Lisa Drives Home (1997)

Lisa falls face down on the tarmac again. There is blood on her nice clothes and her nice face and her averagely attractive shoes. Jamie is dragging Ed by the wrists from the flaming wreck of Lisa’s car. There’s not much left of his face. Lisa takes one tiny look at it and she’s screaming again.

The night begins in a dark place, which has opted out of the clock that the rest of the world operates on. The ceiling is so low that you can reach up with your fingers gently through the sweat that has condensed there.

If nondescript is a description, then that’s what the building is. Two delicately boned girls who look like they’re barely old enough to leave school kiss each other gently on the lips. Delirious bodies and flickering lights, endless beat and sternum vibration.

After getting a grope from security and receiving the green light, Jamie looks for Ed and Kerry; as if responding to a dog whistle there they are, answering his unheard call, emerging from the seething overstimulated rabble to shout into his face things he still won’t understand after they’ve been repeated three, four, five times.

Lisa appears in a cloud of Marlboro Light smoke, looking delightfully sluttish, her intriguing overbite sidelight to perfection by the bar to her left. Tonight she is unpredictable, verging on hostile, and she pisses Jamie off in a number of non-specific ways. Ed disappears for a while and then returns holding his forehead, saying someone on E has just punched him in the face, and he doesn’t really get over the shock of it all night. On the wall, blurry slides flash words like HOMO, WHORE, GO-GO, CUNT, DEALER, QUEEN or FUCK. Although it probably isn’t what they are meant for, these words describe the patrons very well.

They are swallowed and laid claim to by the crowd, absorbed like little white pills, and they don’t have to be independent any more. They are looking at each other, feeling the heat and the concourse of strangers. The sensations of surface and edge. Running eager innocent hands over fabric and feeling exquisitely the differences when they encounter flesh, soft and pliable or stiff and rigid.

A pack of the worst looking drag queens any of them has ever seen arrives. As the queens sashay straight across the dance floor, their X-Large tits bob alarmingly; as if pairs of fighting kittens are trapped in their short little tight spangly dresses. At this point Jamie, Lisa, Ed and Kerry decide to leave. They emerge onto the street and are stunned by the silence that hits them after hours of intense and unrelenting aural sensation.

— Why why why? Lisa is hysterical and Jamie feels this would be a good excuse to slap her. He does it so hard that she falls over and lands on her arse, sitting down abruptly on the kerb, stunned.

Jamie puts his hands up on either side of his head. He is too thin and needs a shave. He’s got a TV tan, sallow and set off by horn-rims. He rarely sees daylight except when it’s coming or going. Takes Ed’s hand in his. Listens to the wrong side of Ed’s chest but it doesn’t matter because his friend’s heart is silent and still now anyway, then he puts his hand over Ed’s mouth to see if he’s breathing and he’s not. The air is thick with burning petrol. Above the smear of orange light, the sky is empty and blue-black except for a tall, thin column of rising smoke.

Lisa lights a cigarette on autopilot and momentarily, irrationally, thinks of lighting it from the burning car like she does from the gas rings at home. Then she remembers how she always catches a few stray strands of hair in front of her face alight, and the vile smell of singed hair; the only thing worse is the smell of burning meat and she absolutely does not want to think about that.

Jamie kneels and starts to thump Ed hard on the chest with childlike fists. Memories of first aid lessons a decade ago— cursory and little heeded in the first place— buzz now, half remembered, in his brain.

— Breathe!

Jamie kneels beside the body and Lisa just stares with smeary panda pisshole eyes, and smokes. Suddenly, furiously, Jamie aims his fists at Ed’s chest again.

— Breathe!

(THUMP)

Lisa croaks something that she herself can’t understand because her vocal cords have been shocked into disobedience, and they make the words come out wrong.

— Breathe!

(THUMP)

— Breathe!

(THUMP)

— Breathe!

(THUMP)

— You bastard.

Lisa staggers over to stand over Jamie. She informs him that in her opinion Ed is probably dead, and if he wasn’t before then he certainly is now.

Jamie’s blows are drained of all energy but they continue for a while, regardless, until both hands eventually succumb to inertia and lie still on Ed’s chest. Lisa smokes her cigarette down to the filter and beyond, then starts another. Jamie kicks Ed’s body hard and it makes a hollow meaty sound. He turns and slaps the cigarette, which Lisa has just lit, out of her mouth. It’s something about the way she stands there with her coat falling halfway down her shoulder that provokes him. Somehow it makes him feel better; the momentary stinging on the palm of his hand, the slight give of her cheek and the involuntary jerk of her head. She crawls along the ground after the cigarette, grovels along the hard shoulder of the empty black road, trying to get a grip on her sanity.

