Tag: Travel

Christina Collins, 37, Rugeley, by Christina Collins, 37, Rugeley

The start of it was hopping off the bow onto the aqueduct – inelegantly into the arms of a passing couple – and following them through hawthorn and campion to the steps. They dropped some comment on the way; I told them my name and melted away into the hedgerow.

Actually, maybe it began two nights earlier on the tow path. Goldfinches landed in a young ash tree and swifts skimmed above. I thought; it is too lovely an evening to die.

Or perhaps it was at the gravestone – the first time I really felt it. I knelt to place forget-me-nots in its shadow and found, to my embarrassment, that I was snivelling.

I must be fair; it started years before that. It was when my fixation with narrowboats first arose, when I read every romanticised perspective about life aboard. It was my research into canals that built towards the moment that our lives would come spinning together across a century – when I read about the murder of a woman on the Trent and Mersey canal at who just happened to have exactly the same name as me.

What morbidly fascinating coincidence. And there were other similarities between the two of us: she was also petite, like me. She also referred to her husband by his last name, like I do. And she was also thirty-seven – like me, and on a boat in the same place, when she was raped and murdered by four boatmen and left in the canal at Rugeley in June, 1839.

But there it is, I suppose. It becomes all a bit less quirky when you put those words together.

****

Researching a murder of someone with your own name is unsettling. We’ve all googled ourselves but let me tell you, seeing your name next to the word ‘murder’ over and over gets uncomfortable. I found a comprehensive internet article with pictures of the aqueduct and bank where her body was found and the Bloody Steps, up which her body was carried to town – which, legend has it, ooze blood. I read a book by John Godwin; a pretty well researched text published in 1999, which details as much of her life as could be known, her journey by a Pickford’s company boat down from Liverpool towards London, and the public response to her murder. It had pictures too.

All taken in winter. There are the bloody steps, with their un-gothic, municipally painted handrail, sodden with rain and mud. The only green is the bleak dark of ivy and the sky’s greyness adds to the sombre mood. Good for a ghost story, isn’t it? You need a bit of pathetic fallacy to get in the mood.

When Christina was actually murdered, it was June. It’s my favourite month – my birthday. Her own birthday was July, another summer child. I was thwarted from shivering with evocative atmosphere as I strolled along the towpath on a May evening, because the cow parsley and bluebells were too glorious. But the uncanny feeling crept in as I pondered the exact place she may have been strangled. I am here, it is evening, she was also here on a summer evening. Did these flowers comfort her? Remind her of some fresh world outside the confines of the stuffy boat cabin? Or did the moist fragrance of late spring become eerily warped by the anxiety of darkness and spending ten hours in that cabin with four drunk men?

I followed the journey in Godwin’s text. Stoke, Stone, Hoo Mill. Place after place where she reported the behaviour of the boatmen, to people who later bore witness to her obvious distress yet did nothing to help her. Then that dark, five hours from midnight when she was last seen alive, yawning to dawn, when the worst thing had happened. And I ended, like her, on the aqueduct at Brindley bank, to stand looking into the water where her body was found floating, face blackened, in her dark gown and faun neckerchief.

It wasn’t spooky and exciting. I found it all very sad. What is it about our attitude to history, where the passing of time can somehow turn sickening tragedy into gory myth? As children, our class was shown grainy photographs of the Ripper’s mutilated victims. We lapped it up, admiring his precision. Why do we show children this and make it some kind of ghost story? Why do we sensationalise and make a spectacle of very real violence against women? In a hundred years, will we have a sign on Clapham Common where Sarah Everard was murdered? Will people take selfies with it, and dress up as policemen?

Much of what you can read about the murder now, is Colin Dexter’s own take in his novel, The Wench is Dead. From his two days of research after reading Godwin’s text, he concluded the court’s verdict over three of the boatmen was unsafe and wrote a version in which Morse effortlessly vindicates them from a hospital bed. This idea was taken up by the BBC’s show Murder, Mystery, and my Family in 2020, where investigators refer to Christina’s murder in quotation marks and bring on a descendent of one of the hanged men to get emotional.

Forgive my waspish tone. Like Dexter, I want to go through all the witness statements to better corroborate Godwin’s presentation of the facts. To be sure in myself that there was actually a murder, and not a madwoman who fell in the canal.

