I followed what might have been the Golf until it became a maroon spec at the foot of the mountains. There were now miles and miles of road between us, long slow curves of it, rippling across the wide plain like a mirage. How far was it? A half hour of blind rage? An hour of mirage time?
I lost it, caught it again. For an instant the spec appeared frozen, suspended, throbbing with my own pulse in the dusty heat of distance. Then it was gone, sucked up into the hot blue sky like an illusion. I couldn't see it any more but I couldn’t stop staring into the hard blue emptiness, the sun burning on the top of my head slowly sapping the life from me.
She'd been gone over two hours now but my mind continued the struggle for reassurance: it might still have been her, if maybe she'd stopped in some scorched layby, angry but hesitant, uncommitted, thought about what she was doing, then decided: Yes, fuck him.
Now I knew I was looking at nothing, then at the hard thought I didn't want to see. A fever lifted up through me again in waves of panic. I started walking back toward the town, stopped, wandered across the hot, deserted tarmac to the far side of the road, then back again. Where did I think I was going? She had the money, the passports, our clothes, our hired car. Where could I go? What exactly did I think I was going to do?
It was ‘alright’, though, ran my mantra of reassurance (a fragile hope flickering, fever descending to a bearable 102F), the flight tickets made it ‘alright’. She had those too but I had the return date and time stamped in my head. That had to be ‘alright’, didn’t it? I shut my eyes and saw the pale blue numbers clearly printed on the ticket. In five days, I tried to convince myself, she'd be in Alicante. She would have to be there, wouldn't she? She'd have to return the car. At the same moment I had a sickening image of her straining the engine back through France, tearing the resistant pages from my passport and letting them flap and fly from the speeding window.
I sat down at the side of the road, pressing the sweat soaked back of my T-shirt into the deceptive shade of a loosely structured and crumbling wall. Think, I thought, but there was just too much heat inside me, inside the day, climbing further and further into the oppressive, mesmeric pitch of the afternoon.
This was ‘Hidden Spain’ with its coastal routes, ‘its stretches of desert, its castles’, its ‘glimpses of sea’, its ‘surprising little towns’. ‘We'll just drive and drive. Away from everything. Maybe you'll get an idea for a story. Maybe you'll write one about me.’
I was between stories and I had only bad ideas. I'd had no ideas since the morning of our flight when I'd awoken into the aftermath of a disturbingly real dream. In the dream I’d been writing the final paragraphs of a story with a structure as tight and powerful as a fist. I’d obviously lost my laptop because I was writing by hand, working under immense pressure to express the images on paper while they seemed fresh and alive; yet my unconscious was locked into overdrive and before I’d completed one sentence the next was already forming. As the final climactic image was welling up through me with tsunami speed, accelerating ahead of my panicked pen, I realised I was so focused on recording the detail, I was losing any sense of narrative. It was something about a woman, maybe two women. I assumed. I no longer had any idea and stopped writing to read over the paragraph I’d just written. At once the handwriting became an unreadable cardiograph which quivered and flatlined while the impatient, still unworded final image began slipping away from me into some vast black hole from which I knew it would never return.
I lay in stunned darkness, listening to the panic in my own breathing and a more distant sound of running water draining through a dark emptiness and an incredible sense of loss. When I opened my eyes I had no idea where I was. The walls, a patchwork of brilliant geometrical shapes, were close and strange. At the foot of one rectangle of unfiltered sunlight, two travel bags lay side by side, lids open, piled contents loosely packed. Across the room, a woman wrapped a white towel emerged from an open door, her face plain and pale, overexposed beneath a white towel turban. She looked down at me as though inspecting some minor domestic accident before reaching back inside the door; the soothing play of water was cut from the soundtrack and I knew the story was gone.
Something was wrong. I recognised the woman, of course, whose lithe, gym-toned body I’d massaged quite thoroughly only hours before and had done so with an increasing regularity and enthusiasm over the previous months. Our weekly meetings taking on an organic life and rhythm of their own: the relentless images of desire developing in the darkroom of separation, the hotel-intimacy of the voice on the phone, the excited, impatient ride to the 5th floor, the calculated hours in the half light before the final parting kiss. Now after three months something had changed. I'd known it even as we lay spent in the tangle of sheets and discarded clothes only hours before, side by side in the stillness and fading daylight, unable to move as we were going nowhere. Words had rarely seemed necessary but now an easy silence had grown into an uneasy distance between us. Perhaps the distance had always been there only we'd never stayed together long enough to experience it.
Now she was trying out something new. Conversation. I'd held her in the dark while her monologue ran on through insignificant news items, gossip and stretches of autobiography; hesitantly at first then in a kind of growing desperation. She wanted to change her life, she wanted to leave her husband, she didn't want a ‘lover’, well of course she did but she also wanted a family, but not with John, she knew that now, and she was nearly thirty now, and life could be so good, I ‘could finally leave Jo’ and she'd help me, I could give up one of my two jobs, I could write, etc, etc. After the mention of Jo's name the pauses grew longer and longer. Like vast black pools, I thought, as I slipped into one and the darkness of dreamless sleep.
She smiled down at me now (rather enigmatically, I thought) loosening the turban to reveal a sodden grey-blonde cowl, her head on one side, still planning the days ahead in that bright voice which had overnight somehow mutated from vital free-spirit to giggling adolescent. ‘This is a dream, isn't it?’ She told me, then as my face must have shown nothing, ‘A whole week together...I've never been away with a married man before.’
‘What about your husband?’ I hadn't meant to sound so cold; I might have been thinking about his money and where he might have taken her. The bright eyes blinked at me. Holding on to the smile, she settled herself on her side of the bed resting her arm on my raised knees. I ran my hand over the long muscle of her smooth thigh. The story had been as lean and sinuous as this thigh. It had been there, so close I could still feel it like an afterglow, but I knew, just as surely, it would never return. I've got to stop this, I thought. I've got to stop wasting my life.
She lowered her face to mine with a dry kiss, hair dripping onto my chest, then sat up straight. Without make-up her face looked disturbingly stark and severe: a face I’d never seen before. I wanted to say something to make things right, to recapture the playful, easy mood which had become our normal currency and join her in our ‘dream’ future: hand in hand, the water’s hushed slapping at the sides of boats in the marina, toddlers and simpletons scattering pigeons across the baking cobbles of a square – that sort of thing. She was waiting to hear me say the words, but I couldn't take my eyes from the colourless face I barely recognised. Like an off duty model, I told myself (or cabin crew). Her smile hardened at the edges. ‘We've got a plane to catch’ she said, wrapping the towel more tightly around her small breasts as she busied herself searching for clothes.
I sat up, sipped the coffee she'd left and watched her make up and dress. She did this with her back turned, finally smoothing her skirt down over her bottom and smiling self-consciously at me in the mirrored wardrobe. ‘You going to spend the week in bed?’
“Hopefully’ was my expected reply but I still couldn’t find the energy for my lines. Tugging a pink baseball cap on her head and pulling the peak into a jaunty angle, the smile brightened determinedly. I closed my eyes to close the conversation, listening emptily to voices of early risers in the corridor outside.
A sharp, aggressive movement made me look up to see her pulling shirts and towels from my bag to find room for the overspill of her own, which now miraculously had refused to zip. She felt for something down the side, hesitated then drew out my notepad. ‘Yours?’ she said, unnecessarily, sitting down at the dressing-table and flicking through the pages. ‘Can I read it?’
I shrugged away my irritation, watching her eyes and lips move over the notes like a judgemental critic. She turned a page, then another then back again, looked at herself in the mirror then closed the pad with a tight smile.
‘What?’ I asked stupidly, I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d written, ‘It's just a few ideas.’
