Tara

She walked through the park as the evening skies grew dark, feeling like it was too late to save what she had lost. As the main writer for her folk band Acoustic Prelude it had always been down to her to come up with new material, but now things were running dry and their time might soon be up. No wonder the shadows seemed deep to her, beneath the trees swaying in the breeze. The park was beginning to empty, lovers on benches now heading for the gates, to wait for trains and buses, midnight promise. But home was not for her, she would have nothing to do there if she picked up her guitar, only repeat what had already been done, so she struck a path for the river. Strangely enough when she got there the skies were lighter, despite the fact it was later, tinges of blue still clearly visible on the far horizon. The waters were low and people were at the river’s edge, an arresting scene which immediately took her out of herself. She focused on figures close to the water, kitted out with metal detectors, spades, headphones wrapped round their heads, digging holes amongst the rubble, sand and broken bricks, some digging deep. She wondered what they were hoping to find; Roman gold, Pagan metals, Tudor silver, or maybe the secret passage through the earth which took one from London to Australia in less than an hour. Yes, she had read about that, the conspiracy theorists who were adamant that the planet was punctured with holes caused by reverse solar accretion in the vicinity of the magnetic poles. This inexplicable cosmic phenomenon  created openings on the earth’s surface for people to enter, to get from one side of the world to the other in little more than a blink of an eye. It had been rumoured for many years a hole from London to Sydney existed, but the authorities didn’t want people to know about it, so they covered it up, quite literally. Her own feelings on the matter were somewhat ambivalent, maybe yes maybe no, although she did think it was weird how identical the English was in Oz, both written and spoken, to that back home. The sight of the detectorists lifted her spirits, after all these people were making great efforts in trying to find something and prepared to get their hands dirty. It struck her like a bolt from the blue she could do exactly the same, go back, go under, dig deeper. She suddenly remembered who she really was, an artist, a warrior. No more Acoustic Prelude, they were dead and buried, it was time to re-invent, go in a new direction, what better way to start than by going home and writing a song called Metal Detector Sky Guru? A bit of a clunky name for sure, with more than a little Tyrannosaurus Rex about it, but it would not be a folk song but thrash metal. The group to perform it would be Tara, named after her, they would be loud n’ proud, as subtle as a rock thrown in your face.