Dream On

by Dai Smith

  They seemed, or so it felt to his arms and in his shoulder muscles, to spend as much time here as they did back at what he called “proper” home. Especially since the cheapo flights now went all year round. Myra never stopped either. Planning and organising. She had had him to strip all the flaky green paint off the wooden shutters and windows, up and down, back and front, doors and windows, inside and outside, to putty and prime and paint her volets, as she referred to them, a light blue that she had seen, in all the glossy magazines which she bought and piled up, designated as “typique” and “lavande, presque gris, un peu foncé”. The walls had cracks. They had to be filled in. They became a curdled cream colour that was, deliberately, the off-white side of yellow. Or so she told him. There were tiles to be replaced. For the roof, old ones, sourced for their lichen and atmosphere-touched rusty terracotta red, slotted to blend in, and for the floors smoother caramel oblongs to complement the originals which Geoffrey and Wilfrid had, so cleverly she pointed out, bought dirt-cheap in Spain. The kitchen and bathroom, suitable enough for bachelors, was re-plumbed and re-appointed with new fixtures by the all-purpose handyman she kept for his uses. Digger was resigned not bitter. Yet he gnawed on the bone of what exactly the purpose was, beyond the outcome of a handsome, restored and refurbished square-set stone house in an exotic and replenished garden. The worry nagged away at him. His worth. His utility. His value. His purpose.

  Myra had stopped the car on the footbrake. Digger handed over the five euro note to his wife, who reached her hand up and flashed her full smile at the scowling female face high above her in the glass-sided cabin. She accepted the twenty-five centimes in change with a gracious “Merci, madame” and flung them into Digger’s lap before purring through the upthrust barrier. Digger experienced a sudden surge of melancholy. Perhaps it was the sex. Or relative lack of it. He looked over at Myra and inexplicably felt a twitch and a liveliness he had not expected. Expectation was another thing altogether. That had been dismissed long ago. There were moments, of course, and he could conjure those up, including the time on the pine dinner table after the opera and the Prosecco reception, when her slinky Donna Karan wraparound had somehow slithered with one tug to the parquet floor, but many possibilities had been deferred with a brisk admonition not to be silly, their age, and later, maybe.

  Digger picked over such a prospect for the weeks to come. He stole a prolonged look at the potential donor of such a prospect and noted his stirring had not yet deserted him. Promising, he decided, as Myra switched from the right into the left exit lane in order to head for the Autoroute entrance signposted above for the city to the east, their direction, rather than the other one to the bifurcating west. She moved into fourth gear and she guided the Audi dexterously around one of those interminable French curves to the left at a steady and instructed fifty kilometres an hour. Then she screamed. Digger jumped. He turned his head to look in front of them. He was staring at an oncoming Renault Clio. Out loud, but in a strangely calm tone, he heard his voice say above her scream, “Fuck it, Myra, we’re going to crash.” An in an instant, they had. Head on.

  The noise had been a muffled crump. Both drivers had instinctively stamped on their brakes. It had been to no avail in avoiding the collision, but it had made the impact happen in slower motion than it would have otherwise. Fast and hard enough for all that to cause Myra to be pulled forward onto the steering wheel and bruise her breastbone and for Digger to bang his hard head against the windscreen. Their airbags, thankfully or not, had not deployed. Later, they told one another that their lives had not passed before their eyes though they both thought, in an icicle of a moment, that they were going to die. They had not. They clutched hands and asked each other if they were all right. They were. They had survived.

  The other car had skewed to their right as they hit each other. The sole occupant sat as still and silent in his vehicle as they did in their own. Digger felt nothing but relief that Myra, though trembling and giving out tiny indeterminate cries, seemed to be unhurt. He felt equally thankful when a young man opened the door of his Clio and stood looking first at his car and then directly at them. He seemed more bemused than anything else and definitely, assessed Digger, not hurt, the silly bugger. The man turned full circle and went to the back of the Renault. He opened the boot. When he closed it, Digger could see, he was wearing the compulsory yellow slip-on waistcoat. He began walking towards the Audi. Digger unbuckled his belt and got out, thinking what’s-the-French-for-you-silly-sod, wrong-side-of-the-road. Maybe Myra would know in a minute.