But as women, aren’t we so used to being discredited? To being ignored and disbelieved when we challenge the abuse we face at work, on public transport, in clubs, in our homes. So used to others looking for culpability in our own actions when bad things happen to us. Or even challenging that the bad thing happened at all, like Dexter and the BBC. The tired narrative of the hysterical woman is preferred over accountability. Is it really so hard to believe four drunk men got handsy in a confined space with one woman over ten hours, and turned to violence when she tried to fend them off? We see this play out in our own lives every day. It’s simpler than a healthy woman on a journey to her lover suddenly being seized by such a fit of melancholy that she throws herself in the canal.

The Wench is Dead, after all. Why worry about her?

Unlike that first Christina, I have had wonderful experiences on boats. I was never a passenger, dependent on others to transport me. I owned my boat, NB Encharnted (yes, that’s how it was spelled, in great big letters); I lived on her gentle rockings with the musical scrape of piling hooks when the locks shifted the water, and I steered her up and down the cut. When I walked the towpath at night, it was not for escape, but to collect wildflowers and put them in jugs on the gas locker. I filled her with water, emptied her toilet, lit my fire in winter and drank whiskey with the owls. I chose that life, in my safe and secure fifty-seven feet of steel that I helmed. Not a constrained trap of horror.

So coming in to Rugeley for this Christina Collins, aged thirty seven, on a canal boat, was very different from the first. And I walked the towpath; thought of her; remembered; wrote tributes and put flowers on her grave. And did not die.

Through all life’s rhythms that cycle through moments and ages – when we try again to do things better; maybe for now, that is the most I can do, for her.

Gift of the Gibb – Pt 1

‘So this is it, guys! Jump in.’

In, he said. Well, I didn’t quite know what ‘in’ was. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I was cold and needed a wee. I was aware that there was water of an uncertain depth ahead and while I’d like to use the old metaphor of ‘inky black;’ maybe chuck in a ‘gurgling’ to describe it, I’d be lying because I couldn’t see a bloody thing. The light of my feeble headtorch patchily revealed that the valiant Damo – our guide, had stripped down to his shorts and boots and was rubbing his hands together between hunched shoulders. Then that image was gone pretty quick, lost to the gulping blackness. Apart from the wobbling, unenthusiastic glow of his headtorch ebbing away, I could see nothing else.

I stood on the sand, with the Gentleman nudging me; go on, Chris. But why the fuck, I thought, am I in a pitch-dark cave at 6am about to swim in a flood-swollen, frozen creek infested with goddamn crocodiles?

Well, I didn’t want to be left in the dark on me own for a croc to find, so in you go, – and I did that thing I do when getting in water (only recently discovered, as entering the inclement waters of the Irish, Atlantic and North Seas is not something in which sensible Brits indulge), which, it turns out, is hyperventilate the words ‘shit! fuck! fuck! Ok, I’m in, I’m in, shit! fuck’ and there you are, aloft, kick, swim! Hope your boots don’t weight you down, don’t think about the crocs and get to the other side.

This was the first major spot on our tour of the Kimberley; heading from Broome to Darwin: Tunnel Creek. Despite arriving at the stretching crags of a 350million-year-old coral reef at dawn, swimming that cold creek wasn’t even the first impressive thing I’d done that day. No. That was to meaningfully pick up the shovel and disappear off into the bush. But I’d been keen on getting to Tunnel Creek – I’d been lent a book by my shanty man Bruce about the Bunuba people’s resistance to encroaching and violent pastoralists in the 1880s, led by the heroic Jandamara who evaded capture for years by hiding in these caves. I dunno if he had to deal with crocs. And they were certainly there; as we followed the creek’s strips and pools, careful not to stumble and reach out for the wrong half naked person in the dark; little red eyes at the edges of the caves where they cringed, spread like butter against the walls. Bloody hell. And then walk towards the light, and relief dripped off me, along with the water, as daylight emerged at the other end of the tunnel, festooned with trees, littered with heron and loud with peace. Until Damo pointed out the long, deep imprint of an enormous reptilian tail in the sand, heading from whence we’d come.

‘Right guys, back through the creek again, then!’

