the ones who have to shoulder all the blame whenever anything goes wrong. That’s what being a man is all about. That’s where the expression comes from, being a man,” Tom nodded knowingly, pausing to take a man-sized swig of his pint before continuing. “Men have to hold their hands up, take it on the chin and not grumble. If I said to you, my dad went to the doctors, was told he had three weeks to live and took it like a big woman, you’d know exactly what I meant, wouldn’t you?”
Images of Tom’s dad bawling on the doctor’s carpet, begging and offering sexual favours for medicine filled my head, so I said, “yeah, sure”.
“Now, if I told you he went to the doctors, was told he had three weeks to live and took it like a man, what would you say to that?”
Tom’s dad got up from the carpet, wiped his eyes and laughed manfully.
“Three weeks to live you say? Why that’s just grand. Gives me time to play golf every day and blow Tom’s inheritance on hookers. Fancy a sneaky pint before I tee off?”
“Hence, being a man calls for certain characteristics and being a woman calls for other characteristics. That’s just the way it is,” Tom concluded.
“You know, the scary thing is you really believe all of this, don’t you?” I said, finishing my next pint before I even knew about it.
“I’m sure I won’t win any awards at the next PC rally, but everything I’ve said is true. Men are men. Women are women. You just have to decide which you want to be.”
Tom didn’t wink, although he looked as though he wanted to, but three winks in as many minutes would’ve seriously devalued the gesture, so he settled for nodding sagely and saving his next wink for something spectacular.
“And what’s all this ‘we’ and ‘us’ bit? Last time I checked you were still single. If you know so much about it, how comes you haven’t got a girlfriend?”
“For precisely that reason, because I know so much about it,” he winked, unable to resist the lure of that one. “Besides, I do all right.”
This was annoyingly true. Tom did, indeed, do all right. Every few Mondays he’d have some tawdry tale of bedroom bingo to share with me and it wasn’t all bullshit either. Some of it obviously was, but not all of it.
Take for example his last conquest – Su Li is the name on her birth certificate but she’s since become better known as “that little Chinese bird I’m banging”. Tom showed me a picture of her a little while ago (clothes on, obviously) and she looked absolutely fantastic: as pale as a drop of snow and just as palm-meltingly delicate.
“Dirty as fuck, she is too. Wanked me off in the taxi and let m
e do it all up her face when we got home.”
Now, I have no doubt he was bedding this “little Chinese bird” but I couldn’t believe the details because they simply didn’t tie in with my experience of girls.
I mean, sure, yeah, there were probably some girls out there who did these sorts of things, but let’s be honest, they were going to be pretty few and far between. And I’m not talking just about sex on a first date here either; that would be refreshingly restrained if only I were. No, I’m talking about nasty porno-type dirty things that you only read about in the sleaziest (ie. the best) sex magazines – bondage, threesomes, lesbianism, doing it in public, doing it up the bottom, all that sort of thing. If Tom were to be believed, practically every girl in the world (or at least in Britain and China) was an insatiable dirty nymphomaniac who’s only concern in life was getting it as hard as she humanly could.
Now, like I say, obviously some of this was bullshit but not all of it.
See, the reason I believed most of what Tom told me was because Tom used to be hopeless as far as girls were concerned, absolutely hopeless. And this is something he freely admits. He didn’t have a clue. Every Friday and Saturday night he’d polish his glasses and head out with his best Ben Sherman on, but the only thing he’d ever pull would be a kebab on the way home. And that’s the way it went for Tom. That’s the way it went for him for a very long time in fact.