THE HAWLER:
NEMONYMOUS NAVIGATION
NEMONYMOUS NIGHT
BY DF LEWIS
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PRELUDE
The opening few sections of this book are like a child clumsily finding its feet upon a carpet: a space and a foundation that seem to be its whole world. The book starts out to navigate this world, to become practised at walking, to become schooled, loved and loving, finally prepared for death.
Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.
Each section will therefore eventually grow up into another later section of the book. This process is the story. This is the truth of its fiction. The growing-up of a book in difficult times.
These words are not a pretentious authorial introduction to the book. It is the book's intrinsic prologue. It is part of the growing-up process. It is part, in short, of the plot.
NEMONYMOUS NAVIGATION
The carpet was quite ordinary. Nobody around was an expert on the manufacture of carpets, so all that could be said about it was some reference to ordinariness. Even the stains were ordinary. Years of wine and grime. Years of mishandled vacuuming. The careless knees of toddlers as they scorched their model cars through the rough of tufts. The odd tread of strangers.
The pattern was non-existent since the carpet possessed a plain beige colour – originally with nothing to recommend it except its unpretentiousness. Yet, despite these various negatives, the items of furniture that pressed its pedestals, castors and broad-beam bases into the pile were rather pleasant in an antique fashion – but whether these represented genuine antiques was anybody’s guess. They were rather down-market sticks of furniture in spite of the dusting by a previous owner who rather enjoyed the varnished or polished gleam of knotted wood more than the clean lines of a carpet’s cleanliness.
The carpet itself had no mind of its own – obviously.
Nothing could be inferred about its soul. If it had thoughts, it kept them to itself. There is a theory that inanimate objects feel themselves to be so real that nobody – even with the wildest imagination – can imagine them as IMAGINARY. And if anything is deemed unimagined or unimaginary or unimaginable then it is incapable of existing in fiction, fantasy or dream – but merely in real life. And it is true that many actual things yearn to be imagined rather than to exist for real ... simply for the pleasure of being fantasised about. This carpet was no exception.
It must feel trapped not by the webbed stitching of its underlay, by its carpet tacks keeping it tight to the skirting-boards and by the downward press of the mock antique bric-a-brac and furniture, but also by the knowledge of its essential reality as a floor-covering, with no possibility of weird elaboration or of weaving into the character of something unreal … thus to make it worthy of imagining or dreaming about. For example, that day, there were deep misunderstood mumbles in large areas of the carpet’s jurisdiction – come down to it together with the pad of two spread soled solid feet and the prod of two sharp feet as they moved about amid the lugubrious talking that belonged to the feet’s owners – or so the carpet would have assumed given the carpet’s ability to have such assumptions.
****
“How are you today?”
The man who spoke was Mike. Deceptively heavily-built. Physically distracted, but he strode through the room as if he owned it. A lorry driver’s face.
The woman followed him about, as far as she could follow someone in such a small room. In contrast to Mike, she appeared as if owned or, rather, controlled by the room while – with rather more panache than the situation demanded – she kept adjusting ornaments … also brushing dust into a pan: a secondary pursuit. Given name Amy. More a girl than a woman but with a woman’s manners. She said very little. Only direct questions could stir her into response.
“Not so bad.”
She had a pretty face, but when she spoke – even lightly, thoughtlessly – there was a frown that appeared and a deep divot within the frown’s area. Hair a fashionable matted brown, so very her it would only be noticed if it suddenly wasn’t there. Apron failed to hide her sexuality and high-heels seemed out of kilter with the dustpan.
Mike was definitely older: more in his mid-forties, compared to her mid-twenties. His own greying hair and stubbly beard were far more noticeable as distinguishable features – compared to the straight herness of Amy’s hair. Suit a bit bedraggled. Shoes solid brown with laces – the type men had worn for years, in and out of offices. The fact he was pacing about the room exposed his nervousness despite the aura of confidence and command that Amy only saw. Or only Amy saw.
Mike was a hawler, although he would have spelt it differently had he known the word at all. At this stage, it was unclear what a hawler was – or what a hawler did. But Mike knew he was one and probably knew what one was and what one did, even if he didn’t know the name itself. Not a transporter of heavy goods along the roads, as that was a haulier. In the old days, a hauler (sic) was involved in moving coal from the coalface, coal that had already been worked by others: a lifetime of chip chip chip, only for the hauler to haul it off. An art in itself and one fraught with many logistical problems. Today, however, there were no coal-mines and therefore haulers had died out – or needed to diversify. Some claimed that butchering was now within a hawler’s brief, even if they only dreamed of the word hawler and later forgot it. A brief for beef, and it is true that Mike loved to consume steak – there being a saying, almost a proverb, that everyone knew but failed to understand whilst otherwise consciously understanding it to the hilt – that Mike, and others like him, “were so voracious they ate beef till it was raw”.
In many ways, when perspectives were collected at the end of the day, this did not mean anything and gave no clue as to the nature of hawling.
****
Mike had left the house. Amy was upstairs making the bed. He wanted to visit the pub but doubted if anyone he knew would be there and he hated drinking alone. The park was second best: a good place for thinking. Susan was on his mind and Susan may indeed be in the park with her two children, one of which was bewitched … or so Susan once told Mike. Mike had usually steered clear of married women especially if they had children, but life was never simple. The bewitched child was a case for a hawler … a nameless child who often dreamed most of the night. While most people dreamed throughout the hours of sleep, very few among them actually remembered all the dreams that had disturbed the felt equilibrium of their rest. But Susan’s bewitched child remembered every single detail of what followed her and of what she followed, sometimes the same thing, follower and followed. The child was nameless and so were the inhabitants of her dreams. One day she’d have proper names for them. Proper nouns.
Susan had a name for her bewitched child but she did not tell Mike because if a hawler’s magic was to work, he must not, in any circumstances, know the name of the child whom he was attempting to hawl. The child must remain nemonymous – which was a word for a sort of cross between anonymity (only wholly real things could be anonymous) and a subliminal or aspirational state of non-existence.
Much was inexplicable, yet it would become explicable when put into practice and seen for what it was. Mike suspected that this child in question (Susan’s bewitched offspring) was named either Sudra or Sundra because he thought he had heard Susan calling the child by a similar name but, naturally, he tried to put the fact out of his mind, so that his hawling would be more effective when the time came. He even put the fact of his ability to < hawl > out of his mind. Yet another word that evidently had gone missing somewhere along the fading spectrum between two or more minds – but there was, so far, nobody narratively COMPOS MENTIS around these parts to reconcile any differences.
He gingerly walked across the park ground. He wondered what stage of the housework Amy would by now have reached. Cleaning the bedroom carpet was never a joke and only attempted by Amy once in a while. He glimpsed Susan and her two children (including Sudra or Sundra) playing on the distant swings and he even thought he saw Susan waving at him. She wasn’t always that friendly. Mike was a hawler, after all, and most people instinctively treated hawlers with a cold respectful shoulder – or, otherwise, they would have given away their presumptive knowledge of any hawler’s identity. Mike, if he thought about it at all, believed himself to be the only hawler left in the country, if not the world, or the only PRACTISING hawler. He felt tears prick out at the thought of Amy. The ground was cousin to the carpet as he sensed his feet shudder, listen to his thoughts and plumb his sorrow. Others felt such shudders as imaginary earth tremors or, at least, that was the best thing to believe them to be. Upon any other way, lay madness.
Or a plate of sizzling beef. But, first, duty called as Mike plucked up enough courage to approach Susan and her children, leaving any residual thought of Amy to the vacuuming.
****
Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. Mike often created images like these in her mind.
“What to do,” she asked or stated. The carpet cleaner churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the earth wire failing.
She was back a few years before. Mike had not come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. She recalled that her brother had always been a bit of a loner, non-expressive and wild. He concocted experiments with household goods, mixing them into a chemical syrup by means of adding garden mud to substances like washing-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. These misalchemies were alive – at least in her brother’s eyes and Amy laughed as she remembered their mother’s remonstrations of despair while she tried to talk sense into her son but merely ended up communicating with the “cowpats” of mixture he had left in his wake. At least, he did the experiments outside. And indoor fireworks only came out of Christmas Crackers in those days, so they were not an all-year problem: those sizzling wormcasts on the seasonal carpet. That was a Godsend.
Amy couldn’t remember her brother’s name. It was as if he had never existed. Her mother was a Mrs Cole, Edith to her friends. Amy was AFRAID of remembering her brother’s name because, by dragging it from the past, trawling it through the coarse-grained muslin of memory’s filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything Mike had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a booby-trap – and she continued scraping the lower surface of the vacuum across the grit in the carpet that had collected there like any dust collects there … from wherever dust and grit and, indeed, stains come from – a mysterious source only hawlers are able to fathom.
She couldn’t really countenance that Mike had more than one job on the go at once. She wanted to be his only subject – because being a hawler’s subject was not dissimilar to being in love. Unadmitted love, true, but love nevertheless. Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. A scene of a park so cultivated its grass was more like a plush lawn for the toes of effete royalty or fairies. She saw it in her mind’s eye, but failed to recognise the fey walkers that positively languished in its heady Proustian delights.
****
Amy had once been a child herself – self-evidently.
“Amy! Where’s Arthur?” screamed Mrs Cole. Edith looked out into the garden where Arthur should have been at this time of day, especially bearing in mind his slippers on the floor and his coat gone from the door-hook. Amy was nowhere to be seen. The meat in the oven was burning, so she rushed off to adjust the temperature gauge – knowing that slowly-slowly-caught-the-monkey. Amy was never a worry, as she spent her time not worrying. Someone who didn’t worry never gave worries, Mrs Cole knew instinctively without articulating the thought. On the other hand, Arthur was a big worry – as he always worried about going out, worried about fulfilment, worried about the ever-increasing need to mix quantities of the world together to see what gave.
Mrs Cole, having finished with adjusting the oven, knew that one of her two children was bewitched and the evidence pointed to Arthur. She reached the apartment window again and eagerly scanned the inner square between the walls of the four blocks that formed it. There was a solitary fountain at its centre – and a few all-weather seats surrounding. Not much for children to do in the square but it was certainly better than the city streets amid which this square was a relatively safe oasis. She saw a huddled figure on one of the seats and, believing it to be Arthur, she called from the window for him to come in. She’d forgotten why she needed him to come in at this precise moment, but the need was one that had become a bee in her bonnet. The white face looked up. It was Amy. And Mrs Cole unaccountably shed tears … followed closely by desperation as she saw a taller figure enter the square. Anyone needed to enter the square via the apartment blocks – so the place was not exactly public but the security was lax. And where was Arthur? The figure in the square was too tall to be Arthur although he WAS growing too quickly these days.
Being at the higher end of the block, Edith Cole felt helpless, should there be any crisis moments in the square far below.
The head teacher had just announced his visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. He’d come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both … at once.
“Hello, Mr Clare,” said Mrs Cole, opening the door. She had put any problems to the back of her mind, as if she predicted even bigger problems arriving via Mr Clare.
“I’m glad to catch you in,” he announced, not waiting for an invitation to enter the flat.
Mrs Cole wondered why he hadn’t made an appointment. This was the second time he had arrived this way. She planted her feet on the ground, expecting the worst, bracing herself for something dreadful she didn’t really want to hear. But a carpeted floor several levels up in the air was hardly the GROUND, and she felt no assistance from this attempt to earth herself. “Get a grip!” she said quietly to herself between gritted teeth. She heard several conversations coming up to her from below – a cacophony of different groups of families in the cross-section of abodes beneath her feet. They spoke of frightening things, childish things, trivial things…
“What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?”
Mrs Cole was still an attractive woman and she knew Mr Clare better than he knew himself. She could see it in his eyes.
At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their head teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur’s hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large truck. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl’s keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it as if it were real plastic with mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips.
“Would you like to stay for dinner, Mr Clare?” Edith had advanced from offering tea to giving him the chance to share the meat sizzling in the oven. He had not really answered but had decided to occupy the armchair in front of the old-fashioned TV, without even a word. The fact he had caught Mrs Cole at home seemed in itself sufficient to create a successful mission.
The trouble was that not one of them knew what the others were thinking. Yet there had to be a lot of sympathy for all of them and that sympathy cost more sympathy, growing and growing cumulatively as the events overtook them at later stages some of which would never be known, let alone described. Each person would take turns to feel … to feel deeply … for the others and themselves. All that was needed was patience. Meanwhile they were simply playing at life, without understanding any of its rules.
****
Mike was quite ordinary and nobody around was expert on what made any man tick – so that all that could be said about him was his ordinariness. Not exactly nemonymous – in the true sense of that strange word we all grew to know … eventually … despite its difficulty to say or to understand, because that would have implied that he was anonymous to the point of non-existence. And Mike sure could lift a few spirits with just a few chosen words from beneath his mask of ordinariness. He lived a full and useful life because of his ordinariness rather than despite it.
Although ordinary, he felt responsible, more responsible for the world’s affairs than he had the right to be. At an early age, he had felt the hawling power in his mind, in his hands: a power that actually was fed by the ordinariness that was his essential default. He saw – instinctively – layers of people passing down a lift shaft, spending time on each floor till they either reached the ground or the top. These layers of people were going both ways, in fact, not just down, passing each other, sometimes changing direction more than once, but staying, for a while, nevertheless, on each floor – getting to know the others on that floor, then proceeding on … downward, after all, or, yes, upward. Hawling was not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the buttons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashed and resulted in the lift-doors sliding aside … new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there was more to hawling than that – it was running a butcher’s shop, listening to the carcasses crack as you lay in bed at night. He was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on … and eventually extinguish with a dying wink … which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from Mike’s mine. It was all this … and more. Mike would only discover the ‘more’ when the time was ripe or if he became mine, if not me, himself.
He had just watched Amy Cole riding up and down the utility supply shaft of some inner city tower. Her brother, whose name was unknown or forgotten was the one she was seeking, having lost him in childhood, when they were both suddenly orphaned. Their mother had been hauled off from them one unexpected day whilst they both played outside among the makeshift dams and rivers of slurry which pleased her brother so much. Amy even lost Amy, lost, at least, who she was and what her years were or bloodcourses were.
Mike had then watched someone else. Susan and her two children running through an unkempt, shaggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. They were all chased by a figure in a cape. Mike desperately wanted to help them but, temporarily, his hawling skills were stunted by the experiencing of the traumas of other families slipping through several dissolving floors towards a huge pit in the earth.
Mike woke in a cold sweat. He put one foot outside his bed to ensure at least his own bedroom floor was still there. Amy snored beside him, mercifully, it seemed, free of the dreams that had just beset him … or were still besetting him.
****
Mike often reminisced about the time he worked in an office, mostly as an administrator, but also as a consultant or salesman, a business that often concerned very complex financial matters. He used to entertain clients at sporting events or orchestral concerts, lunched important representatives from other Companies, attended Board Meetings across the country, driving all manner of distances in a day. He couldn’t do this now, but, in those earlier days, he used to manage stress much better. It was almost like a dream. He had a family, then, too – Susan was his wife and his two children Amy and Arthur. Amazingly, they were still his family today, having put up with him all these years. The children had grown up, of course, and left home. It was just him and Susan now. Susan went out to work and he stayed at home: a token househusband. So, there was a lot of time for reminiscing.
His body was the most mysterious thing about him. He could easily fathom his own mind – but his body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that he – his mind – walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to him, obviously, because, if it had, he would certainly have considered himself mad. Bad enough even to SKIRT such touchy subjects amid the other reminiscences, let alone delving into them.
Those corporate entertainments he remembered as uncomfortable sessions, when he often felt invisible. Eyes grazing him, edging even nearer but, just as quickly edging away to gaze elsewhere. He used to try to fathom the faces in the dance of business and artifice – and wondered if any real minds lay behind them, as they tried, like him, to balance a drink and plate, whilst making small talk before the concert started. Brahms’ Double Concerto with Nigel Kennedy and Robert Cohen playing the violin and cello respectively – the concert music easing away the thoughts, as Mike merged with the rest of the audience who, eventually, clapped as one entity: one nemonymous creature of applause with the merged thought that they remained single entities.
****
The clues as to what a hawler really is sometimes come together piecemeal, often obliquely – rarely in great moments of clarity.
Amy had finished the vacuuming. The man she knew as Mike often popped in so as to see how she was doing. He evidently fancied her. She needed to be checked by someone at least and Mike was representative of the Letting Agents. He needed to follow the rules and rub a finger over a sideboard top to see if it collected dust. He turned a blind eye to the carpet. In any event, Amy’s job did not reach beyond vacuuming it – and any deeper cleaning would have to be commissioned from a specialist steam-cleaning organisation. Mike usually trusted her to lock up after she finished. A good working relationship. No doubt, one day, he would try more than just fancy her from a distance – she knew. Men were like that, despite the existence of a wife and two children. He referred to his wife as ‘the wife’, but perhaps hawlers were allowed to have more than one wife; indeed, one day, believing X was his wife, whilst, the next day, believing Y was his wife – and on those separate days, he was only aware of either X or Y respectively, depending on what day it was. Hawlers were a confused bunch … if there were more than one hawler in the first place, and Mike may have been the only one.
Amy shrugged. She had her own two children to worry about and that’s why she did these housework jobs for the Letting Agents. Mike gave the impression that he’d once had a job better than checking on skivvies like her. Amy put the vacuum into the broom cupboard and left for the lift. She was confused about Mike. She did not even know the existence let alone the meaning of the word hawler.
Often, she even wondered who SHE was. A busy life made her like that. She laughed at herself as the lift left the floor behind.
****
At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.
Mike was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. Susan was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Mike surveyed the dips and dunes – almost FEELING them with his golf mind – as he took stance for his first teeshot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, assessing the relief map between him and the hole … and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his clubhead for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.
****
Susan was silent. It was too early to start preparing Mike’s dinner. Her friend Amy had just left. The two women had a lot in common, both having two kids of similar ages and sexes. A good feminine chat whilst these kids were at school and the husbands elsewhere – that was always a good tonic. But now she was alone with her own thoughts. Often a dangerous thing to be sunk eye to eye with nemonymity. One needed other people to allow oneself to exist at all. And the potential of her family’s homecoming was not strong enough to radiate back in time to stiffen the sinews of her existence. One of her children was currently non-existent as was one of Amy’s children…
Susan shook her head. Two out of four children. She cried. She began to hear something breaking the silence, something she didn’t understand equally as much as she didn’t understand the words in her empty head. The sound of a cricket ball smacking the meat of the willow with a resounding echo … or, rather, a small white hard egg-pod being squashed to smithereens by the coal-pick beneath her feet, or between them.
****
Arthur Cole – despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc. – became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other passengers assuming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn’t otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver’s sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surreptitiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of ratruns and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his ‘brainwright’: an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.
Since the days they lived with their single mother in an apartment intended for fewer than three, there had been long periods when Arthur was in and out of Care Homes, especially ones specialising in their own variety of ‘brainwrighting’ … until Amy herself was old enough to take over such duties – their mother having vanished as had a replacement father figure who had been living with them for a while until eventually vanishing himself … gradually.
They couldn’t remember his name. They couldn’t even remember their mother’s name or, rather, they had deliberately blocked it out. The man’s name they had genuinely forgotten.
It was miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company’s inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver – despite all his driving documents being forgeries.
One day, he was destined to use his bus as a get-away vehicle (with passengers still on board) but that was irrelevant to the events that followed each other – at least semi-logically – in the guise of a story that stood by his side like a narrative thread he followed by means of the metaphysical steering-wheel of his life. Many of the events didn’t directly affect Arthur at all, but those events were directly affected by Arthur.
Returning to his childhood days – when the shadowy mother and father figures were still shimmering like technical interference on a TV screen – his ability to get his hands dirty by actually delving the fingers deep into what he took to be the earth’s crust (or rind) to obtain some purchase on its spinning (also as part of his messy damming river games for which he used the kitchenware substances) was really a dress rehearsal for driving a bus, although he did not realise that at the time, if he realised anything about anything. But certainly Amy – growing into a pretty girl and even prettier woman – knew instinctively that Arthur could control big things just with the flick of his finger.
Arthur dreamed one night of mixed ambitions competing with each other for the forefront of his brain (some eventually to be considered worthless and unmemorable by his waking mind) together with worries about death and guilt … and of crawling forward through a long hedge where it was relatively easy to proceed with only the slightest tear by plant-spike and sting by nettle, until he reached an impenetrable clump at the end edge of the hedge, whereby he had to retreat backwards with the spikes and nettles closing in quite violently as a result of the opposite direction of travel he was attempting to forge through the undergrowth which was resprung against his passage. The dream, however, was not so convoluted as the necessarily convoluted account of its own passage through Arthur’s mind. The words for all this had been lost in transit. Maybe, if he retraced his footsteps, clarity could be hauled back, although, no doubt, with some difficulty.
Another dream – this one more grounded in day-to-day life – was one of trying to park his bus each night outside his house, with Amy waving him into some very tight space between other vehicles. His back was once jammed right up to the vehicle behind, but it was only a small thing (a bubble car?) and this had quite a big gap behind itself to manoeuvre in reverse should it want to get out. Arthur’s memory was of something even smaller than a bubble car, but this was probably a later twisting of the truth in the dream to match the verities of waking life.
Amy and Arthur lived together – and their neighbours must have assumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister. In real life, he was indeed a bus driver and didn’t, of course, need his sister working as his brainwright (a word he hardly remembered, if at all, from somewhere or other, like hawler, weirdmonger and nemonymous) – and he did not, naturally, park his bus outside the flats, but left it at the bus garage at the end of his shift – a shift that usually entailed the night bus. Amy was a counter assistant at one of the local department stores – but sometimes she filled in (for extra money) as a supermarket shelf-filler of disinfectants, washing-powders, cleaning-fluids, fabric-conditioners etc. She was on carpets at the department store, spending most of the day arranging for fittings, after the customers – with her expert help – had chosen the pattern and quality of the carpet they wished to buy,
Yet, then, the horrors hadn’t yet started. Various strange words start to build up – as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did they know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself.
****
Mike and Susan lived together on the other side of the city. Unmarried partners masquerading as father and daughter or brother and sister – often misinterpreted by the neighbours – but the two of them were happy and managed to make ends meet. Why people these days disguised the true of nature of their relationships and didn’t actually seem to need sexual partnerships and, even if they were sexual, avoided fruit of their union at all costs. Meanwhile the world depleted, whilst the words to describe it increased.
Mike worked at a covered market – with his long-time caped colleague Crazy Lope (who should have been a Red Indian with a name like that but was more quite an ordinary girl-shafting ex-miner with an odd turn of corrupt phrase) – but it was the market itself that was the noteworthy element in the day’s work. The area of the city where it was situated was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. This is the first time – it has to be noted – that it has been made clear that most of the events under scrutiny took place in England. A fact that hadn’t been realised until this comparison with Eastern Europe became necessary: ie. inadvertently slipped out, as it were, in the cause of geographical context. All accomplished without any direct narrative intervention whatsoever…
The covered market had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not STRICTLY open-air or covered. On some days – when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom – it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these ‘walls’ looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. Mike dreaded going to work, in case he was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn’t belong to the city at all. The market work itself remained unclear, but Mike was good at it: he kept getting rises. Crazy Lope was not so lucky, if luck were indeed the cursor to success and failure in such settings.
Susan worked in a pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub – unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life – would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile worked there – a real place she couldn’t avoid as she needed the money.
Mike and Susan lived in a top floor flat in the city centre with their two children, Amy and Arthur. They just about made ends meet, with the help of Government tax credits. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling as of yet more dreamers dreaming the covered/open-air market where Mike worked. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that sexual peccadilloes were rife with one or two men living there, one of these men the dreamer’s friend in real life, so you did need to visit him (although this was a dream and you weren’t really visiting your friend at all) – whilst, all the time, it was not dream for Mike and Susan who actually lived in that top flat, with their two children; it was their shelter, their life … where their ends met. Who had lived there before them was not relevant. Not relevant to Mike or Susan. Whether it be dream or real life.
When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything, that was, except survival of oneself and of one’s own. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn’t matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.
Tonight, as the beginning of the drama is homed in upon, Mike and Susan are sitting on the couch in their top flat, ready to speak to each other: the children recently put to bed after TV’s Children Hour: “Whirlygig” with Humphrey Lestocq and Mr Pastry. The Queen of England was still quite young and the end of the war was not more than about ten years old. The carpet was much older; and being new tenants they didn’t know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.
****
A vehicle – like a bus – doesn’t touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads.
Mike watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines – just the bars of the seats being seen from where he stood. It must have just gone under a bridge too low for its height – or the driver had – and those passengers seated on the top deck were either crouched low or decapitated. Mike winced. It would be in the newspaper tomorrow no doubt – but why hadn’t the bus stopped? Or, rather, why had it now slowed? Not because of a bus stop, but because it had self-evidently just had an accident – or the driver had. A serious accident. Mike watched it wheel round the corner, thinking, as he did, of hit-and-run situations and where the bridge was likely to be. He couldn’t think of a low bridge in the area. Hit-and-run. Like having children, then forgetting them … only for them later to become your friends and you don’t remember them, so they are real friends, not your children, because your children can never be your real friends: too much customs duty to intervene…
He was on his way from work. He usually walked – and only caught the bus when it rained. Office work had its own life and customs; people who worked in offices were a certain breed. Mike wished he could work outside, like a labourer could or someone in an open-air market. Office-workers, on the other hand, not only watched ‘Big Brother’ on TV but talked about it in the office the next day. Office-workers had ambitions – of sorts. But the ambition usually involved jealousy rather than the intrinsic need to be promoted. Mike had been promoted beyond his own capabilities (as most office-workers were). He had the healing power – to make himself ignore how he was wasting his life in competing for petty duties … although, these days, he and his wife Susan were often invited to office receptions to entertain clients. This was a godsend to their social life and no obvious need for sitters, as nobody knew if they had children. They’d just watch TV otherwise – and bicker.
Mike’s office was just round the corner whence he had just turned. It was an Advertising Agency with some really creative people – but Mike worked in Administration and only allowed creative jobs from time to time. One would never have known it was an Advertising Agency, because the building was a plain Sixties-built tower block with nothing to recommend it. It wasn’t like that open-walled Eastern European market that plagued Mike’s dreams as his real workplace but one he could never find afterwards. He wasn’t paid much – hence the need to work overtime, which he had been tonight. He shivered as the rain set in – and he wished he had caught the bus despite the vision of the freshly topped one that had disappeared from his memory by placing a street corner between it and Mike – or the driver had.
****
That evening, Mike returned to their home. It wasn’t the top flat that some people dreamed about – with all those feelings of forbiddingness and sexual peccadilloes that shouldn’t be entertained. It was the same flat, perhaps, as the one in the dreams – but now with redecoration apparent, nicer fillings and a slightly better position in the building, and a slightly better building itself.
“It’s been a helluva day,” said Mike. “Did you hear about the incident on the underground?”
Susan nodded as she placed his dinner on the table. He was red-faced from climbing the stairs from floor to floor (the lift being left unattended if not out of order) – and she was red-faced from the stove. They were apparently in their middle years, not yet having reached the bruised look that old age had in store for them, given a glimpse into the future. They had lost the youthful sparkle and any body-hair was tarnished with discolour or no colour at all. Mike was – and, probably, still is – a forthright man, but kept his distance and downplayed any passions. Susan, equally, but her eyes often sparked with anger for some, and anguish for others.
“Yes, terrible wasn’t it?” she said as she sat down. The wireless played softly from the kitchen as she had forgotten to switch it off.
“That station that looks like an open market, round the corner from the office…”
She nodded, having previously heard Mike’s description of it, although she never visited Mike in the area where he worked. Sometimes, she wondered if his description of it was the result of a dream, and it was merely a coincidence that it fitted in with the news report she had heard on the wireless.
“Well, when they started coming out the sides from under the roof … they were covered in blood. Even the walking wounded were terribly bloody, as if they should have been on stretchers. Soon, it was a whole army of them. We did what we could, till the ambulances arrived.”
A crimson infantry, was not an expression that came easily.
“Did the air ambulance come?” Susan asked.
“At least one did but the roads are so narrow round there for landing. Its rotors were inches away from the office’s back wall – and actually sliced through the open empty edges of the station itself.”
Coincidentally, last night, he had a dream of being flown in a helicopter. It was unclear now but he had not before been in one in real life, but it was just as he imagined it. He was normally afraid of flying and, in his dream, the dreamer vaguely recalled this fear from real life … as it slanted close to some trees, almost entering amongst its branches – and he fully expected it to crash, but it landed in some Italian Villa.
The air ambulance, that day, near his office, also looked precarious as it landed between the buildings, looking really huge compared to its air size.
“They took away some of the wounded but I couldn’t see how they decided which patients would go by air and which by road.”
“First come, first served,” she suggested.
****
Later that night, Mike lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined him awake. He got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in their living-room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. They were very close to the ground without even space for ratruns or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.
He wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.
He found himself delving into the wood of the floor as if he had found an opening in human flesh – a natural vent, rather than one he had forced open with his fingers.
That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to him until he discovered himself delivering them … through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And he felt its thoughts as if they were his own thoughts.
****
When Mike and Susan suddenly found themselves with children, they thought they always had children … ones named Amy and Arthur … hauled to the surface from the coal-face of the world’s creation.
Mike listened to their crying from the cots in another room. Susan was off working in Ogdon’s pub. Mike had never visited the pub because he didn’t really want to see the conditions of her work … he’d feel guilty. Working in an open-air market was far below his own original ambitions as a child. He had the ability to get a far higher paid job, even it were in an office. Once his creative abilities had almost allowed him to secure quite a high position in an Advertising Agency. His CV had let him down however and allowed someone else (similar to him) through the back door, leaving Mike with a destiny he would not normally have chosen.
Tears came to his eyes as he looked back at the various paths he could have picked on … chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so he could make the turning towards the goal he had once set himself.
In the distance, he heard the lonely sound of a helicopter – vanes clacking lugubriously – followed by the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty.
Air-liner? Hmmm. He laughed.
Susan wouldn’t be home for some time. Pubs had funny hours these days. No licensing restrictions – and Susan mainly served the night people.
****
Arthur remembered his father, with tears, too. None of the families at this stage in their trees could recall the names of forebears, none of which was written down. Nobody cared to dig into the past to find their roots. That had grown deeply unfashionable with the genealogical obsessions fizzling out into inexplicable mass suicides. Such family research was now banned, naturally.
Arthur looked across at his wife Amy. A mere coincidence that it was his wife because having sisters was not a recognised relationship any more, following the genealogical obsessions. Arthur’s hands were covered in his own tears as they had brought his fingers too carelessly near his streaming eyes. He felt utterly nemonymous.
****
Mike woke from a dream. This had been a real dream. Others had not been dreams. They had been visions thrust upon him by some narrative trickery with a wild weirdmonger trying to force him down byways which his destiny had no right to encompass.
