KLAXON CITY
by DF Lewis
My first glimpse was the hill where stood the Canterbury Oak, if standing or growing could be reconciled. That was not the tree’s real name; nothing bore its real name in my book. Nothing bore its real name, I dare suggest, in Klaxon City itself. If Klaxon City called itself Klaxon City, then it lied.
I had crossed the Inner Plains from a life I preferred to forget so, having tried to forget it, there would be a certain counter-productiveness in rehearsing a re-living of it merely to fill in the wavy area of my past with childish colouring.
I knew beyond the hill would be Klaxon City; the Canterbury Oak was responsible for this name, a name given as a means towards an easy fantasy: a convenient digestibility of facts that make up any fantasy, even if, for me, this particular fantasy was not a fantasy at all.
Klaxon City, therefore. A city full of noise, a noise like klaxons or sirens. So a name like Klaxon City makes things straightforward. I shall not bother with its real name, a name which means nothing or, if it means anything, is lost in some mire of esoteric history or legend. The Canterbury Oak, too, is named thus because it is similar to a tree I once saw in Canterbury. A bottom-heavy tree with warped bark, almost a diseased bark, I guess, with a girth – shall I say of a million miles in circumference? I may as well. I should never be able to convey the IMPRESSION of its irregular wrinkled girth (that lower end of its bole that met the earth) by any claim to know its measurements or any STANDARD of measurement common to all who would like to know its measurements. Scales are quite out of the question. The trunk – as it tapered towards the top where sparse branches started to claw at the sky – had a wind-chewed roughness (I knew it was rough even from the distance I saw it but remained unsure of the wind), growing like a giant serpent whereby all its inner wooden fat had sapped towards its rooted tail, leaving it so dissimilar in bulk when bottom was compared to top. The branches were images of its relentless pain that had once been conveyed by its own internal sirens.
Now, with its sirens quiet for at least a generation, I was soon to learn that the citizens, having long been inured to its ancient noise (now dead or deaf to itself), needed to customise their own background of audible pain: thus building a city-wide tannoy-system to act as temporary coverage of such sirens. So, given the Oak’s recent bouts of cyclic silence, their own homegrown versions of siren-sound in the city seemed to take sway, as if the Oak had decided to remain silent now more often, in face of such unrivalled clamour. However, the citizens themselves – perhaps because they had grown irritated by mock sirens as opposed to the real thing – had started to hire surreptitious ear-muffs to assuage the skewered edges of sound. Some even trod a highly secret route of sound-proofing their houses. Once seen, however, the difficulty of such a task would become apparent.
Meanwhile, I crossed the brow of another hill as I completed my trek – from across the Inner Plains with just a portable tent and meagre rations – starting when an untold past had ceased unfolding and ending as I approached an as yet unknown future. I witnessed the scattered pylons of Klaxon City bearing their tethered skycraft. I knew to expect these. However, I had not been forearmed with any knowledge concerning the vastness of the city – occupying a space within a cavity of truth that housed a whole dynasty, not just one tranche of civilisation. However, that as yet unappreciated fact abandoned my mind when I suddenly became appalled by what hit me with the force of a tangible soundwave – the tannoy-system kicking in with a hair-trigger difference between silence (on one side of the brow) and cacophony (on the other).
****
Greg lived with Beth in London, but they also had a beach hut at Clacton on the coast about 90 minutes’ trainride from Liverpool Street station. They were an ordinary couple, unmarried and childless. Yet nobody made that judgement about them, because nobody knew enough about them to warrant such a view. Greg thought he was ordinary. He worked in Waste Management as a lorry-driver. Beth thought she wasn’t ordinary at all. She was indeed ordinary, if in that thought alone. Both were malleable, but one of them fought against being malleable, and each thought the other to be the one fighting that particular fight. One of them was right.
If they thought about it at all.
Beth worked in Klaxon City – an amusement arcade near Soho – a sight better-class than the arcades in Clacton, where saucy hats and bingo were more the rage. In Beth’s arcade of work, there were high-prize jackpot fruit machines as well as mock-casino games with real tellers. Robot croupiers were not too far-fetched in the sort of computerised world that amusement arcades had now entered, following the miniaturization of machines everywhere – even in Clacton. So there were tellers who handed out chips and made masquerade of gambles being unforethought … mingling with robots who smiled wickedly, giving the punters confidence that all was random, because how could thinking machines not deliver the chance one always seeks in life: the pure chance? Only humanity snags the wheels of chance, with their intentions and misintentions of subconscious thought.
Many fought against thought.
Beth was one who fought against thought. She just dreamed of that ultimate chance where she could safely say that she was full of unmixed happiness. A dream she forgot immediately she woke up from it, although sleep was not the necessary prerequisite for thus dreaming. Not a sought happiness, because that always failed. But a found happiness. One that simply enveloped one, given the lack of forethought or ambition that the very act of seeking it would have entailed, given self-consciousness: a self-consciousness that women of Beth’s ilk luckily lacked. Meanwhile, she simply plugged on. A pretty face neatly sunk on skullbone.
A plug makes things work. An electric plug. A bath plug. A rawl-plug. Even an advertising plug. The latter made a name into a catchword and the circling businessmen would cause manufacture of anything to match the catchword and made it work in tune with the catchword’s neatly fitting its round peg in a round hole whilst making square holes of us all, without us noticing.
In modern screen drama there are swishes of sound to alleviate the changes of scene, large noisy tractions of vision that overwhelm the quiet reflective scene with an abruptness that life never really has in retrospect: all misery is gradual, such as lives are gradual, never fast-changing, even if one can destroy a marriage with one simple act, but it takes days, often, to percolate and reveal its repercussions. Never in drama. Never in fiction. We need the swish of the curtain. A single alert. A sudden siren set off to indicate a change of scene, a change of dream. A false plug. Where amusement is taken from not knowing where things were or who people thought they were.
****
The man juddering with a Klaxon City joystick told me that The Plug was his real name.
"You heard WHAT in the dark?" I asked.
"Voices."
The one word answer which The Plug had given me failed to explain why he had opened the conversation with a non-sequitur about hearing things in the dark. That day I had actually spoken with The Plug; previously I had just eyed him in the corner as he spun the fruits just like one of the unemployed, which, by the law of averages, he probably was. Although he failed to recognise me, I knew we had met before in the dim and distant past. There was no mistaking those two stitched scars that met on his forehead like tug-of-war teams, missing his eyes by a hair's breadth.
He was not alone. Beside him at the Fruit Machine, there stood someone he called The Wife – a meek and mild looking woman with a penchant for floral head-scarves and coats too long for the rest of her. A pointy face with seeking eyes. And, if not exactly a humpback, she did appear as if surgery had stuffed things inside, instead of removing them. As for The Plug, he had not changed much since those days when we both worked in Pensions for an Insurance Company – he a charmless office clerk and me, well, did it matter? I assumed the Plug had continued working there after my own departure – but probably possessing more useful administration experience than they had the resources to exploit, he had no doubt been abandoned in the lay-by on the great trunk road to Business Heaven. Matter over mind, I often said.
I could not recall his name from those heady office days, when grey was the only colour and time didn't seem to pass so much as fleet by like an immoveable rock. So when I introduced myself as the person to whom he used to assist, The Plug merely said:
"I could only hear them in the dark."
"You heard WHAT – only in the dark?"
"Voices."
The strange conversation repeated itself in my memory many times.
"What voices?"
"Haven't we met before?" he asked, pointedly ignoring my own question as well as the introduction I had previously made regarding our past acquaintanceship. His body was swollen to the seams and I wondered whether his flesh had met a diet head on and won hands down.
"Yes, as I said, weren't you at...?" I asked.
"Yes, I was there."
"You did back-up for me."
"I could only hear them in the dark."
"Voices, did you say?"
"Yes, voices. Nightmarish ones with words on edge like blades."
"What was your name?"
"My name IS The Plug."
I smiled at The Wife, who was staring down at her bare share of the gambling-chips. I suppose I was sympathising with her lot in life with such a smile.
"Me and her, we got married so that we could live – how you call it? – together."
I couldn't imagine how they had ever decided to do this, unless it had been utter inertia – which probably meant they had always lived together for longer than either could remember. A dead-end marriage ... dead at BOTH ends.
What happened next was a matter of record. I was seen following them out of Klaxon City and, even by my own evidence, The Plug had invited me to his home which, he said, was only a few roads away in the Clacton backstreets. The time was 3.30 pm and the evening was closing in with winter darkness. A sense of a seaside’s suicide at the end of each season. The Wife did not exactly accompany either of us – merely leading us ... in Indian File.
"When it gets dark, I can hear..."
He left me to continue his sentence as if we were part of a stage play where cues were the currency of exchange. I shook my head, denying all knowledge of the next line. We passed the end of the pier. The house itself was more distant than 'a few roads away'. I felt 'a bus-ride away' was the least of it: several red ones passing us in either direction as we paced the salty pavements. Eventually, however, we reached what I could only describe as a chalet bungalow-house, one with dark yellow stucco walls – and pointed roofs more in keeping with a larger establishment.
The Wife unlocked the front door from inside a huge porch. It eventually opened with a groan, after she had seemingly tried every key on her ring before hitting upon the correct one. The hallway, beyond the door, looked more inviting than the pursuing darkness outside, if only because it hid its own personality with wall mirrors. Indeed, I was soon ensconced upon a sofa, having been ushered into a room that The Plug called The Parlor (the American spelling, he insisted). The English chintziness, when combined with the American East Coast memorabilia and Wild West knickknacks, made me feel more at home ... being a man of no place myself.
I sank into the sofa as if it were a warm bath. I had been armed with a cup of tea and a toasted muffin. The Wife had quickly prepared these comestibles – quicker, indeed, than time allowed, especially as the kitchen's noise of clinking crockery and clanging pans seemed to come from a distant outhouse or, even, cellar ... perhaps an attic, give or take the odd sense of direction on my part.
The Plug switched on a wireless – one of those heavily-valved beasts with a glowing console – and he tuned in, with some difficulty, judging by the whining and screaming of static, a programme playing old Charleston dance music. Despite its evident age, the beast must have run on batteries as I could see no tell-tale flex coiling from it to the skirting-board. The wireless played, indeed, with an autonomy quite distinct from any back-up of broadcasting – a local radio station so local it sounded designed simply for The Parlor. I can't say I was impressed with the wife's dancing to it, her slow hands moving from knee to knee: a sluggish jerking that the Twenties had remaindered for the present.
After being taken inside the house, there were no further witnesses to my movements, nor to those of The Plug and The Wife – so the rest was hearsay. If memory was the only determinant, then they took me down some stone steps for a torch-lit visit to their cellar which had in fact been converted into a dark kitchen. If in retrospect, I was simply asking for trouble. A bungalow-house with a cellar? Seemed too improbable to be safe. Alarm bells rang in my head, but I ignored them. I risked becoming yet another missing corpse, another human gap in the ongoing history of existence's entries and exits ... buried forever beneath their cellar floor. But no – they were nice as pie, both of them.
"We keep the cooking things out of the way down here," announced The Plug. The Wife, as if to prove the truth of the matter, proceeded to fill a kettle with water from a rattling old tap – a tap which had evidently served other purposes many years before when cellars were truly cellars. The cellar's personality, however, could not be concealed by the greasy cooker, visible only by its own gaslight – the hastily put-together cupboard Units from Texas – the giant hummming fridge smothered with scrawled post-its – and the bottles of wine in their laying-down racks returning us full circle to the dank, lugubrious cellar, one that literally screamed out for cobwebs and a silence more in keeping with something called The Cellar.
The Plug waved his torch around and said:
"The voices are always here ... cos it's always dark."
"I can't hear anything but the kettle boiling."
If non-sequiturs could speak with their own voice, then one did: using The Plug's mouth as a medium:
"The Wife and I try to make pension schemes unnecessary."
There was an unnecessary stress on the last word, because I could see exactly what was meant. The wine bottles, pointing from their racks, were corked with human thumbs, nail-ends outward. I had already, with some stealth, pressed the pad of my own thumb against one of them to see if my eyes deceived me – and, yes, there was a pliable stiffness that only old fleshy stubs upon a bed of flattened bone could provide.
I winced, knowing that my fears of my host's madness were fast becoming substantiated. I did not want to show such fears, however, as I would become yet one more statistic for later generations to make a hue and cry about when mine and others' remains were discovered in these very premises. I had to be cool. Just like The Cellar. Cool and inscrutable.
I continued conversing with The Plug as if I hadn't heard his comment about pension schemes.
"Food keeps nice down here, even without a fridge," I suggested.
He nodded and responded with the merest throwaway line:
"Vermin and pests and insects steer clear of The Cellar, cos they don't think there's anything to eat – only an old mangle, they think, or trunks of clothes, disused things of all sorts ... like in other cellars."
He was trying, for my satisfaction, to reconcile the presence of the untouched food I saw all around me. He nodded again – non-commitally. He shrugged and torched me into a neighbouring room. The Cellar had indeed been partitioned to provide two spaces. I was not surprised to find that the second one was a bathroom – of sorts. I wondered who had managed to plumb pipes this far into the foundations, but The Plug demonstrated the shower device which aimed down into what seemed to be a double bath. The water-spray, although making various splutters, seemed to work well enough.
"I get fed up with showers," said The Plug, "cos there's nothing like a long hot soak..."
And he pointed to the huge enamel pit that I had mistaken for a domestic bath. Well, it was a bath. Probably, The Bath. The Platonic Form of Bath – one of which Heaven or, more likely, Hell would be proud.
"I agree," I said. "You can't get the scales off under a mere sprinkle." I should not have been shocked at the way my laughter echoed more than in a normal bathroom. It was as if The Cellar itself laughed, laughed back at me, louder and louder...
"Step inside it – see how roomy it is," offered The Plug, a smile playing round his lips. The torchlit tongue twirled a red rubbery hula-hoop. The Wife could be heard clunking in the nearby kitchen – talking to herself – or to the cellar wall, like Shirley Valentine. The words were too empty to mean anything. Meanwhile, I tentatively stepped over The Bath's rim and into the deep body-length crevasse. Either I had a death-wish or I still believed The Plug to be decent at heart. We had worked together, after all – in an Insurance Company.
Either he forced me to take all my clothes off or I decided to do it anyway from some misplaced exhibitionism. I nodded towards the gold fittings at one end of The Bath – its jewellery, as it were, shown off to the fullest effect in torchlight. They were over-large mixer-taps which I wondered whether he was going to turn on for my soak.
"There's no..." He indicated the plug-hole.
No stopper. No cork. No plug. I nearly said it for him. Yet I hesitated. I would only be playing into his hands, if I went along with the natural cue-line. The Wife entered the bathroom section of The Cellar, wielding a knife that would, on better days, have been used to carve huge Sunday joints. The blade winked wickedly. The House shivered in anticipation, unless it had been merely an underground train. And memory was haunted with the strangest people.
"Once seen, sawn off," said one flourish of their blade's slick snicker, as The Wife and The Knife did their work. And the missing plug for the bath had been solved in one fell swoop – followed by a hot, soothing soak without recourse to the taps. And death was the final witness. The Death.
****
The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.
****
The Death entered Klaxon City. The real Klaxon City, where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet, of various heights, from the top of which stretched out in the wind (the wind?) many skycraft with each one’s make, build, substance, inflatability, non-inflatability, traction, torque etc. mere seeing from ‘ground’-level could not fathom. You had to climb up to them to discover if they were, say, flyable. Having flown to their perches here was no guarantee of future flyability. A few weren’t sufficiently rendered from the flesh and bone that some (not always the few in question) once were. Not renderABLE, let alone non-friable enough to safeguard against weathering. But weather was a dubious topic in Klaxon. It depended on the nature or mood of the city’s geographical cavity at any one time in the vertical cross-section of its dynasty as opposed to in the more usual horizontal considerations of surface cities.
I had died more than once, and, then, it was at least once on the surface that I had died, but several times below the surface. I had suffered a fatal knife-wound in a casino when the gambling laws were relaxed, because I questioned whether the silver ball was in the right hole when the robots visibly tilted the roulette-wheel with their hands, and the tellers later blaming it on an earth tremor. There was no disembowelling of their rules. Even Henry Fifth would have been given short shrift. Unto the breach…
But I was trying to forget my past. I even imagined the deaths. How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real … well the rest is common sense.
As I wandered into the city streets from the brow of the hill I last left our readers watching my progress: I took one last glimpse at the Canterbury Oak, which visibly moved at its thin spacious upper levels, giving the uncanny impression that its large trunk below moved in unison. It was soon stolid, however, etched like a giant black hold-all that God had dropped there in disgust because there wasn’t enough room in it for as many effects as even magic could have managed, let alone a full-blooded religion.
I turned to the abodes. Solid rock-caves that had been built like houses out in the open, where a few scrawny children played hide-and-seek. I knew things would become more palatial the more towards its centre I approached. And at least there I would also find grown-ups grown-up enough to interact like real characters. Not just children acting as human scenery.
One skycraft tethered to one of the few pylons stationed this far into the city’s outskirts was a strange seemingly solid rocket-ship that, like the Canterbury Oak, was misshapen where you thought misshapen would be out of the question. Its business end seemed at the bottom where a single pin glinted in the light of the Sunne*: a pin often twirling lightly in a whimsical nostalgia for its former firedrill**. Nobody would be on board, I knew, and thus the whimsicality of its lower pin’s twirling only gave tiny shadows of doubt. Like speckled ants on my skin. It was not a balloon. It seemed solid enough, with several storeys, sieved by sightholes. It just hung there as if its specific gravity was too hard to match with rhythmic gravities elsewhere – unlike some of the other pyloned skycraft that were like proud pennants in stiff winds. It almost sagged, and visibly bloated. But that was the effect of the incessant klaxon noise, something to which I had already grown accustomed without even mentioning that I was trying all the time to forget it, relegating it, as I did, to some wishful-thinking 'white noise'. Yet this klaxon noise (whether oak- or tannoy-derived), I suspected, was indeed the ‘wind’ I had earlier doubted existed as such. Noise as air movement.
=============
*The Sunne acted like the sun but was not the sun. This does not represent a fantastical or imaginary approach to cosmology, merely a shorthand for something that will eventually become quite reconcilable given the circumstances of intertextual reality. For the moment, please treat Sunne and Sun as blood brothers (ie. crude synonyms), if you currently lack confidence to revel in their essence and truth as spiritual brothers (mutual metanyms, if not alter-nemos). STUB OF PENCIL: SUNNE = SUNNEMO?
**’Firedrill’ was a difficult concept to grasp in this context. This made me think that The Death would have indeed been preferable after all, rather than now (alive) having to explain what is meant by this or that word or concept. I hope they will clarify themselves naturally in the course of events, with the description needed for such events hopefully allowing collateral construction of clue-semantics VIS A VIS many words or concepts otherwise ungraspable.
****
STUB OF PENCIL: HOWEVER CLOSE YOU GET TO SOMEONE, YOU ARE NEVER MORE THAN JUST A COUPLE OF ENTITIES SEPARATED BY THE SKULLS OF THE HEAD.
This is not really a sea story nor is it about the land. It's not even about real people. It may not even be about ideas; it's beyond philosophy, so rarified there is not one person who can encompass its whole audit trail within one skull.
"God, Go’spank, you do talk pretentious crap sometimes," announced Crazy Lope.
I turned round and saw that he had arrived, unannounced. I was sipping at a bowl of chicken noodle soup in a cafe back of Backstreet Avenue. It was really my breakfast – at noon – the only civilised time to have it, you will agree.
"OK, Lope, OK, give me a break, I don't need your comments at this time of day – it's just a joke I've woken up at all."
"You promised me a hand this morning, you know, stowing away the provisions – do you remember, I bought you a pint on the strength of it."
"Did I? Did you? Well, Lope, it only goes to show you can't trust your best friend. That's a new proverb for you..."
"You're damn well right there, Go’spank."
"Want a spoonful?"
I nodded towards the now depleted soup, which had tiny noodles wriggling around like maggots amid the chicken grit at the bowl's bottom.
I suddenly burst into tears. I felt unutterably sad, as if I had just taken a sneak look at the end of a tragedy – one that had begun like a comedy. Go’spank smiled. I cried. Like two masks above the proscenium arch.
I watched the harbour slipping behind us in the dusk, hundreds waving handkerchiefs and even more dabbing their eyes with them. We were taking a river trip into unknown dangers, sliding into the mist from the seaside resort that sat in the estuary of the Inside River. Klacton had been my whole world since becoming a baby, and I knew every nook its crannies contained.
My friend Lope was standing beside me on the deck, peering over my shoulder at those we loved and those we hated, milling about on the darkening wharf, bidding us farewell.
"To the inner zones, then, old mate," Lope said, back-slapping me.
"Yep, but there's a rare mix of feelings floating about in my noddle – I'd rather be sitting over a frothy mug of bittersweet at Ogdon’s pub – or walking the pier out to the Variety..."
"Go’spank, Go’spank, we've been through all this. There's nothing left for us here, our route lies down the river to Agraska – where they say they've got more jobs than there are people."
Our desire merely to talk gave no excuse for such recapitulation, and I frowned.
"You're right, of course," was my only possible reply, but I doubted whether I myself was right in saying it.
The lights of Klacton – where I had felt my first breath quickening my lungs like a blast from heaven – gradually became one pulsing horizon star, making me think of my fast receding home as an idea, a symbol rather than a mass of memories constituted of seemingly real people and tangible buildings. If it were not for Crazy Lope, beside me on the gently sloping deck, I would have felt even lonelier and like a twinkle in an empty universe.
The crew of the paddle steamer were not to be seen – no doubt in the engine room, feeding great vats of green sludge into the moving parts, or standing tall behind the black glass of the bridge, their gloved hands passing smoothly over the control wheelies.
Lope stood tall at the prow of the steamer, like a figurehead, as the hull's foreblade carved a path from past into present, into the darker overland reaches of the Inside River, just as dawn broke. Tricking the above, the below and the across … I laughed.
Several days into the journey, we were chatting away on the deck, while the steamer free-wheeled. Not even one head of steam approached engagement, a fact that was evidently in recognition of the sleeping hours of the skipper and his crew. The vessel glided across the oily reflections of the night sky, like one of those hunched monsters on a creepie through the Death Lands.
"The Death, it comes to us all, sooner or later," whispered Lope.
I couldn't see his face as he uttered this cliché, but I knew that his features must be down-turned and pensive. Having known him for ages, he appeared as good as a photograph of a dream.
"Everybody steers clear of thoughts about death," I offered as a response, "but, deep down, however successful, whatever you may be in the public eye, dripping in diamonds and fame, right down there where the feelings hurt most, there's a black gemstone, perfect in every way, sparkling insidee of itself but with not one gleam coming off its devil-honed facets..."
"That is The Death, Go’spank, you've hit the nail's head. And when others hear about this historic voyage we've undertaken, we'll The Dead, too."
I now desperately wanted to change the subject: "I expect we'll be berthing in Parsimon tomorrow, if the steam's up to its usual billowage. I've heard that they even haven't got electricity wired up."
"We've got cables on board. Maybe the skipper's intending to barter..."
"Maybe."
"They say that beyond Parsimon, there's another called Pylon City – they've never even HEARD of electricity there, it's in none of their books. And the sky whines there as if weather is squeezing its own air-bulbs. Excuse my French."
"And beyond Pylon City?"
"Agraska, of course, where boogie men are kept in apprentice-ship to the devil himself!"
"And we're paddle-steaming there?"
"Yep, I believe so – after picking up a guide in Parsimon. The ship's log, which I sneaked a preview the other night, says the guide's old name is Dognahnyi. Yep, that's him I reckon who'll take us into the dark regions."
"Does this, what's his name, Dognahnyi chappie, know we're coming?"
"Yep, the log says the skipper wired him day before yesterday – a few tugs on the washing-line that runs along the towpath – you've seen it, haven't you, like a wire stretching itself along on Y-sticks ever since Klacton."
Of course, I'd seen it. We had both taken it for granted – until now.
I shrugged and frowned, as I said:
"I reckon the washing-line ends at Mount Core, just beyond Agraska township. I expect the skipper's dying to discover its source. It's handy, though, isn't it? Message yankings – I suppose that's how we know about places like Parsimon, Pylon and Agraska."
Such talking, if nothing else, kept the night at bay. Talking and Death don't go together very well.
"Yep, I suppose you're right."
But was he right in supposing it?
As dawn raised its hat politely to the sun, we were still to be found lying in our hammocks at the stern of the steamer – surprised because we could have sworn we had started the night lying in the prow, but stranger things were yet to surprise us, making this incident one we were not even to recall. That's what the log says anyway.
Mountains reared now on either side, things we had never seen before, because Klacton was situated amid the flat creeks at the delta of the Inside River. These imposing giants were our first taste of Inner Earth's cruelty to itself. With our minds outflanked, we scuttled to our respective cabins for a few quiet hours in front of the shaving-mirror – the only way we knew how to get ourselves to sleep, the staring out of life as it were.
When we emerged much later in the day, we were presented with another eye-catcher. Between the thighs of two mountain systems ranging from the river-bank towards the north, there nestled what they could only take to be Parsimon with its serious Folly overlooking it like legendary Glaston Tor once did in geometric denial. The houses along the famous Hegemony Avenue had roofs looking too unwieldy for the walls to bear – with even bigger chimneys. The towpath "washing-line" passed through the window of a red-brick hovel built up against the dock and out the other side – and on...
I was the first to speak: "They call this Parsimon – don't look like any place to me."
I bit my tongue for I was talking to myself about things I already knew.
"Nor does it to me," said Lope, "and what are all those TV aerials, sticking up from those overgrown chimneys? They must run their TVs on hot air!"
"And those overhead cables across the streets – they must be for trolley-buses – I can even hear one rattling along. Yes, look!"
The thoughts were taken from my mouth. Trundling along a series of humps that constituted the street leading up to the dock came a steam tram, hissing violently and shaking from side to side, balanced by a gyroscope affair which was being threaded on the taut cable above it. Churning to a halt at the riverside, a number of savages alighted, waving umbrellas and what looked like makeshift tomahawks.
The launch quickly paddle-steamed away from Parsimon to what was hoped to be a more reasonable welcome in Pylon City and Agraska.
The days stretched one behind each other, like a bus queue with no hope nor expectation that the service was ever running.
The mountainous banks of the Inside River assumed a more tropical apparel, with squawks and guffaws often emanating from unknown sources behind the lush foliage and sky-climbing tendrils.
Lope and I now spent most of the time in our cabins staring into the shaving-mirrors, evacuating our bowels in strict cross rhythms: a time and motion routine which seemed to go on intermittently day and night. We passed Pylon at night and only heard its famous sirens in our sleep. Sleep and night being interchangeable words.
We did not talk to each other any more, for we had said everything we needed to say. Our previous conversations – struck up more for the sake of just talking than imparting any new information – had always turned more and more to the subject of The Death and what awaited us beyond the barbed margins of even Inner Earth to the Innermoat that was even foreigner than that into which the steamer was currently cutting its wake.
Agraska was in fact more ordinary than Parsimon, having been curtailed by both Cathedrals into a squashed nothing where the Inside River became the Balsam. The twouptwodown houses huddled together with natural roofs and squat smokestacks, and aerials more like dishes. Even the "washing-line" bore recognisable clothes hung out to dry.
I snatched Lope from in front of his mirror and, as he hurriedly fumbled with his flies, I dragged him to the deck and pointed out the sights of Agraska.
Its school had a number of kids milling about in the playground, in all shapes and sizes, waving at us vigorously with what looked like huge gold-clasped black-skinned Bibles.
"Religious maniacs, but who can blame them, being so close to the Death Lands?"
I then indicated the giantesque volcano, extinct and, according to my memory of geography lessons at Klacton Primary School, called Mount Core. It towered in the mist just beyond the outskirts of Agraska, leaning sideways a little towards the plateau lands. Series of forests, a bit like horses' manes, led up to Core; I breathed deeply, taken aback by its ugly magnificence. But beyond that, who knew?
"The towpath does go beyond Agraska, by the look of it," Lope observed, leaning over the deck-rail at a dangerous angle.
I, too, saw, on this towpath, an extension of the everpresent "washing-line" stringing along upon more precarious-looking Y-sticks, winding and bending with the river, as far as the eye could see up to – and perhaps beyond – Mount Core.
Would the skipper dock at Agraska’s Balsam Quay, to pick up "Dognahnyi"? I could well ask. Neither of us had seen nothing of the skipper since dockout, and I was beginning to wonder whether we had been slipping across the black bubbles of a dream in a ghostship manned by Denizens of Death.
I looked up at the bridge of smoked glass, imagining the form of those who had commandeered the craft from Klacton to the Core. I motioned to Lope, but all he could do was shrug, as if he had been reading my thoughts.
It was then I noticed that the "washing-line" had begun to thread through our steamlaunch itself – winding between the portholes, like some crazy knitting!
We were not stopping at Agraska? All we could do, was wave back at the kids in the playground, who had now been joined by their schoolmaster with what looked like a large rat, called to the outside by the strange sight of our passage through.
Perhaps it was a good idea not to have stopped – it was probably not as ordinary as it looked and, maybe, contained worse depths than can be imagined. So, ineluctably, we were threading a path towards Death, and there was nothing Lope and I could do about it.
Missiles were chucked at us – looking like lumps of ill-butchered meat – from youths in shorts who had climbed trees along the banks out of the township. Great nest-like clumps embedded in the branches betokened their dens. Obscenities rang out, but mixed between them was the insidious chant of "Megger Zanth".
Soon, however, these teenage outposts grew rarer as we neared Mount Core. And darker it became, the quieter also. The squawks of whatever exotic birdlife populated those regions just turned into a memory.
And then we wondered whether the Core was extinct after all, for the encroaching gloom, at this mid-point of the day, showed up idle sparks at the lip of its head.
"Lope, if that isn't about to erupt, I'm a lump of chicken grit," I said in as worried a tone as I could muster.
"Yes, and, eh, more than that, Go’spank, the cables are tangling us..."
It was true. The steamer was now sliding through a whole web and cat's cradle of "washing-lines", with them weaving around the funnel and between the spokes of the paddle-wheels!
It was as if steam was no longer required to take us to the end of our journey.
No time to prattle of Death now – we were too busy with the unravelling of the yarn that cannot remain untold. It was extruding inexorably as Mount Core rumbled above us.
Give me your hand, as the last lap of time takes us into something we may never forget, assuming we are alive to remember it.
I couldn't see Lope's face – but a sudden flash from Core lit him up like a face on the wall of some ghost train tunnel. The explosion followed the flash a split second later. Then, glistening ooze began to pop its snout over the rim of the Corehead. It had begun its slow headlong search for gravity down the slopes of the Mount, towards the river on which we floated among the renewed pulsations of spectral light. The glowing slick folded further down in darker cooler lips of itself, curling, snarling as it bubbled and spat across the rocks. Within such tumour-riddled muscles of burping spumatum, wriggling threadworm hairs of intenser brightness coiled in cilia-like formations. Amid burgeoning seas of seething self, the creature came, tussling through its own blubbery veins and membranes.
But what's this? Lope's jumped overboard on to the towpath! Something more astonishing it would have been hard to create even in some fantastical fiction.
Indeed, Lope manages to cross a breach of land before the searing-eyed lava reaches out in further self-replication.
But what's that? He shouts that he's going to open a lock!
I shout back for him to explain himself, but he cannot hear me.
He dashes on without a glance into the multitudinous darknesses that even now are cross-breeding beyond Mount Core.
I lean precariously over the deckrail, as I once saw Lope doing, and held the macrami of "washing-lines". I can feel tugs and yanks as if Lope's telling me something, warning me perhaps about Death and its Kin. The tugs themselves gradually peter out.
But by putting my ear to the tautening line, I could sense what I can only describe as an electric current buzzing along it, in the shape of Lope's voice:
"There's another world back here, far different from the real one. People go about mumbling of churnobill, heerosheemah, tytanick, beth-le-hem, glastontor, mekka, nagasacky, owswitch, dakcow, hungerfood, doneblaming, sayntpoolskatheedrall, princess-die, Jesus it's strange! And everywhere that's somewhere has got electricity. And nobody who's anybody talks about Death. This must be Heaven. Come quick! Just follow the line. You'll know you're here when you come to the gap in the skin. Someone important just come on TV saying he's horrified about something or other, but thankfully he's not really. Nobody's horrified here..."
I tried to tug a few pitiful messages back to him and I even put my mouth up against the springing line and shouted warnings about taking things at face value.
You can never trust your best friend. But I could not really fathom which one of us had failed the other. One thing I did know. Death is far more than just the thickness of your skull.
But the question remained hanging in the air, like the now frozen Core innards around me – who was it who was dead? I chipped off a black nugget from the lava block and whispered to myself:-
"Try to feel your way back along the washing-line, Lope."
He never returned. The tale's audit trail was tangled beyond even the wildest nonsequiturs.
My shaving-mirror eyes full of bitter tears, I returned attention to the steamer, the paddle-wheels of which were spinning uselessly in the slipstream, and I skippered it back all the way to Klacton, without any crew to speak of. Too busy even for death.
The recent storm flattened most of the Y-sticks and it would be devil's own job to put them all back. Yet, if truth's more reliable than fiction, I thought, nothing's more filling than a breakfast of chicken grit and noodles. Except it wasn’t really me thinking.
Whatever the case, I had been commissioned to skipper the steamer back to Parsimon and Agraska – to restore communications.
"Oh yeh – me and whose army?" I snarled, between mouthfuls of my all day breakfast and my hidden tears.
STUB OF PENCIL: EACH STORY-LINE CROSSED ANOTHER, MUCH LIKE LIFE. IT WAS IN GO’SPANK’S TANGLED TELLING THAT ANY USEFUL EXPERIENCE COULD BE GAINED TO MAKE EVENTUAL UNTANGLING POSSIBLE. TO KNOW ONE THING, ONE MUST FIRST KNOW ITS OPPOSITE.
****
Greg suffered from an unbearable tinnitus of the Inner Ear. The only way – in his desperation – to cure himself of this incessant cricketing was to deafen himself. Whilst it would be relatively easy – given the will – to blind the eyes, ie with spikes, it is far more difficult to bring such instruments to bear on the hearing, short of bringing the deafness of death itself to one’s aid. Slicing off the ears themselves would surely be counter-productive as this very act itself harbours the possibility of even more tinnitus that is allowed greater access – via the creatures of noise – permanently to attack an Inner Ear thus denuded of the mysteriously effective protection of the Exterior Ear. Doctors and Ear Specialists would probably disagree with this prognosis, but Greg wondered how they could know for certain. Only doing things to oneself and feeling the effect in oneself directly gives the ultimate certainty of one’s own senses, i.e. the evidence of the self’s senses at whatever level of felt reality one is working through. So, Death seems the only exit from the noise. Sleep does not dull it as dreams often increase the efficiency of the noise or change its very nature into a series of new home-grown noises, a gestalt of noises being dreamed as louder and more relentless. Klaxon City was one such dream. The Inner Earth. The Inner Ear.
****
As they scaled the pylon from their earthcraft, Greg and Beth began to stretch their legs in yawning downward strides. They had been cooped up in a serial cabin-fever for several months of travel in individual body-hugging room spaces. The dream of a Corporate Lounge on board the earthcraft – where an urbane Captain dished out cocktails and scintillating sights of Inner Earth – proved to be a dream even deeper than a dream being dreamed by merely one other single dream. Indeed, a single such cause-and-effect dream in the concertina of dreams proved to be even less reliable: whereby two dowager ladies known as Edith and Clare were not such ladies at all but chivvying dream-stewards ensuring that dreams were correctly threaded in the correct order on any particular ribbon of reality or strobe-strand … presumably also to ensure that believability was not unduly affected by crossing any threshold of disbelief. These two stewards – when failing to maintain their ‘lady’ disguises – often became, by involuntary default, large bird-headed individuals who employed the otherwise human nature of their own residual-‘lady’ bodies in the mock-behaviour of insect-articulated ratchet-limbs that became (in their minds at least) spiny or spiky appendages that the large beaks of their heads actively tried (but failed) to snap up self-cannibalistically as tasty buggish morsels.
Greg, as he neared the pylon’s base, turned to take a closer look at the misshapen tree on the hill overlooking Klaxon City – knowing instinctively that it was the perpetrator of the inner sky’s wall-to-wall wailing: a series of echoes that bounced around the bowl of the city’s cavity. Several separate ribbons of spatial reality – mixed with tangible strobes of time – fluttered in the air-movement of noise: a wind of striated history … a vertical cross-section of which Greg traversed. The earthcraft tethered to the top of the pylon seemed, for him, to become a religious vision that curdled gradually into a huge plume of black smoke from a global-warming turning inward on itself with a heat so over-bearing several incremental levels of dream were needed to intervene as a combined firewall to guard against its ferocity. Dream-fighting on a superhuman scale. And, indeed, as each dream kicked in one by one, Greg was able to ignore the noise and the heat as he ruminatively considered the panoply of Klaxon’s geography … while he continued to scale himself down. The vista of its configuration was like a huge human ear – a canyon, a ridge, a lobe, all constituents of the city’s mingled God-given nature and subsequent fabrication.
****
The flashing coloured lights wheeler-dealed across the upright displays, further engendering misplaced hope by giving the punter the chance to pull the forelock of fate with the small mercy of manipulating the two-timing “flippers” at the side, returning balls into a whole new campaign of cascading, tricksy shenanigans: accumulating points towards an illimitable target, the biggest number you can think of, the size of which only God (and perhaps the owner of the amusement arcade) was aware.
But, now, the arcade is shuttered, the sea-front deserted and the heaving of autumn seas edging nearer to overflow, as the council cart, with a revolving pulse, yellows the night from its cabin roof. It’s touring the streets, with its bewhiskered paddlewheels churning up the gutters, freeing them from the sludge and detritus of summer: discarded buckets, sandcastle unionjacks, rude hats, regurgitated fish ‘n’ chip suppers, mutant condoms fingering out into spider shapes, crystallized candyfloss, like sea-creatures’ abortions, and soggy saucy postcards, scrawled over with undelivered “wish you were here”’s, picturing enormous bums, even bigger boobs and triple entendres...
Outside the Klaxon City arcade, there stand two men, once holiday-makers, no doubt, but now deserters from overdue homecomings and from the inevitable return to the treadmill that keeps their families in sunday dinners and the annual visit to the seaside.
Towards the top of the arcade’s housing, the electric sign still flashes on and off, certain of its letters missing. It fills the street with an intermittent red haze, illuminating the men’s faces, revealing their stone expressions and surly resignation. One of them curls his lips as he takes another drag from his last cigarette of the season, and says: “They’ll be battening down in Agraska, by now...”
A third man has now approached them and, in the weaving lights from both arcade sign and sweep cart, he can be recognized as one of those accessories to the End of the Pier Show which, every night during the summer, entertained the pre-bingo audience … with clattering joanna and cheap talent competitions.
This man was the ventriloquist, a semi-professional, who spends the rest of the year working for the council on the sweep carts. His mouth does not move as he speaks: “It gets me through the endless winter, dreaming of all the hot summer fun we had, you know. Do you remember old Edith Cole? She showed her knickers twice a week, for a free go on the housey-housey. There were numbers all over them, all the sixes, clickety-click, seventy-six, sunset strip, number six hangs loose, hangman’s noose, number one is old rope, crazy lope...”
The other men nod, but do not listen, for they are preoccupied with the dirty weather that is now threatening to come in off the sea -they wish they were back in Agraska or Parsimon, further inland, where their children, even now, stare into the night, wondering when their daddies will come borne; their mummies have told them that they are still on holiday, perhaps the silly buggers have one more End of Pier Show to enjoy, the last of the season and, then, they will creep home, heads bent, to the duties to which all men must face up.
The ventriloquist has taken out his dummy and the rain drips down its plastic face.
“A gottle of geer, who wants a gottle of geer?”
The two men, bemused, disappear into the public convenience nearby which, by tomorrow, will be the last facility to be barred up for the off-season. One more night of relative comfort in the cubicles, one more night before decisions will need to be made.
The council cart is returning on the opposite side of the street, a lightship floating across the shimmering, swelling puddles; it will pick up the ex-ventriloquist at the corner of Litany Street, if he is not careful.
He listens to the rumpus coming from the end of the pier. The fat woman is playing a Russ Conway medley, the gap-toothed sit-down comedian is telling third generation mother-in-law jokes, Edith Cole is getting all eager in her seat waiting for her big moment, the audience is clapping half-heartedly, for they’re only there for the bingo...
The seas are becoming heavier now like an army commissioned as an impatient vanguard of winter. The ex-ventriloquist speaks quietly, but the storm is growing steadily so noisy that he can hardly hear himself: “There’s something special about the sea. That’s where we all originally came from, after all…”
And, as if hypnotised by the mind-reading act that he always had to follow on to the stage, he strides along the planks that creaked in the wind. Between their gaps, he can see blackboiling pools revolving within each other. Through the useless turnstile, towards the darkened theatre, he is counting backwards from the biggest number he can think of ... and his dummy leads the way, on short stumpy legs.
Someone or other threw the switch on the arcade sign, and went to bed for the winter. The council workers locked up the public lavatory, one night earlier than normal, got back on board the sweep cart and drove it further inland, its yellow pulse gradually withdrawing its reflections from the empty sea.
****
Greg grabbed Beth by the hand as they left the environs of their earthcraft’s pylon – without bothering to think that the meter needed inserting with an unknown currency of coinage.
“That’s for others,” said Greg, eventually, to himself, vaguely recalling the duty of parking fees on or within the scarce resources of a finite earth but also that he and Beth were simply crew members, not owners of the earthcraft.
The streets radiated as streets (ie. as gaps between) from the area sparsely planted with pylons to other areas where more cavernous buildings clustered around thicker clumps of variously-sized pylons – some pylons with craft tethered, others empty, and a few currently being tethered by kite-shaped birds with large black plumages. In the distance, the ambiance of a city built as a patchwork of overlapping quaint village-scenarios was disrupted as the rims of giant ANGEVIN tanks were spotted in an apparently camouflaged industrial estate unglinting in the bright directionlessness of Sunnemo Cathedral’s broken shafts through stained glass.
Greg and Beth, however, were window-shopping on a much lower level, as they passed through a precinct where some earth-stripped caves were neatly roof-thinned and glass-fronted. These contained the hardly static wares of a thriving chamber of commerce even if the gaps between these ‘shops’ were deserted ... window-shown to any chance passers-by breaking this empty pattern. One labelled SUDRA’S SHOES brought a wry smile to their lips as they inspected the various jingle-toed items of footwear.
They dodged into something labelled Cavé for some refreshment, hoping that any necessary payment by unknown coinage would be subsumed by serendipity.
Inside were two non-descript locals of short standing whose conversation Greg and Beth began to overhear – during which they decided to intervene with convenient questions, convenient to real visitors such as Greg and Beth themselves and to any possible vicarious visitors coiled on their backs like old-men-of-the-sea. Convenient if the conversation made any sense beyond its semi-conscious ability to refine sense into nonsense, or vice versa.
Beth was described in an unreported part of this exchange as middle-aged, buxom, pretty face scarred with frown-lines, still perky enough to lift her head above the narrative parapet. Greg remained naïve despite a mature aura of be-whiskered pink chops. He still tried to maintain his own identity in face of all attack to divert it elsewhere, but all descriptive resources remained counter-productive in this direction, whatever or whoever took up responsibility for them.
CRAZY LOPE: Where’s the air from, then?
GO’SPANK: Sea air – it’s sort of caught by the melting tectonics, you know, internal tsunamis carried within caches of air-movement made from noise.
CRAZY LOPE: Don’t understand. Words don’t do much for me. Any words. But specially those words. Where do words come from?
GO’SPANK: The words are like moving air, too, or fingered sound. Words are what drift through it. Tricking the above, the below and the across… (Laughs).
GREG: Been here long?
(Crazy Lope seems perturbed at the interruption).
CRAZY LOPE: We’ve been here longer than you two. We’ve been taking the washing in.
GREG: Taking the washing in? Is that a sort of password?
CRAZY LOPE: If you don’t know it’s a password, then it’s not a password.
GO’SPANK: Or if you think it’s a password what’s it a password for? The whole background of black noise is just one never-ending password, perhaps. (Laughs)
BETH: (Frowning) How DO they put up with all that here?
CRAZY LOPE: I block it out. Or rather the blocks block it out.
GO’SPANK: Dream blocks, yes.
GREG: Ah, but I was brought up to believe dreams were a sickness. They are perhaps defence systems, I see. Rather necessary evils. Yet so much depends on the gaps or streets between the dreams. Are we in a dream now or a gap?
GO’SPANK: Wish we knew. And if we did know how would you know we knew?
CRAZY LOPE: Wish You Were Here. Shine on Crazy Diamond. I am The Death.
BETH: It seems you can’t talk properly without, you know…
GO’SPANK: I know… It’s difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication. And to say all those words I KNOW… IT’S DIFFICULT. CONVERSATIONS ARE OBSTACLE COURSES RATHER THAN PROPER COMMUNICATION. has taken a lot of effort and concentration. I’ve never been able to say anything sensible for this length of time before, or perhaps this exact length is my personal best so far.
(The noise of a distant explosion carried further than it would otherwise have been by sound atmospherics of the moment, as the other Cavé customers do runners).
GREG: What’s that?
CRAZY LOPE: What Go’spank just said.
GO’SPANK: Yes, an air cushion, even an air tsunami perhaps.
BETH: (Flicking a speck of dried mud from here eyelid) There’s no noise now.
CRAZY LOPE: Probably the next few minutes’ of noise has turned into silence because it was crowded into those earlier few seconds when the jolt came.
GREG: Sounded like a bomb.
GO’SPANK: No, I think it was condensed background noise of the sirens in time-shift from a period to a moment. Lope was sort of right, for once!
(Beth sniffed at the drink she had been brought by an attractive waitress who turned all heads).
GREG: What ARE you two characters up to here?
CRAZY LOPE: Bringing the washing in. Told you. (Laughs)
GREG: Yes, but…
GO’SPANK: (Squeaking like a gray mouse and pointing at Beth in the waitress’s wake) I like your wife, Mister. She’s nice.
(Beth frowned deeply but her eyes received the information of such admiration with a glinting smile).
GO’SPANK: Can we show you round?
GREG: (suspiciously) If you like. We shouldn’t leave our pylon too far behind in case it, you know, can’t be found again.
They left into the relative outside using strung hawl-pulley hooks as direction-finders (the cost of the Cavé bill blandly settled during a gap between two intersecting dream-streets) and they all looked up at the newly blackened sky-cavity, with Sunnemo Cathedral’s light source as a fairy castle nesting in a fantasy violet cloudscape now just a dull beige disc not unlike the coin just exchanged in the Cavé for a packed lunch.
Greg and Beth wondered why their two benighted companions now kept calling each other Edith or Clare in some new game of nemonymous passwords.
****
The weed-choked tides slid greyly to and fro upon the litter-strewn beach. The morning had dawned brightly enough but now, by mid-afternoon, threatening clouds had built up; the Big Wheel, turning slowly at the end of a fore-shortened pier, was almost lost to the clammy clutches of the mist.
A few late departures of the deck chair brigade appeared decidedly lacklustre. With chip grease smarming their bodies like sun oil, they clambered up the shingle, with only a few words between them. Stern buxoms - with kiss-me-quick hats perched on their bee-hives - heaved themselves to the prom. Snow-chests - with rings in their ears and stale ‘bedroom’ eyes - shuffled along in their wake.
Suddenly, there was a loud ‘Halloo!’ from one of the beach huts. A shaven youth splattered out, limbs flailing like a wild pair of stockingless suspenders. That was me. And I slobbered at those who had just evacuated the beach, pointed out at the sea and shouted so loudly my half-broken croaks seemed to come back off the waves like a series of echoey shipwrecks.
I ranted on of an enemy fleet that even now was slipping through the mist, its looming dark hulks of landing craft creeping in. Those on the Big Wheel could no doubt see them already, hence the screams they made.
I ran off towards Klacton town, where I’d try to spread further panic and dismay.
One of the pleasure seekers on the Big Wheel was another man called me. I did not know why I had now decided to have such a ride, for great heights to me were like great depths to Flat-Earthers. Every time that someone got on or off at the bottom of the Wheel, it seemed it was me who was left exposed, right at the very top, to the soaking of the down-towering clouds. As if the Wheel had only one way up, like the Christian cross.
And, then, during one of those inexplicably long stationary periods when I was thus aloft, I spotted a school of whales approaching over the sea, with jaws opening and shutting in rhythm to the waves. One was suddenly snorting as it beached itself upon the shingle. Another whale hawled itself upon the first whale. The pier shook, as yet another lodged itself between the corroded pillars.