‘Is that supposed to be me?’
‘It's not supposed to be anybody.’
‘No, it's good. It's really good.’
We barely spoke in the cab. At the airport she insisted we checked in separately and we spent the following hour mingling with the bright, sloppy crowd, studiously apart, just to be absolutely safe. Her husband was a jealous man, he'd once sent someone to follow her. She was sure. He'd once followed her himself.
I bought a newspaper, drank some coffee, then called Jo just before my flight boarded for Dublin’ where she thought I was visiting relatives (convenient relatives who could be relied upon not to call me). ‘Have a good time,’ she told me (sarcastically, it sounded to me) after I'd delivered another weighted, understated lie. We weren’t officially talking to each other.
Spain had been Charlie’s idea, it was close, convenient and she'd ‘booked everything already’ she informed me two weeks before, insisting on taking care of all the arrangements herself (presumably, in case I backed out). In the end, she’d booked only the flight, perhaps insecure at placing us in a single, all too detectable location; we would just drive from Alicante to ‘maybe Grenada’, stopping where and when we pleased ‘like an adventure.’ I had the feeling she was reliving or reinventing something. I had the feeling she was not completely honest with herself. I had a whole list of feelings now, all of them very distant cousins to the mood of leering anticipation I’d enjoyed only days before. Where had that gone?
Blindly, I trawled the shelves of a Waterstones, wandered soberly through Duty Free. This whole business no longer had any point for me. We were going to be together for a whole week. Seven nights. We’d never spent seven hours in each other’s company before. Some relationships are best confined to the brevity of snatched, intense hours, their erotic mystery can’t survive over-exposure. Twice in the past week a dire premonition had persuaded me to cancel and each time it was the arrangements, the explanations and the already committed lies which had locked me in. Just think of those legs, I thought. This was why I was here, after all; this, I supposed, was what it was all about.
I found her again in the Departure lounge, seated at one end of a row of green chairs, those legs crossed and entwined at the ankle, a magazine resting unopened across her narrowed lap. She was looking straight at me, her eyes vacuous without the contacts, blindly accusing (like a model in one of her photo shoots). Still waiting for something to lift my mood, I went on watching her with the detached fascination of a voyeur finding someone familiar in a crowd of strangers. ‘Light on a surface. There’s nothing more to a photograph,’ she’d once told me, “To be honest, that’s all we ever know of each other.’ I wondered now if I’d been too rash in dismissing these (probably plagiarised) lines (along with so much else, such as the invented surveillance of a jealous husband) as the pretentious nonsense that made up the Charlie image; the stuff you had to tolerate alongside the good stuff, which had now become little more than an image (with a soundtrack of wordless sighs and groans). She turned her head, pushing the fall of her hair from her eyes with a familiar gesture and I had the sensation of reaching back to something alive in my dream, as though she were a character I'd half made up and could no longer use.
By the time I’d settled into my assigned seat beside her on the plane (aisle to her window), the tips of her fingers brushing my knee, I could feel nothing. I tried to say something but there was nothing to say. She gripped my hand girlishly as the engines roared and I noticed a paperback trapped in the tight netting of the seat in front. It was called 'Flickers' or 'Knickers' and the cover showed a half-dressed, tanned and toned cheerleader (small breasts, long legs) Charlie must have thought could pass as her twin. She was waiting for some reaction. Looking down at her legs I saw a muscled calf, an angular knee. It was just a leg. Incredible. I looked out the window at the stretching, sparkling sea disappearing and appearing again through holes punched in the brilliant dry ice beneath us, listening to myself creating and dismissing some fey metaphor from it all.
I was between stories and as usual when I was between stories I knew there was no point in anything at all.
The feeling of pointlessness lingered through the leering, laughing taxi drivers outside the diminutive airport where Charlie's short, hugging skirt came in for some heavy duty inspection as we searched the sudden afternoon heat for our hired car. Half an hour later the maroon Golf materialised comically outside some locked security gates in a scorched lot I knew had been empty when we’d first arrived, as I told the rheumy-eyed, shoulder shrugging gnome (subservient half-brother to the cabbies) handing me the keys and swearing blind he 'knew nothing.'
I turned left out of the car park and just kept going. Adjusting to mirror-image driving held my concentration during Charlie’s determined attempts to restart a conversation, pointing out a small boy with a cute dog on a string lead, the recurring poster of a black singer she liked, the heat those old women had to endure beneath their heavy black clothes, etc, etc. When her hand found my leg again, I didn't shrug her off and I didn't respond, I was just driving. Finally, she fell silent and occupied herself with winding the radio through a range of incomprehensible Spanish voices, some manic, some merely staccato-serious, until she found a piece of music she recognised. When the track was over she searched again for another just as familiar.
It was nearly dark by the time we stopped in some cramped (‘real’) town with a mystifying one-way loop I stop-started through twice, searching for the hotel she'd picked out of the Rough Guide. She'd also found a restaurant to match but by the time we had checked in even she was too tired to care. After three months of hiding from public places, habit drove us to hide in the hotel room.
The room wasn't small but after an hour with us it shrank to prison cell dimensions. The night was no more than a dark version of the day, hot and humid. The air-conditioning was out of action in this part of ‘real’ Spain. The sounds of footsteps, music from a bar, the rattle of cutlery and dishes, a dog's endless barking and innumerable voices rose from the street. I picked out the high-pitched panic of a TV sports commentator while we lay side by side perspiring silently, the air heavy with Duty Free perfume.
‘Yes’, I lied to her, in the face of relentless interrogation, her hand clammy and insistent on my arm, I was feeling guilty about Jo. She didn't believe me. ‘You just don't want me’ she said flatly, ‘I knew it.’ The phrase delivered with ironic satisfaction, as though confirming the accuracy of her perception. Turning away to address the wall, she added: ‘It's just a pity you waited until we got all the way out here to tell me.’
Angry at my own mood (and the undeniable accuracy of her statement) I didn't know what to say so I went on saying nothing.
‘You know you really are an adolescent’ she told me or the wall, quite objectively, as though discussing a movie we’d just seen. It was quite clear I really didn't know what a woman was (or indeed how to treat one; a ‘real’ woman). ‘Oh, yes’ I thought. Something was opening up now; once started, this initial, hesitant trickle of flat statements began to grow into complex sentences, then whole paragraphs of analysis in a torrent of precise articulation: I knew nothing. I had ‘no sense of commitment’ (these conclusions delivered with the calm confidence of an impartial psychiatrist). And those women I wrote about? They didn't exist. They weren’t real women. They were freaks from some perverted porno show.
I knew a mere hand on her arm would have stemmed the flow but I couldn’t bring myself to make the simple gesture. So much more would have had to follow. I got up and leaned out the window, emptily watching the movement down in the street through mere sensations: a distant neon flickering into life, a woman leaning into a passenger door of a parked car, the faintest ghost of an evening breeze caressing my face. When I returned to bed, the room in pitch dark, she appeared not to have moved, her face still turned to the wall, asleep or pretending to sleep.
I awoke the next morning to find her lying in the same position. We might have decided to return there and then but somehow the discussion never arose. Perhaps neither of us could quite believe what was happening and we were both waiting for this mood to lift.
We drove south for half the day in silence. Charlie played with the radio again then spent time toying with her camera and framing shots of the landscape from the window, before hiding behind her Ray Bans and sipping sulkily at a can of Diet Coke. Locked into my thoughts (or lack of them) along open stretches of road, for odd moments I almost forgot she was there. She was, however, working to ensure the rest of the world did not. With the straps of her short black cotton dress hanging off her shoulder, the pink baseball cap pulled down over her eyes, she sat with her feet up on the dash like a girl in a Coke ad. Occasionally, a car would swing out to overtake and then pause alongside slightly longer than necessary. By some coincidence the drivers were all male. She sighed to herself, pretending to be unaware of this.
