“You know,” said Mark E Smith, “Sherlock Holmes feared nothing except the retribution of Professor Moriarty and the void of the countryside, the countryside that now appears to have consumed us.”
“I can’t see a fuckin’ thing, ’ere,” sweated scaffolder and part-time roadie Rob Carroll, as he leaned towards the windscreen of his Vauxhall VX, without seatbelt secured, in order to navigate the frequent hairpin bends that had been smothered by pale-grey, cotton-wool fog. “Me ’ands are goin’ numb from grippin’ the wheel.”
“When you’ve got fog this thick,” Smith ruminated, “and you’re in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, you can get away with practically anything – murder, rape, theft. If we don’t find an off-licence soon, I’ll be committing all three to you.”
“Look what happens when I put full beams on,” Carroll spoke, and clicked a stalk on the car’s steering column. “It’s just bright fog, as opposed to dark fog – in fact, it’s more difficult to see with the lights on than with the lights off.”
“Shouldn’t be driving tonight,” Smith stated. “Sherlock Holmes would’ve travelled by rail. Jimmy Savile and his OBE says this is the age of the train, but back in Sherlock’s day, it was the only way to get around, and you ’ave to think that we ’aven’t progressed that much. Sherlock was fuckin’ zipped out his brains most of the time, big into the coke. It would have been proper stuff back then an’ all. Pure, industrial-strength. You could buy it in chemists – it was almost seen as genteel.”
“You ever had sniff?” Carroll asked.
“Once,” Smith revealed, “at an aftershow in London. A music-exec guy with bright red braces was rabbiting away, some Saatchi-ite, and just as I was gonna bottle him, he offered me a whopping line from this coalman’s sack of the stuff. I think he’d followed me into the toilets. He was obviously trying to impress me. Thought I’d give it a go, just to be sociable. It makes you yap like a fuckin’ Jack Russell, revealing all your family secrets and you start to make light of… humiliations. I’m not sayin’ I’ll never have it again. You’ve just go to be able to check yourself with shit like that, like Sherlock Holmes was able to do.”
“I was never a big Sherlock Holmes fan,” Carroll admitted. “I don’t like black-and-white films. I prefer Magnum. I wish I had his lifestyle.”
“Huh!” Smith rocked, shaking his head, and shifted around in the passenger seat. “Magnum! How can you compare Magnum to Sherlock Holmes? And I’m talkin’ about the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books here, the written word, not the films! Your brain’ll turn to water watchin’ shit like that. Magnum, with his fuckin’ Hawaii shirts and that daft fuckin’ sports car. You’d have to be seriously minted to have a car like that anyway, so what’s he doing poking his nose into other folks’ affairs, snoopin’ around?”
“Well,” defended Carroll, “it isn’t ’is car, actually, it’s owned by Higgins…”
“He wouldn’t last five minutes in Prestwich with that daft ’tache and ’is daft shirts and ’is daft pals with ’elicopters. He’d fit-in in Alderley Edge, though. They love that stuff round there, where the footballers and TV magicians are. Elaborate wealth. Tastelessness wrapped in a Georgian exterior. At least with Columbo you’re getting a rounded character. You can tell there’s been some thought gone into the writing. You can see there’s something extra going on. They all think he’s a gawp but in fact he’s cleverer than the lot of them put together. I can see a lot of myself in that! Spielberg directed some of those episodes, as did Patrick McGoohan and the chap who plays Coach on that Cheers you’ll no doubt like – that American pap on 4. Actually, I don’t mind that one. But Magnum! Magnum PI. You know what PI stands for? Piss Ideas.”
“The last episode was a good one, though…” Carroll attempted to explain.
“No, it wasn’t!” Smith cut in.
“How do you bloody know?” Carroll retorted, a speed comedown gently rattling his nerves, the heat seeping from his neck and shoulders. “You never bloody saw it!”
“Well, I did!” Smith squawked. “I was forced to! Brix was watching it, probably so she can top up her yank accent, so she can stand out in the Ostrich on Saturday afternoon. Anyway, forget Magnum and Hawaii – where’s this bloody offie?”
“I think I’ll ’ave another dab to keep alert,” Carroll said.
“No, you won’t,” Smith corrected. “You can wait.”