I closed my eyes in disbelief and actually became one of those whales, by several reincarnations removed. Except they weren’t really whales at all. They were the seabed come to life, chunks of it separating from Mother Earth as in some caricature of evolution. And if natural selection was involved they were surely the sweets left at the bottom of the bag.
The comedy came to a close, as the pier collapsed with all upon it. It was a happy ending, in a way, since the slobbering youths and deckchair dickheads had at last been pre-empted by, although a much deeper entropy, a far finer evolution, since sweets left at the bottom of the bag are often the best, when you’re eating them in the dark.
The whale-like creatures roamed the thinning, flattening Big Wheel discus of Earth Comestible. And the one that was me smiled beneath a giant kiss-me-quick hat.
****
STUB OF PENCIL:
My head’s led from the diseased wood of the Canterbury Oak that wraps me. And there is much for me to think about. Can a planet from which I am able to be thus created, ie. one called Earth, be more than just the head of the person who first imagined it? An Earth from the Ear to the Ground.
Who first imagined this Earth? Meanwhile, who imagined the head that imagined another head like the Earth? The thought extends both ex-ends of the dynastic ribbon of reality from first cause to last effect and realises (with both ends now missing or sharpened away) that imagination is not the best tool for imagining reality because reality is unimaginable being already there in an unimagined state. To imagine an unimagined reality would be to corrupt it or create it as a new imaginary thread through a headless head. Then this single thread, by an uncontrollable volition, would stiffen its sinews to masquerade as an imaginary weave of many threads bearing the tread of a head-leased, heavily head-led reality ... the only sort of reality that causes the bodies of its inhabitants to grow cancerous.
I find that, without the Earth on which to be born with a head and to fill that head with learning and to experience or express life via its means, the same head creating the Earth needed another head to create it. Or have I already said that?
Klaxon City being a dynasty rather than a single city on a plain, Greg and Beth - our Essex couple, our salt of the earth - now are indeed (through the imagination of imagination that in turn can summon a new strength to dream novelly without the use of fiction) invested by the background noise of spirit needed to reconfigure their existence as new visitors to the Megazanthine Core whilst having already visited it once before - a fact which, effectively, was imaginable because they had ceased to exist as real people having once entered it as a by-product of producing the creamy ANGEVIN or Angel Wine and thus became their own seed without having created the seed in the first place. It takes two to retro-tango.
****
Mount Core was a mostly extinct volcano, poking a nose-cone above the plateau that verged on the outer homesteads of Parsimony township where Greg, as Gregor, spent at least one of his childhoods. And, today, we approach Gregor’s preliminary involvement in the major events that were to happen later in the future.
A pendulum swung from generation to generation, thereabouts and, indeed, today, the kids were told to straighten their backs and put their index fingers upon their busy inky-black lips as a little reminder of the sanctity of silence. Until then, it was hubbub amid the plasticene; but, the age of the class being around eleven, it only took a little pressure on the tiller of discipline for sweet silence to reign supreme. It was deep summer, and the renewed quiet revealed the richly varied throstling of the resplendent bird-life outside. Mr Cole, the one-eared gardener, was just to be seen through the window, licking his teeth as he tended to the blossomy tendrils coiling in and out of the school railings.
The teacher, Nemo Dognahnyi by name, was in a tidy sweat, since he had just needed to rummage behind the blackboard for a box of rubbers, which were about to be handed round the staring pupils, in a mistaken attempt to prevent errors rather than cure them. All different pastel shades the rubbers were, and he knew that the kids, if left to their own devices, would fight over having the pinkish ones – in the same manner as they did over blackcurrant flavours in a tube of Spangles.
Tales about Mount Core did abound in Mr Dognahnyi's schoolroom, tales which really should have been part of the history lesson but had, over countless years, evolved into Religious Education. In the front double desk – and they were there because they were within smacking distance – sat two nose-crudded boys by the names of Ogdon and Gregor. Both lived in the outskirts of the township nearest to that part of the plateau where timber trees marched along the banks of the Balsam ... towards a thicker forestation that concealed the river's further whereabouts. They were first cousins but none the friendlier for that.
"You may remove your fingers, children, but fold your arms upon your desks ... neatly now."
Sloping Mr Dognahnyi had often considered doing something about the desk-slopes themselves, for they were scored with ink runnels, curlicue engravings, tags and pieces, depicting the childhood dreams from centuries ago. He'd see to them before Christmas, he vowed. He'd require some pretty stiff scrubbing brushes, plenty of toxic bleach, a carpenter's plane, rutted files of various torques and mounds of heavy-duty sandpaper.
For a moment, Mr Dognahnyi's mind returned to the class and he wondered why that kid Crazy Lope in a double-desk on his own seemed to be shadow-boxing. The scallywag had been removed to the back of the classroom by the window, since rapping Crazy Lope's knuckles with the yardstick was like beating steak to tenderise it. No response.
But today's today, no time for slipshod thoughts. The hand-bell would soon be shaken by the Headmistress in the corridor to mark the end of the current period. Mr Dognahnyi had a soft spot for the Headmistrees (or Elizabeth as he preferred to think of her), but he could not endure her in this role of schoolmarm. She pretended not to acknowledge Dognahnyi as the man who attended to her on some evenings after the kids had gone home. Daytime saw her storming through the school building, with wide unpleated skirts, twill twin-sets and booming voice.
Mr Dognahnyi allowed his desultory gaze to wander out the window, where Mr Cole was now looking up into the sky, scratching his head as if expecting rain. Birds had become to settle around as in an old movie by someone with an ever fatter silhouette than Cole’s.
He hated sunshine. It played havoc with his met-tab-bol-ism, Cole claimed to Dognahnyi when they met in the playground. But surely there'd be no rain on a glorious summer's day like this. Ah, well, the end of the lesson – enormous clattering like dumb-bells being rattled in an oil-drum. The kids (Ogdon and Gregor included) immediately collapsed into a body profile more comfortable to their in-built stoops. Their many bones clicked upon release from the strict, hour-long régime imposed by Mr Dognahnyi. They lifted their desk-lids, placed their heads within the dark horizontal cupboard spaces to seek out their lunch-boxes and, on flat feet and with wild chatter, filed out unrulily from the formroom.
Lunch was indeed more than a ritual. They dragged out the thick bristly exercise mats from the bicycle-sheds, rashered them out haphazardly over the playground and forthwith prepared to picnic in the hot summer air. But the real ritual was in the eating. The Headmistress clumped a large soup-ladle along the school railings to permit the lifting of lunch-box lids and the gentle ensuing of the nibbles. The mats chafed the kids' flesh, since the girls' gym-slips and the boys' flannel shorts did nothing to protect their knees, calves – nor, even, thighs. The food, packed that very morning by their loving parents, were fillingless sandwiches rounded off by a single crab-apple. Birds with stubby wings came courageously close to pecking these morsels straight out of the kids’ hands – but were finally put off by the smell of the hands rather than that of the food in them.
The munchers simply took on a melted mutter of fitful undertones, which assumed second place to the chomping teeth. But, today, one little bright spark scared the girls silly by hinting that in the desk ink-wells lurked creepy-crawly-coily things, each with a single eye only for the fair sex.
Eventually, renewed clattering along the railings announced Grace, which the Headmistress proudly intoned:- "It’d’been for what we have moved our teeth through may the One True God find us genuinely thankful for His small mercies." The kids' response, in practised unison, was: "It’d’been for our bellies to stay full till they are ready to empty in His good time." Then, with a sharp blast on a hard-pea whistle, the kids rose from their mats which they packed away and, in twos and surreptitious threes, crocodiled back into the school buildings. Mr Cole, the school gardener, watched them go. He was now up on the roof oiling the cock-turning weathervane. He scratched his head and dug a fingernail into his protrusion of teeth to reclaim some red gristle from his erstwhile breakfast. The day being so calm, he caught the under-hum of the honey-bees in his flower-beds. Folk of his ilk had sensitive hearing.
Ogdon collected his own spankaroos like notches on a whip and was jealous of each and every one that his cousin Gregor received, especially if they were harder than his. And he literally seethed with jealous anger if Mr Dognahnyi should draw Gregor's blood. Whilst Gregor fiercely loathed these cruel smarts upon himself, he smiled for he knew, in this way, they would hurt Ogdon more.
But one day, with his huge cauliflower ear almost hanging off, Gregor let forth a screech fit to strangle a chicken. The class was in uproar. Ogdon and Gregor banged their desk-lids in unison. Some other boys barged up and down the aisle like warriors with their bloodlust in overdrive. Ogdon merely stared ahead. Mr Dognahnyi had at last given up the ghost and was seen to be cowering under his desk, gnawing the chalk duster. Crazy Lope, as usual, was nowhere to be seen.
The summer went on all year, it seemed.
One day, all the boys, enemies and friends alike, huddled in tree-dens along the banks of the Balsam River. They could faintly see the Core cone through an early dawn mist. Ogdon suddenly slipped and fell headlong into the untamed river. As he was swept along further into the plateau land, one could hear his dying snorts for help. But he did not die. Dognahnyi will tell you that. For Dognahnyi had jumped in, half an hour before.
The River Balsam never let anyone die, you see.
The afternoon timetable, thereafter, invariably included Scripture, where Mr Dognahnyi had to scale a step-ladder and hand down the hefty Bibles from the top of the huge Nature Study cupboard. Each kid then toted the tome to his desk, opened its stiff gold-tooled covers with a mighty creak, pored over the close print and learned each verse parrot-fashion for blind recital the next day. Later in the afternoon, Mr Dognahnyi remembered that Health Education, as the Authorities stipulated, should be included within a Scripture lesson, to give the required context. He had only broached the subject once before, when that Crazy Lope kid brought something out in class, saying he thought it was to be a Practical. So Mr Dognahnyi was a trifle nervous this time. "Health" could cover a multitude of sins ... such as "cleaving", as he called it, whilst drawing esoteric symbols on the blackboard, one of which reminded some of the girls of the way they imagined the ink-well creature to look like – a fact which confirmed the boys' fears about their own prospective manhood.
And the afternoon wore on, the heat of the day shimmering forth wet puddles across the playground. Mr Cole sat with his back to the wall, munching on some bodily, if not culinary, leavings he'd found stuck to the exercise mats. The drone of Mr Dognahnyi’s voice filtered through to him from an open window, talking it seemed of a box of rubbers, and which particular colours the boys preferred. The sun was making everybody rather strange. Mr Dognahnyi later shambled off to the Headmistress' office, hoping against hope that she'd give him a tantalising glimpse of her navy-blue knickers. It had indeed been peculiarly hot today. And it was equally hot for many days to come.
Cousin Ogdon was the one that made the difference on the day of the near drowning. With a lungful of river weed, he dragged himself and Mr Dognahnyi from the squally river right at the foot of the rearing Core volcano. They both raised their eyes in awe, for none from Parsimony had ventured this far out before. Ogdon decided to stop playing dumb and, for the first time in his life, he made sense out of the words he spoke: "It's about to go up! The ground's moving, ain't it? We're dead monkeys for sure!"
Mr Dognahnyi, who was now sitting at the river's edge, wringing out his black gown, looked up with shillings in his eyes. Meanwhile, Ogdon saw a man walking down in great strides from the topmost cone of Core. And this man was laden with an oar as big as himself. As he grew nearer, the man's upper black lip turned to a hair-curling snarl and, staring with flame-shot eyes, he began to wheel the oar around him like an ocean liner's giant propellers threshing those bottomless seas towards which Balsam surged. And Ogdon smiled as each cataclysmic oar-thwack bit harder into his own spineworks.
Mr Dognahnyi had already run back towards where he thought Parsimony lay.
Cousin Ogdon returned to school the next day, much to everybody's amazement. In fact it was even more amazing that anybody was there at all, since it was still the summer holidays. He told the other boys in his gang that he'd had a heart-to-heart with Megazanthus and that he, Ogdon, was going to be good in class from that day on. What was more, he'd had his fill of smackaroos, enough to last a lifetime and a half.
Gregor squirmed in his desk. He had secretly hoped that his cousin had been drowned, meaning more money for him when the inheritances came round in due course. Instead, just a drool of cuckoo-spit could be seen at the corner of Gregor's mouth, as he sat and stared at nothing in particular.
Some hands were held under the double desks. Their owners feared the words that Ogdon (with Mr Dognahnyi's help) had scrawled across the surface of the dark blackboard in crude indelible chalk: MEGGER ZANTHUS LIVES IN HERE.
Mr Dognahnyi had no further discipline problems, despite his sitting in the nature study cupboard sucking on dissected rats. All he had to do was intermittently point at the blackboard and the legend upon it.
Crazy Lope, that boy who was only half-noticed and then only half the time, had a half-twin, a concept which was beyond most people's comprehension but, indeed, this half-twin existed by means of some paranormal quirk of miscegenation. Nobody, including Mr Dognahnyi, had seen both of them simultaneously and, what was more, each boy himself did not believe one hundred per cent in the existence of the other. Nevertheless, their existence was an ageless curse, since they never really grew up, despite History passing through their tousled mops like wind. Mr Cole, the odd job man, seemed to know more about their true condition than met more normal eyes. But he didn't let on. He had different geese to cook. And, sadly, greater numbers of bird bodies to clear from the school gutters.
Quite a nightmare to Mr Dognahnyi, irrespective of the feathery pests that even now attacked the inside of the school like rats with wings, and that was because each boy was so different mentally, if not physically. Crazy Lope represented a quieter, more polite version of his half-twin; but, even so, Crazy Lope possessed the knack of making his own bones crack loudly during prayers; and his inch-wide tie with frays teased out like a Chinaman's goatee, together with the crud-encaked nostrils and tongue of wicked wicked innocence were enough to make Mr Dognahnyi bring out the veins of Crazy Lope's calves with the willowy cane. Boys those days had trousers especially shortened to allow such disciplinary behaviour and Crazy Lope's knuckles were likened to pork-cuts at the butchers, from the rapping they had received.
But, Crazy Lope's half-twin, HE was a different ball-game altogether. He indeed attended school less often, God be thanked, but when he did arrive, with every clear-thinking adult assuming that it was still Crazy Lope, the shock became thus more acute. He smiled more sweetly than Crazy Lope, in fact, and THAT should have been warning enough. And after the smile, an onlooker would soon spot that the crudded nose twitched, as if alive by its own volition with the hardening mucus bearing a soul of its own: squeaking in restful rhythm with the boy's heart. His eyeballs were nut brown conkers revolving on their axes, dizzying anybody he looked upon. His insides not only began noisily to crack like Crazy Lope's, but also whine, grind, judder and splinter in the manner of a godawful bonemill. But the smell was the worst. At first, it was merely the typical redolence of 'Boy': the brown skidmarks decorating his underclothes, the ripe heady sweat, the careless lettings – emitting their almost pleasant cocktail of scents. Then, he began to mouth off words of sufficient mind-numbing filth that the breath that accompanied them filled the classroom with such utter foulness and fœtor, it was easier to suffocate than to carry on inhaling it – as if all the stinks of Hell's unflushed latrines were emptied in one go, after an eternity of use, at the back entrance of Heaven.
But Crazy Lope and his half-twin are not our concern. Far from it. Not even Gregor figures all that much in our moiderings. Our story is of Ogdon. And during one particular summer, the days were still endless, the laughter unbridled and the adventures usually wild and hair-raising. Ogdon wanted to be an artist when he eventually grew up. But, in those dog days, like his schoolmates, he had nostrils that hung below his mouth and threatened to dangle lava upon his T-shirt from a volcano back somewhere in his head. His ma and pa had a Christmas tree going all year. Its fairy lights flashed slowly on and off, so slowly in fact that the darknesses in between were reckoned to be "as long as death itself..."
Gregor may have suffered from non sequiturs. Gregor may have answered each question with another. But who cared? Gregor wasn't important. Not even important to himself.
"What you mooning about, Gregor?" Ogdon asked as they followed each other across the frozen seas of hills around Parsimony township.
Silence. Nothing but the still active birds on high half-riding a low rumble of thunder or the surging of an underground torrent reaching blindly towards a heel-off with the Balsam River.
Eventually, Gregor answered. What did he say? Nobody ever remembered. Often, Crazy Lope wandered with them, older than both Gregor and Ogdon put together, by the look of him. His bones cracked as he walked, but Ogdon and Gregor put it all down to the deadfall trees that Crazy Lope trampled through in preference to the relatively open paths. There were a lot of upended trees about that year, following a particularly violent wind-storm that nobody had seen coming from over the hills beyond Core. Some even said Core had erupted for the first time since the Crusades and had added its power to the Twister which later flattened most of the poorer districts of Parsimony.
One day, during that endless year of their lives when all stood still except themselves, the three actually walked closer to the foot of Mount Core than they had ever been before. Arriving beyond the more customary haunts, one or two trees seemed to have their roots where the branches used to be.
"Phew! That must have been a mighteee storm!" shouted Ogdon.
The trees' fallen husks were stranded around. Crazy Lope did not remark on this strange phenomenon. He just ran to where some of the fir-cones had pyramided against each other. One tree was vaster at top now than bottom, whilst, before the storm or air tsunami, it had been vice versa.
Ogdon was still yapping on: "The storm's turned the whole wide world upside down." And he felt his head to see if it was at the right end of his body. "Gregor, let's play that game. You know. I'll be Megazanthus and you can be the naughty boy. And when we've done it that way round, you will be Megazanthus and me the boy."
Then, silence. Only Crazy Lope cracking nuts between his knees.
"Will you let me beat you with the biggest piece of wood I can find, when you act the boy? Will you, will you, Ogdon?" hooted Gregor
"Only if I can use it, too ... on you, 'tother way about.
"Come here!" suddenly shouted Crazy Lope. "Here's the biggest piece of wood in the world!"
They ran instinctively to where Crazy Lope was pointing into a cave-like structure formed by several deadfalls. Ogdon had to hold a large handkerchief to his nose for the smell of ripeness gone wrong pervaded the woven culvert Crazy Lope had discovered. Gregor stood right behind Ogdon, but boys being boys, physical contact between them was never acknowledged. Ogdon's body being in constant motion from point to point did not retain for long the impress of Gregor's along his spine and buttocks, for he had surged into the opening. There, within the makeshift darkness of the cave, was a fresh fir tree fit for a thousand more Christmases. His ma and pa would be chuffed to be able to get rid of the scruffy version from which they had dangled coloured lights for as long as he could remember. This one had crimped-up foliage, sprung branches and a sturdy trunk, reaching a pinnacle as high as the Star of Bethlehem itself ... IF it could only be dragged from its den.
"Gregor, will you help me tote it home?"
Meanwhile, Crazy Lope had decided he was not interested in Stars of Bethlehem or anything else like that or anything at all really what seemed so important to Ogdon. Crazy Lope had taken it upon himself to play at Megazanthus and was pulling Gregor along towards the now towering Core cone.
All endless days do in fact end.
Ogdon found himself alone in a twilight with which the forestland fed its intrinsic birdsong soul. He crouched inside the dark, dripping oubliette that was still forming naturally around him in the shadow of the spluttering Core. Alone, that is, except for the Star of Bethlehem Christmas tree, lighting up intermittently with the new-found rhythms of Core. Fire tsunami, he thought, as he remembered he would later – in another lifetime amid the pylons of a neighbouring city – talk about in the Cavé with others he had not learned to forget, let alone remember.
Meanwhile, the darknesses lasted longer and longer. And during the leading edge of one darkness, where some light was still lingering as the memory of a dream, Ogdon caught the glimpse of a boy's face with streaming hair from its chin, a mouth in the top of its skull whence cracks came and a long up-rearing tongue which had been ill-taught to speak let alone lick. It evidently had a message but, too late, for the head's contents shot out like an exploding fountain towards the heavens, and splattered Ogdon's dungarees with what looked to him like the produce of a wet dream.
He closed his eyes, hoping it would take itself away. And, on opening them, in a short space of light, he had time to see the familiar, non-committal face of Gregor staring at him from outside the den. Gregor had evidently found himself suddenly alone outside.
"Yes, Ogdon, can I help you tote it home?"
****
Mr Dognahnyi felt despair on any day when Crazy Lope's half-twin replaced Crazy Lope himself in the distant desk at the back of the classroom, at the back where, despite the nearness of the window, it appeared even darker than where the shadowy blackboard stood. Mr Dognahnyi often wondered about the desks, the lids of which unaccountably sloped the wrong way. The gardener-factotum, Mr Cole himself often shrugged and scratched his head over the matter. He ever seemed to be around doing more odd jobs in the classroom, when the half-twin was in session. And 'odd' was the operative word, Mr Dognahnyi thought, when the job entailed, say, repositioning the blackboard for no obvious reason other than the seasonal adjustment of the sun's direction.
It is true to say that Ogdon and Gregor could never remember Crazy Lope. For there had never been more than themselves in THEIR gang of two.
For a time, the Headmistress had a job soothing the other kids back to school, for they had started to believe in a Thing called Megazanthus lurking inside the blackboard. Whatever it was, it would crackle through their dreams ... even into maturity ... into old age ... and beyond.
Christmas was no longer celebrated in Parsimony. Nobody being able to afford it was the reason given ... the only reason that could be believed. However, one family kept a rather splendid fir tree, in the outside toilet, in case the festival was reinstated one day.
Ogdon did grow up to be an artist (a writer), but he rarely returned to those areas that huddled in the shadow of a volcano that remained ever extinct – from the Angevin Crusades onwards. Whatever the case, at the end of the particular heat wave in question, Mr Cole wandered the playground squinting out the whereabouts of long lost property. The sky began to blacken on this otherwise cloudless day. Soon after, years passed through each other, often not touching the people themselves and leaving them stranded between archipelago inkblots of recorded time. Only the desklids leave a record with their etchings. Nemo Dognahnyi died from a broken spirit, still bewildered by matters that should have appeared sensible enough. And in fact the half-twin finally killed off Crazy Lope and sat in the empty classroom waiting for the last teacher to arrive in clouds of chalkdust. The Authorities needed to keep at least the rudiments of a school going, even if there was only one pupil left to make a teacher's life a misery. The late afternoon slipped into its evening clothes – but bars of weak daylight still rippled through the curdling fumes of the air and splattered the parquet with puddles of yellowy green pus. Suddenly, the Headmistress herself strode in, her wings flapping like an academic gown, her skull sufficiently flattened out by a bonemill to look like a mortar board. "Where's the usual teacher?" asked the boy, his high-pitched words punctuating the caul of snorting snot that now covered his whole face. They stared at each other, listening to the frightened silence. High Noon at Dusk.
The Headmistress lifted one wing to reveal a long bony cane – but the boy had faded into the foreground, only to fall backwards with a whoop of delight into the deep sucking darknesses of the blackboard. The Headmistress smiled as she administered corporal punishment to her own backside, causing parts of her intestinal tract to erupt from the easiest orifice like live lolloping eels. And then she placed her eager mouth to a particular desk's ink-well...
An older Gregor, one who had sloughed off a hopefully fictitious boyhood, swept his eyes across the plateau: this was HIS land and nobody was going to take it from him. He pulled the rucksack higher on to his shoulders and adjusted the strap around his waist to balance out the weight more regularly and to prevent the sharp end of one of its contents from digging into him. Having walked miles from the farmhouse, including a night's fitful snooze at Wanderer's Point, he could hardly believe that the land upon which he now gazed was still his. He had bought the farmhouse with money left to him by his late God-mother. He knew that the land attaching to it, although worthless for crop, grazing or development was, nevertheless, "mighty big" (as his Cousin Ogdon, in his cups, had described it to Gregor, perhaps with a tinge of jealousy clouding his eyes).
That particular Wake had turned into an all night shindig. Mix the ingredients of a family accustomed to stiff drinking, a corpse nobody had cared about except for the money it had owned, a large rambling house in the more salubrious purlieus of Parsimony and a Cousin Ogdon with an entrée into wine cellars ... then a thin sorrow easily turns into something far more dangerous.
Gregor, as he stood surveying the outer margins of his new property, felt his cheek tentatively: still badly bruised, which the last few days' weathering had done little to disguise. His own fingers were sore from the whupping he had given in fair exchange. He could have killed Ogdon – and, for all he knew, he might have done irreparable damage to his cousin's face, if that were possible. He smiled. If only they could see him now: their "poor old Gregor", the kid with the loose cauliflower ear, whose whiskers was only just starting to show through his pink chops like desert ants.
The treeless birdless plateau stretched before him. It had been a long climb from the lightly forested banks of the Balsam which had wound, in a small way at first by the farmhouse, to this point where it had become a surging, back-breaking beast of a torrent. The river’s squashed sea-sides had been Gregor's guide and would, at the end of this first (and perhaps last) foray into the lands he was so proud to own, guide him back again.
He did not know the exact machinations of riparian law, but he was convinced that he actually owned the river itself. But, at the back of his mind, he was unaccountably irritated by those parts of the river which did not happen to flow through his lands.
He sweated with a memory of ancient knickers. The sun was at the high point. Releasing his rucksack, he pulled out the biggest kerchief, almost a child's bed-wetter sheet, and mopped up his face. The foliage across the plateau appeared as if it had been there years and years, never growing, never dying, only yellowed and scruffed out by the changeless winds. In the distance, Gregor could see the faint nose-cone of Core. Although still extinct, it granted the horizon a spark of character: a relief to the otherwise unbrokenness stretching around him like an empty washing-line.
His eyes followed the river beyond the boundaries of his land. And, to his consternation, he found himself looking at a boat ploughing a course towards him. At first, it seemed as if there was nobody in it but, soon, he just made out that what he had previously taken to be a sail was in fact a woman in white, the wind billowing her drapes.
Still too far for more exact scrutiny, he sat down upon a tussock and sucked mindlessly on a hollow stalk he had snapped from a dried out clump of weed-choke nearby. He spat it out again as he felt something small walk down his throat.
The party had gone on and on. All had received bequests from the late-demented, but none had done so well as Gregor. Nobody could understand it and they were all irritated by the half-smile that hovered around his mouth the night long. Cousin Ogdon in particular wanted to sort something out.
The fights had erupted without warning – but, whatever the reason, the back-biting so commonly prevalent on such occasions became deeper ... and home-truths coiled like worms in shells too small for their bodies. And the thin veneer of civilisation shattered like a thousand lying mirrors.
Cousin Ogdon, acting out a character in one of the books he yet planned to write, took the opportunity to hustle Gregor: "I hate your face and I aim to skin it good and proper. I'm going to stick my fingers up yer nostrils and yank it off!"
Gregor lightly touched his nose with one hand and with the other reached for his huge kerchief which hung from his chin. Snorting into it, he quickly wrapped whatever had emerged into its ample folds. Ogdon suggested that Gregor's brain had just erupted.
Gregor had rarely participated in fisticuffs but he put up a good show. They both ended up whining on the floor.
Earlier, it’d been a day hotter than ever. Yearning for a bit of shade, Mr Cole peered into the classroom and saw an ink-smutted darkness emerging from the blackboard. He remembered a teacher with some affection from his own school days, who used to speak like a new nib's scratching and with skin like blotting-paper. He taught Biology when it was called Biology. He was Swiss and enjoyed skiing. Mr Cole peered again into the classroom and, sighing with unaccountable relief, fell to the ground in a black hairy heap. There was not even the sound of birdsong to break the regathered silence of the empty wind. The heap that had been Cole rose and snickered, licking its teeth's protrusions. The heap had seen, through the window, that there was the suspicion of boy-meat, one tasty glance of which was surely not enough. Glimpses or gulps, the heap thought, were merely degrees of sensory perception – and it followed its urgings towards the classroom. What else could folk of the heap’s ilk follow other than its own urgings? The ultimate lesson, when worlds collapsed.
But that was then and this is now. Head bent, almost weeping, for hours, Gregor did not see the arrival of the lady. She toted an oar all the way up to the plateau, but now she dropped it to the ground. And, as Mount Core gave off a faint belch, she crouched by his side, clearing his brow of wayward hairs. Gregor looked up and found himself the nearest he had ever been to a beautiful female. He could even see her navy-blue underwear which the woman did little to conceal as she sat side saddle upon the world’s snickering steed of a bucking planet.
But she had sailed on HIS river.
She smiled and, despite the now cooling wind, she unshouldered the white satin, shook her body like the river whence she had come and seemed to incite him to join with her in the teasing out of her nipples.
He did not need to see the dagger hidden behind her back. He knew it wasn't there. But he quietly unfastened his rucksack, pulled out his shotgun and created a neat hole in Elizabeth’s forehead like unto an oriental beauty mark.
He never forgave himself. But, it was surely still his river, wasn't it, to wherever it rolled?
Nowadays, Gregor can only cry himself to sleep before waking up in the form of an insect-legged worm on his own bird-tongue and of another exploring the catacombs of his left ear. Yet his sleep at first flows mercifully free from Ogdon’s dreams, a premature burial quite as blank as an unused school blackboard – except, eventually, for a cock-turned weathervane’s swirling bonecrack spark, followed by twin lights shining within a wrinkled heap of translucent skin, megazanthine lips hooting black words ... whilst Core sported twin peaks (rather than the single cone which history books claimed).
There remained separate eyes in the Nature cupboard: two Stars of Bethlehem, not one.
Ogdon? He didn't write this; HE only wrote imaginary fiction.
****
Sudra’s feet needed shoe-horning. Meanwhile, moored boats gulped soporifically upon the belly-wall of Lake Carcosa that rested mirror-like within Inner Earth’s largest cavity or chamber. Not many visitors from Agraska today, despite the friendly heat of the sun and it being the season's height. Not much custom for the lethal chamber, today, interconnecting with the main cavity. Too much happiness about, for voluntary suicides. Only a short queue of miserabilist writers, looking glum as ever.
Greg speculated on the law of averages. What made places the favourite venue for a day? Everybody COULD decide to go to Klacton on Monday, whilst nobody went to Lake Carcosa. On Tuesday, vice versa. But, no, it couldn't happen. There was, after all, the supply and demand of Fate.
His children had already embarked on the lake, growing smaller and smaller as they rowed like slowly spinning turtles beyond the islands. A few stragglers creaked in unison with clumsy oars. A number of geese slid far more easily through ripples of sparkling gold, as pink-stained gulls dived to divert attention from the reflected food that both breeds confusedly envied. All seemed like porcelain venus-shells come to life.
A fleet of ancient jet-earthcraft had just idled over the lake from the nearby reconstruct of an earth base ... following each other like the gulls, now truly frozen in time, bar flight. Greg had forgotten the proper name for these aircraft. Tank-busters, perhaps, from the Mother of all Battles. One of his children (Sudra probably!) would be certain to remind him of the name, when they returned from the boat trip.
To the tune of the relentless gulping, he closed his eyes in the warm afternoon sunshine and floated off into pleasure dreams. But, in actual fact, was burnt to death by friendly fire. No need of the lethal chamber for him
****
"I'll help you unravel them, Nanny."
“You’re very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket," said Nanny to little Sudra, whose universal sense of loss included the death of her father. But, after that fateful overland trip to Lake Carcosa, she never remembered her brothers and sisters, those fading faces who must have been fostered elsewhere before Sudra’s less instinctive memory was born.
With the evenings now drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.
"Sorry, Nanny, I didn't mean to get it all mixed up."
Sudra was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously penetrating her ringlets with fingers. She knew about fairies as well as ancient commandos. She also had a log lorry from younger days.
"It will be the devil's own job to disentangle the carpet threads, specially yellow from yellow, with knots seeming to evolve merely by the act of looking for them," thought Nanny as she tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals, all a noodly black that the coloured yellow strands had seemed to become. From the tangle came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors.
"I'll help you unravel, Nanny."
"No point, Sudra ... I'm leaving here tomorrow ... there'll be a newer nicer Nanny this time tomorrow evening."
Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of Nanny's eyes – whilst Sudra smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: "I'll help you pack your luggage, then, instead, Nanny, after I’ve found the lemon-squeezer."
The fitful wind gulped in the chimney. Nanny had long since retired for her last night in the large rambling house. Sudra felt she had also died ... died, out on Lake Carcosa all those years ago ... but, today, she was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition. She hadn't died, of course. She wasn't even dreaming. She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which a lack of peers and playfellows had engendered. She opened the illustrated pop-up version of THE KING IN YELLOW and allowed her eyes to surf the pages without daring to intake meaning.
****
Unlike Sudra, Nanny was scared of the dark and she sat bolt upright in the truckle bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of the empty fireplace. Only one more night to endure, then she'd be free of this insidious unnatural love, a love which she couldn't live without. Nanny thought that being besotted in both body and mind with Sudra was not very dignified ... and she watched skeins of yellow tubing erupt from the chimney into the grate, as if the corpse of a yellow-clad Santa Claus had blurted out spools of its innards in one last foul spasm of many such spasms since Christmas, attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue.
As dawn spread itself behind the house like a backdrop in a pantomime (or a war), shades of yellow began to curl from the many chimney-stacks – thus a sign that at least someone was up and about. A face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for the first hour of the sun's shredded gold. Sudra was praying that next Christmas she'd get the best present of all – a playmate of her own age ... or, at least, a REAL Nanny to taunt at bathtime, instead of the imaginary one.
Meanwhile, Santa Claus halted stitching together his disjointed noodles ... having failed to imagine a real girl like Sudra to whom he could take presents next Christmas, like a real father would. And he imagined a city instead, one which was a picture of yellow roofs and chimneys rearing magnificently through the dawn mists. Greg had not died on the boating-lake but merely vanished into another world where he had been ejected from his mistress's flat at the first mere hint of daylight. Her flatmate, you see, was rather averse to having strangers in the place. But was he really the single stranger that all women feared? Surely, there must be at least one person who saw Greg as the familiar figure that everybody trusted. He laughed. Well, his mistress had indeed shared her bed with him. But trust could only thrive on a series of interactions, not on a single encounter, however intimate.
Most of the bodily dealings last night had been conducted under cover of darkness and they had met only briefly in the cocktail bar in advance of sacrificing the safety of life and limb to each other in this way. To call her a mistress was a trifle heavy-handed. Mistresses were merely fancy women of long standing or, at least, an intermittent acquaintance with whom a convenient mutual scratching of itches was the sole criteria for dating. Life's events for him were like promenading around an art gallery looking for a girl in a painting with brown eyes, praising or excoriating or, simply, remaining indifferent to each yellow-tinged picture of ancient fourteenth-century Angevin knights and kings, then passing on to the next. Memories were merely recognitions, when or if such pictures, by design or fortune, passed again in front of his indiscriminating viewfinder of a mind. He never expected to revisit a one-night stand or even a canvas on an easel entitled 'fancy woman'. Yet there was something a little out of the ordinary about this city and this world, an existence which had provided his latest partner of the dark. He shrugged, as was his wont when he consigned any particular memory to his sump of lost worlds and missing mistresses. He even smiled, a rarer occurrence, because, while he was searching such inner wastes of expended passion, trying to find a space for his newest forgettable femme, he suddenly came across a token of love – not the love he had for mere mistresses, but a real love, one that he had felt for someone about whom he must have completely forgotten. Yet this had been his one true love. His memories were surprisingly independent creatures, scurrying off to their earths at the first sign of hope or hunter.
A grown-up Sudra, had, last night, been one mere veneer away from her father Greg: she being, coincidentally, the next door neighbour of Greg's latest mistress: this the Sudra who feared strangers as much as thin partitions. But, now, she'd been left behind yet again with her dreaded books, as Greg traced a rite of passage which unfolded randomly within fate's strict parameters. Yet another world's city streets were never-ending, as if a puzzlehead cartographer once had a fidgetty day with the marking-pen, not taking it off the cartridge paper as a sort of Dare. Greg should have known it would not be easy to lose himself, when there were no corners to negotiate. Every building seemed to be a thriving lethal chamber.
Megazanthus was on his tail and Greg found it the devil's own job to shake him off. And, you see, Megazanthus had been queening it a bit in the D'Ys (as this part of the city was inexplicably called) – until Greg came along in an attempt to expose Megazanthus as a pretty low and common denominator. Greg did not know Megazanthus's face but, from the yellowing police records which he remembered somehow studying, he was sure he would recognise the rhythmic sharp-clawed pace of the following footsteps and the ill-disguised snort of lungs and the flipping of his bony wings. Greg guessed Megazanthus would be uglier than an eviscerated corpse half-floating in the whipping-crust outside the Ogdon Pub’s gentlemen's excuse-me.
As Greg escaped down the street, hoping to find at least one side-alley forgotten by the cartographer and thus dodge the searing limelight of Megazanthus's bulging, flameshot eyes, Greg spotted an urchin running towards him from the opposite direction of the limitless distance where the mapmaker had evidently confused perspective with phantasy. They both squatted on the pavement, regaining their breath in snorts.
"What's your name, ragamuffin?" Greg asked, trying to conceal the gabnash of his own teeth and gums.
"Loper." The girl lied, being Sudra again, strutting upon a different stage of timeless fate. She was no older than Greg had been at her age, though she acted as if she had the knowledge of the whole cosmos upon her narrow shoulders.
"Loper? That be a 'trestin' name for a girl. Are yer runnin' up the street for any good reason?" Greg’s voice cracked. He could well believe he had not used it for centuries. Or he had gone back down into the past where the future had not even cast its backward echo.
He was astonished, too, at his own crude dialect. He was in fact only to recall one alter-nemo in which he had seen fit to talk. He kept looking over his shoulder to see if Megazanthus was lurking behind the back of his mind. And there was a corner shop just extending its awning like a tongue, opening for the afternoon session. Funny – he'd thought it was early closing day in this neck of the woods. The shop sold gobsuckers, the window being dressed with aniseed balls, penny chews, blackjacks, pear & acid drops, pineapple chunks, bullseyes, throat-stoppers &c. &c. He was convinced the shopkeeper would be finger-grating at his large bald pate to fill the lemon sherbets. The shopkeeper may have been Megazanthus himself in sudden disguise. Greg turned back to the urchin who now held out her begging-hand, with an expression on her grubby face indicating that she thought him a clinch-fist.
"I'm not goin' ter give yer any-fing, Loper, 'cause I can't even buy meself a clump-sole." He showed her the undersides of his shoes, next to useless without the hardened leather-flesh of feet to supplement them.
"You be pie-powdered," the girl enunciated painstakingly.
"I be not so dirty as I look, young 'un," Greg claimed, rising from the swill-gutter and tapping the precocious witmonger on the shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but she flinched, her whole existence seeming to bodyjack before his very eyes. Good heavens, Sudra might have been Megazanthus in disguise, for Greg saw the underfurrows of age unshrining, as if she had a different flavour inside. Her soul was wither-wrung, and Greg read words in her sticky mouth like sweets dissolving on the blotchy haft of a misshapen tongue and then slicking a putrid throat which Greg could peer down its earthen hedgy tunnel if he stayed long enough to do so.
Seeing that the wacky cartographer had the space with which to work, he hived off some backstreet areas just to give them map room. Good job, too, seeing Greg was now in the relatively disease-free uncharted yard complexes of the city where the pubs were open all day. He ambled into the Ogdon pub, as jolly and carefree as he could pretend, ready to order a tumbler of fizz for his narrow-billed lips and the sucking-sides of his throat. Ogdon himself held out a webbed hand for payment of tuppence-ha'penny in exchange. Reddening to the bottom, Greg fumbled in his britches since his purse had been confounded with the umbilica of his intestines. Loper (aka Sudra) must have been a nifty pycke-purse. He could only find his Share Certificates in the Carcosa Cargo Company that had gone out of business when they first invented firearms. Smuggling, in any event, was hard on inland lakes. And even ANGEVIN failed to find a market unless it was smuggled rather than legally transported.
He scrammed as quickly as he dared, with the first mouthful of fizz still bubbling against the shaft of his gristly clapper which waggled from the depth of his gullet. He hadn't savoured the look of the likes of Ogdon, anyway, nor the foul-slanted cut of his jib, what with his humbug eyes and a speckled spray of spittle with every word from his lop-sided mouthful of lips. Ogdon looked a trifle too much like Megazanthus – and, now, knowing the city streets better, the wanderer in Greg, somehow, tried to get lost, on a quest not unconnected with acting out dreams.
In a peculiar way, he knew that Megazanthus and the King in Yellow were one and the same. It sent a shiver down his spine. He would travel on the underground railway and alight at any random station with an unlikely name. Not a believer in aids such as the city map, he intended to wend the endless terraces and semi-avenues, loop closes, test cul-de-sacs – try, against all the odds, to abandon himself to the city's mystery. Come dusk, which was usually earlier and yellower than he ever expected, he would succeed in finding, in the nick of time, another underground station by which means, because of the over-simplified out-of-scale poster map therein, he could lead himself back to Square One – emerging into the darkness of the streets he had grown to know since the accident at Lake Carcosa.
But, like the underground map of cavities as well as mole-trains, nothing was ever what it seemed. Loper Alley quickly became Sudra Avenue without even turning a corner. Lethal chambers, here, were back-to-back, two-up-two-down, as well as side by side cavities in dark terraces. He had been lost for unconscionable hours, yet through the sapping drizzle, he saw with some relief, the blurred sign for Friendly Fire Crescent, sending up dawnish yellow like ghostlight. Shaking from his exertions, he allowed himself to wander in his thoughts. If Santa Claus existed, it was probably true to say Megazanthus existed, too. Greg also allowed himself to be trundled down the empty half-lit wooden escalator, knowing that the untended lifts were simply asking for trouble and that the gaping hole of the spiral steps was trouble asking for him.
Later, as he clattered along upon the deserted mole-train, he wondered why such a small station had possessed a triple choice of descent. Eventually, reaching a familiar station, the silver escalator was far longer than he recalled it, stretching, it seemed, limitlessly above, with a strong wind funnelling down upon him. He gathered a yellow overcoat about himself. Other people, people like doctors after patients, nannies after children, people after souls, descending in the parallel trough, watched him quizzically as Greg passed them upwards. They evidently found the slow speed sufficient and his demeanour more interesting than the tiered advert posters. Even the photos of people in piss-coloured underwear did not distract them from looking at Greg. He felt his face blush, dreading that the icy looks he suffered would guess what he wore under the overcoat. It was as if they picked his pockets with their eyes, snipping the purse-strings to his heart. Each coin was a silver bullet. Or a quarter p.
He suspected that the creature who followed him through the various worlds had no respect for the law of any land they traversed, whilst scratching a living simply from breathing. But, at long last, the escalator delivered Greg, via the barrier, into some semblance of open air. Nobody collected tickets, only a slowly swivelling chair. The cold sponge of darkness was a shock to his system, especially as the streetwise set-up of back-doubles which he faced was confusing. He yearned for a friendly fire.
He always considered déjà-vu to be a fiction, which would make more sense without the use of the word 'always'. But he now depended on déjà-vu to find his way. Only the night before, he had dreamed of these surrounding. Each turning and line of houses were gentle reminders. He thanked God for small mercies, because it would have been far worse in a completely out-of-the-way area. He was at least on someone's common ground. The windows were mostly dark. Some, dully lit. As he rounded each corner, shadowy figures slammed doors, as if they had been lying in wait for him, only to make this obvious point of unwelcome. Curtains fluttered as did his own sodden eyelids. Silence was just the swishing of rubber blades on a windscreen. His engine gunned – and died.
He had drawn to a halt halfway down a road of high-rises. He had never owned a vehicle other than himself – yet, uncannily, the treads of his clump-soles squealed as he applied the wet weather brakes of his yellow taxi. Braces tightened against his upper frame, pulling the belt to which the braces' crocodile-clips were affixed like a band of hot iron. His sock-suspenders cramped his calves, turning them rock hard by guying the pinions of his searing sinews. His briefs cut into the groin, lifting and separating. The holster seared a diagonal line between the shoulder-blades and breast. The implement he toted within the holster had a hair-trigger too delicate for unwieldy fingers: a lady's jewel-studded automatic: ready-cocked, feather-alert, for beggars, muggers or other ne'erdowells.
The house, outside of which he had broken down, was between two high-rises, a Victorian Detached with twin attic towers and steeply stacked chimneys. The floral curtains in one bedroom were ostentatiously tweaked by Sudra’s poster-white face. He tried desperately to recall the cutpurse incident from the night before, which was fast becoming a key to this night's reality. But having reached such a point, he had established a new spirit-of-place, irretrievably ... thus to set off again, mapless, upon the low-lying tracks towards station names, some not even appearing on the official simplified grid of coloured lines – which lines were not only out-of-scale but also inconsistently out-of-scale. The yellow one was called Circle. Many of the direction angles were misleading, too. But, tonight, the new world could not be shaken off, determined as it was to become real. The drizzle became sleet, as the door of the house opened and a couple of hooray-henries and their skittish molls galumphed down the steep porch-steps, pranging sticks against the metal banisters as if they were once tearaways now made good, clumsy muggers made citybright, urchin beggars made legal, ne'erdowells turned into prancing do-gooders.
The yellow cab into which they disappeared with slamming doors snorted off. Greg heard them shout a destination (in the posh side of the city) to the shadowy driver propped up at the large wheel. He scratched his head. He thought the tail-lights vanished towards the rough end of town, where dark Limehouse hunched against the horizon, made even darker by the now cascading lamp-lit snow. Reality or unreality, he was past caring, yet something told him that someone else sat waiting, with back scratching against night's warehouse wall. Thick-as-thieves, the creature was. Greg lightly touched the hardware he wore, confident with its presence. As he fingered the tiny nipple within its iron aureole, fire thrilled along his arm. Shivering, he negotiated the guttering street, determined this time to reach the end of this reality – or remember whom he feared so that he could make avoidance plans – or, at least, find another underground sign that would allow him to regain his bearings. Eventually, he thought he made out 'Lakeside Mews' on the sign. He prayed it would have an escalator AND lifts AND stairs, to cover the strange odds that only Fate could offer, it seemed. He felt extremely cold without the overcoat that he suddenly recalled once had his own shadowy body inside it.
Now, as luminous and numinous as the snowlit moon, he reflected off the glass wall of an anonymous city office-block. He was indeed a trifle too much like the creature who followed him, but even more like the one who followed the creature. No tongue to speak with, Greg and bewinged Megazanthus drew their weapons on the moment's spur, and they waited to see who would touch the trigger first. The scribbling of crack-deep scratches over the face-plate was the first Greg knew he was no longer there or, even, anywhere. Only an explosion of yellow fire.
****
A voice only sounded when everybody within hearing distance was asleep or, better, dead. That night, an ancient Sudra was neither. She was still falling through a dream of Inner Earth’s chambers with Amy’s look still searing her own eyes. It was a hot night and she eventually dozed fitfully under a single smooth sheet as if she were still young enough for a Nanny to come with a goodnight kiss. Then she snored for a while in a relentless rhythm and, with the state of self-hypnosis thus engendered, she ceased breathing entirely. It was indeed a most realistic death. She had ensured the house was empty, having packed off the rest of her servants and other hangers-on. She was determined to lay the ghost, come what may.
The ghost was evidenced by knitted spools of yellow ectoplasm, discovered all over the carpet on the morning following its supposed visitation. Tape recorders left running overnight picked up its crazy half-hearted attempts to haunt the house. It hinted at Amy’s lisping voice in the corners of night's white noise. But every time a sleeper was heard to stir, the tape indicated the ghost keeping deadly quiet. A shy thoughtful ghost perhaps, but ghosts were ghosts whose games needed stopping, in case they frightened the children and servants. Moreover, old Sudra wanted very much to prove her own disbelief in them. Ghosts were indeed known to become more dangerous, the older they grew. Their age-yellowed winding-sheets would eventually flap across the dark landings and stairways, uncaring of whom they stung during their approach to a mutant fleshy reincarnation. Or so Sudra believed, if she believed in them at all.
So, on that night, she was to get to the bottom of the ghost. As she lay there in her self-imposed state of refined existence, she heard its unprotected voice seeping through her auto-hypnotic defences. Not a tape-recording: a voice indeed unprotected by nothing but the air itself. Her muscles rippled and shimmered, as she heard the fateful voice:- "You who hearest my words via no prophylactick are sure to wear my body, me yours, thus able to scratch mutual backs in our endless struggle against non-existence."
No lisping this time, clear as a ringing bell. The sleeper woke, only to find she did not believe in herself let alone in any sign of exploding yellow, and forthwith curled into a dark foetus beneath the lethal chamber formed by the piss-stained sheet.
Finally, the King in Yellow's plaintive voice spoke these words: "I'll help you unravel."
****
As Greg and Beth left the environs of the Cavé, they decided they were being escorted by two child-sized stick-figures who used Sunnemo’s closure as a light source (with silent drapes) to feed their own emptiness from anything but manipulative bone … to feed it with charcoal drawings from another pencil stub that had a point of incipient darkness for any shading. Like a lost cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci combined with one by Walt Disney who now lived (from death) in such cross-hatches foreign to the smooth technicolor he once so relished. Yet these creatures maintained the dulcet tones of Edith and Clare – which gave a sense of comfort, especially as in their prior Lope and Go’spank modes their voices had been far too shrill.
