by Will Self
‘Well, I can drop you outside Glasgow, I'm heading straight on through and south.’
‘That'll be grand.’ The hitchhiker smiled at Bill, gifting him a sight of peaks of plaque. It was a smile that should be given at the conclusion of such a trip – not the beginning. ‘Nice car,’ the hitchhiker said, still smiling.
‘Yeah,’ Bill drawled, ‘it motors. So, where're you from?’
‘Thurso.’
‘And what's the purpose of the trip?’
‘I'm studying down in Poole, got myself on a computer course like. I had a reading week so I thought I'd get up to see my kiddies –’
‘They're in Thurso?’
‘Aye, right enough.’
The old ‘fluence was still there, Bill thought. A couple of miles, a few questions insinuated in the right vulnerable places, and like some cunning piece of Chinese marquetry – a box with hidden compartments subtly palped – the hitchhiker's psyche would begin to open out, to exfoliate. They swung over the ridge of Isle and the car caromed on down, on to the dual carriageway. They emerged from a forest of scattered conifers and there, hunkered around its cathedral spire, Inverness gleamed.
‘Inverness,’ said the hitchhiker.
He even states the obvious! Bill snidely exulted.
‘Did you come from Thurso this morning?’
‘I did. After a bit of a session – if you catch my meaning.’
‘Some mates saw you off then?’
‘They couldna’ exactly see me off – they were all pished malarkey. Five of the fuckers, all inna heap. So I tiptoed out. Got a lift right away across to Latheron, then down to Dornoch. Then I was walking in the bloody rain for four miles before you stopped for me –’
‘It was difficult to stop. The roadworks –’
‘Aye, right enough.’
‘You've got a tent and stuff there?’
‘In case I get caught short like – and have to spend the night on the road. I had to do that on the way up. I slept by the side of the road near Aviemore.’
‘Wasn't that a drag?’
The hitchhiker snorted. ‘I'll say. Come five in the morning the rain starts coming down holus-bolus, and then a fucking cow starts giving a horn to ma’ flysheet. I was back on the road before dawn, with my thumb stuck up like a fucking icicle . . .’ He trailed off and gave Bill another grimy grin. His stubble was blue.
Bill was emboldened to ask, ‘So, you're fond of a drink then?’
The hitchhiker pressed the ball of his thumb into one eye socket, the middle joint of his index finger into the other. He kneaded and scrunched his features, answering from within this pained massage, ‘Oh well, I suppose . . . perhaps more than I should be. I dunno.’
Bill grimaced. He looked for a turning on the left – the carriageway was still dual – when he saw a forestry track. He dabbed the brakes, indicated, lazily circled the wheel and pulled in. ‘Slash,’ he said.
They both got out. Bill left the car running. They both pissed into the edge of the woodland. Through steam and sun Bill examined his companion's urine. Very dark. Perhaps even blood dark. There was a touch of jaundice in the hitchhiker's complexion as well. Maybe kidney infection, Bill thought, maybe worse. Not that this would be necessarily pathological in any way. They drank like that in Thurso – as they did in Orkney.
Bill knew ten men under thirty-five on Papa alone who had stomach ulcers. In Dr Bohm's surgery there were forty-odd leaflets urging parents to check their children for symptoms of drug abuse. Absurd, when about the only drugs available on the island were compounds for ensuring the evacuation of bovine after-birth. Bohm also had one small tattered sticker near the surgery door, which proclaimed: Drinkwise Scotland, and gave a help-line number. This lad was, Bill re-
fleeted, quite possibly addicted to alcohol, without necessarily being an alcoholic.
When they were back in the car Bill reached back behind the young man's seat and pulled up the car bottle. It was half-full. ‘Will you have a dram?’ He sloshed the contents about; they were light and pellucid – as the stream of urine ought to have been. Bill appreciated the exact battle between metabolic need and social restraint that danced with the young man's features. He broke the spell by uncorking the bottle and taking a generous swig himself. Then he passed the bottle to the young man who was saying, ‘Sure . . . Yeah . . . Right.’