Mike knew a real dream from a false dream. The former often contained words he’d never use, words he didn’t understand. Or was it the other way? Distinction was clear, if not the terms of the distinction.
He straightened the direction-finder of his reality, although this was a subconscious act as he shrugged off any aberrant forces working on him. He was a worker, a drone. He worked in a hive. He laughed. He worked at an Advertising Agency, he had a lovely wife, two lovely kids and plenty of money – and lived on the ground floor of a palatial block of flats on the edge of the city. His wife was homemaker. This was the truth. All else was dream and subterfuge. The compass point pointed steadily at it.
Until the next time.
****
The ceiling was quite ordinary, plain white, with a central rose whence the electric flex dangled towards its own pendant lampshade and bulb. In ancient days, before ceilings were invented, they would have had strange beliefs about ceilings, no doubt. That they were ghosts in disguise would have been the strongest and strangest. Some even believe that today.
John Ogdon – landlord of the pub where Susan worked – was dreaming of over-flying his own pub in a helicopter, except the roof was hidden by the large overhanging buildings in the same street. Either warehouses or tall covered markets, the dream didn’t allow him to remember. He did remember, however, another dream when he was at a family dinner, believing himself to be one of the adults, so it was quite a surprise to find himself placed with the children on a lower table adjacent to the main table. It was only later he lost touch with himself and, after a period of being literally a down-and-out, had struck a patch of good luck and been given the job of managing a downtrodden pub in the city.
He thought he saw his old friend Crazy Lope, a tiny figure negotiating the ratruns and back doubles: and at this time of day it was not surprising that he was one of very few individuals en route between two ends of their own business … hardly a time to be IDLY wandering, Ogdon thought, as his dream helicopter banked and disappeared further into the dark horizon of his sleep,
****
There was some kind of race through the house, but it was unclear who was racing whom and whether it was me or him or her or us or you being chased – but certain was it that the house was a palatial one or rather a large stately house through the ornate rooms of which visitors would normally be guided. All I knew (if it WAS me) was that I seemed to possess far more stamina than I expected myself to possess at my age – AND nimbleness. As the paintinged walls sped past, I managed to keep well ahead of my pursuers, negotiating the various corridors and, even, the ups and downs of trapdoors, oubliettes and attics. Yet most of these areas were well lit and it remains unclear (even today) whether the race was in earnest, life and death, or merely a game.
The helicopter hovered about the country house, it seemed, for hours, hanging from the white ceiling that was the sunless sky. It was reconnoitring or spying for forces that remain mysterious until this very day. At points, one could even just discern the goggled pilot sitting stiffly in his bulb.
****
John Ogdon looked up from his paper, as Susan walked into the bar for her turn of night duty. Despite his down-to-earth occupation (IF supplying processed alcohol via a pub was indeed down-to-earth rather than spiritual by intoxication), he had been day-dreaming about floating above the sparkling sea in the early morning, upside down in a helicopter or balloon (more likely the latter as there seemed to be no noise) where the scintillating waves’ expanse between four identical wall-to-wall horizons was a ceiling or watery underside of some far firmer roof beyond it. Day-dreaming was quite different from doing it during the night. Less control.
Ogdon shrugged. He needed to get back to the state of the bar’s surface – preparing himself to get his own hands dirty. The pub’s cleaner was missing – hauled off to attend to some personal morbidity, apparently. He laughed at his own turn of phrase. He would also need to persuade Susan (officially a barmaid) to get stuck in.
“How’s Mike?” Ogdon’s voice failed to disguise his own irritation at the happenings of the day. The inner laughter at the wordy surrealism of his own mood was already wearing off. His face looked more like a policeman’s than a pub landlord’s. His stomach flatter than that of his own caricature.
“OK. But the roof’s leaking. That’s why I’m a bit late.” Susan never questioned her own state. Life was to be accepted, whatever what. She was half attractive, half determined to accentuate the other half.
“Children?”
Susan had to think for a moment. Life sometimes took you by surprise, even with its own ingrained acceptance of fixtures and habits. How could one forget one’s own children? It was their bedroom that was leaking.
“A bit damp.” She laughed.
Without explaining her quip – but depending on previous information she had given Ogdon, she looked out of the pub window before embarking on the cleaning which she didn’t really need to be told to do.
She caught a glimpse of a figure of a caped man disappearing into the black backdrop of a huge liner in Dry Dock, as if he had nearly been caught ear-wigging their conversation. The cranes on the liner and its gantries reminded her more of an old-fashioned coal mine where chains hauled up and down the man lifts. She knew it wasn’t that, but it seemed more appropriate that it should be. She heard the distant clanging of heavy-duty engineering – and she wondered, perhaps for the first time, how the liner had been transported here (so far from the river or the sea) and for what reason. This area had, she knew, been the site of a Dry Dock for several generations.
****
Tonight, Susan’s sister was coming in together with her husband, Susan’s brother-in-law, but at the moment there was just one solitary pub regular talking about a dream he had the previous night. He was talking to himself, in truth, but Susan pretended to listen to enable him to believe that he was not just talking to himself, although he was.
“I was part of a crowd coming into the pub – a special rough cider was being offered at cheap price from a wooden cask. I wasn’t me in the dream but someone else. Good job as I don’t usually like cider and even though it was just a dream, I could really feel the bits of real apple with my tongue…”
Susan nodded as she proceeded to polish the bar, ready for the 2 a.m. rush. Why there was always a rush at that time was mysterious. Probably because various parties threw out their guests roughly at that time.
The regular nodded, too, as in agreement. He was not invited to the parties in the first place.
It was at this point that Susan’s brother-in-law swaggered into the bar.
“The road’s hairy!” he shouted, as if his sister-in-law would understand.
“Where’s Beth?” she asked anxiously.
“Oh, following on – she’s got a loose hair to clip back into place,” he announced sarcastically: his way of saying she had gone straight to the loo.
“Hairy road?” queried Ogdon from the other side of the bar, where he was emptying the fruit machine.
“You don’t expect roads with uncut verges, edges with hedges – and pavements with long weeds – in the city,” was the reply, as if this explained everything.
“No,” said Ogdon … knowingly.
A few more customers had already arrived – without Susan noticing – in advance of the 2 a.m. busy period. She half-expected Mike, because a childless couple, as they were, could have a devilmaycare attitude with regard to the necessity of sitters or minders. Wishful thinking, perhaps, because another advantage of childlessness was quiet sleepful nights, but that was lost on Mike and Susan as they often spent most of the night awake in any event.
One of the new arrivals was Greg – an ex-office worker – who had been made redundant and often told of his experiences in trying to get back into that sort of work. But the longer it went, the harder it would be, particularly as his appearance was fast approaching the nature of the “hairy road” that seemed to be preoccupying her brother-in-law. Beth had not yet appeared from the loo.
Greg meandered on about a recurring dream: as if Susan was interested! But on he would meander: “I go back to the company I used to work for time and time again – and many of my ex-colleagues have been promoted – and I have to wander the corridors of a new office block … knowing it’s also the SAME office block – looking for a previous colleague who I used to be in charge of … so that he of all people can show me the ropes of the slightly different procedures…”
He gave a sob as if the dream were real and it certainly was real when he was dreaming it – so not much of a logic there. Susan felt sorry for him but was soon re-preoccupied by the arrival of Beth. A blonde curvier version of herself, with all the mutual envy and recrimination that that implied: filtering both ways.
By the time Crazy Lope arrived, not long after Mike’s own arrival, she knew all these people had not met in Ogdon’s pub tonight by coincidence. It was exactly 2 a.m. and she was not surprised when Ogdon bolted the front door – and all of them left together by the back one in the shadow of the liner in Dry Dock – if shadows could be cast at this time of day when most of the lighting was at foot level, dim though such lighting was. So late even the night buses had stopped running, parties or not.
They became a search party. For two missing children.
****
If children suddenly realise they exist, they ask themselves whereto the rest of their past childhood. Were they brother and sister, they wonder, or completely unrelated and, thus, perhaps, childhood sweethearts incubating a future marriage when they would tell their own children of their erstwhile romance resulting in their children’s own subsequent existence as children. But, for all they knew at this crosspoint of time, they may have common parentage, and they hugged in the cold darkness – in the vicinity of the open-walled market – one hug as childhood sweethearts, the next hug as siblings, believing they gambled on one hug being true, choosing, as it were, between a belief in God and a non-belief in God. Both equally comforting.
They had not BECOME lost. They could hardly recognise themselves as lost, but lost they were. They realised that ‘becoming’ was not a necessary pre-cursor of ‘being’. Only adults didn’t understand that – and there were many years in the pipeline before Amy and Arthur would become non-understanding adults themselves. One pipeline, perhaps, leading to a more mature love affair, another pipeline to estrangement as argumentative siblings.
The late night bus passed in the distance, leaving a heavy silence. Although the darkness was cold, these two children were not cold at all. They had a carpet over them like a stiff blanket, having discovered it in a nearby dereliction, unpinned from the floorboards that it had once hugged as a soft underfoot surface – and, strange though it may sound, it was free of its floorboards because the floorboards had been stolen by a burglar for building a shed. Not that the children knew that history and only a dream could explain how the carpet’s subsistence survived its lack of foundations. It had sagged towards a cobwebby heart where red-eyed rats lurked but spared the children knowledge of the true extent of their maggoty existence. The carpet, surprisingly, had well survived the damp hollowness beneath it … and now provided a very serviceable blanket as the children speculated on the basic story-telling that underpinned their wherewithal as “babes-in-the-wood”. Better out here in the open city than in that ramshackle rat-den. A carpet was not as snugly body-hugging as a proper blanket would have been, but the sky seemed distant enough to hide the pin-pricks that were its perforations for heat absorption. The sky shaped itself to a larger body … and Arthur told Amy this was God’s shape and the sky hid the top flat where He lived and where, one day, they’d seek Him out in His bed. Arthur knew he, Arthur, lied, because city flats (especially top floor ones) were always seedy and bent out of any sane shape of comfort. Yet the concoction or myth gave a believeable context (ie. God living in a city flat) and, thus, comfort to both of them, even the liar.
****
At the centre of the earth, there is a face – pock-marked, pox-mouthed – in three dimensions as faces should be if they front the heads that wear them. There is blood seeping from every pore, from every pustule … and the nostrils dangle a rubbery blood that bloats bigger and bigger without ceasing to be rubbery – neither exploding or imploding. And the tongue speaks through bubbles of blood hawled from a chestful of hard core: “For once this is no dream – this is fucking real – so deal with it!”
****
Mike took Susan’s hands. They had found each other yet again, destined, perhaps, to find each other time and time again. Each a romantic epiphany, but equally horrifically real in the implication of needing to find each other time and time again. This time they knew their children were lost and this accentuated the horror, coupled with a wondrous fruition and fulfilment if they could find them. People like John Ogdon, Crazy Lope, Greg the office-worker, Beth and Beth’s husband – Mike had forgotten his name, forgotten indeed that Beth’s husband was Susan’s brother, if in fact that was true. However, it was a search party, although ‘party’ was certainly the wrong word, too.
Mike tried to drag logic from the illogic of his mind, tried to explain something to Susan that he couldn’t really explain to himself properly – as they followed the others across the night landscape that lifted the city skyward.
“It’s like that TV programme, Suse, isn’t it – you know the one. Where they evict people from the house gradually. But this is the other way round, where people are voted into a scheme of reality which fits the reality as we see it…”
“Yes,” said Susan, neither encouraging nor discouraging his blurted rambling tones that cut the night air.
“…like now, tonight, it’s as if we’re fine-tuning everything, looking for new housemates, even children to complete the picture. But also do we know who is acting true to themselves, not emotions so much as nemotions…”
Mike’s wordy speculations were his method to avoid the critical repercussions of the search itself. Like doodling with philosophy as he might have fiddled with prayer-beads. Susan nodded. She’d heard Mike’s rambling thoughts before, very simply expressed on the whole but peppered with words she couldn’t understand like nemonymous, weirdmonger and big brother, although she had heard of the book “1984” and some other things that were relevant, having known them as a tribe consciousness rather than as a product of her own personal learning. Mike, she knew, was a hawler but, in her mind, she spelt it as ‘hauler’ and she didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed natural, nevertheless. The TV programme to which he referred was a mystery. He’d probably watched it when she was out working in Ogdon’s pub, a pub, thankfully, without a TV or a juke box.
****
Near to the open-walled market or underground station, there was a tall building, access to which was by lift – indeed a very complex lift system which Greg often used before he was made redundant from his job in that building. He used to entertain business clients and had to help them negotiate the lift system – changing on specific floors for different lift shafts of higher reach. Some shafts were more palatial and business-orientated than others, some so narrow they could only be used for brooms or very thin utility workers. The highest shaft reached the open air area, leafed over like a wood. From there, once, Greg was sure he could see the distant sea through the unusually clear sky into which the wood penetrated. He imagined a finer, less definable surface barely above the sea but otherwise imitating its waves and swells – a double skin in perfect unison, but the lower one liquid, the upper spectral. Perhaps the second one was the ghost of a giant flying carpet taking invisible human vessels towards Arabian Adventure or towards the darker motives of suicide than seaside.
Greg had surreptitiously left the search party. If a maroon-party is an elongated picnic, then a search party is a day’s hide-and-seek game which lasts endlessly into an equally everlasting twilight – except, in the city, twilight didn’t exist changing, as it did, from day to night with the flick of a seeming switch. Mike and Susan soon lost hope at the efficacy of their companions – and had not seen Greg sloping off to look at his old office block. Ogdon, Beth and her partner, together with Crazy Lope, were fiddling with dustbins and not really getting stuck into the search proper – their excuse being a lack of stamina. Only Mike and Susan themselves, the would-be parents of the lost children, maintained a hard workload of search. They did hide themselves, sometimes, to test out the others’ search capacities and were continuously disappointed when they kept on being undiscovered in whatever easy hiding-place they found. So if not them, what chance the children? As yet, nobody even knew the names of the children.
In one test hiding-place, Mike and Susan had stayed a little longer. They had stared into each other’s teary eyes and fondled their bodies between them … acting more like new sweethearts than seasoned spouses. They even believed, for an instant, they were themselves the children they sought! Meanwhile, time itself gradually dammed up against the tangible delay the two of them set up to test the other seekers’ ability to undam it.
****
Dixon of Mason & Dixon was said to have been born in a coal mine. The two children had been forgotten somehow. Just silly worded day-dreams had intervened with certain members of the search party as they took a well-deserved rest at dawn beneath the shrinking shadow of the liner in its Dry Dock berth, floating upside down amid their clouded thoughts, as if the brightening sky were its sea. One word kept coming to Mike’s mind and he couldn’t fathom how he fully understood its meaning without actually understanding it at all – and why it kept returning to his mind unbidden or untranslated. He wasn’t even sure it was a real word: CÔTÉ. Looked French, but was it? This was the sort of effect of dreaming a word during a night’s sleep rather than the flickering tail of a day-dream at dawn, whilst the party rested from what – he now remembered – was a desperate search for two children. He looked at Susan who also stared dreamily towards the towering Dry Dock – and her eyes later told him that they had forsaken their duty by not earlier informing the Authorities about the children’s disappearance. Many others in the search party had by now wandered off in twos and threes. Greg was the last to leave, as he would soon be due at work in his office. He shuffled papers as he walked away quite quickly for fear of being late. The excuse for his night’s wanderings was now lost on him. If it were children that were missing, surely the police would have been informed. On that evidence (or lack of it), he knew that no children were missing at all. A logic that seemed quite straightforward, as Greg entered the lift to take him to the top floor. Business-life always avoided any thought of crazy dreams and, for the next eight hours, he would not have the luxury of using his imagination.
Much of the building – including the lift that slowly lifted him between the walls of its inner space – represented a reality that could bear no imagination to be applied to it … although many of its constituents such as the walls that were towards its top, certain parts of the basement boiler room and rooftop garden, some of its I.T. (for example) yearned to be less real so that they could be imagined into existence for some satisfying or evocative fiction work. But the building was there, tangible, safe as houses in a scheme of actuality, and, therefore, it failed in its ambition to cease existing so as to become a shimmering fantasy fit for the wildest imaginings. Greg had the same feeling about himself. He was convinced he was less real than Mike and Susan (for whose lost children they had all been supposedly searching) – and these two were dozing at the moment near the open-air market and they did not know Greg had left them to go to work. The others in the search party were also more real than Greg himself, but that left him with the mystery of why he had forgotten their names. This begged the question – were things (living or dead) more real with names than without? If so, Greg knew his own name was Greg which fact gave him a sense of well-being, although tinged with a subconscious regret at the loss of unreality that this entailed.
The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.
****
Amy and Arthur slipped from beneath the carpet as the sun slowly lifted its upper edge above the market. Streams of office-workers emerged from the various wide entrances of the underground system – entrances so wide they almost blended into each other. They shaded their eyes as a shard of sunlight sharply sloped into a tall office block like a seaside aero-act. All grabbed their briefcases to their chests and hustled onward to their desks, fearful that, one day, they themselves would one day commit their own seaside act in some token of devastation … which was odd because, unless they dreamed it, they feared the devastation itself less than causing the devastation themselves.
Arthur helped Amy stand up – and they both shuffled upon the carpet, now using it as a lower surface rather than the upper one it had been when serving as a blanket against the night chill.
Instead of flying off on this carpet – as they would have done in a proper dream or an Arabian fantasy – they returned, as if by magic, to the room whence the carpet first emerged and where it had been downtrodden since time immemorial. Amy stretched and yawned, wondering how a carpet could ever have escaped from beneath the heavy legs of her bed. She had just been dreaming of the hawler – the first real image anyone had gained of such an entity, in dream or otherwise. It was as if each dream – each of everyone’s dreams in the city and of the city – had been straining at the leash, forcing itself to depict – gradually and painfully – the hawler himself. A wide-faced creature masquerading as a man that lurked at the coalface of some underground powerhouse, whose only duty was to gather up all the material chipped away each night by several miners (Mine! Mine! Not yours!) and transported to the surface for processing. The full description – other than wide-faced – was still unclear. Additional dreams – not necessarily Amy’s own – would be required before a fuller picture was obtained.
One irrelevant dream intervened, however, or it seemed irrelevant at the time – although the dream sickness as it developed and as it was better understood by dreamers and non-dreamers alike (and I think this was the first time it was pinpointed as a ‘sickness’ as such) did specialise, it seemed, in mock irrelevancy. This dream, then, was simply knowing – within the dreamer’s mind – that it was a horror film and that all the people in the dream were really actors, but they were unaware, apparently, of this fact. So when the dreamer him- or herself saw the birth of a baby ape, it was simply known – without equivocation – that this would grow into a giant monster. Indeed, looking through to the hall (to where the “baby ape” had fled), there were seen various people treating a gigantic human figure with some respect and unsurprise, not knowing it was a monstrous creature quickly grown from the “baby ape” and that it was pretending to perform on the stage in the hall as part of some talent competition. It towered above all the normal people. The dreamer fled from the hall – where these things had been seen – to warn the rest of the town of what was happening under their noses. Was waking, however, before or after being caught by the monster relevant?
****
In a part of the city, there was a zoo. And it was known by the Authorities that any dream sickness affecting the rest of the city did not affect the zoo. There seemed to be individuals in charge of the city that the ordinary citizens failed to recognise – or ever knew they existed at all. These Authorisers, so-called, had some mandate to keep parts of the city as reservations of clear sense – where dream was clearly recognised as dream and real life as real life, and never the twain should overlap. Strangely, perhaps, the zoo grounds were one such reservation and those citizens suffering from the dream sickness often resorted there – on their holidays – just to be certain about themselves and about reality and, indeed, about the dreams that they still dreamed when at the zoo but they actually knew they were dreams, knew them for what they were. How they knew this fact was similar to going abroad to sunny climes for one’s holiday – away from the cold, dank, often dark city – and believing it was for the sake of enjoyment and recreation, not the chore a holiday surely always was.
Here, at the zoo, the citizens knew similarly that they were free of deceiving dreams and what they saw – as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure – were REAL animals and creatures. Only when the citizens were asleep, at the zoo hotel, did they know they would be in danger of dreaming – unlike in the surrounding city itself, where waking was no safeguard against surreptitious dreams taking over the minds: not day-dreams, but full-blooded dreams which one thought were real life when experiencing them. In the zoo grounds, however, such dreams were dreams, whilst waking was waking.
The entrance to the zoo was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in terraced back-to-back two-up-two-downs in the less desirable parts of the city. And to be less desirable in this city would not to be putting too strong a description on it. There was a turnstile – just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most zoos in other cities would need. No money changed hands and when people had time off from work they came here – all jolly and familified – and entered the place that was hidden by tall grey walls which made them feel they were indeed going to work all over again on their holiday! The turnstile was unimpeded and they emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen but their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages, as visitors who had been here before could attest were full of living exhibits yet to meet the gaze of greenhorn visitors. Why an empty enclosure was the first exhibit often mystified initial visitors, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth and logic and as the total exhibition of the zoo revealed itself to the unpaying customers filing past.
The empty enclosure at the start of the tour – it was discovered – was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping citizens as they took their time off in the zoo. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, the children bawling in disappointment:
“Where are the animals, Mummy?”
“You told me this was a zoo, Daddy!”
The parents tried to pacify their children by pointing to the corridors of cages where the zoo proper, apparently, would start – or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the insects that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for insects. They wanted to see big things in a zoo. Life needed big things in the city.
Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most visitors, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages – a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of exhibits. Kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other – and even uncomfortably close towards the visitors themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.
The remarkable fact – despite the circumstances – none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was one hundred per cent not a dream ... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.
Mike turned towards the others and said: “Quite sweet, aren’t they?”
Nobody replied. They weren’t so sure, because these initial cages seemed to house versions of the apes, a baby one of which had indeed featured in a dream dreamed by at least one of the party before entering the zoo grounds. Yet here, the apes could be clearly seen for what they were – apes with no potential to grow into man-mountains like Gulliver. That, Mike assumed, was what differentiated dreams from non-dreams. In the former, anything could grow into anything else. In the latter, things stood still ever as themselves. The status quo. They may be monsters in a non-dream, but they couldn’t transmute into worse or different monsters.
They wandered further into the maze of cages, Mike in the lead. As a hawler, he could see things more clearly than the others, since he had travelled further underground in his consciousness and established fixtures and bases from which all else could be interpreted and evaluated: thus neutralising their ability to terrorize. Terror did not breed more terror, but less. Hence, Mike’s justification in dredging more terror and horror into view, so as to neutralise it. He had not thought these things consciously – but when between bouts of dream sickness outside the zoo grounds, this had indeed been clearer, the dreams themselves adding a needed logic of their own. Here, inside the zoo, Mike – although an instinctive leader – learned, from this prior in-built experience of dream negotiation outside the zoo, that paradoxically he felt himself to be at a loss in the uniform non-dream world of reality represented by the zoo around them.
The next set of cages was frightful and, if it hadn’t been for the certainty of his own logic, Mike would have been quite perturbed by the sights as they unfolded. It was as much as he could do to pacify the others in face of a tentacular monstrosity that even the infinite star-fields (and what potential life they could conceivably hold) would not have been powerful enough to make possible.
Here they found Amy and Arthur whom they had been seeking all night throughout the city. They were pressed up to the cage bars as if in some desperate embrace with the monster that was contained by them.
Yet, nothing, surely, could be nightmarish outside a dream, a nightmare being merely a species of dream. Yet the two children – as Amy and Arthur still were inside the zoo – seemed actually tied outside the cage to its bars not by ropes and bindings but by the long locking claws of the beast that the cage contained. Mike and the rest of the search party quickly shuffled identities between them as none wanted to be responsible for leading a rescue mission towards this cage with a view to releasing the two children. Yet, this cowardly act could not be cowardly for long, because no sooner than one felt the cowardliness coursing through their veins than that same person felt an equal counterbalance of bravery … and they lurched forward to prise the children’s fingers from the bars only quickly to realise that the fingers were not all the children’s own – and cowardliness returned with redoubled force.
Meanwhile, Greg the office worker had rejoined the group unexpectedly – having followed the others after his lunch break into the zoo grounds – and had no time to be infected by the switching identities caused by an alternation of cowardliness and bravery. He had no second thoughts but to rush towards the cage and pulled the children away from whatever it was that kept them bound to the bars. Indeed, there was nothing in the cage … except a threadbare carpet lining the floor, a carpet peppered with indeterminate tiny droppings and sown with holes that needed darning.
The group were pleased to escape the zoo – via the back entrance which was not far from the underground market. They hadn’t paid to get in but, somehow, they needed to pay to get out – as a man stood at a turnstile with his hand out. But the two children went free. All were pleased to escape without having their faith in the clear dream/reality dichotomy of the zoo undermined. They knew, however, once outside the zoo, each and everyone would be susceptible to the dream sickness. They needed a drink, so they sought Ogdon’s pub – but the streets round the market had somehow changed from a negotiable pattern to one of mazy confusion. The two children were no longer children – and, having been rescued from their kidnapping, they returned to a more adult appearance and behaviour, treating Mike as if he were a child. Mike couldn’t see Susan any more – but a certain loyalty to her memory forced him to stick by his promises to protect her against the onset of dreams, giving himself a more steadfast or statuesque image: a landmark around which the dreams revolved but could not affect. Susan would soon be able to return to this fixed point of Mikeness given the time and the inclination. He hoped against hope. He still loved her. This facility to be a fixed point amid the whirlpool of dreams that existed outside the zoo was akin to the ability of hawling: reaching to the core of the earth for one’s bearings – and mining them for certainties and immutable compass points of direction.
He looked up into the sky. There was something lovely about a sky that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from within themselves. A good hawler could plumb heights as well as depths for this brand of substance, sustenance and reassurance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, the sky (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphanously from horizon to horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were weirdmongers and others of their name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew or at least he hoped he knew for a while till he even forgot he was a hawler.
****
Susan woke beside her husband Mike in the bed she simply and unsurprisingly recalled falling asleep in. No better reassurance could there possibly be for getting one’s waking feet on the ground. She wondered how – in her dream – she seemed to be named Amy. And Mike had been called Arthur. She wasn’t sure how long the dream had lasted, but the actual reality within the dream had seemed to last a whole lifetime – until she awoke some time during the zoo sequence. Mike (or Arthur) had a role to play that nobody else could play. As with most dreams, its sense of reality was fast fading as she continued to reach a full waking state – and the name given to this role tantalisingly escaped her.
She soon saw Mike standing at the open bedroom window watching a jet liner slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give Mike a hug from behind. He would soon be off to the office and she to her barmaid’s job. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his buttocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. She yearned for the sea, where she had been brought up – yet the sight of the huge ship in Dry Dock on the city’s horizon was more than just a little recompense. She listened to see if she could hear their daughter Sudra waking. This was her first day back at school. They had decided only to have one child – even though they both knew how difficult it was for ‘only’ children in later life. Mike and Susan both missed their brothers and sisters … almost as if they had once existed. Mike turned round – the sun etching his head like a black hole – and he took Susan in his arms, lifting high the bottom edge of her nightie so that she could snuggle up to him even closer. No fear of peeping toms – because the open window was a good Blackpool Tower or two above the now enlivening streets below. She felt him come inside like a huge welter of comfort – and the friction was just a side effect. It was at that moment Sudra had quietly opened their door – and she was old enough to laugh at her parents’ predicament upon discovering they were being watched.
Sudra watched the city from the window, as if watching through the gaps left by her parents’ clinging, cleaving to each other. It was her birthday today and she was expecting a welcome hug and a bountiful gift – yet all she saw were the bodies of the people she loved dissolving in the growth of sunlight … until even the bones themselves tingled slightly and then vanished. She rushed towards them over the carpet but only gathered curtains to her instead of parental love. Yet, love is invisible – even when the people “doing” the love are there. And Sudra could feel the love around her, even if there were no arms to gather her closer to that love. It would soon be time for school – and she walked off to the fridge to fetch milk and the kitchen cupboard to fetch cereal … yet her feet were becoming more and more draggy as she tried to reach the kitchen, as if the carpeted floor (several storeys up) had a magnetism greater than the earth’s Core. Sudra could not even reach the body that was hers before it disappeared into the kitchen.
Mike turned round – forcing Susan also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he’d heard a shuffle or a whisper – but there was nobody there. He picked up the freshly delivered newspaper from the table – as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary – and read the main headline:
MAD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS
Without thought, he plunged it into his brief case, and waving a cursory backward greeting to Susan, he left for the office. Time had crept up on him and he was already dressed in his uniform of three-piece suit and bowler hat. This city lived in the Fifties and bowler hats were still evidently the rage.
****
Mike had forgotten how he had been described in earlier parts so he assumed he’d always looked like this. Barely close-shaven hair in a crew cut before crew cuts were known by numbers for the respective choices of length. Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley were in the Hit Parade – milk bars full or pre-pubescent teenagers, because puberty was very late in those early days. The office – once he arrived – was full of massive desk-calculators (that, one day, could fit into the palm of your hand), surrounded by pipe-smoking jobsworths rattling at their numbered keys. Mike said a jolly good morning as he took his own seat in front of a calculator that was rare inasmuch as it had a ribbon of paper where his work was printed automatically for future posterity – churning out in endless ticketing spools as from an old-fashioned bus conductor’s hand ratcheter. Still too early for his mind to be on the job – and he thought back to his walk to work, past the covered market, where many office-workers emerged as if they had been sleeping there all night – past the Dry Dock, the pub where Susan worked, the zoo gates – and before he managed to summon up sufficient concentration of will-power to face the calculator keys, he took a quick browse of the newspaper, the main headline being:
CHILDREN STILL MISSING
An all night search of the innercity has produced no sign of the Angevin Twins – so further sweeps are soon to take place in the outer city towards the suburbs.
“They ought to try UNDER the city,” said Mike to himself. The Angevin Twins were the first-born of an important city family that had first grown rich over the generations by means of coal-mining on the Northern edge of the city. Mike had seen photographs of that area – big towers with turning wheels threaded by clunking chains, silhouetted against a sky that was more often as black as coal as it was ever blue. The prevailing weather thereabouts had made sure of that. Most citizens travelled south on their holidays and not even the weathermen could explain why it was generally brighter in that direction. Nothing concerning geography or science could justify such differences – almost as if the city seeped darkness towards its head … bearing in mind that its map was a direct representation of a human body: either purposefully or purposelessly reflected by the evolving architecture, town-planning and urban scrawl set in motion by the founding fathers all those centuries ago. On that symbolic template, Mike knew that before one reached the holiday areas surrounding the city’s feet one needed to cross the standing water of a waste reservoir.
