by Will Self
‘Yeah.’
‘Once we’re right bladdered we get them out. There’s one each – an earth mover and a dump truck, but we always have a little scrap over who gets which. The dump truck’s faster, but it has a dicky wheel – comes off at speed. Anyway, we get ’em out, like I say, and we go racing down Sauchiehall Street. Y’know Sauchiehall Street?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Aye – well, you’ll know it’s got a good long slope to it then, just right. Like a sort of ski-jump effect, y’know. Anyway, it’s a right good laugh. All the folk coming out of the pubs cheer us on; and if one of us runs into a feller, there’s always a ruck of some sort. Good laugh – great craic!’
Mark was clearly gingered up by this, this prospect of a drunken race seated on toys long since outgrown. His eyes were wide – so that Bill could clock all the yellowed rim of them. His grin gaped; his sour mash breath blanketed the car. Bill lit the last of his pre-rolled joints and took a big pull of flowery smoke. Mark was still puffed up, but Bill’s silence about the Tonka-toy trials was clearly unnerving him.
Eventually Bill spoke: ‘Tough, tough toys for tough, tough boys,’ he said.
‘Whassat?’
‘You remember – don’t you? Or are you too young? It was the advertising slogan for Tonka toys. The telly advert was all set in a sand-pit and there would be this drumming – tom-toms, I suppose – and the various Tonka toys would come into view, all of them self-propelled. No drivers – of any scale at all. Then the drumming would go to a kind of peak, while one of the Tonka jeeps bounced over the terrain, and a voice would say “Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys!” in very stentorian tones – you remember?’
‘No, I can’t rightly say I do.’ Mark was downcast.
Perhaps, Bill thought, I shouldn’t have upstaged his anecdote, or maybe he’s embarrassed because he doesn’t know what stentorian means. They drove on in silence, passing the joint between them.
They were leaving Dunblane behind on its promontory of green, when the rain, which up until then had been confining itself to irregular bursts, clamped down in earnest. As Bill pushed the big saloon up on to the M9 motorway, curtains of near-solid precipitation were pulled to around them. The world disappeared into an aqueous haze. Bill sat forward in his seat and concentrated hard on the driving. There was so much water on the road that any sudden braking would result in an aquaplane. And the skunk – which never troubled him in clear weather – seemed to slick his brain, so that an injudicious thought might result in a psychic aquaplane. He tried a few more conversational forays with Mark, a few more insinuating questions, but the hitchhiker had clammed up. He’d shot his wad with the Tonka toys anecdote. Either that, or – and the apprehension of this made Bill peculiarly uneasy – Mark was coming to an awareness of the extent to which he’d been filleted; of how much Bill had managed to get out of him, while rendering nothing of his own in return.
What must it feel like, Bill considered, to have given that much of yourself and got so little in return? It was a version of psychic rape. It was a dishonest employment of his own neglected analytic abilities. It was an abuse of someone who had never agreed to be a patient. It was like trying to get a whore to come. It was an obscenity – a violation. Bill kept silent, piloted the car through its new, turbulent element.
Past Stirling with its folly wavering through the rain. Every time Bill went by he swore that one day he would stop, climb the tower, preferably with a woman. It looked like the tower’s summit might be a good place to make love. Or at any rate fuck. The rain was worse now – almost solid. And the traffic was heavier – in every respect. Enormous articulated lorries pummelled the carriageways. Bill began to bite the insides of his cheeks. By the time they passed Falkirk, and joined the A80 for a spell, the conditions were truly dangerous, and the big car was wallowing along at between thirty and forty.
‘There won’t be much racing tonight if this keeps up,’ Bill said, trying to leaven the atmosphere. But all he got from Mark was a grunt.
Bill couldn’t get the Tonka-toy racing out of his head. He could picture it only too well: the drunk ragamuffins at the top of the road, their outsize toys clutched between their tattered bejeaned legs. The knots of men and women spilling on to the pavements from pubs and clubs. And then the bellow to begin. The acrylic wheels skittering and scraping on the paving. The sense of accelerating on nothing as the stabilising legs retract. A biff here, a bash there, and all the time picking up speed. The racers’ jerky perspectives disclosing only the onrush of the street … How will it all end, if not in tears? Tough, tough toys – for tough, tough boys.