FUCK’s sake.

On our way back, we encountered three noisy lads on giant, unicorn inflatables with tinnies.  Now we’ve read a lot about crocs, or ‘croncs’ as the Gentleman has affected to call them. Salties can live in fresh or salt water and have a gland that removes the salt. They can come up to 100km upriver. They like to eat small calves, or wallabies, or wallaby sized humans like children and Chrissies. They can lean back on their tail as if it was a fifth leg, just like kangaroos, so pealing you off the roof of your ute isn’t much of an issue. They can even, apparently, climb up waterfalls. Jesus. We have agreed that, along with its weather, you don’t fuck with Australian wildlife. The hippy mantra ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ rather underestimates the boofhead courage of your average 5 metre fucking salty. But here’s an observation from The Brit Abroad, West Australians and Northern Territorians certainly have an impressive risk tolerance. Or commendable courage. Or they’re just fucken nuts. I pondered the gleeful shouts of those floating blokes the next day while drinking a cup of tea by the bank of the incomparable Manning Creek at 7am, breath caught by the misty golden beauty of the morning. Little fish swam right up to the edge where I sat, then spun round to rub their backs on the sand and flash their silver bellies to the sky. I sipped me tea and watched a white egret on the rock in the middle of the river, patient and still, next to an equally motionless penguin. …   …    …   Why the hell is there a penguin in the Kimberley. I shaded my eyes from the sun, and it shifted, revealing the long neck of a white bellied cormorant. Righto. Animals are secretive and deceitful in this country. Remember that, Chris. What else do you need to remember? Shit. Eyes widening, I hastily interrogated the sand. I couldn’t see any croc tracks, but I took the opportune moment to get the hell away from the river’s edge.

More on crocs later.

We stayed at Manning Gorge two nights. The first day began with an hour’s walk down to the waterfall to go for a swim in the gorge. Damo was pretty convincing about toughening up – you start the walk by swimming across the creek, he said, you’ll be right, he said – there’s little blue barrels to dump your gear in, then you can just hang onto them and kick if you can’t swim. It’s hot, you’ll dry out in no time. Far out. But having done the same thing the day before in the pitch freakin’ dark and much colder water, this was, er, too easy, as they say, so in I got. It was a beautiful river, surrounded by trees, rocks to laze on, birds and the blue, blue sky, I was actually pretty energised getting in. Refreshed, we hiked over the hills through pink wildflowers and cotton flower trees that bear pretty yellow blossoms (right on the end of the branch, with no leaves; imagine a magician’s wand when it spurts a bouquet out the end) and eventually got down to the waterfalls and swimming pools of Manning Gorge. It was glorious. Red, red rocks curved their arms around us, and slabs floated in the water, sprouting shady young, green eucalypts. Vivid scarlet dragon flies landed anywhere you threw your eyes. Fishes swum up to the rocks and gawped at us and rainbows capered in the waterfall’s spray. Like, ya know those screen saves on your computer of magic places you don’t really think exist? It was just like that.

The whole adventure was very much walk to a gorge, get in the gorge, walk to another gorge, get in that one too. Which was great, because if the Gentleman and I had been driving the road alone, I don’t know we’d have committed in quite the same way. Despite the children running around with pool noodles stuffed into their rucksacks and really making a go of it. After dutifully getting in Tunnel Creek, Bell’s Gorge, Manning Gorge and the waterlilies of Galvan’s Gorge we headed off to El Questro Station across the Pentecost River.

