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| ISBN-13: | 9781908646484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eye Books |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Series: | Eye Classics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Discovery Road
By Andy Brown, Tim Garratt
Eye Books Ltd
Copyright © 2005 Tim Garratt & Andy BrownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908646-48-4
CHAPTER 1
Something happened – Andy
A delicate essence of human excrement, finely blended with rotting fruit, followed me down the station platform. An ageing brown cow with a hunched back nuzzled through a waste bin and contentedly chewed on a portion of crumpled newspaper. Beyond the cow, in half-light, lay a human corpse. A man in his thirties, lying to attention, feet slightly splayed and eyes staring up at the vaulted wooden roof. It was midnight in Agra, northern India. The air was still; the stench and the heat oppressive.
Ahead, in the dim fluorescent light of the platform, a scabby dog staggered around going nowhere, shaking violently and frothing at the mouth. He used to be a greyhound. Now, his rear leg was broken and gleaming white bone jutted through skin and black gunk. Odd tufts of ginger hair hung to purulent, pink flesh. I skirted him and climbed aboard the train.
The engineer was stoking up the boiler, ready for the off. Squeezing my way along the narrow corridors in the dark, I stumbled over sleeping bodies, a mother cuddling a child, a wrinkly man two hundred years old, several families on the move with their pots and pans, chickens and bulging white bundles. Using my lighter, I located the numbers painted on the ends of bunks and found my way, eventually, to my reserved bed.
Sitting smoking clay pipes on the opposite bunk were two white guys. 'Wild place eh?' I said as I lit a candle and introduced myself. Their names were Wink and Tim. 'Did you see the dog?' I asked. 'He's hoping to find someone who will be kind enough to shoot him in the head,' said Tim. They were English like myself.
Wink wore a flying helmet, but his resemblance to Biggles ended there. They both wore lightweight cotton, bought for a penny or two in some local market. In dim, flickering light we chatted amicably for a while about diarrhoea. A small boy came down the gangway selling chai. He waited patiently while we drank the sweet brew from fragile clay cups.
An open hand appeared at the window, resting on the ledge. We ignored it for a minute. Tim eventually looked out. 'Christ, look at this,' he said. 'We'll have to give this guy something.'
I moved over and looked down on the beggar and was shocked at the sight. His face was horribly contorted; skin seemed to drip off his skull like melted chocolate. Dark, empty eyes stared back from beneath folds of skin. He just stood there, not speaking, hand out. We each gave a few rupees to ease our consciences.
At last the train lurched into action and we lay back and tried to rest. Sleep was impossible with the banging of the carriage couplings and the rolling of the old beast, instead we recounted adventures long into the night.
'How about a little poetry Watson?' said Tim in time, looking to his friend.
In the dark, swaying train, Winker Watson recited Coleridge's Kubla Khan, from beginning to end. It sounded fantastic, although he probably made half of it up. I responded by reciting If, by Rudyard Kipling and certainly made half of it up!
Wink, the poet, worked in a scrap metal yard, melting down beer barrels; Tim was a teacher of English and Physical Education and they both lived and played rugby in Telford in Shropshire.
The three of us hit it off and went, eventually, up to Nepal, where we trekked, laughed and philosophised for a few weeks in the Himalayas. At about sixteen thousand feet, on the well worn trail to Everest Base Camp, I got sick and headed down, while they got sick and headed up.
I had met Cassie a short time before I went to India and when I got back to London we moved in together. I was really ill, amoebic dysentery, giardia, campylobacter and fish flukes were all drawing lots for my food before I could get to it. When Cassie eventually got tired of the smell, she pushed me into The Hospital for Tropical Diseases in St. Pancras, where I was fed nothing but cream crackers and after dinner mints; not because they were any good for me, it was just that these were the only foods the nurses could slide under the door!
