The Burning Ground

by Adam O'Riordan

  ’98 Mercury Sable

  It’s really the plainest of cars. Instantly forgettable. It’s kind of like a Ford Mondeo but with a narrower, meaner, more pinched front. Slightly tinnier too. Less substantial. To be honest, I don’t really know the first thing about cars. When we’re out here in the States it’s all I can do to make sure I don’t turn left onto a rotary. There’s nothing flashy or fancy about the Mercury Sable: it’s dependable, boring, beloved of car-hire rental outlets, it’s that kind of machine. I was happy to take it. It was cheap for one, by which I mean inexpensive, not badly made. We felt it was safe enough for the twins in the back. The guys at Midway even threw in a couple of child seats gratis, which I thought was good of them. I reasoned that even if I did bump it ( last time out I’d clipped a mail van driving into Palm Springs, which, our lawyer later informed us, is a federal offense, and that wouldn’t have looked good on my o-1 visa application), then it wouldn’t be too expensive to repair. I’m not a natural driver, you see.

  I was almost thirty before I passed my test. And only then after a weeklong intensive course in Southport back in England. I think they chose Southport as their base of operations as it’s so mind-numbingly dull in the evening all you really want to do is stay in and read your highway code. After a day at the center I would come home to the moth-eaten, musty guest house on a terraced street and call Sophia from the pay phone in the hallway (my network had zero reception). She was pregnant with the twins at the time and I was always desperate for news. We’d agreed I had to be “road worthy” by the time they arrived. After all my coins had been gobbled up and I’d said a rushed good-night to Sophia, I would take a walk around the town and try to think of ways to pass the time. A northern seaside town in midwinter. It’s about as grim as it gets. The last time I’d been there was on a school trip, so it felt like a particular kind of purgatory for me, as if my adult life had never happened. I mean, it’s a compelling image: those tatty rows of shops, the strings of fairy lights, the angry sea. It’s just not very practical.

  After the first few nights, I gave up and stayed in my room, going over my highway code. Sitting there on flimsy reproduction furniture miming three-point turns and emergency stops. Pathetic really. The morning of the test was a nightmare. I don’t think I’d ever been so nervous. If I’d had my way I would have stayed a card-carrying pedestrian, but the more we came out here to Los Angeles the more odd it seemed that I didn’t drive. I’d tell people we met at dinner parties, decent, artistic, liberal people, that I was a nondriver and they’d look at me like I’d just told them I was illiterate. Not to mention the looks of perplexed machismo on the faces of valets when they saw me alighting from the passenger side. They looked at me as if I were an irredeemable drunk or mentally deficient. I’d taken to saying, loudly, “Do you fancy driving back, darling?” as we left restaurants. Sophia didn’t find this funny at all.

  The day of the test I was woken at 6 a.m. by Sophia’s father telling me it was all about “the sports moment.” Stepping up. Controlling my fear, not letting the fear control me. Sophia must have given him the number of the pay phone. I imagined him taking the corners of some tree-lined Hampshire B road in his Jaguar as he talked into his “hands free” on his way into the office. “There’s a lot riding on this, Sebastian. Don’t let us down.” Christ, I thought. Nerves had always been a problem.

  A week after my A Levels, I’d failed my test for the first time for speeding. I’d got it into my head that the bearded, bearlike examiner looked like a pedophile, which had really thrown me. It’s amazing what stress can do. The next time was a decade later in Norwich, where Sophia was directing a play. The examiner, a friendly tall man with protruding front teeth and a luminous safety jacket, had just finished a cigarette when we got into the car. You lucky bastard, I thought. I’d given up a week earlier, which, in retrospect, was too much to take on, what with the driving as well. He’d been chatty through the test but toward the end—after it was clear to him that I’d failed (speeding, again)—I’ll never forget how his mildly jaundiced face was completely unable to square the articulate man next to him with the inept driver in control of the shuddering, stammering car. In my defense, he’d thrown me from the outset, telling me that I had a strange accent and asking where it was from. Liverpool, I said, via Cambridge and, more recently, New York. Sophia had been directing off Broadway and we had been living out there for the past year. A gap in her schedule had brought her home for the summer. The final examination failure was in London a fortnight later, the day before we flew back to New York. It was an easygoing Rastafarian this time, with a gap-toothed smile, who laughed when I touched the curb during my reverse park. “Y’all be fine de next time, Mr. Carter, almost der, almost der,” he chuckled. I went and got very drunk by myself in a bar just off the Portobello Road full of Polish builders on their lunch break.

