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.

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.

He presses his head against the plastic window. It is cool and reassuringly solid. He closes his eyes for a moment and focuses on the half remembered outlines of buildings and trees beyond the window. When he opens his eyes they remain. Still there.

The bus narrates his journey in broken sentences and phrases. “65, to, Ealing Broadway… calling at”

Pablo tastes the salt dripping down the worn grooves in his face, reaching the edges of his lips. He tries to get comfy on his seat and ignore the blaring noise of the other passengers.

He focuses on what is there and reassuring. Pressing his head closer against the cool glass, he focuses on it’s own existence, and nothing else. The further from this pane of glass, the less of importance to the universe it exists. He presses against it, and becomes one with the universe. He presses against it, and lets the bus narrate him home.

The dead fish’s eyes are clear and liquid, tiny bowls of jelly that stare off into the middle distance. Mikey watches the dead fish, unceremoniously lying on yesterday’s newspaper, watching the increasingly gray sky above.

Mikey picks up the fish again, he takes the knife, and sticks it into the the fish’s belly, just past the tail fin. He tugs along, cutting a ragged envelope along it’s stomach. Blood and riverwater spill out onto the sudoku page.

The fish turns it’s head and looks condescendingly at Mikey;

“You’re doing it wrong” says the fish.

“Shut the fuck up”

Mikey finishes his first inscision and tentatively sticks a finger into the newly formed cavity. Inside is lukewarm, oily, and a variation of soft fleshy textures. He suppresses an involuntary gag.

“You’re going to poison everyone” says the fish.

“Fuck off” says Mikey, sticking his tongue out, he begins to scrape out something dark and sticky with his knife.

Across from Mikey, near the tent, Rob is blowing on the embers of the barbecue, trying to get it started and drinking fosters.

“What’s that Mike?” he says

“Nothing” Mikey says

“He thinks you’re crazy” says the fish.

Mikey pulls out of small sac of something, that bursts and smells foul, then a series of tiny organic geometry lessons that he assumes are internal organs.

“How’s it coming along?” calls Rob, still not looking over

“Terrible” calls the fish, straining it’s head over to Rob.

“Ok” says Mikey.

“Liar” says the fish.

Mikey inspects his handiwork, the set of discarded innards and the relatively intact fish. Vaguely satisfied, he takes both ends of the newspaper and walks the few steps over to the river. Then he scrapes off the discarded fish guts, washes the knife, wipes it in the long grass. And walks the whole lot carefully over to the barbecue.

“Looks good” says Rob, approvingly, “How shall we do this then?”

“Just throw him on the bars, grill him whole.” says Mikey

“The hell you will, city boy. Crazy boy.” says the fish.

“It’ll be fine” says Mikey, to both of them.

They both open a fresh beer, and wait for the flames to die down and the coals to retreat to to white.

“See, this is the life” says Rob “The great outdoors, living off the land and all that”

“Listen to him” says the fish “acting like bloody Ray Mears. You’re in suffolk mate! You’re a loser!” He stares bloody glassy eyes at Rob. He stares daggers. He turns to Mikey.

“Loser man with a crazy friend. Crazy friend talking to a seriously dead fish, somewhere in a field in Suffolk! Oh this man is finding himself alright. The great outdoors , living off the land and all that. Jesus wept”

Mikey tries to ignore them both. Midges snap at his knees.

Soon they feel the fire is ready, and they brush the fish with olive oil (”Olive Oil!” cries the fish, “Fucking Ponces”) and salt, then they throw him on to the barbecue.

They watch him cook for a while. Mikey tries to ignore the monologues and curses, as he watches the smoke rise up above the grass and the weeds; lit up by a dying sun behind them. Rob, bored, goes back to his book.

Mikey alone concentrates on the smoke, and, when the wind changes, he lets it flow into him through his eyeballs. Until his face is stinging and he can taste it on the back of his tongue, salty dirty and wet from the burnt tears on his cheeks. He breathes it in until he cannot take anymore, and has to go over to the riverbank and cough and cough and cough, feeling the branches lungs sore and tender like razors. He pukes and lies, panting on the riverbed, watching an upside down sky and listening to the world without fear.

