Dark Fillage

The Improbable Suburban Beginning

The lazy calm of the neat suburban street was rudely shattered by the vehicle’s arrival. It didn’t just make a turn into the residential haven; it barged in with all the subtlety of a gangling, hyperactive puppy. It was a battered Willys Jeep and its Detroit motor was in engaged in a losing battle with an 8-track cartridge player, which was throbbing with some old Led Zeppelin song that seemed to involve a lot of screaming. Mounted on tyres that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a farm tractor and open to the elements the car shrieked to halt outside the home of Alyson Combes and the driver sounded the horn.

Howoogah!

The horn was as raucously unselfconscious as the car and its occupants. The driver was a shaggy-haired man aged around 20 years. His tangled curls were a sun-bleached testimony to that rare phenomenon of a long hot English summer. His front seat passenger was a bronzed blonde girl of about 18. Her fine blond hair was wrapped into a tight knot under a paisley scarf to save it from getting all tangled up in the slipstream. A second girl was wedged in behind the car’s only official seats. This was Laura Sparrow, best friend to Alyson and little sister to the blonde in the front. The driver hit the horn button a second time and across the street a man who was waxing his car in spite of the heat stopped work to stare with frank annoyance at the disturbance.

Howoogah!

“Hey, Ally!” Laura shouted over Mister Plant’s impassioned assertion that his only goal was the western shore. “Alleeeeeee!”

Alyson’s face appeared at her bedroom window. Her face went through a sudden transformation as she recognised her friend. “Laura!” She shouted out with delight over the discordant racket. The Jeep’s driver had begun to rev his engine in time to the pounding bass of the music, and in the still air a haze of blue-grey exhaust was gathering about the car like the smoke from a badly built bonfire.

“We’re going to the fair over at Mountfield,” Laura told her. “Wanna come?”

“Gimme one minute,” Alyson shouted back and she disappeared from sight. Moments later she appeared at the front door where she paused to shout something over her shoulder before jogging down the driveway to where the Willys was parked. She clambered aboard in a most ungainly manner, half falling over her friend as the impatient driver slipped the clutch and sped away at the head of a stinking cloud of fumes.

posted by Trillian @ 6:48 AM