Greg could just discern the tannoy-system strung with wires that had emerged from the earlier hawl-pulleys as part of one giant soundweb of communication – and the tannoy’s loudspeakers themselves were shaped like large human ears rather than the more normally acoustically-efficient cones. A decorative system that didn’t lose its irony in the transit from symbol to reality. One clockwork-type of tannoy (it needed to be kept wound up to keep its emissions of noise at full swell) was so violent in these emissions that it was fast burying itself into the ground … as if extreme sound was a downward motive force of drilling within Inner Earth, as well as being a wind-source, even a tornado torque.
The wailing was now deafening – their being now several blocks away from any possible firewall of dreams. Greg often witnessed Klaxonites passing by along the paving-slabs with huge muffs on their own ears – and others were clambering on the thinned-out roofs of some newly externalised cavities or chambers to restore any sound-proofing lost in the thinning process. Large coats of a glue-like substance were being ‘painted’ over all visible tectonic cracks that pavy-crazed this their growing ‘internet’ of homesteads. Yet, Greg felt that Sunnemo’s intermittent emissions of daylight – if that was what it was called – would later give a better view of these customary tasks of the natives amid all the daily wear-and-tear caused by both automatic and clockwork tannoys, which would be useful since he later intended to write a semi-scientific, semi-autobiographical book about his time in Klaxon City as well as his childhood in Parsimon, attempting to fill in any gaps later.
As if the thought had trangressed some stewardship of dream that Edith was currently nurturing, the word ‘book’ in Greg’s thought evoked some literary talk on her part:
“Marcel Proust’s book treats of separate selves of one individual through a cross-section of time. Sometimes the selves interact, without understanding they were selves (or cells) of the same person. Nothing strange in that. Though we owe Proust a lot for his fiction and such ground-breaking concepts.”
“Pessoa, too,” added Clare.
“Yes, and Joseph Conrad had a feel that there were so many layers of intention…”
Greg wondered how he could hear them talking – not that he was terribly interested in the content of the dowagers’ literary musings – if the wailing tannoys were so deafening. It was as if noise not only produced air movement or downward proclivities of twisters, but also a means to transfer thoughts inside such air movement without the use of speech, but retaining a disguise of speech. He tried it out:
“What are those chambers?”
He pointed to some unusually constructed areas uplifted into a huge portholed lobe of swollen earth membrane.
“They’re the Healing Chambers.”
Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them – but now suffering from Bird Flew. Each body (including face) was currently being cream mudbathed with ANGEVIN (a new discovery of its curative qualities in addition to its known dream-masking) to remove feathers at their root so they would not return. Each patient – to have been admitted to this particular chamber and its specialist healing process – had been forced to show the depth of their illness by actually proving they could fly: hence the name of their disease. One was in such a state of desperation – because, having once flown, to be treated he or she needed to show they couldn’t fly any more, a method that necessitated the painful process of plucking. Those that were incurable and more intrinsically (indelibly) Bird Flown or still-Bird-Flying (albeit only in dreams) were forced from their beds and frog-marched next door to what was called a lethal chamber.
One patient was jerking in his or her own bed – as if pitifully trying to fly from within the heavy quilt. The nurses – who themselves were not dissimilar to human-like ostriches – continued, undeterred, the painful process of plucking that did not seem out of place amid all the wailing noises.
As Greg and Beth left – after their tour as tourists – they spotted a long winding queue of hopping creatures leading to one of the notorious lethal chambers. Some hopped a few feet into the air and then flopped back. Greg averted his eyes. None of this would go in the book.
****
STUB OF PENCIL: The word ‘indelibly’ was added in brackets. It may be rubbed out later. I hope not. Despite the culling that followed the plucking, I shall ignore this topic for the moment. I shall instead treat of other matters. Greg and Beth had earlier visited the Megazanthine Core so couldn’t really visit again. Yet there is a theory, as I may have mentioned already, that having produced their seed for the Angevin-bank when in company with the Hawler they were accidentally born again from that seed in re-transit – logically entailing that they never went to the Core in the first place: or that they never existed at that time to warrant their later existence beyond the fiction of their original creation. Only fiction, indeed, is able to cope with such concepts. Thanks to fiction, we may never otherwise have addressed the possibility that they could revisit the Core and thus bring back the rarer forms of ANGEVIN needed to counter Bird Flew here in Klaxon but also in the surface cities of London, New York etc. Only an overtly ILLogical possibility of such a revisit could be the catalyst for the aforesaid rarification of refinement in the ANGEVIN process, one necessary for the ultimate virus-buster of them all. It was like a scientific process of Parthenogenesis (coincidentally the first book in the Bible) – whereby creation’s reignition is possible by means of creative imagination rather than by years of empirical scientific study – with cells revisiting their earlier carcinogenic selves to restore them to health. A shorthand for much else. I cannot be clearer at this stage. And I hope nobody rubs this out, simply because they don’t CURRENTLY comprehend it.
****
He entered the London museum. The door-keeper paid him a handsome fee at the turnstile, only thankful that the day was sufficiently rainy to attract the odd paid customer or two. The museum was now only open at weekends, with the art-going public having become so thin on the ground - or perhaps the items of art themselves had started to deplete, time having taken its toll upon the fragile canvas medium the artists had chosen.
Gregory was sufficiently seasoned to recall those controversial days when public museums had first charged customers entrance fees. That must have been the uproar of dissent he heard through the open window of his city flat on a Sunday morning - or so Gregory thought, perhaps mistaking a football crowd for a mob of banner-waving art-lovers - or even a trade union demonstration - or a mass of yowking money-changers lately made redundant from the crumbling halls of the Stock Exchange. Indeed, the ultramodern buildings of high finance crumbled and became protected ruins like any cathedral, abbey or real-ale pub, since nothing, perhaps, could have a monopoly of everything.
Shrugging off a multi-lingual headset and, also, the real-life talk on the movement “Art Through Man,” Gregory wandered idly between the dim aisles, peering closely at some of the items of faith. Since it grew so dark, the paid customer was no doubt meant to conjure up images for him- or herself from the black shapes hanging on the walls. As a child, he recalled being taken around the National Gallery by his Great Uncle Nemo. This particular fine building of high whitened arches and once da Vinci-haunted alcoves had indeed needed to import various versions of modernity that the Tate Gallery could no longer house because of that building’s gradual submersion into the widening marshy edges of the River Thames - thus in turn necessitating the removal of Old Masters from the National Gallery upon vertical stretchers, to make room for the Tate’s geometrical blobs of new generations in Dulux and High-Teck. Little Gregory, still holding his Great Uncle’s paw, mooned over an expanse of canvas, empty but for a Maths Teacher’s doodlings - and, in evident preparation for his last visit to a museum as an old man himself, he dreamed his own dreams within their haphazard frames. He then left that world perhaps for others.
Little Gregory had seen a cat, as large as life, staring bowlfully from between the crazy crossword puzzles of a Mondrian masterpiece. The cat was him. He felt how an animal must feel beneath the heel of the tameness of man. His eyes swivelled in the dark, feeling other eyes upon him, but not being able to see them because human eyes are essentially non-sparkling, almost non-viable. His brain was dulled, but still sentient. He crouched, arched, felt, sniffed,saw. At the same time, he had other emotions unknown to man - the feeling of an omnipotent creature who was looking through his eyes, the ability to weigh the whole universe with simply his own sensitive paws - knowing that all directions led to this one point in time - understanding all this, but at the same time understanding nothing. With no premeditation (nor even foreknowledge of his prey) he pounced (a shaft of black upon the dying light) and gnawed off the miniature limbs of a mewling man in clothes.
Gregory awoke in the future. Great Uncle Nemo skulked back into the past where, because of his vintage, he could only subsist in the part of the ancient present he once knew. But the future, for Gregory, was now the true present. He was currently as old as his Great Uncle had been in the National Gallery on that far-off day when he, Gregory, as a small child, had imagined himself to be a pussy cat after a bird.
So, yes, the museum only opened on weekends. After those early visits to a corrupted National Gallery (where Titian had been replaced by neo-Dada and Zeroism), Gregory had never found the courage to visit it again, despite the generous fees offered to customers. And, now, it turned out to be not at all what he had expected. In fact, it seemed to be a smugglers’ den of those Old Masters once thought to be relegated to the untreated entropy of time.
In the darkness, he could draw shapes and colours from the empty hanging squares: a Mona Lisa here with inscrutable smile intact or even enhanced, and a Virgin On The Rocks there with the colours still matchlessly deep and untouchable. He saw them all. Even Holbein's famous portraits of the Angevin Kings.
There were the intricate vistas of Canaletto, where miniature people made erotic love behind the architectural facades of a version of Venice, with the thousand-boat cavalcades cruising down the wide palisaded waterways and taking the past into another future through which only visionaries can live. Then, he gazed at such Suffolk softness of John Constable’s underbelly where the actual surface of the paint was nearer to grass and water than grass and water themselves or, within the special reality of art, what grass and water should be. Constable’s little boy leaned over to sup from Dedham Lock and felt flow into him the congregated tears of millions who had died without ever seeing this painting in the flesh. And flesh it surely was that Gainsborough had used to forge the tones of life into the faces of his portraits. Gainsborough’s subjects would now be green-eyed corpses, with tattered, ill-embalmed skin, if it were not for these paintings that had frozen them (or melted them) within a fuller existence that only fine art can lend. The fact they could not move even a slight muscle upon the canvases was no hardship compared to the perfect, sensual immortality of their poses left for others to see via this living, unphotographic medium - thus giving them life for life. AND other paintings too rich even to begin to describe. But Gregory - who felt himself to be tantamount to a Raphael pontiff, if not to one of Francis Bacon’s Three Screaming Popes (late musicalised for klaxon and orchestra by Anthony Turnage) - saw clearly with the flicker of his eyelid.
Imagination, if that was what it was, grew stronger than reality, becoming a realler reality he wanted never to shake off.
The museum’s door-keeper (rubbing his back legs together) crept up on Gregory unawares.
“Seen the paintings we’ve kept from the maulers?”
Gregory pivoted in the darkness.
“Yes, this place is a sight for sore eyes. I had no idea…”
“Very few people come through these aisles, Sir, without realizing their dreams.” The door-keeper’s voice ground like a mill-wheel upon granite. “There are paintings, in here, that nobody has yet seen...”
“Not even yourself?” As he spoke, Gregory searched the darkness to explore the door-keeper’s face, at which he had not even bothered to glance when first collecting his entrance fee at the turnstile. Then, with the same vision as had seen the Turners, Gainsboroughs, Constables, Canalettos &c., he saw a hellish masterpiece (depicting Inner Earth) by Hieronymous Bosch or by some other artist with even greater nightmarish skills whose work nobody, but nobody, had yet dared to see or conjure forth, whatever was the apt description. It was delineated from the pure black canvas of the museum’s sudden shutting door. The door-keeper was a crosswork of spider and demon - and there was no frame to keep him within. Gregory should have realized that, with Old Masters, one could not have the Beautiful without an equal share of the Ugly. And, in true art, both shall always be as powerful as each other. Gregory’s arms seemed like floppy rolls of blood-mapped paper - but he did try to defend himself when the Thing pounced, despite not having been given even a mere premeditation.
The undergrunts of noise as the passing crowds circled pigeon-haunted Trafalgar Square outside the museum (each group with its own pet cause) continued for several hours into the next century, as the mandibles slowly took the museum guest apart, both to see how his innards ticked and to staunch a hunger that had subsisted since man wildly scratched at his cave-walls.
Gregory screamed for ever and ever.
****
He entered the London museum. The door-keeper paid him a handsome fee at the turnstile, only thankful that the day was sufficiently rainy to attract the odd paid customer or two. The museum was now only open at weekends, with the art-going public having become so thin on the ground - or perhaps the items of art themselves had started to deplete, time having taken its toll upon the fragile canvas medium the artists had chosen.
Gregory was sufficiently seasoned to recall those controversial days when public museums had first charged customers entrance fees. That must have been the uproar of dissent he heard through the open window of his city flat on a Sunday morning - or so Gregory thought, perhaps mistaking a football crowd for a mob of banner-waving art-lovers - or even a trade union demonstration - or a mass of yowking money-changers lately made redundant from the crumbling halls of the Stock Exchange. Indeed, the ultramodern buildings of high finance crumbled and became protected ruins like any cathedral, abbey or real-ale pub, since nothing, perhaps, could have a monopoly of everything.
Shrugging off a multi-lingual headset and, also, the real-life talk on the movement “Art Through Man,” Gregory wandered idly between the dim aisles, peering closely at some of the items of faith. Since it grew so dark, the paid customer was no doubt meant to conjure up images for him- or herself from the black shapes hanging on the walls. As a child, he recalled being taken around the National Gallery by his Great Uncle Nemo. This particular fine building of high whitened arches and once da Vinci-haunted alcoves had indeed needed to import various versions of modernity that the Tate Gallery could no longer house because of that building’s gradual submersion into the widening marshy edges of the River Thames - thus in turn necessitating the removal of Old Masters from the National Gallery upon vertical stretchers, to make room for the Tate’s geometrical blobs of new generations in Dulux and High-Teck. Little Gregory, still holding his Great Uncle’s paw, mooned over an expanse of canvas, empty but for a Maths Teacher’s doodlings - and, in evident preparation for his last visit to a museum as an old man himself, he dreamed his own dreams within their haphazard frames. He then left that world perhaps for others.
Little Gregory had seen a cat, as large as life, staring bowlfully from between the crazy crossword puzzles of a Mondrian masterpiece. The cat was him. He felt how an animal must feel beneath the heel of the tameness of man. His eyes swivelled in the dark, feeling other eyes upon him, but not being able to see them because human eyes are essentially non-sparkling, almost non-viable. His brain was dulled, but still sentient. He crouched, arched, felt, sniffed,saw. At the same time, he had other emotions unknown to man - the feeling of an omnipotent creature who was looking through his eyes, the ability to weigh the whole universe with simply his own sensitive paws - knowing that all directions led to this one point in time - understanding all this, but at the same time understanding nothing. With no premeditation (nor even foreknowledge of his prey) he pounced (a shaft of black upon the dying light) and gnawed off the miniature limbs of a mewling man in clothes.
Gregory awoke in the future. Great Uncle Nemo skulked back into the past where, because of his vintage, he could only subsist in the part of the ancient present he once knew. But the future, for Gregory, was now the true present. He was currently as old as his Great Uncle had been in the National Gallery on that far-off day when he, Gregory, as a small child, had imagined himself to be a pussy cat after a bird.
So, yes, the museum only opened on weekends. After those early visits to a corrupted National Gallery (where Titian had been replaced by neo-Dada and Zeroism), Gregory had never found the courage to visit it again, despite the generous fees offered to customers. And, now, it turned out to be not at all what he had expected. In fact, it seemed to be a smugglers’ den of those Old Masters once thought to be relegated to the untreated entropy of time.
In the darkness, he could draw shapes and colours from the empty hanging squares: a Mona Lisa here with inscrutable smile intact or even enhanced, and a Virgin On The Rocks there with the colours still matchlessly deep and untouchable. He saw them all. Even Holbein's famous portraits of the Angevin Kings.
There were the intricate vistas of Canaletto, where miniature people made erotic love behind the architectural facades of a version of Venice, with the thousand-boat cavalcades cruising down the wide palisaded waterways and taking the past into another future through which only visionaries can live. Then, he gazed at such Suffolk softness of John Constable’s underbelly where the actual surface of the paint was nearer to grass and water than grass and water themselves or, within the special reality of art, what grass and water should be. Constable’s little boy leaned over to sup from Dedham Lock and felt flow into him the congregated tears of millions who had died without ever seeing this painting in the flesh. And flesh it surely was that Gainsborough had used to forge the tones of life into the faces of his portraits. Gainsborough’s subjects would now be green-eyed corpses, with tattered, ill-embalmed skin, if it were not for these paintings that had frozen them (or melted them) within a fuller existence that only fine art can lend. The fact they could not move even a slight muscle upon the canvases was no hardship compared to the perfect, sensual immortality of their poses left for others to see via this living, unphotographic medium - thus giving them life for life. AND other paintings too rich even to begin to describe. But Gregory - who felt himself to be tantamount to a Raphael pontiff, if not to one of Francis Bacon’s Three Screaming Popes (late musicalised for klaxon and orchestra by Anthony Turnage) - saw clearly with the flicker of his eyelid.
Imagination, if that was what it was, grew stronger than reality, becoming a realler reality he wanted never to shake off.
The museum’s door-keeper (rubbing his back legs together) crept up on Gregory unawares.
“Seen the paintings we’ve kept from the maulers?”
Gregory pivoted in the darkness.
“Yes, this place is a sight for sore eyes. I had no idea…”
“Very few people come through these aisles, Sir, without realizing their dreams.” The door-keeper’s voice ground like a mill-wheel upon granite. “There are paintings, in here, that nobody has yet seen...”
“Not even yourself?” As he spoke, Gregory searched the darkness to explore the door-keeper’s face, at which he had not even bothered to glance when first collecting his entrance fee at the turnstile. Then, with the same vision as had seen the Turners, Gainsboroughs, Constables, Canalettos &c., he saw a hellish masterpiece (depicting Inner Earth) by Hieronymous Bosch or by some other artist with even greater nightmarish skills whose work nobody, but nobody, had yet dared to see or conjure forth, whatever was the apt description. It was delineated from the pure black canvas of the museum’s sudden shutting door. The door-keeper was a crosswork of spider and demon - and there was no frame to keep him within. Gregory should have realized that, with Old Masters, one could not have the Beautiful without an equal share of the Ugly. And, in true art, both shall always be as powerful as each other. Gregory’s arms seemed like floppy rolls of blood-mapped paper - but he did try to defend himself when the Thing pounced, despite not having been given even a mere premeditation.
The undergrunts of noise as the passing crowds circled pigeon-haunted Trafalgar Square outside the museum (each group with its own pet cause) continued for several hours into the next century, as the mandibles slowly took the museum guest apart, both to see how his innards ticked and to staunch a hunger that had subsisted since man wildly scratched at his cave-walls.
Gregory screamed for ever and ever.
****
Greg and Beth were offered a chance to view more specialist operations upon Klaxonites who were suffering from a version of Bird Flew deeper than their own bodies, with diseased feather-spindles spreading their cancerous spike-ends unto the soul itself. Beth, even with her hard-nosed Essex-girl image, was reluctant to accompany Greg on this part of the tour. So Greg – putting himself in the hands of a masked surgeon – was taken on his own to not a lethal chamber as such, but something far worse. Lethal chambers would at least staunch the pain eventually.
Here Greg saw a patient – etherised upon a table – presenting a pink wasteland of body surface tussocked with Bird Flew. Apparently, this patient had earlier indeed managed flight as high as the highest pylon of the city and only flopping to earth with a wing-stressed bounce – because, otherwise, a mercifully heavy fall from flight would have ended his illness there and then. Illnesses tended to die with their patients. Except in the most diseased cases.
The surgeon was wielding a instrument like a pen-torch that emitted a beam of siren-sound more intense than any hearing could bear if that hearing had insufficient dream protection – which, luckily, had been provided for Greg by one of the dream stewards from Klaxon itself. Edith and Clare had washed their hands of the matter, pretending that it was impossible to offer such protection, but, simply, if the truth were known, they didn’t know how to do so. The dream steward who actually took over from the dowagers, in this respect, was a character by the name of Blasphemy Fitzworth, once cat’s meat salesman in Victorian London, who was so full of makeshift dreams he was able to find one perfectly suitable for concocting a particular madness that produced impossibilities such as engendering Greg’s immunity to the shrieking ‘pen-torch’ surgical instrument.
The patient himself was resistant to any application of ANGEVIN ointment to help with humane plucking. So, the surgeon (equally protected by one of Blasphemy Fitzworth’s dreams) aimed the ‘pen-torch’ beam of sound towards the most obtrusive of the rooted feathers and seared hard at its clawhold for some hours, as Greg watched the surrounding flesh sizzle and then melt away from the column of healing key-hole sound. Eventually, the surgeon could yank the feather-spindle from its tenacious grip on the patient’s bony soul-matter. Only the patient’s resultant wild screaming at the top of his voice was the final danger of sound-deafening proportions to any onlookers. But, with that withstood, the surgeon and Greg left the patient to recover for a while – before they returned to attack the next feather’s root in a long line of such feathers carpetting the patient’s flesh.
****
"An apple for your thoughts," announced Miss Clare in a moment of remorse amid those interminable kept-behind hours of dusk which come to all schoolchildren who strayed.
She watched the child in the front desk lean its head on the exercise book. It straightened its back into a yardstick, its eyes unblinking.
"Can I go home now?" its small voice asked.
"Well, I don't know - you're meant to be here finishing off the sums which you didn't do at the right time."
The child resumed its desultory scribbling. It was not the only one whom Miss Western had kept behind this afternoon. The three naughtiest kids from the same adopted family, Feemy Fitzworth, Padgett Weggs and Crazy Lope, had been sitting at the back of the formroom only a few minutes before, complete with smug we-don't-mind-if-you-keep-us-in-till-Kingdom-come expressions. She eventually sent them home because their mother would complain at them being victimised yet again. They certainly did deserve it. They used to be gypsies. But that was not the reason.
Meanwhile, the nemonymous child was now re-doubling its efforts to encourage monsters to doodle self-portraits in the arithmetic book. There was a certain peculiarity in that Miss Clare had completely forgotten the child's name. She would need to check it in the attendance records but the lines of black circles and red ticks told her nothing except perhaps that there were underlying patterns to existence in the small town she'd decided to work as a schoolteacher. The three naughty kids had more black circles than most, but that was only to be expected.
Miss Clare was suddenly aware that a stranger was sitting in one of the tiny desks - at the back of the classroom, where the depleting afternoon light could not now reach.
"Yes? Can I help you?" Her voice sounded distant ... even to her own ears. The moment of fright had been exceeded by annoyance at the intrusion.
"No, but I feel I can help you instead." Whilst his voice was louder than hers, it was like the undercurrent of a conversation in a house next door.
Miss Clare turned back to the nemonymous child to see if it had noticed the exchange, but its head was back on the desk-slope, eyes still wide open, whirls and coils of its doodles appearing to flow directly from its brow as well as from the stub of pencil gripped in its fist. The arithmetic book’s pages themselves were thus cross-hatched by prior scribbling with not a single sum in sight
The stranger - taller than the confines of the desk would have seemed to allow - left the back of the room and slowly advanced down the aisle, passing via varying degrees of shadow. If it had not been for this intrusion, Miss Clare would have by now lit the lamps, for it had quickly turned too dark too early to see very clearly.
"I've got some homework to give you, before you can go, Miss Clare ... about visions of meadows, endless childhood summers, the tenacity of feathers and the meaning of fruit-stones and flowers."
The voice had become more like an old 78 rpm record with a dog and horn on its label ... hissing and cracking in rhythm to the accompanying steps.
"Who are you?" Miss Clare asked, with fear now gradually dawning on her.
"I'm the one who can teach you of none-so-pretties, soft hobmadonnas and cuddle-me-to-you's, and pick them from under sun and hedgerow - and, later, with all learning done, we can play frog-hop, scotch-skip and dibstones for an everlasting gossamer twilight..."
The spoken subject-matter belied the speaker's attitude.
"Who are you, please?" the teacher cried, sitting as straight as a wooden set-square, protracting the hushed pause while the stranger manicured its claws and continued:
"I know the winged fairies who play in the pippin orchards. I spin tales at night from beneath the bed-clothes, where further down I dare not reach my toes for fear of hurting the coily things by the footboard. I'm a version of thee, I'm a version of others yet to come ... and soon I will join the procession between the night daisies, joining songs of such sad beauty..."
Inexplicably, the words gave to Miss Clare thoughts of tiny faces each with one finger placed on their pursed lips and of tenantless see-saws at sunset pivotting amid the twirling translucent girders of the golden hill-beams.
"WHO ARE YOU?"
He replied as quietly as he could. So quiet., it was easy to forget one had heard it in the first place. Miss Clare's eyes weltered with tears at the fading memory of his answer. There were now only shadows moving in the early evening breeze which entered from the window. She looked at the nearest desk scored with the anciently inked runnels, the incomprehensibly scored languages and graffitic tales of unlikely love. The pages of an arithmetic book fluttered over, full of nothing but interlocking black circles in meaningless patterns half-concealed by careless blots.
The following day, with the weather turning back towards winter, Miss Clare shivers. One of the three naughty kids has just asked if she believes in ghosts. There was meaning in the questioner's eyes. But at least even the naughty kids cannot summon sufficient courage to ask about curses and ancient gods and arcane rituals and such matters. The other tiny children giggle as they place their palms together like pink fleshy moths closing their dusted wings, this being morning prayer. Miss Clare prays, too, that she will truly forget the tall stranger's response to her frantic WHO-ARE-YOU last night. A silent response as he pointed at the vacant desk with the arithmetic book’s cross-hatched pages still fluttering like feathers.
****
Greg learned a lot from being allowed to watch the urgent Chamber Surgery that was required in view of the advancing Bird Flew throughout Upper and Inner Earth. He was told, however, there were equivalent physico-psychological operations which in fact could benefit himself. Greg was aware that his visit to Klaxon was indeed twofold – or even threefold – ie. to have a holiday break, to record events regarding the spread of Bird Flew for posterity and to cure himself of unGregness (or Greg Flew). Klaxon, with all its bespoke chambers of good medical practice, comprised the only symbolic literary clinic/ health retreat in the Magic Mountains of Inner Earth. And his illness was not being Greg. And he wanted to be who he was by right of identity and body recognition, i.e. to be Greg, and not anyone else. To rid himself of this disease of the slipped liver.
Firstly, dreams were a sickness in themselves, because if you suffer from too many dreams, this adversely affects any residual waking life (if any), and can be classed as a sickness, till one is cured by losing any ability to have a waking life to BE diseased … or by ridding oneself of the cancerous growth of such dreams altogether through treatment in the Klaxon Chambers of Body/Mind Commerce. It made sense at the time, ie. at that stage of raw dreams that Greg was suffering precisely when the disease was defined or diagnosed in his case. Any diagnosis essentially depended on the dreams prevalent at the precise astrological epoch of the diagnosis itself. And other considerations of planetary transits and mind/body interaction. So it was an art rarther than a science.
Secondly, dream sickness featured dreams ABOUT sickness – such as dreaming of bodily nightmares that – given just a single stretch of imagination – could even beset the dreamer whether the dreamer had this dream or not.
Thirdly, there were dreams created by tablets that were prescribed for any mind’s debility during waking (non-dream) life, ie. tablets that changed the patient’s personality, changed the you you were or ever likely to be or have been.
Greg was sick of all such dreams. They kept recurring like bad pennies of the mind – until that night in Klaxon when the doctors chose to use some of their skills on curing Greg instead of those dreaming patients spiked from outside the dream by the feathered arrows of a real disease spread by birds in waking life.
Even Man needed a retort.
Greg smiled at the latest inexplicable non-sequitur. “I’m sure I can live without dreams,” he said as he self-hypnotised an attempt at persuasion that he had fully woken up – at the same time as he found himself emerging from a particularly numbing dream that had eased some of his pain. However, even more painful were the dreams that meant nothing or, worse, filled up with nonsense or, worse still, created plugs for products such as Death – thus creating the need for yet other dreams to neutralise them, ie. spamicidal dreams or dream redoubts.
The doctors had given him a sound-torch similar to those employed in gouging out patients’ feathers, but this one had to be self-operated on his own body, stroking it up and down like an electric razor – applying the focussed sound on the flesh, starting with the face, as he began to delineate a full limned-out Gregness of Greg with the help of a magnifying shaving-mirror which he had earlier used in the daily ablutions of attacking his own bewhiskered pink chops.
GREG: What next?
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: You could try the left ear. It’s far too large or cauliflowery for real Greg … yes, that’s it, ah, that’s nice. Spread the torch up and down. Do I look more like you now? It helps with the noise of the sirens, too, the earhole closing up with a web that dissolves the sound before it hits the inner drum. Pre-empting the kick-in…
GREG: I didn’t know I had such a big ear. I felt I loved Beth but she surely couldn’t have loved me with an ear like that. (Laughs)
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: Don’t delay with such things. You now quickly have to rub out the Mikeness from Greg’s mouth and then the I-ness of I from each eye.
GREG: (Waving the sound-torch up and down over his face). Good as done. But it hurts the eyes…
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: But you can see us better now and we can see YOU better through them.
GREG: Windows of the soul.
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: That’s a bit trite! More a two-way filter than a window, I’d say.
GREG: What next?
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: The whole body needs to be done eventually. A nip and tuck to bring back the sleek English lorry-driver that you truly were. Get rid of all the irrelevancies of flesh and identity. Bring in the washing to untense the washing-line of your true being.
GREG: As each minute passes, I feel the real Greg is becoming me again.
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: Or vice versa.
GREG: But WHO are you?
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: Just a reflective sounding-board. Don’t worry about me. I have no axe to grind.
GREG (Turning away from the mirror) I hope so. I really hope so. I’m no longer Mike. No longer the false I that I never wanted to be, in the first place, despite the sense of security being an I made me feel.
GREG-IN-THE-MIRROR: (From behind Greg) A FALSE sense of security. But, thinking about it, you are still not talking like a lorry-driver, are you. Argghh! (Glass crazes over as if in a psychological road crash).
When Greg had finished the sound-shaving process, he relaxed back into the newly undisguised welters of Chamber Music, waiting for the doctor to return following a set period of mind-confinement … to test whether any of the process had actually ‘taken’ and Greg was satisfied with the plug of his own recovered Gregness.
SHATTERED MIRROR: Do you know what the first sign of madness is? Being told you have hairs growing in the palm of your hand … and then looking for them!
Greg stared at his smooth inner-hand and saw a tiny hard knot in one pore which he feared might pre-figure the future tenacity of a feather.
****
Beth had been going through a feminine version of this process in a neighbouring Chamber but the facts are far more inaccessible since the various methods were privy only to the women themselves and to their beauty-sleep mentors. It is to be hoped, however, that she had removed any restricting characteristics concerned with any mutual identity-envy between her and her sister Susan.
A low-key end to what was a crucial soundfest.
****
When Greg and Beth emerged from their respective chambers of re-asserted identity, they immediately fell into each other’s arms, with a renewed love surging through their veins – not so much reminding them of their old love as it once was but showing them the potential of their new love as a cathartic transformation of their old love … as a crystallised plug of wisdom to replace the angst that used to fill the growing hole of disappointment gradually and ineluctably encroaching upon them in recent years, to blot out what was once possible between them by revealing what was now possible again in the enhanced wonders of sheer togetherness and love for each other as well as for life itself.
The sirens had momentarily ceased their wailing, whilst the citizens were singing a Bach Cantata. Not stage-managed so much as the natural spontaneity of a flashmob.
Many gazed up into Klaxon’s undersky, shading their eyes from a newly radiant Sunnemo, in fact two Sunnemos as one had emerged from a blindspot to become the other’s ghost and symbolic of the love between Greg and Beth. Within the glowing skin of the master Sunnemo could be glimpsed the silhouette of the Angel Megazanthus itself slowly and repeatedly folding and unfolding its wraparound wings, a vast king in yellow, or a nesting mother-bird, or a token of a horror vision now made divine.
A scattering of hot-powdered ANGEVIN fell from the two cores like Christmas snow.
****
"I don't think you're anyone to talk," says Beth.
As I haven't said much since breakfast, I wonder what she can have in mind. I retrace for myself what has passed through my lips since re-establishing contact following the long night – trying to identify anything to which she may have taken exception. This thought process lasts a mere second, so Beth finds it difficult to notice any pause between her statement and my reply, which is:
"If I'm not anyone to talk, what actually am I then if not anyone and, furthermore, what am I currently doing, if not talking?"
It is my little attempt at humour, to lighten the gloom that has long settled upon our heavy-duty marriage. Neither of us are spring chickens, after all – and, Beth, if a trifle batty, is not as senile as some women of her age.
"When was the last time you forgot something? Only yesterday. So, a little forgetfulness seems to be something we both share." Beth appears triumphant, as she says this. I liken her to a ghost with wrinkled skin wrapped round it, one who realises that one-upmanship is the only thing that pumps the juices around without using the corroded veins. It is as if she has discovered the way to by-pass death.
I remember earlier times when a disturbance at the dead of night was the sound of my nose-bleed. And I was so ashamed of the fuss and bother, the next day I decided to make it up to Beth and, on the spur of the moment, said: "How about going up to see Trooping the Colour in London, today?" I smiled, automatically fingering my nose which had caused all the trouble, testing for any renewed flow.
"Trooping of the Colour? You're not usually interested in all that brass band stuff and pomp and circumstance..."
Beth was genuinely bewildered by my suggestion following close on the heels of our sleepless night with my nose – especially since I rarely took her anywhere. She recalled the way she had needed to baby me, after I'd woken up covered with blood. In the heat of the moment, my whole face and head, she later hinted, seemed drawn out into the shape of a nose, not unlike a horse's. Indeed, she had wanted a bit of calming down herself, after the initial shock, but soon realising it was merely a nose-bleed, if a bad one, allowed her quickly to regather her matronly forces, as she vanished downstairs to find a cold penny to drop down my back. An ancient remedy.
****
Anyway, that was some time ago. Today, her new talk of us sharing forgetfulness stirs my own hackles. She has not fully appreciated the wisdom of her own thoughts, but what she has said causes me to turn some corner of reality. Not that I fully negotiate the bend: I hover at the corner's edge: seeing simultaneously whence I come and whereto I go.
I recall a dream. There were creatures with skins far wrinklier than Beth's, worn like togas, or long turbans, or undulating saris, with rips and tears for normal orifices. Nothing frightful about them. The whole tone was one of sensuality amid siren-sound – but with not a single sign of those embarrassing effects of childhood dreams when one wondered if, in the morning, mother would notice the tell-tale stains on the sheets. I don't want to be uncouth. So, I'll leave enough rope for others to hang themselves.
"What are you moithering about?" Beth has just emerged from one of her own brown studies, to notice mine.
"Oh, nothing, really." I have become an accomplished liar, since entering realms of mutual weak-mindedness that ancient marriages often engender without the participants noticing.
****
"Come on, Beth, a day up in London will do us both some good. Blow away the cobwebs. And you always like seeing the Queen..."
The last time she'd actually seen the Queen in the flesh was on her succession to the throne back in 1952 – and, even then, Beth had not expressed a view one way or the other. She rarely did. It'd been far too hot, she recalled. Everybody was sweltering, kids flaking out – and, yes, plenty of nose-bleeds. It was funny how thoughts could run in circles, especially the thoughts of someone as unround as Beth.
"We don't even usually watch it on television, let alone traipsing all the way up there to see it properly."
That was her last word on the matter, as she went off to see if she could dredge up any more kitchen chores to keep her busy.
I shrugged. I didn't even know myself why I'd plumped on the Trooping the Colour for an unfamiliar trip out. Perhaps it was because I had accidentally watched Beating the Retreat on TV the evening before. Soldiers threading between each other in always resolvable ranks. The bands keeping time to the unnaturally fast marches. Just a smidgin short of goose-stepping. Quick-fire changes of routine. Ancient rallies. All for what? Beth's phrase about "pomp and circumstance" came back to my mind as uncharacteristic of her. Other words like "ritual" and "ceremonial" came to me against all the odds of my feeble vocabulary of thought. The plush flags with motifs betokening brave actions in history. Killing fields where they cultivated the cropped corpses of men and horses. The officious shouts echoing across Horseguards Parade. The rigid stands-to-attention, held for periods on end. The endemic patriotism of the Englishman. And, again, I had to ask: Why?
****
But that was then, and this is now.
"Nothing?" she said to my oh-nothing-really.
Today, we are out window-shopping. The bus is late and we have decided to wait for a second one, rather than be annoyed by the first one. But this entails loitering outside shops, dithering over this and that. Where to have a coffee. Or if.
I abandon her interrogative, left it hanging in the air like a hook waiting to hang me. Nothing question mark. She will have to be the next one to say something or neither of us will talk again, I vow. I have often vowed this, and one of us has always surrendered and spoken, sometimes even me. But now, things are different. Her lips are pursed tighter than I've ever seen them, stretching her scrawny neck almost smooth, yet with residues of foxing and echoes of frown divots. The eyes squint at me. I am at the well-head of her soul, but I need to drop a bucket to test its drinkability. And, as the old song goes, there is a hole in mine, dear Liza, dear Liza.
****
I gingerly touched my nose again. Not as if I regularly suffered from nose-bleeds. The last one was as a teenager. The sweet sickliness at the back of the throat. The fear of a body drained of its fluids.
Beth returned bearing two cups of coffee.
"Perhaps, we ought to go out," she said.
"To Trooping the Colour?"
"Yes, why not? What time shall we get a train?"
I looked at my watch and absentmindedly remembered a dream.
Dreams were often either recurrent or obsessive, dependent on the guilt the dreamer felt and whether the dream controlled the dreamer or vice versa. A particular dream of mine, however, was sired by Obsession, out of Recurrence. The dream depicted my act of waking up to discover sleeping beside me, not Beth, but the Queen. The most frightening part of the dream was not the fact that the Queen was actually there beside me but that she snorted as well as snored.
****
Come evenings, we sit silently before the flickering square shrine, imbibing the coarse cultures upon which most others seem to thrive. It keeps us quiet, I suppose.
Not that we need much gagging now, after the self-imposed synchronicity of our not-talking vow. The second bus, too, has not turned up till late. Yet neither of us has groused. We show our mugshot passes to the hunched-up driver with the minimum of fuss, merely a microsecond of photo-flash. Strange – the driver looks a bit like a wrinkly creature with a large ear from an erstwhile dream. And his girl-groupie, too, with tight jeans, but remarkably flabby flesh up top – one of those flighty flirt-merchants who seems to enjoy swaying on their feet with the rhythm of the bus, holding indecipherable talk-ins with someone who ought otherwise to concentrate more on grappling with the large wheel. Amy and Arthur, their names, if what they called each other had any value of recognition or identity.
Despite our age, Beth and I ride on the upper deck. The stairs are growing crueller, it is true, and today I am determined that I will pretend to drive the bus with the safety-bar at the front top, something I have not done since I was a wet-behind-the-ears kid. Better than a wet-after-the-dreams kid, no doubt. I laugh inside at my own silent joke. Beth frowns as if she has read my childishly crude mind. I hope the rest of the passengers are thankful for my selfless wrestling with the unwieldy vehicle, for the joy-rider down below who ought to be steering is probably enjoying the girl-groupie nibbling on his ear-lobes. Better than a burger-in-a-bun, which Beth and I are often forced to cram down our throats, because of our indecisiveness not to do so. I laugh again. Public transport is all the rage these days. As we sat in silence, I overheard a conversation between two other passengers.
“We’re trapped on this bus.”
“You can get off at the next stop. It’s not like a plane.”
“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it. To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape – until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meet in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox – that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”
“Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.
****
The air was like dead meat. I turned my attention back to Beth from overhearing things I wish I had never heard. Indeed, far from blowing away our cobwebs, the humid atmosphere festooned our faces with sticky strands of its own, with not even a single spider in attendance. Beth fanned herself with a folded Sun, as, now we had boarded another form of public transport (viz. a train) trundling northward through South London. The desolate expanses of British Rail land was a junkyard of disused tracks, whilst the rusting rails were still on equidistant parade for potential use. All the sleepers were worm-holed, except, Beth hoped, for the ones which the train clattered above. The scrawny trees trooped brown and green, with tower-block sentries as intermittent backdrop.
"Perhaps, it wasn't such a good idea, after all," I suggested, as I looked away from the fleeting frames of a no-man's-land where people lived and with which I dreaded getting acquainted. Central London was at least an oasis, where strangers, being straightforward cosmopolitans, weren't as strange as those true strangers of the inner suburbs. The sooner we reached London Bridge Station, the better. The sooner we returned home, even better. Excursions were probably a necessary evil, I thought. However, the less that people went out of their homes, the less evil would necessarily be evil. People wouldn't mug, murder or maim each other, if they stayed at home, studiously forgetting the domestic variety of violence. Yes, I hadn't hit Beth for several years now, even though I physically loathed the tufts of old-lady hair that were now sprouting in odd patches on her erstwhile youthful face and body.
"Makes a change," replied Beth to my earlier comment, with barely a pause for thought. Thoughts were not her forte. However, she hoped the railtracks held up as long as she was on them.
"Makes a change," I echoed.
Makes a change? What ever does she mean? Who wanted change, anyway. These days, even change itself had changed. The world could do with far less of change, to my mind. Routines were not half so bad as they were painted. Ancient routines. Like Trooping the Colour. And the train passed the open goal of one end of Tower Bridge, temporarily closed to traffic, I assumed.
Yes, I remembered. An initial study had reported that its girders were corroded and badly in need of repair. It had been originally built for horse-drawn traffic to cross the Thames. Come to think of it, only a few years ago, the Queen used to ride her own horse in the Trooping the Colour ceremony, side-saddle, with a stiff-brushed white feather standing up in her tunic hat. Now she was too old. The soldiers were more regimented in those days, too. More colourful, despite being seen by most of the population in television's black and white. No hint of governmental Defence cuts, then. Nowadays, the Queen was dragged behind another horse in a phaeton. Everything had a more burnished look in the Fifties, more spit-and-polish. Even trains were smarter. There had been a certain nobility in the blood. And no scandals.
London Bridge was bustling with visitors, many just idling at a loose end, some with intent on their faces, a few who decidedly had the air of being complete strangers, making my hair prickle up on the back of my neck – and I saw at least one stranger who had more in common with an actual animal than a human being. Beth was oblivious to such concerns, wanting to sit down and have a hot drink. Yes, hot, despite the heat. We were both dressed for cold weather. One of the few affectionately secret jokes of our marriage was Beth's hatred of the cold – on my behalf and well as her own. Indeed, we had not plucked up the courage to remove a few things, as had the cooler, if uglier, customers milling around us.
The question neither of us had yet asked ourselves was why we had come to London Bridge Station. Victoria or Charing Cross would have been far more convenient, bearing in mind the venue of the ceremony we had come to see. And, here we were, looking for Bank tube, having eschewed the station nearer London Bridge for no accountable reason other than that the Northern Line was too deep for them. The Central or Circles Lines from Bank would be better, less claustrophobic, especially on a hot day, we thought. But we hadn't told each other the reason, in case the one laughed at the other's madness.
The truth, which neither could admit, was that we were lost. We ended up walking round St Paul's Cathedral in a rather desultory fashion, reminding me of a dream I once had of a cathedral that straddled rather than squatted domely. We returned home, without having the nerve to do anything else, nor even to partake of a tea and a fancy-cake. Neither mentioned to each other the original purpose of our trip to London, not even when we later saw the news and discovered that there'd been a terrorist bomb at the Trooping the Colour ceremony, which, thankfully, missed the Queen by a whisker, but had maimed one of the horses.
That night, I dreamed that I was woken up in the dead of night by the sound of clattering upon the roof above our bedroom. Followed by snorting noises in the general direction of the skylight.
In the morning, I saw that the roof slates were covered in something white and evidently sticky. Some ill-tufted birds seemed to be in a parlous state as they tried to hop into the air from off it, only managing it at great cost to their plumage. The bits they left behind looked more like hair than feathers. Beth, who washed the pavement outside the house every morning, shine or showers, was quite aghast at this outrage. She looked accusingly at me.
"I'm sorry," I said. Which was exactly the right thing to have said. And we went indoors for a nice cup of tea. Beth's looks were similar to the Queen's, I had always thought. I squinted through a silver tea-strainer at her. She was the only person in the world who was least like a stranger. I later gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. The first for many years. She smiled, as if she knew the cold times were over. Or simply the smile knew.
****
But things weren't over. Beth rises from her armchair, with the merest swish of her bodily curtains. She obviously intends to switch off the damn screen, so that we can ritualise our preparations for yet another long incommunicado night. However, I am determined to be obstreperous. After all, men of my age are meant to be tetchy. Before she is able to reach the stare-eyed creature in the corner, I have, with my oilier bone-system, darted in front of her and fended off her programmes of instilled habit. Please believe me, but I never, in normal circumstances, raise a hand to a woman, nor have I ever done so vis-à-vis Beth, despite the various provocations that might have excused me. But, tonight, I grab hold of the hem of her flesh – a neatly stitched scar which has marked her neck ever since I remember – and tug it viciously down, rupturing her blouse in the process and scattering breastfuls of plum-pudding to every corner of the living-room.
She weeps bitterly as, on hands and knees, she desperately tries to gather together the missing parts of her body. I might claim that crying was tantamount to breaking her spiteful vow of silence – but I retain at least an ancient residue of affection for the one who was once my sweetheart all those years ago.
It does not take much for a living-room to become a dying one: a lethal chamber. Nor a vow to become a curse.
"I didn't mean to make you sad." There, I’ve said it. I am man enough: proud not to have too much pride. At least, she will die with us on speaking terms. But then she finds what she seeks on the floor – the locket she has always worn around her neck. Inside it, a bus ticket – a souvenir of earlier days when she was the girl-groupie and me the hunky bus driver.
"I don't think you're anyone to talk," she says. And yes, it’s true, I haven't been able to talk (or even anything else) since that day the bus that I drove failed to take a tight bend. Or was blown up by another terrorist.
Beth has spent the rest of eternity simply dreaming me alive in a dead-end marriage.
I smile and troop after her to bed ... seeking sleep's ancient remedy for life. Dream of a better reality.
****
Bach’s Cantata draws to an end and the sirens resume, as Greg and Beth, hand in hand, continue their adventures of self-discovery within Inner Earth. He would need to visit Klaxon’s cleansing chambers regularly for the Gregness of Greg to prevail. And to tussle with the Tenacity of Feathers.
****
Beth stared up at Sunnemo – and she wondered whether the Angel Megazanthus within its eggskin owned a sensory capacity equivalent to her own selfhood. Beth was the salt of the earth, full of natural Essex feistiness. She was so deeply in tune with things that she didn’t understand she was in tune with, even her wondering about this fact took place without it touching the sides of her own selfhood’s intellect (or lack of). A process that could only be addressed by the arts of fiction or fantasising. Imagining imagination that could not exist without multiple imaginations plugging in socket to socket. A power of imagination (a strength to dream) that could only be possible following contact with the Flew. Flown the next nest. Brain with new wings. Mind with old ones. Beth Flew. Greg Flew. All flocking together towards or from the Klaxon chambers as a positive migratory force of flight.
So, in short, did the Angel Megazanthus have its own ‘consciousness’? Or did it manoeuvre its wings as part of some parthenogenetic spontaneity … or of a mysteriously insidious instinct of twitching or tweaking parts of itself to prove to any observers (such as Beth and Greg) that there was indeed a real creature lurking within its shape: pulling its own strings from within itself. Beth thought about one of her friends from school. Rachel Mildeyes (as she was known to peers and teachers alike). Everyone loved Rachel. She had a self-creative gloss that girls like Beth could never aspire to. Nevertheless, Beth was one of Rachel’s best friends … sharing those secret feminine moments that remain an enigma to most men.
Beth wondered if everyone’s special friend – someone they recall with deep affection (remarkably forgotten or appreciated quite how deep) – populated the shape that was Angel Megazanthus. She imagined Rachel looking down upon her now – in Klaxon – as she and Greg wandered aimlessly from chamber to chamber, yet learning cumulatively the lessons of imagination whilst living within imagination’s creation (fiction, fantasy or dream) as real people. Most fictions contained fictional characters ... or once real people – now ceased to be real people (if retaining their real names) – fictionalised as fiction characters. Yet, strangely, Beth and Greg retained their hard-won, hard-worn identities as real minds and bodies while living and dreaming – unfictionalised – within a full-blooded fiction. A fiction shot through with reminders of itself via fluctuating volumes (from silent to strident) of Klaxon’s noise.
STUB OF PENCIL:
RACHEL MILDEYES PEERED THROUGH A SLIT IN SUNNESKIN, FEELING HER HUGE WRINKLED, WEBBY WINGS ON THE OUTSIDE OF HER BODY (JOINED TO HER BUT NOT STRICTLY HERS TO USE) LIFT SLOWLY LIKE IMPERFECT FLAPS OF HER OWN SKIN MERGING (LIKE SHUFFLING CARDS WITH CARDS) INTO THE SINEWY MEMBRANES (HALF-COOKED, BUT DE-BLOODED, MEAT AND/OR POULTRY) OF SUNNE’S LAST UNDERLAYER OF SURFACE SKIN. SHE FELT HERSELF TO BE A CORE BUT ALSO A CORE’S INNARDS – BUT COULD A CORE HAVE ANYTHING WITHIN IT WITHOUT THE INNARDS BECOMING A NEW CORE?