  So as you can imagine, that morning in Southport I was pretty nervous. Give me a script to edit, give me words to play with and my confidence knows no bounds but make me do something practical and in public and I am a wreck. I thought back to the last time I’d been crippled by nerves: my French oral examination at Sixth Form. The head of modern languages, Mr. Armstrong, had sensed my anxiety and suggested I take the edge off by having “a taste” before I went in. “A taste?” I said as we sat alone after class in the Portakabin that was the temporary classroom that term. “Yes, a taste,” he said, “have a drink, lad.”

  The same strategy was deployed that morning in Southport. In the bottom of my wardrobe were six bottles of Premium Italian lager (the sourcing of which was a task in itself and had filled up at least one free evening) and a quarter bottle of vodka. I dressed, then downed a bottle of lager by my sink. Then another. Then for good measure took three long pulls on the tepid vodka. I then brushed my teeth vigorously and gargled with mouthwash. You can’t be too careful. At the end of the test, when the lady examiner told me I had passed, all I could say was “Really? Are you sure?” On reflection, I suspect the driving school had some kind of arrangement with the examiner, who had seemed mildly distracted throughout the whole thing, at one point even composing a text message on her phone. But in Southport I guess you have to take good reception where you can get it.

  Anyway, all of this is by way of explaining that I am a cautious driver at the best of times and ever since the mail van incident, I could safely classify myself as extra cautious. Sophia was out here taking a bunch of meetings. Her Hamlet two summers at the Roundabout had been universally acknowledged as a triumph, noted for its “cinematic use of the stage.” This had obviously made its way to the right people. So after working on a couple of independent films in New York that had gone down exceptionally well at the festivals, she’d been signed up by a studio. We’d been bouncing coast to coast for the past nine months and it was a time of great excitement in our lives. Excitement intensified by the imminent arrival of “No. 3,” kicking, it seemed constantly, in that huge globe Sophia carried around her midriff.

  We were driving out to Sophia’s godmother’s house for the weekend. The twins were in the back lobbying for a jack-in-the-box. We’d agreed on one “nonhealth meal” a week—Sophia’s phrasing, not mine. Personally, I thought a bit of junk food did them no harm but Sophia was a little more militant. “Don’t,” she said, looking across at me, sipping from her bottle of Kombucha, a fermented Chinese tea.

  As the twins’ protests grew more fervent we agreed to stop at the next turnoff. The twins clearly needed to eat something and I could use a break as Sophia had proved completely inept at communicating the directions from the map on her iPhone, leading to several wrong turns along the way. Traditionally this had been my job and I now regretted making such a big deal of it, as it was clear Sophia was taking her revenge.

  As we walked into the service station, a baby on each arm, my eye was drawn to a parked car in a row of empty spaces opposite ours. It was identical to the one we were driving, which wasn’t that unusual, as ours—in de
sign at least—looked pretty much like every other car on the freeway. However, what caught my eye was that this one, like ours, was a specific kind of electric blue. We’d picked ours out from among its dull cousins one hot morning on the Midway forecourt early on in our trip. It was mutually agreed to be our one concession to style. I had never seen one exactly like it here. In the back was a girl, about six, weeping, apparently inconsolable. See what happens when you don’t get them jack-in-the-box, I thought and almost said as much to Sophia but decided to keep my powder dry. I imagined the argument the poor girl’s parents were having inside. Christ, I thought, just bite the bullet and get her the burger.

