Joe Bennett: Youths and cars, low-slung, fat-tyred, over-powered, dark-windowed

A young man and the pride and joy of his life - his car. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

So there I was, lugging my fat about the hills in a bid to be rid of it, an ageing man on the move, striding out, not swinging the arms with the vigour of the truly committed, but still filling the chest, and shifting, as my mother used to say, the cobwebs, and I came down the muddy little steps onto the end of Foster Terrace and there in front of me, not 30 yards away, in all its unglory, was youth, decadent youth.

I wrote last week about a crusty landlord many years ago who hurled us from his pub for being long-haired and decadent. Well the feelings that surged in him back then were the same as surged in me when I beheld this youth, with the only difference being that the landlord was wrong to feel this way and I was right. My reason was the car, the youth's car.

You have already pictured it. Low-slung, fat-tyred, over-powered, dark-windowed. With all its vile appurtenances it had to be worth at least $20,000. Aged 18 I did not have $20,000. How did this youth get it? Theft? Criminally indulgent parents? Loan sharks? I don't know and in reality I don't much care. And nor do I resent his having a car. Or his driving it too fast, so long as he doesn't drive it into me. What I resent is the noise.

The beast is designed to make more noise than it needs to. Its noise is its point. It exists to announce its presence. Its primitive testosteronic growl belongs on an Attenborough documentary. And when it intrudes on my world with a violence that silences conversation, that crushes thought and peace, I become on the instant like my old dog Baz, a horse-sized beast as black as midnight, who, whenever he heard a noise he thought might constitute a threat would leap from the chair he slept in and stand tall and proud facing the source of the noise - be it the roar of wind, or the hiss of a possum and the hackles would rise along his back from nape to rump, like some furry stegosaurus.

The youth, the owner of this hateful car was demonstrating exactly why I hate it, why it makes my hackles rise, by making noise with it. The car was parked but the engine was running. The driver's door was open. And he was pressing the accelerator, revving the thing, and at the same time leaning out the door to look behind at the fattened exhaust, delighting no doubt at the way it magnified the engine noise and broadcast it to announce his royal and all-important presence.

I thought of remonstrating, as I always do, and then decided there was no point, as I also always do. I resolved to do nothing but deliver a look of scathing disdain that he'd neither care about nor in all probability notice. But he looked up as I came by. And he looked up, to my astonishment, apologetically.

"It's not what it looks like," he said. "I'm not just gunning it. It's just the muffler was making this weird noise, sort of a high-pitched rattle. Can you hear it?"

And here he pressed the gas again and I listened and I said I wasn't sure if I could hear it or not because I wasn't sure what I was listening for. The lad looked genuinely worried, as if a beloved child were wheezing.

Ten seconds later I was sitting in the sunken driver's seat pressing the accelerator on command while he lay half beside and half underneath the car and studied the fattened exhaust, and then he stood up and said, "I think that's done it."

And I got out and he got in and he asked me to listen while he drove it a bit and though I still didn't know what I was listening for I said I would, and he drove it up to the end of Foster Terrace and then back and stopped and wound his window down and grinned endearingly.

"You seem to have done the trick," he said. I said I had a gift for this sort of thing and wished him well and meant it, and he wound the tinted window up and put his foot down and the great revolting beast went deafeningly back down Foster Terrace.