by Various
‘That’s all very well, but I’m still stuck here, aren’t I?’ He knew he sounded peevish and ungrateful, but for heaven’s sake, they’d had the thing all bloody day.
Crewe grinned obsequiously. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not far. You can catch a number oh-nine-two at the bottom of the hill. Okay, so what you do is, you take this-’ he pointed at where the bottom of the inspection form had been stamped with a red star like a primary school reward sticker for having behaved like a good boy. ‘And you show it to whoever—bus driver, taxi driver, doesn’t matter—and they’ll get you to your car free of charge.’
‘What—absolutely free? No fare?’
‘Ministry of Transport, mate. We all work for the same people.’
‘So what’s to stop me just keeping this and using it whenever I like, forever?’ he joked. ‘Why do I even need a car, now?’
‘It’s only valid until midnight tonight,’ Crewe said with surprising intensity, pointing out the small print. He didn’t appear to find the situation funny.
‘Sort of like Cinderella, then.’
Crewe looked at him with dark eyes in an oil-streaked face. ‘No, sir. Not really.’
The bus from the bottom of the hill was crammed with so many rush-hour commuters that at first Terry thought he wasn’t going to be able to get on. He showed the red star to the driver in his thick, assault-proof booth, who nodded Terry on without a word.
Though the journey wasn’t long, it took him to a part of town he was unfamiliar with: a place of motorway flyovers, boarded up pubs and scrap-metal yards. Every so often he caught the driver glancing at him in the big convex mirror which allowed him to see down the interior of the bus. Once, when Terry caught one of those furtive peeks, the man glanced quickly back at the road again as if having been caught committing a crime. It made Terry feel uncomfortably like an exhibit of some kind.
It also became obvious that there was something wrong with the route which the bus was taking. Nobody said anything aloud, of course, but it was there in the sighs, the snapping of newspapers and anxious glances out of the windows from his fellow passengers.
Just when he was beginning to get up the courage to ask exactly where it was they were going, the bus pulled to a sudden halt.
‘Your stop,’ the driver called back to him.
‘Here?’ He peered out of the nearest window, seeing nothing but factory units and lock-ups. A crisp packet and a plastic carrier-bag were duelling like drunks in the gutter. There didn’t appear to be an actual bus-stop anywhere nearby. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Your stop.’
‘Hang on a second,’ objected a large woman with scraped-back hair and an obese toddler on her lap. ‘Have you’m tekken us out of our way just for him?’
Disgruntled murmurs of agreement rose from her fellow passengers.
The driver flicked a switch, and the doors opened with a hiss of pneumatics. ‘I think you’d better get off, sir,’ he suggested, in the same sense that a lion tamer saying, ‘I think you’d better get out of that cage, sir’ was a suggestion.
He took it.
Where Nick Crewe had been small and dark, the proprietor of Imperial Exhausts was a wide, shambling sprawl of a man with a head so closely shaved and shiny that it looked like he was perpetually sweating. He pumped Terry’s hand enthusiastically with a pair of big paws which had A-S-T-O-N tattooed on one and V-I-L-L-A on the other, as he apologised for the fact that the car wasn’t actually in his workshop any more.
‘So where is it, then?’ Terry couldn’t quite believe this was happening.
‘Well you see, sir,’ said the man cheerily, as he rummaged through a desk drawer, scattering stationery, ‘the problem with your emissions was a doddle to fix. We got that sorted in about a half an hour. No, see, it was your brake fluid levels that was the problem.’
‘Brake fluid.’
‘Yes sir. Can’t mess about with that sort of thing. Not enough brake fluid, your hydraulic pressure drops, and if you suddenly need to brake quickly—like, say a small child run out in front of you, well… ’ He stopped, gazing into the distance as if savouring the scene in his imagination. ‘Make a hell of a mess, that would.’
‘Um, yes, look… ’
‘It don’t matter what anyone says—you can never get the smell out. Not really.’
