Wrecking (Part One)

1/3

“We can do some wrecking here. And find something to love in this broken place”

– Laura Veirs

We’re in the hospital car park, me leading and him following somewhat unsteadily behind. He hasn’t even got a proper coat so he’s wrapped some kind of shawl, useless and thin, around his neck and shoulders.

I should have brought him a coat.

It’s April and it’s freezing, and the wind rushes around us with both insistence and vengeance. We shouldn’t be here, this place where April brings arctic winds into car parks, we should have been born elsewhere, lived elsewhere, nearer the equator somewhere. This would never had happened, I think, if we had been warm.

“You got a cigarette?” he says, the words catching on rasped tongues and furry teeth, vibrating and hungover.

“Should you even be smoking?”

He shrugs.

So formal, Cigarette, never Fag.

“In the car” I say. We need to be in the car.

The car park feels theme-park large, why did I park so far away? Making him walk across, in the cold, without a coat. I am basically inflicting torture on him.

We reach the car, my battered Peugeot, and I open the door and jam the seat forward so he can get in the back. Holding the frame of the door, he sort of swings himself back and forth a few times to build up momentum, then pulls himself inside and onto the backseat.

I lined the back with blankets before I left, has he seen too much of blankets in the hospital already? Jesus Christ does he think I think he’s going to mess up the seats? Does he think that I think he’s going to cover the sheets with blood, or mucus, or piss like some kind of dog?

“Sorry about the blankets” I say

“S’alright” he says. “Comfy”

“I thought maybe you were sick of blankets”

“Got that cigarette?”

Why did I even bring the packet with me? I should lie and say I don’t have one. I should deny him it. I should protect. I should not supply poison and smoke when this is all about clean, about purity and salt and rendering old lines and marks new.

I give him the cigarette.

“We just gotta pay” I say, “then we can get out of here”

I roll the Peugeot round to the exit and pay the bored looking guy two quid for parking, before the battered metal barrier judders unsteadily into the air, like a drunk rising himself off the floor at closing time.

“You think that’s a good job?” he says
”What?” I say.

The open road. Got to get to the road. It is what I have seen and read in movies and books. I pull out into traffic.

“The parking guy.”
”Him?”

“Spending all day just taking people’s money and pushing that button to raise the barrier”

“Doesn’t sound it”

”But he’s got time to think hasn’t he”

“I suppose”

“I think- I hope, he’s sitting in there writing novels or composing symphonies”

“More likely taking naps, reading The Sun and wanking” I say, craning my neck to see out of the mirror.

“Put some music on” he says, leaning against the window.

We curl out of the suburbs and towards the north circular. It is, almost, like our college days, busily working our way through a pile of cds, driving somewhere, anywhere, just an excuse to talk and listen to music and smoke with a moving, rolling backdrop. We listen to bands and talk about gigs and records and things that we both know and that we have shared. Disposable things. He looks tired.

“You can sleep you know” I say “If you want”

“I’m ok” he says, blowing smoke out the window “I’ll keep you company”

“Must be tiring”
”What must?” he says

Dying. Is dying tiring? I need to know. I have so many questions. Like falling asleep awake, slowly, for months, rotting and falling apart and with bits and pieces old and falling off. Dying is something I only know in movies and tv shows and songs, not something sitting with me in the back of my car.
”I dunno… “ I say.
”Check the bag” I say again. Wanting to kill the silence. I need to fill this car with music and talk.

“I got all kind of good shit for us both”

He rummages through my canvas record bag and pulls out items I have specifically chosen to save us both. He’s humouring me. He knows the stuff - and it’s just stuff - I’ve brought isn’t for him, it’s for me. Inside –

DVDs; an eighth of draw (see my hypocrisy about his cigarette, I bring more poisions); a harmonica; a pair of binoculars; music deep with in-jokes and old club nights, even a battered copy of Lord of the Flies from an English class seven years ago.