For most of the next four years I behaved like an ambitious, suburban career boy, while Cassie and I toddled along quite happily. I devoted myself to the petroleum industry and made respectable, safe progress through the corporate ranks. The pension fund was building up nicely, I had a few shares, the cottage was stylish; stripped pine, Monet prints, mandolin on the mantelpiece and magnetic messages on the fridge.
Every morning a pile of paper an inch thick dropped on my desk and needed attention. I pushed and tweaked the business relentlessly; for this my staff used to call me the electric ferret. I travelled the country spending two or three nights a week in hotels trying to avoid ball-bearing salesmen at the bar. I persuaded people to believe in company policies in which I did not believe myself. The company squeezed every possible hour out of me; they owned my soul and my passing youth. Every month I paid a thousand quid to the mortgage company and every month the value of the cottage went down by the same amount and I worked harder and harder. I seldom slept peacefully, or found time to walk in the hills, watch the sunset, play with my nieces or see my friends. The more successful I became the harder it became for Cassie to put up with my unpredictable mood swings and my miserable face.
Meanwhile Tim, Wink and I only met up a handful of times. I dragged them down to London for one or two wild parties and they, being good old rugby playing Midlanders, thought me rather yuppyish; though compared to real yuppies I was a yokel! When everything started to change for me I had not seen them for nearly two years. Tim had even lived in London for six months but I had always been too busy to see him.
On a dazzling, blue January day I was invited to a business lunch in the private dining room of a country pub. It was a jovial, mutual back-slapping affair for the key management.
When the meal was finished the Director held the floor, '... and most of all', he said, 'I have to thank the Sector Managers, Andrew and Bernie, who have each made around a million pounds net profit over and above their targets this year. Without their innovation and persistence we would not have turned this company around or achieved these tremendous results.' He paused dramatically. 'Outstanding performance guys.' There was real emotion, his voice even cracked on the word 'outstanding.' Now it could have been the Chateauneuf du Pape talking or perhaps his jubilation at his imminent promotion and return to Aussieland on the back of our success, but he seemed to mean it.
'Christ,' I thought, nodding my head in thanks, 'this job's done then'. The job and the figures were not important to me; being successful and collecting the recognition was all that mattered. I had now achieved what I had wanted. Another thing struck me; 'Outstanding achievement' he had said, but where exactly was it? I could not see it or touch it, it was just a set of figures on paper. There would always be more petrol and more figures stretching on forever. My pioneering spirit would not allow me to plod on into middle age with more of the same, so what could I do now?
Perhaps reading my mind, the Director pulled me aside a few days after the lunch and said he was trying to sort me out a secondment in Europe or the States to 'keep me interested' and 'moving forward', 'No promises though.'
'Yeeee Haaa!!' I thought, 'Now that'll be a challenge.'
I soon attended a five day assessment programme, where twenty assessors analyze every move of the twelve candidates. The prize at the end of countless tests and presentations was a place on the fast track to oil stardom. When the fifty page report arrived a month later the summary read, 'While Andy is certainly able to operate at grade eleven ( the grade of the posts mentioned in the US and Sweden) it is the view of the panel that Andy is too entrepreneurial and too innovative to become a senior manager in this organisation.' This was worth rereading a few times. It wasn't that I wasn't entrepreneurial enough or innovative enough, but too much so. For five years I had been under the impression that I was working for a business, I had clearly got it wrong, it must have been a government I was working for, perhaps in the Eastern bloc. It also struck me that no senior managers apart from my immediate boss had made any mention of the fact that I had produced an extra million pounds profit from the seventy businesses under my control, no 'well done', no 'how did you manage that?' no 'I bet you sacrificed a lot to do that!' in fact they didn't seem to care whether I made ten million or lost ten million. They seemed to be playing chess while I was playing world cup football.
Alone one night, flicking around for a late night movie, I was assaulted by images. The usual thing, you know: starving babies, injustice, apathy and greed.
'... 250,000 children die each week from easily preventable diseases ...' the presenter informed me.