He looked into the mirror of the office toilet to remind himself of how he should have been described as a person – if anyone needed to describe him to any people who did not know him. He had just physically added to that standing water (of which he had just unaccountably pictured) and he smiled a smile which he decided was uncharacteristic of him when viewed in a mirror. He wiped his hands on a paper towel. Was this how hawlers were meant to look? A strong personal face with deep lines and searching brows. Black looks offset by sweet smiles? Only the nemonymous ones had tantamount to the blank expressions of those bodily projected ghosts on TV dramas – so he knew exactly what he was, down to the chipped toenails, even if he hadn’t yet dared tell Susan and Sudra.
The office work had taken a backseat ever since the news broke about the Angevin twins. Nobody had given them a second or second’s thought beforehand and maybe many of them knew nothing of their existence at all. The tea lady – pushing her steaming urn – had nothing else in her new gambits of conversation. Not long ago she had been on about the wayward progress of the latest evictions on ‘Big Brother’. Now it was whether the Angevin twins had been kidnapped or simply run away like the Famous Five had to Kirrin Island.
None had been prepared for the startling news – and how important it would be for the city and its life – until the population had woken up to the breaking news: hearing of the twins’ existence for the first time followed a few seconds later by news of their mysterious non-existence. The twins, before this extreme metamorphosis, had been surprisingly old for their age, so nothing was ruled in, nothing ruled out.
Mike tried to concentrate on his paperwork – without much enthusiasm – occasionally glancing up at his colleagues to whom he often remembered talking when times were more ordinary. It had indeed been a job where office politics often took sway – with alternating recriminations and reconciliations. Corporate entertaining of clients at sport and art arenas. Hitting the knuckle of the business with sensitive tweaking of figures and projections.
“How’s your wife doing at The Third Floor?”
Mike’s colleague – what was his name? – had actually spoken to him. The first attempt at conversation for several days.
“OK. Do you know her boss? Ogdon he is. He often serves behind the bar. Strange bloke.”
Mike had answered, as if he had learned his lines parrot-fashion. Ogdon was known to most people. He used to run a pub near the office to where everyone had resorted at lunchtime for a boozy crush and exchange of business gossip. More was gathered at such gatherings … than gathering the proper statistics back at your desk. Life was human. Life could not be contained within restricted socks. Booze loosened the tongues and then facts flowed, too.
“Yes, Ogdon. I know him. In fact, I knew him before he was a pub landlord. He used to sit for days in a square between tower-blocks, by a fountain, writing novels…”
Mike’s colleague might have continued, had not Mike himself brought the contrived conversation to an end with a throwaway line:
“Novels get you nowhere.”
****
The bendy bus threaded the lower streets, having eschewed the mainstream for the back doubles. The windows were scratched by scores of cavalier vandals, who had tried to smash them just with their gaze until getting the milled edges of their shiny shillings to the glass in a pique of frustration that their lives were going nowhere fast. Arthur was behind the huge steering-wheel as the wheel tried to take him more than he was able to take the wheel. Much water had passed under the bridge since that time he and his sister Amy were sent missing: and even he couldn’t remember the circumstances. He’d need a brainwright sooner. In a dream, he once believed he and Amy were some kind of Royalty with Franco-Anglo roots: and their disappearance had set the whole city into a quiver. Not at all like the true circumstances: just he and his grubby-faced sister taking their pluck in their hands to see if anyone really cared for them and escaping deliberately into the darkening streets rather than go home for tea. Just a test for their parents. To see if they had sufficient love to find them again. A crazy, mixed-up looking for nothing except for the goal of people looking for THEM. A quest for a quest.
The two children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets – of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction as A&A, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Most tried to discover each other’s names.
“Hey, are you…? How long have you been…?” asked one child with a polished face and knobby knees. She failed to give any information about herself, however.
“Too long,” said one of the posher kids. “There’s a hole that goes to the other side of the world. But where?”
Indeed, whither the antipodal angst?
In the distance, one of the other children heard the hum of traffic – as if the city had started to reignite – and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.
“But nobody will ever find it. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.
“There’s a bigger hole in my Mum’s carpet!” laughed a sarcastic rascal, one of the few children not part of his or her own pair. He remembered the high flat that most adults had told him existed somewhere – even if it were only in forgotten dreams; even the slightest infection of dream sickness itself could engender false imaginings of real things or real imaginings of false things. The flat was an archetype, especially with kids. A literally dreaded flat where an individual – who was once one’s best friend – spent most of the day and night in bed. Nobody suspected this could be God Himself – as such seedy, tawdry dread could not possibly be any part of a divine iconography. Even the flat carpet had tantamount to melted into the grooves of the floorboards’ ill-knotted and crumbly fibre.
The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play – seeking the bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore – having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz … but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it – and why they had to find it … and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.
****
Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra – feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids’ parts, but some did run away although they didn’t know why. But that’s another story – as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fashion that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.
Mike pointed into the sky, drawing attention – for Susan’s benefit as well as Sudra’s – where he saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a lego-brick device or even a model of a toy lorry the size or a real lorry – but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus … followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada … until Mike realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys … soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter’s … until that shock became real as he watched one of them accidentally clip another – with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even his feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky – more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet – and Mike prayed that they would not crash anywhere near their own house … a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened their lives which were far more valuable than property. He also hoped that Ogdon’s ‘Third Floor’ pub would remain intact. Then, quickly realising how vulnerable he, Susan and Sudra were in the open, Mike gathered Sudra up and told Susan to run alongside him – even though he didn’t know if running away from danger was actually running into it.
The grass was scorched by their frantic escape.
****
He is dreaming. He knows it is him dreaming but, in retrospect, it could be just about anyone dreaming – Mike or Greg, even Ogdon. Hardly a woman, however, could have dreamed the dream – or a child like Arthur. Yet nothing is certain in such novel circumstances as dreaming a dream such as the dream he thought he was dreaming. He felt himself to be a man, not only within the dream context but also outside the dream as the person eventually to wake from it – and having already entered it via deep sleep, he seemed to mine even deeper. The dreamer had in his arms a girl and she was almost offering herself to him in skimpy night-clothes or an even skimpier evening dress. At first, he thought it was his daughter and, since then, within the dream, he has no reason to think it was not his daughter. She had shortish curly or bushy blonde hair and she was a bit plump so not at all like his daughter in what he later would consider to be waking or real life. But she was his daughter in the dream and it seemed they were both accustomed to these surreptitious flings and she was kissing him longingly, lengthily – eventually with her tongue. He felt a climax ensuing as he was now convinced it was one of those dreams that often end abruptly at good or bad bits of it, and the dreamer woke in a sick sweat. And that is all he can remember of the dream, and whether he is still trapped in such a dream is quite unknown to anyone capable of knowing there is such a thing TO know.
****
The children arrived at the Dry Dock – but the ship had been moved back to the sea during the night. Each pair circled the area where it had stood for months between stanchions, breezeblocks, gantries and giant chocks. This was where they suspected the hole they sought would be found – a service tunnel bled from the ship’s hull for off-loading unfiltered substances: leading into the intricacies of the earth’s valves. Not that they possessed those words to describe it. They merely had dreamed them, beamed from elsewhere, during the returning onset of the dream sickness (a sickness that most people, even children, had forgotten).
One child thought of the maps that had been on board – in the maproom. A wall of maps overlapping each other. This child then told his other half about it: “They were wall-sized maps on hardboard, one on top of the other, hinged at the top where the ship’s horizontal false ceiling ended in meeting the vertical – and you needed to lift one map to see the one underneath until you lifted them again and again, until you reached the wall itself. Some of the maps are blank, some very complicated with lots of wavy lines…” He tried to take a breath as he took a long run at describing everything that went through his mind. He had the word-power and the enthusiasm to match it. His listener was in awe.
Other children, with similar memories, could hardly describe them. “The walls were red,” one of them said, a girl with bushy blonde hair, meaning to say they were read like a book. Or perhaps she did.
“There was a map of a rail network,” answered another precocious child who held the hand of an older child with fuzz on his top lip, the latter not seeming quite so ‘with it’ as the younger one.
“On the wall?”
“Sort of under the wall. You had to lift the top wall up to see under it – and the first map underneath was of railway tracks, not a map of rivers, roads or mountains – only never-ending caterpillars and points.”
“A peculiar map to have on board a ship!”
“Yes, but most people these days think about trains, rather than boats, planes or cars.”
“Do they? What about helicopters? Do you count them as planes?”
Children crowded in to listen, whilst others searched the distraught area where the ship had once been stationed – still trying to locate the hole to the centre of the earth – and beyond.
“Some remember the times when grown-ups used to travel to work.”
“Commuting,” chimed in a bright spark from the back of the crowd.
“Yes, something like that – but they remember the open platforms in the countryside and the halts and junctions they used but now slightly altered, confusing the direction and whether one had changed to the correct platform for the next train – going back in the same direction as you came, whilst you have doubts because most of the other passengers are collecting themselves on the opposite platform to the one you are on – and you’ve forgotten whether you were travelling to work or travelling back home having already been to work…”
The chatter soon dissolved as the kids departed in dribs and drabs, having given up any chance of locating the pit entrance hereabouts. The chatter faded into the distance and, simultaneously, became more like chatter fitting for children to chat.
****
During their lunch-break from the office, Greg and Mike visited Ogdon’s pub on the third floor of the New Trocadero. Mike was disturbed to catch Susan and Ogdon canoodling behind the bar when he and Greg arrived – but Susan quickly rectified herself with some careless excuse. Sympathies for all parties have been meticulously crafted by the implied omniscience of someone who stands behind all the characters. If only he or she were more up front with this task instead of keeping everything between the lines. And given these sympathies, one can try to imagine the sorrow in Mike’s heart at this sign of seedy affection between Susan and Ogdon, plus the shame he felt at his colleague Greg also witnessing the tawdry scene and the further shame felt, indeed, by Susan herself. She quickly changed the subject, whilst serving Greg and Mike their lunchtime booze.
“The ship’s gone, then.”
Mike nodded. The huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock – not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit – had long become a fixture on the city’s skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance – presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed – was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who – despite the frantic searching by the Authorities – were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper…
“Nobody seemed to notice,” said Greg. “It’s not as if the sea is close by, but they must have re-cut the river to the sea overnight, too! Amazing what they can do.”
“I heard the groaning of sheet metal throughout the night, but I couldn’t wake up properly – to check,” announced Ogdon.
Meanwhile Susan’s sister Beth and Beth’s husband had entered the pub. A childless couple, but they had great sympathy with those who had lost children overnight.
Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened.
“I went to his room – and he said he would show me his if I showed him mine. So I escaped back down the stairs, helter skelter. A long way from his flat to the ground. Heh heh! The sea, you say? It’s not far to the coast from here, really. I once went…” He spat into his drink before he continued, oblivious that nobody was listening to his series of conversational non-sequiturs. “There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga – and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills – and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like ‘Angerfin’ on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing….”
Nobody paid any attention to Crazy Lope’s failure of communication, a failure even with himself. He didn’t fill up the whole screen.
Greg and Mike soon left the pub, intent on returning to the office where the computers continued to work throughout their lunchbreak, like huge sensory calculators with amputated keys. Each man felt the other was a website, a blog city, a click on the right point bringing everything up in various stages of construction. Either that or they were slightly merry from imbibing on empty stomachs.
****
Beth was beautiful but she often seemed bitter … or strident … transferring furrows to the face that seemed out of place there. Her personality had changed the character of her face. Her sister Susan was less physically attractive, yet her nature was calmer, more amenable – not necessarily kinder or smarter than Beth, but less prone to have mind rage at the slightest setback. Patience was something Beth deeply lacked and her non-descript husband took the brunt of her short temper – to the extent of having any of his own personality stripped from him, like a gossamer upperskin peeling off and jettisoned: left just to cling on, for dear life, to the cast shadow in his wake.
When Beth’s nephew and niece disappeared, Beth initially failed to react sufficiently: but as soon as she did take initiative on her sister’s behalf, Susan stopped being simply bemused at losing two children she somehow hadn’t realised she had. Beth had at first retained her habits, however – arriving in Ogdon’s pub rather late and with cool nonchalance – yet later her inbuilt stridency took inevitable sway and she felt there was nothing to do but burn the candle at both ends, tussling insistently, if not violently, with the Authorities, whilst chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?”
“Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid – unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.
The dream sickness – like a ‘flu pandemic – caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered … but, unlike a ‘flu pandemic, the dream sickness was inspired by an inference regarding an infernal mass-hysteria linked to a mass-suicide syndrome rather than by any individual’s pain or conscious disability.
Many parents set up search parties – because Arthur and Amy were not the only ones believed to have inexplicably gone missing. Some search parties overlapped with other search parties. There were petty rivalries, even bitter disputes between them, believing their own children were being sought by other parties and vice versa.
Meanwhile, wells were dug all over the city towards the Northern coalfields. Separate queues were set up at these wells to reflect the medicine queues further south, as if some unknown synchronicity was sought to provide an explanation factor linking two imponderables and hopefully make them ponderable. Some children who hadn’t yet run away from home played sandcastles around the wells – damming and river-construction games mocked-up from various substances abandoned by gardeners in allotment sheds previously rifled by unknown hands and given to the children. Weighing bucket against bucket was a common daily reality even though it sounds more like something they should have dreamed about … being tantamount to a WAKING sickness, assuming anyone could get their heads around such a concept.
****
Much further south, towards the holiday ‘feet’ of the city-shape, other queues formed near ranks of parked silver craft that had been earmarked and then advertised as vehicles for tours beyond the city toward the sea in pursuit of adventures of which Jules Verne would have been proud.
Crazy Lope and John Ogdon had booked for an undersea tour, but then decided against it. This would have been under the tutelage of a rather outlandishly garbed and dramatic Captain Nemo (or so it was blurbed in the brochure), cashing in on a vogue for such old-fashioned fantasy trips. Booking avoided queues but cost a lot more. Greg said he wanted to accompany them, but currently there wasn’t a vacancy, unless a late cancellation arose. At that stage Crazy Lope and Ogdon had not yet cancelled. Greg wondered if he really shouldn’t accompany Beth, Susan & Co. in search of Arthur and Amy. A holiday seemed a bit of a cop-out compared to participating in a pukka search party. Mike himself kept his own counsel.
Long ago, Mike (or others on his behalf) believed he was a hawler but, along with a generally increasing number of inscrutable dreams, that concept had vanished into some forgotten sump of tribal consciousness. The only thing known about a hawler was that there was no fact to know about a hawler. A hawler being a wide-faced creature that sat at the centre of the earth was an earlier description – but whoever or whatever created that description had since disappeared and thus become unaccountable for it.
****
Greg, meanwhile, remembered the zoo visit with some clarity. His face was a bit effeminate – and one could easily imagine him performing a drag act as a hobby. A Danny La Rue manqué. He was a loner but people in the office where he worked thought he was a rather pleasant individual and they believed many of the stories he told about his non-existent life. His suits were immaculate. His jokes tasteful. His visits to the loo kept to the minimum as he hated mirrors. The zoo, too. Rather good at his administrative job, a whizz with the keyboard and could build websites at a flick of his wrist – or so it seemed. A pity he had such awful, guilt-ridden dreams about a daughter he’d never had. Nobody knew about this, of course.
He missed Mike. Mike had once worked in the same office, but with the domestic problems that later beset him, he had left and moved to the other side of the city with his wife and children. They seemed somehow distinct from the Mike and Susan with whom Greg had since become re-acquainted on the screen … in the era of televised search parties pre-occupying the ‘Big Brother’ reality-show mentalities of the gullible public. And Amy – one of the children – was later found grown-up and vacuuming carpets without even knowing Mike was her father. But that’s an earlier story since abandoned. For whatever reason. Or a later one yet to be told. Nobody was quite sure.
****
Crazy Lope was Ogdon’s alter ego. And vice versa. The fact that one set of relationships between them could overlap another yet opposite set continued to make it possible that they remained separate people, despite the evidence otherwise. Writing fiction was his first love – often about a vampire called a Horla after a French writer’s story of the same name – but this had soon fallen by the wayside. Nobody could earn money from writing such rarified fiction – so he proceeded to put it on an antipodal back-burner whilst deciding to open a pub (his second love).
Ogdon gave himself an evening off from time to time, as pub life was generally very hard. But he spent most of this free time behind the other side of his bar, talking to regulars, if not to himself. Conversations on either side of the bar did differ, but it was all basically the same: ‘pub talk’: loosened tongues amid boozy brainstorming.
OGDON: It’s like fixing a painting with a special cold varnish, so it doesn’t fade, or even change. Paintings can change, you know.
CRAZY LOPE: Change?
O: Yes – fixing dreams is one thing, like making sure we remember them a few hours after we wake up. But far harder is to fix reality itself – stopping it slipping or sliding into dream. That’s the fixing I’m talking about.
CL: I didn’t know you knew about such things. I’ve often had dreams which get confused and, sooner or later, lost forever. Does that happen to real things, too, then? I suppose you might be right.
O: Dream sickness – heard about that? Well, I’ve got a cure for it in a fixing-device … or a fixing-person, a new job that I think we need to fill. Government’s not going to do anything about it.
CL: Dream sickness, yes, but nobody admits to it existing. Nobody actually says those words in public.
O: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!
CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.
O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?
CL: Yup. Don’t like holidays myself. They seem like a chore half the time. I just enjoy staying in my flat and mouldering away. (Laughs)
O: Well, I know someone who went on one of those trips. They DO exist, I’m sure, based on what he says.
CL: Who’s that?
O: That friend of Mike from his office. Greg, is it? He comes in here often on his own now – Mike’s gone north.
CL: Has he?
O: Yes, like all those others. Anyway, that trip Greg told me about – it was a submarine run by someone acting as Captain Nemo. But not an ordinary submarine, as Nautilus sort of was, as I understand it. This submarine had huge vanes on top like a helicopter – and it churned down through the sea-water scattering fish and so forth in a great big stirpool!
CL: Sounds decidedly ungreen!
O: To say the least – but apparently the vanes were a protective system as much as they were propulsion. Deep down where Nemo took all the passengers down and taught all those trippers about really deep things, quite beyond you and I. And green is the thing, indeed, in many ways, dark green, right down there … emerald scenes, with emerald beasts of the under-sea. Frondy. So Greg said.
CL: I thought it was all blue, the sea.
O: So did I. But at the deepest – down there – are giant green squid that have civil wars, it seems. Tribes of the same breed wrestling in mounds of black mud. Absolutely mad.
CL: Black as well as green?
O: Apparently so. Nemo called these squid vermin “ancient kings of besmirched sperm-banks.” Greg got that from a line of old poetry.
CL: Whales? Sharks? They’re in that same poem, I think.
O: Well, mutant versions, apparently. I didn’t understand most of it. Greg seemed to know all about it, but he’d actually seen all these things. Seeing is believing, isn’t it?
CL: Not so sure. Probably brings us back to your ‘fixing’ idea. Fictioning, similar, I dunno. You need a kiln for baking reality! (Laughs).
Others who were listening laughed, too, as Ogdon bought another round of drinks, thus squandering his pub profits. Crazy Lope spat into his drink for luck.
O: By the way, I had a funny dream last night. I knew it was a dream, without having to fix any true waking life that came before and after.
CL: Oh yeh?
O: One part of the dream wasn’t so clear – it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it – and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.
CL: Like Tardis? (Laughs)
O: Maybe, but it had a Lounge bar as well as a Public one. I went into the Public and started chatting with someone, though I can’t remember who that was. I seemed to know this person, however. I owed him money, it seemed.
CL: A him then?
O: Yes, I’m sure it was man. Anyway, I repaid with loose change. (Laughs). A series of one p and half p coins. It couldn’t have been much or I would have used notes. Probably. Anyway, as I say, to the point, one of the coins was a quarter p! Smaller even than a half p – so tiny you could hardly handle it. I then knew it must be a dream, as everyone knows that a quarter p coin doesn’t exist in England and never did exist.
CL: Exactly. Half p coins don’t exist now, but they once did. But never a quarter p. You’re right.
O: Ah well, there are SOME truths to life one cannot doubt!
All laughed and nodded as more drinks were purchased. A few of the regulars wore flat caps and they decided to have a game of darts. The pub talk was evidently fizzling out for a while amid much merriment, yet mingled with worried private asides and surreptitious glances.
****
If there were horror lurking somewhere – nobody would ever know for sure. Yet, at the depth, this horror was aware of itself and, even without a mirror, it knew it had slobbery gums and long teeth and a face wider than its head. Not absurdly dreamlike but monstrously, nightmarishly real – just waiting for its time to come.
****
Beth’s husband may not even have known his own name. He was nemonymous. Some of his friends recognised him and called him by a name they thought he was named. He was a working-class lad recently grown into manhood – slight fuzz on his upper lip – with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming Beth’s husband. Beth could easily have hen-pecked him to death because she was a strong, impatient character who paid no heed to her own original beauty and feared no spoiling of that beauty with any hard-nosed actions. In fact her face had become more pointy and as if scorched by a cold cutting East wind – whilst all the time it was her personality that had given the features this unwelcome cast. Her husband eventually became her right-hand man who defended her and somehow complemented her with the backdrop of his near-absence accentuating her presence. Not that he was a pushover. He had pub-going pals and a career in waste management, driving one of the firms’ largest lorries through the city and using his slippery guile to prevent the Authorities discovering what sort of waste he was transporting to the coalfields. It is reckoned that his intrinsic nemonymity helped with both aspects of logistics and surreptitiousness by being able to drive skilfully under all radars, metaphorical or otherwise – and dodging between the speed cameras … thus arriving in a timely fashion and in successful completion of the job. The envy of his colleagues. Thus, he was promoted – almost to Board level, but he still preferred to go AWOL and drive the lorries.
He met Arthur after Arthur grew up from being a child. They shared pints in The Third Floor – and not surprising since they both negotiated the city traffic in their own ways, one with a double-decker bus, the other with an articulated juggernaut. Arthur had a partner he called Amy and Beth’s husband a wife he called Beth – but neither woman met each other so they never knew who the other one really was. This was strange as the two men were close friends and often talked about the old days that many had forgotten – and this forgetting was perhaps because either the dream sickness still prevailed but hiding its own history of pandemic or the dream sickness had abated allowing real memories to subsist instead.
Beth’s husband, however, had secret vices. He didn’t even recognise them himself, IF that is the same thing as secrecy. He wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England – a hobby and a method of saving money. He had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which he leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread – knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with his hard-padded fingers: as if tidying a rhythm of growing patterns of thick surface-veined underlay: except this underlay was a surface – but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. He wanted one of his special carpets to be beige-coloured to match some future required necessity of appearance, one that fitted in with a retrospective destiny. There were mounds of these vexed textures of surface: each a fire-wall – or, rather, fire-floor – as if he were readying them to serve as an insulation device that even time couldn’t penetrate. A cover for the hawler. Only Beth’s husband knew how important his task was – masquerading as a rather effeminate hobby for one of such hard-bitten working-class background (or underground). Foregrounds were not even considered.
Edith Cole and Mr Clare controlled him from afar. But nobody now knew who they were or who they had once been.
****
Arthur, Amy and the other children had eventually reached the edge of the Northern Coalfields in search of the entrance to the vertical tunnel that would take them to…
It would take them nowhere. They knew this at heart, it is certain. The quest was for a quest, originally – yet now the quest had become this downward pit that led nowhere. An end in itself. The means to that end were just a subterfuge that contained their end like an insulation case around a live wire. “A fugue for a darkening city.” Beyond the end, they knew there were no further ends. Otherwise they would have given up in sheer terror. Or they hoped so. It beggared belief to believe otherwise.
They were not old enough, thankfully, to realise they were too young to understand.
****
I stared at the screen wondering where I fitted into the schematic movements of the symphony. Not that I could hear any music at all. Silence.
The screen showed a clouded yellow surface, yet mottled with – if it were real – stains or signs of wear. Not yellow so much, I guess. Maybe beige. Not a uniform surface. Again, if it were real, it would bear perceptible bumps or lumps in its fibre. Fibre? Or weave. Or web. Or net.
It is as if I had created this site with a number of codes: codes that began with < hawl > and ended with < /hawl >. I went to shut it down because I felt myself threatened by it, as if sucking me into it like a fly.
Now, I know deep down who I was. Or I was in the process of creating who I was. I was about to enter the intermittent and unsmooth flow of action. The yellowy web, hopefully, was to be the firewall or firefloor to protect me (or anyone else following me) from the dire horror that was a lurker on or within the threads of my discursive being.
****
Mike, Susan and Beth had reached the edge of the city’s Northern Coalfields at West Wednesday. They were not far behind the children. As they entered each suburb, they heard talk of the children’s prior passage through its streets, lifting manhole covers, peering into drainage/heating shafts, breaking into derelict houses to test the cellar floors and so forth.
Crazy Lope/Ogdon and Greg – calling themselves the Two and Half Musketeers – had reached the Left Foot of the city down south and were currently queuing up to buy tickets for the latest Jules Verne holiday-of-a-lifetime. JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH – THE ENJOYABLE WAY. Greg was to test it out for subsequent entertainment of his firm’s clients. CL/O merely felt like a holiday.
Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide who I’d follow. I knew that Arthur and Amy would, at least, survive what was indeed to happen because it has already been reliably recorded that Arthur grew up to drive a bus and Amy to clean flats. As to the others – and myself – any survival was yet merely hearsay.
The coin dropped on its milled edge within a gutter’s drainage slot.
****
Ogdon stared at the screen in his flat. He had started typing up his things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. “I am curious – yellow,” he whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. He scribbled in his bright red Silvine ‘memo book’. He was more a dreamer than a pub landlord, but he needed a proper job to bring in the beef – and why not combine that with his second love (drinking and indulging in pub talk)? Dreaming never brought in much money, even when one could turn the dreams into words. He actually wore a long cape when he was the dreamer – and called himself Crazy Lope. He wore non-descript clothes when working behind the bar, as differentiation. These days, Ogdon hardly worked in his own pub, for various reasons, and had got in a locum as a manager.
He spent much of most nights exploring (wandering) – mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city – areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, he imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy. It was all good meat for his dreaming (he saw fiction as miraculously feeding the multitude) and these airports were much more efficacious in this regard than the large city-centre area of the covered market – now divorced from its secondary role as an Underground station. And more efficacious than the now disused Dry Dock where gargantuan ships and liners used to arrive for riveting.
The western airport area – now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course – reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research. This one was in a place called Hawler – where was it? – in Kurdistan? Whether the city airports were connected with this middle eastern one in some way was uncertain, yet Ogdon believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface of the earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body … invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes’ owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.
Ogdon reviewed his own dreams. The fiction could wait, as he shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of his yellow screen.
He was quite aware that there was not enough detail, not enough provenance and not even enough providence in whatever had by-passed his mind. He recalled the city-centre zoo visit with some pleasure, but weighed down with equal displeasure bordering on dread. Had justice been done to this zoo? Mike was STILL not filled out as the real person he was. Some of the others had given a good shot at it and even gave a passing impression of having deep feelings and understandable impulses or intuitive intentions: mixed intentions some logical, others paradoxical. All of them were like this, except, perhaps, for Beth’s husband. Ogdon at first thought Beth’s husband was the wild card. Little did Ogdon know, however, that he should keep a beadier eyes on one of the children. A bewitched child. Yet nobody seemed to have put a finger on this. Give them time for nailing down.
Ogdon sighed. Despite the coin tossing, he was still undecided which of the two parties to follow. Either one of the audit trails could hold the crucial clue as to the rest of it. He prepared himself for dreaming about the huge man-made flying-craft down south. Next, he made a stab at dreaming of the dark striated horizon of the bleak north, its coal-towers and clanking works, all stitched skyward with the gigantic webby wings of real and living flying-craft.
First, he needed somehow to resolve the zoo visit. The much earlier clue as to Mike’s “lorry-driver face” and his voracious approach to beefsteak were red herrings of the first water. Beth’s husband was the lorry-driver (in waste management), after all. There was some confusion that Ogdon would never be able to resolve. Real people (as opposed to fictional ones) had real idiosyncracies and paradoxes that could never be conveyed by a dream or even by the near-photographic description of realities (because each description was imperfect by the nature of words): realities that were simply and inexorably realities, and nothing else. If people were such realities, then there was no way of imagining those realities – and this was because realities (by being real) were unimaginable. They kept avoiding Ogdon’s flawed ‘camera obscura’ of a mind. And this applied to real things as well as to real people.
In the zoo, there had been a cage they all peered into with some trepidation. This scene had been left unreported, for whatever reason, but as things panned out, it gradually grew into view from a single atom of dread in one of the witnesses’ minds. Poultry combined with beef in some complex miscegenation. In this cage was a truly massive pulsing amorphousness with feathers tufting in all directions from each suppurating pore. He first saw it as black but, in retrospect, he knew it was white. He wondered if further hindsight might make it later look red like skinned meat. But, no. It was unutterably white. No amount of retrospection could change that, he knew. A noticeboard attached to the cage had identification: “Infinite Cuckoo”. That was when they all decided unanimously to leave the zoo grounds by the exit turnstile. They’d pay anything to leave, even if it were more than the normal ticket price of a few p.
Well, in further hindsight, the creature wasn’t infinite at all, Ogdon thought. It couldn’t be contained in a cage, otherwise. Unless it was a BIT of an infinity. The implications were too wild to deal with today.
And he returned to his desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up his screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation to which he would need to come to terms … eventually.
****
There was a liar among them.
But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they were lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. I have told lies in dreams, for example, and the character I felt myself to be from within the dream knew full well that he was telling lies, i.e. that I was telling lies – yet all this as seen from outside the dream after waking was yet another lie in a way, an untruth, a falsehood, because I could hardly then remember the details of the dream and I am now making up what happened in the dream just for an exercise in fancification … making conversation as it were … stringing words together to create an interesting scenario which I can later work up as a story for the dinner party I was later due to attend in real life.
Someone stared across at me over the table, winking in tune with the candles, as if she knew that I knew that she knew she was telling lies. Her face was a cutting one when she was interrupted or gainsaid. I could tell she had once been very pretty, but now her character intervened and made the face carry the ingredients of an underface like a bird pecking for worms. I recognised her from the dream in which the lies had started their concertina domino-rally from unreality into reality – crossing some bridge that linked untruth with truth.
“What IS a liar?” she suddenly and unexpectedly asked, thus causing such a non-sequitur to become an intrinsic constituent or continuation of the prandial conversation that was already taking place before she again so skilfully interrupted it.
“A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses – and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.
I know that I am not a liar. I am perhaps THE liar. I am in control of a dream in which everyone else is a participant within that dream’s ambit – an ambit I’ve allowed the dream to have. The liar is the one who makes what he does absolutely true. This the knack that I now settle down with as a comforting prop, while sleep overwhelms the dream with its own brand of seeping darkness. It doesn’t matter that I drown in death, because I am certain in my own way that I shall survive it by lying about its aftermath. After life. After death.
