22
It was possible – no, certain – that Vincent had passed his millionth mile years ago, if you included every journey made in the twenty-three years before he began driving for a living. Even if you discounted every journey in which he was the passenger and not the driver, he must have crossed that line much earlier, but the point was unknowable, because only when he became a professional driver did Vincent start counting the miles.
It began with him monitoring distances. Understanding distance, knowing how far he travelled each day, was integral to his job, but in time this was surpassed by his determination to reach that next point when a messy figure was flattened out, regimented by zeros. First ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. Soon enough he began thinking of those distances as trips around the world, and by the age of twenty-six had, by his reasoning, circumnavigated the globe four times. Always counting in miles, rather than kilometres, because miles offered a rounder, neater figure. The earth is 24,000 miles in circumference; a thousand miles for every hour of the day. The moon is 250,000 miles from the earth, give or take. And when his laps of the earth became meaningless he looked to the skies. At twenty-eight he’d been to the moon. At thirty-two he had been to the moon and back. Now, aged thirty-seven, he had almost completed his second return trip.
Only three men had ever done this for real – the astronauts Jim Lovell, Eugene Cernan, and John Young – and of them only Young and Cernan set foot on the moon itself. On his second trip, Lovell captained Apollo 13 and, while passing over the dark side of the moon, reached, along with his crew, a point more distant from the earth than any other men before them. It being his second mission, this made Lovell the farthest travelled person in the history of mankind, meaning he had travelled the farthest from earth, rather than on it, but Vincent liked to think the point in that night’s journey somewhere between Bristol and London would place him in an exclusive group of men, standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Lovell, Cernan and Young.
So much of his driving happened at night, and he spent so many hours in his cabin, that he felt a certain affinity with Lovell in particular. Sometimes, when he was between cities, he believed he understood how remote, how disconnected from the world, an astronaut might feel at that halfway point between worlds. People had made good work of naming most places, labelling almost everything down to the square mile, but there were still voids in between, and at night those voids were featureless but for the rhythmic sweep of the lights above, and the smooth Morse code of lines and patterns on the roads.
The emptiness and monotony of the night were hazardous. It was easy for the mind to wander, and a wandering mind was perhaps the most dangerous thing for a long distance driver. How to keep the mind sharp and focused when the world around him was hell bent on hypnosis. In fourteen years he’d tried everything – caffeine, amphetamines, every genre of music the radio could supply. He’d experimented with his diet, with his sleeping habits, even with the décor of his cabin. It took much of those fourteen years for him to find exactly the right combination, the right configuration of lifestyle and environment to keep him alert and in the moment, to stop his mind from wandering.
Drugs no longer played any part in it. Amphetamines had been recommended by a frazzled older driver he met at an all-night café near Frejus. There, this Satanic-looking character – black goatee beard and multiple piercings in his left ear – pushed a small paper wrap of crystal meth across the table they shared, and told Vincent he should try it.
‘Pour le voyage.’
He should have known from the dark rings around the man’s eyes how the drug might leech the life out of him. Day and night, light and dark, happy and sad, all became meaningless. Amphetamines crashed through the barriers between days and between moods with equal recklessness. Once the initial euphoria passed he was left only with an inability to rest, even when the journey was done and it was time for him to sleep. However much his limbs might ache, however heavy his eyelids might feel, his mind still fizzed with unspent energy, each thought barging past the next, vying for his exhausted attention.
His two years on crystal meth had given him the restless, agitated look of someone hunted. Not twitchy, but never calm. He was a man in perpetual motion, and had been for years, even before he began driving trucks. Taped to his dashboard, next to a yellowed Polaroid of his sister, was a tattered photocopy of an English poem he learned in school. Not the whole poem, only a few lines from it. English was the only subject he’d ever excelled in, and that poem, and those lines in particular, stayed with him. On the longest of nights he would read it aloud, listening to his own voice saying the words of an ‘idle king’. He wondered sometimes if he loved that poem because it so perfectly captured the nature of his existence, or if his life had itself been moulded by his memories of studying that poem and its meaning.