The whisky went off like an anti-personality mine somewhere in the rubble-strewn terrain of Bill's forebrain. He flicked the shift into reverse and crunched backwards. He took the bottle from the young man and re-stashed it. He hugged the headrest and sighted down the road. Nothing. He banged the accelerator and the car twisted backwards, pivoting at the hips, rested on its rubber haunches for a second while Bill flicked the shift into drive, then shook itself and plunged back up the long hill. Twenty, thirty, forty . . . the turbo-charger ‘gnunng'ed!’ in . . . fifty-five, seventy, eighty . . . to either side the rows of orderly conifers strobed back; the gleaming road ahead twanged like a rubber band; the sky shouted ‘Wind!'; the reggae music welled like beating blood: ‘No-no-no-oo! You don’ love me an’ I know now –’ Bill was feeling no pain. The young man was shouting something, Bill hit OFF.
‘– arked cars –’
‘What was that you said?’ Bill's voice was precise and dead level in the instantaneously null environment of the car. It sounded like an aggressive threat.
‘Y’know the police, man . . . the pigs . . . They have unmarked cars on this road.’
‘I know.’ Bill poked at the speedometer. ‘Anyway I'm only doing eighty-five, they won't pull you till you get within a whisker of ninety – d'you smoke?’ Without so much as twisting the thread of conversation, Bill had filched another joint from his inside pocket.
The whisky and the skunk opened the young man up. He skewed himself further in his seat, imposing more intimacy, and Bill began to feed him questions. His name was Mark. His father had been a marine engineer. Much older than the mother. The father was Viennese – Jewish. A wartime refugee, he designed some of the early SONAR systems. The mother died of cancer when Mark was eight, the father four years later. The father had had money but the estate was mismanaged by uncaring trustees. Mark and his brother ended up in children's homes. They were separated. Mark left school, got a job with a carrier's. Married, had two children and . . .
‘Fucked up, I s'pose, right enough.’
‘What's that?’
‘With the kiddies like. Fucked up. Y’know, I was young – didn't know what I wanted. Still don't, I s'pose.’ He gifted Bill another smile that had once – no doubt – been charming.
Bill had been waiting for this; this descent into the cellar of Mark's mind. The kids – his relationship with his kids – would have to be the trapdoor, the way down. Bill had pegged Mark as a bolter almost immediately. There was an aspect of bruised dejection about the young man which suggested someone who was willing to wound but afraid to strike. Someone who would say the unsayable and then attempt retraction. Someone whose capacity for self-love would only ever be manifested through attitudinising and narcissism.
Bill thought that he quite hated Mark already. He hated the young man's willingness to be drawn out. His self-absorption. His tiresome lack of cool – he had told Bill four times while they smoked the joint how good the dope was in Poole, and how adept he and his pals were at obtaining it. Bill resolved to pump Mark for all he was worth. To gut the man's past, quarter his present, and draw a bead on his future. It was a game Bill had often played before – trying to find out as much as he could about someone he encountered by chance. Find out as much as he could, and – this was crucial – not give away anything about himself. Once the mark began asking questions themselves the game was over.
‘It's difficult bringing up kids –’
‘Specially with no dosh. Specially with no space, y'know. Space to think. I always thought there was more to me than just a driver. My father was a brilliant man. I couldn't find myself. Couldn't in Thurso
– nothing there. And my wife . . . she didn't, sort of, get it . . .’
‘Understand?’
‘Right.’
‘And it's better down in Poole? Did you go there directly?’
‘Well, no. I bummed around the country, sort of, for a while. I mean, I set off aiming for Glastonbury that year – and then just sort of kept on. Got, well, ended up in Poole because of the Social –’
‘Easier to claim?’
‘Aye.’
They were well into the mountains and the clouds had come down. To the right the Monadhliaths, to the left the Grampians. The valley was a mile or so wide. Beyond the rough summer pasture the mountains did what they did best: mounting. Either the furred flanks of forestry, or the abrasive architecture of scree. Up and Up, until the indefinite, thrusting peaks made contact with the cloudy massifs lowered from above. Bill noted that the car was almost out of petrol. They would have to run into Aviemore.
‘I'm going to run into Aviemore,’ he said to Mark, who was humming along with the music, ‘but we won't be stopping, we'll just grab some sandwiches and head on have you eaten?’ The young man was hitching. It was plain that he'd spent all of his money on booze the night before. This was Bill's opportunity to do him a real turn. Feed him up.
