Chapter 18: To Mothers and Mud.
Cambridge to London to Aylesbury
The queen was dead and I was going to London. I was standing on a slip road in a cold shadow on an otherwise warm day. A small car pulled over and put its flashers on. I whipped open the passenger door. There was a big white box on the seat. I hurriedly offered to put it in the boot and raced round the back to do so. I lobbed it in and slammed the door, rushing back to leap into the car. “What was in there?” I panted as we set off.
“A cake.” The driver replied.
“Ah…” Nothing was said for a moment as we both contemplated how I’d probably destroyed it.
The driver’s name was Carl and he was on his way to Kent to see his mum for her birthday - hence the cake - and was glad to be finally picking up a hitchhiker. He said he’d seen a few about but had always had a car full of dogs and other bits so he’d never had the space. I tried to make a special effort to ensure the experience was worth crushing his cake.
Carl was wearing blue sunglasses, had a neatly trimmed haircut and a clean polo. He told me he was a veterinary neurologist. He was a bright man and had been at Cambridge as an undergrad. Now he worked not far away in an animal hospital. Mostly his day-to-day involved dealing with epileptic dogs or fixing dachshunds’ slipped discs. Occasionally he’d have to remove a brain tumour if the owner was really desperate. “Or just crazy,” he thought. It was dangerous and hugely expensive so mostly they’d just put the poor thing to sleep.
Carl’s husband also worked at the hospital with him. They used to live in Camberwell and had moved out to a village near the hospital a few years before. His husband, Valdrin, found a role as a theatre technician so they took the plunge. Carl missed London though. There wasn’t much going on where he was and certainly not much of a gay scene. “Not that that’s all that matters,” he added with a shrug.
We were cruising down the M25 and in no time were on the Dartford Crossing, rising up over the sludge-coloured Thames, the lego-like warehouses and factories shrinking below. Crossing that bridge I always get a vertiginous sense of awe mixed with horror as the cold, faceless industry stretches away either side. Soon after we pulled off the motorway.
“Welcome to the bright lights of Swanley…” Carl announced dryly. He’d grown up in the town and didn’t have a particularly high opinion of it. I could see why. We pulled into a car park and I jumped out, thanking him and waving as he pulled back into the relentless traffic. I thought I’d try and hitchhike all the way into London so walked down the main road towards town. It was dead straight and thick with cars and far in the distance, the silicon ingot of Canary Wharf speared the air. “Margaret Thatcher’s temple to high finance” I remember someone once called it.
I stood for 20 minutes as the cars streamed past, tail toe tail toe. People eyed me strangely if they acknowledged me at all. In the end, I gave up and got the overground straight into town. It’s never worth hitchhiking inside the M25.
I rode it all the way to Blackfriars. I wanted to see the famous queue for the Queen’s coffin and as we pulled in there it was, steadily snaking along the river’s edge. I had no intention of joining it but felt it had to be seen, such a bizarre and extraordinary concept as it was. People of all ages, shapes and sizes were merrily plodding along, most of them not really speaking. I even saw a blind man, clutching someone’s arm and tapping his stick. It was moving at quite a pace and I followed it for a while as it passed the Tate Modern. Nothing in there could be half as expressive as this enormous, living moving piece of public art. They should have let it run through the Turbine Hall.
The next day I went to Green Park to watch the funeral. There was a crush of people getting off the tube and a high-vis security guard calling above the crowds that the park was closed. People quietly eyed the shut gates and slowly pushed towards Hyde Park, hungry for something, hungry to be somewhere, to see and feel something. In Hyde Park, huge screens beamed marching men in red uniforms. People watched in silence mostly, eyes fixed on the distant screens. A strange atmosphere hung above the park. The air crackled as thousands and thousands of people were all at once conscious of a huge and abstract moment. Somehow the whole thing made you question the big questions, questions of power and history, the state and what it all meant. There was a foreboding sense of unease too.
“Sit down!” A woman screamed noisily from behind somewhere. Everyone turned to look at her as she became more and more hysterical. People turned back to the screens, shrugging. Nobody sat down and she keep screaming.
“Stand up you lazy twat!” Someone eventually called back. Then the service started and the whole park stood up anyway. The screaming stopped.
I bumped into some friends and we went to see the hearse go past. “I hope the hearse is on stilts,” a little boy in front of us remarked to his mum. It wasn’t and all I saw was the tiniest flash of a bejewelled crown between a forest of up-stretched arms and iPhones. I held up my sign and put my thumb out but the hearse driver was obviously in too much of a hurry.
I got the tube to the end of the line. Uxbridge was totally deserted, every shop was shut, graffitied shutters pulled down. No one was on the streets but a couple of spindly crackheads who had the place to themselves.
I looked at a map and decided I’d go to Oxford so wrote it on my sign and was soon picked up by a heavy-set man with a deep scar on his cheek. His name was Ricky and I told him I’d just been at the funeral.
“Did you feel safe?” Was the first thing he asked me, looking at me intently. He said that he’d been worried something would happen.
I asked him what he did.
“I pick up mud,” he replied flatly and let it hang for a while before carrying on. “I was never very ambitious as a kid.” He told me how he’d always wanted to be a lorry driver and so aged 17 he became one. Since then he thought he’d probably driven well over a million miles - to the moon and back, twice. He was sick to death of it now. People on the road are less kind these days. They won’t let you pull out and small things like that, so Ricky was hoping to employ a few people and get behind a desk instead.
We drove past the works for HS2 and I asked if he was picking up any of that mud. There was certainly a lot of it to be moved.
“All the big boys get plenty of work from it but I don’t bother. They pay 90 days after and not in cash. You see while they’re all focused on that, I go and pick up all the normal mud and get paid in cash! Untraceable. No one wants to pay more than they have to, do they?”
Generally speaking, Ricky’s business plan was to pick up the mud no one else would. As a result Travellers and Asians were his best clients. There was a Traveller called Joey whom none of the big boys would work with. They’d quote him astronomical amounts and say they were only available in two weeks’ time. Ricky meanwhile would do it for a fair price the very same day. He didn’t mind that Joey was a Traveller, he knew he was a nice guy all the same. It was a similar story with his Asian clients. The big boys were too racist to work with them so Ricky would sweep in and happily pick up their mud.
As we pulled in for some petrol I asked about his partner and what she did. “She’s a full-time mother,” Ricky replied proudly. “She’s amazing. I could never do that job,” he shook his big bald head. “People like to shit on mothers but it’s a full-on thing. In comparison, driving trucks is eeaasy!” I told him I didn’t like to shit on mothers and had never met anyone who had but otherwise I agreed with his point wholeheartedly.
I reflected for a moment on all the amazing things my mother has done. I thought of the Queen who in many ways had been a mother to the country and I thought of Valdrin’s Albanian mother. I even thought all the way back to Carl’s mother. It was a shame I’d crushed her birthday cake - I’m sure she’d deserved a perfect one.
Didn't have you pegged for a Royalist ; )