I stood listening to the roar of traffic, clutching my coat tight to me as I shivered in the evening cold of a car park whose floodlights stained the world yellow.
In the daytime this acre and a half was full of cars belonging to people who shopped at Asda but at this time of night it was deserted. A keen wind shuffled through the small shrubs surrounding the car park and just the noise of their rattly branches made me shiver. I’d been waiting only about 10 minutes but it seemed like an age. To me, everything I hated about today’s world was here. The tangle of busy, fast roads, the circling swathes of concrete and tarmac, those searing floodlights, the car park bays, the small yellow shrubs, the glass and metal green and cream Asda with its locked trolleys, and the fact that it was all in Essex.
I leaned against the Lotus because it was still warm. I heard the approaching car before I saw its lights. There was a bump and a crash and I knew he’d mounted a kerb somewhere out on the sliproad. Clarence was coming.
When I’d left the car magazine they’d replaced me with Clarence. That wasn’t his real name but it’s what everyone called him on account of the fact that he was cross-eyed. Though to be honest saying he was cross-eyed hardly did his affliction justice. His eyes were everywhere. They were like twins who weren’t talking to each other. The nickname came from Clarence the lion in the TV series Daktari. Now, if you’re not familiar with Daktari I can tell you that it was a truly forgettable program about a group of safari people out in darkest Africa. Every week something dire happened but of course every week the team managed to sort it out. All in all Daktari was your standard TV fare but it was made watchable thanks to Clarence, the lovable cross-eyed lion. I think also there was a blonde in tight khaki shorts, but that might just be my imagination.
My Clarence came around the corner and his car lights raked the shrubs. He mounted one of the shrub beds and crashed straight through the foliage, the car bouncing down onto the tarmac and heading straight for me. I felt like a rabbit trapped in the headlights. I snapped out of it as he crashed the gears. I went and stood at the back of the Lotus. I remembered wondering what I’d say to Clarissa, her car all scraped down the side, but at the last minute the car swerved sideways and stopped. Clarence opened the door and hopped out, tripping on the seat belt as he came, executing a near perfect parachute roll on the ground before popping up right in front of me. Neither of his eyes was looking my way - one looked left and the other was swivelling around like a spotlight after fighter planes.
“Hello skipper, how you doing?” I resisted the desire to ask if he was talking to me. He started looking off to the right then, off towards Asda I thought, but I was sort of used to it, him talking to you but looking somewhere else. At least that’s what it always seemed like. Sometimes Clarence’s eyes swivelled seemingly of their own accord, staring at objects that were way off. People who met him for the first time were always fooled. Often when he started talking people would look off to the left or right, wondering who he was chatting to. On one occasion I introduced him to someone at the Motor Show up in Birmingham and the man he was talking to eventually got fed up and said, “If you can’t look at me when you’re talking to me then fuck off!”
Well, he had to; it was impossible to look the bloke in the eye, any eye.
Another time, some bloke in a pub punched him, in the eye that seemed to be staring right down into his girlfriend’s cleavage. I doubt it was, I think it was just an unlucky swivel.
Driving with Clarence was always an experience. Quite how he managed to get a job as a motoring journalist, I never knew.
Once, we were in Sweden on a three-day press trip driving some new Saab Turbo. Clarence was at the wheel. I’d held my breath several times as he got the tyres on my side of the car bouncing up and down on the very edge of the road. I could clearly see the long drop below studded with sharp-branched fir trees. Eventually we got out of the mountains and I breathed more easily and Clarence opened the Saab up a bit, getting the turbocharger whistling. We were on an arrow straight stretch of road, coming up behind a slower moving car. I looked down at the map on my lap, working out where we needed to turn off next and when I glanced up we were close to the car in front. On the other side of the road coming towards us was a truck, but it was way off, so far off you could only just make it out. Well, I could...
Clarence indicated, gritted his teeth and pulled out. He looked over at me, but actually I’m not sure that he did, if you know what I mean, and then we were on the other side of the road. There was so much room we could have stayed out there a week. Half way past the other car Clarence started huffing and puffing and I thought he was going to have a seizure. Suddenly he stamped on the brake pedal and I groaned and strained against the seat belt. The car we were overtaking shot back past us on the inside, the driver staring at us wide-eyed, wondering what the hell we were doing.
“Jesus,” said Clarence as we tucked back in behind the car, “that was bloody close.” Then he turned his head towards me, but his eyes were still looking out the windscreen and he said, “you okay?”
I forgot myself and said, “You talking to me?” then I shook my head and said, “what’s with the sudden change of mind?”
“Skipper,” said Clarence in exasperation, “that truck. Could have killed us. Surprised I didn’t see it sooner.”
“The truck?” I said.
“The truck, King.”
“What truck’s that then?”
We sat in silence for maybe a minute, following the slower car. When the truck eventually came past in a sudden blast of air, Clarence screamed and looked at me, startled. Well, I think he did.
Anyway, it just so happened that Clarence had been asked to compile a motoring book, a sort of motoring encyclopaedia, and obviously he couldn’t do it all by himself so he’d got in touch with a few other motoring journalists he knew and asked them to give him a hand. I was one of them and because Clarence was so short of time it meant that each time I wrote more words I had to meet up with him and hand them over. (He lived way out in Essex and I was still at Clarissa’s in Surrey, so this Asda car park was about halfway between the two places, and remember back then there was no email, so it was post it or meet up).
I put my hand in my coat pocket and brought out a plain brown envelope. It was so cold in the Asda car park that I was wearing gloves. Clarence took it off me and then dipped back into the car and came out with his own plain brown envelope.
“Here’s a list, Skip, of the other cars I need you to write about. Can we meet up again in a couple of days time?” He handed me the envelope but it was off to my left, like he was giving it to someone standing beside me. I shook my head, and then reached out, arm straight from my shoulder, bent my wrist at a right angle and took it off him. I felt like I was in some jerky Michael Jackson dance.
“No problem,” I said, and stuffed the envelope in my jacket pocket. He stuck his hand out to shake and again it was off, nowhere near my hand but this time to the right. I clumsily shook his hand, actually more like a fist clasp than a handshake. When was he going to get someone to look at those eyes? It did occur to me though that if some expert had him in a chair and asked him to look into the light he’d probably start and say, “What light? Where?” Or, “I am looking into the light”.
“It’s funny aint it, Skipper? You in your coat and wearing them leather gloves and me in me swish road-test car. We look like a couple of drug dealers standing around doing something dodgy. What do you reckon the coppers would make of it?”
“I really don’t want to find out. Things are complicated enough as it is.”
“How’d you mean?”
I gave Clarence a run-down on the situation - still living at The House of Babes, teaching a class of students who all thought I was an undercover white South African spy, trying to make ends meet with this little bit of freelance work, no home, no regular income, no obvious goal in mind, standing here in the dark looking like a drugs dealer in an Asda car park in Essex.
Clarence sucked a whistling breath in through his teeth and looked at the ground, and then looked up at me - though his eyes were looking in opposite directions - and said, “I see what you mean.”
But somehow I don’t think he did.

to be continued...