MY CAR STORY

I. INTRODUCTION

 Every man has a car story.

 He has this story, and he slots it away somewhere in a memory rack and then under some hard-to-define circumstances which are signalled in a secret way which only other men can perceive, he and other men, standing in a circle round a braai, each with a beer in hand (which may not be the first one), he rolls out this story and although his closest buddies may have heard it ad nauseam, he will re-tell it once more for the benefit of The New Guy and out of deep and mutual respect and a lifetime of adherence to The Code the others will stand around in silence as if they had never heard it before, while he tells His Story.

It may not be exactly the same as the last time, mind you, because these stories grow in the telling so its always worth listening attentively to catch the upgrades. I’m not being bitchy or nasty here, I mean all this with the greatest of respect to the men and The Code. This is The Light, The Truth and The Way.

So this is my car story (but please do bear in mind that in my teenage years I did not own a car: I was a biker, and many years ago I did write stories about those years but the stories are kept under lock and key. Those stories are more raunchy, more edgy, and I have to pick my audiences more carefully because they contain references to sex and blood and real living people who may not be named, and humans and animals who/which actually were hurt – some even died – so they’re no fucking joke. Don’t ask.)

Sooo this is my car story. (By the way this story is out of sync because by the time this story commences I’m no longer that young: I’m married, I own a house in the suburbs, I have two children, and I’m wondering how I’ll ever pay for their Herzlia High School or their tertiary education or their weddings one day) – and then in spite of being in debt up to my eyeballs (or perhaps because of that), one fine day I’m taking a walk up Long Street – just to stretch my legs, you understand - and I just happen to walk past the shiny windows of a car dealership that sells Mercedes Benzes.

II. THE BANK MANAGER’S CALL

But you must know this: by sheer coincidence and with the providence of Our Lord, a week prior to this fateful day I had received a telephone message that my bank manager wanted to meet me. “O kak!” I thought, “the only reason anyone ever gets an out-of-the-blue call from his bank manager, is because there are dark clouds on the horizon.”

Nevertheless, after twenty years of solid practice at a good city-centre law firm, I know, of a certainty, that the thing that a creditor fears most from a debtor, is silence. As long as there’s what the politicians call “dialogue”, no matter how dark the clouds, you have got some kind of a handle on the situation. So if you ever get THAT CALL, call back asap. Don’t let the buggers think that you’re afraid or you’re avoiding them. Call NOW.

Allegedly, he just wanted to meet me. Nevertheless, this is Charge-of-the Light Brigade stuff, I thought.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I

   Half a league, half a league,

   Half a league onward,

   All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

“  Forward, the Light Brigade!

   Charge for the guns!” he said.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

 

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

   Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

 

III

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

   Rode the six hundred.

 

Etcetera &c – you know the rest of it. Enough!

 

You see? You see! – That’s how it felt.

 

“Ah, Mr Friedland!” A large, balding, barrel of a man in a perfectly fitting grey three-piece bankers-type suit circumnavigated his desk, hand outstretched in preparation for The Handshake, affable as hell.

The warmth, the warmth of it all! It took me quite by surprise. I was expecting something a little more Arctic.

“So nice to finally meet one of the bank’s old clients! Fifteen years, is it?”

I did a quick mental review. Damn, he’s right, I thought – he’s done his homework.

I braced myself for one of those “You’d-better-not-fuck-with-me” bully-type handshakes, like being caught between two Table Mountain rockface-type rocks, but instead my hand was cuddled by the soft, chubby hand of a man who has never done a day’s manual work in his lifetime.

At his cue we settled into two nice armchairs, like Biden and Putin at a photo-op.

Hmmm ...

“You know, I was looking at your balance sheet”.

Oh shit, here we go, I thought. (as a director of a law firm, you have no right to privacy from your bank).

OK ... sabres out ...

“I noticed” he pressed on, “that you are driving a very old car...”

WTF! He wants my pathetic old car now? – sliding deeper into the Slough of Despond ... where is this going?

“A young professional in your position needs to inspire confidence in his clients” he said, with a gentle, reproving smile as if he thought I’d been doing it all wrong in the misguided folly of my youth.

 

“You can afford better. Hell, we’d be delighted to give you the money” (it being perfectly well understood all round that he meant “lend”, not “give”, but we weren’t about to split hairs about such a piffling little detail).