She was still pretending when the road drew us from the wasteland of desert up through the main street of another small town. Roadsigns had been passing in a blank blur but it seemed pointless to ask where we were, the Rough Guide had long since been frisbeed into the back seat and she’d been merely staring straight ahead, lips pursed for several miles. Even as I pulled into a space beside what I assumed to be a bar, her gaze remained fixed on the road ahead, which almost immediately began edging back out into desert.
In contrast to the shabby street, the bar looked modern, high-ceilinged, white walled and serene beneath the whir of cooling fans; self-consciously modern and empty, as though someone had miscalculated the tourist route. The ‘cerveza’ came in a long iced glass, cool in my hands as I carried it with an arctic Coke to a table by the window where, still wearing her Ray-bans, she was looking out in silence at the car and the almost deserted street. No longer eased by the forward motion and the illusion we were going somewhere, the tension between us reasserted itself. I followed her gaze back down the way we had come, a few huddled shops were almost hidden under the shade of their bright, striped awnings. A huge net of red and blue plastic footballs hung outside another store further off, shouldered aside by a man rounding the corner they stirred languidly in the warm air like heavy party balloons. There was little accessible shade now on our side of the street and the narrow patch I had parked in seemed to have already receded into the wall. The chrome blazed and I could feel the heat building inside the car. Suddenly, I saw a dent the size of a fist in the passenger door just below the handle. Jesus, I thought, trying to remember when that could have happened, with the sickening suspicion that on top of all else they were going to bill me for repairs.
I finished one beer, then another while Charlie sat watching the Coke bottle with the same look of resentment she'd treated her can earlier. She'd spent most of the time rolling it back and forth across her forehead and had poured only a small measure which she sipped from time to time as though setting a rhythm to her boredom. Her mouth, turned down below the shades, had lost its natural animation or maybe this was her natural expression and her face had been lying to me all along. When I asked if she wanted a beer she merely averted her head as though exercising the muscles in her neck. Breathing in deeply and letting out the air with a sigh, she suddenly upended the bottle into the glass so that the brown froth foamed up and over the top. She spent a moment watching it settle then traced the drops of spilled liquid into lazy patterns over the table with the car keys.
We should have been on our way but the thought of getting back into the heat of the car was not inviting and we really had nowhere to go. We were both waiting for some sign, some decision, something to happen.
The solitary stroller, or someone just like him, had returned with a friend and had reached our end of the road, both men were in overalls and crossed towards us with the same self-conscious, straight backed style that seemed to be the male obligation here, serious-adult frowns on their mirror image boyish faces. One of them waved an arm across at our car and both frowns hardened into laughter.
The laughter stopped as they came through the drapes, passing us with faces averted, the stern looks deepening as though still troubled by the sun. They joined another, older man I hadn't noticed tucked into the furthest corner of the bar, all three leaning on their elbows and ignoring the high stools. The barman’s staccato greeting was met with dry, humourless laughter and he uncapped three bottles of beer while the group settled into a lazy, sporadic conversation as if they too were wilting in the heat.
Charlie was now sitting very still, shoulders slightly hunched with a sense of anticipation I didn't like. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked at last, with no particular urgency in her voice. I took a swallow of beer as some sort of reply. Another man appeared through the drapes and the murmur behind us began to rise steadily in volume, erupting now and again in small waves of laughter. When I looked across one of them turned away, studying the framed football team over the bar, then the barman who kept his eyes down, redundantly wiping glasses which had surely never been used. ‘I'm bored’ Charlie said at last, her voice flat and expressionless. With no response from me, she stood up and sauntered outside where she stopped to study the end of the street, then a display of postcards by the door. When I didn't follow, with arms folded and head bowed, she returned to the table. Very deliberately, she removed her shades, polished the lenses and put them back on, sipping her forgotten drink, fidgeting with her hair, bunching and lifting it as if to cool her neck. She crossed her legs, impatiently swinging her shoe for a time, then crossed her legs the other way. I didn't turn to see if anyone was taking this in, but the conversation had become steady and muted. She began fingering the Minolta on the table between us and I picked it up, noticed she'd taken only two shots, then as casually as I could, began framing and snapping off pictures of her. She asked what I thought I was doing. ‘Nothing’ I said, ‘What are you doing?’ She looked away out the window. ‘Surprised you care. You don't own me’ she said, ‘I can do what I like.’
‘Well you do that. Do what you fucking like.’
A moment later I felt my hot, damp forehead against the cool wall of the urinal wall. Six more days of this, I thought, it's just not possible. How the fuck did we get here? We have to go back, we have to get out of here. All right, I thought, let's drive, let's get this thing done.
When I returned, already mapping out a mental image of the route to the airport, Charlie, and the car keys had gone. Apart from the glasses, a few breadcrumbs and the grey snail of a Fuji colour film, the table was empty. Outside, there was a very bright, very naked space where the car had been.
The heat buzzed in the air around me. Across the road an incongruous and highly polished black BMW stood like a 3D silhouette in front of the glaring whitewashed walls of a garage, where in the moving shadows behind it I thought I could make out the two workmen previously at the bar. They watched me as I moved away, further into the dreaming town in the direction we might have driven. As if held until now in some unseen roadblock, three cars appeared from the glare in quick succession (none of them Golfs), the third, following a slight delay, holding down an irritated horn as I stepped off the pavement almost straight into it. When I reached the bulging net of plastic footballs, my breath was coming in gasps as though I'd been running. The adjacent road was absurdly quiet, a few shops shuttered and slumbering under their shades, two old women in black and a gaunt dog padding toward me in no hurry at all.
Back inside the bar the bartender, alone now and still polishing glasses, looked at me as though I was insane even trying to talk to him. Anything outside 'Boccadillo' or 'Cerveza' and he didn't want to know. ‘The girl’ I told him (I’d almost said ‘Charlie’), ‘Tall, slim girl.’ I held the flat of my hand up to indicate a height just above my nose. He shrugged. His eyebrows shrugged. ‘How can you not know?’ I'd seen him taking in her legs. But his eyes met mine with that sullen 'piece of shit' look. What do I care? Can't you control your women? Women don't take cars and just drive off without a word. Not out here. They just don't do that. They get slapped. They get fucked. They stay quiet. Something occurred to him, he took a pad and pencil from his apron; leaning his big forearms on the counter, he wrote out a note, passing it to me with a flat nod. What was this, some set of rules for handling women? There was a list of three or four items sprawling above an emphatically circled figure: 30Pts. I had only forty in change.
I didn't panic. I stayed very calm. So, the car was gone. The thought of the Police didn't enter my head. No, I thought, that's just what she wants me to do. I could see how this would work. She'd drive off, her rage would cool to boiling, she'd see how stupid the whole thing was and drive back content with having given me a fright (maybe even shocking me back into desire for her).
I paid the bill and spent the last of my money on another beer (‘Just gimme a fucking beer, you cunt’), went back to the table and composed myself over the cool glass and the silent sulk with which I would greet her inevitable return. ‘Yeah, satisfied? Now what the fuck was all that about?’
Out on the road, cars and trucks passed infrequently (the roadblock back in operation). I toyed with the breadcrumbs on the table, studied the poised arching back of the bullfighter on the wall, the black and red strips hanging motionless in the doorway. A couple of flies too fucked to fly lifted off my flapping hand and settled again heat heavy on the table top before finding the rim of the uncleared Coke bottle. My eyes burned on the bright white walls of the gas station across the road.
