Birthday treat
Jeremy Clarke
Four o’clock on the morning after my birthday and I was lying under an evergreen bush in somebody’s front garden with my face buried in crisp leaf litter. I didn’t know whose front garden I was in. Nor did I know what kind of bush it was. But I was very grateful to it and to the garden’s owner for affording me protection at very short notice. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that in the hour or so I was there, I formed a relationship with this bush. Its attitude towards me was one of benevolence, I felt. In an otherwise mundane suburban existence, affording protection to the persecuted made it glad. The leaf litter was pleasantly fragrant, like eucalyptus. The dense foliage must have kept out all but the most torrential rain, and the ground was bone-dry.
I might have been over the drink-driving limit, or I might not. I’d drunk a pint of lager before the play, another during the interval, and a couple more afterwards. Four pints in three hours and a large doner kebab with chilli sauce to soak it up, so I was probably OK. But when I’d seen, in the rear-view mirror, a police car with fluorescent chevrons all over it, and that it was following me, and picking up speed round the corners, and the chevrons were aiming at me, I knew I was in for a pull.
The red-brick Victorian suburb was laid out in a grid pattern. I’d pressed the toe down and turned left and right at random, but couldn’t shake it off. Judging by the way he took right-angled corners, I think the driver must have had framed advanceddriving certificates all over his wall. My Audi 80 Sport (£150 on eBay) was faster on the straight but I lacked his cornering skills. The police car was a Ford Focus. I didn’t know Ford Focuses had it in them.
That evening I’d been to see The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Sharon paid for the tickets as a birthday treat. I wasn’t going to see her again because, for one thing, she’s bad for my health. But as this was a purely cultural outing and she’d already bought the tickets, and, as I wanted to catch up with her news, I’d gone.
Much of Sharon’s news consisted of pub-fight reportage. Sharon is something of a connoisseur of pub fighting and an astute analyst. She knows and relishes the difference between scuffling and something with a bit more intent. Many a time I’ve heard her contemptuously dismiss a fight in the pub as ‘handbags’, while everyone else is giving rave reviews.
Trevor had been involved in a pub fight, in which his ear had been torn. There was blood everywhere, said Sharon, and word had got about that Trevor had taken a pasting. But this was rubbish, she assured me. It was only a small tear, sustained more by accident than by design. Whereas Trevor’s punches had been accurate and telling and his opponent had ended up with two black eyes and went home ‘looking like a panda’. Faced with a dilemma of which of his customers to ban, the landlord, a skinflint of international repute, had banned the other bloke purely on economic grounds, said Sharon.
The rest of her news concerned her boyfriends. She was currently down to four. As Sharon put it, the men in her life were getting ‘thin on the ground’ at the moment. I told her how sorry I was to hear it. After the show, we went to the pub, but only had time for a couple. As I drove home I reflected that it was perhaps the soberest, most uneventful night out with Sharon I’d ever had.
The gaining police car called for desperate measures. I’d been arrested twice for drink-driving and I’ve heard that magistrates take a dim view of persistent offenders. I made a sharp right, slammed on the anchors, leapt out, and launched myself over the nearest garden fence. And there, on the far side, was my lovely big bush. I crawled in. Five seconds later the police car skidded to a halt on the other side of the fence, then, assuming I’d legged it off down the road, sped off again. Half a minute later they were back again, and, returning at intervals, they cruised the streets, searching, presumably, for a motorist pretending to be a pedestrian.
Just turned 48, I thought, my face buried in the fragrant leaf litter, and I’m face down under a bush in someone’s front garden hiding from the police.
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