Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  The dashboard was a mass of readouts and telltales set in a walnut panel. The smell of the leather upholstery filled the small space. The steering wheel was a small circle of leather-covered wood held in place by brushed metal spokes.

  ‘There are no safety features in this vehicle,’ said Dermot. ‘This is a killer car. This is a lethal device. All it does is go fast. It doesn’t brake well, it doesn’t turn easily, it has no roll-bars and if it hits anything it explodes.’

  I didn’t doubt any of it. I felt like the pilot of a test aircraft. No, thinking about it I felt more like Laika, the dog the Russians sent into space in a Sputnik. I was enclosed by powerful machinery and I had no control over events. We were very low down. I was on a level with the crotches of the pedestrians. That didn’t calm me down.

  ‘You hungry?’ asked Dermot. ‘I’m hungry. Can we stop somewhere for something to eat?’

  ‘It’s too early. They’ll only be doing breakfasts.’

  ‘I can go slowly. This car can be driven at less than the speed limit. It’s fucking difficult, but it can be done. Then we can wind her right up after lunch and head out to sea. Can we have a look at the sea? While we’re there?’

  ‘It’s like taking a child on holiday. Yes, fine, we’ll stop for lunch. Did you have anywhere in mind or are we just going to take pot luck?’

  ‘We can stop off at the Slipped Disc. That’s on the way, more or less.’

  ‘Less, I think you’ll find.’

  ‘Look, I can do warp speed in this thing. This car outruns fighter planes and rocket ships. We can get to the coast in ninety minutes tops.’

  ‘Some of the roads will be closed. There’s still foot and mouth disease out there.’

  ‘Then we’ll use the open fucking roads, that should do the trick. So, are we alright for a spot of lunch then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I can have your PC? For five hundred?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There. I knew I’d get a cheap PC from somewhere. Strap yourself down. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.’

  He turned the ignition key; the dashboard instruments all glowed a gentle shade of green. There was a faint engine sound, a powerful vibration, and the feel of suppressed energy.

  ‘And now we’re going much too fast,’ he said, dropping the 733t into gear and heading for the horizon. Acceleration pressed me back into my seat, or rather, slid me back along it. From that angle, and at that speed, the landmarks were unfamiliar. I was looking up at Dudley’s upper storeys. Up there, things were better than at ground zero. There was still that overuse of stressed concrete, but above the ubiquitous plate-glass windows of the charity shops and chip shops there were touches of architecture, flourishes of masonry. The shoe shop on the corner opposite the black church was art deco once you got one floor away from the floor. The black church had some lively stonework under the dead soot.

  Dermot threw the 733t down the road towards the bypass and its islands with their artworks. Beyond the black church the road crested a hill and then fell for miles. Dudley is higher than anywhere else for a long way in any direction. Driving out of town, you drive downhill.

  An uncertain sun began to poke its way through the clouds. Long rays of light fell out of the sky and landed reluctantly on the landscape. From there, on a clear day (and travelling at less than a hundred miles an hour) you could see Bewdley, the River Severn, all of Dudley’s satellite towns. You could see countryside, with those rays falling onto it from the clouds.

  As we flew past the islands, sneering at the sculptures because we sneered at everything, the clouds began to fall apart. Blinding stretches of sky filled the gaps. Dermot let the 733t slow to a sensible speed.

  ‘Forgot we were supposed to be going slowly,’ he said. ‘I do get carried away with this thing. It has a cigarette lighter. Is that cool or what? Isn’t that just the best thing?’

  He pressed the lighter in, although neither of us smoked.

  ‘We don’t smoke,’ I said.

  ‘We can learn,’ he said. He drove easily, not seeming to pay much attention to it. I thought of myself in the Audi; I wasn’t that confident. Sometimes it felt as though I was working at cross-purposes with the vehicle.

  ‘I’ll go through Bewdley and back out,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we’ll be at the Slipped Disc before it’s open. I’m fucking starving, they’d better have more than scampi on the menu.’

