Adverse Camber

ADVERSE CAMBER

  By Christopher Best

  Copyright 2012 Christopher Best

  Cover image ‘Blizzard 2’, courtesy of A.T. Willett.

  www.atwillett.com

  ~~~~

  ADVERSE CAMBER

  Ridiculous, I know, but I am staring through glass onto a world I no longer recognise. How can a line of terraced white cottages behind modest front gardens leave a person in such a state? How is someone rendered speechless by a quiet village street on a crisp winter’s afternoon? How? Because the commonplace has suddenly been made alien by an event I simply cannot fathom. This may or may not be the story’s end; where it goes from here I have no idea, but I can at least unpick a line of fine threads back to the point three days ago where it all begins.

  It is a somewhat surreal beginning: hobnobbing with hobgoblins, wisecracking with wizards and fantasising with phantoms, yet ironically this marks the last moment before the fabric of normality I’ve known all my life starts to unravel. I recall show-music spilling in from one room, amateurish tinklings on piano from another, and from a third the hubbub of paper plate chat – the sort where everyone laughs about nothing and listens to no-one, convinced that better conversations are to be had elsewhere, too wrapped up in preventing chicken wings and sausages, canapés and bread rolls from falling to the floor, or fretting about teeth made unsightly by salad.

  I avoided the food altogether that night. To my mind, buffets are not meant for mere mortals. A buffet demands at least four hands: two to hold the cutlery, a third to support the flimsy plate and a fourth to cradle the wineglass. Admittedly I was no mere mortal that night, those long white fangs flecked with blood, the starched, upturned collar and sweeping cloak left made sure of that. But this buffet was the slayer of vampires too. I stuck resolutely to the drink, avoiding the unbranded beer and warm Chardonnay and using my borrowed bloodlust as pretext for clinging to the one decent bottle of red wine I could find. Cheap humour has always been my first resort under stress and I was on top form that night; a pun for every refill – ‘Vintage fruit on the veins’ – ‘The art is in the arteries, you know’. Wit, one might say, with real bite.

  Of course the whole unlikely evening had been little more than an excuse to recycle old Halloween costumes, the theme a lazy one, if not without its perks. For me the highlight was going head-to-heads with a feisty young Ann Boleyn, my words mostly aimed at the scowling wigged football under her arm as a means to stare shamelessly at her breasts. I might have made some headway had Henry VIII not arrived to deliver that crass-awful chat-up line: ‘Well, well my dear, about time we had it off, wouldn’t you say?’ She soon lost her head to him.

  But people’s appetites for play-acting waned rapidly once the ice-break of those first encounters had thawed. It may have been the heat or the sheer impracticality of costumes, but one by one they began denuding themselves of masks, capes and pointy hats, and before long I found myself amidst an absurd gathering of caricatures in a state of fancy-undress. Minus those accessories and hired confidences all their real demons could begin to surface; eyes that gave the lie to their promotions, foreign holidays and new cars, and spoke deeper truths of crippling mortgages, high cholesterol, failing marriages and a hundred other mid-life crises. By the time the chimes rang out over the radio and we jostled for the kisses we wanted and dodged those we did not, I felt an urgency to escape and get home. The witching hours may be the Count’s favoured time to prey on his victims but this lowly vampire was overdue his box of Transylvanian soil.

  And so to the hunt for my partner – the elusive ‘Mortitia Addams’. No sign of her at the stroke of twelve. Half the evening she’d been chatting up the Marquis de Sade, our suitably sadistic bank manager from Totnes, and for all I knew she might even now be indulging some masochistic fantasy she’d never once thought to act out on me. Eventually I found her in the kitchen fumbling to make coffee. The heavy lipstick, white pancake and eye-shadow remained (though the Marquis had certainly left his mark), but her hair-piece had long ago become a chest wig for some ape of a comedian, and it was another twenty minutes before we’d gathered all her costume together and could exit into the night.

