‘I remember when I thought I had a life.’ he said, without lifting his eyes from the road. ‘How wrong I was…Life. Don’t talk to me about life. No, don’t talk to me about life.’ You hadn’t opened your mouth, you were still watching the headlights picking up the white lines like tracer fire, throwing the miles out behind, too slowly.


Tracer fire, who would see tracer fire in these white lines? A combat survivor? A war zone game player? Neither induced any muscle memory of trigger or joystick and faded into dead ends. Why not lines of cocaine stretched across smoked glass, hospital corridor lights above a speeding trolley? If you stared hard enough or long enough, either seemed just as likely. More, perhaps. ‘We only see what we already know’, you thought, aware of your own awareness. ‘imagination is limited by experience.’ Temporarily, the words themselves seemed like beginning of a breakthrough, the deceptive profundity of the  thought, illusory though it might have been, suggested an analytical mind; perhaps an academic: teacher, lecturer, professor even. So, why not doctor?


‘Whenever I saw an actor in an old movie pretending to drive as he delivered his lines, 10 to 2 hands swinging up and down to the to and fro of that smart-arsed script. You know, that staccato, the hard-boiled beef with the ‘broad’ beside him in the old black and white,  the two of them tossing those lines back and forth in that simulated brawling, as if they hated each other and you know they’ll be fucking like rabbits come the last reel. Either that or she’ll be gunned down by some evil fuck which will give our man his excuse to fuck up a whole truckload of evil fucks. And the hands, you know, up and down, like a puppet. As if dodging ruts in the road. Completely, I mean completely, out of sync with the film on the backdrop. Fucking hands  still moving as he turns to look at her for his cue,’ He began weaving from side to side, as if some physical demonstration was required, drunkenly crossing the white lines and back (dodging the tracers), ‘I mean where’s the director? I’d be like watching them, the hands, open mouthed. Open mouthed, like this. Squirming. Like watching a horror movie. What can I say, I was a sensitive kid. Couldn’t take in a word they were saying, Just shouting at them in my head to ‘Look at the road’. Shut the fuck up and look at the fucking road.’ ‘He paused for you to what, smile, laugh, savour the image?


‘That’, another pause for effect, ‘is what I should have been doing...Looking at the road. Trying to see what was ahead of me...So’s I could adjust, prepare, do something.’ He shook his head ‘Hah, that’s life. That’s fucking life, man. The things you don’t know you don’t know. Sure you don’t want this?’ He was pointing to the sign, ‘Services 7 miles’, still thinking of the overturned car you’d invented to explain the cut he’d seen across your head. No, the car could wait, it wasn’t going anywhere, you’d called everyone, police, garage, etc and no, you hadn’t wanted to call insurance, all that could wait too, you had to make the hospital first. There were people depending on you.


‘So, brain doc, eh? You guys are all heart.’ The words, appearing completely credulous in his ‘actor’s’ voice, trailed a tone of doubt. ‘Jeez, you guys get younger all the time. Or I’m getting older. ‘Brain man?’ He smiled wistfully, ‘Yeah, Jools could do with some help with that shopaholic obsession.’


‘Probably outside my field’ You tried to match his smile, turning it briefly to include the woman in the back seat (any understanding of psychiatry you might have, was at the moment at least, limited to re-runs of Frasier) ‘Operating might be a little extreme’


Coping with the small-talk interrogation: where you lived, where you worked, how many wives and children you’d acquired, what you were doing out on the road ‘in the middle of the night’, your organic biography had extended almost effortlessly to include a call from your ex, a sick child and a recklessly driven BMW now face down  in a ditch, ‘wherever’. All of which he took down in mental notes, nodding solemnly at each new detail.’They need me back at the hospital right now.’ you’d told him, ‘I’m a brain man.’ The last part you’d added thinking this was the self-effacing, patronising manner a surgeon might use to describe himself but even as the words came out of your mouth you could hear their lack of conviction