The truth is I’ve packed all this, retrieved anything with a hook between us, because the thought of this weekend, filling this weekend, terrifies me. What will we do with the time? Will he be able to drink? Will that make it worse? Will he get tired in the middle of the day? What will all the tablets and pills do to him. I have so many questions.

Out the window, London is finally unravelling its furthest tendrils, along the streets and concrete dual carriageways, I imagine the colourful tentacles of the tube map flowing underneath the streets like blood in veins. All those exotic names, Rickmansworth, Chorleywood, and Morden, the possibility of the unexplored. We had a plan, years ago, of visiting every place at the end of the tube map. Taking a camera or something and filming ourselves there.

I don’t recall what we planned to do when we got there.

What were we thinking. Theydon Bois, Beckton, and Cockfosters. Our horizons limited by travelcards and ambition

“We’re getting out of London, soon” I say “I might need you to map read”

Is that ok? Has all the medication affected his eyesight?

“Sure thing”

I throw the AA into the backseat, as we finally slip into the junction, like a vaccine off a needle, flowing into the main bloodstream, shooting off on higher purpose.

Outside the window England dribbles past like rolls of stapled together sheets. There is no drama, no cinema, to this country, and for the two of us raised on DVDs and filmic dreams, no satisfaction remains out there. But motion, the force of moving is good for us, as we drive we live, the imitation of life is maintained as long as we both appear to move. But remove those forces, those centrifuges and moments, and I fear we both will drop down lifeless to the floor. If only we could keep driving, just repeat this time trading jokes across headrests, changing cds and talking about half-remembered songs. But soon, despite our best map-reading efforts, we’re nearer to where we’re going than from where we came, and I know if we were merely to continue, all that would happen is we’d reach the end of England and plunge into the sea.

I think of ‘if onlys’. If only we were American. If only this were America. We could continue forever, we would go south at first, to Mexico, to Macchu Picchu and Chile and places we had only seen on packets of coffee beans and in old westerns. Central America and the pacific coast, that scene from the Shawshank Redemption with all it’s mock sentimentality. South America, jungles and Amazon and motorbikes and that shot of Jesus over Rio De Janeiro. Scenes from movies, false memories that I have adopted as my own. Football in Chile and Tangoes in Argentina and being obliterated by the spray and the roar and the nothingness of the Igazu Falls, further further further. Right down to the end, the tip of the continent stabbing out like a needle, and then at least when reached those waters, and standing upon the tips of lighthouses we could shout things to antartica and all those fucking penguins.

If only we could stay on the road.

Then I think of his ‘if onlys’, and how, in the cosmic scale of bigger problems, he outranks me by a few notches. His ‘if onlys’ beat mine every time, it’s the hand he’s been dealt.

Every few miles he takes a picture, “gotta keep records” he says. He says he has a video camera and a Dictaphone too in his bag. I wonder if we are trying to create a kind of permanence, as he films me, messing about with accents and strange voices and all the same jokes we used to share at school, committing life to tape. We had this joke, this skit, at school, of replacing key lines from films with ‘pants’, I remember doing most of the Star Wars trilogy on the way to our GCSE exams, “The pants are strong in this one” and the like. And for some reason, for some stupid reason, this is coming back to us big time.
“Here’s looking at pants, kid” he says.

And this is hilarious now, like some jokes have times and moments where they are particularly funny, above and beyond their ordinary threshold, whether it’s a mixture of time and audience and teller or something, like the bad comic having the show of his life.

”You want the pants? You can’t handle the pants!” I say.

We’re laughing over and over again, and it’s so funny that we’ve stopped laughing at the joke, or at the lines one another is saying, and just laughing at eachother laughing, at the act of it, the inane biological evolutionary uselessness of it. And at least, we’re talking, and we have something to talk about that can sustain us for the rest of our journey, as our mouths and jaws are aching from the laughing, and tears building up in the corner of our eyes like we were chopping too many onions.