Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

The door rocked gently on its hinges and wafted a little more petrol and diesel fumes into the passenger compartment. The night was as warm and as vinyl as the interior of the car. It was as if the motorway, the central reservation, the screed, unfinished banks — all of it — were enclosed in some larger, staler, automotive interior. The sky was flatly two-dimensional; an all-encompassing, bug-smeared windscreen, stippled with dried, dirty droplets.

For a full three minutes after Jim had got fed up with waiting I thought that things might still pan out. By rights in a situation such as this, left, unable to drive, in the passenger seat of a car hopelessly jammed on the M25 in the middle of the night, the scene ought to fade out. It was a natural ending. But after three minutes the traffic started to edge forward and I panicked. Eventually, irate fellow motorists — family men, stock controllers and solicitors’ clerks — in beige leisure wear and patterned Bermudas, got out of their cars and pushed the Sierra across the two nearside lanes and on to the hard shoulder. Then they got back into their hatchback Daihatsus and Passat estates and ground off, with infinite pains, towards the tangle of striped cones and panting JCBs which marked the genesis of the jam.

I was left sitting. The knob atop the steering column of the Sierra clicked on and then off — what a drama queen — sending a false message of hopeful hazard, nowhere.

Two hours later a truly fat man buckled the belts round the car’s axles, pulled the lever on the back of the pick-up and an electric motor whined. The cable pulled taut and yanked the front of the Sierra up in the air. We got into the cab and started off towards scored and grooved exit roads, ranged around the orbital road like the revetments of some modern hill fort, marking our way back into the Great Wen. The AA were unsympathetic; the nominated garage man wanted cash. It was almost 3.00 in the morning when I woke Jim’s wife up. The source of the trouble was crouched, looking crippled on the steep camber of the road, its knob still clicking. To give her credit she paid up without a murmur. The truly fat garage man went on his way. Jim’s wife, Carol, gave me a blank look of sad resignation and shut the door quietly in my face.

Jim and I had spent the day up in Norfolk. ‘I like flat places,’ said Jim, ‘places where the sky has a chance to define the land. I’m fed up with the tiny proscenium arch of the Home Counties. If I wanted to act on my day off I’d join an amateur theatre company.’ He tended to talk like this — in the form of a series of observations, which hammered out a Point Of View. One that couldn’t be argued with, only acknowledged, or assented to. We had spent the afternoon wandering from village to village. Jim took a lot of photographs with his new camera. He was a good photographer, his photographs were always artfully uncomposed; they were visual asides. He only took pictures where objects in the foreground could insidiously dominate the scene. He wasn’t interested in people, or nature for that matter. Naturally enough, Jim had a view on photography as well: ‘It doesn’t mean fuck all. It’s a toy — that’s all — not some potent weapon for transforming reality. You point it at an object, you press the button, and a few days later you see the “thing”, and can’t resist a little gasp of wonderment.’

We started the drive back at about 10.00. As darkness fell, the promised cool of the evening failed to materialise. Instead, the sticky, humid afternoon gave way to a hot, close night-time. The first part of the drive was relaxing and apt. We swished across the Norfolk plain, our tyres whispering to the tangled verges, the Sierra’s boxy suspension flatly reporting over the potholes.

I sat rocking on the car’s offside, absorbed by Jim’s concentration as he drove. He sat low, the car seat raked backwards and at an angle. His disproportionately long arms gripped the bottom of the wheel at the unrecommended position of twenty-five minutes past seven. His eyes seemed to be roughly at the level of the top of the instrument panel. He was more intent on the green and red lights inside the car than those ahead. But he drove well, with an unforced and intuitive ease, as if the car’s controls were natural extensions of his own limbs.

However, by the time we reached the A45, things had begun to change. It was as if we were being sucked into some giant vortex of traffic. Although we were still over fifty miles from London I could feel the magnetic pull of the city. The cars that passed and repassed one another along the sections of dual carriageway were like iron filings, unwillingly coerced into flowing lines, all heading in the same ultimate direction. It felt as if we were no longer in a car at all, but in some miniature, mono-carriaged train. The track was laid out ahead of us. We could increase or decrease speed, but it was impossible to change direction. And when we reached junctions or roundabouts all the points had been switched in advance. We howled through the tight curves, wheel rims straining against the track, and on.

Thirty minutes later we pulled off the All into a petrol station. As Jim filled up the tank I continued to stare blankly through the windscreen. The forecourt was brightly lit. A sales display of garden furniture was set out near the cashier’s window, flower-patterned chairs and recliners with frosted aluminium arms and legs. There was a coming and going of leisure wear and Bermudas. A high octane stench combined with the wash of orange halogen light, spreading across the stained concrete pan. It was like some parody of recreation.

Jim paid with his company petrol card. He threw the crumpled-up counterfoil into the back seat where our jackets lay and we wheeled out on to the road. He let the Sierra pull us up quickly through the five long, low gear ratios and then hunkered down into his seat again.

We had long since ceased to speak when we neared the intersection of the Mil and the M25. I could feel Jim’s indecision in the way the car held the road. He was calculating routes back to south-west London. I knew he hated the M25, ‘The stupidest thing about it is its name. If a road is described as “orbital”, it’s a sure-fire guarantee that when you get on to the thing you’re bound to feel as if you’re in outer space.’

The alternative to the M25 was to keep straight on and join the North Circular at Gants Hill. Jim tensed at the wheel in a peculiar way. A body tenses up before receiving an expected blow. Jim tensed as if to ward off the heavy traffic congestion at the roundabout where the A404 meets the Great North Road. The Sierra skittered a little, and then it was done, we plopped off on to the exit road. There were two seconds when it was too late: one when we were on the exit road and the next when we saw the great yellow hoarding with its familiar legend, ‘Delays possible until late ‘91’. There was nothing for it now. It was as if we had been determined. The Cynics were correct, the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us. Nothing for it now, but to regard the motorway furniture with a baleful eye as we cruised gently to a halt and rocked into stasis at the back of the stack of cars snaking through the long, low, flat chicane.

‘A three-lane jam at midnight on a Sunday! I can’t fucking well believe it. I can’t believe it. I do not believe it. Look at these people.’ Jim gestured wildly at the yellow profiles receding into the distance like a frieze of minor Assyrians. ‘They simply don’t know what they are doing. They are waiting. Do you understand me? Waiting. And while they wait nothing is happening, and when they stop waiting nothing will happen either, and while they have waited nothing will have occurred — except, perhaps, for the collapse of some more carbon molecules. Mmmmm! Breathe it in, man.’ Jim encompassed some air with another ham gesture and drew it into his nose and mouth. ‘Finest destruction of the ionosphere, most perfect winding down of fossil fuel reserves. I love it! I love it! God speed, you future patina of grey chemical soot on the leaves of municipal gardens in Osterley, Egham, and for that matter, Stockholm! Mmm, my air sacs have never felt so good!