Beth laughed at the whimsy of such imaginings in the air about Rachel spotting her from aloft. It was bad enough living within imaginings without adding to them with one’s own imaginings!
Greg asked why Beth was laughing – giving her a peck on the cheek in honour of their lately rediscovered love of and for each other – and as he did so, they happened to pass a lobe or dune near to new chambers about to be on their list of visits whilst here in Klaxon – to learn about preparations for war and other hand-to-hand conspiracies.
“Nothing really. Just an old schoolfriend. She was funny and I just remembered an old joke we had together.”
“Rachel, you mean? You’ve even forgotten to send her Christmas cards in recent years. Life by-passes friendships sometimes.”
Rachel shrugged, reading ‘time’ for ‘life’ in what he had just said. Greg smiled. Indeed, Klaxon was soon to be at war with itself – a fact that had been lost sight of, one that needed addressing because, as visitors, they owed it to themselves to get their loyalties sorted out like coloured threads in the eventual textured pattern of carpet pre-destined for their feet to walk. Captain Nemo had not briefed them about these dangerous inter-tribal machinations before leaving the now pyloned earthcraft. And here was Beth talking about an old schoolfriend! “Women!” he thought – and laughed at and against his own instincts.
****
Having walked on water, the saviour clambered on board and went the rest of the way by boat. Soon after landing, he was brought to a paralytic man lying on a stretcher-bed.
“Your sins are forgiven,” announced the saviour. “Rise and take up your bed.”
The man rose with the merest bubble of breath and crack of bone - & set off, without bothering to take up his bed. The saviour was spitting blood, shouting for the man to come back and take up the bed, but the wretch merely wagged his finger at the saviour and strolled away in a strange wading motion. As it would have been a pity for any loss of temper to become quicksand in the otherwise firm path towards Divinity, the saviour decided to use the abandoned bed for a long well-earned snooze.
****
BETH: Now we’ve rediscovered our love for each other, I get the feeling that they’re splitting us up again by forcing us to be on different sides in a war.
GREG: I didn’t understand all this about a war, until someone mentioned it in a cavé the other day ... off the cuff almost. Klaxon seemed so peaceful when we first arrived.
BETH: (Laughs) Peaceful!
GREG: Well, you know what I mean. Citizens at peace with each other, at least, if not with this flipping racket of air signals! (Laughs, too)
EDITH: The war was second thoughts, I gather. Things were getting too boring ... and tension IS required for anything creative to work properly. Even Proust realised that as he created friction as well as fiction between levels of time.
CLARE: And of sexual acceptability. Between levels of it, that is. Grinding levels sparking off further frictions … and spinning.
GREG: How do you ladies cope with seeing everything as if it’s in a book? It’s enough for me to get my head round reality! Isn’t this place bizarre enough already without fictionalising it? This war, for example. I hear it’s where a person becomes a Flew person and those who are not Flew are still themselves – and they open veins in their bodies to see if they can merge the meats between them – coming together in hugs that blend as genuinely as hugs of love always tried to be.
BETH: Or sex. Not love. Yet, it’s a war. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s not a love-in.
EDITH: A love-between?
CLARE: That’s a better expression – a love-between, but the meats weren’t meant to merge, when some people have become poultry – some even giant insects – leaving some other people as genuine human meat. And when they try this love-blending business, the meats reject each other. Like transplants in the old days.
BETH: Captain Nemo always spoke about something called Human Coning when we were all getting here on the earthcraft. Perhaps that was a misprint – I mean a mispronouncement for what you’re talking about. War because the cones or clones don’t ‘take’. I’m talking beyond myself, now. But do you know what I mean?
CLARE: I think so. It is only possible to understand rarifications like that if you fictionalise them – which brings us back to where we started.
EDITH: So, what are we saying? As in Proust we need really long sentences to manage the concepts properly – whilst conversation is inevitably staccato. Like this.
GREG: All I know – is that the citizens are in two warring groups – yet simultaneously paired off as love-partners BETWEEN each group. And they want us to nail our colours to one mast or the other. In fact, Crazy Lope and Go’spank are already involved. Up to their necks.
BETH: Not only warring, Greg, but VICIOUSLY warring. The combatants are tooth and nail. Almost tearing each other apart – sinew by sinew. Both sexes, each sex with a different sex, or both the same sex together. It does not seem to matter to birds or insects. I could never tell their genders, in any event.
EDITH: Proust hinted at all this in SWANN’S WAY.
CLARE: Needs careful exegesis, though, Edie.
BETH: Do they have any weapons – others than their bodies, I mean?
GREG: I saw a skirmish outside one of the lethal chambers. The sirens sort of joined in, increasing their pitch – as a cover for the weapons. Or to imitate the weapons, perhaps.
BETH: Old-fashioned muskets.
EDITH: More than just muskets. The muskets, if they ARE muskets, had mouths – when they were popping. Muskets that were insect-like whatever the meat they grew from.
GREG: I’m sure there are more to the shape of the words themselves, if not to their meanings. Mask, Masque, Mosque, Mosquito, Musketeers, Mousquetaires. I seem to have lived with these horrible words every night when I dream. In fact, I’ve not really thought about all this before OUTSIDE of a dream.
BETH: Old-fashioned dreams. There are no such thing as old-fashioned dreams any more. Fictionalised dreams are – well, I’m beginning to think that fictionalised things are actually more real – more tenable – than non-fictionalised things.
GREG: Hmmm. I always preferred reading non-fiction because I thought it was real.
BETH: We are alone. This is frightening. True horror.
EDITH: Don’t worry, Beth. We are all in this together. We have been from the start. We visited you in your flat all those years ago, when Arthur and Amy were playing in the garden.
CLARE: That’s when we knew we had to protect you and each other.
BETH: But now we have to fight a war. Nobody warned us about that, when we signed up for the trip.
GREG: We could get back to the Drillcraft. And persuade Nemo to leave early for Agraska. Which pylon? I’ve forgotten.
EDITH: (Turning to Clare) Sunnemo is a place in Sweden – Hawler is a place in Kurdistan. The surface is alive with places like that. Proust lived on the surface once. Many poets flew in his wake. Fin de Siècle.
CLARE: Yes, Dumas’ Black Tulip, too. Characters without depth. Silhouettes. I think to use the word ‘cardboard’ about fiction characters is demeaning.
EDITH: Indeed.
****
The row of derelict chicken sheds had open hatches three-quarters of the way up to the ramshackle roofs – ready to launch squawking squatter-rats in further spurts of Olympian endeavour. I slept in the house nearby, being one of those toffs whom the squatter-rats so loathed and would really liked to have raced against – thus to diminish their competitive bloodlust rather than do it between themselves in running skirmishes of hand-to-hand brawling (to which they eventually resorted as “better” than racing). Sorry, the whole thing was a bit too complicated to tell, anyway.
As for me, I preached taking-part-is-as-important-as-winning from my open window. But the finishing-line came too late.
I recall that particular evening, with the sun low in the sky casting doubts as well as twirling girders of translucent gold. First one gnarled head, then another, poked from the chicken hatches, tousled mops coiffured into coxcombs. With jabbing glances to either side, I was soon to be treated with the sight of their knees for ears and scrawny thighs clambering out in piecemeal contortions.
Eventually, they scuttled across the allotment, their muskets like knobbled elbows ratchetting out in skewed angles … rehearsals of bullets rattling into my fence. I waved a fist at them from my bedroom window, only to discover they were already doing likewise to me, in unison, wishfully thinking I would come out to have the race to end all races, a beatable customer for their cut-throat athletics. My principles did not, of course, extend to jeopardising my own preservation to provide a catharsis that would in turn prevent an even bloodier competitive edge. I limbered up, though, in my bedroom – just in case.
In any event, as I say, the finishing-line came too late.
When things got a bit quieter, with the squatter-rats off on their practice jaunts, I did venture into my garden which was next door to that allotment with the now empty chicken sheds. The wood of the leaning gap-toothed fences and of the tumbledown sheds themselves and of the nearby goose-run and of many of the makeshift trees had all been blackened by the recent climatic changes. If I did not know better, I would think I was in a particularly bizarre dream.
One of the more chickenish squatter-rats, previously concealed from my view by his own shadow, jumped out and started squawking so frantically about the final race, it was difficult for me to pick out any words other than ‘race’. The creature’s knees and elbows were somehow conjoined like outlandish mouth-lips with his elongated neck plus narrow head their intervening tongue.
“They’ve gone off to train for the last race. A race war. The last race on earth.”
At last his gabble had separated out.
“How do you know it’s the last race?” I asked.
“Because... because there are no real competitors left to race against.” The squatter surveyed me quizzically as if sizing me up for sacrifice in the very last dash of all.
Deciding to tack against the natural drift of the dialogue, I asked for his name.
“None-of-your-business.”
‘Nonefer Yerbizniz? That’s an interesting name.”
He knew the game was up. I’d blown his cover. The rest came out in a rush, each word racing the next: “Mama Yerbizniz, Dada Yerbizniz, Cousin Yerbiznizes, they’ve all gone off... I’m just a sad critter compared to them, left here to guard nothing but the ruins of a track.”
“You’re squawking again, Nonefer ... what’s the point of speaking when he to whom you speak cannot make head nor tail of your gibber?”
Whatever was said, there was indeed an argument for saying the finishing-line had come too early. Nonefer was the real victim of the racing, the only one left alive to compete again. Gene against gene.
In the distance, we heard the grumbling hills, much like the thunderheads bubbling up in the olden days before the climate changed, with clouds now clashing more in the mode of tongues clucking than lightning flashes sparking off Heavenly removal men’s clumsy attempts at preventing the ricochet of angels’ furniture in spur-of-the-moment elopements to Hell. Phew! It was a good job I wouldn’t be called to write all this down. I can simply call the war a Demolition Derby, by rumour if not by hard fact. That’s all.
That night, I heard Nonefer’s squawking plaintive crooning about the way death was only sad for those left behind. He envied his Cousin Yerbiznizes their race wars – in Heaven or Hell, he wasn’t sure.
And it was morning by the time I truly fell into a sufficiently peaceful slumber, thus blotting out Nonefer’s plangent wails. I hope I don’t wake up till much later, or I won’t be in a fit state for digging or putting a sad critter out of its misery. A rat race apart. Other than that, perhaps the whole point of telling this was to prove that having-no-point is the point.
****
Sunnemo released its demonised shafts of rainlight along the Inner Earth gutters surrounding the City of Klaxon. The sirens whined out their customary warning to earthcraft sailors – as the war was about to enter a cyclic moment of intensest victory or defeat. Consequently, the Canterbury Oak became as silent as the deadened or unwound stridency of buried toys – as it no longer needed to summon up the soundchecks that, given a slightly altered scenario, would indicate the impending challenge-and-response already (before the chance to record it was given) in full bitter sway.
I stood again beneath the very gravity-logged Oak, from where I had first viewed Klaxon all those clockwork ratchet-clicks ago. The ear shape of the City had, by now, become a mass of new dunes or lobes, some inflamed as with a disease from further inward to where even Inner Earth itself failed to reach. Millions of citizens in various stages of Name Flew were currently in individual hand-to-hand combat, comprising two armies both with their lethal plugs in the pylons … and, by dint of the power vacuum provided by the resonating echoes, it was difficult to judge which inter-combatant belonged to which army of ready-opened body-gaps bearded with feathered veins.
All the catacombed or labyrinthine out-buildings had retained their vulnerable chimneystacks despite the sideways weapon-like sound-torch gravities gushing along every channel of combat between shuffling individuals of volitional war-strength – and the organic structures built into or around these chimney-flues were remarkably still intact but many now had growths of coxcomb or wattle. From each roof, they crew long, they crew wildly at the fast denemonising of Sunnemo into Mount Core. Its Megazanthine flames like wings half-lit the embracing sky around me.
****
Most faces, these days, are kept behind glass, representing those too scared to venture into the city streets.
Still, they yearn for the outside, hence their mooning faces stuck to the inside of the wintry windows like posters ... seeking sights, often locking on to others of their kind in the windows opposite, then tracking the movements of those diminishing souls who do brave the urban phobias, watching with clouded eyes.
The streets grow empty, the streets grow dark and, even come the mornings, the streets only grow vaguely less empty, only vaguely less dark. As the cold closes in, too, the windowfolk's smeary ears can only hear the oil-slicks upon the seas of siren noise.
The people behind such faces are hidebound by reality and tend to condemn the art of imagination. So, when one of their number – Beth – sees what she considers to be an elfin creature kicking its jingly-jangly foot in the gutter during its apparent saunter between two nowheres in particular, yes, when she thinks she has just witnessed this sight, a sight more fitting for her dreams – dreams which can only occur when she manages to sleep between her lengthening shifts of window watching – she looks imploringly towards another face, another of her kind, in the bedroom window of the house opposite ... in some attempt, no doubt, to cross-check. Cross-checking with each other was the only comfort that such faces could possibly muster having retained the art of reading expressions and, in rare cases, lips.
One wild Wednesday, it is, with winds of rain travelling up the Balsam River to the conurbation as if on a conveyor-belt. The windowfolk are settling in for a seemingly endless wet-watch, when the playing of out-staring competitions with each other across the city squares is the most amusement for which any of them can lightly hope – and, even then, most secretly yearn to lose such competitions without making it too obvious.
Beth's face hears the elfin bell-pad's earnest approach – and whips of wind eke teardrops from a sorrowful dusk, as her face finally sees the ambling cockiness of the tinkle-trod imp.
Faces that are kept behind the cold river-mapped glass are quickly warmed with the flames of sight that are switched on from some spigot in the soul.
Indeed, the rain was already, until then, threatening to turn to sleet or, even, to a swarm of snow – but the faunish entity seen splashing in the gutter with jingling joy aided the facefolk's weatherwatch against and Agraskan winter.
"Singing in the rain, I'm singing in the rain, what a glorious feeling..." it trills with the tune's runes tingling the gazers' newly pricked-up ears, the window-glass – through which the facefolk moon – cleaning itself not only of the frost but of its smears of sound-proofing, too.
And they all join in with the chorus.
But then the faces and their worst fears are reunited; they watch the creature being mugged by one of the plug-ugly bruisers whose crimes of brutal street robbery are so self-defeating in keeping the city rat-runs free from the wealthy footpad folk whom the faces used to be.
The imp's last plaintive song is a plea for help but it goes unheard as warmth wilts from the windows...
There's no money upon the elfin body for a bruiser to steal, of course. But the creature's plaintive song itself should soon be switched off from the spigot in its soul ... whenever any bruiser – with feasting jaws – reaches that far in its elfin body.
****
Greg walked the outways until he decided that this was not a particularly efficient method to find a social environment conducive to meeting his future mate – the outways being between the suburbs and the city, a ring of gridwork housing called the Klaxon Lobe.
One dreadful morning, Greg met a few city stragglers poking around some of those dead bodies who had, when they were real people, failed to reach the unemployment office on time. The stragglers looked at Greg and then set about pointing dramatically into the sky. Through the scattering of cushiony clouds, there appeared an alien spacecraft like an endless tongue of metal. But who had ever heard of a spacecraft actually joined to its mother planet Light Years away? That was a universal question fit to beat the combined brains of a thousand top notch philosophers. It stood to reason that Greg was not one such. However, he was man enough for most normal processes of the mind, but the softness inside his head certainly had to go into overdrive. He pointed, along with the others, and stated quite baldly to his new found friends that it was not a spacecraft at all but an earthcraft come to rescue them from a belief that the sky was the sky.
The world seemed a sunnier place from that moment on, but it didn't help Greg much, since he discovered he was someone else. The stragglers had scuttled off, except for those who were already corpses.
The Klaxon Lobe was indeed nothing but outlandish geography, but it WAS part of the city where the facefolk mooned; it actually existed beneath the common sky of man. Nobody outside its ringworld purlieus knew of its whereabouts. The faces in the suburbs knew not of the faces in the city and vice versa – and neither knew of the land between – except in dreams. However, one day, Greg managed to beat a path into it, not via dream, but across this ring of reality. His existence as a alter-nemo turned out to be a dream which he had thought was real life. He had been at war with himself and – imagining himself to be a mighty-thewed warrior with a sound-torch in one hand and a three-handed broadsword in the other, both of which had grown to become living extensions of his arms – he had seen himself off but, now, with the imputation of insufficient blood to slake his thirst, he took his horny home upon widening shoulders; eventually and inadvertently, marching into the Lobe ... seeking foes for their own sake.
Many whispered good riddance to bad rubbish. But, if they had read their hearts to the bottom, they would miss having Greg around and sleep less easy in their beds for lack of the devil they had known. Their proverbs churned over and became confused as well as more meaningful: "One nasty giant in the hand is worth two in the offlands", "A blood-letter in time is worth nine already in the post-hole", "A rolling limb-hacker need gather none of your bad rubbish", "Bad riddance to alter-nemos" and so forth. Greg shrugged off these confused maxims with some crazinesses of his own devising: such as walking for eternities in empty city streets where roamed scrawny goats which, at the very least, allowed him to quench the top-edge of his thirst for blood.
Soon, that was not enough, since eternities are a very long time and the eager under-thirsts clustered in the pit of his cavernous stomach and, one day in a million, they hit the gullet with one combined forward-push just as he came upon the ring of reality between the jagged jaws of his own imagined horizon. And, the place being so unutterably nowhere, the loneliness sent a siren louder into his skull and the crazinesses which he himself had earlier engendered began to flush out certainties from his mind. HE was the only foe he could not slice in two with one deft stroke. He crouched and sobbed, whilst wrestling tooth and nail with himself. He sobbed even harder at the sight of his bottom-heavy sword and silent torch. Both gravity-logged like the Canterbury Oak.
The faces in the city, and those in the suburbs too, could not believe their dreams when they saw the pitiful sight – but dreams they surely were. Yet at the edge of the Lobe, where no man's lands meet, there stood a single block of flats that seemed distinct from its neighbours, one without numbers. Greg, in a disguise more amenable to his true state, had so much libido, he felt as if he had a spiky sputnik between his legs. He was romantically attached to Beth's face at one of the windows and he would wait outside till kingdoms came and went, rather than regret his impatience for the rest of his life. The other faces at the many windows often stared out at him as he loitered outside. The sole streetlamp settled a steamy light upon his snazzy stuffed hat, the brim of which hid his features as if he were a spy or a tax-avoidance scout. Equally, the faces in the house were overshadowed – to Greg's mind – by large eaves and leaning chimney-stacks.
He breathed hard. One of the faces he knew was Beth (but he didn't know her name). Greg wondered why he had fallen in love with her, in view of her steepness. Moreover, she was far from pretty and doubtlessly carried a small butcher's shop between her legs – and her meat would have gone off years ago. A young elfin creature had arrived out of nowhere and knocked on the secret door. It delivered something to the block's letter-box and then placed its mouth to it, remaining in that position for longer than was necessary to share a password with any off-duty face acting as a doorman. This impish seeker of sex was evidently a cheapskate. One window winked shut as if someone quickly turned on and off a light inside and the tallest smoke extractor exuded a thick black liquid into the evening sky, looking almost like fumes. It streamed upwards and outwards in the shape of an umbrella. Greg pulled up his collar and walked on, eager for a pee.
Beth was evidently busy tonight counting her elfish customers in and counting them out. He would return for yet another day tomorrow. Ever tomorrow. Never today. Greg had no hard readies himself. But love couldn't be bought, only sex. He wondered if the passion he felt for the face in the counting-house was platonic and he tried to wipe away the soot-black clinging tears. He could not even count on the unnumbered house, let alone its faithful tenants. The Klaxon Lobe was just another no man's land, after all and, forthwith, Greg suffered from nasal hair which he was not adept enough with the nail scissors to snip clear of the gaping nostrils. The points always jabbed the soft bony flesh. "Ouch!" He held his free hand to the nose, whilst the other tipped up the empty pint pot. He was back amongst his own back-doubles, on the State bread-line and the current Government, if there was one, collected taxes at source. Greg had yanked out the hairs scorching the membranes, as if they were weeds whose roots were sunk into the brain itself. His head bulged hugely in an erysipelas fever, the flesh audibly ballooning and separating from the tent frame of the skull.
"DON'T pull out your nasal hair by the roots! Always cut it, or otherwise you will end up like that bruiser Greg," said the tippling suburban doctor who – because he was a wanderer not merely a windowface – was also the local optician, as well as the dentist, chiropodist, manicurist, boil lancer, pest controller and dream interpreter. He could read palms as well as lavatory bowls AND the blotched surface of a full moon when it was eerily magnified upon the Lobe's blurred horizon. Being the vet in disguise, he could not stay put for long. The mating season was one that never came naturally. Madness and hair growth go hand in hand, he often maintained. "There she blows!" he roared as he sped off in his car – whilst Greg's newly affixed face of elfin perkishness was scooped off by the tongue and swept into the only sky with only space enough for Angevin snow as well as sad songs.
As the snow slowly turned black above Lobe de Vega, a twirling broadsword toppled from the sky like a dislodged sputnik, its clang on the concrete marking the end of the last morning. Yellow jingle-jangly shoes sucked into the torch as the only sound left.
****
Beth, this time, does not bother to cross-check with the face opposite. She simply knows.
****
Edith and Clare had resorted to the same building where – cutaway or not – they had, together with Beth, originally watched Klaxon’s ritual of Sunne Stead all those years before – watched it via the transparent offices of the building’s marigold-window (since repaired).
The room itself had since been cleared of any rubble or off-detritus, although the oil-painting – depicting the ‘Reyn-Bouwe’ earthfly – still decked the wall, its frame now cleaned of its infestation by an insect-nest.
The war was clearly visible by the two dowagers – as they smoothed off the mist from the marigold’s glass. Being battened down in here had been the only option left them short of joining in the war itself by means of their own lady-bodies. A sight of the warring millions seen from the Canterbury Oak’s hilltop was one thing – but viewing the same millions from AMONGST them was quite another. The hand-to-hand contact was literally a few inches from the dowagers’ window vantage-point, with the depth of combat beyond that only a guess. A guess or a dream.
The well-stood Grandfather Clock – which was a new feature of the room since its restoration – tocked lugubriously in an ignored corner, telling moment from moment with each such snap of its ratchets. Duration would otherwise have passed smoothly without this punctuation, but, in truth, was giving an aura of mechanism to the in-fighting of the hordes – each Death Plug shown as a frozen frame of film rather than as an instantaneous path from Fly-to-Flew or Man-to-Bird-via-Insect with the aid of symbiotic/ hypersexual synergy or the staged blood-lust of multi-self out-fighting.
“Look, Clare!” screamed Edith – uncharacteristically because being bookish normally avoided any necessity of resort to hysteria.
She pointed at the room’s empty fireplace where its chimney-flue was dangling down a pair of large bird-legs accompanied by the growth of groping as well as squawking.
Clare quickly thrust large amounts of scrunched-up newspaper into the grate and lit them with a Swan Vesta, causing the legs temporarily to withdraw upwards from the tall thin flames – while she looked round for more solid fuel North of Monday.
****
Greg and Beth had meanwhile taken refuge in a lethal chamber – being the only means of protection from the ricochet damage created by the warring millions. This was a collateral or lateral irony because, normally, such places were intended to deal out death to those who found themselves there via various stages of imperviousness to sound-torch surgery.
As described in The Yellow Book, those lethal chambers were not to be lightly entered – but, luckily, Greg and Beth happened to be together when the war first ignited and they had the combined nous to take the path of least resistance (albeit the most unlikely for safety) where the interior of this particular lethal chamber, by dint of a lateral irony (an expression that bears repeating), turned out to afford a relative immunity.
Unlike Edith and Clare, they could not view the war by sight since these chambers did not boast such vantage-points as marigold-windows. However, despite the blast of renewed klaxoning by tannoy of air alerts, they could also hear the rushing frictions of combatant bodies as they barely crossed the outside like a freak weather-storm.
To hear but not see was frightening.
GREG: I love you.
BETH: I know. You’ve always loved me. Most women complain that men don’t tell them enough times that they love them. And it does need to be said once. But more than once – I wonder why they need to say it more than once, as if each time they have to say it, is because they feel themselves to have become a different person.
GREG: I am desperate to remain myself this time. Now that I’ve finally reached who I am. (He is visibly weeping).
BETH: (reaching out to him) I know. I know, Greg. I know it’s you now. Hold on to that.
They listened to things climbing on top of the chamber, just above the roof of their heads. The chamber’s resident patients gurgled lightly in their sleep praying within their dreams for homelier hospices to host them than this one. Greg and Beth looked at them – knowing that such patients were safer in here than Greg and Beth themselves, by some further ratchet of lateral irony regarding ruffled feathers.
****
Sudra’s sure that tiny people were involved. How can big ones have threaded through the pigeon flap? Yet the trail of crumbs which she discovers along their erstwhile route almost indicates fairy story characters, if not actual fairies. Whatever the case, the perpetrators are definitely not animals. Whilst animals are tiny enough and, at a push, may be capable of creating random music, they do not have the aesthetic nous of real folk. Indeed, although the music Sudra heard admittedly possessed an atonal quality, it was underlaid with a nagging harmony which, surely, excluded full-blooded haphazardness. Yes, she thinks, only real people can wield the refinement of soul sufficient to strum the air so hauntingly. By the widest stretch of the imagination, crude animal instinct fails even as a spare spear-carrier. On the other hand, the truth stares Sudra in the top of her head, if not the face. Angels, as is commonly the case, disguise themselves as ceilings, albeit, in Sudra’s chamber, crumbly ones.
****
Crazy Lope and Go’spank were ensconced in SUDRA’S SHOE SHOP during the course of the war which – by some accounts – lasted at least two decades of bitter in- and out-fighting. Other accounts gave a shorter period, by virtue of a time angle not dissimilar to Proust’s method of self-dissection with ‘selves’ sometimes overlapping but then becoming separate people with thus longer to live. Yet other accounts put the war as stretching even further into the future, where memories piled up to become tail-to-tail history books.
It is clear from other accounts that Greg and Beth eventually reached Agra Aska on an earthfly (disguised as a drill) – one called ‘The Hawler’ – in company with Captain Nemo (aka Doghnahnyi), the pair of dowagers plus the nameless shadowy businessmen from the earthfly’s corporate lounge … there, as a select number of accounts attest, to meet up with Mike, Susan, Amy, Arthur and two Agraskans called Tho and Hataz.
Sudra had been left in Klaxon to set up a shoe shop as a business venture, since her alter-nemo had died in the hawling-shafts further towards the surface. And that business spread – in time – beyond both ends of its actual start and finish, because she lost the plug keeping her own accounts in order. Everyone needed a plug to keep fixed into the circuit-boards of reality. And without a plug there was no pylon which would kick-in her true juices of duration through the veins.
Sudra enjoyed selling shoes and the war meant plenty of unshod people, even soldiers who were served ill by the authorities regarding their need for these basic essentials. As such, there was no demarcation between civilians and military, even to the extent of there being a common uniform for everyone – even the same uniform for both sides in the war.
There was a third side in the war but the constituents of its army were invisible, if not completely non-existent (non-existence being a stage further towards disbelief than invisibility or nudity). Wars are difficult to conduct from three different angles of attack, especially without benefit of conspiracies, side-treaties, bluffs, feints and counterfeints – and so this third force of participants was kept shadowy on purpose (merely being referred to as Ogdonites in mysterious underbreaths).
The two main ‘known’ armies were simply known as Them or Us, depending which side you were on or thought you were on.
Sudra had, by now, developed into a most beautiful woman and much of the remainder of our time in Klaxon will be concerned with her story, with little, if any, reflected taint from her earlier self or rumoured childhood as Mike’s step-daughter or her nightly dreams of a wicked blood-father who made her eat flesh-infested cabbages in the hope of keeping Name Flew at bay (or that was the excuse).
The war was her backdrop. Equally, Sudra’s story was the reason for the war because without her own story as ITS backdrop it would have lacked the forefront to give itself reflected point or focus.
****
The Weirdmonger, careless of the plots, meandered through park after park of scorched earth. He trod down tannoys to rid himself of their sirens – but not on purpose – simply making a bee-line for the shop that he knew was just beyond the last park of all. So he trod on concrete and sward just as readily as dune or lobe. Not even eschewing the mudpatches that prevailed in every single park. Dispersing children in their play. Elbowing bikes into untidy skids. Brusquely brushing aside attendant mothers and trainee nannies, as their prams escaped down some unlikely slopes towards where the war was still prevailing.
Each park merged with the next; some children’s playgrounds seemed to straddle two parks at once, with railings cross-sectioning ride from ride and, in some cases, splitting single rides in half. Boating-lakes, too, had paddle-boats that couldn’t land on certain banks, whilst others, of a different livery, could ply any part of the lake and put off on any towpath. The Weirdmonger could not fathom any of the rules and customs as he negotiated various rights of way and weaved between interlocking and overlapping mazes of bye-law and respective Klaxon-reclaimed or war-scorched jurisdiction. The further he travelled, the more he noticed the parks becoming shabbier and ill-kempt, railings battered down by winds and left unmended, pools allowed to seep at the edges, mud encroaching flower-beds and rockeries alike – even walkways sticky with a substance somewhat more akin to congealed cuckoo-spit than common-or-garden soil deposits. Or that was what the Weirdmonger wondered in his crazy fashion, with or without the help of onlookers.
As the shop’s curved runnel or lobe (as his destination) grew taller upon the edge of his sight, he was finding his rite of passage through the parks more and more problematic. The natural onset of war-scorched areas was slowly impinging upon the parks. There was one children’s slide, for example, the silver sluice of which was inches deep with a texture of varying degrees of brownness and burnt yellow. Only a few individuals – of youthful persuasion – could be seen making merry … twirling on over-oily roundabouts and croaking swings, releasing fitful ochreous spillages from their central hubs or hinges. One boy with precocious chin hair called foul messages from the top of the slide. The Weirdmonger shrugged, as if to claim fellow-feeling with any who were left by parents to play in this godawful park … not like the neatly manicured bowling-greens and shiny primary colours of children’s rides boasted by the earlier paths and parks he’d crossed … crossed in dream with a good measure of forboding.
He knew that the shop towards which he travelled on foot housed not only itself but also the one he was destined to love. The Weirdmonger had endured his own fair share of past times … and he predicted that there would also be many wax figures of historical humanity in the shop, depicting ancient customs or educational themes. Tableaux of timely remembrance. One word from him and such fabrications would take on new tones, if not a life of their own. The words the Weirdmonger spoke flew from his mouth with the garb of essential truth, words like butterfly-birds and poisonous insects, words like flowers in free flow and historical primary sources, words like dragon-scales forming, eventually, into real dragons. Dragons with wings even bigger than the flames their mouths spewed.
He laughed. There was the shop. Sudra’s shop. That’d bring the Weirdmonger’s pretensions down a peg or two. He felt as if he were a child again, entering his first museum, harness held tightly by leather leads as he toddled in front of his mother on tenter hooks.
The Weirdmonger had indeed been a normal child before he’d thrown youth away like a crumpled sweet-bag. That was the day he realised that the words which he believed were true actually became true. Faith was everything. Faith dictated reality. And he had been his own father was all that he recalled – a strange fate for an even stranger sire – and he as the older Weirdmonger had taught the younger Weirdmonger how to throw words like balls in a game of Catch. Popping boiled humbugs or acid drops or aromatic crystallised figs from mouth to mouth. Perhaps his father was the true Weirdmonger, and the true Weirdmonger (so-called) was the true impostor. Words became impossibly tangled as soon as the concentration dropped and the years passed by, consigning his father to merely an oil painting of himself stippled with misdirected pellets – and the Weirdmonger (now the true one) went out into the world, park by park. But the world was hot and dry – and the parks were deserts of Inner Earth. But now, global cooling, artistically speaking. Today, the parks were wet and soggy – terribly muddy, denying the flower’s plots any ambition other than the extrapolated brown blooms upon wilting stalks, each one weeping yellow tears for a poet called Charles Baudelaire. Even the park-keepers had given up their watering-cans … and you know how officious they once were when school caretakers.
The Weirdmonger nodded as if he heard his father in his head. The shop stood there, now, tall and stately – the waxen exhibits he expected staring through the windows, wielding axes like ancient Northumberland Reivers or French Angevin Kings, denoting the precise historical moments, bringing THEN to NOW with all the force of precariousness. History made real – whilst any students of his would become part of some fantasy world which learned the lessons head on. These wax figures, he was aghast to see, however, were simply shaped like shoes in odds and not pairs.
The Weirdmonger nodded again. He was his own son as well as his own father and now as the former he had returned to the turning pages and the juggling words as a student – sprinkling the air above the print like hover-flies, depleting the print by their very presence or, rather, the print had left the page and become the hover-flies themselves. He paid for his museum ticket at the kiosk – a guide-book to shoeboxes from Crazy Lope for a round tour, complete with ear-muffs and learning devices that were stuck straight into the body’s veins. Go’spank smiled as he passed over the long spool of tickets, saying: “Enjoy the trip.”
As if (the Weirdmonger thought) the parks hadn’t already been enough. He looked back wistfully to see over-sized birds, with stubby wings, failing to fly from the last park. This was the first time he’d noticed how the mud had stopped all Nature in its tracks … as if mud was an effluent with which Nature had tried to oil itself but, in the process, over-egged the cake that had been left out in the rain.
The Weirdmonger toured the Shop on the Borderland with torchbright eyes – or that was how he was subsequently described by an unseen onlooker. There were many oil paintings of shoes … and a whole host of nemonymous figures wearing them … their names queueing along the wainscotting beneath their wildly daubed mugshots, making the museum more of a modern gallery of ultramodern pretension than a potentially tedious array of educational wax figures, speaking in misalignments of recorded voice or reported speech.
He wondered why Go’spank traipsed in his wake, half-staggering, half-shambling back and forth in tides of indecision.
“Mr…”
“Yes?” he boomed.
“The shop shuts in half a trice.”
Go’spank was evidently concerned that the Weirdmonger would be angry at not previously being warned BEFORE he had the tickets unravelled for him at such great cost. Go’spank seemed to hold a stub of a ticket for dear life in his mitt-end, as the Weirdmonger’s booming voice belied the nervousness he shared with Go’spank.
Truth, sometimes, on a good day, can be felt as well as told. The Weirdmonger did not shrug, did not laugh, did not utter anything approaching the suspicion of a word … yet there were sounds of tongue clucks and palate cleaving, igniting a whole string of horror images: spilling from his mouth like regatta flags towards Go’spank. The only thing that could be said for the Weirdmonger was the free-flow of tears from his remorseful eyes, as Go’spank twisted amid the entanglements and coils of designer rudery. Rudery (a collective noun for rude things) was better, however, than, say, sweaty bird-heads: this being the giggly observation of an unseen onlooker. Better than the mounds of crusty scabs and curds of gangrenous pus from a million childhood accidental abrasions failing to heal. Better than corrupt organs that rotted because they had no owners to wield them. No more giggles. Only side-swipes at the absurdity of the situation from now a rather cool, detached onlooker. There was indeed a harvest of HEALTHY rudery wrapped around Go’spank, a harvest of rudery, indeed, wielded by spectral athletes, gymnasts, body-builders and hawlers in yellow jingle-jangly shoes and invisible carpet-coats. Despite their already swollen appendages, the ghostly figures lovingly meted out more and more of their body-ends from the modelling clay of ectoplasm to form the ridged winding-sheets … swaddling poor Go’spank. Killed by kindness.
With his ultimate cliché thus uttered (tested for truth as well as timbre) the Weirdmonger left the environs of the shop for the purlieus of the nearest park. It was just one minute before the shop was due to close. Not that it really mattered now. The saddest part, if the truth were told, was that Go’spank’s whole life heretofore had been as preparation to be a spear-carrier in an onlooker’s scenario he would never understand, even given the chance.
But if Go’spank had been merely created for his own death, then what, if not who, was I? I, the onlooker, stared from the attic’s own attic of Sudra’s shop barely concealed among the ridges or narrower lobes of the roof, short of surrendering a geometry to the space that generated it. I gazed over the mudparks as they fitfully vanished towards the middle distance, even to a point where the war had re-started – as evidenced by the sight of new tannoys being built by combatants for sirens.
Like a geomantic zodiac, the mudparks formed the face of the man I’d known as the Weirdmonger, with brown eyes and even browner tears: above which hovered a creature with stubby wings: either a child bobbing upon a playground ride* (a ride so burnished it shone with pure invisibility) or an Angel that had been stripped to the bottom bone of meaning.
“Fly!” I shouted.
And it was.
*STUB OF PENCIL:
A THIRD PARTY CLAIMED THIS WAS CLEARLY A SEE SAW
****
Sudra was in her bedroom of the shoe museum listening to the newly prepared armies march-running towards war through the cutaways of Klaxon – measuring the pavy-crazed sluices between the lobes with the rhythmic onward march of their medium-pace limbs in running mode as opposed to any standard patterned walk. March-running is a forgotten art. Neat ranks of soldiers (mostly female), these were, keeping perfect pace with each other at the run, rather than the lift-and-separate of slow-motion goose-step or slightly quicker frog-march or general English slow marchpast for Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday. Memories of Things Past – a hypnotic echoing march-run as the various sections of army proceeded – half in and half out of Sudra’s dreamtime perception of them from her bedroom window – towards their billets in the various establishments of darkening Klaxon.
This was during the early stages of the war before sides had been picked, like children in the classroom exchanging bright coins of choice for the best runner on their team, leaving the solitary turnips to be the final choices. Sudra had earlier watched a strange individual visit her shoe museum – despite the good offices of Crazy Lope (her doorkeeper) to keep unpaying customers at bay – and she wondered if war was something that had come accompanying the visitor, rather than a genuine interest in viewing the shoes on mannequins’ feet. Ulterior motives … led to a neat withdrawal of the visitor back to the mudparks whence he’d first arrived (Go’spank’s dead body upon his back like a cancerous growth).
One of the march-running woman officers was to billet in the shoe museum. She was introduced to Sudra by Edith who was now in temporary charge of billeting arrangements in the city prior to full-out war. Armies needed their sleep, and armies were made up of individuals who thought sleep would help later as acclimatisation to death.
The woman soldier who had splintered off from the synchronisation of her fellow march-runners when she’d reached her appointed billet (in this case, the shoe museum) was shown to a bunk bed in the attic’s attic.
“Rest here,” said Sudra with a smile. A fine figure of a woman who had loosened her tie on first sighting the equally attractive soldier. “If you need anything in the night…”
“I shall be fine,” said the soldier, listening to other sections of march-runners still rhythmically passing in the night, eager for their own billets elsewhere. The soldier slowly withdrew from her uniform as simultaneously as covering herself with the carpet-blanket that Crazy Lope had earlier provided for the bunk, thus revealing nothing of her eager body.
It was like imagining one was in a dream simply for the sake of haunting oneself with it. A means to extend life. Wars often caused similar mentalities of false dreaming.
Sudra smiled, determined to bide her time. March-runners were now passing with the perceived sound of much smaller groups, silhouetted by sirens. Until only an odd pair of billetless march-runners echoed down the sluice-alleys that Sunnemo’s withdrawal into its nightmask had created from the once wide esplanades of a finer siècle.
As Sudra settled into a feather-mattress, she heard the war crackle into existence on a far ridge of Klaxon with mere Muskets of Mass Destruction.
****
“Wagger Market, Wagger Market, Come to Wagger Market!”
The Weirdmonger once had a stall of his own at torrid Wagger Market (a suburb of Klaxon) – but today at the fun-at-the-fair, stuff seemed as tawdry as the sun now seemed cool. The brown canvases, once pulled taut by hooks on ancient tenter-frames appeared soggy, threadbare, frayed … even worm-holed. The wares as chipped and crocked as the costermongers’ faces that tried to sell them from deeply-veined marble slabs, slabs so stained, the Weirdmonger knew that dead fish had once sat on them eyeing the customers … with imperceptible flicks of their tails…
No sign of the healthy human rudery that once hung from the tenter frames … much sought after by the mountain nomads as ornaments as well as carnifications. Nor were there now displayed those rolls and rolls of partly piled carpets and mats, with rough-sewn inner cylinders of space being home for numbers of creatures that had since become as legendary as they were once so far-fetched, despite their inarguable existence as forces for dream.
It was then the Weirdmonger was delighted to find a stall with a bit more get-up-and-go than the other downtrodden trestles of junk. It bore a sign with yellow lettering saying ‘Olden Days’ and a beautiful attendant who wore a name badge saying WAR. The Weirdmonger lowered his eyes from her buxom comeliness to the stall’s comestibles and purveyances of provender. These were all varieties of syrup, it seemed – ranging from some Happy Shopper stuff through branded Tate & Lyle – until eyes reached the more exotic end of the syrup market that stemmed from Far Samarkand and Ancient Cathay – flecks of spice generously lacing the aromatic glue-syrups and treacles, the slimy tentacles of which curled and coiled within the substance they themselves constituted, in and out of each other like tubular sinews of bee-honey.
More marmalady substances squatted like set jellies without the help of containers to hold them up. Thick cut & thin cut. Peppered with peels. Peels like orange ones. Or peels like lumps of hairy hide. All sitting incoherently within clear syrup as well as cloudy … like pickles or foreign bodies or sizeable splinters of rind or hardened skin. The top notch syrup was not from the deepest, strangest Orient but from the Pacific Islands. Petals floating in silken tides. Tiny nugget-sown lagoons of amber wreathed with garlands … teased back and forth by weltering waterfalls.
Some syrups actually moved by their own volition – seething, gurgling, even burping – as bubbles broke towards the meniscus of more turgid marmaladery (at the lower end of the range). A single syrup was effervescent, as a series of prickling sensations cascaded – microscopic air-pockets tingling to the Weirdmonger’s imaginary touch. Then, he spotted letters floating about in it. Making words. Unmaking words. Poems being slurped and sloughed between the walls of the transparent jug. The words ‘Olden Days’ abruptly ratcheted into view, locking into some serendipitous significance beyond any semantic meaning. Telling, perhaps, of the particular stall that sold these sinuosities of syrup. Then – just like an ugly duckling – a lonely letter ‘g’ floated into view through the undulating avenues of aspic – and joined up just as the Weirdmonger’s attention returned to the stallholder. Syrup, as well as silence, was golden. He felt dazed, as he momentarily bent his head under an impending emotion. This emotion was strong, more golden than anything. But then he was startled by the thought that came into his head – unannounced. He knew the game was up. His sluices of logic had been blocked by plaits of gooey love.
WAR smiled meltingly.
“Would you like to buy some syrup, Weirdmonger?”
“Yes, but can I ask why you call yourself WAR, WAR? I recall wars as men all mouth and trousers who fought till they found that fighting was harder than drinking.”
“My father died of a broken heart over a botched result at his own World War.”
WAR seemed even more pretty when she spoke serious. The Weirdmonger wondered what heights of passion she might engender if she actulally talked dirty. He nodded as if he understood without the necessity of her continuing. Apparently, her father had lived his whole life upon the hope of winning the World War.
WAR said that she was continuing the investigation at the behest of some paternal beyond-the-grave power which could not be defied. When a corpse got its claws into an issue, there was the devil to pay.
WAR herself turned as white as a ghost, gaunt and stare-eyed … as she fiddled with the jars of syrup. A haunted woman. Prettiness draining from her by the second. The bitterness of something that wouldn’t let go even in death. She sighed. Her eyes glazed as her father’s eyesight spun from them like wasps. She wielded long cultivated fingernails which she scratched along the nearest trestle – as if playing noughts and crosses for real and in earnest. From the middle of her head there sounded two voices clicking like miniature wooden dolls – foully swearing. Then WAR slumped forward…
The Weirdmonger now heard the voices inside his own head. He shook his head to free these poor creatures of his thoughts. Wagger Market resumed its business, oblivious of the tragedy. Nobody even bothered to clear up the huge mound of slime till the various corpses that had formed within muscley folds of it had disfigured.
****
The Weirdmonger had stayed away too long. The blanched thistles crouched like forgotten cruel love affairs – and he whistled with delight as he recalled the games of Catch he’d played here during those hotter days of youth. Not that he’d grown any older. Weirdmongers never did. And he was the only one left. Perhaps the only one that there ever was.
The landscape had changed. Cooler. Wetter. Strangely brighter. Or was it whiter? Paler. He tried to juggle the words. Despite the dankness, things looked shrivelled, burnt, desiccated … even more so when Sunnemo had shone strong and high, during those endless days of his … youth. Yes, why not say the word? Even if it meant little, if not nothing. Agelessness was a burden that many carried, but the Weirdmonger carried it with some style and panache. Why use two words when none would do?
He shrugged. He had returned to the Klaxon Keys to renew acquaintanceships, if not with the original contacts of his “youth”, but with their progeny. He had recently travelled – further than anyone could imagine – towards lobes and poles of Inner Earth where few appreciated his art-with-words, an art of uttering a word or phrase or saying which then immediately became a self-evident truth. The Weirdmonger’s watchword was ‘one word, one truth’ for generations – but sometimes he needed to visit people able to have faith in this facility, thus to regain his own self-confidence. Some, for example – in (god)forsaken clans of siren-driven wastes shadowed by Canterbury’s gravity-logged Oak – had merely stared at the Weirdmonger, open-mouthed, expecting their own words to issue forth as true as his. And they never did. Others had not even bothered trying, especially amid the coming war, failing, as they did, to understand anything the Weirdmonger said. Yet, here, back in Klaxon, he hoped at least the people retained a modicum of empathy with ‘one word, one truth’, not that anyone could TRULY empathise. If they did, they’d be Weirdmongers, too.
He shrugged again. He watched two boys throwing a ball to each other, with, between them, a puddle that the relatively weaker Sunnemo had failed to dry up … although, judging by the hover-flies sprinkling about above it, there was steam rising…
The Weirdmonger could hear the nagging voice of the two boys’ mother: a descendant, no doubt, of the woman he had known on his earlier sojourn in these parts … and for the likes of the Weirdmonger, knowing was not knowing nearly enough, there being far too much about people that the people themselves or others could possibly imagine. The Weirdmonger recognised that knowing was tantamount to not-knowing, until he spoke the word, and THEN he’d know someone to the bottom bone of the soul. One word, that was all it took. One word from the Weirdmonger.
And today the voice scorched each Inner Ear … to THEIR bottom bones. She was screeching for her boys to come in and not speak to strangers … and she stared across at the Weirdmonger, as if daring him to speak first. The boys, indeed, scampered to either side of her wide skirt.
“Git! We don’t need need you here.”
The Weirdmonger touched his chimney hat with the tip of two fingers, fingers that had grown webbed since he’d been known in these parts. Even Weirdmongers can change. Even plural can become singular.
The woman’s ancient great-grandmother Sudra had, if the truth were told, accused the Weirdmonger, in a dim past now beyond any torching out, of turning everything red. Making bread red, she’d shrieked, YOU’VE TURNED BREAD INTO MEAT!
That was the day he had uttered the word which meant just one more gear up from breeding – where love was more a feast than anything else (if comparisons can be made so loosely). The word – even he had forgotten now … but it still seemed, from today’s evidence, to run free in this present woman’s blood. She had spoken instinctively…
“Don’t worry thyself,” the Weirdmonger said, with such simplicity, the woman immediately calmed down, held out her hand to him and smiled so generously, he wondered if laughter could possibly be as fulsome as her slicing grin.
“Welcome, Weirdmonger,” she said, “a stranger like you cannot be strange for long.” And she pushed her two boys towards him, uncaring whether they were being sacrficed to a demon or merely being introduced to a kind uncle.
The Weirdmonger offered to catch their ball. He held up one of his hands which was swollen like a huge keeper’s mitt or oven glove.
“Thou, throw,” he said.
And the ball, as if of its own volition, left the boy’s right hand straight into the safety of his finger cage which the Weirdmonger’s other hand had seemed to have become as it switched responsibility of catching.
There was always a catch. Even blind ones.
***
The room into which the Weirdmonger was shown was certainly not a showroom. Cramped, cluttered, yet beautifully cloisonné. The tassel on the blind clicked irritatedly against the window as a damp, then dry breeze absconded. A dry sound like a moth in a paper bag. A broken siren-breeze.
The woman frowned her two boys into the corner. They sank back into the shadows as if they were learning to swim or, at least, float … but silently failed to do so, smiles frozen on their faces like disguises for disgrace.
The kitchen, too, was nothing to write home about. There was meat stretched in strands from sink to worktop … like Christmas decorations. Sinews and threads of dripping muscle.