‘Jools’ remained a silent tension behind you. A tension you’d sensed back at the petrol station as you watched the driver track her progress from kiosk to pump (tight-skirted, stilletoed stride); the black dress, cut to display the length of her arms and legs, contained some sparkling weave of thread which caught the light of the forecourt catwalk as she came to a halt beside the SUV, feet together, arms folded, cowl of blonde hair narrowing her face with what might have been a supercilious look, perhaps alcohol induced. While he (dark suit, white shirt, expensive grey hair) pulled at his already loosened tie as if the action itself helped maintain the genial smile of his, possibly drug enhanced, ‘Can’t leave you here. Middle of nowhere.’ Without acknowledging your existence, however, she’d merely stared hard at the man who seemed to take this as his cue, repeating his ‘Can’t leave you here’, like an actor unsure of the next line. Her eyes widened meaningfully, she opened the door herself and climbed into the back. As you joined him up front, he talked on to cover the tension filling the car, as he did now, running on his fluent self-help seminar.


‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, passing the slip road, the glowing village of the service station. ’It’s all in the mind, you know. All mechanics. Just a matter of connecting this bit to that bit. Spending my money makes her feel good. There must be some technique to short circuit that. Make her feel good about something else.’


The wistful smile hardly left his lips. You wondered just how serious he was taking you, whether your voice carried the appropriate gravitas, and began holding your face upright and concerned so he might read a past of struggles in the operating theatre, painful talks with grieving relatives and the future life and death challenges into which you were heading.


Well if you’re heading for the smoke tonight you got your work cut out…You haven’t heard? Where you been? Half of Croydon’s on fire. The other half soon, we hope.


‘No. Medicine. That’s what, 7 to 8 years hard labour over the books; school, uni and beyond? Before you can make the same money as the average taxi driver and start paying off the debt you’ve picked up along the way. Pays off in the long run, I guess. But the shit you have to deal with along the way. All those years training to become what, objective, detached, a body mechanic immune to the piss and shit and blood and guts and tears. Wow. You must have a vocation.’


You saw a naked body stretched across an unmade bed.


‘Yeah, Life.’ he remembered, picking up his theme again, ‘A movie coming to a theatre near you. What’s all that about?’ He picked up the balding tennis ball lying incongruously in the well above the gearstick and began squeezing it as he drove one handed. ‘So, Doctor.. ‘


‘Dom’


‘Dominic…Dom…DD. Off to save another life? Well, let me give you some advice. You need more than a doctor to save a life. Ain’t that the case, Jools?’


The tension in the back of the car seemed to intensify as the pause extended, without turning all the way round you could see the woman’s bowed head, absorbed in the glow of her phone (the way a woman of an earlier monochrome movie might be studying her compact mirror).


‘You think you’ve found a woman who is everything to you, who will be your life. You marry her...(course I’m not talking Jools here) Marry her...and in 2-3 years you have 2-3 kids and she’s the wife you no longer want to fuck. And who sure as hell don’t want to fuck you. Well, fuck you, is all I can say. Right, Jools? Right Jools?’


‘You got that right’ she said, with no attempt to conceal the effort in her bored voice. The accent Stateside, perhaps West Coast.


‘Not that you have time to think about this when you’re holding down a job that barely covers the mortgage on a place you no longer love. It’s not a house, it’s a millstone. Yeah, when did that milestone become a millstone? It once looked the perfect Saturday evening TV family-friendly sitcom home, but now...Now your eyes are open, now you can see...’


