One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (30 page)

Clutching at my head, I got up and tried to walk but kept falling over. I was barely conscious. The sky was tar black. I just couldn’t walk. I could hardly breathe. In front of me were gorgeous star beings. Clutching my head, I staggered towards them drunkenly and watched them flee. But try though I might to pursue them, their speed was such that I soon ran out of energy, then huffing and puffing myself to a standstill, I watched as they chased off into the darkness. Then I turned back and returned to my bolthole, I stuck my head back under the great Doorway and lay there miserable, inconsolable. What was life? Where had it gone? And yet, and yet … And yet at long last, from outside the very utmost outlands of human experience did I slightly obtain in my nose an espungent and satisfying ripeness quite foreign to my current senses. Gradually came upon me once more the smell of myrthus bushes, the smell of woodsmoke fires, the alien effervescence of patchouli incense, the heady zing of cognac, the rich sweet overkill of marijuana smoke. And with slow inevitability I descended once again into Now. Around my ankles, I felt the firm grip of four big hands dragging me with great care. Then, with equal care was I flipped over on to my back, whereupon my eyes were greeted by a sensational night sky Persian-carpeted with all the stars of the Arabian Nights! And even as I exhaled a great ‘Coo!’ of astonishment, so did my dark companions announce their presence.

What encounter? Whom did I have worried? Warming to my compadrés’ voices and dumbstruck by the starry night below – or was that above? – I now attempted to raise my head but could not; now opened my mouth and attempted to speak but could not. Nevertheless, my life stirrings had clearly satisfied my companions, who both now made no attempt to lift me further, instead wrapping my body in blankets and feeding me with life-enhancing sips of cognac. Then, as a basic sense of humanity gradually restored itself within me, so I struggled to shake off that ancient world, so I struggled to put back on the mantle of this current one. By-and-by, such basic personal thoughts began to drizzle their way through my un-oiled synapses that they brought about a massive grin to my drooling phizzog. Thus was my first verbal exchange with my two associates more clichéd than any hack writer would have dared to feed even to his cheesiest character.

Now I understood. Those hot-footing-it star beings I’d tried to pursue had all been Porcus running away from my headless form in terror! How sad to be a Porcu: repulsive in this life but gorgeous in some other unreachable dimension! But as the two brothers’ lucky escape had only been facilitated by my utterly impromptu behaviour, my spell in that overlapping, in-between dreamtime was now cut drastically short by the hefty implications of this Porcu invasion of the camp.

Within the hour, I was back to my old form, now more hugely affronted by the Porcu invasion than ever and determined to seek justice for our noble savage. Both Jim and his brother, however, now appeared to be in no hurry to move on from Bidil ’e Pira, the two of them convinced by my headless display that no return Porcu encounter would be forthcoming. What
had
I done to those scoundrels? But Jim and the Rev, having both experienced first-hand my headless behaviour, now took far more seriously my pre-journey banter. For the brothers saw that it had yielded … ahem, results! But what, asked the brothers, were these results all about? And to what great underground network were Sardinia’s Doorways connected? Oo-er, what a question! I swayed my head and pursed my lips in prevarication, for each successive Journey Through Time had yielded entirely different
results and had even deployed different methods of travel, or certainly arrival. How limited also had been my Doorway experiences! In trying to explain in any depth to the brothers, I was like a nipper on an Early Learning Centre trampoline trying to describe Disneyland to other nippers.

Now, I laid my bag upon the ground and sought to retrieve that sheaf of June 14th celebration brochures that Anna and I had nicked from the back of the Opposite club. I was rather hopeful that there might be more clues in its contents that Jim Feather could acquaint me with, so I removed my black shirt and socks, and dug deeper. But when I took out my copy of Hertzog’s
Prison Writings
and placed it temporarily on the parched ground, it was not the unsettling X-faced image of the Judge that grabbed Jim Feather, but the unyielding trajectory of the author’s blurb, which Jim immediately read aloud to his equally spellbound brother:

The two brothers looked askance at each other, as if diminished by their sudden encounter with Hertzog’s printed words. During my long months of owning a copy of
Prison Writings
but having never looked inside it, I’d grown used to this blurb, almost fond of it. But then, that was before Barry Hertzog had torn a strip off me at Florinas Penitentiary and showed himself up as the Munter Cunt from Wankerland. And I tried to imagine how the two brothers would now be feeling: an imprisoned maniac with a scary prophetic book already published is the underlying cause of your life problems. Unlovely. Believe me, I’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea and it still sat rather harshly in my gullet. But while Jim seemed floored by Hertzog’s blurb, the Reverend Jim Featherian remained upbeat, even philosophical about their risky situation.