‘Nah, really . . . nah . . . I'm all right.’ The suitable case for charity suitably hung his face. Bill said nothing – he was looking for signs. Eventually one ran along the road towards them – it was a mile to the turn. The sign – as did most in this part of the Highlands – showed a turnoff diverting from the main road, lancing a boil destination, and then rejoining it. Bill mused on how like life this was; the temporary diversions that you attempted to make, which were always cut off, subsumed once more to the ruthlessly linear, the deathly progression. Bill thought of sharing this observation with Mark, but then thought better of it. Then he did anyway.
Mark pondered for a while, then factored himself in: ‘Yeah, I feel that my whole life's been like that up till now. I haven't been doing what I should – I've been marking time.’
‘Neat.’
‘What?’
‘Neat.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ They sat silent as Bill piloted the car through the outskirts of Aviemore. The place was still tatty despite the money that had recently been poured in. Most of the buildings were chalet-style, with steeply pitched roofs running almost to the ground. But the materials were synthetic; concrete and aluminium; asbestos and perspex. Every surface seemed to be buckling; every edge rucking up. ‘Shit hole,’ Bill said.
Seeing a biggish Texaco station, set back off the road, Bill lazily circled the steering wheel to the left and the car oozed on to the forecourt. He pulled up to the pumps, was out of the door with the petrol-cap key in one hand and a tenner in the other, before Mark had a chance to plan his arrival. The air here was a sharp embrace. Bill still vibrated with the road. The outside world was warped. It felt like leaving a cinema after a matinée, and coming out into the inappropriately bright afternoon.
‘I'll fill the tank – could you go and get us three or four of those crappy plastic sandwiches they do – tuna, chicken, whatever . . . And some drinks, Coke, Irn Bru – yeah? And some fags. Regal blue. OK?’
Mark slouched off to the shop. If I give him enough things, Bill thought, he'll have to ask me about myself. He'll have to evince some curiosity about his benefactor. Bill wanted this. He didn't like his dislike of the young man, didn't like the way it was curdling in his gut curdling it with still more bilious, watery gripes. If Mark would only ask him about himself the inquisition could be called off. They could chat normally, instead of this ceaseless interrogative chatter. Eventually silence would fall – not companionable, but not alienated either. In due course he would drop the young man off, on a slip road, about ten miles outside Glasgow. They would part and forget.
Spasmodically, Bill clutched the handle of the pump, until the attendant hit the flashing button on his console and the petrol began to glug. Perhaps Mark had done a flit, a new bolt, Bill couldn't make him out in the shop. It wouldn't be a bad score for the lad; a bit of whisky, some dope, a tenner, a ride, why not duck out now while he was ahead? Then Mark appeared from the back of the shop, where the customer toilets were, and Bill allowed himself the luxury of feeling a little guilty, imagining that he had misjudged human character.
Back in the car Mark struggled with his seatbelt while they rolled back out on to the road. ‘They'd no tuna, but I got a bacon one, and chicken with corn . . . and . . . smoked ham.’ He displayed the plastic-packed chocks of sandwich to Bill, as if he were about to be asked to perform some visio-spatial test with them.
‘Have you got a Coke?’
‘Aye.’ Mark passed it to Bill, but not before thoughtfully opening it.
Bill drank the Coke and drummed the wheel. They puttered between more, mutant chalet-style blocks of tourist flats, then past a shopping parade, then out into the country again. Bill didn't say anything until they were heading south on the A9 once again. Then he sighed, cranked the big car up to eighty-five, overtook a convoy of Finnish campervans which were struggling up a long gradient, and said, ‘So, did you see much of the kids when you were up this time?’
‘It was . . .’ Mark was struggling with a recalcitrant piece of ham; gristle in a tug-of-war between bread lips and flesh lips. ‘It was . . .’ Bill decided to ignore the appetitive recovery. ‘Difficult, y'know. I've nowhere to take them, and I'm not happy hanging around her place – not that's she's keen or anything. I took them to the park a couple of times . . . and for tea.’