‘I can’t drop you right in Glasgow –’
‘Whassat?’ Mark had to shout over the drumming of the downpour and the thrumming of bass. Bill killed the CD.
‘I can’t drop you right in Glasgow, I was going to let you off when I got on to the M73, but –’ Bill remembered the confused pack, the cheap plastic poncho. ‘I couldn’t do that in this rain – you’d be soaked.’ Mark gave him a look as if to suggest that this was all that people like Bill ever did to people like him. ‘What would you say to my dropping you in Motherwell and then you can get the train in from there – it’ll only be a few quid …’
Mark looked at Bill, his expression heavily freighted with the lack of a few quid more than the very few quid he had; and the eternal recurrence of people’s assumption that he might be capable of making good the deficiency. Bill thought of Mark’s night out, the cheap drinks scrounged; the dregs drained; a crumb of hash on a pin head trapped beneath a milk bottle; perhaps solvents or fights towards dawn. Bill ambivalently relished the opportunity to say, ‘Look, it’s no bother to me – a few quid. I’ll stump it up … and well, who knows, maybe you’ll have the chance to pay it back in the future.’ Bill presented Mark with the grin of an inverted Cheshire cat – it was gone long before Bill was.
‘I wouldna’ want to impose –’ said Mark, with the easy non-assurance of someone who had been doing just that for years.
‘It’s no problem – no worry.’ Bill wanted to go on with this mini litany of reassurance, to say that there would be no pain, no poverty, no want of any kind. That Mark and he would be reunited after the storm had spluttered to a finish. That they would find themselves in a field, verdant with opportunity, growing with cash; and that the two of them would smoke skunk and drink whisky. Make fiscal hay while the sun shone.
But instead Bill said nothing – simply drove; and as the prow of the big car parted the downpouring waves he envisioned Sauchiehall Street, the tough, tough toys, their tough, tough riders. Surely with this offer of money Mark would ask him something – his name even. But no.
They splashed past the slip road for the M8 and central Glasgow. By the time they reached the Motherwell exit of the M74 the rain hadn’t simply thinned – it had gone altogether. The road ahead was mirror-bright once more; the verges painfully green. Even the outcrops of housing in the middle distance appeared sluiced into cleanness. See The Difference With Flash-floods. If only this will hold, thought Bill, knowing full well it wouldn’t. He began making those same, implausible calculations of hard driving he had made on the road out of Thurso that morning. It was four-thirty now, drop the hitchhiker by five. He might be in the region of Manchester by eight, Birmingham by ten, home by midnight – wherever that was.
They were puttering up the hill into Motherwell, then they were channelled into the switchbacks of the one-way system. The inhabitants of the old steel town had taken the break in the rain as a signal to sally forth. There was a preponderance of wheeled shopping bags and thick overcoats among the precincts. Eventually Bill found the entrance to the station and pulled in. He twisted sideways in his seat, while Mark, galvanised by arrival, yanked open his door, swung out, opened the back door and commenced reassuming his confused backpack. Bill managed to extract a tenner from his tight pocket; a tenner so worn and soft that it felt like the pocket lining. ‘This should do it,’ he said to Mark. Th
e hitchhiker looked at the money as it were no more than his due – a reasonable prophylactic, Bill tacitly agreed, to the shame occasioned by receiving charity.
‘Are you sure?’
‘No problem, really, no problem at all.’
‘Well, thanks for that, really, thanks …’ Mark dried, perhaps conscious of a hole in his gratitude; a hole where a name should have been inserted – but it was too late for that now. ‘I dunno – maybe some time –’
‘Whenever, really – whenever.’ Bill did his negative Cheshire cat act again.
‘And thanks for the lift, and the smoke … and the dram –’
‘Really, no problem, good to have company. I wish you luck with all of your endeavours. A bright young man like you – you’ll come through.’ Sounding portentous no longer seemed to matter. It was better to pull out this Capraesque bullshit, rather than allow Mark to wallow in the gathering realisation that he was an unthinking, unfeeling drone. That he could take a lift from a man, smoke his dope, eat his food, drink his whisky, and then take his money, all without even asking him his name.