In an hour the bartender mimed he was closing, for his own private Siesta, or because I was the only punter and had no more money. My head fizzed in the glare outside. I sat in the shade of an awning until I could sit there no longer and the throb of desperation drew me along the road, seeking out cars in the distance.
After two hours the impossible fact was beginning to work itself clear of the heat: she was not coming back. My mind, focused one minute, adrift the next, finally settled on Almeria. When we left that morning we'd been vaguely heading down the coast, it was a vague route she'd vaguely suggested days before when we were just planning to 'drive and drive' away from everything. (Well, we'd done that all right. Here I was deep in 'Hidden Spain', away from everything). I remembered her sitting beside me, eyes fixed on the road ahead. She'd have driven straight on, I decided; blinkered by rage, she wouldn't think to drive anywhere else. ‘Fuck him’ I now saw her say to the receding road in the rear-view mirror. ‘Let him find his own way there.’
I decided to follow her. What else could I do? The alternatives kept rising up in my head and dismissing themselves; the police, for example, had now become frequent and mocking visitors, always conducting the same interview: This woman is? Not your wife? Your fiance? Your...? And her address in London? And her husband’s address? No, the police were not an option. Besides, I realised, I couldn't even remember the licence number of the Golf.
'Cars do, however, stop quite frequently' I read later in the Rough Guide 'So it is possible to pick your lifts.' Within only minutes of a painful walk to the main road my raised thumb drew joyous horns, insane laughter, incomprehensible abuse, jerking forearms and fingers, barking dogs, their heads straining from the speeding windows, but no lifts. All this from a tour bus, a few local cars, the vagrant bike, the bumping scooter, the tottering Robin Reliant veggie trucks. These hidden Spanish were all driving and driving in a mad rush to stay hidden. They had just never heard of hitchers; or maybe they had, they'd heard too much. Probably, they could see I was English. Who else would be staggering around in the sun at this time of day but some stray ‘Eeenglish’ on a bewildered bender from Benidorm? I might just as well have been wearing Union Jack shorts.
In an hour I was ready to give up. It rained for one week in the year here, and this was not the week. I was dying out there in the heat and dust. The thirst which had begun the moment I'd finished my last beer had been building like clotted salt in the back of my throat. I’d barely enough saliva to swallow. I was not going to last another six hours here, never mind six days. In a while, I hoped, the Siesta would be over, the bars would open and I could beg for water. The cool, clear stream from the long silver tap began to dominate every other thought when out of the town swung the Golf.
So long had I been staring at the idea of it in the distance, I could now only gaze stupidly as the tiny image grew into real life. ‘Bitch’, was my first reaction, too shocked to know whether I was angry or relieved. Relief, however, hung in suspension. It was the Golf, it was maroon but as if part of some visual trick, the driver, although still in shadow, I could see in one heart-splitting second, was not Charlie. The licence plate, I thought. looked familiar and although I had no chance of remembering the actual number, my mind raced through a fruit machine of possibilities as the car passed and then screeched to a halt yards ahead of me. I hadn't signalled, I hadn't moved. I was too stunned to react. The passenger door was thrown invitingly open and a voice with my own South London accent called out: ‘Awright?’
You have to indulge drivers. You have to let them talk, it's the fee they charge for taking you where you want to go. At least if they're talking you can sit back and count the miles. If they don't talk, if they sit and stare at the road ahead of you then you sweat. You sweat because hitching is a lottery, it's a dangerous business. Who are these people who pick up hitchers? What do they want? Samaritans; innocent bores; bored bores; long haul specialists; ex-hippies; gum-chewing students of Kerouac; cruising homosexuals; desperate sweating perverts; multiple rapists; psychopaths. Anyone in fact. They could be anyone; they could be you.
But no women. That's the stuff of adolescent fantasy. No, women don't pick you up. Women drive off with your car and money.
Inside, the hot plastic headrest burned my neck and the air was already thick with a sweltering paranoia. With the clunk of my door and the click of my belt I was driven into the seat by a sudden runway acceleration. ‘Awright?’ I heard again. The driver’s hands were relaxed on the wheel and without taking his eyes from the road, he spoke with a vague smile, restrained but friendly, like an unstressed cabbie. He seemed surprised I had no luggage. I told him I was meeting someone. ‘Oh, where?’ he asked. A road sign appeared up ahead and I read off the furthest name on the list. ‘You're in luck, son’, he told me, ‘None of these cunts would have picked you up.’
He caught and passed three cars in quick succession as if making a point before I might martial some defence of the Andalusian culture. ‘Not a chance. They're all cunts out here’ he added amiably by way of explanation, cutting sharply inside the racetrack, unfazed by the barking horn of one of the cunts, ‘You know this stretch?’
No, I had little idea where we were. Nor did he, so he said. He'd been driving for two or three days from the north into 'unknown territory.' He’d picked up the car in ‘Barca’, he went on unnecessarily, and would be dropping it off in Malaga.
Two or three days? Considering his driving, I couldn’t think how he’d taken two or three hours. We were already some distance from the town, speeding through the space into which I'd been staring, too fast to keep all four tyres on some of the sharper bends, though he looked in control, his hands deft and contemptuous on the wheel.
More tanned than raw, he’d obviously been out here far longer than a couple of days and there was something familiar about him I couldn't place, but maybe that was just hearing my own accent here in the desert. A South London accent in Hidden Spain? Some minor criminal on permanent retirement? Some Deptford bouncer made good? He had the build, age larding the muscles, and the calm, indifference of experience. However, with two days growth of beard beneath the sunglasses, sweat stains creeping from the armpits of his formerly white T-shirt, the corrupted brand name ('Cocaine') wrinkling across his chest, he could have been anyone, anyone who'd done some hard driving.
‘So, what brought you here?’
‘Looking for a good beach’ I offered, managing some sort of smile. I didn’t want to sound dismissive but I wasn’t about to provide any personal details, certainly not involving an angry woman who had just driven off with my car and money and passport.
‘By yourself?’
I offered an extended, non-comital version of the same smile, I hadn’t counted on an interrogation. Empty handed, no backpack, not even a towel, I sensed he could hear a defensive tone in my ‘beach’ response, perhaps even a facetious rejection of all further conversation. However, he had a manner of asking questions as if working off a script with no real interest in the answers and seemed to take no offence, preoccupied as he was with the rear-view mirror. I couldn’t think why he’d picked up a hitcher, it obviously wasn’t for the conversation, I wasn’t even a distraction. I didn’t care, but I didn’t want him to change his mind now. Being dropped off out here was not a prospect to consider. With a slow bend in the road the sun shifted to my side. I pulled down the sun-flap and the small mirror showed me the desperate eyes and sweating face of a horror movie hitcher. I was lucky he'd stopped.
‘…a good beach’: the quiet bay of still, transparent water, the semaphore of brilliant bursting sunlight winking on rippling waves, coating the bobbing white hulls of moored boats with liquid marble; the sun singing from the chrome fittings under a hard blue sky, and white ghosts of ships passing across the distant horizon; girls stretched out on towels, face-down, hands restless with a compulsive massage of their tanned limbs, the raised legs the crossed ankles, the teasing touches to the tight elastic of their costumes. Whose thoughts were these? Mine, apparently. It was hardly coming from my driver, unless through some telepathy.
‘How long you been travelling?’ he asked at last (the next question on his list). ‘Long enough’ I told him. He could see by my colour it hadn’t been too long and, watching his nodding head, I was conscious of an unreasonable guilt building inside me, feeling I'd made a mistake in saying anything at all. I was beginning to think there was something deceptively casual in these formulaic questions (as though I was being interrogated by a student of Porfiry Petrovitch or Columbo) making me feel I had something to hide.
