LAST FUEL BEFORE M4

I’m the child I was in the back of the car. Looking at my dad’s shoulders, looking at the back of his head which carries so much of the meaning of him. It’s like a way in, a back door to my dad.

His silhouette bobs, it dips, it floats slowly back up again. This is because it is laid over the darkening scene beyond the front windscreen and is getting swept in the wash of the oncoming headlights.

We’re driving home from my nan’s and this is quite a long time ago now so you will have to imagine motorways that could be near empty already by early evening. The new grey brushstrokes of them through the dusty greens, the chalks.

The cars were thin tin and their door seals were made of hope and hard rubber. The spray from the wet road set up a long hiss which chorded with the mid-note from the motor and the rumble of the tyres on the road. And somewhere near the wild edge, the whole song of us.

The thinnest of shells we were in, passing cars would jostle us and the rhythmic telegraph poles, all down the long journey, would impinge slightly on the air inside our vehicle. The long sag of the wires sighed, the poles made their quick gasp. On and on. These journeys were huge, everything and edgeless to a small child.

My sister would settle into a sleep early, maybe she was pretending like me, I couldn’t always tell. Until her body began to tilt over and fall. I would copy all this - change my breathing, let my mouth open and allow my body to drop in tiny increments with the car’s sway.

And then I would open my eyes a crack. And watch dad’s shoulders, the slow-motion dream of them.

Inside the long note of the journey and its rumbling pulse, threaded through it and indistinct, my mum and my dad kept up an intermittent exchange. A conversation made from air and silence and, at its perimeter, the long prayer of kin. The thin sheet of my mother’s voice…the thick cloth of my dad’s. And the air rushing through them, making the phrases billow and shiver.

I am there now. When I was there I was here too. This journey back from my nan’s was all my time, perfectly expressed, the seed already the tree.

I watched the verge in the fringe of the headlights stammer past. Looking out for the hand-drawn sign that had this to say:

LAST FUEL

BEFORE

M4

Pegged into the ground at a careless angle, it would loom up and stare in at us for a second before a petrol station would flick by and we climbed the sliproad. The sign was for the wrongheaded who think a trip is made out of forethought and insurance. Not for us.

As we threaded ourselves onto the motorway, dad would settle an inch or two. The motor would climb a few notes then quieten as it found some easier resonance. Such a restfulness descended. Dad would shift slightly and the car seemed to glide.

My journey is inviolate and deep with power. It writes up worlds and winds the dotted life of the road into the spool of itself. Turn upon turn, the twist in the thread is the strength of it. Clifford, Mick, Annie: the flecks in the rope of it. It is my most intimate possession and stands as token of my incontestable belonging.

He would shift slightly and the car seemed to glide.