Holding Patterns

Emerging, a little unsteady on his feet. Gerry runs a hand over his features, hungover like, from a bad dream. He hears the post gig whine in his ear, a solid note descending steadily.

Slowly, sounds filter back at him. The world re-orientates itself back into focus for him.

He hears birds. Then water. Waves steady like heartbeats. He looks up at the sky and momentarily forgets to shield his eyes from the sun. Hissing. A giant snake.

No, not water. Cars. Traffic. fifty sixty mile an hour irregular traffic.

Oh yeah.

He turns back to see the Fiat. Now at an angle, rudely sticking it’s behind up in the air, back wheels off the floor, frozen midway through it’s own quiet attempt to dig it’s way through the hedgerow and the protective fence. Face pressed against the floor. Steam or smoke rises from the radiator. He realises there is the snake.

He expects the back wheels to still be spinning, comically, like a cartoon animal trying to run on air. But they are still.

The traffic on the winding A road slows down as it approaches him. He sees faces regarding him with amazement. He is sure that never before this moment, has he attracted such interest from strangers. The drivers habit, rushing round the corner, then slowing right down, never stopping, then accelerating away, creates a visual doppler effect. Gerry has to remind himself it is not time slowing down around him. He feels sick.

Turning back to the fiat, he feels all the muscles down his back ache. His face feels twice the size and flushed red from the airbag. He can remember feeling the same when being struck in the face by a football at school.

He should call somebody. He remembers he has a phone in his back pocket. Trying to ignore the rushing sound of blood and water in inner eardrums, he attempts to make fingers press keys.

As he tries to decide whether to call the RAC or his wife, he looks beyond the hedgerow at the fields beyond.

This is truly an anonymous place, free from signs or houses, just beyond this strip of concrete, could be anything.

Gerry clambers, slowly, to the side of the road, and pulls himself up to see over the hedgerow and the damaged fence.

He stares at the view, and listening to the waves in this place realises that for the very first time he could really go anywhere, or be anything.

For as long as he could remember John had been obsessed with the pacific. Perhaps it was his Britishness. His proximity to the comparatively feeble Atlantic and such minor-non oceanic entitities like the North, Mediterranean, and Irish seas.

The pacific was the one. It held secrets, long lost archipelagoes and islands that were once volcanoes.

It contained easter island and the galapagos islands and fiji and places where the sun came up on the wrong side and places so big and so empty that they still contained lost souls from air-crashes or world war 2 or something, that have been abandoned so long they’ve since set up their own perfectly isolated civilisations.

He dreams of flying for days without reaching a continent.

John hides the maps from his parents in toy-chests and behind band posters. He worries about his step-fathers reaction, the consequence of any contemplation of escape.

He wants to skydive out of a plane, a simple propeller plane, to dive straight out and to crashland somewhere alone and small and surrounded by water and his and his own.

John spends his evenings after work scouring the coastlines of argentina and new zealand and new guinea and hawaii.

He learns about all those clumps of islands with strange colonial first names. The Solomon Islands, the Marshall Island.

Jarvis Island.

Pitcairn Islands.

Cook Islands.

Federated states of Micronesia.

He finds names and places in Maori and imagines their meanings.

Mata-Utu, Niue, Vanuatu.

When he smells his step-father’s cigarettes, across his cracked worn fists and in all John’s clothes hung up, absorbent and spongelike in the kitchen,  all he smells are bonfires on beaches, with clouds all circling low, like a wreath around an empty clean sky.

This morning it has been a particularly bad one. When he feels he is finally free from it, and they are both asleep or passed out or simply fought out, he goes outside and steals a fiver from his mother’s handbag.

He catches the sunday bus into town, goes to WHSmiths, and buys new drawing pins.