Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (6 page)

When he reaches the bedroom he pauses, stands and looks at the urn in his hands for a long time before finally placing it amongst the black-framed pictures on the narrow mantel, sliding them left and right to make room. Past selves smile out at him in grainy colour and black-and-white, and he suddenly realises that he can’t remember the last time he looked at any of these photographs. He picks up one of them and tilts it so the light from the lamp can help him to pick out the detail. His eyes aren’t what they were.

They are on a beach that yawns away beneath a dark strip of sea. The sun is low in the sky and she is smiling broadly. She looks so young. His hair is thick and his forehead is smooth.
It’s
years ago.

Brittany. He remembers it. He’d picked up a lead on an exhaust in Rennes, and she’d suggested that they make it a long weekend away, so they’d taken the car over on the ferry from Portsmouth. After they’d picked up the exhaust and politely admired the man’s mausolitic fleet, they’d driven back through low countryside bruised with heather and found a sweltering room at the tiny
Hôtel Petit Bretagne
,
then
they’d eaten, slept and walked together until the sun was long dead. They were young then, not long married. He remembers enjoying the weekend.

He picks up another photo, but in this one she isn’t smiling. Not properly. She’s trying, but the sun is in her eyes and her hair is being whipped across her forehead by one of the winds that scour in off the Channel.
The smile’s there, if you look, but she’s wearing it like a uniform.
Where was it taken?
Brighton?
Hastings? He doesn’t remember.

Was he even there, behind the camera? Or was he in a van, being bullied by Parisians on the
Périphérique
, on his way to beg and barter a headlamp or a carburettor out of some pinched, mean-spirited collector?

Something begins to nag at him, a vague feeling that refuses to solidify and remains perceptible only on the fringe of his awareness.

Before he goes to bed he lays out a skirt and blouse on the back of the chair, like she used to before the chemotherapy dredged the strength from her limbs, and he wonders why he’d never done it for her before. Outside, a dog barks. He lies down, then he turns to the side and says goodnight to the space in the bed where she used to be.

He hunches his shoulders on the way to work, braces himself against the world. The wind has shifted, northerly, and it sends thick fleets of clouds scudding across the sky in its path. He arrives at the workshop after what seems no time at all, and he has to check his watch to convince himself that any time has passed since he left the house. He realises he has no memory of the journey.

The workshop reeks of a disappearing age, the heavy scent of grease sharpened by an overnote of thinners and a bass drone of cigarette smoke. Chipped workbenches hug the walls, covered in bolts and bulbs and fossilised spark plugs, while dark gargoyles of metal hide in corners and peer out from beneath heavy tarpaulins. Two fragmented cars occupy the centre of the workshop like ruined castles, one elevated on a lift to allow access to its underside. A third vehicle shelters beneath a soft cloth cover closer to the back. Terry crouches beneath the elevated car, working a wrench at its filthy belly. When he notices John, he lays down the wrench and wipes his hands with a rag.

“How are you doing?” he asks. His face is already streaked with grime, and when he
frowns
dark lines fire across his forehead.

“Oh, you know,” says John.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” says Terry, “We can manage without you if — you know, if you need some time. Craig says he can do Saturdays if we need him to.”

“No, no, I’m fine. Probably best if I keep busy.”

Terry’s an old friend.
The oldest.
He was the one who suggested they go into business together all those years ago.

You and me, buying old cars, fixing them up and selling them on! We’ll make a pile! We’ll get a workshop! It’ll be great! What do you say?

It’s a hobby for John, really. He put most of the money in up front, and he tinkers at the machinery, but Terry’s the one who really knows what he’s doing.

He climbs into heavy overalls and turns the kettle on.

“Craig in yet?” he says.

“Not yet.”

Craig is Terry’s son-in-law. They took him on last year, and they tell each other it was just to give him a chance, just to get him started on a career, never admitting to one other that the heavy lifting is starting to hurt the old back, that the close-in work is starting to strain the old eyes.

John brews two cups of strong tea and hands one to Terry, then he walks over and slides the tarpaulin off the car near the back of the workshop. Terry walks up and stands beside him, sipping his tea noisily.

“Got some good news for you,” says Terry, nudging him with his elbow.

“Oh?”

“Bill told me some Arab drove his Facel into the back of a lorry at about sixty over the weekend. Completely wrote it off. So I’ve got him to buy what’s left of it for us and ship it over. From what he says it’ll give you pretty much the rest of the bits you need.”

“Doesn’t he want to get it repaired?”

“Nah, he’s some oil sheikh; he’ll just buy something else. Bill says the guy told him he was getting bored with it anyway. Bored! Can you believe that?”

John looks at the car. Sleek and muscular, heavier than its size suggests, the chassis a wrestler’s torso, the headlamps a pair of wide, surprised eyes.
The Facel II.
His
Facel II.
He’s built it with his own hands, piece by piece, from the scavenged corpses of the few of its brothers that have succumbed to accident, disrepair or time, born out of weekends spent on roads to Monaco and Reims and Geneva, hunting down doors, fascias, seat covers, gear sticks.
Damaged pieces, refurbishments, replica parts.
Hundreds of hours.
Thousands.

He’d bought the skeleton of it years ago, back when they’d just got the business started. There’d been no money for it, so he’d had to buy it out of his own pocket. He’d tried to convince Terry that they could make a profit out of it, but Terry hadn’t wanted it.

“Too rare,” he’d said, “Not enough parts out there to rebuild it.”

Terry was right; it was astonishingly, legendarily rare, but John was convinced that it could be restored, certain that sufficient fragments might be unearthed and procured and pieced together.

