However Max immediately had a small favour to ask.
“Sorry, mate. My wife, she’s got bad bronchitis. I need to put a prescription in the chemists in the High Street. Then I can pick it up soon as I get back.”
How could I refuse? This poor woman coughing and gasping, the very same poor woman Max had, perhaps, told, to her astounded amusement, how once I had been a little girl dressed in pink. After which she passed the information on.
“You go ahead,” I said.
He thanked me, and we drove into the High Street, which was very crowded, both by people and other parked cars.
“Won’t be a mo,” said Max old-fashionedly, and got out and crossed between the intermittent traffic.
Now I sit here. I’ve been here ten minutes. Presumably he has had to queue up. Oh well. Be philosophical.
The road is untidy here and there with uncleared slush. Patches of ice? The cars that thump by seem to be, all of them, travelling much too fast, and gradually it occurs to me they are veering off slightly as they reach the spot where I sit in the immobile cab. Max hasn’t, it seems, parked very well. The pavements are mostly clear of snow; I consider getting out and stretching my legs. After all, it will take at least an hour to reach the hub of the city and get across to Euston.
That car was very close. It seemed to rush straight at me. Yes. Maybe I will get out. I’m growing edgy after all. And given the way time is elongating, not to mention the bad organisation of the local chemist, I could be stuck here another twenty minutes. Though I can pay for the cab, I’m pleased to note the clock isn’t running. The fee is a set one, and Max, whatever else his failings, is prepared to stick to that.
87
My hand is on the door handle. I’m half turning in order to get out.
I don’t see the last car until it is almost on top of us, me and the cab. I don’t believe what I see when I do.
And then we meet, the car and its flurried-looking male driver, and Max’s cab, and I.
There is an incredible thump, a crunching and splintering noise, which I feel stabbed all through me, since it is happening both to each of the vehicles and also to me. Pains like slivers of broken glass flash inside my body or in the air, and I hear things snapping sharply, breaking, which—from at least a mile away—I realise absurdly and unconvincingly are my bones. Flying pieces like bright water cut my forehead and a curtain of scarlet mostly puts out my sight. That is all, for now. Nothing else… except, through the darkening haze, abruptly I notice Max running across the road, where all the other traffic has now stopped. He seems frantic, staring at what has been done to his cab.
Irvin:
88
Out of sorts. Yesterday I forced myself to the theatre and turned off a very vile performance. Was lucky not to be harangued with missiles from the crowd. As for Merscilla Peck, when we were from the stage she slapped me across the face. It seems I had ruined her own presentation with my lazy clowning.
Home with the carter, who tells me I have the winter plague, and also, (gratis) how many so far have expired of it, and that they are piled up near the Ravensburn marshes for burning, there being too many of the inconsiderate wretches to permit them Christian burial.
It was brooding on Mis’us Templeyard, I believed, had lowered my spirits. Try as I might I could not get her, as last I had seen her, from my mind.
The next night to the theatre again, and so to the stage, despite a raging ache in my skull, and too in every joint. Like an ancient tope of sixty or ninety years I crawled about there, and at length went off and fell headlong in a swoon. I recall little of that, and the fall could not bruise me worse than already my rheumatics made me. Waking I found I lay in Merscilla’s lap, and her face all concern, and calling me her dove and her best darling.
This cheered me mightily, and after some brandy I felt so much the better, off to The Red Stag tavern with her, but as we sat to our wine and pigeon, first came some news that general opinion thought the Thames would be freezing over, a thing it has not done, as I understand it, since two hundred years or more.
Next minute though there comes another bursting into the inn, with the fresh snow pluming him and aureole all about him, like the white smoke that comes up with the Devil in the play.
It was none other than Jemmy Templeyard, and his face set like a gargoyle’s with some bitter, terrible grimace.
Straight to our table strides Jem, and stands over us, shimmering with cold and his terrible unnamed emotion. No longer now a boy, I think. Something has made a man of him, and this thing, as so often it is, unkind and without clemency.
“Well, Thessaris,” says my lover, “turn off your strumpet.”
At which, it can be guessed, Mis’us Peck stands up and says glowering to him, “Will you be turned off then, sir?” Meaning of course he is the trull, not she.
But he neither answers nor looks at her, only at me. And his anguish brings back the aching into me, so cold and steely as a bite, or the sword’s edge.
“Do it,” he says.
And I say to Merscilla, “Best leave us, sweetness. I will…”
“Oh. He is preferred then to me, you donkey? Well, may you have much pox of each other.” And she exits.
At that