She feels completely alone, completely alone, completely alone, laying on her side with her face two feet from the asphalt. One hand grips the cigarette she’s recovered; the other hugs her thin self tightly. She wants to build a box around herself. There’s just that one word— why? — hovering before her, branded into her retinas like a glimpse of the sun. There is warm, liquid blood in her eyes. Supermodels smoke Marlboro Lights; she read that in a magazine once. Lisa smokes them, too.

Jamie puts his jacket over Ed’s face. He is not sure why, but he thinks that it’s the done thing and anyway who wants to look at an object like that, all splayed out in the road? In his other hand he holds a large soft drink container. He mindlessly sucks insipid, flat Fanta through the straw as he stares for a long time at his friend’s legs and spastic grasping-nothing hands, protruding from under the coat. It isn’t real. He just keeps waiting for the scene to end, for the commercial break to begin. Ed told him that if he was a girl he’d go out with him, definitely. Ed who was cheeky and just went up and said hi and started being overly familiar with the girls who’d had way too much to drink or had just put something on their tongues. Ed who had stunted sense of personal space and an expensive CD player but only five CDs. Now there’s nothing left in that silent little grey kingdom of meat.

This is not exactly what he wanted from his Saturday night. He really did not need Lisa to crash the car. He didn’t say: Lisa, it’s Saturday night so let’s get shitfaced on brands of alcoholic drink that we’ve never even heard of and will never see again, and dance on the tables, let’s go really mad this Saturday, and then why don’t you stack the fucking car and kill us all? He doesn’t recall saying that, not at all. Now it’s Sunday morning and he realises that he has been thinking out loud, shouting into her face, holding her by her bra straps. She says she hates him. The complete bitch psychotic freak hates him.

She says: I hate you, do fuck off. She is shaking with anger now; she lights another cigarette with fierce and clipped little motions, like some kind of military drill. After a while, Jamie wanders off and peels the jacket up again to look at Ed. It doesn’t even look like him any more. It doesn’t look like him at all. The slack, upturned face reminds Jamie of raw skinless chicken breasts defrosting by the sink. The open mouth expressing some silent need in the moments before the brain died. Under the sodium-orange light Ed’s eyes look at nowhere, but like the eyes of a false-backed painting in a cheap horror film they seem to swivel imperceptibly to meet Jamie’s gaze no matter what angle he looks at them from.

By this time of night, Lisa thought she’d be practising love yoga with some moronic love monkey that she’d maybe meet at the club. As she sits on the kerb she notices that Jamie has the physique of an eight year-old and the face of a child molester. She decides that she’s splitting up with him after they get home. It’s not like she’s only doing it because she crashed the car; like she crashed the car so she could break up with him or something. What if she never said anything to him, she reasons, and he’d died instead of Ed? He would have just gone on with his life, never knowing that in her head she’d blown him out. All of this could easily have occurred in some parallel universe where Lisa made it through the millennium to die of something more interesting and original than a simple error of judgement leading to an automobile accident.

Her mum assured her that Jamie had nice eyes. She should have sensed that there was a serious problem right at that very moment, when it became clear that Jamie was pulsing on her mother’s sexual radar. Her mother, the conservative matron of the future as played by Barry Humphries. That her mother approved of Jamie makes Lisa feel like they’re married, in some way. She can’t conceive of that. Waking up on the kitchen floor after a heavy night is about as domestic as she ever gets. Worse still, they sometimes feel like brother and sister. And how sexy is that?

She appears gorgeous to him at that moment, by the light of her flaming Honda Civic. She looks so chic and now with that “face full of broken glass” look that everyone will be wearing next season. He can’t honestly say that he blames her for using the beautiful face she happens to be carrying around on the front of her head, in order to get whatever she wants. After all, she has no other assets.

When she was young, she never did anything even a little bit rebellious. No boyfriends, not really. A virgin until she was nineteen, coming up twenty. He doesn’t know that. When he first met her, he thought she looked pretty hard. Pretty and hard. Like she drank spirits neat and stripped for lorry drivers to get her jollies. But she never did anything like that, never even thought about it, just about herself. She thought about the same things as everyone else, had the same kind of boring life as anyone might. All night sessions back at somebody’s house after all the boozers are shut. Ending up miles away from home, you’ve forgotten where the car is or even if you had one to start with, and can’t work out how to get a bus. Talking all night about girls and why do they do that and boys and why don’t they do that, and self-hatred and everything that’s wrong with life in general, then finally going back to a warm bed and sleeping for eighteen hours. Except tonight. Tonight she drove home.

He doesn’t hate himself. He doesn’t hate anything. He just thinks everything is funny. There’s a big difference. He laughs now, laughs when he thinks of how Lisa said she’d drive because she was the only one who wasn’t wasted and Kerry said she’d get out here, don’t bother dropping me home because I could do with the walk and it’s not like I’m going to get raped or killed or anything har har har and if anyone does try it I can do karate.