  Digger managed a woeful grin and a wave of his arms at the sight of two write-offs. Insurance job for sure. The Frenchman pre-empted his own attempt at explaining they were foreigners with a solicitous: “Ça va? Tous les deux?” Digger nodded. His pronunciation would announce he wasn’t French anyway so he began, magnanimously in his view, what was going to be a difficult conversation with the young idiot, with a generously returned, “Et vous, monsieur?” In reply there was a curt nod and a shake of the head to indicate all was much clearer now. His spoken reply to Digger’s concerned query was lengthier, colder and angrier in tone than Digger had anticipated. Nor had he understood most of it. Digger muttered sharply: “Un moment, s’il vous plaît.” He beckoned Myra to join them. She sat motionless. Maybe in shock. Shaking, he could see. Surely the police or somebody would be here soon to sort out this arrogant bastard.

  For the first time since the accident Digger became aware of what was happening around them. There was noise again. There was traffic moving. Somewhere a siren was wailing its imminent arrival. Digger looked at the traffic, moving slowly to gawp at the wrecked cars. More to his astonishment than any initial consternation, it registered with him that the cars and lorries crawling past were in the right-hand lane going away from them, moving on, and that the only discernible traffic in the left lane, the one Myra had pulled into, was backing up and honking their horns behind the bashed-in Clio which was unseen beyond the bend, and was blocking their own progress. “Oh, no. Oh, fuck me gentle,” whispered Digger, and looked behind him at the empty road back around the bend the other way to the Péage, and then at the raised yellow-and-white lengths of rubber studs that divided the two lanes.

  He put an arm around his wife, who had stumbled from the car to his side. The same sickening realisation of what had happened now flitted between them. Digger had been dreaming of Myra when she went through the toll booth barrier. Both would have assumed that, as always when you left the Péage, it was one-way traffic, the mad scrambling re-positioning, and then, just as they had done many times before, into the left lane marked for Montpellier with the right shearing off to Toulouse. She was still sure there were no signs, no warnings, no indicators, to tell you different. Except, and now that she re-ran it in her mind, all the exiting cars had funnelled into the right where she originally was, all westward bound she’d thought, as she crossed those funny central markings to the left, to the east, alone. There had been re-routing, a temporary Déviation, that had sent her into oncoming, exiting off the motorway traffic. She began to quiver uncontrollably from the roots of her dyed blonde hair to the tips of her hot-pink painted toes. Digger held her up and then gently sat her down, her head in her hands, at the side of the road.

  Their French victim was pointing a jabbing finger at Myra. His voice was harsh. Digger heard him say, “Votre femme … stupide … pas de jugement … votre femme … imbécilique … votre femme … votre femme. Votre. Femme. Votre. Femme,” like a jackhammer out of control. He was getting louder and repetitive. Digger looked at Myra, rocking back and fro, head to knees and back again, making no sound, not a whimper, covering her face with her hands, her tears seeping through the gaps between her fingers.

  “Alors, votre femme,” the accusation began again, accompanied by more furious stabbing gestures, “Votre femme, Monsieur …,” until Digger said, in a reactive heartbeat, “Precisely, sunshine! My bloody femme, not yours, so shut the fuck up!” There was a pause, a
hesitation when the tormentor becomes the tormented, which Digger knew well. He acted. He yanked off his sunglasses with his left hand. He took two strides forward and wrapped his own right hand around a wagging French finger. He squeezed hard. There was surprise and then alarm and silence at last. It was Digger who spoke now, bending down right into his opponent’s face, to deliver some verbal “afters”, a dialogue with only one outcome.

  “Now listen, butt. Écoute, eh? Je suis le conducteur. Pas my bloody femme, right? Bloody moi, see. Pour vous pas de problème. OK? Le whiplash? Hôpital? OK. Insurance? Monnaie? OK. Pas de problème. Je suis le conducteur.”

  “Mais … c’est votre femme qui …”.

  “Pas de bloody ‘mais’, you clown. Jesus Thomas! Me, see? Comprendez? Vite! Pas de bloody witnesses, see? Je suis le only conducteur. Ma faute, OK?”

  The Frenchman gingerly extracted his finger from Digger’s grasp. Bruised, not broken. Not yet anyway. He ran a sweaty hand down the front of his freshly ironed, short-sleeved, monogrammed shirt. He looked up at Digger and said,

  “OK. I follow. I understand. We do. Liked you sayed.”

  Richie “Digger” Davies nodded and sighed and walked away. He bent low on the driver’s side of the open Audi and moved the seat backwards. He got in and adjusted the mirrors. He leaned over and found the lever to pull the front passenger seat forward. He took the key from the ignition and pocketed it. He went to comfort his wife.