The Weirdmonger blinked. And the vision vanished. He dared not speak it … for obvious reasons. However, during the next few days, as soon as the boys had recovered from shyness, the Weirdmonger played trifling word games with them, like saying something along the lines of ‘bubble’ and a huge sooty one expanded from his mouth – and once complete – floated off. He’d say: a colour and, momentarily, the place where they were dallying – be it sitting-room or backyard – would blush to its roots with the colour chosen. Purple – and the trees swagging over the fence or window sill were like richly Royal garments or ecclesiastical vestments. Grey – and the boys laughed to think they’d returned to the days when films had a grey monochrome consistency; TV, too; black and white versions of Big Brother. Not that screens even existed at all now, even in colour. Screens had been kicked in ages ago, for all the right reasons. Visual image overdose had caused all manner of aberrations. Including no need for shoes as feet had become webbed and weather-proof like birds’.
He made as if to play Catch with an imaginary tongue-tied ball of tumours, threaded throughout with veins and almost living morsels themselves. The boys cringed when they saw the Weirdmonger being so uncouth with his game. And the mother would cluck with distaste, despite being duped by phrases such as “Never you mind, my dear” or “Give me the benefit of the doubt” which flapped from the Weirdmonger’s mouth like platitudes with a demon’s wings disguised as an angel’s.
****
One day, the Weirdmonger uttered some words which didn’t quite take off. Whether it was a catch in the throat, a tickle caused by some misbehaving phlegm or a more serious seizure of bodily function, the words wormed out warped and wayward. He had meant to say “Where is your father?” (and to himself “Where is me?”) – the optimum of a love he was beginning to feel for these boys, his new-found foundlings or changelings or lostlings now found. One of them had the boggest ear he had ever seen. All the better to hear you with, perhaps. Instead the sense shifted … in a language so foreign-looking it represented the outset of a civilisation that had never existed – until now. The words’ exit was wrapped in cross purposes.
The mother wept. For she didn’t know who the boys’ real father was – having been taken in her sleep between one dream and the next. She had felt for some time that there was some deeper meaning to the Weirdmonger’s words. She examined her own right hand. For as long as she could recall, it had been swollen like an oven-glove and the left one articulated like a cage with a trapped pellet of dry dung rattling like a ball valve.
The Weirdmonger was sad and deep kissed her. And she vanished like a fast shrinking red balloon into the fundaments of his being. The boys laughed and laughed till they died of it – or the Weirdmonger dropped the ball, whichever came first.
The Weirdmonger was then free to leave the Klaxon Keys – his feet crunching thistles like hollow bones. He held his chimney hat on against the dry wafts of air. Sunnemo never seemed to set any more or it became a volcano called Mount Core. “Grey!” he shouted at it, with as much feeling to the word as he could muster. And he smiled at the black and white movie upon which he lived and had his being … before the screen blew its circuits, vanishing – as old-fashioned TV sets used to do – into a fast diminishing white dot.
Except he was never to know it wasn’t white, but red.
****,br>
Centuries before, when the war still thrust its purpose between bouncing-walls of time, Sudra cupped the man in her tiny cold hand, the headless neck still nesting quaintly upon a pair of scrawny humps. She preferred women as sex-partners, in truth, but, in fiction, she decided both were suitable for her needs. The woman soldier who had billeted in the shoe museum’s top attic, had joined her silent silhouette to Sudra’s own silhouette for men, like the Weirdmonger, to watch all night from outside through the translucency of the rattling blind. But that was a dream, dreamed from both sides of the same dream’s spinning golden coin as it slowly dropped towards a hole in the beige carpet…
Wagger Market had not yet fully opened to the common public - and only professional dealers were allowed access when Sunnemo first peeped above the horizon’s hair-brush. Dawn spread red marmalade between the bristles, as if Mother Nature had been welted and wealed all night long with that self-same hair-brush.
The market was essentially a Meat Exchange, despite a few side-shows for amusement rather than business: situated on the plain between the two great Klaxon Lobes. The trees, of course, formed the bristles of the hair-brush which instilled bizarre thoughts about beatings and blood. One tree in particular was heavier than gloom made bottom-heavy.
Crazy Lope saw, at the furthest range of his eyesight, the young girls exhibiting the livestock. He knew, in his heart, that the market was primarily concerned with he-slaves and the purchasing power of the southern Madames, ladies who had travelled to the market during the cold season when he-slaves were not on heat.
Such perishables were indeed tradeable creamy pink parcels of flesh over a tent-frame of walking bone whose privates were obviously a part of the weight which the market-workers had to transport through the Klaxon Sluices. Any carnal excitement in the livestock, and, thus, tumescence, tended to increase the overall poundage more than proportionately: in fact, the last straw that broke a she-beast of burden’s back.
So, any rearing up of the perishables could make the whole venture far too laborious to consider: a dead duck, even before it started. For this reason, any sign of stems unnesting was punished with something called pig-sticking. Or turkey-halting.
Lope shrugged. He didn’t really care. He loved the Sunnemo-kissed vega that was his stamping-ground.
Sunnemo had already erupted surprisingly high in the sky for the time of day. Lope’s clients were not professional dealers in anything. His bread and butter were common folk who were let in just before lunch when the cheap meat-burgers were yet barely baked on the backs of ovens.
The common folk did not know what was being cooked INSIDE the ovens, always being booted from the Market when their cast-iron doors were opened long after sunset. THEIR daily tucker contained nothing but donkey-buns dunked in slave sweat.
Lope shaded his eyes from the brightness of the overhead sun, now a fiery eye in a milk-pond of blue. He heard the chants of “Wagger Market! Wagger Market!” as the rusty public turnstiles creaked and groaned. Not as if anyone didn’t know the name of the place, but there had to be ritual in trade as well as in religion.
Lope was not averse to casting a glance at the he-slaves being shown off by the young girl traders. But he would have preferred the young girls themselves to be shown without any clothes on. He didn’t know, of course, why he thought that, female nudity having been banned for several centuries.
Lope was set on chatting to a stallholder who had the title “Weirdmonger” stitched into his canvas backing. He sold fortunes; told lies which he palmed off as truths. “Fibs for fabs! Fibs for fabs!” was the Weirdmonger’s catchphrase which Lope never understood. Was this the man who had once visited the shoe museum? Lies were the best sort of truths, it was obvious, however. It doesn’t get anyone into trouble believing truths when they’re really lies. Saves on embarrassment. It was like betting on the last nag home, after the race was over.
“Well, what can I sell you today, Crazy Lope?” the Weirdmonger asked.
The voice was so ancient sounding Lope was surprised the Weirdmonger wasn’t a corpse. Only Sunnemo in the stallholder’s eyes bespoke any tinge of life.
“I want love,” Lope stammered.
He had been plucking up enough courage to make this request for the whole of the heat season.
“What is love, youngster? If you can tell me, you’ll have oodles of it from me, no mistake.”
The Weirdmonger was jesting, of course, but Lope believed his own soul had been fondled to its very bottom. Since leaving Ogdon’s employment all those years in the distance, it seemed Lope had grown younger, and yet younger, and more on heat.
In the distance, Lope heard the giggles of young girls; one of their stock in trade must have revealed that the mating season was not quite over.
Sunnemo by now dipped low, having spent its bolt on the clouds which spread like grey swill from the Forest of Love direction. Sirens betokened new air raids by diseased bird – or enemy earthflies and drills.
Lope, short of time, stabbed at an answer: “Love is something that people felt before they forgot about courting and snogging and canoodling and all that smack and tickle of Inner Earth.”
Whence he got the words, only more words could tell. The Weirdmonger smiled, as if Lope had indeed hit the right note, and put his hand under the stall-counter and produced a misshapen tree log.
“There was once a lovely lady, dressed only in her flowing locks, who carried this about, believing it to be a love-baby,” he said with a smile.
“A love-baby, Weirdmonger?”
“Yes, Crazy Lope, a love-baby is what we all once were when time was a thing you could count on.”
At that point, as if on cue, the sky darkened more quickly than a donkey-bun on a griddle. One cloud was evidently thicker and blacker than night itself. And from it teemed a blood of rain.
There was panic among the tents and stalls to get the produce under shelter. Someone soft bumped into Lope and, before he could think what he was doing, his lips were plastered to a fleshy appendage that reminded him (in all senses of that word) of the rubber teat on bottles he was given to suck when too young to remember anything properly.
Something stirred in him, or out of him, and I understood, with an instinct inculcated by his dealings with the Weirdmonger, the truth about love rather than its lie.
When Sunnemo’s ghostly moon came out more blue than Lope could ever recall, Lope discovered in his arms the loveliest girl imaginable, who beckoned him to groom her golden mane. And as the moon brightened, he was surprised to see that the hair-brush she’d handed him for her grooming was a pine log with long sharp metal nails banged outwards as if something lived inside it with a hammer. Lope recognised it as the device often used for pig-sticking. Or turkey-halting.
The last corroded turnstile to the city zoo stalled and finally ground to a halt. Or it was a commoner surreptitiously opening one of the oven doors early – thus allowing the specially fattened privates to escape before they were dead, let alone cooked in their famous Angevin cream sauce.
Meanwhile, Lope lovingly thinned out the girl’s most deep-rooted strands of gold. He was so engrossed, he failed to hear the faint strains of “Fibs for fabs! Fibs for fabs!” gradually disappearing behind the even fainter ones of “Wagger Market! Wagger Market!”
****
It was a May war. Perhaps earlier, perhaps, later but May maybe was the best guess. Klaxon seasons were as slavishly followed as their months, despite the weather-mad waywardness of Sunnemo itself. Sudra watched her billeted soldier guest with beady, if not steely, eyes. Eyes both looking and looked at. She suspected the soldier (often now glimpsed intimately to bear a body fit for all sorts of use and not only for cruelties entailed by war) of being someone else. Too much of a coincidence to believe it was Amy or a May-masqued Amynemo returned for a further bite at the cherry of Sudra’s doom. Thus singled out from those thousands, if not millions, of march-runners – ceremonially making the relentless churn-churn rhythms of footwork by-passing the Klaxon sluices in pursuit of military glory – why would it be Amy herself snatched from these very churning ranks as chosen by higher authorities to billet in the shoe museum during the course of the war?
Sudra also watched the watcher – the man who had mysteriously visited the museum in past months, both as regular customer and as an inspector of museums. Dealt with by Lope, following the unexplained abscondment of Go’spank. This man stood outside staring up at the imaginary salacious silhouettes that were not silhouettes at all but shadows of the window-blind itself rattling in noise-breezes rather than at any sights that the blind itself concealed. Sudra watched a watcher outside in the city sluice thinking he was looking up at attic’s attic window watching Sudra but really watching the empty spaces she left behind so as to darken in her wake like stains of deceptive movement – as she later surreptitiously sought her soldier guest in places where it had not yet darkened sufficiently to tease with the nipply buttons of military undervest or see-through camisole that dressed the fleshy spaces below the eyes that looked and the eyes that were looked at.
Lope could be heard floors away straightening the mannequins in their demonstration shoes. Much of the museum depicted earlier periods when shoes were more in keeping with not squashing the toes, but since toes had gradually pointened with layers of white poultry flesh – eventually hardening into horns or curlicues that no chiropodist could possibly cut, mannequins had taken on the role of stolid lifelessness more in keeping with hand-puppets that had lost the hands that worked them from within as if the puppet-skins were soft body-hugging chambers and the hands coxcomb flamingos shrunk to the size of gristle-flags. If mannequins could walk at the dead of night – with the cracking of bone that once typified derelict butcher-shops in hawling-days – then they surely no longer walked there now. Any footstep heard on the breath of night was Sudra’s own or Lope’s slow lope (so slow it had become rather a slouch or shamble) or, in recent times, the soldier’s boots deadened by the thicker carpets she had insisted upon for step-comfort as well as insulation against the gullible spaces between floorboards and the cavity-rock..
Lope told Sudra of the man who visited the museum being someone he once knew as a younger man (both of them, he and Lope, often, it seemed, the SAME young man). Indeed, the watcher wore a cape similar to Lope’s. Rumoured to be in league with the Ogdonites – but nobody in the know or otherwise was meant to be aware of this the war’s third force – or whether Ogdonite officers wore capes sufficient to hide themselves against the chameleon backdrops of Klaxon’s lobes and dunes cresting the upper profiles of the city’s more habitable chambers.
SUDRA: I had a dream last night.
LOPE: The Weirdmonger again?
SUDRA: No, it was just that our guest was showing me out of the window the leading-edge of a vast surface city passing slowly through Klaxon’s cavity as it worked its way towards the Core.
LOPE: There have often been rumours of a man-city.
SUDRA: It was difficult to see it all in one go to define its shape. It was just a vast city – with buildings, and streets, and people clinging on to what they could help themselves stay with their homes – and I did see a long area or runway that must have been an airport oozing through Klaxon brick like knife through butter. It must have been a dream. How otherwise did it avoid coming through here? (She pointed to the long corridor of shod dummies that made part of her museum)
LOPE: And the carpet is untouched. It would have ripped it to shreds if a city had passed through it, surely.
SUDRA: Yes. However, the soldier took off the top of her uniform and I could see shapes sliding through her flesh, like bones on the move…
LOPE: Must be a dream. Like that married couple from Clacton.
SUDRA: Yes, that was a dream definitely. But sometimes I think the city dream passing through here is still going on even though I’ve now woken up. Look out the window. It’s walls in silhouette marching like staircases or collective chimney-stacks – all taking their slowmotion marchpast – to war, via war, from war. One bit, the other day, like a vast model of a ship, got stuck in a chamber, and is still lodged there as if it’s landed itself on a cliff ledge – a cliff ledge to it but part of Klaxon to us. Guess depends on the perspective, rather than on whether it’s a dream or not.
LOPE: Yes, I wonder whether dream is a relevant term any more. If all is dream, it does come down to perspectives rather than an easy excuse of dreaming. Turkey-halting, I call it.
SUDRA: Why?
LOPE: Well Turkey is both a bird and a country.
SUDRA: Yes, but how many times is the globe melting – making all countries one?
The conversation itself was being dreamed by Amy as she rested in her bed between battles. Between perspectives.
****
Namesake. That's me. Someone else. THE else. An Else. A person other. I have a life, but where have I left this life? I have a head, a skull that shapes the head, a brain that contains it. I also have or, rather, had people. Belonging is subjective. I don't know even if I belong to myself. An Else is always someone else's. Or am I drifting off into melted mutter?
I have a house. Simply that. A house where those people I don't own no longer live. They no longer live full stop. Their lives no longer belong to them. Lives left behind, like me. Except I still have my faculties. Unlike them.
Now, let's relive their lives. Grant them a few seconds or minutes or hours or, even, days extra. Their names were important as definers. Mike. Susan. Amy. Beth. Greg. Not forgetting Arthur.
The house is probably the best starting-point which may mean scrapping much of what I've already written to make this a starting-point proper. The house stood on an island off France; well, certainly nearer France than England. An island circumscribed by seas, which I suppose goes without saying, except a lot can be gleaned from the manner some things are said, as opposed to the things themselves thus said. There were no cars allowed on the island, which does not go without saying. Dusty lanes map-worked the island where two-wheeled people disguised as tourists biked. They never reached as far as our house (OUR house?), because our house, yes, our house, was hidden even beyond those unbeaten tracks. Not at the centre of the island, but, to my mind, at its centre of gravity, albeit towards one end and not the other. Our house (and I must become accustomed to that expression when thinking of the people who once owned it) was called GULLSCREECH or was it GULLSREACH or SKULLSREACH? Give or take an odd apostrophe. Memory for an Else often feels as if it does not belong to the same Else - a bit like thinking with cold slime instead of a proper brain.
And so, in the beginning, there was Mike. Yes, Mike. The house then was newer and smaller than it is now, but so was the island and, by extrapolation, the world and its seas. The bikers, at that stage, didn't have the name tourists for themselves or, if they did, they were nothing like the loud-mouthed ones nowadays: dressed top to bottom in their pink-to-brown skins. Bikes were more woodeny, too, clacking over the stone-sown crust of baked-in dust. Words were LESS woodeny, if wordier. Mike and his family were tantamount to hermits, as far as it was possible for any family to remain hermits, given its need to further itself.
But the house had ghosts. Which didn't explain why that fact was either relevant or a non-sequitur - nor anything else, for that matter. Or was it more melted mutter? Merely let Mike conduct us round: "As you approach the house, there are plenty of trees and a choice of two crazy-paved routes to the front door, and the air seems to grow darker the nearer the house comes. The sun-flowers are spiky full-moons in mourning. Once inside, the winding staircase takes you up to the various family bedrooms. I shall leave the downstairs as a place of the past. The bedrooms give more away about the inhabitants. The first one you come to is mine (and Susan's, I suppose): the master suite with a bed that I sometimes think could easily fit three. But that's enough about that. Susan's in the past, too. Our children's rooms each have a habit, an obsession, an aura which can't be shaken off. One, for example, is entirely shapeless but, not only that, positively disfigured – leaning walls with lumpen excrescences, ceiling sagging with misshapen breasts, mirrored wardrobe doors hanging from their hinges like dead angel-wings – similar, in fact, to its occupier: Amy. They do say a room adopts the stance easiest for it to adopt..."
And Mike drifted on, plucking descriptions from the air as if the air were imagination. I've only allowed his ramblings to ramble thus far because I knew he'd soon start rambling about Amy (after rambling about himself, that is) and it was Amy I loved. Still do. Who else can an Else love other than another Else?
"There was another room," continued Mike, "Where Arthur slept. Not in a bedroom, more in-a-box."
Everybody tried to laugh at Mike's jokes. Another one of his jokes was about the Doll's House: tiny Sudra's suitable bedroom because she stayed as tiny as she was when she was a toddler. And the Rocking-Horse Room: where Greg still slept in his cradle, to-and-fro, to-and-fro, till self and sleep became indistinguishable in his head.
Then Mike described my bedroom. Not a joke, I assure you. Nor a game. Nor a toy. In those days, my name was Greg.
Now, before we proceed any further, I should explain that there is a difference between Reincarnation (which the Easterns believe in) and the realms of Elsedom. Straightforward folk (if Reincarnation has any basis in fact, which I doubt) plummet from one ham-fisted existence to another, pell-mell, without thought for fear or favour. In contradistinction, we Elses are obliquities who choose berths with care so that our hosts have no inkling of our co-habitation. I hasten to add that Elses are not parasites. We don't live off physical energy. We're simply lazy ghosts who need a body to rest within for a while, before launching out again upon the ether. A tiring business is bodilessness at the best of times.
So, although I was Greg in Mike's time, Greg was not necessarily me. So when I speak of Greg as me I mean someone else other than Greg as him. It all sounds a trifle complicated, but I assure you that my task here is to clear up confusions, not to create them. I want to give you some inkling of the forces working behind your big days, your small days, your off days, your on days and why you sometimes don't feel quite yourself. And, also, the story I have to tell (am already telling) – no, what WE have to tell (are already telling) - would not otherwise be able to be told. So when I say I, you know it's me. When I say Greg you know it's him. When I say we, even YOU need to stand by your beds, as the old Klaxon army saying goes.
Back to Mike. He was about to describe my bedroom in that island house called (what was it?) GULLSCRY. GULL'S CRY. GULL SCRY. SKULLSKY. A fact of which even an omniscient such as I is unsure.
"Greg's room," continued Mike. "Yes, let me see. This didn't have a nickname. Greg had one, though. Numbskull. Thick as piled water, I'd say. His room was plastered with pirate flags. The island was a hotbed of smugglers - and I think Greg wanted to be one. Skull & Crossbones. He even had a gull skull as an ornament on his tallboy, along with lots of other knick-knacks. A ship-in-a-bottle. A pirate one, of course. He could only grunt, so we never found out whether he really wanted to be a pirate. God has enough blessings for all of us. Yet He did go sparing on poor old Greg."
And I often went spare, too, when I heard Mike talking about God the Creator. God, in truth, was the ultimate Else, giving Him His due. Melted mutter. Prayer. Crossed finger-bones.
"Greg," continued Mike, "was the only one who wasn't a blood relation. We took him in when he was abandoned by one of the bikers. A foundling whose nest was a black saddle-bag at the foot of the sun-flower stems one moonless night. Only a human by virtue of his looks. A foundling who was originally a changeling, if that's not a contradiction in terms. However hard we tried we couldn't make his grunts into words. Even Amy, with her lopped tongue, could say certain things. And, yes, she took a shine to Greg and became like a mother hen to him, despite being much younger."
I nodded. I had allowed Mike to spin out his tired old tale of past times, because his very act of telling his story is part of our story – whilst the actual contents of his story are not. Mike is a protagonist, albeit an undependable one. And so is Amy. And so are tiny Beth, Arthur and so forth. And so, perhaps, is Mike's wife Susan who stayed in one of the attics – because she was afraid of the island's tightening circle of seas. Which brings us to the journey, one in which Amy took Greg on a trip to the topmost attic of the house, via the lower, more accessible attics. Nobody Else had been that far before. Or not since the loft luggage was stowed there by one of Mike's ancient ancestors. In actual fact, Greg took Amy, not the other way about. Whatever the case, Susan's attic was tantamount to being a cellar when compared to the topmost attic to which Greg and Amy aspired – an attic so topmost it reached beyond the roof itself.
The story of their journey is less important than the fact they wanted to make it at all. Its outcome can safely be told, however. A kiss where Greg touched the tip of his tongue upon Amy's own gristly stub; feeling it slightly wag from the root. Such a stump was not long enough to bite through, which his blood-lust made him feel he wanted to do in the dark. From her point of view, a kiss was the most erotic thing in the world, but when his teeth later entered her neck instead, she couldn't have believed anything could be more erotic than the original kiss. Which was a pity. Because the Horla’s sinking teeth were as erotic as it was possible to be.
Her body felt like a kite, one which Beth and herself had regularly flown from the island's nearest clifftop. God's kite, this time.
The attics had become darker the higher they had painstakingly plumbed the narrow upward hatches from raftered space to space. This phenomenon could not be explained other than by the upper walls possessing more chinks than the roof proper. Then, once beyond the roof itself, whatever the nature of the topmost attic's outer casing, it was certainly impermeable, belying the fact that its interior atmosphere had grown smoky from, no doubt, being above the house's chimneys. Greg thought he saw a rat scurrying in one of the lower-down attics, but then guessed it might be midget Beth following them: dodging behind each leaning black timber when they looked in her (or its) direction.
Beth was as near to being an Else as a someone could be without becoming either. Bigger than a Borrower, true, yet coming to below the level of my knee. The only way to bring her into focus is to permit her the use of speech-marks, borrowed from Mike and employed with eloquence: "I hate Greg with all my heart," she sang with a pucker. "He teases me as King Henry the 8th used to tease his wives, pretending they weren't there other than for the flesh in his mouth that his teeth tore off their legs. He imagined strange things did that King. One of his handkerchiefs could have made me a frock. Well, Greg's worse than Henry, 8 times worse, judging by the hurts he does me."
Give Beth an inch of cotton, she'll take half a mile of spider's web. Her bedroom is smaller than the others and it's not surprising that Mike compared it to a Doll's House, albeit a rather trite comparison. She looks up as I come in and continues her monologue straight at me: "Yes, he calls this bedroom a Doll's House, although I'm sure I'm noisier than most dolls, & cry more & laugh more. I'm older than a doll, too - even older than dolls who've had several girls to play with. He'll only admit that there are certain people living in GULL'S CREECH - Arthur, Amy, Greg, Sudra and, at a push, little old me in a spotted pocket frock and nothing small enough for knickers except things cut in half or in a quarter or even less. Of course, I'm my own centre of attention, but what about the old wrinkled lady who lives upstairs? Nobody's bothered to give HER a name. And Mike's ancient crazy manservant, too long in the tooth for anything bar compiling lists, and what's he doing in the wine cellar? His name? Your guess is as good as mine, or better. Names are merely words by another name. Mike has a way with words, but he uses them too meanly. I don't resort to implication nor can I readily apply inference to other people's implications. Yet, having said that, one can't be too obvious. The old house would fall down like playing-cards tilted against each other soon as look at it too closely. Greg's taken a fancy to Amy. Greg, Greg, Greg, I wish I knew who Greg was. Amy's my sister, docked at birth for want of a proper brain - even so, she can say a few things now. I’ve got a huge ear. Whilst Greg, Numbskull Greg, he grunts and each grunt is random. No thought behind them. A bit like Mike when he gets going - because Mike's words may as well be grunts for all what they may mean. Yes, Greg. He is a son to someone here, but who? Certainly not me. I'm smaller than my own baby would be. But who Else is there? Who Else is still fruited down below?"
"Arthur, you're wrong," suddenly announced Mike. "Greg came with one of the bikers in a saddle-bag."
"Why didn't you give him back to the Authorities, then?" Sudra's squeak was like Punch-and-Judy.
The same old questions, the same old statements, a ritualistic conversation stone-sown with lies and disbeliefs, cancelling each other out. If the truth were known, Greg only existed in my own head - or me in his.
One day, tiny Sudra woke up and knew that Greg and Amy were already too far gone from her dreams to be recaptured. She'd need to track then down to their earths in the roof and fetch them back to the lower floors where, perhaps – hopefully – she'd see them for what they were. Elses. And then she'd have them trapped within her mind's eye – and then within her sleep in the hope of casting out a butterfly-net of a dream. Mike, at least, would be thankful to rid the house of such worrisome creatures. Greg and Amy – Lenders, if not Borrowers, to whom Sudra duly wanted to return a dream; HER dream but THEIR rightful abode.
So, yes, Sudra was up and about early that day, waiting for Greg and Amy to emerge from their respective bedrooms, where Mike had billeted them. Arthur and Beth were real slug-a-beds, so Sudra wasn't concerned about any interference from the likes of THOSE ne'er-do-nothings. She'd be free to follow Greg and Amy to the ends of the Earth. Overland to its very centre. Even to the top of the house.
Arthur and Beth were equally unconcerned. Mike was completely unaware of the shenanigans of the other occupiers, if other occupiers existed at all. Arthur's ear-shaped cradle had long since outgrown him, unlike a snail's shell that would have gradually grown with its slug-a-bed – or so the legend went in that island. One could often see Arthur struggling under his humpback along the island's coffin-paths – the latter being rights-of-way by the simple virtue of having had a full coffin, once upon a time, travel above it on four separate shoulders. Or merely travel.
Greg was a bouncy sort of fellow. His bedroom was a veritable gymnasium, hung with trapezes, black beams and a washing-line in the guise of a tight rope. His best exercise equipment, however, was a spring of spirals more powerful than his legs. Even when Greg grew grey, there was a summer in his walk.
One day, Amy and Arthur followed tiny Sudra, someone they had summoned up as children do (even ancient children) when they summon up secret imagined friends and summon up summers that know no spring or autumn. Sudra was the sole small creature with whom Arthur and Amy peopled their friendless world – a world so friendless, even two such close friends found it friendless. Sudra was their own special imagined friend whom they kept secret from each other. Arthur, when he struggled along the dusty island tracks dragging behind him his own coffin-shell auricle, saw Sudra's twinkling calves ahead and her polkadotted pocket frock. Amy followed Arthur, only because he was following Sudra, too. A coincidence, perhaps, yet no coincidence at all, depending on the point of view. Yet, when Sudra followed HER special imaginative friends Greg and Beth inside the house, she knew by the creaking floorboards that she was herself followed by ghosts pretending to be people. Ghosts are indeed housebound. Everyone Else knew that except, of course, writers of ghost stories. Good job there's no writer of this. Mike's the nearest we'll get to someone writing us up. In the open air, any following sounds Sudra put down to the rumblestrips of the bikers or clumps of horses or the odd choking tractor that threaded the various island by-ways. She sometimes tried to avoid her special imagined friends, little knowing that they simultaneously tried to avoid her, which they needn't have bothered doing, in any event, her being so tiny – a double bluff of a paradox, seeing that they didn't really believe they could see her nor know she was there to be seen. Greg and Beth were often spotted by snoopy bikers whose sunhatted heads were then shaken in disbelief as if any such visions could only be imported from dreams. They hid their surprise when Greg and Beth shook their own heads back at them. Or was it Arthur and Amy?
Sudra only followed Greg and Beth in the hope of discovering their earths somewhere in the upper reaches of the earth near Clacton. Arthur and Amy, in turn, followed Sudra, wondering why she seemed to be following someone Else. Or were they each the Else in question? Endless spirals of Elses following the same Elses? Being imagined playmates, they were amazed how each of them explored unpredictable places into which they would never have imagined themselves in a million years: such as the uninhabited parts of the house's east wing (which Mike had made out-of-bounds) or the dark secret passages that smugglers or pirates had once used (priest-holes and burrows whence Mike didn't ban them because they shouldn't have existed) or, as we have seen already, the attic areas (none of them realising that each attic could have its own attic, even to the extent of the loft luggage being left in increasing hierarchies of uselessness – the topmost attic being so useless, its contents regained an antique value that Mike would have reaped if such contents hadn't already reached beyond not only the roof but also the buffer zone of useless memories.
I am Mike. There, it's out. I've peopled my house with everybody but Mike, since HE does not need to be 'peopled', as it were, because he is, in truth, the only person in the house: someone to whom I find it easier to assign the third person singular. One day, he negotiated the gull-screeching periphery of the island, as far as this was possible given the natural fortress of rocks and cliffs making the clamber to and from bays a strenuous activity: too strenuous for someone like Mike who eschewed exercise and who was accustomed to having his being sucked from him by generations of folk he'd conjured up from the peopleable air. Some such had not arrived fully formed from his mind and only full exposure to their own motive force gave them their minds and bodies. Others were already too formed for his mind to alter in any way. An odd few arrived from Elsewhere, only to enter his mind and subsequently become ghosts, still autonomous, if unreal.
His 'children' did not derive from such brands of Mike's conjuration. Their coming, their going, their pure static existence, were mysteries to him. He dreamed (or he blamed dreaming) that he performed surgical operations on them - a fact that might have gone a long way to explaining, for one thing, Sudra’s parlous physical state. Unlike her disfigured bedroom, some parts of her body were not open to view: so to that extent Mike's butchering remained a dark secret: only later to be discovered should there still remain an element of tenability as a human body following her death when, no doubt, a crafty coroner would begin to smell a rat. A tiny rat.
The Tenacity of Feathers.
The House that Mike Built seemed taller than its own height, because all the woodeny rooms were so very very small. He had built it for someone else. For Greg? Or someone else again. He melted into mutter. Prayer. Crossed doll-bones. He tilted back and forth on the ratcheting roof, a horsewhip in his hand, watching hooded figures tug kites from the darkening sky upon the rock-racked horizon. Sudra, he knew, enjoyed spinning in pocket frocks – because she only had one leg left. The other leg torn off between the spokes of a passing bike's wheel. Shoe still intact as the numbskull biker obliviously clumped it through a round tour of the island’s beachy terrain. That jingle-jangle morning.
****
THE HAUNTED FLOWERPOT
Arthur as a child enjoyed mixing experiments in the back garden – often watched by his younger sister Amy. He’d requisition household substances – Fairy liquid, white powdery Surf, Dettol disinfectant, creamy-white cleaning-fluids, soaps of all sorts and consistencies, dishwasher tablets, table salt, left-over food and so forth – then proceeded to imagine he was a top scientist, plying thick pastes of such concoctions to looser fluids and hardened surfaces of impacted sponge or crystalline solids. ‘Requisition’ was a posh word for creatively transfer from one place to another. His mother Edith failed to notice much of her stock of kitchen lubrications had gone missing over time or she turned a blind eye to the ‘messes’ that Amy tried to tell her about if only she’d go down the garden to see.
Arthur saw himself as a top scientist. His experiments led to much global good. Even Amy was astonished when watching Arthur flick the tail of his Davy Crockett hat from his eyes as yet another steam creature erupted into the sky like a wet version of a firework display.
Sometimes, Arthur was also a top surveyor or geographer. Indeed, he often made dams from his ‘messes’ mixed with earth – and a moat of suspiciously multicoloured ditchwater around an island whereby his toy soldiers had a field day training amidst a sticky alien landscape of Tide and Toilet Frog.
He laughed as Amy turned up with a watering-can and flowerpot.
“I don’t need those.”
And she went off sobbing her heart out. Brothers weren’t easy monsters in her world of blurred growth and incipient humanity.
Arthur continued shaping swill into barely erect castle-battlements on his island, fostering insect-nests to take root to give some semblance of unpredictable inhabitants threading in and out of the maze of half-frozen messes that the winter weather had brought about.
Often, he’d put his ear to the ground to see if any larger inhabitants were about to emerge, and being larger, noisier, too. The insects, if insects they were as opposed to chemically-induced mites of impossible lifeforms, merely created a relentlessly mild buzz barely above his young hearing-threshold.
He stared back at the tower-block where he saw Edith waving at him. Apparently this was the day for his schoolteacher’s visit, someone who was most definitely not on Arthur’s side in the race for Natural Selection in a competitive world where children were no longer offered flying-starts. Amy turned on her heels, dropping the watering-can, but managing to keep grip on her flowerpot for dear life.
Arthur could also see – between the gap in two of the four tower-blocks – the square where a fountain played at its middle amongst four cast-iron benches where both residents and strangers could sit, given clement weather. Today, it was deserted, and the fountain frozen into the shape of the creature that had once been its free-flowing water-sculpture.
The teacher could wait. Arthur picked up the abandoned watering-can and peered inside. Nothing except a residue of some mossy paste that had been one of his now forgotten experiments from before the time he had managed to forge a memory of the past. Any past. Children only knew the future as and when it was crystallised as a memorable past – and today Arthur, for the first time, realised he had a past he could remember. Amy, by contrast, was still lost in a fog with which stunted growth besmirched the infant mind even if it was on the point of emerging as a butterfly of Amyness from the dank turnip-egg embedded in the mulch of creation where she had wallowed, disguised as a human baby. Arthur laughed. No such thoughts had gone through his mind.
Yet nagging at him were further thoughts. Amy had left the watering-can because it was evidently not important to her. She still had the flowerpot as she left for the meeting with their schoolteacher. There was evidently something about the flowerpot or what was in the flowerpot or what haunted the flowerpot or a combination of all these things which had caused Amy not to leave it in his possession. And he took a last glance at his moated island of now bubbling earth-erosion, and followed in the wake of his sister, even if that brought forward the dreaded repercussions of the schoolteacher’s visit. The flowerpot had become magnified in his new-found memory and would remain embedded there forever, even when he gradually became an old man with many more memories to harbour than just this single one about his sister’s haunted flowerpot. A haunted memory, if indeed not a haunted flowerpot.
There was now a caped figure sitting on one of the square’s benches, busy writing, oblivious of the weather-proof fountain that cracked like bones in a steady wintry wind. Arthur knew that was himself – a visitant from the future to seal or mint or rubber-stamp the memory that this sight would eventually become. A second memory to join that of the haunted flowerpot. This was a day rich with memories – because, a child’s memories once begun and once adept in the art of storing themselves, multiply with a feeding frenzy.
That day’s meeting with the schoolteacher would be a third memory that was destined to last for as long as memories remained. Including Amy’s reaction to many confused instructions and recriminations regarding the shoes that belonged to a friend of hers. Thankfully, the meeting did not concern Arthur at all. For once.
Later, he returned to the garden – the family’s own allotted plot amongst many other fenced subsections of agriculture or flower-display – and found his latest island of earth had subsided into a stinking compost of known and unknown colours. Despite the frozen weather, it gave off a warm steamy putrescence which was almost pleasant to his untutored nostrils. He could also still hear the relentlessly mild buzz of whatever lifeforms had emerged deeper down below his mis-mechanisation of stones, earth-deposits and man-made chemicals. Now more like gabbled talk than sirens. He poked a finger in and felt a large soft fleshiness that created the loudest screech imaginable.
He ran and ran, if only to escape the memory. Thankfully, he succeeded. The screech simply became the echo of a dream he no longer believed as a real dream let alone as waking reality itself.
His sister Amy squatted on the backstep of the lift shaft – tears streaming down her face – flowerpot clasped to her chest, as if she had kept it as a receptacle for any vomit she was about to let rip from the bottom of her lungs.
Arthur shrugged. Sisters. Strange creatures. Sisters were of that same group of creatures he would never understand, a group that also harboured his mother as well as schoolteacher. He looked into the square to see if that man was still there. He assumed it had been a man. It had the shape of a man, despite the concealing cape. Shapes could be imagined as well as seen for real.
He turned back to his sister. She had gone – leaving the flowerpot on the step. With his Davy Crockett hat’s fur tail swinging, he went over. He needed some more swill for his
moat.
****
THE TENACITY OF FEATHERS
Greg knew it was in the broom cupboard, because that was the obvious place, the safest place for it. Under lock and key. In fact, he knew it was there, since he had personally put it there – folding it flat, easier to put down than put up, its wooden leg-frame often getting tangled and then, when untangled, too thin-edged for the soft sand on the beach to bear … and where one intended to erect it, the whole thing sank an inch or two, worming itself towards hotter climes at the Earth’s Core, no doubt! It sank even further when he sat in it! Then sinking even more the longer he sat in it – neither lying down nor sitting up, but at an angle that meant his body was both lying down and sitting up … but, as time went by, he was relatively more lying down than sitting up. Instead of what it was he pretended it was a feather, to rid himself of what it really was. He imagined the barbs, barbules, retrice, retrige, vanes. A helicopter-feather if you let it go would spin slowly to the ground. Far safer than what was really in the cupboard. Feathers made beds not a nest that is neither bed nor seat or even a piece of household furniture. He preferred the tenacity of feathers to that giant canvas-stretched stick-insect that Clacton council hired out to holiday makers on hot days for their tired limbs instead of feather mattresses which would have been better but less likely to be acceptable on a crowded beach.
Inexplicably shamefaced, he’d manage to extricate himself from thoughts of the feather and, when managing to straighten up upon his hind legs, he would ruefully stare back at the canvas stick-insect. The insipid sun in England was merely the reason for being there or, rather, DESPITE the insipid sun (which he actually found far too hot). His body had indeed been laid upon the stretched-out curve of striped canvas (upon AND along it), his long limbs and torso being supported more for the simple sake of such support than for any benefit of relaxing beneath what he felt to be the smouldering sunshine … all remarkably humiliating: a humiliation that eventually lent itself to the thing itself of wooden frame and striped canvas.
But, then, he had no need to be hung up on sun-bathing. This obsession was now locked up in the broom cupboard under the stairs along with the thing that had caused the obsession – and he had no intention of releasing it. He often imagined the thing as an innocent feather but then he heard whatever-it-was creaking within, pitifully trying to release its wooden bones, followed by a faint shuffling or rustling… perhaps the odd sound of a breezy wave upon pretending it had found its own shoreline within the darkness.
Then, one day, he found sun-worshipping Beth. Or, rather, she found him. He had never had a girl friend before – let alone a partner with which to share a life. He realised that he should have no secrets from her and when she asked about what was in the broom cupboard (as she was bound to do) – well, what could he say? He said: “It’s a feather.”
She had agreed to live with him – bearing in mind that his house had a long garden with plenty of its own fresh air, although she would never have admitted this as the reason. She convinced herself that he was potential love material and already even just the prospect of him being her soulmate had out-lasted several earlier models because this one – with the long garden – was a good proposition, not short of a bob or two. Not great-looking, not of breath-taking film star quality, but certainly not BAD looking. A bit set in his ways, but he did come complete with property and he would probably bend over backwards to please her – and, today, she was inspecting that very property prior to moving in with him.
“Nothing in there really, just a few feathers. And some old paintings I’ve got no room to hang.”
“Anything to sit out in the garden on? It’s a bit bare out there. Not even a shed or any shade, not that I want much shade – as I love sitting out in the sun.”
“Not really. I’ve lost the key anyway.”
“Well, we can force the cupboard door open – or get a locksmith.”
“No point. There are only duplicates of things in there. And some old paintings copied from other old paintings.”
“Duplicates? What do you mean?”
“Duplicates. You know. Things that double up elsewhere.”
“Not seen anything round here that would fit in that cupboard.” She stared at the slanted cupboard door. “All your furniture is too big to get through … unless you mean knick-knacks or ornaments … or bigger things that would fold away in such a space?”
“Yes, that’s it, duplicates that fold away. Not worth the trouble of opening just for them. Next time I have a skip, I’ll force it open then, and get rid of what’s inside.”
Beth glanced over through the dining-room door at the table, wondering if it was duplicated within the cupboard. A duplicate sofa couldn’t possibly be in there, could it? Not many chairs to speak of. A single arm-chair and a couple of dining ones. Surely, if he had duplicates of them, he’d have them on show and not in the broom cupboard. She shrugged. Why bother about such things? She was a jolly person at heart and jolly she would be. She was slim enough to get into the broom cupboard herself. Instead of shrugging, she laughed out loud. What did he say was in there? A feather? And some old paintings?
Well, although they did not live happily ever after – who does? – they struck up a passable living arrangement where – between sun-bathing binges – she did most of the household chores – and she never really questioned the contents of the broom-cupboard and simply used her own body with which to sit or lie out in the garden without any artificial aids to support it. She subconsciously accepted, in other words, his unspoken phobia of the type of seating that he could not even name without blushing rather calling it a feather than actually calling it what-it-was. She sometimes used ordinary house chairs taking their place in a makeshift transfer from the dining-room to the garden and back again after dusk. She resided on pillows and lilos – acceptable replacements because they weren’t used upright and didn’t have to be erected or have shiny striped skin-sticking canvas … like the thing in the broom cupboard he now literally began to hate.
One day – a rainy one – Beth was in the kitchen pouring cream-milk from a pink jug into a bowl – and, although rainy, there was sufficient light from the garden to be the only illumination of the old-fashioned kitchen – slanting from the window upon the now portly shape of the upper half of her body clad in a yellow mock-peasant blouse. These days she usually wore a floppy white hat to complete the picture of ancient domesticity. Her skin was decidedly pale, despite the sun-bathing. Maybe, in fact, she had already given up sun-bathing at this stage in her life. It was as if she had suddenly become an image quite out of keeping with the image she had of herself. She put down the jug with a puff of irritation. And, just as abruptly, she heard – from the hall – a sound she hadn’t heard before. Someone unlocking the broom cupboard, perhaps. The cupboard under the stairs. And it wasn’t Greg. She hadn’t heard him come downstairs from the bedroom where he usually stayed these days. Sounded like a lighter breathing …. A lighter touch, a flicker or spray of sunweb bursting into cigarette flame at the flick of a finger … She’d evidently fallen asleep upon the kitchen trestle and dreamed of a feather by Vermeer whose barbs singed in the blazing light from the Earth’s Core.
STUB OF PENCIL: THE CANVAS STICK-INSECT BENT UPWARDS IN THE LIGHT OF SUNNEMO WITH THE SLOW-MOTION YAWN OF A B-MOVIE MONSTER. TRYING TO REPLICATE ITSELF. THEN, WHEN FAILING TO DO SO, TRYING TO RUB ITS LIMBS TOGETHER TO SPARK A FLAME… AND ITS DREAM OF GRASSY GROUND
MOVED BENEATH THE MOCK PILLOWS …WOODEN FINGERS TRAPPED BETWEEN THEIR OWN PINCERS.
Greg was a chair himself, one that captured feathers in the tenacious grip of its wooden vice. While Beth, in her turn, duplicated the painting in the broom cupboard – the peasant in yellow top and white cap pouring Angevin milk from the dripping blow-lamp of paint. She’d become the stretched-out canvas he sat on.
The broom cupboard clicked doubly shut and all was dusk. Nobody to repaint the feathery light shafting in left to right from the ancient window. All of us end up, one day, in our own Earth’s Core of dark unconscious pain. Skin cancer loosened the seat. And she never lived to leave him.
****
The Weirdmonger – upon his now legendary rite of passage through Klaxon’s peripheral mudparks – came across a dreamcatcher hanging in the sky. Feathers and netting upon a singular swinging frame of irregular shape – or, rather, of both regular and irregular shape. A collapsible frame when not in use, the Weirdmonger guessed. He wondered from where it was thus suspended swinging in the siren-breezes that played fitfully around it at this distance from the city proper. He looked into the cavity’s half-sky and only the light of Sunnemo gave any clue: itself. But the same light glared into his eyes – thus making it difficult to ascertain the dreamcatcher’s root.
He touched it tentatively and watched it swing more vigorously. Dreams flocked around it like moths or mosquitos into the netting, some stuck there as burrs would on fly-paper. One dream caught Weirdmonger in the eye: and he saw (ahead of time) his arrival in a war-ravaged city, his close scrutiny of Sudra’s shoe museum where the smoke from the chimney was like a huge stilleto-wedge rather than a plume or umbrella-shape, and the hasty departure of ‘The Hawler’ flopping from its pylon towards the gravity-logging of its pull only for the Drill's bit-tip to grind uselessly against the beach terrain which was apparently harder within Inner Earth than it had been on the surface.
Captain Nemo had to alight himself to sharpen the bit-tip whilst it was still spinning. And away the Drill went, faces mooning at the portholes near its back of vanes. The Weirdmonger knew – from the dreamcatcher – that the faces’ names were Greg, Beth, Edith and Clare. The Captain was left stranded as the Drill proceeded to push on into the under-surface without him. Fears for his passengers blackened his face. Nemo and Dognahnyi parted company at that moment of violent alter-nemo dispute … a symbiosis in reverse decorated with a flare of more mosquito dreams caught by feathers. With Nemo’s head yanked apart by a pair of its four limbs, the creature emerged from the red-sea gap in the skull with a smirk and a wave towards the Weirdmonger’s future in the city. It was Weirdmonger himself (aka Dognahnyi).
The dreamcatcher had saved him the rest of his journey across the mudparks, so stub-of-pencil now needs to return that way itself so as to erase the relevant bit from the vexed texture of text with a renewed head of rubber, if not steam.
The Weirdmonger scratched his head. Identity was a very strange burden to bear. To take his mind off the momentary discursiveness, he wondered how Sudra’s museum was allowed to smoke in a smokeless zone. Fire was not allowed within Inner Earth – for obvious reasons. And, shrugging, he went towards a cavé to give the locals a piece of his mind.
****
I had been down to the sea front – eager for a breath of fresh air after a night tending my flew-ridden wife – only to find the landscape had changed. "Landscape" actually seemed appropriate. You see, what had changed was the customarily empty horizon between the perfectly geometrical edges of sky and sea, set afire by a recently risen dawn. Populating (if that is the right epithet) this very divider of space and substance, as well as the bulging sun, were several spread splodges of ships: ships simply imputed to be such: not budging nor giving any semblance of distinguishing themselves by smoky funnel or visible wake. The strangest thing was never had I seen more than the odd craft along this peaceful stretch of Clacton coast. More a resort than a dock. So, was this a fleet, a convoy, a logical gathering of otherwise nautical non-sequiturs? Amid seagull sounds at several knots of siren screech.
I returned with my shoulders uncontrollably shrugging as part of my quickening stride. I needed to get back to the bungalow to see how my other half was faring. The sea and its craft could take care of themselves. My lungs and face were appropriately leached, my body superficially exerted and my mind, if not my soul, intriguingly stirred. As they say, I knew where the bodies were buried. Yet, thankfully, most of my guilts and anxieties were now pigeon-holed in some disused office within the brain, creatures which could only be exhumed by the sleepless darkness night often fetched. The golden light had, by now, buried such skeletons in their cupboard. An oubliette beyond the reach of the sun's splattered egg-yolk sky.
A gull shrieked as I turned the corner into my road. Too big, though, for a gull. Its shadow darkened my own – as it slanted between high-rise smoking chimneys at either end of my bungalow. I found the key to my door's deadlock and twisted it several times. Almost as if my return recurred more often than it paid off as a visitor in disguise.
The place felt empty. Instinctively, I wondered if I had stayed away too long. I didn't believe in ghosts, but here I was sniffing the air as if one was imbuing everything with some waxy waft or savour. My tongue was touched with some sharp tang, a residue perhaps from my walk in sight of the biggest salt monster in the world: then, with flesh suddenly bleached by the ultimate angst of all, I stormed towards the bedroom to see if I could salvage anything from sickness. I vowed not to suffer despair, should I be too late. But would it be touch and go?
This was not a quake zone, the carpeted floor, though, swaying beneath me on recognition that my ancient marriage was still intact. There was a crease across one of the pillows just like her smile. The one next to it was mine. And death flew out, screeching for some other perch or dry dock – or, perhaps, simply the ever splodgeless sloping of the sea.