  He slid the 733t from lane to lane, driving past the Merry Hill shopping centre with its full car parks and then on to Stourbridge via Brierley Hill, which wasn’t the way anyone else went.

  He got onto the Stourbridge ring road by cutting up another car, which was the only way you could get onto the Stourbridge ring road. We passed the Bright Harvest Research building, which wasn’t the Bright Harvest building at all but only a front for something else; and its crowd of demonstrators, who were something else altogether. I hoped that the guinea pigs were getting along alright.

  ‘This fucking joker wants to race me,’ said Dermot. Sitting up and looking past him, I saw a car driven by a young Asian man. He looked about fifteen, and his car was decorated the way a fifteen-year-old might think looked neat. NINJA was written down the side, the windows were tinted black, and there was a blue light on the top of the gear stick. The youth looked at us and then gunned his engine and pulled ahead. His engine sounded tinny, as though it was at the end of its range. On either side of his rear number plate there were pictures of women.

  ‘I’ll give him a head start,’ said Dermot. ‘We’ll count to ten.’

  We did, and then Dermot stood on the accelerator and we slid past the tacky little car and that was that. During the excitement we missed our exit, and had to go right the way round again before we reached escape velocity.

  V

  After Stourbridge, Dermot drove on through Kidderminster. I looked at the upper parts of the empty carpet factories, and wondered why someone didn’t do something with them. They hadn’t made carpets there in living memory; why not turn them into something else?

  ‘Why don’t they do something with those buildings?’ I asked.

  Dermot let himself look away from the road.

  ‘Do what?’ he asked. ‘Bomb them? Knock them down?’

  ‘Turn them into riverside flats. Apartments. Offices. What they do with the old mill buildings in the rest of the country.’

  ‘No demand,’ he said. ‘Who’d want offices here? Here’s something you don’t know about offices. You know where the most expensive office space in the world is?’

  ‘New York,’ I guessed. He shook his head. ‘Los Angeles. Berlin.’

  He shook his head at all my suggestions, idly fiddling with the cigarette lighter. Unable to find anything to do with it, he popped it back into its socket.

  ‘Give up?’ he asked. ‘Birmingham, England. That’s where. Office space there costs more per square foot than anywhere else.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked irritated.

  ‘I don’t fucking know, I just do the fact itself not the background story. You went to college, you tell me.’

  ‘I only did computers. I don’t know about office space.’

  ‘You think you could sell space in your head? You know, create places for people to play in, and then charge them for it?’

  ‘I don’t have much control over it all. They might die in there.’

  ‘Charge them on the way in, then.’

  By that time we were passing the safari park and were almost on the outskirts of Bewdley. The Severn was low and placid, and the pavements were jammed with tourists. I looked along the river in the direction of Tina’s house, but we were past the junction so quickly that I couldn’t get it into focus. There was no longer any sign that the river had made its way into the town; I realized that if we’d driven through the floodwater in Dermot’s car, I’d have been a foot below the high tide mark and therefore drowned.

  ‘That’s the scenic bit of the tour o
ver,’ said Dermot.

  ‘There’s half of Wales to look at,’ I said.

  ‘I was including that,’ he said. ‘Tell you something about Wales. In Swansea, there are no jobs. I mean, there’s fuck all there, there’s the sea and it’s too cold to do anything with, and there’s a University but anyone decent goes to an English one.’

  ‘Which one did you go to?’

  ‘That’s not the fucking point. The point is, in Swansea there are no jobs. The only jobs you can get are in call centres for evil multinationals on the nightshift for three quid an hour.’

  ‘And that’s the fact?’

  ‘That’s preamble,’ he said, looking pained. ‘That’s background. But there is a college there, as well as the University. And you know what they teach at the college?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘How to answer the phone,’ he said. ‘They teach you how to work in a call centre. Because that’s all there is to do. And you know what else? If you live there and you don’t go to fucking call centre college, you don’t get a job at all.’

  ‘Is there a point to this?’