  A navy blue police car and a blue-and-white ambulance screeched to a halt behind them. Digger hunkered down and waited. The Frenchman he’d fingered did all the talking. Explanations seemed to be about the fools from Angleterre. The male cop seemed amused. He probably amused himself often by the looks of him, Digger speculated, a bigger and butcher version of that Johnny Hallyday he’d seen on her CDs. Only with a gun strapped on and in combat boots. His female sidekick was just as gimlet-eyed but smaller and less butch. She did the organising whilst Johnny postured for the passing traffic. Myra and Digger were ushered off the road and into the obligatory fluorescent jackets. Documents were checked. All in order. Reports were written up and passed over for comment. It was clear who was to blame, and why. The French whiplash sufferer was to be taken to hospital. Digger insisted that he and his wife were not physically harmed in any way. It still took a further three hours to sign everything, to have the cars and themselves carted off to a nearby garage where such collisions seemed to be a regular occurrence, to sign more forms of claim, and no counter-claim, to speak to the hire company’s Paris number and arrange to pick up a replacement car that was a taxi-ride away across the nearest large town.

  When Digger was finally sat behind the wheel of the new car – a Mégane, maroon in colour and sassy in the rear – which he was driving carefully along minor roads to their village, he allowed himself a slow smile. He talked. Myra listened and nodded. He found different ways of saying it, over and over. They were lucky. They should be grateful. Think of how, despite all the bollocking he’d had to take from those flics, the tossers, and how they’d dished out their severe reprimands, that they hadn’t even bothered to breathalyse him. Not that the double G & T he’d sipped on the plane would have counted. Well, probably not. Still, you’d have thought they’d do their job properly, better than that, wouldn’t you? All Johnny Bloody Hallyday could do was ponce around, strutting his stuff, rubbing his fingers through his punk blonde hair. Bloody rubbish, he was. There was more about her, the woman, wasn’t there?

  “Yes, love,” Myra agreed, and then, “Thank you, love. For taking the strain … the blame. Thank you. You were great.”

  Digger’s strong, thick fingers pinched into the leather of the wheel.

  “No probs, love,” he said. “No probs at all. All for you. Anything for you.”

  It took less than an hour after it all ended to reach the house. In the late afternoon the sun was still high above the waving cypress trees and the temperature not yet below 80° fahrenheit. Digger invariably translated from centigrade to take what he called the true reading from the thermometer nailed to the side door of the house. He opened the lavender-grey double-doors and put the bags inside. He felt almost at home. He had a sense of well-being that was only partly caused by the familiar, dark coolness of the interior.

  “I’ll unpack later, love,” Myra said. “Why don’t you go and cool down? Have a nice swim. Looks nice.”

  “Aye, OK, then. Think I will,” said Digger and, winking, “In the buff, mind. Trunks are in the case. But nobody to see, eh?”

  After the plunge into the crystalline pool – fair dos to Philippe – he lay back, dripping wet, on the blue-and-white striped cushion cover of the wooden lounger. He put his broad hands behind his head and dozed. Water globules glistened and wobbled on the barrel of his hairy stomach and burst on the thickness of his thighs. All around the cicadas were keeping up their end-of-the-day one-note-in-concert, a plastic squeaky toy sound, made incessant as if being held in the mouth of a dog who would not give it up. His triumph, if that was what it was, seemed insignificant and momentary but still satisfying. Digger drifted, as usual, into the past that had once seemed so open. Was it the same for everyone? He couldn’t answer that. He only knew that closure was not what he had had in prospect once, and yet that prospect was the thing for which he had compromised the moment. His head felt heavy. He would never manage to be clear on any of this, would he? It wasn’t the rugby, or Bobby and the business, and certainly not Myra. Was it resentment, then, against the whole manner of a changed time and place, something he couldn’t really shape or resist? Not that either. It was Who Whom. That was the revelation. Who Bloody Whom. Something about once knowing who the who was who did it to others until, somehow, the who was us doing it to us. And not understanding it.

