The V without victory

THE MAN in the polished white Peugeot, who has grey hair, is not - is he? is he? - going to take, to steal, my parking space, because that would be too much . . . I'm crouched above the steering wheel, tense, late, waiting for the car which is already parked in the space to edge out across my bows, temporarily blocking me off, leaving the space vulnerable.

Jesus] He . . . is, he's really doing it, and, for three seconds, I'm pure fury; I can feel my fingers taking up their positions, almost instinctively, the thumb like a strap across the ring and little fingers of my right hand, the index and middle fingers stiff, ready to jab upwards, and my girlfriend, in the passenger seat, sees it coming and shouts 'No] No]', but it's too late . . .

What, exactly, do I want to do here? I want to insult this man, to make him feel bad about what he's done; more important, I don't just want to show him my disapproval - oh, he knows I must disapprove of him; he can't fail to know that, the old bastard - but I want to hurt him as well, to do him a little bit of psychological damage. Does he know, for instance, quite how dim you have to be to cut somebody up in the car park for the sake of saving a couple of minutes, when you've just spent an afternoon turtle-waxing your car? Old fool. Small-minded git.

A gesture needs to be good if it's going to get a complex message across, and obviously I can't hope for much, but in the moment of pure fury, at least I want to try. So I'm jabbing my fingers, stiff and fast, with a 0-45 degree flicking motion, just as the car goes past me and into the parking space, but I'm a second too late, narrowly missing the driver's sightline, but getting a nice one in his passenger's face, a prim-looking woman, possibly his wife, and for a single, joyful moment, I think: yes]

'What . . . what're you doing?'

'The old bastard] The old bastard]'

'Stop it]'

My hand is down, I'm leaning back, but still peering at the Peugeot, still hungry for confrontation; as soon as it's over, I realise the

V-sign hasn't done the trick, it didn't do the trick at all. I'm thinking of other possible gestures now, to intensify my insult, to show contempt - the single-finger, the 'wanker'; I'm clenching my jaw, breathing hard through my nose, not quite in control . . .

Once, when I was a teenager, a group of us were arguing on the Brighton seafront with a group of Moroccans who, when the confrontation reached flashpoint, pulled out a great- looking insult: semi-squatting, they put both hands, palms outwards, between their legs, and flapped them upwards in a wafting motion; a real Premier-League insult. Delivered with sincerity, it had a strange power. I thought: if only we had something as good as that, something better than just two jabbing fingers and a leer.

But what? In the car park, the grey-haired man - he must be 60 - struggles out of the car, turning towards me, and I'm right on the edge; another moment of pure rage is still on the cards. He looks at me; I grin at him, moulding my face into a leer, furious, partly because of the uselessness of my gesture; I wanted to offend, and my gesture came nowhere. As an insult, it just wasn't doing its job.

So how on earth could my parents have lectured me, 20 years ago, on how incredibly rude, how effective the V-sign was? Was it really? And if so, what a superb place the world must have been - not when my parents lectured me, but in the 1940s and 50s when their ideas were formed. Just imagine: someone chugs their old pre-war box into your space; you flick them a Vee. And it . . . works; they stagger back, shocked, not quite the same for the rest of the day. And was this great power you possessed counterbalanced by equally great feelings of guilt? Did you, too, feel not quite the same for the rest of the day as well?

Recently, Germaine Greer said that the V- sign signified: 'Up two of yours' a double- barrelled jab at the two adjacent female orifices, which meant, handily, that 'the inclusion of the second finger when it is a man to be intimidated or insulted' entails a 'fantasy feminising of the individual'. What flights of fancy] What optimism] How I wish it were true; it might come in handy with this Peugeot driver. But it wouldn't work, would it? He wouldn't know about the fantasy feminising; he wouldn't catch the drift at all.

So what's happened? When did it all go wrong? For one thing, we don't fear the disapproval of others these days - quite often, we actively court it. These days, obscene words are often used in contexts where they are not supposed to be rude; correspondingly, the most typical V-sign these days is ironic, the sort of gesture you'd give to a friend when he walks into a bar after his team has beaten yours - the gesture is as devalued as the words it's meant to represent.

So what do I do? The man steps along the channel between his car and the one parked next to him, the piece of the car park that is supposed to be mine; he looks at me and smiles. My V-sign has made him smile: is this a possibility? I didn't think it had gone this far. What should I do? Kick his car when he's gone? Put a ball of newspaper up his exhaust- pipe? Get my key and rip a jagged line into his shiny paintwork? Of course not. But being unable to resort to obscenity pushes us towards, not peace, but escalation: 20 years ago, I'd have been happy to flick my fingers at him, and he'd have been unhappy that I'd done it.

Now, I look at him, walking along in his zippered jacket and slacks, and he turns and smiles again. I'm not going to get out of the car and flap my hands up and down between my legs. That's not the way forward. I wind down the window, and, horribly, find myself shouting: 'You know what your problem is? You're old] You're senile]' My girlfriend is hiding her face. I'm in disgrace. Maybe, in retrospect, I should have delivered a single- finger salute. That might have done the trick. Or is that just wishful thinking?-