Not wanting to witness such misery I reached for the ON/OFF button, but was stopped, '... $2.5 billion per year, the amount spent on cigarette advertising in America, would prevent most child deaths in the developing world ...', the presenter went on, '... the quarter of the planet's population which live in the north consume three-quarters of the planet's resources ...', on and on she went. I could not switch off.
The head of Oxfam came on, '... What is living? What is life?' he asked, speaking slowly. 'Living is discovering your intellect and using it ...', he was forceful and angry, '... for hundreds of millions of children there is no possibility of living in the true sense ...' More pictures of deformed, miserable, homeless children.
My cheeks were wet with tears. I felt embarrassed to be a European; ashamed that I was healthy, that I was capable of anything and doing nothing. I cried for the children starved of opportunity and I cried for my life, full of opportunity yet unfulfilling.
Another Friday evening, dark and drizzly. Windscreen wipers slid in time to Roy Orbison singing Mystery Girl. I joined Roy in the good bits, '... Darkness falls and I, I take her by the hand, take her to my twilight land ...'. We were not bad together Roy and I, we could have been great, except that when I went up he went down. The powerful car felt like a cheetah zipping up the motorway.
My phone rang. This would be my own mystery girl, Cassie. It was her first day back. Roy Orbison was cut off in mid flow. Pushing a button, I spoke to the microphone above my head. In case it was not her I said a formal, 'Andrew Brown'.
'Drasvadure!!' said the voice. It was her, bursting with enthusiasm. That word, some sort of Russian greeting, sounded like, 'Does your arse fit you?'
'Yes, thank you,' I said and we both chuckled as always. 'Hello, it's lovely to hear your voice, are you OK?'
'Yes. Come home, I want to see you.' She had been filming in the Soviet Union for five weeks. Too long, much too long!
After the call I turned the music up and sang on happily. Ahead, brake lights banged on across three carriageways. We all stopped, sat and waited. No movement. Must be an accident, I thought. Why do people have to have accidents on Friday evenings? Why can't they wait until Monday morning? It's so damned selfish. Eventually we started moving again, a metre at a time. Flickering jets floated down across the night sky. Where had they been?
I was so looking forward to seeing her tonight. Cassie had been twenty-one when we met. I was twenty-six then. She had lifted me up when my marriage had ended and taught me to enjoy living. Cassie was a beautiful girl, marvellous in lots of ways; bright, artistic, mischievous and passionate. I felt I would never find anyone better. Through her I had discovered the theatre, great art, foreign movies, toe sucking and taramasalata. I confess that, before Cassie, I had even eaten white bread.
The traffic crawled forward. We had moved half a mile in thirty minutes. I switched the tape off and listened to the radio. After a while the announcer said, '... and London's traffic this Friday night ... There are long delays on the M25, anti-clockwise, approaching Heathrow Airport.' I could have told him that.
Things, though, had changed between Cassie and me over the last few months. It just happens. Work had got in the way, my electric ferret trips all over the country and her filming trips to the Soviet Union were starting to tell. We had started to form our own separate lives.
A large dark shape loomed up gradually on the left hand side of the motorway. As I edged forward, I could make out a crane, forty feet high. Ten minutes later I was level with the mighty praying mantis of a machine as it stood deserted on the hard shoulder. I inched past and was confused to see the cars in front zooming off into clear road. There had been no pile-up after all.
I exploded, 'You mean I've sat in a queue for half an hour, while you lot have taken your turn to stop and look at a crane? A crane!! You stupid bastards!!' This was the last straw.
Had they no awareness of how their actions affected anyone else? Or was it that they were aware, but did not care?
Who were they, these motorway loonies, these crane spotters? People driving expensive company cars; they had power and position. They were off to warm, comfortable homes in the suburbs. All this talent, education, ingenuity, drive and skill being wasted on trivia; making and selling things that we do not need, while the world is crumbling about our ears. Their lives so dull that a crane was interesting. People LIKE ME!!