She lifts her skirt as she leaves the dinner table, wondering who had been due to sit in the chair opposite her, partaking of bird soup ladled from a huge chipped tureen. A dinner guest who hadn’t turned up – as the host had explained – because he had died suddenly that very afternoon.
****
Greg returned from the dinner party and stared at himself staring back at himself from the chipped wardrobe mirror. Wondering, extrapolating, brainstorming, lying – and none of it made the context obvious. The woman opposite at the dinner party he rather fancied, despite her aggressive nature. Beth was her name – introduced by the host in such a way as Greg suspected match-making. Another lie in the making.
Back in his flat, the face in the mirror began to talk. Greg’s face – showing not a mixed race, but a mixed class. The barely sprouting fuzz on his upper lip belied his youth, but the eyes spoke a working-class directness and a raw but instinctively astute naivety together with mechanical awareness … whilst the moving lines of his lips forming the speaking mouth indicated a more academic or professional or at least clerical/ administrative slant. The face spoke and he could not stop it speaking.
Pinnochio’s nose grew longer when he told lies. Yet we have no easy way to judge lies in real life. There is a question whether a single lie, once told, creates other lies in its wake, then radiating, spawning more lies, new and different lies living off each other – like a butterfly theory of chaos – moving round the world like a disease till everyone tells lies, Russian Doll lies, until they return to the original liar himself who accepts them as truths – because he started them in the first place and he has persuaded himself, by being in denial, indeed has simply forgotten that he lied in the first place and that he had started them moving round the world. Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies…
Greg smiled as he realised that the face in the mirror had come to a halt … frozen like a sepia photograph of one of his Victorian ancestors … gradually growing yellowy, staining the surface with feathery fibres between the beige-ridden silver backing of the mirror and the front glass itself: spraying apricotty ice follicles across. He imagined, not a nose growing longer with each lie, but a small white feather beginning to sprout from every pore of the skin. One feather per lie. The originally bendy bone of each feather’s spindle fused with the bones beneath the skin, all their flossy sprigs striving but failing to be animal fur. Everyone’s blood is normally red, whatever the skin colour, yet the thickening plume-spindle bones of the werebird’s new covering turned it into an utterly pure white consistency dripping to his flat’s carpet…
****
The sun literally seemed to scream at the holiday party as they arrived in the tour coach at the edge of the Left Foot Plateau to the south of the city. Its rays gradually spread along the then empty horizon like orange marmalade – the bottom arc of its orb dripping something like thick liquid to the point on the horizon whence it had just fully risen. The holiday makers were due to go from viewing one arc to another. They were to board an ark as it were and become participants in the latest Jules Verne expedition that had been advertised as going to the centre of the earth. Booked as a holiday, many now indeed saw this as useful escape route from the unsaid dangers that had begun to beset the city.
Greg turned to look at his wife Beth and shrugged. They were in two minds about this whole trip because, clandestinely, they were not real holiday makers or, even, escapees from a world that no longer welcomed them but, instead, they had a mission to find the Angevin children who had vanished from the city under the cover of rumours. Indeed, Greg and Beth both knew that other people (including Beth’s sister) were trying different apertures to enter the earth further north in the Head Region of the city. There was more hanging on these events than just a jamboree or self-indulgent adventuring or, even, conscientious objection to what was going on in the city.
The horizon and, indeed, the upper sky, were now filling with huge kites upon slanting rope-tethers to the hands of as yet invisible kite-carers on the ground. The individual kites were – as a promotional vision for the Jules Verne Holiday Company – shaped like some of the craft the Company had used for previous jaunts and some, even, models of proposed future ones.
Lightening up, Greg laughed as he spotted one of the kites was a flying carpet prancing higher and higher from yet one more slanting tether. He was older and hopefully wiser than before with his bum-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.
Beth remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching the centre of the earth from a different terrestrial angle. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling – yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at her husband. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie.
“Hey, some of those kites haven’t got people flying them!” suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.
Beth was more interested in viewing the craft that was due to take them to the centre of the earth. That was a far more important priority at the moment. At first, she was mistaken as to the correct craft in question, as she spotted a long queue of would-be holiday makers near a large landcraft which multi-resembled a cross between various forms of transport (that was the only way she could describe it). She thought she and Greg must be on the wrong side of the platform as it were, in the wrong queue, because their own queue was much shorter, indeed depleted to just the two of them being led by an inscrutable Jules Verne official whose face they had not yet seen – but it was not long before they rounded a deceptive dune to witness the first sight of their own potential craft.
It was awe-inspiring. Strangely, from the distance at which they first viewed it, the craft struck them as simply more than gigantic. It was literally bigger than a mountain and, surely, would become clogged in the earth’s throat, at such a size. Tilted at an angle, it was a wildly proportioned Drill …with a bit at its tip, pointing at the earth and tantalisingly only a few inches from the beachy surface. Even more strangely than before, the nearer they approached the Drill, the smaller it became, but still reasonably massive judging by mere human proportions. Beth could now actually pick out the pilot in the cockpit behind the bit-tip. He was dressed in a period costume with frills, ruffs and a feathered peaked cap. He smiled at Beth as he gave the Drill’s ignition a quick trial grinding roar … and she watched the bit-tip spin, splinters of orange sun spraying in all directions from its sharp bright torque.
The most amazing item on the craft, however, which Greg was the first to notice, was an outlandishly protrusive set of slender rotor-blades or vanes upon the back of the Drill like that on the back of a helicopter. Insect-like. He could not imagine how the Drill could be able to dig its way through the earth with that as part of its propulsion system. He originally imagined the Drill sliding through the earth like a knife through butter, but that thought now went straight out of the window.
But the matter was soon forgotten when they were abruptly introduced to the Drill’s ‘Captain Nemo’ – who appeared just as suddenly on a ladder that dangled from the boarding-hatch in the side of the Drill. He was a tall figure with a certain resemblance, as Greg recalled the people he had known in the city, to Ogdon or, even, Ogdon’s sidekick Crazy Lope. The Captain was not however in any way related to these two people, as both he and Beth soon instinctively gathered.
“I’ll take you in and show you the wallmaps in a minute,” he crooned with a nut-brown voice.
Beth was entranced. Greg sceptical.
“Wall maps?”
“Yes, charts and so forth of our route.”
Greg shrugged. Surely there was only one route to the centre of the earth. As the crow flied. A straight line. A slanting tether.
“I have books on board to keep us amused during the long journey,” the Captain continued.
“Books!” interjected Beth. “I hate books. Ever since I gave one as a present – one I valued as if I’d written it myself – inscribed it lovingly to the recipient – and then I found myself eventually buying it back because I saw the same copy being sold on e-bay!”
The Captain shrugged as if this was a silly reason to hate books. With only one backward glance at the shadow of the vertical sun above them amid the increasingly crowded sky, Greg and Beth excitedly followed the Captain on board the Drill. The name on its side had escaped them: “The Hawler”.
****
Mike was a solid figure of a man. Not at all like Greg with Greg’s slight figure despite the years that had thickened Greg’s facial growth. Not wide so much as bushy. But that was Greg, and attention must perforce spotlight Mike again for a while. And Mike was still doubtful about his own beginnings – barely remembering even the shadowy figures who had been his parents in the Fifties. He had compassion, however, having long forgotten the earlier years as a child when he played pretend games in the garden and up the bullace tree – sometimes masquerading as Davy Crockett in a long-tailed fur hat, sometimes as an even more distant memory: the creature he inscrutably called a hawler (although the spelling was doubtful). All that concerned him now were naturally the concerns of today – his middle years – as he and the party with which he had joined were trekking northward to what was loosely named the city’s Head Region.
Until recently, he had been working in the city centre’s covered-market, living a frugal existence – together with Susan, a pretty woman who, unlike her sister Beth, had failed to gather frown-lines during her middle years. When she and Mike had decided to live together, she already had a daughter called Sudra who was now herself growing into a pretty woman with pig-tails, a style that was too young for her. Sudra laughed often. Yet she had an aura of malevolence or, at best, bewitchment about her. She, too, was in Mike’s party, together with her two similarly aged friends Amy and Arthur, friends of doubtful relationship with each other, with nobody questioning this because there were some lines drawn beneath which it was impolitic to delve. Amy worked as a domestic cleaner, Arthur a double-decker driver – both salt-of-the-earth citizens who would never have dreamed of travelling north … unless times were extraordinary.
How extraordinary the times had become only hindsight retained a clue. The identities of Amy and Arthur – it was believed – had been stolen by lostlings or foundlings or changelings who had escaped with much of their victims’ past cloying to them. These were apparent children indeed masquerading as the children Amy and Arthur had once been in earlier perhaps less extraordinary times. This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.
The five of them trekked because public transport had long since departed, having been earmarked for some important matters ordinary citizens like them were not considered suitable enough to know about. As he strode along, Arthur imagined the stuff underfoot – the party having finally left the pavemented area of the city streets – to be residue of his childhood ‘experiment’ games with household substances. This was probably his own version of a retributive past coming back to haunt him. Amy smiled as if she could read Arthur’s thoughts. Arthur, however, soon became preoccupied by what evidently preoccupied Mike … and what gradually preoccupied all five of them.
The sky was slowly, surely and imperceptibly becoming more of a roof than a proper sky – as if they had entered a much larger version of the city’s open-sided covered-market – where, incidentally, Arthur now recalled was where Sudra’s stepfather worked as a waste manager. Having a roof – one might have thought – would have afforded protection from the weather, but they all still felt a soaking drizzle as though rain had been replaced by some variety of sprinkler-system.
Nobody mentioned the colour. Indeed, could darkness be any colour other than black or, at best, grey? A monochrome of darkness, gathering in around them more like mist than darkness proper. Yet, they could still see the even darker shapes hunching upon the distant terrain towards which they hiked. Nobody mentioned the colour, as it did not come up in conversation, bearing in mind the preoccupation caused by the difficulties underfoot.
“Hey! Look – are they volcanoes?”
Mike pointed at the rough cone-shapes each with an odd flame-like plume fitfully being spat by what he assumed to be some of earth’s many apertures.
Sudra quaintly described them as “Redoubts” – but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, simply for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. “Redoubts” in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word “Côté” was written on one broken brick wall that they were now passing – almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces … all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.
Yet, what was that?
“What’s that?” shouted Susan, flustered but retaining the studied innocence characteristic of her.
There was what appeared to be a pier on stilts – of the seaside pleasure variety – reaching into or across a very shallow inner sea – not a sea so much as a series of dark gleaming puddles creating the feel of an elfin archipelago that had gone to seed, made from patches of black sand. Near this pier was a stained-yellow block-building of inferior architectural qualities which once – they guessed – had housed an amusement arcade. They though they could here the ghostly whirrings, blurps and chortles of erstwhile jollification.
And nightsome gurgles of waves against the pier’s stilts.
“The pier’s pillars are made of wood,” said Amy, as if in a speech she’d learnt parrot-fashion. She was desperately trying to be herself, not someone else. She needed to be herself – otherwise nobody could sympathise with her as a potential human being. The once thick-thighed oaken hafts were slowly decaying into the brine, even as she watched them. Wilting as boniness would.
They soon passed this real or mocked-up (they weren’t sure which) version of a seaside resort from Fifties England … not even something the city had EVER boasted. But here it was. Seedy growing on seedy.
In the distance, beyond the puddly sea, they all saw two small figures – no bigger than match-stick marionettes – employing their own silhouettes to crouch and peer into or under – not a manhole cover but now, far from the city proper, the first of many under-underground oubliettes that peppered the northern night lands in an unmanmade state of existence.
“I can hear something,” said Mike. He heard it as if his feet were ears. A distant downward noise – not of underground trains that were what such noises pertained in the city but, rather, underground dogfights by second world war spitfires that felt just as much at home within earth as air. Yet, Mike didn’t put his description of these noises into words. He was more concerned with the others in his party running away from his own position near the puddly sea towards the matchstick silhouettes that were sinking slowly into a surface which once seemed solid enough to bear their slightest weight as well as for them to walk upon.
****
Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls – the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls – otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city – but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn’t grow. Brick is more prone to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south – but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imagination, because everything using the gaps had widened.
Edith and Clare, when they fell asleep, the walls vanished as if they had never existed in the first place. And when they woke up – the walls were back where the two girls knew the walls had always been. One twin tried to stay awake while the other twin slept … so as to check out the walls, but they could not sleep or wake without the other one sleeping or waking. They dreamed each other alive.
Edith and Clare were once quite young. Now they were old. If one of them died, they wondered if the other one would also die. Identical twins were one thing, but mutual twins were twins even a step beyond mere identity.
****
Greg had two recurring dreams of characters that he called (from within each dream) Edith and Clare. In one dream, they were twin sisters and, in the other, complete strangers who meet up and conduct an even stranger relationship. In the latter dream, they did not live in a city wall but in a tied cottage near a tree with an enormous knotted girth of crusted bark – about twenty-five feet in circumference at its base but a normal amount of various branches emerging in a tangle from the tapering top of this over-sized cone-topped trunk – making it seem like a normal tree from about eight feet high onwards. A bottom-heavy tree that was called a Canterbury Oak.
However, before Greg could pin down any memory of the tree’s identity or its significance to Edith and Clare, he woke up with a start into a situation he could not remember how he had reached in real life prior to sleeping, until a slow waking-up process reminded him.
He was on board ‘The Hawler’, a vast Drill thing, with helicopter vanes, that was to take Beth and himself underground on a trip to the centre of the earth by means of a well-trodden route from the Left Foot region of the city … as the Captain had informed them – and if the vertical chimney-tunnel was already “well-trodden”, they asked the Captain, why the need for it to be a Drill at all?
“Because the tunnel has closed up again, as it always does … the tectonic plates ensure we have to forge the route anew each time we make the trip from here.”
The Captain’s answer had a an air of disinterest about it. But Greg and Beth nodded with full understanding. They had been astonished – when they first arrived on board – at the facilities of the Drill’s interior. Very modern and high-tech but interspersed with antique or fine art accoutrements so as to make it feel more salubriously civilized than it actually was. They had to clamber through various tasteful ‘floors’ via attic-like spaces and even smaller passageways that one might have called open-ended oubliettes. In fact, the Captain teased them into a race from floor to floor so as to see which of them arrived first at their private cabin.
Imagine their disappointment, however, when they both breathlessly reached the highest floor in the Drill, at the furthest point from the Drill’s leading edge of a bit-tip. Their cabin turned out to be a mock-up of a seedy city flat, with a damp smell, hung with stained and slightly bulging wallpaper … and a worn beige carpet or, dependant on the light, yellow carpet on the floor.
“There is always at least one thing that makes any event imperfect,” had said the Captain with a wry smile, as if this explained the inferiority of the couple’s quarters within the Drill.
It was here within the damp bed that Greg had awoken from his by now fully forgotten recurring dream – Beth beside him. And, indeed, the cabin itself had reverted to its original state of a sleek comfort-zone of tasteful décor. Not one single sign of seediness or mildewy carpets or peeling wallpaper anywhere.
Greg recalled, with still increasing wakefulness, that, the next day, the Drill (and them within it) would be setting forth on its big adventure. He smiled to himself as he listened to Beth contentedly dozing beside him in the cabin’s plush double bed. Her snores could not disguise the trial revving noises of the Drill’s bit-tip as the pilot rehearsed its re-ignition of spinning, even now at the dead of night. The Drill’s launch would be quite well prepared by the time daylight appeared, Greg was sure – and a daylight firework display would be set off in celebration, with the sparks in cascades and their colours designed even to outshine the sun … colours that would include black as well the more usual brighter colours of fireworks.
****
Mike took one glance at Susan, Arthur and Amy vanishing towards the point on the dark horizon where they had seen the two small match-thin figures sink down into it – and he loped after them, conserving his energy because distances looked further than they actually were in the north’s night land.
A number of black seagulls flapped their wings inefficiently above him as he plugged on beneath their migrating cloud. One defecated on him. Gulls were traditionally prone to a sod’s-law more than any other foulness of the sky – certainly as far as human targets were concerned. But this was no normal birdmuck. It was gull vomit that stung the top of his head, searing his scalp through the hair. Gull’s vomit – a sign of bad luck. BLACK gull’s vomit – worse than the worst bad luck. All the vomit was spotted with blood-flecks whatever the gull’s own body colour. So one could never be certain which type of gull had splattered you unless you saw the gull itself. And the sky’s roof camouflaged any of the stub-winged birds that managed to coast or skim along its under-surface.
****
Ogdon sat on the customer’s side of his pub’s bar, staring into the decorative mirror behind the gleaming shorts and their optics. The reflective glass had the word C – O – U – R – A – G – E etched in swirls of artistic lettering at the top of the mirror: an advert for one of the bitters that were sold there. Ogdon could see his own face lower down between a bottle of rum and a bottle of vodka. But it wasn’t his face but that of a Spanish playwright by the name of Lope de Vega who, Odgon always thought, was the author of “La Vida Es Sueño”, but he also thought William Congreve had written “She Stoops To Conquer”, so whether Ogdon was correct about any literary matters was anybody’s guess! In any event, he imagined a dialogue between himself and the reflection in the mirror. There was nobody else to whom he could talk – the barmaid (a replacement for Susan) being down the other end of the bar and she didn’t seem to have anything much in common with Ogdon – and she freely admitted to being a fan of the ‘Big Brother’ TV show and other Soap Operas. And it was now that no-man’s-land of time between popular drinking sessions: and next to no customers were present to listen to his pub small-talk.
OGDON: There is one people carrier.
REFLECTION: A people carrier?
O: Yes, a human being who’s infecting the birds with a virus, and not vice versa.
R: Now that sounds possible, but how do you know?
O: Well, the birds are becoming more like red meat than white poultry-flesh when you cut them open.
R: As if they’ve got an animal disease?
O: Turning them gradually, from a bird into an animal or half and half. And they’ve caught it from us humans. Or they have just started to catch it from us humans. That’s why many of them can’t fly any more and only hop about. Their whole essence is somehow corrupted.
R: So, they don’t need roofs on aviary cages any more in the zoo? Makes you want to cry.
O: There is one single bird that is in charge of all the other birds. Did you know that? A sort of Bird God. This Bird God is set to wreak vengeance…
R: Really? What do they call it?
O: Like all gods in religion, the birds know it with different names or no name at all.
R: If it’s got no name at all, what do the birds think of when they think of it?
Ogdon pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket, placed it on the damp drink-stained surface of the bar and started to write out a few of the possible names for the Bird God. He then folded it up and returned it to his pocket. He had by now forgotten about the conversation … until the reflection brought him back by asking a further question: “Can the Bird God, whatever its name, stop birds coming in contact with the people carrier?”
“It remains to be seen,” answered Ogdon, now forgetting his own point or why he had started the topic or even the whole topic itself – as if he had simply been doodling with words and concepts … in the composition of an abstract poem. If he thought the destiny of the whole world depended on the outcome of his thoughts, he would have been more careful with those very thoughts or just tried to be less thoughtful altogether.
“It’s the beer talking” was a saying that Ogdon’s mother often said – usually about his father, her husband. His mother was very wise, he thought, as he called out to the barmaid: “Chalk up on the blackboard that drinks are on Happy Hour all night!”
He returned to his thoughts, desperately wanting the people who were caught up in these thoughts of his to be believeable, sympathisable figures: because, if not, there would be no way that the conflicts in store for them would be sustainable conflicts at all. These people were in danger, he thought, of becoming mere ciphers acting in a game, or a dream, or a lie. Little did he know, however, that the people themselves (Mike, Greg, Susan, Beth and so forth) – currently on the brink of enormous human significance – were essentially real: tangible bodies with flesh and blood, owning minds that could be hurt or filled with joy, thinking thoughts that could be clarified, confused or defused.
Meanwhile, by comparison, he, Ogdon, was the emptiest cipher of them all, less real even than his own reflections. Hence, the sheet of paper.
****
One viewpoint is that his dream is separate, insulated, uninfecting and uninfected.
An alternative viewpoint would be that the dream itself – this we read – was infected from outside.
Or, yet, as there always are three alternatives, the dream itself infected other dreams, other realities.
****
REFLECTION:
The daylight firework-display on the open plateau of the Left Foot Region was indeed a sight to behold. It was intended as environmental context for the Drill’s ‘lift-off’. The bright primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous bangers were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one’s retina. The wide shiny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices and slashes of display – accentuating how faded the sky’s otherwise bright backdrop had become. Meanwhile, the revving throbs of the Drill’s engine took sway as the sunlight sparked off the fast-revolving bit-tip at the Drill’s lower leading-edge. The pilot could be seen grappling with the controls in his cockpit as the bit-tip finally met the beachy terrain beneath it with a sickening crunch – both the bit-tip’s self-induced sparks and the crunching noise now outdoing the firework display which had previously outdone all else.
Ogdon turned from the mirror and busied himself with more pressing duties that the current Happy Hour in his pub had created.
****
Mike reached the area on the horizon (a horizon now turned into the hard-rippled ground beneath his feet) where the rest of his party seemed – at the previous distance from which he had viewed them – to have slowly sunk from sight. The others had, in their turn, been pursuing two stick-thin figures of child-size that, it was assumed, were the stolen or missing identities as children of Amy and Arthur who were also in the same party pursuing the same figures. Mike’s wife Susan and her teenage daughter Sudra were also in the party, so Mike panicked when thinking that something evil had befallen them. He could not remember why he was so behindhand with his own pursuit but any possible quicksand needed to be respected by means of a slow approach to its suspected whereabouts. He had shouted out warnings to the others.
However, there was no sign of quicksand at this headpoint in the northern coalfields. The sky had, by now, grown even darker and he wondered how dark any sky could possibly grow. Was there a black blacker than black? Despite this, there was a thin effulgence which picked out an untidy mound of what appeared to be old stiff and rumpled carpet in the vicinity of where the others had last been seen. That was the only way he could describe the sight before gingerly approaching the odd crumplings to investigate what it was and whether any blackness could exceed any other blackness. This and different rhetorical questions buzzed through his head, some relatively sensible, others completely crazy or off-the-wall – and he felt himself desperate in not being able to differentiate the crazy from the sensible.
He was a hawler, he knew, and, amid the current mishmash of his mind’s thoughts and questions, the concept of ‘hawler’ seemed – against all the odds – to crystallise. A miner went down to gather fossil-fuel never expecting to return to the surface. The word ‘miner’ derived from ‘mine’ – as in ‘belonging to me’. It all seemed so simple. That was why the Himalayas were so high. It made sense. And the MAPPA MUNDI in Hereford Cathedral seemed to set a varying context of clarification. And the Ewbank – a brand of non-electric carpet-cleaner. Hoover, too. Who? Bewhiched – Susan’s Herstyle – much was unravelling as he tried to gather his thoughts… Hurler … Horla… hair-curler…
He looked down at his own hands. The nails were too long – the recent events preventing all manner of ablution or body-care. His tongue felt his teeth, teeth that now seemed too big for his mouth – a most uncomfortable feeling. He needed to sink them into something juicy … or creamy. He needed to reach the core of things and haul off its bone-caged heart. Feast off its pulsing meaty pith. Milk its weakening metabolism. And he knew, in this context, that filters could work both ways…
At that sudden point in his thoughts, all the teeth clamped and became (or felt like) a flickering hinge of two scooped out bones.
Soon, however, the storm of thoughts subsided and Mike became worried again about the others in his party. There was a gap in the blackness of the ground beneath his feet; he lowered his head to peer into the ragged aperture. He sensed it was merely an oubliette of vacant earth – so he was amazed to find a further sense that followed the first sense indicating it was the start of a shaft that reached beyond any conceivable depth possible within the context of earthen tunnelable dimensions. When did depth become height? Another question that was soon forgotten when he saw, in the thin effulgence, that there was a spiky hedge filling the gap in the ground – and, at the back of his mind, he somehow recalled the time when he had first encountered such a hedge, needing to thread his own body through such a tangled mass of twigs and sharp leaves. But, then, it was a horizontal hedge which grew along and from the surface of the ground. This new hedge was a vertical one; he knew instinctively it would be relatively easy to push aside and penetrate its nettly growths in a downward path – but if he changed his mind and tried to come back up through the hedge, such growths would have closed ranks, changed points of direction, with each spike jagging against the matted grain, making any escape impossible.
He heard the other’s voices below him from within the hedge’s ambit but he could not judge whether they called for help or for him to join them in the renewed pursuit. Nor could he judge if they had fallen accidentally through the hedge that had opened up its scratchy spindly arms to welcome them into the undergrowth (in the true sense of that word) or if they had jumped with joyful shrieks into its enticing knots of wood-nymphs. His mind was evidently still trying to play tricks on itself. At least all this explained the stick-figures that had tempted them this far. Explanation, however, is not a two-way filter.
****
REFLECTION (talking to itself with alternating prurient relish and prim properness in a now empty pub):
It is hard to reconcile the earlier characters of Mike, Susan, Sudra, Amy and Arthur with their later madness in undertaking such a downward search. As Mike had soon gathered by investigating the so-called crumply mound of ‘carpet’, he discovered it was a pile of discarded clothes. All of them had indeed needed to take off their clothes to be able to slide with greater ease through the hedge-filled tunnel as the spikes would have otherwise snagged on the teased and worried material of even underwear. Therefore, they spent their first sleep-stop completely naked (it couldn’t be called ‘spending the night’ as the thin effulgence that seeped through the tunnel was uniform, thus not being able to differentiate between seasons of time), but they had managed by then to re-establish their personalities, inhibitions and vulnerability to fear – just like the real people that they had been when first walking through the city zoo, certain then what was dream and what was not dream. This hedgy drop was another area – as with the zoo – where one could be oneself without fear of becoming other than oneself. Not confused by what was real and what was not real. By what was and what was not.
OGDON (returning out of the blue to his position opposite the mirror, cigarette glowing redly):
But don’t forget when they were in the zoo, someone, for whatever reason, left quite unreported one of the sights they saw in a cage just before leaving the zoo!
Reflection nodded sagely.
****
Amy finished carpet-sweeping, turned over the Ewbank and emptied what it contained. Not only flies from a cabbage fell out.
Greg inside the Drill, just before its ‘launch’ and its now famous daylight firework-display, had dreamed of Amy in various inexplicable roles – which was a bit surprising as he didn’t know Amy at all well. Amy was more Mike’s acquaintance than Greg’s. Yet, Greg had also dreamed that he, Greg, was not Beth’s husband and equally Beth’s husband was not Greg. A further dream, or rather, nightmare, made him live through an existence where he and Mike were the same person – which belied their quite distinct characters as men of the world. Perhaps, Greg’s dream reflected that they – he and Mike – may indeed be distinct characters, but also that nobody (other than Greg and Mike themselves) could distinguish one from the other. In another dream, Greg felt as if trapped within an outlandishly huge trunk of a Canterbury Oak – unable to budge up or down. He heard voices, familiar voices, but from within the nightmare he sensed that they were quite UNfamiliar voices and that he failed to grasp that it was a Canterbury Oak at all – because in the dream he was simply trapped in a vertical body-hugging coffin.
He woke in a sweat – only to feel the Drill around him starting to throb, as its pilot made a few playful testing twirls of the bit-tip before making the final teasing approach towards earth encounter.
Beth, already up, having creamed her face with beauty unguents, was standing at their cabin window, eager for the start of their trip. Indeed, it was ironic that the best view of the trip would be the one currently from this window, because soon the window would be immersed or covered with earth’s own crumbly curtains for the duration. Inner earth itself was – like the city zoo – a discrete dream-territory and any dreams they dreamed once they’d entered the earth would be clear-cut dreams, unconfused with waking life – so they would need to acclimatise in due course with the new conditions. Meanwhile, they could enjoy (if that was the correct word) the blurring of reality and dreams as a thought-provoking accompaniment to the start of their journey – against which backdrop they would soon be able to enjoy dreams for dreams’ sake rather than the enforced dream-curdling of the rest of their waking life which prevailed above ground, in most places, other than designated areas such as the city zoo. Speaking of which, the city zoo had a lot to answer for, because it was too high-profile, too often trumpeted as the only discrete dream zone, a fact which created a situation where most people forgot that being underground was a better way of sorting dreams from non-dreams. There was far more underground available to explore and where to spend one’s time than upon the finite surface of the overground.
Greg got up from the bed and joined Beth at the window. It was yet a few minutes before the final ‘lift-off’ and he knew there was to be a firework display as accompaniment – a display which had apparently now started. But it was a pretty pathetic affair – a few spluttering Roman Candles, a Catherine Wheel that refused to spin on its nail, a number of bangers that farted in a spinsterly fashion. One of the fireworks, however, wasn’t too bad inasmuch as it quite successfully depicted a peacock with a fan of rainbow fire, pluming smoke in grey sculptures that reminded Greg of maps in the making. The traditional bonfire was ignited but spluttered to a dead heap since it was not doused enough in petrol … but the Drill’s bit-tip at last struck the beachy terrain with a teeth-on-edge grinding … as the Drill began to delve towards its journey’s path. The firework display thus soon became an irrelevancy.
Greg now sensed one of the helicopter vanes from the Drill’s back flashing by their cabin window like a camera shutter strobing or a dose of rarified migraine or a foreign flicker at the screen’s edge as an old film was projected upon it.
****
Earlier, upon their first arrival in the Drill, Greg and Beth had met two unexpected additional paying-passengers on board. These were dowager ladies by the names of Edith and Clare – and nobody knew from the way they acted, whether they were just good friends, blood sisters or more than just good friends. If they were sisters, the family likeness was quite remarkable. The Drill’s Captain seemed to know these two ladies already – but he retained a professional approach to any passengers and had promised them all to show and comment upon the various sights through the window of ‘The Hawler’ during the coming trip.
The two ladies were avid readers in the Drill’s library, being particular fans of Marcel Proust’s DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN – and there was also much promise of them sharing their reading passions with Greg and Beth, should there be periods during the trip when there would be time for all of them to kill…
****
Ogdon held his head in his hands after he had looked round his empty pub. The headlines of the newspaper in his hands spoke of the mysteries of ANGEVIN which had taken away most of his customers – and even those who remained in the city stayed in their houses these days dreaming of drinking Angel Wine … or even drinking it for real.
Nevertheless, there was still activity in the city and, in the distance, he could hear the sound of serious clanking – so hugely riveting – so vastly ear-splitting and ground-grinding – he guessed it was another huge broken ship or liner being forcibly dragged for mending to the Dry Dock nearby. A gigantic contingent of shift-workers and trained apes were involved in its transport to this its temporary berth … and no doubt many of this contingent would be visiting Ogdon’s pub later … but with no bar staff left, he may as well lock the doors now.
However, before Ogdon could do so, he spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn’t his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke:
“Help me, I’m Greg. PLEASE don’t let me be Mike. I know it’s easy to confuse us but I’m the one who’s on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I’m desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I AM Greg.”
