Wednesday, 1 June 2011

From the 'novel' (The Red Horse)

The trees are becoming silhouettes; they edge the road greedily, all but engulfing it.  Richard sees this darkness and is suddenly aware of how long he has been off the motorway, how long it has been since he saw a light that wasn’t his own high beams, which only just manage to cut through the thick black of the – b-roads? more like D-roads, Richard had thought when he first turned onto what resembled a dirt path.  These roads are unmarked but for the white-topped greenery that floats like fog on the sides of the road, it hems the trees like lace, and Richard knows its shape and that it’s commonly called Cow Parsley.  But he does not know why he knows this, neither does he know the feel of the stuff, that it smells faintly of urine and that it clings to one’s skin when manhandled.  Somehow it seems important to him that he find out.  Tom should know.  Thomas Taylor,Richard’s longest serving friend, yet the thought of him is cumbersome in Richard’s mind.  Tom should know, but whether he will or not is a different issue, one of a dozen issues that have sat stubbornly in Richard’s head.  They have been there so long that they are now stagnant, yet still glutted and pricking at his consciousness so tactlessly that his three hour journey from London to the Taylor’s new residence in the Cotswolds has been distinctly full of headaches.  In fact, Richard has spent most of the journey pushing his hand across his crumpled forehead, for a while he thought of it as a screwed up piece of paper that needed smoothing, but this notion put in his head an image of Tom’s literary ‘awakening’ as a writer, sitting before a typewriter and surrounded by empty wine glasses and paper balls.  Richard knows that this is inaccurate; Tom probably used a laptop and was sustained by tea while we wrote his best-seller, but the idea of Tom having procured the myth of the struggling artist only deepened the creases. 
And so by this point Richard has been repeatedly brushing back his forehead and caressing his temples with the overwhelming vision of his head a thin layer of tin foil, making his attempts at smoothing it futile.  He is an irredeemably creased man. 
But soon this concept brings about another image, one of Samantha Taylor placing leftovers in tin foil and zip-locks, Samantha, Tom’s beautiful caramel-haired hippy.  She had grown so hard over her last years in London; her heart was too good for it all.   
Suddenly the headlights hit a wall of green and Richard is swept abruptly out of his thoughts by a sharp bend in the road, he swears under his breath and the tyres squeal a little, for a moment he is afraid of having left a mark. 
At this point Richard’s destination is still a completely blank canvas.  His imagination plays upon a vision of it, though it is built on very little; the grand sum of his familiarity with the countryside was fed to him as a child through Kevin McCloud and Kirsty and Phil.  Ever since the immigrants had been transported en masse in to the city, the notion of Escape to the Country had taken on such a different meaning that they had changed the title to Love the Countryside before eventually panning it.  The country had altered its perception of itself, which meant that someone as young as Elvie Taylor had never have been versed in the ways of the countryside, it must be as alien to her as she is to it.  This thought has worried Richard before, but he promptly shakes it from his mind.  
Tired scraps of the programmes have remained in his mind and since the moment Tom announced the success of his book and their move, Richard has been persistently trying to construct an image of the new place.  A ‘luxury’ home in the countryside, he contemplates once again, he tries to imagine a modest house that the family would fit nicely in, red brick – no, that yellow stone they have up here, it was in that episode with the woman who had seven spaniels that kept licking Kirsty’s knees – stone fireplaces and oak staircases.  Samantha had once spoken of wanting a house like that.  
Richard is tired of this blind curiosity, he comes to a junction where a sign reads UPPER SLAUGHTER ½ MILE, and once again pushes back his forehead, with the vision of ripping tin foil appearing momentarily before his eyes.

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