DRIVEN
[EXTRACT]
WHEN YOU FALL OFF, GET BACK UP AGAIN
He drives on to her wanting to do it again.
Getting back in the car just now Sean placed what the clatter had been when the road slid and the verge tipped. Whether at the beginning or the end or throughout the roll, only getting back in, with them on the seats, in the wells, he saw the clatter had been tapes shooting all over and out of their boxes. Driving on to L there is no order to what happened - it develops in space, not time.
- The static works cabin coming at him.
- Accelerating out of the roundabout, the back end going, controlling it, pleased with himself, saying lips tight on his teeth Surface water.
- Soft grass, poking through the passenger window, thinking if I wasn't hanging here in this belt, I'd like to put my head on that.
- Controlling the first skid, then the back end going the other way, losing the front, spinning at the roadworks cabin, the verge tipping.
- Three Range Rovers out of nowhere, and six police rolling the car off the grass onto its legs, like vets after a horse operation, laughing "You won't take that at ninety again." Wounds superficial.
- In the cabin, roadman making tea, piling in sugar, "They'll be all right the M62 pigs, M1 they're bastards."
- Onto the roundabout and off, changing up, pleased this was the last shift of motorways. Mel had said, "Come if you want to." And he lost grip.
Back on the M62, strange wind wipple in the dents and buffeting, he wants to do it again: in controlled conditions, off road, skid pan, to ride the slip and spin, tuck the wheels in to the edge of the roll, then sit back out, watching, listening, feeling things back together. Going over and over the slip, the roll keeps the adrenaline high, he milks it.
The time they split before the last, definitely the last time, meeting by accident after a long summer fortnight apart: him abroad, she back to her partner for good this time, both relaxed, both tanned, both eye-bright with seeing each other, Mel standing half-in-half-out of her hatchback, fingers tapping the roof. No doubt. Neither suggested it - they couldn't wait for his place, stopped on the moor top, parked grinning your car or mine? She drove down the track between pines. He walked in the rut after her.
He drives on to her, wanting to be in the roll, the roll, the roll, the slip, the spin. He drives on. His car new already. Undented.
MAYBE FOR AN INSTANT, YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING
The TV man is coming about Mel's snapped aerial. She asked, "Morning or afternoon?" "That's right," he said, "morning or afternoon, see ya." There's little day left. Rob on Bahrain time should have landed by now and phoned to miss her.
Instead, Sean rings, "Only dents, nothing serious." He's still coming, they promise again "Just friends. Just friends." He says, "Anyway you're ill." So she knows he's hoping - but they can't, mustn't because it means this tension like a pencil through her neck - out under her ears. Jaw numb with unlodging it. What they call the 'situation'.
Sean, still high and falling over himself, yappers about things happening in slow motion. Mel says, "Nah! You're either alive or dead. Things happen as they happen, they're just slow after."
But putting the phone down she thinks there must be that moment knowing this is it, this is what I thought about never happening. Doing ninety, sun, windows down, breeze, looking up from changing tapes, touching smoke from your eye, unscrewing the Coke cap between your legs and you're undering a truck - this is it - big instant - then the picture goes.
She checks the clock though she knows the time. For Rob already night, foreign-lights, dust, heat-smell.
A nail in your tyre, a crack in your axle, the steering wheel off in your hand, a hair in the bed.
She has red pills and yellow pills, one compensates for the other, can't remember which for which. Her father has thirteen all boosting and balancing each other - calls it 'chemical promiscuity.'
Into-the-back-of-a-queue-hidden-by-a-corner, oil-unseen-under-trees, kid-running-out-from-nowhere, sometimes - usually when Mel won't let him touch her - Sean says, "Make-up-your-mind-or-I'll-tell-him-myself."
She switches the telly on - the crackle distracts her from brooding on the first time - upstairs, friends' coats under Sean, the barbecue charcoal and meat - Rob frying. How she wanted, had to, both of them, each other. She covered Sean's eyes to hide her own wanting - using the red silk scarf from a friend's coat which she made him take after and he said "What kind of woman would do that?" - like a compliment, smiling, meaning steal a friend's scarf. Not like now his mouth set, his eyes, "What sort of woman can go on doing this?"
He'll come, high, a typical Sean crash - "No one else involved, no real damage.
COMPLICATIONS
High over the Ship Canal, in another world to traffic, un-real, dis-located, a-tingle, Sean listens for damage in the gears, tyres, chassis. Never sure what 'chassis' was exactly, he feels now - from the judder - it means the frame of things. "In real life," she says "you can't always have what you want."
The dents buffet the slipstream differently. He has taken a knock somehow. His elbow.
Driving to her he can never anticipate the reception. Not like rat-running over the moor back to his place, bonneting her silver hatchback into corners, or him in front her eyes, grin, blush in his brake lights. Arriving out of breath like they've run not driven.
No room in his house they've not made love in, no room without things for safe-keeping - hall, kitchen, study, lounge, spare room, the bath, the bed. Letters, pictures, presents, clothes, shoes. If he had a shed there'd be something of her out in it. Keepsakes, keep-safes. No time - out of the real world. No time - forever clattering into it. Spermicide. Tissues. Hairbrush. Eyelash curler. The red silk scarf, a long glove she said was cornflower coloured, when he always thought cornflowers were white.
The tingle's stiff, his sleeve joint filling. Swelling. Spongy. For 'Bye' she says 'See you later'. Later to him means that day. He asks, "Do you mean later?" She says, "What does it matter? You make things mean what you want them to mean." The tapes lie where they clattered. The lanes narrow, or seem to.
Come if you want to. Come I want you. Come if you must.
Sean decelerates, crosses lanes, the bonnet dips swervely, wind across the slip road, his arm becoming useless in the long bend and onto the airport spur he can't lift it accelerating. Through the domestic terminal roundabout, no bend in the elbow, spiders in the forearm pulling the fingers, he rests them in the crook of the wheel cupped rigid to steer gear changes. Ending the runway, a wide jet belly, already off, out of here, wheels folding, becoming lights only.