Around mid-morning, I smoked a hefty joint for good luck and to calm the old nerves and set off on foot and bus for Amber's house, her address scribbled down on a tatty bit of paper gripped in my sweaty palm.
I tell you, I was as edgy as a teenager before his first kiss. How would Amber react at seeing me?
Would she be happy? Would she be mad?
Of course. She'd slam the door in my face, for walking out on her, surely.
As I neared her street, my heart began beating like a fucked clock. I turned a corner. Maddox Road. This was it.
And all of sudden there she was, walking up the pavement towards me.
"Hi!" she said brightly. "How's it going, stranger?"
I apologised for disappearing the other day. Explained the confusion over where she lived.
Amber said she'd guessed something like that had happened. She
asked if I wanted to get out of there, take a ride. “A ride? Where?”
"I know this cool place.”
She had a battered old Citroen 2CV waiting at the curb down the street. Being stoned and edgy, I asked if she was okay to drive.
“Yeah, I only have a problem controlling the car when I’m straight.”
Amber’s 2CV was parked up at the end of the street. Painted a sun-bleached Sky Blue, it had once been blessed with a soft-top convertible roof, now conspicuous by its absence.
Patches of rust punctuated the bodywork. Both driver and passenger door windows were missing and I could clearly see metal springs through the seat covers.
The vehicle looked remarkably unsafe. I said as much.
“Get in, stop moaning.”
I did as I was told.
It took a few goes to get the engine running and when it finally did an ominous cloud of black carbon monoxide burst from the exhaust.
“Has this thing got an M.O.T?”
Amber gave me a sardonic sideways look, pulled on a brightly coloured woolly hat replete with earflaps almost like she was donning a crash helmet, and took off.
She drove at pace through the North London streets. There’s nothing quite like sitting in a rickety old car, stoned and whizzing through the capital in the middle of a cold winter morning with a freak of a girl at the wheel with the wind rushing through your hair.
It was all so magical, so surreal, so beautiful, so dangerous.
At some traffic lights somewhere in Islington we stopped and observed a bloke by the curb on the opposite side of the street taking a photo of some road kill with his mobile.
Later, as we raced west heading out of the city, I stole a quick glance at Amber. She was checking me out too, not looking where she was going, wisps of hair poking out from her hat, whipping her face in the wind.
She smiled and shouted, “You’ve got nice eyes.”
Accepting complements graciously had always been a problem of mine, especially travelling in a sardine can at speed in a built-up inner city zone.
“Well, thanks.” I smiled modestly, trying not to think of the consequences of an accident at such a high speed. “Your arse ain’t too shabby either.”
Amber laughed. “I say you’ve got nice eyes and you jump right in with a comment about my arse?”
“Oh, eyes. I thought you said arse…sorry”
With her strange accent, the roof missing, the windows open, the sound of the wind rushing by and the whine of the tiny engine and everything, well, you know how it is.
Amber was still focused on me, frowning. I gripped the edge of my seat harder and instructed her to please keep her eyes on the road, before she killed us both.
“Am I scaring you?”
“Yes.”
She swerved violently side to side for a laugh and I let out a little yelp. I grinned nervously, staring straight ahead thinking, is this really happening? Have I really been stolen away from a party by a delicious, but wasted and quite possibly unhinged girl? Where was she taking me, if indeed we would make it anywhere? What treats were in store for me when we got there, if any? But then I thought, what the fuck, you know? Wherever we were going, whatever we were about to do, was fine by me because I was with Amber.
I was dreaming, can’t remember what about, when I startled myself wide-eyed awake sometime later. I’d fucking fallen asleep in the car. A habit of mine, I’m afraid. Planes, trains, automobiles, doesn’t matter what form of transport it is, if it’s moving and I’m on it, sooner or later, I’ll fall asleep.
Things tend to be a tad confusing when you come to, sprawled out on the front passenger seat of a 2CV parked at a crazy angle on a grass verge in a country lane somewhere, the front passenger side deeply imbedded in a hedge. Especially when you’re still stoned with no idea where the fuck you are or how you got there, full consciousness coming up to fast for the bends and all that.
Only the busy chirp-chirp-chirping of birds, the names of which I couldn’t begin to guess at, broke the silence around me.
Gradually vague memories of what I’d been up to pre-snooze came gate crashing through my fuggy mind until - hey, Amber, that crazy bewitching girl with the dazzling eyes who stole me away from London in a rickety old sardine tin.
Just thinking about her, my heart momentarily skipped out of its groove.
The colourful woolly hat she’d worn in the car lay draped across the steering wheel. But where was she?
I sat up and checked around.
Nowhere in sight, that’s where.
I got out of the car, stretching my aching muscles out in all directions, doing a bizarre but hugely satisfying spasmodic walk for a few omni-directional paces.
I stuck a hand in my pocket and pulled out my mobile to check the time. Sweet Jesus, ten to one. A cursory check of my surroundings revealed very little, apart from a hedge-lined lane disappearing in two unfamiliar directions and a crystal clear blue sky overhead.