Finally, I retrieved the Opposite programmes from deep inside my bag, and the three of us fell upon their contents looking for clues and rum doings. But initially the programme seemed no more than a gargantuan ego trip for Bugs Rabbit, and a funny one at that:

‘The Bugs Rabbit Story famously started in Milan, in 1966, with the completion of the
Nice Little Urna
LP by Sardinian soul singer Urna Washington, whose first hit was Bugs’ own song “Come Back and Haunt Me”. Inspired in 1969 by a London performance of the rock musical
Hair
, Bugs developed an Italian version with new lyrics, but was devastated to learn that the Catholic Church, appalled by the show’s nudity, absolutely forbade any performance of this work. Determined to find a home for his songs and new arrangements, Bugs Rabbit next created
Ears
, a homage/parody of
Hair
employing rabbits in place of the hippies. This hugely successful rock musical travelled all over Italian-speaking Europe – Sicily, Albania, parts of Malta – and ran for close to a decade. Contrary to popular rock legend, Bugs Rabbit takes his nickname not from his prominent teeth but from this early Italian theatre success.’

But now in the Opposite programme I found the evidence at last, brazenly occupying the glossy pullout Drinks Centrefold, and looking just as I remembered. There in glorious full colour was that same off-kilter South Africanised map of Sardinia. Again, there was that same bizarre re-labelling of Sardinia’s most prominent towns and cities with the names of South African cities. And next to the map was the complete price list of Opposite’s available drinks, each named just as perversely as before: The Mafeking Make-over, The Bubbling Bloemfontein, The Shady Ladysmith, The Taste of Old Cape Town, The Magisterial Magersfontein, The Durban Shakedown, The Colenso Colonic, The Pretorian Guard and The Kimberley Comeuppance. Brr, I don’t like the sound of that last one. I kept on staring at the map, but I was still looking at the outside form of everything, and I was positive there was a whole different truth just waiting to be consciousized. What do you mean there’s no such word? Weirder still, emblazoned large across the head of each programme page was a different cryptic fact:
1645 The Battle of Naseby brings victory to the English Parliamentarians; 1667 The Raid of the Medway by Dutch Fleet; 1789 Bourbon invented by Rev. Elijah Craig using maize; 1846 Bear Flag Revolt; 1940 First day of Auschwitz; 1949 Albert II, the rhesus monkey rides a V2 rocket 83 miles into space; 1967 China tests its first hydrogen bomb
– the list went on. But random as the list appeared to me, so did a couple of those facts strike a, well, what did they strike? Wasn’t there a king called Albert II? Who’d told me that?

And then I registered at last – and for the first time – the reason for all of this confusing protractedness. Now at last I got it in all of its glorious evil. Wednesday June 14th would be the opening of Opposite precisely because it was the birthday
of our own dear departed Leander Pitt-Rivers Baring-Gould. It was to be a retribution party! Now I remembered those final cryptic comments that Breakfast had made to me after soundly thrashing the Judge in Slag Van Blowdriver’s very public argument. Now, I could hear his voice speaking from the grave: ‘Battle of Naseby, Old Rock. Do drink a bourbon for me.’ I’d been thrown off the scent by Breakfast’s comment about Albert II, mistaking him for some obscure Hapsburg-type emperor. In reality? Breakfast had merely been comparing Barry Hertzog to the first monkey in space! Wow, these enemies of ours had been rather too thoroughly evil: What fucking creepoids!

Convinced that more atrocities would be sure to come to light in time, I left one of the programmes with the pair of them. For now had come the time for me to split, time to hightail it north to Macomér in order to enact the next part of our research. Our research! Get me! Delighted that my own actions had scared away the Porcu clan, I could now rely on the two brothers to stay put for the next couple of days, knowing that both Anna and myself could find them easily enough should their assistance be required. Just as I was picking up my bag to hoof it out of there, Jim told me he’d been thinking about ways in which we could unite our powers against these evil cunts.