THE CAR IN FRONT

Is a Toyota. Well, that proves I watch television and know about conditioned responses. It doesn’t prove I give in to peer pressure or go with the crowd. I have never played follow-my-leader. I don’t know anyone called Simon, and wouldn’t do what he said even if I did. My views on leadership were deformed by early acquaintance with Gilbert and Sullivan. Remember the Duke of Plaza-Toro in Gondoliers, who ‘led his regiment from behind’, because ‘he found it less exciting’? I acknowledge two legitimate meanings of the word leader: a newspaper editorial and that bit at the beginning of a tape that doesn’t record itself, but is designed to protect the stuff that follows, which is actually important, from accidental damage. Leaders, please note. Look after your followers. Without them, you are nothing.

So, why the car in front? By definition, it’s going slower than you want or faster than you dare, though the second is only a problem for certain kinds of people, not me. Speed is a means, not an end. I have art, music, literature and drama for thrills. Being fast on the road makes up for being slow in the house. I came to driving late, and I appreciate its functionality (look at my car – if you can bear to; it’s a Polo, with a hole in). I choose my routes for the same reason. I hope they have the elegance of a good mathematical equation, perhaps with a tang of history. For instance, I love the Fosse Way, that cross-country hippy autobahn which, as B-this and B-that, cuts through the country like a Roman ruler from Isca to Lindum.

Moreover, like all country-dwellers, I cut corners. It makes blind bends partially-sighted. You can see what’s coming to you slightly before you get what’s coming to you. And this is why it’s a little bit safer driving down curly country lanes at night: the headlights show up from a long way off. Like water dripping through a nest of sieves, they pierce the distant hedges with a clue to what’s ahead.

As I say, I’m a country-dweller, and if you want to spend time in the open, you have to spend time in the closed: time, in my case, inside a giant mobile loudspeaker, waving my arms about when traffic conditions allow, on the way to work, on the way to pleasure,. I act, or, as some people would say, I run away from myself. I think I’m running (or rather, driving) from one self to another, and both of them are me. And where am I, you ask, when I’m in between? Günter Kunert (don’t pretend you’ve heard of him!) wrote a story in which the main character sees the world as projected on screens, film screens, television screens, windscreens, whose wipers wipe the world away, and recreate it a moment later. Or you could say it’s a bit like meditation: the mind is conscious, but conscious of nothing. When I’m trying to fall asleep, I want the mind in neutral: turning over, for sure, but not connected to the wheels. The way it is when I’m walking the dogs and getting ideas for stories.

Driving at night, on my way back home (if it is home, since home is, after all, the place where I belong…), can feel a bit isolating. Why? No landmarks? Not true. The landmarks exist, and I recognise them, but I don’t know where they are: that twisted tree, the falling-down gate, the rusted enamel notice – sharp in the headlights, filling the screen, and gone as I turn the wheel and change my point of view.

Small wonder, then, that I’m glad of another car, to tell me the world still exists, and has not, like St Petersburg in that Rilke poem, ceased to be, fragmented to nothing by a nocturnal journey through it.

Not, of course, coming towards me, when its selfish clarity of vision imposes blindness on everyone else. Ahead of me. The car in front.

Red, they say, is for danger. No. As always, danger lies in getting too close. Driving at night, it’s red for company. Red: the illusion of companionship. The car in front is like an older brother. All those embarrassing experiences: it has them – minutes – seconds – before you. By the intensity of their brake lights, you can anticipate your own response. You share their over-confidence and belated agony, and with the perfect vision of hindsight can avoid them both. A bit like acting really: all the thrills, and none of the spills.

Autumn into winter, the nights getting longer, two shows back to back, and I’d found a new, more efficient route, narrower and windier but faster (I believed). The rehearsals always ended at the same time, security chased us out of the room, too cold to chat in the car-park, no one else going my way. Except –

Except for the car I always found ahead of me, just after I turned off the main road, on the far side of the hump-backed bridge. Up and over into the dark and before the curve to the right twin points of red, glowing brighter, like a pair of smokers taking a long slow drag, in passion or relief, as the brakes bit. It reminded me not to be complacent.

But then, I didn’t want to lag behind. I’ve walked three times from Avebury to Stonehenge, sponsored, en masse, some faster and some slower, and for a while you keep pace with one another, and talk, and then one speeds up or the other slows down, and inexorably you lose touch. Like life, really – unless you hold hands tight and stick together.

Speed limit, sequence of curves, there are the lights again – I’ve not been left behind! The bends have slowed them down, like me, I’m not alone. A game of hide-and-seek. Are they waiting for me? Deliberately? The way I used to hang around after school… The memories come unbidden when you’re in that neutral space.

Left at the T-junction, under the trees, out into moonlight when the skies are clear, and sometimes the wind rocks the car. A long slope down with a bumpy road surface, brake and brake and brake, like the scattering of sparks, more bends, more trees, some houses and the dark. A long, straight stretch that finishes in a right-angled bend. The lights flare like the beginning of a firework and vanish. But I’ve been warned by the farewell beacon. It is farewell, no lights round the corner, but now it’s not far to my village by the back way, through lanes I know in the dark, so it’s not that bad.

All things come to an end, even shows. I knew I was going to miss the drive. I was going to miss the lights of the car in front that drove as I drove and kept pace with me. Perhaps they were even glad of my dipped headlights in their rear-view mirror. Not alone.

Silly me, to leave my diary in the dressing room, and to need it desperately before the final evening show. Saturday, the weather fine, time to spare. Not that far, after all, if I go to the super-store instead of the shop in town. And back by the usual way.

But it isn’t the usual way if you do it in daylight. Some things, believe me, should only be done in the dark. I miss the lights, and wonder where they live. As I come to the corner, I look, and slow down. Is that a driveway under the trees, the holly trees, straight ahead, where the road would have gone if it could, but for the Enclosures Commission’s re-allocation of common land?

I stop and look. Not a driveway. Not even really a rutted track. Long dried mud with deep wheel-tracks. A smashed dead tree. Rusted. Burnt-out. There for years. A car. Cold in the shade.

I drive home, eat, drive back, act, drive home. I’m proud of the way I can turn emotion on and off. Like a tap. But a tap drips. Like a light-bulb. But the bulb stays hot. The road ahead stays dark. No car in front.

My curiosity is satisfied. I have the answer to my mystery – and nobody to show me the way home.

8.35 am – 3.10pm 1.v.2007

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