Three Mile Drove
A Dark Inheritance - A Novelette
This is the first of Twenty-Six Chapters; all subsequent chapters will be available to Members on JKTalla.com. Story Vault.
Chapter One:
Rory Gillan leapt into his Bedford van and headed for home, the last guitar chords of “House of the Rising Sun” still ringing in his head. It was as if he had a private stereo system installed in the backwaters of his mind, blasting out music that he couldn’t switch off, and it seemed to be getting louder by the gig.
He wondered why his band never played their own music anymore, then cursed himself for raising a question to which he already knew the answer.
Nobody wanted to hear it anymore.
The heady days of “Wild Thing” were long gone, if they could ever have been called heady, that was. A few moderate hits in the mid-sixties, struggling to impress amidst the lower regions of the charts and that was about it. By the time the decade had ended, they had all but slid into obscurity, redeemed only by their re-workings of old classics, dependent on instrumental virtuosos such as “Whole Lotta Love” and “House of the Rising Sun”.
But it was a competitive field, and along with the increasing number of bands doing the same thing, age was beginning to extend its withered fingers like worn frets on a fingerboard. It was a gruelling six-nights-a-week, bottle-of-whisky-a-day string of gigs that sent them up and down the country like chickens in a run.
Internal squabbles hadn’t helped either. The five-member band had suffered more downs than ups of late, degenerating into petty disputes and casting clouds which threatened its very existence.
And to cap it all, he wasn’t immune on that score. His turbulent, long-running affair with Goldie MacLeod was probably the most disruptive influence of all, though now it was drawing to its inevitable conclusion. Perhaps that wasn’t an apt description, because hurtling into a brick wall at six miles an hour seemed more apt.
Gillan glanced in his mirror and slid the Bedford out of the slip road and onto the main road, heading home to Glasgow. Shaking his mind free of the final chords of “House of the Rising Sun,” he found himself considering his ten-year roller-coaster relationship with the group’s vocalist.
She was vehement, vindictive, violent, a living three-pronged “V” sign in fact, though her outrageous antics had been a turn-on in their earlier years. Their lovemaking might have taken place within the volcano that seemed to encompass her, and the explosion of life and vigour, of power and hate that surged within her had seemed to suck him in like a speck of dust in a vacuum. He could put up with her turbulence in those days, seeming to draw on the very strength that was her life force.
But a decade of self-abuse had taken its toll on her, extracting piece by piece that which attracted him to her.
Goldie’s body, once strong and shapely, was now thin and puny. She seemed to have lost a couple of inches in height, and her stature was pathetic. Her spine now seemed to curve in an arc, and the voice he’d once so admired had lost all its raunchiness.
Her explosions of temper were now little more than pathetic, childish tantrums, and there was no longer any force behind the blows when she lashed out. He could meet them with derisive laughter, which just about summed up their shambles of an affair. In fact, the whole sorry group was in a shambles. He felt with complete certainty that the death knell was about to sound.
Thirty minutes ago he’d left her cursing him after a performance that had been every inch a flop. She’d picked on him, of course; his guitar work had been sloppy, off-key and downright lousy.
It hadn’t been, of course, at least not in his book, even if he couldn’t be sure of a disgruntled band’s backing on that, because he knew if nobody else did, that Goldie’s voice had been weak and slurred, and as thin as her stature had become. In trying to strain it, she’d wandered off-key.
But try telling her that.
It had begun to rain as he turned the Bedford into his street, tiny droplets at first, but in the short time it took him to pull up outside his house, they had grown larger and more intense. As he hopped out, Gillan believed they might be forerunners of an unwelcome storm.
He had a reasonably sized four-bedroomed house and a reasonably sized driveway leading into it, which he never used, preferring to leave the van out on the narrow, tree-lined street, where it often caused obstruction, much to the chagrin of his neighbours.
The phone was ringing when he entered the house, tripping over the hallway mat and disregarding a formal-looking white envelope, which lay upon it.
Unbalanced by his encounter with the mat, he stumbled across the rectangular hall before snatching the receiver from its housing by the door of the main reception room.
‘Rory, it’s Iain, I’m calling to tell you that Craig and me have had enough of the antics, the band’s sinking like the Titanic, and we’re not going down with it. We’re pulling out here and now.’
Gillan felt Iain Forrest’s words lodge sharply in the pit of his stomach. So that was it, just like that. A ten-year association split, and by way of a bloody phone call. Well, he didn’t really mind; he’d known it was coming in any case. What really riled him was that they hadn’t had the guts to tell him face-to-face.
He felt his anger rising like acid from his gut, ‘So why tell me now, Iain, why didn’t you tell me up front, after the show. Guess you didn’t have the nerve eh?’
‘You were too quickly off the mark, Rory,’ Iain Forrest said with quiet sarcasm, ‘running away from Goldie, I suppose.’
‘Go to hell!’ Gillan slammed the receiver into its cradle with a force that rocked the wall socket. Was that what they really thought, that he was scared of her, was that what they had been thinking all these years?
Well, it was total crap; he just needed space, that was all. He needed eternal space from her ranting and raving.
Gillan stormed into the lounge and yanked a bottle from the mahogany drinks cabinet. They could all go to hell if they thought the split was going to bother him. The writing had been on the wall longer than the graffiti in Gladstone Street subway.
He would be glad to be free of the lot of them.
He could find a job as a lead guitarist with any band he chose; they would be glad to have him; he’d been holding this motley little crew together for too long. He’d earn more than enough money to keep himself and his place ticking over.
Except that he couldn’t.
He knew it with all the bitterness he tried to hide. Bitterness that threatened to erupt from the core of his head like discharge from a crater.
His fingers were too shaky, too slow on the fingerboard these days, no matter how much he tried to hide it. Sometimes he found himself struggling to hold a G chord. Why, even at this moment, he was struggling to remove the top from the whisky bottle. The top eventually fell to the floor; he didn’t bother retrieving it. His mind felt like a network of lines, none of which met. Face facts, old friend, one and only self-effacing friend: you’re finished, washed up, a has-been at thirty-nine, a potential vagrant in a smart, four-bedroomed house.
Gillan took a big swig from the bottle, clasped his hand around its neck and crossed to the gilt-edged mirror which dominated the room. He examined his black curly hair, matted with sweat from the performance, saw his blood-rimmed blue eyes and ran his fingers around the hollows beneath his eyes. He could swear that the normally thin lines had doubled into folds since the last time he’d looked.
He turned away in disgust, slammed a record onto the turntable and turned the volume to full, then headed through the hall towards the downstairs toilet.
Then he remembered the envelope lying on the mat.
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