Our House(22)

Thank God I didn’t. A message stating my intention to drive that day could have buried me.

Speeding only when I knew for certain there were no cameras, and with the last of the rush-hour traffic against me, I reached the hotel with minutes to spare, co-presented the mumbo-jumbo Tim had strung together and then suffered the demoralizing tedium that is a full day’s programme of strategic team building.

(Basket-making. I’ve just remembered. After lunch – at which I restrained myself and had only two glasses of wine – we did a basket-making workshop. For fuck’s sake.)

Now fast forward to the drive back home. Not only was I exhausted, but I was antsy as well, thanks partly to the need to get the car back and partly to the darkening of my door by a new HR executive called Saskia. She’d been emailing me for the last few weeks about the firm’s reissued contracts following our merger with a competitor earlier in the year, contracts that required disclosure, among other things, of any motoring convictions. (Did I mention I hadn’t yet declared my driving ban to work? Even at this stage, the blunders were stockpiling.) I’d stalled her for as long as I could, avoided eye contact during the day’s activities, but just before I’d left the venue, she’d materialized by my side.

‘Everyone else in sales has got their contract back to me,’ she said. ‘I just need yours. Can you make sure you bring it in on Monday?’

She was young and attractive and aware of it and somehow this only added to my agitation.

‘If not, I’d be happy to reissue a new one and find you a quiet spot to read it through during office hours?’ she offered.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’ And I hung back so she wouldn’t see me walking to my car, which I’d parked in a different car park from the assigned one just in case the ban came to light and someone like Saskia remembered seeing me driving off.

I can’t go on like this, I thought. The constant ‘just in case’ precautions. I have to tell people. I have to tell Fi. Without a doubt, she would consider the lying as egregious as the ban itself, so perhaps I could present it as a brand-new development? A six-month ban that began in August, when we were out of touch? What was the worst she could do?

Well, she could pull the plug on the bird’s nest, keep herself at Trinity Avenue with the kids and consign me to the flat fulltime. Maybe not even that. Once the need to economize lost its appeal, I’d be out of there too, just another sad fuck living with his mates or parents. Penge. Childhood meals. Godliness.

Now, of course, I see how lucky I would have been to settle for those consequences. I could have negotiated with Fi. Even when at the end of her tether she was no monster. Besides, the law protected fathers’ visitation rights and far worse scumbags than me had regular access to their kids.

So, I was driving home, avoiding the main arteries as I’d learned to do while driving ‘rogue’, taking instead the unsurveilled parallel roads, long residential stretches like Silver Road in Thornton Heath, which was where I was when I got clogged behind a white Toyota.

I began flashing him to get a move on. Can you make sure you bring it in on Monday? I was thinking, screwing my face up at the memory of Saskia’s voice, low-pitched and syrupy, as if HR was psychotherapy not bureaucracy, when I lost my patience and pulled out to overtake the guy. I shouldn’t have bothered – obviously I shouldn’t have bothered – but if I was the kind of person who regularly exercised restraint then I wouldn’t have been in that mood in the first place; I wouldn’t have been churning myself up about what I was going to say to Saskia or Fi; I wouldn’t have lost my licence; I wouldn’t have been at the wheel illegally. I wouldn’t have been estranged from my wife. But I was this kind of person: sick with self-pity, prickly with the urgent, petty, short-term desire to get the upper hand over a stranger.

So, evidently, was he, because just as I was beginning to cut in front of him he accelerated, forcing me to straighten and abort my overtaking. For a second or two we drove side by side without acknowledging the other, our cars inches from touching. I could tell he was scowling and swearing at me, and I set my own face in a sneer before glancing left. He was just the kind of bloke I’d known he’d be: hard jaw, hard eyes, built in that solid way, like a weapon. And not just scowling but raging. The adrenaline rush I had on facing his fury was so powerful that all reason was lashed into its flow; as I put my foot down in a second attempt to overtake him, I felt an intense release of all the fear and impotence of the last few months.

Then I saw the car coming towards me and I changed my mind and braked, ready to concede defeat now, expecting to slot back in behind the Toyota and suffer the sight of a finger raised in victory as we reached the junction. But that wasn’t the way it played out. To my confusion, he braked as well, blocking my attempts to slip in behind, and we were continuing side by side, as parallel as if the cars were joined. Every mile-an-hour my speed dropped, his matched it – we were going at thirty, twenty-five, twenty – and yet the oncoming car didn’t seem to be slowing, a little Fiat 500, snub-nosed and innocent, with a driver who’d either decided to trust us to sort this out in time or wasn’t concentrating fully, until suddenly there wasn’t any time left. One of us had to get out of the lane or we would smash head-on. The Fiat swung sharply with a split second to spare, seeming to accelerate instead of brake, screeching off the road at speed and into an off-street bay with a parked car.