You Are Awful (But I Like You) Page 20

  This impact dislodged the relevant door’s interior armrest, but before it hit upholstery I had dropped the clutch and was very nearly careering backwards through the grass and – ka-BOM, ka-DANG – down on to the road. Some brutal work on the wheel and the gears and Craig was lurching through an about turn. Its apex was a blur of yelling and sportswear: ‘… set fire to that fucken car WITH YOU INSIDE!’

  I’ll say this for Cumbernauld: when there’s fucking-off to be done, you won’t find a better place to do it. Two yanks of the wheel and a minute of unbroken acceleration saw me fairly barrelling out through The Megastructure, my peripheral vision a blur of concrete stilts and mildew. A series of roundabouts were dispatched in a fashion that would have upset Gregory’s father no end, and then I was out of there and away, my heart and Craig’s pumping hard and fast.

  Off we fucked through the rain. Soon large buildings clustered the fuzzy horizon, and Ozzy was beseeching me to take the next left, then the next, then to turn around when possible. I ignored him. My after-lunch Glasgow schedule was to take in two fortified sectarian pubs, and a hotel variously reviewed as inferior to a shop doorway, a park and a bus station, overseen by a receptionist who swore at children and flaunted her amphetamine habit. In light of the morning’s excitement, I found I had no stomach for any of this: the city of Glasgow in general, and its 3lb battered cocks in particular. Expressionlessly I registered that we’d hit the coast: a firth was broadening out to my right, its opposite bank patched with misty fields. Unhappy thoughts crowded my mind. What other words in common English usage incorporated the ae digraph and ended in o? I could summon but two: paedo and Maestro. Perhaps it was all Craig’s fault. Or perhaps it was just time to accept, finally, that I had passed into a certain stage of life. It could have been that first grey hair, the first time I went to bed before my children, the moment I found myself typing ‘what to do with leggy petunias’ into the Google search box. But middle age only shut its doors behind me when I recognised that from now on, the threat of a good shoeing wouldn’t be down to supporting the wrong team or getting on the wrong bus or dressing too damn sharp for my own good, but looking like a nonce.

  Approaching the town of Port Glasgow I stopped for petrol – since leaving the filler cap in Forth I’d been too scared to drive about with more than a third of a tank full – and walking back across the forecourt I saw Craig through the eyes of an overwrought ned. A sorry old heap rendered weird by rarity, with a thousand miles of wintry road filth spattered up his black flanks: a seedy loner on wheels. When I placed my black-gloved hand on the grubby door handle it looked like a cutaway shot in some public information film about stranger danger. There was a carwash round the back and very soon Craig emerged through its furry rollers, steaming and glossy. Catching our reflection in a Port Glasgow shop window, I accepted the effect was wholly counterproductive, a frankly deviant exercise in turd-polishing. I remembered the sound of heels clicking nervously off into the dark as I crawled the kerbs of old Hull, and the question writ large on the young faces that ghosted into my rear-view mirror: what kind of sick creep cares so much about a car like that? At least I now had an answer: the kind that needs setting fire to.

  Port Glasgow offered a complementary backdrop. Pebble-dashed housing blocks shared a cul-de-sac with British Polythene Industries. Ramshackle pubs opted for plywood as a glazing material. An enormous new Tesco sat in the wide open space that had once been docklands and shipbuilding yards. In its car park I squeezed in between a burnt-out van owned by some local tanning salon and a replica of ‘Europe’s first commercially successful steamboat’. Then I got out and found myself on wet pavements thronged with glowering descendants of the Dip the Dyer clan, most grotesque and sinister of all the Happy Families. PORT WOMAN 4 TIMES LIMIT, declared a local-rag newsboard, but the only paper still in stock at the shop behind it was the Daily Mail. I bought one and read it back in the paedowagon, slumped on the passenger seat with a battered black pudding in my lap. This tasted rather better than it looked, but then it looked like a forearm boiled in yogurt.

  When you cross the Cheviot Hills you cross a great media divide. ‘Except for viewers in Scotland’ is the catchphrase that defines it, a motto bitterly parodied by satirist Armando Iannucci in a sketch mourning the televisual deprivations of his Scottish upbringing. Visiting TV heaven, Armando discovers that while he and his countrymen endured an animated series about Gaelic accidents, the rest of Britain was watching the first live interview with an alien, and being shown how to turn base metals into gold. The display of outraged violence aroused by this revelation sees him cast down to TV hell, where he is condemned for all eternity to watch a Grampian quiz show about hills.