Both hands were now hovering in a mime above the wheel to help you see by re-constructing whatever it was he saw in the air. Headlights appeared round a slow bend. Thankfully the words returned, replacing his right hand on the wheel. ‘...only the imperfections. And that’s all you see. Your children grow from cute, crawling babies depending on you for their very existence, to sulking teen scumbags. Yes, you heard me correctly, Miss Political Correctness.’ The title thrown over his shoulder meeting no obvious response. ‘Sucking your income and your dreams. Your dreams. Hah, forget dreams. Delete dreams. Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse? Even holidays are on the back burner and your kids - your kids - whine about what other kids in the street have (whine in technicolour detail) like they’ve entered you in some dick competition for Dads (and they’re losing their stake)...taking anything you’ve scraped together - for them - for granted. Taking you for granted. And everything you have, everything you provide -for them- is substandard. Jesus, you’re supposed to be grateful when they still call you ‘Dad’. Dad? Then they’re gone and you are staring at a worn out woman you don’t even recognise, across a silent dinner table, on an evening you realise (by the prices on the menu) is a celebration of 20 odd years of service. And you’re studying the bill.The bill, right. You see exactly what this means. I mean, exactly. mean. You’re only thinking what she’s thinking. You know it’s what she’s thinking because what else is there to think but where did all those years go? 20 fucking years. Like that. But you know what you’re facing. Like a parole board who always tell you ‘What, think you’re leaving? Oh no, son, back in that slammer for another 5,’ And all those dreams? Before this thing began. Those paths to better lives? Well, they’re just dreams...Is that what you call love? Is that what you call commitment?’


You didn’t know.


‘Still, all told, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ His mouth smiled briefly. ‘Would I, Jools?’
    
‘No’ the voice from the back of the car mouthed the single syllable with a reluctant drawl.
    
‘No what?’
    
Jools adjusted her position, you heard her crossing her legs as she leaned into the tinted window, peeling back a lank strand of blonde hair to tuck behind her ear. ‘No, you wouldn’t have it any other way.’
    
‘Damn right. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. We are what we make of ourselves. So, what did I do?’ There was a brief pause which made it seem a genuine question and he was holding his head away from you at a strange angle as if posing for a photograph. Something, you felt, was expected of you here. ’I became one of the walking dead’


You must have looked blank.


‘The Dreamless Dead?’


You must have looked even blanker (failing some test).


‘Sky? HBO? The Dreamless Dead. Ironic or what? Jesus, Where have you been, in hibernation?’ He said this not unkindly, with simulated shock, as if he saw you as someone who could take a joke, as if the joke was your opportunity to rise to a superior level (somewhere roughly close to his own) and you smiled back to reassure him he wasn’t mistaken.


‘I was one of the ‘Dreamless’. He shook his head in amused bewilderment. ‘Survival in the world of the zombie’


‘Really?’ you tried to make yourself sound impressed.There didn’t appear to be much else to say. You said it anyway: ‘I don’t really get this obsession with zombies, if I want to see bits and pieces hanging off people, I just go to work.’


‘Hear that, Jools? Now that’s a genuine brain doc speaking. Try getting straight talking like that from the suits at HBO. Even now’ turning back to you,’ some blind editor is tripping over my best scenes on the cutting room floor’


‘One who still has a cutting room’, said Jools


‘But you don’t know zombies. There’s zombies and then there’s zombies. I can see you need educating. I was all over them. I knew how to deal with them.  ‘Was’ of course is the operative word. Was. Was. Nonetheless, there I was, day after day dealing with those fucking mindless spooks. By which, of course, I mean the producers.
Series 1, surviving expendable; Series 2, talking part. Series 3, more scenes, more lines. I just kept in there, moving up that pecking order.
 
‘How did I do this? How?  I developed a backbone. I had followed my dream: I went out for a ride and never went back. Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going...’ Quite unselfconsciously, he broke into song, hammering the beat out on the rim of the leather wheel: ‘Everybody’s got a hungry heart...Everybody’s got a hungry heart...Is that you singing back there, Jools.’


‘I don’t think so.’ You heard a snuffling sound, as if  she was inserting something into her nose.


‘Yeah,’ he smiled ‘Only it was no wrong turn. And no great surprise really. I’d done the knowledge: Stanislavsky, Stella Alder, Strasberg. These mumbling kids today know nothing. Found my way into a few ads, a couple of shorts, did a few favours for a few ‘friends’, eventually found myself in LA. LA. Can you believe it? Long way from Solihul. Eh Jools? Got a break. Got. A. Break. Amazing what you can do when you drop the luggage...and you’re hungry.’


