Live and Fabulous! (17 page)

Gnnnngn,
that's it! I've officially gone bonkers!
I think to myself.
I've actually begun seeing things!

I take a deep breath and shut my eyes. Rapidly I'm drifting soundly off to sleep, where my fuddled mind is replete with stuffing golden rucksacks and sandy hair and splattered eggshell. And yellow vans full of mushed banana and giant chess pieces.

And filling Fleur's stiletto boots with tea. And Job banging his drum in the kingdom of heaven and eventually being thrown into the Caldwell River and borrowing Jimi's shirt. And catching tiny pieces of rolled-up magazine in my open mouth.

Hang on.

I'm not dreaming that last bit.

“Stop it, Fleur. She might choke,” Claude nags Fleur.

“I'm trying to wake her up!” says Fleur, throwing another ball of ripped-up magazine at my open gob. “She's been asleep like that for hours, she looks like a flipping Venus flytrap.”

“Come on, Ronnie. It's time to wake up now,” Claude says quietly.

I open one sleep-jammed eye. Outside of the Mini, the sun is beginning to set. We're traveling at a snail's pace now. A convoy of vehicles reaches out before and behind us as far as the eye can see.

“Ronnie, are you with us?” Claude says, poking me ever so gently in the shoulder.

“Ronnie! We're here,” says Fleur.

Maybe I'm still dreaming.

As the Mini Cooper wends its way upward on the twisty, rather steep dirt track, right, then left, then right again, the pungent smell of ripe fruit floods into our car. On either side lie the most breathtaking orchards, boasting row upon row of laden apple trees. Luscious red fruits crowd every leafy branch, scattering down messily over the grass and soil below, squishing under the tires of the festival traffic. Enough apples to keep Nana in crumble, pies and turnovers for a hundred more lifetimes.

And just as apples become vaguely passé, we move on to acres and acres of large juicy pears. Apparently I snored like a gurgling drain all the way through the plums.

“Marmaduke Orchards!” I gasp. “I just totally didn't expect there to be ...”

“Aha! You're alive!” laughs Claude. “No, we didn't expect actual orchards either.”

“Baron Marmaduke owns the land,” chips in Daphne, nudging her brake as a lady with flapping flamboyant pink angel wings on the back of her rucksack cuts in front of our car.

“He's one of those eccentric millionaire types, isn't he?” laughs Claude. “And I mean, he'd have to be eccentric to let a hundred and twenty thousand strangers have a party in his back garden.”

Fleur is looking all around her impatiently, craning her head to see over the hill. All this fresh air and fauna is clearly giving her the heebie-jeebies. “We're miles from civilization!” she mutters. “I mean, where's the flipping festival? We're in the middle of a fruit farm!”

Daphne tuts nervously as just ahead of us an ancient multicolored double-decker bus struggles with its brakes. “Pleeeease don't roll back!” she whispers. “We'll be toast!”

Nervously, Fleur checks behind us to see if we've got any room to maneuver, letting out a sharp yelp as she spies something in the queue. “Errrrr, don't all look at once,” Fleur gasps, staring straight ahead again, pretending to be calm, “but I think there's a Land Rover about three cars behind us!”

“What? Noooo!” sighs Claude, dying to look but restraining herself. “Not
Panama's
Land Rover? It can't be! They passed us hours ago!”

“Yeah, well, it certainly looks like them,” says Fleur.

I sneak a peek. It's difficult to see, but I'm almost certain I can see Abigail's white-blonde straight hair.

“Pah, let's face it,” Fleur tuts. “They possess only five collective brain cells between them. They're bound to be behind us; they probably got lost.”

Just that instant, a deafening burst of bad pop music with a loud female vocal blares from the Land Rover's powerful speaker system.

 

“Oh my God! That's a Catwalk song, isn't it?” shudders Fleur, recalling the breathtakingly terrible all-singing and all-dancing pop group Panama and the gang used to torture us all with. Catwalk even brought out a lame CD single, “Running to Your Love,” which was played three times on the local radio station Wicked FM, well, before Panama sacked Derren, Zane and the whole gang to pursue a solo singing/modeling/acting career.

“Yeee-hah! My love is in the sky! Like a big love pie,”
squeal the profound lyrics, accompanied by a Casio keyboard bossa nova drumbeat.

Inside the Mini, there's a collective LBD slapping of foreheads and dropping of jaws.

It's definitely Panama and the gang. And they're listening to their own terrible music!

“Ahhhhh, jeez! I remember Panama!” sighs Daphne. “Wasn't she that stuck-up brat a couple of years below me who was suspended for bullying?”

“Nah, they didn't suspend her,” sighs Fleur. “Lack of evidence. The girl who complained about Panama ended up seeing the school shrink. McGraw reckoned she was paranoid.”

We all sigh.

“Right,” huffs Claude. “Don't even acknowledge them. That's what they want.”

We all feign indifference, staring instead at the hundreds of hairy kids flocking all around us, armed with rucksacks, tents and sleeping bags, making their way up the hill on foot. Other pierced, dyed and braided kids are slumped down on rucksacks, taking a breather, swigging from bottles and munching newly swiped fruit.

Claude gathers her composure, retrieving the Astlebury tickets from her bag for the twenty-sixth time this journey, just to ensure they've not evaporated into thin air.