Terry was acutely aware of how quiet the world outside this office was, as if the rest of the city had been deserted, and it was just him left alone with this man. This happy, possibly unhinged, absolutely huge skinhead…
‘Here we are!’ He slammed the drawer, having evidently found what he was looking for: a small stamp and inkpad. ‘Can never bloody find anything around this place. Course, I en’t used this in years.’
With great care and precision, he stamped another star next to the red one.
This one was green.
‘There you go. All sorted. Priority Fast-Tracked. You take this and you… ’
‘Yes, thanks, I get the idea.’
The big exhaust man looked surprised, and a bit unhappy, as if he’d been interrupted in the act of delivering a speech he’d been rehearsing for ages. ‘Right,’ he sniffed. ‘Well then. I suppose you know best. Let me just write down the address of the place where they’re sorting your brakes. Specialist, he is.’
‘Mate of yours?’
‘Why yes, as it happens. D’you know him?’
‘No,’ Terry sighed heavily and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘Oh. Well, anyway, there’s a bus stop just around the corner, get you there right as rain.’
As if to prove the point, it was raining when he got there.
PB Brakes and Hydraulics operated out of a row of semi-derelict industrial units backing onto the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal. Terry’s nose detected it before his eyes did: the thick brown smell of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. Between walls of crumbling brick and rusted ironwork, he caught glimpses of weed-tangled banks and a detritus of plastic and styrofoam bobbing in greasy water. Rain pockmarked the surface like acne scars.
There was no sign of his car anywhere.
In the workshop doorway gangled a tall, ginger-haired mechanic wearing the ubiquitous blue overalls, watching the rain and smoking a fag. Its red ember glowed in the gloom. He had an enormous nose which he kept blowing with great frequency and volume into a handkerchief so crusted with filth that it looked to Terry like it probably gave worse than it got, and his eyes narrowed with suspicion as he saw Terry approach.
‘We’re closed,’ he said curtly.
‘Um,’ replied Terry, unfolding the wad of paperwork from an inside pocket. ‘I think you’ve got my car in for some work to its brakes?’
The mechanic peered at the form. ‘Don’t know nothing about that. Come back tomorrow.’
‘It’s been Priority Fast-Tracked. Apparently.’
He sighed, and stubbed out the fag. ‘Give it here then, Sonny Jim. Let’s have a butchers.’
He took the paperwork and made a show of inspecting it closely, before taking out his mobile and dialling. He wandered away into the darkened workshop as he talked, and Terry edged in cautiously out of the rain.
‘Hello, Steve? Phil. Yeah, no it’s pissing down. Look, do you know anything about a blue Ford Focus with buggered brakes? Oh-nine registration. Got the fella here.’ He glanced sidelong at Terry. ‘Fast-Tracked, apparently.’ He listened. ‘Yeah, definitely the type,’ and he laughed wetly. ‘Okay, cheers mate. Owe you one.’ He folded up his phone, stashed it away, and blew his nose again.
‘Wait here,’ he said to Terry, and disappeared into the shadows.
Terry waited, standing in a small puddle of his own making.
When Phil returned he handed the paperwork back to Terry without a word. A blue star had been added to his collection.
‘So,’ Terry ventured, ‘my car?’
‘Oh it’s not here,’ said the mechanic, in tones which made it clear that Terry was only a step or t
wo above being a moron for having suggested it. ‘We sorted your brakes; there was a pinhole leak in one of the lines. Not serious at the moment but would have been very soon—good job we caught it when we did. Thing is, when we were under there we noticed some bad rust on the front suspension arms so we had to send it off to get that seen to.’
Terry was aghast. ‘You what? This is ridiculous! I only brought it in for its bloody MOT! Is this some kind of idiotic practical joke?’
The mechanic sniffed. ‘Had to, mate. Terms and Conditions. Nothing I can do about it. You don’t mess with the Ministry.’
Terry more or less flipped at that point. His opinions on the Ministry of Transport in general and car mechanics in particular were broadcast loudly across the canal, including for good measure some observations on the weather, public transport, and little coloured stars. If it hadn’t been for the shouting and swearing he might have been dancing, an interpretive piece based on the theme of ‘impotent rage’, which made up for in passion what it lacked in technique.