EXT. LONDON. NIGHT

A series of grand hotels and mansion blocks - lit up orange by tasteful, low emission, council sanctioned public lighting - loom over the plastic shelter of a bus stop. Four people surround it.

One is inspecting the route map, hopping from foot to foot and jumping up and down on the spot; tall and trying to make the best of his thin coat, this is ALEX.

ALEX

No way Coop, no way, we’re not going any further.

Another is lying spread across the bus stop, staring up, trying to see through the semi-opaque roof. He is clutching a terracotta coloured polystyrene kebab container in one hand, bottle of corona (empty) in the other; This is COOPER

COOPER

I swear to god man. I swear to god it is. It’s nearby, seriously.

ALEX

Bullshit.

The road is empty. Despite this apparently being a busy london street barely a car has passed by.

COOPER

I went there with, whatshername, the one with the hair who did economics.

ALEX

You’re fucked.

COOPER

I’m like a homing pigeon when I’m drunk man. The instincts just take over. I could find it seriously. I always get home, always. It’s like the force.

ALEX

The force?

COOPER

Check it on your fucking iphone then, if you don’t believe me.

ALEX

Doesn’t bloody work, some drunk fuck spilled bishop’s finger all over it remember?

COOPER

Fucking proper kent ale.

ALEX

It’ll be here soon anyway. The thing says every twelve to fifteen minutes.

COOPER

My boys! My homies! Canter-bury!

A third person turns round. She has, up until now, been sitting oblivious atop a parking permit, short, spiked and feathered hair flicks around her ears like a videogame character; this is JEN.

JEN

And how long has it been?

ALEX

How long has what been?

JEN

Since we decided to wait here for the bus.

COOPER

Too fucking long.

The fourth member of the group crosses the empty road, vaulting the concrete planters serving to divide the lanes. This is MATT.

MATT

Nothing that way. I still don’t know where we are, near Horseguards or something.

COOPER

See!

MATT

What?

ALEX

Don’t encourage him.

COOPER

Fuck off you. Mattyboy! There’s this amazing like, fenced garden around here somewhere. I went here with Sally.

JEN

God, I had done best to forget her.

COOPER

Hot.

ALEX

She was crazy. She went crazy. She came round to my flat once and you hid in the wardrobe. She was crazy.

COOPER

She took me to these amazing gardens, and we ate sandwiches, and people played badminton. It was the fucking best day. Like from a film.

JEN

Badminton? Sandwiches? Did this romantic tryst take place in a Henry James novel of your adolescene Coop?

COOPER

It was fucking brilliant, she was at the point where she was just crazy enough that it made her cool and exciting and sexy.

MATT

What happened?

COOPER

I realized she was nuts, but-

He sits up, and jabs the corona bottle accusingly at Alex.

COOPER

We should go man. Come on, let me show you.

ALEX

We are not going off to follow your impaired sense of direction, which lets, face it, is hopeless even when you have a full possession of your faculties, to find this magical secret garden somewhere in the middle of central london.

COOPER

Nah man, I can see it now, I can see the route. There was this giant statue of a dude with a sword.

JEN

I think I can hear something.

MATT

It’ll be an 83 again.

COOPER

Big motherfucking sabre, he had, with his hand resting on it like this. It was in a shield, sheath, what’s that fucking thing called you keep swords in?

The three of them peer into the road, trying to see round the corner to the inescapable , yet instantly recognizable growing noise of a juddering large diesel engine consistent only with a london double decker.

ALEX

Who’s got his oyster?

Jen holds two walleted-oyster cards up.

COOPER

Good stuff that man!

Headlights appear at the end of the road. Even Cooper attempts to stand.

MATT

Come on you fucking bus.

JEN

Pray to your god of transport for london…

The bus materializes, then approaches. OUT OF SERVICE emblazoned boldly on it’s face.

ALEX

Fuck! Bollocks.

