Infidelity for Beginners (6 page)

When he finally got the message I was no longer playing, BMW
man did the same and zoomed off into the distance with a final roar of
indignation.

“You’re all the bloody same, aren’t you?” Sally observed,
before crossing her arms and turning up the silence.

I was in no mood for a fight so I left it at that, though it
annoyed me how little faith she’d shown in me. Like I’d said, it was a dry and
clear day, we were driving along a long straight motorway at a safe and
legal(ish) speed and I’d had the rules of the road on my side. What did she
want me to do? Give way to everyone else just because they’d forgotten the
Highway Code and apologise for being there in the first place? Christ on a
bike!

You know what, you should never let yourself get pushed
around in life. Weakness only ever led to more pushing around. Sometimes you
had to push back, even if it meant taking a fist in the face. It’s not fair and
it’s not fun but sometimes it was the only way. This was the price we all paid
for being men. An X and a Y chromosome and bike with a crossbar simply didn’t
cut it. Men had to
act
like men, not
just look like them. What was it Kipling had said? Something about exceedingly
good cakes? I can’t remember. The point is men weren’t born. Boys were born.
Men were something we had to become.

This is a concept Sally never understood.

“Don’t say anything.”

“Turn the other cheek.”

“Don’t get involved.”

“Just look away.”

“Don’t forget to thank them when they’ve kicked you in the
teeth.”

That was pretty much Sally’s philosophy of how I should
behave.

Well that wasn’t my way. And it wasn’t BMW man’s way either,
but Sally had stuck her oar into something she couldn’t comprehend which meant
that BMW man got away with it and now he was off laughing at me. It was
microscopic; barely a slither of a fraction of a percentage, but thanks to BMW
man’s aggression and Sally’s fear, the world had become an ever-so slightly
worse place to live.

Christ I wanted a fag.

I couldn’t blame Sally for how she’d reacted because Sally
was just being Sally, and Sally had to be true to herself. It was more the
hypocrisy that annoyed me. I mean, how would she have reacted if some little
kid in her class had started painting all over the walls and every time she’d
tried to stop him I’d told her to turn the other cheek?

Who would be in the wrong then?

Me of course. It would always be me.

It was annoying and it was infuriating but what could I do?
Sit her down, explain the situation to her and hope she eventually saw reason?
Or give up and simply say “yes Sally”, “no Sally” and “three bags full Sally”?

Which held the greater promise of a peaceful life for me?

Singletons might think it would be the former; the sit her
down and talk to her option, to get an open and frank dialogue going, but every
time I’ve tried that in the past, the open and frank dialogue almost always got
quickly hijacked and I’d have to listen to her dragging my self-esteem through
six dozen different hedgerows for about two hours while she got everything off
her chest.

No talking rarely worked. All talking ever really did was
wake you up to the fact that you had ten times more problems than you ever
dreamed of.

With this in mind, Sally and I sat in silence stewing over
the same incident from different perspectives while a cold and wintry Surrey
slipped by at an icy lick.

This was a real pity actually because we’d got on
brilliantly over Christmas, better than we’d got on in years and I’d really
been looking forward to getting away from the folks and spending some quiet
time with just Sally at home. Now that looked to have gone for a toss with the
BMW incident, which would no doubt hang in the air for the rest of the day and
flavour every glance and remark.

“Shall I put on the radio?” I asked, but Sally didn’t
answer.

I did so anyway, in the hope that a familiar song might
soften both our moods, but all I had to show after five minutes of continuous
tuning were Car Phone Warehouse adverts and euphoric DJs boasting about how
drunk they’d got over Christmas, so I turned it off again and played “count the
red cars” with myself for twenty minutes or so until I almost crashed out of
sheer despair.

“Shall we stop at the Services?” I suggested, spotting a
sign for Fleet Services.

“Why?”

I didn’t know. We had loads of petrol and neither of us were
particularly hungry or needed the loo. I just thought it might’ve been good.

