The Tortoise and the Harefield

Marooned like a reddish brown object, it skulks in the top left hand corner of the map of London. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century the inhabitants of Harefield could easily have claimed to be forgotten. That is if it is possible to be forgotten when you have never really been known. Then in the seventies the pioneering work done by the Heart Surgery Department of the local hospital put Harefield well and truly on the world map. It became the focus of local pride throughout Hillingdon Borough. Dave's father's brass band played at benefits for the Heart Unit and Gary's family arranged fetes and ran in half-marathons. Throughout the borough people wore their white T-shirts with large red hearts. That was before Virginia Bottomley's reforms of the health service and the threat to all their efforts.

It was around nine in the morning when Dave drove past the hospital in the white Ford Escort estate. It had been a pleasant journey so far. A bright yet brisk morning ideal for the required journey through the forest and agriculture that separates Harefield from the outer edge of the metropolis. Gary was waiting outside the house that Dave always referred to as the last in London. Heading north from Gary's parents' house they followed the winding lane down hill to Batchworth Lock on the Grand Union Canal. The cassette player had been assigned the task of reproducing the Original Broadway cast album of "West Side Story".
'I like the Isle of Manhattan, Smoke on your pipe and put that in.'
'God I hate that line!' Dave shouted above the chorus of "Everything's free in America".
'I hate it 'cos it spoils the whole song, without that line it would be perfect, that's why I hate it so much.' Gary faked an interest, resigned to having to listen to West Side story yet another time and hear how all Dave wanted now was to write a musical.
'It's like Oklahoma, I always have this vision of the corn fields being inhabited by herds of barely visible elephants, or Moon River, the line about the Huckleberry friend.'
'Yeah, makes you think of a guy sitting by the bend with a bloody great big blue dog.' Gary had either got the point or more likely he had heard this argument before.
'Exactly.' Tony and Maria were making of their hearts one heart as Dave and Gary turned onto the M25.

Dave was feeling shaky like an Elvis impersonator, and although he had had a restless night he felt excessively awake and alarmingly alive. This was not unusual whilst recording but Dave had the awful suspicion it might be love.
'What did you think of Alex's new assistant?' Dave asked.
'What, the girl? ' Gary replied with overstated disinterest.
'She's only seventeen.'
'I think that's what I find fascinating about her, that and her lips.'
'Can't say I noticed.' Gary lied.
'I think it's love.'
'Fuck love. Just stick to the guitar.' Gary advised as the chorus carried away the corpse singing. 'There's a place for us.' Just as you would.

The dyno-rod of love had unblocked him completely. With the windows open, doing seventy on the M25, the cool air rushed through Dave's extraordinarily vacant sinuses occasioning a sharp pain in the skull. This was a sensation Dave recognised. His senses always became more acute when anticipating rock and roll or love. He worried that his headache would get worse, and the worry meant it did. He worried that he might forget what he had been worrying about and when he did he worried that he might have forgotten to be worrying about something important. He worried that the dermatitis of love was making him flaky.

Somewhere along the line he had lost all control over his reasoning. His thought patterns had rejected symmetry and were erratically twisting and turning like a supermarket trolley with a broken wheel.

The wind coming through the window was not cold enough to warrant the wearing of a sweat shirt, but just chilly enough to make him aware of the goose pimples on the pale tops to his arms and make him question the wisdom of having cut of all of the sleeves on all his black T-shirts. The window had to be open. The lack of sleep caused by rock and roll always made him fart and his guts felt restless as the tapeworms of love wriggled in his bowels.

As they entered the tunnel under the cricket ground at Epping, Gary enthused about the "Crackin" good set of songs they were recording. Dave was never one for agreeing and since this was a subject that was beyond dispute he felt no desire to do anything other than nod. In his mind's eye he could see her as she had been just twenty-four hours before, sitting at the table in Alex's kitchen. With her long blonde hair and her eyes of blue, it could only mean the kind of sorrow warned of by both the Merseys and David Bowie. The shafts of early autumn sunlight that cut through the tobacco clouds and kettle steam spotlighted her heavily made up face. It was the ineffectiveness of the heavy foundation to cover all her teenage pimples that Dave found so enticing. That and the way she opened her packet of John Player Specials in the blue packet with her tiny child-like hands. The way she took out a cigarette placing it between her pouting lips, and fluttered her dusky coloured eyelids as the first waft of blue smoke drifted up into her eyes. Then, with her lips expanding beyond the parameters of any normal mouth, half her face bloomed into the most breath-taking, cardiac-arresting smile Dave had ever seen. Her perfect teeth gleamed ultra bright and white like fairy snow and Dave melted. The leprosy of love was making him fall apart.

Alex introduced them. 'Dave and Gary, this is Mandi.' She made some lewd comment and laughed a dirty laugh but it was the smile that did it. Some people laugh like a drain but Mandi could smile a Viennese sewer as Dave excitedly chased the third man.

Alex had explained how Mandi had answered an advert for a trainee engineer and would be the tape-op for their sessions. This in itself would have been moderately exciting but the implications were lost to Dave as he became aware of the fishnet top she wore and the small delicate schoolgirl like breasts that probed the fabric from within, unencumbered by underwear and unaffected by gravity. Her nipples, semi-visible, peeked out like inquisitive gerbils. Her left ear glittered with a row of silver rings while an intriguing silver snake deceptively appeared to puncture her right lobe with its entire circumference. Dave mused how wonderful it was that nature should decorate a reproductive system in such a delightful way, cunningly making reproduction so enticing.

The car tilted to the left as the slip road banked and snaked its way down to the M11.
'Some of this stuff we're doing ought to make it this time.' Gary iterated.
'Yeah it's certainly good enough to make it.' He reiterated. Normally such a statement would have annoyed Dave. He hated such phrases as "making it" believing it to exist only in the Rock and Roll vocabulary and even there its only use was to rhyme with "faking it" and "taking it". The same could also be said of "maybe", its only reason to exist being that it rhymes with "Baby". But Dave had lost the will either to argue or agree. The tourniquet of love was slowly tightening round his throat. He was reliving a magic moment from the previous day's recording. Dave, Gary and Cliff, the resident in-house drummer were laying down the backing track for a song called "Heart and Soul", an anthemic tour-de-force dedicated to the peaceful co-existence of the collective of musical siblings who had together created an artistic oasis from a barren Walthamstow basement. The song pivots around the open E, the greatest chord known to man, one kerrang of which can make you feel like a triumphant warrior standing on the edge of time. Two kerrangs can make you feel like Wagner the Goth Metal Meister, invoking the wrath of Wotan king of the Norse gods, commanding the Valkyrie and raging the ultimate battle. Three kerrangs and you are a gibbering wreck having travelled the whole universe in the blinking of an eye and fallen through the mighty vagina of consciousness into the womb of inner space.


They were just about to leap into a mighty key change when Dave found his attention distracted by the realisation that the large dark mark over one of Mandi's shoulder blades was a tattoo. How much excitement could he endure in one day? Was it Rock and Roll or was it that the psychotic axe murderer of love had cleaved a wedge from his frontal lobes.

The car approached the waterworks roundabout at the top of Forest Road. Meanwhile, two miles away in a small bedroom above the kitchen that was in turn above the studio, Mandi prepared herself for the arrival of the gorgeous hunk she had hopelessly fallen for the day before. So overwhelming was her passion for Gary that she remembered almost nothing else from the previous day. It was only when she heard two voices in the hall that she remembered the ugly one and the odd way he had kept staring at her.

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