Coventry Read online

  All sorts of things can cause the traffic to stop, an accident, a scene at the side of the road. It’s often surprising how minor these dramas are, compared to the size and extent of their consequences. Their power is cumulative; it arises from the number of people to whom the incident, however trivial, is exposed. I once talked to a man who specialised in patterns of traffic flow and he showed me a set of diagrams illustrating how the merest distraction in one place, something so small that it would cause passers-by to briefly glance at it and therefore unconsciously decrease their speed, could over time result in the whole motorway coming to a standstill in another place miles away.

  The drama of the road, once you have been observing and participating in it for a number of years, can be seen to change and develop: new themes arise or die out, new narratives emerge and either progress or fade away again, certain behaviours grow widespread and occasionally take hold. In this country, for instance, the fast lane of the motorway is increasingly full of people driving slowly, while the other two lanes are often more or less empty. On a motorway, it might be said that you ought to know your place: here, increasingly, it is clear that the majority of people – wrongly or otherwise – believe that place to be the fast lane. This belief, and the behaviour that attends it, has numerous consequences, one of which is that it is now almost impossible to get quickly where you want to go. Rather than representing an opportunity for passing, the fast lane is dominated by the person going most slowly, who dictates the speed at which everything behind him is travelling.

  As a result, despite the fact that the rules of the road forbid it, people here are now deciding to overtake on the inside. There is some confusion about what this practice should be called: undertaking is – it would seem – the logical formulation, despite its funereal associations. It used to be the case that only reckless or seemingly lawless drivers would undertake, but now a wide range of people can be seen doing it, to the extent that when the traffic is heavy the middle and slow lanes often move faster than the fast one. Undertaking is perceived to be cheating, but the more that people do it, the more it becomes justified as a response to the corruption – as it were – of the principle of the fast lane. The Speed Awareness Course has nothing to say about the question of driving too slowly and the particular dangers it generates, but the undermining of an orderly consensus would seem to be one of them. People decide to take things in their own hands; if there is no longer any fast lane to provide a context for their aims and abilities, they must act for themselves.

  Despite the eternal nature of the driving scenario, its boundless time, the mentality of the last chance adheres to it. For example, a car will be driving along a stretch of road with nothing at all behind it and another car will pull slowly out at the last possible moment in front, having watched its approach. It is as though, by approaching, the first driver has caused the second to feel some competition for resources; or as though the second driver can only define himself and his intentions in relation to the first, whom he consequently obstructs. On motorways, often a lorry will abruptly swerve out into the fast lane to overtake another lorry, its size operating as a kind of authority. These incursions can be surprising, even frightening, because the build-up to them is usually hard to perceive. From a distance the lorries seem more or less indistinguishable from one another: their differences in speed are minimal; the reasons for one of them to overtake another are not entirely clear. The drama of this act, being slow to accrue, is therefore unexpected when it comes, but its apparent violence is quickly undermined by the bulk and slowness of the perpetrator. A long line of car drivers quickly builds up behind to watch him inching past a vehicle as slow and cumbersome as his own. When he has succeeded they hurtle by him with contempt. If the difference in speed between the two participants is sufficiently minimal the contest can take a long time and cover many miles of ground, and when this happens the overtaking driver becomes, at a certain point, an aggressor again. His lack of power is having serious consequences: angry as they might be, the cars can’t get past him. He has rendered them helpless.