He doesn’t listen to Lisa, who is off on a softly muttered monologue now, regularly interspersed with her asking him if he’s cold because she’s bloody freezing. He talks to himself as well, not really to hear himself talk or because he likes the sound of his own voice, but just to hear himself think. Lisa’s always been been guarded about being open-minded. She doesn’t want to know what’s going on inside her own head; she’s a born list-maker because she’s afraid to trust herself with remembering things, afraid she doesn’t know anything unless it’s stuck on the fridge in front of her in black and Post-it note. Mostly she doesn’t want to hear what anyone else has to say unless it’s of immediate benefit to her. Doesn’t care is she feels like she’s got nothing in common with most people, because she doesn’t think she has.

Now Jamie’s afloat on a sea of emotion, but he’s getting nowhere and he feels like throwing up over the side. He spends his weekends with two thousand fucked up E-heads who wouldn’t know how to be nice to each other or come with six inches of another human being if they weren’t drugged up to the eyeballs; completely off their faces, all of them, and don’t know how much is too much. Loved up? Bullshit. Raging now. A load of sordid, rampant quasi-hedonists mauling each other and blurring their minds together until they all the greyish-brown colour of old Plasticene, he thinks. I was out of my box: the excuse for everything from mismatched socks to date rape.

They decide that somebody has to come along soon, after all it’s a busy road, and it doesn’t occur to either of them to find a phone.

Two hours later, Lisa is asleep on Jamie’s shoulder in a spreading patch of blood. The amount of aspirin she’s taken during the week to get over the previous weekend, you could cut her anywhere and her blood would trickle out like dilute Ribena. Lick her, and she probably tastes like the inside of a Boots carrier bag. She feels cold; so cold that she seems to radiate it into Jamie through his clothes, like an open fridge. He takes Lisa’s hands in his and rubs them together.

There is an intense release as she becomes aware of all her blood flowing out of her. Incredible feelings. Agony and sadness mixed up together. Her thoughts all beaten up and held together with Sellotape. After this, she’s like to take a long road trip, in the summer. Not be scared of cars because of one little mishap. To sleep in the car, live in the car and take odd jobs when she runs out of cash. But nobody ever finds themselves on four wheels around here, be realistic girl child. No epiphanies here. Lisa doesn’t even know what the word means. There’s only the light of a very distant twenty-four hour garage and a burnt out Japanese car on the grass next to an empty road.

Jamie asks her if she’s sleeping.

Five minutes later, she says that her eyes are just closed, let’s have a silent moment OK? Lisa slurps with the straw against the bottom of the cup and can’t remember what flavour the drink was supposed to be. She dedicates several minutes of serious brain power to this enigma, then she tells Jamie he has to go away because she’s about to cry. In fact, she is about to fucking weep. He doesn’t move. Her teeth are chattering even more than they were when she said she was freezing. Cold. Fear. Her watch has stopped because it banged up against the steering wheel. Lisa knows he gave her that watch, but she doesn’t remember him actually doing it. Is that bad? Is that awful? She decides that perhaps forgetting might be good.

Jamie’s mind wanders and he’s thinking of the rich getting richer and everyone else dying, her sticky seeping head in the crook of his arm. Of being a meat puppet on a stick, his arm is going to sleep. Of how it feels to dance and not know of anything but bass and sub-bass, rhythm bulldozing the air. She is so sexy.

Lisa waves like a feeble pageant beauty, to nobody in particular, then slumps into a sleep that will in time and imperceptibly segue into unconsciousness. Her breath on his face smells like cigarettes.

The two rows of fuzzy orange lights arc away into the night, erotic and mathematical. Did three men really ask her out tonight, like she said? What were they like, and what were they thinking about? Were they more like him than not, or less? Were they drive-by bullshitters, university bar rapists? Or were they friendly and cute, so obliging that they’d let her stub out her smouldering Marlboros on their smiling little upturned faces?

He really meant it, the time he told her she could earn like four-and-a-half million pounds, just with the shameless face she’s lucky enough to carry around for free on the front of her head. A come-on girl who drinks lorry drivers and strips for spirits but I suppose she knows what she wants, don’t we all?

Ed lays in the road, his dirt and blood-smudged face half hidden behind a well-worn coat, lonely and forgotten. Jamie looks into Lisa’s face for a long time, it is covered by the darkness and he knows that he will stick to her like napalm. He gently works his watch off her wrist and onto his, then holds her hand as her pulse ebbs away.

© Alistair Gentry 1997. First published in 'Allnighter'.
Also available in 'Uncanny Valley: Collected Short Stories'.