One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (11 page)

Our Gran Tourismo supercar now mercifully brought to a halt, Anna and I – for several minutes after that Near Impact – were no more than zombies, two petrified zombies still sat both bolt upright in our cockpit’s cushy leather aircraft seats. And even though our bruised limbs and whiplash necks remained nursed by the Facel’s sumptuous padded knee-and-armrests, its enormous Chrysler 5.8 litre V8 engine still purring as though nothing untoward had taken place, nevertheless I was altogether freaked out that Albert Camus’ Ruin had been so unceremoniously shoved off the road by that refrigerated artic. So whilst I unconsciously nibbled at the hard skin on my guitar-playing fingertips and ruminated on the shabby outcome of this well-intentioned bit of M. Goodby research, Anna herself sat in silence staring ahead. Probably thinking about her dad. Moreover, the two of us were still sitting upright like the same pair of petrified planks when the cops arrived ten minutes later, two blue supercharged Fiats tearing right up to us lights a-blazing, six officers disgorging, mucho shouting, mucho verbalese, yet both of the police drivers remained behind the wheel of their stationary vehicles, mindlessly burning up much unnecessary fuel. The head cop was a picture of macho health and strode over to us, grinning widely and shrieking his praise for our beleaguered supercar.

Right about now, I felt as though my duty to ye Bard had just sent us down a very rum cul-de-sac. Echoes of a different
time long ago perhaps? Why, with all the injustices suffered by Brent, Dean and Breakfast, was I down here researching solely on Mick’s behalf – and with such limited time to get to the bottom of things? Hmmmmm, I took another deep breath and re-thought the situation. I could feel Anna next to me deep in her own re-evaluations, her life force once again surging through her after that Near Impact. And right there and then, I knew that what Mick needed from R.A.F. Decimomannu was not the precise extent of its Avro Lancaster landing facilities, but just that I go there and walk around the camp on his behalf, back there where his gorgeous, tiny Sardinian mother and beanpole six-foot-four R.A.F. father had first danced together. Because Mick was stuck mainly under his mother’s stairs, I knew that I now remained his only lifeline, and that lest I drum up some proper Sardu vibe from this end, his current sense of futility and earthbound inadequacy would only spiral him deeper into depression. For, with Dean still yet to be buried, his Goodby–Garrett Clan’s elaborate thirtieth-birthday celebrations having been so violently doused, and
me
having just jumped on that EasyAir 757 without even switching the engine of the hire car off? Mick was currently more Home Alone than he could ever have imagined was possible. So any spurious info whatsoever that I could lay upon him would help to douse, or at least smother temporarily that raging Anglo-Catholic guilt in his pumped-up mind. In truth, all that I really knew of Mick’s Sardinian novel was its usefulness as a vehicle for his Atonement, a more cushioned world into which he could tumble whenever this real one became too severe.

But even as I sat there still slumped into my lush aircraft seat watching the cops checking Anna’s paperwork, then surveying and measuring our skid marks, I knew that there could never
be peace under Mick’s raging brows. For his entire Worldview since his early teendom had been geared to reflect his stance as the W.A.C.C.O., or White Anglo-Catholic Cop-Out. His own term, his badge of pride: Mick the Poet had developed it as a parallel to the W.A.S.P. concept. Claiming that the Catholic man could never be boss in his own home whilst the priest held sway, Mick’s W.A.C.C.O. character relished his priestly enslavement, merely adding it to his ‘Addicted To’ list somewhere between fizzy drinks and Spanish Civil War history. However, as an eternal Jim Morrisonian who’d felt obliged to throw up his hands in surrender to America’s all-pervasive but far too woolly concept of the W.A.S.P., ye Bard’s W.A.C.C.O. was just too betwixt and between for me. But Mick’s Worldview Problems clearly emanated directly from his mother’s various Southern Latitude hang-ups. For, even though Mick’s parents had met in the south of the island at R.A.F. Detchy, his mother Gabriella was neither proud of her Italian status nor of her Sardinian home, having been raised in the fiercely Catalan Spanish northwest enclave up at Alghero, then still a safe haven for Barcelona Anarchistas on the run from ‘that Moroccan dog Dictator Franco’. So although throughout Mick’s R.A.F. childhood in rainy England the gorgeous Gabriella had pined and pined for their brief time down south at Decimomannu, whenever we teenage youths popped round to ogle her stunning Mediterranean looks, any unsuspecting and overly loose-lipped ignoramus among us might receive a thick ear. Indeed, Dayglo Maradona’s temporary bass player Hippo once commented dazèdly that he’d spied Gabriella’s doppelgänger in Rome on a recent tour, and she whacked him. Really hard in the knees, too, but clearly aiming for the nuts. I’m not kidding.

