One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (15 page)

Out of nowhere Anna heard joyful yodelling! That’s how she knew when I’d got my head back, or so she said. All I can remember is my eggshell skull having suddenly become – on my list of physical agonies – secondary to my garrotted neck, the other dimensional wounds of which I massaged and probed with all of my fingers. Thus, through sheer joy and relief did my deep and resonant ‘Oms’ pour forth, not yodels as Anna had claimed. For it was as though my head and my body were in joint celebration of being re-united; my lungs anxious to co-operate again with my lips, jaws and tongue in a giant Remembrance Ceremony. I’d been headless. I’d had no voice. I’d travelled so far away from the Present that those ancient details were already on the way to becoming useless to my current situation. But so disorientated was I that it was only when I’d heard the dulcet disembodied tones of Blessèd Anna that I recognised that I was still lying prone at the entrance to Goronna, ‘yodelling’.

How long? I couldn’t say. Only the paramount points of my Time Travel remained bubbling upon the surface of my Now. Such specifics as the time, the people and the places I had visited had already long faded from my memory, mostly obliterated by the sheer psychic and physical cruelties visited upon my Being during that return buffeting of Inter-Time Travel. Thus, I struggled out of Goronna’s megalithic hole only with very great effort, wearing my human body like a badly fitting wetsuit, but so relieved to be my whole self once again that I felt easily able to tolerate whatever residual water-logging remained in this immediate aftermath of Time Shift. And then I started coughing. Coughing and coughing and coughing my throttled guts up, until Anna thrust a bottle of water into my hand and I gulped down one single mouthful.

At great speed Anna rocketed off down the hillside, shouting and pointing out the route back to the car, the Facel’s glass hardtop now clearly lit up by the long fingers of the evening sun’s rays. I, meanwhile, fell far behind as I struggled in my ill-fitting wetsuit body, my hands currently too flipper-like to aid my egression through field obstacles. So instead, I clambered with much ado up the great drystone wall that ran conveniently like a central spine along the Goronna hillside down to the Mílis road itself. Unfortunately, I proceeded at a pace not much faster than a horny slug. Furthermore, those nasty entanglements of brutal Sardu thorn bushes grown up here-and-everywhere set me back at least twenty minutes behind the hotfooting Anna, whose return to the Camus-mobile was now signalled by an awesome eruption of guitar-wielding ambulant noise across these Goronna lowlands. 89.9 FM, I’ll wager! Ye Gods! Who is scattering obsidian shards of sonic black light across these ancient precincts? That extraordinary wall-of-noise now contributed such focus to my precarious situation that I teetered down the thorn-grown wall with unstinting vigour and determination, every move orchestrated by the electrical storm of guitars. Oh, but how exhausting this all was! Why was I feeling so utterly dead-beat?

When at long last I arrived back at Albert Camus’ Ruin, Anna was sitting in the driving seat, the car still pointing in the Mílis direction, engine running. Alternately pouting furiously then smiling, pouting again then smiling, and – of course – listening
to Jesu Crussu on 89.9 FM, Anna paid almost no attention as I slithered inelegantly into the Facel’s passenger seat.

Just as we were about to set off, however, seemingly out of nowhere moving also in the Mílis direction trundled an archaic combine harvester replete with flashing amber lights and its own accompanying B-road tag-team-from-hell, which grumbled along behind, each honking and flashing its headlights but making no attempt whatsoever to pass. This Delhi Assortment of rural jam cars and unspecified vehicular detritus was headed by a rusty pale blue three-wheeler Piaggio laden to the sky with melons, closely followed by a snorting old red Fordson tractor, itself tailgated by a second layer of accumulated malcontents – hatchbacks, estate cars, moped riders, what have you. And thus, when the limping cavalcade had finally washed by, we tail-enders in the Franco-Suisse supercar could do no more than tuck in behind – and from the map it looked to be a long road to Mílis. Limping along behind these dwindlers would get us to the 131 eventually, but after what Blessèd Anna had just been through, it was clear she needed food and rest, and soon. But at this time of night, nothing in these rural areas would still be open.