 

“Well,” I said with feigned modesty while examining my shoes unnecessarily, “well, that’s very generous of you sir, especially as you can see the extent of my debt” –

“Oh, that,” he said with a dismissive gesture “- don’t worry! You’re a promising young man! We’re betting on you! It’s always like this! It’s just a bubble that passes through the system! This is the most financially stressed point in the life of a family man. We know what we’re doing here. We know which horses to bet on and which not to. You’ll ride out of it soon – and in a better car, I imagine!” – jovial guffaw of laughter.

 

And then I realised that the dark clouds which I had foreseen, had just dissipated like the morning mist and it was a beautiful day.

 

Nevertheless I was determined to show some backbone. “Actually, that beautiful old Chev 4100 was my father-in-law’s car. He drove it from new for about ten years before he died and I coveted it all that time. And when he died, my mother in law gave it to me, and I love it. It’s fast, it’s incredibly powerful, it’s as comfortable as driving around in a lounge, and frankly, its beautiful”

 

All of that was true, but you’ll notice that I omitted to mention the fuel consumption.

 

And yes, it was beautiful, but it was now about fifteen years old, it had none of the modern electronic gadgets, and things like the window winder handles were falling off, and there was something seriously wrong with the exhaust system. But I could still hold my head up in a crowd, although I did notice, one night when I attended a parents' evening at Herzlia school that the antiquated Chevy grille of my proud old car stood out like a sore thumb in an otherwise unbroken phalanx of Mercedes Benzes.

 

And after I had regretfully declined the bank manager’s offer of credit, and as I walked back to my office, some words of wisdom came back to me from my late father-in-law which reinforced the proposal of the bank manager: I recalled Louis, the said father-in-law, standing in his lounge, cigarette in hand in his characteristic pose, as he said, “I’m telling you, when you’re down and out and you’ve got no work coming in and you’re on your last buck, go out and get a new suit and a new car. Then, you HAVE to find new work and be a success! And you will”

 

It was the sort of Pollyanna philosophy that he loved, and now suddenly I had it on my mind.

 

But in order to tell the story of my car further, I first have to interrupt myself to tell the story of another car. So this, dear reader, is the story of the other car:

 

 

III. CINDERELLA’S SLIPPER

 

As a young lawyer in a law firm I was required to handle a very mixed bag - which included some motor accident claims. My firm did all the work for a well-known national insurance company which had the amusing motto, “We don’t hassle, we pay!” – which was complete rubbish and within the confines of the firm, we switched that to “We don’t pay, we hassle!”

 

And so it transpired that some time during the early 1980’s I was dispatched to the town of Worcester, at the edge of the Klein Karoo, to represent our insurance client in suing a local farmer. The farmer was a horse breeder and on the night in question some farmhand had left a paddock gate open (or the horse had leaped over the gate – and that was the central question in this case). A magnificent black stallion had got out of the paddock, and thereby hung a tale, as Shakespeare once said.

 

At about 2.00 a.m. one particular morning, Alwyn, the wealthy son of a local farmer, a hot-blooded young man of about thirty, was winding his powerful red BMW two-seater through the Hex River Poort, a mountain pass situated on the N1 between Worcester and De Doorns, at breakneck speed. He came round a blind corner with his low-profile racing tyres screaming and encountered the astonishing sight of a magnificent black stallion standing crossways in the road. He was just about on top of the horse when he first saw it: black tarred road, black horse, moonless night, and no time at all to react. Alas, all was lost.

 

A BMW racer is a very low-slung car. The hood of the car got right under the horse’s belly – but not so any other part of the horse. The upper edge of the windshield, followed by the sharp leading edge of the roof, sliced the horse in half, along its entire length – so the abdomen, part of the thorax, and a couple of legs, went through the windscreen. The head and the spine went over the roof. The car rolled on for another two kilometres before choking off and fetching up in a ditch.

 

The road was deserted at that time of the night and the scene was still and silent for about thirty minutes before a truck appeared, travelling out of Worcester towards De Doorns (in the opposite direction to the BMW) and into the mountain pass.

 

The first thing the truck driver saw in his headlights was a young woman, on his side of the road, dressed in what appeared to be an evening dress. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was now 2.30 a.m. The woman appeared to be completely alone, but two alternative scenarios immediately occurred to the driver, who was obviously not a fool.

 

Either this was an ambush and if he pulled over a bunch of thugs would appear out of nowhere and do him some damage and take his truck; or

 

This was one of those roadside ghosts, of which so much has been written in South African folklore, and if he pulled over and she got into the cab - who knows what might happen to him?

