Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

‘But that,’ he continued, indicating the number-plate with his boot, ‘unless I’m much mistaken, is a Midlands number-plate, is it not? In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a Leicester number-plate. Am I right?’

As he pronounced the word ‘Leicester’, a bright jet of saliva spurted from the side of his mouth. Moses watched it trickle down the car-door. What the fuck is going on here? he wondered.

He began to explain that, yes, they were Leicester number-plates because the car had originally come from Leicester. A friend of his, who had moved away from Leicester, up to Edinburgh, in fact, had sold it to him. But that was four years ago and he himself now lived in London.

This casual dropping of the names Leicester, Edinburgh and London in such rapid succession was proving too much for the policeman. He had unfurled an enormous white handkerchief, almost the size of a sailcloth, and was pressing it to his mouth. The handkerchief was drenched in seconds. Unwilling to risk speech again for hydrological reasons, his excitement now unquenchable, he seemed to be about to wave them on their way. And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the matter. But Gloria chose that moment to glance back down the road.

‘What’s that? ’ she cried.

The two men swung round. One of those old-fashioned motorised wheelchairs with a khaki canvas surround and plastic windows whined round the bend towards them. But there was something about this wheelchair, Moses was thinking, that wasn’t quite right. As it drew level, he realised what had been troubling him. The wheelchair wasn’t a real wheelchair; it was a motorbike disguised as a wheelchair.

‘Good Christ,’ the policeman exclaimed, allowing the handkerchief to drop away from his mouth (and hosing down one side of Moses’s car as a result), ‘that’s old Dinwoodie!’

He raised his whistle to his lips and tried to blow a piercing blast, but all he succeeded in producing was a spray of furious white froth. As he looked on, foaming, impotent, the wheelchair accelerated with an unexpected surge of power and simultaneously jettisoned its entire outer shell to reveal a pre-war olive-green BSA. It was a quite extraordinary moment — like watching a rocket leaving the earth’s atmosphere or a chrysalis releasing a butterfly. Old Dinwoodie vanished round a curve in the road with one arm raised in triumph, his grey hair flapping on his shoulders, blue smoke belching from his exhaust.

The policeman cried out, half in anguish, half in exhilaration. He turned and raced back into the house, spraying a cluster of rose-bushes as he went which, as it happened, were in dire need of water because it had been an unusually dry summer in the south-east.

‘Emergency, poppet,’ he slobbered.

Through the open door Moses saw the policeman brush his wife aside and begin to ransack a cupboard under the stairs. Moments later the policeman emerged again, brandishing a megaphone and a red-and-white-striped police-beacon, one of those plastic ones with a magnetic bottom. Ignoring his wife, he burst from the house, sprinted across the lawn, and hurdled the privet hedge, helmet askew, uniform marinating in the juices now flowing freely from his mouth.

‘Quick!’ he spluttered as he reached up and attached his beacon to the roof of Moses’s car. ‘ Quick! Before he gets away!’

Moses gazed at the policeman in utter stupefaction. He was beginning to think that the man was dangerously mad. He looked across at Gloria for guidance or advice. Gloria was giggling. He looked at the policeman again.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

‘What are you waiting for?’ the policeman shrieked. ‘Follow that wheelchair!’

It dawned on Moses that his car was about to be appropriated for police purposes. The policeman had already bundled Gloria into the back seat. Now he was in the process of clambering into the front himself. The Thermos of vodka rolled against his boots but he kicked it away without seeming to notice.

Moses walked round to the driver’s side and climbed in. The policeman was sitting in the passenger seat, hunched over, rigid, mopping at his mouth. He was staring at the windscreen like somebody watching their favourite programme on TV. Moses started the engine. He didn’t understand what was happening, he didn’t know what kind of policeman this policeman was, but he had decided that it would be wisest to play along, for the time being at least. And besides, he thought, relaxing a fraction now it seemed that the car wasn’t going to be searched after all, it isn’t every day that a policeman tells you to follow a wheelchair, especially a wheelchair that isn’t a wheelchair but a motorbike disguised as a wheelchair.

They had only been driving for two or three minutes when the motorbike came into view about half a mile ahead on the open road. Moses was disappointed. He had been looking forward to breaking the speed limit. Legally, for once.

‘He isn’t really trying,’ he complained.

‘Oh yes he is,’ the policeman said. ‘He’s trying like absolute hell.’

He could imagine exactly what was going through old Dinwoodie’s head, he told them. He had done his homework and he recognised the symptoms. That initial rush of adrenalin would even out into a feeling of euphoria, one hundred per cent euphoria, which, in turn, would give way to a sense of disconnection, creeping up gradually, stealthily, making everything seem unreal, paranormal, only distantly experienced.

Moses absorbed this curious information in silence.

When Gloria asked the policeman whether he had brought any handcuffs along, the policeman replied with a confidence that was almost patronising. ‘Oh no ,’ he said. ‘We shan’t be needing anything like that .’ He had his saliva under control at last which made it possible to pick up the tremor of exultation in his voice.

Meanwhile they were still gaining rapidly on old Dinwoodie. The policeman removed his helmet. Then he wound the window down and leaned out with his megaphone.

‘Dinwoodie? This is Police Constable Marlpit. Please pull over to the side of the road immediately. I repeat, please pull over immediately.’

He shook his head and turned to Moses. There was a very good reason, he explained, why his words were having so little effect. Old Dinwoodie had just caught a glimpse of the South Downs for the first time in his life. They stretched away above the trees, they stretched into a distance he had dreamed about. Their modest green undulations, the copses nestling in their hollows like soft green explosions, like miniature puffs of smoke, brought tears to his eyes. They were more beautiful than he had ever imagined. And he was floating towards them, untouchable, part of everything. He was dissolving. He could no longer feel where his body ended and the air began. It flowed round him as the grain in a length of wood flows round a knot. Everything was warm and slow, and there were no sharp edges any more, no needs, no pain. His goggles were misting over. His grip on the throttle was relaxing.

During this monologue Moses couldn’t, at certain points, be sure if Marlpit was talking about himself or about Dinwoodie. There seemed to be a temporary blurring of identities. As if Marlpit had inhabited, and could read, Dinwoodie’s mind.

By the time Moses drew alongside the motorbike, his speed had dropped to fifteen miles an hour. ‘This has got to be the slowest car-chase in history,’ he muttered to himself.

PC Marlpit was bellowing through his megaphone again. Old Dinwoodie just didn’t seem to hear.

‘Jesus,’ Moses said. ‘He’s driving with his eyes shut.’

Even as he spoke the motorbike slowly wandered off the road, slid sideways down a muddy bank, and folded in a ditch. Dinwoodie sat up in the long grass, dazed but unhurt, his goggles dangling from one ear. His eyes were open now. Tears were streaming down his face.