‘What happened to your car in the end?’ she asked after a while.
‘The car-breakers offered me forty quid for scrap so I traded it in for a second-hand tube pass. I miss it sometimes. The other day I was walking past a motor spares shop and I suddenly had an urge to buy some jump leads.’
‘What are jump leads?’
‘Don’t you know what jump leads are?’
‘No.’
‘They’re those things you lend to people when their car won’t start.’ Eventually we reached the Common and Fran began manoeuvring into a parking space. You’d have thought we were trying to reverse into a telephone kiosk the way she hauled the wheel first one way and then the other, crawling forwards a few inches and then lurching back after a strangled screech of protest from the gear-box.
‘Shall I have a go?’
Fran got out and I slithered over into the driving seat. I twisted and shuffled through the various stages of a three-point turn until the car was parked perfectly between two other vehicles — except that it had its back to the kerb instead of its side.
‘It does sort of extend itself unnecessarily at the front and back doesn’t it?’ Fran called to me through the open window. I extricated the car and got it parallel with the one in front, vaguely remembering that this was what you were meant to do. This time I must have got the lock just right; it started gliding into the space behind without a murmur of complaint. Fran was directing me back with that circling motion of the hands that I always associated with the adult world of our father. I reversed another foot or so and Fran continued waving me back until I crunched into the car behind. I looked again into the mirror and saw Fran absentmindedly urging me back.
‘Dear God! I do not believe it!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Can’t you see what’s happened?’ I said through my clamped, my traffic-wardened teeth. Fran looked down at the cars, surprised for a moment, then put one hand over her mouth and gave a wide-eyed chuckle.
‘Ooh!’
‘Fran!’
‘What a driver!’
‘Fran!’
‘You might have been a bit more careful,’ she said between laughs. I didn’t begin to see the funny side of it until seconds before it stopped being funny, when the man whose car we’d hit came bulging out of the cake shop like meat from a pasty. The first thing he saw was the cars; the second was the smile coaxing its way out of my mouth. He looked like the kind of guy who could get violently angry over something like this: a self-made man who had got where he was through hard graft and wasn’t short of a tattoo or two. There was no point saying anything. It was just a question of standing there and hoping that whatever he did wouldn’t hurt too much or cause any major structural damage.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Fran. ‘I’m afraid we’ve had a bit of a prang.’
The man still didn’t say anything. The bag of whatever it was he was clutching was starting to turn transparently greasy: sausage rolls perhaps. He was breathing thickly through his nose.
‘Only a little prang really,’ said Fran but as she was saying it the last syllable was already bubbling into a laugh. She tried to stop herself but her eyes were shining with wet laughter.
‘Just the teeniest little prang,’ she said, holding her thumb and index finger a fraction apart. ‘And we’d be very happy to lend you our jump leads. Unfortunately we haven’t got any.’
With that she doubled-up laughing. It was OK for Fran. Despite what women claim, in situations like this men are much more at risk than women. The bloke would never hit Fran — he’d hit me twice as hard and twice as often instead.
‘Something wrong with her?’ the man asked.
‘She’s my sister,’ I said trying not to laugh. Laughing would have revealed my teeth and that might have tempted him to knock them out. I hadn’t been hit for years. I could hardly remember what it was like but that only made the prospect more frightening — like getting stung by a wasp: I couldn’t remember what that felt like either but the idea of it was terrifying.
The bloke slid into his car and moved it back a foot or two, then got out again, the engine still running. Fortunately the damage was all self-inflicted. As soon as our car had got within six inches of his it had bumpered out our rear light and punched in part of the boot.
‘It’s people like you,’ he said looking at me and not Fran who had stopped laughing by now. ‘It’s people like you. .’ He left it at that. We never found out what it was that people like us did for him. He just gave me a look that said he could buy me, my sister, the car and everything in it and scrap the lot if he didn’t have about a hundred other more important things to ruin first. He had some trouble squeezing the car out of the space we’d boxed him into. Fran was drying her eyes, still chuckling.
‘Silly prick,’ she said as he drove off.
‘Shit, Fran,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to be careful with people like that.’
It was a clear but cool day. Fran was wearing a red woollen hat and a grey raincoat which she always called her ‘famous blue raincoat’ — she had gone through a Leonard Cohen phase a few years back — because it was torn at the shoulder.
‘Anyway, it’s a good job we hadn’t eaten these,’ she said, pulling a polythene bag out of her coat pocket. ‘Things might have got really out of hand.’
‘Are they what I think they are?’
‘Yes,’ she said pouring out half the contents of the bag and handing them to me. The rest she tipped into her mouth. Wrinkling up her face she pulled a can of coke from another pocket — I was beginning to wonder how many pockets that coat had — opened it and took a big, frothing gulp.
The sky was pale blue as if showing through a gauze of cloud so thin as to hardly be there at all. It was neither summer nor autumn. The sun had none of the intenstity of summer but the trees were still thick with green leaves. A strong wind came and went. As we walked by the edge of the Common there was barely a breeze. Then we came up on a large tree hissing and writhing. At our level there was still only the very faintest of breezes, as if the wind existed only in the twisting leaves and rocking branches. Green with time, a large statue of a woman offering a drink to a lame man had been erected in front of the tree. The man was seated; with one hand the woman helped him drink, the other rested lightly on his shoulder.
We walked on. The Common stretched out vast and flat before us. Up ahead a line of thin trees cast long poles of shadow across the grass. In the distance there was a clump of fertile trees — slightly hazy as in a landscape by Claude Lorrain. The sun flung clouds across the sky. Every few seconds the light changed: now the clouds were flecked with lemon or pink; within a few moments they were turning bruise purple. The ground felt hard under our feet. Fran’s face and clothes were bathed in the brightness of the light; the light of the sun burned in her eyes.
We watched a man with two young children and a dog take a large model of a Sopwith Camel out of the boot of a car. The plane was radio-controlled; twiddling with his hand-set the man taxied the bi-plane along the ground. We watched for about five minutes during which time he sent his children back to the car for spare parts or oil of some sort. Then he tinkered around with the wings and stepped back, pointing the aerial of the hand-set at the plane. It taxied along the ground for a few more yards but didn’t gain any speed. His kids lost interest and were throwing a balsa-wood plane at each other; it caught the wind and looped the loop for a few seconds or just floated before falling quietly back to earth. The man had one more go with his radio-controlled bi-plane but this time it wouldn’t even crawl along the ground.