“Where are you going? North or south?” Ellie fizzed, opal-eyed and electric. She didn’t wait, “I’ll take you!”
Off we fled. The wheels barely touched the ground. Every bump sent us high in the air.
“Right,” she began without exchanging names, “I’ve had a weird day and I’m gunna tell you about it. Picking you up’s only added to it!” She was bursting in her seat, an aerosol on the fire. ‘Right,” she tried to organise her thoughts but they ricocheted out of control, “Right…So Boris is a cunt, and he took away my dream car…Are you vaccinated…Owh why did you do that? Anyway… What was I saying? Oh yeah, Boris is a cunt and I had my own cleaning business and it was going really, really well. You wouldn’t tell from the state of the car!” The car wasn’t clean. “I had three ladies working 40 hours and I had 60 clients. Then Boris announced lockdown and I had to lay them off overnight. Lost everything. Had to sell my dream car!”
I’d barely put my seat belt on. We were flying down a long, straight road. The cup holder was full of coins; the footwell full of junk. A cigarette raced back and forth, from pink lips to the wheel.
For two years she’d had no job. Then that morning she was offered one with an estate agent. An hour later someone asked her to take over their cleaning business. It had 3 ladies and plenty of clients. She could do it alongside her new job. Suddenly her life was back on track, flying like the car. She trembled as she told me, the tiny capillaries on her cheeks danced.
“I’ve also got an eBay business too,” she exclaimed, reaching back to the backseat and grabbing a handful of plastic bracelets. They rattled in her hand as we bounced. “I buy these for a few pennies and sell them for a few quid. I made £250 in a couple of hours!”
We were driving north from Newark, on the Great North Road. Ellie had to be in Newark for 2, but it was 12:30 so she could take me north until she couldn’t. Then she’d turn around and drive back. We drove fast, well over 80 miles an hour.
Ellie told me she’d been at university in Nottingham for two years studying law. She’d got a first in both years but had to drop out because her grandparents’ Alzheimer’s was too bad. They’d call up their friends saying the other had died and they’d go missing all the time. Ellie had to look after them - nobody else would. Plus she had a child to raise. In fact, she had two.
She told me about a Kenyan boyfriend she’d had in London. She said she’d been at a house party once and the police had turned up. She opened the door but they weren’t there for the party. Turns out they’d found a bomb on the street.
I asked if he was the father.
“No,” she replied, then paused, “Right…” she took a deep breath and launched off. “So in my teens, I had a very violent relationship with this guy. I had one child with him when I was 20.” She counted it on her finger, “Then I married the Kenyan guy but he cheated on me so we got divorced and I had a baby with another guy straight after. Then I went to uni…and I had my third a bit later on.”
So wild and exhilarating were her thoughts I tried in vain to catch them. She was like a firework fallen over.
“And,” she added, “My eldest has got two kids of his own.” She went on to tell me he’d had his first just after his 15th birthday. Ellie hadn’t met her grandchild because she made the wrong noises when he and his girlfriend announced they were pregnant. “You know right, he comes up and asks me to be a guarantor for finance so he could get a car or something. I told him to fuck off! You’re not gunna let me see my grandkids, you can jog on!” It had clearly gone well though as they’d had another child since. “I just think it’s a shame that he’ll miss out on all the stuff you get to do growing up. You know, uni, lads holidays, having your first legal pint…”
By now we were rushing up the A1. There was a slight hold-up as one lorry overtook another. She shook her head then whipped the car onto the slip road, dropped a gear and roared around the bend. “Can’t be dealing with traffic!” She beamed. “You know you remind me of my cousin. He’s quite sensible though. I’m not very sensible!” She flashed a radiant grin, “Look at the way I drive.” I didn’t have to. She thrust the accelerator, flattening me in my seat.
“When I was 14 I was trained to be a getaway driver for my brother’s gang. I never had to use it but that’s why I drive crazily. My cousin took his driving test 13 times. I passed first-time coz of all that training.”
I asked what the least sensible thing she’d ever done was. “Errrr…” she pondered for a second, a rare moment of calm. “Probably living with a gangster for a few years. I learnt to cut drugs with a gun to my head and learnt to shoot…although I could already shoot coz I’m a country gal. I never shot anybody though… Actually… I shot myself once!” She laughed hysterically, “But that was just stupid.”
