The Idler

ON THE MIDNIGHT RUN

Hungry, desperate alone; MATTHEW DE ABAITUA ventures out for a Ginsters and steps into the alternative reality of the all-night garage.

“Two Ginsters pasties, maybe a pork pie or a scotch egg, something meal-ish.” I conjure food possibilities and then roll their brand names across my tongue. “A flapjack, stodgy, mmm; a flapjack covered in chocolate, better.” There are five of us here, perhaps one or two others who have already assumed crash positions behind the sofa. I have taken the orders for the all-night garage run countless times, but it never gets easier.

As a child, I used to play swingball. Sometimes the ball-on-a-rope would wrap around the pole, and we would have to take a break from all the fun of the game to disentangle it. Much the same process has occurred in relation to my life; most of the time spent calmly swinging from one side to the next, trying to earn a crust (but never the whole loaf) until the rope snags and I become wrapped around this lounge, with this handful of people, taking down orders to satisfy their late-night cravings. I try to explain that the shop people know who I am; they know what I am up to. I try to explain the poignancy of the swingball metaphor to them. “A King Size Mars Bar!” calls a voice from behind the sofa, cutting off my protest. There is no more avoiding it. I am going out. I have my list, I have some currency. I may be some time.

A landscape is a state of mind. A field of abundant corn is a sense of open, well-being. The grand hotels, theatres and pernickety Italian restaurants of Picadilly are arrogance, the baroque thoughts of a rich ?�lite. But these morning glories are not for me. My state of mind is at one with the walk to the all-night garage, with the terrace houses breathing down my neck, with the tower blocks giving me the finger. It is not so much paranoia, as a kind of hyper-sensitivity. Whenever I see the oily shadows of after-pub gangs coalescing down the end of the street, it sets off a series of violent vibrations on my membranous state of mind. I am stretched drum-skin tight across the evening, rolling and unrolling the shopping list in my pocket, tense and ready for the showdown.

Decaying halogen lights reveal the rictus grins of revellers, as they zoom by encased in the black shells of taxi cabs. I catch a glimpse of their faces and wince, preferring to huddle down into the walk. “A landscape is a state of mind.” This is my mantra for survival as I trudge by the silhouettes of urban trees, frozen in their dance along the boulevard, toward the revolving sign of the late night oasis.

Eventually I reach the garage and make my way towards the porthole. I read the list into this orifice, the arsehole of the establishment, and wait for my desired effluent to be squeezed out. Tonight I am tempted to order a giant-size pack of Corn Flakes to constipate the delivery. This idea was suggested to me by Matt, a Geordie eccentric who collects copies of Jaws: The Novel from charity shops around the world. Once he blew the last of his cash in Amsterdam on a translation discovered in a pile of vacuum cleaners. He now owns over fifty copies of the book, lining four shelves, and he still prides himself on never even having read it. I am so enamoured with Matt’s hobby that I almost fluff the Rizla order. It is hard to keep my mind on the task at hand.

I order five Ginsters pasties. Strange, since most rational people wouldn’t go within a yard of one. Ginsters pasties suffer from a reverse-Cinderalla syndrome. Before midnight, their mattress of pastry and ineffectual fillings are as appealing as eating the gristle out of the knees of ostriches. After midnight, they are transformed into haute cuisine. I spend some time deliberating over which flavour to order; should it be chicken and mushroom (which tastes like a skin sample from a leprous fowl and two bonsai fungi) or steak and kidney (there is no more traumatising epiphany than waking up at three in the morning with a piece of rubbery kidney crawling towards your eye). Can I really go down this road, the self-loathing of actually requesting that the grey flesh of a pork pie be passed to me to satiate the insidious desires a late night arouses? Must we delve into the horror of actually buying a microwave burger with the taste and consistency of a surgical sock? Strip the pastry from them and serve me a succession of naked lunches. I could construct a second skin out of the diaphanous cheese slices to help your understanding of the exact nature of this masochistic ritual but I doubt it would help either of us. Some people like to pierce their nipples and encase themselves in rubber; some people like to be whipped; some people like to be chained; I prefer to abuse myself with cheap meat products.

I leave the garage. I cross the forecourt and realise I have only bought one side of the list. Horrified, I turn it over and see five orders, five unfulfilled requests, and one of them is the King Size Mars Bar. There is no way I can skip back to the porthole to get them. A queue has formed, suspicions would be aroused, questions would be asked about my state of mind. No. I must push on to the 7-Eleven.

At least at the all-night garage the transaction is conducted outside. If events took a hellish turn, I could always run away. At the 7-Eleven there is no escape. When I walk in the faces of the other customers revolve to look at me. They have hunted eyes, and they all look disturbingly like myself. We are all adrift in search of King Size Mars Bars. A procession of Escher clones marches up the aisles, along the soft drinks section, down the confectionery section and back up the aisles, condemned by their indecision to roam these parts forever. The man behind the counter interrogates us with his minute pupils. They have been shrunken by his need to limit his attention span to the thirty seconds it takes to complete a transaction. They have contracted around the circumference of his existence. His psychosis was induced by moving small change from my palm to the till tray, from the till tray to my palm, putting my order into a bag, giving the bag to me, taking the change from the palm of my clone, moving it to the till, putting the clone’s confectionery into a bag, taking change from the palm of my clone’s clone, putting the change into the till, putting its goods into a bag, watching us leave with pinprick eyes before turning them upon the next chain of customers.

After twenty minutes of circling the store I have mentally tasted everything on its shelves. I have considered cobbling together the ingredients for a cake but had to give up when I couldn’t lay my hands on any vanilla essence. I have considered buying some bouncy balls. Lingering over some Phileas Fogg products, my eyes meet with one of my clones. We scrabble for the last bag of Tortillas but my doppleg?�nger wins. Unable to take the indecision any longer, I grab a King Size Mars bar, push my way through the counter, slam it onto the formica and scream; “For God’s sake just give me everything except this!”

PS The moral of this tale is this: travelling to the all night-garage is bad for you. But trying to calculate everyone’s change is worse.