The solitude of the road had suited him over the years, but now he found the longer nights left him empty, the voices on the radio sounding more distant, more artificial. When he thought about those three astronauts who travelled a million miles, he realised he was different from them in one important aspect; his isolation. None of them, not even Lovell, travelled alone. The loneliest of the Apollo astronauts were those men in the command modules, orbiting the moon while their colleagues touched down on the surface. Perhaps those six men, from Michael Collins to Ron Evans, experienced the same depths of loneliness and of distance as him. Perhaps they too were the ideal men for the job, drawn to darkness and peace. Or perhaps not. No one ever made the trip twice, so maybe that feeling of remoteness had been a step too far away from the world. And perhaps Vincent had spent too long driving through the night. When driving he now imagined himself out there, beyond the dark side of the moon, with even the earth blotted from the sky, as distant as he could be from everything he’d ever known, and he wondered if he’d ever laugh at another person’s joke or flirt with another pretty girl in a bar. When he reached the next city or the next service station, he imagined he was coming in to land, the glow of orange streetlights the fire of re-entry, knowing all the while the people he saw might treat him differently, like someone changed by the distance he’d travelled and the time he spent alone.
In recent months he had begun making plans while he drove. Perhaps one day he would start saving money, and having saved enough would hand in the keys to his truck, and find somewhere he could be still, stationary, a place to live. Not the place where he grew up. Never there. Some place a little further south, perhaps. A postcard villa, next to a vineyard; terracotta roof, azure sky, cypress trees lining the nearest road – a collage of those things he believed made a place beautiful and serene. It was laughable, he knew that, and so he told no one his plans, but he was certain he’d settle in a place like that, and he waited patiently for the day when he could drift off to sleep without the sensation that he was still moving, still in transit, as if his body remembered every bump and every turn of every road.
23
Glass walls and white tiles. Soft muzak piped through speakers, and the rattle and chime of arcade games. A slice of the high street wrenched out and planted far beyond any town or city. The service station was exactly what Ibrahim expected. Here there were coffee shops, amusement arcades, a newsagents, a restaurant. A shop that sold jewellery, another toys, and he found it impossible to imagine who could need jewellery or toys on the motorway. It was as if this place existed solely as a diversion from the road’s monotony; taking travellers away from that endless strip of tarmac and road signs and offering them something human, something normal. If anything this concentration of normality, boxed in on all sides by floor-to-ceiling plate glass, only made the place more unsettling; the muzak and the drowsy wandering of customers giving the place an air of forced serenity.
Ibrahim loathed the service station and everyone inside it. He saw it not just as a place where tired drivers and their passengers could stop and rest, but as a microcosm; the country reduced to its basest raw ingredients. Here
was the compulsion to eat, the compulsion to shop, the compulsion to gamble. Here people demanded to be fed and entertained. The travellers in the service station were helpless, caught between places. Harassed by screaming children, frustrated by road maps. Shocked speechless by the prices. Assaulted by an impersonation of normality, and confronted everywhere they looked by adverts and primary colours, what else could they do but spend?
And what did any of them really know about travelling? He doubted any of them had been on the road more than a few hours; a few short hours away from their televisions, their computer games, their internet. If they were hungry, it was the kind of hunger that would pass if they had something else to occupy them. If they were tired, they were merely heavy-eyed, not exhausted. If they ached, it was the kind of pain that passes after a quick stretch and a brisk walk, not the kind that keeps you sleepless for nights, no matter how tired you are.
In the restaurant, Ibrahim bought a veggie burger and fries and a large cardboard cup of coke, and he took a table near the window. From here he could see out over the car park, and he saw Reenie, still resting on the embankment and, about halfway between the embankment and the service station, a minibus. Crowded around the bus was a group of men and women – he counted twelve in all – and their roof rack was crammed with luggage; oversized suitcases and backpacks huddled together with bungee cords. Along the side of the bus someone had painted – amateurishly – the words ‘King’s Temple Rapture Tour 2009’.