“Sorry to hassle you, Daph,” says Claude. “But, just to check, we are heading for Gate A, aren't we?”

“Yes, Claude, for the ninth time, we certainly are,” smiles Daphne.

“Sorry,” chuckles Claude. “We're just so close now, it'd be a bummer if we were in the wrong queue.”

“Don't fret,” says Daphne. “We're totally, one-hundred-percent-certainly on the Gate A route. I made sure back at the bottom of the hill.”

“Why is there more than one gate?” I ask. I'd not even noticed we'd taken a specific route.

“Well, they have to divide tickets into different entrances so there's not a stampede of people,” says Daphne. “Gates B, C, D and E are dotted all around the perimeter fence.”

“There're more people scheduled to come this weekend than live in our entire town!” replies Claude, holding the tickets to her heart.

“But where's everyone going to fit?!” Fleur asks as we eventually reach the very steepest point of the hill, pausing on the brow to behold the fabulous view on the other side.

“Well, how about down there?” Daphne laughs, turning to us with saucer-like eyes. We all emit a succession of gasps, cheers and whimpers ...

In the green valley before us, literally thousands and thousands of tents are pitched already! Hosanna! Tents, tents and more tents as far as the eye can see! Orange tents, blue tents, green tents, red tents, yellow tents, plus a zillion other hues and tones, crowd the two square miles of festival site. Teensy-weensy one-man bivouacs, massive hulking ten-man “field hotels,” swanky Winnebagos with blacked-out windows, battered camper vans covered in spray paint, sprawling makeshift hippie communes fashioned from wood and tarpaulin, as well as, dotted throughout the site, smoky bonfires, yellow twinkling nightlights and occasional exploding fireworks. In the middle of the settlement, we can just about recognize the legendary main Hexagon Stage, where Spike Saunders and Amelia Annanova will be performing this weekend; its angular framework is still being hammered together by a swarm of technicians and roadies.

“It looks just like a proper city!” squeaks Fleur.

“Or a magical kingdom!” gasps Claude, although we can barely hear one another now, as all the various vehicles' sound systems are battling for airspace. The Kings of Kong are blaring out from a large battered mini bus ahead of us. Behind us, a man in a motorcycle sidecar is letting rip with some African bongos, totally drowning out Panama and Co.'s hideous atonal screeching.

“It all just looks so amazing,” I say, feeling a bit choked.

As we trundle up to Astlebury's Gate A, the track divides into five sections, where five different, yet curiously similar, big, burly security guards are examining tickets. In the lane adjacent to us, Panama's Land Rover glides into view, its electric windows winding down, displaying the gruesome gang in their full glory.

“Wonderful,” Claude smiles, quickly putting on her best polite face to greet our security guard.

Every morsel of space in Panama's Land Rover is full of bags and cases; in the back trunk area, the place usually reserved for dogs, I spot Zane's fake-tanned face, squashed and gasping for air.

“Best place for him,” Claude mutters.

“Abigail, speak to the man,” Panama commands, chucking the tickets at her friend as a fierce security guard with a jet black ponytail and a name badge that seems to read “Boris” approaches their vehicle. At the same time, we're being faced with our own rather scary security guard dressed in the uniform black shirt, black combat trousers and a pair of twenty-holed Doc Marten boots. Hagar, for that's his name, is a formidable presence with fire red hair, huge hands like clusters of bananas and a nose reminiscent of the Blackwell School caretaker's prizewinning strawberries. After snatching our tickets and holding them up to the floodlights, Hagar peers at us all suspiciously, raising the right-hand section of his fluffy ginger mono-brow.

“Everything okay?” smiles Claude. “This is Gate A, isn't it?”

Hagar looks at Claude, sighs, then points at the huge ten-foot, neon orange Gate A sign glowing behind him.

“Oh. Okay!” giggles Claude nervously. “So we're fine then?”

“Hmmm ... well ... s‘pose,” grumps Hagar, whipping a clipboard from under one beefy arm and flicking through the pages crossly before scratching his head a bit, then smiling in a rather sinister way.

“Right ... okay ... take these,” he huffs, eventually producing four elegant golden wristbands from a drawstring bag. We fasten them tightly to our wrists.

“And don't you be taking these off before you leave on Sunday, right, ladies?” Hagar snarls. “Under pain of death. Or worse fates.”

Gulp.

“Er ... but what if I, y'know, accidentally lose mine?” ventures Fleur foolishly.

The atmosphere inside the Mini turns distinctly chilly.

Hagar sighs again even more deeply, causing the curly red hairs pouring from his nostrils to flutter; then he pushes his face slightly through Claude's window, so close that we can practically smell on his breath the small children he's just gobbled up for supper.

“Oh, well, then, in that case, you just come and find your uncle Hagar,” snaps Hagar the-turning-out-to-be-really-quite-Horrible, swiveling around and winking at Boris. “I'll just be sitting here on the edge of my portacabin, waiting to give you another one.”

“Don't worry, Mr. Hagar, sir. We won't lose our wristbands,” interrupts Claude, trying to make merry of Hagar's sociopathic tendencies. “We won't be any trouble. And can I just say, by the way, what a great job you're doing checking all these tickets? I mean, wow!”