****
As well as Klaxon, Parsimon and Agraska, there is another known or tenable conclave within Inner Earth to which the name most often offered as label is Whofage. The derivations, even aptnesses, of these names are unknown whilst, paradoxically, the names have readily fallen into usage without any question of demur. Their real names remain unknown, whilst that named name of Klaxon still resonates, however, with an actual meaning that effectively entailed the tannoy siren-system to be created, not vice versa, ie. character from proffered name, a phenomenon which is, when fully considered in the light of cause-and-effect rather than synchronicity, not surprising.
Whofage, in fact, was once named Synchronicity by some historic Inner Earth travellers during the days of Jules Verne, a fact now forgotten amidst repercussions of Klaxon’s war spreading by strength of the battle echoes and air-alerts firstly ricocheting from chamber to chamber on a tight regional basis, then cavity to cavity between city-margins. Whofage (now named AGAINST the normal channels of sane semantics) was a place where Synchronicity began to be deemed as evil, thus giving Synchronicity a bad name at the same time as giving Randomness a haphazard boost by the strength of the craziness of war itself. Whofage seemed random anough (more random than using the name Randomness itself), and this even seemed eminently logical to the top brainwrights of Whofage’s Inner City Council who were concerned to prolong the unpredictabilities of war (imported, by echo, from Klaxon) amid their various pragmatic uses of its collateral damage and bad karma … ie. politics.
It is an unrecorded fact that THE HAWLER (with its index-number of H5N1 now visible for the first time from the direction of any observers) stayed over at Whofage on route between Klaxon and, eventually, one hoped, the Megazanthine Core near Agraska. Greg and the others alighted simply to stretch their legs and to discuss the disappearance of the Drill’s Captain. Should they return to Klaxon to rescue him or forge on without him, both options impossible to carry out without his presence in the first place. They had crash-landed in Whofage having traversed random cavities in a rather spin-easy fashion of free-fall that did not entail any drilling whatsoever or any off-detritus clearance by the rubble-vanes. Even now, the Drill squatted on the craggy sides of Whofage’s cathedral, having demolished half of the Gothic architecture in the process – making it look more like a bridge than Notre Dame. A bridge from and to nowhere. And over nothing.
Greg had put such problems towards the back of his mind – as he wandered the back-streets of Whofage looking for souvenirs. There were feathery models of the Angel Megazanthus in many of the antique shops, but, at that stage, none of the party recognised these knick-knacks for what they were. They assumed they were dreamcatchers on varying frames of complexity or simplicity. The Core, to Greg and his party, was still a mystery and no rumours as to the Core’s incubatory nature had back-tracked along the sound-veins from Agraska to shed any light on this mystery. Echo-filters, unlike some other filters, were never two-way. Beth did buy one ‘dreamcatcher’ to hang in her cabin in the Drill.
Another excursion – one not programmed in their original holiday itinerary – was to watch larger models of ‘Megazanthus’ dreamcatchers actually working. The party sat in a row of canvas deck-chairs – hired for the purpose to them from the rather business-like brainwrights of Whofage – at the edge of a cracked meadow. And they listened to a commentary from the city’s own tannoy-system describing the various aspects of the air-show. One craft that slowly took off – by the use of a rather slow-motion lifting by spluttering fireworks – was a gigantic kite or glider that seemed a cross between a crop-sprayer and horizontal radio-transmitter. Bearing in mind its motive power, it was rather difficult to control at ground level and it soon diverted from its original advertised course towards a random one that entailed much collateral damage in the city itself.
****
Meanwhile, I remained on board THE HAWLER. And I took opportunity to explore all the cabins, even to the extent of pretending I existed as a person I knew as someone else rather than someone sufficiently COMPOS MENTIS to call him- or herself ‘I’. If anyone opened the next cabin, I could only remember the type of person involved and the thoughts judged in isolation from being that person. An insulated dream which knew itself – somewhere – to be real and boundless. Once I was inside the cabin – a walk-in wardrobe that I could never have afforded the space to own, even given the wherewithal of finance – I could perceive the dulcet care of lighting that a gentleman about town may have preferred for liaisons rather than garment storage. There were no garments; they had been stripped out along with their hangers and sock-drawers. No drip-dry shirt-tails to assist the lighting’s ambition to dim. There were many things not there, not even thought about or considered worthy of noting their absence, I’m sure.
There was a dead tree lying on the cabin carpet. Seeping open its own frayed and palsied bark. A large slumped trunk reaching into the darkest regions of the wardrobe, leafless branches out-splayed like a thousand knotted limbs grasping at nothing: crumbling where the damp had reached its due existence of further nothingness. Rotting by root and tip, I tried to plug my nose with rhino-gomenol. Its minor rootlets were further limbs, but rather more sveltely ‘living’ than the branches. Yet rotting, nonetheless.
The major roots were tantamount to things I once feared growing in my own body. No possible description of such menaces. Hidden by their minors, as they were. Vaguely sensed in the wardrobe’s body mirror on the side wall.
I stooped to touch the dead tree’s bark or, rather, its upper sutures – or, rather, I didn’t stoop at all, but squinted in the sedated light – to see the shape more clearly, without daring to approach it. Merely to touch with my eyes, as it were, failing to see that this was the most dangerous entry to the soul with which I saw.
The dampness had reached such depths, I spotted a tiny lake amid the runnelled surface – even a pocket sea. I yearned to saw through various branches to allow irrigation to drier areas where tiny wooden mouths seemed to pock out with airlets or minuscule bubblings. I fondled the nail-file in my pocket, wondering if its serrations would prove sufficient purchase. I clicked my heels on the parquet, in a tantrum of powerlessness.
Purple crosses had been carved into words upon the bark and equally stained with some verjuice that my tongue knew (more intimately than my nose) was rhino-gomenol, despite various trajectories of these two senses were conflated with surrogate touching. I could not read or reach the sad words thus chiselled, words which no doubt were noting some tryst beneath the tree’s wide bower in happier times.
The tree’s pulpy ridges pulsed but, then again, they were dead, completely dead. As if the floaters in my eyes – fed by deeper heartbeats – lent their own life to what they witnessed. Back and forth our sight does travel, nobody owning its visions. My last and best liaison perhaps, I raised my hand tentatively to the dimmer-switch.
A voice spoke that the cabin was made that way. From the Canterbury Oak.
****
The dubious direction of the next cabin derived from a sense of both inner and outer address, as well as both game and serious quest. Which of these became appropriate would remain uncertain for some time, I felt – but I was at least sure I approached the next cabin almost instantaneously, even possibly in advance of a few other cabins that had once appeared chronologically prior to this my current locking into a new set of falling lock-tumblers. These, I assumed, were a suite of cabins belonging to the missing Captain.
I was faced at the back of the cabin with – not hinged wall-maps – but soldiers depicted in a carpet-tapestry (albeit with no obvious weft or woof in the fabric). The stitches or weaves were slipstreamed, but they remained proud from the surface upon which they had been laid down like rich chintz: soldiers that once (in a previous or subsequent cabin) had been photographed old (beyond indeed the age of film) but now even older like Mediaeval icons. Each of their eyes stared out at my face in the cabin’s opening frame, like a gold coin … or a military medal. I cringed, as if they deemed me unworthy of my own personality’s currency or exchange rate protagonism. Deemed me a mere quarter p.
Then I noticed that the soldiers did not bear crosses like wounds or stigmata – purple crosses that had crossed them out in earlier lingering images once foretold by another cabin. Here, the soldiers themselves crossed out the crosses by means of their tunics, but crosses still vaguely seen through the woven arteries of the soldiers’ bodies in the shape of wrong marks or slipped tapestry-stitches or falsely identifiable co-ordinates where treasure was buried … except the cross itself constituted the treasure and the uniform plateau of flesh above marked its spot.
The smell, I noticed, was simultaneously anger and incense, a strange heady contagion of eucalyptus cold cure like rhino-gomenol and the rankness of confession.
Beneath these images of soldiers were wickerwork baskets containing the ripe seeds of ancient sanitary processes – as if positioned there to catch all the droppings of the tapestried soldiers.
I laughed – I who had backed into this telling cabin tableau – roared with hysterical mirth. Among the droppings were true pigeon-holes. Not those pigeon-holes that existed as familiar open-fronted slots that cross-hatched the back wall of many a cabin proper … but, instead, as they rested and nested in ordure, singular nothingnesses like noughts.
****
Whofage, unlike the other conclaves within the cavities of Inner Earth, was prone to funnel forces – which, on the surface, were commonly recognised as whirlwinds or tornados. Often, Whofagers would glimpse a sparely nourished coil of discoloured sky, but then slowly but ineluctably deepening and spinning into wilder, larger shadows of shape (whilst simultaneously trying to hone its integrity as a funnel) – finally, not spinning away into nothing as tornados manage to do on the earth’s surface, but spinning into the under-ground, maintaining its force-fed maelstroms (now of rubble as well as of black-clouded air-space) as it wreaked further courses of crazy-paving via many under-surfaces, even via otherwise impacted areas of solid earth.
Before Greg and his party had managed to salvage the Drill from its open-plan sectioning of Whofage’s cathedral, one such funnel-force had managed to accomplish this feat quite freakishly, almost balancing the Drill’s form within the inner meshments of its visibly darkening torque until landing it lightly near the cracked meadow where the party were already watching an air show. All seemed highly appropriate, if essentially accidental – in keeping with Whofage’s reputation for the syncromesh of randomness.
Also, with some panache, Captain Nemo arrived hotfoot from Klaxon – or someone remarkably carrying off this persona with skilful replication – claiming that he had utilised a number of short-cut back-doubles intrinsic to the hawling-shaft system of Inner Earth, comprising mostly rat-runs privy only to Drill captains. Nevertheless, it had been quite a journey. The other members of the Drill’s party welcomed him with mixed feelings. Soon after, all of them left for Agraska in a quickly repaired Drill and for what was already to have transpired there VIS A VIS Mount Core (or Sunnemo) and the Angel Megazanthus.
****
‘The Hawler’, having now drilled onward from Whofage – together with its ominous index number – the cracked meadow soon became peppered with picnic parties: a loom of dawning Sunnemo light; twirling parasols; bright checked tablecloths spread over the greenest grass possible (possible, that is, outside the scope of a painting); wicker baskets brimming with edible goodies of every dietary persuasion; and joyful, sexy people.
"Nice day, Louise." A hand both saluted and shaded Sunnemo.
"It'll be even nicer when the wine coolers arrive."
The voices of chirpy, dimply children mingled with the deeper grown-up sounds. The clink of glasses. The buzz of mining-bee. The chomp of molars. The giggles of those deep in love with each other.
"It'll be great when the competition begins."
"Yes, it'll soon be time."
Any stranger might have questioned WHAT competition was in prospect. Three-legged or egg-and-spoon races ... or both together? Tug of love? The loudest laugh? The furthest roll of the hoop? The fastest spin of the top with a cracking whip? The prettiest frock? The sweetest smile? The longest beard? The shortest? The ugliest pulled face? The biggest this, the smallest that? The most durable picnic? The maroon-party to beat all maroon-parties?
It was probably none of these. Whilst it wasn't, after all, ANY old Stranger who faced the prospect with so many queries of what it was. It was the Weirdmonger who had arrived through the hawling-shafts in company with Captain Nemo but, having surreptitiously stayed in Whofage to while away the narrative of higher scribal authorities than even he was allowed to manage, he was determined to create some enjoyment for himself (and to give him credit, for others, too), ie. as a Stranger to create enjoyment indeed from the otherwise gratuitousness of his situation thus to be transcribed into poetic or vexed text.
Soon, a rubicund retainer arrived with cases of chilled white wine and – amid the consequent hilarity surrounding the popping of corks – it gradually became clear to the Weirdmonger what exactly was to transpire. Each group of picnickers was sited beside one of the many natural geysers that abounded on the cracked meadow. The openings were controlled by manual valves – and the intention was to release them in one fell swoop, whereby the winning group would be the one with the tallest and longest lasting fountain. Furthermore, a SPECIAL prize was to be given for the fountain that emerged with the fanciest configuration.
As Sunnemo dipped below the distant wooded hills, it spread along the horizon like thick cut marmalade. The wine corks took up new crescendoes of popping, as bonfire beacons were set alight across the cracked meadow by each picnic group. Then, there was a secret starting signal (which was only obvious retrospectively to the Weirdmonger) – and the geysers were released in a perfect flashpoint of simultaneity. Some spluttered in short silver cascades or spirts of gurgling spray. Others were sufficiently tall to steal gold from the sunset and become gushing giants of myth and magic. A few, even taller, sported every colour of the rainbow plus colours unknown to the painter's palette. Yet, there was one geyser, the tallest of all, which lost its colour as it sprayed new-born stars across the darkening sky - and at the mountain-peak of its fountaining power, it formed a mighty dragon's head. The roar from the head's gargling mouth was incredibly even louder than the geyser which had originally given it birth.
The picnickers were cowed by the intrinsic, if short-lived, magnificence of such a white-water beast looming from the earth in cataclysmic contrast to the rearing tides of darkness.
After eventually packing their hampers, the parties wended their way home from across the cracked meadow, each jollifier with a blazing torch. The Weirdmonger followed, keeping himself to himself, and softly sobbing. He had stayed on the cracked meadow long enough to watch the geysers being pent up within their rightful confines of dark earth - EXCEPT, of course, for that single squirt the picnickers had forgotten to cap within its oubliette, one that continued spluttering, perhaps pathetically, perhaps otherwise, forming snowdrop petals in the marooned night. Tiny silver frostfish sparkling: sparkling, even, without light.
The Weirdmonger knew – despite the carefreeness of those erstwhile picnickers whom he followed – that the treasure which Dragon Earth greedily guarded was itself.
Having the sense of floating upon one among an archipelago of fountainous ice-carvings, the Weirdmonger shuddered with ultimate fear. The fear of self.
O Stranger, O Saint George.
****
Scene: Sudra’s Shoe Shop in Klaxon City.
Sudra is sitting in one of the stockrooms, surrounded by shoeboxes from ceiling to floor, having just received a surprise visit from Amy clutching a rather large flowerpot. They had embraced and were now in close conversation.
SUDRA: The last time I saw you was when you were holding me from falling in the hawling-shaft…
AMY: Yes, I’m delighted to see you survived.
S: I didn’t! At least for a while. Until I woke up here in charge of this shop. Placed into business by some benefactor who stays unknown, even today. I still felt it was me that was me, but I suspect sometimes that I woke up as someone else. At first it was disconcerting…
A: Very! But you learn to live with yourself eventually as I did. I still have memories of a childhood, my brother Arthur and all that – and Mum – and Miss Clare our teacher. But then, I’m not sure I’m the same person who grew out of that child.
S: When I last saw you we were both hanging on to dear life, or at least I was! It was my life hanging in the balance, after all. I looked up into your eyes and I saw something or someone behind them which wasn’t quite right. And then you let go!
A: No, you let go! I felt your hands ungrip around mine. I wasn’t perhaps completely myself, true, but I wanted to save you – I really did. I had been recruited by Doghnahnyi for something but I’m sure it wasn’t to kill you. It was to do with the Angevin traffic…
S: All these years I believe you killed me. But life has to go on without recrimination. Since things went strange, I’m sure there’s no possible blame. Even shame’s gone out of the window. Dognahnyi – wasn’t he also known as Captain Nemo? … THE ONE WHO TRAVELS OVERLAND TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH as they put in the ‘Jules Verne Tours’ blurb…
A: Yes, and I’ve since found out, he’s also known as the Weirdmonger…
S: The Weirdmonger? Someone of that name has been lurking round here for a while – but I ‘ve not seen him for ages.
A: They said you had John Ogdon working for you here in the shop?
S: Who said? Has someone sent you here to spy on me?
A: No, No, Suds, it’s just that – I can’t explain it – or I can explain it. You probably know John Ogdon as Crazy Lope… You nod. Well, he’s also known as Blasphemy Fitzworth or Padgett Weggs… A proper spy disguised as a dosser or cat’s meat man or…
S: Well, I’ve not seen Lope for days, either. They say there’s war afoot. Many have already left Klaxon. Most visitors have gone. You’re probably the only visitor at the moment.
A: Not a war so much, Suds, as head-on collisions of bird-sickness plague , body to body… blending…
S: I don’t understand. I don’t think I ever will.
A: It’s the Drill. Dognahnyi’s Drill. It was more intended as a plug (a moving plug) than a thing that took people overland within Inner Earth to the Core. It was originally intended by its designer (DF Lewis) to prevent the flow of Angevin back to the surface, as he believed it was not so much a recreational drug as a carrier of the bird-sickness in a more virulent form, encouraging people-to-people contamination instead of mere bird-to-people contamination. The latter can be controlled. The former can’t be.
S: That’s the first time I’ve heard mention of that Lewis bloke.
A: He’s a rather shadowy figure. Arthur once told me about him. Anyway, getting back to the Drill or Plug – it has worsened the situation because of what happened at the Core when it got there. It just provided more fuel for the Angevin from the pairs of people who visited it – and then the hawling-process took it back with it, so not a plug to prevent carrying but the carrier itself. The sickness has now reached the surface via man-city – Viet Nam, Rumania, Turkey, later London, even Clacton – then New York, the whole globe infected not from the sky but by things that masquerade as birds within the globe itself and then come out as real birds having stowed away on the Plug or, more likely, flowing like feathered torpedos with the Angevin hawling-flow. It’s still rather confusing. But it can be stopped.
S: How?
A: It’s something so oblique, so damn opaque, it needs conversations like this to approach from various brainstorming angles to reach some semblance of its basics. Something to do with the word ‘firedrill’ I believe. And that’s just the beginning of the wild guesses.
S: Firedrill?
A: Let’s relax for a moment. Talk about other things. Solutions only come when you don’t try to think of them. How’s the shoe business going?
S: Not bad. With the war coming, the armies needed shodding for a start.
A: I don’t know how you put up with all those sirens all the time.
S: Well, they are only going, when there are visitors in Klaxon. Otherwise, the tannoys play Classical Music all day. It’s rather a blessing.
A: Classical Music! I think I’d prefer the sirens!
S: It’s quite restful most of the time – Chamber Music by Debussy or Beethoven, Schubert – loads of Bach – but yes, they sometmes play some more modern Classical Music more related to the siren sound so we don’t miss it too much! Ligeti, Bartok, Penderecki’s THRENODY FOR THE VICTIMS OF HIROSHIMA, you know the sort of thing… But if there is at least one visitor in Klaxon, back to the sirens proper!
A: Rather you than me. I’ll be pleased to get out of this place.
S: What’s in that flowerpot, Amy, by the way?
A: Guess.
S: Can’t guess.
A: OK, let me guess first what that thing is that is in the corner over there – it looks to be a cross between a shoebox and a proper shoe.
S: That’s a shoe for a Grandfather Clock.
A: I wish I hadn’t asked! Anyway guess what’s in my flowerpot. It may help.
S: A porcelain venus-shell?
A: Nope.
S: Arthur’s ear?
A: Nope
S: My shoes that you once stole from me?
A: Nope. And I didn't!
S: A clockwork toy – a model of the Drill – an Angel Megazanthus brooch - a cabbage full of dead flies - a toy log-lorry?
A: Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope.
Amy puts her hand in the flowerpot and brings out her own childhood doll strapped into a doll-sized deck-chair and clasping a doll-sized flowerpot. And Sudra is alone again with her shoeboxes and bespoke shoes. Even the tannoys are silent for once. Just barely perceptible jingling from some of the shoeboxes.
****
Klaxon City was the name of an amusement arcade in London’s Soho – sufficiently sophisticated to be considered a casino, or certainly abiding by the same rules and providing comparable opportunities for the punters. It was simply more open-fronted with looser membership conditions and lower grade jackpots, but otherwise it had all the trimmings: just on the corner from Leicester Square underground station.
A husband and wife team by the name of Greg and Beth were managers and the owner was Sudra Incorporated the whereabouts of whose shadowy head office was even unknown to the managers, other than a Registered Address which could not easily be checked out, short of a long journey to the ends of the earth, it seemed, or at least beyond Zone Six on London Transport. Greg and Beth were recruited via an agent by the name of Mr Dognahnyi who had a flat in Mayfair, but even he had indirect contact with Sudra Inc. Emails and cash transfers by PayPal. Only the odd visit from Authorities, most of which prying was kept at bay by mysterious paperwork behind the scenes in bent accountants’ and solicitors’ offices. There being no food involved, only the broadest Health & Safety Regulators were given the slightest excuse to pay heed to Klaxon City’s methods, without any recourse to Cleansing Agents or Culinary Inspections. And even these turned blind eyes as well as deaf ears to some of the outlandish noises and migraine-inducing strobes.
Mr D’s flat had original oils sporting walls to hang on that were so thickly chintzed one did not need to wonder how the thrum of London outside was sound-proofed for the benefit of the subtle Chamber Music playing from the tiniest speakers, but ones with the greatest dynamic range that Greg and Beth had ever heard. The walls of Klaxon City itself likewise did indeed have oils to set off the hi-tech walls of digitalised games and spinning mantras that constituted some of the ‘amusements’ and insidious temptations to gamble. Oil portraits of fantasy vistas which – when one became accustomed to the types of game on offer – were seen to accompany the risk-and-ride boxes-of-tricks as a pianist would accompany a singer.
Only few were privy to Klaxon City’s ‘amusement’ services because – from the outside – it looked quite seedy with a threat of muggings by scarred street-sleepers rather than promise of coddlings by bosomy croupiers. This was a way to keep the place select - a topsy-turvy method of restricting the clientele by aversion therapy with regard to the unwanted narrow-minded types of punter who only judged things by surface appearances. The games needed far-sighted specialisms of humanity to make them work at their optimum – and these prize customers were encouraged by winning large sums of money rather against the odds of most other casinos. It was creative payola for turning imagination into actuality – a method in a madness of which even Greg and Beth had hardly scratched the surface. The punters simply needed to get past the obvious signs of criminal danger that associated itself with most arcades and then they would find beyond such frontage the most benevolent form of creative gambling imaginable – and once imagined, the world was their oyster.
Greg and Beth used to run an arcade in Clacton. That was useful experience. In Clacton, one can be trained for all manner of deeper occupations which seaside resorts alone know how to harbour. A Dry Dock for the re-fitting of genius prior to its re-launch. And even for Greg and Beth, it was simply a short journey by train to Liverpool Street , then underground to Leicester Square followed by a warm welcome by Mr Dognahnyi on behalf of Sudra Inc. At first, rather troubled by the frontage of Klaxon City, they were – once inside, once through that initial burst of dismay at the grim-faced bouncers – soon glistened upon by every conceivable spinning-table of landlocked luck teetering towards the benefit of all who played them – and even the toilets boasted original oils.
The underground trains made the place shake with low-throated rumbles from time to time. Luckily, imagination drew short of imagining them to be bombs or quakes or even life going on elsewhere beyond surface after surface of surface appearance towards a recognition of the madness intrinsic to an existence still not fully in the know.
One wall-game was to shoot the birds. A spinning-vista of a lake sanctuary where you needed to aim at any feathers once glimpsed. And the more you shot off, the more you won. It was called ‘The Tenacity of Feathers’. And a siren sounded out at every direct hit.
I wonder myself if there was a deeper symbolism in that phrase – ‘The Tenacity of Feathers’. And that it was just another misleading frontage within the first misleading frontage. A meaning that we were all feathers in an eternal lifetime of identities, each identity a single feather that we wore throughout this time-line of crossed-feathers or ruffled ones, being indeed a single feather that we fought to preserve tenaciously, only to fail when one became the next feather (or identity) ripe for plucking. It takes more than one feather to make the bird. And somewhere a creature stretches its still sparsely feathered wings – but with gradually less balding tufts just starting to sprout on its huge balloon of a belly.
One day, I fear sound-fire will be drilled real deep by a dead-eyed punter towards my own feather’s root. Crazy Lope – dead Red Indian.
****
“It's a need for immortality – whilst before in pre mass-communication eras very few people went down in history books – therefore religion provided the 'immortality' because there was no feasible ambition of 'immortality' in any other way. Today, one can imagine one is in the public eye, and the public eye immortalises in a very insidious but also a believably crystalline fashion. Notoriety or self-crucifixion are two possible paths towards this crystallisation within the 'public eye' as well as more straightforward forms of fame - all as provided by the mutual reflections from the unreality/reality syndrome of mass communication-mirrors (and I would include the internet as well as TV as examples of these).”
THE SPEAKER IN EARTH TOWERS HALL PAUSED. THE AUDIENCE COULD ONLY WONDER IF THEY HAD CORRECTLY PLACED THE QUOTE-MARKS AROUND WORDS OR PHRASES WITHIN HIS SPEECH. HOW COULD THEY DO OTHERWISE? SPEECHES – LIKE ANY OTHER SOUNDS OR ITEMS OF MUSIC – ARE INTERPRETED AND FILTERED BY THE LISTENERS, SOMETIMES QUITE DIFFERENTLY FROM EACH OTHER BUT ALL ‘CORRECT’ FOR THEMSELVES. THEY ARE OFTEN DEPENDANT NOT ONLY ON MENTAL CAPACITIES (PREJUDICES, PROCLIVITIES ETC.) BUT ALSO ON PHYSICAL ONES ACTUALLY TO RECEIVE THE SOUNDS AND TRANSLATE INTO ‘MEANING’ VIA, FOR EXAMPLE, BOTH INNER EARS. LIKEWISE: VISIONS, DREAMS, LIES, GHOSTS, FICTIONS, PERFORMANCES, POEMS-ON-THE-PAGE, MORALITY FABLES – ALL ‘SEEN’ (MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY) AS ‘CORRECT’ BY EACH AND EVERY ONE, BUT IN A SLANT OR SHADE THAT IS PECULIAR TO ALL OF THEM ONE BY ONE … OFTEN AFFECTING (OR NOT) THE ‘REALITY’ WITHIN WHICH THE SOUNDS OR VISIONS ARE PLACED OR CONTEXTUALISED. AND THIS CONTEMPLATION OF MINE – WORDS THAT YOU HAVE JUST READ AS COMMENTARY ON THE SPEAKER’S SPEECH AND HIS AUDIENCE’S POTENTIALITY TO ‘LISTEN’ – WAS EFFECTIVELY ANOTHER SPEECH WITHIN MY OWN MIND AS I WAITED FOR THE AUDIBLE SPEAKER (COMPARED TO MY SILENT ‘SPEECH’ TO MYSELF) TO RESUME HIS OWN SPEECH, AS HE DID:
“Here in Earth Towers Hall, it seems appropriate to digress upon the meaning of fiction in the context of what I’ve just said.”
EARTH TOWERS HALL WAS A NEW PURPOSE-BUILT BUILDING ON THE BANKS OF THE THAMES QUITE CLOSE TO THE CITY OF LONDON. THE TIP OF ST PAUL’S DOME COULD JUST BE SEEN THROUGH THE WINDOW THAT BACKED ON TO THE HI-TECH PODIUM. MOCK-ARCHITECTURE MIXED WITH REAL PAINTINGS OF THAMESIAN SCENES. THIS WAS THE INAUGURAL EVENT. AN IMPORTANT SLANT ON THINGS REAL AND UNREAL BY A PURPOSE-BORN PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY WHO WAS DOWNGRADING HIS THOUGHTS BY POSING AS A FAMOUS AUTHOR OF FICTION.
“And one can believe that fiction and non-fiction share the same jigsaw, the same rattle-bag of broken shards of ancient pottery of thought all leading – potentially – to a pattern that we can examine, then use to solve problems (or to create them). An example would be useful. ‘The Tenacity Of Feathers’ ostensibly deals with many current matters (as they happen) and today bird sickness has fallen lower in the sky – and we can only hope that the fiction itself is helping to lower influenza’s temperature and eventually eradicate it. Fiction is that powerful. A happy ending (yes, skip to the end of the book, go on) – it’s bound to be a happy ending or the author would never have finished it. He needs to be thanked for all his good work in harnessing the power of fiction to solve this single pressing problem by setting himself the goal of a happy ending, despite all the horror images he necessarily conjures up IN ORDER TO reach that happy ending…”
I SMILED. THIS SPEECH MADE NO LOGICAL SENSE TO ME. I DID HAVE SOME SYMPATHY WITH THE SPEAKER’S VIEWS ON THE BLURRING OF REALITY/UNREALITY, AS EXEMPLIFIED BY TV REALITY SHOWS LIKE BIG BROTHER AND THAT AUDIENCES, THESE DAYS, ACTUALLY ‘CREATE’ THE EVENT WITH THEIR REACTIONS (SUCH AS POP CONCERTS) – BUT TO EXTRAPOLATE, IE. TO MANUFACTURE AN AUDIT TRAIL BETWEEN FICTION (ART) AND THE MALLEABILITY OF REALITY ITSELF TO THE SAME FICTION (ART), WAS CERTAINLY SOMETHING VERY DIFFICULT FOR ME TO SWALLOW. I HELD THE VERY BOOK IN QUESTION WITHIN MY HANDS AS I SAT IN THE AUDIENCE – SKIPPED TO THE END AND EVERYTHING VANISHED, INCLUDING MYSELF. EARTH TOWERS HALL ECHOED WITH THE SILENCE OF BIRD DROPPINGS.
****
I'd better ease back a bit, for space is a biggish place to get lost in.
I often talk to myself, especially when trying to concentrate on piloting this monstrosity of a rocket along the cargo lanes between Earth and Jupiter. It bucks like a branded bronco, but a feather touch is all that is needed by me to keep it on course. The highly-geared, power-driven joy-stick is like a hair-trigger lover in my hand – my slightest fondle setting off paroxysms in the vacuum-rudders at the tail – and the mighty craft glides into the ley-holes and wheels along the space-lines – pre-tracing the course of such a lonely hunter as I in the endless empty night...
Back home, when I was a boy, I'd gaze at the ever-lasting twilights before my mother called me to bed. I dreamt that one day I'd be beyond the rim of Earth itself. I thought I might even one day become a shooting star among those which I then drank into my wide, but tiring, eyes.
But now at the age of fifty-eight, I really am such a shooting star, with all the power which man has been able to muster subject to my merest flick of the wrist, and I wonder what it is all about – life, the universe, everything...
I imagine a new generation of boys looking up from the deepest part of the blackness before me – seeing me perhaps like a bird-shaped splash of silver on the underside of Heaven – those same boys taking dream photographs for their sleep to use later – yearning to become one with me.
I'll take their souls on board – give them a joy ride they'll never forget.
Jupiter is closing fast, boys – I see its whirling wen, its runnelled visage, looming up like God's very skull.
I'll take you in closer – the ride is becoming much like a rollercoaster, I know – the planet's wide wide mouth and lolling tongue – since our vision has momentarily lost vertical hold – and the horizontal balance is shaky too – perhaps I've been a trifle heavy-handed...
A line of boys, still leaning against rustic fences across the lands of Earth, stared sightlessly towards the darkening sky. Jagged edges of frozen bone funnelled upwards from each of their opened skull-tops whence their brains and souls had exploded towards a nova they never really saw.
And I still talk to myself and hopefully others, in the slowing light.
****
STUB OF PENCIL: Many people each holding one large word and, if they found the right order, the words would tell a significant story. They shuffled places in an arc, until a consensus as to an optimum order. A camera swivelled taking a panoramic photo of the story … but broke before the end.
****
He told her that when they played noughts and crosses together she, Tho, would have to wield the mistake and he, Hataz, the perfect circle. He even hinted that each time she engraved the intersection on the old wooden desk-slope, someone somewhere bore a natural death. For him, of course, the joining of endless curve with endless curve was tantamount to another one being born elsewhere.
Why SHE, Tho, had to carry what she considered, to be a burden upon her slender shoulders, Hataz never explained. Equally, when they were younger, he never quite chose the right words for their act of see-saw. Into the late gossamer twilights that seemed to abound during those limitless summer holidays, they would alternately break and join the shafts of hill sunshine with their joyful pivoting, young lives very much in the balance. The two of them being of unequal weights, Tho never really understood how that ill-knotted plank could take Hataz towards the touching blue sky and, then by turns, tug HER evenly towards those same parts where earth’s caring pull thinned out. Again, Birth and Death were assigned his and hers respectively, as each made their own characteristic landfall upon the springy turf: he with confident reliance on the synchromeshing muscles and bones of the legs, as smooth as if his blood were oil; she with shapely limbs splayed almost to the snapping point of thin bones, her lips quivering as the tiny skirt grew tinier.
Tho was given her real name only at the age of twelve. This was the person she would need to grow into, Hataz told her.
“But why? I am surely me already.”
His voice grew deeper in reply. She could never recall exactly what he said. His words, she was sure, were about magic in the hills; past destiny fanning into parallel and crossover realities as far as the eye of memory could see; a greater destiny even than that which circumscribed Space, Time and Mind with its perfect revolved hologram of convoked circles; and the centre of it all, the Core where the Angel Megazanthus riffled its wings.
The schoolyard echoed with the happy frightened cries of short-shinned boys and thigh-wheeling girls. The teacher hid his intrusive gaze as the Hataz lad walked hand in hand with the Tho lass who always sat anonymously at the back of his history class. He sometimes inadvertently overheard the conversation of Hataz and Tho, but could not fathom why young children should prattle so dreamily: Words like “Angel Megazanthus” were for books with wide empty margins, weren’t they, and so were such expressions as “the mystical beauty of night upon ever-bosoming hills” and “the white people within our skins”. These were so far-fetched upon the tongues of mere kids, the teacher even doubted whether he had heard them properly. Surely he could not have invented the words himself.
One day, he kept a number in for detention. Even so, there was no explanation for the extension of twilight beyond a certain point. The narrow beams of dusty sunshine still sloped across the double-desk at the back. Hataz and Tho were bent intently over the grain, compass points at crazy angles. The teacher did not dare recriminate them, because of the sparkles at the points.
The teacher felt his flesh crawl when he saw the other children put up their hands. How could he ever explain? But, then with relief, he examined the attendance register so meticulously maintained by their form teacher. Hataz had a series of black crosses stretching endlessly from the edge of his name, instead of the red circles of which all the other names could boast. His relief was tinged with mystery, however, for the lines in the register he kept for his own form marched along with red herring-bones, with only an odd black circle here and there to sully its perfect symmetry.
When the detention reached its inconclusive dismissal, he wished he’d counted them in before he counted them out. He rocked gently at his high desk, somewhat preoccupied, as night reclaimed this particular reality for what it was.
****
The millions of warmongers in Klaxon-under-the-Ground swarmed from pillar to post, ready to stone even stones as well as each other – displaying a mob hatred simply engendered to stem the tide of love’s infections. A vital mutation or misalignment of possibilities.
****
Quite close to Clacton in Essex, there is Britain’s oldest recorded town, Colchester, its tall Town Hall pointing at the sky like a stretched wonder of the world – so attenuated you wonder if you’re in a surreal dream rather than a proper lifetime. The Water Tower is another land-locked kite of stone. The Castle an impacted rattle-bag of Norman stone, weathered to the gills. Yet a tree grows from its topmost tower. The Colchester Tree. Wet-weather fireworks of green. A ground-based kite-display beneath the empty sky.
I was brought up in Colchester from the age of eight.
****
I first met Greg at the Round Gardens. I was working as a washer-up and he as piano-player in the resident band. Greg being a man of few words, I had to compensate by telling him about my life – the many women who had passed through my hands, the enormous amounts of money I had squandered on the race-horses, the various jobs in dubious joints scattered along the English east coast, the brushes with the law, the burglaries, even the murders. And, eventually, he came round regularly to the poky kitchen, squatted on the disused oven and countered my tales with his own – and pretty mind-blowing they were too. He often moved his fingers in tune with his tales as if he were accompanying himself with silent music.
The boss at the Round Gardens was a guy in his fifties whom most of us, for whatever reason, called Ogdon. He lived in a large establishment called Olive Villa near the seafront pier, into which he had introduced four erstwhile strangers: a fancy woman, this fancy woman’s daughter, the daughter’s husband together with a small boy.
At Christmas, we staff went to Olive Villa for a seasonal tipple. Greg didn’t drink, but he went for a chance to play solos on Ogdon’s Grand. I went mainly because I did drink – probably too much for my own good, but what’s life without a little of what you fancy? I had my splashes on the rocks, anyway. Oh, I forgot to tell you, at the time there was a war going on and this seaside resort, Walton-on-Naze, took the brunt of the night flights from enemy quarters. On this particular Christmas (the third of the war, I think), Ogdon had held a party at Olive Villa for all his hobnobbers. It was a strange one, to my eyes at any event, for everybody had to come in the clothes of the opposite sex. Greg said he was shocked, which I found surprising in view of what he had told me about his previous experiences.
Indeed, from whatever perspective, it WAS strange. The men had stockings threaded by hairy legs and wore utility print-dresses, false boobs and bottoms, eye-makeup fit for a circus act and falsetto voices to boot. The women in three-piece tweed suits, with deep turn-ups, fob watches, kipper ties and voices so gruff they must have nurtured sore throats for days before. Ogdon loved it all. He was dressed as neither. He looked a bit like an angel or, maybe, a cricketer in white flannels.
Greg played the Grand. And the motley guests did old-time dancing, with the women leading the men across the large lounge floor. I sauntered from the kitchen, where the makeshift bar was erected, occasionally to take a good look because, even then, I realised that affairs such as this were the stuff of future memories. And what else was there in store for me but mere memories?
But, now, a word about Edith. She was Ogdon’s fancy woman in question: being a female a rough diamond, grown from muck-heaps of war-time East London, true, but a lady for all that. She did not always put on airs and graces. Sharp, shrewd and forceful; one moment common, the next noble, but mostly a bit of both.
She treated me well, but Greg did not like her, called her the governor’s bit of stuff in her hearing, and she tried to get him sacked, but Ogdon did not want to lose the best piano player on the East coast. She argued in her typical oblique fashion that Greg had tangled fingers, making the music unhearable.
All of which brings me to the night of that party. Like Ogdon, Edith did not stoop to cross-dressing, yet sported a white organdy outfit, with a brushfire of flowers across the bodice. She took long drags at a slender cigarette-holder and held court as guests from time to time approached to flatter her.
Greg, I could see, when on my excursions from the steamy kitchen bar, was scowling as he played the Blue Danube for the umpteenth time. The waltzing couples swirled across the polished floor, as the air raid sirens whined distantly...yet they continued dancing like the dodgem cars on the pier. Suddenly, the total scene froze into what I can only call a waxwork tableau. Even now, I wonder whether it was me freaking out, or them. But, whatever the case, the piano music had stopped, allowing the deep droning to fill the newly vacated silence. Ogdon and Edith had no doubt skedaddled off to the air-raid shelter at Olive Villa, to taunt each other with drunken jokes. And the men and women on the dance floor looked as if they had clothes – strung on washing-lines – hanging between them.
I hadn’t been drinking all that much, I can assure you, nor had Greg – him being a teetotaller after all – but he was moving freely about the dance floor, amid all the waxworks, waggling his fingers like drying underclothes. He was playing a plaintive tune that would have brought tears to my unblinking eyes and shivers to my spine, if I had not myself been carved from solid timelessness.
The war lasted longer than anyone had predicted. Greg disappeared from my life, as did the Round Gardens itself. I resigned my position, mainly because the smell of the sea did not agree with me.
I hitched to East London, to seek my fortune, only to have all my hopes dashed by the post-war slump. I did encounter someone who may well have been Greg, at Gibbet Court near St. Paul’s Cathedral – where they executed miscreants.
He was in the process of being strung up by a particularly vicious-looking hangman in drag. Greg’s head jerked in the noose...his tongue lolled out...his “gentle” stiffened...his eyes met mine, not in accusation, but in the manner of tenderness, as if he knew that I would be worse off alive in England’s future than in the utter purity of death’s blackness. He held out his fingers as if they were a parting gift. With that, his eyes filled with shadows, as if someone was turning down the dimmer-switch of his soul.
Among those who had crowded into Gibbet Court to share in the blood-lust, I saw a ragged busker playing a tuneless concertina in the hope of a brass farthing in his battered top hat. He held a sign saying he was Padgett Weggs. Beside him, crouched on bruised haunches, was a scrawny female sucking on an empty bottle. The busker’s face looked remarkably like Ogdon’s but he showed no sign of recognition when I said hello. I dropped my last coin into his scrimper, dye-casting yet one more memory.
At Olive Villa, fancy woman Edith’s grandson had lived, the toddler boy-child – and I fear that it was HIS memories that were to fill my future, rather than my own. But how would I ever tell? There was an ancient lady with the air of a rich widow, flounced up in clothes too young for her. The spectacles that rested precariously upon her foxed face were definitely a throwback to the nifty fifties, dark purple with removable butterfly flares on the upper frame. She spoke as if she were mistress of all she surveyed. The second participant in the memory was a younger man, in plus fours and tweed sports jacket: there were leather patches on the elbows and bright yellow socks which I could see were held up with calf suspenders. His face was familiar, naggingly so. The third individual lolling about in the easy parlour chairs was difficult to decipher as either male or female. The light was a bit tricky. It could only grow worse, for the afternoon was becoming late. Still, I just made out the outline of the person’s dressing-gown and head. It did not do much speaking but, when it did, the undertones were as if they were spoken in the next room. I was the fourth participant, yet unsure whether they knew I was there. I was hiding behind the Grand Piano.
“Everything was so simple then, Ogdon, don’t you agree?” asked Edith. “People knew where they stood. I had admiring glances wherever I went. The people who now look so foreign were never seen. I doubt if they existed at all then. The woman who did for me at Olive Villa, she told me about her family. And I was only too pleased to give her a Christmas box each year to help out. And men? They were so gallant. The ones I met, anyway, and they did not automatically expect bodily contortions as repayment for their care and attention.”
Her voice was on edge, despite its intermittent laughter. She was evidently not so self-composed as I had originally assumed: the tones were brittle spiders arching like yawnercats. Or fingers clawing the silence. The carriage clock on the mantlepiece suddenly went dead: not that I had noticed its clacking beforehand, though it must have been there, I suppose.
“I can’t remember as far back as you,” said the one addressed as Ogdon.
“Come on, come on, Ogdon, you’re not so spring chicken as you’re cabbage looking!” said another participant.
“But I do recall those times as a child,” said Ogdon. “I had a clockwork train going round a circular track which had only one station. The stupidity of it was lost on me then. I preferred a log lorry as my best toy.”
“My grandson had a log lorry, too,” said Edith. “That reminds me, I bought him new shoes that worked off batteries, with coloured flashing lights. The newspapers said Prince Charles had been given a pair, so I decided what was good enough for him was good enough for MY grandson.”
“Hello, Nanna, I’m back again,” I suddenly said.
There were startled glances as all three turned towards me in the piano. I suppose the sudden white glow of my speech patterns was enough to frighten even ghosts.
“I really did enjoy those new shoes,” I continued. “I know I left you only too soon afterwards along with a dreadful disease that stitched my eyelids to the cheeks...”
Edith screeched incoherently. She watched the black and white keys depress themselves in the unholy rhythm of my speech chords.
Ogdon stood up and, approaching me with a poker grabbed from the companion set, asked: “Who’s there? Come out into the open, whoever you are.” He watched the pedals for tell-tale signs of a piano-roll.
“Careful, Ogdon, you’ll tear your scar,” said another, although my memory is not certain about the exact words.
“It’s only me, your little grandson, Nanna,” I tinkled. “I once played on your garden swing at Olive Villa in those endless hot days of lost childhood and raced marbles with Mum and Dad’s crib board. You loved me, didn’t you, Nanna? Your whole life centered around your only grandson. You came back from the Round Gardens to see my dear round face bounding along, eager to discover if you’d brought me another present. Remember that huge box of chocolate Smarties that Mummy threw on the fire because I’d spilt them on the floor? She didn’t want me to get a dreadful disease from the carpet. You were furious. You said that my mother never did anything but vacuum the carpet, what possible harm could have been done to me if I’d eaten the Smarties?"
“Careful, Edith,” said Ogdon, “this entity is not what it seems!”
“He’s been dead these thirty-five years,” Edith sobbed, “and he has come back to me. Don’t take that away from me.” Her asthmatic clogging took sway for a few minutes, as she tried to get her tongue round the syllables of my name.
“I would trust that thing in the corner less than I would trust myself,” persisted Ogdon.
She lifted her body and approached me, whilst doing a little mock jig to my undercurrents, as was her wont, to prove her bones had not seized up with age. I then knew it MUST be her.
The people in the room finally faded leaving me nearly alone: I just sat there staring sadly into the silent sound-box of death, flashing my torch on and off.
But another participant was still in the room: I had not noticed its shadow in the sorrow. It swivelled on its plinth, showing its naked bones stumping out yellowly like huge rotten teeth. This I knew must indeed be the real Ogdon, returned from my memories, the man who had taken my grandmother to his bed, who owned Olive Villa and the garden with the swing and the name Ogdon. He had always opened doors for ladies, despite sometimes dressing as one. Yes, no tease this time. He followed the others into fading, but not before his open maw of a body swallowed me into its gulfness. The past spun round my head like a confused train, slowly winding down as it got nowhere. Until it reached a secret ring-fenced garden of counterpoint memories...
My Mum and Dad, Mike and Susan, never believed in banks. In fact, back in the old days, they would not have had enough money to make anything like that nearly viable. I often recall (and I am in a good position TO recall, being an only child) their red tin. It was a flat box, about six by nine, and one high, with a hinged lid. Inside, their were eight sections partitioned by strips of tin in a grid...and it was in there that they saved their copper pennies and silver sixpences, shillings, two bob bits and half crowns, each section for a specific purpose, such as the gas bill, the rent, electricity and so forth. As far as I recall, there was no section called Bunce or Pin-Money… more’s the pity.
They didn’t have a name for this tin. But, I’ve thought of one since: How about a scrimper? But THEYsimply called it the Tin...plainly, innocently. More often than not, when a particular bill came up for payment, there might not be quite enough in its apportioned section of the Scrimper. I recall them getting into a huddle...trying to keep the worry away from me...and debated the pros and cons of moving a penny or two from a different section. Such a discussion was more important to them than a board meeting of the biggest global corporation.
What happened to the Scrimper? I often mean to ask them, when I make my increasingly rare visits. I wonder if they have left an odd copper in it for luck. Nowadays, they keep their money in a bank I’m sure, but how would I know? I’m not interested in money as such, only in things like the Scrimper which are full of memories. Like mascots, one should cherish memories, however painful. However pianoful.
Now, I don’t even question the mysteries of life; I rather bask in them. I simply compartmentalise between reality and fantasy...though I do often debate with myself the apportionment between them. But reality and fantasy can NEVER overlap and, unlike the legendary Scrimper, never feed off each other NOR tease one into believing it is the other.
It makes me unaccountably sad to think of my Mum and Dad. So I’ll let someone else do it instead. Someone else called ‘I’. Indeed, when I was lad, I had lots of imaginary playmates, like Arthur, Amy and Greg – except the last one was in fact myself. In those days I didn’t find much to do other than stare at the new-fangled TV contraption that my Mum and Dad bought for the black and white Coronation of the new Queen. From that time, being the only child of lonely parents, I noticed their eye-lids growing heavier and heavier, larger and larger like flaps of chicken breast. Yet I did not always stare at the TV. I also raced glass marbles, concocted knock-out competitions with a dice for sixty-four unknown names, listened to Radio 208, played Del Shannon 45 singles on my Dansette auto-change, formulated programme schedules for an imaginary radio station and climbed the bullace tree in the back garden to escape real-seeming enemies. My grandmother, who wanted to be called Nanna, made me a Davy Crockett hat from remnants of her fur... and often just she and I sat in the front parlour, where the electric plugs were of a smaller gauge – and we whiled away the time merely enjoying the security that such an ambiance provided for us, she clicking her number eight needles which sprouted endless knitting and me twiddling the tuning-knob on the great glowing console of the wireless, searching for a station playing “Apache” by The Shadows. The piano in the corner remained lidded over, because neither of us could play it.
Then Greg went to Inner Earth. He did not know why. He was older of course and now had the wherewithal for travel. He’d been through various experiences since the time of the heavy eyelids, the marbles with their colours as nicknames, the bullace tree (now chopped down) and the intimacy with his Nanna in the piano parlour. TV was now more taken for granted, less a novelty, a way of life that few avoided. His aging Mum and Dad slept for twenty-four hours in their armchairs in front of the expanding screen, ever since the TV programming had swallowed its own tail. There were so many radio stations scattered about the country, too, fading in and out as one sped along the motorways... playing all the same records with gaps for inane chatter which, whatever the dialect, ended up in the same result...the ears trying to grow flaps, but failing abysmally because God did not give ears lids like eyes. There were no longer any silences in the world.