One of them, an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and a powder blue cardigan – popped open the bonnet and leaned in, studying the engine. It was getting dark now – the sun had disappeared behind a distant row of trees, dragging in a veil of dark blue from the east – and the older man had to use a torch. After a moment he stood and shook his head, and the others sagged in unison; shoulders drooping, faces glum. After a few minutes more of anxious shrugs and shaking heads, they locked the minibus and made their way toward the service station.
Presently, they entered the restaurant, queuing for food before taking three nearby booths, and keeping his eyes on his own table Ibrahim listened to their conversation.
‘Listen,’ said the older man. ‘This is just a test. If we give up now, He’ll know we’re not serious.’
‘I could phone the AA,’ said a young, dark-skinned boy in a brightly patterned shirt. ‘I’m a member. I’ll be covered for this.’
‘No, Zack. It’s fine. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the engine.’
‘But it won’t start.’
‘I know that, but I don’t think it’s a problem with the engine. I think it’s a test. I mean, for this to happen when we’ve only just started out? And I only took that thing to be serviced two weeks ago.’
‘Yes, but I could still try calling the…’
‘Let us pray.’
Those three words were a slammed door on the discussion, and on all three tables the makeshift congregation bowed their heads. With half a burger in one hand, his cup of Coke in the other, and a smudge of ketchup in his beard, Ibrahim stopped chewing and listened.
‘Lord,’ said the older man. ‘Help us through this, the first trial of many we shall face on the long road ahead. We know that Satan will do all he can to stand in our way…’
‘Amen,’ said the others.
‘We know he will try to tempt us from the road and from our pilgrimage, but we promise to you, oh Lord, that we will stay true, and that we will not give in to such temptations.’
‘Amen,’ said the others.
‘And so we pray to you, Lord, that you will heal our bus, as you would one of your own flock, and help us on the road. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ said the others.
As they opened their eyes once more, the older man looked at Ibrahim and smiled, and Ibrahim looked away, embarrassed, and took another bite of his burger. Chewing, and with his eyes fixed on the table, he sensed the older man getting up and crossing the aisle.
‘Hello.’
Ibrahim looked up. He couldn’t speak without spitting out a mouthful of half-chewed bread and burger, so he nodded and smiled with puffed-out cheeks and sealed lips.
‘Mind if I…?’ asked the older man, gesturing to the opposite seat. Ibrahim shook his head, and the older man sat, waiting for him to swallow his food before speaking again. ‘Hello, brother,’ he said. It sounded strange. To Ibrahim, ‘Brother’ was a word he associated with Muslims. Brother. Akhi. It was what they – he and his friends, back in London – had called each other, called any other man from the ummah. This guy wasn’t from the ummah. He looked like the kind of man you see talking about gardening or antiques on Sunday night television.
‘I saw you watching us, just now,’ he said. ‘While we were praying. I hope you weren’t… unsettled… in any way. Some people find praying a little…’ and now he moved his head from side to side, as if to shake the right word down from wherever it was kept. ‘Well, a little off-putting.’
‘Not at all,’ said Ibrahim.
‘That’s good,’ said the man, reaching across the table with an open hand. ‘My name’s Graham, by the way.’
Ibrahim shook his hand, and Graham held on with a firm grip, sandwiching Ibrahim’s digits between both hands in a way that felt warm and invasive at the same time.
‘Ibrahim,’ said Ibrahim, pulling his hand away as gently as he could without it seeming like a recoil.
‘Ibrahim. Like Abraham?’
‘Yeah. Like Abraham.’
He remembered Reenie telling him her father’s name was Avram.
‘The father of us all,’ said Graham. ‘Do you follow any faith?’
