One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (10 page)

Baling along through the scorching midday heat of the 131, but now newly enclosed in the Italianate cockpit of a late-1950s Facel Vega luxury supercar, I felt like a doomed man. Not doomed as in ‘destined to die soon’ – for I knew that choice remained my own – but after yesterday’s colossal events and last night’s extraordinary reminiscences with the people I’d loved so? Well, I knew that my comeuppance was nigh, for I myself had commenced that Countdown merely by returning to Sardinia. But as these past sixteen years since the Kidnapping had so often seemed merely a waste of daylight, my confrontation last night with the Fascist Cheese Factory of our nightmares had been a roaring success. For its awesome presence alone had precipitated in me an exhausting flood of carefully forgotten memories, a pell-mell micro-tsunami of wild recollections pouring down so thick-and-fast that they entirely breached my selective memory. And so the result was, this noontime, that my branium remained somewhat tortured by my recognition of the beauty and compassion of former lady friends, and by the intense Mithraic fire of my old compadrés. I recognised that I was doomed at a Cosmological level for I am a Higher Being, though cognisant of this fact only on occasion. But whenever
in
that brief Cognisant State, I recognise instantly just how great is the Task expected of me. I was doomed to be judged by the success or failure of my actions; doomed to be judged in as much detail as the Normans had
judged the Saxons in their
Domesday Book
. So had I any real chance of achieving my Sardinian Mission in the days allotted? My brief return to the Distant Time of my Ancestors had been so pharmaceutically beneficial that I couldn’t help but ache and yearn for that simple life of ephedra and its guaranteed high. But even Time Travellers of my own inestimable age enjoy only glimpses of their other concurrent incarnations, for it is said that too much self-awareness of the Parallel You can lead to a huge build-up of trapped gas, and everybody knows it’s the Old Farts that destroy the Universe.

Nevertheless, here we were now, we two. Back together after all, Anna of the generous spirit had not stood me up, not left me to stew at Su Talleri, but had returned joyful and re-charged, ready to continue with my Mission
and
driving the kind of wheels that James Bond would have been proud to be seen in. Why had this lovely lady come back? But I could ask myself that only once before I became overcome by the churlishness of such a question. Better instead to kiss the ground in gratitude that one so open-minded had been booked as my final guide. And as we high-tailed it southwards, Anna and I now kept making accidental eye contact as we both compulsively checked each other out, each of us grinning slightly hysterically, possibly sharing simultaneously the bizarre notion that yesterday’s supernatural events had been experienced only in the company of this near complete stranger. And now it was as though both of our inner seven-year-olds were secretly chanting at the other in playground singsong:
I’ve seen you in your undies! I’ve seen you in your undies!
However, as both of us were now sitting considerably closer together than yesterday – this being a high-velocity Franco-Suisse sports tourer – it was enchanting to discover that Anna’s determined driving expressions and wild-eyed
declamations to foolish drivers only increased her magnetism the closer she advanced towards my magnifying glass. Indeed, it was as though only now was I ‘registering’ Anna, or perhaps re-registering her through the blessèd filter of last night’s spectacular reminiscences of Moravian womankind. So, both of us sitting there strapped-in, side-by-side, each slightly smirking at the other, well, as the novelty high-speed situation that it was, I concluded … fair enough. And thus in shyness our Sunday conversation started up only just as we zoomed south past the Paulilátino exit of the 131, a full fifteen minutes after our reunion.

Anna reached among the sheaf of papers on the dash and handed to me a tiny hardback copy of D. H. Lawrence’s
Sea and Sardinia.
Whoa! Better to inquire what pages therein did I
not
know! Why, as one born and bred in Lawrence’s own hometown of Eastwood, bawling my way into the world at 39, Barber Street – directly between ye Sage’s primary school and childhood home – these exquisite dark green hardbacks with their gold lettering had pervaded my boyhood existence. Like secular Gideons Bibles,
Sea and Sardinia
could be found on the tables of even the most monosyllabic households in Eastwood, and nearly always in immaculate, unread condition. It was as though the strictly sensible council of our Midland mining town – desperate to divert attention from the Chatterley ways of our most misunderstood son – had deluged Eastwood with
Sea and Sardinia
in a bid to sell Lawrence to locals purely as a travel writer. Fine by Teenage Me – the Sardinia book was certainly less embarrassing than
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, for fuck’s sake.

Better still, my super-thorough knowledge of
Sea and Sardinia
had been my perfect method of introduction to my hero Jim Morrison – then just thirty-four years old – when he’d passed through Eastwood on a Lawrence kick during the late ’70s. Having just legged it up the hill from school, I was toking a cheeky one outside Eastwood Guitars on the corner of Dovecote Road, when Jim stumbled by all bearded and lean, refused the ‘damned ciggy’ I offered him, then requested directions to the nearest off licence. Trembling with excitement at meeting one of my big heroes, I’d led him across the road round the back of the Man In Space, where my Auntie Florrie crated us up with free Pale Ale, then we took off on a traipse around D. H.’s fave haunts. Luckily, Eastwood Council’s policies had indoctrinated me with sufficient
Sea and Sardinia
to bullshit Jim into believing
he was in the presence of the next Thomas Chatterton. I didn’t mean to spread it on so thick, but … well, I wanted to make an impression, I suppose.