  I accept that the Daily Mail probably isn’t ideal reading matter for anyone who fears they may be slipping into the clutches of paranoia. Its editorial policy is neatly summed up by a website entitled the Daily Mail Oncology Project, which details the publication’s tireless efforts to classify all inanimate objects into two types: those that cause cancer and those that cure it. In fact, it occurred to me now that my battered black pudding came close to a Mail journalist’s perfect storm: underclass ned-fodder, probably carcinogenic and definitely Scottish. Because even with Gordon Brown’s career in its fading twilight, the paper was still running dire and almost daily warnings of the ‘McMafia threat’: a cabal of Scots that the paper’s reporters had discovered nibbling away at the very fabric of England, infiltrating our politics and media, managing our football clubs, poisoning our swans with euros dipped in swine-flu. I candidly confess that at this stage of my relationship with the would-be me-burners of Scotland, I was looking forward to reading many such tales. After much jabbing at its tiny buttons I navigated my MP3 player to an anthology of appalling – but very English – football songs, and spread my appalling – but very English – newspaper across the dashboard.

  I turned to the inside back page and felt a smile – accurately more of a sneer – annex my features: a column about the forthcoming World Cup, and Scotland’s absence from it. A paragraph in and the expression was chased off my face by despair. Say it ain’t so, jock-bothering journos of rant-land, say it ain’t so! I had in my hands a very different Daily Mail, some ‘except for readers in Scotland’ edition that I couldn’t believe the excitable Middle Englanders who wrote and read the paper had allowed to exist. This article was written by a Scottish columnist and from the usual Scottish perspective: to wit, the gleeful wishing of ill upon England and its footballing representatives. ‘The target for our contempt is just so inviting,’ he wrote, a quote deemed so toothsome that a sub-editor had stuck it in a box in bold.

  The England 1970 World Cup squad launched into their anthem with wayward gusto, and I allowed myself to dwell upon its copyrighted lyrical sentiment. Presently I went outside and retrieved from the boot a tin of Quality Street the size of Lewis Hamilton’s rear wheel, acquired some days before in another moment of homesick festive weakness. Eleven and a half hours later, knee-deep in harlequin foil wrappings, I eased Craig to a halt outside my house.

  Chapter Ten

  THE FESTIVE SEASON afforded Craig the opportunity to enjoy a well-earned service and a good hoovering, though in the event I chose not to grant him that opportunity. My innards reacquainted themselves with forgotten food groups, and my family at least considered forgiving me for having burst into their bedrooms at 3.40 a.m., wild of eye and brown of mouth. With the new year upon me I considered afresh the balance of my itinerary, with particular emphasis on the basic failures of intelligence that had left me rattling padlocked doors at wax museums and the like. In the end I targeted the February half-term sweet spot to head back north and pick up where I’d left off, a time when many of the seasonal attractions I wished to visit would be creaking open their gates, and in weather likely to make them regret it. So six weeks on there I was, back in the sticky saddle, Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant just a sleet-blurred chimney in Craig’s rear-view mirror as we grumbled
into Barrow-in-Furness past the toilet-paper factory.

  ‘Hello, I’m conducting a survey on behalf of Cornhill Insurance.’ Words that to most of us are an invitation to test out those click-brr reflexes, yet which evidently exert a come-hither appeal upon some – I’m seeing a person who lives alone, and has a hill of corn to insure. At any rate, the firm’s relentless market-research drones apparently harvested at least one opinion, and published the result in a press release headed: IDIOTICALLY SPURIOUS PHONE-POLL NAMES M6 AS BRITAIN’S DULLEST ROAD.

  As it was only weeks since the chocolate-powered all-nighter that had taken in all 232.2 miles of the M6, reacquaintance with 170.9 of them should have driven me to the edge of reason and beyond. Four hundred miles of certified tarmac tedium! Thankfully there’s a simple remedy for motorway ennui, even in its concentrated M6 form. As Dr Johnson so very nearly said: ‘Nothing more wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind than ragging the nuts off a 1.3 Maestro up the fast lane.’