 

But as he drew nearer, several details became more evident: firstly, she was completely dishevelled; secondly, her face and arms were streaked with quite a lot of what appeared to be blood; and thirdly her dress, which he had initially thought was a shiny red dress, was in fact completely soaked in the red liquid; and as he drew level with her he realised that she had a wild and what he later described to the police as a “maddish” look about her.

 

This picture did not match either of his imagined scenarios. There was no question, he couldn’t just drive away. There’d been some kind of disaster and this woman needed help urgently.

 

As soon as the passenger door of the driver’s cabin swung open and the cabin light fell on her it was clear that she was indeed covered in blood – but strangely, she did not appear to be injured.

 

“What – who – where are you going?” He stammered, not sure how to begin.

“Police. Worcester. Anywhere. Please!” She was shaking and stuttering so badly that it was an effort for her to speak.

“Get in!” he yelled, to be heard over the growl of the diesel engine. “Close the door!” he yelled, slammed his truck into gear, gunned the engine, and set off once again for Worcester.

 

He left the cabin light on. There was something decidedly creepy about this woman and he wanted to be able to keep an eye on her. In the cabin light he noticed that she was barefoot. Jesus! Barefoot, at night, in the Karoo! Her feet must have been frozen solid! But she had detected hot air coming out of a heating duct at floor level and she moved her feet up against that and a sudden expression of bliss came over her face and she sank back into her seat with a moan of relief.

 

They had hardly gone more than a few hundred metres when, on the opposite side of the road, the red rear reflectors of a car under a bush caught his attention. It was a red BMW racer. It looked pretty smashed up. And then, straining his eyes into the darkness, it appeared that there might be people in the car – or something -  he couldn’t quite make it out. Clearly this wasn’t an old wreck. Something had just happened. His passenger was silent and in fact looked as if she had passed out. He slowed down once more and started to pull over again.

 

“Don’t stop, don’t stop!” yelled his passenger, who had suddenly come alive. She was quite frantic, but he would not be swayed and ignored her. He pulled up on the road shoulder opposite the wreck. The truck, like many of its kind, had a spotlight on the roof of the cab which could be controlled from inside, and turned in any direction. These things are useful for all sorts of purposes on a truck. He turned the light to shine fully on the car. Clearly, the car was occupied, but he couldn’t make out what he was looking at and nothing was moving. He jumped out of his cab and walked up to the driver’s side of the car.

 

What he saw made him freeze in his tracks.

 

Behind the wheel of the car sat a well-dressed man in a sports jacket. His hands were still on the steering wheel. He sat bolt upright. But he had no head. His neck was a mess of raw meat. There was a lot of blood around, starting to coagulate. The passenger door hung open but the passenger seat was empty. Everything was full of shattered glass, which glinted like diamonds in the truck’s spotlight. The back of the cabin seemed to be full of a mess of raw meat and fur of some kind. So full, in fact, that it had blown out the back window of the cabin and the boot lid was strewn was gobs of flesh.

 

“What the hell…” he exclaimed. His own flesh was creeping. He felt revulsion welling up inside him, and he knew that he was going to vomit. He was feeling shaky. He sank down onto his hands and knees beside the wreck and vomited heartily into the Karoo earth.

 

Then he stood up, made his way quickly to his truck, and climbed up into the cab. The passenger door hung open, and his passenger was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t care. He had to get out of there. He leaned across, pulled the passenger door closed, gunned his engine and got his 24-wheeler rolling again. These massive trucks cannot take off quickly, nor can they stop suddenly. This was the mightiest of them all: an Oshkosh, with 18 forward gears – and the driver builds up speed by working his way through the gears. It’s quite a performance, but once these behemoths get going, they get up to the speed limit and they stick to it. They have huge fuel tanks, and they can do Durban to Cape Town without filling up. The drivers are supposed to stop for breaks every two hours, but they don’t. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are occupational hazards. Having left Durban fourteen hours ago this man had been running on pure adrenaline for hours already, but he was an old hand, and he stayed the course.

 

It took him another twenty minutes to find the Worcester police station, park, shut off the engine, and walk through the doors of the charge office.

 

He found a single constable nodding sleepily in his hard Provincial Works Dept office chair, looking forward to the end of his night shift. The constable had but one thought – to climb into his soft warm bed beside his wife and be enveloped by the luxury of sleep. But on this night, it wasn’t going to happen.