El Questro had been talked up a fair old bit by old Greg, camp guitarist, singer, American accent talker and teller of tall tales. After five nights of sleeping in the bush, this camp site had a bar, he said. Steady on, I insisted, after all, we have campsites with bars in them even in Grimsby. (For those that don’t know, this is a thoroughly uninspiring north-east corner of the UK.) And we were packing a hell of a lot of juice – the Gentleman and I had not expected it to be quite the booze cruise it turned out, but Damo is there to be our guide and make sure we have a good holiday, and when it’s dark and the activities are done, what else is there to do but sit round the fire, drink beers and sing? A bar would at least ease the pressure on the icebox, furtively betraying us beneath our seats in the giant 4-wheel drive van by piercing our unopened cans with the combo of sharp ice and rough roads. The bar delivered (until we drank it dry), and as El Questro is an enormous cattle station, occasionally you’d see a cow wander around. These must be some of the most lean, free range organic beef cattle in the world, but who knows how many there are because there are no fences, and you have to get an external company in with helicopters and special gear to hunt down and round them up for selling. But here we were at the feet of the Cockburn Ranges (Australia pronounces all the letters, to my glee), the Pentecost River flowing by and the tall rocks heated up creeks to keep the Zebedee springs at a beautiful 38 degrees all morning. We were in them at 7am, lolling around in hot water between pandanus and ferns like a luxury tropical bathhouse. Apparently, they chuck all the proles out at midday and then the hot springs are the exclusive reserve of the posh lodges where celebrities are helicoptered in. They can keep it – who wants to be in hot water after midday? They’ve missed the best bit! True to that, we left Zebedee springs to hike to Emma Gorge; the coldest waterfall of the tour. Striding up the rocks we passed a limpid blue, sunlit and sparkling pool. Can’t we stop here, Damo? No. Get in the cold one. So we did and it was the true sublime; my breath was taken away by water kept in the shade all day by the enormous cliff surrounding it, the water was deep and murky, I swam towards the yawning black wall that was so tall as to block the great fiery sun and my soul expanded in the terror.

Right after I got out, someone shouted that they’d found a hot spring by the other wall. Bastard.

Part III – Lightning Ridge. Feeling Sorry in the Thirsty Dawg

Mining country. Blinding sunshine bouncing off piles of rubble heaped up every few metres next to holes carved out of the ground like the butchery of a madman ripping the internal organs out of a giant and scattering them like baptisms. We drove in singing ‘I’m sorry I’m always pissed and I’m sorry I exist.’

Honestly; it was hard coming from Aboriginal fish traps to mining. I don’t know what to tell you – as a socialist greenie, I’m not a fan of mining. But before you click away, I’m about to go through some kinda character journey here, so bear with me. You could just skip the next paragraph.

While the fish traps talked about respecting land; mining by definition exploits it. Drag what you want out of the ground, then move on. Let’s be honest, often it’s pretty destructive; even if you’re not mining fossil fuels which accelerate climate change. It uses an incredible amount of water, in an incredibly dry state, ostensibly to wash dirt, in this case. Large companies dig holes the size of small villages in the ground and leave the scar, obliterating biodiversity and heritage – often choosing to cop the fine for cultural heritage destruction as profits far outweigh it. Just look at Rio Tinto (Britishers – look this up, it was a Fucking Scandal.) How can I connect with people that make a living out of this, even if, you know, it’s the only job in the area and all that?

Thanks for sticking with me, we’re moving on. The point is: Lightning Ridge kinda aint like that.

Mining in this crazy place is for opals. Lightning Ridge has the largest deposits of black opal in the world. They’re not black, btw, they’re just way more blue and colour-intense than the milky iridescent ones you’ll have seen, something to do with black potch behind the stone…or something… look, I’m no chemist; google it yourselves. And I arrived thinking, ‘oh, this will be historical, they used to do mining here.’

Nope. Still doing it. Which, growing up in a country where mining is not (anymore) an industry, I find bizarre. So, arriving and doing a tour round an underground mine was confronting. Lovely lady in the shop was desperate to sell us an opal, and talk about opals; she’s got props and trays and display pieces all for explaining how the opal gets so damn blue and got ‘em all out to show me. We looked around. Had furtive and intense whispered conversations. The Gentleman wants an opal. Splendid, I say, get an opal. Why do I have to be involved with this? I don’t want a shiny symbol of earth’s destruction. Why do you hate me? he asks; I don’t, I say, just buy a freakin’ opal if you want one, but I’m not wearing it. He buys an opal. The lady asks if it’ll be for a ring or a necklace. The Gentleman mumbles his way out of this one while I saunter my way out the shop.

