I’M IN BED , avoiding my father. I know he has jobs lined up for me, because it’s Sunday, and everywhere’s closed on Sunday, and he’s keen on us doing things together and being ‘useful’. I hate being useful. Once I used to escape to church, to the choir—a chance to dress up in a white cotton surplice and hairy black cassock, a way of meeting the other three boys in the village. But now that I’ve stopped believing in God, now that I’m running away from the holy family, my one escape is the football I play on Sunday afternoons. Rain flusters against my bedroom window. I worry that today’s match, against Bradley, will be called off. I close my eyes and imagine water gathering in the mud-brown stud-holes of Barnoldswick’s recreation field. Please God, let it stop raining.
I have another worry, that my father will want to come and watch me, which embarrasses me, because he’s a doctor, not like other boys’ fathers, and with a posh car, a black Mercedes, which I don’t want them to see. Luckily, he’s not much interested in football. His sports as a boy were rugby, squash and tennis: ‘Good eye for a ball I had. You have it, too. You should try rugby or tennis as well.’ I did try tennis once, but he beat and barracked me so heavily I have not tried it again. Now that he’s fifty, he is trying other sports, but he’s not had much success. Yachting in Abersoch, he couldn’t get the hang of tacking; the wind died on us, and we had to be towed back by a kid with an outboard (the car we’d left on the beach was about to disappear under the high tide). Riding in Anglesey, he lost a stirrup while galloping along the beach and for a mile or more clung on to the horse by its neck; friends hootingly observed it from a hotel balcony; he came back pale but grinning: ‘Destry rides again.’ He’s fond of telling me to stick to ball games, and I want to tell him to do the same.
The rain eases at the window. It is eleven o’clock. I plan to stay here, reading Kerouac or Salinger or Mailer, until my ritualistic pre-match lunch of steak and chips. But now here’s my father, pushing straight in, hoping to catch me up to no good.
‘Come on, nose out of that book, up. I’ll give you five minutes to get some old clothes on, I need some help washing the car.’
‘I’ve a match later.’
‘So? Plenty of time till then.’
‘But it’s cold.’
‘Up. Half an hour it’ll take, that’s all. You’ve got to learn how to wash cars. You’ll be starting to drive next year. Come on, up.’
I put my clothes on, wishing it were spring, when the job I help my father with is not car-washing but mowing the lawn. Mowing is a drag too, most of it—the sloping front lawn, the two raised back ones—but I love cutting the grass verges out by the road (a chance to look at girls in passing cars, and for them to look at me), and I love the moment when I turn the engine off and run my fingers through my hair—the mower’s vibrations soften my hands and make my hair feel silky-sensual, like a shampoo advert.
It’s freezing up by the garage. There is a cobbled area in front of the old barn, and this is where my father’s car is standing, his black Mercedes, his red-and-white Metropolitan, his drop-head Triumph Vitesse, his maroon Alvis, or whatever model currently meets his requirements of being open and sporty. Car-washing, he thinks, is a DIY task: coin-in-the-slot alternatives have begun to spring up, with their woolly roller-bales and double row of changing-room showers, but he’ll have no truck with them. Car-washing is as integral a part of his Sunday as a cooked breakfast or the blazer and cravat worn to the pub. It’s more than a conforming, middle-class anality. Car-washing to him is part of learning about cars, a process he’s inducted me in since I was eight, when he put a moped engine in the back of my old pedal car and taught me to drive, a process continued more recently, in his car, on the Polish airfield near Pwllheli, the beach at Black Rock Sands, the skid patch at Criccieth, and anywhere else you don’t need a driving licence. But car-washing is about something else, too: he wants his cars to look clean and respectable because he thinks that makes them less noticeable , less criminal , when he’s speeding, as he usually is. Police-evasion is high-priority with us: he has had a second mirror installed, on the left of the windscreen, so that passenger as well as driver can keep a look-out for patrol cars behind. When my mother isn’t his front-seat passenger, my sister or I play security man for him. He did the driving, and I did the mirror, during his greatest ever journey—when he covered the 181 miles to North Wales (no motorways, B-roads mainly) in 180 minutes. He prefers dawn runs like that because the roads are clear, and he can drive at eighty in built-up areas. Once he had to speed off down narrow side-streets in Rawtenstall to lose a chasing police car; another time he was stopped, but sorry-sirred the squad car constable, let drop the fact of his profession, and got off with a warning. He has never been fined, never had his licence endorsed. He puts this down to the self-effacing cleanness of his cars.
I stand watching him as he makes sure the car doors and windows are properly closed: ‘Tight, mind: water can get through the tiniest crack.’ He hands me the hose-pipe, whose floppy octogenarian pee I dangle vaguely over the bonnet.
