Read Online The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page B

they approach it.
    ‘I
smell burning,’ says Mrs Fiedke as they stand at the corner waiting for another
taxi to come along. Lise sniffs, her lips parted and her eyes moving widely
from face to face among the passers-by. Then she sneezes. Something has
happened to the people in the street, they are looking round, they are sniffing
too. Somewhere nearby a great deal of shouting is going on.
    Suddenly
round the corner comes a stampede. Lise and Mrs Fiedke are swept apart and
jostled in all directions by a large crowd composed mainly of young men, with a
few smaller, older and grimmer men, and here and there a young girl, all
yelling together and making rapidly for somewhere else. ‘Tear-gas!’ someone
shouts and then a lot of people are calling out, ‘Tear-gas!’ A shutter on a
shop-front near Lise comes down with a hasty clatter, then the other shops
start closing for the day. Lise falls and is hauled to her feet by a tough man
who leaves her and runs on.
    Just
before it reaches the end of the street which joins the circular intersection
the crowd stops. A band of grey-clad policemen come running towards them, in
formation, bearing tear-gas satchels and with their gas-masks at the ready. The
traffic on the circular intersection has stopped. Lise swerves with her crowd
into a garage where some mechanics in their overalls crouch behind the cars and
others take refuge underneath a car which is raised on a cradle in the process
of repair.
    Lise
fights her way to a dark corner at the back of the garage where a small red
Mini-Morris, greatly dented, is parked behind a larger car. She wrenches at the
door, forcefully, as if she expects it to be locked. It opens so easily as to
throw her backwards, and as soon as she regains her balance she gets inside,
locks herself in and puts her head down between her knees, breathing heavily,
drawing in the smell of petrol blended faintly with a whiff of tear-gas. The
demonstrators form up in the garage and are presently discovered and routed out
by the police. Their exit is fairly orderly bar the shouting.
    Lise
emerges from the car with her zipper-bag and her hand-bag, looking to see what
damage has been done to her clothes. The garage men are vociferously commenting
on the affair. One is clutching his stomach proclaiming himself poisoned and
vowing to sue the police for the permanent damage caused him by tear-gas.
Another, with his hand to his throat, gasps that he is suffocating. The others
are cursing the students whose gestures of solidarity, they declare in the
colourful derisive obscenities of their mother-tongue, they can live without.
They stop when Lise limps into view. There are six of them in all, including a
young apprentice and a large burly man of middle age, without overalls, wearing
only a white shirt and trousers and the definite air of the proprietor.
Apparently seeing in Lise a tangible remnant of the troubles lately visited
upon his garage, this big fellow turns on her to vent his fury with unmastered
hysteria. He advises her to go home to the brothel where she came from, he
reminds her that her grandfather was ten times cuckolded, that she was
conceived in some ditch and born in another; after adorning the main idea with
further illustrations he finally tells her she is a student.
    Lise
stands somewhat entranced; by her expression she seems almost consoled by this
outbreak, whether because it relieves her own tensions after the panic or
whether for some other reason. However, she puts a hand up to her eyes,
covering them, and in the language of the country she says, ‘Oh please, please.
I’m only a tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey. I’ve hurt my foot.’ She
drops her hand and looks at her coat which is stained with a long black oily
mark. ‘Look at my clothes,’ Lise says. ‘My new clothes. It’s best never to be
born. I wish my mother and father had practised birth-control. I wish that pill
had been invented at the time. I feel sick, I feel