The Schizophrenic Goodbys. Where did that leave Mick? During his childhood at Liverpool’s R.A.F. Burtonwood, Mick had been allowed three years in which to develop that combative all-purpose Pan-Mannypool brogue. Preceding that, his sergeant dad had been on trainer conversions up at Wainfleet, in remotest, flattest Lincolnshire, where our Mick and the rest of those forces brats had been unconscious guinea pigs in the M.O.D.’s cheap dealings with Wainfleet’s local Kola Bear fizzy pop firm. And it was not until three years after Mick’s addiction to the drink was confirmed by doctors that other R.A.F. Wainfleet kids came forward with similar nervous complaints. What had been the M.O.D.’s secret ingredient? Entrapped by State conspiracy since the age of eight, therefore, Mick’s poetic methods of dealing with such chronic life problems has been to celebrate them
all
. Forced through addiction to rage through life on Kola Bear, the ever-ardent M. Goodby – at the onset of the Rave Era – even graduated to the more destructive (and far more fluorescently packaged) Kola Max as two fingers to his M.O.D. addictions. But only in this manner has everyone’s favourite W.A.C.C.O. been able to grab back from those authoritarian cunts some kind of temporary Personal Responsibility.

Nevertheless, from all the wide-ranging evidence he’s asked me to gather down the years – and Mick’s Sardinian novel has been long years a-coming – his book appears to me to be the ultimate Conscience Salver, being a kind of great personal repository of information from which ye Bard could alchemically construct and develop some great fictitious Utopia of his own. Conspiracy theories and bizarre alternative technologies abound in Mick’s
Sardinian novel, much of it culled from clandestine post-Kidnapping conversations with dubious, obsessive peripheral scene figures like Barcode and Gerard Frawley, whom ye Bard would befriend and make his temporary conspirators purely in order to save reading the latest dodgy theory himself. ‘Operation Magic Fire’, he’d state triumphantly, pseudo-engraving it into his cheap notepads with a stubby, soft-tipped pencil. ‘The Raw Materials & Good Purchasing Company, aha!’ ‘Spanish–Moroccan Transport Company. Yes, of course.’ And all-the-while, a great quaffing of pop would be taking place both in-and-around Goodbyshire, a Norse Orgy of sugar and combative substances whose far-reaching tentacles could leave virtual strangers near-paralysed with Sugar Overlode. Oh yes, M. Goodby was the St. Paul of Sugar, a Sugar Shaman, a Sweet-treats Showman, the Alan Sugar of Sugar. And so, like guilty
G2
readers bullshitting around a proper vegetarian, Mick’s hangers-on would all be attempting to take on The Master, knocking back Red Bull like gout was still an Old Man’s game. S-s-s-s-shaking and shuddering within a permafrosted sugar-bearded frenzy, these maddened peripheral Neo-Sucrinistas would rage and inflame ye Bard with ever more excruciating conspiracist theories, until – at approximately the same time every night – the infamous tale of Fanta’s rise from Nazi Germany (always told as though for the first time) would draw these latest Conspiracy Assizes to a close, so that all could return to their individually twitchy domains and have a beer, cider, vodka, hell, anything but more of Goodby’s Sweet Sweet Loved-Up Juice. Mercy!

As the six grinning and be-shaded police officers saluted Anna and piled back into their two patrol cars, it was only now that I understood the shift that we had undergone on account of this Near Impact. For I realised right here in the raw June
heat of Sardinia’s most monumental volcanic desertscape that, although Anna and I had nearly died together today, nevertheless the accident had not been of my making. Convinced until now that Anna’s bad luck had all been of my own manufacture, our shared experience with The Reaper had in itself provided me with enough rich evidence that Anna could – even without my being around – find herself in quite decent amounts of trouble
all on her own!

Back on the 131 southbound, Anna was raging with indignation at the manner in which the main policeman had spoken to her. Indeed, on returning to the driver’s seat, her fingers had clung so tightly to the steering wheel that she appeared to be strangling the cop in question. Thus in order to help restore Anna’s shattered nerves, we had set off at minimum m.p.h. through the village of Úras, trailing out the other side, and eventually once more hitting the 131. But, although her psychic hackles had been unnecessarily stirred up by police attitudes, Anna was made of stern stuff and pretty soon our Franco-Suisse supercar was back up to speed again, hurtling along somewhere between Sárdara and Sanluri.

