Written mostly because I find the idea of taking a road trip in Britain quite amusing, and also as an excuse for slash. Yay, slash.
"What's your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow."
Jack Kerouac -- "On The Road"
Anywhere Road
There comes a time when you realise that life is passing you by, and if you don't do things now they won't ever get done. There comes a time when it's now or never.
Epiphany comes to Howard Moon in front of the mirror one Thursday morning, eyes like poached eggs and an expanse of unshaven jowl staring back at him. He is, he realises, a man of a certain age, he is not getting any younger, and soon all those things that he hasn't done yet will become simply things that he never did. And, he realises, it's time to rectify this situation.
---
"Aroad trip?" Vince glances up from the glossy magazine he's reading, expression incredulous.
"Yes sir," says Howard. "The open road ahead of you, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair, never knowing where the day will take you. That's where it is."
"You won't get much wind in your hair in that van," Vince says, but Howard ignores him; he can't expect such a simple creature to understand the spirit of the road.
"I'm going to write a novel on this trip - the tale of the human soul, its triumphs and its failings, played out on the black tarmac. I could be the next Kerouac."
"Whatever." Vince rolls his eyes and returns to his magazine.
---
On Saturday Howard's ready to leave. He finds Vince already in the van, the back piled with jumbled suitcases, colour coded for easy identification. Vince grins ingratiatingly at him; Howard is unimpressed.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I took a look at your itinerary - who makes an itinerary for a road trip, by the way? - and you're going through Peterborough."
"And?"
"Andthat's where the Peterborough Hair Museum is. It's legendary! They've got Vidal Sassoon's first pair of curling tongs there, and David Bowie's off-cuts."
Howard doesn't even bother to ask why Vince waited until now to absolutely have to visit the hair museum; he's sure the answer would be nonsensical, and anyway he doesn't care.
"You're not coming," he says firmly.
"But Howard - "
"No. This is an exploration of my spirit, a private, personal journey into my own being. There's no place for hair museums - and I'm not having you sitting there speculating about why sheep wear wool or asking my opinion on bolero jackets."
"Like I'd ask your opinion," Vince mutters, folds his arms sulkily.
"Get out," Howard says. Vince doesn't move.
"Come on, out."
"Please, Howard! I'll be quiet while you're exploring yourself, I promise. I'll even take out one of the cases."
"Which one?" Howard eyes him suspiciously.
"Capes, cloaks and mantles?" he suggests hopefully. Howard considers this for a moment.
"Leave the glass-soled platform boots too and you're on."
Vince makes a face. "Fine - as long as Naboo agrees to feed the goldfish."
"Fine."
---
Two hours after they leave, Vince loses the itinerary to a gust of wind and a suspiciously loose grip. The back-up itinerary has gone mysteriously missing too.
It's all right, Howard rationalises over the rising panic of disorganisation. This is lottery, now. This is a real road trip, flinging themselves on the roulette wheel of life and waiting for the red or black. Everything will be fine.
---
They head north, because really there's nowhere else to go. Except Wales and, well, not that Howard's got anything against Wales (lovely people, the Welsh) but he doesn't think he'll find his true self down a coal mine with a male voice choir. And so, north. In Peterborough they stop at the hair museum, at Vince's insistence, and Howard suffers through three hours of his endless fascination with products and styling. He finds a display of head lice taken from a youthful John Coltrane, though, tiny white exoskeletons laid out on black velvet like miniscule ivory carvings. It's fascinating, in a horrifying sort of way.
Hours later, Vince is still talking about the place, suggesting that they've done the most interesting part of the road trip now, so maybe they should just go home. There's a program on television that he wants to see, and he forgot to set up the video recorder, and all this driving is sort of boring really. Howard shakes his head tolerantly.
"Vince, Vince, Vince," he says.
"Yeah?"
"Let me tell you a little story, my friend. About something very important that happened to me when I was a kid."
"Do you have to?" Howard ignores the note of distress in his voice.
"Yes, I do. Perhaps it'll help you understand why I need to go on this trip, follow it through to the end, wherever that might be. You see, Vince, when I was a young lad, only twelve years old, a wise old Beatnik stopped me on the street one day. And do you know what he said to me?"
"I have the feeling I'm going to find out."
