The Paradise War (4 page)

He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I could do with a pee.”

A few minutes later, Simon worked his way over to the exit lane and we were coasting into an M6 oasis. The parking lot was jammed; everyone had rolled up for tea. And many of them were having it inside their cars. I have always wondered about this peculiar habit. Why would these people spend hour upon hour driving and then pull into a rest area only to stay locked in their cars with the windows rolled up, eating sandwiches from a shoebox and drinking tepid tea from a thermos? Not my idea of a welcome break.

We parked, locked the car, and walked to the low brick bunker. A foul gray sky sprinkled drizzle on us, and a brisk diesel-scented wind drove it into our clothes. “Oh, please, no,” Simon moaned.

“What’s wrong?”

He lifted a dismissive hand to the much-abused blue plastic letters affixed to the gray concrete wall facing us. The gesture was pure disdain. “It’s a Motorman Inn—they’re the worst.”

We shuffled into the gents. It was damp and filthy. Evidently some misguided rustic had herded diarrhetic cattle through the place and the management had yet to come to terms with the crisis. We finished our business quickly and retreated to the concourse where we proceeded past a gang of black-leathered bandits loitering before a bank of screeching kill-or-be-killed arcade games. The cheerful thugs tried to beg loose change from us, but Simon imperiously ignored them, and we pushed through the glass door and into the cafeteria.

There was a queue, of course, and the cakes were stale and the biscuits shopworn. In the end, I settled for a Twix bar and a mug of tea. Simon, on the other hand, confessed to feeling puckish and ordered chicken and chips, apple crumble and cream, and a coffee.

I found us a table and, having paid, Simon folded himself into the booth opposite me. The room was loud with the clank of cutlery and rank with cigarette smoke. The floor beneath our table was slimy with mashed peas. “Too utterly grotesque,” groaned Simon, but not without a certain grim satisfaction. “A real pigsty. The Motormaniacs strike again.”

I sipped my tea. The balance of milk to brew had been seriously overestimated, but never mind; it was hot. “You want me to drive a while? I’m happy to spell you.”

Simon dashed brown vinegar from a satchet over his chicken and chips. He speared a long sliver of potato; the soggy digit dangled limply from his fork. He glared at it in disgust before popping it into his mouth, then slowly turned his basilisk gaze toward the food counter and the kitchen beyond. “These subliterate drones have no higher challenge to their vestigial mental faculties than to dip over-processed potatoes into warm oil,” he said icily. “You’d think they’d get it right eventually—the laws of chance, if nothing else.”

I didn’t want to get involved, so I unwrapped my Twix and broke off a piece. “How much farther to Inverness, do you reckon?”

Writing off the chips as a total loss, Simon moved on to the chicken, grimacing as he wrestled a strip of woody flesh from the carcass. “Putrid,” was his verdict. “I don’t mind it being lukewarm, but I hate congealed chicken. It should have been chucked in the bin hours ago.” He shoved the plate aside violently, scattering greasy chips across the table.

“The apple whatsit looks good,” I observed, more out of pity than conviction.

Simon pulled the bowl to him and tested the contents with a spoon. He made a face and spat the mouthful back into the bowl. “Nauseating,” he declared. “England produces the finest apples on the planet, and these malfeasant cretins use infectious tinned refuse from some flyblown police state. Moreover, we stand amidst dairy-land which is the envy of the free world, a land veritably flowing with milk and honey, but what do we get? Freeze-dried vegi-milk substitute reconstituted with dishwater. It’s criminal.”

“It’s road food, Simon. Forget it.”

“It’s stupid bloody-mindedness,” he replied, taking up the bowl and lifting it high. I was afraid he was going to fling it across the room. Instead, he overturned it ceremoniously upon the offending chicken and greasy chips. He pulled his coffee to him, and I offered him half of my chocolate bar, hoping to pacify.

“I don’t mind the money,” he said softly. “I don’t mind throwing money away—I do that all the time. What I mind is the cynicism.”

“Cynicism?” I wondered. “Highway robbery, perhaps, but I wouldn’t call it cynicism.”