  We came out of the service station, loaded with dried fruit, Brazil nuts, goji berries, coconut water, and two strangely happy children somehow placated by Sophia’s organic offerings. As I was opening the trunk, I saw the girl’s father in the Mercury Sable across from ours smacking her, hard, across the front of her legs. The crack rang out across the lot. I reasoned that her mother was probably inside buying her that jack-in-the-box and it would all be OK when she came out. I didn’t want Sophia to see as I was sure she’d cause a scene and I’d have to end up duking it out with some perfectly reasonable and responsible but deeply aggravated parent in the parking lot of a service station. Sophia is militantly anti-corporal punishment. She threatened to leave me six weeks into her pregnancy when I told her I could understand the arguments for it, calling me a “fucking Neanderthal” in the middle of the beer garden where we were having lunch with her parents. I looked away from the scene inside the car and down to its number plate, which began: S75. Ha! I thought, like me: Sebastian, 1975. I took it as a good omen.

  An hour later I looked up briefly from the road and saw a flashing traffic sign with three lines of text; the middle line read “98 Mercury Sable.” Is that a freeway? I thought. Christ, is that the turn I was meant to take? Sophia was asleep in the back with the twins. I had a premonition of her waking and suddenly shouting, “Mercury Sable, Sebastian, that was our bloody turn!” I looked down at the iPhone on my lap, clumsily thumbing at the map application. It told me we had another thirty miles before our first junction. Phew, I thought. Close call.

  The traffic was moving nicely down the 101. I was beginning to loosen up, almost enjoying the drive. I was thinking about arriving at the lake house that evening. Wondering if Ernie, Sophia’s godfather, would be around to take the boat out before supper. I unspooled my little fishing fantasy, imagining myself strolling triumphantly into the house, holding a giant trout aloft, presenting it to Sophia’s godmother like a sacred chalice to a medieval queen. Ernie standing behind me, finally approving of something I did. I looked up again and there was the sign I had seen earlier, the words “98 Mercury Sable” in bright orange lights. I caught the bottom line this time too, “Lic: S75 FTT.” Sebastian, you idiot, I thought, Mercury Sable, it’s not a road. It’s a make of a car. It’s the make of the car you’re driving. I heard Sophia’s father’s voice in my head: “It’s a Sable, Sebastian, come on, focus.”

  A few minutes later and a little farther down the freeway I noticed the sign again. “98 Mercury Sable, Lic: S75 FTT.” Funny, I thought, that car in the service station was S75 and a Sable too. Then it dawned on me: rampant commercialization. We had passed a series of sponsored motorways earlier, the Shirley Chen Junction, the Consuelo Latimer Bypass, and now they were even advertising used cars for sale on the freeway! Trying to sell you a used car during your commute. God bless America, I thought and floored the gas.

  The sun was setting as we approached our turn-off to the lake house. A powder purple suffused across the skyline. Beautiful. I looked in the mirror at Sophia and the twins asleep in the back. There I was, king of the road. Well, a princeling at least. I imagined Ernie opening a beer for me and then I would take a long hot shower before dinner, listening to the crickets and cicadas starting up outside. I saw our junction and indicated to turn. Then I saw the sign again. Took it in. Fully this time. Each little orange light burning: “Child Abduction. 98 Mercury Sable. Lic: S75 FTT.”

  Magda’s a Dancer

  “She’s an intellectual actor. She brought a lot of thought to Ophelia when we workshopped Hamlet together at Columbia.”

  “What’s she done? That space movie, right?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “It was terrible. Naturally. I saw her at Shakespeare in the Park a few years ago. She was completely insipid.”

  “Magda is just annoyed—can I tell them, baby?—Magda is just annoyed because a casting director I once worked with told me my darling wife looked like her. I took it as a compliment.”

  “It’s not a compliment, Zachary. I was mortified.”

  “OK, OK. But, I gotta say this: at her best she kinda reminds me of a young Ingrid Bergman.”

  “Oh, come off it, Zack! That’s like comparing Charlotte Church to Maria Callas.”

  “Charlotte who?”

