One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (3 page)

Running for dear life as fast as my rock’n’roll legs would carry me away from that dreadful place, I was somewhat undermined by Anna’s unilateral offer to give friend Lame Warder a lift home. So while my pounding heart and my mind’s eye had us lightspeeding back through Florinas village to the 131, in truth we herded the cowed and be-callipered little Klötz into the back of J.M.’s Ruin, re-launched that land-yacht down the penitentiary’s slipway, then – Oh no! – turned right down the highly suspect mountain road. Have mercy! No more than a half-mile later, indeed at the very first corner after, we pulled up at a farm gate. Anna jumped out, gave the warder his big white bag full of shopping and, pursuing a three-point-turn, slowly reversed the Buick up the dusty farm track. But after a coupla fails, I got out reluctantly to ensure that the massive chrome bumpers didn’t snag on the dazzling mound of obsidian aggregate dumped by the gate. Then I stopped Anna and pointed. There was Klötz huffing and puffing and 0.0003 miles-per-houring it homewards across the fields. Well actually still no more than about thirteen steps from our car. Rotund as you like, heart attack on the cards. Fuck’s sake, I strode up to him and quite abruptly annexed his shopping.

Faraway Field? For fake’s suck! I took off at speed with Klötz’s spluttered directions in my head and headed past five garrotted and shrivelled foxes hanging up at about head height. I needed to get out of here now without this new mission. Down the combe I stumbled, nearly losing Klötz’s top layer – gum, eye drops, last-minute checkout what-have-yous – then up the other side I ranged at top speed, desperate to put some kilometres between me and Bazza Hertzog’s Big Evil. And if delivering the shopping to some bucolic outpost, blah, blah, then whatever … But as I continued the climb, that steady climb up the other side of the valley, I peeped over the final rise only to collide head-on with a Vision nothing less … aaaaargh. I halted too soon for my legs to slow down, no direct link between my body and brain. Now I lost control of the shopping, my limbs, my tongue and jaw, and almost my MIND. What the Geriatric Fuck? Directly ahead at the field’s centre was a massive stone doorway. Holy shit! It’s one of those epic doorways I’ve been envisioning for umpteen long years. Holy Fucking Shit, a Doorway!

By now I was on the Sardu soil scrabbling and dribbling like a right fucking Rubber Roomer. For I did spy a World Doorway cast in rock, hewn by masons from out-of-time. Weeping, I crawled on my hands and knees fully 300 yards up the final incline towards the Doorway. Now, I cried out: Nuscadoré! Nuscadoré! Nuscadoré! No reply. I’m on my knees. How I applied myself now. I surged forwards those final yards and – on reaching the Doorway carved in stone – ramalamalama went my fists upon that archaic entrance. But all to no avail. Ramalama went my fists once more. Again, I cried out: Nuscadoré! Nuscadoré! Nuscadoré! Then I clawed and I felt and I reached into the stone around knee height but my hands felt the forms of a passageway. And then I understood. Oh, shit! Wrong fucking
Doorway. Unholy Shit, I was back! My mind’s eye shown but my mind blown, I was back in Sardinia and already sunk back into that Visionary mindset. How much had I cast to the back of my mind? For how long these places had obsessed me!

Staggering downhill to the car, I crossed paths with the Lame Warder crying over his spilt milk and broken eggs, battered fish, strewn bacon, shattered local brews and far-flung butter. Only the tomatoes had bounced to safety. With his credit card, Klötz was spooning shattered globs of Sardinian butàriga mullet roe off the Sardu hillside and back into its brown package: disgusting even to me. More pitiful than ever, the Lame Warder needed my compassion. I shrugged. Now I knew him. In his hunchèd neediness he was revealed to me. Klötz? I don’t think so. Now, in his prime porkish pinkness did I know him at last. Indeed, via that single glimpse of Klötz’s Super Neediness, had I now recognised all of those penitentiary fuckers. At last the penny dawned on me. Oin and Gloin and Tinky Winky or whatever those three barreloid cunts called themselves were all Porcu. Was there any more pitiful and disgusting petty criminal family in all of Sardinia? I think not. I’d smelt a Porcu immediately I’d entered their Florinas sty, but I’d never truly clocked it until now. Couldn’t really imagine them outside their Zinnigas sty, I suppose. Couldn’t put poo and poo together. Fiends were at work in these valleys.
Those
Fiends. Still invaded by my Visionstate, and all the while observing the Porcu as it howled its shoppingless head off and tried in vain to cauterise the remaining draining fluids with bread, I searched. I searched and scanned the land around for more evidence of Fiends. What was going on here? Suddenly I located the evidence down in the river bottom, in the form of a mashed and concertina’d bright yellow caravan surmounted with a massive fiery red-painted sign that bore the
inscription Meatburger. Holy Kack! The caravan was old, old, old and looked as though it had been pitched forwards into the stream from way up here on the hillside. I had located peculiar evidence. A Meatburger caravan so far north of Nuoro? My my, how some allegiances must have changed! And it’s at that precise moment when I heard a Sound Uncanny drifting over the valley from Jayne Mansfield’s Ruin, no more than 400 strides away. The radio was playing that fucking Brits Abroad song that had caused all our problems.