“My dear fellow, that’s exactly what it is. You see, the thieving blighters know they have you—you’re trapped here on the motorway. You can’t simply stroll along to the competitor next door. You’re tired, need a respite from the road. They put up this façade and pretend to offer you succor and sustenance. But it’s a lie. They offer swill and offal, and we have to take it. They know we won’t say anything. We’re English! We don’t like to make a fuss. We take whatever we’re given, because, really, we don’t deserve any better. The smarmy brigands know this, and they wield it like a bludgeon. I call that bloody cynical.”

“Pipe down,” I whispered. “People are staring.”

“Let them!” Simon shouted. “These scum-sucking slop merchants have stolen my money, but they do not get my calm acceptance of the fact. They do not get my meek submission.”

“All right, all right. Take it easy, Simon,” I said. “Let’s just go, okay?”

He threw the coffee cup down on the table, got up, and stalked out. I took a last sip of tea and hurried after him—pausing in the parking lot to gaze in envy at the punters taking tea in the comfort and privacy of their automobiles. It suddenly seemed the height of prudence and taste.

Simon had the car running by the time I caught up with him. “You knew what it would be like when you went in there,” I charged, climbing in. “Honestly, sometimes I think you do this on purpose, just so you can gripe about it afterwards.”

“Am I to blame for their criminal incompetence?” he roared. “Am I responsible?”

“You know what I mean,” I maintained. “It’s slumming, Simon. It’s your vice.”

He threw the car into gear, and we rocketed through the parking lot and out onto the motorway. It was a good few minutes before Simon spoke again. The silence was merely the calm before the storm; he was working up to one of his tirades. I knew the signs well enough, and, judging from the intensity with which he grasped the steering wheel, the storm was going to be a doozey. The air fairly trembled with pent-up fury.

Simon drew a breath and I braced myself for the blast.

“We are doomed, of course,” he said slowly, picking out each word as if it were a stone for a slingshot. “Doomed like rats in a rain barrel.”

“Spare me.”

“Did you know,” he said, assuming my ignorance, “that when Constantine the Great won the Battle of Milvian Bridge in the year 312, he decided to put up a triumphal arch to commemorate his great victory?”

“Listen, do we have to go into this?”

“Well, he did. The only problem was that he could find no artists worthy of the project. He sent throughout the whole Roman Empire but couldn’t find a single sculptor who could produce even a halfway acceptable battle frieze or victory statue. Not a man easily deterred, however, Constantine ordered his masons to remove statuary from other arches and attach them to his. The artists of his age were simply not up to the task, you see.”

“Whatever you say,” I grumped.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “Gibbon considered it the turning point of Roman history, the beginning of the decline. And it’s been downhill for Western civilization ever since. Look around, sport; we have finally reached the nadir. The end of the line. Finis! Kaput! We are doomed.”

“Oh, please don’t let’s start—” My plea was a paper parasol raised against a typhoon.

“Doomed,” he repeated for emphasis, rolling the word out like a cannonball. “No doubt there was a curse placed upon our sorry heads from the cradle. You’re an American, Lewis; you must have noticed— it’s in our very demeanor. We British are a doomed race.”

“You look like you’re doing all right to me,” I told him sourly. “You’re surviving.”

“Oh? Do we look like a surviving civilization to you? Consider our appearance: our hair is limp and greasy, our skin is spotty, our flesh pallid and scabby, our noses misshapen. Our chins recede, our foreheads slope, our cheeks run to jowl, and our stomachs to paunch; stoop-shouldered, bent-backed, spindle-legged, we are rumpled, shaggy, and unkempt. Our eyes are weak, our teeth are crooked, our breath is bad. We are gloomy, depressed, anemic, and wan.”

“Easy for you to say,” I remarked, seeing as how Simon displayed absolutely none of the physical defects he described. His own physique was blissfully free of blemish; his words were smoke and sizzle without the fire, all hat and no rabbit. As expected, he ignored me.

“Surviving? Ha! The very air is poisonous. And the water—that is poisonous too. And the food—that is
really
poisonous! Let’s talk about the food, shall we? Everything is mass-produced by devious men in salmonella factories for the sole purpose of infecting as many consumers as possible and charging them for the privilege, before turning them over to the National Health, who give ’em the chop and a hasty, anonymous burial.

