One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (27 page)

It made a pretty sight no doubt about it, Giampaolo’s purple flake 1970 Plymouth Barracuda sitting square and bullish on the hot tarmac, and there tucked in behind it the gleaming Facel Vega fresh from the carwash, restored once again to an all-singing, all-dancing party machine. What a pair. Both cars sat parked up in front of Opposite, where the results of last night’s Separatistas chaos could still be seen through the vast plate-glass front window. But where was Anna’s father? We wandered around to the back of the deserted building, where a tall, lean, middle-aged chap stood at the top of the illegal club’s metal staircase, relieving himself through the railings. He raised his English-size coffee mug in our direction, smiled broadly and shook himself dry.

As her father descended the backstairs, Anna scurried around to greet him with a well-placed boot up the jacksie, and he in turn responded with an overly dramatic wince of pain, then hugged his child firmly. They both turned to me, and her father extended his right hand.

Anna’s father spoke only very limited English, however, and it was through his lovely daughter that we would be forced to communicate – but all in good time. First, we must confirm our respective schedules and itineraries. Yes, Anna would with reluctance permit me to make my visit to the great Doorway of Bidil ’e Pira alone. Score. But only so long as I phoned her this evening, once I had checked into my room at Macomér’s Su Talleri Hotel, the booking of which she herself promised to take care of. Today, Anna and Giampaolo planned to head north in tandem to stalk the movements of The Reaper in their twin supercars, thereafter delivering the Facel to a client in Sássari City. Later on in the evening, Anna intended to return to Su Talleri in tomorrow’s new ferry car, whilst her father would drive the purple metal flake monster east to the ferry terminal at Ólbia. I was so delighted to be working on two fronts now that I was almost overcome with emotion. Dean’s death was so recent, so harsh. And now that I’d once again prised open that can of Italia ’90 worms, well, dear Leander’s tragedy now never left me for more than perhaps an hour at a time. But I trusted Anna’s good judgement and more: I trusted Anna’s anger. That above everything was good enough for me. Giampaolo suddenly turned to me and began to converse as though I were a native Italian. Fortunately, Blessèd Anna picked up the baton.

Throughout this conversation, all of us had remained lurking around Opposite’s back staircase. Thus neither Anna nor myself could resist sneaking a little peek through the club’s back door. What Bugs Rabbit secrets this office space must hide! So, while Giampaolo kept watch around the front, Anna and I mounted the staircase and peered inside the club. Boxes of unsold Nurse With Mound CDs littered the confines of the management office, whilst umpteen large free-standing visual displays of Bugs Rabbit’s career highlights leaned against the walls of the narrow corridor, still awaiting assembly out in the public area. Piled up closest to us beside the locked glass back door were stacks of newly printed brochures emblazoned with the words:
June 14th Big Kick-Off Celebrations
. That’s gotta be suspicious. It’s probably the Grand Opening. Oh, if only that door were not locked! But Blessèd Anna was way ahead of me. Now she simply pushed her right shoulder with all her might against the door’s largest and lowest glass panel, pushed and pushed and pushed until … Until suddenly the glass pinged free of its tight rubber surroundings and shattered into thousands of jagged pieces across the piles of new brochures. Sure that we must have been heard, Anna and I fled down the club’s rear staircase, but not before I had grabbed several Nurse With Mound CDs and a thick wad of those intriguing June 14th celebration brochures, which I jammed into my bag, zipping it up tight. Then the three
of us jumped into our respective supercars, roared through the tunnel under the motorway, then high-tailed it north back up the 131 to the Paulilátino–Santu Lussúrgiu exit maybe five kilometres away.

What a glorious day this was. Such had been our grand confinement at Iloi these past long hours that although I regretted missing out on experiencing the sheer road power of the Plymouth Barracuda, nevertheless I was hugely exhilarated at the prospect of my long solo walk out to Bidil ’e Pira. Therefore, when Anna pulled off the 131 and turned left on to the SP 65 signposted to ‘Cúglieri/Santu Lussúrgiu’, I leapt out of the Facel in sheer anticipation of what the day ahead would bring. Anna, however, was not best pleased at the deal I’d forged for myself and she told me as much. But today I was above such protests. We had mucho work to do, and Giampaolo was here to assist us. I walked back to the Barracuda and shook his hand through the open passenger window, wishing him the best of luck. Then, just as I believed that Anna was persuaded and that they were about to growl off to Macomér and Sássari, Giampaolo whistled me back to the Plymouth Barracuda and handed me an old green box of Coughlan’s Waterproof Matches.