I realised I had always wanted to be in their gang and bit by bit, over the last years, I had joined. I was one of them, self absorbed, inward looking, unproductive and I despised myself for it. I was, after all, making my living by selling the earth's resources, polluting, using and consuming. My life was almost void of giving.
I pulled the car over onto the hard shoulder beyond the crane and turned the whole thing over in my mind. It just hit me, sitting there in the car: I did not want to be one of these people any more, or more accurately I did not want to be me any more.
It is a shocking experience finding that all you have worked for is worthless. I just sat, oblivious. There had been something else I had wanted to do, once. That might be a way out. What was that? I had a vague memory of studying maps and jotting notes on weather. I could give up the job, satisfy my stupid ego and my lust for adventure, drop the millstone of the mortgage, leave this poisoned air far behind, and maybe do someone a little good at the same time. There had been an idea; I had left it tucked away in a dark place at the back of my mind, safely out of view for two or three years.
Had I been in a movie, I would have jumped out of the car right there. Leaving door open and engine running, I would have kicked off my sensible, shiny shoes, discarded the white shirt and paisley tie and crossed those muddy fields to the roar and bright lights of the airport and caught the first flight out. But no. Too straight. Too stiff.
I kept my own council for a week while I mulled over my life. Work suffered, my head was full of distraction. I took long walks along the Thames towpath in the evenings, while a battle of conscience raged in my head. Wait for the job in Europe. No, break out and find new ground. Think of the dangers. You are thirty years old, grow up will you? You're still young, in your prime, you should be out hunting, it's a natural instinct. Knuckle down. No, make your life extraordinary. You've got it made, don't chuck it all away now. Stay with Cassie, get married, have kids. No, no, you fool, live your life as if your life depends on it. There was no easy solution, the price was going to be high whatever I decided.
'I have something to tell you', I said to Cassie at last. We were in the sitting room, reading and drinking a cheap Safeway Rioja.
There was a worried silence, then 'What is it?' She was more than beautiful, she was elegant and offbeat. She leant forward, supporting her chin gracefully with the back of her hand. I did not want to lose her. Her cheek bones statuesque. The dark silky hair was high on the forehead and severely short at the back, an image of cool efficiency.
'I'm going to cycle round the world.' For something so major for us both the words came out surprisingly easily.
More silence. 'Oh yes?' she said at last, flatly, not believing, 'Er ... Why?', even a hint of mockery. Her mahogany eyes were piercing and unyielding, missing nothing. She was weighing me up.
'Come with me Cassie, this life is no good for us. These jobs and the expense of living are destroying us.'
'Why, AB?' she said calmly putting down her book.
'Time's ticking away, I have to do something before my spirit is sucked out of me entirely. We can do it together.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Discovery Road by Andy Brown, Tim Garratt. Copyright © 2005 Tim Garratt & Andy Brown. Excerpted by permission of Eye Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Dedication,Acknowledgments,
Foreword,
1 Something Happened,
Australia,
2 A flying wombat called Ethel,
3 Cruising the Great Ocean Road,
4 Beyond the back O'Bourke,
5 Roo-shooters and roadrains,
Africa,
6 Beside the Jade Sea,
7 Rikki-Tikki-Tonga and the Bongo Bongo Man,
8 Crossing the Massai Steppe,
9 Ladies who are not gentleman,
10 Halfway around The world,
11 Too much close encounters,
12 Much further by bicycle,
13 The heart of the matter,
14 Sauerkrout and Cream Cakes,
South America,
15 Hottest spot north of Havana,
16 Two scabby dogs on the road to Iguacu,
17 The Lost Jungle,
18 A little Argie bargie,
19 Over the Pampas,
20 Appointment at the end of the world,
Postscript,
Tribute to Tim,
Equipment List,
Also by Eye Books,
About Eye Books,
Eye Books Club,
What People are Saying About This
"Truly inspirational reading. 10/10." —Cycling Plus
"The power comes from the excellence of writing." —Independent