Light Errant Read Online Free PDF Page A

longest possible distance in the shortest possible time.
    Always is the longest in distance, this particular journey. Count it, measure it. Name it. Heaven to hell? Freedom to slavery, fantasy to reality, there to here? They say you can’t go home again, you can’t step twice into the same river; sometimes I say that you have to. And it’s one mother of a slog getting back there, so much ground to cover and the roads not built for returning traffic.
    Hard work also, swimming against the rush of your life. I was tired after just the run up the coast to Santander, which was always going to be the easiest stretch of the journey. Tired but not sleepy, no question of sleeping: I caught the overnight ferry but never for a moment thought of joining the crashed-out backpackers on the banquettes. I munched a cheap burger—no BSE scare for me, I knew how bad my blood was, what madness I carried in my veins—and chugged my way slowly through a giant bottle of Coke for the caffeine kick of it; spent a lot of time up on deck, watching lights define the darkness on the water; finally found my way to the video lounge for the in-float entertainment and watched The Dirty Dozen for what might have been the dozenth time in a world that liked to round things off nicely, but almost certainly wasn’t.
    I’d never noticed the world do that, not of its own accord. Neat endings, patterns and symmetries, things coming together at the last: we say it’s so, what goes around comes around we say, and history repeats and all of that, but that we say it doesn’t make it true.
    We make it true, sometimes. Not history, but we repeat. We go around, and we come around; and occasionally, very occasionally—fighting hard, driving hard—we go away and then we come home again. We draw our own line in the sand, and drag it round in a circle before the sucking tide can break it.
    Or we lose our metaphor entirely, scrape it deeper and call it a moat, wait for the tide to fill it and hope we can hide inside. All the world’s a wooden O, and O is for oyster and it had I thought been mine, or so I’d been pretending, but I was maybe discovering a disaffinity with shellfish.
    o0o
    You can run, but you really can’t hide.
    o0o
    Go slowly, come back quickly. We disembarked at Plymouth, the bike and I, and the bike was full of cheap Spanish petrol and I was virtuously empty of cheap Spanish wine but sloshingly full of Coke, dizzy only with a night’s sleeplessness and a caffeine kick and the soul’s wrack of the day before, and maybe a little dizzy with setting my feet one more time on good English concrete, with all that that implied.
    Customs was a breeze, there was no one there even to wave me through, let alone to check me, check my papers, tell me I was a deeply undesirable citizen and lock me away in darkness, out of the sun’s potent glare.
    It was sunlight that kept me going, kept me quick. If I’d landed in the dark I might have stopped for the night, sought out some cheap boarding-house and slept, been sensible. And then I might have lost my nerve, or at least recovered my wits and taken my time, gone slow and careful.
    But no, I came out onto the road in bright morning, and my blood sang in the light and it was like drinking pure energy, my mind might be exhausted but my body was up for this, no question. Four hundred miles, four fifty? Not a problem...
    So I drove, all day I drove north and east, stopping only to refuel my belly and my bike.
    So I was stupid, and what’s new?
    o0o
    Sun was sinking, even so far north and high summer, so late I was on the road; tide was ebbing as I came at last to the last bridge over the last river and saw the glow of my city right ahead. Mud flats below me, glistening darkly and striped with shadow; council flats before me, grey concrete towers tinged pink and striped with light. Catch me living in one of those: I had a pretty good idea how much the