 

Dumisani the Oshkosh driver had about 35 years of driving experience. These long-haul, heavy-duty drivers are unquestionably the best drivers on the road. They know their machines, they know (and adhere to) the road rules and they know the roads themselves. Like airline pilots, they are a kind of brotherhood on their own and many of them know each other.

 

So when Dumisani walked into that police station he knew the drill and he reported what he’d seen in a way that the constable could understand. And a patrol van and an ambulance were despatched from their respective bases, and they reached the scene of the smash within minutes of each other. Dumisani made his sworn statement, and having done his duty, he went on his way.

 

Constable Prins wasn’t sure how the story of the woman in the bloodsoaked dress fitted into the story but on the assumption that she might have been a passenger in the car, he had included that part of the story in Dumisani’s statement.

 

Several other policemen had drifted into the charge office while this was happening and they listened to the story while pretending to do other things. After all, this was quite a tale. There was a lull in these activities after Dumisani left. Obviously the guys were turning the story over in their minds.

 

Bear in mind that all they had now was Dumisani’s story – the involvement of the horse had yet to be uncovered and the sudden appearance and disappearance of the woman were still not connected to the smash.

 

In the ensuing days, weeks and months there was much speculation regarding this story:

 

How had that horse got out onto the road?

 

What speed could that car have been doing?

 

These questions were important for my case because the farmer was claiming from his insurer for his horse; the insurer was claiming for the farmer for the loss of the horse; and Alwyn’s young wife was claiming from the insurer of the BMW (our client) for the loss of financial support due to her husband’s death. She was not concerned about the other details – the mystery of the horse in the road, the question of an unidentified woman (in fact it had not even registered with her that there was this story of an unidentified woman in the background) she was grief-stricken, desperate and confused.

 

But all along, there was this other nagging question: had there really been a female passenger, or was Dumisani just a victim of a prank by a roadside ghost? No real woman who fitted his description was ever located.

 

And then the police forensic team who inspected the vehicle found a single, rather elegant and fashionable white high-heeled shoe jammed under the passenger seat. Alwyn’s wife was questioned about the shoe, but she said that it wasn't hers. The implications of their discovery hardly registered with her. But you can’t keep these things secret, so speculation was rife in the district.

 

At that point, and from the point of view of my own involvement, the dispute hinged on the horse: if it’s owner (or his employees) had been negligent in securing the animal for the night, then he could be liable for the insurance claim; if he hadn’t been negligent, then the insurers, who would in any event have to pay out the wife, would not be able to claim compensation from the farmer.

 

And then there’s this:

 

We know that the driver of the red BMW died instantaneously, and we know why. We do not know whether there was a Cinderella in the car at the time of impact but there is at least a possibility that there was. But considering that the driver got his head taken off by the flying fragments of a horse, how is it that she could have walked away uninjured?

 

Well, what if her whole body was below the level of the hood/engine/dashboard at the moment of impact? – she would have been effectively shielded. Everything would have gone over her and all that she would have collected would have been the blood that splashed out. The forensics team could identify Alwyn’s blood and the horses’ blood – but no other blood.

 

There are several plausible reasons why she might have adopted that posture – she could have been putting her shoes on or taking them off; she might have bent over to pick something up off the floor; she might have been performing fellatio on the driver - and so on.

 

But the last suggestion might have reduced his concentration on the road and slowed his reflexes. And, of course, that’s the one the public wanted to go with anyway…

 

We’ll never know.

 

The insurance company lost their case. They couldn’t prove that the farmer or one of his labourers had left the gate open (although months later, at the trial, someone in the courtroom was overheard to say that they had overheard the farmer saying to one of his men, “Ek het jou gese om daai hek toe te maak” (“I told you to shut that gate!”), but he couldn’t be persuaded to repeat that in the witness box), so there was no objectively provable negligence on the farmer’s part. And anyway there was all this doubt and fear about what was going on, or what might be found to have been going on, on the driver’s part … so once again, nothing provable there.

 

Such are the perils of litigation. It can all come down to a few simple words. Or – not.