A little way further along the lane, in a break in the hedge line there was a wooden stile.
I set off to investigate, get some perspective on my whereabouts.
The stile opened on to a grassy field at the top of a steep hill. A mighty fine view actually, the full glory of the English countryside set out below me in all its patchwork quilt summer splendour.
It had been raining. The air had a certain freezing bite to it.
Off to my right about half a mile away at the bottom of the hill a few cows milled about in a field, chewing grass, doing cow type things apparently without much effort.
Further over there was a farmhouse and a cluster of farm buildings with a smattering of hens strutting their stuff. A derelict white caravan sat abandoned to its fate round the back, but that was about it.
Why do so many British farms have a derelict old white caravan and/or a broken down old coach parked on them?
I spied Amber, sitting with her back to me on the grass about three hundred yards dead ahead down the hill.
I called out but she couldn’t hear, so I scaled the stile and set off to join her, skidding across the uneven wet grass, soaking my shoes, slipping frequently, trying hard to avoid the impressively large crusty cowpats that marked the way.
Amber was sitting on a red and yellow tartan blanket spread out on the wet grass, bent forward studying a magazine, smoking the last of a joint, listening to tunes on an iPod.
An impressive looking camera, a half empty litre bottle of water, a chunk of Clingfilm wrapped hash and some skins lay on the blanket at her feet.
She looked up, smiled a megawatt smile and pulled out her earphones.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“How’s it going, sleepy head?”
I stroked my stubbly head self-consciously, a little embarrassed at having fallen asleep on the journey and mumbled something about feeling a tad rough.
Amber pointed out (in a husky but sexy kind of voice that I’d zonked before we’d even passed Reading. It it was most boring of me.
I apologised, blaming my performance squarely on my inability to stay awake as a passenger on any form of moving transport, but most of all on getting old.
“You’re not old,” Amber insisted. She offered me up the joint. I asked her whether I’d been snoring.
Well, maybe a little.
A diplomatic answer for sure. Mimi used to liken the sound of my snoring to the sound of an articulated lorry idling at traffic lights.
I mentioned how beautiful I thought the whole scene was. Where were we?
Amber gave our location as about twenty-five miles south of Bristol, on the Mendip Hills above Cheddar.
Blimey, I’d imagined we were in the countryside somewhere just outside London. I couldn’t believe Amber had driven so far. How long had it taken in that rusty old sardine can?
Amber shrugged. A little over three hours, including a brief wee stop at the services on the M5, but hey, it was worth it. This place was amazing.
I asked her what was so amazing about it that she’d driven three hours from London in a fucked up old car to see.
Amber just shifted over, patting a vacant bum space for me on the blanket and ordered me to sit. She threw the dead joint away into the damp grass.
“I just like being here.”
Amber stretched out the full length of her delicious body. So this was what she’d driven him away from London to see? Fabulous countryside.
I sat down next to her and there we remained in perfect silence for a bit. One of her legs rested gently against mine.
We remained like that for a while, until Amber suddenly raised both her legs in the air, pointing at the sky with her toes to show me her nails, which were painted bright pink with delicate silver rings round each one. The rings were studded with little sparkly beads that glinted in the sun.
My eyes followed the length of her long legs down towards her body. Unfortunately, she’d tucked her skirt between her thighs, preventing any intimate sightings of her undercrackers.
Amber turned onto her side to face me, propping her head up with her hand, elbow on the blanket.
She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”
I dipped into my pocket to check the time on his mobile. It was twenty-five to four.
“You know how when you’re really tired you sort of black out every now and again for, like, just a split second and you get that warm, clicky, peaceful feeling all over?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s me now. I was up all night and now I’m…slowing down.”
I stretched myself out on the blanket, resting back on both elbows. “Hey, if you want to grab some sleep,” I suggested, with ulterior (sexual) motives a forethought. “We could always find a hotel...”
Amber didn’t reply. She was already asleep.
She slept for nearly three hours straight without moving a muscle, curled up on her right side in the foetal position facing me. I listened to a random and rather eclectic selection of tunes on her iPod - Iggy and The Stooges, The Killers, Blind Willie Johnson, Babyshambles, Folk Implosion, Velvet Underground, The Staple Singers, The Kills, Kilo Riley, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Kooks, Maria Callas, Hot Chip, some jazzy trumpety stuff I didn’t recognize at all and a trippy techno band singing in what I think was Spanish.
But it was hard to concentrate on anything with Amber lying so close.
I spent an indecent amount of time just staring at her. The sweet curve of her hips, the shape of her nose, those delicate shoulders. The rise and fall of her breasts with each breath. She was perfect, at least in my eyes.
And I could’ve just stayed there observing her secretly all afternoon quite happily, except I was getting seriously hungry. There was nothing for it but to wake her as gently as he could.
Amber was more a little disorientated at first when she came to, but soon got a handle on where she was and whom she was with.
I apologised for disturbing her, but I needed nourishment.
She sat up, necked the remainder of her water, whilst telling me in barely a whisper about the strange dream she’d had involving a bloke with a frog drawn on his tummy who was chasing her through Camden Lock.