Ogdon’s own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.
“I’m Greg,” continued the face opposite. “Help me, I’m Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike.”
It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his glass across the bar smashing itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror’s contents.
But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice:
“I’m Greg. Please don’t let me be Mike.”
And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.
****
Crazy Lope was settled in front of his drink of Angel Wine, surrounded by the customary sticks of furniture that populated the top flat of an inner city block. He had just switched off his wireless because, he guessed, the news was full of lies. His cape hung on the door-hook like a giant bird-of-prey at rest. He stared at the Angel Wine before daring to take a sip. It was sold like milk in the city these days, without fear or favour, to rich and poor, young and old, sane and insane alike. In fact, it looked like milk, but even whiter, creamier. The supplies had been freed up to prevent a black market emerging for it – yet a lot of money was still being made by those who WERE supplying it. From whatever source, nobody knew. Its original tradename was ANGEVIN, but most customers in the city could only get their mouths round the English tongue – and soon Angel Wine (a very evocative name as it turned out to be from the mouth of whoever coined it) took over and now it was on all tongues.
Lope slowly raised the glass to his lips and allowed them to sip slowly, then sup noisily, lapping with a relish … not at all like milk to the tongue’s feel or taste, but more a slimy consistency with a fabricated flavour of aniseed which could not really conceal its insipid chemical quality: sensing a deeper undertaste or aftertaste even more insipid. He was savouring not so much the taste or drinkability for a deadened thirst but more the mental effects that sped to his brain in a direct socket-to-socket fashion from the tongue, or so it seemed. The relishing experience prevented him from spotting that he had accidentally spilled some of the Angel Wine – in a slow motion of the liquid’s sluggish specific gravity – to his flat’s carpet.
****
Somewhere, in a clouded mirror appeared a wide face – wider even than the mirror itself so that one could not see the face’s edges, howsoever they stretched beyond the mirror’s frame. Slowly, but as quickly as the time passed, the wide face grew cloudier and yellowier – and a beak emerged as part of a narrow face from within the original wide one that faded from around the second face, with a pecking and sharp-nodding combined.
“I’m me. PLEASE don’t let me be other than me…”
And tears runnelled down the face like Angel Wine.
The words spoken, however, weren’t from an English tongue.
****
Sudra squatted with her young nude body upon a narrow ledge in the thin effulgence of the hedgy tunnel. Her companions snored nearby – in equally precarious sleeping perches – no doubt dreaming. They had just undergone a long but relatively easy descent so far – and it didn’t seem to matter that none of them truly appreciated the real purpose of their quest. A quest for a quest was the nearest they could come to it. In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts they would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times.
The hedge itself had almost HELPED their descent of passage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected – but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance. The only real problem was the soot-like substance that clung to the hedge’s twigs and branches, a damp consistency that Arthur seemed to recognise (but he kept his cards close to his chest) and that dampness tended to get down their chests causing coughs which they prayed were nothing to do with the more general sicknesses they’d heard rumoured in the city before embarking on this journey. The stickness (not sickness or even stickiness) of the two creatures – suspected as substitutes for Amy and Arthur – whom they pursued were simply more than a dream away – despite often hearing these creatures crackling (if not cackling) further down in the hedge towards even lower regions than anyone could imagine approaching without feeling the traditionally believed molten heat of earth’s Core.
Soon enough, Sudra herself dozed off on her ledge and dreamed. She dreamed of being a small girl again and of the Christmas when she was due to receive a pair of new shoes as a present. She knew it was a real dream because she was dreaming it far beneath the surface of the earth – and it mattered little that the events in the dream took place above ground and in the past and upon her old bedroom carpet. She simply knew instinctively within (and, later, from outside) the dream that it was a real dream and not real life – although the dream was ABOUT real life, a real life from the past, filtered by both her dreaming and waking minds – so it was uncertain whether the dream was exactly how the real events once were – but they were surely close enough to reality to be called a reflection of reality in the future of the past, Sudra’s past.
Those promised new shoes had been important to her as a very young girl that Christmas: more important than anything else before or since. Even the flies in the cabbage were forgotten when she turned her mind towards the prospect of the new shoes that she had been promised. The flies in the cabbage had been originally important because she’d been instructed to clean the cabbage ready for supper and the task had now taken on a frightful dimension when she discovered a nest of black stringy flies at its heart. All she needed to do, however, was to think of the new shoes (which she imagined as supple yellow leather with blue laces) – and then all the troubles that beset her young mind seemed to be assuaged, healed, removed to a new dimension where she did not exist and if she did not exist there why should she worry about anything that happened in that dimension? Not exactly an out-of-body experience but more of a projecting of a troubled ghost from her body into areas where that ghost could be left to cope with all the dark problems that would otherwise beset her real self – here – today.
She dreamed about all that in the future but once upon a time she had lived through all this for real, indeed lived through all such thoughts as real thoughts. She tried not to recall who had told her to clean the cabbage. It was probably her late father (whose name she had since blotted from her mind). He had been a nasty man. She hated him and pitied her mother. She was later pleased when he died and Susan eventually remarried, and Mike became her stepfather. But in those old days Sudra pitied Susan having to live with such a nasty man as her real father. It had been Susan who had promised Sudra the new shoes – and, as the words ‘new shoes’ returned to Sudra’s mind, the thoughts of her father, then and now, dispersed into forgotten memories, yet memories that lurked and silently threatened to return should she lower her guard. So as to prevent this eventuality, she kept repeating the words, ‘New shoes’, ‘New shoes’, time and time again, until the words ‘New shoes’ – more and more quickly said – took on a new meaning, almost a new sound, a new single word: ‘Newshoes’ and she could not even visualise its spelling, least of all fathom its meaning.
“Flies in the cabbage” became another expression or mantra with which she tried to enchant with her chanting repetition of this phrase’s syllables. “Flies in the cabbage”, “Flies in the cabbage”, trying to weld the words into unbroken letters and unbroken fragments or phonemes or morphemes. Yet, on this occasion, the spell didn’t work and it brought her dead father to the bedroom door, staring at her, beady-eyed and smiling. Sometimes, smiles were evil. Indeed, smiles were always evil. People only smiled if they wanted to get something out of you, achieve something, delude someone. A smile was always a lie. Even her mother’s smile, Susan’s smile, hid something below it. And at that moment, the dream became a nightmare as a swarm of flies flew from her dead father’s mouth and nose.
She woke with a start. Not from the dream she was dreaming but from the dream she was dreaming ABOUT.
“New shoes, New shoes, New shoes,” she quickly chanted as she found herself in her dark bedroom – at the cusp of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. She smiled to herself as she saw a shadowy figure with a prodding horizontal beard at the place where its chin should have been – with a long cape-like body silhouetted against an even darker backdrop, a backdrop that seemed to ooze the natural darkness into the room. She hoped she knew who this figure was. She convinced herself she knew the real colour of the cape-enveloped shape, because red wine often did look like black wine when Susan left a bottle of it in a dark corner. The figure placed a package on the bed, with a crinkly paper sound, together with its heavy weight upon her feet that were in the part of the bed where the package had been laid upon it. She sighed and fell asleep with a sense of satisfaction, submitting herself to dreams she was destined not to remember when she woke up on Christmas morning.
The Christmas bells woke her with a steady tolling – and the sun surprised her with its Winter power as it shafted through the ceiling-light and also surprised her how it had not woken her before the bells had woken her. “New shoes” were the first words she spoke – both an incantation and an expression of truth as she pounced out of bed intent on reaching the package left at the end of the same bed from which she had had just pounced. The words doubled up on themselves in unnecessary repetitive patterns as if to delay the time before she opened the package, because, even if she herself didn’t realise what was happening, everything-else-that-could-think thought that she would be devastated by the contents of the package and anyone describing these events needed to spend as much time describing these events as possible to delay the inevitable – describing aspects of the room, its carpet, the sunshine, the bells, all of which were quite untrue – in the increasing desperation of preventing the young girl from reaching the package in which she believed were lovingly wrapped new shoes of supple yellow leather and blue laces that she had been promised for Christmas, new shoes with feminine trimming, small studs on the soles to create sparks on the pavement, vestigial spurs on the heels to allow her to pretend she was an elf or fairy – and toecaps of silver beauty that would spark more naturally than the studs without any sharp friction, sparking in the sunlight that still shafted through the ceiling-light as she finally, inexorably reached the package, eager to unwrap it without caring whether the wrapping-paper was torn in the process because the all-important things were the package’s contents, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes that she would wear all day, that perfect Christmas Day – and Boxing Day, too. And, in the end, she reached the package without much help or hindrance from outside forces and she started to unpeel the various wrappings as if it were a pass-the-parcel game for one person. A cunning game for first thing on a Christmas morning. She could not hear her mother stirring – although she sensed the front room fire was already blazing. And, at last, there they were – the new shoes in all their glory. She whispered “new shoes” through her milk teeth, with awe and wonder and an intoxication beyond any angel’s wine. She was past all possible excitement. This was now a tranquil moment, amid the hubbub of her busy childhood. A moment to cherish forever. If a moment could indeed last forever. The new shoes were no disappointment. Supple yellow leather, indeed, and black laces. Not blue laces, but that didn’t matter. The colour of the laces was only a minor detail. These were perfect shoes. The new shoes to complete a childhood. All else could be forgotten.
She woke she knew not from which dream within which other dream. The nightmare was not the contents of any dream but not knowing how many dreams she had to travel as dreamer and dreamed to get back to her real self. “New shoes,” she whispered through her milk teeth or through her old yellow teeth or through her toothless mouth. “New shoes,” she repeated as she walked to her bed on bare floorboards, the carpet gone. All that she was sure about was that THE LACES HAD TIED THEMSELVES.
Sudra woke on her shelf in the hedgy tunnel and smiled.
****
It is common knowledge, of course, that Beth’s husband had in truth remained in the city – within a safe-house – whilst Greg was currently in the Drill masquerading either knowingly or unknowingly (it mattered little which of these) as Beth’s husband … thus providing Beth’s husband in the safe-house with an alias or, even, an alter-nemo (a more subtle form of alter-ego). NOTES TO BE CLARIFIED, SCRATCHED THE STUB OF THE PENCIL AS IT WROTE OUT VARIOUS REPERCUSSIONS REGARDING THIS KNOWLEDGE.
Beth’s husband, in this way, was rather proud to have become Beth’s REAL husband, there having been a rather complex arrangement between various parties – including Beth herself – for this situation to prevail. Beth had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed herself – by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the City Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner – to believe that Greg was her real husband. Meanwhile, her really real husband – as yet nameless – arranged various factions back in the city regarding the transport and distribution of the ANGEVIN substance and its offcuts.
The only source for the raw materials that made up ANGEVIN was the cream substance found to be cached at the earth’s Core. As in all scarce resources cherished by certain factions of humanity, there was both a cost and a danger in harvesting it. Or mining it, if that’s a better word.
(1) The logistics of travelling to the earth’s Core, (2) grappling with the ‘Corekeeper’ whose name needed to be fixed and thus neutered for prevention of its impeding the necessary work in the broadly difficult mechanics of the harvesting process itself (details of which will have to be left to kick in later, so that the full implications can hit home in full relevancy), (3) the harvest process itself, and (4) the hawling of the ‘cream’, ie. transporting it back to the earth’s surface where most of humanity lived and where it could be refined in the ‘Dry Dock’ facility (a mobile industrial complex that was used to fool the other wings of the City Authorities). MEANWHILE, BARRELS OF THE STUFF ARE IN IMPENETRABLE CONTAINERS STOCKPILED WITHIN THE COVERED MARKET (THE UNDERGROUND PART OF IT FOR OBVIOUS REASONS) AND THE PUREST FORM OF IT (WORTH MILLIONS OF POUNDS) ARE NOW HELD, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, IN CERTAIN ENCLOSED AREAS OF THE CITY ZOO.
All these mechanics (some unspoken) – including the inevitable ‘hawling’ process which was more difficult than the earlier harvest process – weren’t necessarily listed out as logically as it seemed. Most of it is a mere summary of Beth’s husband rehearsing the whole tangled process from beginning to end … rehearsing it in a rather fragmentary conversation that he was conducting with a new ANGEVIN recruit who sat with Beth’s husband in his flat housed at the top of the safe-house.
The recruit was evidently female and behind a veil which she twitched from time to time giving her co-conversationalist tantalisingly sexy glimpses of her inscrutable face.
“Regarding point (3), has anyone got any nearer nailing the Corekeeper’s real name?”
Her voice was lilting in a rather Welsh fashion. Her shoes intermittently were scrunching the carpet, rumpling it up towards the table where various official papers sat, papers instrumental to the conference that was still proceeding between the two of them.
On one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which Beth’s husband would later lift to show to the female recruit as part of revealing the Nemonymous Navigation intrinsic to the whole master plan for the contraband and its later distribution – including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went before it.
On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens’ MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist – depicting a naked man with a beard who had a large white swan sitting on his lap … and he was fondling the long neck in a rather salacious fashion.
The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a TWIN PEAKS trademarked silent runner, implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, a night bus could be heard faintly droning past. Helicopters weren’t allowed over any part of the city these days.
The flat otherwise was quite neat, as if a cleaner and/or decorator had worked quite hard to spruce it up, but it still showed indelible signs of previous seediness.
Beth’s husband had evidently taken quite a time to answer the recruit’s latest question but, after a while, he pulled a paper from the table. The other as yet untouched papers were neatly stacked – in tune with the rest of the flat – bearing some form of ranked typescript. The paper he had actually picked up, however, was torn along one edge and bore handwriting. He passed it to the recruit.
“That’s the latest guesses. I can’t dignify them with any other word!”
She sniffed the paper, finding it to waft a faint aroma of stale beer. It was a mere list of smudged names.
COREKEEPER (CORETAKER): INFINITE CUCKOO, GODSPANKER, DOGNAHNYI, MEGAZANTHUS, WEIRDMONGER…?
The sixth name was illegible and Beth’s husband shook his head when the recruit asked about it.
“Well, we know it’s not Dognahnyi,” he said, “because that’s already there in the list. Indeed I know it’s not Dognahnyi at all, because…”
But then he decided to decline stipulating his reason for it not being Dognahnyi.
“Are we any nearer nailing it?”
He shook his head at the déjà vu question, then continued: “A more pressing matter is that there are various factions at this very moment travelling towards the Core, some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial … some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing…”
“What for? Isn’t such confusion self defeating …. dangerous?”
Beth’s husband shook his head and said: “If it weren’t for the – what shall we call it? – confusion, where would we be? We’d be just like that rabbit frozen in the open by the headlights of an oncoming car.”
The recruit nodded and briefly slipped aside the lower half of her veil to reveal the pique of a smile.
****
Beth was more impatient than her sister Susan – so she was eager for the Drill to reach its destination and their holiday to begin proper. She had been told to bring all manner of things in her luggage, including respectable swimwear and a high factor suncream. So her expectations were quite sufficiently filled with excitement. But, all in all, she didn’t really know what to expect.
The mention of Susan in her mind reminded her for a moment that Susan had faded from her life in recent times. In fact, Susan had faded from many lives including anyone who was interested in her fate, along with her husband – what was his name? – Mike? Beth could hardly visualise them – and the excitement of each moment prevented memories to fill the less than momentary gaps between those very moments. BUT THEY WERE ALL LATER SYMPHONICALLY SAVED BY THE PORTRAIT DREAMS (MORE OF WHICH LATER IN THIS MOVEMENT).
The actual logistics of the Drill’s journey itself, the means as it were to its ends, she would need to leave to her husband Greg to describe or rationalise or reconcile or extrapolate upon. All she herself could recall was that the Drill’s first penetration of the earth’s crusty rind was carried out with a tremendous amount of vibrating, as the helicopter-like vanes on its back took the strain of the task of industrially churning the excess waste from the downward path’s terrestrial backflow … in fact those very vanes creating that rubbly backflow, as the Captain had called it when warning them about it before the journey started. A wonderful invention this Drill, she assumed, but she failed to appreciate the scale and the complexity and exactly how the various interconnecting devices worked as a synergy of ‘human coning’, as the Captain called it.
Thoughts of the Captain again reminded Beth of Greg. She hadn’t seen her husband for several days and she assumed he must indeed be with the Captain, in the secure cockpit ambit of the lower Drill … being shown better views (better than her own views) via windows nearer the bit-tip. All she could see through her own cabin window or the library windows was the passing sameness of crazy-paved slabs of lubricated earth – lubricated by a creamy oil that the Drill exuded from several ‘pores’ or ‘gills’ along its hull to ease the drag of friction or the danger of gouging by rogue rocks. After the initial teeth-grinding vibration, the Drill’s journey so far had been relatively smooth, give or take the odd crunchy jolt.
Thoughts of Greg had in turn reminded her intermittently to connect herself to the ‘lie-fixer’ – although she didn’t call it that. It was more like the need for beauty sleep or sunbed treatment . It was a contraption that looked indeed more like a sunbed than a science-fictional synapse adaptor with throbbing electronics (which it effectively was). She simply needed to lay on it and be reminded … literally.
It was a rather refreshing and feminine activity to have to do. Far better than those mud baths she took regularly for her complexion. The mud, actually, on board the Drill, derived from loess.
In the Drill’s ornately leather-bound book-lined library, Beth often met up with the dowager ladies, Edith and Clare. It was akin to the coffee-mornings which Beth used to conduct in the City – when Greg was out at work. The turning over of gossip and the planting of metaphorical daggers. Edith and Clare were however more intellectually inclined than any of the previous members of Beth’s hen parties. There was classical music going all day in the library at least as an undercurrent of sound – such as Philip Glass’s AKHNATEN or Wagner’s PARSIFAL. The two ladies often knew the exact name of the music being played and details of the composers. They were also very well read, trying to get Beth into reading Marcel Proust’s IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. Beth, however, soon gave up – without even finishing the first volume: SWANN’S WAY. The sentences were far too long for her and too florid – and nothing much happened to the characters (whom she couldn’t really visualise in any event) and what was all that about dunking a PETIT MADELEINE cake in a cup of tea?
Beth accidentally picked up a fantasy book entitled CRAZY LOPE & GODSPANKER by someone or other, but the first sentence put her off: “The carpet was quite ordinary.” Surely, there were better ways to start a book, she thought. In any event, she didn’t like Fantasy or Science Fiction – and certainly not Horror. The blurb on the back cover mentioned it was an ‘alternate world’ fiction treating of the rabbit plague in Fifties England where the rabbit’s disease – myxomatosis – mutated and spread into a human-to-human disease, thus wiping out the population. Dreary stuff, she thought, slapping the book back on the table, next to Proust.
Edith finally found some classics for Beth such as the Brontës and Jane Austen, until Beth did manage to find some pleasure in this middle-of-the-road literature, even without fully understanding all the social undercurrents of the historical settings. She did however have a good laugh at the title WUTHERING HEIGHTS. She thought of the Drill as wuthering depths! Dickens and Shakespeare could probably wait for the return journey, suggested Clare. If there IS a return journey, thought Edith.
The two ladies were very touchy-feely and Beth finally decided that they were not her type of people, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in such confined spaces. Like coach trips on the earth’s surface, one tried to mix with the other passengers to help the time pass much more pleasantly. Polite standards and talking terms needed to be manicured.
All three of them shared the loess treatment in the form of white mud baths – to tone up their otherwise scrawny bodies. Beth cringed however one day when she spotted Edith eating a bit of it as she wallowed in it.
****
At night, after several weeks of these dreary waking hours between her bouts of sleep, Beth dreamed. She knew they were dreams because she was now so far underground, they couldn’t be anything but dreams. She slept in the cabin meant for her and Greg, but by now she had almost forgotten she had come on holiday with Greg. There was not even any intercom to the cockpit, where she assumed, if she assumed anything at all, Greg was being guested by so-called Captain Nemo – hobnobbing as men of the world tended to do.
The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond her control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.
At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan’s pretty face, prettier than her own, but when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.
Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circumstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or even a bus-driver? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.
Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn’t now place him as a grown-up. She dreamed of him – much thinner – mixing some foreign substance into her bath of loess treatment. Amy was a similar portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn’t really differentiate one portrait from another.
Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so.
Beth woke from the Ogdon portrait with a start. The Drill had just jolted so violently all the light had been sucked from the cabin.
****
All those children who had earlier left the city along with Amy and Arthur – or along with the foreshortened versions of Amy and Arthur as they subsequently turned out to be – were evidently seeking apertures in the earth but carrying out this search without any known conscious reason for so doing.
They had, however, in hindsight, been ‘lie-fixed’ to seek further apes for breeding – and these apes were said to live in caves. But that begs the question, how deep can a cave become before it loses its identity as a cave. Even Plato’s Cave was above sea-level. Surely, the deeper a cave becomes the more it approximates a pot-hole. In its turn, the deeper a pot-hole becomes the more it approximates a terrestrial oubliette or unhawlable cache – especially as there is no access from the surface to reach such an oubliette or cache.
On the other hand, the children themselves were, perhaps, apes in the making, having been force-fed some mutant form of ANGEVIN to reverse the evolutionary process. History apparently was full of Angevin Apes and they played a large part at the Battle of Agincourt, but exegesis of primary sources (such as excision of any knowledge of the infections brought back to England by Henry The Fifth and his cohorts) has ensured that vital components of the NEED for apes today and what part they played throughout Toynbeean history are now largely forgotten.
Some children, as already hinted, did, however, remain in the city, either variably untouched by the ‘lie-fixer’ or simply too lame to travel far – and these children now ran wild, because many of their previous external authorisers as well as their own self-discipline were so badly dissipated by every attempt to corrupt all levels of society in age, wealth, creed and sanity.
These children often made visits to the now semi-derelict zoo, believing that its reputation remained as a rare area of surface land where dream-clarification and dream-justification were easiest to accomplish, as well as being a reputed seat for zoological learning, with or without implications to any history (alternate or not) … although the latter was not important to the children, even if they had understood it.
John Ogdon, now increasingly at a loose end as a result of his pub lacking customers for ordinary alcohol, also spent some time in the zoo for its dream qualities, but also masquerading, as an excuse for his presence, in the shape of the zoo-keeper, i.e. the Authorities’ last redoubt against civil unrest amid their pretence it was still a proper zoo where law-abiding citizens could spend a relaxing afternoon as well as to learn about Natural History or Zoological Biodiversity.
Ogdon had now ‘come out’ (to the surprise of every onlooker) as a cross-dresser, strutting as he now did amongst the cages and enclosures in high-heels and a beige frock. The children called him ‘Hilda’.
Crazy Lope was now rarely seen, except, in Ogdon’s absence, when it suited him to turn up in his cape and scare the children with his antics. It was believed that a few dark myths such as those depicted in old Nursery Rhymes were a vital factor in a child’s upbringing, and Crazy Lope was pleased to fulfil such a role. All light and brightness make Jack a dull soul, as the saying goes.
One day, a clutch of these residual children (now much thinner because of various imposed dietary factors combined with the ill-sustenance that general scavenging in the city enforced) turned up at the zoo for a desultory kickaround. The first enclosure was, as ever, empty. The cages and enclosures further into the real meat of the zoo were still no doubt at least partially inhabited by exhibits because they were fed by certain nightly manoeuvres of metabolism and airfly – but very few grown-ups went to check and any such remaining exhibits had inevitably become hearsay, as the children said they didn’t know or deliberately didn’t say anything at all. It was rumoured that the zoo’s many birds had died, claws-up on the cage floors … except for one giant creamy-white poultry-thing that gradually bloated as if its claw-ends had rooted themselves into the ground (via the riven cage-floor) like a massive feathered plant-thing feeding off some unfathomable nourishment. It deeply chirped, but eventually it was mostly silent, still pulsing with some form of dubious existence.
The children – for whatever reason – usually played football around the outside of the ‘empty’ enclosure which had once been assumed (at least in one of the interpretations) to exhibit barely visible insect-life. On the day in question, one child took his eye momentarily off the ball and pointed excitedly at the scrubby soil in the enclosure.
“What are those?”
The others peered over the enclosure’s barrier and gasped. Scattered all over the ground, within the enclosure, were what seemed to be hundreds of discarded toys. Clockwork ones, some budging slightly as if they had been insufficiently wound up. At a closer scrutiny, some were actually trying to burrow into the ground, making a very bad job of covering themselves for dignity’s sake – showing, perhaps, that they thought themselves to be little better than catmuck.
As Ogdon later determined (on his tour of duty as zoo-keeper), the contraptions had indeed been a multitude of mini-Drills complete with gossamer vanes on their backs, each attempting – with some difficulty – to penetrate the hardened zoo floor. Meanwhile, in real time, the children were about to climb over the barrier to double-check the nature of what they still thought to be toys, toys with what one of them described as ‘cockpits’, but another child interrupted with a shout:
“It’s Lope! Scram!”
Crazy himself turned into the zoo, intent upon becoming the children’s routine nightmare of the day.
They scattered and vanished into all corners of the zoo, before gathering together instinctively like a flock of migratory birds, only to escape screaming with fright (or joy) by means of the now untenanted exit turnstile.
****
Later, Ogdon, still in full female regalia, was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus’s usual allotted white-lined space alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. NEVER EAT YELLOW SNOW, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.
Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could aid the maimed and the dead.
****
The real ‘Beth’s husband’ was now late-labelled Dognahnyi: perhaps one denemonisation too far, but he was still interviewing the new recruit (following the revelation) in his pent-house, the log fire glistening off the Rubens like neutered indoor-fireworks.
DOGNAHNYI (an early worm in any conversation): Have you managed to fix your dreams yet?
RECRUIT (still veiled, speaking Welsh-prettily, if semi-nasally): Fixed them, yes – or so I thought – but last night someone told me or I dreamed that someone told me that they had a dream recently of a foreign body torpedoing itself into their tower office-block. You know the one – the block round the corner from here with a roof garden and a complicated lift system that books on architecture often write about.
D: Yes, I know the one you mean. Where our man once worked when he was still a ‘sleeping’ hawler. I presume the torpedo thing came from the dream terrorists.
R: I suppose so – but it wasn’t the classic jet-liner attack – it was a replica of the tower-block itself coming in at an abrupt angle and sticking itself like a pig about two-thirds of the way up.
D: Hmmm…that’s interesting. I think if you have dreams or dreams of dreams like that, we can certainly use your skills for furthering the hawling process everywhere.
R (smiling beneath the veil): Thank you.
D (walking over to the curtains on silent runners making as if to open them): Out there are many situations that need fixing.
R: I know.
D: Such as that tower block – as you’ve just suggested – being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.
R: I believe you.
At that point, she slowly removed her veil.
****
Mike sat upon a ledge in the downward tunnel – just beyond the point where the hedge petered out together with a tapering into horizontality of a new tunnel – or a perceived horizontality at this perspective of the underground’s in-built sextant and its effect on the brain’s balance.
The hedge itself had tended to prevent dangerous free-fall but, equally, had not hindered their nude scaling-down to this point in the earth’s interior.
Mike was pleased that it was now slightly more ‘civilised’ at this juncture of his party’s journey. The stick-like ‘hares’ or decoys were indeed now fully absorbed into the Amyness and Arthurness of two among them. The group had grown somewhat, but the main constituents were still the main constituents.
Furthermore, there was now a service tunnel parallel with their own tunnel of concourse – and this service tunnel was complete with pulleys and ropes, passing clanking buckets to the surface from the Core itself. He readily assumed all was part and parcel of some quite complicated hawling-process which he was due to oversee, once his training was complete. And, surprisingly (but, in hindsight, not surprisingly), there were warm clothes waiting for them at this crossover point in the tunnel systems. Indeed, this must be an official root-exchange, whereby Mike now realised that all other approaches or ‘attacks’ towards the centre (such as the many Drill companies he had heard about) were quite UNOFFICIAL or simply subterfuges.
He had heard earlier rumours that the immediate surrounding area of the Core was populated by a set of creatures known as Carpet Apes who tended to the necessary ablutions of the Megazanthus (one of the names of which Mike was aware had been given to the Corekeeper) – and that the marginal ‘land’ around the Core itself was the legendary Agra Aska … but the facts were still uncertain even if the non-facts were now clearer.
However, the Carpet Apes (so-called) were probably a false assumption or, at best, an unfixed dream. He looked down at the coat with which he (and the others) had been supplied: a stiffish, ankle-length carpetty thing with simple arm apertures. At first it was uncomfortable to walk about in but one soon grew accustomed to its combination of warmth and bodily support. He had not yet questioned the fact that the nearer the Core they travelled, the colder it was becoming, despite history saying such a process should mean that you were approaching a molten heat centre.
He looked at the others – Susan, Sudra, Amy, Arthur etc. – in their carpet coats and he somehow knew whence the legend of the Carpet Apes must have derived – and he laughed at the antics of the others. One of them was doing a puppet-like jig in his or her stiffened coat and it was terribly funny. Apeish. Mike felt cheered.
Yet Mike questioned himself. He realised he was a hawler – always realised this perhaps – but now he knew it wasn’t because he had previously been a hawler, but because he was about to become one. Self-identification by an as yet unproved anticipation was a dream-fixing he needed to address. It all seemed a very unsteady grounding for a vocation or a raison-d’etre. Mike shrugged and peered at his step-daughter Sudra as she now began to practise walking in her carpet coat. She took delight to tease him with her imputed beautiful body hidden beneath the dumpy beige covering and the ungainly yellow clod-hoppers on her feet – clogs, in fact, that were on all their feet. The thin effulgence of the previous hedge tunnel had given Mike few glimpses of her nudity…
He shook his head to himself. He should not be having such thoughts about a step-daughter, should he? He was a hawler, he knew. Yet a flawed hawler. He suddenly stopped laughing. LATER: STUB OF PENCIL WRITES: AMY COMPLAINS THAT READERS HAVE LOST SIGHT OF WHO SHE IS!
****
In the days before the sudden jolt had stolen the light from Beth’s cabin in the Drill, Greg and a few other nebulous businessmen were entertained by Captain Nemo in the corporate lounge, a select area on board that boasted viewing-windows close to the leading-edge of the bit-tip. The proceedings were a combination of a scientific lecture upon what they were seeing and pure holiday entertainment, all laced with cocktails.
****
Meanwhile, over the years, many had debated why the city needed two airports instead of one … now both derelict sites on the left and right arms of the city proper. This hadn’t come up in general conversations or newspaper reports for quite a while but one must be seen to address this issue nevertheless, even if it’s just for the sake of chasing some noumenon.
These airports were always benighted even in their respective hey-days. One theory was that they only served each other, i.e. short-haul flights between them taking place for their own sake, because it was easier to travel across the city by other means, even if one wanted to travel across the city at all. These airflights were later assumed to be merely acting as cover for their real flights – beneath the ground, with the main runways leading steeply down tunnels into the earth from each airport.
