Seven Series Saloon

The car was stifling, so airlessly warm that Martin could smell the static tang of the new plastic interior. He’d let it get like that on purpose, stuffy and stagnant, despite the cold blasting against the two-millimetre-thick steel skin as he bucketed down Route Three towards Zurich. He’d wanted it to be cosy so Clare could sleep, but now he opened his window. Just a dab on the switch to let an inch of the world whistle in and chase away the soporific fug of body and nylon. This wasn’t the time for him to start feeling drowsy, and he wanted her back with him, wanted her company as they approached the outskirts of the city.

The air was cold and solid with speed. The violence of the rain-flecked rush caused him to look at the speedometer and ease down from 152 as his wife stirred beside him. He smiled and composed himself, ready to pretend that he had maintained a steady 110, having resisted the temptation to hoof the Seven Series since she’d fallen asleep on the outskirts of Basel. He was enjoying the huge German car. He would have liked to bring his own VW, but they had decided to fly to Paris and rent a vehicle for the onward trip so that Clare could catch a flight straight home from Zurich.

The Seven Series was indulgently expensive, but, true to the ad-man’s word, it was giving him sheer driving pleasure. They had laughed as they approached it, accompanied by an employee of the rental firm young enough to be one of their grandsons. Clare had intended to drive the first leg, to get them out of Paris, always the cooler of the two in more complicated traffic. Martin was determined to have a go behind the wheel of the executive beast, but was content to wait until they were on the open road. Incorrigible Brits, they had both opened their respective doors before it occurred to them that they had rented a left-hand-drive. They had walked laughing around the car, crossing in front of it, stopping briefly next to the bewildered boy in his liveried fleece to share a head shaking smile. Martin even passed Clare the sleek fob, as if it was the key of the Beetle they had borrowed from her mother in 1973 to go on their first adventure, and the little silver spike would be needed to begin the patient process of firing up the twenty-five reluctant horses.  

“Sorry, love. I didn’t want to fall asleep. How long ‘til Zurich?”

“Don’t worry, Pet. About half an hour.”

“Are you feeling ok?”

“I’m feeling fine. This thing has got a bit more welly than your mam’s Beetle.”

It was late one night in the parked Beetle that Martin and Clare had first shared a moment that would have made Jagger blush. Unfortunately, the porch light had come on and the moment had also been shared with Clare’s nightgowned grandmother. Martin’s heart had nearly stopped as he locked lidless eyes with Clare’s mother’s mother who, without missing a beat, had whipped off her glasses and turned to grope blindly for the light switch, putting everyone back into merciful darkness before Clare had even looked up. Martin had liked German cars, and Clare’s grandma, ever since.

Grandma had died in 1986. When she got too tired to deny that she was ill, and too weak to ignore it, she succumbed with an unfussy dignity in a briefly occupied hospital bed. If Grandma had been the model, Martin’s father had been the late-night-tears-and-piss warning. Choose your time while you’ve still got time to choose it. Or risk inadvertently choosing the heavy blue plastic mattress and a life held in the rubber-gloved hands of empathic mercenaries. No. Martin had chosen a week in Paris and a top spec. saloon to drive himself to Zurich. It was important that he drove himself.

“Is there anything else you need me to do?”

“No, love. Everything’s ready.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes. I really am. More than I thought I would be.”

The main artery from Basel to Zurich had branched and narrowed and now they entered the capillary system that fed their hotel, guided by the Seven Series’ calm satnav. The car was powerful, but safe as milk. Martin half wished he’d rented something oily and analogue. Part of him wanted a tricky clutch pedal and a tape deck. A go-faster stripe and bulging wheel arches. The last time he drove could have been the first time he was Steve McQueen. He could have made tyres squeal and picked up a fine he would never pay. But no, he looked at his beautiful Clare and was pleased she’d dozed, reclined in the serenity of an executive passenger seat, in a vehicle more expensive, and only slightly smaller, than their first house. Suddenly Martin missed cars with ashtrays, and the world in which they had been a standard feature. He longed for the feeling of having a pocket full of heavy, thick coins and telephones that clicked and whirred on the end of wires that tethered them to blown-vinyl walls. But no. He had been there and felt those things and their loss was not what he felt now. What he had lost was the future that lay ahead of him when he had still lived in a world of Bakelite and VHS tapes proudly displayed on a bookcase. The future that lay ahead of him now was short.

His last drive was only one of many lasts that he had consciously undertaken since he had made his choice. The period between now and his appointment tomorrow – he looked at the precise digital readout of the car’s clock – just over twenty-two hours, would be a condensed procession of previously unimagined last-times. He saw himself in the hotel room, little plastic brush in hand, scrubbing away for the last time at reasonable-for-seventy-three teeth, sag-chested and spotted in front of the harshly lit wall-sized mirrors that hotel designers seem to think their guests demanded. He laughed at the absurdity of it. A spontaneous, selfish laugh, and then stopped, pulled up by the thought that it would be his last.

“Are you ok, love,” said Clare.

“Yes, pet. Are you?”

“Yes. More than I thought I would be. What are you thinking?”

“I was just worrying about whether I’d packed my toothbrush or left it in the hotel in Paris.”

“You silly sod.”

They laughed together, more united than ever in the absurdity of it all. The feel of the leather covered wheel, the responsibility of guiding the car the last few hundred yards to the hotel car park stopped Martin’s laughter filling his heart altogether and metastasising into anything harder to handle in moderately busy city traffic. But Clare’s laughter came with the last-time catch of a tear that couldn’t be blinked back.

“It’s ok, love. It really is.”

“I know.”

“The boys have got their letters. Everything’s going to be ok.”

“The boys will be fine.”

“You’ll be fine.”

They were in the parking garage now. Under the hotel in Zurich, a short walk from the apartment they would visit together the next day. The last place they would ever be together.

“Did you enjoy the drive?”

“I did.”

Martin pressed the button and the engine stopped.