Short story: Way of the Blue Stone

Jonah Jones

Her working personality was left behind when she was driving, she’d be the first to admit. Mistress of the car, she became a lovely animal that was wild, free and much more her own true self. No passengers, no compromise, no small talk, no clutter. Her skills, her determination, her own delight in her own capability.

Whenever she needed to escape the menacing or meaningless, she would cast her mind back to her first car – a Ford Fiesta. Someone had steamed up the engine and she loved that extra punch. Roger as she called him, was a touch tatty around the trim but he still roared like a good ’un when you put the boot to the floor. Happy, uncluttered days. But you can’t change certain fundamentals. He was a Dagenham Rust-bucket and lived up to his name, crumbling like a politician’s promise within a couple of years.

After university, she got a job at Jackson and Crowe in Canary Wharf and rose up the executive ranks, upgrading to a VW Golf GTI and then a BMW along the way. She disliked the epithet “executive” when applied to her. It implied executing a superior’s orders and as far as she was concerned, she had no superiors. Some might call her driven but there was no question in her mind. She was The Driver.

As such, she grew in her lust for speed in cars and quick turn-overs in men.

Although she never defined herself the way she looked, with the use of subtle sexuality, she found it easy to manipulate and cajole her way through the murderous savannah of the boardroom. Nothing obvious, never much of a cleavage but blouses that clung and swung where required. Men were predictably stupid when it came to boobs. Stupid and therefore malleable.

Vacuous

Day by dreary day, as she navigated the shifting echelons, she became aware of a hollowness inside herself and a vacuous world outside. Nowhere new to go, nothing to challenge, no way to grow. Static as the ossified managers and office workers that populated this sterile place with less purpose than woodlice. Yet, what else was on offer? Marriage to one such as these, producing children destined to become like them with the surnames of their fathers as if their mother had taken no part?

Not for her. Love ’em and leave ’em was the watch-phrase. These unkind people were nurturing the same sentiment in her, widening the distance between them and causing her to embrace solitude. Emptiness was preferable to being crushed. Fulfilment could wait.

The Porsche Cabriolet shifted every perspective. A handsome Midnight Blue, he squatted low on the road like a panther about to spring and took corners as if he was inside a glass tube. She called him Damien because he could draw the demon out of her as they merged to prowl as one ferocious beast.

Every weekend she would select a suitable location and book herself into a hotel, three to four star but quiet. Friday was driving there, Sunday was driving back but Saturday was pure driving for its own sake.

Scotland was good, especially twisting along the West coast but getting there and back took too much time. The Pennines weren’t bad either but her favourite had become mid-Wales as long as she could avoid the middle-aged-crisis-ridden men on motorbikes that were too big for them.

Ravens

One dull weekday, after a dull weeknight with another unimaginative executive, followed by a tedious strategy meeting in Aldgate, she took a long walk past the Tower of London, where the ravens flew above her and spoke of their homeland. She imagined flying with them, looking down on the Preseli hills, their dolmens and standing stones set amongst the unspoilt legend-strewn landscape.

Generations of these magnificent birds had borne witness from the time long before the tower was built, right back to the times before the name Londinium. Harbingers of death to some but in truth, these were the messengers of the Ancient Britons. If they speak to you, you’d be wise to listen.

During the next morning, over coffee and ludicrous team-building on the Internet, she looked at the satellite-image map. That part of Pembrokeshire looked wild enough for a challenging drive and it was motorway or dual carriageway nearly all the way there. She looked up hotels and found a nice-looking place at Druidstone, which at that juncture simply seemed like a intriguing name in a quiet location on the curve of Saint Bride’s Bay.

Leaving behind any frippery by Gucci or Chanel, jewellery and high heels, The Driver set off westwards as soon as Friday’s work was over, the lust for new experience smouldering in her heart.

Even so, she wasn’t stupid when it came to speed limits. Any idiot could get caught speeding on the motorway, that wasn’t the thrill. Seventy was fine all the way to Membury, where she stopped for a leg-stretch and a coffee. As she walked past the rack of tourist brochures, the one for Stonehenge caught her eye. The unbidden connection came to her. Pembrokeshire Bluestone had been taken all the way there to form the inner circle and no one knew why. The Ancient Britons had accomplished that ridiculously demanding task five thousand years ago, in the mists of history, and they had taken the reasoning with them.

Coincidence 

Something was nagging at her, drawing her attention to another way of seeing. She was heading towards Druidstone. Previously, she hadn’t thought anything of the name but now an inkling of destiny tickled the back of her mind, yet she she continued to dismiss it as strange coincidence.

As she made her way back to Damien, there was the distinctive deep “kraa, kraa” of a raven, calling from the trees bordering the car park. She stopped to look for it, failed to see the bird and so continued to walk towards Damien, convinced that she had imagined the call but then the raven swooped down to stand in front of her, blinking and tilting his glossy head to one side, the better to assess her. No longer part of a coincidence, it seemed like a good omen.

‘I’ve been speaking to your family in the City of Madness,’ she said softly.

