Before we walk back to the car, Alice stoops down and collects two pebbles and gives them to us: ‘Lucky stones for you both!’ Driving back now, the pools of the headlights reaching into the night, we talk of primal memories of childhood, of being in the back of the car at night, being enfolded in that world. The warmth of the cocoon against the blackness beyond. Drifting in and out of sleep. Voices murmuring from the front. Alice is now recounting how her father would take her and her brothers on wild weekend trips from the city. Sometimes they’d head off on Friday evening straight after school, he’d meet them at the gates with no warning, and they’d all just pile into the car – Alice’s older brothers never let her sit by the windows, so she’d always be in the middle – and then out into the Ontario night. They’d drive for hours, then pitch their tents, carry on the next day, just exploring, continuing through the weekend, finding new valleys and waterfalls and mountains.
There’s very little traffic on the B-roads tonight. Only a few miles from Ashford now, where I’m going to drop everyone off to get their train back to London. The sense of the evening coming to a close, the melancholic pull of late August and the end of holidays. We’re now discussing how talking in cars at night is different in texture from any other kind of talking. Especially on long journeys when it’s just the driver and the passenger, the intense intimacy, the confessional energy of both people just focussed on the pools of light in front of the car and the words of the other. Inspired by this thought, Alice then wonders if this could be represented in film – two old friends who haven’t seen each other for years, driving through the night and talking.11 And the film would be only this – the journey at night with just the two voices. And the sound of listening. And gears humming, and occasional windscreen wipers flapping. And all we’d see was the unspooling road ahead and glimpses of trees and buildings caught in the headlights. And the sound of friendship in the dark. The love between two people talking with no boundaries.
While Alice and I enthuse about this idea, Stefan, in the passenger seat next to me, is writing in the dark. I can hear the soft scraping of pen on paper. It’s from film reviewing, he explains, you learn to scribble notes in the dark. But doesn’t he find later that these are often impossible to decipher? Yes, all the time. He’d had one a couple of days ago which baffled him – it looked like he’d written ‘Abigail – reverse – lawyers crossing’ – not one word of which made any sense at all! So much for memory, if we can’t even remember what the aides-memoires were supposed to mean … I tell the others about my grandmother, and that baffling euphemism we heard as children, that she’d ‘lost her memory’. We’re on a long, straight road now, ahead of us the glow of Ashford becoming visible. Alice is speaking of her father, and the Alzheimer’s which also claimed him in the decade before he died. Towards the end, most of the time he didn’t know who she was, but there were occasional moments of lucidity. Moments when a memory or a piece of music would get through, and she’d find him sitting in a chair weeping. The journeying and the exploring almost over. The man who had once given them life, driven them through the night and into the morning.
*
We say our goodbyes outside the floodlit concrete concourse of Ashford International station, which looks like it’s pretending to be the entrance to an airport rather than a railway station. I still have another three hours to drive tonight, to get back to the fisherman’s cottage on the Suffolk coast where I’m staying for the next few days – the place where I began writing more than seven years ago, in the grip of winter. I look at my road atlas, sadly there seems to be no real alternative to the motorway up to the Dartford Crossing and beyond. I need more air to keep me awake, so put the window down as I drive away, and see the lights of Ashford International receding in my mirror.
Onto the motorway slip road, only a stone’s throw from where we’d been earlier in the day, by Weil’s grave, just beyond the line of poplars. But now dealing with a very different world, as I edge onto the motorway. Past eleven o’clock, but I’m shocked by the volume of traffic, and the stupid, aggressive driving, tailgating, overtaking on the wrong side. Impossible to find a greater contrast with the calmness of our day. I suddenly sense my exhaustion, a combination of having been up since six o’clock this morning, and the intensity of what we’ve experienced today. Dangerous to drive in this state, I’m finding it really hard to deal with the constant stream of lorries and cars. I pull over into the slow lane to avoid having to make decisions. Past Maidstone, Chatham, down into the valley of the Medway and up again, sensing the pull of London’s orbit now, and the M25 just ahead. My eyes are so heavy, I’m having to slap my face to stay awake. I put on music, loud as possible, see if this will help. A lorry brakes, suddenly, in front of me, I slam on my brakes and only avoid hitting the back of the lorry by a matter of feet.
I know I need to get off the motorway. I take the next exit, and find a garage. I get a strong coffee from the machine, know the caffeine will take twenty minutes to start working, so put my seat back and try to sleep. I’m out like a light. When I wake half an hour later I feel revived. I flick through my shoebox of CDs on the passenger seat beside me, and pull out a few that will be my fellow travellers for the next couple of hours. Then back on the road, M25, Dartford Crossing, through the marshlands of southern Essex, then signs to the A12. The road emptying as I drive away from London, which is a great relief. There’s a new one out in a series of Dylan bootlegs, most of the tracks are familiar, but suddenly I’m arrested by something I’ve never heard before – a mesmerising, rolling drum and bass, whiplash intensity and his voice coming in with hypnotic power and urgency, ‘I was think-ing of a ser-ies of dreams, / where noth-ing comes up to the top, / every-thing stays down where it’s woun-ded, / and comes to a permanent stoppp …’ Thrilling to hear this song for the first time tonight, and also synchronistic, because it’s an amazing piece to drive to, especially on long, straight roads like tonight, where you can put the car into fifth gear, and watch the speedometer dial move round to 80, 85, 90, the pounding energy of the music fusing with the road. As I drive north and east, I play this track again and again, in fact it takes me all the way from the A12 junction at Brentwood to Ipswich – at least an hour, so I must have played it a dozen times. Getting something new on each hearing. Being taken home by a series of dreams …
Over the Orwell Bridge, the last stretch finally, the curve round, then off on the road to Woodbridge. one forty-five now, very good progress. I stop for petrol at the twenty-four-hour garage. Shell, but there’s no other choice. It always leaves a bitter taste to pay any money to this company, though as I fill up I reflect that if you wanted to come up with the definitive oxymoron, it would have to be ‘ethical oil company’, so I’m not certain any of the others are much better. I go into the shop, surprised it’s still open, usually after midnight you have to pay through the ‘night window’. The young guy on the till asks me if I have a Shell loyalty card. Normally I’d just let this go, but I don’t tonight. After all, it’s late, and there are no other people around. I ask the guy whether he thinks it’s possible to be loyal to a corporation? He laughs, ‘No, of course not! It’s just the bullshit we have to ask everybody.’ As I drive off, I see him picking up a book, illuminated in his nocturnal kiosk.