Heading back downhill to the car with that music ringing in my ears, I once again reached the fast flowing stream. Here at water’s edge, that baggy Brits Abroad beat – loose to the point of being slack – eased my Visionstate and soothed my heathen temples. And so, now well out of Anna’s sight, I kicked off my stinky boots and black kecks, peeled off my black shirt, and lay face down and naked in the running water. Sardinian radio was playing the extended re-mix, the whole fucking thing on 89.9 FM! I suddenly had fifteen full minutes to myself! Oh bliss. But even though my face was plunged deep into the stream’s pebble bed, all I could register in my mind’s eye was the throb-throb of that ancient spectral Doorway plonked in the field still just 200 metres behind me: the throb-throb manifesting in some strange otherly dimension, pulsing across my stream-bathed temples and branding itself into my 3rd Eye. Still my naked body dammed that stream until – with the arrival of the guitar solo – reality reared its Pavlovian head at last and I spluttered back into the air and began to bathe my limbs urgently. I’d completely forgotten that guitar solo! What a flared killer! It’s got to be eight years at least since I last heard it! Consigned to the 12" re-mix only, poor forgotten Rob Dean’s beautiful and epic lead guitar break was now breaking in my heart. It was as though
I were breaking it in for the World and for the first time ever. Holy. How it dislodged so much of my psychic plaque with its sheer aspirational bonkers brilliance! On and on it soared. What a truly lovely thing. And as I shook my body dry and dabbed it with my shirt then slipped back into my black kecks and boots, I was utterly re-invigorated by this strange 1990 Chart Hit which had caused us all so very much Uber-grief.

When I got back to the car, Anna was sitting demurely on the driver’s side of the Buick’s colossal front fender, whilst the Brits’ classic chorus, though still booming across the valley, was slowly being faded by the radio DJ.

Clocking my dazed, somewhat
Gone Out
expression but saying nothing, the diplomatic Anna promptly switched off the radio, climbed into the driver’s seat and fired up the big V8. Then, with no more ado, we sailed out of there and headed south at last on the 131, still saying nothing. Doorways, Doorways, I’m back in the land of Doorways.

My mind was fried. What a flying fuck-up. What a fucking stick-up. We’d all of us been totally stitched! And by the illest-looking gang I never could have imagined. If Judge Barry Hertzog, his Porcu cronies
and
the Italian Authorities were all working in cahoots together … well, what chance for we hapless English all these years later? Huh, the return of the hapless English motif. But now, just two hours after Hertzog’s spiteful revelations, my thundering self-doubts and feelings of World Naïveté had utterly evaporated, fried up to a crisp on the Judge’s own blazing altar of evidence: that overturned Meatburger caravan so close to the penitentiary and so very far north of Nuoro. My my, Klötz would be facing a severe chastisement from the jostle brothers if he were clueless enough to let on to them how he’d led me past such big evidence. But what did that evidence mean? My mind reeled at the wide range of possibilities. What the fuck did it all add up to?