  Dull moments are rare behind a British Leyland steering wheel. What’s that flapping noise? Hang on, I think I can smell burning plastic. Sorry – not sure what this bit is supposed to do, but it just came off in my hands. All that before you’ve even started moving. Attempt to drive almost the full length of the M6 at speed, and you will find such fascinations magnified many times. The passenger sun visor flopped off onto the dashboard as we passed Crewe. A sixth sense and a faint whiff of sooty despair drew me into a Welcome Break near Preston, where Craig gulped down one of the bottles of Tesco Value engine oil I’d given him for Christmas (along with a new petrol cap, the spoilt bastard). To add to the fun, I started sticking up for him whenever he was bullied, which was often. Right, I’d think, clenching my jaw as yet another BMW dismissively cut across Craig’s bows at close range, bet you never thought a Maestro could do THIS! Then, to his spiritual and mechanical disadvantage, Craig would very noisily fail to do it. Despite the view, the drizzle and The Best of Robson & Jerome, boring it was not.

  I turned off at junction 36 and headed west, leaving the sketchy Lakeland peaks in the damp twilight behind. An excitable landscape of tilted pastures and wandering drystone walls settled into somnabulent corrugations of cold mud. The bare roadside trees were festooned with shreds of carrier bag, their branches swept back into ragged quiffs by a lifetime of steady, buffeting westerlies. Settlements were few and far between, then fewer and further. I caught a whiff of coal smoke and a lonely cry of, ‘Fookinell!’ A little orange light flashed up on the dashboard: acclimatisation process complete.

  Great Yarmouth, Hull, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough: so many of the places I’d visited were dead ends, towns en route to nowhere and so deprived of passing trade and its life-giving succour. But Barrow-in-Furness was right out on a limb – so far out that the limb had been amputated and thrown off the Isle of Man ferry. Marooned at the end of Furness, a long and lonely peninsula halfway between Carlisle and Liverpool, Barrow is amongst the most isolated towns in Britain. The current population is seventy thousand: head out of Barrow in search of somewhere bigger and you’re looking at a 70-mile drive in the direction of your choice (tip: unless you’ve got Jim Davidson trussed up in the boot, don’t try west). In short, it’s an excellent place for doing things you don’t want to be seen doing, like tipping depleted uranium down the sink, making bog roll, or chasing an Austin Maestro hubcap along a dual carriageway.

  Barrow didn’t actually score too badly in any of the civic-performance charts. It was just one of those places, like Slough or Coventry, that everyone automatically assumed would feature on my itinerary, me included. But now, as the lights of Barrow beckoned me forth, I tried to think what it had done to deserve such reflex derision. As a boy, I knew it only as the team that always propped up Division 4: in 1972, Barrow AFC was booted out of the Football League on the rarely invoked grounds of perennial uselessness. Thereafter I lost contact with the town until 2002, when a faulty air-conditioning unit at Barrow’s arts centre triggered the UK’s worst outbreak of legionnaires’ disease. Factory closures, a bit of radioactive contamination: this wasn’t a town with a good-news vibe, but there still had to be more to it. Slowing to 30 and approaching its trading estates, I wondered if Barrow might be damned by no more than its own blunt, grim name. A town carting itself off to the dump. And that was before I’d heard a local unleash the blunter, grimmer, sawn-off ‘Barra’.

  The tyre-fitters and bus depots thinned out, and I passed into the familiar post-industrial urban landscape: retail sheds set in empty tarmac fields, the night lit up by totem poles clustered with gaudy logos. Carpet Right, Pizza Hut, PC World and – by now I could feel when one was coming upon me – a Tesco the size of Denmark. For once I’d found a Travelodge with spare overnight capacity, but suddenly felt certain that part of me would die if I even set foot in that overgrown bungalow opposite a twenty-four-hour Asda. Presently I spotted a parade of handsome old civic buildings, all towers and arched windows, and impulsively yanked the wheel. Almost straight away I was pulling up outside the River Kwai Guest House.

