Gravity’s Volkswagen

Sixteen

I had seen next to nothing of Fontinella, but now, still in my precarious position on the floor of Leezza’s stunt Beetle, I got the grand tour. It was a flying visit and a mystery trip, and it was taken at a terrifying speed that made it hard for me to concentrate. I saw railway tracks, marshalling yards, every kind of business relating to trucks and cars. There may have been an old main street that was a piece of classic Americana, but I didn’t see it. Instead I saw some second-division fast-food restaurants, Mexican supermarkets, a surprising number of Thai massage parlours, and quite a few trailer parks that looked far less appealing than Idle Palms. I saw all these things briefly and in a bit of a blur, but I saw them.

Eventually Leezza slowed down and then stopped. We were on the outskirts of the town, in a thrillingly bleak and anonymous bit of territory, a patch of land between an unfenced railway siding, a holding pen for trucks that were being repaired and a disused cement works. Why, I wondered, didn’t Josh Martin film here? If you were looking for a post-Apocalyptic landscape this would do just fine. I told myself it was better not to think about why Josh Martin did or didn’t do things.

“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” Leezza said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Sometimes I even surprise myself.”

“Was that guy really trying to kill you back there?”

“Maybe,” I said. “He’s the movie director so I suppose he can do what he likes.”

“Does this mean you’re out of a job?”

“I never really had a job,” I said.

“What? You’re like a freelance.”

“You could call it that. I just happened to write the book that he happens to be trying to turn into a movie.”

“You wrote a book?”

She sounded amazed rather than impressed.

“More than one, if you must know,” I said.

“Wow, I didn’t know people still wrote books.”

“They certainly do,” I said. “It’s just that very few people read them any more.”

“And sometimes they get turned into movies.”

“Rarely, but yes,” I agreed.

“So you’re creative. You’re like an artist?”

“On a good day, yes.”

“You know about art and stuff?”

“Just enough to get by.”

“That’s good. Your opinion means something. Right. So what did you think of the show?”

The idea that an English novelist’s opinion might mean something to a member of an American automotive freak show was flattering yet hard to take seriously. Even so, I wasn’t exactly lying when I said, “I liked it. I thought it was really good.”

“You don’t have to be polite,” she said.

“There’s no harm in being polite,” I said. “But I mean it.”

“So what was your favourite part?”

“You,” I said, and this time I wasn’t lying at all.

“You were great. That was a quite a jump. This is quite a vehicle.”

“You didn’t think it could have been better?”

“I suppose anything can always be better.”

“So how?” she demanded.

I hadn’t a clue what to say. Look, I’m a writer, I know all about criticism. I know that nobody who makes art or entertainment or anything in between ever really wants to hear anything other than, “You and all your works are truly, wholly wonderful.” They don’t have to mean it: they just have to say it.

And as for ‘constructive criticism’, well, there’s no such thing; that’s like constructive pillaging or constructive carpet bombing. So I had absolutely no intention of criticising Leezza and her act, not in any way, not constructively, much less destructively. And when I said, “You make it look so easy,” I thought I was delivering a fine and positive, but essentially bland, neutral and harmless compliment. She didn’t take it that way at all.

“Damn it,” she said, and she was suddenly very upset. “That’s just what Motorhead Phil keeps telling me. He says I make it look way too easy.”

“I’m sure it’s not easy at all,” I said.

Leezza slapped her hand against the apex of the steering wheel. For the first time I noticed that the steering wheel was made of transparent Perspex, and that Leezza had the most wonderful, long delicate hands.

“Oh, but it is easy,” she said. “That’s the thing. It’s just a matter of knowing some math, some physics and a little calculus. You have to know what gravity is, you have to know about velocity, drag and wind resistance. But if you understand them, then you understand everything. After that, anybody could do what I do. If you’re in this car, and it’s going at the right speed, in the right direction and the angle of the ramp is what it should be, then there’s no way the jump can fail. It’s inevitable. It’s just what happens. It’s about trajectory-control theory, a time-order set of states in a dynamic system. It’s about the forces of nature, orbital mechanics. It’s not about the driver. It’s not about me.”

“I see,” I said, and I understood what she was saying, at least I thought I did, that although a car flying through space may appear to be defying the laws of gravity, in fact it’s absolutely obeying them. That had a great appeal to it, and that being the case, what I said next seemed thoroughly innocent at the time.

I said, “Maybe it should be more about you.”