 

Alwyn’s battered skull was found in a field about two kilometres back from the car, near the mutilated carcass of part of the horse, more or less at the point of impact of car and horse. The point of impact itself was evident only from a set of skid marks from the car’s tyres – and those marks were only about eight metres long, thus demonstrating that the driver had only applied his brakes in the last eight metres before impact. “Cinderella” (as the local press referred to her) – was nowhere to be found …

 

As I said, this story took place in the 1980’s. It left me with bad memories of Worcester. We had decided to go up the day before the trial, meet our advocate there, and spend a few hours in final preparation for the trial the next day. Some fool (who probably had a grudge against us) had recommended that we overnight at the Cumberland Hotel. It was the pits. Worcester was freezing and there was no heating in our room. I went to the reception desk to ask if they could do something for us and I was told that we could have a heater, but that it was “extra”. There was no question, we had to have that, but when I set it up in our room I realised that it was an ancient heater with a bar element – one bar – and it only heated the air in the vicinity of that bar. That experience ensured that we never went back to the mean, ugly little town of Worcester for thirty years.

 

And then about thirty years later I had to return to Worcester for an afternoon for another matter. Again, I took Simone along, the plan being that when I had completed my job in Worcester we would go up the Garden Route to Knysna for a week. So when my job was done we went to a rather quaint and arty coffee shop off to the side of the town for coffee. It was a converted old house and they also sold all sorts of locally-made items and paintings by local artists, with the prices stuck to them. The staff were pleasant and friendly and we ended up chatting to our waitress, who wasn’t busy. She was an Albino (a black person with white skin). You may know that they have very distinct characteristics which are instantly noticeable, and they are usually not well regarded or treated by other black people, and quite hard to coax out of their shells if you want to talk to them. Simone excused herself and stepped out into the backyard to have a cigarette.

 

But this woman looked familiar to me. Why? Where had I seen her before? Her looks were quite distinctive.

 

And then it struck me: thirty years ago, in a magistrates’ court in Worcester, a young woman with these looks had sat in the back row of the public gallery of the court. She sat quietly, she spoke to no-one, and she was there for the duration of the trial. I got the impression that she had had some interest in the case but whatever it was, it was never revealed. Obviously she knew no-one else in the court because when it was over she walked out alone.

 

She was in her fifties now, as was I, but the features that I had noticed were still there. As we chatted, an idea was brewing in my mind. It was hardly possible, it was a very long shot, I thought I was probably wrong, but I decided to try a test:

 

If I spoke softly, and she didn’t hear me, no harm done, forget it;

If I spoke softly and she heard me but didn’t understand what I’d said, still, no harm done, forget it;

But if I spoke softly, and she heard and understood what I said, she could answer one of those lingering questions that had followed me through life.

 

So as she turned to walk away, I said very softly, half-hoping that she wouldn’t hear me, “Do you remember Alwyn?”

She froze in her tracks and dropped the tray she’d been carrying.

Bingo.

After hesitating for a moment, she turned slowly to face me.

She was bewildered and tears welled up in her eyes.

She searched my face for a full sixty seconds, which can be a very long time.

I could actually tell from her face when it dawned on her:

“You – you were the lawyer!”

Neither of us were smiling. It was a rather grim moment. There was really nothing to say and we stared into each other’s eyes in silence. I had invoked unnecessary pain in her. I could see it in her eyes. It may have taken her a long time to quell that pain, and now I’d reawakened it. This, too occurred to me so involuntarily I said,

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

She took two steps backwards, accidentally kicking the tray on the floor. She turned, picked it up, turned again, and fled to the kitchen.

                                                                                           

I did not see her again. When time to came to pay the bill another waitress attended to us.

 

As we drove on to Oudtshoorn, the irony of the name tag pinned to her blouse, came to me.

 

It was Sindi.

 

No-one but a South African could grasp the implications of a relationship such as that between Alwyn and Sindi, in South Africa, in the 1980’s. Racial segregation, which had always existed, became the law of Apartheid in South Africa in 1948. Prior to that, such a relationship might have invited mockery, or shock, or horror, or public humiliation, and most likely ostracism – but after 1948 and up to 1994, a prison sentence would have been added to all of that. There were many such relationships, but the great majority of them ended in tragedy. In South Africa, that was “the love that dared not speak its name”. The toll in human misery will never be known.

 

 

 

IV THE WEST COAST ROAD - N7

 

I was mooching around that showroom, thinking how I’d never even dared to dream of owning such a car, when a salesman homed in on me. I’m not a pushover so I didn’t wait for him to say anything. “Just looking!” I said, “I can’t afford these things!”

“Do you like them?” he asked, mischievously.

“Listen, I know what I can and can’t afford and I’m happy with my car. Just looking.”