All he’d wanted to know, it seemed, was ‘how Millwall had done on Saturday.’ I told him. (They had not done good.) Seeing the opportunity to head off any interrogation, I also told him I was from New Cross, a small, safe un-incriminating piece of evidence. ‘No’ he said, delighted, seeing me as though for the first time, someone who’d grown up in his ‘own back yard'. We swopped information on local pubs and he seemed to relax at last, passing me an orange from a brown paper bag resting by his ankles, and driving with his knees for a bit while he peeled one himself. We cruised open desert at a slightly trembling 90 with no one in sight and he talked Millwall for a while: the problem of competing with the bigger clubs, even in a lower division, having to sell quality strikers just when you're building a side; while I spent a painful couple of minutes trying not to choke on the tantalising trickle of warm juice I managed to suck from the orange.
‘So they lost, eh?’ He repeated, looking at me and then away, nodding to himself as though the news was not unexpected. ‘I had a trial with them as a kid’, he offered, doing something with his eyebrows.
Sure, I thought. ‘So what happened?’
‘What you mean?’ Done me knee.’ he said, a forced smile masking some instinctive aggression as he jammed on the gas to skip past the empty tour bus we'd been racing neck and neck on the sharpest bend we'd yet encountered. ‘Cunts. See how slow they are? It’s all fucking ‘Manyarna’ out here. Don’t even look where they’re going.’ he added, cutting in hard to avoid a head on collision with the blue blur of the BMW appearing suddenly out of the blind bend ahead. My fist tightened around the handle above the door I realised I'd been holding for some time. ‘Fucking Manyarna’.
The road ahead was empty again and conversation dried, his attention focused on ‘killing the kilos’ and the obsessive relationship he’d developed with the rear-view mirror, his eyes flicking back again and again with a Tourette insistence, locked into the thing that was making him push the small car to its limit. His silence and the purpose in his driving began to weigh on me, bringing back a nagging question held off by his genial presence: what was he doing in our car? It was a question I thought would cease to exist if I didn't give it any concentration. Having briefly registered and dismissed any familiarity with the licence plate in the excitement of climbing into the passenger seat, I still couldn’t remember our own number beyond a 2 and a 5; the 2 as maybe the second digit, the 5 somewhere near the end. I was sure, however, if this had been our Golf, somehow I'd have recognised it by now. I was ‘sure’. Where were our magazines? Our papers? Our empty cans? Our Kleenex? Hardly a forensic analysis, I know, but in the context, enough. For someone who looked so dishevelled, he was a suspiciously tidy traveller; but why not? Most of our hoarded waste was Charlie’s. Besides, I reassured myself, these hired cars all looked the same; somewhere there was an entire lot the size of the Den packed with maroon Golfs for rent. 'Vehicles are very rarely stolen' I read in his Rough Guide (same edition as ours, only well-travelled) 'but luggage and valuables left in cars do make an inviting target, and rented cars are easy to spot.'
Besides, there was this awful smell. A sweet, sickly smell I'd noticed when I'd first got in. All the windows were wide open and it had receded a little once we'd started to move, but it remained as a quiet, tantalising presence beneath everything else. Furtively, I studied the soles of my trainers: just dust.
What had brought him to Spain, I asked, just to keep things flowing. He didn't seem to hear. An open top Audi he'd been blocking on the bends for the last few miles had drawn level as the road began to straighten out. He was watching the dark haired girl in the passenger seat with her elbow out the window, her hand now shielding her face as he struggled to keep level. She glanced across, looked through us, then away as the Audi eased ahead and he breathed out some expression which might have been ‘slag’.
He looked at me and then back at the car disappearing ahead of us as though he wanted to explain something (maybe something more about these ‘cunts’) but was determined to reach some destination before he could begin.
We caught and passed a truck which I was sure had ignored me over an hour earlier, the dark, unshaven driver holding a vibrating wheel, his eyes fixed on the road ahead where there was still no sign of another Golf, maroon or otherwise. But I began to feel our progress and I was suddenly alive to the possibility of catching her up.
We crossed a bridge over a dried up river and he nodded at the dash while the road still held his eyes. ‘There's a map in there.’ I reached into the glove compartment trying to avoid the thing my hand found inside: a forgotten packed-lunch, a sandwich sweating inside the folds of its Perspex wrapper and floating in the ooze of what might once have been brown mayonnaise. Something was moving under the plastic, maybe a trapped insect, maybe my imagination. I didn't want to make a scientific study of it. The map underneath, lying across a handful of photos (blue skies, bleached hair, tanned legs) was stained brown at the edges and already folded to expose our stretch of coastline. I placed it on the dash in front of him. The smell lingered even after I'd shut the compartment and I sat with my head tilted toward the open window.
After a few squinting double-takes (road-map-road), he seemed to find what he was looking for. We were in open country, somewhere between here and there. What did I care? I didn't know where I was, what with the sun and the beer humming in my head and the intense panic and relief, I was just staring at the rush of black glossy tarmac through a drugged haze as if I was heading somewhere. The traffic was light and mesmerising, most of it racing at high speed from the opposite direction as though everyone wanted to get through this stricken landscape before something bad happened to them. Something bad could happen here. Ruined farm houses, clumps of isolated vegetation, scorched earth: I felt vulnerable and dependent and pleased we were also moving at pace. Millwall was too quiet for me now, the questions had dried up; he was chasing something (or fleeing) and I began to feel like excess baggage. If he decided to drop me here I'd be fucked.
‘Look at this’ he said, more to himself than to me, indicating, I thought, some burnt out, long abandoned wreck by the side of the road. No hovering vultures, but you had the feeling. Then beyond it suddenly was the Golf, growing from Dinky Toy distance to life-size doppelganger; a mirror vision of ourselves approaching at seemingly matching speed. The squat, square shape quivered in the heat and my straining eyes. Jesus, she's coming back, I thought, my insides melting. I knew I should have held my nerve, stayed exactly where I was in that town and she’d be back. We'd been straining toward 90 for the last few miles, but now, as if wearied, the needle was hovering just under 70. I could also see we were low on fuel. When the licence plate came into focus and the number lead with a 2, I had a sudden impulse to ask Millwall to slow down, perhaps stop but there was no time to explain my insanity; the other numbers now appeared like a random lottery ticket, just numbers and I could do no more than stare mesmerised and impotent at the oncoming mirage. At a strategic distance, maybe 50 yards, the sun burned like a white laser across the oncoming windscreen, peeling off too late to offer even a glimpse of the solitary driver, bathed now in deep shadow and hunched tensely over the wheel. Perhaps a movement in the backseat; perhaps not. Our mirror image scorched past with a light swish of air and I turned to follow it.
‘What?’ he asked, sensing my anxiety. What could I ask him? To pull up? Drop me off? Turn and follow some random car? The stalled impulse became a sinking within my stomach as our twin receded into the distance as if into my own past. Simultaneously, and confusingly, my eyes adjusting from the brilliance of the speeding ribbon of black tarmac in the back window, I noticed first a tear in the padding of the back seat, then, almost hidden beneath the driver’s seat, Charlie's black Minolta camera case, the twisting black strap, as it had been only hours before, attached the wrong way round.
I need to get a grip, I thought. In the wing mirror the road was now Golf free. Behind my blood red eyelids, an afterglow of the driver became an even vaguer silhouette. The nausea rose and sank again. It could have been her, was the thought I struggled to repress. It could have been anyone. Surely I would have recognised her shape, even in shadow. I thought. But for one cold moment, strain as I might, I could not recall her at all; that is, I could summon no visual image; all I could see was the model on the cover of her airport paperback. She was gone. With a sharp right turn, the camera case crept further beneath the seat and I began to convince myself it had not been her, then not even a ‘her’; and Minoltas sold in millions.
