In Search Of Chopsticks.
Part Two.
By the time we get to Ophir, I really need a cigarette. I gave up twenty years ago but times like this – times of fear and memory – I really, really want one. I ask the man with the beard if he has any and he says, ‘Nope. I quit the day I died.’ Great. Stormzy’s on the radio now and his snide-spit anger stabs me, shakes me, wraps me in a kind of sour homesickness. ‘Can never tell what these people are singing about,’ says the man with the beard and I start to respond, then stop myself. No time left for righteousness.
I take a breath. Then another. I loosen my grip a little on the wheel. A kind of peace descends. Until – oh yes! – I remember the song you sang that sweet spring morning in Raleigh.
Five, six miles pass. ‘Turn off here,’ the man with the beard says, as I knew he would, and I slow the car, ease it onto the forest track, the track I last drove down the night of the flood, the track to Jump Off Rock and the dusk of our lives.
It’s cold now, the sun’s gone, the radio’s switched itself off. All I can hear is the breathing of the dead man next to me. Do you remember those sleepless childhood nights when all you could hear were the creaks and groans of the house and the blue chatter of your thoughts and the ancient echoes of the day? Do you remember wondering if this night would last until Judgement Day? Yeah. It all feels like that. The earth is changing and the white hoods are here again and it’s time to drag us all back from the clasp of the past, as the song says.
It’s afternoon still – it must be – but it’s pitch black and I turn the headlights on. I look round, start to ask the man with the beard the question, the question you’d want me to ask him, but he’s no longer there. His bowler hat’s sitting, mocking, on the passenger seat.
Shit. There’s mist now, rain, I can hardly see anything. I put my foot on the brake and the car ignores me, try again and feel it start to speed up. The rain’s pounding on the windscreen, the mist has become fog, the steering wheel’s jammed, solid, unswerving. Faster, headlights are switched off now, faster, just blind darkness ahead, faster, feel the head-on-roof bumps and jolts of car on forest floor, faster, fear the scratching and knocking of branches on the roof, faster, sense the wolf-howls and the voice of Nelson in ‘63, faster, hear the sore cry of his guitar, faster, close my eyes, faster
faster
faster
faster.
faster
To be continued
