From Jester To King XCVII

My good uncle was a laid back sort of guy but sometimes when he said stuff you couldn’t always take it for gospel. Round about my teenage years, or probably even before then, he was seriously into cars and had a stream of expensive ones at his disposal. Just after he got them, we’d go for a ride. This instance was the most memorable, and when he came round he delivered one of his typical off-the-cuff remarks which I could never figure for truth or embellishment, and this time the disclosure was that he’d just bought a Ferrari and it was waiting for us outside to go in. More than looking at it from the outside I remember being in it the most, being sunken in so deep that I felt queasy, my stomach pushed down to my pubis, not being able to see anything outside, but when good uncle started driving he was so laid-back he hardly even took the controls, he just let it drive itself, and I couldn’t work out what he was doing, was scared, and it wasn’t that he was asleep or drunk, it was just that he was lackadaisical and thoughtless, and I knew that if I let it carry on like this, something bad was going to happen so I took the controls on my side to stop us from crashing. When I did, I don’t think he knew I was controlling it, I’m not sure he even knew about the second controls, but it felt out of place and awkward, the last thing I wanted was to show good uncle up, I needed to respect him, I didn’t want to be the invigilator, to embarrass him, imply that he was neglectful and reckless, but what choice did I have since if I’d let him carry on regardless, we’d have come a cropper, and though I know he wouldn’t have blamed or expected me to have taken over, I felt I could get away with the driving without him noticing. And this is precisely what happened, with my uncle blithering away in his good cheery voice, hardly touching the wheel, all absent-minded, as I drive the car methodically around the side roads of Finchley.

All of a sudden my uncle perks up. In the middle of the road and right in our lane, is a large white van, the ones that have those really tall rooves, stationary, its back doors wide open so you could see straight in, a little skewiff, in that its front was pointing to towards the left pavement, its left-side passenger wheel might have been mounted on it, and you could see a man in the back doing something I couldn’t initially make out, but when we came upon this van, something about it enlivened my uncle and he sat up a little straighter in his seat, showing his disapproval at this stationary obstacle, and then as if to show how proud he really was, how macho and no-nonsense he could be, he must have stuck his foot on the accelerator to show he wasn’t going to be dissuaded. But the thing was that there was oncoming traffic in the other lane and I could see that we weren’t going to be able to make it through if there were cars coming towards us, and right then, cars were coming towards us, and though there was this instinct to trust my uncle I could clearly see we weren’t going to make it and I took the controls and brought the car to a halt. My uncle was like the perennial startled old man having been awoken from a nap. He blinked his eyes as if he couldn’t work out what was happening and whether he knew I had stopped the car I don’t know, whether he realised on some level I had been overriding him, it’s difficult to say.

And here’s the weird thing. At the moment we stopped right, we could see right in, and I will always remember this distinctly. This man in the back was gutting fish; he had a large eel in his left hand and in his right what looked like an awl and he was picking things out of the eel all in plain sight, in the middle of  a quaint suburban road, and then you could see all the other fish and all the accoutrements in the back of this van, all the guts and the off-cuts, and he had saws and gouges and wooden benches and crates of other fish stacked up all over, and he was wearing a white fishmonger’s coat but there were no markings on the van, and just after I took it all in, there was a part of me that became scared, scared that my uncle would be prompted to show defiance, confront this lowly fisherman, and although my good uncle was a laid-back man, I was really worried he’d use the opportunity to take out his frustrations, lord it over this man, show him who’s boss. But luckily he didn’t. He just turned away as if he hadn’t noticed. We waited for a few cars to pass before my good uncle, much more alive and engaged, set us in motion, and he might have spun the wheels with his foot flat on the gas but I don’t remember either way, all I know is that the man had had an effect.