We went to the IGA then aimed at our air BnB; a cute old wooden schoolhouse set down an unsealed road surrounded by trees and … holes in the ground with heaps of crap next to them. I glumly wonder what the fuck we’re going to do here for two days and whose bloody fault is this; oh that’s right – I remember, my boss recommended it. -_-

But the point is; the point IS… it’s kind of awesome. I genuinely left thinking, ‘fuck, do I want to get an opal mine?’ for fleeting seconds. There are no enormous mines in Lightning Ridge, they are all tiny individual claims owned by madmen or couples, with glazed, glittering opals for eyes, all excited, optimistic, creative and desperate. It’s the real pioneering spirit of Australia – exploration, discovery, hope and tea. Something, and I mean a kind of madness, has got in to the people there.

What is wonderful about all these people who are on a lifelong quest to discover eye-watering hoards of beautiful, useless little things is that they don’t seem to be consumerist or greedy in any other way. While looking for enough opals to cover a house, many live in caravans, with crazy car seats ripped out of some abandoned vehicle and lassoed with bungies to the back of the gas bottle as their veranda. Art abounds; John Murray lives up there and has a gallery (look him up!), people’s gardens are demarcated by empty oil barrels and decorated splendidly with handmade…I dunno, scarecrows and things; wind chimes, plants, coloured stones and quirky little signs saying ‘where the bloody hell are we.’ Everyone has a mine in their back garden. Even the place we stayed! And the owner was an artist and her mother was a writer and the house had a wee book about how the building came to be in their family and …well. That on its own was gripping narrative. Everyone is hoping to find their fortune; just one more foot! but only just about find enough opals to live on. Everyone is an artist, a poet, a scientist, a jewellery maker – and there’s a sort of fever and excitement to the place.

One chap, an Italian from Treviso, came out to mine in his late twenties. He never found a damn thing, then in the afternoons, taught himself to build and constructed a stone castle. True story. Built scaffolding from planks of wood balanced on oil drums and carried all the stone up himself. Kinda like that Ricetti guy from Griffith, but maybe madder and vehemently still alive. Lives in a caravan next to the castle with hoards of … stuff; old saucepans and general ironware piled up. Another chap built a house entirely out of glass bottles, with a little doghouse, too. There is a pub ‘in the scrub,’ we had to drive 40km to get to, over a lot of unsealed roads that were hella bumpy and it was quirky and beautiful and amazing and I had a chat for about an hour with the most irrepressibly energetic and wonderful woman about her band’s incarnations from Dry Heat to Just Us. She’s gigged everywhere from Bourke to Mallacoota. She and her husband also mined, she said, and she looked suspiciously over her shoulder every time she mentioned her claim and whispered ‘where we think there are Some’ through gritted teeth. She was an inspiring and warm human being. We went to the Artesian Bore Baths which was the whole reason we’d come, thanks to my boss. These are glorious hot baths drawing water from the Artesian basin which is the size of bloody Queensland. As we slid into the 42 degree water and watched a splendid sunset, surrounded by silver hoards relaxing in the water (which gave the place a sort of refined and family tone), talking in Polish and Italian, and reflected on the madness and wonder of the place, I forgave Rachel. Then we had dinner at a restaurant I… shall not name, where the plates were dusty, the waitress got everything hilariously wrong (she brought the starters, which we fell ravenously upon; she cleared the plates and said conspiratorially, ‘how about some dessert?’ How about the mains? we suggested. How about a whole bottle between us, instead of just a glass, how about the Bolognese instead of the puttanesca, and how bout, please please, cooking my pork all the way through without dallying with medium rare or other caprices?) and we drank a pleasing bottle of Penfolds and had a jolly good laugh.

I guess the point of travelling is to learn. To meet people. To understand things with more nuance. I know this intellectually, that’s why I do it. But to be presented with a bunch of people who do something I think is wrong for the world, and then really really like them, forces you to look at a person holistically. Obvs. It removes prejudice, which comes only from ignorance. Because that’s what making a judgement about all miners before you know any, is. Travel, and meeting and learning about people forces you to not see in black and white but to look at all the other bits of people, and focus on the things you can agree on, and enjoy together, not the things that divide you. Try remembering that the next time you argue about Brexit. Well, we loved the place and were pretty gutted to leave the acres of sky and the surprise emus, rivers, red kangaroos and red earth and mad, warm, and wonderful people.

We drove to Orange. Got pissed at the wineries. Bought some books.