She picked up her blanket and all her shit and staggered up the hill with me to the car. Even half-asleep, she pointed out things I’ve grown depressingly blind to on the way; a beautiful patch of violet and yellow wild flowers, an oddly shaped dead elm tree, a Common Buzzard hovering high over the next field.
Once in the car, it took a while to get the engine running and when she finally did, another huge plume of black smoke billowed out of the exhaust.
“You should really get that fixed,” I suggested.
She gave me an energy-free sardonic look, pulled the woolly hat down over her hair, extricated the car from the hedge and set off in search of Cheddar, the town a few miles away renowned for its gorge, caves and world famous cheese.
As we descended the impressive gorge, me staring up through the missing roof at the sheerness of the rock faces, I wondered aloud whether ‘Gorge yourself on Cheddar’ might be a suitable tourist-attracting marketing slogan for the town to adopt.
Amber just gave me another sardonic look and mimed vomiting.
“Look out for a parking spot sideways on to the hill.”
“Why sideways?”
“No handbrake.”
Ah, waking up earlier to find the car lodged in a hedge now made perfect sense. I kept my mince pies peeled for a suitable car spot and spied one in a dirt area otherwise full of coaches. Amber parked up between two of them, wedged a big stone under the back wheels and set off for the town on foot with me trailing slightly behind.
I’d never been to Cheddar before. I found it a reasonably pleasant spot. That afternoon it was still rammed to the rafters with day-trippers milling about in their happy bland supermarket summer clothes, studying tourist maps, eating ice creams, carrying children on their shoulders and mostly speaking in Black Country accents.
Amber and I settled on Ye Olde Cheddar Tea Rooms near the foot of the gorge, which offered such edible fare washed down with watery coffee and fresh orange juice from a carton.
Marvellous.
Conversation at the table was limited. Amber stared off out of the window most of the time. I asked if she was okay. Yeah, just not fully awake that was all. It would take at least two hours to get her brain functioning properly. Didn’t matter what time of the day or night she went to sleep or how long she slept or what time she woke up, the recovery time was always the same.
I was advised to ignore her until about nine of the clock, when she assured me she would be back to her normal charming self.
I fell asleep in the care again on the drive back to London. Amber woke me as we approached the city to ask where exactly in town she should drop me.
Drop me?
That sounded horribly like us not spending the night together. “I thought maybe we could head for your place…or mine. I don’t mind, as long as we end up doing rude things to each others soft parts.”
Amber smiled, but appeared strangely ambivalent. Probably still tired, I thought.
I decided to impress her by guiding her to Haringay via my favourite scenic route, if you can call any routes within London ‘scenic’.
On the way I pointed out a few buildings I thought were quite interesting, well actually just the one – the new Wembley stadium. Amber mentioned something about how the idea of attending any large public event filled her with dread, crowds made her feel claustrophobic.
We turned into a steep side-street off Green Lanes near to my place, meant as a clever short cut, but we encountered a removals van blocking the road ahead. With no handbrake, Amber had difficulty keeping the car stationary on the hill.
“Listen,” she said. “Do you mind if we give it a miss tonight? I’m really very tired.”
“No, not at all…”
“It’s been a long day.” She smiled wearily.
“Of course, yeah.”
“Maybe tomorrow, you know, we could do something?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
The removals van wasn’t shifting. I suggested Amber turn around and go back up the hill, otherwise we´d be there all night. I could walk home from there anyway. She should reverse back up the street and head off.
Before getting out of the car, I scribbled down my mobile number on a torn up scrap of Rizla packet and her number on my hand.
"Right," I said, hading her my number. "As they say in the films, it’s been real.”
“They say that in films?”
“Yeah. The ones I’ve seen, anyway.”
“Right.”
“Listen, I’ve had a great time and thanks, you know, for everything. I shall remember this day ‘til, well...‘til the end of the day.”
Amber smiled. “Well, I’m glad you had a good time.”
“I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“I suppose you will.”
“Excellent. I'll call you.”
"Okay."
I opened the passenger door and swung one leg out. Then, unsure whether to plant a smackeroo on Amber’s cheek or on her lips, I ended up kissing the flap of her hat. But hey, that was good enough for me.
She smiled beautifically at me as I got out of the car and stuck the car into reverse with a grinding of gears while I walked the short distance back to the top of the street to guide her safely back.
The main road was free of cars so I waved her out.
Amber reversed round the corner slowly, and was gone with a cloud of exhaust fumes and wave through the open roof.
And I was left alone with, you know, a distinct hard-on.
I walked the short distance to my flat (hands in pockets, obviously, to shield the unyielding erection) and let myself in to find Weird Bob at the end of the hallway.
Sorry, he said. He couldn’t stop and shoot the shit, he was off to eat some sushi from a barbershop floor.
Inside, I had a shower, did Amber’s stiff willy toilet roll test and failed. I fixed a bong, grabbed a beer from the fridge, got my acoustic guitar out of its case and strummed it wistfully, staring up at the ceiling (still sporting an erection) and wrote another set of lyrics.