“No, I’m ’aving some…”
Just as a physical set-to looked like it might brew, there was an almighty thud followed by a series of unusual, hard jolts. It wasn’t until branches and twigs presented themselves through the car’s side windows that Smith started to suspect that he might be experiencing a serious road accident in slow motion. The unbuckled Carroll became weightless, like an astronaut, his shoulders repeatedly pushing against the interior mirror and roof, like he was attempting flight but was being thwarted – flight that, Smith now assumed, Carroll had always been capable of.
For a while, there had been little noise, but soon there was the sound of sliding and scraping metal, then the volume enhanced, suddenly becoming louder, like the TARDIS was arriving from an alternative dimension. Among the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, dematerialisation, vworp-vworp din, Smith thought fit to announce, “Now, Dr Who, that’s a decent concept.”
“Whhhat?” Carroll replied with a dull tone, like his batteries were running low.
As Smith attempted to qualify his statement, a thundering coniferous tree erupted through the front windscreen, taking Carroll and most of the driver’s seat through to the rear of the car and beyond. Smith realised that the world was in a very topsy-turvy state, not an unusual sensation for an alternative North-west performer who was constantly on the road. It was perhaps Smith’s past experience with LSD that allowed him to keep a clear and open mind, and at no point did he feel overwrought by this spectacularly surreal experience. The tree trunk widened within the cabin and pine needles started to tickle Smith’s cheeks before the car, finally, came to a grating, jarring halt.
To Smith’s delight, the car door opened of its own free will and fell off. Having managed to unfasten the VX’s seatbelt and grab his leather-sleeved baseball jacket, Smith was able to shimmy along a thick branch and appraise the situation. Above: wreckage and dark-matter fog. Five feet sideways: the impaled, torn-open, ragged shell of a 1970s Vauxhall saloon, its headlights still shining, illuminating shattered wood and evergreen spiky foliage. Below: tree, more fog. Smith descended, using the tight branch structure as an effective ladder. But what had just occurred? It felt like he’d had a fracas with a tyrannosaurus. They must have careered off a ledge and fallen onto a forest! Smith knew that all might not be as it seemed; experience suggested that an element of shock might be curving his perception. It was feasible. For instance, had Smith always known that Carroll could fly?
Smith was almost certain that his erstwhile chauffeur must have spread his wings and flapped, like Icarus, towards the clouds, taking care of No.1.
Down, down, down Smith clambered, like Jack scaling the beanstalk on video rewind. At the lowest branch, Smith peered towards the ground and calculated there was a hefty distance still to drop, a good 25ft or so, but for Smith, the options were limited. He didn’t fancy kipping with the crows, slowly freezing to death, drifting to sleep with frosted eyebrows and white eyelashes, unable to escape ever-softening dreams. Smith leapt like Lee Major’s Colt Seavers – another OK American programme; The Fall/The Fall Guy, stuntman/frontman, there were parallels – and landed on both feet with a crouching stance, before falling back onto soft, sweet earth. The ground was strewn with pine needles, broken branches and motoring arcana. Smith gazed skywards, searching for answers. He found himself in a theatre-stage spotlight provided by the beams of the impaled Vauxhall.
“Rob!” Smith called. “Rob!”
There was no reply.
Carroll’s batteries had indeed run flat. Unbeknownst to Smith, Carroll lay limp, straddled across the branches of the towering pine tree, his bones smashed, his organs battered, his neck instantly broken upon collision with solid timber.
“Rob!”
Again, nothing.
“Bugger you, then,” Smith uttered and set off in search of cave rescue or some semblance of civilisation, yet feeling that the discovery of an off-licence was still of critical importance.
Smith glanced incredulously at his turquoise, cable-knit jumper and discovered that a large hole had developed in the material – how, he couldn’t recall. His wife, Brix, would be disappointed but as she lay comatose in a plush Glasgow hotel, hangover headache receding, hair no doubt like Mr Whippy’s, she could hardly comment on Smith’s rundown appearance. To be frank, Smith would rather have been involved in a serious car accident than wasting money in pricey Scottish digs. The band wasn’t forking out for outré luxury in four-star lodgings, just because you couldn’t take your drink. They still had to pay for the van getting fixed! As for how the night was panning out: so far, so The Fall. Driver possibly dead or flown off; wrecked car; dense fog; lost near some mountains; and a hole in a new jumper he’d only owned for three weeks. Smith pushed his arms into his jacket. All he needed now was to run into Tony fucking Wilson.