That extrapolation, however, was often taken too far and was nipped in the bud before it could actually take off. However, in even more recent days of the ANGEVIN conspiracies, there was a renewal of its hypothetical undercurrents regarding the internal workings of the earth. More, perhaps, of that, in due course. What one has to take into account, meanwhile, is that nobody at all has been in control of hypotheses for a long time now, and any crazy brainstorming has indeed eventually become the norm – with even written documents (where one should normally have inferred a responsible writer of such documents or, at least, an editorial chief/ steering-committee) being considered just as bad as pub talk. Equally, the inverse may be true, i.e. when something is written down it lends credence even to pub talk. It depends on one’s point of view.
The optimum, the fail-safe assumption, is to believe nobody is in control.
As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many documents since discovered have touched on dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us. Allied to the dreams etc. were ghosts (it has to be said), and many people actually began to believe in ghosts, to the extent that each person necessarily had to have his or her own ghost – implying that there were two of everyone. But, no. Not a person and that person’s ghost as the pair in question, but two ghosts, each a ghost of the other (with no real person involved at all). Symbiotic haunting seems a good term for this.
Which brings us straight back to the question of why there were two airports in the city, where even just one airport would have been redundant. So, with further extrapolation, not only did people or living creatures become tangled up in this two-ghost hypothesis but supposed inanimate things, too, such as aeroplanes, helicopters, other craft. In fact, ALL things under the sun, not just means of transport, but even buildings, household artefacts etc. were subject to this hypothesis.
Such a supposition would pre-suppose much inadvisable loose-thinking, of course. However, it would serve to explain the eerie sightings (during the days even when people were more down-to-earth) of ghostly craft skimming across the city from airport to airport, complete with scary droning just upon the hearing threshold. Simply to call them ‘scary’, however, doesn’t necessarily MAKE them scary. You had to experience them to know how really scary they were.
As a boy, I used to wander around the Left Hand airport, the one that by then had become a disused golf-course. It was always dark there, it seemed, but I loved the den I built beneath a hedge where I and my friends played Cowboys and Indians or Doctors and Nurses. The Cowboys and Indians, Doctors and Nurses were delightfully, if sometimes chillingly, real – or, at least, seemed real because they were some of the ghosts that appeared to be attracted to the area as if it were a spectral magnet.
The slots in the turfy ground which had been passed off by the Authorities as stretched-mouth golf-holes gave some substance to the theory that history is bunk. But also gave substance to the possibility that under-flights took place from this erstwhile airport. At least, for me, it did.
I often saw with my own eyes grey shapes skimming above my head, leaving for the other side of the city. But I also saw similar shapes entering the ground as if taking advantage of inverse vents.
Those days are now long over. I’m not sure even if I exist any more, let alone the two of us that were once the ‘me’ I can now only vaguely recall, if at all.
****
The Drill’s corporate lounge windows – like the other windows where Beth, Edith and Clare had been left to have their mud baths and generally to while away the journey in feminine yellow-wallpapered cabins – revealed at first only just the same boring panoplies of passing slabs of earth, glistening with the suppurations of oil from the Drill’s gills. However, eventually, at the leading-edge of the Drill, where the lounge windows were situated, the vista became clearer as if the vanes were now managing better in clearing the forward (downward) thrust’s waste further back towards the tail-fins.
There is no description that can do justice to what wonderful, awe-inspiring and sometimes scary sights they saw – but the inference is that the words of the Captain conjured more than he actually said.
CAPTAIN NEMO: Now what do you think of that?
GREG: Wow!
CN: Follow my finger – there are some of the things that exist down here. They are not what they seem – they are modelled on aircraft you’ve seen before, but these are their equivalents, better to call them earthcraft. They are crewed by some who’ve never been to the surface.
G: It’s just like a real sky. There’s even a sun.
CN: That’s the Core itself, of course. You must have guessed that. But there’s no real heat coming from it – as some have believed for centuries. That’s simply its colour you can see, not a symptom of a heat source. Scatter-orange I call it. And that, my friend, is the brightest scatter-orange you will ever likely to see. That’s why I made you wear those glasses. They’ve got a tint that makes the scatter-orange just about bearable. Makes it look more yellow or even beige, than orange doesn’t it?
G: Well, it looks just like the real sun when you use smoked glass to look at an eclipse coming up.
CN: Yup yup. The glasses also protect you from its jagged iciness, although that iciness is in fact an optical illusion , but one can’t be too careful.
G: The earthcraft seem to be wheeling around each other – oh, look, I’m sure they’re using the blazing Corelight as a means of cover… sort of hiding from each other…
CN: Yup yup. Not exactly friendly with each other, it has to be said. They sometimes fight or feint a fight more like and we have to be careful ourselves but up to now they’ve left us alone on each trip. But that won’t last forever, I fear.
G: It’s all gone again. Back to the slabs.
CN: That often happens when our vanes get clogged up with our off-detritus. We’ll probably see more later. You haven’t seen half of it yet! (Laughs).
Greg sipped at his cocktail thoughtfully. This was turning out to be a wonderful holiday. But, like all holidays, it had its moments of stress, no doubt.
****
Dognahnyi gasped when he saw who was behind the veil.
Apparently, his new recruit had turned out to be none other than Amy herself, the woman who regularly cleaned his flat.
DOGNAHNYI: I thought you were with your brother on holiday … and those others from the pub you use.
AMY: How do you know Arthur is my brother? Everyone assumes that. I thought you were Beth’s husband…
D: I am!
A: I’ve been pretending to be a domestic cleaner and Arthur’s brother. I am really what you call a ‘brainwright’. Heard of that? Anyway, one of the reasons was to get closer to you and clinch an interview. I’ve managed to shoot the rapids. I’m here …. AND I’m there. (Laughs).
D: You can’t be in two places at once.
A: Can’t I?
D: Well, if anybody can, you can, I suppose. I was very impressed how you just conducted the interview with me. You must be someone very special. Beautiful, too, if I may say so. Never realised before – in your cleaning overalls – quite how beautiful!
A: Thank you. I bet, before tonight, you wouldn’t have been able to describe me at all. You always seemed to ignore me. Now this context, this setting, only proves what I am capable of. I am sick to the teeth of that Sudra taking the sexy role in all this. I am going to show how a real female ticks. Just let me show you what I can do. We’ll have all Angel Wine going through your processors and no other processors. Just trust me.
D: You don’t like Sudra?
A: (Chuckles). I’ve got her favourite shoes. She’s not missed them yet.
D: Well, enough of that. I do trust you. But how do we deal with the Megazanthus?
A: Well, when I arrive at the Core, along with Mike & Co. … oh yes, he thinks he’s going to be the hawler (laughs) – they’ll all be like putty in my hands. It’s easier now that the genealogical strictures are in place. It was all rather gimmicky when everyone wanted to trace their family trees. But it put a lot of spanners in the works, when folk realised they weren’t who they thought they were! Now that sort of thing’s gone out the window, it leaves so many loopholes for someone like me to exploit. And what’s that? The Megazanthus? It is only an assumption that there is any Corekeeper at all, even if that is its name. Let’s address problems as they arise. Amy will be able to deal with them. Rest assured.
D: I’m impressed.
Dognahnyi opened the curtains upon their silent runners and watched the gulls flopping from the sky like body snow.
****
It is difficult to imagine the world being better or worse than it actually is. However, without humanity to stain its pages, who knows what will then become imaginable or even real? There is a theory – to which I subscribe – that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one … time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse … or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
****
The Drill’s corporate lounge is empty and silent, except for the odd eerie shaking of the wall maps as its relentless path – through the ribbons of reality that is Inner Earth – continues towards the Core. There is now nobody, even Nemo, to watch the vista through the windows, as the vanes once more struggle to clear the Drill’s off-detritus to the rear from the leading-edge. There is what seems to be an old-style caravan stuck on a crag – above a deceptively real sea – and (in the Core’s scatter-orange light), a sign can just be discerned saying ‘The Angerfin Public House’ planted clumsily on its roof – but then it is gone. Must be a crazy dream. But whose?
****
The jolt has finally finished, if one can actually imagine a jolt (by definition) that endures for more than just a few seconds. The rearward cabin is empty – as can be seen when the light slowly wells back into it. The window still simply shows the passing crazy-paved slabs of earth. So, at least, that vista was not just the inhabitant’s imagination. A tortoiseshell hairbrush falls to the carpet, having sat as an object ill-becalmed for a while on the edge of the dressing-table following the initial jolt. Then silence again. And a mirror merely reflecting yellow wallpaper.
****
The city pub was empty. Merely that. The optics of the shorts gleamed as time threatened to begin another diurnal round with unforgiving dawnlight. The city started to thrum, but thrummed with what? It may never be known. A barstool clattered to the pub carpet (clattered, despite the carpet) and remained there, unlifted and artistically sacrosanct like a Turner prize. What caused it to topple was a short sharp jolt that nobody felt.
****
The top flat still retained its open curtain policy on silent runners. The empty Dry Dock could be seen, even in the dark. A tall tower-block in the distance winked like a gigantically based but underwhelming lighthouse light. A computer screen in the room blinked blankly in curious yellow. An empty veil fluttered on the carpet like a butterfly.
****
The covered market was at rest, no commuters changing for even the wrong routes, let alone the right ones. A route exchange, a root filling … and the container lorries neatly parked alongside – perhaps forever, until they dropped an inch or two upon tired wheels.
****
In the service tunnel – where the hawler and his party (now unknown, unnamed, forgotten or even nemonymous people) had been training for further encroachment towards the Core itself – there was still the rattle of buckets as if in automatic fire-drill climbing towards the surface on pulleys. There were a few discarded carpet coats and yellow clogs. One pair of clogs had spurs and silver toecaps, the spurs still slightly jingle-jangling as if someone had just taken them off in a pique of feminine tantrum.
****
The city zoo echoed with snorting squawks. After all, it was only humanity gone missing for the nonce. And a few (very few) residual clockwork toys in the insect enclosure were still pitifully trying to bury themselves.
****
"Dreams leak, books leak..."
- Rachel Mildeyes (from MY CULINARY AFFAIR WITH BIRDS WHITE SAUCE)
II. NEMONYMOUS NIGHT
Perhaps the carpet was not quite so ordinary, after all.
I shall remain nameless, as is fitting. And at that time, nobody, not even me, was around to act as an expert on carpets, so, now in hindsight, all that COULD be said about it was some reference to ordinariness. Yet, had we all known, we would have INDEED known that the stains were signs of some incipient endgame. They were stains worthy of the word stains, not just years of wine and grime or mishandled vacuuming or the once careless knees of Amy and her brother’s friends as they scorched their shameful toys through the rough of tufts. And the less said about the odd tread of strangers, the better.
One could hardly tell that the carpet had once been yellow. Only Amy knew that.
The carpet’s companion accoutrements were rather down-market sticks of furniture in spite of the dusting and polishing by Amy who rather enjoyed the varnished gleam of knotted wood more than the clean lines of a carpet’s cleanliness. She needed dusting herself, even at her moderately young age.
****
“How are you today?” I ask.
Amy (who spent her childhood in this room) follows me about, as far as she can follow anyone in such a small room. Not surprisingly, she appears as if owned or, rather, controlled by the room while – with rather more panache than the situation demands – she keeps adjusting ornaments … also brushing dust into a pan.
“Not so bad,” she answers.
“News on the radio is bad again.”
“You mean about the…?”
“Yes. We’re not allowed to eat anything that comes from eggs. Not even…”
“I know, I heard it from Beth this morning.”
Amy has a pretty face, but when she speaks – even lightly, thoughtlessly – there’s a frown that appears and a deep divot within the frown’s area. Hair a fashionable matted brown, so very 'her' it’s only noticeable if it suddenly isn’t there. Apron fails to hide her sexuality and high-heels seem out of kilter with the dustpan.
“Best not to think of it,” I say. “How’s…?”
“Dognahnyi?”
“No, not him. I mean the girl … you … you know … you kick about with. You’ve been very happy I know with … what’s her name?”
I am delicately pretending to forget her name.
“You mean Sudra? No, that’s gone a bit sour. We had a argument … something very trivial … but she was so petty … I couldn’t handle it any more.”
“Sorry to hear that, Amy. What was it about?”
“Oh, something or nothing. A pair of shoes. See! You’re laughing!”
“Life turns on trivialities,” I say, knowing already about Sudra's side of the story.
I am a comfortable pair of ears, I guess, although some may have different words and put capital letters where only small ones belong, laced with swearing! What’s the word? Counsellor, hmmm, Interferer, Meddler ... someone who drags things from your soul to let it breathe more easily. I haul on your guy-ropes and see your tent rise again. I have some silly concepts about it but I’m sure my radio phone-ins do achieve quite a lot of good.
I’ve come a long way since my ancestors worked in the coal-mines. I’ve just discovered that one of them was a ‘hawler’. In the old days, he would have been involved in moving coal from the coalface, coal that had already been worked by others. I think the ‘w’ is a misprint in the 1901 census records I got off the Internet. Anyway, it is an art form in itself and one fraught with many logistical problems. Today, however, there are no coal-mines and therefore haulers have died out. Now, with the plagues, I reckon that butchering of meat may now be within a hawler’s brief. Just a whimsical thought on my part. But I try to keep my mind busy, as there is so much to worry about otherwise. Perhaps, in fact, thinking about it, a brief for meat and poultry, especially as – God forbid! – the two seem to be blending in a very disturbing fashion. Cutting prime complex cuts from now badly understood novelties of meat that combine all sorts of animal and bird in one. But I hope it’s not what I fear. I love pure beefsteak so much – isn’t there a saying, almost a proverb, that everyone once knew but I never understood – that I, and others like me, are “so voracious we eat beef till it’s raw”?
A far cry from radio counselling! Then, I need to be precise and careful. No brainstorming allowed. I still have to think quickly on the hoof, however.
****
Today, I intend to visit John Ogdon in his pub but I doubt if anyone I know will be there and I hate drinking alone. John will be too busy to talk to me. The park is second best: a good place for thinking. Susan’s on my mind and Susan may indeed be in the park with her grown-up daughter Sudra. I still can’t believe in the coincidence that Amy has been close, if not intimate, friends with Sudra. I only knew Amy because, well, I was a sort of Uncle figure to her in the old days. Still am, I guess. I originally knew her Mum before she gave birth to Amy. But that’s a long story. I met Susan (Sudra’s Mum) quite independently, and Sudra already knew Amy quite well even at that stage. A sort of secret between me and Sudra that we both separately knew Amy.
I have usually steered clear of married women, but life’s never simple. I didn’t admit to myself then that I really fancied Sudra (more than fancying her mother probably), but that’s taking us into an even longer story. I thought both of them were a case for a hawler … and I even began to use that terminology on my local radio counselling programme. It even caught on as a name for a sort of modern-day shrink. It was worth a few shillings too in the bank account. Still is.
Much is inexplicable, yet it will become explicable when put into practice and seen for what it is. I suspect that there is more to Sudra than meets the eye. She often tells me about her dreams and they are CRAZEE!.
I now gingerly walk across the park ground. I wonder what stage of the housework Amy will by now have reached in her top flat. Amy is always doing housework, these days, as if it takes her mind off other things. Ewbanking the ‘yellow’ carpet is only attempted by Amy once in a while. I glimpse Susan and Sudra. Neither of them are particularly friendly to anyone, but I guess they have a soft spot for me. Fame opens doors, in many way.
I am a hawler, after all, and most people instinctively treat hawlers with respect even if I haven’t any real qualifications for this line of business. I feel tears prick out at the thought of Amy. I wish I had been kinder to her when she was a girl. Her Mum Edith always turned a blind eye.
I imagine a plate of sizzling beef. My stomach tells me something that words can never explain. An empty nagging pain. I look up into the sky. Not even a flying pig! But, no, I am wrong. There is a flying pig, of sorts, that day. And a hot air balloon with people on board who surely have an enduring love for flying, even with any mechanical aircraft whatsoever now grounded (perhaps meaninglessly grounded – and do keep listening to the news on the radio and all may be explained). As ever these days, there are a few outlandish kites (including the flying pig) that citizens have taken to flying from the ground in some subconscious grief, no doubt, at the disappearance of anything else in the sky. But, first, I need to pluck up enough courage to approach Susan and Sudra, leaving any residual thought of Amy to the vacuum.
****
Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. But that was part of herself she had ignored or not even known so as to be ABLE to ignore it. The talking revealed more. She expected a role that she hadn’t yet been given. The as yet missing part of herself meanwhile visualised me carving joints of unrecognisable meat. The ribbing thicker than most poultry but with a vague appearance of a fish’s backbone, whilst with the floppy feel of sirloin as it slid too easily off the T-spine.
“What to do,” she asked or stated. The vacuum churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the earth wire failing. Her missing part viewed a vista of a dull pinky yellow sun smoked over with clouds of birdlife as seen from a distance. A craggy sea and a giant submarine with rotors just nosing into view from the creamy waves. A cruise liner was halfway up the steep side of a cliff, dry-berthed if not literally shipwrecked. This was a concoction of several dreams, if she had but realised or known she was effectively (at some unconscious level) sharing in a vast communal vision just below the threshold of knowledge or even belief.
Her actual conscious self meanwhile brooded on the real past. I had not quite come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. Her brother Arthur had always been a bit of a loner, non-expressive and wild. He concocted experiments with household goods, mixing them into a chemical syrup by means of adding garden mud to substances like washing-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. Symbolic, in hindsight of, mixing dreams, too, just like those to which we have all needed to grow accustomed in recent years because of the world’s difficulties. Fixing dreams, too.
These misalchemies were alive – at least in her brother’s eyes and Amy laughed as she remembered their mother’s remonstrations of despair while she tried to talk sense into her son but merely ended up communicating with the “cowpats” of mixture he had left in his wake. At least, he did the experiments outside. And indoor fireworks only came out of Christmas Crackers in those days, so they were not an all-year problem: those sizzling wormcasts on the seasonal carpet. That was a Godsend. One day, they’d invent daylight fireworks for the outside! She laughed to herself. Why had nobody thought of daylight fireworks before, so potentially au fait with the way the world was now going, with street riots meaning there was always a strict curfew during any dark hours.
Amy was scared to recall the past because, by dragging it onward through time, trawling it through the coarse-grained muslin of memory’s filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything I had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a booby-trap – and she continued scraping the lower surface of the vacuum across the grit in the carpet that had collected there like any dust collects there … from wherever dust and grit and, indeed, stains come from – a mysterious source only hawlers are able to fathom.
Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. Her missing part now viewed a scene in a park, a park so cultivated its grass was more like a plush lawn for the toes of effete royalty or fairies. She saw it in her mind’s eye, but failed to recognise the fey walkers that positively languished in its heady Proustian delights. A man she knew instinctively (yet still unconsciously) was named Swann walked past with a girl, her sleek FIN DE SIÈCLE dress buttonholed with cattleyas.
****
In the past, Amy’s mother, Edith, having finished with adjusting the oven, reached the apartment window again and eagerly scanned the inner square between the walls of the four blocks that formed it. There was a solitary fountain at its centre – and a few all-weather seats surrounding. Not much for children to do in the square but it was certainly better than the city streets amid which this square was a relatively safe oasis. She saw a huddled figure on one of the seats: a man writing. She grew suspicious.
Clare, a schoolteacher, had just announced her visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. She’d come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both … at once.
“What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?”
At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur’s hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large ship in Dry Dock. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl’s keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it despite its plastic and mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips. Amy had rescued it one day when she found it in the garden trying to bury itself in the ground, soil which Arthur had just loosened as part of one of his ‘mixing’ projects, when looking for new ingredients below the surface of top earth.
****
Hawling is not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the buttons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashed and resulted in the lift-doors sliding aside … new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there was more to hawling than that – it’s running a butcher’s shop, listening to the carcasses crack as you lay in bed at night. I was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on … and eventually extinguish with a dying wink … which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from my mine.
I watch Susan and Sudra running through an unkempt, shaggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. I glimpse a figure in a cape watching them.
I woke in a cold sweat. I put one foot outside the bed to ensure at least the bedroom floor was still there. Nobody snored beside me, mercifully, it seemed, because anyone sleeping next to me would have been infected by the same dreams that had just beset me … or were still besetting me.
****
My body was the most mysterious thing about me. I could easily fathom my own mind – but my body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that I – my mind – walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to me, obviously, because, if it had, I would certainly have considered myself mad. Bad enough even to SKIRT such touchy subjects amid the other thoughts, let alone delving into them.
One nemonymous creature of applause – with the merged thought that each member of the audience in the concert hall remained (to themselves at least) single entities – sounded from the radio after Brahms’ Double Concerto drew to its close. And I dozed off again.
****
As I press my head close enough to the connecting door, I can hear the sleeping couple's heavy breathing as if I am actually in the bed with them both.
However, strangely, the words which sporadically break the surface of their sleep, I cannot make out very plainly. I soon gather, however, that they are exchanging remarks from separate dreams: holding an almost logical dialogue about the nature of the nightmares each is undergoing, without awakening.
I turn the handle and push the door merely a creak, but surely loud enough to wake them. One of them merely stirs and says something which must have been out of context, since the other says:
MAN: "Who are you talking to?"
WOMAN: "Only someone at the door, but he's gone now."
How she knows my sex is a mystery, since even I am uncertain as to who or what I am.
M: "Good."
W: "What were you saying?"
M: "I said that the twins were welded at the two hinges between their four legs when they were born."
W: "I hope the doctor did not attempt separation, leaving them at least a circus act to perform."
M: "But it does make you wonder how Mother Earth could have borne such a monstrous pair."
W: "As a sort of punishment to the parents for having sex, perhaps."
M: "There's a lot you don't know about the earth. Its core bubbles and burps, stews and curdles, with worse things yet to come up the chimneys shafts. In my dream, I can see the terrain peppered with the evidence of vertical tunnel openings. Even Superman cannot plug them all up."
W: "Especially as I've got the real Superman in MY dream. He's with me now. He wants me to bear his child."
The sleeper laughed to herself with a ricochet of snores.
They both grow quiet. Evidently, gaps in dream-talk are not so embarrassing as in real life. Nobody can blush in their sleep. But I can see from a seeping glow in the bedroom curtains, hinting at a makeshift dawn, that the upper profiles of the bodies on the bed glisten with sweat.
I dread returning to my own bed where they have put me every night so far, in case my own dreams merge with theirs. I am their child. Their changeling. Their foundling. Their treasured groundling. I am not sure which, except my flesh is theirs. I'm too young, perhaps, to comprehend even my most simplest thoughts.
Knowing them and calling them Mummy and Daddy in daylight hours is no help to me now...
Should I wake them? I fear the monsters I might stir, if their dreams are aborted. So, I creep on all fours (on all claws, as some dreams say) under their bed. It seems the safest thing to do. Their tosses and turns upon the spring-loaded mattress make me think Hell is where Heaven should be.
I must be half asleep, or half awake, really. I have to budge the chamber pot to make more room. I'm a growing child, after all. The pot's contents slop from side to side for longer than I would expect. The Overgrunts resume:
W: "I am climbing down one of the shafts. I can hear the core seething below. It must be the Infinite Cuckoo taking an early morning skinny-dip in the white slime of earth's innards."
M: "Be careful what you are doing down there, while I tell you about MY dream. I've become a butcher-surgeon and a monstrous fleshy carcass has been deposited upon my slab. It is joined at its wing-tips. At each of my careful incisions, purple slurry free-oozes. They groan in pain (because the carcass is made of two different creatures), despite the sleep medicine I've administered. But how they know to groan alternately, never overlapping, is too mysterious even for a dream."
I curse. The chamber pot HAS overlapped. My bottom is more than a little damp. As is the carpet. The mattress presses down upon my head with each turn-spitting of the bodies above me in the bed. I cannot creep out easily now, since some of their bed-covers have slipped over the side, concealing the horizontal door of dim light. It should not be long till daybreak. Meantime, I can only squat, listen and lurk.
W: "I can see the light at the end of the chimney tunnel below me, a white mass of flickering tails. I dearly wish I could wake up before I get there."
M: "Let me take your mind off it, with MY dream. The next patient is not a pair of mutant twins at all. It's a woman, I can tell, but for various medical reasons there are several incompletions. Despite being pregnant – a straightforward diagnosis – I can find no way out for the baby. Evidently, it's my job to make one. And the only implement I've been given is a heavy-duty chain saw..."
As one sleeper hesitated, the other spoke up.
W: "The hand-holds have run out and I'm in dream free-fall. Too slow for real life, but far too fast for a nightmare. By the way, do NOT use the chain saw. It seems too ... cruel. Isn't there an alternative?"
M: "I've got no choice. The clock tells me I've only a few minutes before the next operation is due. And that one is far more important. Waking up is literally impossible before I tackle it."
W: "What's making you do these things?"
M: "Shunting shapes of shadow in yellow, with eyes where eyes shouldn't be. But what about you? Have you reached the Core yet?"
W: "Yes, of course. I didn't want to tell you, in case your hand slipped on the chain saw. But it WAS a great shock. The Infinite Cuckoo is not a bird at all, but a huge deformed foetus whose bones are on the outside grinding against each other. It gobbles up human heads with legs in the necks from the swamp of white melted slug-meat in which both fed and feeders incubate..."
M: "A human foetus?"
W: "Yes, I believe so, but it has too many of its own limbs and other appendages. And some of its parts have formed too early, others too late. With the swatches of hair, it looks older than ordinary time would allow. But too young to live. The thick cuckoo-spit heaves back and forth, as the earth shudders around me."
M: "It's incredible. There's also an earthquake in MY dream. the woman's body has slipped from the operating table and flaps on the floor like a fish. Its belly balloons further. Hard for me to keep upright, the floor angling back and forth like a frozen sea."
W: "I must be waking. I zoom up the chimney like a fire-devil."
M: "We'll soon be together again."
W: "Indeed, my love."
Then, the breathing grows less heavy, and finally ceases altogether.
Suddenly I realise that the bed now only tosses because of me underneath it. I have grown far too large for a believeable child. I feel my back hump violently, as if its spine is jutting, sawing, finning...
I am still sliding from deep folds of darkness in the floor, as the waking process takes full purchase. I am fleshing out as the dreaming screws existence with cross threads. I am in two minds whether to humour reality with my presence. I must stop the process of my physical existence, before it is too late for the world. I hope.
The floor beneath the bed has suddenly nothing there, but its carpet remains quite damp – and not with just urine.
****
At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.
And to my reasonable knowledge, I am a hawler, but at earlier stages I myself didn’t realise this at all. I so wish I had. Things might have turned out differently. However, still not knowing FOR CERTAIN whether I am a force for good or a force for evil makes me draw back from fully exercising the creative strength I know I possess. I even deign to compete with that Ogdon person – who, one day, first started writing his own novel in a city’s fountain square between four apartment blocks one of which, as it happened, housed the young Amy . As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in this right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.
Meanwhile, I need to introduce Greg. My alter-nemo. This is a more nebulous form of alter-ego. The late John Fowles invented the ‘nemo’ in contradistinction to the ‘ego’ or ‘id’ in his book THE ARISTOS. But such information inevitably interrupts the narrative flow. And narrative flow is the reason we are all here. One ambition that we all share, both as writer and reader..
Greg was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. His wife was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Greg surveyed the dips and dunes – almost FEELING them with his golf mind – as he took stance for his first teeshot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, assessing the relief map between him and the hole … and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his clubhead for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.
****
Arthur – despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc. – became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other passengers assuming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn’t otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver’s sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surreptitiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of ratruns and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his ‘brainwright’: an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.
It had been a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company’s inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver – despite all his driving documents being forgeries.
Arthur believed, in his childish fashion, that all meat was going off, but not simply growing mouldy, but LITERALLY going off (eloping?) with other meats from different animals, fishes and fowls, mixing, blending, into new concoctions of meat with arcane bone maps – all because of global warming.
These were big things. Global things. Symbolised by Arthur knowing instinctively that he could control big things just with the flick of his finger. Like the bus.
Amy before she had met Sudra had lived with Arthur – and their neighbours must have assumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister.
Yet, then, the horrors hadn’t yet started. Various strange words start to build up – as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did Amy and Arthur know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself. And worse still was having already lived through half of it via the creative medium of someone other than myself. Fixed for the wrong fiction, cross-grained against the truth, forming a diseased Canterbury Oak in my head. Or so it felt.
****
The area of the city where the covered market found itself was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. It had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not STRICTLY open-air or covered. On some days – when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom – it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these ‘walls’ looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. I dreaded going near that place, in case I was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn’t belong to the city at all.
Susan worked in Ogdon’s pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub – unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life – would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile worked there – a real place she couldn’t avoid as she needed the money.
I lived in a top floor flat in the city centre. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling as of yet more dreamers dreaming the covered/open-air market. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that you really did need to visit me there (although this was a dream and you weren’t really visiting me at all).
My carpet was much older than any building that ever contained it; I didn’t know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.
When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn’t matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.
I could not shake off another dream. A dream of a hawler but, this time, in its misshapen form as a Horla (or vampire).
****
"The meek shall inhairit the irth, as long as worter continyoos to flo under brijjes."
The words carved into the plaque above the door, despite being misspelt, were vaguely familiar to me, as if it were a line from a poem that I had learned by heart as a child – a real sledgehammer of a punishment, it had been – but which even parrots couldn't memorise perfectly, for love or money (or even birdseed).
The whole situation had the feel of a dream (even from within the dream itself), but also a version of deja-vu that had been implicated with reality's spectrum at its least believeable point. Life for me had indeed become a precarious offshoot from the circle which, as a child, I thought to be endless. And here I was touring an area that I'd not toured before ... even further west than geography could substantiate.
I was so dog tired and parrot pickled, this place with the funny words outside, purporting to be an inn as it did, became almost half welcoming. I was rather surprised how countryside could look run down. Cities and towns, yes. But for forests, hills, rivers and fields to be dilapidated, dirty brown grass, with shaggy trees and misshapen hedgerows, droopy horses pissing twenty four to the dozen, doleful cows dragging their red-raw udders along the stubbly ground, threadbare sheep tugging pitifully at the tussocks for sustenance only to spew them out again with yawning bleats ... well, this was not really the hiking trip I'd first envisaged when sitting in my top flat in the city.
Even the odd building or two were either stinking cowsheds or detached slums with doors hanging off – and urchins in the yard playing ugly.
I had today passed under a high aqueduct carrying Narrow Boats along a stretch of canal. These garish craft I jokingly depicted as nervous aeroplanes or stream-lined parrots. I laughed, suspecting that real aeroplanes must have hidden strings – how could they stay up in the sky, otherwise?