The Jimbo that drank me under the table in Eastwood that night had just returned from Limerick in the W. of Ireland and was nearly suicidal. He said he’d gone in search of the Kelt inside him, but had discovered only the Viking, and that all of his own songs of the sea – his chants, his shanties – had, in that dire hotel room in the Limerick Strand, risen up as one great Canon to beseech him to leave, to run, to quit the city and its environs. Mercy me, I thought. Jim described a chronic and vicious illness-inducing weather depression that filtered permanently east up the mouth of the river Shannon into Limerick city centre, where the sickness malingered, unable to dissipate due to a massive membrane of cloud created by the surrounding mountains. Jim told me that there had been ‘such a slough of despond hanging trapped over Limerick’ that he’d had to flee from that place and its heinous past. Moreover, on his final night in the Limerick Strand, the civic ghosts of the city’s 17th-century leaders – Clanricarde, Hugh Dubh O’Neill and Mayor Piers Creagh FitzPiers – had all visited Jim’s hotel room as one spectral deputation, offering their apologia as to why negotiations with the English Parliamentarians had been so devastatingly mishandled. Jim then described how, during a ‘bedside vigil’ by a spectral being that called itself Aphorismical Discovery, he had unwittingly infuriated the spectre by refusing its ‘generous proposal’ that Jim compose a new Irish river elegy with these first lines:

I was seventeen. What do you say? It was the making of me. Later that same night, Jim nearly got me kicked out of the Man In Space for singing an IRA hymn to the tune of ‘Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles’ in a Nico accent! Thanks for that! But then Florrie had relented when she’d learned that Jim was the ‘Light My Fire’ guy. Thereafter, Morrison-at-the-piano had charmed the pants off all the middle-aged ladies by singing a bar-room ‘Roadhouse Blues’-version of Paul Evans’ shite novelty hit ‘Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat Hugging and A-Kissing with Fred’. And blow-me-down if the tune didn’t fit! When the Van Morrison story inevitably came up, I really wanted Jim to tell it purely from his own point of view. A couple of the Man In Space regulars had been big fans of Van, and – knowing nothing of the circumstances – had been quite outspoken about Jim’s reported role in Van’s strange demise. Jim was quite matter-of-fact but it clearly bothered him a lot. The way he told it, his white witch girlfriend Patricia Kennealy had been ‘throwing anagrams’ all evening, when it was ‘revealed to her’ that Jim’s own ‘Sacred Anagram’ was Mr Mojo Risin’. Far out, thinks Jim, and looks around at each of us for encouragement and agreement. We all nod. Fair enough. Great stuff. Anyway, explained Jim, having now learned the sacred nature of the Anagram, he and Patricia next embarked on a through-the-night anagram spree, one that terminated only on Jim’s discovery that his great hero Van Morrison’s Sacred Anagram was Mr Avo Snorin’! Guffaws all around the pub for that one, especially from the few clueless pre-pop music Old Timers for whom all the names mentioned would have meant sod all. Anyway, the next time Jim was back on the W. Coast, he informed Van the Man that the two of them were re-incarnations of ancient Irish Drinking Poets; and that Jim henceforth wished only to be known by his Sacred Anagram:
‘Call me Mr Mojo Risin’.’ Van, however, unconvinced by Jim’s Sacred Anagram alone and himself already an Irish Drinking Poet of considerable authenticity, was nevertheless tremendously impressed by his own Sacred Anagram Mr Avo Snorin’, if only because of its then-current poetic ring. Everyone knew that Van’s former producer Bert Burns was at that time making it almost impossible for him to work in America, but Van’s stubborn, tough façade was such that no one could estimate his real pain. To Jim, he admitted that his health had been iffy for a while. And by the end of their exchange, Jim told our hushed congregation, he feared greatly that this Sacred Information had ‘grievously overwhelmed’ his hero. By now taking Jim’s comments very seriously, Van Morrison next assembled that legendary loose band of musicians that laid down his brilliant LP
Astral Weeks.
Thereafter, Van the Man – convinced by circumstances that his own Mr Avo Snorin’ denoted a truly Cosmic Invitation to the Big Sleep – had embarked on the now-infamous Psychic and Artistic dwindler that resulted in his tragic early death just eighteen months later. At the end of Jim’s story, the silence in the Man In Space was so loud you could have released it as an early Tangerine Dream LP.

But throughout this tumbling of ancient memories, each entire thought process lasting no more than a minnow microsecond, I knew I had not nearly enough alacrity of linguistics to confer upon Anna anything but the most basic facts of my D. H. Lawrence connection. So with regard to
Sea and Sardinia
?

Here in 2006, however, the enormous sense of duty that I felt towards my tribe obliged me first to get Mick’s R.A.F. Decimomannu research out of the way – better boot that
personal nostalgia trip well into touch. I’d already missed a couple of his phone calls this morning, and understood that there’d be no peace from ye Bard until all the questions for his Sardinian Novel had been answered. But, of course, speaking of the Devil, my phone rang.

A massive swish of articulated truck roared by, overtaking us far too close – nearly sucking us up into the vortex of its own velocity. Losing temporary control, Anna battled to bring the Facel to a stop, but it was only achieved after we’d spun around a full 180 degrees and been forced off the road. Indeed we were
now facing back the same way we came, almost due north, overlooked by the enormous extinct volcano of Mt Arci. As quickly as it was upon us, that enormous articulated Hellwagen was heading off and into the distance, its twenty-two wheels and Leviathan Load leaving our simple V8 supercar coughing up trail-dust by the side of the road, its passengers slack-jawed, bewildered and mouths agape. I looked at Anna.