You could feel something touching the back of your head, a gentle, glancing touch, so light it might have been the ghost of a memory. You thought of a room suffused with soft rose light, a hotel room, silk scarves thrown over bedside lamps. When it touched again, lingering brazenly across your neck, you allowed yourself to accept it as complicit human contact.
 
‘All gone now, course’, he said, the voice sobering, his eyes fixed on the road, both hands now on the wheel.’And don’t think I don’t know who killed me. No...not that dumb biker with the hunting knife. Killed me. I’m talking HBO, I’m talking dollars, I’m talking extended series, box sets, repeat fees. I’m talking financial security. And they killed me. Money men brought in some new fuck, some new kid on the block. Producer. Some ‘LA hotshot’. You know the type. Got to make their mark. Said it was the accent. Said he didn’t want Ozzy Osbourne out there in Dystopialand. Or, get this, (after I’d had a few words, told them what was what) ‘someone impersonating Ozzy Osbourne. Badly.’ He said this in a mocking imitation of an LA accent. Badly.  ‘Think I’m blowing smoke up your ass’


‘And there it was, I was gone. The mad fuck, the hunting knife, the shredded contract. Don’t think it didn’t hit me right to the core. I hung around the apartment for days like a…Could’t talk to no one. Like a…Ever seen a stage actor who dries in the umpteenth show of a run in which he’s been saying the same lines night after night, until he’s walking from mark to mark like an automaton. Like a zombie. Mind on something else - no longer the character he’s playing.


‘Some days I even thought of taking one of them out. Its what you think, you know. Might be worth taking the hit. Just for the personal satisfaction. I hear Tim Robbins runs acting classes in Norca Prison. I’m always looking to develop myself.


‘But it’s all about how you bounce back. What did they know? It’s LA. They all think we sound the same out there. It’s almost a tradition. You’re a Brit, you’re typecast,. You go out there with an English accent, your playing cold lizard psychos, Nazis; the rest of your life.


‘I was doing something different, bringing some warmth to the part. What do they know? It’s Sugartown. It’s another country. La-la Land. No one out there’s even crossed the borders in years. Jools here’s spent most of her life out there. In Sugartown. Don’t tell her I told you, will you?’


‘Oh, ha-blooody-hah’ said Jools on cue, with an exaggerated English accent; her breath close to the back of your head.
 
‘No matter, no Sugartown hotshot from La-la Land’s going to hold me back’. I just developed my own screenplay: The Punisher. Surefire winner. Guy comes home to find his wife raped by intruders, animals (Mexicans, of course, I’m selling to the US market). Spends the next two hours running them down (‘I will find you  and I will kill you’ sortathing). What?’


You’d said nothing.


‘I know it’s not original. Did I say I had an ‘original’ screenplay? Who wants original? Who’s going to risk money on original? Hear that, honey? Like I’d write original.’


‘Mmmm’ the voice softer, you could feel her breath on your neck; the contact, sensing no initial rejection, lingered, more intimate than a kiss. ‘Fat chance.’


‘Yeah, fat chance. It’s already been optioned. We are back on track. Back - on - track. Right on the money. But it’s only the beginning. I got something special waiting in the wings; for the right moment. A book I’ve found: I say book, vigilante movie really, way i see it. Great concept. Two guys, buddies, channelling Batman and Robin, think they can clean up the city all by themselves. Its set in Saga City (as yet zombie-free) throwing in a bone there for the intellectuals among us. Know your Milton? ‘Long is the way and hard that out of hell and shit leads up to light.’ Our light seekers are driving round at night taking out the bad guys in bad ways. Can’t fail. Everybody loves a vigilante (look at Eastwood; a one-face actor turned into a legend. Look at Arnie, for Christ’s sake). Only worry I got is the PC crowd, not that they’re likely to be queueing for any movie without subtitles. Climate’s changing, though; as we speak.


‘As we speak…The Vigilante, eh Jools’


‘Mmm…the vigilante’ she echoed tiredly (as though about to endure a lecture she’d heard before, many times).