The raven dipped his head in a form of curtsey, bobbed and skipped a step or two of his greeting dance, then flew back to his watchtower in the trees as she fired the remote to unlock Damien. This time she was able to see him as the bird watched her opening Damien’s roof and for a few shared moments, they exchanged silent rapport. Then she started the engine and the link was broken as the vagrant raven watched her pull out of the car park and on towards his ancestral home.

With a sense of pleasant foreboding, she continued on her way towards the birthplace of the Bluestones. Seventy all the way to Cross Hands, stretches of sixty until she reached Haverfordwest and then a slow cruise down to Druidstone as the sun was setting over the sea in a glorious golden ending to the day.

That Saturday, the dawn light blazed its invitation from Preseli’s pink tinted peaks, promising to keep the high paths clear. She showered, put on minimum make-up, went down to the dining room to demolish a full British breakfast, before returning to her room to begin the ritual of dressing as if she were a medieval knight preparing for the tourney. No bra because she wanted to feel that shift in her breasts as she took the corners. Her armour was a loose-fitting blouse, specially designed to look as if she was wearing a seat-belt, helmet – a wrap-around peaked hat and, as she strode out to Damien, she pulled on her crochet-backed driving gloves.

‘Okay, Damien, my love, you know the ropes,’ she said as she slid into the seat, taking the unattached seat-belt buckle from her pocket and pushing it into the catch, so that the car’s blind safety system and any human guardian would be obliged to believe that she was wearing a belt. However, there was a tacit understanding between the knight and her steed, that she was going out into the fray as wild and free as she reasonably could.

‘I have a good feeling about today,’ she told him as she switched on the ignition, pulled the lever and waited as the hood slid back, revealing the clearest and bluest sky she’d seen for weeks. Once it was slotted securely in its place, she drove sensibly along the hotel’s gravel drive in second gear. No need to rush, she and Damien had all day to enjoy the game of fast and loose.

Twisting roads

Still legal, sixty miles per hour was a challenge on these twisting roads with their sudden straights and mean cross-cambered, uneven-surfaced bends. An unknown blind corner at forty-five was a greater challenge than a racing circuit chicane at over a ton. Damien roared and whined like the sabre-toothed cats that roamed these hills in ancient times, when the Bluestone masons lived here. She felt their presence, cat and Briton, as she sped faster along the roads built upon the trackways they would have known.

There was a deeper truth and understanding of the experience as her whole unrestrained body felt every nuance of movement, every component of the centripetal reaction whenever she deviated from the straight and constant, her hair whipping and tugging at its own whim. The movement was compressing her, stretching her, as if it were a series of notes in the wind; an aria sung only to her by Damien, her demon lover, as they sped through the encompassing landscape.

Near the seven stones of Arthur’s sons, three sheep were obliged by the gods to spring onto the road, so she swerved, causing Damien to leap the ditch and run full tilt into a gate-post. Aluminium composite against the ancient Bluestone of the bards. He crumpled, somersaulted and landed upside-down on the set slabs of the field’s entrance. She should have been crushed with him but was thrown out of the cockpit to fly with the ravens before landing in a cleft in the rock where the bracken grew thick and cushioned her landing as if it had been waiting to embrace her.

Crushed

As the hissing concussion cleared, all she could hear was the song of a vagrant blackcap as he fluttered and strutted in the tattered hawthorn, then all she could see was the blue sky with clouds skipping by to the blackcap’s joyful melody. She turned her head to see Damien, her beautiful blue boy, her newly realised sabre-toothed cat, lying upside-down, crushed by this unyielding path into the mountains, his wheels spinning in a futile attempt to grip the air. The realisation flooded through her befuddled mind that she should be dead but for the crazy urge to drive without a seatbelt. Tempting Fate had kept her alive. Oblivion could wait another span.

Cautiously, the first raven approached Damien’s dead body, hopping, stopping, cocking its head to one side, then hopping and stopping again. Another arrived and approached the carcass as if they would feast upon his remains. In moments, a conspiracy of ravens had surrounded his corpse, speaking of occult understanding beyond that of humans. Without reasoning, she knew these ravens had spoken to those in the Tower, telling Damien to bring her here. They had organised this conspiracy for the sake of the ancient gods who sang her a lullaby for a healing sleep. As she drifted into the next world, she saw that Damien’s wheels had stopped spinning.

She had no reason to return to the hollow city, so remained with the ravens and those that understand them, teaching the farmers and the dreamers how to manipulate money whilst they taught her the ways of the Faerielands: collecting and reforming, weaving and sewing, sowing and reaping, being nurtured and giving succour.

As she grew to understand her place in this mystical land, the new woman accepted a new name, Branwen – White Raven – from the wise-women. When they deemed her ready, they helped her to move into a cottage on the track to Carn Ingli, just short of the springing water, and introduced her to a husbandman to help with the crops, the animals and any other needs.

Now she smells of dog-rose and water-mint, smiling in contentment as she flies above the hills of Bluestone with her kin, and with those breasts that once held the board room in thrall, she feeds her children.