The hitchhiker stood, one foot on a newly laid kerb, the other on the wet asphalt of the roadway. His pack was back on his back, his poncho caught the wind and billowed: the spinnaker for a solo yacht on a round-the-life race.
Bill leaned across and addressed him through the lowered passenger-door window. ‘And as for the dosh – don’t worry about it. I hope there’s a couple of quid left over – you’ll need some oil for the racing tonight –’ Bill heard Mark try and cut across this final imprecation, but the big car was already rolling, and the blunt hand was already circling, and the bloodshot eyes were already checking, and the bored ears were already adjusting to the thrum of bass.
In the rearview mirror Bill saw Mark jerk the pack into a more comfortable position and head towards the station entrance. It wasn’t until he was back on the M74 and rolling south, at speed, that Bill considered what it might have been that the hitchhiker was trying to say.
Food, who needed it? It just made you shit more on these sedentary migrations. Best not to bother. Best not to think about rest either. Those signs that whip by in the already hazy periphery of vision:
T…A…K…E……A……B…R…E…A…K…
T…I…R…E…D…N…E…S…S……K…I…L…L…S.
And what would rest be like anyway? Bill had tried that option, sagged across the wheel like a human air bag, in some forlorn service-station car-park. Or Welcomed Inn to seven hours of thrashing in thin duvets, then tea-making in the chill dawn, rearranging individual plastic cups of UHT milk on a little ledge, before putting on his pants, his jacket, driving again.
No, stopping was out of the question – there had already been an unscheduled halt at Mrs McRae’s. But that was only to be expected … by the time the Ola got into Scrabster it had already been eleven … and there was no point in pushing on with that savage headache … or that savage tremor. Did he perhaps have a savage tremor now? Bill held one hand free of the steering wheel and watched its level, relative to the horizon of the windscreen itself, which, as he honed in on it, gulped up a hundred metres of road and a chunk of hillside. No, no tremor in particular. Bill groped for a couple more Pro-Plus pills in his jacket pocket. He lit another cigarette. He boosted his speed, overtaking a lorry, undertaking a panel van in the fast lane, ratcheting the big car up to ninety-five as he hovered back to within sideswiping distance of the central barrier. Strip-the-steel-willow!
Bill liked this section of the drive. To have slipped away from Glasgow so surely, and now to bucket down Clydesdale with the last of the afternoon sun bouncing over his shoulder, and the hills of the Ettrick Forest opening up to the south-west. It was also an entrance to another hinterland – the Borders – and suitable that night should meet day here as well.
But, Christ! Bill was tired. And ever since he’d dropped the hitchhiker in Motherwell, dropped him back into his own particular sink of anonymity, he had felt troubled. It was a mistake to have picked up the hitchhiker. He certainly hadn’t appreciated the gesture. No, not a gesture – actually an altruistic act. Or was it that the hitchhiker had got his measure all too well? He wasn’t that stupid. He had been genuinely affronted by the inquisition, resolved to give nothing real at all – spun Bill a line. ‘Genuinely affronted’! What an asinine expression. Bill laughed at the asininity and then tried to surf a little more on his own hilarity. He tried to imagine that he was high – and lighthearted. It didn’t work.
Darkness was welling up from the road; to the west it flowed from the valleys. Bill switched the lights back on to full beam. I’ll be cosy in my little light tunnel, he joked. He had stopped at Mrs McRae’s because he was sick with drink. He had more or less gone up to Orkney this time because he was sick with drink. He didn’t like doing locums – he couldn’t hold any other kind of job down. Not any more. He knew what genuinely affronted him – Bill did. What genuinely affronted him was the vigour of his fingernails. They kept on growing despite everything. Even now, the pallid fingers wrapped around the steering wheel each had their own dear little crescent of new life – and new dirt. Only something as dumb as a fingernail could go on growing in this hellish environment. Take skin, for example. Take the skin on Bill’s ankles – Bill had. Bill had picked and plucked and even strummed the ulcerating skin on his ankles, and it had rewarded him by generously suppurating. That was skin for you – very intelligent stuff. Didn’t go on growing after death, like hair or nails.