  ‘Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that fucked up enough all by itself? A fucking college to teach you how to tell people you’ll have to put them on hold? That’s as fucked up as things get. And that’s what Wales is like, and that’s where we’re going. You didn’t just imagine the place did you? This isn’t one of your head trips we’re driving into?’

  ‘I don’t think I could do a whole country.’

  ‘It’s more a peninsula than a country,’ he said, angling the 733t into the car park of the Slipped Disc.

  There were only three other cars there. We weren’t going to be fighting our way through drunken crowds.

  Just to annoy Dermot, they were out of everything except scampi.

  TWENTY

  I

  After Dermot had finished being irritated by his lunch, and I’d visited the Slipped Disc’s toilets, he drove on at high speed. He was sulking, and therefore quiet. He pointed us back in the right direction and headed on through long miles of dull countryside to Craven Arms, and then on to Newtown, which sits nervously on the edge of Wales.

  ‘Brilliant fucking name for a place,’ he grumbled. ‘Someone really let themselves go with that one.’

  I wasn’t paying attention to him. I’d noticed a road sign that had cleared my thoughts, or at least replaced them with another set. I looked at the sign, startled, and then we flew past it. The road dropped into Newtown from the surrounding hills, and as we approached it we could see the whole town. It looked sooty and unpleasant. It looked like another Stourbridge. The sky had filled with clouds as we’d crossed into Wales, and there was a clear and present threat of rain. Dermot was cheered by a McDonald’s.

  ‘They haven’t found a Welsh spelling for that,’ he observed. Welsh spellings annoyed him. They annoyed Les Herbie too; he was on my mind, just then. This is what he had to say about the Welsh language:

  I write. You know this, you read me. You like it, and you think: I could do that.

  You couldn’t. Let’s get that straight. You could write a bestseller, sure. There’s no real trick to that. Sex and violence, six hundred pages, no flair or style: bestseller for a year.

  Throw in military tech, throw in a woman balancing her high-powered career with raising a family, throw in bad guys from the Middle East: bestseller. On the lists for all eternity.

  You could do that, but you can’t write. You can’t string a sentence together. You can aspire to the basics. That’s as good as you’ll get.

  I can do English. I can’t do any other languages. I can’t do Latin, or French. I don’t know any of the Germanic languages.

  No one can do Cornish. We can ignore Cornish.

  We ought to be able to ignore Welsh. Welsh was last of any real use in the Middle Ages. This is why it has no words for anything more modern that crop rotation. How many nouns does Welsh need? Sheep, cloud, chapel. That’s three. That’s the lot.

  So what do they do when they decide they’re going to run with that as the chosen tongue? What about new concepts? How do we get around new things: stereograms, horseless carriages, flying machines?

  Here’s how. We don’t bother going to the roots of our language and creating new words to embody these concepts. We’re proud of our language, but not that proud. That’s too much like hard work.

  We swipe the English words instead. We despise the English language, but not that much.

  Then, we mess about with the words a little bit. We turn car park into car parc. We turn taxi into tacsi. We turn consanguinity into a way of life.

  I say we because I’m included. I have Welsh blood.

  These are my people, and they irritate me. This nonsensical desire to have our own language, and we’re too lazy to do it properly.

  Somewhere on the border between English and Welsh, somewhere between Newtown and civilisation, it’s all gone haywire.

  Still, let’s lwk on the bright side. It cwd be worse. We cwd be Cornish.

  II

  Somewhere between Newtown and civilisation something happened to the Meriden 733t.

  We were some distance between places, somewhere unnamed on the tedious road. We’d passed through a series of identical villages, each comprising three houses and a chapel. The villages were called things like Carno and Clatter. Dermot doubted that they were real names. He kept giving me sceptical looks, as though he suspected I’d invented the entire journey. After we drove through yet another hamlet with the inevitable chapel, he couldn’t keep himself quiet any longer.

  ‘Is this all there is in Wales?’ asked Dermot after the tiny village had vanished behind us. ‘Bad weather and chapels? No fucking wonder they die young.’

