Take the next road on your left (1)

“Take the next road on your left and follow it for three hundred yards” she said. It was a voice unconcerned with fallibility and pronounced with little more than a flat monotone timbre, yet condescending enough. I obeyed like the dutiful offspring of this bizarre parent (itself the seemingly weird hybrid of a School Head and an AA road map) but my deference, to begin with as big as a Sequoia tree, was now some thirty minutes old and had tapered to little more than a toothpick.
“I’m bloody sure I’ve been down this street already” I muttered; I talked to myself a lot. I always did even as a child. I didn’t love the sound of my own voice and I wasn’t lonely or unhappy child and I didn’t come from a broken home – I just talked to myself more than I talked to others. I wasn’t a solitary man, I loved company. But I was always more comfortable listening to people.
The events that involved me or occurred around me within my social or occupational circle, between the ritual opening and closing of my eyes were matter-of-fact enough. Occasionally something peculiar or comical would intersperse the routine and to provide me with sufficient data, when I found myself among a social gathering, to produce an interesting paragraph of dialogue, or, perhaps, a droll observation. I believed in economy and it served me well.
My productivity, however, was being sorely tested by this machine, stuck on my dashboard like a high-tech St Christopher’s medal with a success rate rather more truncated than that attributable to the beleaguered Patron of travellers. I had arrived in the city good time for the meeting and had taken measures against the inevitability of traffic snarls and motorway congestion. Unfortunately this high-tech piece of crap was draining away this resource and making real the prospect of arriving late for the meeting.
“At the junction turn right onto Oracle Close” she ordered. Oracle Close, is she kidding? How drunk does a councillor have to be to name a road Oracle Close? What was an oracle anyway?
I did as she asked and turned into what appeared to be one of those roads that run behind residential housing estates where the garages are located at the rear of the property. It was a little wider but still far too narrow to claim street status. Where the fuck is she taking me? I should be among high-rise office blocks and large departments stores; all those reassuring signs of city centredom. Hell I didn’t even know in which direction the city centre lay.
I pulled up and reset the Satnav with the arrival address. There seemed little danger of blocking any traffic. For the first time since I entered the metropolis, I took my eyes away from the road and examined the hinterland. It was drab and litter congregated in the corners of walls like a succession of street gangs, carrying with it the promise of impending violence.
As I tinkered with the electronic bitch a dull thud rocked the boot of my car. I turned quickly, my neck cracking in the process, to see two young boys grinning at me through the rear window. A half-brick lay across my boot. The arrogance of their lawlessness was compounded by a deficiency of fear. It was almost as if the brick were a vehement door knock, trying to goad me out of the safety of my vehicle.
They were aged, I guessed around, 13 or maybe even younger. They were scrawny and their thin white faces peered out beyond the hoods of their jackets like the visages of emaciated fiends. I was thirty and well-built but had no intention of stepping out. I kidded myself there may be others or that they may have knives secreted somewhere. But to be brutally honest it would cost me less to get the car fixed and paid for by my employer than any loss of earnings incurred to a good kicking. Besides which I now had a bloody good excuse for being late. Hey guys look what happened to me, and they would apologize on behalf of their fellow citizens and subsume my guilt as theirs.
Had I turned the engine off? I tapped the accelerator and it hummed sweetly in response. Smiling I gave the two little bastards an index finger, popped the car into gear and reversed straight back at them. They threw themselves sideways even though I stopped short. The bluff had worked. I lowered the electric window on my side, secure now from attack the enemy prostrate and dirty on the ground.
“Real tough guys now, eh?”
They snarled like ravenous mongrels and began to rise but I’d popped the car back into first and was moving off.
Suddenly I was hit by a spray of liquid of some sort. I automatically hit the break, then remembered the human canines giving chase and sped off. In the rear view mirror I saw the assailant. A girl, a little older than the boys, or at least looking that way, had stepped out from behind a concrete lamppost. The bitch had been part of a hoody pincer movement I guessed.
She moved across the road toward the rest of the pack. All three were gazing malevolently toward the vehicle as it drew away from them. The girl twirled a bottle of coke between her right index finger and thumb. “Aaah shit” I blasted sensing the sticky resin around my chest and lap.
But what did I expect? It was a devious race; usurers. I found that out early on; three of them - a two-timing mental prepubescent, a casually married twenty-something and a female mid-life crisis crash site. The teenage tramp hurt me hard like all first relationships. I never put her on a pedestal like all those soppy prats at school. I knew she was “experienced”, they didn’t call her Sonya sleep around for nowt, whilst my sexual discourse was limited to playground flirtations and fondlings. Then, at the end of year ball, I walked in late, and stumbled into her running out, red faced and spitting ICBMs.