That had been my one proper act of sight-seeing all day. And I did not now feel like erecting a tent tonight. I desperately yearned for a real bed with clean crisp sheets and plump pillows. The day had been like a dream with life thrown in for good measure. Like those crazy canal boats, I felt I wanted to moor myself for the night on the firm ground of sleep, as it were, in the hope of real dreams making more sense.
Having forced my way through a clutch of foul-mouthed brats, I knocked on the door beneath the plaque. The building was, unusually for this area, in reasonable repair, each window shutter on two hinges and the pebbledash less like a dreadful disease than that on the walls of other buildings hereabouts. Even the soot stains were minimal, if slightly yellowier. It was a pity, therefore, when the front door abruptly toppled inward upon my knocking.
A beautiful wench was standing in what must have previously been a dark hallway, since she blinked furiously at me. Not that I myself considered that I was an intruder, more an unexpected visitor, a stranger losing his strangeness by the second. It wasn't my fault that this place had half the look of an inn: a single shutter was not only open upstairs but had the word HOSSPISS crudely painted on it. Could the fact that my polite knocking had caused the door to collapse in a shower of splinters be laid at MY door?
"Yes?"
The voice was as lovely as her face ... except the teeth were rather protruding. Her shortish frock flowed around her thighs like silky satin. Her unhaltered breasts were seemingly full plum-tipped and readily graspable. But then I noticed the chipped china chamber-pot positioned between her feet.
"Excuse me ... I don't know, but ... I thought you were an inn ... I'm very tired ... have you a room for the night?"
"With a bed?" The wench's question took me by surprise. "You see, we have some guests who don't need beds – even at the start of their stay."
In the distance behind me, I heard the unmistakeable sound of a canal boat horn. I even thought I could hear the rattle of lock paddles being worked, followed by the surge of water from the pound. Did I really want to stay here at all. Perhaps a ramshackle barn or, even, a haystack would suffice.
I whimpered a reply to the wench and fled so peremptorily I thankfully couldn't retain in my mind what we MAY have had time to do together. So, it was a mystery how I knew the inn had coffins, instead of real beds, slum coffins which would fall apart soon as one laid one's weary body upon their back-scratcherfuls of crumbly earth.
****
As I sluggishly returned to a waking state in the city, the anaemic amnesic parrot that remained for a while in my head couldn't remember much about the dream at all, let alone why my subsequent dreams featured the buxom wench necking me in her dark hallway ... amid an incessant splattering noise between her feet.
****
A bus doesn’t touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing TO float, two passengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.
“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.
I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.
****
Captain Nemo himself took the controls himself as the Drill docked at Klaxon City. Their first stop-over on their journey to the Core via Inner Earth itself.
Just before this manoeuvre, the leading windows in the Corporate Lounge had sufficiently cleared to afford a view of another inner sea lit lugubriously by a now unprotected Core ‘sun’. Their naked eyes had now been able to grow acclimatised to its combination of brightly icy scatter-orange and the contrastively wan effulgence actually given off from it (increasingly wan the nearer they approached it). The city of Klaxon was a vast collection of arabesque turrets peppering an out-of-place complex similar to a FIN DE SIÈCLE Paris on the banks of the Seine. And as the Drill burrowed nearer in a circling motion not unlike that of planes stacking up over an airport, Greg (invited into the cockpit itself) watched Nemo grapple with the joystick which was on a hair-trigger relationship with the Drill’s vanes, vanes that were currently working overload on vast amounts of mixed off-detritus. Greg feared that Beth and the two dowagers would be seeing even less than before from their rearward cabins. But that didn’t worry him for long as he grew fascinated with the docking pinion (on one of the turrets) that seemed to snatch the Drill in the same manner as old-fashioned catch-nets on the ancient railways collected letters and parcels without the train stopping.
A jolt – and then, even through the sides of the Drill, the relentless sound of a multi-tannoy system on permanent klaxon that gave the city its name. Greg could hardly imagine living a whole life in such a place with that noise echoing in your ears all over the city. Always with you. Accompanying work, love and play.
“Much like living trapped within one’s own body and its everpresent frightful tinnitus of antipodal angst,” said Nemo, as if having read Greg’s mind.
Greg shrugged. He wasn’t sure what Nemo was driving at.
****
I lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined me awake. I got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in my room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. It was very close to the ground without even space for ratruns or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.
I wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.
I found myself delving into the wood of the floor as if I had found an opening in human flesh – a natural vent, rather than one I had forced open with my fingers.
That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to me until I discovered myself delivering them … through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And I felt its thoughts as if they were my own thoughts.
All this had been in Ogdon’s novel, too. I could not shake it off sufficiently to warrant excluding it in my competing novel. I sensed Ogdon was intent on an unhappy ending for the world by means of the ‘truths’ he hoped to sculpt from his own version of those “synchronised shards of random fiction and truth”. By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us. You can’t destroy evils without having first set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.
****
Tears came to my eyes as I looked back at the various paths I could have picked on … chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so I could make the turning towards the goal I had once set myself.
In the distance, I heard the lonely sound of a helicopter – vanes clacking lugubriously – followed by the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty.
I returned to my sleep.
****
Many of the vehicles had been abandoned with no regard for the white lines that marked out the allotted spaces in the carpark. The snow that had covered the area had subsequently melted, thus giving an excuse for careless parking.
A shapely woman in a scanty frock approached the barrier, whereupon the ticket-dispenser machine thought she was a thing on wheels and handed her a reminder of the date and time printed on a stiff hard-to-lose card. She forthwith flicked it away into the darkness, as if participating in one of those ancient school-playground cigarette-card games – the blind-man's buff version.
She remembered that she sought a car (one with its headlights switched on) and a registration-plate matching the letters and numbers tattooed on her left breast – a combination she'd meticulously memorised the night before. If she ever turned into a nameless corpse, Dognahnyi would be in no doubt that it was her. The whereabouts of such a corpse would indicate the successful outcome of her mission – or not.
Yet none of the cars were alight. They simply squatted there like extinct baby-pods of prehistoric monster berserkers. She wandered in and out, unworried as to the floweriness of her own thoughts' language. She had been brainwashed only to take the illogical for granted. Amid the haywire aisles of scattered metal, she peered through the windows to ascertain the nature of any occupants and, if there were any, whether they were still alive and communicado. Not that she really wanted anything but an empty car. But the confusion derived from her training that she had received from Dognahnyi to seek that for which she did not seek, in the hope that such obliquity would lead her – by accident – to the thing she actually sought without knowing she sought it. Angel Wine. ANGEVIN. At this stage, her goal was unclear. As was the precise nature of the terror (dream terror or otherwise) she was obliged now to perpetrate.
The sky had just started to activate sprinkler-systems of disabled snow, which seeped as sleet into her skimpy clothes, giving her the SHYFRYNGS...
The headlights came on suddenly. Not merely one or, even, two. All the cars broke their vows of silence and erupted into a life which, if the very beginning of the world had been witnessed, this would appear to be its obverse at the very end of time. An abrupt awakening as a prelude to death. She was caught in the cross-glares, eyes blinking, heart thumping, her mind full with memories of those shafts of twirling lateral light stirring the war-stricken night of her youth.
Having used confusion as a subterfuge for clarity, she could hardly recall how she had clambered into one of the cars and driven it from the car park. Even without the all-important card, the barrier had lifted of its own accord, knowing that, if it had not, it would have been smashed to smithereens. Even stones did bleed in certain phases of the cold blue moon.
She steered quickly through the slanting icicles of rain, her high-heeled feet playing the engine like a bass organ. She knew the bomb in the boot may also have had a life of its own, its short fuse matched to her own feminine one.
The streets through which she drove were completely unfamiliar but, at the same time, she knew exactly when to take certain turnings. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she thought she could discern the dark shape of someone sitting in the backseat. Yet, darkness, when it saw fit, could take whatever fumbling form it wanted.
Ah, there was a bridge near the covered market: a mock-gothic affair which the street lighting moulded from almost nothing, so as to allow the river (or was it a railway track because the city didn’t usually boast a real river?) to be traversed as the crow (a very special crow) would drive. Was she mad? Or already steeped to the gills in Angel Wine? She felt an embodiment of someone else's dream. She felt calm, as she was certain that she had been warned about the encroachment of such madness. Madness was what made the job so dangerous. She would need to compare notes.
Driving to a halt at the brink of the bridge, she turned to see who may have been backseat-driving. But nobody there, only a pile of what appeared to be unwanted rubble from a building site. Or a dream Drill’s off-detritus.
She left the car and walked round to the rear where she could see tyre-tracks in the snow leading up to the back-wheels. The sleet had in fact resumed its snow disguise after settling. The marks were more akin to skids, as if she'd screeched to a halt and, on returning to the front, she saw why: the inky cut was just out of sight beyond the gaze of the headlights. The bridge was a cartilaginously cantilevered mass of pulsing flesh, ribbed further with engorged veins, parts fluted with perfectly linear tumours, other areas haphazardly sown with knobbly cancers beyond even the manufacture of crazy modern sculptors in clay or any other medium, and the pinions and stanchions upholstered with scarlet haunches of clumsily sawn meat – all being wrapped by snow and, conversely, dyeing it.
Snow? Or was it dry-powdered ANGEVIN, she suddenly wondered. But wondering did not absolve her inbuilt duty.
Tentatively, she first-footed upon the near edge of slimy gristle. It moved under her, as if hurt by her stilletoes. She shuffled forward, testing all the time, because the snow made nonsense of the structure's hidden strengths – like walking on a hammock, but with underlays of breathing, if not burping, animal-fat. Birdbodies were also embedded in the hardened surface of grease.
Halfway across, she looked back at the car, which immediately doused its lights as it trundled engineless in her wake. Amy was thus left invisible to anybody keeping watch. They could only guess whether she had reached the other side, before the boot blew up...
****
I woke from a dream. This had been a real dream. Others had not been dreams. They had been visions thrust upon me by some narrative trickery with which a mad Ogdon was trying to force me down byways that my destiny had no right to encompass.
I knew a real dream from a false dream. The former often contained words I’d never use, words I didn’t understand. Or was it the other way? Distinction was clear, if not the terms of the distinction.
****
The ceiling was quite ordinary, plain white, with a central rose whence the electric flex dangled towards its own pendant lampshade and dull yellow-glowing bulb. In ancient days, before ceilings were invented, they would have had strange beliefs about ceilings, no doubt. That they were ghosts in disguise would have been the strongest and strangest. Some even believe that today. Sheets of whitened surfaces marching through the city at the dead of night, like frozen wafers or thin slabs of ANGEVIN. Much like Charles Dickens’ walking coffins in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Far more believable, I believe, than the spontaneous combustion of Krook in BLEAK HOUSE. Floors were far more dependable, too. If not the ground itself.
John Ogdon was dreaming of over-flying his own pub in a helicopter, except the roof was hidden by the large overhanging buildings in the same street. Either warehouses or tall covered markets, the dream didn’t allow him to remember. He did remember, however, another dream when he was at a family dinner, believing himself to be one of the adults, so it was quite a surprise to find himself placed with the children on a lower table adjacent to the main table. He dreamed, too, of Klaxon City where the inhabitants spent their whole lives in ear-muffs, dodging around the backstreets eager to find sound-proof specialist clinics where they could remove their muffs and clean out their ears once in a while. They all looked dogged but cowed. Come morning, the dull yellow Core in their sky would bring no relief from the klaxon. At least there was never any wind, nor much weather at all. He then dreamed of his alter-nemo Crazy Lope, a tiny figure negotiating the ratruns and back doubles … hardly a time to be IDLY wandering, Ogdon thought, as his dream helicopter banked and disappeared further into the dark horizon of his sleep. I’ll leave him to his dreams. They are now redundant as is the rest of his machinations with the pen. He only wanted unhappiness for us all. I at least seek a happy ending. Not just a quest for a quest, as he did.
****
History, however, often needs to rear its head.
The helicopter hovered about the Drill as it sat ready upon the plateau of Left Foot. The helicopter, it seemed, spent hours hanging from the white ceiling that was the sunless sky. It was reconnoitring or spying for forces that remain mysterious until this very day. At points, one could even just discern the goggled pilot sitting stiffly in his bulb. He must have imagined the climbing race then going on between the attics and oubliettes of that very Drill’s interior until two as then unknown protagonists reached the top cabin at the Drill’s tailfin. He also watched many workers scaling the sides of the Drill filling the gills with vast barrels of a creamy lubrication. And then the helicopter ratcheted into a sleeker beast than a helicopter and soared even higher – to view the whole city ‘body’ striding like a pseudo-Dickensian imagining into some geographical future towards a point of the compass that was not actually any of the normal ones.
****
Today, I have been dreaming about floating above the sparkling sea in the early morning, upside down in a helicopter or balloon (more likely the latter as there seemed to be no noise) where the scintillating waves’ expanse between four identical wall-to-wall horizons was a ceiling or watery underside of some far firmer roof beyond it. I woke as soon as I approached land with the appearance through fresh mist of an ungainly pleasure pier.
****
We soon left far behind the hedgy tunnel entrance (now our only known exit to the above world, although an impractical one) – then following the hawling-system for a while, running its pulley-rope through our hands as a sort of guide and confidence-booster in the increasing darkness.
I could hear Amy and Sudra bickering over trivialities. Yet this was a strange comfort as it brought worldly concerns to a very unworldly situation.
If there is such a thing as global warming, then it’s not inside outwards, it’s outside inward, as the 'atmosphere' became colder and colder – until, just for a nonce, we were slightly warmed by a clearing of the darkness and a sudden thrilling vista of the Core like a sun in the roof, a roof that was, in hindsight, below us as a floor. But then the spherical light vanished just as quickly, with the re-onset of darkness. I knew we would catch glimpses of this from time to time on the journey, the disc-light growing bigger each time, but equally less warm.
How we survived and conducted ablutions (a euphemism for many things) and provided ourselves with comestibles I cannot now recall. Not recalling such things actually gives more credence to the events than recalling them clearly. It simply proves that whatever we did, we did successfully, because I am here now to tell you about the important matters: the journey and its eventual repercussions for us and the rest of the world. That’s why I cannot recall what Amy and Sudra were bickering about. Arthur kept his own counsel, although his mixing skills did come in handy (and this I do recall with relative clarity) with the preparation of comestibles from waste material.
Meanwhile, I have to admit I’d lost sight of Susan.
****
There was a glimpse of a figure of a caped man disappearing into the black backdrop of a huge liner in Dry Dock, as if he had nearly been caught spying on my dreams. The cranes on the liner and its gantries reminded me more of an old-fashioned coal mine where chains hauled up and down the man lifts. I heard the distant clanging of heavy-duty engineering – and I wondered, perhaps for the first time, how the liner had been transported here (so far from the river or the sea) and for what reason. This area had, I knew, been the site of a Dry Dock for several generations. Dreams are often too late to throw any light on more important matters that had already arisen.
****
Beth Dognahnyi came into the pub together with her husband but at the moment there was just one solitary pub regular talking about a dream he had the previous night. He was talking to himself, in truth, but Beth pretended to listen to enable him to believe that he was not just talking to himself, although he was.
“I was dreaming I was part of a crowd coming into the pub – a special rough cider was being offered at cheap price from a wooden cask. It was white cider. I wasn’t me in the dream but someone else. Good job as I don’t usually like cider and even though it was just a dream, I could really feel the bits of real apple with my tongue… You don’t expect roads with uncut verges, edges with hedges – and pavements with long weeds – in the city.”
It seemed he was remembering two separate dreams at once.
****
If children suddenly realise they exist, they ask themselves whereto the rest of their past childhood. Were they brother and sister, they wonder, or completely unrelated and, thus, perhaps, childhood sweethearts incubating a future marriage when they would tell their own children of their erstwhile romance resulting in their children’s own subsequent existence as children. But, for all they knew at this crosspoint of time, they may have common parentage, and they hugged in the cold darkness – in the vicinity of the open-walled market – one hug as childhood sweethearts, the next hug as siblings, believing they gambled on one hug being true, choosing, as it were, between a belief in God and a non-belief in God. Both equally comforting.
The late night bus passed in the distance, leaving a heavy silence. Although the darkness was cold, these two children were not cold at all. They had a carpet over them like a hard blanket. Their arms through rough-cut holes in its stiff weave. And the sound of rattly pulleys from the Dry Dock kept them company.
****
"Yes?" said Edith and Clare almost together.
Beth at last mustered the words to her mouth: "I've just realised ... we haven’t seen my husband or the Captain for weeks.”
They had been allowed off the Drill for a short break, whilst the stay at Klaxon City delayed the holiday for a time.
The other two had not heard exactly what Beth had said, as they were still preoccupied with the loathsome insects they had discovered beneath a stone.
It was almost midday by Corelight, a lightsource that the inhabitants seemed to call the Sunne (spelt out in their noticeboards and shop-window cards).
As the three women entered a derelict building for increased shelter from the klaxon, they were surprised to find its carpet covered in stones and lumps of larger rubble. A painting on the wall was the only decoration, depicting a ship in a storm; Clare, as she peered closer at it, saw that the ship was called 'The ReynBouwe' and was evidently sinking. She spelt out its name for the benefit of the others.
“Who's the painter?” queried Beth, half-heartedly. She thought that the ship's name was strange … strangely familiar.
“Can't make out the signature."
Edith was decked out in a soft-horn hat and heavily made up with turquoise under-eyes, a Proustian parasol hanging from her limp arm.
“What a mess!” said Clare, turning to view the despicable floor. Beth was admiring the marigold-window, in the wall opposite to the painting, which cast slanting lines of light through the dusty air.
“Edith, come here, though," urged Clare, who was now turning over stones in the corner furthest from the window. Clare, like Edith, seemed in her mid-fifties and, although not as smartly dressed, was more attractive than her. Her hair was fastened with a butterfly clip, but wayward wisps seeped out like smoke.
The stone she had turned revealed a wriggling knot of unrecognisable insects buzzing somewhat at the disturbance.
“Ugh!" Edith flinched off, waving her parasol like a sword. Beth turned from the window – a little white flake clinging to her lip like a remnant of food – and stared uncomfortably at her two companions. She needed to speak but evidently she was finding it difficult to make her mouth formulate the words; she just made embarrassing sucking noises.
Today was Sunne-Stead. A ceremony for which the Drill had delayed its journey.
Many had gathered on the quays to view, through optic-scopes, the temporary fixity of the city's light source. The various craft had moored to their turret-pylons for the duration, well out of the way; the Holy Stone had been cleared of tourists to allow the scientists to set out their telescopes and sextants at its topmost tower. Their other contraptions hung like intricate scaffolding from each cornerstone and gave the three women, who viewed the scene from their room, an impression of a clock-house that had been turned inside out. They adjusted their ear-muffs as the klaxon wailed on.
They had indeed intended to view Sunne-Stead from the marigold-window. The moment came and went. The Sunne, rising from West to East, shuddered to a halt, poised in the white hell of the ‘sky’ for what seemed almost a minute and, then, returned East to West.
The three women held hands in serenity for interminable hours, drawing as much spiritual significance as was possible into their communion. It was a frozen tableau, a mistress-piece and, as the heat gradually went out of the day, as ‘dusk’ met ‘dawn’ in the same quarter of the ‘sky’, their alabaster skin crumbled to the floor; and, if darkness came then the room would echo with the initial clumps of falling stones followed by the increasing clatter and final crescendo of collapsing masonry.
The black roof-sky was a Queen Catherine Wheel of the Inner Earth’s traffic, dodging in and out of the aperture-speckled wastes.
One man in particular climbed the tow-path of the city's central turret-pylon from which several craft dangled like dead horses, He found the one he had been seeking – 'The Reyn-Bouwe' – the name was painted in all-weather gloss on its side. He inserted his limbs into the contour-seat and launched himself towards the inner circles of earth. Pulling and pushing at various levers and gloating over just as many dials, he found himself spinning like a dying fly towards an under-sky where the Sunne was about to lift its cool rim. But, not being able to control the machine, the fuel burst and flew up into his face … like being sick on a funfair ride. The over-sky had turned turtle below him and he was diving, nose down, towards the last zenith, desperately struggling with the release harness in his seat. Fumbling for the mercy-ejection device, he lurched between what he believed to be two Sunnes in violent love with each other. He was surely dead.
The last fragment crumbled to the floor; and the marigold-window had been shattered by a shooting star-crag … or at least a crumb of one.
It was almost Midnight, almost Moon, and a slick of slime slowly slewed across the surface of the painting from a cake of wrigglers nesting in its frame.
From Stone to Sunne and back again, there were other lives and lovers dodging death and damnation, but in the utter solid darkness of Inner Earth, who knows whether there is a vast wide face between the two giant imaginary eyelights. And where's the mouth … or beak … for eating … for breathing … for speaking …for kissing? Megazanthus Rampant.
****
I took Susan’s hands. We had found each other yet again, destined, perhaps, to find each other time and time again. Each a romantic epiphany, but equally horrifically real in the implication of NEEDING to find each other time and time again. All thought of my step-daughter’s charms abandoned my mind when, within the darkness, I could no longer reconcile Sudra’s ugly sharp tongue with the beautiful body that I knew she wielded beneath the carpet coat. I belonged to her mother. I was Susan’s. And Susan was mine. My wonderful mine.
We had all encountered – on our downward trek – some increasingly common oases of light where the Core dispersed the Inner Earth’s darkness like the sun above ground often would disperse stormclouds – or even like such normal sun would take advantage of a riven nightsky to reveal an untimely evidence of its reflected antipodal earth-warming presence.
I tried to drag logic from the illogic of my mind, tried to explain something to Susan that I couldn’t really explain to myself properly – as we followed the others across the ground-housed landscape of Inner Earth.
****
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the tunnel:
SUDRA: I suppose we ought to make it up.
AMY: It wasn’t me who got so touchy about a pair of shoes!
SUDRA: I know, but with it all changing – and my step-Dad so ‘funny’ with me … I now need someone in this darkness to hold my hand and MEAN it.
AMY: OK, Suds. I’ve not been myself these days, I’m sorry, too. I feel something creeping around me.
SUDRA: What do you mean?
AMY: A sort of … another me. Another me I don’t want me to be. As if removing a veil inside my head. I can’t put it into words, Suds.
SUDRA: I think I know, Ame. What’s it trying to make you do? Making you imagine we’re walking in a tunnel heading for the centre of the earth or something? (Laughs)
AMY: Well, surely it IS a sort of nightmare. But it can’t be, can it? You’re there. I can feel you in the darkness like in the old days before things started going strange. And Arthur he’s still my brother, but on the other hand he's changed, I reckon. I know he has always been a bit queer, since a baby, but mixing up things from nothing in his ear!
SUDRA: Has he always had such a big left ear? (Laughs) Its lower gutter seems to contain all manner of substances!
AMY: Well, it’s always been bigger than his right, with a flap that allows storage at the bottom. The doctors said it was a birth aberration and, short of serious surgery, they thought he would need to live with it. It wasn’t so noticeable then.
SUDRA: It’s huge now! Still, would we be able to survive without him?
AMY: By the way, did you watch the latest light period when the Core came out?
SUDRA: It was longer than usual. Yes. It was more stripey, with dark and light together, sort of.
AMY: I thought the shape of the uncleared dark bits that formed together around the Core looked like a giant black bird, its wings stretched as if there were things trying to tear it apart.
SUDRA: I see what you mean, Imagination can play all sorts of tricks.
AMY: OR it really was what I saw.
Both girls had a bout of the SHYFRYNGS as they settled in each other’s arms to sleep; now silent as both suspected – without telling the other – that their conversation was being earwigged.
****
Near to the open-walled market or underground station, there was a tall building, access to which was by lift – indeed a very complex lift system which Greg often used before he was made redundant from his job in that building. He used to entertain business clients and had to help them negotiate the lift system – changing on specific floors for different lift shafts of higher reach. Some shafts were more palatial and business-orientated than others, some so narrow they could only be used for brooms or very thin utility workers. The highest shaft reached the open air area, leafed over like a wood. From there, once, Greg was sure he could see the distant sea through the unusually clear sky into which the wood penetrated. He imagined a finer, less definable surface barely above the sea but otherwise imitating its waves and swells – a double skin in perfect unison, but the lower one liquid, the upper spectral. Perhaps the second one was the ghost of a giant flying carpet taking invisible human vessels towards Arabian Adventure or towards the darker motives of suicide than seaside. And then the same building in duplicate appeared from the clouds and speared ITSELF about two-thirds of the way up. The ultimate suicide by architecture. But that is deja-vu history of sorts and only has bearing on itself. History of history. History hugging the same history, without reality to come between their embrace. His story. My story. Nostory.
****
The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.
****
In these hard, awkward days in your distant future when a Horla cannot even get a decent drink, my plight brings tears of a pink cast to my eyes and a faint quiver of the upper lip upon my toothsome fangs.
It's the Black Drought that did it. I cannot bring myself to syphon up just ANY blood unless I know where my subjects have been. Creatures from the ancient past, such as yourselves, are no use to the likes of me. Too much of the BAD blood, if you see what I mean.
My suffering is becoming so piquant, I'm having to find other means of sustaining my undead soul ... this soul which is the Way Station of the mutated veinwork of my carnal body. Only in Horlas can the logic of Nature really be seen for what it is; only on being born an Undead, can one truly follow the uncharted mazes of God's work.
Anyway, enough of philosophy – back to my urgent theme, the plight of my kind in your unreachable future where a dream sickness prevails, a dream sickness from which you cannot free your restful wings of sleep. A lack of sleep, a lack of 'blackness' draining, depleting, disfiguring your waking life it seems forever. A Black Drought that you suffer as utter sleeplessness – because of wall-to-wall dream interruption.
You may well ask: why is the wasting away of a Horla deprived of its external blood sources not as bad as that of you unfortunate victims of the Black Drought that I've just described?
Well, we Horlas know full well why.
Ours is an infinite wasting-away whilst yours is finite.
Let me lay it on the line: in periods of cyclic Cosmic Menopause, we can, at least, like a parthenogenetic camel, as it were, survive upon recycled blood. Perhaps I should give you a lesson in the biology of the Undead. Blood in, blood out. That's our catchphrase. Most food that YOU used to consume turned dark brown on exit. On the other hand, blood that WE imbibe stays bright red, as pure as the day it was pumped by the young supple hearts whence it came. But, until these post-Drought days, it has always been deemed crudely cheating and almost unchristian amongst we Nosferatu Fraternity to recycle blood. But when needs must...
****
I'm in terrible trouble. Æons have now gone by. And still no supply of fresh blood. What I have left is growing pinker and pinker like paraffin the more I use it.
As even the tiniest moments of time pass, I am sure my bowels are growing their own teeth or beaks between the various byways of the intestines. Even the most unlikely inner and outer orifices of my body seem to be cutting a molar or two. It may be in my mind, but my innards are so desperate they are moving about like separate creatures within my body, searching for the nooks and crannies where real blood – my original birthright when I was a mortal like you – is secretly stored.
Am I to experience a real death for the first time? I feel my own bifurcating bones suckling gently upon the slowly emptying sump within my innermost reaches, the last refuge and sanctuary for my own blood from the thirsting beaks within me, beaks that now have jaws.
****
It was known by the Megazanthus that any dream sickness affecting the rest of Reality did not affect the Core. Anywhere else on or in the earth that claimed such a distinction would necessarily be a perpetrator of an inanimate lie.
The Coreseekers who approached the Core via drilling, burial-by-another-party, exploratory pot-holing, self-interment-by-shame or simply merciful immolation knew similarly that, there at the Core, they would be free of deceiving dreams … and what they would see – as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure within the Core – were REAL animals and creatures, one of which was the Megazanthus itself, the ‘zookeeper’ who also occupied a cage of its own to disguise not only its identity but its capacity for infinity.
Only when the Coreseekers were asleep, at the Core’s very own core, did they know they would be deliberately exposing themselves to dreams – unlike in any surrounding Reality where sleep was not a prerequisite for dreams.
The entrance to the Core was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in the less desirable parts of Outer and Inner Earth. There was a turnstile – just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most Cores in any planet would need. The turnstile was unimpeded and the Coreseekers emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen but their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages. Why an empty enclosure was the first display often mystified Coreseekers, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth.
The empty enclosure at the start of the tour – it was discovered – was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping Coreseekers. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, their own vestigial ghosts bawling in disappointment.
The Coreseekers tried to pacify their own ghosts by pointing to the corridors of cages where the Coregrounds proper, apparently, would start – or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the beaked plankton that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for such creatures. They wanted to see BIG things at the Core. Like the Megazanthus itself.
Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most Coreseekers, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages – a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of Megazanthus-imitators, many just small apes. Further on, however, kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited creatures could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other – and even uncomfortably close towards the Coreseekers themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.
The remarkable fact – despite the circumstances – none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was not a dream ... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.
****
Greg, stopping over at Klaxon City, looked up into the ‘sky’. There was something lovely about an overhead expanse that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from his mind. He had dreamed of the Core as a zoo, where the Corekeeper was in one of the cages.
A good hawler, he guessed, could plumb heights as well as depths for substance, sustenance and reassurance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, Klaxon's 'sky' (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphonously from inner horizon to inner horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were others of a more name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew this for a while till he realised he was not a hawler at all. Because I was the hawler, here in the tunnel much nearer the Core than Klaxon City! I laughed. But Susan didn’t wake. I always kept my laughter to myself.
****
The woman soon saw the man standing at the open bedroom window watching a huge black vulture-moth slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give him a hug from behind. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his buttocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. All they could hear was the incessant klaxon that no longer warned them as all warnings should but now simply thrummed at levels of the hearing to which thresholds of sound had accustomed themselves.
He turned round – forcing her also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he’d heard a shuffle or a whisper – but there was nobody there. He picked up the freshly delivered Daily Klaxon from the table – as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary – and read the main headline:
MUD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS
Unaccountably, he thought of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Then of some other history nearer to home, a World War that affected England like a dream once slept through … despite all the evidence that it had been all too real.
****
She had been only a little girl. The war was in the process of being historically positioned for its allocated length of time – sufficient to take it from the day it started to the day it ended. It gave her blitzkrieg instead of nightmares: skyfuls of flak piss-sparking like God's migraine.
She had not been evacuated from the city, because nobody important enough was aware of her existence. There existed a small coterie of other similarly placed children who squatted in the corner of the otherwise empty schoolyard, exchanging shrapnel as their predecessors used to exchange marbles or prize conkers.
Her parents chose to ignore her. She slept in the backdorm and was not even invited into the Andersen shelter when air-raid sirens started their interminable thrumming across the city and the bombers droned in upon her ear-drums. She crept further down under the duckdown, trying to blot out the insidious rumble of dark shapes which she imagined to be in the even darker sky.
Somewhere inside her, she remained confident that there would be no direct hit upon the house, but a doubt niggled; hence the fear, hence the encroaching terror. Even when prototypes of unmanned Doodlebugs abruptly regained the volition to cut their engines at the point when they potentially sounded at their loudest, the splintering explosion always finished up streets away toward the covered-market area of the city.