If Graham’s first point had been a segue, it was a clumsy one, but Ibrahim let it pass. ‘Kind of,’ he said. ‘Not as much as I used to…’
‘You see, we meet people from all kinds of faiths, and the question we ask them is, do you believe in the immortal soul?’
Ibrahim looked down at what was left of his food – the last orangey, hard-looking fries, the soggy bread, the daubs of ketchup. He looked at the cardboard cup of Coke and the drinking straw sticking out of its plastic lid. He braced himself against the table’s edge, wondering if this was a dream. Perhaps everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours had been a dream. Perhaps he was still lying on a pavement in Gloucester, unconscious and bleeding. Or earlier than that. This whole week, everything that had happened. Because what were the chances, really? Perhaps, having realised the dream for what it was, Ibrahim was on the verge of waking in his flat in Cardiff, the long walk to London still ahead of him.
‘The immortal soul,’ he said. ‘Well, I… I suppose I haven’t really thought about it in a while.’
‘No, no,’ said Graham closing his eyes and nodding sympathetically. ‘And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I mean, these days, everyone’s so busy. So few of us have the time to give it any real thought, but we should make the time. We really should.’
‘Yes,’ said Ibrahim, with too little conviction. ‘We should.’
‘Now, I don’t profess to know a lot about the tenets of your religion, Ibrahim. I’m assuming you are a Muslim, is that correct?’
Ibrahim nodded.
‘Good, well, I don’t know much about Islam, but I do know this. I know that you venerate our Lord Jesus Christ almost as much as we Christians, and that you too are the children of Abraham, and that’s a really good place to start. You see, by letting Christ into your heart you become a new person. You are almost literally born again. Does this make sense?’
‘Er, I guess so, I supp...’
‘And when I saw you, just now, I thought, “There’s a young man who’s had a tough time of it. There’s a lad who could do with waking up afresh tomorrow morning.”’
Ibrahim glanced briefly at the window. With the sky outside almost black, the reflection of the restaurant and everyone in it grew more distinct, and he saw the stitches on his eyebrow and the purple bruises on his face. He saw himself as Grah
am – Graham, with his salt-and-pepper hair, his powder blue cardigan, his invasive handshake and over-friendly voice – had seen him.
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Yes, really,’ said Graham. ‘And I thought, “There’s a young man who’s ready for Christ.” Am I right? Are you ready for Christ?’
‘Um…’
‘You see, a lot of people think you have to want to be a Christian to let Christ into your heart, but that’s not true. If you open your heart, Christ will find you. Ask any of my friends over there,’ he gestured across the aisle toward the three booths, ‘and they’ll tell you the same thing. We didn’t ask to be Christians. Some of us didn’t even want to be Christians. Christ found us.’
‘Right.’
‘But you have to be ready for Him. Are you ready for Christ?’
‘Not really.’
‘Now you say that,’ said Graham. ‘But I think you are. The heart is deceitful, and your heart is telling you you’re not ready, when really you are.’
Could Graham really believe he’d found a convert in the making? Was he that deluded? But Ibrahim knew this was what it meant to preach. This was what it had meant to stand in the street, near Stratford tube, handing out flyers. Even when it was raining. Yusuf yelling through the loudhailer, his voice squeaking with feedback. And Ibrahim hated that loudhailer, hated the way it made the adhan sound so harsh and tinny. The muezzin at his father’s mosque sang so sweetly it sounded to Ibrahim like violins, but this noise, this bristling electric noise, was nothing like that. And some people would change direction even when they were fifty feet away; subtly turn a little to the left or the right, working out the best route so they could avoid them, Ibrahim and his friends, and the Big Issue vendor near the station doors. That was what it meant to preach. The belief that if they kept handing out those little slips of paper (‘GOD IS THE WAY!’) someone, anyone, might take notice. And now this. Another believer, leaning across the table and asking him if he was ready for Christ.
Ibrahim & Reenie Page 20