When I leave the house I usually don't check if the cooker is switched off. I only remember that kind of detail, when I hear a faint boom in the distance, followed by the cooker falling out of the sky, landing on the car bonnet. God is in the details, as they say, but in that respect I am a complete heathen. So, I sat and waited.
Even though the house was clean and tidy when I left and joined the luggage in the car, Lesley was having one of those, “Houston, we have a problem” moments. You see, the lady a few doors down had said she would come in each evening to put the lights on. She would draw the curtains and make it look as if somebody was at home. This was a ploy to ward off burglars. I was all in favour of this. But I was more in favour of hooking the doors and windows up to the mains and frying them, but Lesley didn't want me messing with the wiring in the house in case I electrocuted myself; again.
I saw Lesley pass the window again with a Geiger counter and a surgical mask, checking for dust.
At two minutes past ten she got in the car.
At four minutes past ten I got out of the car.
She had forgotten her comfy shoes. I went in to get them. I wasn't being helpful. I was just worried that she would redecorate the kitchen if she went back in.
‘They’re the flat brown shoes, under the stairs’ she said.
Probably in the vacuum cleaner, I thought to myself, a little disgruntled. When I looked there were two pairs of shoes, and both were brown. I brought a pair out to the car like a dog expecting a biscuit.
'No, not those' Lesley said, ‘I need the brown ones.'
'But these are brown,' I replied.
She pointed out that they were more of a tan shade of autumn leaf on a misty morning in the Outer Hebrides kind of brown.
Silly me.
I forgot. Women generally have a more acute perception of colour, hence those pots of paint in hardware stores called ‘hint of’ this that and the other, instead of white. I don't know about you, but when I buy a pot of paint I want to know what colour it is. If I want a hint or a clue, I'll do a crossword. I buy a tin of white paint. I open it. It's white. Lesley buys a tin of Jasmine White. I open it. It's white.
That’s what it looks like when you’re going snow blind, putting it on the wall. That’s what it still looks like when you’re told you’ve missed a bit, which you probably have, but it’s only a bit. That’s what it looks like when you’re both standing there admiring your handiwork and she says ‘do you think the jasmine white is better than the apple white? I think it brings out the colour in the curtains.’
Just say, yes.
Anyway, I got the other shoes and stowed them in the car boot and once more we were off. I felt the need for a snack. 'Can I have a...?' 'No,' she said, studying the map. I kept quiet and concentrated on the driving. As well as organising the trip and rebuilding the house, she had made my breakfast to avoid having to continually give me Scooby snacks every ten minutes.
So, I couldn't complain about the service. Nevertheless, she relented after five minutes and wedged a currant bun in my mouth.
We were quite behind schedule; quite behind indeed. We should have left the previous night to avoid the traffic. However, after pumping up the tyres on Elvis and checking his oil and water, I discovered there was a pipe missing in the engine. Well, not missing exactly. It was there; in the engine, where it should have been, only one end didn’t connect up with anything else.
When I touched it, the whole thing came off in my hand. Expletives were ‘expleted’ and what little luggage we had was left sitting like fat orphans in the kitchen.
So, I had been to the garage earlier in the morning whilst Lesley had been sorting the house out. The mechanic had looked at me as if I was bonkers then said ‘it’s just to make the engine look tidy.' Fair enough. I took his word for it. We had delayed the trip for the equivalent of a pair of earrings for the engine.
But at least it was Elvis the Punto and not Damian the Bastard
We raced up the motorway. A fine drizzle was falling from a grey sky.
‘Do you remember Damian?’ Lesley asked. I did. Damian was the first car we owned as a couple, a gold coloured Mini, and yes, I do have a habit of giving cars names. I find that once you’ve driven around in a car, you get a “sense of it's personality”. The Mini showed us his true colours very early on in our relationship. Simply: Damian was cursed. It was a right evil bastard. It would break down if you opened the glove compartment; and usually you only opened the glove compartment to see where the smell of sulphur was coming from.
Elvis, on the other hand was very reliable; apart from the odd bit of engine coming off in my hand. For example, it was raining quite heavily as we made our way up the motorway but we felt safe and secure driving around in the warm snugness of Elvis the Punto.
Driving Damian was another matter altogether. Damian loved rain. Rain was great fun to break down in. You could almost hear it chuckling to itself as the engine cut out on whatever motorway we happened to be on. As it glided to a halt on the hard shoulder, with articulated lorries thundering past, dangerously close, it would ooze smug satisfaction like oil; it had managed to come up with some mysterious fault not found in any vehicle manual this side of Cuba.
Then it would start again, mysteriously, probably half an hour later; when it thought I couldn’t get any wetter. By that point I had usually run out of all known foul language and was having to invent my own. Incidentally, I think this was how German originally came into being. I would regularly vent my spleen and curse the day it was ever built from the wreckage of the Marie Celeste.
Naturally, after my outbursts, Damian's engine would politely cough, as if embarrassed by my Fawltyesque outburst of incandescent rage. Oh, how I hated it. I'm getting indigestion now just thinking about it.
Sometimes, it liked to make me look particularly stupid by having me call out a mechanic because it wouldn't start. The moment the mechanic tried it would start first time; and he would pat it on the bonnet and say 'that'll be thirty quid, please.' It only fell short of rolling over and letting him tickle its tummy.
I always regretted calling out a mechanic.
I always knew I should have just called an exorcist.
I dreamt of wedging a stake through its engine; many times it narrowly escaped being tied to a stake and burnt to a crisp. It got to the point where I’d leave the doors unlocked, hoping somebody would steal it. But it would still be there in the morning, cold metal gleaming, glassy headlamps staring innocently off down the road, engine grille smiling sweetly, as if it wasn’t planning to fuck up my day.
I think, it knew that I knew, that it was actually the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse; resentful of the fact that while the other horsemen rode magnificent, black steeds, it got a set of tyres and an AA road map for Bolton. I twigged this on the day we pulled into a garage for petrol and for no reason at all smoke started to billow out of the dashboard. The forecourt emptied in an instant. When it became apparent it wasn't going to burst into flames, a worried mechanic peered into the engine to find: absolutely nothing wrong. I could have told him that before he pulled it to pieces trying to find the fault and charged me a fortune for the labour.
In the end, a friend of ours managed to sell it to some lads from Liverpool who collected Mini cars as a hobby. God have mercy on their souls.
'Yes’ I replied to Lesley question. ‘I remember Damian’.
We reminisced about the time we had gone to Wales and it backfired constantly for hours in the pouring rain. It was like driving around in the midst of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Until we got it to a mechanic that is. Then it immediately stopped backfiring. It stopped before the mechanic heard it, of course, and true to its diabolical nature, purred like a pussy cat when he started it up. He even gave it an affectionate pat on the bonnet. I’m sure the grille at the front grinned at me behind the mechanic’s back.
But that was a lifetime ago, before Elvis who never misses a cue. Sure, I have been known to crunch through his gears, but only when I want to feel like a bit of a twat.
 Two hours after leaving the house we were travelling on the M6. We passed a place called Shap in Cumbria. It was probably the best thing to do with a place called Shap, unless that was where you were going, which of course we weren't. We were going to Scotland; Lesley, Elvis and myself and the big black cloud that followed us from Manchester. Its belly glowered above us.
Drizzle made the road a little dangerous. Spray from the passing lorries covered the car but Elvis wiped the windscreen diligently until we passed Carlisle.
And somewhere out there, no doubt, Damian was parked up in a lay-by, in the pouring rain while two Scousers kicked it to death.
At least, I like to think so.
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