“And if, by some miracle, we should somehow survive our meager noonday repast, we are sure to be done in by the unrelenting meanness of our very existence. Look at us! We slog numb and shell-shocked through bleak, pestilential cities, inhaling noxious gases spewed from obsolete factories, clutching wretched plastic bags full of toxic meat and carcinogenic vegetables. The stinking rich amass wealth in tax-exempt offshore capital investment accounts, while the rest struggle along stark streets knee-deep in canine excrement to punch the time clock in soul-stifling sweatshops for the wherewithal to buy a rind of rancid cheese and a tin of beans with our overtaxed, undervalued pound.

“Observe any street in any city! You’ll see us shuffling grimly from one hateful upmarket boutique to another, wasting our substance on obnoxious designer clothes that do not fit, and buying gray cardboard shoes made by slave labor in the gulags, and being routinely abused by blowzy, brain-dead shop assistants with blue mascara and chicken-fleshed legs. Overwhelmed by marketing forces beyond our ken and purchasing wildly complicated Korean appliances we neither want nor need with hologrammed plastic cash from smug, spotty-faced junior sales managers in yellow ties and too-tight trousers who can’t wait to scuttle off to the nearest pub to suck down pints of watery beer and leer at adenoidal secretaries wearing black leather miniskirts and see-through blouses.”

Simon had liftoff. I settled back for the ride as his cavalcade of horror rolled on. It was all about the Channel tunnel and a landscape awash in Eurotrash and French fashion victims and acid rain and lugubrious Belgians and Iranian language students and lager louts swilling Heineken and football hooligans and holes in the ozone layer and Italian playboys, and South American drug lords and Swiss banks and AmEx Goldcards and the greenhouse effect and the Age of Inconsequence, and so on and so forth.

Simon clutched the steering wheel with both hands and punched the accelerator for emphasis, bobbing his head to the cadence of his words and glancing sideways at me every now and then to make sure I was still listening. Meanwhile, I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity to toss a monkey wrench into his fast-whirling gears.

“We don’t have any place to call our own, but we’ll all have cold Guinness in cans and inscrutable Braun coffeemakers and chic Benetton sweatshirts and nifty Nike Cross-Trainers and gold-plated Mont Blanc fountain pens and Canon fax machines and Renaults and Porsches and Mercedes and Saabs and Fiats and Yugos and Ladas and Hyundais and Givenchy and Chanel pour Homme and Aeroflot holidays and Costa Del Sol condos and Piat D’Or and Viva España and Sony, and Yamaha and Suzuki and Honda and Hitachi and Toshiba and Kawasaki and Nissan and Minolta and Panasonic and Mitsu-bloody-bishi!

“Do we care?” he demanded rhetorically. “Hell, no! We don’t bat an eye. We don’t turn a hair. We don’t twitch a solitary sedentary muscle. We sit transfixed before the Tube Almighty, lulled into a false Nirvana by a stupefying combination of pernicious banality and blather while nocuous cathode rays transform our healthy gray cells into jellied veal!”

As harangues go, it was one of Simon’s better efforts. But his dolorous litanies could endure ad infinitum, and I was growing weary. He paused for breath and I saw my chance. “If you’re unhappy,” I said, throwing myself into the withering flow of invective, “why do you stay here?”

Curiously, that stopped him. He turned his face to me. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. If you’re as miserable as you make yourself out to be, and if things are as bad as you say—why not leave? You could go anywhere.”

Simon smiled his thin, superior smile. “Show me a place where it’s better,” he challenged, “and I’m on my way.”

Offhand, I could not think of any place perfect enough for Simon. I might have suggested the States, but the same demons infesting Britain were running rampant in America as well. The last time I was back home, I hardly recognized the place—it wasn’t at all as I remembered. Even in my own small, mid-American town the sense of community had all but vanished, gobbled up by ravening corporations and the townsfolks’ own blind addiction to a quick-buck economy and voracious consumerism. “We might not have a Fourth of July parade down Main Street anymore, or Christmas carols in the park,” my dad had said, “but we sure as hell got McDonald’s and Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Wal-Mart mini-mall that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week!”