‘No, not like that—it’s kinked under your foot, look. That’s better. Now put your thumb over the end.’
I do this, but the spray is erratic, hissing off over the car roof one moment and down inside my Wellingtons the next. Gradually, as my thumb turns to ice, I begin to control it better, until there’s a steady forked tongue of spray, which spitters on the bonnet and boot simultaneously, but omits the whole side of the car. I ease my thumb back a bit more, and at last I’ve got the full, solid eight-pints-in-the-pub-gents power-stream my father’s been looking for.
‘That’s it. There’s only one right way to wash a car.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘Hose it first. Start at the top …’
‘Then work down … I know.’
‘Bonnet, sides and hub-caps last of all.’
The two dishcloths are in a red bucket of hot soapy water. I plunge my chapped hands in, and keep them there as long as I can, making a great ceremony of squeezing and re-squeezing the cloth. My father is enjoying himself—triumphant at forcing me from my warm bed, absorbed in a practical task, glad of the company and someone to boss around. We work together, swishing the warm cloths, taking it in turns with the hose, going over the little mud-streaks we’ve missed. My ears ache in the December wind, my duffel coat is sodden from the misdirected hose, my toes in the damp Wellingtons have gone missing. My father, in his thin overalls, is happy.
Out on the road there’s a screeching of brakes, and my father says: ‘Christ. They still can’t negotiate that corner.’ The ‘corner’ is a T-junction just beyond our driveway. Until the council improved it, every other Sunday seemed to bring an accident. I remember one lunchtime two years ago, a loud bang and chandelier-fall of glass, my father’s knife and fork left on the edge of his plate in a smear of horseradish as he ran down the drive with his bag. I skipped pudding and peered over the wall where bushes hid me. The motorcyclist under the lorry was white-faced, not moving and half-hidden by the wheel. My father crouched over him in the rain. An ambulance came, and more people crouched by the lorry’s grille. When the fire engine arrived I went back in. I couldn’t imagine how they’d get the motorcyclist free. Lately there have been no accidents, but as we swish and spray my father recalls some of the worst he has had to attend: the young lovers hit by the Nelson– Skipton train at an open level crossing (‘Just bits—couldn’t identify them’); the lad in a van who braked too hard and was decapitated by the metal extension ladder he’d propped in the back; the girl run over by the school bus (‘at a pedestrian crossing—criminal’); the woman found dead on the moors, MURDER headlines in the paper until her boyfriend went to the police weeks later (‘choked to death—when you’re older I’ll tell you what happened’). The talk is ghoulish but my father’s tones are comforting. By talking about accidents he hopes to ward them off, perhaps—or to interest me in his work.
‘So what are you going to study in the sixth form do you think?’
‘Oh, you know—I seem to be best at English and languages. Something like that.’
‘And what career would that lead to?’
‘Teaching, I suppose. Or journalism, maybe.’
‘Journalism? That usually means London. The Yorkshire Post ’s not a bad paper, though.’
‘Or law.’
‘A profession, that’s the thing to aim at.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘But if you do sciences in the sixth form,’ he says, bending over the silver platter of the hub-cap, ‘surely you’d have more choice of career. Even if you’re not a genius at science, and it’s a bit of a chore for two years, at least you can read medicine later on.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘And medicine is different, not a science exactly, more practical—you’d enjoy it.’
‘I know, you’ve said.’
‘I want you to do what you want to do, but Mummy and I have built up this practice, and I don’t suppose Gill is likely to be a doctor, and if you took over, a son taking over from his father, and by then you’d be married probably, and you could live nearby with your wife and children, that would be marvellous, all of us together.’
‘Hum.’
‘Think about it.’
I’m on the hub-caps now, feeling through the cloth the grains of muck that have sploshed and stuck there from puddles and ditches and gritted roads. I scrub hard to be rid of them, the old mud-stains and scratches, until the circles of chrome shine in their dark rubber like full moons.
‘The Riviera, look,’ my father says, as the sun breaks through the clouds and a sheen comes off the bodywork. I pick up the hose again from where it’s bleeding into the metal drain, and aim it noisily at the wheels. I empty the bucket’s foamy black liquid, fill it with cold water from the stable tap, and pick up the chamois wash-leather. It is a khaki colour, hard and stiff and fossilized, like a small plaice: it makes me think of a poem we’ve been reading at school this week, Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’. I dip it in the bucket, where it changes its nature, softens, plumps out. I hand it to my father, who wrings its neck.
‘Clean as a whistle,’ he says, as he finishes wiping and the last yelps die on the windscreen. ‘There’s a fault on the brake-light I need to fettle, but you go in and warm up if you want.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Remember what I said. Not a bad life, being a doctor. There’d be a practice all waiting—a son taking over from his father, people respect that. Think on.’