Dialogue: Just the ticket for boyhood flashback

By JOE BENNETT

The worst of it is that I shall be fined a fat sum of money.

No, I lie. The worst of it is, well, let's start at the beginning.

A windy afternoon, fragile sunshine thin as cellophane, chilliness coming off the sea at 40 km/h, perfect for keeping the sand-castle-building, shallows-paddling, shell-collecting kiddiwinks off the beach and leaving it free for me and the dogs and the sticks I shall throw them.

Into the car and off to the beach, stopping only to post a letter to a madwoman. Past the sewage ponds we drive where the wind whips up little brown waves, on the crests of which the sunshine splinters.

Right at the roundabout, my three-legged dog barking out the window at the smell of the salt, then over the bridge in, would you believe it, Bridge St, and stopping at the junction with Marine Parade. Look right, look left, look right again along a road as clear as conscience.

Only a single ancient woman hunched against the wind with a sad bag of groceries. The littoral is empty and the whole beach will be ours.

Swing right on to the beach road, then drive 200m past the blockhouse surf club with its desolate carpark and the clump of conifers all crabbed from the sand-laden winds, and pull over to park in the bay of rough grass, glancing as I do so, oh so properly, in the mirror.

Lights. Lights flashing red and blue in the radiator grille of an otherwise unmarked car.

I get out of my car and so does the cop. The dogs are puzzled. I've no idea what I've done wrong and yet already round the base of my neck unwanted bubbles of schoolboy guiltiness, fear of authority and a sense of being in the wrong are going crawlabout as they've not done for years.

And a sort of pricking lightness in my arms and palms. And a knowledge that I am only a couple of words away from blushing. I hate myself for all of it.

He calls me "sir". I don't call him anything. Around his belt the usual uninteresting paraphernalia of enforcement. On his feet the regulation heavy soles. I am old enough to have taught him.

He has stopped me, he says, because I was speeding. I want to say he hasn't stopped me.

Here was my destination. I had already arrived and safely. But I do not say that. I say, God help me, "sorry".

"Eighty k," he says, "in a fifty k zone. That's a little bit excessive."

Mentally I gesture to the carnage I have wrought in my whirlwind passage down that deserted road. I gesture to the absence of strewn bodies, of orphaned children, of stove-in sides of houses. But I say nothing.

I feel simple injustice, that I, who drive like a spinster, who have had since I turned 30 and the hormones stopped their roaring, a driving licence spotless as a wimple, who hurts nobody and pay my taxes and uphold the laws I don't find inconvenient, am now having my details laboriously recorded in his stage-policeman's flip-top notebook.

"We're having a blitz on speed this month," he says.

The woman with groceries battles past on the pavement, turning her hunch and her headscarf to look at me, pleased to see me caught. Trouble's good to watch.

"A blitz, a blitz on speed, oh that's just dandy. But not on speed like mine. My speed's okay. The speed you want is hoonish speed, the needless growling adolescent speed of nasty low-slung cars with spoiler-things, the speed of boys and men with horrid haircuts who go fast only to go fast, who speed in just the manner that a rooster crows.

"That's the speed you should be after, not middle-aged speed in a dirty old car on a poker-straight road with nothing to hit."

Of course I don't say any of that. Instead, and to my deep astonishment, as if I were the sudden victim of ventriloquism, I hear myself say "Thank you".

My tone of voice reminds me of a schoolboy in some ancient institution who stands after a caning and shakes his assailant's hand.

The cop drives away. I release the dogs, follow to the beach and kick the sand. The monstrous fine will be nasty but it's not what makes me kick. What swings that kick is petulance, a feeble schoolboy whine of "that's unfair", a deep conviction that the rules should not apply to me.

And also, more important, the glimpse I've just been granted of the schoolboy I had never much admired, extant still within my ageing frame, as craven, base and whining as he ever was. That's the worst of it.