Geoff Dyer - White Sands - Experiences from the Outside World

‘I need to take a leak,’ he said.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Go right ahead.’ I said this in as neutral a tone as possible. I made sure my facial expression gave nothing away and then, worried that this non-expression manifested itself as a rigidity of expression which in fact gave everything away, I relaxed and smiled a bit.

‘You ain’t gonna up and leave me here, are you?’ he said.

‘Leave you here?’ I said. ‘No, of course not.’

‘You sure about that, brother?’

‘I swear,’ I said. He nodded and began walking slowly to the rest rooms. He was dragging his left leg slightly. He took his time and did not look back. I watched his retreating form. As soon as he disappeared inside, I released the trigger of the fuel line, clattered it out of the side of the car and banged it back into the metal holster of the pump. It fell noisily to the ground.

‘You need to push the lever back up,’ said Jessica. I did that. I pushed the lever back up and settled the awkward nozzle of the fuel hose back into it.

‘Quickly!’ said Jessica. I twisted the cap back onto the fuel tank, but I did it too quickly and it would not go on properly. There is much truth in the old adage ‘More haste, less speed.’ Eventually I succeeded in getting it on and ran round the front of the car while Jessica turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared into life.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ I shouted as I climbed into the passenger door. Jessica pulled away calmly and quickly, without squealing the tires, and I shut the door.

We exited the gas station safely and smoothly and in seconds were out on the road. At first we were elated to have made our getaway like this. We high-fived each other. Ha ha!

‘Did you like the way I said “I swear”?’ I said.

‘Genius!’ said Jessica. We went on like this for a bit but we soon ran out of steam, because although we still felt a bit elated we were starting to feel a bit ashamed too, and then, bit by bit, the elation ebbed away.

‘Your door’s not shut,’ Jessica said after a while.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Jessica. I opened the door a crack and slammed it shut, shutter than it had been shut before.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You were right.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Jessica. Then, ‘Was that a really terrible thing we just did?’

‘I think it might have been.’

‘Do you think it was racist?’

‘I think it was just kind of rude. Judgemental. Rash.’

‘Think how he’s going to feel when he comes out of the toilet. He’ll be so let down. He’ll feel we treated him so shabbily.’

We drove on. The scene was the same — cars, lights, almost darkness. We were safe, but perhaps we had always been safe. Now that we were out of danger it seemed possible that there had never been any danger.

‘It’s as if he were testing us,’ said Jessica.

‘I know. It’s never a good feeling, failing a test,’ I said. ‘I still remember how I felt when I was seventeen and failed my driving test.’

‘How did you feel?’

‘I don’t remember exactly,’ I said. ‘Not great. What about you? You probably passed first time.’

‘I did,’ she said, but there was no avoiding the real subject of the moment. After a pause Jessica said, ‘Should we go back?’

‘Perhaps we should.’

‘But we won’t, right?’

‘Absolutely not,’ I said, and we both laughed. We drove in silence for several minutes. We were no longer elated, but the vibe in the car was good again even though we were still ashamed, innocent of nothing and guilty of nothing, relieved at what we had done and full of regret about what we had done.

‘You know those urban legends?’ said Jessica.

‘The vanishing hitchhiker?’

‘Yes. There’s probably an axe in the back seat.’

I twisted around to look — a bit awkward with the seatbelt. There was nothing on the back seat and nothing on the floor either, except two Coke tins and a bottle of water, all empty, and a torn map of White Sands.

‘Nothing,’ I said, rubbing my neck. We drove on. It was quite dark now. Night had fallen on New Mexico.

The dashboard lights glowed faintly. The fuel gauge was pointing almost to full.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘We performed one useful service. At least we got him away from that area where it told you not to pick up hitchhikers. He should be really grateful for that.’ I said this, but as I imagined him back there, coming out of the washroom and looking round the gas-station forecourt, I knew that gratitude would not be uppermost in his mind. There would have been plenty of other cars coming and going but he must have known, deep down, that the car he wanted to see and which he hoped would still be there would be long gone. I could imagine how he felt and I was glad that I was not him feeling these things and I was glad, also, that it was just the two of us again, safe and in our car, married, and speeding towards El Paso.

One of my mother’s three sisters, Hilda, was extremely beautiful. In what seems like a Thomas Hardy story relocated to Shropshire, she met a pupil from Shrewsbury School, the improbably named Charles Bacchus. She had been intending to go into domestic service but instead, after a courtship whose details I never learned, she married Charles and moved to London. She later separated from Charles Bacchus and began a long relationship with a self-made millionaire called Charles Brown, whom she always referred to, confusingly, as CB. They led a glamorous life. Once they drove down from London to Cheltenham in CB’s white Rolls-Royce, which they parked right outside our house like a temporary monument to wealth and several kinds of mobility. They were on the maiden voyage — or maiden cruise — of the QE2 . Either as part of this cruise or on another trip, they went on a tour of the American Southwest. When I was in junior school Hilda sent me brochures and postcards from places like the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest and Monument Valley. These were landscapes I had glimpsed in Westerns, but the fact that someone I knew had been to them — had proved that they were real — gave me my first sense of elsewhere: an elsewhere that seemed the opposite of everywhere and everything I knew.

Pilgrimage

I spent the first decade of the century telling anyone who would listen that I wanted to end my days in California. One of the people I said this to, in San Francisco, was quick to put me right: you don’t end your days in California, he said, you begin them. Jessica and I began our Californian life in January 2014, but it wasn’t quite the life I’d always wanted. I’d pictured us in northern California, in San Francisco, but because of Jessica’s work we wound up in southern California, in Los Angeles, in Venice Beach. Life there got off to an unexpected start — to put it mildly — and we’ll come back to that later, because just as stories sometimes start with endings (‘my last day in China. . ’) so beginnings can sometimes make for useful ends. Here I want to tell about our weekends, especially the Sundays when we went on little pilgrimages. It’s not a religious thing — we only do it on Sundays because there’s less traffic and it’s easier to get around — more like a hobby, something we do with our free time. And they’re not pilgrimages really, just outings in the same way that, as a boy, I used to go on drives with my mum and dad to Bourton-on-the-Water or Stow-on-the-Wold.

The first place we went to was 316 South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood. It was cloudy when we set off from Venice and drove past Santa Monica Airport, where aviation informs much of the surrounding development and design. There was the museum with the life-size nose of a FedEx plane protruding ludicrously from the front, and the Spitfire Grill with painted fighter planes and scrambling pilots climbing the sky-walls. People were sitting outside, eating and drinking, getting a few down them, as though they were in the suburbs of a town in Kent where developers had obtained permission for a programme of radical modernisation while incorporating heritage ideals of the few and their — our — finest hour. It was lunchtime, the sky was still overcast — undercast if you were aloft, scanning the burning blue for Messerschmitts or Heinkels.