I liked motorway service stations. They were unusual places
that you only ever visited when you were on long journeys somewhere and that
didn’t happen very often, at least not to me it didn’t. I always thought of
them as little islands in the sea, with tea and cake and light bulb-baked
sausages, where ships passed in the night and truck drivers washed their
armpits. There was also something slightly rough and ready about them that I
liked, due no doubt to the fact that they were pretty much inaccessible except
by motorway so that they weren’t full of annoying teens or cheerful pleasure
seekers. Everybody in them was just passing through. Actually, forget the
little islands, they were more like border towns, or no, better still space
ports or something. Nobody talked to anyone else, nobody mingled, they just had
their bacon and eggs and coffee and washes and contemplated the things that
waited for them many miles away.

“We could stretch our legs.”

“But we’re almost home,” Sally pointed out.

This much was true. We were now only about four miles from
home and due to take the next turning so there really wasn’t any reason to go
to the Services.

“We could pop in anyway if you liked,” I said, but Sally
wasn’t keen.

“Let’s just get home shall we?” she said, and that was that.
We passed the Services without slowing and I felt the pang of regret at the
lost opportunity.

“I might give Tom a call when we get home. See if he wants
to go out for a drink tonight,” I said, causing Sally to glare at me all at
once.

“I thought we were going to have a quiet night in?”

I was half-tempted to tell her that I wasn’t sure I fancied
it this quiet, but I figured that would only fan the flames of this particular
disagreement so I settled for looking bewildered.

“When did I say that?” I asked.

“Oh whatever. Go out if you want then, I don’t care,” she
snarled, so I deliberately missed the subtext and played along as if I’d just
been given the green light.

“Great,” I beamed, letting her know my emotional blinkers
were on and that I could no longer read between the lines. I was pretty
confident I’d get away with it too, because Sally hated putting her objections
into actual words, so as long as I was prepared to pay the price (ie. two days
of short shrift) then I’d get to have a couple of pints tonight.

And believe me, I was.

Well you might as well get hanged for a lamb as a sniff of
the barmaid’s apron, as they say on the internet – somewhere probably.

I was just wondering how early I dared make a break for the
pub when brake lights started filling the horizon. The traffic immediately
thickened and before I knew it I was working my way through the gears and down
to first. A few hundred cars tightened up to a crawl and all too inevitably we
ground to a halt.

“Oh, what is this now?” I moaned, winding down the window
and craning my head out when I saw some guy in front do something similar. I
couldn’t see anything but then again neither could he, so we both ducked back
into our cars and speculated with our respective partners as to what the
problem could be.

“It’s probably a crash,” Sally said, underlining those few
carefully considered words with a tone that didn’t make it past my emotional
blinkers.

“Well I hope it’s nothing serious, we’re only half a mile
from our turning.”

We sat in the same spot for another thirty frustrating
minutes before a gradual trickle of movement started shifting cars from our
view. I started up the engine and waited expectantly for the movement to reach
us and when it did a clear stretch of motorway, roughly the size of a family
saloon, opened up in front of us. I drove straight into it, and then another
bit of motorway opened up, and so I drove into that one too and so on until
three lanes merged into one and we circumvented a twisted heap of steel and
glass that looked like it used to be several different cars. Astonishingly, no
bits looked like they used to be attached to a BMW, which meant my
finger-waving friend had been stuck in this same mess along with the rest of
us, no doubt flashing his lights and hooting his horn at the logjam in front of
him. Ambulance men and policemen were already on the scene and doing their best
to clear the road and keep the traffic moving, though the wreckage was strewn
right across three lanes, so we were having to be directed onto the hard
shoulder.

The cars were already empty and I wondered how their
occupants had faired. One of the wrecks looked as though it could’ve been
walked away from, though I doubted the same could’ve been said of the Vauxhall
Corsa wrapped around the central reservation barrier. That one was mess. A tin
can crushed to bits by rampaging elephants.

“I hope they’re okay,” Sally said, looking past me as I
steered my way around the accident.

“Yeah, me too,” I agreed, though I didn’t hold out much
hope.