MATT

Who would drive an out of service bus around london at

He checks his watch

MATT

(Cont)

Four in the morning! Who does that? Seriously?

COOPER

Scabbard! Yeah fucker! Scabbard. Sword in the fucking scabbard. Boo-Ya!

]]> http://holdingpatterns.hwcommunity.com/2009/04/25/night-bus/feed/ http://holdingpatterns.hwcommunity.com/2009/04/23/hadyard-hill/ http://holdingpatterns.hwcommunity.com/2009/04/23/hadyard-hill/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:26:04 +0000 Tom http://holdingpatterns.hwcommunity.com/?p=97 You can hear the noise of them before you can see them. Especially in the dark That’s what suprised us the most. For such tall buggers they kind of creep up on you, but the hum, the three tone breath of giants, that you can hear for miles. Each of the fifty six giants goes Whump- Whump- Whump. Three beats of a heart, three breaths per second, as regular as a metronome.

There are four of us trying to creep up on them. I keep my maglite aimed on the ground, hoping to spot unexpected geography. The maglite is our one concession to practicality, otherwise we are ill-equipped for the task at hand. The scottish wind cuts through our coats and hoodies, and my feet are sodden and cold through my battered pair of canvas Dunlops.

We try to keep eachother regularly spaced out in a line, each a few metres apart. City types unused to the gentle permeating dark of the countryside, and the absence of bleeding ambient light, we hum songs in a whisper to remind eachother of our presence. Above us is another unusual sight for those brought up in London. The stars that have been sprinkled like we think we remember them from childhood seem unreal, they seem like bad CGI so theatrical and cinematic. We home in on the breathing giants, whump whump whump, in a low crouch that we think will make us, trespassers, vandals, an honour guard, harder to spot in this murk.

As a bunch, as a rule, we were a cynical lot. Thats what comes from  a middle class upbringing where your parents feel too guilty to send you to private school so they relocate to some leafy affluent corner of south west london, barely gripping onto the edge of the tube map for dear life, where the poor and the kids they read about on the news seldom venture, or at least, only figure into the catchment area in manageable numbers. As kids ‘too posh to pay’ brought up with fathers in the music business or mothers who work in the city, parents who buy an eighth for themselves and another for the kids because ‘at least we know they’re not going to get into trouble’, yet refuse not to buy organic milk for health reasons.

She certainly bought into our cynicism, our perfectly manufactured desperate apathy. She espoused many plans to emigrate, to buy an old VW camper van and drive from Lands End to Dunnet Head, a place she smugly would inform was further north than John O’Groats.  She then planned to shove the van off the edge of a cliff. Or set it on fire. Or turn it to sculpture. She never did quite decide.

But she did love wind turbines. At college when she sported the de-facto green hair, too big jeans, and listened obsessively to Belle & Sebastian on a battered mini-disc player, she spent months creating wind turbines. Hundreds of them. In paint or sculputre or drawing or animation or collage or writing or whatever. She was obsessed, she was a minor celebrity in the art department. Her ability to take a brief or a project and somehow, either validly or hidden away somewhere, sneak in a turbine.

If you were to go round to her house, you would see loads of them in her room. Made out of paperclips or blutack coated in spray varnish, or sculpted from parts of scissors and electrical tape. She had them everywhere. On any available flat surface, laid out in packs.

This is why the four of us find ourselves, finally, at the perimeter fence at Hadyard Hill in western Scotland. The fence, to be frank, is something of a disappointment. Where we expected barbed wire, guard towers and searchlights, we found simply the sort used to keep out curious sheep. I guess there is little need to protect 56 giant wind turbines in a field.

It is only now that we can finally see them, rotating illusionally elliptically, the assymetric point leading one to believe they swing like a cam, like a man falling asleep on the tube, his head up then falling down due to it’s heavy narcoleptic weight.

Upside down they look like atlas. Holding up the sky on giant pointed shoulders above a thin torso. All keeping their own particular time, beating their own rhythm like fifty six slightly different clocks.

unfinished - 23/04/09