Yeah man, what a nerve! But how I wished we’d had that cop looking out for us on the Oristano–Úras Straight all those sixteen long years ago. For this was precisely where we’d fucked up so royally! I knew it was around here somewhere, but precisely where? Who knows. Even though Mt Arci is omnipresent, that ex-volcano is so damned big that tourists can never judge whether it’s two or twenty kilometres away. But, oh yessiree, that fateful Italia ’90 day of the England–Ireland match, when we’d headed north out of Cágliari up the 131 in the stolen Carabinieri patrol car, this fucking Oristano–Úras Straight had proved our real undoing. For it was hereabouts that M. Goodby – fuelled by the sudden death of our dear friend Full English Breakfast and goaded on by his fourteen-year-old cohorts Brent and Dean – had felt obliged to prove beyond measure that he was the Top Anglo among us. How? Get this for ye Bard’s response:
I’m so fucking English I’m driving on the left!
Next moment Mick’s accelerating our cop car clear cross the central reservation and heading north on the left at top speed – this, of course, causing the Sardu Highways Authorities to shut down the entire
131 system. North of Oristano, both the Carabinieri and the Cágliari cops had simply called off the chase and left us to the kidnappers.

But now, as Mt Arci’s conical silhouette receded in our wing-mirrors, Anna’s face suddenly lit up as she pointed out the road sign for San Gavino Monreale, home of her beloved 89.9 FM Radio, those independent nutters who had just yesterday restored my faith by playing the Brits’ ‘Last Tango in Paris’ as I’d bathed in the stream. However, when Anna – in Pavlovian response to seeing the road sign – fired up the Facel’s car radio, her beloved 89.9 FM immediately pitched us both into the kind of raging 1972 John Peel session that only certain untamed Europeans were capable of mustering up. What the actual fuck? As the super-fluid bass and the cavernous coyote howl of some feral bongo player ricocheted around our glass-and-metal hardtop, I was both delighted at Anna’s beaming response to this noise
and
shocked to experience once again DJ Jesu Crussu displaying such extraordinary faith in his afternoon listening audience. What in hell was this superb racket?

On and on and on went the cavernous crud, only its lupine howling and overdriven bass bringing the remotest clarity to this soupy anarchist testament. And such was the enduring powerdrive of these rampant cave dwellers that it was to be another ten minutes after we had parted company with the 131 and headed south at Monastir before Make Fuck had brought their exhausting trip to a conclusion so stumbling that even Anna felt obliged to click the radio off before Jesu Crussu’s announcement. Phew.

It was, therefore, in silence that we arrived at R.A.F. Decimomannu, its high wire fences and perfectly lawned entrance softened by a deep fringe of trees, but the whole encampment still displaying a typical Ministry of Defence tidiness utterly at odds with the rest of the island. All was silence, a breezy, tidy silence. It was fucking awful – like some tired 1950s teacher-training college block whose concrete shell had been updated constantly but at minimal expense. What was I gonna tell Mick when he called in a couple of minutes? He was expecting some kind of guided tour by proxy, with yours truly as mouthpiece and a helpful staff sergeant to show us
around. Oops, forgot to organise that bit. So when Mick called right on 3pm our time, Anna and I were both still at the rear of the R.A.F. compound breaking in. Oh yeah, and I was in full Hoodwink mode.

Now was clearly the time for me to bring this Deception to a close, for even I could recognise that Detchy’s current wingèd guardian was not a Spitfire, and not a Hawker Hunter neither – perhaps not even a warplane at all. For a start the thing was French manufactured and, despite having been cleverly angled upwards on a nifty plinth, looked to be no more than a parody of a Jet Fighter, especially its gaudy camouflage, which would have looked more appropriate in some equatorial South American air force. Right about now, ye Bard needed authenticity at Decimomannu, not this gigantic Bic Biro created by some hyper-energetic Pop Artist. Why else were we here if not to gather fuel for Mick’s Sardinian novel? And so, out of respect for ye Bard, right then and there I declared Time’s Up
and closed down our curated phone tour. But not before having reported to Mick the presence of several massive and mysterious four-engined UK bombers still hidden in the Detchy hangars. All lies of course, but all the kind of necessary lies that would irrigate, inspire and re-fuel our tragic Bard under the stairs.