A few minutes later somebody offered me a lift back to Brixton. Impulsively and happily I said yes and for the next half an hour I quivered in the back seat of a car with two other passengers while the driver, roaring drunk and sipping Sapporo, squealed around corners and kamikazied his way through the red lights of east and south London. Every couple of seconds I had a precise and frightening vision of a head-on collision, of getting oxy-acetylened out of the wreckage and coming round in hospital a week later while a doctor patiently explained that I was going to have to spend the rest of my life in a brain-damaged wheelchair. I got out of the car about a mile from home and walked the rest of the way, relieved to feel the blood pumping through the muscles of my still intact legs.
Waking up the next morning with the odd sensation of being surprised to be alive I threw recklessness to the wind and abandoned my spontaneity programme then and there. I was fed up with the rigours of impulsive living anyway: I didn’t have the application for it. I couldn’t cope with being stoned at eleven thirty in the morning and that kind of thing. Spontaneity seemed constantly to tow regret in its wake. Living for the moment was all very well, I decided, but you had to pick your moments carefully. Quite often there was another moment just around the corner which was much more worth living for than the one you were engaged in.
The phone rang. I picked it up semi-spontaneously. It was Fran.
‘Hi! How’s things?’
‘Good. How are you?’
‘Fine. Listen,’ I said. ‘Dad phoned the other day. He said he’d been trying your number for a week and no one knew where you were.’
‘I’ve been all over the place. OK, I’ll phone him. How are you though? I haven’t seen you for ages.’
We talked for a few more moments like that (neither of us really knew how to chat on the phone) and then arranged to meet.
Fran, I reflected when we’d hung up, was much better suited to the spontaneous lifestyle than me. She had a knack for avoiding the consequences of things. Or rather, like Steranko, she was at ease with the consequences of things. When we were on holiday with our parents we would go swimming together and afterwards I would always want to get dry fast and change out of my wet trunks; Fran, on the other hand, would be happy to build sandcastles or go for a walk along the cliffs in her wet costume, letting the sun and the wind dry her off. And still, as an adult, she managed to inhabit a world of action and gesture rarely seen outside the cinema, where people walk through streams without taking their boots off, or rush out into the pouring rain wearing only a shirt, or throw plates at their lover across the room in a fit of passionate rage. I’d love to do all those things — but in real life you always have to get your boots dry, or wake up with a cold, or sweep up the broken pieces and fork out for new crockery. It’s the same with fighting: afterwards you have to hang around the hospital for three hours waiting to get your nose X-rayed and straightened, or you’ve got to take your best suit to the dry cleaners to get the blood out and the lapel stitched back on. In the cinema there are only the large consequences of plot; the mess is cleared up off-screen by stage hands; even a real trouncing leaves only a few cosmetic scars.
In cinema or books the climax of the action, however calamitous, simplifies and resolves — brings things to an end. In real life calamity and confrontation always bring chores in their wake. There are keys to return, bills to pay, the milk to cancel, people to tell and arrangements to make. It’s like Othello. Two minutes after murdering Desdemona he’s expecting earthquakes and eclipses and all he gets is the neighbours banging on the door wanting to know what all the noise is about. Or like a friend of mine who was stabbed and got his dole money stopped because he missed his signing-on day and hadn’t filled out a sickness form while he was on a life-support machine.
046
At the underground station a group of policemen and women stopped everyone as they passed through the barriers. I joined the long queues at the ticket machines but the police had no interest in fare-dodgers: they were asking everyone if they had been using the tube at this time a week ago when a woman had been killed between Brixton and Stockwell. I shook my head and was handed a sheet of paper with MURDER and APPEAL FOR ASSISTANCE printed in large letters at the top. Underneath was a photograph of a woman. She was smiling; the photo was blurred as if it had been taken at a party where she was laughing and drunk. She was twenty-one, an African, and no one knew anything about her except that she’d been found bleeding to death in an empty carriage when the train pulled in at Stockwell.
And now, exactly a week later, I sat waiting for the train to pull out. Hunched forward and holding it in both hands like a tiny newspaper, I stared at the photo of the dead girl. On either side of me a dozen people were doing exactly the same.
045
Fran came round the next day in an expensive-looking car. I didn’t know what model it was and she wasn’t sure either.
‘I think it’s called a Vauxhall Courgette or something like that,’ she said, kicking one of the front tyres as if to suggest casual familiarity with the world of pistons, cross-plys and sump oil.
‘Whose car is it?’ I asked as we hummed noiselessly past the new riot-proof Tesco’s on Acre Lane — it had the look of a place which could be air-lifted out to neutral Vauxhall in under fifteen minutes in the event of trouble.
‘It belongs to the guy who goes out with Sal in my house. He lent it to her and she lent it to me on the strict condition that I don’t have a prang in it. Apparently that’s what motorists call an accident: a prang.’
Fran wore her glasses to drive. They had big plastic frames that made her look almost comically scholarly. She clutched the wheel like she was steering a ship in heavy weather. We moved very slowly in dense traffic; I groaned, complained and swore but Fran, showing no sign of irritation, tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm of a pop song that played on the radio. Over the years my own impatience had become so extreme that I was in danger of becoming incapable of enjoying anything: every activity was an obstacle to the next. This accelerating impatience had nothing to do with being late or in a hurry; it was a condition not a response. I was even in a hurry when I had nothing to do. On buses I watched traffic lights compulsively, dreading a red, loving a green, happiest of all when the bus hurtled past a stop without stopping. On holiday I longed for the train journey to end and the holiday proper to begin, and then for the holiday to end and the normal routine to resume. Fran had always been different. As kids we used to go out for a drive with our parents in their sky-blue Vauxhall Victor. Our father was a very cautious driver and every time someone overtook us he would say: ‘he’s in a hurry’ and our mother would nod wisely. It used to drive me crazy but Fran would continue looking out of the window and sucking her boiled sweet. (I’d already chewed and swallowed mine.)