  He didn’t look up when she lifted the latch of the pool’s wooden gate – fenced all around by legal decree and by virtue of his sweating, fetching and carrying – because he was still in a reverie, muddled but crucial to the underlying thought, about the connection between fly halves and flankers, a chain as much as a broken link maybe. He snapped out of it when he heard the latch click shut and her footsteps click-clicking across the patio towards him where he lay at the side of the pool. He half-raised himself to see Myra standing over him. She had put on a black one-piece swimming costume – but she never swam! – that was cut flatteringly low over her rounded breasts and high on her legs. She was wearing matt black open toe and ankle-strappy high heels – the ones he sometimes persuaded her to wear just for him – and her hair, freshly washed and brushed, was bunched up in the back and held there by a comb – the way she knew he liked to see it done – and her mouth, her glorious mouth, was a bright scarlet gash.

  “Christ! Myra,” he said.

  “Shhh. You can close your mouth now, Richie. And I’ll open mine. If you’re ready that is …,” she said.

  And, since he was, his femme, Bobby Braithwaite’s only and lovely daughter, Myra, bent over him slowly, and slipped her poised and carmine lips over the offering of love which had risen up to meet her, and which she held helpfully and firmly at its base as she began to bob slowly up and down with the assurance of a once habitual and now returning, and customary act.

  “Christ!” Digger thought he’d tell the boys. “Maybe not all frittered away after all, eh? Bet not many sixty-five-year-old fly halves get such good treatment. Who Whom be buggered!”

  And with that he fatally raised his head to get a better look at himself, and promptly groaned.

  Filthy, Gone

  And then she said:

  “I’ve never seen the crem so packed. It was jam-packed. Overflowing. Into the yard outside. People were standing there for ages. In the rain, mind. Soaked to the skin, they were. And inside, all squished up on those wooden benches, cold and hard under your bum, you know, or standing, dripping, in the back. So, I gotta say, I was glad Trev had nagged me to be ready, said we’d have to be early, by the door, in the porch, hanging about for half an hour,
mind, if we were to get a seat. I mean, you had to wait outside, didn’t you, couldn’t go in, like, till the family had come. There was a big silence when the hearse pulled up, people shuffling, respect shown isn’t it, all to the one side, but then coming together quick in a crowd, so we had to scoot in straight behind and sit down, as it turned out, just a few pews behind the family while the whole place, like I say, just filled up so quick with people. I had to keep turning my head, slowly, you know, respectfully, to see who was there. Altogether, like.

  And I’ll give her that. She looked great. In the circumstances, like. Made an effort. You could tell. Always lovely to look at, Myra, mind, even if she is a bit of a stuck-up-cow. Not ’oity-toity, cos she will speak to you, but thinks she’s a cut above, don’t she? Always did. Mind you, fair play. She never said nothing out of place to me – she’d have the back of my tongue if she had! – others, yes, but not me. Ever. Even if she thought she might have had cause, years ago, of course.

  And another thing was, she didn’t overdo the black. Easy for the widow to do that but it can drain the colour awful if you’re not careful, so I’d have to say her pallor was just right. Pale, mind, wan even, but offset by a swanky-looking brooch, diamonds I’d say, knowing her, and a little ribbed-silk red scarf round her neck. Club colours, see. Well, the Order of Service said it was to be a celebration of Digger’s life. They used that, the name, on the leaflet. Nice touch, I thought. He’d’ve liked that.

  Richard “Digger” Davies, and his dates, sixty-five he was. Who’d have thought. But not “Richie”, see. She never called him that, mind. I know that for a fact, don’t I? You remember.

  Anyways, I’d have to say she was looking nice for him on the day. She’d had her hair done, more blonde than it ever was, if you know what I mean, and her lips were a post-box red. Stood out. She wasn’t on nobody’s arm, of course. Well, no one particularly close now, is there? No children, as you know. He didn’t have no brothers or sisters, same as her, and all the old ones gone. Couple of cousins on his side, and their kids, scruffy buggers in black leather jackets, drainpipes, no ties. Typical. That was all. So she walked in, quite dramatic mind, behind Richie’s coffin. Plain black dress, a little jacket, black court shoes and tights. They must’ve held an umbrella over her from the car cos she didn’t have a coat or mac with her, and, oh ay, she held a single red rose in her hand. Almost like being at the pictures. They’d been in France, where it’d happened. Always going there, on holiday. I expect Richie, as I always called him anyway, was as tanned inside that box as she was outside it. They went regular, to that place she’d inherited from that pooffy cousin of hers, you remember, Jeffrey Whatsisname, ’came an actor. Went on the box. He’s dead, too, years gone now.