Banquet for the Damned Read Free

heartbeat. He seems to dance with it for a second – two shadows in a drunken piggyback ride – before he plunges through the icy surface of the sea with it all about him.

CHAPTER TWO
'You're going to miss this place, mate,' Tom shouts over the judders and roar of the speeding Land Rover.
'Yeah, like toothache,' Dante replies, his concentration split between driving, thinking, and now Tom's jabber. He wants to dwell, uninterrupted, on the city where he's spent most of his adult life, the city he feels he is leaving with few regrets, besides taking his best friend along.
Birmingham dwindles behind him in the rear-view mirror and he feels it was never a city indifferent or unkind to him. They were comfortable in their squalid life. But the city of their birth and childhood and teens and early twenties wants them to remain with the other musicians, bums and losers of the rock scene, floundering in the shallows of a tide long gone out. Too late for a second start, his instincts suggest. The groaning activity in his stomach, caused by his doubts about driving four hundred miles to depend on an old man he's never met, reinforces this suspicion.
And the statistics are not good. Every other band and musician they know who attempted to leave the Midlands returned home in anything between a month and a year to scratch around again. Some came back with babies and girls with strong accents, some with suntans and new tattoos, and some even returned with short hair. But no one seemed to escape the lifestyle it was so easy to slip into at eighteen and impossible to leave once you passed twenty-five. Or perhaps this insecurity is just the result of waking early, fleeing a house you owe rent on, and then staring at your entire collection of earthly things in plastic bin liners strewn across the chipped and dusty floor of an old Land Rover. It is hard to tell.
Out the side of his eye, Dante can see Tom fidgeting. His seat belt remains unfastened, cassette cases are littered around his footwell, and his scuffed boots are planted on the dashboard where the green paint is worn down to brown metal. 'God ran out of everything but horseshit when he gave you brains,' Dante says, without turning his head.
Tom frowns and pushes his head forward, over the gearstick, with a familiar what-did-you-say? expression on his face. Dante says nothing. He checks the rear-view mirror, and then glances at the fuel gauge beside the broken speedometer, making sure his eyes only leave the road for a second. In a 1969 Lightweight Land Rover with no midships, anything beyond a second's distraction can be fatal. A white van, with a ladder tied loose on the roof, overtakes them on the inside lane before cutting across the Land Rover's square nose. Dante brakes and then listens to their luggage begin an uneasy slide behind his seat.
'Do your bloody belt up. Jesus!' he shouts, and gives Tom his best look of disapproval.
Tom grins. 'When you left home you forgot something.' He raises two fingers. 'You left these!'
Dante sweeps the de-mister sponge off the steering column, which is heavy with dew, and throws it against the side of Tom's head. There is a wet slap from the chamois leather as it blasts off the side of Tom's face. Dante roars with laughter at the success of his shot. Tom's arm, tight in biker leather, rises to deliver the retaliation. 'Don't!' Dante shouts, but his cries become laughter. Should have known better. The sponge hits his left ear. It feels like a cow has kissed the side of his head. 'Stupid bastard!' he screams through his laughter, and begins a fight to control the Land Rover as it swerves on the approach to Spaghetti Junction.
'For fuck's sake!' Tom yells, his voice slipping into laughter. 'We're only five miles from Northfield and you've nearly crashed the War Wagon. Should have let me drive the first leg.'
'Should've left you behind! Look at this bloody mess. You've got cassettes out of their cases, ash all over the friggin' luggage, and you've