‘I was saying that …’
‘Phillip had a convertible Beetle that I couldn’t make up my mind about, you know, whether the convertible bit made up for the Beetle bit …’
There was no question of a kiss, let alone a night of inept, but heartfelt fumbling. In fact, the only physical contact Andrew obtained from the exercise was a very public crushing hug from Pam, who whispered loudly and wetly in his ear that Ophelia wasn’t good enough for him. Had anyone, he wondered, not heard about his humiliation? He did a quick calculation to work out how uncool the episode left him seeming to the eyes of Books and/or the world; the result came out at something close to the boiling point of lead, or, according to the traditional scale of one-to-ten, really very uncool indeed.
Yet more dishearteningly, the sure knowledge that Ophelia was one of the first division girls who would not be stooping to entertain a plucky second division contender only served to splash Tabasco on the hot chilli of his passion.
Nor did Alice’s arrival lead to an immediate or complete transference of affection. The wandering Tessa, it is true, no longer played a role in his fantasy life, although a candle long burned brightly for him down in the Internet division, where she did clever technical things to facilitate on-line auctions. The trouble was that Ophelia was simply too damn beautiful – actress beautiful rather than supermodel beautiful, which allowed for the discernible and delectable presence of hips and buttocks and breasts – not to be, however critically and/or hopelessly, adored. The way he put it to Leo was that he loved (‘don’t cringe you fucking long-faced, cynical wanker’) Alice, but fancied Ophelia, although he did allow for the possibility of a little bilateral seepage between the two (leer, plap, schleershp, mmpap, mmmpap, mmpap, from Leo).
And no, after The Disaster in the Park, he never got up the courage to ask Alice out on another date: the deepening, mystifying, otherness which enveloped her made it impossible. How do you ask the Sphinx out for a curry? What chat up lines can you use on Astarte, everyone’s favourite Phoenician goddess of life and death? So, for eight months from February to September, Andrew yearned: and it was a yearning without respite, because to look away from Alice meant to look towards Ophelia.
And then came the Audubon. As soon as word reached him that an elusive copy of The Birds of America was up for grabs, he knew that it was his big chance, not only to increase the incline of his modest career graph, but also to spend time, no, more than time, to spend a night with Alice. In theory the Quantocks trip could be done in a day, but what if something unexpected cropped up? What if the deal was about to be closed and they had to rush off to catch the last train? Lord whoever-it-was might feel offended if he received a mere single day of flattery and cajoling. And for all they knew, the Other Place might already be on the trail, offering the usual inducements: the pretty girls (or boys), the promise of secret buyers, and fabulous wealth. No, this was a two-day job, with a night in (consulting the relevant page from the atlas), Nether Stowey or Crowcombe or Spaxton, assuming any of those hamlets could supply a comfy B&B. It wasn’t that Andrew had any explicitly formulated plan of seduction. He just hoped that the simple fact of spending the time together would somehow meld them, or work some other magic. He got as far in his head as a boozy night with her in a thatched hostelry, hung with antique farming machinery (turnip spanglers, hay thrummers, perhaps even a many-bladed pig splayer), and there drew back, hoping vaguely that she might blurt out something about having always fancied him, no, dammit, loved him. That would see off the Ophelia problem.
Just love me back, my strange, my precious Alice, he thought, and I’m yours forever.
‘Climb in,’ said Andrew, smiling brightly. It wasn’t one of his usual faces. Nor did it particularly suit the greasy grey skies, oozing drizzle like a fat man sweating over a meal.
Alice had been daydreaming. She’d been waiting on the pavement for ten minutes. Because she was by the busy road she saw, of course, the Dead Boy; saw him there for that second before he died, the second before she turned away. She had coping strategies now, and rather than cry out or turn away again, her face in her hands, she was able to drive out the bad thoughts by immersing herself in the Boy, breathing him like incense, drawing him in to her cells, until he was inside her and outside her and everywhere.
And now here was Andrew. In a car. And what a car.
It was perhaps fortunate that Andrew never had the chance to tell Ophelia about his car. Even Alice, who cared nothing for such things was vaguely aware that it was the sort of car that the kind of person who might be ashamed of having a crap car would be ashamed of. Andrew’s attitude to his car was deeply ambivalent. He had enough intelligence and awareness to see that it was a completely crap car. And not just because it was a bottom-of-the-range 1979 Vauxhall Chevette two-door saloon. There were other reasons.
First of all there was the colour. Andrew would occasionally try to pass it off as mahogany, or chestnut, or dark tan, or burnt almond, or sienna, but the truth is that it was brown, and more than that, shit brown. Then there was the filth. The outside had never been cleaned in the year and a half that Andrew had owned it. His reasons for this were logical, if short-sighted. ‘If I was going to be frying eggs on the bonnet, then I’d give it a wash,’ he’d say. ‘Or if I wanted to roll around on the roof wearing a cream linen suit. But I don’t like fried eggs and I haven’t got a cream linen suit.’ And so layer on layer of crust had formed over the brown core, giving it yet more of an excremental aspect. In places, some of the outer layers had liquefied in the rain, and formed swirling patterns, before drying again, giving the effect of a lava flow, glooping its way towards Pompeii. The inside was slightly less filthy, although the exoskeletal remains of sweet and savoury snack products were lodged in most of the car’s niches and inglenooks, and there was a faint vegetal aroma, unexorcisable by any number of pine-fresh car deodorisers, caused by a stray sprout, lost six months previously somewhere in the superstructure of the vehicle. The problem internally was more the décor, in particular the matching brown fun-fur seat covers, tufted and mangy now, but still able to drench a back in sweat in all climatic conditions short of a prolonged nuclear winter. Everything inside the car was ill-designed, adept only at spearing knees, jabbing kidneys, and catching and tearing clothing.
So yes, Andrew was aware of the fact that the car was a (barely) moving insult to all road users, a thing neither useful nor beautiful, a slovenly, casual V sign, thrown by the lazy seventies at the very William-Morris, utopian socialist, arts and crafts creed to which he felt most allegiance, indeed a thing both useless and ugly. But he loved it. He loved it not only because it was the physical manifestation of the fact that he had, after ten years of nervous trying, finally passed his test. But also because it needed him, because it was so bad. So he could insult it, hit it with sticks, spit at it in rage when it died at traffic lights or belched the black smoke that meant that yet again it was burning oil, but nobody else was allowed that privilege, and Andrew could be very unkind indeed to anyone who questioned the merits of the Merdemobile.
‘Just sling your bag in the back,’ he said, pointing to a rear seat overflowing with books and newspapers, but dominated by a headless porcelain dog, which Alice never got round to asking about. As she sank into the front passenger seat, her knees disconcertingly at about the same level as her shoulders, and her bottom gingerly aware, despite the intervening fun-fur, of individual springs, sprung all gone, he added, ‘Welcome to the Merdemobile.’
Alice won instant points by neither gagging, nor laughing, nor leaping straight back out and running screaming down the road, all common responses. She did smile, however.
‘Hello, Andrew. I really appreciate you collecting me. Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?’
‘I find it distracting if I can see too much when I’m driving.’
‘Ah.’
Alice