  Isn’t it only Hollywood where Christmases are invariably sprinkled with snow? A Devon Christmas seldom promises more than wind and drizzle. Yet while we steamed and boiled away the year’s final hours behind double glazing, unknown to us the weather outside was having a late change of heart, silently laying out a Disney fantasy for our departure, a scene at once beautiful and awful, total white-out obliterating the borders between path and lawn. At the end of the driveway another couple were busy ploughing snow from their windscreen and hurling it at one another. The sight was surreal, Satan himself taking one full in the face from Cruella De Vil. A cool reversal of fortune for the old snowball; it was hell that had no chance out here.

  Being among the last guests to arrive, we’d been forced to park some distance from the house, and as we set off I could feel the ground already freezing beneath fresh snow. We walked in silence, unsteady on our feet, arms linked for support, each still inwardly piqued by the conduct of the other, if safe in the knowledge that a day or two, a sarcastic word or two, and a bottle of wine or two should put matters to rights. These episodes of mild betrayal had in truth become something of an aphrodisiac for us both; a kind of game we had to play. Our pact of silence was broken only by necessity as we approached the car.

  “I’ll drive,” I insisted.

  She did not protest.

  I shouldn’t be driving of course. Neither of us should. Natasha would have been on her native vodka all night, and though I’d paced myself I was still way over the limit. But we belong to a generation still willing to take risks, not only with our own lives but with those of everyone around us – the teenagers of the seventies (those lucky enough to survive) who hit driving age just as the campaigners were ‘Thinking-before-Drinking-before-Driving’. We were to drink-driving what sixties youths had been to seat-belts: ‘Clunk click every trip? No fear, Jimmy.’ Back then, our measure of car versus bus would have had nothing to do with safety, only to do with policing policy: whether weekday or weekend, before or after closing time, main roads or back streets. These days it’s taxis rather than buses, but the criteria hasn’t changed, and tonight it was to be a short cross-country trek through quiet B-roads, favourable odds even given the extra patrols promised for New Year’s Eve.

  The driver’s door stood in the lee of the wind and opened easily. The passenger door was partially obliterated and had frozen solid. Natasha succeeded on the third attempt and nearly went flying into the road. Once inside, we just sat for a moment. A cat had recently crossed our bonnet, its tracks still visible but filling fast. Each fresh flake on the windscreen spread like a silent padding of its paws. No purring into life for this little engine however, more the rising-falling guttural wail that heralds a catfight.

  To my relief, the car not only started but moved forward out of the lay-by without protest. We edged slowly away from the party lights into the black abyss of rural Devon. Full beam was out of the question – in the intensity of light the swirling snow became a new Doctor Who title sequence; or the viewing screen of the Starship Enterprise in warp drive. Even with lights dipped the effect was hypnotic, as though I could do anything at all at the wheel without consequence. I began to feel dizzy and nauseous. As the edge of the road snaked in and out of sight I found myself losing all sense of our speed and having to flick my eyes again and again over the dials, only to find each time that the car had crept back above forty.

  We must have been going for about ten minutes. Natasha was still in a world of her own and had begun breathing loudly. To keep myself awake I reached over to the radio.

  “Shi..!!”<
br />
  Even before the air had squeezed between my tongue and teeth to cap the word, my foot had slammed on the brake and sent the rear of the car into a spin. I knew at once that we were hopelessly out of control – not only was the road on a slope, but it curved off to our right and seemed to bank the wrong way. Within moments the loss of external reference and the alcohol in my blood had numbed all sense of movement – we might have been floating in space. Besides, I was still in shock from what I had seen. Someone had been standing in the road, I was sure of it. A woman perhaps, though the figure had caught the headlights only for a second. And maybe even someone with her. Smaller. A child? For what seemed like minutes I studied this mental image before realising that we were still spinning, and made a last-ditch attempt to steer into the skid. All at once the feeling of weightlessness was gone. The lights caught the onslaught of the grass bank and we could do nothing but wait for the impact. It came, inevitable and final, if not quite the mighty thud I’d dreaded, more a series of bumps and grinds, the scraping of earth against metal. The engine stalled, we were thrown off the seatbelts back into our seats and it was over.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “Really, really sorry. Did you see...? Just standing there in the road. A miracle we didn’t hit them.”

  Natasha blinked drunkenly and turned on the light.

  “No, I don’t notice. I had my eyes closed. You are okay?”

  For a moment neither of us could act. My hands and knees had begun to shake. Natasha chewed on her fingers.

