Enchantment by Monica Dickens Page A

Brian.’
    Tim looked back into the room. Harold was up and approaching, doing his bear walk. Brian clattered his boots down the steps. Tim shut the door.
    â€˜Got to go anyway, me old son. Thanks.’
    â€˜Thanks for coming.’
    â€˜All right, then?’ Harold shrugged into his overblown jacket, which made him look like an American football player, and dropped a hand on Tim’s shoulder. ‘You’re all right, considering.’
    He tore open the door and pitched out. On the stairs, the broken step cracked and yielded. Harold let out a hoarse shout, ‘Broke me bloody leg!’, and crashed down. By his car, he turned round and waved. ‘I’ll sue!’ he called up amiably. He went round the front ofthe car and fitted himself into it, backed out into the road and roared away. Tim shut his door before Brian drove in.
    Considering what?
    â€˜Driving a car is erotic,’
Pocket Pickups
announced. ‘You’re controlling a powerful machine. You can be gentle with it, or forceful at speed. Get a car – get a girl!’
    The powerful machine that Zara brought round before she left for Australia was a little old Fiat 650, known to her as Baby Bilious. The yellow paint had been patched in different shades, the bottom was fringed with rust, the aerial was a wire coat hanger, and bits of the interior had been eaten by dogs.
    But it was a car. It was freedom, it was status, it was erotic. Tim loved it. He re-christened it Buttercup, and paraded about the local roads for a long, entranced time after he had driven his sister cautiously back to Rawley, and said goodbye.
    Erotic, eh? He was a man with wheels, like everyone else. He was in charge. He conquered the miles. He could detest pedestrians, or make a benevolent gesture of stopping even before they had put a foot into the road, waving a lordly finger to let them cross.
    Brian and Jack had said he could keep Buttercup in the space between the house and the garage, where there was just room by the foot of the outside staircase. Having fitted her in, he had to move his legs over the gear shift and get out of the passenger door. As he shut the door, which had a sticker on the window saying, EASY DOES IT, from Zara’s days in Alcoholics Anonymous, and turned to slide underneath the stairs to get to them from the garden side, he saw Brian’s girl friend with the rampant blonde hair watching him from inside the kitchen window. She was in the dark, but some light came through the doorway from the hall. She was wearing a pale suit with a pink scarf tied fussily at her neck; a rather nondescript type of woman, except for the hair.
    Tim could not take the car to work, because there was nowhere to park unless you had a permit. After work, now that the Marchevenings were lightening, he hurried home and changed into jeans and his bright-green sweater that would be noticed, and took the car out, as if it were a dog. Zara had had Buttercup for quite a while, and it had some irresponsible habits, which it must have picked up from her. The steering you couldn’t take chances with. The wiper often stuck, and the gears were as erratic as Zara. Sometimes you could not get into reverse. Sometimes reverse was the only gear that worked smoothly. Zara had taught Tim how to fiddle the clutch, and he could always get into gear eventually, but there were embarrassing times when cars piled up behind him while he pushed and struggled to get into first, when a traffic light turned green. Not so erotic.
    Sometimes he went on to the motorway and drove among the people sweeping along through the dusk to London, as if he were one of them, with an evening in town ahead. Buttercup could not reach any great speed, so he drove in the slow lane, making a serene face to show people that this was his choice. Any idiot could go fast, but there were philosophers and dreamers who did not need to compete in the self-destructive race.
    When cars passed him going