tapped the spoon a few times on to the rim of the bowl, then passed it to Drew. He dipped it into his mouth, and as the wooden lip slid back into view, I explained. ‘The vinegar brings out the flavour of the strawberries. And you know strawberries: some of them do need coaxing.’ I was speaking over his protracted groan of pleasure: the proof is in the pudding. He went to replace the spoon in the bowl, so I had to swoop, snatch the handle, tick him off: ‘Saliva digests, Drew; didn’t you know that? That’s what saliva’s for.’
‘Oh, and I thought –’
‘– Drew, don’t.’
He was amazed, amused. ‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’
‘Coming from you, and concerning a bodily function? Bad news, whatever.’
From across the kitchen, Philip enthused, ‘So strawberry-ish.’
I said, ‘So real that somehow it seems fake.’
Drew said, ‘Post-modern strawberry ice-cream.’
Putting the bowl in the fridge, I complained, ‘Ice-cream is underrated in this country.’
Drew despaired, ‘Oh, everything is underrated in this country.’
‘Except self-denial,’ I said.
Which made him laugh.
I did ask Drew if he wanted to come with us to the park, but he declined. I felt that I should ask, but knew that he would say no. So, here we are, Hal and I, alone together as usual, side by side, accompanying each other on our separate strolls, like an old couple. And we have just passed the impeccably dressed old couple who are here most days in their small parked car, asleep. As always, she was in the driver’s seat and he was sitting directly behind her on the back seat. They do not always sleep. Sometimes she holds in her kid-gloved hands a floppy book and a pencil: puzzles, crosswords, I presume. Sometimes he stares ahead through the windscreen. But the purpose of the daily trip seems to be to sleep, because on the rare occasions when they are awake, they look furious, cheated. Why do they come here to nap? I went to parks, in darkness, in cars, when I was a teenager. Odd, to think how I slid into those deserted parks under cover of darkness alongside someone else. Odd, to think of once having been so purposeful, so physical. So purposefully physical.
Whenever I see the old couple, I ponder their relationship: perhaps she works for him, drives him here, because why else the bizarre seating arrangement? They seem to be of a similar age, but of course there is no need for her to be younger than him in order to work for him, to care for him. I am a poor judge, though: to me, old is old; I could be looking at an age gap of ten or even twenty years and I would not know. I have doubts that their relationship is professional, I see no semblance of good form in those faces.
So the homeless man is not the only person to sleep here. And as well as the old couple, there is the courier. Every morning, Hal and I pass a parked van, the windscreen of which displays a sign, Courier on delivery. We had been passing that van every morning for weeks before I realised, one morning, that what I was seeing when I glanced through the windscreen was a person, asleep. What I was seeing was a figure, reclined and wrapped in blankets: formless, featureless, but the repose unmistakably that of sleep. Suddenly, I was uneasy: I felt caught out, as if I had been observed, as if it were me who had been seen. Self-conscious, I was anxious to be quieter, although that was scarcely possible. I wanted to mark my respect. And so, nowadays, I tiptoe by the van, marvelling at the ability of that person to sleep visible, to turn so thoroughly and apparently peacefully from the daytime world of dog-walkers, childminders, council workers.
Yesterday evening, I was driving along this side of the park on my way back from the station. The drive home from the centre of town is so familiar to me as to feel choreographed: a five-minute journey made from precision-timed turns of the wrist, and a balance of braking and acceleration. No steps up and down the gears: my car is, regrettably, an automatic. I love driving. I love the necessary, narrow, but unremitting focus on the minutiae of the windows and mirrors: the whole busy world reduced to blips on my screens. I love that I cannot go forwards without constantly, simultaneously looking backwards. Driving is made of judgements of distance and speed, the very two elements by which I am so floored in my earthbound life. But on wheels, on a road, I am faultless. When driving, I am nothing but eyes, hands, feet, all in perfect co-ordination, and all-powerful. I have never had a moment of panic or fear or even of doubt when driving; in no other circumstances do I ever feel so safe.
Driving, I am transformed into someone decisive and able. My father used to say, A moment of hesitation is a moment gone. Sometimes he said, A moment’s hesitation and you’re dead. And so’s the other bloke. I learned to drive to his constant refrain, Anticipation.
Driving is in my blood. My father drove even as a child; his family – his father, grandfather, uncles, older brothers – were mechanics; they cared for engines, composed them, cleaned and coaxed them. My blood hums with, and thrills to, this particular competence.
Sometimes I think that this is all that there is to my blood: this most unnatural of activities seems to come to me more naturally than anything else. More so than the activities that are supposed to come naturally, such as eating, walking, sleeping. I am never so alive as when I am driving. And never so happy: the world shrunken, scrolling, passing beyond me; my machine responding to every mere touch. Sometimes, arriving home, I turn and do another lap, or go to the motorway to speed and watch the speedometer, to relish that immediate, utterly uncomplicated relationship between the downward push of my toes and the smooth rise of the needle.
My father used to say, The faster your car, the faster you’re away from trouble.
This is a fast car.
Sometimes, driving, I sing:
You may not have a car at all,
But, brothers and sisters, remember,
You can still stand tall.
Just be thankful
For what you’ve got.
When I arrive home again, I stay for a while in the car, perhaps listening to the radio, and gazing through the windscreen: I love to be there, in the street but not in the street; home, but not home.
Yesterday evening, when I was driving home along this edge of the park, the radio was playing the Chopin nocturne that is the theme tune to my memories of childhood ballet classes. The classes’ pianist was our teacher’s elderly mother. That piece of music – strangely, only that piece – recalls for me the slippery, bouncy sensation of wooden floorboards beneath my soft shoes; the smell of the church hall, balmy with beeswax; the blaze of Victorian windows, numerous, high and viewless, and faintly mysterious with blinds, ropes, hooks, like sails. The pianist was so old; I wonder, now, how old she was. I remember her face and no others, not my teacher’s nor my peers’. That old face looked so resigned, was expressionless. And terrifying, for some reason: terrifying in retrospect, not at the time. Perhaps I am troubled now by her phenomenal agedness, or by the almost muscular expressionlessness. Or perhaps by the anomaly of such a bearing in a roomful of supple, self-conscious little girls. She was old in the way that perhaps women of my generation, later generations, will never look old: the white perm, the unsoothed wrinkles, the standard-issue specs. To her Chopin, we did our
