The Man Who Travelled on Motorways by Trevor Hoyle

Author:Trevor Hoyle [Hoyle, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 1979-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE IMMINGHAM DRIVE

PART I

THE MYTHICAL FUTURE

I

At long last Gorsey Dene found himself on the way to Immingham, a drive he had been keen on undertaking ever since he had received Jay’s letter informing him that she was to return from Sweden during the winter months, and suggesting – or rather hinting – that he might travel across the country to meet her at the dock and bring her home. As the young man was anxious to see her, for sexually hedonistic reasons, he immediately wrote back pledging his part of the rendezvous at the specified time and date. It was a brilliant, cold and endlessly blue day, the sort of day when the air is described as ‘crystal clear’: a perfect fusion of hard pure light and cold crisp fields lying open and bare with their worn green cheeks turned heavenwards. It was possible to imagine the sky as clean empty space, which was how Gorsey Dene thought of it as he drove the small blue car up the curving road rising from the valley to the moor. The close-cropped greenness turned to brown and purple patches of coarse, brackenish growth at a certain exact point – a topographical oddity he had noted before. On the tops the air was rushing coldly – he knew this from the slanting stalks of grass and buffeting brambles – but inside the metal/glass casing he was snug, smug and beautifully content. He was going to meet Jay; and yet, as usual, within his flesh/bone head abided the worm of disquiet, of trepidation, as if a giant from above were scrutinising his puny progress, allowing him to go so far and no further: until the dreadful moment when a monstrous hand would reach down and pluck him off the road, wrench him out of the dream, and toss him in his metal/glass/flesh/bone environment into the pit. It was the turmoil of a deluded mind but nonetheless terrifying for all that. Supposing, for example, that Jay had developed a growth on her face? It was entirely possible. Or, if not a facial disfigurement, had been party to a cancerous breast, having had the offending portion removed, so that now she lurched lop-sidedly along with but one breast to call her own? Her hair could have fallen out: head hair, underarm hair, pubis. What would that imply – some dreadful Swedish disease? But, Gorsey Dene realised, he was just being silly. As a child he had suffered from hallucinations and ever since had been especially wary of those occasions when it seems that life is wearing thin – when, in fact, the canvas backing begins to show through the decorative embroidery. Of course she would be all right; of course. But, then again, he had often suspected her of being unfaithful. There had never been any proof of this – rather, he had had the nasty idea that secretly she thought him a fool, a dupe, a weak and worthless charlatan, and at the first opportunity

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