One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (12 page)

One hundred miles per hour suddenly felt about right in this car. But I was just the passenger so I didn’t half keep my head down, and I didn’t half screw my face up at some of the rum moves we were undertaking. And I mean
under
-taking. Burning back up the 131 northwards after that stultifying air force museum, Anna the demon driver currently seemed intent on proving her police detractor right. Yes, you
can
drive at breakneck speeds along the 131 so long as you’re willing to compromise the rest of us. But as we once again approached that famous/infamous Oristano–Úras Straight, I knew that Anna was only driving so fast in freaked-out response to the ghastly accident we had witnessed just twenty-five minutes previously, soon after re-joining the 131 at the Monastir exit. That fucking Reaper truck again. No shit. But this time, from the outside lane, we’d spied The Reaper up ahead making big trouble as it rumbled on to the 131, knocking a slow lane motorcyclist into the path of a pick-up truck, which was itself then forced to swerve into
our
lane! Mercifully, Anna had foreseen the problem and we’d surged clear! Thereafter, she had been so furious that she’d high-tailed us out of the situation in a manner utterly alien to me.

But if two close encounters with that truck in one day didn’t necessarily add up to some kind of Psychic Attack, then what
happened next certainly does. For when Anna switched on the Facel’s radio too late to hear DJ Jesu Crussu’s complete 4pm traffic report, no sooner had Crussu concluded with the mention of ‘twenty-kilometre tailbacks south of Monastir’ than all hell broke loose. Holy Shi-ite! The pulverising noise with which 89.9 FM had chosen to follow up that tragic accident report was none other than Spion Kop’s terrifying epic 1985 football hooligan chant ‘Das Boot’, that legendary Pan-European Promoter of broken limbs, trashèd skulls and misery; a song which had taken its title and inspiration from that massive ’82 Deutsch movie about doomed WW2 submariners and turned it into a Skinhead Stomp. Oh Lordy, listen to that hideous demon-child vocal! Take heed of those fucking lyrics! And the man behind this jaywalking abortion? Our very own Flying Dutchman Judge Barry Hertzog! Why the fuck was Crussu playing this? Barry Hertzog was haunting me:

Thanks Jesu Crussu, inappropriate or what? A violent declaration of Sectarian Football War cynically written by Bazza Hertzog from the point-of-view of ye Liverpool Hooligan Lifer. And clocking in at just 123 seconds in length, the jackboot stomp, the creepy kid, the single repeated threat of Spion Kop’s ‘Anfield’ novelty anthem had now ignited in dear possessed Anna that same raging fire that had set the charts alight back in ’85. And boy, did I understand. For now, seemingly
out of nowhere, the rage of ‘Das Boot’ had set even my own reluctant heart alight, as I joined Anna in our new role as the Ton-Up Kids! Fucking hell, for those old punks with a penchant for Orwellian Two-Minute-Hate songs, forget about the first Clash LP, forget about Crass’
Feeding Of The 5,000
EP, just sling a 7″ single of ‘Das Boot’ on your deck. And with the pair of us now speeding together down the fastest stretch of the 131 at 100 UK miles per hour, and in the same Swiss disaster that had killed Albert Camus … Well, it did feel as though I was declaring myself to the Cosmos:
Bourgeois Individualist Target #1.
And with Anna still ranting and squirting out the old daytime full-beams? It’s amazing how long 123 seconds can seem when you find yourself in the grip of Nihilistic Evil. So well did I know that I must, right now, right this minute, wrestle control of Anna’s Hertzog-incited slalom and bring this madness to a halt, or risk us somersaulting off the road entirely. And from the back of my mind, I somehow summoned up the will to challenge the hypnotic power of the Judge’s Manic Stompf.

Less than two minutes later, as we taxied in near silence along that rural slip road still parallel with the 131, I pointed out the road bridge over the Cágliari–Ólbia railway line ahead as an appropriate stopping place. When we ground to a halt on that elevated road section, the pair of us quick-as-a-flash evacuated Albert Camus’ Ruin and darted off into our respective pissing worlds. But when each of us returned from our business, I strode around to the pilot’s door and hugged my troubled aviator right where she stood. And for several minutes thereafter, Anna clung to my black t-shirt and rained tears into my chest as I grimly surveyed the Sant Anna 131 junction laid out below us. Barry Hertzog’s bad magic was beginning to permeate every aspect of our roadtrip. Hell, until a half-hour ago, I’d not heard ‘Das Boot’ in over ten years. And though I hadn’t wished to inform Anna – hadn’t wished to instil in her the fear – even our second tussle with The Reaper had yielded Hertzog evidence of its own in the form of a massive bumper sticker that declared: Pretoria–Cape Town. South African cities on Sardinian trucks? Why, only yesterday I’d seen those very names Blu-Tacked on to Hertzog’s off-kilter map of the island. What the fuck was going on? And all the while, as Anna and I gripped each other in silence, my scandalised eyes traced the triple dodgy route, which ye Bard Mick Goodby had – during our police chase sixteen years previously – chosen as his method of re-entering the 131 north on the left carriageway. Yes, serendipity had chosen to escort Anna and myself off the 131 at precisely the place where Mick had made his infamous decision to become Super English by driving on the left! Yes, yes, this was the precise place, the fateful springboard from which we four Italia ’90 kidnappees had abandoned all sense of reality. And so it was with a slight reluctance but a vestige of Hooligan pride that I took Anna by
the hand and led her up to a long piece of very faded and very Anglo-Foreign graffiti stencilled in yellow upon the walls of the bridge. It read:

Too right he was, man. That Basque midfield executioner was a nihilistic legend among Maradona devotees. For not only had he fucked up my belovèd Diego’s ankle ligaments, he had even made a big thing about keeping the infamous boots at home in a glass case! Thereafter, I’d made it my duty
always
to have both paint and stencil on me, to be always Boy Scout Prepared at the slightest chance of a snidey diss of Mr Unpronounceable. Back at the car, I produced from my battered bag an overly folded cardboard wad caked with the yellow accretions of umpteen kinds of paint – this still-tacky mess was the same stencil with which I had perpetrated my Zealous Mission. All across the walls of the Mediterranean, all across the Adriatic, all across the Baltic had my little stencil fucker rendered again-and-again its righteous message. But this faded proclamation on the lower wall of the Sant Anna railway bridge was where the Italia ’90 phase of my Gonzo Mission had been forcibly concluded.

We were walking over to Albert Camus’ Ruin hand-in-hand when Anna suddenly released my grip and ran back to the bridge. I carried on, but could tell that my ancient graffiti had stirred up something within her. As I rested my butt against the hot car bonnet, I watched Anna crouching down transfixed by my faded words, her head nodding up and down as if in some kind of Understanding. And when finally she returned to our parked car but made no effort to get in, we struck up a deep and immediately Cosmic conversation, the pair of us all the while pacing back and forth distractedly on that sorry patch of scrubby waste ground above the rushing 131. But when I dutifully explained that the bumper sticker on the back of The Reaper had a Hertzog connection, the lady – still so buoyant from my words on the bridge – just rolled her eyes defiantly.

She reached into the Facel Vega and scooped up the wad of archaeology photocopies. Then, brandishing the sheaf in front of my face, she grinned triumphantly.

Invigorated to the point of giddiness by Anna’s heartfelt outpouring, the righteous intensity of her words shocked me so much that I rose up out of myself briefly, suddenly blazing, re ignited, alive. This was Big News! For, having only yesterday been flung headlong into her life – and in such hygienically challenged circumstances – I had several times in the past twenty-four hours expected her to set me down at some train station and leave me to my own devices. But when I articulated this fear to the lovely lady? Whoa …

Then, in an instant, Anna was wailing again. Please stop crying, Anna. But this time, she made no attempt to stem the flow, instead raising her tearful countenance to the heavens as if to permit some Creator, some Ur-Antonioni to claim responsibility for her actions. And yet, how brightly through that downpour did her full beams still shine. I stared at Anna’s sheaf of archaeology papers. I stared at my ancient wad of graffiti stencils. I stared at the dusty bodywork of that exotic Facel Vega HK500, and upon its back parcel shelf Jim Morrison’s tome. Then, through the afternoon haze, I eyed up M. Goodby’s so-called Italia ’90 escape route and I grimaced. What codes
did
I live by? Antonioni’s
was
one of them, for shit damned sure.

I knew I’d caught a live one when Anna mentioned
Spoorloos
, that crazy Dutch homage to claustrophobia wherein every likeable character gets entombed. But how weird, how spectacular it was that we both shared the same favourite road movie:
German Motorcycle Murderer.
To be on this righteous Mission with me, this Terminal Mission of mine, I hadn’t expected Sardinian sympathy of any kind whatsoever. A driver please: I hope someone can do it. But now Anna and I were enjoying
empatica!
Mercy, all hail the heavens!
German Motorcycle Murderer
had the best soundtrack of all time: Agitation Free, Atlantis?
and
Furekaaben. Better still, it had the all-time best-looking male–female lead couple, the best-looking bunch of 750 cc motorbikes
and the kind of finale that removed
Zabriskie Point
’s multiple couple desert sex scene to a ghoulish Dark Ages bog burial like something out of the Norse Myths. Released in 1977 after years of hold-ups, and never receiving a proper cinema release outside Scandinavia and Germany, the film was nevertheless massive simply by its association with the tragic death of Steppeulvene’s singer Eik Skaløe, himself considered to be the Bob Dylan of Denmark. Oh, don’t start me talking about this cinematic scorch-o-thon. I just really really needed to point out something, er … big. For me:
very
big.