  ‘This is supposed to be a hotel, not the Burma railway!’ Basil Fawlty’s reaction to the overnight death of a guest rang through my head as I stood at the porch. The breakfast menu almost wrote itself: no breakfast for you, foreign devil! I knocked again but no one came. Still, the broad pavements ahead were flanked with creaky old Edwardian piles that all looked like b.& b.s, and indeed largely proved to be. I walked under the first VACANCY sign and found myself at a porch flanked with red-lettered notices: DID YOU CLOSE THE GATE? on one side, NO MUDDY BOOTS on the other. A digital ding-dong ushered me into a hall edged with further printed exhortations, though my attention swiftly attached itself to the laminated card that read WE ARE NOT TOYS, affixed as this was to the trunk of one of the several hundred elephants with which I shared the room. From thumb-sized wooden miniatures to hefty renderings in garish ceramic, they stared in tight, silent ranks from every shelf and ledge and massed menacingly beneath every hallway chair and table. The largest, a pair of knee-high golden trunk-wavers, stood guard either side of the staircase, beneath the legend, THIS IS A RESPECTABLE HOTEL – KEEP IT THAT WAY.

  One of the unsung joys of individual enterprise is the scope it offers for the indulging of personal eccentricities. My gaff, my rules, my whimsical derangement. For a long while it was just me, the pachyderms, and the diktats I now took the time to peruse in full. BREAKFAST IS SERVED FROM 7.00–8.30. DON’T BE LATE AS A “NO” CAN OFFEND; NO HOT FOOD OR UNPAID GUESTS IN BEDROOMS; DON’T START WITH ME – YOU WILL NOT WIN. Presently a bespectacled boy of about twelve appeared, and processed my accommodation request in efficient silence. He led me up two dark flights of elephant-lined stairs, and along a wandering elephant-lined corridor, then held out a hand to indicate my allotted bathroom. I put my head round its door to be met with yet another printed order: PLEASE LEAVE THIS BATHROOM AS YOU WOULD LIKE TO FIND IT, which meant a delay while I took down several framed safari scenes and installed a sunken Jacuzzi. Then he opened a door opposite, gestured at the darkness within, and departed.

  My appointed quarters were very small and unbelievably pink. The Dralon buttoned headboard, the sink, the bedspread, the curtains, the small bits of wall visible between no-smoking stickers: all was violently cerise. All except the inevitable grey mammal or three, and a mysterious rosewood and aluminium box that filled the bedside table. With its speaker grille and many knobs and rocker switches, it looked like something an early Miss Moneypenny might have employed to let M know that 007 was here to see him. None of the controls bore any identification, though a faded typewritten label above one read, PLEASE ENSURE THIS BUTTON IS DEPRESSED AT ALL TIMES. I smiled and nodded for a while, then quickly leant forward and clicked it out. Nothing happened, of course, though I did later learn that at precisely this moment Dumbo fell out of the sky in nearby Morecambe, damaging a bus shelter.

  I walked back to town in a stiff wind that carried before it the sweet-and-sour dishwater whiff of Chi
nese takeaway. Little tornadoes of dust and litter rose up and stung my eyes; the wind turned and I was overtaken by skittering beer cans. Dalton Road, the desolate main drag, was full of pawnbrokers (one day I’m going to walk into a Money Shop and ask to buy a tenner) and soap-windowed errors of commercial judgement. (‘You know what would do really well in Barrow? A casino. A casino called The High Street Casino.’) I allowed myself to be blown past the grand but gloomy town hall and out to the waterfront, epicentre of the town’s explosive awakening.

  Barrow was a fishing village of thirty-two dwellings when the first Victorian industrialists arrived in 1840, attracted by its huge natural harbour, the legacy of a long, thin island that kept the ebullient Irish Sea at bay. Throw in the ample availability of local iron ore and a new railway, and you begin to understand how within fifty years Barrow-in-Furness found itself hosting England’s busiest shipyards and the largest steelworks on earth. It was an extraordinary tale even by the standards of this golden age of industrial boom towns. You might, for instance, imagine that the New York Times would be busy reporting upon its own mercantile miracles, but in 1881 the paper felt compelled to report on the Barrow phenomenon, in an article dramatically headlined: AN IRON CITY BY THE SEA – THE GREAT SHIP-BUILDING YARDS AT BARROW-IN-FURNESS. FROM VILLAGE TO METROPOLIS – BUILDING OCEAN STEAMERS. It reads just like a story you might find today about some rampantly expanding industrial port in China, full of awed statistics and the same thinly veiled sense of economic dread and envy. At least it does for a thousand words or so, at which point the journalist abruptly runs out of portentous things to say about Barrow, and lets the reader know as much with this sentence: ‘In the boiler shop a number of Mr Tweddell’s hydraulic riveters are in use.’