  It seems possible that people experience more extreme emotions when they drive, and reveal cruder prejudices, than they might otherwise be aware of or admit to. Perhaps the soldiers of the past, in their suits of armour, felt similarly disinhibited and more capable of violence. Women drivers, for instance, have been openly pilloried, and it is noticeable that even those who would not normally regard themselves as racist or xenophobic frequently describe driving in other places – Germany or Italy or the Middle East – in ways that draw upon or lampoon national characteristics. Road rage, as it is called here, is a common occurrence: people can often be seen shouting or gesticulating at one another from their cars, whereas in the street or other public places such violent outbursts and attacks are rare. Once inside a car it becomes permissible to comment on those outside it, to remark on their appearance or demeanour, with a brazenness absent from most social situations. The occupants of a moving vehicle might even feel licensed to heckle or harass those they see, yet when the car is stripped of its power – by being stopped by traffic lights, for instance, or at a standstill in a traffic jam – and those occupants are exposed, their violence and aggression can rarely be sustained. They may even be frightened of being confronted in the flesh. It has often been observed that people behave in their cars as though they cannot be seen.

  Recently, stuck in a traffic jam, I saw an elderly and respectable-looking man leaping wildly and jerkily in his seat, his arms flailing, his face half-demented with anger, shouting things at other drivers that could not be heard through the glass.

  *

  Occasionally I meet a person who has never learned to drive. Sometimes he or she is a city-dweller for whom the need to learn has never arisen with sufficient force. Sometimes a lack of opportunity or privilege is the cause. There are also people who appear to have known from the beginning that driving wasn’t for them: often they are individuals society might label as sensitive or impractical or other-worldly; sometimes they are artists of one kind or another.

  I myself never considered not learning to drive. Had I not learned, my life would doubtless have taken a somewhat different course: I would probably not have been able to live here on the coast, for instance. Yet I don’t remember it as having been much of a choice at the time; I don’t recall having a sense of the alternatives. But I think about it sometimes, the life I would have lived if I hadn’t learned to drive. It might be said that there would have been social and economic consequences to not driving, but for most of the non-drivers I meet that doesn’t seem to have been the case. On the contrary, their lives often seem saner and more efficient than my own, more compact, lacking the formless sprawl in personal decisions and arrangements that driving encourages. They are not always, it must be said, above accepting scraps from the driving table, allowing others to ferry them here or there if the need arises. But in the cases that I know of, they have tended to take on fewer responsibilities, to scatter and divide themselves less, to consume and be answerable for a smaller portion of our shared resources. Increasingly I regard them as a kind of elect: they appear, essentially, free. How did they know not to do it?

  When I look at my history of driving, I begin to see that it has been analogous to the history of my own will, of all the things I have made happen that wouldn’t have occurred naturally on their own. I find myself wondering at the nature of the story it has made up: its relationship to the truth is opaque. My impatience with the slow drivers on these coastal roads, for instance, remains at odds with my fear of cycling on those same roads: perhaps it is myself I am afraid of. Despite my claims to equality, when my husband and I go somewhere together by car I automatically get in the passenger seat. At busy or complicated junctions I find myself becoming self-conscious and nervous about reading the situation: I worry I don’t see things the way everyone else does, a quality that otherwise might be considered a strength. Sometimes, stuck on the coast road behin
d the slow drivers while they decide whether or not they want to turn left, it strikes me that the true danger of driving might lie in its capacity for subjectivity, and in the weapons it puts at subjectivity’s disposal. But how can one know when the moment has arrived at which you are no longer capable of being objective?

  Recently, hiring a car alone on a trip abroad, I realised that something had changed: the world no longer seemed familiar to me. I struggled to understand the car’s controls and its alien shape and size. On the motorway other drivers surged up impatiently behind me, sounding their horns. I had forgotten, it seemed, how to drive; or rather, the degree of responsibility that driving entails suddenly seemed unmanageable to me. Why was everyone else not likewise crippled by this realisation? I moved into the slow lane but lorries loomed in the rear-view mirror one after another and then overtook me, their huge forms seeming about to suck me under as they roared past. On that wide grey unfamiliar road, swept along in the anarchic tumult of speeding cars, every moment all at once seemed to contain the possibility of disaster, of killing or being killed: it was as if driving was a story I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality. The river of cars plummeted on, relentless and unheeding. But the fact of myself, of my aloneness, had somehow been exposed.

