Monte Carlo

by Peter Terrin, David Doherty

Genres: Disaster Fiction; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

It is the Monaco Grand Prix in May 1968. Jack Preston, a mechanic for Team Sutton, is making the final checks on his car as the beau monde mingles with the drivers under the eyes of the world's press and the galleries of spectators. DeeDee, a starlet of great beauty, seems to be walking towards him, or perhaps towards the royal box. Without warning a fireball rips across the starting grid. Preston will always bear the scars as a consequence of his unthinking heroism, his saving the life and the beauty of the girl, but details of the accident remain vague - no photographs capturing the moment have come to light. Weeks later, Preston emerges from hospital and goes home to his wife in a remote English village from which the drab atmosphere of the 1950s has yet to recede. There, as he slowly recovers, he awaits word from his employers and some sign of DeeDee's gratitude, an acknowledgment that it was he who saved her life. This is an unsettlingly beautiful story of obsession by an acknowledged master of classical restraint. Translated from the Dutch by David Doherty

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 176

Sample

Jack Preston was thirteen when he began to tinker with the tractor over at Colin’s farm. It was a Massey Ferguson from the early Thirties that stood in the shadow of one of the huge sheds built at right angles to the road. There were six sheds on either side, giving the road the appearance of a driveway that ran through Colin’s land. Some had open sides to keep the hay dry. In the preceding two years Jack Preston had become a taciturn boy, ever since he had stood beside his mother and listened as a man from the army, holding his cap against the gleaming buttons of his uniform and staring over their heads into the hallway behind them, recited the message he had been ordered to deliver.

The tractor had been doomed to slowly rust, shot through with climbing weeds, a quiet place for the cats to shelter from the wind. It was a process to which Colin and his farmhands had resigned themselves, though none of them would have admitted it. Every farm had one – a tractor, a trailer, a muck cart, something that from a given moment never again left its spot, an object to which time could stick and stake its claim in a setting that was caught up in the turning of the seasons.

Jack would run over to the farm after school. Sometimes he would see no-one there for days on end and the looming, abandoned sheds frightened him so much that he murmured an Our Father as he concentrated on the job he had set himself. As yet he knew nothing of engines, could not begin to explain how they worked. He tinkered. He arranged the components of the dismantled engine one by one on a horse blanket. In search of replacements for worn seals, he explored the drawers of the workshop in the nearest shed. He polished with spit and rags. Each time he ventured a little deeper, memorising his way into the heart of the machine before fitting everything together as if slowly backing out of a room he had entered.

After three months, the engine of the Ferguson shone like new. The fact that it still did not run was of no great importance.

Through the viewfinder of her camera the woman sees a man with brilliantine in his hair pull a length of duct tape from the roll. Another man looks on with his chin tucked into his chest, watching as his workmate crouches between the front and back wheels of the Sutton at the end of the front row of cars closest to her. Taking the edge between his teeth, the man with the tape tears off a strip and sticks it to the bodywork. The fat, Italian-looking man beside her is first to react. Out of the corner of her eye she sees his hairy forearm abruptly leave its resting place on his thigh and just as she grasps the connection between the rising, pointing arm and the length of black tape obscuring the top half of the image in the middle of the bodywork, she hears her husband moan. Her husband is a reserved man, a man of business, a property broker with connections in the world of Formula One – connections about which she hears nothing specific and about which she does not enquire, in accordance with the unspoken agreements that keep matrimonial relations running smoothly – yet now she distinctly hears him utter a moan of disappointment, of disbelief, and feels a rush of indignation at the shameless ambush of this unthinkable, almost theatrical sound, albeit not half as theatrical as the arm of the fat, Italian-looking man. Through the viewfinder she continues to look at the image on the Sutton, until a second strip of tape hides it from view. A sailor. Yes, she clearly saw the head of a sailor. A roar of laughter from the fat man punches a hole in the dignified serenity of the grandstand. There is the odd flurry of disapproval, but the overriding mood is one of amusement, protest mixed with amusement, the tumult builds and the man with the roll of tape takes a bashful look over his shoulder, unsettled perhaps by the response he has triggered. The black tape has obscured a noble, three-quarter portrait of a sailor with a ginger beard, framed by a lifebelt entwined in rope. The word “Player’s” is still legible above, the words “Navy Cut” below. Ginger beard, red lettering. A brand of cigarettes.

Even before he takes the tape between his teeth and tears off the first strip he can feel the eyes of the spectators on his back. Those eyes are everywhere and on a Grand Prix weekend even the mechanics do not escape their notice. Along with the drivers and the cars, they too are worth watching, and while no-one has come especially to see them, they become part of the spectacle: the men who get to touch those insanely expensive raci. . .