My car overheated in slow-moving traffic so I rang the local garage and the man said bring it in on Monday and he’d have a look. I was anxious to find out why my car was overheating because if the head gasket was blown, it would cost more to fix than it was worth and I’d have to throw the car away. ‘What time shall I drop it round?’ I said. ‘Quarter to nine,’ he said.
I remember that, his being specific about a time. I dropped the car in on the dot and on the Friday I went round to collect it, assuming he had forgotten to ring to tell me that the car was ready. But it wasn’t ready. He hadn’t even had time to glance at it, to be honest, he said. His chief mechanic was away on honeymoon, he said, and he was working his way through a backlog of work.
Well, a month went by and still he was saying he hadn’t had time to look at it. This was frustrating because you need a car if you live around here. So I started combing the secondhand car adverts for a cheap stand-in. If this sounds spineless and extravagant, it is, I suppose, but have you seen how cheap secondhand cars are at the moment? It’s ridiculous.
How about this, for example. Mercedes e190, 1992, no rust, private plate, 11 months’ MOT, five months’ tax, good runner: £300 ono. I rang the number. If this car was all the author of the advert said it was, it would be perfect. Even if the chief mechanic decided to settle in the Dominican Republic with his bride, and it took the garage man five months to get round to addressing the overheating problem on my car, I’d have a legal set of wheels to be going on with for the price of an evening in a lap-dancing bar.
The vendor said his name was Reg; not a name I automatically associate with probity. I had an Uncle Reg once, a wonderful man, the kindest and best, but he was the only man in our family who has ever got to see the inside of Wormwood Scrubs. This Reg was in the trade, he said. He sounded like a pleasant, easy-going person, but I sensed that on the other end of the phone a quick and devious intelligence was carefully sounding the extent of my ignorance. A £300 shed and still I was getting the Oscar-nominee performance.
The car had come in as a part-exchange, Reg confided, and he and his fellow salesmen were so taken with it that they were using it as a ‘run around’. (That old chestnut. Everywhere the car goes, people fall in love with it.) Usually, he ‘weighs in’ these older part-exchanges for their scrap value, he said, but this one was just too good. A car like that just didn’t deserve to be scrapped. (So I’d be riding to the rescue and righting a wrong.) He could show me the car at six o’clock, he said.
At six o’clock it was pouring with rain and darker than either of us had imagined it would be. His directions led me to an industrial estate. The car was parked beside a plastics factory. ‘So we’re meeting in the pitch-dark at a neutral venue, Reg,’ I observed as we shook hands. He was a big man with a big head wearing a big coat. But mentally he was light on his feet. And he looked at me carefully, as though adding the final touches to his understanding of my essential character. ‘What’s there to see?’ he said. ‘Look at her. She’s a straight car that’s just been through an MOT.’ And perhaps betraying his final conclusion about me, he said, ‘The trouble with cars showing their age a bit is that the police are more likely to stop you. Old Bill wouldn’t look twice at this one. She’s respectable.’
It was certainly a point worth mentioning. In fact, he’d hit the nail squarely on the head. I squinted through the rain at the car. There was no more to be said. I pulled out the cash and handed it over.
And to be fair, Reg was telling the truth: she’s a nice, straight little car, and she looks quite respectable even in broad daylight. The first place I visited in my new car was the local garage. My other car was parked in its usual spot. ‘Have you managed to have a look yet?’ I said. The garage man started regretfully shaking his head at me before I’d got the question out. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said with a languid wave of surrender. ‘Take your time. I’ve bought another one to be going on with.’
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