 

I’ll save you the verbal manoeuvring. I bought the damn car: an “S”-class 380 with a V8 fuel-injected engine (sometimes referred to by people in the motor trade as “The Jumbo”). I didn’t tell Simone in advance: there would have been a war. But on the day in question, I drove home in this massive, silent machine – so silent, that twice at traffic lights I tried to re-start the engine, thinking that it had choked off. I called Simone from the car and told her that I had some parcels and that I would need her to help me when I got home, and I would ring again for her to come out when I arrived. Thus said, and thus done.

 

The timing was excellent. She was out front when I drove up. I think she thought it was some kind of joke and I was driving someone else’s car. But the deal was a fait accompli and there would have been no point in resisting so there we were. And anyway, as a partner of mine once said, anyone can get used to a higher standard of living.

 

We went all over the country in that car and then one quiet day Simone was off visiting a friend. I had always wondered how fast that car could actually go. I thought about that a lot that morning. I also thought about the West Coast Road, the N7 that runs from Table View past Blouberg and Malmesbury and eventually all the way up to Saldanha and beyond, right into Namibia. It’s virtually dead straight, and almost completely flat with a few mild undulations and its quite intimidating because you have all these huge trucks and cars with big engines barreling along at high speeds (its quite a boring road – you just want to get it over with) and I thought, if you really want to test the speed of a car, that would be an ideal place to do it.

 

But its notorious for its speed traps, so the best thing would be to do the outbound journey at the speed limit, keeping an eye out for speedtraps and then picking a stretch which looked trap-free, and doing the test run on the way back.

 

Which is what I did.

 

I picked a good day. The road was straight, flat and quite dead from a traffic point of view. I found a stretch about 150 kilometres out of Blouberg with not a cop in sight.

 

I did a slow U-turn to face back to Cape Town, picked my moment and started rolling. I wasn’t looking to make any records with the famous 0-60 km/h takeoff the way they do with new models on the market: this car must have weighed two tons or thereabout. I was just looking for top speed, which is quite a different thing. This is a question of brute force.

 

I couldn’t even hear the engine up to about 110 km/h, there was no road noise, no wind whistle, and it sat like a suction cup on the road.

 

No difference at 120 (the national speed limit),130, or 140. This being the West Coast Road, other cars had been overtaking me, but by 150 virtually no-one was overtaking. I was starting to get some respect now. By 160 I was starting to glide slowly past the fastest cars on the road. By 170 I was passing the slow cars at such a speed that they were starting to blur in my vision.

 

At that point I started to wonder about the car’s stability, and I recalled something that I’d heard about formula 1 race cars: apparently the floor of the car is convex, so that a vacuum builds up between the floor of the car and the road. The car is no longer held to the road by its tyres alone, but also by a vacuum under the floor. The car is literally becoming a suction cup. They say that the vacuum under the floor of a Formula 1 racer travelling 300 km/h is so strong that the car can drive upside down along the ceiling.

 

The Mercedes has another feature: the faster it goes, the less power it feeds to the steering mechanism. At a certain point you simply cannot turn the steering anymore, which would prevent the driver from making a sharp turn. At 200 km/h you can no longer turn the steering wheel.

 

The car continued to accelerate steadily up to 200 km/h, after which the rate of acceleration started to fall off gradually. The engine had a nice hum to it, but I was very aware of the powerful forces working around me: aside from the engine, there was wind resistance, and a wind cross-current that was stating to make itself felt in small, lateral, buffeting movements, which I would not have felt at a lower speed; every undulation in the road surface was transmitted to the driver’s seat; I could hear the road-noise of the tyres through the body of the car; I could hear the rush of the wind against the tightly-sealed windows.

 

This was the fastest that I had ever travelled in a motor car, and it was still accelerating albeit more slowly now. It just wouldn’t quit.

 

When I got to 210 I started to doubt the wisdom of what I was doing. The car had developed a slight rocking motion that I didn’t like. I hesitated, as the speedometer crept up to 220, and the rocking motion became more emphasised.

 

Far in the distance I noticed an untarred farm road that ran to meet the road that I was on. A red car was travelling on that road towards our intersection. “Enough!” I thought, “the game’s over.” – and took my foot off the accelerator, leaving the engine to do whatever it wanted. The car responded immediately, reducing speed quite effectively without the need for me to brake. The red car was waiting for me to pass. I was close to the speed limit by the time I did so and I got a good look. It was a red BMW 2-seater.

 

I kept the car for a month after that, but I’d lost my taste for it. I called Johnny Schmidt of Claremart Auctioneers and he sent someone to collect it. I was done with big cars, fast cars, fancy cars….

 

@HARRY FRIEDLAND

“Marimba”

29 April 2023