An extract from the novel *AVALO*

Chapter Fourteen

In the dry hypnosis of noon on a hot
day in February, I watched reflections of my face and hand
through the sunlit windshield of the car, jeweled on either side
with rolling movie reels of roadside shrubbery, imagining the
awaiting joy of solitude that burned bright in my mind’s eye just
4 miles away, where I could begin my recovery from parties,
from carnival, from three days of continuous relentless hedonism
and that’s when the bastard stepped into my lane from behind
the trees and pointed his leathergloved finger at me. The rage
that bloomed into an ugly clicking flower in my gut set roots and
was nourished and flourished from all the bad momentum of my
overdrive accumulated due to lack of sleep and general excess of
recreational deviances.
I drove past the droid and decelerated slowly and gradually
enough to show that I was a responsible and considerate citizen
who was simply pressed for time but more so to make the robotpig
walk a little further. Three days of untrammeled mischief
had until that moment, gone unpunished and this inbred scum
had decided to flag me down ten minutes away from my room.
I plucked my license out of the glove compartment and stepped
out of the car with my blank face on; cops never have been able
to read anything off a blank page. I leaned against the boot of
the car and extended my arm, as he stepped before me, with the
license snapping and glinting between two fingers in the marvelous
highway wind and highway sun. It was a panoramically
beautiful Sunday in late February. His eyes were redder than
mine. He started spilling out the Greek.
“Do you know how fast you were going?”
“No, not really.”
He showed me the dialog box on his tachometer. “The speed
limit for this road is one hundred kilometers per hour. You were doing
one-forty-nine. That’s a forty-nine pound fine. You’re a lucky
man.”
“How’d you figure that?”
He blinked at me with green wind-watered eyes. “One mile
more and I would have suspended your license for six months.”
“I guess I am a lucky man.”
“What were you driving so fast for?”
“I was in a hurry to get home. I’m not excusing myself of the
act, just explaining.”
The sincerity had got to him. “Well there’s no good reason for
speeding. Would be a shame if you got hurt doing so to0, young
man like yourself, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
If I were an older man, I may have been excused for driving
so fast being expendable cattle and a cheap loss upon collision,
for a symbol of irony. I might even have eluded the speeding
ticket. What the droid didn’t understand was that if I had been
fifty years older and alive, I’d be 73 and he’d be dust.
“If you do not pay the fine after 15 days, the matter will be
taken to court and you shall be fined a substantially larger sum.”
“Thank you.”
I drove away from the cop with controlled fury, fuming
inwardly, wanting to speed more than ever but instead shuffling
the car along at a dull and dismally legal 80kph.
Off the highway and into the city, the free flow void of the
open road sent its final glistening glare of sunray along the rear
view mirror and kissed the windshield goodbye, twitching suddenly
into strobe as building blocks of glass and stone enveloped
everything and leaned over the traffic and into streets filled with
noisy, frowning people.
The familiar back roads of the neighbourhood began to rotate
into view filled with giant cuboids full of tenants I’d been living
next to for years but had never met. All of it screamed sleep
in the bright noon light; the turn to the right off the bare dusty
suburban T-junction said sleep, the suspended rise and fall of
the building’s garage concrete beneath the wheels of the car said
it too, the relief from the dust & cigarette heat from behind the
dashboard as I withdrew the key from the ignition and stepped
outside, the lobby, the wooden mail boxes, the elevator buttons,
my own ragged breathing as I let myself in the front door, the
absence of the camp bed in my room that I’d slept on the first
night I’d put her up, the mountain contours of my bed sheets
where we’d slept together the second day and following night;
wrapped in each other like fever-racked brother and sister, refusing
to fuck as we both knew of the disaster that would ensue but
drunk instead in soft early evening azure smoky light, rubbing
and caressing, breathing in each other’s skin. Sleep! A pair of
sweat pants I’d given her to wear to bed caught my eye. I lifted
them up by the waistline with both hands from the bed post. I
took a good whiff of the crotch, inhaling deeply, lay down on the
bed and sunk into deep sleep; clothes, shoes and all.