‘… Has to be a loner. No family, no children, no ties. So he can act, see. I’m holding out for a Brit, Neeson preferably (‘I will find you, I will kill you’). Love that scene. See what an actor can add? A British actor. It’s the flat delivery makes the line great, the blank certainty, ‘I will kill you’ its no empty threat, its a fact, this thing is going to happen. Yes, he’s a father, technically, but he’s a vigilante first. He’s fighting for his daughter but she’s no longer his, she belongs to another family now, another world, and when he brings her home, he’s Wayne carrying Natalie Wood over the threshold at the end of the Searchers, he’ll be turning right around from those startled, grateful faces, turning away and back out the door while a new Mum and Dad take his place in the home. ‘Ride away’ the song tells him because he has no home. The Searcher’s? Yes, I know. Ford, ’56. It’s a long and noble tradition, this vigilante business. Kurosawa to Leone. It’s a study in isolation. Your rank and file vigilante can’t be domesticated, never going to happen, he has to do what he has to do then disappear. Into the sunset. Walking off to vigilante the fuck out of someplace else.


‘Still...You know what still sticks in my throat? I could have done so much for those guys. Not the producers; scumbags. No, I’m talking about my band of buddies. They were depending on me. How were they going to fend for themselves without the old Brit, the old Black Country nous? Fucking Yanks? Give me a break. Two months later I have to  sit and watch Jordan, lovely girl, a pure angel, slaughtered by a pack of dog-brain zombies. Oops. Spoiler alert. Tell you any more, I’ll have to kill you’ His mouth smiled to let me know he was only joking. ‘Lovely, lovely girl, Laura.’


‘Jordan’ you corrected him.


‘Yeah, right. Say, thought you’d never caught the show? Jordan needed me. Needed me. Needed my protection. I could have saved her. And where was I? Sitting at home watching her being ripped apart and sinking into oblivion, fucking oblivion. And where is she now?’ He looked across at you suspiciously (acting probably) as if you might really be able to tell him where she was and how she could be saved. Maybe he thought she’d somehow been on your operating table. ‘No doctor’s going to help her now. She’s beyond help now. See, you can’t be humane to these fucks. They’re not human. They’re fucking zombies.‘


‘And that girl...She works…worked so hard. You know why she worked so hard?’


‘Yeah’ said Jools ‘It’s in a million Country and Western songs.’


‘That girl...Her ‘Daddy’ (you should hear the love in her voice when she says that word), the one man she truly loved, just gave up on life one day. The day he lost his job. Settled into the couch on that very morning and never got off it again. One day she’s waiting at school with her empty lunch pail and a worried teacher and there’s no pick up to pick her up. Teacher calls home and there’s no reply. Teacher drives her home, despite her protests (she’s ashamed anyone at school would see where she lived). Drove her home to find her ‘Mama’ gone, all the contents of the apartment out on the street and her ‘Daddy’ lying beside them asleep in his pyjamas, which amounted to a pair of ancient tracksuit bottoms. Laura is mortified. As she’s standing there it begins to rain and he wakes, sitting up and looking around at the furniture as if seeing it for the first time then begins to sob and punch himself in the side of the head. All this while the teacher’s standing there open-mouthed; Jordan beside her, head hung  in shame.


‘So what happened?’


‘You don’t know?’ said Jools (in her flat drawl),  ‘Read Raymond Carver.’


‘What happened? What happened? What does it matter? Zombies killed her a year later…I’ve written her into Vigilante. The part’s going to bring her back to life. She…that girl’s going to be my salvation.’


‘Look…’ he said, turning right around ‘Don’t give me that shit about Carver…’ A deep foghorn blared and the headlights of a freight truck widened to saturate the windscreen before veering aside. The interior filled with stark light and you were spinning as if caught in a slip stream, looking at the white-knuckle hands suddenly moving up and down like a puppet’s on the wheel. Something glanced off the side of your face, the back of a hand or a tennis ball perhaps, and you were watching the dark whipping along the windscreen then the side windows as the car, brakes screeching, revolving within the psychedelia of blurred headlights until you were somehow facing Jools in close-up twisting and shaking her hair from side to side as if performing in a music video, a part which possibly required a younger woman. 

​DG  2017