"He said that I had the Beat in me."
"The beat? What's that, then?"
"The Beat! The beat that moved a whole generation, the beat of Burroughs and Kerouac, the jazz beat and the heart beat and the beat of your feet on the street. The Beat!"
"Oh,that beat." Vince nods sagely.
"Exactly," says Howard. "Anyway, this guy told me that he saw the Beat in me the second he laid eyes on me. Told me I was special, I couldn't stay in one place my whole life, that I had to move, to get out there on the road and only then would I find my true home. He said I should go as soon as I could, but, well, life sort of got in the way. I started at the zoo, and got settled there, and with one thing and another I never got around to it. But I always remembered what that old man told me. And that's why I have to do this now, before it's too late."
"Wow!" says Vince, looking genuinely enthralled. "So you're going on a road trip because some bloke told you to thirty years ago."
"It was not thirty years ago," Howard protests. "And no, I'm not going because hetold me to, I'm going because it's the right thing to do. I can feel it in my bones. This trip is going to change everything for me."
"Fair enough," Vince shrugs. He doesn't seem as convinced and awed as Howard might like, but at least he says no more about going home.
---
They drive up through the midlands, bypass Newcastle, and the weather gets steadily worse. In cramped northern pubs Vince drinks elaborate cocktails mixed from liquors the barman probably never knew he had. Howard drinks warm bitter because the locals do, and watches as Vince charms them effortlessly, as they try to push their pasty northern daughters in his direction. Vince grins nervously, meets Howard's eye and jerks his head at the door, and they leave, drive on and don't look back.
In Leeds Howard keeps his head down, and agrees to stop and take Vince's picture beside some gaudy sculpture, just to stop him complaining.
"Hey Howard, you're from Leeds, aren't you?"
"So?"
"Well, don't you have any family you want to visit or anything?"
Howard doesn't answer him, even when Vince repeats the question, just snaps another photo and hands the camera back wordlessly. Vince complains that his hair is cramping from being stuck in the van, so they spend that afternoon walking around the city centre.
"I'm bored," Vince whines. "Isn't there anything to do in this city? Any good touristy stuff?"
"No idea," says Howard, still keeping a low profile, one wary eye out for familiar faces. "I never went looking for tourist attractions when I lived here. You just don't, when you live someplace."
"No one ever does," Vince agrees.
They make it out of Leeds without a single familial encounter, and Howard breathes a sigh of relief; he wants to discover himself on this trip, not be dragged back to his roots, muddy and tangled as they are. Rain smears the windscreen as they head towards the Scottish border, the wipers dragging back and forth with a rubbery squeal. Time and distance are running short, and Howard has come to suspect that Britain is too small for a proper road trip. About himself, though, he's discovered absolutely nothing.
---
On Wednesday they rattle down Scottish secondary roads; it's drizzling, the sky grey overhead and oily water slicking the road. Howard's mood suits the weather. He's tried to write something each night since they set off, and so far hasn't managed as much as a sentence; he tries to blame Vince for being a distraction (though really he hasn't been that bad, hasn't even asked about sheep or boleros) but he's starting to suspect that maybe, in fact, there is no enlightenment to be found, or at least none for an aging jazz maverick on the A1068 between Amble and Alnwick.
"I think maybe we should turn back," he tells Vince.
"What? But what about your novel? Your exploration of the human spirit?"
"Yeah, well, it turns out I don't have that much of a spirit to explore after all. I'm just wasting my time."
"But what about that beat of yours - that bloke said you were special, right? That you needed to travel to find where you belonged and all that."
"Oh,fuck the Beat!" Howard is tired and frustrated, and he knows it's not Vince's fault, but there's no one else here to take it out on. "That guy was nothing but a pervert, anyway - right after he told me all that beat stuff he offered me a fiver to get in his car."
"You never said!"
"Well, the story doesn't sound so good, does it, with the attempted child molestation?"
Vince says nothing, but they don't turn back either, drive on into Edinburgh as the rain clears off, silence and resentment sitting between them. Edinburgh Castle comes into view, proudly overlooking the city, and Vince points out the passenger side window.
"Hey," he says, "Look," and Howard glances over to see the sun breaking through the clouds, and a band of colour arching over the castle.
