A tale of derring-do set against a background of the fantastic world of the mind; where that mind can do things that would have once been called witchcraft but for those who now practice it what they do is normal as breathing. It is scary, funny and fascinating and above all a good read which will fly you away and light up your dreams. Frank Randal does not really need a 'Q' to assist him in his exploits as does Bond but there is a lovely eccentric character Jake who resembles 'Q'. This novel is funny, exciting occasionally dark and will, I hope, lead to many more stories by the same author about the same characters.
R D Thomas (Professional reader)
GET AWAY/QUANTUM SHIFT
Chapter One
“And when are you going to fix that tap?” Marjory’s voice sliced the words from the kitchen. “It's been dripping for God knows how long!” Her tone could sharpen ploughshares! Reaching him, Frank's wife's voice grated against the air of the sitting room where he tried to pretend he didn’t exist. Air he was certain she polished every morning, and then scraped it thin; like a landlady's butter on bread. Her mouth, he had often thought, ought to be patented as a design for a rat-trap!
He sat still and mute in one of the armchairs - the only one which was even remotely comfortable - in a house to be much admired but never really intended to be lived in. With any luck Marjory would fall into the hole her words left in the air and then she would be gone, forever! But what to do, how could he rid himself of ‘this pestilent woman?’ His mind miss-quoted and his deceptively mild mannered good looks remained as they often did, blank and unemotional. Several men in bars had found out, to their cost, it did not pay to believe what their eyes told them about him. He was in fact a solidly built and very fit young man.
It was not that he did not like Marjory, oh no! He now hated her with an all-consuming passion that, thankfully for him -- prison not possessing much appeal for him -- expressed itself in an irrepressible desire to escape! Other men more given to overt violence than he might have considered murder, but he couldn't; somehow escape it had to be! And not merely running away either, no, escape it had to be, utterly total and complete.
Nor could it be the simple escape of divorce, she would never allow him to get out this mess that way; at least not easily. Her malevolence towards anyone by whom she had felt crossed was such that she would have bled him dry! Even shredding what tenuous rind of self-respect there might have been left, after she had trampled all over his psyche, into microscopic amoebic pieces. If, at some later date, they met in a public place, Marjory would take great delight in humiliating him in whatever manner happened to take her fancy at the time. No, it had to be an irrefutable and untraceable escape. The sort of thing one occasionally read about in the Sunday papers, when some spy or scientist defected or disappeared and could not be found. But how? He had read of people just walking out of their front doors, vanishing and never coming back. In most cases though Frank felt such disappearances were more likely down to murder or suicide, than the person just taking off into the wide-blue-yonder never to return. For Frank, suicide could ever be considered an option and he found the idea of murdering Marjory distasteful. Killing an enemy in battle was one thing, murder was totally different, he could never commit it.
Marjory, though classically beautiful, with soft curves in all the right places, was actually moulded out of emotional concrete. Oh she had charm, plenty of it, and used it to great effect on any personable male. However he had soon and bitterly realised, she had never really loved ‘him,’ only his rank in the R.A.F. and his Social Status. It had rapidly become obvious that she was a Status Seeker and Gold Digger of the most devious and detestable type. His ‘Private Income’ had caused her some pain for it had turned out not to be quite as large as she had assumed. An assumption based on the very large house and lands, his family owned in North Wales. In terms of ready money Frank was not much better off than the average man on the Income Support! If he had chosen not to work, that is. True he was related to minor aristocracy but that did not really make up for the lack of cash; at least not as far as Marjory was concerned. She was a consummate actress and no sign of her real nature had made any appearance until, about three months after the wedding, Frank had to say that spending the entire winter in Florida was way beyond his means. The shock of this announcement had caused her to cease speaking to him for several days or letting him have sex with her. He had discovered within a couple of months that the ‘passion’ of the courting had been put on. Once married she was a not very malleable plank!
Then there had been the accident in which John Morton, his best friend and usually his pilot, Frank being a Navigator, had been killed. Frank hadn’t been able to fly that day and John had gone up with someone else. They never came back. And it was only a routine mission. It hit Frank hard, very hard, Marjory hadn’t been able to see why.
The whole situation was compounded a few months later. It manifested itself in a look of disbelief, turning rapidly to scorn and dislike, on her face when he had come home one evening and told her he had resigned his commission. She made very it clear that this was some kind of ‘last straw.’
She couldn’t even begin to understand why John’s death had hit him so very hard; and that it was something he would probably never get over. After all, Morton had only been someone he had served with, in her eyes. So if ‘he’ vanished, Frank mused, she wouldn’t bother to look for him, well not very hard. In fact he suspected that she had her eyes on one of the unmarried directors at the firm she worked for as a secretary. The only problem was how to vanish? He would need to re-invent himself, get himself a new and totally different personality. Maybe he could lose his memory, that might work, he thought. But somehow and one way or another he knew he just had to get away from her and all she stood for.
He got up from his chair, which crackled as he did so, the plastic covering it had arrived with never having been removed in case the material got dirty. That had been nearly three years ago! He carefully folded his paper, the one he had been pretending to read, and placed it exactly two centimetres from the edge of the small table by the chair. Then he smiled absently at her, as she stood foursquare and implacable in the middle of the room.
"Just going out for a moment, love," he said absently and went to the closet in the hall to get his coat. She followed him, heels clicking on the parquet floor, glowering, and drew her beautifully moulded lips into an even tighter line than usual. He found himself wondering idly: if she drew herself in any more tightly than she was at the moment, whether she would turn into a totally two dimensional creature. And if she were then turned sideways on, would she become nothing more than a thin line against the wallpaper? Like the blade of a knife looked at edgeways. A beautiful thing to look at and perhaps handle, even caress, but very deadly.
"The pub as usual I suppose," she said contemptuously.
There was no point in denying it. He couldn't even make ‘taking the dog for a walk’ an excuse. She had made him have Benji put down months ago. A perfectly healthy young dog, nothing wrong with him other than the inexcusable fault that the dog had liked Frank. That really had been the last straw. Camel's back and all that sort of thing. So with respect to her present remark he merely nodded vaguely and said absently, "Er, yes. I had thought of calling in for a quick one." Everything he said to her nowadays had that absent quality, as if 'he' wasn't really there. Either that, or she wasn't. It was his only defence; the only way he could remain in the same house with her was to pretend she didn't really exist!