Either the clouds were descending, or the road was still rising, because turbulent clumps of vapour were falling down from the dark passes, and scudding a couple of hundred feet above the road. Bill put on the headlights, full beam. ‘Was it a long time since you were up before then?’
‘I hadn't been back before.’ Mark let this fall from between chomping jaws, then grimaced. ‘Ach! It's not like me.’
‘What's that?’
‘To be saying so much.’
‘Really?’
‘Ach ye-es, well, I dunno . . . I was always a bit of a tearaway, y'know –’
‘I gathered.’
‘Nothing grievous, but this and that, y'know, telling a few tall ones to the Social, doing a few chequebook and card jobs. So I was always good at . . . y'know . . . ‘
Y’know, y’know, y’know? What could this young man imagine about Bill? That he knew everything? That such a nonce word had become Mark's asinine catch phrase, begged the very question the answer to which it assumed. The more ‘y’know's filled the car, the more Bill felt certain that he did know – and bridled from the truth: ‘Lying?’
‘Yeah, I s'pose. There's a way of doing it –’ He grinned.
‘A technique almost. It's like job interviews –’
‘Job interviews?’
‘Yeah. If you don't want the job, you tend to do well in the interview. It's the same with lying. People always make the mistake of trying to make someone believe what they're saying – but that's not the way. You've got to not care whether they believe – and they will. I'm pretty good at it, if I say so myself. Not that I lie now though.’ He was gabbling. ‘I don't have to any more–don't need to . . .’
But he had lost Bill, who was no longer listening to the content of what Mark said – only its form. Bill was listening to the emotional shapes that Mark was making. In the rising and falling of tone, the bunching and stretching of rhythm, he was able to discern the architecture of Mark's past history: the outhouses of unfeeling and evasion; the vestibules of need and recrimination; the garages of wounding and abuse. All of it comprehensively planned together, so as to form a compound of institutionalisation and neglect. Bill honed his ears, concentrating on this shading in of a sad blueprint. The young man's actual pride in his mendacity – that would have to be one part bravado, one part a lie and one part the truth. Nasty little cocktail. Nasty little dil
emma for the two of us, imprisoned in a car, speeding through a mountain pass. Bill hunkered down more against the comfortable padded extrusion of the door, letting his weight rest on the inside handle. He scanned Mark out of the corners of his eyes; a series of quick penetrating glances, as ever interleaved with shards of scenery, fragments of road. He really was rough. The fingers nicked and burnt: pus-ridden here – browned there, the knuckles fulsomely scabbed. He might not be altogether compos mentis – this hitchhiker, awarded to Bill by the journey, like an idiotic prize – but that made him all the more potentially dangerous.
‘Potential for people, like me, to do all sorts of things . . .’ Mark had veered on to the subject of the Internet. It appeared to verge most of his discourse. ‘Don't you think?’
‘Oh definitely,’ Bill replied, surfacing, and used the hiatus to ask for the chicken sandwich, before getting back down to the drive, getting back down to the questioning.
Past the turning for Kingussie, past the A86, forking away to the west coast and Fort William, the big car bucketed on along the darkening road, as the autumn afternoon curled about the mountains. Bill kept the speed up – because he had no speed. The last of the Dexedrine had been used for the drive north. It was unwise for him to blag any more for a while. More than unwise – fucking foolhardy. So, on this mammoth drive Bill would have to depend on caffeine and ephedrine pills. Hideous shit he hadn't scoffed since revising for school exams. Feeling himself flag and sopor welling up from the road, Bill scrabbled in the pocket of his jacket, located a couple of the bitter little things, washed them down with a mouthful of flat Coke. Mark was talking about what served him as a love life.
‘If you've had bad experiences it affects you. I dunno – maybe I'm not so good on the trust end of things . . .’ Bill realised he was referring, preposterously, to his capacity for trust – not his trustworthiness. ‘So I keep my distance. Jennifer’ (that was the new girlfriend) ‘did move in for a bit, but I felt crowded. We couldn't see eye to eye. The place was too small. She wouldn't give me my space – like my wife. Always crowding me, getting on my case about . . . stuff. We're still seeing each other though . . . though it's not quite so full-on . . .’