Traffic was thickening by the minute, and at the next box of lights a London swine wheeled down his window and called across at me that I should buy a new car. I was too done-for to respond, but Bill, straight from a refreshing doze against June’s precious bosom, poked his nut out of the gaping windowless window and shouted in his best, vicious jailbird’s voice that if the other bloke didn’t stop his feeble insults he’d take him and his instalment-plan tin-lizzie to pieces and pelt him with the rusty bits after he’d been tied to a traffic light with a fanbelt. The trouble about insulting somebody in a car is that you can’t see how big they are, though it was certain that no person could be bigger than Bill Straw’s big mouth.
The lamps were still on blood-red stop, so this chap swings his door open and comes over, aiming a punch at Bill that Bill dodges so that it grazes June. The light changed to amber so I shot forward as fast as my battered car would go, swinging across to the inner lane so as to put a line of protective traffic between me and the hefty swine now set to get my liver. This was a feat in itself, but soon his souped-up Zodiac came gliding sideways on, so close I felt a bump as he got me at the place where my fender should have been. ‘Let’s stop and fight it out,’ said Bill. ‘There’s a razor in my bag. I’ll cut him in bits.’
‘Maybe he’s got one too,’ I said. ‘It looks as if his boulder-head has been in a few avalanches.’ A wide front view with flashing headlights filled my mirror, and he then swung to get me in the flank. Bill mumbled something about having seen that face before, but couldn’t think where or who it belonged to. When I caught a glimpse of it looking at me, it seemed the sort that never forgot the face it looked at. My steering was so erratic that maybe he thought me a skilful manoeuvrer against his attacks — if a trifle reckless. But I hit the high kerb, and one of my wheel hubs spun along the gutter. It was the last I had, and made me want to get out and kill him. Several glimpses showed him as well dressed and about fifty, with a huge red-stoned ring on a finger of his hand that gripped the wheel. ‘I’ll know him if I ever meet up with him,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget that face.’ He tailed me again, came close for another bumper-knock, trying to open my car like a sardine tin but do no damage to his own. He cruised alongside for a few seconds, and Bill also got a good look at him. As the thump tore against my front wing June said: ‘Bill’s fainted — or he’s seen a ghost. He’s as white as a sheet. If we can’t rustle up some smelling salts or another flush of whisky he’ll pass into the eternal fields.’
‘I know who it is,’ he croaked. ‘Why didn’t I guess sooner?’
I made a suicide dive to get back at him, feeling my car so battered that I’d nothing left to loose. ‘Who? For Christ sake, tell me!’
A police car with wailing sirens and a blue light flashing pushed by us both, and my attacker slowed down in front as if steel wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
‘It’s Claud Moggerhanger. I sold a brand-new car to him for fifty forged quid a few years back. What a nut I am, getting on the wrong side of him. I’ll never open my big mouth again.’
I thought he was going to burst out crying. ‘Not in this car you won’t, anyway. Just call next time he comes close and say you’ll apologize. Maybe he’ll let up.’
My engine started to bang like a machine gun that shot nuts and bolts, and I thought the end was close, even without Claud Moggerhanger. Strangely enough, it picked up speed and whizzed its howitzer way towards Hendon. As I crossed the North Circular I hoped vindictive Claud would veer off east or west, but he didn’t, and came in for another bang just beyond. It was like a dogfight, but he missed. Thinking he’d done the worst, and leaving my engine to do the rest, he turned off before me.
I reached the traffic island in Hendon, and instead of going round it to the middle of London, I took a wild swing to the left, pulling up to the kerb as soon as I could without killing us all. When the car was still, and a reasonable silence reigned, and before anybody could comment on our miraculous deliverance, the engine dropped out.
‘We just made it,’ said Bill, opening the left-hand door, which also fell off. ‘It was exciting while it lasted, though.’
I sat with my head in my hands, over the steering wheel, reflecting ruefully (that’s the only phrase I can use) on the fact that I’d bought the car especially to come to London in, and that such a simple journey had cost me a hundred and forty quid. At that price I could have hired a Rolls-Royce and chauffeur and eaten caviar and drunk champagne all the way down, and still stayed the night in Claridges or wherever the best doss-house was. ‘I thought I’d never see my little girl again,’ said June, pulling her valise out.
‘Come on, love,’ said Bill, ‘we’d better get going. I expect Michael’s going to stay here a while and make arrangements to have his car reconditioned.’
‘Go away,’ I said. ‘Vanish.’ It started to pour with rain, heavy drops drumming on the roof, homely and comforting now that the car had stopped, streams of water going down the perspex windscreen.
‘We can’t vanish,’ Bill said, ‘without the Tube fare.’ I gave him a ten-bob note. ‘What about a quid for a cup of coffee?’
‘Perish,’ I told him.
‘A right bloody comrade you are,’ he threw at me. ‘Come on, June. You can see me any night of the week at the Clover Leaf if you want to. Maybe I’ll buy you a drink.’ They ran along the road towards the Tube station, and fifteen minutes later, by which time I’d been able to recover from the awful fact of having to abandon my first and beloved car, I took up my suitcase and went in the same direction. A coat collar didn’t help against the blinding rain, and my legs were weak and wobbly, like a sailor just on shore after years at sea. I’d had a few months with a car, and was now back as a normal member of society, a bloke in the descending piss lugging his suitcase towards the Tube station, standing at the ticket box and asking for a one-way fare to King’s Cross. As the train rattled south I laughed at having done that simple journey so perilously, crossed that no-man’s-land after a red sky in the morning, all hundred and twenty-five miles of it.
Part Three
A catchy tune was playing all over London, and I don’t remember the name of it any more, not even the tune itself. Sometimes it half comes back to me, but before it can turn fully on, I blot out my mind and fight shy of it, as if I really don’t want to remember. It was a gay, jumpy, tuneful, deathlike-trancelike tune which seemed to be everywhere, livening up the wet winter, and giving people a reason for thinking they were alive. But conductors and window-cleaners whistled it, hummed it, thrummed it on their bells and buckets as if determined to prove themselves made of flesh and blood. I first heard it on the Tube train from Hendon to King’s Cross. A long-haired youth had a transistor radio, and it broke into my speculation as to what I should do now that I had reached the smoke.
In spite of losing my car, things weren’t as bad as they might have been. I had a hundred pounds in my pocket, and supposed most people came to London with less in their wallets than that. It felt like a fortune that would never run out, to be lived on in affluence for endless weeks. I found a hotel beyond the station, that was full of old ladies and foreign students, where I could get a decent bed and breakfast for thirty bob a night. My name was Donald Charles Cresswell, and I gave my address in the book as 11 Stoneygate Street, Leicester. Why, I don’t know, because I didn’t even feel I was doing it till I had (which is always the case), though I considered only a minute later that it might one day come in useful.