In a long empty moment the road wound up and then down a hill into another small sanctuary of Hidden Spain: a run-down street of two-story buildings, closed shutters, narrow alleys, a church, a square, a dead fountain, two bag-packers stretched over four seats outside a shuttered boccadillo. The town seemed to be built on an incline and we climbed through its one main road at 40, then 30, then at a speed which encouraged me to seek out Golfs parked impatiently awaiting discovery in side roads. People were now waking from their Siestas, bodies lounging sleepily from doorways, faces frowning emptily from windows into the street, as though some sluggish Sunday afternoon had settled on the place and never left. I didn’t know what to think now, part of me wanted to ask him to drop me here, at least to quench the thirst I could no longer ignore.
Beyond and a little isolated from the town stood a complimentary run-down gas station. A small boy beneath a crumbling white-washed wall watched us pull in, he was nibbling at an outsize hunk of bread while throwing a stick with his free hand to an energetic black, mongrel dog. We came to a halt beside two dull green pumps in front of the simulation of an office in shantytown; a decaying stage set, in the shade of which an attendant in his twenties slumped back on two legs of a kitchen chair a forgotten newspaper open across his lap. Anonymous in the regulation uniform of skin-tight jeans, Marlboro pack tucked tight to the bicep under the short sleeve of his sized-down red polo shirt, he roused himself as the engine cut, rising to his feet in a slick, athletic movement like a reversed collapse and ambled toward us with that stiff-backed Macho walk which was obviously the house style out here.
Millwall watched him all the way to the car. ‘Look at this cunt’ he mused ‘Fucking queer. Who do they think they fucking are?’ He stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, tilted his chin back as far as it would go, then, shrugging his shoulders loose, started revolving his head in some tension releasing exercise, nodding to me as I opened the door.
Outside the air seemed to crackle and the hot metal burned my hand as I slammed the door behind me; it was, however, the cracked edges of a fist-sized dent below the handle that hit me like the first wave of sunstroke. I struggled for focus in the glare but the small crater remained where it was, my fingers feeling out the hot contours like brail.
‘Don't get lost’ he called after me as I stumbled into the sun, picking my way between oil drums and pointless planks of wood towards a chicken shack I realised, as I passed and returned, was the toilet.
In the dank shadows and gyrating insects, the uneven slats of wood gave a narrowed view on to the pumps and the 'cunt' filling the tank, his face set with the now familiar expressionless frown. Millwall had got out to perform a more elaborate stretching routine, flexing his shoulders and jerking his neck from side to side, his eyes, however, never leaving the car. The rear end number plate was almost facing me, mocking with a meaningless clarity, but from this angle I could no longer see the dent, which remained locked into my head like prima facie evidence. Now what? My mind, a sweating panic of inarticulate theories and scenarios, needed a moment to settle, to think.
From where it had been enthusiastically fetching stick, the skinny dog had now dropped its toy and became drawn to the rear end of the car. Guardedly, Millwall watched it sniffing the air, edging closer and closer. The boy (the mini-cunt) his face wizened as if from a childhood spent staring into the sun, called to his dog, slapping his thigh with an aggressive warning. The numbers clicked on but the pump wasn't working fast enough for Millwall who had began pacing to and fro as though the movement itself could speed up the whole operation. The dog was now running its nose along the rear bumper. The boy’s call rose in pitch and aggression but the animal refused to obey. When Millwall took a step toward it, the boy began to chant what must have been the dog’s name, a rising atonal phrase which he kept repeating in either anger or fear, with no response; impatiently at last striding toward the dog, seizing its collar and lifting its forelegs off the ground. The mongrel, however, was locked into some scent and wouldn't move, staggering like a drunk on its hind legs as the kid yanked, its nose twitching in the air. The cunt looked on insouciantly, the dial wound on. ‘Oi, fuck off out of it!’ shouted Millwall, striding round the driver’s side. He made to kick the animal who shuffled yelping backward and out of the boy’s grasp, then returned with a face-saving growl, crouched for attack. Millwall kicked out again (swinging the leg whose knee ‘he’d done’) and the boy was suddenly indignant, appealing to the attendant, perhaps an older brother, who began to say something; in English, I thought. Millwall made an elaborate mime of failing to understand (‘You what?’ Ear-cupping hand, animated eyebrows, ‘You what, cunt?’), The tank filled, the cunt calmly replaced the nozzle into its cradle still speaking his calm English, while Millwall without altering the rhythm of his stride and with an economy of effort that took the Spaniard by surprise, slammed his forehead into the man's nose, following through with a reflex knee to the groin. He tightened the petrol cap and moved sharply over the fallen body, doing something extra to the face with the heel of his shoe.
Jesus, I thought in confusion, fuck him; or rather I didn't think, there wasn't time. If I had thought I probably would have stayed where I was.
By the time I’d emerged from the shack he was already back in the driver’s seat revving the engine. The attendant, having risen to his feet was limping towards me, shouting at me, this time in Spanish. I was there now in the film. I saw the boy holding back the barking dog, another man, an extra, hidden out back until now, half falling down the steps of the building with what might have been a stick or a rolled up newspaper. I'm not ready for this, I thought. I was right. I started to run in the direction of the Golf which now, incredibly, after pulling away from the pumps, had stopped to wait for me. Within the first couple of steps, however, it was clear I lacked the energy to make it. I was treading water in a routine bad dream cliché, my feet sticking ludicrously to the wet tarmac. Just as ludicrously I was somehow gaining on the car, now moving again like a bend runner awaiting the baton, although the cries behind me told me I was not going to reach it in time. Suddenly I realised the Golf was reversing towards me. I had barely time to swerve as it accelerated, brushing me aside and hitting the limping ‘cunt’ behind me. I heard a cartoon winded sound (Wily Coyote taking another flying anvil in the gut) but couldn't turn to see the damage. I didn't want to see, I was too busy climbing into the passenger seat.
‘What the fuck were you doing?’ Millwall roared at me as we gangster screeched onto the highway in a comic strip dirt cloud. Surely this should have been my line. But he was driving and for all I knew, this was the way he always filled the tank.
‘Got no class’ he muttered to himself ‘No fucking class.’ He had his foot down so hard now we caught and passed a small convoy of trucks which had begun as gleaming miniatures ahead of us. His mouth ran on while his eyes edged off and magnetically back on the rear-view mirror. A bead of sweat hung from his nose, he rubbed at it viciously and I could see the stains under his armpits had widened. The smell inside the car had become more intense now, as though it was leaking through his pores.
‘What did he say?’ I asked. He looked at me and then away. ‘Him?’ he asked himself, surprised, ‘Hah. He's just a cunt.’
‘He might be a dead cunt now.’
‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.’ he said dismissively, ‘No, I busted his leg, maybe, nothing more. Don't take no notice, they're just fucking little whiners.’ We were driving through flat, featureless desert now, nothing for miles or kilometres. Satisfied at last there was no one following, he eased down from a Police-teasing 110 to some speed the car could take without shuddering. My own body was still trembling with the effort I’d made to reach the car, I stretched my legs as far as the seat would allow but I could still feel a twitch in the muscle I couldn't control.
Things were getting out of hand. I no longer knew what to think about this car or the driver, but found myself searching for Charlie hitching by the side of the road. The camera case had gone, I thought it might have been shoved fully under the seat during the panic but my trawling hand found only a gum wrapper.
‘What you looking for?’
‘Nothing. I thought I left something here.’
‘You didn't have nothing.’
‘They'll be looking for this car now.’ I said, as though the thought had just hit me.
