The Midden by Tom Sharpe Read Free Book Online

when the Suzuki clocked up 170 mph on

their radar and they made the decision not to chase him on the grounds that they would only get

involved in a particularly grisly retrieval operation requiring an infinite number of body bags.

To Timothy Bright such a likely end never occurred. He was in the very centre of an enormous

disco with flames and shadows dancing round him and terrors twining and unwinding in an intricate

pattern of lights that were sounds and musical notes that transformed themselves into colours and

endless necklaces of lights, before detaching themselves from the cat's eyes in the road and

becoming the faces of Mr Markinkus and Mr B. Smith. If the Suzuki could have gone much faster at

this point Timothy would have ensured that it did. He was now in the grip of demented terror

which reached one almost insufferable climax only to have it succeeded by another. Underneath him

the miles slid by unnoticed. Car and lorry rearlights swam towards him and were avoided like so

many images on an arcade game with, to other drivers, a quite terrifying ease.
    By ten o'clock Timothy had swung off the motorway onto side roads across a rolling upland of

little towns and villages, wooded valleys and tumbling rivers. Here, acting on the instructions

of his automatic pilot, he slowed down for corners and braked where necessary and swept up hills

and onto moors where sheep miraculously crossed the road just ahead of him or just behind and

there were few signs of habitation. Somewhere ahead of him lay safety from the demons in his

skull and somewhere ahead was a paradisiacal land where there was infinite happiness. The images

were ever-changing but the same message of escape in alternate forms sustained him for the drive.

On and on he went into a world he had never known before and would never be able to find again.

And all the time Timothy Bright remained unconscious of his actions and his surroundings. His

hand on the throttle twisted this way and that, slackening the speed on the bends and

accelerating on the straights. He didn't know. His inner experiences dominated his being. At some

point during the night his bodily sensations joined forces with the mental images to convince him

he was on fire and needed to take his skin off to escape being burnt. He stopped the bike in a

wooded area by a stream and stripped off his clothes and hurled them down the bank before

mounting the Suzuki again and riding on into his internal landscape entirely naked. Ten miles

further on he came to the Six Lanes End where it joined the Parson's Road to the north. Timothy

Bright shot across the intersection and took the private road belonging to the Twixt and Tween

Waterworks Company. With a fine disregard for its uneven surface he shot the Suzuki up it. Cattle

grids rattled briefly beneath him and he was up onto Scabside Fell beside drystone walls and open

grassland. Ahead of him a great stone dam held back the waters of the reservoir. It was here that

the night ride ended.
    As he accelerated on what looked to him like the blue, blue sky an elderly sheep that had been

sleeping on the warmth of the road grew vaguely aware of a distant danger and rose to its feet.

To Timothy Bright it was merely a little cloud. The next moment the sheep was airborne and

hurtling with the motorbike over the deepest part of the reservoir. In another direction Timothy

Bright, still sublimely unconscious of his surroundings, shot through the air and landed in a

coppice of young fir trees on the far bank. As he drifted limply through them and landed on the

pine needles underneath, he knew no fear. For a while he lay in the darkness until the conviction

that piggy-chops had begun drove him to his feet and out of the coppice. Now he was a bird, or

would have been if the ground hadn't kept getting in the way. Three times he fell over on the

tarmac and added to the damage he had already suffered. And