All at once the traffic cones and police tape ended and the
motorway opened up in front of us again. I moved through the gears up to
fourth, and then fifth, but stayed under 60mph for the last half a mile. Other
cars sped past me like a hail of bullets but I wasn’t interested in keeping
pace with them any more. The turning for Camberley soon appeared, so I checked
my mirrors and pressed down the indicator, signalling an end to mine and
Sally’s motorway adventure.

To tell the truth, it hadn’t been the best car journey of
our lives.

But at least it hadn’t been the last.

The relief at being home again is
tempered by yet another little niggling row. Andrew and I don’t have blazing
rows. I wish we did because I bet they’re easier to patch up than our niggling
ones. With niggling rows they’re almost always over something that’s so tiny,
so petty that neither of us want to talk them through for fear of being thought
of as tiny and petty ourselves. So what do we do to do? Well, I usually bite my
tongue and try to keep the peace, but this rarely works as the niggling just
ends up hanging in the air, drifting from one day to the next. I hate niggling
rows, I really do, but they seem to just keep coming out of nowhere. Last week’s
happened because Norman bought Andrew a bottle of wine for Christmas.
Seriously, Norman got him a present, a lovely bottle of sparkling wine and told
him to enjoy it with his Christmas dinner and Andrew launched into a rant about
how it was some devious move to try and buy his respect. “Of course, now I’ve
got to buy him something and how he’d like that, hey!” he fumed, working
himself up into one.

Andrew’s not really one to listen to anyone when he’s in
that sort of mood and he ended up roping me into his bad temper when I refused
to condemn Norman for his gift (although he soon held out his glass when I
cracked it open that evening). Silly, isn’t it?

Today we niggled over… over what? Some insane petulant
nonsense on the motorway. God, why does he always have to be right about every
little thing? Some other driver behind us wanted to get past and Andrew
wouldn’t let him. It was like some sort of game to him. Ridiculous, isn’t it?
It really is. In fact, as I’m sat here writing this, I can’t even understand
how it all blew up again. Why couldn’t he just pull over? There you go, problem
solved, next problem please. I mean, if he’s going to fall to pieces every time
something this tiny inconveniences him, how the hell’s he ever going to cope if
something serious goes wrong? And you know what, that’s my real frustration. I
work with children all day long. I’m getting a little bit tired of having to
come home to one.

“This bastard was right up my arse;
hooting and trying to flash me off the road. I tell you, some people,” I said,
draining the last of my pint.

“Blimey, you thirsty or something?” Tom asked, half a pint
behind me.

“First one I’ve had since… well, before Christmas I think.”

“Really, you haven’t had anything at all over Christmas?”

“No, just scotch and wine.”

Tom angled his eyebrows. “That counts. I thought you meant
you hadn’t had any booze, full stop.”

“Oh no, God no. Three days at mine and Sally’s parents?
Christ, I couldn’t do that sober,” I shuddered.

“Go on then, what did matey do?”

“Well, he was just there wasn’t he, hanging off my arse and
trying to intimidate me into the central reservation.”

“Cunt!”

“Yeah, that’s right. He was like a maniac he was, a total
fucking nutcase. I thought he was going to kill someone.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well I wasn’t going to let him past, was I, so I let the
bastard stew.”

Tom gave a considered nod and took the penultimate sip of
his pint. “In your own time, Tom,” I said, nudging his arm along.

“What? Oh yeah, sorry,” said Tom, downing the dregs and
summoning the barman away from his
Take a
Break
magazine.

“Same again, Tom?” the barman asked, hovering a couple of
fresh glasses under the John Smiths.

“Please Graham. And have one for yourself?”

“Thanks. I’ll have it for later, yeah?”

“No problem,” Tom nodded, all pleased with himself at being
so flash. Still, that was Tom and Tom liked being flash. He wasn’t flash in a
‘in-your-face’ ‘Jack-the-lad’ ‘utter-wanker’ sort of way. It was more a languid,
unconcerned, look at me, aren’t I cool, sort of thing. I was never sure where
he got it from, whether it was Clint Eastwood in
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
, Michael Caine in
Alfie
, or Regan out of
The Sweeney
but he’d definitely got it
from somewhere because when I first met him he couldn’t even open a door
without knocking his glasses off.