The gangster was nice at first, charming as you like. But he turned out to be nasty. He still was apparently. She knew because he was the father of her third child.
I asked what she was most proud of. Again she pondered. “Probably…getting to where I have all on my own.” She smiled a beautiful smile and I realised I was there at the watershed. It had suddenly all clicked into place.
“I’ve never really been lucky in love though,” she confided. Her stories supported the claim but she was a romantic nonetheless, still searching for a magic man. “I want to be like my grandparents. They were married for 74 years, together for 76. She cooked, he washed up. She washed the clothes, he ironed them. They died of broken hearts. But you know,” she sighed, “I dunno if that kinda thing still exists.”
We tried to work out why. Ellie thought it was because people no longer marry for status and that we’ve given up trying hard to make things work. It’s much easier to cheat too, she thought. It only takes a few texts.
She perked up suddenly. “Ah! The other day the maddest thing happened, yeah!” The energy surged back into the car. “I was walkin’ along and the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen walked out in front. Ahhh! He had white teeth….tanned…butch…and properly ironed clothes,” she wallowed in the memory, “and suddenly, right, he just turns around and waves at me! I’m like who the fuck is he waving at? There’s literally only me…And he starts walking towards me. And suddenly everything went in slow motion. He said ‘Good morning!’ yeah, really loudly and I could see his lips moving but I was so nervous and everything was happening in slow motion that I couldn’t speak. I…genuinely… I couldn’t speak! I was spellbound. And there I was in yesterday’s clothes, yesterday’s makeup and he was saying hello to me! I was so nervous I ran off….If you wanted to know what my biggest regret is…”
It was a whirlwind and over very suddenly. We steamed into Doncaster and with a wave, a smile and a puff of blue smoke she was gone.
My only option out of there was traffic lights. I don’t like hitching at traffic lights. It gets awkward when you have to look at people as they wait. I quite like seeing some people’s reactions though. The stroke of the chin, don’t for God’s sake look at him! side of the mouth stuff. Sometimes one will look at the other with a “Shall we?” sort of expression. “Absolutely not!” It’s quite amusing but awkward nonetheless, especially when they sit there for a while.
Luckily it didn’t take too long to catch a lift. The driver was a smart man in suit trousers and a white shirt done up at the cuffs. His name was Chris and he was going to Liverpool.
Chris was a consultant for local governments and councils. He’d been in a neighbourhood outside Doncaster meeting local landlords. It was a rough area, a really rough area, full of crime and poverty on an almost Dickensian level. The landlords were worried that the house prices were going to fall so low it would be untenable. The place sounded awful.
This was what Chris did, helping councils deal with poverty around the UK, dealing with homelessness charities and government task forces, that kind of thing. He must have been busy. In truth though, he said he was winding down his career. He’d been very close to moving to New Zealand with his wife. There was a job and house lined up and everything, but Covid put an end to that. Now the moment was gone so they were staying in Liverpool.
They’d lived abroad before. Chris had worked in Romania in a Delivery Unit for Tony Blair Associates, Blair’s development organisation. He’d been dealing with the national government, the cabinet ministers and even knew the president.
He got to know Blair quite well too.
“What’s he like?”
“Really nice guy,” Chris replied with a nod of his head, “Really, really nice guy.”
You get the impression these politicians are smarmy, self-interested, glib, that kind of thing. I put it to Chris but he disagreed completely. “He thought nothing of sitting down with a relatively unimportant guy like me and being briefed for two or three hours on obscure Romanian issues.”
He said he was “fiercely intelligent” and totally devoted to improvement. “I think he and John Major were probably the last politicians like that.” He thought today’s were purely self-interested. It was hard to disagree with him - Liz Truss had just been elected.
His time in Romania had been a success. His model for youth unemployment was rolled out across the entire southern EU and he would have stayed out there had it not been for Brexit. Blair withdrew the initiative and closed the organisation. Chris came home to work for himself instead.
On second glance he did look uncannily like Alistair Campbell. I tried to angle some questions about any Scottish heritage but he was a Scouser through and through. Clearly unrelated, unfortunately. He was an honest man, and a good one too. You could tell.
It was raining, grey and miserable when I got out. There was a dilapidated granite warehouse, a motorway flyover tearing across the sky and a visceral sense of industry. I splashed off the road and hurried for refuge in a doorway.
I’d made it at last to Halifax.