  “Bloody hell,” I said at last. “Bloody hell that was lucky.”

  It seemed to rouse her.

  “You said there is someone out there?”

  She looked first to her right, across my lap and out through the driver’s window. Then, as she turned away, the car was filled with a heart-stopping shriek. Plastered up against the passenger window, framed by the unremitting snowfall and blackness beyond, was the face of a man. His skin had turned yellow where it pressed hard onto the glass. I had the sickening sense that we had just pinned him against the bank and killed him outright, but at once dismissed it – we’d hit the bank head-on and there was nothing to our left but the road we’d just travelled. Natasha sat paralysed. The man’s eyes fixed her in a stare. Their standoff lasted barely a moment but seemed frozen in time. Suddenly the face unstuck itself from the window and withdrew into the night.

  I scrambled out of my seat and staggered from the car. Looking back up the hill, at first I saw no-one, then gradually a figure materialised out of the flickering white-on-black, like some shadowy image on a detuned TV screen. He walked reluctantly into the light and stopped a few yards off. It was then that I saw how things must look from where he stood. A car spins into view from nowhere and ends up nose deep in a grass bank. Inside, a woman all in black with huge shadowy rims around her eyes and next to her, the Prince of Darkness with blood oozing from either side of his mouth. Little wonder that he’d stood there gaping and then beat a hasty retreat.

  “Fancy-dress,” I explained, limply. I opened my cloak as if to show I was unarmed. “No-one hurt fortunately. We’re just a bit shaken.”

  He looked singularly unconvinced. In fact he looked petrified. Perhaps I had not avoided hitting anyone after all. Perhaps he had a loved one bleeding to death further uphill.

  “We didn’t hurt you, did we?”

  He shook his head and finally came forward to greet me. I could not fathom him at all. Despite the cold, despite the blizzard, he was making no effort whatever to warm himself. No attempt to cover his head, no self-embrace or beating of fists. What the hell had he been up to out here? Walking home from some revelry? Maybe, like us, he’d misjudged the weather when setting off for his party. But for Christ’s sake, when you have no decent winter coat with you, no proper boots, no gloves or hat, why put yourself through such torture, why not just call a taxi?

  “I saw it happen,” he said, quietly. “Seeing it has rather upset me. It brought it all back, you see.”

  This sounded like a preamble, so I waited. But he continued to stare bleakly into the darkness. It only fuelled my fears over what might be lying out of sight up the road.

  “You are out here alone, I take it.”

  He nodded but didn’t move. “Alone, yes.”

  The word hung there awkwardly, unresolved in the busy silence of falling snow. If this guy wanted to stay here all night then I most certainly did not. I shivered noisily, told him to get inside where it was warmer, and insisted on taking him home once he’d helped push us off the bank. He seemed resigned to instruction and slipped into the back. By the time I’d returned to my seat Natasha had already calmed down and introduced herself. He gave us no name in return. Instead he told us, “It’s a black-spot you see, this stretch. An unexpected incline on a corner with adverse camber. Eleven accidents in three years. The cars always spin the same way and end up on the left bank.”

  I pulled a face.

  “You’re left broadside to the path of oncoming traffic. But tonight you were lucky. If there’d been another vehicle behind you, because of the corner it wouldn’t have seen you in time.”

  These words were spoken without emotion, but I was no less chilled by the scene he was painting. As I saw it, there was nothing to stop it from still happening. If another car was suddenly to round that blind bend and plough straight into us, he and Natasha would be the first to cop it. I no longer had time for him to thaw out. I wanted us off the bank immediately.

  “’Tasha, get behind the wheel. We’re going round the front to yank it clear. Don’t rev the engine, just put it in reverse and gently release the clutch when I say.”

  It was no easy matter getting sufficient purchase between the bonnet and the raised bank. In the light of the headlamps I could see the bumper and grill tangled in brambles, the sill having carved a furrow of earth before latching itself over the mound. I was only grateful that this was Natasha’s car. The two of us would never have lifted my Passat out of there. Even her Clio took much heaving, cursing, revving, wheel-spinning and protesting of innocence before it finally lurched backwards. In its wake: one broken number plate, a plastic tow hook and a length of rubber skirting, all scooped up and thrown into the boot.