“It’s like an endangered species,” he’d said, “When they’re gone, they’re gone. It’s our duty.”

“It’s hardly a bloody polar bear,” said Terry.

But the Facel II was never really about making money, and he suspects that Terry has known this all along. It’s a fable.
A mythical car.

Craig asks him about it from time to time. “I can’t explain it,” John will say, “It’s just something you either get or you don’t. It’s not the fastest car, it’s not the best to drive,
it’s
not the most comfortable. But it’s
something
. It’s beautiful. Probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Beautiful?” says Craig, “It looks like a fuckin’ tank. Probably drives like one an’ all.”

Craig would never understand. All they teach you in college is wires and fluids and tolerances.
Hardware.
Nothing about the soul.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

John doesn’t really hear what Terry is saying; his attention is taken by the car. It seems different today, somehow; the silver paintwork seems lifeless, the chromework will-o’-the-wisp not present. He feels none of its usual magic, none of the stomach-tightening thrill of imagining himself behind the wheel, cruising down through southern France to the Ligurian coast, the sun scorching down, just him and—

Just him and—

And who?

“With these parts from Bill you’ll have that beast up and running in a few months, I reckon,” Terry says.

“What?” says
John.

“The parts.
From Bill.
Should be enough for you to finish it.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

Outside, rain begins to smack down, streaking like quartz along dim windows, hissing from the pavement and the roof like white noise.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” asks Terry.

“Do the lights seem funny in here?”

Terry looks up, frowning.

“No, they’re fine. Why?”

John doesn’t answer. The car seems dead. No, not dead; more as though it could never live.

“I think I just need to get some fresh air.” He starts to strip out of his overalls.

“Sure, no problem,” says Terry, “Take as long as you need.”

He walks home, but instead of going inside he gets into the car and pulls out of the driveway. Before long he’s on the road, but he has no idea of where he’s going. The windscreen wipers squeak and thud; brake and traffic lights bleed red and green before him. He drives through suburban estates, high streets, arterial roads, until he reaches a motorway, and then, then he realises where he is going. He joins the traffic, hissing along, until the blue exit sign appears through the spray like an epiphany, and he turns off down the slip road.

He reaches the car park at the bottom of the hill and parks up. He’s the only one there. He leaves the car, picks his way through the puddles and mud, and climbs the tree-lined path to the top of the hill. At the top he sits on the bench and looks down through the rain at the countryside that stretches away before him: the ruined abbey, the coiling river, the patchwork of fields flecked with sheep and cows. The motorway is barely audible. Nothing changes. Apart from the weather, it’s the same as when they came here before.

They sit on the bench, looking out at southern England. He’s packed a picnic, and they spread cloths on their laps and eat cold quiche and salad. He pulls a bottle of champagne out from the bottom of the hamper. She asks him what the occasion is. You’ll see, he says. He pops the cork so that it flies off down the hill, which makes her smile,
then
he pours champagne into two tumblers. To us, he says, and they raise the glasses and sip champagne and gaze at one another. There is one other thing, he says, and she asks him what it is. Hold on, I need to be on one knee, he says, and her expression is an unforgettable blend of surprise and joy. He holds up a ring, and she offers him her hand. She almost forgets to say yes.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been sat on the bench. He looks at the empty space beside him. The rain is easing now, but it still colours the landscape in long shifts of grey. He wonders when that first supernova of passion faded, when exactly his obsession with the car began to corrode their marriage.

After the picnic they go for a walk, down the hill to the ruined abbey, then along the stream. They walk for miles, all the way to the weir. They hold hands, and he enjoys the feeling of the ring on her finger. They take some leftover pastry from the quiche and feed it to the ducks.

He doesn’t feel like doing that today. He gets up from the bench and walks back down to the car park. Does he feel better for having come here? He feels less alone, certainly. He can feel her energy here. Some part of that other day still remains on the landscape here, underlaid faintly beneath it.
A watermark of the past.

He sits in the car for a while before leaving.
His breath turns the cold windows opaque, and the world outside seems to become a little less real.
The bare trees grow faint, as though they are moving away from him, shifting into another dimension. He can barely make out the hill.

When he gets home he finds that the clothes of hers that he hung on the chair are gone. He looks on the floor, under the bed, but he can’t find them. He wonders whether he put them away himself and simply forgot. He wonders whether he hung them there at all.

~~~

The will is straightforward. Mr. Skinner, the solicitor, reads the document, but it’s a formality. John remembers being here with her when she made it, a month after she’d been diagnosed. When the reading’s finished, John stands and waits to shake Mr. Skinner’s hand, but the solicitor remains seated.

“There’s something else,” he says, and he reaches into a brown envelope on his desk and pulls out a black notebook.

“What’s this?”

“Her diary.
She posted it to me with the instruction that I give it to you on the reading of the will.”

“What does it say?”

“I haven’t read it.”

At home, John sits on the bed, under the gaze of their photographic pasts, and reads the diary. It tells him some things he knew, some things he didn’t, and some things he knew but had never admitted to himself. He reads the diary from beginning to end, and when he has finished he goes back and reads it again. As he reads the words they take on more substance, become more resonant, become livid or joyous or sorrowful, until eventually he is no longer reading ink on a page but hearing her words as she whispers them to him.

Terry’s very understanding. John’s working less and less, and when he does come into the workshop, he seems distant and unfocused. The parts that Bill scavenged from the oil sheikh’s wreck arrive, and John begins the painstaking task of repairing, refurbishing and refitting, but his work on the car is autonomic. There’s none of the joy that he once felt. He just uses it as a reason to get out of bed now.