The hitchhiker had had this information encoded in his own lousy, drink-raddled body. In that they were alike – in that and perhaps a lot else as well. Bill thought of how workable, how trustworthy, his denial of his own drink problem usually was. It was like a handy, movable bulwark that he could position in front of any one of the dark corridors leading away from his self-awareness. The hitchhiker – Bill shouldn’t have picked him up. He’d broken the rhythm of the journey; he’d made Bill late. He’d fucked with the bulwarks. Ha! Late for his own funeral. No – his own cremation. In Hoop Lane, opposite the Express Dairy. When Bill was young he thought that everyone had died here, that everyone was burnt here – at Golders Green Crematorium – their essence disappearing in the form of charcoal smoke issuing from a red-brick tower, into a grey sky. Now Bill knew he had been right.
And now, in the gathering gloom, Bill felt all pushed out of shape. His method of dealing with himself depended on carefully negotiated transitions from being alone to being among others. Hence Mrs McRae – who didn’t, of course, count. Hence also Anthony Bohm, who was no threat to anyone; least of all – with his swollen liver more or less propped on the bar – to Bill, or any other physic-fond physician for that matter.
The encounter with the hitchhiker had turned Bill about. He had mentally castigated the hitchhiker for his abusive relationships – but what constituted such an abuse? He knew what constituted such an abuse. The 3 a.m. rows that cranked up and then cranked down and then cranked up again; the siren song of emotional fracture. He knew all about them, just as he had full cognisance of the serial, parallel monogamist’s lifestyle. No, no socialese, call a fucking spade a spade. He fucked around – like a spade. Grasped his haft and planted it where he would. At the Felliniesque conversion of Dunrobin Castle it wouldn’t simply be a case of wassailing whores causing trouble – the whole emotional Utopia, the whole fantasy of inclusion was just that – a fantasy.
Bill’s life was now – and he realised this groping in the dark for the car bottle, as the big saloon whipped through the roundabout and on to the A74 – based, established on exclusion. Every hysterical evasion, every late-night session rubbing up the whisky bottle, until Mr Blubby, the drunken genie, emerged – it was all coming back to him. He took a slug, and in his hurry to get the bottle up and down without leaving go of the wheel, managed to slop several measures on to his chest. He was tired – and yes, perhaps it would be worth admitting it to himself – just a little drunk.
No t
ime to consider that now. Heads down, no nonsense, mindless boogie. Hone in on the music – ignore the background screech of the Furies, who pursued him: ‘Bill! Bill! Why did you do it/say it/go there/lie/come back/treat me like this!’ He pumped up the CD. He bit down on another caffeine lozenge, hoping the bitterness alone might make him alert. It wasn’t working. The road was doubly blurred. He rubbed one ulcerated shin against the other. He chomped the inside of his cheek. He pinched the fat on the inside of his thighs with his unabashed fingernails. Eventually he took to slapping himself. Big, open-handed clouts. First one with the left, then one with the right. Left to left and right to right. Each blow gave him a few seconds of clarity, another hundred metres of onrushing progress.
And as the big car bisected the night, drumming past Lockerbie, ignoring the blue signs that blazoned: Carlyle’s Birthplace, and eventually gaining the M6 – which was lit for its first few miles, a tarmac chute – Bill gutted the carcass of his own life. He pulled out the entrails of neglect, and the gall bladder of resentment; he removed the engorged liver of indulgence, and excised the kidneys of cynicism. He fumbled in the cavities of his body for his heart – but couldn’t find it.
The big car plunged on. No longer a chimera, a meld between man and machine, but merely a machine, with a ghost loose in it somewhere. Desperately Bill shuffled his pack of shiny memories, of al fresco lovemaking, of dramatic hill scenery, of … his son. Who would be what – around five now. Not very clever that. Not clever at all – to have not seen your own child for two years. Three years. It had been three years.
That had been the shabbiest of the accusations he had laid against the hitchhiker – the one of neglect. Bill knew all about neglect. He knew all about unanswered phone calls, crumpled-up letters, torn postcards. People said they didn’t want children because they didn’t want the responsibility. But if you didn’t take responsibility for them – how could you have it for yourself?