Now that I've begun, the words are flowing quickly, probably because I can identify with someone so stupid.
My hero is, essentially, an idiot. Pretty soon he's going to find himself on the run for something he didn't do. What passes for his brain is slowly improving as the book continues. How he'll end up I have no idea. Here's the opening section: just setting the pace, as it were.
The motorway and the darkness, stretched off endlessly. Harold didn’t know what time it was; somewhere in the middle of the night. The clock in the car he was driving was still set to German time and his own watch had not survived its encounter with the washing machine in the launderette last week. In front of him a badly maintained lorry shed another bolt. One had already flown over the roof of the car, narrowly missing the windscreen, and probably decapitating him, but only after taking out the bonnet ornament of his boss’s Mercedes. Whether the iron missiles came from its cargo bed or the wheels, he might find out soon. Back in the service station, an hour before, the driver of the enormous vehicle had looked at him, at first sceptically, then with open scorn.
‘You’re a bleedin’ chauffeur and you don’t know the way to London. Are you bleedin’ kidding me?’
Harold had not been kidding him. He really didn’t know the way to London. This was just another failing in an already long list given his chosen profession. Harold lacked possibly the most fundamental prerequisite for his job; which is to say, a sense of direction. After asking politely once more, the driver, a burly man in his fifties lifted an arm sporting numerous tattoos, all of which exhibited his loathing for anything not English, or white. His oily middle finger barely missed Harold’s left nostril before telling him to get stuffed; and with a flatulent wheeze of his air brakes had run over Harold’s big toe in an exuberant display of pure malice.
Not really sure where it's going, but I'm having fun.
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