‘That was interesting,’ the mechanic said when he’d finished. ‘Do you want to know where your car is or not? It’s only just around the corner.’
‘I give up,’ Terry replied, panting and a little light-headed. ‘Tell me.’
The mechanic told him.
‘You have got to be fucking joking,’ he said.
Redditch. They’d sent his car to Redditch.
He didn’t even know where that was. The name of the place sounded like a frog farting.
‘Just around the corner’ turned out to be a Metro shuttle to New Street and then a half-hour wait for the connection, and as the train clattered up to the platform he saw with a sinking feeling exactly how crowded it was. He squared himself up to the familiar ordeal of having to force his way aboard, when a sour-faced ticket inspector plucked at his elbow and asked if he was the Priority Fast-Track customer.
‘I think I probably am,’ he replied.
‘Very good. Your papers?’
He presented them for inspection, but the ticket inspector wouldn’t touch them; simply glanced at the star-stamps and flicked through the pages with the tip of his biro like a pathologist examining something particularly gruesome.
Terry had never travelled first-class in his life, and didn’t believe that it existed on short-haul commuter services-which was why he was quite surprised to be led to the front of the train and into a spotlessly luxurious and completely empty carriage. His deeper instincts might have warned him that this was a little too good to be true, but they were drowned out by the complaints of his knees and his stomach, which had gone without much rest or food for nearly three hours. He sank into a wide chair and reclined gratefully. He thought he might have been offered something to eat, but the attendant disappeared almost immediately, as if he couldn’t wait to get as far away as possible.
Then the train set off, and darkness slipped past the windows like an oil slick.
Once—just once—it seemed to him that something was keeping pace with the train on the other side of the glass. Something too big to be an animal, but moving too fluidly to be a machine. He pulled the window blind down with a shudder and dismissed it as the product of his overtired brain.
Redditch was the end of line—literally so, because there were no through services. It was one of those large Midlands market towns which aspired to inner city deprivation but couldn’t quite pull it off, its one notable feature being a massive cloverleaf junction joining two minor dual-carriageways, built with the grim optimism that one day there would be enough traffic to need managing-like a healthy man having double-bypass heart surgery just in case.
At least, that was the impression Terry got as Rajbinder the taxi driver swept him along its wide, empty curves on his way to Avon MotorCanics, which was allegedly where he would find his car at last.
Rajbinder disturbed him more than anybody else he’d met so far.
Despite being an obviously well-fed young man with a beard in which you could lose not just a badger, but most of the cast of Wind in the Willows, he was shy to the point of reverence. He seemed to be simultaneously terrified and elated at having Terry in his cab. He asked to have his photograph taken with Terry holding up his Priority Fast Track paperwork, saying that his wife would never believe him otherwise. Whatever that meant.
He also wanted to know if Terry would like to stroke the little elephant-headed statue on the dashboard for luck, but when Terry said that he wasn’t sure whether he was currently in need of luck or suffering from too much of it, Rajbinder laughed nervously and said no, no, no, the luck was for himself.
‘Why?’ asked Terry. ‘Who is this a statue of, anyway?’
‘That’s Ganesha,’ Rajbinder answered. ‘One of our most important gods—his name means the Remover of Obstacles. It might be that he is like Saint Christopher to you.’
‘Is that why he’s got four arms?’ Terry wasn’t a Catholic; as far as he was concerned the closest thing to a patron saint of travellers was Jeremy Clarkson, and that was depressing enough. ‘Is he like a cosmic traffic policeman or something?’
Another nervous little laugh. ‘No, not at all. In his hands Ganesha holds each of the four elements: fire, air, water and earth. It puts him at the centre of the universe.’
Four elements. The centre of the universe. He couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly what it was, but something about this rang a bell faintly inside Terry’s mind—the sort of deep, slow bell one might hear at a funeral.