So, he came to Inner Earth, for a self-awareness exercise, a re-spray and, oh yes, to find his piano-playing fingers. He followed an endless dock wall that itself traced the same course as the rail-lines embedded in the road. He often trailed his fingers along the abrasive surfaces, wincing at the ever-present pain. From time to time, he saw a mighty ship in Dry Dock whose funnels seemed too big for it. He waved his fingers in the empty air often pocketed within the cavities and chambers of Inner Earth. There were warehouses on top of each other as if built by a long-term inhabitant of a play school; security fences interspersed with red and white striped frontier poles; inner-land masses wasting away beneath rusted heaps of girders and other unrecognisable hard muck; big tipper hawling-lorries shunting back and forth without really finding the depot they sought. He pointed, jabbed and made V-signs. Again the noise was in crescendo. Industrial gothic. Avant garde trills of so-called civilisation.
Let your fingers do the walking. Yellow pages wind-trailing the gutters. Greg followed, seemingly getting nowhere; he had to return to his journey soon, but only if he could find a path for it amid that grid of wide, unapportioned, tall-walled roads. He spotted a crane rearing into a darkening half-sky, like an antique TV transmitter, or like an ancient Gibbet, dangling a huge copper man-hole cover with the Queen’s head embedded.
Why the marbles came back to him at that point, it is hard to say. But I suddenly recalled that I only had one of them left from my childhood days, one left from those racing games, releasing them down a slope, after holding them in line with my Mum and Dad’s crib board, to see which one rolled the furthest. And that one was usually Split Dark Blue. I kept it in the car as a mascot. However, down the road came other old marble friends...Big Blur Green, Spot Yellow, Thick Red, Scratch Light Blue, Funny Green, Big Light Blue, Bubble Red and, oh yes, Split Dark Blue, the champion, himself ...all of them almost ten times life-sized, rolling along the grooves in the disused rail-lines, in disciplined parade. I saluted them...these were true friends...and I thought I saw a glimpse of a giant-sized version of Edith, Nanna, Grandmother, further down the dock road, bowling them towards me, one by one, a smile on her face (much younger then when she originally died). Edith in Toyland.
I waved my fingers. I felt secure, for the first time, in this huge parlour of the world’s innards. And as I heard the droning, we froze like waxworks, this time forever. Carved from solid timelessness. No teasing, this time. No scrimping the memories. You see, memories are mascots. And the keys black and white only because there was no other reality than that locked into ancient TV screens.
Greg was found in a particularly downtrodden part of the Docks. When the doctor first examined his body, he was mystified by the ingrowing lids that completely covered his eyes as if someone had knitted them up. And an ear that grew larger – even in death. And why he was wearing an out-dated Davy Crockett hat from the fifties, not even his wife or children could guess. But the doctor failed to notice Greg’s missing fingers. You see, autopsies were far more careless when life itself had become so valueless.
Some people in life only reach the heats, others the quarter finals but, if you reach the final itself, you still cannot be sure of being the cream of the crop. Even the apparent winner may have further rounds to face, more thoughts to traverse, in an entirely different level of that knock-out competition which is Existence.
As the cross-dressed shadows rear, thankfully the dimmer-switch of memory clicks off with the very last piano-roll. Silence, punctuated by distant sirens in counterpoint.
****
I was sure my teacher’s name was Miss Clare but I could have been wrong. Memories are slippery creatures, and they sometimes escape into realms beyond the mental trawling-arc of the people who originally owned them. Once, I followed a squirrel of a memory into a region where, if I was still not mistaken, I always wandered. It concerned the nature of that very schoolmistress, who was the first one. Most people, if they failed to remember other teachers too clearly, often retain a strong impression of the original one who loomed up amid the smells and colours of the first day at school: plasticene, accidents of the bodily process, chalk-dust, stale ink-wells, over-ripening school-dinners, premature confusions and automatic tears. Her face was pointed and, if she had borne whiskers, I would not have blinked an eyelid. And in an interconnected wordless fashion, I thought the school blinds were tiered eyelids. Her plain pleated skirt stretched several feet to the rear. I imagined this was to encompass the extended parts of her body.
“Welcome,” she said to me, “just tear yourself away from your mother now and sit at this desk.”
I gazed up at my mother and saw her head nodding, making attempts at smiling. I cast a wary glance at the desk, scored over with grooves in the wood which previous children had spent lifetimes filling with crayon colours. The contents of the ink-well were topped with a substance that looked like the skin of an old rice pudding. And I thought of something coiled up inside it. I was big for my age and I found it difficult to squeeze into the tiny desk-frame. Once seated, however, I felt it growing even tinier. I did not notice my mother leaving. Nothing in the desk but the crumbled remains of a blue rubber and a smell, a bit like disinfectant or Germolene, tinged with an aura which I was to associate in later life with Indian restaurants.
There were several other children, all glassily staring towards the chalkboard. Miss Clare stood at the front with folded arms upon the bed of her chest which, if she was bare, I was sure would be covered in a vixen pelt. “Children, we do not play with toys any more, now we are at Big School – we shall learn how to add one word to another, and perhaps even another, and perhaps yet one other and what do we end up with?” She abruptly turned, as if on a weathervane, towards me.
And that was when I entered the black realm for the first time. I met people who said they were my friends, only to double-cross me for just one christmas-cracker trinket. I ate unfit food, full of fat and blood-clots, steeped in spice. My mother became somebody who had no sympathy for me as a human being and disguised herself as a man to avoid trouble with what she called “the authorities.” The school cupboards in the classroom were full of half-dissected birds, in the cause of science, they said. Some I recognized much later in life disguised as dark-red insect-bled tandoori chicken. The canteen trestles were layered an inch thick with a hardened, half-digested substance, a cross between custard and brown sauce. And Miss Clare often sat in a cupboard with half-alive rats, especially during Morning Prayers.
The blackest moments were freighted with frights that were easier to bear than the reality. I quickly toppled into sleep at the slightest opportunity, to view Things descending from the impenetrable night-sky of that very sleep. The biggest I called a Hawler, for that name was given it by the sleep-master, he who controlled the content of my dreams. The Hawler’s head was modelled upon the shape of Miss Clare’s skull, with a clayey appearance, perpetrated by a blind sculptor god. It had no mouth to open, so its eyes spoke, with hair-lashes on their thin lips. It complained of having only a head and no body and would I help create one for it? All I needed was straight graphics, it somehow said.
“Perhaps your body’s in the nature-study cupboard,” I suggested.
The Hawler had floated downwards before it heard me and, upon returning to the classroom from a dream within a dream, I woke up with my head inside the desk. Everybody had decamped to the canteen and I was afraid of all the turning faces if I should go in there late. There would only be stale vindaloo stuck to an impossible plate. So I spent dinner-time seeing what I could prise out of the ink-well.
“What are you doing here?” A voice came from the back of the classroom. A Hawler stood there, having just clambered from the cupboard. It came tripping over and whispered in my ear: “I’m you when you’re not you.” It clambered through the lidded blinds into the noisy hellish playground. And then time passed in year amounts, until my next mind-stopping memory, which was meeting a certain man calling himself Pope Gregory, just one of those ordinary workers who plugged on through life, doing an honest day’s work for a dishonest day’s pay and generally minding his own business. That was before I really got to know him. Always to be found in the dark chimney-corner of Ogdon’s Bar, he was a regular institution, one upon whom you could depend for a chat, if there was no one else in the bar. A good listener, there was no doubt, but he only implied feedback by a subtle nod of the head or a knowing rattle of his tiny demon-wing eyelids or a combing through of his grey tussocky beard with a hand of fingers. Then, one day, I think it was late last Fall, he suddenly started answering back.
“When I was younger, I had dreams you wouldn’t credit.”
I couldn’t credit that he had spoken at all. Some members of the professional class frequented that bar just to show off their fat wads in front of others whom they considered to be on a lower rung of life’s descending ladder. They turned on their bar-stools and stared at us. My companion had said something! But now he was slowly sipping his beer, as if nothing had happened. I was in the midst of one of my interminable diatribes on the poverty of latter day morals. I had always been a stickler for standards, ever since Miss Clare had instilled them in me. I did not only want hooligans hung. I wanted them slowly hung.
“Did you say something?” I asked at a point halfway through my next sentence. He looked up from the bubbling world of his drink, stared at me oddly and then visibly relaxed when he saw that I meant no offence.
“Yes, I did say something. But now I wish I had never said it.”
So be it, I thought, and went on with my own weighty preoccupations. I could see, however, that his eyes had mirrored over. He was not listening to a blind bit of what I was saying about morals – perhaps he had never listened. He was obviously retracking his youthful dreams, perhaps reliving or even redying. I suddenly realized that there was a gentle hiss of whisper at his lips, more visible than audible, as if he were speaking with his spittle rather than the vocal cords. I put my ear closer and caught the drift.
“I had waking dreams,” he said. “You know, when you lie awake as a child in the early summer evenings. Put too soon to bed. I had not been able to use up my energy because I was kept inside the house, dithering and moithering. I had no friends. I suspected often that I did not exist at all. My mother coddled me. The birds twittered long into my dozing, and guns pocked on the distant army range, like the Earth breaking open the buttons of its waistcoat...”
My neck ached from craning over to hear his mannered ramblings, so I pulled back, but missed a whole section. He did not seem to care whether I listened or not. In fact, I had probably ceased to exist for him at all. I came back in closer.
“A vast tower in the waste ground behind our terraced house,” he continued. “A mechanical wonder of the world, in my charge as caretaker. I wandered its labyrinth of horizontal and vertical corridors of pressed steel, inspecting the dials, throwing a switch here and there for good measure. I was viewing the world from the perspective of the watch-hatch at the top, announcing in to the global tannoy about the next disc on the turntable, for it was surely a radio station. Or was it a factory for children’s stick-together toy models where large angular machines fed each other with cardboard, papier mache and bone-glue, as I sat in one of the contraption’s pods mastering the crazy robotics? But the crucial weakness of the tower was a hub-point, like a car’s petrol tank, under the pavement outside our house in the Street. I simply knew it was there. The dial on its breeder-hatch was the dial which controlled the whole thing. One turn out of turn and the mighty tower would be driven into the ground. Thousands of mortals worked in the tower, under my jurisdiction, but none knew about the hub-point, that stop-cock in the street - with no hydrapoint marker. My mother did not know about the tower. She never looked out of the back window. She did not know how important her son was - thought he was playing with marbles or lying in his bed, waiting patiently for sleep.”
“Is the tower still there?” I bit my tongue nigh in half. I was playing into his hands.
“No - for, one night, I crept out into the street soon after the birds had gone, and I decided to push the plunger on the hub-point. But I couldn’t lift the pavement slab. It had taken on the weight of the world, it seemed. Then, out of the darkness at the end of the street where it dipped down to make room for a hill, I saw a nightmare which I was not due to suffer until I was much older. The shimmering presence of my Unguarded Angel, with black corrugated wings blacker than the sticky pitch of the night, flapping like vast paper kites which ripped piecemeal as it progressed towards me with the noises of a tree-stumper. Crudely emasculated, it wore a shorn stump of engorged blood-vessels, an inch long but a foot wide. Its one eye watch-hatch shrivelled everything in its path with beam of visible willpower - a headlight of the brain…and when it had gone so had the tower with it.”
As his sibilance continued, I found myself drawing nearer and nearer to his mouth, for the words added to each other with a drooling, a drawling, a sucking even more. I could smell his bad breath, like a drug. I thought him to be a dosser whose cardboard bedding formed wings instead of makeshift blankets. I laughed, but the professionals at the bar looked askance, for they must have thought we were becoming far too affectionate with each other. We were bearing out what they thought working people always did like animals. However, he seemed to have finished, at last. He gazed up again into my eyes at the most two inches from his. So, close, I could not see which of us was crying. He started whispering one sentence, again and again, like a deep inescapable record groove with an enormous crack, as if it were a continuous loop of existence, as word ate word: “I can never bear to hear - HIC! - paper blinds a-rattling in the wind.” Again and again, forever and ever. And I shuddered too, as I heard paper being endlessly unrolled in the nearby gents. The professionals had disappeared in there to unravel their innards, no doubt.
I laughed again. “Never mind, have another drink,” I said, disentangling myself from his desperate embrace. But life is full of false promises. Without even bothering to get him the drink, I left – into the night where Ogdon’s Bar was hemmed in by those tower blocks which had been built with such hope and destiny by Hawlers. And, as years turned shorter, one day I sat outside a newsagent shop on a pavement bench, idling the time by watching people going in and out - until I realized that the people going in were always different from those coming out. After quite a long while, I went in to investigate and discovered there was another entrance round the corner. On coming out, I wondered who that Hawler was sitting on the bench, staring at me so strangely. I had probably met it once in a dream. I once dreamed of being a helper in a school canteen, watching all of the items on the trays passing before me. Yes, I had the shapeless overall and wicked gossiping tongue. The boobs felt funny hanging on my chest like polythene bags full of plum-pudding. But there were stranger things, for the food-bearing trays gradually turned nastier, piecemeal. At first, I thought the meat-loaves were getting rarer and rarer but they were, I guessed, thinly disguised bits of raw human bodies. The new child who came last had what looked like a body-part coiled upon a bed of pilau rice, garnished such that it almost looked tasty. I woke with a start, sweating like a pig on heat. I fumbled for what I thought would be proof of my manhood and was devastated to find that the dream sickness had returned. No wonder that a Hawler coming out of the newsagent ogled me as I sat cross-legged upon the bench. He sat down next to me and whispered through a slime-ball of saliva that HE would like it “off the bone.” Forgetting my concern, I smiled knowingly, as dinner-ladies sometimes did, without really appreciating that Hawlers were already off the bone. And as each year becomes a mere pinprick of existence, the window blind rattled into life. I gradually awoke as I was brought down gently into my own body by the sleep-master. I heard the Hawlers outside, no doubt blackening the already meagre daylight with their descending canopy-wings. One of them managed to fumble at my high-rise window – romantically, if dolefully, believing me to be another of its kind. Thankfully, my real soul had already flown, tantamount to a Lark Ascending, leaving something behind still calling itself “me”, something that was crude enough for death.
****
“There is too much concentration on false endings. References to death. Half-hearted attempts to progress some semblance of a story-line – meandering like a blunt drill between the images – or like a Proustian discursiveness without Swann’s long-feathered perfections of prose or poetry. Not even managing to convey the believable, truly-felt astringency of human failings. Just attenuations of mock-philosophy or many wild side-glances from a big Bird Brother with a desperately flirtatious squawk or tail-flutter. Then role-playing a kitten so that its own feathers would be squashed under its own immediate paw.”
I LISTENED TO THE SPEAKER AS HE CONTINUED FROM THE PODIUM IN EARTH TOWER HALLS. HIS OWN LECTURE ITSELF WAS INDEED MEANDERING LIKE A BLUNT DRILL WITHIN ALREADY CARVED TUNNELS – ALSO THRASHING ABOUT IN CRAZY DISMAY LIKE A DYING CREATURE TRYING TO REACH SOME SENSE-BAIT AT THE END OF ITS LONGEST SENTENCE. BUT HE WAS READING FROM AN INVISIBLE MEMORY-AID THAT THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES OF THE NEW BUILDING SUPPLIED. LIKE A POLITICIAN, HE PROBABLY HAD NOT WRITTEN THEM – AND WAS RECITING THE WORDS PARROT-FASHION. EVEN THIS MY OWN INTERPOLATION WAS DRAGGED KICKING INTO THE RESIDUAL CAVITIES OR CHAMBERS OF HIS VERY SPEECH THUS MASQUERADING AS HIS OWN WORDS AS DEPENDANT UPON THE HYPOTHETICAL FONT USED WITHIN THE AFOREMENTIONED MEMORY-AID.
“My long-term hobby or labour-of-love: literary experiments in depersonalisation and seeking a unified morality from among the Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction: 'difficult' extrapolative empathy in the art of fiction writing: and creating/distributing the acclaimed but non-profit series of multi-authored anthologies entitled NEMONYMOUS... Some people have even written stories AS me, for example in the recent book entitled 'A New Universal History of Infamy' (MoW Press 2004).”
****
The platforms were being queued haphazardly (and often over-vigorously) by those waiting for their turn to take the long trains that had now been shuffling steamingly within sidings for some hours of impending preparation. The hawling-tunnels had by now been freshly railtracked to furnish easier journeys to the Earth’s Core without having to travel overland. And most were eager to take advantage of these technological advances. The first public trips had been well-advertised and the demand was great. Ticket-only.
One of the platforms was so ill-queued only a few stragglers had self-consciously sidled there into makeshift positions of arrival’s order by mechanical memory-aid. They wondered if they were on the right platform, as they viewed the milling hordes on the opposite platform across the gleaming tracks. These few stragglers were evidently representatives of people who had already been to the Earth’s Core – and, in some cases, were still there, never having returned in the rather undependable transitions provided by the early ‘Heath Robinson’ Drills that had prevailed heretofore. Their tickets were for specific journeys whereby they could seek and then reclaim their lost selves… an adventure or quest that would be both exciting and linear. Several trainspotters or twitchers watched them from various signal-boxes in the vicinity, giving themselves (and hopefully others) some perspective to the early beginnings of the platform stragglers’ characterisation and potentiality within an unusually distinct plot-development.
A smartly be-suited Greg was a tall figure with pink chops sporting Victorian whiskers, which rather belied earlier sightings in other habitats of his working-class upbringing and work as a lorry-driver or amusement arcade attendant. Mike, Greg’s alter-nemo, was possibly the wise counsellor Greg truly sought, rather than just another version of himself.
Beth, his wife, frowned but instinctively showed an equal balancing of love and caring beneath the brusque veneer. She would be his real-life counsellor, whilst maintaining a rather uncomfortable relationship with her own ‘road rage’. Once beautiful (and her alter-nemo Susan was still present just below the surface of the skin in a far more acceptable silhouette of femininity), she now had frown-lines tracking the crows’ feet on her face and (if revealed) the rest of her body.
The children Amy and Arthur would need to develop more naturally without being force-fed fictional epithets. Equally the older ladies Edith and Clare would be given even more shadowy roles than those granted to them in earlier days.
If Lope de Vega, Dognahnyi or Sudra were present at all, they were not among this shorter platform queue of so-called stragglers. They probably only had tickets for the more populous queues on other platforms. We perhaps shall never know.
This time, however, what was already certain, the main protagonists were due (by dint of the railtrack’s pre-laid direction within Inner Earth) to by-pass Klaxon City, thus hopefully enabling them an easier path towards the goals they thought they sought.
****
The dowager stood on the windswept platform with two children either side of her, both clasping her hands, it seemed, for dear life. Occasionally, she lowered her head to listen to their words which would otherwise be lost to the wind, or to exchange with them her own choice of words, in evident mutual encouragement.
The children knew they waited for a train: more likely to spot its smoke first, snaking above the nearby hills, even in advance of the hooting whistle being conveyed to them, even now, upon the driving wind. They also retained a beady eye for scrutinising the silver runners of the track for any telltale sign of the clacking’s coming.
From behind the derelict station house, I approached the solitary threesome (guessing that such a few could sometimes feel more solitary than being truly alone as one). I could see the dowager’s wintercoat was weatherworn, but a bright yellow scarf at her neck relieved the dowdy appearance somewhat. She wore a large silver brooch depicting, I thought, the angel megazanthus, which secured the scarf against the cold’s onset. The small children were dressed in khaki jerkins, tangled laddered stockings and threadbare berets with bobbles of hair poking through. They shivered visibly. They failed to see me, since I now crouched in the old ticket collector’s booth, untenanted for decades – yet I could still sense the reek of that ticket collector’s rank shag doing its best to conceal the ripeness of his soiled undergarments. Scattered around me were a number of clipped platform tickets, among which I had long since ascertained were residue of used journeys from far off Whofage, Innsmouth, Agraska and St Pancras. Yet, who’d ever disembark at this railway halt’s neck of the woods? Surely, nobody.
The wind, in the interim, had died down to allow me to catch a good share of the threesome’s words together.
“We’ll be there before you can say ‘Knife’. A roaring fire right up the chimney and you’ll toast your hands – with Nanny Sudra’s stories all stocked up, just waiting to be told…”
“Shall Nanny Sudra be pleased to see us?”
“She’ll be so pleased, she’ll dance a jig of joy in her special shoes and give you both big kisses on your rosy apple cheeks.”
“And shall we stay there…to live for ever and ever and ever?”
“We’ll live there so long into the future that the end will always be too far away to worry about.”
“Look, I think I see black ghosts in the air.”
“That’s from the train’s funnel. An ancient train by the look of the dark steamy smoke it’s giving off, but a warm one, with an endless corridor.”
“I can’t hear it yet. Is it really coming?”
“Yes, it’ll be all darkness inside and those passengers in the Third Class will just have the reddening ends of their ciggies to watch.”
Listening to this chatter, I smiled to myself. I had feared that life outside my little world had not subsisted, ever since they closed the station waiting-room, the steamy buffet and the dark dripping Necessarium. I had been solitary for too long and the vision of such happiness was a tonic to my old heart. It was a pity that trains never stopped at this particular halt any more.
Momentarily losing interest in the threesome, I nibbled at one of the discarded tickets with my teeth, the taste of rich train smoke seeping to my lowest tongue of all. I slumped back in some meditative trance which was more than a little self-indulgent, because, by the time I looked from the web-choked cubicle again, the platform was deserted. Since I needed to keep exercising my limbs, I scuttled to where the threesome had stood. The wind was filling its own cheeks, I sensed, to fetch the tuggiest gust.
I picked up the megazanthine brooch that the dowager must have accidentally dislodged from her scarf as she hustled her charges aboard before the train slid past them into the trundling echoes of darkness. The brooch wriggled and its tongue flickered quicker than any eye could see. Not a brooch at all, but a large glistening insect the like of which I’d never seen before, slugged out by the sudden arrival of winter. I forthwith popped it between my jaws to allow its flavour to wash through me.
Nanny Sudra, awaiting the children’s arrival, sewed long stitches into a battered wintercoat – listening to the wind howling the length of the chimney. Or was it the sound of those spiny creatures with sticky wings that haunted her dreams, now attempting to reach her in real life down that very flue? She was pleased that she had the fire roaring in the grate, serving both to warm the room and to keep such unwelcome chimney visitors at bay. Still hemming, she moithered over mythic miscegenations, versions of competing history, regal heirs and graces playing Russian Roulette with Fate, tentacular bird-monsters who, in the same way as human beings, had insect-pests with which to contend – and, if only in her mind, she plucked unwanted fruit off the well-mulched family-tree. The clock pendulum swung idly to and fro in rhythm to her stitches. She still heard the mothballs clacking in the wintercoat’s lining where she’d sewn them, but Nanny Sudra didn’t know that I watched her from behind the clockcase, whereto I’d scuttled, black as coal, before she’d ignited the fire.
The two children watched the wreaths of black smoke billowing past the train window, as the wheels churned them through a wintering dusk. The leather strap that was used for raising and lowering the carriage window swayed gently with the clack-clack of bogies over runners. They knew the dowager sat between them, still in wintercoat and yellow scarf, for the cold would have seeped otherwise into her every bone. I could have informed her charges that if she had doffed such impervious garb, she would have allowed the cold to seep out again. A mature dowager, at least, should show some semblance of common sense. The children felt her shudder in tune with the train. On either side, they had their hands tightened within hers. If they let go, they sensed they’d never see her again. Or was I sensing it on their behalf?
The train entered the darkest tunnel. I lit a cigarette, so that they could see I was there. There was no corridor, only autonomous carriages – so I knew for sure they were still there. The train hadn’t stopped since they boarded it in the middle of nowhere.
I knew exactly how long the train would take to pass through the tunnel, having been on this journey, one way or another, for as long as I could remember. But they were new to its foibles. I listened to the children speaking, despite the surging tunnel.
“Why don’t they have lights on trains?”
“Is Nanny Sudra still expecting us? Won’t her fire have gone out?”
“Why don’t you answer?”
The train emerged into light, too quickly for a blink, and revealed the answer. The two children were hand in hand, the wintercoat lying like an empty rhinoceros skin between them. I had scuttled to the window where, with jaws clacking, I pressed my suckers to the stained glass to keep myself steady, as I stubbed my ciggie on the ‘out’ of ‘don’t lean out of the window’ and stropped my beetle pincers on the door’s leather tongue.
With its heart of fire driving steam-power towards the almost prehensile pistons, the Victoria-Vienna-Moscow-Megazanthus Express screamed through the bewintered bewildered heritage of history: into another horizontal chimney of smokes and spooks, this time, so far, an endless one.
****
Another or the same train disappeared with great whinings of fire-cranked pain (fed upon nuggets of blackened Angevin) … down the steep slope towards the centre of the Earth, ratchetting upon funicular gravity-braces. Aboard this corridorless vehicle, mock-timed for other eras when steam was the only motive force behind such iron beasts of transport, those in one carriage were immediately disappointed that there was no on-board lighting. Amy and Arthur were scared, but Greg managed to light a spill (one he used for his pipe). The glow upon their faces was more than just ghostly. It was comforting, too.
They felt the juddering of the gravity-braces as they slipped across the sleepers of time as well as of dream upon another set of sleepers: themselves. The Sleeper Express for the ends of the world.
In timely fashion they skirted a visibly far-stretching dune-curved lobe within a gigantic cavity, lit only by a subdued Sunnemo. Greg quenched the spill as they watched awe-inspired the glistening tracks vastly undulate into the numinous distance with a renewed flurry of choking smoke or steam: inferred to be thus choking since plumes of such emissions had only been cursorily test-run within mock-ups of these cavities or chambers, but the authorities had hoped for the best – in that the natural vents of an organic planet would naturally cope with such human interventions as fire-cranked transport.
Then utter blackness again, eventually dimly inflamed by another spill.
Followed, a few hours later, by a bright chink of a few seconds as the pyloned city of Klaxon was by-passed – viewed between the margins of a lightning crack in an otherwise unilluminated cavity of Earth’s most elephantine junction of rail-tunnels. The train’s whistle – becoming more like a siren by dint of the echoing cavity’s configuration of space and sound – blasted out for the first time (with the shuddering imminence or immanence of seemingly religious ‘antipodal angst’) as the train continued its nigh unstoppable steam-driven course through a more benighted night than even those previously imagined.
****
SCENE: Lecture Room of Earth Towers Hall, London.
Delving further into THE TENACITY OF FEATHERS as a work of fiction, many reviews have pointed out how the characters remain fluid, difficult to nail down, even NOT ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON! Therefore sympathy or empathy with the protagonists remains elusive. Normally a disastrous situation for the efficacy of any novel or set of novels. A sign of failure.
Hopefully, they are sufficiently ALlusive to warrant further consideration in the light of the author’s intent (as far as I can ascertain without recourse to any debate on 'The Intentional Fallacy' upon which subject I currently keep my powder dry). That intent, then, however difficult it is itself to nail down (like the characters), seems to me – as I implied before – to stem from an attempt at making ANY empathy as untenable as possible. However, I’ve met this author head on (determined to play the game on my own terms) and I feel that one can put YOURSELF in the role of Greg or Beth, whichever one is chosen to be more likely to be empathisable for you. The ‘vexed texture of text’ and/or ‘a novel growing up as it is written with very little retrospective revision by the author except for typos or grammatical mistakes’ help one in this attempt to empathise and become involved and to suspend disbelief in the – what is it? – SF trilogy of novels within a Jonathan-Swiftian or Jules-Vernian or Marcel-Proustian ‘Inner Ear’ or perceived dune of trackable fictionality by drilling through for the oil of its plot. In other words, the empathy becomes more powerful from the fact there is little assistance by the author towards any empathy at all. You need, therefore, to insert oneself.
Before I came on to the podium here today, I scribbled out – at the last minute – with this small stub of a pencil (holds it up to applause) a few more notes as analogy and to serve as my own AIDE MÉMOIRE. I’ll read them out verbatim: “The method of fiction in TENACITY. Like trying to crawl through a long horizontal hedge. It’s easier than you thought. Coming out at the end of the hedge – find oneself lodged on a cliff-face. No way forward. Yet, the hedge going backwards has turned itself against you. More nettles. More spiky obtrusions pointing in the wrong direction… ”
****
When I first saw her sitting opposite me in the train carriage, I wondered if I’d travelled back in time, for she was too old to be as pretty as she was.
Knowing this did not make much sense, even to myself, I decided to strike up a conversation: Anything was better than all that turning in on myself, following my recent bereavement.
“Had many train journeys like this one?”
I pointed to the fields held in view by the train’s delay.
She shook her head, either to indicate a negative reply to my question or to give me no illusions about her reluctance to talk at all. Maybe it was because there were no corridors on the train, no other sign of life other than the fact that there must be at least a driver somewhere towards the front. I’d in fact been the second of the two of us to get into this particular carriage. I pulled down the window and leaned out, mainly because it told me not to do so. This brought the fields into sharper focus and I could just make out the blur of a figure walking slowly along the sky-line, to where the brightness of the late afternoon had been relegated. Night was too early, hustled from bed (I laughed) by the darkening of an unseasonable storm on the other side of the train.
I turned back to my fellow passenger to see if she was now in a more talkative mood.
As the train began to move and the rain spattered the window, I thought she must have silently slipped from the carriage, rather to negotiate the tracks than remain alone with the likes of me.
Then I realised that she had indeed been alone all the time, as I smoothed down the tweed skirt, on resuming my corner seat.
****
I was rather pleased with the socks that Sudra gave me for Christmas. They were plain beige, yet when I examined the pattern more closely, I discovered it was constituted of ill-defined diamond and lozenge shapes, like the scales of a rather inscrutable, deep-water fish hiding under a rocky outcrop. Browny green tinges were also in the weave and an uncertain blue: slippery to the eye whilst rougher than morling wool to the touch. In actual fact, despite the roughness, the socks were reasonably comfy to wear.
I modelled my feet above the carpet for my own admiring gaze. Despite the reticent nature of the socks, I felt sure I could strut like a real toff when sporting them down town. The good-time girls in Klaxon City would sure to be flocking in my wake amid the spinning-games and paintings.
Yet I was usually the soul of discretion. So, when I removed the socks to lay them neatly in my drawer, I wondered if I had thought about good-time girls at all. That wasn't like me. But my undressed feet DID look decidedly sexy. I had never noticed THAT before.
The next day, I decided to wear Sudra’s presents – presents in the plural because, after all, there were two of them in the single pair. It was to be their first official promenade in the outside world. They laid side by side in the drawer, outdating the rest of my socks which had been my companions for years, some of the older ones like dish cloths or with ladders and holes which I often concealed surreptitiously from view by artfully twisting the hose and heel. In any event, I threaded the new socks upon my already bared feet, in the way Beth rolled on her stockings ... with a slow sensuality
I rather wished I owned a pair of Dognahnyi’s sock-suspenders that he used to wear in the good old days. They would have completed the act and tightened up my calves nicely. Suddenly, I heard the babble of good time girls on the landing outside my bedroom door
“I love you,” Beth said.
“I love you, too,” I replied.
“That's not right,” she said.
“I do love you’.” I maintained.
“No, what I mean is that it’s not a logical reply to my original statement. I said ‘I love you’ and if you wish to follow on with an expression containing the use of the word ‘too’, you should have said ‘I love me too’”
“I don’t agree, since the ‘too’ referred to ‘love’ rather than ‘you’.”
A third voice, a childish one, piped up: “You both love something called you.” Then another childish voice: “Meanings are never clear, especially when mere words are used to thread them.”
There was a deathly hush, during which Beth stared at my feet. Then I decided to tell her about the dream I had about the good-time girls – with one of whom I had fallen in love.
“I did love someone else, once,” I announced. “It was a girl in a dream. It didn’t seem important at the time because I myself had become the girl I loved in the dream, a good-time girl called Sudra. I didn’t have the use of a mirror, so couldn’t be certain if she was me. But, looking down, I could see a dancer’s petite feet.” Beth stared coldly, as I continued to speak. “Anyway, that was not all, because there was a show in the dream. I think it was ‘Around The World In Eighty Days’ where I had the star part – a huge production with all the singers and dancers being transported around a spherical stage upon a complicated elevator system. The audience were like gods outside the globe of action, up and down and around. I was so well rehearsed (without of course recalling such rehearsals from prior to the dream) that my songs and dance movements were second nature. And the audience LOVED me. Their applause was deafening at the end of each of my set pieces. The round curtains swept in and swept out, as I was taken on yet another carousel ride. It was as if the universe was one huge proscenium arch. And, in the dream I knew I was both beautiful and brilliant. My steps were wondrously light and in time with some heavenly choreography. I could hear my own voice trill out in glorious tones, without even trying. And my body was ogled by tiers of faces. Not a dry eye in the house ... nor an itchy foot.”
Beth, my wife of many years, looked down at her legs: sausage-loaves of purple wickerwork corseted by an intricate suspender-belt contraption, each ending in a dull pad. She waggled the pads like freshly landed fish. She sensed hooks tugging at the sole flesh of her under-insteps: a pain that shot along her legs like acute inversions of sciatica or a spinal trapped nerve. She hoped that they would fly off at the ankles to relieve her of such excruciating agony. Yet a harness of flesh and gristle guyed them to the shins with a pain which became literally unbearable, the pinions of sinew noisily ripping.
But was it her? Or was she no longer there, merely her feet upon a different person’s legs? Even she would fail to recognise her own empty face, a face that was swiftly becoming mapped all over with crimson ligaments, ligaments that laddered into the cheeks and jowls from the feet upwards.
I faded behind a blur of tears, as if I didn’t exist, which I suppose I didn’t. But, I am confident Beth knows that – somewhere – there’s a place for me on the surface of the world. Or even in it. A place for us. Somewhere, a time for us.
The trouble is: the pain’s mine.
****
Angels, as well as cowboys, were part of the childhood culture where I lived. You can still feel their games pulsing under the very cobbles. Indeed, I could easily recall the uniformly terraced streets which played fast-and-loose with ley-lines as well as with strict geometry. And around each bend was a game of hide-and-seek simply waiting to be played. There were tags and tassels, too, where good-time girls kicked thin legs out of short tented run-ups or floral hand-me-downs. Boys had socks down to their ankles...
Hopscotch and leapfrog – Red Indians disguised as tomahawk-wielding tearaway urchins (I called myself Crazy Lope) – no end of laughter, no end of tears – no end of pretend make-believe – no end of criss-crossing cul de sacs and blind alleys – yes, Angels, Cowboys and Tomboys, too. I had fond memories of a particular tomboy, but I couldn’t fix a name to her face. Beth was the only girl with whom I ever made best friends, in the same way as you could be best friends with another boy. The two of us played pistol-packing when even the empty street corners returned fire.
There was some common ground close by – one of the mudparks, if I remember correctly – where indeed bushes were hiding-places. Long hissing clicks could be uttered with tongue, teeth and grimacing smiles in the shape of gun-sound and I, in later years, would re-enact such mockeries of snake-shot, pointing my barrelled fingers (thumb as handgrip) at the television – but no firing-device, other than an all-purpose trick of a trigger that only memory could pull. The remote control of the past. The particular event of which I, now in my dotage, want to summon to a contemporary version of reality was when I and that tomboy girl played a gunfight to end all gunfights.
There are, of course, several imaginary friends scattered around the mudparks, that day, all firing silently on dead cylinders. The girl slowly swings on one of the tall slide’s under-struts, showing that her legs are getting longer, her socks shorter, She spurns the idea of yet another game of Cowboys and Indians, preferring the slide instead. Although a stickler for her sex’s right always to play out-of-kilter with dolls’ tea-parties, today she is also in the mood to he feminine ... for once.
“Come on. Beth. You promised.”
I accentuate the two syllables of ‘promised’ with a sluggish conviction, whilst pronouncing ‘Beth’ as ‘Sudra’. In those days, of course, I have no difficulty; in recalling her name.
“No. I don’t feel like it,” replies Beth, “Go and have a shoot-out on your own.”
She purses her lips as she clambers higher on the slide, eschewing the more normal route by the steps provided for reaching to the top. “And you didn’t play-hide-and-seek with me yesterday, either,” she shouts.
“Didn’t I?”
“No, and I don’t see why I should play Cowboys and Indians with you today.”
“Let’s play hide-and-seek, instead, then,” I suggest, with very little enthusiasm in my voice. But we didn’t play hide-and-seek. Having abandoned the mudpark to our imaginary playmates, Beth and I careered along the terribly similar streets in a game involving gangsters – escaping with pretend stolen property – making mock flights from shop doorways – each of us taking it in turns to be police and thief
Yet all pretence came to an abrupt end, when we witnessed a real robbery ... a gutter gunfight. The throbbing of Klaxon sound-torches, the rattle of snakeshot. Sometimes the memory sounded like the Earth slowly doffing its coat, by rhythmically ripping the buttons off one by one.
Years later, feeling older than if I were dead, I struggle up in my chair to peer through the net-curtained window. I have lived in the same house – the same street – even the same town … child, chap and chairbound.
What WAS that girl’s name all those years ago? Beth, wasn’t it? I shrug. Sudra? Susan? Who cares? She was probably one of my imaginary friends, in any event – so not worth the thought-pattern she was printed on. So. who cares? Certainly not me.
****
However, I am able to go back in time. even if it means resorting to a form of mock deja-vu. Each heartbeat was a resonant harmonic of heaven’s gate opening and shutting...
We cower behind the sharpest corner in town, occasionally peering round it, as the shots began beating out. We see two shapes in tall black overcoats, faces stitched over with what look like grey socks backing out of a newsagent shop.
It was a pity we never saw each other after that day – otherwise, we would’ve come to some mutual agreement to keep our stories straight or at least in tune with the same beat... leading to a much needed, yet never accomplished, catharsis of the soul.
****
“We hid behind the corner of the street but the blokes with guns soon saw the sides of our heads, I reckon. We ran and ran and ran till we could run no faster... but we kept ending up at the mudpark again...”
“You then both kept running back to where you started from? Did he lead you? Or you him?”
Leading or following, who cared, thought Susan (for that was her real name), but she answered:
“Me him ... I think.”
“So you THINK you led him.”
“I led him or I followed him. One of the two. But it was me who did it.”
“Why, Susan?”
“‘Cause he’s more stupid...”
“Yes?”
“I always did things, not him.”
“Was someone chasing you?”
The policewoman sidled a glance across at her male colleague seated in the corner of the interview-room, as if she knew he hoped they would he on the same beat tonight. Their eyes locked and unlocked.
“Come on, Susan,” the policewoman resumed, “who was chasing?”
“Chasing? No, not chasing us, ‘cause the blokes in black coats were LOOKING for us.”
“Looking for you?”
“Yes – sort of.”
“Why, Susan?”
“Because we were hiding, I suppose. If people hide, other people have to seek them. Stands to reason, don’t it?”
****
“I did it.”
“Did what son?”
“I killed Susan.”
“How did you do it, Mike?”
“With a gun. I shot straight into her head.”
“Where’s the gun now?”
“I dropped it in a dustbin.”
“Where? Which dustbin?”
“Can’t remember. Maybe in one of the mudparks.”
The policeman shrugged at the policewoman. They would soon be off duty. In any event, there was no mudpark in the town where they’d found him wandering. No child reported missing, either. Best just to send the kids home with red ears.
“Why did you shoot – what was her name – Susan?”
“I shot her because I had no reason to shoot her. I wanted to see if I was mad enough to kill someone, when I didn’t need – didn’t WANT – to kill someone. It was a sort of test. So, I now know I must be mad. And you can put me away where no one can find me again. And I’d’ve beaten it.”
“Beaten it? Beaten what?”
“Beaten the game.”
“What game, son?”
“The game of doing something without wanting to do it.”
“So you saw a robbery?”
“Yes, two blokes in black coats – I’ve already told you.”.
“Which shop had they robbed?”
“The one near the mudpark.”
“But there is no such mudpark there, Mike,” said the policewoman’s voice. She bit her lip and remained silent.
The old man bit his lip and remained silent. He was so old, he felt he had never been a boy. Imaginary playmates were full of life. Or was he becoming confused? Life was full of imaginary playmates. Tomboys and Indians. He felt himself all over as if seeking his manhood. He pulled up his dish-cloth socks. GOTCHA! he screeched with the residue of his voice. He pointed his barrelled fingers (thumb as handgrip) at the corner of his head – and he put tongue to teeth, combining a croak with a whistle. He looked out of the window. Two shapes in tall black coats were always hanging around in the street. Sizing him up, no doubt.
The twigs on the bushes in the mudpark click sluggishly with the sudden arrival of a hissing wind. A red pool becomes a rabbit-eared shadow upon the concrete at the side of the slide, a playground slide where Susan once perched on its struts. Like a stage...
Perched so very precariously...
A pair of Angels in police overcoats saunter past. One the Weirdmonger, the other Megazanthus.
****
The deepest domestic well in England was situated in a domestic garden- but few knew it was there and even fewer knew HOW deep. Of course, nobody knew what was at the bottom of that well – unless, of course, one counted Dognahnyi: the oldest person most people would ever come across, given the chance to meet him in the first place. He had many anecdotes to tell of the time before he became factotum to various houses in the area and of when he served in the war, as he called it, of the world’s beyond. His favourite tale, which Amy and I, having played all evening blotting up the late sun, pleaded for him to recount, was one about beetles. Quietly breaking wind – a habit to which we had grown accustomed without giggling – Dognahnyi lowered his voice to match their rapt attention...
The nights were hot, Arthur and Amy, me dears, hotter than any in England. The noise was full of separate darknesses – insects as big as your fists, fluking about like inky birds, swarming in to make the sounds of the sounds one already heard. You know what I mean?”
“No, Uncle Dog,” lisped Amy, “tell me again.”
“Well, there have to be things to make things. Say, there was no shadows, there’d be nothing there to cast them. Same as there’d be nobody, if there was no noise to sound that nobody out.”
Amy nodded, condescending to understand.
“But, Uncle Dog,” I piped up, “would there be no Earth if there were no holes in it like our well?”
“Of course not, Arthur. Like old socks, things without holes in it is nothing in the first place. Carpets, too. Even stones have pores, you see.” Dognahnyi pointed beyond the orchard where the well was sunk. “On those hot, hot nights you felt the nearest you could get to the world’s core without scorching.”
“Oh, Uncle Dog,” said Amy, forgetting that she had just comprehended, “are there always beetles wherever you don’t look to see them?”
Yes – thousands upon thousands clucking and climbing on top of each other, like tiny yellow crabs or nut-small birds – but you must realise, they’re always barely beyond the eye’s corner and, if you look directly at them, they flit to the other corner between blinks.”
“But if they cluck, why can’t we hear they’re there and follow them around ... with our eyes following our ears?”
“Come on, children, how many times do I need to tell you? They’re always where you don’t hear ... and smell ... and touch – ever just ahead of your head.”
“Amy! Arthur!” It was our mother calling us in for high tea; she didn’t like us staying in the garden after dark, especially on long evenings like this one: in fact, she preferred us not to be outside of the house’s jurisdiction at ANY time of the day. We did not usually require much persuasion, because tea was our favourite meal. Toasted cheese golden-eyed by a poached egg – washed down with a piping hot tea infused from dock leaves and fresh well water.
Dognahnyi’s parting words sped us on our way: “The yellow beetles come here at the turn of each century... and seek out dank berths, like culverts, disused drains, broken sewers and, yes, wells.”
We bustled into the house, not hearing the end of Dognahnyi’s customary words – as if we had ripped off a love-letter’s cruel valedictory because we knew it would spoil the rest of it when we came to read its earlier endearments.
Nobody grown-up admitted to believing in the existence of Dognahnyi when someone called Dognahnyi was spoken about. In fact, we even found it difficult to encourage most people’s belief in the existence of the house’s various maidservants, chambermaids, kitchen staff – let alone Dognahnyi the factotum.
“There’s a letter for you today which the postman left on second post,” said Edith, our mother, looking at nobody in particular. She was often absent-minded, especially when eating – as if mastication was all she could deal with.
Amy and I glanced at each other in a bemused fashion whilst our father nodded slowly, saying: “The tea tastes as if it’s boiled from tap water”, a statement which showed that he joined in with the silent in-joke about there being well water available, a joke which never subsisted beyond the snigger from our grandfather – who sat in his chimney-corner rocker. The grandfather took his tea at a different time of day – on his own, or as on-his-own as talking to himself allowed.
****
With the two children having departed for their high tea, Dognahnyi stepped across to the twilit well, where its over-frame dangled a knotted rope ... and he stared into the hidden depths, believing his own tale about its bottomlessness as a skulking-place for pre-migrating insects. He had seen no grown-up venturing into the orchard garden for decades, so Dognahnyi thought everybody except the children must be dead.
Indeed, Dognahnyi and the children’s grandfather used to be old cronies, drinking pals at Ogdon’s pub which was situated too close to the house for clear-minded comfort. Indeed, friendships were frequently too short-lived, as far as Dognahnyi was concerned.
Dognahnyi was willing to offer a friendship forever, whilst others only, at most, for life.
He shrugged as he cranked the handle of the well, hearing the wooden pail clanking against the tubular brickwork below. He knew there was no water slopping out. What he had earlier lowered down there was a letter – and now there would be a reply to fetch up.
Unknown to Amy and Arthur, their grandfather believed in the existence of Dognahnyi and, what was more, believed in the other servants. Indeed, he cast more than a single daily glance towards the twinkling backs-of-knees as maids scooted from room to room on endless light chores. He inwardly scorned the middle generation for their lack of time, for their seeing only what they saw, for their thinking only what they thought. The middle generation, as represented by the children’s parents, actually failed to acknowledge his presence itself, despite the tea-time nibbling noise coining from his chimney-corner.
They were not letters as such that Dognahnyi tugged up and down in the well bucket. Darkness NOW engulfed the hedge which he had to negotiate in order to reach the well-head.
Shadows upon shadows, he thought, were the best way to describe the onward onset of twilight.
No, not a letter. Never letters to and fro. The transaction via the well tunnel was concerned with provisions. Food being passed to someone (or to something) down there who wouldn’t otherwise he able to eat – as Pip had once smuggled food for Magwitch. A supply chain. Sooty and sweep.
****
Chimney-corners were little better than attics or cellars or lofts or oubliettes, thought our Grandfather, as he kept a beady eye on the rest of the family attacking their Welsh Rarebits with relish. He was simply given smelly leftovers, given to him by the most cursory arm movement of a buxom maidservant, who only HAPPENED to be passing. Her mouth was gashed into a false smile, as if she knew it would cut him to the quick. He suspected that her cleavage hid a tantalising titbit for which a hungry pet might beg.
The well may have been deep but domestic it wasn’t. The house had originally been built with the steel socks of’ plumbing already threading its man-made cavities – so why the necessity of Dognahnyi lugging a slop-bucket back and forth from a winding-hole in the garden? Such were the thoughts of somebody that nobody could substantiate.
Our Grandfather rose slowly from his rocker, hobbled round the nearside elbow of the wall which formed his inglenook and stared pleadingly up the chimney-flue – and, seeing the empty light at the end of the vertical tunnel’s tower. He prayed for something to bring down a rare edible snack to keep him going.
Amy and I tripped out into the Springlight for new games of mixing experiments and Cowboys amid elisions of mind – only to discover that Dognahnyi had vanished, as he had always vanished even before having a state that actually was capable of vanishing. But what was that group of antlered shadows amid the orchard trees? Pippin scrumpers? Fruit-stoners? Tinkers? Pedlars? Beggars?
We shouted to scare them off. We belonged here, so we had the right, if not the strength, to scare off intruders.
Yet when we saw the dark overcoat wrapped around the stuck body, we wondered whose body it was. The shadows scuttled away to realms where things could cast them.
“An angel policeman?” I suggested.
"Who knows?” answered Amy.
We realised, eventually, that it was not a coat that was dark. It was the body’s flesh with bruises risen to the surface in maps of black blood. Archipelago lands where undead creatures had ended up residing, thought a thought. An antipodes of antibodies, thought another.
“It’s time for tea, children.”
No answer.
“Fetch some water from the well when you come, children!”
No answer.
“Hell and High Water! I’ll have to fetch it myself. You must think I’ve got more than one pair of hands!”
No answer.
I was the only child left. And I was older than most. I struggled into the garden from a house-far-too-big-for-me, the chimneys of which were far-too-high-even-for-the-longest-flues. For show, I toted a broken pail through the nettles towards the well. I hoped my socks would last out the rest of my ever-shortening life. I hoped, nay, prayed that my own stumpy arms were less stumpy than the grey vein-knitted arms that would stretch from the well upwards to my own seeking fingers...
The house knew something about it, but there was no sight of a smile upon its wall. Never been on the mains, even in its heyday, by the look of it. More of a potting shed than a proper place to live. Or a bereft beach hut. Probably infested with the touch of fingermice and knuckly yellow bird-beetles. The sound of applause ... and the smell of leftover cheesy feet.
