Clegg smiled. “He’s probably playing with the levers in the signal box, trying to lure a goods’ train from the main line. I once caught him reaching for my cap so as to look the part. I’ll worry about you every minute, though.”
I reached for my jacket. “Have faith. You know I’m indestructible.”
At fourteen-hundred hours I strapped myself into the cockpit, sorry as always to leave Upper Mayhem and the countryside smell, even when it reeked of shit. Except for Nottingham I belonged there more than anywhere else, because it was where my children had grown up, though if I’m honest — and when wasn’t I? — I recall that every morning of my ten-year stretch there I woke determined to pack the car and flee, vowing to be well away by nightfall, but the enormous Dutch breakfast spread on the table by my smiling and full-bosomed wife would not allow me to flee, and when the hunger clock chimed for lunch I mellowed back into the dissipation of peace, till the day came when she was the one who left.
Driving out of the gate, I set a southwesterly course for Huntingdon, to connect with the dual carriageway trunk road that ran between Harwich and the Midlands. With petrol fumes and the smell of burnt rubber coming through the window I knew I was back in my natural state of uncertainty and movement, the only regret being that Bill Straw wasn’t with me, whose advice had often been that it was always better to be on the road than bolted up in a house like a sitting duck. There were times when he seemed more an elder brother than a friend. “A car can also turn into a fortress,” he’d go on, “and very tempting it is to let it, but you have to know when to abandon it and move on foot,” a course that had no attraction for me, though who wouldn’t see the sense of it?
Maybe I always felt more relaxed on going west, but after Huntingdon the road was clogged with traffic, and between an endless juggernaut and the central reservation a deep and pitiful yawn seemed to come from my own mouth, or more like as if someone below the rear seats was about to expire. I’d let no tramp on board since leaving home, but the sound made me speed up almost to a ton, and on to a service station signalled a mile ahead, so as to find out what it was. A scuffling behind was as if whoever it was had decided to hang a few hours longer onto life, but I daren’t turn my head in case a collision plunged us both into an inferno, so I overtook more lorries before cutting into the slipway and off the road.
Dismal had pulled off his old trick of flattening into the well below the back seat so as not to be seen in the mirror, willing himself into invisibility.
I opened the door. Calling him sheepish was just about right, as he flopped his big body out to do a piss against the very expensive car next to mine, letting go so copiously I was forced to hold my right foot back from giving him the sharpest kick of his pampered experience. All I could think of was that I must drive back to Upper Mayhem and put him into the care of Clegg where he belonged. But the place was too far away by now, and the delay might stop me getting to Peppercorn Cottage before nightfall, apart from me being too superstitious to turn on my tracks. On the other hand, taking such a huge dog with me would cut the food supplies by half, if not two-thirds. If I turned him loose he would fend for himself at the dustbins behind the cafeteria before setting out. Or maybe a kind animal lover would take him home for a huge meal, before setting him free to find his way back. Even better if the dog lover had a conscience and, seeing Dismal’s name and phone number on his collar, drove him home in the style to which he had too long been accustomed. I thought of driving off, but the picture of him charging after me on the motorway and getting mangled by a white van was more than I could bear.
Even so, had anyone heard of a man on the run with a nodding and farting dog that weighed at least a hundred pounds in the back of his car that wasn’t made of rubber? Having long since decided to accept whatever came by chance or destiny I looped a length of thin chain through his collar and tied him to the dog post while I went inside for a cup of tea, hoping he’d be shanghaied in the interim.
No such luck. He snapped up one of the cupcakes I’d intended eating later, paper and all. If I served him swamp cabbage and crow I don’t think he’d know the difference. “Dismal,” I said sternly, “get in.”
With an expression that managed to be both sly and sad, he laughed himself into comfort along the whole of the back seat as if in his rightful home at last.
I drove onto the road and, like the captain of a ship trying to get around Cape Horn, went on making westing. The weather was fine, high cloud up ahead and not too thick at that, a day for travelling dry and covering distance. After crossing the M1 I noticed a black hatchback on my tail, an English model, with the same advantage as me from the driving seat. “Dismal, we’re in trouble.” The only response was a long yawn and simultaneous fart, as if the two motions were controlled by the same press button somewhere in his stomach.
I doodled along to make sure the hatchback stayed with me. He wasn’t always right behind, though rarely where I was out of his sight. I placed myself like an old aged pensioner between two juggernauts, the gap in both directions too small for my pursuer to interpose. He couldn’t stay side on because there was always a white van to hustle him along, so he had to get some way up front. Unless it was a manoeuvre to deceive me into thinking I was no longer followed. Either way, it allowed me to fork left at Exit One onto a dual carriageway signposted Rugby, by when he was too far ahead to follow.
A few miles later I swung right at a big island onto a B road, pulling up when it was safe to find out from the map where I was. Turf had been skinned off a field and stacked at the edge like chocolate rolls. Bees at the hedge blossom weren’t fighting over a flower, one waiting outside until the other had taken a look, before going in for its own portion. If only people could be as civilised, I thought, but on the other hand how dull life would be if they were.
Right once more on threading a village, I got over the M6 recently forked from, and at a roundabout set off on Watling Street to do a wide sweep west-north-west through the heart of the Midlands, which road I should have taken in the first place, because I’d long been familiar with it.
I considered myself sufficiently safe from the black hatchback to stop at a service compound and feed myself, as well as my passenger who, unrolling from the car, nudged my left ankle with his box-like snout to indicate that the hunger was mutual.
Another of Bill’s precepts was that subordinates should always be fed first (especially, I supposed, when it had concerned himself) so I went into the café for a ration of chips, half a dozen bangers, an eccles cake, and a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock for Dismal which I poured into one of my camping mess tins, then laid the food out for him on the ground. He was too busy scoffing to take a blind bit of notice but I said: “Dismal, you’ll be on short commons from now on. You’ve had it too soft in the last three years.”
Either he couldn’t believe I’d be so callous, or was too engrossed in lapping and slurping to care. After his piss had scorched the paint off a smart new Peugeot I smacked him back in the car and, because it was getting on for four and my guts were hollow, went in to feed myself on a teatime breakfast and pot of coffee at a table littered with cake packets, fag ends and crumbs.
I made Dismal give up his luxury couch and sit in the front passenger seat so as to fox any hatchback driver into thinking twice before tackling two grown men, especially one as ugly and menacing as my favourite dog.