The Adventures of Halgrim and Binky On The Road

It was a quarter past ten when Halgrim the book guardian finished taking the daily inventory. However today, (a fine spring morning, if a little windy and changeable) looked to be getting off to a bad start.

A book was missing.

He frowned. He checked again. He cast about the shelves for a misplacement. He clambered down and set off on sure footed purposeful feet around the boat where he guarded the Books to see if it had been moved.

‘It’ll turn up,’ thought Halgrim. ‘I don’t know, I tend and protect these books all the day long – if they are moved when I am off duty, it’s hardly my responsibility,’ but even while he muttered this, scrambling up the mountainous bed to scale the wall and check the high corner shelf, he couldn’t believe it. Books were his soul. Deep under the jewelled lock of his tiny troll heart, his spirit was made of fine pages covered with the ink and whisper of language. A missing book was anathema and it corresponded to a now missing part of his very being – words and thoughts that were gone.

Having completed his search of radiators, high tables, steps, window ledges, even the bathroom cupboard (sometimes!), he could fully ascertain that this book was gone.

‘Come Binky,’ Halgrim called to his war rabbit. He mounted its ears. ‘We have an important quest.’

****

The missing book, according the Halgrim’s fluid and fastidiously neat inventory (Halgrim had a masterful grip of a pen for a troll), was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Highly typical for it to go off on a journey, Halgrim thought and now I must go after it.

The first trial was to ford the Great River. Now occasions like this were always fraught because despite both Halgrim and Binky being excellent swimmers, Binky was a most corpulent rabbit on the inside which made staying afloat problematic. Nevertheless, the river must be forded, and Halgrim called on the bream and carp gods to follow beneath, blowing bubbles to aid floativity. In this way they managed most of the way across before encountering their first enemy. Two white swans, statuesque, snowy and beautiful in their malevolent deadliness were heading for them. While having no interest in Binky, they were highly interested in the fish below, without which, Binky would be sunk. And swans have their own magic. A disdainful look from their frozen eyes strikes such contempt to the heart of their victims that they are turned to stone. Halgrim knew there was little time as their elegant forms glided inexorably forward.

‘Ye gods Binky! Kick!! By Loki, rabbit, KICK!’

Of a sudden, a passing kingfisher (friends with Halgrim who always enjoyed his stories) heard the panicked shouts. He saw at once Halgrim’s danger and flitted off where his jewelled sapphire flash caught the eye of a heron, who, caught entirely off guard, stumbled over his long legs and caught himself only by flapping his long wings lugubriously upwards. In his annoyance he saw the swans and the struggling Halgrim. He knew this meant fish beneath and this ever patient shawled pescatore flapped over to challenge the swans.

In the commotion that ensued, Binky and Halgrim reached the shore and tumbled spluttering, safe, onto the bank.

****

After riding together for considerable time, Halgrim tugged Binky’s ears up short.

‘No Binky. No dark green grey forest on this quest. Today we need the grey path. Even more so, we need to hitchhike.’

Conveniently here, a car stopped at a set of traffic lights and Binky hopped onto the chassis in a great leap before the car sped off again.

‘We’re On The Road Binky!’ Halgrim exclaimed with a dig of his troll elbow into Binky’s shoulder. Binky said nothing, but turned his black eyes away and sighed a rabbit sigh.

****

The miles were eaten and car after car hugged the white line in the middle of the grey road while Halgrim and Binky laughed at various hitchhikers swigging whisky from a bottle, passing round cigarettes and one who tried to urinate off the back of a truck but got it all over himself with every swerve.

‘I feel we’re getting closer Binky!’Halgrim shouted above the roar of the wind. ‘The narratives are blending! Let’s get off at the next gas station and look around.’ Binky twitched his nose in agreement and off they hopped along the highway.

Several hours later they were still traipsing glumly alongside the grey and barren Road. It had begun to rain, and rabbit and troll were soaked through.

‘I blame you for this Binky,’ muttered Halgrim, scowling thunderously. Binky merely sighed his rabbit sigh.

Eventually ahead through the rain, they saw another lone traveller squatting over a knapsack gloomily. They bounced over.

‘Bastard split with my jumper,’ said the traveller. ‘It had sentimental value.’

Halgrim rather took offense at this morose attitude when greater things like book were at stake.

