Sleeping rough
Jeremy Clarke
Iwas driving home after yoga last week, thinking about Barry's tree pose and laughing out loud like some paranoid schizophrenic, when the car suddenly conked out. It was gone midnight and I was ten miles from home in a narrow country lane, halfway up a steep hill.
I tried to restart the engine. Nothing. Dead as a hammer. I had fuel, and the brightness of the headlights told me there was plenty of life in the battery; the trouble, therefore, was possibly serious. Possibly a broken cam belt. The only thing to do was to roll backwards the half mile or so into the previous village, using my tail-lights to light the way.
I lost momentum outside the post office and general stores, underneath the village's solitary street lamp. I got out. The village was asleep. The only noise was the agitated babbling of a stream and young foxes yapping on the hill above. My mobile-phone battery was flat and I had little money on me to pay for a taxi even if it were possible to get one at that time of night. My only option, it seemed to me, was to sleep in the car and have a poke around under the bonnet in the morning.
Except once, in a dustcart, after about ten pints, I don't think I've ever had a good night's sleep on the back seat of any motorised vehicle, Family saloon car interiors, however, though in many ways a perfectly comfortable environment, seem to have been specifically designed to stop people sleeping in them. I could find DO position or location in which I was remotely comfortable. I tried sleeping in the front. I tried sleeping in the back. I tried wedging my body sideways between the front seats and resting my head on the
dashboard. By sliding the front seat back and curling up into the yoga position called the foetus', I even tried lying in the passenger-side footwell. But it was hopeless. If the weather had been warmer, I'd have been better off lying underneath the car than trying to get comfortable inside it.
And then, what with my increasingly violent bodily contortions, and the increasingly fetid air, and the half-dozen post-yoga pints of fizzy lager I'd drunk, and no tea, I was sick. Fortunately, it was simply a question of hanging my head out of first the driver's door, then, a bit later on, the rear offside door.
As the night wore on, it got cold. My breath condensed into droplets on the windows and ran down. To begin with I tried covering myself with the rubber floor mats, but they kept falling off. I got out and searched the boot for something else to wrap myself in. Luckily, there was an oily curtain (red stripes) and — praise the Lord! — I found the old army balaclava I thought I'd lost. Thrilled to bits, I pulled the balaclava over my head and wrapped the curtain about me. I might have looked like a barber's sign that had gone undercover, but I couldn't care less. Sartorial elegance, or even appropriateness, is hardly an issue when kipping on the back seat of a 15-year-old car with a rusted-out wheel arch and an expired tax disc.
I think I lay awake all night. Through a gap in the condensation on the rear window I saw the sky perceptibly lighten around five o'clock and heard the first songbird clearing its throat. Then I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, it was intolerably hot instead of intolerably cold and I could hear voices outside. Children's voices. Happy children's voices. The ordeal was over.
I pushed open the rear driver's-side door, and, still wearing my stripy curtain and balaclava helmet, crawled out into a crowd of village children waiting in warm sunshine for their respective school buses. As I emerged, face down, the happy children's voices around me became terrified children's voices. Then, in the half-second it took for comprehension of the prosaic reality to overcome their fear of the supernatural, the voices became shrill and derisive children's voices. One or two of the more fastidiously brought-up children expressed disgust and someone flicked a cigarette butt in my direction.
I don't blame them in the least for laughing at me dressed like that. I must have looked ridiculous. I was, however, unhappy to see some of the older girls in short skirts laughing all the harder when I pulled off the balaclava helmet revealing my head and face to them. A sleepless night, my car broken, and now my face laughed at by schoolgirls. I gave way, for a moment, to the sin of despair.
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