---
Howard continues to drive north, more from a grim determination to finish what he's started than from any particular hope of revelation. They stop to walk along the shore of Lough Ness, the lake deep and black and bloody pointless as Howard's soul, and the valley is strangely dark despite the bright sunlight overhead, the water glass-like and flat despite the breeze. Apprehension niggles at Howard's brain; foolishness maybe, but he knows better than to disbelieve in monsters, especially in lakes. They haven't seen another person since they got here.
He's standing well back, watching Vince mess about by the water's edge, when he notices a strange bulge in the lake's strange calmness, small at first until he realises it's much farther out than he estimated, heading inland and gaining momentum, black water roiling white and Howard thinks he catches a glimpse of green oily scales, or maybe it's just waterweed. The water sweeps up towards Vince, who's facing the wrong direction and not running away, looking tiny in the shadow of the approaching wave. Howard's shout is lost in the rushing of water. The wave crashes down, swallows the small figure whole, and Howard is somewhat surprised to find that his legs are already moving, that he's running towards the shore rather than away.
---
Vince only nearly gets eaten, and they would have definitive proof of Nessie's existence had Howard not forgotten to take off the lens cap. Vince complains about that, and whines about ruining his favourite velour pants, and Howard wishes loudly that the monster really had eaten him, but he doesn't actually mean it and Vince knows he doesn't. He shuts up about the velour and his eyes flick between the window and the driver's seat.
"Hey, Howard?" he says eventually.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for coming in after me."
"Don't mention it," says Howard after an awkward moment. It's a stupid, pompous thing to say, but really he can't think of anything else.
---
They push north, far north as they can, to John O'Groats, because they might as well now they're in Scotland. That evening they sit up on the cliffs as it gets dark, looking out over the North Sea, and Howard builds a fire that he can't quite manage to light until Vince catches a ray of the setting sun on his hand mirror, focuses it down and sets the kindling ablaze, and Howard sighs. It's so easy for him, isn't it? Seabirds scream as they come in to roost and Howard thinks it'd be just his luck if one of the little bastards took a shit on him. The highlight of his bloody road trip, anyway; it'd need its own chapter in the novel.
He wonders yet again if maybe the reason he's discovered nothing about himself is because there's nothing there to find. Looks up to find Vince watching him, as he's caught him doing several times since Lough Ness, thoughtful in a way that he's never associated with Vince and he thinks that'd be just his luck too, if Vince got the life-changing revelations on this trip. He could write one of his novelettes: Charlie Goes On A Journey Of Self-Discovery. That'd be a turn-up for the Weetabix boxes, wouldn't it?
Vince is still watching him, his face strange in the fire's shadows, eyes hollow and fever bright. He's sitting too close; Howard wonders if you can get ocean madness in a camper van.
"What?" he demands, and then Vince is kissing him, and oh there's that deep personal self-discovery he's been looking for all this time. Who'd have thought it was under his nose all along? True what they say, he supposes; you have to travel to find out what home really means.
"So," Vince says eventually.
"Yeah."
"Umm."
"Huh."
At that they seem to run short of syllables, so they retreat to the back of the van, and end up scattering the contents of three cases over the floor and under the seats. In the morning Vince will complain that his drainpipes are mixed up with his clamdiggers, and at this rate he'll end up on a beach looking like Sid Vicious, but at the time he really doesn't seem to care.
---
The next day they head southward, and Vince wonders aloud why Scottish cows are brown and fuzzy and have such long horns, and Howard feels the familiar urge to strangle him, tempered in equal parts by a sort of helpless affection and fear of what would happen to a guy like him in jail.
"Pretty face like mine? I'd be eaten alive," he murmurs and Vince says "What?" and Howard says "Nothing".
"Are you going to write that novel, then?" Vince asks after a while.
"Not this time," Howard says, shakes his head. He somehow doesn't think the word is quite ready to read about his explorations of the human, ahh, spirit; that's really more Ginsberg than Kerouac, and he's not prepared to attempt that.
"Oh," says Vince. He looks out the window at the fields of highland cattle, chewing not so much with pleasure as with single-minded determination on their cud. He half glances at Howard, half grins.
"It was a good road trip, though," he says, and Howard has to agree.
"Yeah," he says, "I suppose it was."