Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Nobody was watching. He zoned back in. A bikini girl on the television shouted, at a buff-bodied and gormless male competitor: ‘Alix!’

He flicked the channel, and a British sports commentator said with lugubrious sonority: ‘… run…’

Flick.

‘…run?’

Cricket, this time. Flick.

‘…run away as far and as fast as you can…’

A cowboy film. Flick.

‘…circumstances are conspiring there…’

Politics. Flick.

‘Out!’

Tennis. Flick.

‘To get you…’

An advertisement for an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer whose swiftly scrolling small print was just beginning to make its way up from the bottom of the screen.

Click. Alex turned the television off. Something nagged at him – a feeling right at the back of his mind, almost below the level of consciousness – that someone somewhere was trying to tell him something. He shrugged it off.

He decided, finally, to make himself go for a walk. He swung his legs off the bed, and himself up onto his feet. He pulled back the chain from the door, shrugged his jacket on, and with not the slightest enthusiasm left the room, crossed the broad balcony and took the single flight of stairs down to the car park.

The light was orange and the night hot and tarmacky and strange-smelling. It was about nine o’clock, he reckoned. The motel consisted of an L-shaped block of rooms two storeys high, up to the foot of which parked cars nosed shell by shell. The motel was about a third full. Looking behind him as he crossed the tarmac, he could see a guy with his face in shadow, drinking a can of something on the balcony, two rooms down from his room.

At the registration office, strip light blared from the Perspex window where the teenage night clerk sat watching television. The door adjacent was half lit, with a sign hanging on it saying ‘Closed’ and the brightest light source the Mountain Dew decal on the vending machine.

Alex walked past the office and onto the broad highway: three lanes in either direction. He turned right. There wasn’t much traffic. To his left, a pickup and a family car waited for the overhead lights to turn green.

There were no pedestrians. On the opposite side of the road was a long car park on the other side of which was a Pet Superstore, a CVC chemist and a 7-Eleven. On his side of the road was nothing at all: a pavement, a broad grass verge, a low hedge. There was some sort of office building set back from the road behind a network of drives and flower beds.

It took him ten minutes to reach the end of what he presumed to be the block, and still there was nothing doing. He kept walking. He assumed that this was not downtown.

It took him another ten minutes to reach the end of the next block. There was a twenty-four-hour photo shop. It was closed. He kept walking. It took him twenty minutes more to reach a drive-through McDonald’s on the other side of the road. Alex felt a shade ashamed to have travelled to America and to be eating at McDonald’s, but he was now tired and he thought that something comforting and familiar might see off his self-pity if it didn’t exacerbate it.

He walked up towards the ordering window. There was one car – an SUV – pulled up by it, a meaty forearm and a measure of beard protruding from the driver’s window. It rolled on with a jerk, and Alex walked up to the booth.

‘Ah.’ He tried to see past the kid behind the microphone to a menu somewhere, though he didn’t need it. ‘I’d like… two plain hamburgers please. Small fries.’ This had been the food Alex had ordered while alone, and passing McDonald’s, for years. ‘And a -’

He was interrupted by the blare of a horn, close enough to cause him to jump with fright. Ice-white headlights washed past him, and the horn went again.

‘Hell do you think you’re doing? I could have killed you! Get in line, you little prick!’ a woman with a frightened face shouted at him from the driver’s window of her station wagon. He realised that behind the SUV had been a queue of two cars, one of which had not seen him walk past it in the pool of dark beside the cashier’s window and had nearly broken his legs.

The cashier looked amused. ‘Ma’am?’ he said.

Alex, hot with shame, retreated and let the car jounce up to the window. The woman’s attention left him. He walked down the curved grass verge. The car behind pulled up to the station wagon’s bumper as if pointedly. Alex walked down further.

He stood by the offside back wheel of the car behind. Whoever was in it showed no sign of acknowledgement. Another car pulled in behind. The station wagon lurched off from the window. The car behind which Alex was queuing moved off to take its place – and the car behind Alex, as if he were invisible, moved up in turn behind its bumper.

‘Hey!’ Alex felt himself saying – or would have, had he not felt the ridiculousness of him saying it before it left his lips. ‘Ahem!’ would have been no more dignified or effective. He didn’t think he had the courage to go and remonstrate with the driver. He was a pedestrian. He was nobody.

Alex stepped off the verge and stood behind the rear bumper of the car that had jumped the queue. He didn’t look to see what if any expression the man in that car was making in his rear-view mirror.

It took about a minute for the car to move off. Another had pulled in behind him. He could see the shadow of his own legs across the bumper and boot of the car in front. Then it was gone, his shadow lengthened across the tarmac, and the car behind him honked its horn.

He held his ground, and moved forward deliberately. Finally, he reached the window.

‘Two hamburgers. Medium fries. Regular fries. And a Sprite please.’

He ate his supper out of the paper bag on the verge. The burgers were not like they were at home. They were hotter, flimsier. The buns were different. More scrunched-up, somehow.

He felt, again, lonely. He walked back to the motel without meeting another pedestrian.

When he got up the stairs the man on the balcony was there again. He couldn’t reach his door from the staircase without walking ten feet towards him, so he bobbed his head and said: ‘Night.’

‘Night,’ said the man, in what sounded like a British accent.

Davidoff was lying on the bed nearest the window when Sherman came back in. He had his white earplugs in and was rapping his knuckles in the same annoying way on the wooden bed frame. That was what he had been doing to cause Sherman to go outside in the first place, Sherman remembered.

On the table was the wreckage of a service-station sandwich.

Still standing up, Sherman plugged his own iPod into his ears and pressed play.

There was a high squalling guitar noise and then what sounded like a teenage girl’s voice even higher through a gale of feedback. Sherman winced: a teenage girl with serious emphysema, apparently.

‘Waaansathoudahsawyou…’ the girl’s voice wailed, ‘… innacrowdiyazybaaaah…’ A drumbeat started to thump insistently in the background, and another wave of guitarry fuzz came over the top. Sherman pulled out the headphones.

‘This is pointless,’ he said, just loudly enough to break Davidoff’s reverie. The younger man picked his big head up a little and looked at him. He stepped over and pulled out one of Davidoff’s earbuds, at which he frowned. Music leaked from the dangling earbud: ‘… bompTSSSSS, bompbompTSSSSS, bompTSSSSS, bompbompTSSSSS.’

‘What?’ said Davidoff.

‘Are you receiving your directions from the cosmos all right there, mate?’

‘No,’ said Davidoff. ‘I’m listening to REO Speedwagon.’

Sherman dropped Davidoff’s earbud so it dangled by the bed, inhaled, and shuffled impatiently. It bugged him to be doing so little. It also bugged him that Davidoff pronounced REO ‘reeyo’, but that was just part of a wider discontent.