‘Now look,’ he smiled after a pause to compose his features, ‘I know you won't fuck up on me, because you're South London. But we're here now. In this.’
‘Are we?’
‘We are.’
I looked out across the heat haze of wasteland. ‘Don't ask me to drop you nowhere.‘ he added casually, as though he could read my mind. ‘If I drop you, no one will pick you up. So let's just get to where we're going.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Where we going? Now that's a question.’ he said. It seemed to be a question without an answer.
His concentration focused as a white Mercedes had somehow caught up with us from nowhere and was now pressing in at our rear. It pulled out and passed on ahead and the tension seemed to ease.
‘Listen,’ he said, talking to the road ahead. ‘This is nothing...I’ll tell you something, something that happened to me.’
Jesus, I thought, what's he done now?
‘This didn't happen here. This happened back home.’ His voice had lowered, taken on a confessional tone (or at least the one I had simulated as a child in the confession box, inventing sins I hoped would impress the priest sitting in the dark behind the grill). This thing, he went on, the thing that happened to him was hard to understand, you wouldn't understand it without knowing what was behind it. I mean, you'd think he was some sort of cunt. This thing was all about a need, an addiction. Don’t get him wrong. This was not even a sex thing. Or maybe it was. ‘When you start out you think it's airtight and alright, you can handle it. Everything. I mean, everything...’ But wait, he'd better start from the beginning.
He was ‘a photographer’, he told me (a little too casually). Yeah, it was a living. No, he was good. He’d just sold a couple of shots he’d taken in Barca (‘Celebs and stuff. Wankers. Up their own fucking arse. Decent shots though’)’. He’d already ‘hit five grand’ from one of his contacts on ‘The Mail’ and was now following up with an assignment in Malaga, ‘Should clear twenty grand all told.’
And this thing, in the beginning, began with a photograph; his inspiration. A press shot. Famous. I must have seen it. (I had. I’d seen it a number of times over the years in magazines and on TV.) It had hit the front page of the Mirror or News of the World when he was a kid. These were the only papers they'd had at home so it must have been one, or both. The woman was sitting in the back seat of a car, the door was open and there was a feeling of movement in the stillness, as though she'd just got in or was just getting out. A hurried Press shot (you could imagine the noise, the scrum, the flashlights) but by accident or Fate (he paused, significantly) or (another pause) ‘something’, everything drew your eye toward her legs.
Legs on the front page, skirt half way up her thigh; quite something in those days. He didn't know who she was, she was just a woman on the front page of his Dad's Daily Mirror. He spent the whole dinner, the whole egg and chips, bread and butter mop-up, furtively studying the long face, the arched eyebrows, the parted lips, all propped up by the HP sauce bottle while his old man read the football pages at dyslexic speed. As the image rose, inch by inch, his Dad squinting and frowning through the league tables at the bottom of the page those legs gradually came into view, like a message on a teleprinter. What was it about them? ‘Something’. Something that went beyond sex. What did he know about sex? What did he know about anything at all? The tabloid was in its genteel infancy, there were no shelves of soft porn where he bought his weekly Dandy and Beano. He was eight years old and the image ‘hit him pure’, undiluted by any background fuzz, any white noise of politics or scandal, stirring some feeling he didn't understand, something adult and sacred. ‘Like the Virgin Mary.’
The eight-year-old went back out to rejoin his mates in their day-long game of football, but he kept the photo (for which he received an outsize hiding from his outsize Irish Catholic Mum who found it cleaning under his bed) and playground kiss-chase began to reveal another, confusing, dimension. A dimension unlocated in the real world, for the giggling, gangling girls he came across were creatures merely for teasing and abuse. If anything, he became an even more violent exponent of the abuse business. Girls his own age remained just girls, but dreams of the woman haunted him and in these he was frequently called upon to rescue her from King Kong or Godzilla, whose movies, by coincidence, had just been playing at Saturday Morning Pictures ‘down the Elephant and Castle’.
In his daytime life he went back to the happy and healthy enjoyment of the world of football heroes and friendly, faithful dogs, comics and cartoons. But somehow, in the background, there was that feeling. Somehow he made a connection.
He what?
No, listen. This was serious.
He was in the school gym struggling to climb a rope he usually monkeyed up no problem, when he found himself hanging there unable to climb any higher; a weakening, disabling sensation (not pleasurable because it was too pleasurable) shutting off each attempt to rise ('scuse the pun'). At the time this was just a curious irritation to the free flow of ‘Pirates’ across the gym apparatus (he was caught annoyingly easily) and a blow to his 'manhood' as Jimmy Curren was, for the first (and only) time, able to beat him in a race up the ropes. However, although the feeling persisted as a disturbing irritation, he tried to recreate the sensation when at night he lay in bed thinking of those lips, those legs.
So it was then, on and on through a furtive history of pin-ups, slag mags, and wet dreams, this one image initiated, measured and superseded it all ('Amazing really, come to think of it'). The image was his secret, and the secret had a powerful opportunity to work on him. So when it came to real women something was already in place; a formula was formulated. He knew that. He knew what was behind it all. He'd had time to think. There were various attractions: the face had to be some sort of shape, of course; but he had no real interest in the breasts. It was useful to see a pair of them, but their function was no more than supplementary, they were there to make up the Jesus-fucking-Christ profile. Above all it was legs.
Why was it, however, that real legs (on his estate, anyway) always belonged to slags? ‘That was a funny thing’ (amused bewilderment) ‘Couldn’t get over it.’ Somehow they had magical, redeeming powers.
‘Mmm’ I told him (What the fuck?), my eyes tracking the lack of hitchers (with ‘real legs’ or otherwise), the flat, neutral font of the signage and the fork in the road ahead; the panic I’d felt on seeing the dent in my door was now working overtime.
The trouble was there were ‘just too many women’. Relationships? Don't talk to him about relationships. There was nothing like the photo, the image. When you had the thing there in your hand, it all somehow transformed. ‘It’s too real.’ You see it from the wrong angles, you get a critical edge: this thigh could do with some extra-curricular in the gym, this skin tone too pale. Yet even with a more strenuous work out regime, more time under the sun lamp, something wasn’t working; that elusive ‘something’ had been lost. And invariably, at the moment he’d be thinking this, gazing longingly from a car, bar, bedroom window, there in the street striding not so innocently away from him would be the very model he desired. Incredible, he thought, how legs can look better as they recede further and further into the distance, as the girl is walking away. It was an illusion, of course.
Here it was photography began to take over. He loved the power it gave him to remove, improve, create. Women, of course, were the natural, the only subject of his portfolio. What was he, a hetero-Mapplethorpe? A sensuous Helmut Newton? He was a fucking artist, like some sort of plastic surgeon of the page.
‘It's an obsession. I know what it is. I'm not fully balanced. Sometimes I'm sure, I know. I know it's got nothing to do with sex.’ He smiled his bewildered smile, rediscovering the innocence all over again.
Yes, of course it was a sickness; all obsessions are a sickness. Soon the only way to get started with sex was through photos. He looked at me, then away, his eyes glazing off into a further distance as he remembered when he was eighteen and (in a hesitant, ‘don’t know why I’m telling you all this’ way) met his first real glory on a small, Greek island: the white-washed houses, the empty blues of sea and sky, the dazzle of hot, deserted sands and the bronze, starfished body. He had left her as he left the island, searching for some greater Paradise: Heaven, perhaps.
The lines on his face deepened, his smile fixed on the mirror and we cruised steadily at 5k under the limit as the mosquito buzz of a Police motorcycle grew behind us. It drew out alongside, then shot on ahead shrivelling to a black dot in the distance. 'Cunts' he hoarsely whispered, his eyes on the white of his knuckles gripping the wheel as though talking about his hands. ‘See. What did I tell you?’ he smirked.