Various children, some with the same names, and the same children with different names, slid restlessly between the cylindrical sheets, put to bed too early on a long summer evening and they wondered if their waking dreams could ever get mixed up.
STUB OF PENCIL: Tales may barely tally, whilst Death be the only proof that Life beyond Dream exists.
****
The first regathering of its steam by the train within Inner Earth was at Parismony. It would be folly to pretend that this was anything other than a short cessation for reprovisioning or renewed fire-cranking or water/ carbonised-angevin re-stocking. The passengers were intended to stay in the vicinity of the station awaiting announcements from the mini-tannoy system that had been set up merely within the hearing-range of the station itself. Parismony had no ambition to become another Klaxon, it seemed. Parismony’s tannoys could hardly be heard, except for a pitiful cartoonish squeak punctuating the steam-burnished hiss of the mighty iron beast that still billowed visible smoky off-detritus into the crowded atmosphere.
It is also folly to use the word ‘station’ – as it was more like an old-fashioned halt from that idyllic period in English history depicted by ‘The Railway Children’. Greg and Beth, together with their own two children, stretched their legs along the dark-roofed platform – amazed that a cavé was provided, one not dissimilar to the buffet used in the film ‘Brief Encounter’. Steaming samovars of freshly-infused concoctions of Indian leaf, plus various tiers of cream or coconutty cakes. And a large old-fashioned clockwork clock that told surface time, for the benefit of the smooth throughput of surfaceers such as Greg and his family. Amy and Arthur shuddered in their thin-limbed smocks, because the station was merely a dank, troublous tunnel – such as those tunnels punctuating the canals of surface England whereby Narrow Boats plied their own ancient, sluggish, chilly, gloom-filled, chugging paths of broken water – and the SHYFRYNGS were almost second nature. Even Beth felt the gnawing to the very bottom bone. They were all relieved to get into the relative cosiness of the cavé, where they could replenish their stock of good-will and pluck.
Upon their alter-nemos’ first visit to Parismony, they had not been able to explore the city at all. In fact, a passing subterfuge of memory seemed to tell them that they had by-passed this city altogether in the Drill, just as, on this journey, they had by-passed Klaxon. Therefore, there was a temptation to leave the jurisdiction of the squeaky tannoys in the station and just poke their heads out for a moment and view the vistas available, including the famous pyramid on the hill (equivalent in historical interest to Klaxon’s Canterbury Oak or, on the surface, the Colchester Tree) – and, having discussed the chances of managing this without missing the train’s departure (ie. discussing these chances with the buxom white-overalled tea-lady behind the cavé’s counter) – they took off on Poliakoff-type adventures within the purlieus of Parismony and beyond the catchment area of the station premises, let alone just its tannoys. And perhaps those adventures are worthy of a whole book in themselves.
They were surprised, for example, that there were many other passengers on the train – judging by the very short queue of them that had boarded on the train’s first inward outward-journey. Many of these shadowy individuals eschewed a trip round the city, but a number did take the same risk as Greg and his family took. How many managed to get back to the train before it departed remains an exciting conundrum of rushed running and panting moments of dire stress. Each a book in itself.
The city was rather Eastern European in atmosphere, with a mighty cathedral on huge stilts that seemed to be around every corner they turned. No sign of the famous pyramid on the hill and there were rumours that it had toppled a few years before – killing three million citizens in the process. The city was a strange contrast to the close-ordered darkness of most of the erstwhile train journey – with muffled sirens from the front pullman – as well as being an equal contrast to the fleeting vistas of Sunnemo-lit dunes or lobes that took the continuously curving railtrack upon their backs. For something to be a contrast to two quite opposing contrasts simultaneously said a lot for the power of Parismony as a contrast.
By-passing the various books that will one day be available to tell of the adventures of Greg and his family in Parismony, they returned to the station just in time to hear the tannoy’s announcement of their train’s impending resumption of its journey to the Earth’s Core.
****
SCENE: The Lecture Room of Earth Towers Hall, London. With powerpoint plugs.
O.G. Donde-Vega wrote that, with the technology available, there was no excuse not to be professional when publishing fiction. The fiction market was incredibly crowded because of this technology and the potentiality given by simply being protagonists on the Internet. Every one who wanted to be a writer became a writer. All three million in UK alone, probably! It became simply a question of getting your stuff read. No necessary advantage in having your stuff published traditionally. It would sink without trace eventually in those crowded seas HOWEVER GOOD IT WAS. In the main.
Self-publishing - to Donde-Vega - was anathema, always had been. But, of course, that only applied to printed works. For example, he would never have dreamt of including one of his own stories in NEMONYMOUS (a fiction magazine he earlier edited and published).
There seems now to be five ways to publish a novel:
(1) Traditional publisher with all their services of distribution, marketing, review copies sent out etc etc, (either by Print-On-Demand (POD) or traditional printing).
(2) Publisher who simply prints book and facilitates distribution (usually by POD)
(3) Publisher who asks for money from author to publish it (vanity publishing, either by POD or traditional printing).
(4) Author self-publishes in print with whatever he wants to give to it as publicity impetus etc etc.
(5) Author makes raw text of novel available on-line allowing the reader to decide to 'publish' it by simply reading it there or producing as book for author to sign (or not).
In hindsight (and perhaps sub-consciously), Donde-Vega chose (5) for his first tentative novel (WE ALL LIVE ON A YELLOW CARPET) at the age of 58 (after 20 odd years' activity as a story writer and editor/publisher), because that was the way he did it and it probably read like that (with references to current affairs of the day when he wrote it etc.) and it would never have been written without this method of doing it and he was deeply unsure of the novel as comments on his earlier work did not encourage him to think he should ever write a novel that was publishable traditionally, because of commercial considerations etc. although he did seem to have some facility as an acquired taste for a small coterie of readers. All speculation.
He named his method (5) above as Print-on-Reading (POR) as a method of publishing a novel (NOT self-publishing although it involves the author making raw text available on-line) - with the knowledge that it had become easier to print and bind things to one's own specification. This could have led to many unique editions of one work - and signed by the author if the logistics of getting the author to sign the hard copy are easy enough.
I shall quote from the introduction to 'We All Live On A Yellow Carpet' by O.G. Donde-Vega (aka Rachel Mildeyes): “In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', it was said that there had been some prejudice against using magic in the wars of those historical times. However, today's magic has become fiction: equally powerful, equally prejudged, equally within the hands of only a few skilled practitioners. And the biggest war is about to be fought using fiction's powers as one of the available weapons.”
STUB OF PENCIL: Horror literature horrifies, but does it ‘truly’ horrify? A work of fiction, if you touch its words one by one, should literally (as well as literarily) fill you with horror -- an electric shock from one word? A synaptic outburst from another? Just reading the words doesn't seem enough. Incidentally, do the viruses in avian influenza have conscious ‘intent’ to infect the human beings to further their own survival or are they hidebound by the tenets of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’? This and other catalysts are treated in Donde-Vega’s novel.
****
After leaving Parismony Station, it wasn’t long before the train came to a series of irritating halts … with intermittent hisses of brakes.
“Engineering works,” suggested Greg.
Unusually, illumination within the carriage was a few notches of glimmer above pure darkness – thanks, it seemed, to a few uncertain chinks in the cavity-walls that allowed a thin effulgence from an ever-weakening Sunnemo … or so Greg assumed. His two children were sitting patiently on the opposite side of the carriage – far too patient to be believed possible, but they were probably over-awed by the novelties involved in this journey – as they had yet insufficiently evolved to be able to empathise with – or, rather, “wear” – their alter-nemos who had already travelled throughout Inner Earth during earlier times.
“It’s a pity we couldn’t visit Sudra this time,” said Beth, the children’s mother. Greg nodded, as she continued: “I hope her shoe business is keeping its head above water.”
“Bound to be,” said Greg, “with all those preparing for war.”
“I don’t know if she has military footwear in some of the displays.”
Greg laughed, saying: “Well, those jingle-jangly ones are certainly not suitable for spies!”
At that point, the train began to travel forward more consistently, if still painfully slowly – leaving Sunnemo’s dim light behind.
The two children took this opportunity – amid much fidgeting – to attend to some necessary matters of ablution or body-dispersal.
“Can’t you do that a bit more quietly?” snapped Beth.
Greg lit another spill, but the children had, by then, resumed their more natural sitting positions. Amy tugged up and down the padded armrest from its slot in the seat’s back – as if rehearsing some future tantrum.
“That’s enough of that,” said Greg, as the train finally picked up speed.
****
Beth speaking into the darkness: “I wish we could have stayed longer in Parismony. You know, the huge pyramid that used to be balanced on its point on the hilltop for years and years? Well, they say, it crashed into the city making millions of individual shards from itself, each shard a perfect miniature replica of the original pyramid from which they were smashed. They say each one is very valuable. I wonder where they put them?”
The others huddled into the darkness, Arthur nursing his earache, Amy her doll. Beth was half-speaking to herself, half to them. Yet Greg was the one to respond: “Pushed?” He spoke absent-mindedly as if joining a conversation he imagined he was having.
“Yes, pushed. It was like having a weapon-of-mass-destruction and setting it off simply because it was THERE … not for a cause, but to release the tension…”
****
The train roared through the tunnel cavities like dust through a vacuum’s nozzle. Hours of wild churning passage (each chug having become a rough transition towards a uniform teeth-grinding surge) as the train’s travel touched upon the fasttracks … with the carriage vibrating and each pair of points being crossed with surprising ease as the train plunged onward alongside the very close proximity of the black cavity walls that formed the untouching but closely-hugging tunnel-sides. The passengers became accustomed to their own nerves, as they attempted to sleep.
Eventually, the train emerged into a more consistent area of Sunnemo light, where the cavity walls widened sufficiently to allow the appearance of surface travel, the striated mould on the rocks even granting the terrain a feel of fields: dunes of traditional countryside vanishing towards the horizon where Arthur imagined an English village nestled with its churchspire prominent … but not prominent enough yet to see. The trees were mysterious figures – perhaps setting out for Dunsinane.
Soon, however, Arthur (yawning and rubbing his sleepy eyes) saw the terrain had become less ‘traditional’ and in a field of mould turned brown, if not black, he saw thousands of boys squatting: each with a single overgrown ear: surrounded by bottles and cans and packets: delving into the subcarpet of Inner Earth with trowels.
Upon a distant hill sat a giant Toilet Frog, as if overseeing the ‘labourers’.
Arthur silently wept. He realised, frighteningly, that one could not escape the dream sickness – even here within Inner Earth, where they had all been assured dreams would be easily distinguishable from reality … as they had earlier been promised would be the case in the erstwhile zoo grounds of man-city, an area of the past which had been forgotten amidst subsequent events, forgotten not only by Arthur but, sadly, by us, too. Even fiction has its own version of pitiful senility amid the other realities to which it ever tries to cling.
****
I came into it about halfway through, so what had gone before was a complete mystery to me. And I feared the rest of it must turn out to be pretty frightening.
Dognahnyi had entered the waiting-room in a tailspin, greeting me as if I were an old friend.
“Hiya, Lope, how yer diddling?”
“Fine, I think,” I answered staring him straight into the eyes, to call his bluff, if not my own. I was intrigued, after all, how I knew his name was Dognahnyi in the first place.
“When the others come, I’ll cut loose with all the info,” he whispered.
I now looked quizzically at him, or so I thought. I had only come into the waiting-room to kill time whilst waiting for the 11.09 to Sunnemo. The flames were roaring in the corner, crawling all over the gas fire’s vertical bone-white grid – sucking draughts through the ill-shaped windows. Another traveller slipped quickly in through the creaking door – which continued to bang in a newly sprung wind in his wake.
At the back of my mind, I heard trains steaming in and out of the platform and carriage doors slamming. The hunched-up silhouettes of passengers and others merely with platform tickets passed beyond the smeared lenses of my glasses as I popped my head out for a moment to ascertain whether my train’s headplate had shuttled round on the departure board. I was particularly concerned to ensure that I reached the correct platform in good time.
I came back into the waiting-room to see Dognahnyi chatting away with some other travellers – all were crouched over the gas fire rubbing their hands vigorously and grunting small talk.
I soon realised that matters were definitely out of my control. Why I had come into the waiting-room and become so embroiled, I didn’t understand. There had only been twenty minutes until my scheduled departure, in any event.
I shuffled over to the others and held my own mittened hands above the gas fire which, true, was feeding warmth into its relatively small catchment area but leaving the outskirts of the room, where the battered benches leaned against ill-plastered walls, even colder than they would have been if there had been no fire in the room at all.
Dognahnyi, who abruptly stopped exchanging undertones with the others on my arrival into their vicinity, turned to me and said: “That’s right, Lope, come and have a warm.”
The others gave their agreement to this invitation by nodding. It was then I noticed that they wore identical angel-brooches on the lapels of their shabby jerkins, trinkets saved from a summer outing to a (God)forsaken seaside resort in the Thames Estuary, no doubt.
“Going for the 11.09, eh?” queried Dognahnyi.
“Yep,” I answered.
“Pity the 11.09 don’t run any more,” said the other man with a suspicion of a sneer.
“Not running?”
“Best you stay here in the warm and listen to our time-passing traveller’s tales,” suggested someone with distinct breeding. And indeed, that was what I did, against my volition and notwithstanding the timescale I thought I had to spare…
Once upon a time there was man called Greg. He scrutinised the palm of his left hand as if it were about to reveal something about himself that he did not already know. He saw the date of his funeral (not too far off if you only count shopping days). What was perhaps more surprising, there was a divot in the soft flesh under the index finger which indicated the nature of his death in all its horrific detail. So what else could there be? Only the increasingly irrelevant details relating to his personality, the odd rough edge that he preferred not to acknowledge, even the smallest nick near an under-knuckle.
Sometimes, he saw right back to where Mind started in darkness, but he never dared pioneer those unexplored regions without the aid of a psychiatric prop … but where, these days, could one obtain the likes of a shrink? Few and far between in such times of universal madness, shrinks had never felt so diminished themselves.
There was knocking on the apartment door: more sudden than the flash of enlightenment that occurs when one finally breaks an impossible code. Probably, another one of those ne’erdowell do-gooders, Greg thought. Someone who wanted to nurse him through the worst mantra of wrinkle maps and fingerstalls … someone who may even want to become MRS Greg! He ignored the knocking, knowing from his palm that it would eventually cease and go away. But the audible pain of wood panels were relentlessly beaten. He pinned the blame on circumstances, if odd circumstances at that. There was one item about himself, however, that slowly dawned on him from a new nodule on the thumb’s heel: he was fast becoming someone other than Greg. His hand flopped at the wrist like a suddenly untenanted glove puppet.
“Come in,” he said, in a voice he no longer recognised as his own. Still the plain knocking. Eventually, he got up and freed the door.
There stood a dumpy woman in a floral frock with unshaven legs – and feet that could easily be mistaken for cloven hooves. She held items of shopping in one hand, the other having been allowed to knock by the use of clenched teeth to hold her handbag strap.
“Blimey, Greg, you took your time about it! You know we’ve lost the door key!”
Her voice was harsher than his. He could see now that her so-called feet were not hooves, as such, but pretty outlandish jingle-jangly clod-hoppers with which yet another World War had caused the shoe-shops to stock up … in some misbegotten imitation of the Utility Years. He yearned for the days when women dressed as ladies, elegantly and, yes, shapefully.
Greg lay beside the throbbing cairn of his wife, wondering who he was. He had just woken up for the second time that night. She was snorting like an oven-ready pig in labour … no wonder he couldn’t nod off. The advertising sign outside his bedroom window slowly flashed. He couldn’t recall the nature of the latest logo that the electricians had erected only two days before. It cast sufficient light, however, for him to scry the ill-ploughed mandala on the palm of his left hand. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was smothered in animal fur and bird-feathers!
He shrieked, running for the apartment window.
He dangled from the advertising sign like a dead marionette: caught on a green-pulsing inverted comma by the pyjama cord. In worse than slow motion, the pyjama bottoms split and his body flopped through. As the hard pavement drew nearer with tantalising dread, he thought he saw the sign was advertising a new brand of lightweight, but heavy-duty, stays:-
BETH’S BONELESS CORSETRY.
He swept past the electric bulbs constituting a high fashion lady from the old school, one that flashed like a good time girl – but the speed of his descent pixellised the vision into a dumpy devil…
The Works outing was the one event to which the whole corset factory looked forward from one year to the next. Being an industrial concern near Birmingham, England, a visit to Clacton-on-Sea would put salt in their veins and the echoes of saucy promenade songs in their ears – memories for the long smokestack evenings when even sexual by-play became more wearing than getting up early on dark mornings.
Greg had worked for the firm, man and boy, since before those gathering storms which, some said, Hitler had magicked up from the blue sky of Europe’s new hope but which, in reality, as others perhaps suspected, had belched from the new sprouting factory-chimneys – betokening the conjuration of Man into Machine…
“Greg, I guess you’re not going on the trip this year.” The foreman smiled, whilst his eyes spoke sorrier volumes.
“Blimey, of course I am, Guv, never missed it before – just since I’ve been a bit dicky lately, don’t mean nothing…”
Greg’s dreams had taken a lot out of him.
“I don’t want you to overdo things…”
“Oh, I see, I see, dead man’s shoes, eh?” said Greg. “I know young Mike wants to come and there’s no room otherwise. I never thought it would come to this. I fought for this country, young man…”
The foreman, who wasn’t that young, shrugged. “OK, Greg you know best.”
Yet, Greg, naturally, died. It was two weeks before the outing. Some said he was like a little kid about the trip, full of eager excitement for the journey. It must have gone straight to his heart.
Young Mike tried to appear downcast but, in his heart, he knew he would now be able to sit only feet away from Susan in the lead coach. His ticket had Greg’s name on it, but no matter. He mourned with the best of them. Greg had been a fine chap, of the old school. And the Congregationalist Church was full to bursting not only with his well-seasoned pals, but with the young blades of the firm’s shop floor, all attending to show their last respects (even if they hadn’t shown any first ones).
Then August arrived and, with it, the Corset Works outing.
“Thunderheads are a-bubbling up,” said one old fogey, his spit mimicking the action of his premonitions at the corners of his mouth. He pointed into a cloudless blue sky, as he boarded the coach. The others jeered: they had forgotten that the weather on these excursions was more often than not just one piss away from a torrent.
The convoy of coaches left the Works car park, past the war-fallen arches, amid cheering and rude gestures. The boots had been stacked with crates of booze. Some of the young shavers, complete with their sparkling ear-lobe jewellery, chanted rudely, whilst the girls from the production-line adjusted their skimpy holiday gear to leave no possible enticements to the imagination. No corsets for them. Flirting as an art form. Flaunting as a subconscious precursor to innocent love.
Young Mike sat on his own at the rear of the coach, staring at his ticket, torn in half as if he had just been admitted to the one-and-nines at the local flea-pit … for poor old Greg’s last curtain-call.
But, then, as he spotted Susan in her brand new spankers bending down at the front of the coach, he soon forgot. And he joined in with the ritual sing-songs – dateless ditties old Greg would have relished from those good days before the clouds curdled the sky and hid Heaven from the masses for ever and ever…
“Bobbing up and down like this…” one song went. And up and down, up and down, went their heads, as drunk demons from above the rainclouds began to spatter the coach windows with brown-streaked gunge. Young Mike cursed his new sneakers, as they began to pinch his toes and deaden his soles. He should have got at least one size bigger, or more.
The night is indeed dark, but probably not so dark as the inside of Greg’s head. He feels his way by brushing fingertips along the tops of garden walls. Evidently suburbia, just as he was told. No longer lit by the nation’s power industry, but merely dependent on separate private electricity companies. The one round here seems to have a monopoly in going out of business.
Greg dreams he is a government policeman hired by a private detective agency to seek out wrong-doing in its own ranks. A bad apple sniffing out others of its sort by the art of self-understanding. The agency is in turn investigating the same government department for which Greg happens to work. We are all windfalls off the same tree. All bones in the same corset.
But, little does he care for such incestuous circles of self-interest. He likes incomplete things. He thrives on broken links. He lives at the sharp end. His whole well-being depends on misunderstandings and cross purposes. He lives off shattered mirrors. Even if he bridges one rupture temporarily, he ensures that an even wider one gapes open in another neck of the woods, so that he can offer his expertise in repairing it.
But tonight’s mission is one that even Greg has his doubts about. A huge purse is laid upon the head of one woman. A dumpy creature that spreads wider than her own hips. She derives from the vine which connects parts that the normal grape versions cannot reach and lurks in this omega-grey suburbia of privet hedges and tree-lined avenues. The residents will be huddled round their flickering screens, trying to ignore the likes of Greg shaping up in the night outside their Englishmen’s castles. The target woman may be disguised as such a goggle-eyed squatter, if not intrinsically being a real one.
Which window to tap? Which keyhole to set my ear to? Spoilt for choice, Greg has a long torch down his trouser-leg ready to wield at the slightest suspicion of the scent growing stronger.
Apparently – and this is the brief given him by a top dog in the detective agency – the woman is running law enforcement from behind the scenes. Pulling strings, as it were, so that crimes are not only left unsolved but, in the main, unperpetrated. The reasoning is that there is no need to bother with committing felonies and muggings and burglaries and murders and rapes, when the term “law enforcement” is so fluid it can even be called “crime enforcement”.
Maybe, maybe, Greg is confused, but no matter. The proof of the apple strudel is in the eating and the gnawing and the sucking. There is only one pie that holds the bittersweet fruit of fortune. Many the time Greg has snapped off his teeth on gold pieces masquerading as dried apricots.
He now knocks on the first door that takes his loose fancy. Even fate’s on the side of a chancer like him.
Bleary-eyed, the dumpy lump of fur stood at the door which it had instantaneously opened, almost as if it were waiting for Greg’s arrival. But how was Greg to know it was a booby trap? A bullet-proof body trap? Mirroring his own beauty trap? The torch spat bouncing bullets as well as godgiven light upon the beaming face. The skull cracked louder than any of the shots and not only could Greg easily accept that the creature had evidently changed identity since Greg first saw it, but also that it spilled a redness so dark, such redness rivalled the night…
Greg was to be smoked from his dream burrow by the fostered forces of his daughter, wife and mother.
He’ll probably blink wildly as he staggers out into the late afternoon sunshine: amazed to see that his life-time friends and acquaintances were members of the crowd that had mustered since early morning … on hearing that good old dependable Greg had threatened some form of felo de se. If even men like Greg could consider just a smidgin of self-annihilation, what chance them? Depressions being two a penny these days, half the world should have met their maker in this fashion long before the likes of Greg, or so the crowd thought. Even Young Mike had arrived to return the shoes.
But none could quite believe Greg’s choice of venue. Secreting himself in the coal bunker and waiting … just the sheer waiting for the Heavenly tip-lorry to disgorge its freight of Earth’s black curds upon him.
Greg’s womenfolk had searched the house long and high for some sign of his living body … but none thought of the bunker … until the youngest called Susan tossed her hoop randomly round the yard and it glided like a dream through a narrow gap between the hinged slats of the coal bunker door.
To Susan, the rooms of the house were dark enough. So, imagine her consternation when she heard stifled breathing from inside the bunker when she approached to rescue her hoop. If she’d known it was the breathing of her father, the terror of the situation may have reduced.
“Mummy, mummy,” she screamed, as she escaped into the house.
But none answered, for none realised to whom she called…
The sun had come round to the bunker’s side of the house. It fell in streams of golden light, bathing the early evening in an aura of non-reality. The leading lights of the neighbourhood shuffled into knots of further onlookers, as the womenfolk sidestepped into the assumed roles of Earth Mother, Half Daughter and Sibling Wife. Each hung upon the same set of constricting bones.
The newly kindled fires inside the house found exits for their heavy smoke, as the main chimneys expelled it fitfully … thus darkening the sky in tune with day’s war with night. Having himself by now fed on Angevin coal till his belly was a ruptured carrier bag, Greg eventually floated free, in equal ghostly garments of choking grey … and disappeared into the gaping cellar of night, the proud wielder of death’s golden hoop of halo-light.
Those who were left below wended back to their tasks and re-apportioned roles; they soon reminded themselves that ghosts can only appear in dreams.
Susan pointed into the sky at the fading ring of light. None could reconcile her lisping tears with any feasible sadness. If it were indeed sadness at all and not anger…
****
Despite the re-onset of another traveller’s tale, a train, I could hear, was drawing into a platform close by. The noise of escaping steam concealed what Dognahnyi had earlier replied to my questioning surprise at the non-running of the 11.09 to Sunnemo. Whatever, he didn’t bother to repeat it when the hissing eventually stopped.
The bright fizzing glow of the gas fire suddenly dipped and spluttered for a few seconds, as someone else opened the door and, on entering the waiting-room, allowed a cold blast of wind to reach even as far as our hot zone…
This new person Dognahnyi welcomed with a hearty embrace and offered the best place by the fire, nudging me out of the way in the process.
I could not guess the exact nature of the sex of this new arrival, because of the dumpy clothing, but I suspected it must be a woman. It’s funny how you can tell that from the sound of lungs. She, if she it were, also wore the same angel-brooch on her beret.
They must have been on a Works outing together and today was the occasion of another.
All the time, several blurred shapes of other passengers trooped outside and I wondered why none ventured in here with the certain knowledge that, as was common with most waiting-rooms those days, it would provide a modicum of comfort for the weary, bitter traveller.
Dognahnyi had visibly calmed down since his arrival in the waiting-room and was now questioning all of us on the provisions we had brought with us.
“Whatyagot, Lope?”
I looked blank and dodged off to the door where, much to my disbelief, icicles had formed from the seeping of the rain that had evidently started slanting across the tracks. The train departure board was busily shuttling but still no sign of the posting for the 11.09 to Sunnemo.
I braced myself against the cutting wind and went to look for the ticket hall where I hoped to obtain more sense from a real railway man. Then the tannoy put me out of my misery – it choked out a garbled message that the 11.09 would depart from platform 3.
Damn! I had left my soft luggage in the waiting-room. I did not really relish returning there only to find myself debating with Dognahnyi and his cronies over the tossing existence or not of the 11.09 to Sunnemo. Still, nothing for it.
Imagine my relief when I found the waiting-room empty. No sign of them at all – nor of my soft luggage! But what made me think that I was carrying soft luggage anyway? I must have sent it on ahead, as one could in those days at 7s 11d for each case. The fire was out, but I was relieved to see that I was not going crackers, for a hint of heat still hovered, together with a faint aroma of gas. I had not dreamed it all, then – and the icicles hung like bones from the top of the door.
I hoped Dognahnyi and his companions would have a good journey on their Rail Rover ticket. I bore them no ill – why should I? True, they had told fibs about my train, but fellow travellers are often wrong. It’s not their job to give information on the arcane mystery of Inner Earth Railway timetables. But on consideration, they probably weren’t going anywhere at all, just masquerading as seasoned train-hoppers on the strength of a single unclipped platform ticket. But, no, give them their due, they probably knew all the interconnections spider-webbing out from Crewe like the back of their hands. Just a few seconds in Leighton Buzzard to fix their bearings before being gathered up by the Post Office’s catch-net like inert parcels…
“Come and give yer mittens a toast, Greggy Lope.” The voice was a sexless, breathless ghost in my head. And the river delta mapped out on the palm of my hand began to fade. I quickly realised that, like my soft luggage, I had GONE AHEAD of myself and was already halfway to Sunnemo on the 9.09, probably at Klaxon or Wigan by now. Thank goodness, I had missed the horrors of the end as well as those of the beginning – by squeezing myself into the middle!
But then Greg looked up from his revery – to see, plastered to the outside of the waiting-room window, what the dumpy woman’s face would resemble if its inside was at the front. It was flanked by others which, if clumsily fashioned snowmen were to have personalities shining forth from their moonbear faces, these were they. One was even pretty enough to be less than frightening. Another held up a pair of jingle-jangly dead man’s shoes. A size too small to pinch his toes.
****
I shall try to relate as closely as I can my experience, but please keep your hand on your heart and read this story in the clear light of day...for you may die of fright, as I so very nearly did. Please take care, make sure my words are not those of a mad man or one who wants to frighten you gratuitously; make sure you do not put too much credit in their meaning as appreciation of their truth could have damnable effect on the mild-mannered or the nervous...but, as I write this, I genuinely believe each word I am about to devote to paper.
So much for the warning, now for the facts.
I snuggled into the warmth of the carriage as the train churned through acre upon acre of English countryside. It was impossible to view the trees and village stations we must have passed through, for the night enshrined everything; so the most sensible thing to do was to try and sleep until the time for arrival at my destination, where my uncle would be waiting to greet me.
I slept for how long and with what vague dreams? Nebulous vistas of strange dimensional cities intruded, warped visages staring and tentacles clutching, wet lips and things sucking near and beaks pecking. I awoke to the carriage, the formless darkness sliding away past me and an old man snoring in the corner. I was quite shaken by my dreams as the memory of them lingered incoherently. But I soon realized on looking at my timepiece that I should have arrived at my destination about an hour before!
It was then that I comprehended I had not seen one thing from the carriage window. True, I was travelling through a comparatively uninhabited part of England, but this was decidedly peculiar; even though there were no stars nor moon, I should have seen the distant glow of some big town or the lonesome light of a spinster’s cottage. But absolutely nothing could I see, presumably on account of the unusual blackness of the night through which I was speeding in a corridorless train. Might it be fog?
I relaxed back into the seat and viewed my sleeping companion. The fog would explain the lateness of the train, but what about its apparent speed?
I was convinced the train was travelling at a phenomenal speed, but it was now two hours overdue – without precedence on that line. I resolved to wake my companion and I stepped over to shake him. What curled from the hood of the duffel coat was an evilly scarred face and, on unwinding, gave me an imbecilic smile: a moon-face topped by a schoolboy’s cap, giggling in the depth of its rasping throat.
“Mutation” is a word too medical, too clinical, as what I saw was essentially unwholesome; nothing created by a mother on this world, but fashioned far away in dim lands beyond the galaxy we know. The transfiguration took me completely by surprise as, before my eyes, the monstrosity literally dissolved and dripping from the yellow duffel coat was white, sticky slime, forming a viscid puddle on the swaying floor.
It held all the smells which disgust man throughout the world and others completely new to his nose, recalling my dream vistas and certain other things I could not quite place.
My first thought was to pull the communication cord, but I felt the train was slowing down – presumably my destination had been reached. My mind was a maelstrom as the train drew to a halt. On jumping to the platform, I realized it was not my intended destination, but a strange station … and the nightmare train was drawing out, leaving me bewildered and valiseless. Amid the chaos of my mind, I knew I had to find a porter and share the horror I with him.
Empty tins and scraps of paper scuttled along the deserted platform, driven by the night wind. So, no fog! Visibility was excellent, but it still puzzled me why I could not see the moon nor the stars. I shouted for assistance, but none came: a forsaken station, forgotten by all who used to work there, those who, under a happy sun, waved green flags and blew whistles, carted parcels and drank tea. Dazed, I shuffled along the cluttered platform towards the station-house, sithouetted against the ceiling of the sky, ominous and spectral.
I came to a turnstile and, not surprisingly, it was enlaced with choking cobwebs, twining through the bars. The only exit I could see was through there, and so I pulled myself together to cut a path through its creeping entropy. As I entered, an over-nourished spider skittered to its lair. I wish to God I had not looked to the left into the ticket-collector’s cab, for here was not a deserted seat, but the ticket collector himself sitting, not as he used to be, but a decaying skeleton-creature with a puncher in the bones of a hand. A plump worm coiled through the skewered ribs and a blackened pigeon sat bemusedly on the skull … and I screamed … ran from that blasphemous railway station...
...into avenues of ill-lit horror, through lines of trees, black and twisted against the blacker sky, along country roads twining between untended hedgerows ... until exhaustion put paid to my progress … I saw the House; it rose out of the darkness, looming forbodingly. It was more of a castle than a house, and had two towering wings, pointing and mocking at the sky.
I should not fear its occupants, I told myself – they would probably disperse my fears and show my position on the map – so I plucked up enough courage to walk to the main door. Its massive oaken surface and golden knocker filled me with awe, but I grasped the knocker, pulled it heavily from the wood, and let it drop with a crash echoing throughout the whole house. It was such a loud noise that it startled me and put the fear back. There, I waited for what Fate would bring to the door, waiting, eternally waiting. But no one came. No one deigned to answer my call for help, so I decided to force my way in for shelter, but the door looked too mighty for entrance there. But I was mistaken as a single trial caused the door to swing open with a splitting creak revealing ... only darkness. I coughed as the atmosphere tightened in my chest and I felt for a suitable position to sleep the night out.
It was then that I heard something which I can hear even now inside my head, a funeral moan, harmonically illogical, resonant, deep but also shrill, coming from up above me, approaching down a rickety staircase, a moan carrying at one and the same time the horror of the graveyard, the scream of delight as ghouls ecstatically lift a prutrescible corpse from its resting place, the terror of a lunatic’s laugh as he carves his own flesh, and all the pain and panic of the Pit where shapeless elementals vaguely swim in fire, chewing off the heads of the human damned.
After, came a slithering and bumping above me: a thing was moving across the floor and, then, it was squelching down the stairs emitting the long drawn-out moan. The alternate slithering and bumping rode the creaking, teetering stairs, inexorably drawing closer, nearer, faster, down, down, down…
…it seemed as if I were in another world, sucked in by intangible forces to a revelation of the cosmos, a panorama of all time; stars and streaks of light reaching to infinitudes of chaos and cult, ethereal glows and fresh, unmathematical lands. I saw a city with dome-like, square buildings on plains of kaleidoscopic bubbles and, in each bubble, a grotesque gargantuan gargoyle-bird leering at the citizens in the buildings. Those citizens themselves were immaterial, covered by jellified white slime and motivated by an ectoplasm of yellow exactly in the middle of its soul-light.
I saw vague ski-runs of beige effulgence stretching for aeons from the mamnoth, bubbly planet past the barrier of time and space, almost an interpenetration of two universes. I saw an enormous sled skim down the runnels, carrying those unfathomably huge monstrosities of white slime, and it looked as if they were waving and laughing, gobs of jelly forming into limb-strands and mouth-holes where the yellow ectoplasm turned into a flickering tongued beak.
They laughed! They waved! They grew even larger! And on their interuniverse journey, they bred more and more of themselves as they neared a familiar planet...
The vision changed: I was looking at the cities of earth – London, Paris, New York, all empty except for ill-twisted skeletons littering the streets, doing exactly what they were doing when they died. Until the visions faded...
I was still in the House blanketed in darkness. The slithering and bumping grew yet nearer until I could see it!
It was a luminous blob of white pus – looking as if it had plucked itself unceremoniously from the incubating slime of its huge host monster following arrival on Earth. By turns it materialized and dematerialized as it squirmed and hobbled towards me... and I imagined I saw a crease of a wicked smile where the white fat folded and twitched. I screamed and screamed. It touched my foot. It actually touched my foot! My blood curdled as I felt it gradually creep up my body. The breathing gunge whitened me over, covering my face like slobbering clay. I was then a gibbering, juddering puppet, insane with disgust, but tittering in ecstasy. I felt it enter my mouth, ooze into my throat, a seething, thickening, feather-spitting mess of burping stew.
I found myself back in the train, watching an old man in a yellow duffel coat sleep opposite me ... and out of the window the distant glow of a city.
It must have been a nightmare.
****
The train was four days late when it arrived at my destination. It had evidently taken another untimetabled route - one that I sensed from a dream of another dream - delivering the white monster to its new lair at the centre of the Earth by some previous unknown route of railtracks. I feel an impending doom on our world. Nothing to be done. As I lie here in a hospital, the doctors are amazed and disturbed by my body, which is dyed a hideous white in and out.
****
SCENE: Lecture Hall, Earth Towers Hall, London
A new theory has emerged. We now need to proceed speedily from hypothetical literary matters concerning the use of Fiction as the New Magic in the role either of genuine cure or, at least, of constructively believable panacea. The Art of Fiction needs, therefore, to progress towards a stricter and more verifiable account of what happened or what will happen in the final war between humanity and a terrible foe and, subsequently, by extrapolation, to become a means to the end of neutralising the results of that very war.
Heretofore, it was believed (and I am the first to admit that I was one of those believers) that the Core – aka Earth’s Core, Mount Core, Sunnemo, Jules Verne’s Centre Of The Earth – housed a single malignancy known as the Angel Megazanthus or the Infinite Cuckoo or other possible names that were listed by various protagonists. Gradually, however, queries began to crop up as to whether its initial appearance as a malignancy represented in effect a benign force in disguise. One that fought on humanity’s behalf.
Then, with even more powers of creative meaning and truth, it was proposed that the force inhabiting the Core had not STARTED its life there but had always existed as a generally migrating form in a wider universe … but then it was plucked from its otherwise slow and self-occupied passage through space-time and transported to the Core – perhaps accidentally – by a means of public transport invented by humanity.
It was a proposal coupled with a diverse concept of dream sickness, yet a sickness that enabled the potentiality for good to evolve.
STUB OF PENCIL: Aide Mémoire. I’m getting stuck. The fact that a core could double up as a sun was probably the most crucial ‘vision’, when Captain Nemo – all those years ago – showed Sunnemo to Mike from the window of the Drill’s corporate lounge. Further thoughts that the actual force (or migrating form) transported (by chance?) to the Earth’s Core was a moving plug, a plug acting as a plug to itself! Also that William Blake had very few readers and needed to self-publish his own works. Jonathan Swift? Jules Verne? Marcel Proust? During these considerations, attention to be diverted, because I’m due to explain that the ‘skies’ of Inner Earth are beginning to be populated with vast machines that rival even Sunnemo in size and it must be wondered if these are related to the Unidentified Flying Objects that often pepper our surface skies. But a singularly outlandish flying-saucer hovers, currently, over Klaxon City, like a spinning wheel churning through soft earth as well as off-detritus. End of notes.
****
“The fish smelled!”
Arthur smiled as he replaced another divot above the body that he and his younger sister Amy had just buried during a solemn ceremony of childish reveration … marking a departure from life by one of Amy’s loved pets.
“He didn’t!” Amy dabbed at her eyes.
At that moment, a low-flying helicopter – vanes clacking fast – banked over the apartment towers, criss-crossed as in a display of aviation above the allotments and finally churned quickly into the distance. If children were able to feel their own paranoia for what it was, then Arthur sensed that his worst enemy was the pilot of that chopper spying on him … and, with the sensitivities that only children can feel but not understand, he somehow knew that the pilot was himself (Arthur) from a future he was yet to inhabit.
He turned to Amy, deciding to ignore his dark instincts with regard to the diminishing pinprick of the helicopter now being lost to the suburban horizon. While both their sibling feelings towards each other were typically abrasive he did, at heart, worry about her and, before being able to stop himself, he proceeded to quench Amy’s tears regarding her recently deceased goldfish.
“You’ve still got a canary in a cage. And that fish really smelled!”
“It only smelled after it died.” Her sobs worsened to the extent of giving her words an even higher pitch than normal.
When they had found her dear fish floating at the top of the bowl, the room was so filled with fumes, Amy’s canary showed signs of soon choking to death itself had not the fish-bowl been removed forthwith to the outhouse. And, if not death, certainly some state between life and death which could not easily be defined.
Arthur stared at Amy, his immediate impulse caught between hugging her and scolding her for being so sentimental, but the words he used to convey this thought to his brain were much simpler than words such as ‘scold’ or ‘sentimental’. He recalled their mother’s story of dream sickness and wondered if it would be any use in comforting Amy by reminding her of it in words she could understand. Arthur himself had failed to understand their mother’s version of it, but deep within yet another instinct similar to the earlier one regarding the helicopter, he understood the story quite well as he replayed it in his mind.
Once upon a time – their mother had begun by telling them – there was a country where people could not judge between the state of dreaming and that of experiencing real things while awake. A girl called Sudra lived in that country. Not a country of the blind, but a country of dream uncertainty. Sudra loved the new shoes that she had been given for Christmas. But how could she be sure they were new enough? Or even shoes at all in such a world? She decided to visit the wisest man in the country who happened to live in the same village as Sudra and her family. This man told her the shoes were not only new, but also real. She was relieved – at first. Until she worried if the wisest man in the country was a dream himself. Why would the wisest man in the country happen to live in the same village as Sudra? But he had to live somewhere. He had even claimed he was the wisest man in the whole world, not just the wisest man in this particular country. Did this claim not prove he was lying, and, if lying, did not the probability of this being a dream increase considerably? Or lessen? Sudra didn’t know where to turn. The shoes were strange shoes since at the front and back of each one were little bells. And they were yellow shoes. Her parents said this would help them find her, should she get lost. But Sudra had never seen shoes like them before in the country where she lived. They must have been specially made. And the family was so poor how could they have afforded such bespoke shoes? She decided to test out the reality of her current thoughts by unthinking them. People got over deaths by unthinking them. They got over grief and pain simply by unthinking them. Yet she still smelled the countryside that surrounded the house, she still smelled all the common and customary smells of the house itself ... and even with her eyes closed as she concentrated on unthinking all her doubts, the smell of the smells continued to smell around her. And when the parents entered the room to find her, she had vanished! Only the shoes remained, sitting silently on the yellow carpet. But Sudra’s smell remained for her parents to follow.
A sad or inscrutable ending – their mother had explained – but one that had many possible meanings.
Indeed it did, thought Arthur, as he more simply retold the tale to Amy. And as Amy wiped the tears away, she even smiled. Now the whole world would be her fish. Just one of the tale’s many morals.
They laughed as many other morals of their mother’s fable took root.
Meanwhile, a huge spinning wheel appeared over the suburban skyline, constructed of many shining metal stanchions and cylinders, its central top cockpit filled with the biggest head of an unknown creature the children had ever seen. Soon, however, at a vast slant in the sky, it dipped towards the ground where its spinning edges began to delve: throwing up great cascades of earth like fountains of detritus towards the clouds that soon became gritty themselves. This Unidentified Flying Object soon vanished below the ground towards further skies it hoped existed inside the Earth – or it had simply grounded itself like a pitifully sick whale beaching upon the bank of a river.
“If the fish smelled anything,” said Arthur, “it certainly can still smell you, Amy.”
And he took her hand to go inside.
“Wait!” shouted Amy. And she picked up her favourite flowerpot nearby, in which sat her favourite doll, and she took this with her as she followed a now freshly unthinking, unthoughtful Arthur overland towards their home.
****
SCENE: In Paternoster Square: just outside Earth Towers Hall, Klaxon City.
“There was no scene-setting,” said Crazy Lope, “only the bare stage.”
“Did anyone introduce Sudra?” asked Edith with the parasol. Indeed, she bobbed it up and down with the rhythm of her words.
“She did her best. Nobody knew what to expect.” Lope was fascinated by the lady’s parasol, if not hypnotised.
“What did Sudra say?” asked the matronly lady, still in tune with the parasol.
“Sudra, Sudra, Sudra, Sudra, why keep saying her name? There’s only one person we can talk about at a time.”
“Well, what was said?”
“Verbatim? You want it verbatim?”
“As far as possible.”
The parasol remained dead still, despite a breeze, as Lope did his best to repeat, for Edith's benefit, the exact words which Sudra used during her speech from the bare stage:
“‘Speech needs nothing but the words and nothing outside of what was actually said. The explanation of my theory, therefore, will, today, be uninterrupted by scene-setting or, even, questions. I shall simply launch into it, as I have already done with the words about speech above, and then launch out of it before you have the chance to know what has happened. Indeed, a being’s most significant sign of humanity is speech. Once upon a time, speech developed slowly but, at least, it did develop and, only in rare cases, did it remain in the realm of animal grunts. But, now, children are becoming less and less innocent with the onset of an increasingly modem civilisation. Their eyes become cowed with experience, as if they can foresee the sex in which they’ll be forced to partake, by gratuitous choice or by love or by lust or by rape … or by a combination of any of these. Speech is part of this process, that and self-awareness, body-awareness, gender-awareness, genital-awareness … even before puberty. No wonder a sparkling infant soon becomes dowdy and bleary-eyed … with sorrow and sadness underlying the veneer of its happy-go-lucky speech. Another factor, too, is madness. You may feel the impossibility of self-madness. You may look at drunks or lunatics or any of the fringe people in the street mouthing obscenities or simply shouting nonsensical noises or grunting like animals. Indeed, as a side issue, have you noticed how even ordinary, clean-living folk are now more prone to mouthing uncouth words? Anyway, you may be confident in your own sanity but, then, completely unpremeditated, you find yourself shouting out … angry, say, at how the waitress is late with your order or, simply, the stress of an increasingly modern world finally takes its toll on you … and that is merely the beginning of uncontrollable madness taking you over as the language of speech once slowly took you over when you were an infant…’”
Lope paused from quoting Sudra, with tears in his eyes.
“Is that all that was spoken by Sudra?” asked the dowager, wondering why she, Edith, was still holding up the parasol when the sun had long since vanished behind the clouds.
“I may not have quoted exactly.”
“Yes, but was there any more?”
“I don’t know. I had to leave the theatre in a hurry to meet you here.”
“I wouldn’t have minded if you stayed to hear the end.”
“Well, I felt too sad to listen to more. I recognised myself in that bit about madness. And in that bit about children growing up too quickly.”
“We all grow old too quick. There’s nothing new in that.”
“And we all grow confused and unsure of our bearings.”
“And of who is speaking...”
“…to whom?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe God meant it to happen this way.”
At this moment, crowds began to pour silently from the Hall’s entrance at the other side of the square. Many of them raised umbrellas over their heads as it was now raining. And many did not. Sudra, uniquely coloured, was among them pushing a doll – in a toy pram or wheeled flowerpot depending at the distance with which one was viewing it. A zoom lens would have revealed a stub of a pencil stuck in one of the doll’s eyes, perhaps evidence of an earlier tantrum – also that Sudra was bare-footed. At least, one hopes that Sudra HAD reached the outside, because a giant complex UFO accidentally clipped a pylon and finally collided with the Hall where she had been speaking … followed by a roar of splintering off-detritus more suitable for a strapped-bomb christened Sunnemo finally imploding.
****
The waitresses were generously supplied, almost one for each table.
The tea-room was very swish, plenty of smooth freshly laundered white linen, silver napkin rings embossed with antlered deer and pentinent youths, sturdy chunky heavy-duty yet good quality cutlery ... and large bowls of fresh flowers pricked out in bright colours and still drenched in dew.
He ordered a tier of cakes, licking his lips at the thought of the custard slices, cream cones, coconut pyramids, battenburgs topped with whipped almond, spicy bread-and-butter pudding baked to a rich brown crust, waffles dripping in wild honey...
The particular waitress attending to his needs was no older than his own daughter, the prettiest of the whole bunch, he thought. She wore a uniform which, rather than hiding her figure, accentuated its more sensuous angles, as if an artist had finished off an otherwise boring portrait with the subtle pastel striptease of water-colour.
The skirt-length was below her knees, but the slender calves and dimpled ankles were all the more enticing for that. The stockings were of such low denier, they took nothing from the flesh.
The tea infused him, like a heady drug. The blends reached to the back of his throat, even before he lifted the bone china to his lips. And he stared dreamily across the tea-room, as the waitress turned her back to fetch from the display counter further cakes he had ordered. Her rear proportions were slight enough to retain the integrity of the skirt-length, but womanly enough to produce folds, pleats, flairs and a long sculptured quarter-moon down each side ... that made him want to touch, if only fleetingly.
The other waitresses were nothing in comparison: mere bodies holding up their uniforms like clothes-horses for airing. One even had a face that reminded him of his nightmares ... and she had the temerity to scold his own waitress for picking up the cakes with her fingers rather than with the tongs.
He half rose from his chair, as if to remonstrate: he could not wish for anything better than to have the comestibles handled by his waitress, to produce a new flavour, whether imaginary or not, that would backwash the roof of his mouth with the froth of love...
He thought better of it. The tongs would have to do. The winsome one returned with the second tier of cakes, smiling fit to take sunshine into the dreariest late afternoon.
Her skirt-length lightly brushed his arm, inadvertently, and he bit his tongue painfully to stop himself from...
She had gone far too quick. Evidently the end of her duty, disappearing into the kitchen, with not even a backward glance for her erstwhile loyal loving customer.
His teeth entered an angel cake, leaving daubs of red where his injured tongue had probed its texture...
He cursed and left the tea-room, paying the nightmare waitress; she worked the old-fashioned cash register as if she were issuing tickets for a dubious show in that other part of London he sometimes frequented. Being in so much of a hurry, he even forget to retrieve the large gratuity he had left under the bone china saucer: it had been intended of course for the waitress with the sunny smile who, like him, had taken such a sudden departure into the gloom of dusk. Perhaps intent on catching a train before it left. Air-raid sirens permitting.
THE END OF 'KLAXON CITY'