That the bonnet has been lifted I
can see as I turn into my row in the car park. I have a large box under my arm
– birthday present for Cody – and it is slipping uncomfortably down my hip. I
should have accepted a plastic bag, but you know how it is with a cupboard
already overflowing and you don’t want to add to that problem along with
anything else. What I can’t see at first, thanks to the bonnet, was the man
looking inside. Then I see him step into view and turn to the car facing mine
in the opposite parking space; I stand still, to work out what to do. I know I
should go in all ‘Hey, that’s my car, get out of here!’ But I test my voice and
it does not sound right. I am seven cars down the row. Hitching up the box,
which contains what they call a smart TV – Cody, only turning seven, wants a
smart TV – I approach my car.
‘That is my car.’ No challenge,
but you never know, maybe the words hang like a non-specific threat. It doesn’t
seem to come off that way though. The man steps to my side of my car, a good
German saloon. I can see now that he has attached jump leads from wherever you
are supposed to connect them under my bonnet to the points under his own. His
car is a large pickup truck, dusty, dented, unpleasant and somehow improbably
American on this car park. He looks me up and down. Now that’s something I
rarely see. As someone who pays close attention, I know how people look at each
other, and while their eyes usually flick down, check out your clothes, maybe
your crotch or chest, they soon settle on eyes and mouth, or, worst case
scenario, some horribly distinctive feature, like my overlong nose. But this
man, who has appropriated my car, without permission, looks me fully, slowly up
and down as though I have invaded his space and he is assessing me. He wears a
leather jacket, and tattoos were visible skulking out from the cuffs to the
backs of his hands. One can rarely trust a person with tattoos, let alone
leather jackets. He smiles broadly and shows me a gold tooth – I mean, come on.
‘Is this your car?’ he asks, a dense
but fluid accent. He could do advert voice-overs, or at least be a football
pundit. I know that he knows it is, because I’d already said so. He is
stalling.
‘It is my car, and it seems you
are helping yourself without permission.’
‘Aw, well, sure, but you’re
helping a brother out, and a car like this,’ he rests his hand on the car in a
deeply proprietary fashion, ‘it can spare me a bit of juice to get me started.’
He says this like it justifies it all.
‘How did you even open the
bonnet? Or start the engine?’ He is standing between me and the wires, and
besides, I had the TV box under my arm: there is little else I can do.
‘Ah, nothing to it,’ he says
mysteriously. He obviously isn’t going to tell me, and I am struggling to get
any power in the situation. Not knowing what else to do, I unlock the car (so
much for immobilisers) and put the TV in the boot. Unencumbered, I feel ready.
‘Even if you can, doesn’t mean
you should. I’m sure if you’d have asked..’
‘No one about to ask,
unfortunately. And if you’d have said yes if I had asked, what difference does
it make in the end?’ His logic is horribly reasonable.
‘Well, are you nearly done?’
He looks at his watch.
‘Almost.’
We stand and look at each other.
‘This is a nice car,’ he says. He
is setting up for something. I say nothing – usually, it is better that way.
‘What’s your line of work?’
‘Insurance.’ I say it blandly,
trying to make it uninteresting.
‘Really? Broker are you? Look at
this – could be your lucky day!’
My lucky day?
‘My company is looking for new
insurance. I’ve just grown the fleet.’
His company? As if this man runs
a company. Next he’ll tell me he is royalty.
‘Oh, vehicle insurance isn’t
really my area of expertise, I tend to look at bigger projects, insurance for
housing developments and so on.’ Had I overshared? I may have just been caught
by the simplest of sales tricks.
‘Nonsense!’ he declares. People
with tattoos and gold teeth shouldn’t use this word; it is divertingly
incongruous. ‘Look, have you got a card? I need to get moving now, but I am
genuinely interested in getting your services.’
Dazed, I bring out my wallet and
hand him my card, passing it between index and middle fingers, as you’re
supposed to.
The man positions himself with
his back to me as he leans over my car’s engine and whatever other parts they
keep there under the bonnet, so I can’t see what he does to cut my engine and
disconnect the cables to his car. He makes a meal of winding them up, stowing
them in his back seat foot well, dusting his hands and rubbing them on his
jeans. Only then does he take the card.
‘Well, you really helped a guy
out. You’ve done me a huge favour.’ He sticks out his hand and I shake it. His
hand leaves a little dark smudge on the side of my first finger, which I look
at almost constantly on the drive home.
He does call me, after a couple
of weeks. I had found myself wondering with some frequency whether he would.
‘Hey buddy,’ he says. The man’s speech patterns change with alarming
regularity.
‘Uh, hello.’ I try not to let on
that I knew who it was straight away.
‘So I wanna talk insurance.’
Before I knew it, I am inviting
him over. I was working from home all that week; sometimes management let me do
that, when I needed to.
He walks in, wearing similar
things to the time in the car park, hands shoved in the back pocket of the
jeans, which pulls them tight. ‘My wife will be home with my son before long.’
I don’t know why I say that. ‘Just one kid, huh? I’m on three,’ he replies.
I hadn’t imagined that he had
children. A vision of his erection swells in my brain, threateningly fertile
and febrile, and I feel my own rising in my trousers. ‘I’ll take a beer,’ he is
saying. I don’t recall having offered. There is some in the garage – it will
not be cold. But what do I care about impressing this man? We sit in my office;
he almost puts himself in my orthopaedic chair, but there are times when my
glare looks the part. I have never whistled through my teeth in my life, but
find myself doing so as we put numbers to his needs. Most people think
insurance is dull. I don’t argue with them, but there is nothing like the
gentle comfort blanket of pecuniary protection. It is responsible and adult, as
I need to remind some of my clients. To be insured is the greatest gift you can
give your loved ones, I tell others, with deepest sincerity.
