Commencing Our Descent. Suzannah Dunn
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of braking and acceleration. No steps up and down the gears: my car is, regrettably, an automatic. I love driving. I love the necessary, narrow, but unremitting focus on the minutiae of the windows and mirrors: the whole busy world reduced to blips on my screens. I love that I cannot go forwards without constantly, simultaneously looking backwards. Driving is made of judgements of distance and speed, the very two elements by which I am so floored in my earthbound life. But on wheels, on a road, I am faultless. When driving, I am nothing but eyes, hands, feet, all in perfect co-ordination, and all-powerful. I have never had a moment of panic or fear or even of doubt when driving; in no other circumstances do I ever feel so safe.
Driving, I am transformed into someone decisive and able. My father used to say, A moment of hesitation is a moment gone. Sometimes he said, A moment’s hesitation and you’re dead. And so’s the other bloke. I learned to drive to his constant refrain, Anticipation.
Driving is in my blood. My father drove even as a child; his family – his father, grandfather, uncles, older brothers – were mechanics; they cared for engines, composed them, cleaned and coaxed them. My blood hums with, and thrills to, this particular competence.
Sometimes I think that this is all that there is to my blood: this most unnatural of activities seems to come to me more naturally than anything else. More so than the activities that are supposed to come naturally, such as eating, walking, sleeping. I am never so alive as when I am driving. And never so happy: the world shrunken, scrolling, passing beyond me; my machine responding to every mere touch. Sometimes, arriving home, I turn and do another lap, or go to the motorway to speed and watch the speedometer, to relish that immediate, utterly uncomplicated relationship between the downward push of my toes and the smooth rise of the needle.
My father used to say, The faster your car, the faster you’re away from trouble.
This is a fast car.
Sometimes, driving, I sing:
You may not have a car at all,
But, brothers and sisters, remember,
You can still stand tall.
Just be thankful
For what you’ve got.
When I arrive home again, I stay for a while in the car, perhaps listening to the radio, and gazing through the windscreen: I love to be there, in the street but not in the street; home, but not home.
Yesterday evening, when I was driving home along this edge of the park, the radio was playing the Chopin nocturne that is the theme tune to my memories of childhood ballet classes. The classes’ pianist was our teacher’s elderly mother. That piece of music – strangely, only that piece – recalls for me the slippery, bouncy sensation of wooden floorboards beneath my soft shoes; the smell of the church hall, balmy with beeswax; the blaze of Victorian windows, numerous, high and viewless, and faintly mysterious with blinds, ropes, hooks, like sails. The pianist was so old; I wonder, now, how old she was. I remember her face and no others, not my teacher’s nor my peers’. That old face looked so resigned, was expressionless. And terrifying, for some reason: terrifying in retrospect, not at the time. Perhaps I am troubled now by her phenomenal agedness, or by the almost muscular expressionlessness. Or perhaps by the anomaly of such a bearing in a roomful of supple, self-conscious little girls. She was old in the way that perhaps women of my generation, later generations, will never look old: the white perm, the unsoothed wrinkles, the standard-issue specs. To her Chopin, we did our pliés and stretches, each of our movements deliberate, slow-motion, expansive; each of her notes roping us into a sequence.
My drive was interrupted when I had to stop at the zebra crossing; a crossing that, close to the park, is rarely used, particularly during the evenings. There was something unusual about the pedestrian, too: a girl, a young woman, in pale and therefore illuminated clothing. Then I realised that it was the way she was moving that was confounding me. Her move across those black and white keys was unbroken into steps, wiped of the numerous tiny groundings that would indicate motion on foot. And so she seemed to be moving above the crossing; the movements seemed fluid, drawing low luminous arcs in the deep dusk. She crossed quickly, taking perhaps two seconds to reach the far side, and as she did so, I realised what I was seeing: she was rollerblading. I stayed still for a moment, wishing that I could do that, watching her sweep away into her disappearance.
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