‘Boy, what is your name?’ he asked imperiously.

‘Jack,’ said the young man. ‘Hey, you two hitching?’

‘Sure! Er, I mean, indeed we are,’ said Halgrim. ‘Where you going?’

‘Well, I’m heading out Mexico way for kicks. I’ve got this bottle o’ whiskey here if you want some to keep ya warm.’

‘I’m Icelandic,’ replied Halgrim. ‘I only drink schnapps. Listen Jack,’ he pursued, ‘I’m looking for something and I think you can help. Would you help Jack? It’s life and death!’

‘Why sure,’ drawled Jack, much cheered as the rain eased up. ‘If not, I’ve gotta pal down in Denver that could; Dean, or Will, or Neal. We’ll go there, where the waitresses have big sad eyes and cut about in slacks and fall in love with you, then we’ll all head down to Mexico to look for this thing, What kicks! You dig that? Whaddya say?’

Halgrim and Binky looked at each other with grey expressions. Halgrim sighed.

‘Sounds like I could…er, dig…that. One question.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do we really have to stop in Denver?’

And a lorry came and picked them all up.

****

After the extended jazz and bop party in a beer sodden bar with some sweating madman screaming ‘blow man!!!!’  into the saxophonist’s face, Binky turned to Halgrim and gave him the look which said: just how the hell did we get to America anyway?

Halgrim’s grey and fatigued voice replied: ‘suspension of disbelief.’

****

Their journey continued much in this vein. They seemed to be dragging about behind a mad Jack who ran from city to city in a drunken haze screaming and having intense all-night conversations with morose poets and homosexuals. Ironic when you think about it.

But after a while, Halgrim began to loosen up a bit and even accept a little whiskey and indulge in thoughtful whimsical conversations about freedom and life and joy, without burdens and societal constraints – for example like the daily guardianship of books.

‘So you see man,’ Jack was saying at the fireside of some god forsaken nowhere railway line somewhere south of Texas, ‘out there we have to find Truth. Now I knew when I saw you, here was a man –‘

‘-Troll,’ interjected Halgrim,

‘-Troll, who really digs life, you know? Digs people and this beautiful world and those stars and the humming nights of beats and bops and just people loving each other, you know? But all day, you gotta cut about in one place, counting books right? Now how is that freedom?’

‘Didn’t you write some books Jack?’

‘Yeah, well,’ faltered Jack, ‘but real beauty is in the madness of these gone cats over here! Whiskey?’

‘Why, thank you,’

Binky sighed his rabbit sigh.

‘Now, what we gotta do is head on down to Mexico where I know this end of the world most beautiful gone gal you ever did see. I want you to meet her. She got the most honey thighs and her hair is like a whole field a ripe wheat got inta them braids.’

‘What about Mary Lou?’ asked Halgrim.

‘Oh that’s all done with,’ confessed Jack. ‘We agreed it all, ya know? She is my real soul mate – she can read behind my eyes the secret truth of my soul and tell it like a beautiful poem.’

‘Hmm,’ mused Halgrim, sipping more whiskey and watching the fire’s gold liquid dance in crackling can-cans. ‘Ya think I could hook up with her?’

‘Why sure man!’ Binky sighed another rabbit sigh while Jack became gleeful at the idea. ‘Why she would just dig you. Ah man, you’re gonna love her. I’ll wire her, tell her to come right down to Mexico.’

‘Swell,’ muttered Halgrim, already slipping into a warm sleep. ‘Hey Jack?’ he managed. ‘How do you always seem to have gas and wire and beer money?’

‘What?’

****

Deep under a jewelled locked heart, the gap of pages and language grew blacker. Nature abhors a vacuum, as does a troll’s heart which was now sucking in through the written pages of aortas further words and lines and images as the narrative; the meaning lost itself, became confused and ripped.

Under the American night sky with the smoke from the fire shooting straight up, Binky’s nose twitched.

****

Mexico burst forth over the windscreen, hot and moist like opium with the flies smearing themselves into the sweating skin of man, woman, troll and rabbit alike. The moonless sky seemed to throw back the moisture and exotic mangroves and trailing moss kissed them through the open steamed windows.