When my wife gets home, she asks
him to stay for dinner. She has this naiveté, which is sweet when it isn’t
catastrophic. She cooks: some meat, indescribable greens. He overpraises – she
thinks it charming. I don’t like how they go on, like old friends. He asks her
too much, and expects too much. After he leaves, I go to the bathroom and throw
up, strands of nasty khaki tangling in the toilet bowl. My wife rubs my feet in
bed, talking about him. After a bit, I pretend to be asleep so she stops.
He sends me an email. I can’t
imagine those meaty tattooed hands at a keyboard. He is a more atavistic being
than that, I had supposed. The grammar is acceptable – within the normal range
of ability found among adults these days. It is about our arrangement, adding
details, correcting things he had got wrong over at my house. I can’t
understand a person who tries to simply remember the facts they need. The brain
is hopeless, hopeless, at getting them right.
That weekend, my wife goes to
visit her mother. I am not invited, and this time neither is Cody. My wife says
he tires her mother out. Yet her mother has always claimed to be young for her
age. She overly defines people in terms of their age, or at least how their age
appears to her. I spend most of Saturday preparing my response to the email
while Cody sits on the edge of his bed watching his new TV; eventually striking
the tone of professionalism with a breath of deviance that I sought. Tired but
wired, I collect Cody.
‘Let’s go out to eat.’
He made a face, eyes still on the
cartoons.
‘Where would you like to go? How
about pizza?’
This gets his attention. My wife
is dairy-averse, so this is a treat. We talk about his teacher and the little
girls and boys in his class.
I miss the telephone, and thus
the news that my wife died on her way to her mother’s, because I take Cody
cruising. He has fallen asleep in the car, so I figure it makes no difference
to him. I pull my auto into the forgotten car park on the disembowelled
industrial estate outside of town. A musclebound youngster with tight blue
jeans, white singlet and pierced eyebrow promptly approaches the car. I can
tell he is one you have to pay for, rather than a thrill-seeker, from his
confident, business-like walk. What is it about this car that encourages people
to take advantage of me?
At my open window, he sees Cody
asleep in the back, and pulls away slightly: not too much though. He will have
seen stranger things, I think.
‘How can I … crumpet your
trumpet, old boy?’
Suddenly terrified, I gun it and
drive off. Fellating couples peer my way momentarily. Cody wakes up, but
neither of us say anything. I wonder if he was asleep at all, but then find
myself questioning whether I care, so I stop wondering.
‘If you’d invited me too, or made
me feel welcome, ever, maybe she wouldn’t have died.’ On the phone to my mother
in law, I was getting a little mulish.
‘You’re a fucking idiot.’
Cody watches as I pretend she
hasn’t hung up, continuing the conversation as naturally as I can.
I call the man. There’s no-one
else to call. He answers with a long hello that means he hasn’t saved my number
into his phone. A hello with a question mark. I ask if he wants to get a beer;
I know how to talk to ordinary folk. Cody is at school, a place of low virtue
and low standards.
He says ok. Men like him always
have time, and are just waiting for the reason for a beer, a reason he can give
his wife.
Two beers become four, eight,
doubling like microbes, as they do, and whiskey, and then a gay club. This
isn’t like places I’d been before, which had deliberately dark corners for
whatever you wanted: there was always someone willing. This is a smart place,
doormen, not bouncers, cocktails and elegant glasses of lager. It is his
suggestion – he says you could have more fun in a place like this.
‘Not going to run into any of the
boys from work!’ he laughs. We party with bears, squares, tearaways with a
youthful freedom, not to say desperation: creeping around the edge of their
conversations. I am dubbed a kindly old faggot; my companion they call biker
while they call me sidecar – if this means something more, I cannot say.
Cody says: ‘The house is dirty.
Where’s mum?’
‘Let’s go out for tea,’ I say.
Truth is, I haven’t noticed and
don’t know what to do about it. I am thinking about the conclusions to last
night’s fun times. The greasy gayboy was spitting out his teeth when the man
and I had finished with him, a pathetic husk. They glinted on the moist ground
in the alley – he must have had whitening treatment.
‘You homophobes,’ he was still
mustering at this point. I looked bland and pure of expression, at least I
think, but the man still had a red fog over his eyes, lip curled like a baited
boar, and he put the shoe in one more time, aiming for what he called the boy’s
disgusting stained balls.
‘Pizza?’ Cody was saying.
I swear to god, my son has no
imagination.
As we pull up to the house after
our food, my wife’s father’s car is outside. He’s at the wheel, two hands on
it, in fact, like an actor in front of a blue screen in an old movie. He gets
out and starts shouting.
‘Cody, you’re with me!’ As though
he is picking teams, and I am bottom of the wish list.
‘You’re a f … fuck,’ he directs
at me. He says it like he’d never used the word before.
He hands me an envelope, fat with
legalese. He says, ‘Cody has to live with us now. It’s all in there – don’t
argue.’ How little my father-in-law knew me.
Cody says: ‘Can I get my TV?’
His grandfather ruffles his hair
and says: ‘We have everything you need, not to worry.’ To me: ‘She was always
too good for you.’
Then they are gone – I am
childless, like before Cody was born.
Left to my own devices and
deviancies. I think about the man, think about gathering all the power tools I can
find in the garage – stupid people often give them at Christmas – stowing them
in the boot of my good German saloon, picking up the man, shopping for a
leather jacket of my own, and heading for my cruising spot of old, reinventing
myself as a vigilante, the greatest yet, with a tattooed sidekick, a vigilante
of a new morality, where permission for your permissiveness comes from
insurance men and delivery company owners: we are the decision-makers.