  Back at home, rounding a bend on one of the empty roads where I live, I came upon an overturned sports car on the verge. It was a hot summer’s day: the upside-down car had its roof down. Lying stiffly beside it amid the foaming white cow parsley were its occupants, a man and a woman, their pale legs sticking straight out in front of them, their shocked faces as rigid as dolls’ faces, their summer clothes askew. The man still had his sunglasses on; the woman’s broad-brimmed hat lay in the middle of the road. The accident could only just have happened, but no one had seen it and there was no one there.

  Coventry

  Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry. I don’t know what the origins of the expression are, though I suppose I could easily find out. Coventry suffered badly in the war: it once had a beautiful cathedral that in 1940 was bombed into non-existence. Now it’s an ordinary town in the Midlands, and if it hasn’t made sense of its losses, it has at least survived them.

  Sometimes it takes me a while to notice that my parents have sent me to Coventry. It’s not unlike when a central-heating boiler breaks down: there’s no explosion, no dramatic sight or sound, merely a growing feeling of discomfort that comes from the gradual drop in temperature that one might be surprisingly slow – depending on one’s instinct for habituation – to attribute to an actual cause. Like coldness the silence advances, making itself known not by presence but by absence, by disturbances of expectation so small that they are registered only half-consciously and instead mount up, so that one only becomes truly aware of it once its progress is complete. It takes patience to send someone to Coventry: it’s not a game for those who require instant satisfaction. If you don’t live with your victim or see them every day, it might be a while before they even notice they’ve been sent there. All the same, there’s no mistaking this for anything less deliberate than punishment. It is the attempt to recover power through withdrawal, rather as the powerless child indignantly imagines his own death as a punishment to others. Then they’ll be sorry! It’s a gamble, with oneself as the stakes. My mother and father seem to believe they are inflicting a terrible loss on me by disappearing from my life. They appear to be wielding power, but I’ve come to understand that their silence is the opposite of power. It is in fact failure, their failure to control the story, their failure to control me. It is a failure so profound that all they have left to throw at it is the value of their own selves, like desperate people taking the last of their possessions to the pawnshop.

  But perhaps it isn’t like that at all. I remember girls being sent to Coventry at school, a cold and calculated process of exclusion in which the whole cohort would participate. It was a test of an individual’s capacity for survival, of her psychological strength: if other people pretend you’re not there, how long can you go on believing you exist? This was elemental bullying, the deliberate removal of the relational basis of human reality. The group would watch their victim with interest, as she wandered wordless and unacknowledged through the days. By sending someone to Coventry you are in a sense positing the idea of their annihilation, asking how the world would look without them in it. Perversely, over time, your victim might cultivate exaggerated notions of their own importance, for this troubling fact of their existence seems to have an unusual significance.

  Sometimes, at school, a person could ultimately gain power by surviving a visit to Coventry. It is a place of fragments and ruins: I’ve seen a photograph of the cathedral the day after its bombardment, a few smoking walls standing in an ocean of glittering shards, as if the sky itself had fallen to the earth and shattered. What the image states is that everything, no matter how precious and beautiful, no matter how painstakingly built and preserved, no matter how apparently timeless and resilient, can be broken. That was the world my parents were born into, a world where sacred monuments could disappear between bedtime and breakfast, a world at war: it is perhaps no surprise, then, that war remains their model. War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself. It is the attempt to create a story of life, to create agreement. In war, there is no point of view; war is the end of point of view, where violence is welcomed as the final means of arriving at a common version of events. It never occurred to me that instead of the long siege of sending me to Coventry, my parents might simply have picked up the phone and set things to rights in person. That isn’t how stories work. For a start, it’s far too economical. The generation of a narrative entails a lot of waste. In the state of war, humans are utterly abandoned to waste in the pursuit of victory. Yet in all the many times I’ve been sent to Coventry, this question of waste is one I’ve never really addressed. Sometimes I’ve been surprised to find myself there again; at other times merely resigned. I’ve been dismayed, upset, angry, ashamed. I’ve felt defiant, self-critical, abject; I’ve gone over and over events, trying to see where I made the mistake, trying to find the crime that might be equal to the punishment, trying to see my own unacceptability, like trying to see a ghost in the cold light of day. The thing about Coventry is that it has no words: nothing is explained to you there, nothing made clear. It is entirely representational. And what I’ve never felt about it, I realise, is indifference.