  There was no waiting for my hands to steady. The only priority was to get us home, to safety, as cautiously as my tattered nerves would allow, keeping a vigilance for awkward bends and ‘adverse cambers’. At the next junction we would have a chance to join safer, probably gritted main roads. But to do so would be one hell of a gamble. The police would be out in force by now. The whole incident had given me a heavy shot of adrenaline and I felt quite sobered, but a breathalyser would have told a different story. As if to underline the point, our passenger unexpectedly made a pronouncement.

  “There’s a smell of drink in here.”

  His tone was not accusatory; it merely stated the fact. His face bobbed in and out of sight in my rear-view mirror and never once changed its expression. I shifted uncomfortably and looked askance at Natasha. Her presence of mind took me by surprise.

  “Sorry, you are right. It is me,” she grinned, turning round to face him, then cocking her head towards me: “David pulls the small straw tonight and he must drive.”

  Her vodka-fuelled pigeon English added a certain weight to her story, but I remained doubtful he would buy into this, given that only minutes before the two of us had been shoulder to shoulder, puffing and panting across each other’s faces. My next look to the mirror was met by an unbroken stare, one that challenged me to stay eye-to-eye and confirm her account. But the rest of his gaunt face was already delivering its verdict: don’t suffer me the indignity of another lie. I could only drop my eyes in shame.

  “He had been drinking too. I smelt it on his breath...”

  There it was. His indictment delivered.

  “...The driver who struck us.”

  The meaning of those final words didn’t register at first. But Natasha understood him at once. I saw h
er jaw drop and hand rise to her open mouth.

  “Oh my God, you were in similar crash. Like the one you tell to us.”

  He nodded, though not to the mirror. His attention had moved elsewhere. Having delivered his bombshell, his whole demeanour had softened. Now he sat back in his seat, hands on lap and face turned to the window. In a matter-of-fact voice he began to reveal why witnessing our accident had left him so distraught. On the very same stretch some weeks previously, driving home on a frosty November morning, his car had entered the lethal bend, skated across black ice and ended up nose-first into the bank. No casualties on impact, but a mighty four-by-four, too heavy to be in the least troubled by slippery roads, had been just a fatal few seconds behind them, going too fast to slow down, its driver too drunk to swerve clear of anything that blocked its path beyond the bend. With its thick chromed bumpers and heavy bull-bars, the vehicle had ripped into the passenger door of our friend’s car and dragged it broadside on for over thirty yards.

  He brought his gaze back from the window onto my reflection in the mirror.

  “May I ask you your name?”

  “David,” I said. “David Carrigan.”

  “I lost both my wife and child that day, Mr Carrigan. You cannot imagine how very, very lonely this last month has been.”

  I can honestly say I have never been haunted by superstition. Even as a child I was quite fearless of the dark, of black cats and ladders, of spilling salt and breaking mirrors. To my adult mind, ghosts, demons and monsters all fall strictly into the province of the fancy-dress party, the horror film, the gothic novel. So there was no way I would ever speak the thoughts that crashed through my mind at that moment, but I knew what I had seen caught in the fleeting sweep of the headlights just seconds before our accident. Had it not been for that woman and child I could have avoided the skid altogether – we’d been doing barely thirty – I’d have had no cause to apply the brake at all. We’d have passed this miserable soul on the roadside and been none the wiser.

  Our commiserations offered (with an incompetence that was shameful on my part), the rest of the journey was travelled in silence. Doubtless, the din of inner thoughts was as deafening for Natasha and our passenger as it was for me, but none of it was stuff we wished to share. Conversation only resumed as we pulled into his village and I was steered to the drop-off point.

  A line of plain terraced houses presented themselves, about seven in all. One or two still pulsed to the tune of partying behind curtains. The rest stood silent and in darkness. The house to which he pointed, and in front of which we rolled to a stop, gave out a singularly cold message – not a soul sat here awaiting his return. I had a sense that he was utterly loathe to enter. We waved goodbye and wished him well, but even as we turned at a junction a few yards on and came back around, he remained unmoved, one hand on the gate, this miserable figure, head naked to the swirling snow, thin jacket opened to the wind.