Twenty long minutes later, however, Anna was leading an imaginary funeral cortège as we headed now towards Bauladu and
the 131 – clearly utterly shell-shocked by her Goronna experience. She pointed the nose of the Facel Vega on to the slip road of the 131’s northbound carriageway, which we entered at that same suicidal snail’s pace. ‘Santa Cristina 5km’ announced the compassionate road sign, as we crept along the so-called hard shoulder like a couple of Kerry biddies in a rented car through Dublin. Unfortunately, indecision and delusion have been the cause of every road accident I’ve ever been involved in. Thus, for those five long kilometres down the 131, I gnashed my teeth helplessly in the passenger seat, while the rest of the fast-moving traffic attempted to assimilate the stodgy presence of our Facel Vega in its current Half-Supercar/Half-Snowplough incarnation. Ah, those five kilometres which waited upon eternity …

Finally finally
finally
, we pulled off the highway and entered the long straight slip road into Santa Cristina, at which precise point Anna’s grand dam of silence finally burst, and magnificently. Welcome back! Suddenly she began to fire out Santa Cristina’s most salient facts in her truest machine gun style. Like some Sardu Stonehenge, this fabulous 5,000-year-old national monument symbolised the great continuity of the island’s insular culture from prehistory right up to the present time. As far back as the Bronze Age, the restorative waters of the holy well had been ringed by its own sacred enclosures, thereafter being dedicated to Santa Cristina in the 4th century, the effects of its healing springs continuing right up to the present time. Still pertinent today, this fantastic centre of Sardinian Ur-Culture had long housed its own museum and restaurant, wherein all of the smartest members of Sardinia’s Separatista movement nowadays hung out and made their plans.

By the time Anna’s sixty-second-long information assault had concluded, I couldn’t help but feel that this was just the
kind of cosy welcome break we required after the Wuthering precincts of Goronna’s high altar. So it was with much more than simple regret that we spied right ahead of us – down in the dip of that long slip road – parked up parallel to the Santa Cristina museum was none other than The Reaper itself! Holy kack! And around its cab buzzed a score of colourfully dressed characters, some kicking the wheels, some clambering upon any step available, most of them shouting loudly. These were the Separatistas, furious that their sacred meeting place was being despoiled. We cruised past this scene of confrontation and parked up behind the museum itself, both of us exhausted and neither wishing at this time to address the presence of The Reaper, not even to each other. Indeed, so desperate were both of us to sit and drink quietly that we grabbed the quietest table in the empty restaurant bar and sat facing a rear wall. But all the time the vicious vibrations of The Reaper’s idling engine sent such a hum through the museum building that it was impossible for either of us to ignore it. And so, reluctantly, we exited our long-sought sanctuary and joined the Separatistas outside in the near darkness. Where were The Reaper’s idiot drivers? And who were these two mysterious waifs that approacheth?

Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons? Refugees from the Manson Family? Was it the similar dress sense of the two young blonde girls now approaching that made me wary, or the confident and purposeful manner with which they did so? Aged about twenty the pair of them, dressed both in blue jeans and white t-shirts emblazoned with a single Rave-orange smiley surmounted by the letters ‘NL’, it was perhaps only the young ladies’ bare feet that made these two cult kids stand out from the crowd. Yeah man, that and their orange lipstick and nametags. Not to forget their massive ‘Free Hertzog Now!’ lollipop, of course. What the fuck were this pair all about? I didn’t know Hertzog had fucking followers! What
have
I been missing? Unfortunately, Anna had – on entering the museum – immediately become engaged in a fiery conversation with Angela Solarussa, leader of the Separatistas, their Italian conversation peppered with Anglo-Saxon profanities of the ‘Fuck The Reaper’ variety. So by the time she noticed our culty orange duo making a beeline for me, Anna was too late to extricate me from the situation. Instead, she called over to me, eyes raised to the heavens.

From her knapsack, she proffered a battered hardback with a highly familiar dust jacket. Oh shit, how I’d always hated this crappy book, even fought with R.E. teachers at school over it, even once ripped that familiar dust jacket asunder and hurled the book at a Christian school friend. C. S. Lewis: smug fucker.
And
I’d hated his
Narnia
trilogy, too. In Lewis’s drab homosocial world, anything the female characters do outside his tight preconceived notions is a passport to conceitedness, frivolousness and make-up.

As the two Hertzog Girls fell into a temporary disagreement, around me thronged the Separatistas, all of whom had tuned into Anna’s halting translation of the Hertzog Girls’ rhetoric, each listening dumbfounded and with ever-increasing agitation. Then Anna, now full of vim and vigour despite her exhaustion, pulled me to one side.

And with that, the two Hertzog Girls marched off past The Reaper and headed down the slip road towards the dark tunnel under the 131. What a stupid superficial dickhead I could be. Two minutes around these Void-oids and I was instantly jealous of Barry Hertzog; didn’t give a fuck about their beliefs, just out-and-out jealous that two young women found the Judge so compelling. My ex-pop-star mentality or what? I grabbed Anna by the hand. Come, my dear, for we must in the Name of Righteousness pursue the Hertzog Girls and see for ourselves what’s going down at Opposite.