But I had already turned heel and set off at a brisk pace, waving enthusiastically but pointedly not turning around. Behind
me, I heard the two massive Chrysler engines growling uncertainly for two full minutes, but then at last the pair of them pulled out across the bridge over the 131 and disappeared north up the motorway’s slip road. I had in the meantime already walked 400 paces along the SP 65 and could not, according to my written instructions, relax my counting until I had travelled a total of 3.8 kilometres: 3,800 paces by my own estimation. And as I walked and counted, so I hit my fingers at each new hundred and watched the figures ratchet up until both hands were full and off I’d start once more. The day was lovely, the traffic was absent, and I was alone with my thoughts of Death and Dean and Duplicity. Anticipating the ‘obscure bend’ of my written instructions, I recognised from more than a kilometre away the high yellow hedges of the ‘obscure farm left turn’, so allowed my thoughts to wander briefly until I left the road. Through all the tragedy that I had been laying upon Anna, I suddenly realised how much I missed taking drugs. Not their effects so much as the getting there. I missed the toking, the wrapping of things around other things, I missed the retrieving of gear from out-of-the-way parts of my flat, the replacing of loose floorboards, the cleaning and sterilising of things: boxes and bottles and modelling knives. The management of Stuff, as it were. I even missed the emerging, the coming back to life in the morning. Currently ephedra’d up for the next ten days, even twenty days perhaps I might be; that didn’t stop me n-n-n-n-n-needing to enact occasionally the outward gestures of the Drughead. Basking in the SP 65 sunshine of that Cúglieri–Santu Lussúrgiu back road, I relished not having to score. But however fantastic, it was also a bit too remote control for a paranoid like myself. It was just a bit too like having the Lord as your dealer. And how often would you wanna hassle
him? So I slightly kept thinking I might start jonesing for a hit, even though I knew I’d been on enough of an Ephedra Siege – somewhere in … well, another world – to last me probably three full weeks. That’s truly how buoyant I still felt … But a symbolic toke right now would deffo be sweet.

The obscure farm left turn now upon me, I followed precisely my instructions to proceed ‘150 metres along track and turn right’, next pacing exactly ‘350 metres to T-junction and park here’. Relishing my instructors’ employment of the Highway Code term ‘T-junction’ for this scrubby interface of two rural cattle droves, I next turned right and walked ‘40 paces to fork’ then turned left and walked the prescribed ‘236 paces’. So far so good. But even as I began at the next fork to ‘turn right and walk 198 paces to a wire blockade’, dammit if I didn’t smell wood smoke and hear the low overtones of a didgeridoo. Unlovely. What kind of Sardinians are these that frequent such ancient Doorways, and in such daytime working hours? Following my final instructions to ‘undo wire from right side, then proceed due south 126 paces across pasture to monument’, my heart sank further as I spied poking out above the tough scrubland ahead of me the canvas-and-poles of a wigwam, you know, your typical Glastonbury yurt. Even ungreater. Then, as I rounded the bend into the great paddock of Bidil ’e Pira, I saw three seated figures – still blurry through the afternoon haze – sitting together on a raised earthen platform. But even though I approached nearer and nearer to the three, still they remained a blur. Indeed, it was as though their identities grew even less discernible with every step nearer that I approached. Until at last, when I was almost upon them, the veil lifted from my eyes and I recognised all three simultaneously. Holy shit, each one was Jim Feather!

Forty minutes later, out in the sun-scorched pastures of ancient Bidil ’e Pira, I sat beneath the hanging bough of a splendid olive tree, spliff in hand, nursing a half-empty cognac glass and shaking my head in near disbelief at the outrageous tales of injustice that Jim Feather was laying upon me. Jim Feather? After making such an impression on our war band at Peterborough Services just before Italia ’90, Jim Feather had become our ‘Man Who Never Was’. He’d disappeared. Full English Breakfast had spotted, or rather claimed to have spotted Jim briefly on the beach at Poett in the questionable company of Pit-Yackers. But after dear Leander’s death, and his own bizarre state of mind leading up to it, well, Mick and I had both questioned even that sighting as problematic. But how wrong we had been: the two-metre Nature Boy that occupied my present frame of vision was the product of nobody’s wild imagination. True, there were not three Jim Feathers here as I’d at first been led to believe. But he still looked magnificent, Herculean even. And if there were not three Jim Feathers, still there was Jim Feather, his lost twin brother and a mannequin. But more of that later, for I was now acquainting myself with the bizarre trajectory that Jim’s life had taken after our first fateful meeting. Out here in the steaming pasture of Bidil ’e Pira, our erstwhile shaman and happy-go-lucky Ur-Spirit proceeded to inform me of his living nightmare these past sixteen years spent enslaved by Bugs Rabbit. What? Having had his magic cloak nicked at Italia ’90 by Party Orange’s Walter-Under-The-Bridge, and having no passport nor papers of any sort, Jim Feather had become a non-person: scratched off the records of modern humanity. I couldn’t bear what I was hearing. Had no one been left alone by these sick fucks of Italia
’90? For these past sixteen years, Jim had been forced into the drudgery of the truly Disappeared; his beautiful-but-impetuous decision to follow us to Sardinia had ended up with him lugging donkey-sized loads around the island without even the promise of a carrot at the end of it. Previously straight edge and all set for Tibetan consciousness, Jim’s vicissitudes had turned him into a hard drinker and a chain smoker of … well, whatever you’ve got. Those racists, those smug white slavers!