Meatburger had always been a purely southern Sard food franchise run by those fucking lunatic Spackhouse Tottu DJ brothers José and Luis Mackenzie, those wealthy Cágliari plumbers – adopted sons of a Scots flight sergeant from nearby R.A.F. Decimomannu, apparently – who seemed to have had their 1980s fingers in every Sardu pie. Rave music, plumbing, hot food franchises. Bad combination! Shit, their rank, putrid wares had even permeated the hot slop stands at F.C. Cágliari
Calcio throughout those first stages of Italia ’90. How had they clinched
that
deal? The stench, the full-on stench of that microwaved pus they were selling us sent some kids mad. I mean, even nowadays, you only have to YouTube those Anglo-Dutch riots and burning, overturned yellow Meatburger caravans is the primary motif. As leader of Rave munters Dayglo Maradona, I’d met José and Luis Mackenzie loads of times DJ-ing up in the Peak District at Dehydrated, and we’d even supported Spackhouse Tottu at The Haçienda during our brief chart heyday. They were always exhilarating and musically brilliant. Both much older than us, José was stick thin, six-foot-one, tiny moustache, droopy eyes and hair, brilliantest Sardu live DJ alive, but in real life a sucky fucker for shit damn sure. He carried a knife and he’d use it on you. His brother Luis was even worse. Tiny as a little shrub, he roamed the N. England clubs armed with new Spackhouse Tottu re-mixes, bullying Arthur Tadgell to play full 20-minute excursions
and
getting his way. Genius genius stuff. Always greeted with roars of approval. But Luis had such a menacing manner. Being older and Catholic and tiny and macho, he always referred to women as ‘boilers’ and always carried a knife. Even in Manchester on holiday. But while José and Luis were too out of their depth in N. England to reveal their true colours, and even had a tendency to brown-nose celebs, back on Sardu turf those two became the surliest, sullenest, southern Sards you never would want to encounter. ‘Not North of Nuoro’ was a real Spackhouse title off their debut LP. At Sardusonic ’89, they’d refused even to make a toast with Sardinia’s national beer Ichnusa, just because its symbol of four blindfolded and decapitated Muslim Warriors had Catalan origins. That was the Mackenzies. They distrusted everybody north of that Nuoro line for being either Spanish, educated or
secretly Corsican. So why had I found one of their Meatburger caravans totalled down some remote northern valley?

I stared over at Anna, who’d put up with a lot from me today. Sorry Anna, I thought quite loudly. At least I’d got cleaner throughout this first day. On arrival, so high had been my levels of Hideous that I’d not even noticed the pale blue rubber sheet she’d surreptitiously laid across the Buick’s front passenger floor. But by this late stage of the day, even I’d returned enough to the so-called Real World to begin to suffer from the unholy emanations uprising from my footwell. So when – as we sped through the spectacular ruins of the ancient Valle dei Nuraghe – we clocked a road-menders’ camp up ahead replete with a dramatic skyline of three burning braziers, well, I knew that the soaking shirt, the stinky t-shirts, the ex-socks, indeed that whole footwell of iffy nestlings had to be addressed right now … and with a vengeance. Sorry Anna.

As we pulled off the 131 on to that stretch of the old road that now formed the lay-by, we cruised uncomfortably past a horde of cheering road-menders, who – enjoying a bite of tea in this killer heat – now raised their mugs collectively either to the car, to Anna and the car, or perhaps simply to me for appearing to have both. Sweet. 300 metres or so ahead, high up on the scrubby ridge that separated our lay-by from the headlong rush of the modern 131, the three braziers burned voraciously, unattended and looking to cause problems in all this dry heat. I dragged all of the mucky clothing out of the footwell and, sweating like a bastard, hotfooted it up the ridge with Anna in tow. As we walked, I had some explaining to do.

Then, having reached the summit of the stifling ridge, I heaved that unrighteous sodden bundle into the middle brazier’s grateful maw and sprang back quickly from the flames. Whoosh went the fire and I spun around astonished at my sudden cleansing festival here atop this improvised heathen Fire Hill. And as that boiling slab of flammable matériels first buckled, then hissed within, I saw on every inch of the horizon great ancient towers magnificent, terrible and everywhere. Anna said nothing to me, but sauntered across to the ridge’s only protected part and sat down overlooking those several score nuraghic towers. I followed and sat down next to her.

As a Midlands lad born and raised in D. H. Lawrence’s hometown of Eastwood, my early music scenes, my early sex scenes, everything took place around the Nottingham area. So hearing Newark spoken of in such glowing tones, even by a foreigner? A pig’s anus with the runs has better vistas than Newark. As a seventeen-year-old, I’d hitched quite regularly up the A46 to a girlfriend in Lincoln, until my most regular lift – a six-foot-eight supply teacher who existed on family-size Maltesers and six-packs of Kola Bear – had a heart attack on the outskirts of Brough and kaputed his minuscule Honda hatchback against a skip with me in the passenger seat. And with no airbags in cars of the time, it seems probable that only those endless layers of sickly sweet Maltesers family packaging had saved my life. But I wasn’t about to mention to Anna that the supply teacher was the only cunt in the world with a footwell smellier than mine! No, now was a time only for generousness. And as we sat atop the ridge in that great heat surrounded by omnipresent lost ancient lurkers – all of whom would have been desperate even for one moment to take my blessèd place – I thanked the Gods that a warm creature such as Anna had been sent to share my final weird hours in the 21st century.