‘Yeehaw!!’ shouted Dean, who they’d picked up on the way. With Mary Lou. And Clarice. And Rene’. And Neal. In fact it’s a good thing Halgrim and Binky could sit on knees as there was no seat room.

‘This is IT man!’ screamed Dean banging the steering wheel while a wild eyed, giggling and strained Jack trembled next to him.

‘This is the HEART man, the HEART of it!!’ Dean was shouting.

‘But is it the heart of the novel?’ queried Halgrim politely.

‘What?’ asked Rene’. ‘Here, have this bromide tab. It’s trippy!’

‘Sure!’ Halgrim eagerly took it.

‘WOOOO!!’ Halgrim swiftly began dancing crazily on the knees of the others and making out with an eager Mary Lou. ‘We is DAMN gone cats! Ain’t no one crazy like us, we FEEL life beating through us and this here road. Dig it man! DIG IT!!’

The others laughed and slapped him on the back, swerving the car to swig whiskey while Neal said something crude about Mary Lou being dug all the time.

Binky gave Halgrim a severe twitch of the nose, clearly indicating: that’s it, get out of the damn car NOW.

‘Excuse me luscious,’ slurred Halgrim as both Binky and Halgrim slipped out to hold conference on the roof of the car.

‘We’re close Binky, I can feel it!’ Halgrim was ranting, wild eyed and gritting his teeth.

Binky twitched his nose.

‘What do you mean no?’ Halgrim exploded. Binky twitched again.

‘Alright, no but yes. You are a most infernally cretinous Rabbit Head Binky!!’

Binky sighed his rabbit sigh. He twitched again.

He waited.

Halgrim sat down, stunned.

‘But it –‘ he spluttered.

Binky nodded.

‘And he -?’ Binky nodded again.

‘Even…?’ Another nod.

Troll and rabbit faced each other in the night breeze as tree branches came rushing towards them, that fortunately, they had enough presence of mind to get out of the way of before being swept clean off the car roof.

Halgrim took a deep breath.

‘Let’s articulate this clearly and get it straight like a sensible troll,’ he decided. He took a small bottle of aquae vite from a deep pocket in his overalls that he reserved for emergencies of perspicacity.

‘So, while they’re all in search of a sort of beautiful truth, free from society, its meaningless and poisonous trappings that they consider themselves above in some way…’

Binky’s twitch intimated: go on.

‘Jack’s actually dependent on his aunt for money to fund his great trip to be freed from the trappings of society, symbolised by abandoned wives and fatherless children all over America?’

And Mexico, Binky’s twitch conveyed.

‘So while it’s a damn good party – that’s all, in effect, they manage to achieve; a long, out-for-yourself, reckless, rejection of responsibility, misogynistic party! Isn’t it?’

The mangrove trees shimmered and wavered like a mushroom trip in crazy bright colours. When the world settled and stilled like a sunken rock in a pool of water, there were Binky and Halgrim beside their boat and its biblioteca, and there, on the muddy tow path beside them, was On The Road.

‘Oh thank the Gods Binky!’ shouted Halgrim. And Binky and Halgrim danced in praise to Odin and Loki, the divine storytellers, and waited blankly for someone to wander up and find them and put them back on the boat.

****

Later that evening, cozy and back in their rightful guardianship positions; after a perplexed Yates had found Halgrim and Binky on the grass and crashed back in grinning and accusing Chris of hiding them outside for larks and was this the new game – to sequest them and a random book every day in a new place? To which Chris turned her eyes away and sighed her patient sigh, Halgrim and Binky discussed the day.

‘You came through there Binky,’ Halgrim proudly said. Binky lowered his eyes modestly in acquiescence of his silent greatness. ‘The Gods will reward you handsomely.’

Binky sighed. He’d hoped for something more tangible.

‘Poor old Jack,’ continued Halgrim, ‘he died of alcoholism didn’t he?’

Binky blinked 48 times to indicate Jack’s age.

When he’d finished, Halgrim said, ‘Blimey. Well, I hope Big Sur doesn’t escape next. I don’t think I could keep up.’

Binky’s twitch indicated that it was not in the title’s nature.

‘Well, that’s as well, Loki be praised. Still.

‘It was a good party.’

Binky looked away and sighed his rabbit sigh.