  “She’s a young English soprano. Sang for Clinton once.”

  “She’s Welsh, Harry.”

  “A young Welsh soprano.”

  “Glad to see I’m not the only fella who got a little sun this weekend, Harry.”

  “I was being very English about my sunbathing.”

  “He was being very silly. We were at Malibu Colony. He sat there all afternoon without any sunblock.”

  “Now I wake up every morning with pieces of my face falling off.”

  “It’s like sleeping next to a leper.”

  “So you guys are subletting, right?”

  “Just for the month.”

  “It’s a great place. So much space. I always wondered who lived downtown.”

  “Itinerant Brits.”

  “It’s funny, I was saying to Magda on the way up—by the way we parked in one of those vacant lots—the car is safe there, right?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I was saying to her that when I was filming here last year I was actually given an escort to walk two blocks down to use the restroom.”

  “NO!”

  “I was wearing stilettos at the time.”

  “I don’t imagine downtown takes too kindly to drag artistes.”

  “Harry loves it down here, don’t you? Says it’s the only place he can get anything done.”

  “It’s the only place in this whole city that actually feels like a city.”

  “Tell them what happened last night.”

  “I’d rather not. Are these lentils?”

  “Harry!”

  “I was waiting for Julia outside the parking lot down there.”

  “Come on. Tell the story properly.”

  “When you stand still for long enough out there you start to sink into this underworld that ordinarily you would have walked right through.”

  “Never stand still. First thing they teach you at Langley.”

  “It was incredibly quiet. No traffic. After about ten minutes I notice these guys are walking around and around the block, circling me. These three feral-looking guys.”

  “Tell them about the chair.”

  “Oh yeah, then this kid in a do-rag walks past carrying a chair. Puts it down directly opposite me, just under the scaffolding down there, outside Wigs and Slippers. It felt like he was marking me out or something. The whole thing was loaded with portent.”

  “Harry was terrified. Took him an hour to wind down.”

  “I wasn’t terrified. It just felt completely lawless. Like anything could happen. It was like being back in the wild. It was exciting, I suppose, in a way.”

  “Can you imagine him? Standing down there in his espadrilles?”

  “Hey buddy, it beats stilettos.”

  “Oh and you’ll love this, Zack. He has this one hoodie. He thinks it helps him blend in. But those two sweet old queens we walked past the other night, what did they say?”

  “Nice top, babe. Is it designer?”

  “He thinks it makes him look like one of those cops from The Wire.�
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  “It does make me look like one of the cops in The Wire.”

  “Tell Harry how you two met.”

  “We were in middle school together.”

  “I’ve been kissing the same man for sixteen years.”

  “That’s a lot of saliva.”

  “Harry!”

  “Sorry. Go on. I’m interested.”

  “Magda’s mom ran the drama center at school.”

  “I watched him auditioning for a play, doing this series of little comedy skits he’d written, in front of the whole year. I thought—there is a brave man.”

  “Not a handsome or a witty man, just a brave man you notice.”

  “So my mom cast us both in a production of Tartuffe.”

  “Which translation?”

  “The Wilbur, you read it?”

  “No, but I know his poetry.”

  “So in a sweeping feat of nepotism Mom casts us both . . .”

  “Sorry, Magda, I interrupted you there.”

  “It’s OK, Harry.”

  “Yeah, sorry, honey. Carry on.”

  “. . . in this school production of Tartuffe.”

  “Magda was a genius, Harry. I mean she’d been coached by Wanda, her mom, since she was a little girl.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “I’m serious, honey. And let me tell you both this, hand on heart, Magda has more talent in her little finger than the actress we were discussing earlier whose name I won’t mention.”

  “Zachary, you’re embarrassing me.”

  “What do you do now, Magda?”

  “You’re a landscaper, aren’t you?”

  “Studying to be. I just signed up for a three-year MSc.”

  “But Magda trained in ballet initially, at the Joffrey. My girl’s a dancer.”

  “The ballet was my first love.”

  “She used to come home with these bruised knees.”

  “So why the change of career?”