He passed the rest of the journey in an uneasy silence.
Avon MotorCanics was another anonymous industrial unit stuck way out in the middle of nowhere, almost in the Worcestershire countryside. If Redditch was the end of the line, then this estate was the buffer beyond which there was no track, and nowhere else to run.
Two cars were parked outside the garage—neither of them his. One was a large, sleek Beemer with its engine running and its brake-lights glowing like eyes. He asked Rajbinder to wait for him just in case, and knocked timidly on the door.
It was opened by an extremely large man dressed entirely in black—not large as in tall and gangly or fat and cheerful, but as in built of hard and highly-trained muscle. He had a bristling military-style haircut and an earpiece which trailed a length of coiled wire down into his collar. A second man, almost identical, stood further into the room behind a mechanic who was sitting at a desk, jigging one knee nervously.
Before Terry could even begin to form a reaction to this, the mechanic surged to his feet, exclaiming ‘Finally! Thank Christ for that!’ He tugged a cap down far over his eyes as if wanting to hide his identity, grabbed the paperwork out of Terry’s hand, stamped it hurriedly without either reading it or making eye-contact, and fled, muttering something which sounded like, ‘I want nothing to do with this. Nothing at all. You people are fucking insane.’
A motor revved into life and tyres squealed as he pulled away into the night at high speed.
Terry was left alone with the two black-clad men.
They looked at him.
‘I don’t suppose either of you know anything about rusted front suspension arms, by any chance?’ he asked.
They slowly shook their heads.
Terry clutched his paperwork, which suddenly gave him a tremendous sense of security. The last star-which was some kind of orange-brown colour-had been stamped so hurriedly that it was little more than a smudge, like a smear of blood, or dirt.
Or Earth.
And suddenly, a lot of things fell into place in Terry Grainger’s mind: the misfiring (fire) cylinder and the paraffin heater, exhaust emissions and the wind (air) playing with rubbish in the gutter, brake fluid leaking and the rain-swept canal (water), and now the earthen rust of his suspension and… what?
In his hands he holds the four elements. He is the Remover of Obstacles.
What went along with this, finally?
He didn’t want to know. He really did not want to know.
; ‘Right then!’ he clapped his hands, hoping that he sounded cheerfully nonchalant. ‘I’m good here, I think. I’m going to leave it for now—thanks all the same. I’ll pop by tomorrow to pick it up. Or maybe next week. I can find my own way home.’
The man in black nearest the door was suddenly in front of it, blocking his exit, though Terry could not recall having seen him move.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Grainger,’ said his companion. ‘We’re just here to escort you to your car, that’s all.’
‘That’s very kind of you, but if you could tell me where it is, I can just… ’
‘It’s parked in a secure location, sir. You can’t ‘just’, I’m afraid. It’s all part of the Priority Fast Track service-can’t have thieves and burglars interfering with your car now, can we? Not in this sort of area. It isn’t safe.’
‘Gypsies,’ the man by the door added darkly. ‘Place is crawling with ‘em.’
‘So if you’ll-?’ the second man indicated the open doorway, which was now as miraculously clear as it had been blocked a moment ago.
They escorted him outside and into the purring Beemer. He noted with a dull lack of surprise that there was no sign of the taxi. It crossed his mind to make a break for it and run, but in all honesty he couldn’t think of where he would run to. And besides, why should he? Nothing had been done to him—or even threatened. It had been a supremely strange evening, to be sure, but nobody had been overtly hostile or aggressive.
Nevertheless, it was strange to realise that as his rides had improved in quality-from foot to bus to first-class carriage to taxi and finally to the back of this luxurious motor-the places he had travelled through had become increasingly remote and desolate, and his sense of unease had slowly acquired the squirming weight of actual terror. But no, he couldn’t run.
Then he was in the back, and both rear doors made quiet little chunking noises as they locked.
He should have run.
He lunged forward, gripping the shoulders of the seats in front of him, head straining between the two large men. ‘What’s going on?’ he cried. ‘For God’s sake, where are you taking me?’