I was with the lads. We’d had a few drinks (cans bought by the tallest and bravest from the local “offy”) because none of us had the bottle to ask a girl to dance without alcohol’s erosion of self-consciousness. She exited the club door looking backwards and rammed into me with so much force that I had to throw my arms around her waist to prevent me falling. They were only around her for a moment but the intensity of her being charged through my hands and shot around my body as if I’d been wired to the National Grid.
She shot me a look as I straightened up. Her eyes were a two profound brown wells within a backcloth of two brilliant white discs. They shot my patellas away, which was unfortunate because she’d instinctively pulled back from me after our eyes had met. Then the club door slammed open again and the source of her anger appeared. In a trice she had linked her arms around mine and hauled me up for a second time.
“I’m with Charlie” she spat
The soon to be ex, a dense (in both body mass and cerebral activity) thug called Simon, resolved the potentially explosive situation by screaming back at her, “The bitch is yours” and punched me. This time I did hit the deck.
That set the next three months in stone. Sonya asked ME to go out with HER. I also knew that, despite the nicknames, most of my mates were greener than fairy liquid. But this poor naïve fool thought that, after choosing me after ditching the school heavy, she was searching for something finer.
I had her attention for a good month, but to be truthful I doubt if it were a week. A virgin to begin with by September I was a veteran. By Christmas I was a virgin again. Apparently she’d had a dozen liaisons over that late autumn period. How she’d had the time I still find hard to reconcile, never mind the vim. I was a fit 17 year old virile adolescent but by Halloween I was becoming tired of sex.
I didn’t want to break up with Sonya, she still retained an enormous physical presence that drew me to her like a love junkie, but, although I could map her naked regions by memory, I knew nothing of her beyond the pub, the flicks, Burger King and the bedroom (always mine)
Just before Christmas my mother asked me if I was going to bring that nice girl to dinner. By the time it was cooked and the table laid there were two turkeys at that sitting. Christmas Eve I was out with my mates for the first time in weeks. Most of us had turned 18 except Joe, but Joe could drive.
Sonya wanted to see her pals but by this time I was suspecting the worst so I made the guys drink all night at the one pub I knew Sonya would end up at if she was out with the girls. By midnight, the landlord had an extended licence for the season, we’d all had enough to drink and Joe was desperate to get us home as we were becoming heavily reliant on the local’s walls and pillars to remain upright.
Staggering out into the car park we could see a couple on top of Joe’s little Renault screwing like it was their last night on earth. The girl was flat across the roof with her thighs and legs lifted, as if she were about to give birth, in the muscular arms of a male stripped to the waist and whose upper torso resembled a line of hams in a butcher’s window. He thrusting was so intense that he seemed not to notice that Joe’s aerial was planted firmly into the crack of his anus and was waxing and waning in equal measure as he was thrusting in and out of the girl who we could hear whispering encouragement to him like a tutor would give to a failing pupil “Faster, faster”
“You’re gonna end up with a soft top Joe” I laughed, until we got closer and I recognized the rose tattoo on the left buttock of the female.
“Fuck me Sonya”
They both stopped; he grateful and she annoyed. She looked at me from the cold greyish top of the Renault and said casually: “Charlie. By the way we’re finished” I could see, even in that darkness, those pitiless eyes and then she turned back toward action man.
“Well” she said, “Get on with it” and so he dutifully complied. After ten or fifteen strokes he realised we were still watching and growled at us like a rapacious wolf and we adopted the strategic rationale of retreat.
“I’ll pay for any damage Joe. She’s my girlfriend”
“She was” and I knew then that I was truly back amongst the lads, single and sex-starved.
“At the junction turn left”
I did and the road was wider. It was like stepping back onto the main pedestrian walkways from those dark menacing alleyways in Venice.
“No more dead-ends you silly cow”
“Then take the second road on the right” The traffic grew heavier.
“This is more promising”
“Follow the road for half a mile”
The buildings grew taller as I approached the next crossroads. It began to resemble a city centre.
“At the crossroads turn right – no left!”
I turned the wheel right and then left as if I had a third rate navigator in my car trying to guide me round a rally course and then two things hit me simultaneously. The shock at what appeared to be a piece of technology that can contradict itself and then, a millisecond later, the pedestrian.