  ‘What do you mean, die young? They live as long as we do.’

  ‘Doing what? I bet they don’t have three TV channels here yet. They’re all indoors reading the fucking bible by candlelight. This is the Middle Ages. They’ll never have seen anything like this fucking car. This horseless fucking carriage,’ he said, settling into his role.

  That was when the horseless carriage became noisier. The engine already made a fair amount of noise, because the designers of the Meriden 733t wanted it to make a lot of noise so that everyone nearby would know that they were in the presence of a serious vehicle. Now, the engine noise increased.

  ‘What the fuck?’ asked Dermot. He began to do a little tap-dance on the accelerator pedal. ‘I’ve lost some poke.’

  The road was thin and irregular, bending in three dimensions; over little hummocks, around unexpected bends. Dermot had been accelerating out of the bends and onto what straights were available. Now he didn’t seem to have the same powers of acceleration. Something under the car began to pop, loudly. I felt the reports reverberating through my low seat.

  ‘It’s the exhaust,’ said Dermot. ‘We sound like a fucking rally car.’

  ‘What do we need to do?’

  ‘We don’t need to do anything. It’ll get us there OK. It sounds worse than it is.’

  It suddenly sounded worse still. There was a louder bang from under the car, and the exhaust volume increased.

  ‘Oh, you malignant fucking cunt,’ said Dermot with feeling. He slammed on the brakes, which eventually brought the 733t to a resting position. He’d got the engine switched off before we drifted to a halt, between fat wet hedges on a narrow road a fair way from anywhere. He got out. I got out to see what was going on.

  He was looking under the back of the 733t.

  ‘Bastard fucking thing,’ he said.

  The exhaust was dangling onto the road. I didn’t know a lot about mechanics, but I thought that one end of the exhaust should have been attached to something. Dermot’s exhaust was not attached at either end, and if it hadn’t been for the bracket it was dangling loosely from, it wouldn’t have been attached to the 733t at all.

  ‘Can you drive it like this?’ I asked.

  Dermot looked at me. Hi
s insane curly hair held what looked like thousands of raindrops, all on the point of falling. His eyes were wild.

  ‘Of course I can’t fucking drive it like this, the exhaust is no longer attached to anything. It’ll barely fucking move in this condition, and if it does move it’ll drink petrol like there’s no tomorrow. What it needs is repairing. Did you see a garage on the way?’

  I tried to remember what we’d passed. I had half a memory of a garage that had consisted of two pumps, a shed, and a shop. There had been a border collie on the forecourt and a Morris Minor with no wheels standing on bricks nearby. It was a shame we didn’t need a chapel. I’d seen plenty of those.

  I couldn’t remember when I’d seen the garage. It had been that day, but it might have been fifty miles away.

  ‘I can’t get a signal,’ said Dermot, fiddling with his mobile. ‘Where are we, on the fucking moon? Can you get anything?’

  I switched my mobile on and watched it fail to get a signal.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, fucking terrific. We’re out here in the middle of nowhere with a dead car and dead phones and nothing but chapels in any fucking direction. What was that last place we went through? Panty fucking something. How long ago was that?’

  ‘Not long. Ten minutes?’

  ‘And I wasn’t going all that fast. I couldn’t get above forty most of the time. How far have we gone, if I was doing forty? In ten minutes?’

  ‘Forty divided by six. Seven miles.’

  ‘Then we’ve got a little walk to do.’

  ‘Seven miles?’

  I was a computer programmer. I probably didn’t walk seven miles in any given week, and Dermot wanted me to walk along seven miles of narrow road in the rain.

  ‘The road is not straight. The road has bends in it. If we cut off the corners we can cut down the distance. Here,’ he said, peering over a hedge. ‘Look over there. That’s the road. So if we go straight across, we’ll save ourselves a walk. Which will save your little fucking toes from getting blistered, which will save me from listening to you complaining. So, over we go.’