Part of me had wanted to call out to the cop while some sane part of my mind told me to stay calm, I'd got it all wrong. She was just ahead of us, we were gaining on her all the time.
At the next available opportunity, however, as though he’d intended to do so all along (‘Short cut’ he winked), he pulled off the main road onto a single lane which after a few dawdling miles began to run out of smooth tarmac as scrubland closed in around us. The distant mountains rose high into the haze of heat. We seemed to have travelled no closer towards them. A feeling of suspension now overtook any vague sense of purpose I might have had, as if we were lost, and I now badly wanted to locate our position on the map.
‘The what?’ he asked.
‘The map.’
‘I know where we are. Fucking nowhere.’
I pulled out what I thought was a guide book from the door pocket and opening it, several Polaroids spilled into my lap. Hurried holiday snaps: awkward, unfocused bodies, bleached faces, startled blondes squinting hard-faced into the sun. One, still sticky to the touch, showed only the lower half of a woman, stretching skirt-free across what might have been a stained maroon duvet, one leg straight, one bent at the knee, the edges blurred with movement as though she was turning over onto her stomach.
He hadn't noticed any of this (or at least pretended not to notice) already deep into his ‘experience’, (this ‘thing that had happened to him’), some woman he'd picked up in a bar somewhere. There he was leaning over the counter to study the neat backside of a barmaid reaching down to the lower shelf to retrieve a cold bottle of Pils, putting a lot into that reaching although she somehow hadn't picked up the trick of bending her knees to make it easier. Then in walked ‘the one’.
‘It was her, I swear.’ Just as she always was: high forehead, catwalk stride, legs (two of them). Alright, the red hair was ‘cut different’ and dyed blonde, the face paler in the heat and for a second, ‘only a second mind’, less vivid than the mental imprint he'd carried with him all those years. But with the next heartbeat the two were one.
‘This was the strange thing’ he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side, ‘No way were these the most perfect legs. No way.’ He kept repeating the awe-struck mantra. Seated on the barstool, however, (more Bambi than track star) there was ‘something about them’, ‘something that brought something back to him’. It was in the way she held herself. ‘Like, fucking arrogant.’
Water was all she wanted and a phone, but when a glass was placed in front of her (jealously, he thought) she merely sipped at it, toying with the phone on the counter as though she couldn’t bring herself to make the call she needed to make. She barely heard his banter, ignored his script and tossed down the brandy he bought her without a word as though this was his job, as though the drink and the service were complimentary. Now she could make that call. She punched out a number and waited, answering his questions with vague movements of the head. At the other end of the line no one answered, or if they did she gave no sign but he could barely see her face, hidden as it now was behind the veil of lank hair. Where can I find a cab, she asked the barmaid, who merely shrugged as though she couldn’t understand her and glanced at Millwall. Jesus, he thought. It was too good to be true. There had to be something wrong.
Slowly she became aware he was talking to her. Her face changed expression only once, and then as though trying out a new pose. Had she ever been a model? Don’t lie, of course she had. What was wrong? Did she need to get somewhere? Reluctantly, she nodded, shoving handfuls of hair straight back over her shoulder in that way she had, all wrists, like a Javanese dancer.
She was in luck, he told her, watching her reply with a faint smile that might have been no smile at all. ‘Look’ he told her ‘I'll drive you.’ He had to tell her this three times more before she nodded some sort of assent. Now this was more fucking like it.
He could not believe it. It was something wondrous watching her bending down to get onto his car. ‘I mean,…’ He winced.
‘Where was she going?’ I asked. He didn't seem to hear but the question interrupted his flow. He frowned to himself to recapture the picture.
‘Where?’ He shook his head. ‘She got there. She got there, alright.’
She was laughing. Well, smiling. Well her mouth was tight and she was holding her stomach and falling forward. The ‘brandy’, obviously. Well it was hardly his fucking jokes, although these were coming thick and fast now, as he tried to keep her distracted, his mouth on auto, his hand ‘accidently’ brushing her thigh, finding no resistance, moving higher. ‘But just when I thought....’
He seemed to see something I couldn't see and pulled over to the side of the road, which had dwindled to a winding dirt track, his hand still moving gently over the wheel as though remembering her body. In the still, silent air the smell inside the car was now intense. His silence extended, as if words were in his head which wouldn't get organised and he was waiting for them to settle. ‘Wait here’ he told me, throwing open the door and wandering in the direction of the ragged stone wall of some ruined farmhouse (out of habit I assumed, for we were completely isolated here). He swung himself over the waist high wall but instead of urinating, began carefully pacing the barren ground as though sizing up a plot of land or searching for something already buried. I watched the keys swinging from the ignition, still waiting for something, which I realised was the end of the story. It was something I knew instinctively I didn't want to hear.
I slid across into the driver's seat, turned the ignition and threw the gears into reverse. His shoulders heaved, his head turned with the sound of the engine but with no sense of urgency. Perhaps he was still lost in his thoughts or couldn't believe what was happening. I couldn't believe it. I wasn't thinking now, just driving in a panic until I hit some rut in the track and stalled. In the rear-view mirror I could see him strolling toward me, shaking his head. As he hesitated by the boot the engine fired up again and I shot forward. I heard his hand slapping the window and glimpsed his shrinking figure staggering around, shouting something I couldn't hear.
In a running sweat I found my way to the main road and drove back in the direction we'd come, all the time looking for the figure of Charlie hitching on the side of the road. Why I thought I’d see her I had no idea but I badly wanted to see her now. I had to see her. It was the smell that drove me, settling heavily around me like some guilty reminder of an error of judgement. I threw the sandwich out the window but it made no difference.
There was little traffic on the road now and no sign of life as I accelerated past the garage. Just as well, I thought; he'd pushed the car so hard the engine was fucked, I just hoped to make it back to the town before it gave out completely; back to Charlie standing there sulkily, hands on hips, waiting for me,
Acceleration was no more than a retarded dream, a motor mirage, as I almost clung neck and neck to the motorcyclist waving me down. Parking a few yards ahead, he took his time strolling up to the window, stopping to study the front of the car as though he might be asked to draw it later in some test. I waited quietly in a now cold sweat. At last he asked to see my licence, at least that's what I assumed he was asking in his faltering English, a little like my own at the time. He had a tired cop's face, the face of a hard-working father and husband; it looked very tired as he listened to my explanation of where I'd picked up the Golf and where he'd find the ‘thief’. I think I even used those very words. And had he seen a hitcher; about so high? Blonde hair, long legs?
Of course I had no licence, no passport, no identification, I was some impossible character emerging from a crude road movie. He asked me to ‘step out of the vehicle’ and wait a ten yard distance to the rear while he searched the car. The sun was a tightening ring on the back of my head and a now familiar sinking motion had reasserted itself in my stomach. Finding nothing of interest in the back seat, he sprung the boot and drew back the dark covering sheet like a conjuror to show me the blonde, her eyes vacuous, her mouth gaping (probably mirroring my own at the time). A thread of blood from her nose running down into her mouth had long since dried in the heat. Gently overcoming some obstruction, he pulled the cloth all the way, revealing the bare arms tied behind her back, her ankles secured demurely together, her knees drawn up in the foetal position. He studied her reproachfully, like a disappointed father, then looked at me as I gazed down dizzily in the unchanging sunlight. It was all such a cliche. Hadn't we both been here before? She looked a smaller, graceless figure and while he rattled a series of severe instructions into his radio, I felt a furtive urge to touch those too symmetrical knees and rearrange the position of her legs.
DG 2015