  *

  I have a woman friend whose children are starting to leave home. The eldest has gone to university; now the second is filling out application forms, as the others will do in their turn. It’s a big family, steady as an ocean liner. There’s been no divorce, no disaster; any minor difficulties or discrepancies that have arisen over the years have been carefully toned down and blended back into the picture. Sometimes, talking to my friend, it has occurred to me that even if there had been a disaster, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it; that in fact her very definition of a disaster might be ‘an event impossible to conceal’. This quality in her, this ability to maintain the surface, has always struck me as a form of courage; indeed, I have vaguely considered her to be the adult in our relationship, though we are more or less the same age. But lately things have changed – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, since change always implies at least some possibility of renewal, that they have deteriorated. Like an actor coming out of character onstage, there is evidence of slippage, of a loss of frequency in my friend’s persona, as though she is losing belief in what she is doing. She has started to talk too much, or not at all, or in non sequiturs; she produces observations out of unfathomable silences, as though laboriously drawing up from the bottom of a well things that have lain there undisturbed for years. It is clear her mind is moving on a different t
rack, away into uncharted distances. One afternoon, at her house, she talks about a feeling she’s been having lately – that she’d like to see, piled up in a great mountain, all the things that have been bought and thrown away over the course of their family life. All the toys and the tricycles, the Barbie dolls, the Babygros, the cribs and the chemistry sets, the outgrown shoes and clothes, the abandoned violins and sports equipment, the bright crumpled paper plates from birthday parties, the Christmas trinkets, the souvenirs, the tat from countless gift shops acquired on countless days out, the faddish electronics – everything whose purchase had at the time seemed to offer a solution to something, and whose disposal later on a better solution still: she would like to see it all again, not for the sake of nostalgia but to get the measure of it as objective fact. My friend is admittedly something of a materialist: from the beginning, her enactment of family life was played out amid a substantive and ever-changing set of props. She governed this world of possession with one cardinal rule: every time something new was acquired, something old had to be disposed of. Like a spring of fresh water running through a pond, this mechanism had seemed to avert the danger of stagnation. But now a different possibility appeared to be occurring to her: that it had all been, in the end, a waste.

  Stories only work – or so we’re always being told – through the suspension of our disbelief. It’s never been altogether clear to me whether our disbelief is something that ought to be suspended for us, or whether we’re expected deliberately to suspend it ourselves. There’s an idea that a successful narrative is one that gives you no choice in the matter; but mostly I imagine it’s a question of both sides conspiring to keep the suspension aloft. Being sent to Coventry is perhaps an example of such a conspiracy: it would be hard to send someone to Coventry who refused to believe they were there, just as it’s hard to fight a pacifist. Much of my being in Coventry, I now realise, lay in my willingness to recognise and accept the state of being outcast. I suspended my disbelief and having done so I jeopardised, in some sense, my relationship with reality. Like gravity, truth can only be resisted for so long: it waits, greyly, for the fantasy to wear off. My friend’s concern with the material evidence of her family life likewise seems to me to be a concern about truth. It is as though each of the many objects that passed through her home over the years represents a lost fragment of reality. She believed in all of it, at the time, believed passionately in the Barbie doll and the violin and the Nintendo that everyone had to have one year – and once the belief had worn off, these things were thrown away. But what, had she not believed in them, might she have seen instead? In the suspension of her disbelief, what did she miss? It is almost as if she feels that the true story of her family has eluded her; and that the mountain of discarded possessions, like a mountain of unopened husks, would represent the size and scale of the mystery.