One of the other kids who lurked by day in the school playground was a strange whimsical boy called Arthur. He possessed an over-grown ear on one side of his face. She could not usually bear to look at him, as he rotor-bladed cigarette cards into the street from between the spear-like railings. One ear was quite normal, whilst the other sported a lobe like a pink duffle-coat hood. The larger ear's curlicue innards seemed biologically untenable and extraneous holes formed in the fleshy labyrinth at every opportunity of rupture. She imagined, when Arthur became older and consigned to the trenches of another war, he'd be able to stub out his cigarette ends in that ear-lobe ... only to scoop them out later and make them into the longest joint in the world, to outlast the sleepless night – with only its red glistening tip comforting the other restlessly fearful souls who would bivouac close by.
As the regressive cycles of war turned into huge wastelands of spent history, she and Arthur were eventually the only two left unevacuated in the playground. And so, eventually, she began to acknowledge Arthur, although his strange ear still bothered her with its bizarre ugliness. She even grew to care for him like an older sister would. And, as the summer became endless, they took to staying in the playground come the night and cuddling each other while the sky lit up with one false dawn after another ... and they pored over the depictions of car-makes upon the sweet-cigarette cards.
During the sporadic attacks, Arthur heard the rumblings of the bombers louder and deeper than she did, since one of his ears was, after all, tantamount to a radar dish.
One night, before the summer finally ended, the blitz was brighter than normal, often illuminating the barely discernible roof of the covered market and empty Dry Dock, and lasting well past daybreak. Such prolonging brought about the first air-raid to take place in the cold light of the sun. Like daylight fireworks. So, the two children could now see the dark shapes for what they really were: angels in splints, one of which looked heavy with child, soaring against the sun as if trying to obtain retribution, as any night creature would.
Soon enough, the angel’s belly yawned open.
****
Arthur wept as he heard, by means of his inner ear, the girl’s barely discernible whispering from the toilet across the other side of the playground – that she really loved him and would do so forever and ever. Then, there were left no kids at all to exchange shrapnel or flick sweet-cigarette cards. There was only a flap of smouldering ear-flesh spiked upon a railing. And other small joints of butchered meat scattered randomly between the white-painted netball lines of the playground. Luckily, Arthur and the girl were always too young to realise that they'd probably never grow up to be grown-ups. And the girl’s mother would never know that her daughter had even gone missing under the onset of history. The mother did, however, try to re-incarnate her daughter from her innards. But she had already dreamed a forgotten dream that a doctor had put an ear to her stomach and said it would be a boy.
Just some of the accidents of fate that interpenetrate history, looming a layer of woven time that we all walk upon from one room of our lives to the next.
****
I have forgotten how I described myself earlier: and I now try to find the essential Mikeness of me.
“I ought to try looking UNDER the earth,” I said to myself.
Whatever the case, I would try more than anything now to shake off those encroachments of doctored repetition that were Ogdon’s original wordings in his novel and, thus, give more rope to my own words and concepts. Otherwise, there would be some danger of his novel becoming the victorious prevailing reality: a fact which would be a vast disappointment to us all, as my own novel was the only novel that contained a happy ending.
HAWLING, after all, is dragging positive from negative and crystallising it. A novel is shorthand for a novelty trying to find its permanent fixture or berth as a well-established truth. And my scatter-brained extrapolations from all manner of different truths and fictions were – and still are – trying desperately to fit their novel jigsaws of shard into the ultimate picture of probability and, from probability, learning to summon the sinews of certainty … carving the perfect dimensions (inner and outer) of the sphere where we can live forever happy and content, having defeated those who wanted to smash it to smithereens even before it was formed.
There, the definition of hawling … at last!
Yet, meanwhile, I had to face one problem. It was Ogdon who first created Mike as a character and, therefore, by syllogism, myself! It was like trying to unclog the throat of my existence from the choking flying-threads in the air I involuntarily breathed to maintain that existence in the first place.
****
The children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets – of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Some in little better than makeshift carpets fashioned into coats. Most tried to discover each other’s names.
In the distance, one of the other children heard the thrum of traffic – as if the city had started to re-ignite – and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.
Things were evidently coming back to life after the strobe systems of reality had jolted out of kilter for a short few moments.
“But nobody will ever find it again. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.
The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play – seeking the Second World War bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore – having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz … but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it – and why they had to find it … and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.
****
The city of Klaxon had gathered to bid farewell to the Drill on its renewal of burrowing towards the earth’s Core. Greg shaded his eyes from the Corelight, like a salute, as he gazed towards a deceptive hill, a hill that had grown from two vast encroaching earthworks shifting together towards the variable cavity-space that housed Klaxon – shifting together during the Drill’s stopover. A huge Canterbury Oak seemed to be standing proud upon this hill above the city turrets and ‘Parisian’ quarters, bellowing out its wild, tortured wailing within the echoing hollow that was Klaxon. The multi-tannoy system that was used to imitate its wailing had been switched off, whilst the real thing reclaimed its ability to fill the city with its siren.
There would be no fireworks to mark the Drill’s departure because no fires and resultant smoke were allowed in Klaxon. For obvious reasons.
Beth and the two dowagers boarded in advance of the businessmen class’s own ceremonial boarding – especially as the women had further to go. Right up to the top for the rear cabin, where the Captain – it has to be said – had arranged for some redecorating by Klaxon workers – so as to make the journey more comfortable and easier on the eye. Adjustments had also been made to the huge insectoid vanes on the Drill’s outside so as to help improve the views from the rear cabin’s windows once en route via renewed intra-uterine burrowing.
Beth recalled the vision of two huge eyes in the Klaxon 'sky' and she shuddered, having now forgotten whether the ceremony of Sunne Stead had been a dream or real life. She had forgotten, too, self-evidently, that there were no such things as unrecognised dreams within Inner Earth. So it must have been real. Clare and Edith were too preoccupied with their next choice of books from the Drill’s library to care either way.
Greg took one last backward look at Klaxon, wondering if he would ever be able to relive his adventures there. They would make a small book all by themselves.
He also recalled the multi-manhandling of the mighty Drill from its pylon-turret’s pinion, with some difficulty, by the Klaxon workforce. But, eventually, the Drill was pitched upon the banks of the river near Klaxon’s own Notre Dame Cathedral, the bit-tip once more poised over burrowable terrain. He imagined that the bit-tip’s whirring and eventual screeching as it met the under-surface would out-noise even the city’s wailing sirens themselves. Meanwhile, the Canterbury Oak, with gigantic bole, but sparse branches aloft, was still etched against the wan Corelight. Now silent. Hence the renewed man-made sirens opening up their avant-garde threnody à la Ligeti or Penderecki.
The other businessmen whom Greg had hardly examined during the first part of the journey were still nebulous figures or an undercurrent of company rather than specific hard-drawn faces of mutual communication – but they were no doubt due to share the Corporate Lounge’s facilities with him again. Hogging cocktails and anchovy munches and canapes. This time he thought he recognised one of them. At first a waft of Ogdon’s smell. But, without the cape, Crazy Lope looked quite different. He didn’t seem to be out of place. So IN place, therefore, so basically unnoticeable that, in the end, Greg didn’t notice him at all.
He just day-dreamed of their overground City following them on, digging with its airport arms.
****
There were many cities within Inner Earth. Klaxon is just one example. Whether the Drill itself or even the party travelling simultaneously through dark tunnels in an attempt to beat the Drill to the Core would visit it, one of those other cities whose repute has filtered to the overground is Parsimony.
There were four long hills leading up to the centre of the city, whereupon its Ancient Fathers had seen fit to erect an architectural folly, a giant tower that leant in all directions at once. Some of the inhabitants, when they actually deigned to look up at it from their daily strife for life, saw it more like an inverted pyramid. But, mainly, it was just there, a landmark that nobody any longer bothered to notice.
So, when new arrivals used to come in across the neighbouring cavity’s scrublands on a packhorse, he (and, on rare occasions, she) would be stunned by the apparently unstable megalith rising and widening from an already high point of Parsimony, up to which the huddled, makeshift beast-sheds, that served as shelter for citizens as well as their beasts, crawled, without any worthwhile gaps for movement between.
There had been no new arrivals for some years. The cavity winds, caught up in some cyclic intraglobal panic on the ice runs that another neigbouring cavity contained, had worsened for several seasons, making Parsimony further from the thoroughfares of holidaymakers or Coreseekers.
Then, out of the blue, during a particularly long pandemic of freak mildness, came one – side saddle – across the cavity’s wastes. Dressed as a woman should be, she was seen to lift her hand to her brow to shade the dust-choked Corelight from her eyes, as if surveying, with in-built sextants and balances, the height of the folly-tower. She must be an architectural student, working out a doctorate on the wonders of Inner Earth, the citizens thought, as they raised their eyes from dredging the accumulations of dust from their earthen floors.
They did have pride for the folly-tower that dominated, but did not encroach upon, their daily existence. However, as soon as a stranger was espied on the otherwise unnoticed cavity’s horizon, they became conscious, not only of their own shortcomings but also of the tower's representation as the last vestige of the Ancient Fathers, as bequeathed by that one particular item of folly.
The inn was crowded, which was unusual for that time of day. The landlord had spent most of the morning clambering over the roof, cleaning out the gutters and patching up the holes which seemed to break open every season of untimely mock-weather. He brushed off the dust as he bustled into the bar area, cursing the day he was born. When he saw the amount of people crowding round the pumps of ANGEVIN, mouths open, he cursed even louder, for there was nothing more irritating than customers.
“Hey, what do you think you lot are doing?”
“We’ve come to partake of your lousy Angelus Vino, mine host,” jeered one lad with lights in his eyes.
The rest nodded diffidently in assent.
“Well, you can all pack off till nearer closing time. I’ve too much to do to deal with the likes of you, today. Up on the roof, just now, I saw one coming ... who looks a sight more respectable, AND a lady at that! She won’t want to mix with any old company and she’s bound to step off here, this being the inn.”
“Come down off it, you think she’ll stick her nose in this dump?” continued the young lad.
Suddenly, all heads turned as the door opened, and in strode the stranger that many in the city had seen coming since earlier on, when the young, dust-free Core had etched her silhouette upon the most distant cavity’s horizon that they could manage to see with their retractable eyes.
Their vision was now out on stalks, as they explored every nook and cranny of her garb. They didn’t know it was rude to stare; she stared back.
The landlord was the first to move, striding over to her, holding out his hand – she did not take it.
“Welcome, madam, I hope your stay here will be fruitful and don’t mind these gawping gents, they’re just going....”
And he motioned them out the back way. Turning again to the stranger, he went on, “Can I offer you a mouthwash, a waft of roasting bird-carcass, a clean ladle of...”
“No, no, I’m only here to seek directions to the folly.”
Her voice hinted at breeding, slightly masculine in its overtones, but underlaid with a lilting dialect that betokened feminine upbringing.
The voice was, however, furthest from the landlord’s attention, when he realised that the stranger was blind. The eyes were shards of grey pottery; but her fingers were long, slender, more feeling and manipulative than any he had ever seen; they were playing a braille compass-box as if it were a musical instrument.
Her steed snickered outside. The landlord, at a loss for words, asked whether she would like to bring it in for a watering, before venturing up one of the long hills to the Ancient Fathers’ monument, as he preferred to call it.
She shook her head.
“I’ve spent most of my life getting here, dear sir, through all manner of mock weather systems, and this...” She pointed to the revolving wheel-spikes of the compass-box. “...my trusty box of tricks, has got me here. But now, all I can find with my feet are splintered wood, disused fences, corrugated iron sheets, cries of child and beasts as one, and no way through them to that I most want to see. So pray, don’t dilly, just give me the once over for the top!”
She used the word ‘see’ as if it held all the mystery of the universe.
Darktime was later because the Core had steered clear of the worst of the duststorms. It was still a relatively uncorrupted scatter-orange eye as it set behind the distant northern hills in a different cavity.
The folly, to those in the southern reaches of the city, hid the last golden rays and stood out like a vast triangle which, for long, had bean emblem of their faith in religion. Many kneeled in penitence, not with faces upraised, for very few could look up at it with equanimity: it would remind them too much that the past has no longer duration than the future. It just shadowed their temples, granting an unremarkable peace, and as the Core finally left their world for the next in line, the darkness became everything, no longer just the trinity shape on the hill…
As darkness took the shanties fully in its embrace, one could only hear the odd howls of beast and babe, and even those intermittent reminders of life’s light-time took their noises into dream.
But one still sat awake. She had reached the foot of the vast inverted pyramid, where mathematics (or some arcane version of that science which only the Ancient Fathers had known) balanced the apex upon the central proud fulcrum of the township, allowing incredible balancing feats and inner strengths to take the line of least resistance ... which was the perfection represented by the unwieldy up-widening chaos of the superstone perched upon comparatively next to nothing.
She recalled the landlord’s amusing chatter as he himself led her to this place of quiet. The landlord himself was somewhere near, snoring louder than the beast that had carried her.
ENDING (A)
She smiled. With her box of tricks fast-churning within her hand, she reached out to touch the vibrant surface of the tapering base, in the hope that it would fulfil her as much as it would drain her. Perhaps she could lay off her blindness upon it, somehow, as many had told her of its curative properties.
She stumbled. At the very end of her tortuous quest, she fell over the outstretched leg of the landlord and careered into the monument. She could not see it, but she knew it as if instinctively: the massive block teetered, righted itself momentarily, and then hurtled from its plinth down the screaming slopes, in all directions at once putting out of misery all in its paths finally, coming to rest, in several halves, and brooded henge-like for the rest of eternity within the Parsimonious cavity.
The landlord had been in one of its paths, so his dreams were cut short. She shrugged and hugged herself to sleep.
ENDING (B)
She smiled. She would be neither blind nor a woman. She walked up the sloping side on the inverted pyramid, defying all the gravities known to man, her box of tricks whirling and clicking in her hand.
“Blimey!” said the landlord, on awakening to a renewed Corelight that was clearer than any he could remember. “What am I doing here? It’s cold, soon to get hot — no doubt. Must have dreamed myself up here.”
He wandered down the long hill, dodging in and out of those yawning from the ‘beast sheds’. He was in a hurry, for otherwise he would be late for opening time, with many customers wanting a drink of ANGEVIN before breakfast.
Halfway down the hill, he looked back, without really knowing why. He had gazed a thousand times up to the monument, without properly ‘seeing’ it, but today it filled him with a glory.
The folly was his God, the only way to face out the Absurd; no need to keep staring at it, for it wouldn’t go away. It was rude to stare in any event.
He got back to his inn and he welcomed his customers with a very special ‘happy hour’.
This ending seemed far better to him. He smiled.
****
Having a CHOICE is the only happiness.
Having a choice of ending is the optimum ending … eventually.
“A chosen unhappiness is better than an unchosen happiness,” are the convincing words I whisper into what I hope is the left ear of the headlease narrator’s head.
Susan stirs in her sleep and asks me in empty dark echoes: “What did you just say?”
****
Dognahnyi had returned to his pent-flat and stared at a flatter day that welcomed him back from a short unexpected strobe-holiday: stared, too, upon an even flatter threadbare carpet, which he had not bothered to replace for years, despite being otherwise surrounded by hi-tech equipment together with what he boasted to be an original Rubens on the wall opposite to the other wall where glowed the closed drapes-on-silent-runners.
Amy, the new recruit to his level of narration, had also disappeared with the initial abrupt strobe-out, but, unlike Dognahnyi, she had not returned here to continue the interview. Perhaps she thought she had already passed the necessary tests, before being strobed out. However, he feared she might have been caught up in last night’s explosion in the Moorish quarter of the city – near the Bridge. However, it was more likely (he hoped) that she had already joined her alter-nemo in the tunnel’s level of narration, i.e. two levels below Dognahnyi’s own.
He laughed. The day was suddenly becoming less flat. He knew there were two main narrative levels below his headlease narration – i.e. John Ogdon (aka ‘Hilda’) and myself (Mike). Both in intense rivalry to produce the ‘truth’ of the event-conspiracies, dream sicknesses, contaminations etc., although Dognahnyi sensed the narrator he knew as Mike was too sentimental for such machinations since Mike had already admitted he was intent on a happy ending. Little did Dognahnyi ACTUALLY know, however. HE was not the headlease narrator at all. There was one level above him which pulled all the strings, including his.
However, Dognahnyi actually SUSPECTED that he might not be in complete control. He would not have been strobed out (albeit momentarily) if he were in COMPLETE control. But this suspicion was little more than sub-conscious, a synaptic undercurrent that hardly vibrated his thought cortices. However, the suspicion was subtly symbolised by his own tingle of fantastical belief that the city around him was also underground to other cities – just like Klaxon and Parsimony and Agra Aska were, in turn, underground to his own city. The sky in Dognahnyi’s city was indeed filled with stars, yes, but these were perhaps pinprick apertures to a further upper world where people were as yet preparing to travel to explore Dognahnyi’s city in Drills and pot-holing expeditions. He loved fantasising. The real City itself, the one around him with covered market, Dry Dock, derelict zoo etc., was perhaps itself a living creature preparing to lift its airport arms and follow its own corpuscles’ flightpaths to the essential Core of things. But then fantasising was a thing you could take to the Nth degree and still allow the brain to survive to deal with more down-to-earth concerns such as his imminent supper…
…and such as the contaminations. Dream spam. Riots in real life between dreamers from different nightmares. Dream terrorism – where no cause was too slight to warrant dream-suicide in its pursuance. Day-dream junk of confused waking. Contaminations where animal meat and bird meat welded together, even dead bits of each shuffling together in various fridges: yearning to weave threads of sinew together into the weft and woof of new palpitating substances. Dognahnyi even speculated on giant insects. If you cut them up, would their ‘meat’ be meat as he understood the term? There was a theory that insects when blown up out of proportion were the instigators of meat-off-the-insect-bone that resembled a interpenetrative mixture of poultry and beef, interleaved with yellow insect fat.
He returned to making his supper. Fantasy, even the dream-concerns of narrative level, must take a backseat to survival, he thought, as the blue flame bloomed from his cooker-hob beneath the frying-pan.
As he cooked, he speculated on his own definition of ‘hawling’, viz. dragging truths through various levels of competing narrations towards crystallisation.
****
In the past, Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.
I pointed into the sky, drawing attention – for Susan’s benefit as well as Sudra’s – where I saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a Black & Decker drill the size or a real lorry – but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus … followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada … until I realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys … soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter’s … until that shock became real as I watched one of them accidentally clip another – with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even my feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky – more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet – and I prayed that they would not crash anywhere near our own house … a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened our lives which were far more valuable than property.
****
“The walls were red,” one of the children said, a girl with bushy blonde hair, meaning to say they were read like a book. Or perhaps she did. The Yellow Book, however, blended into the wallpaper and remained unread.
I nodded. I did not wish to approach her, because these days touching was not allowed, even by teachers. I pointed to a huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock – not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit – had long become a fixture on the city’s skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance – presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed – was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who – despite the frantic searching by the Authorities – were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper…
I suspected that there was more to this trade in Angel Wine than met the eye. The girl looked as if her veins were full of it. Bulging all over like raised contours on a wall-map of a soft Antartica.
****
Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened then and nobody listened now, especially as he wasn’t there … but someone or something was still there with the same speech on tape-loop. Or, rather, was it a flesh-corrupted ghost … or was it a spirit-diluted body? The voice SOUNDED like his own, despite the lack of mouth muscles or any possible throat/chest resonation. But the voice was clear, nevertheless.
VOICE REFLECTION: “There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga – and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills – and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like ‘Angerfin’ on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing….”
TAPEWORM-LOOP: Want another drink, Craze?
****
Greg dreamed at night, as the Drill plugged on towards the Core, window views forgotten for a while, as the vanes struggled against the worst rubble-storms in even Captain Nemo’s memory. Greg dreamed of when he worked in an office.
I usually went to bed in my body.
Dreams were like swimming through gluey blood and skin, desperately trying to keep my head above the curdled folds of flesh.
By day, however, I became a ghost. I left my home at home. Along with all the other commuters from dream to real life, I sought a working train which would take me, without mishap, to an end-of-line station – where I could latch on to an individual of my random choice and haunt its bodily home which it had brought to work for the duration of the increasingly endless day that I would have otherwise had to endure. I preferred irritation to boredom.
A ‘he’ today, I was soon to gather.
Using the windows at the front of his skull, I could peer down at the office papers on which he was currently working. But, what was that? He kept looking at a young female creature a few desks away in the office – perhaps he wanted to ask her out. I wouldn't have truck with such peccadilloes, so I forced the muscles at the back of the neck to relax, so that he could return to the proper business at hand. However, I misjudged the neck's elasticity and it abruptly flopped over, as if it were hinged at the middle. The head thumped the desktop, knocking over his cup in the process, the contents of which, luckily, slurped across the green blotter-pad – with a strange geography of stains.
"Are you OK, Greg?" Evidently, the voice belonged to Greg's boss, unseasonably released from the manager's office aquarium.
For the rest of the day, I left so-called Greg very much to his devices, if not on his own. After all, he knew best in the circumstances. But it WAS more than just an irritatingly hairy ride on the flesh fairground. I had no taste or discrimination when choosing hosts and companion-minds for my daytime existence as a benign parasite.
Greg had a headache. Since leaving the train which had taken him from his home to the City centre, a feeling of nausea and heaviness had seeped from the attic basin to lower sumps of thought and feeling – not that I would have expected Greg to be in tune with such a way of describing his unaccountable spiritual predicament. He shook himself like a sopping wet mongrel. This must be what a woman experienced at the wrong time of the month, he found himself thinking without really thinking.
The office lighting blared. Since the Firm had decided to move, Greg simply knew that he would never be able to endure those air-conditioned office wastes. A one man Sick-building Syndrome, that was what he feared he was destined to become. The light fitments were dysfunctionally concealed behind false ceilings. The lift systems far too complicated. And the roof-garden prone to aerial buzzing. Each disorientated department had its own identical 'bay', where the open-plan design caused confused faces to scrutinise each other across the wide clerical areas, rather than knuckling down to the core work. Line-management sat behind tinted glass partitions, not unlike frogs in aspic, sporadically blinking as they kept watch on the their office 'young'.
Greg considered himself too old to be watched. Yet, today, it was not age that irritated him, but thoughts that kept coming unbidden to his mind. Usually, he accepted his lot in life: poring over meaningless actuarial statistics of mortality and morbidity – whilst growing towards the old age pension that waited like a little yapping monster at the end of time's telescope which he often held up to his eyes the wrong way round. Today, in short, he saw everything for what it was: close up: in skin-pore detail: the girl's pimply face...
He studied the coffee stains which he had so carelessly prevented from spilling. He felt the back of his neck, discovering nodules he never knew were there. The green blotter had already dried into ... a face ... yes, that was what it was ... a configured face ... not a pattern of islands which he'd never thought it was in the first place. As in those scribbling, doodling childhood games, he added a few biro lines to the otherwise haphazard blotches, smuts and smudges ... then, slowly, there gathered the features of one he recognised from erstwhile forgotten dreams. Unaccountably, he wrote "Weirdmonger" underneath, finishing the word with the automatic flourish of a signature.
Greg suddenly sensed a load lifted from his mind as he reached the railway station in the evening. But he wondered if he was on the right platform, as everyone seemed to be congregating on the opposite one. He had already struggled across the river, his legs like soft iron, a hand in his pocket to keep in place a hastily prepared ad-hoc nappy against his incontinence. The other faces that floated with him through the adhesive air turned to neither side, whilst he kept a weather eye open to all quarters, expecting the worst. A distant tower was almost sentient as it reared from the screaming orange oils of the sunset like a pair of siamese-twin creatures that cantilevered in slowmo progress through the slimy river gunk. Over his shoulder, barely discerned through a hairline crack in the back of his skull, was the gold-pulsing tip of the liner in Dry Dock, as if it were flinching from a ghostly swarm of second-world-war fokkers. The far-off entrance to the station was a gate to Hell, each trundling strand of traintrack-humanity loosely-coated with fireproof shells of costume jewellery.
Resuming attention to the frontward view, without turning his head, Greg's eyeball ratchet-zoomed upon its red-veined stalk and managed to see, in the tapering distance, a blurred roof of what was once known as the covered-market, but now it was an Unidentified Flying Object – albeit planted in the ground, unlike those that once floated above in earth's tidal ether. But that was strange, because it was now commonly accepted that there was nothing surrounding the earth but the KNOWN universe – which, to his mind, if not mine, made UFOs obsolete.
I was glad to escape such an irritating mishmash of thoughts. I dislodged myself from Greg's bony meat-haven and fastened myself to the back burner of the train as it sped southward. I could see Greg dangling his erstwhile crutch-pad from the window like a ragged army's flag of convenience – before, eventually, letting it fly off as an integral part of dusk's fading red. I later watched him getting out at his usual stop: home to wife and children where, no doubt, they would welcome him with open arms, blissfully ignorant of the weirdities with which he had been freighted. Though the overspill of blood on his underpants, without a wound, would take a LOT of self-explaining.
As for myself, I eased back into my own boring body in time for night – in some industrial wasteland, not far from Greg's abode. This, my real body, was an ancient metal contraption that had once served as a sleek British Rail train. I then submitted to an irresistible need for sleep and drifted amid the archipelago patterns of inherited history and Collective Unconscious.
Gradually, however, I was eventually to know, day by day, mind by mind, that my actual substance of existence was indeed a sump of universal mind-and-matter, one that was cruelly abandoned each night within a rusting sample of Man's futile industry, yet sufficiently compos mentis to recognise that I was the true gestalt, perhaps Megazanthus itself.
****
SUSAN:
My sister Beth is beautiful but she often seems bitter … or loud. I’m right ugly by comparison – but perhaps calmer. I don’t go into rages, like Beth does with Greg. Still, she’s still getting over Dog. That was a relationship and a half, if ever there was one! Anyway, when we thought the children had disappeared, Beth was a tower of strength. Just shows you. I hope she’s enjoying her weekend break with those JULES VERNE tour holidays. I hope she and Greg are managing to patch things up. I have dreams myself. I could do with my own break. Mike is a blighter sometimes – he just leaves me alone – and when we sleep at night, I hear him snoring peacefully whilst I return to those dim dream-caverns that I can’t escape – where I dream he’s staring at Amy and Sudra cuddling each other. Dreams don’t make it untrue, I say. Just because I sense his nature by means of dreams, doesn’t mean I can’t function properly when I finally wake up. There are words I don’t understand that keep coming into my dreams. Jules Verne things – like Musketeers. Mistaken, perhaps, who knows? I was never one in waking life to know anything at all about such things. Who wrote what and whether I love music beyond the normal run-of-the-mill, but the dream thinks I love listening to quite strange things – because the caverns echo with opera and that noisy philharmonic stuff. I’m sure I’m at least dreaming THAT. I just love me old television, back home. Back home? BIG BROTHER, CORONATION STREET, NEIGHBOURS – that’s what I really enjoy. I can’t be doing with anything like these nightmares that I can’t get out of. Mosquitos, more like – not Musketeers at all. And Minizanthi (I don’t know if that’s spelt correctly but it doesn’t matter as I’m saying these words not writing them down), things that peer round boulders, real ghosts in unreal dreams, with wide faces, having a break from hauling on the bucket-pulleys, their faces all smeared with white as if they’ve been naughtily at the cream cakes from my old Mum’s larder. I love Mike. I wish he could see that. I try to make him love me in the dream. Because I know there is no real hope when I wake up. We both seem to be covered in a stiff coat, just with armholes, and I try to share his armholes with mine, taking his mind off the two girls. Amy’s been a bit strange lately. She’s been insufferable since she made it up with Sudra. I don’t think I can trust Amy any more. Sudra has always been a worry to me, ever since her real Dad was so nasty to her. Flies, more like – not mosquitos. He stuffed her mouth to keep her quiet. I called the police, but he was little more than a cabbage when they came to take him away. I bet not many women have got their husbands put away. Most women put themselves away, I guess. I wish Sudra would not be so … innocent. But we’re all in strange times down here. All bets are off, as they say. Just recently we had a whole long period of light from that shining thing in the dream. Arthur’s ear is now growing again. No wonder he walks lopsided. But now it’s near to darkness as darkness can be without being truly dark. I give Mike a kiss. He kisses me back. And at last we snatch some sleep, TOGETHER for once, rather than him sleeping and me waking, or vice versa. And we’re back in what I can only call real life – just for a short while at least. The sun is shining. The traffic has started up in the city. And I get up to switch on the TV. But before I can do that, I wake up again (or return to sleep?), and I’m here. I kiss Mike as he snores. He smiles in his sleep. Only his smile is there. Arthur’s earwigging us, no doubt, hoping we may give a clue as to why we’re all here and not at home in front of the TV. He never talks to his sister any more. Amy’s real strange, you see, as if it isn’t her any more. But she loved Sudra before, and she still loves Sudra, so I guess there is some thread of truth somewhere between the first Amy and the second one. People never stand still. They are always changing. I need something myself. I need Mike to come to me at the window where I look out at the city and the sun, then for him to put his arms round me… This coat is so difficult to wear. I can’t even get it off, even if I tried. I need something more than all this. I need… I thought that there were some places where it was clear if you was dreaming or not dreaming. I’m not sure I believe that any more. But perhaps I’m mixed up and I’ll soon wake up again and be less mixed up…
A WAFT OF MUSKY ANGEVIN IN ITS RAW STATE INTERRUPTS HER REVERY … AND EVENTUALLY, HAVING THOUGHT ABOUT IT FIRST, SUSAN SNORES PEACEFULLY FOR ONCE, WITH NO DREAMING. THAT BEGS THE QUESTION, HOWEVER, WHERE EXACTLY ARE YOU WHEN YOU ARE ASLEEP AND NOT DREAMING? I LISTEN TO HER SNORES WHICH KEEP ME AWAKE.
****
SYMPHONY OF ANGEVIN
OVERTURE
I watched two of them mate, thus multiplying almost instantaneously. How many times this must have happened when I wasn’t watching is now impossible to discover. Not mosquitos, but similar, both in sound and look. I heard one of my French colleagues call them mousquets, spelt ‘mousquet’. Sometimes mousquetaire. Spelt ‘mousquetaire’, not to get mixed up with mosque or musk, both with standard spellings.
FIRST MOVEMENT
They shot from the hip, my wife Susan told me, in a moment of drunkenness. Her drunkenness, not the mousquetaires! Drunk on duty was a sin, but in view of what we had to endure, excusable. I didn’t understand the expression ‘shot from the hip’. A proboscis or something I imagine ought to be called a proboscis, spelt as one would expect the dictionary to spell it, and whether I got the meaning of the word quite right adds another layer of doubt – but whatever-it-was stabbed out and impregnated another of its kind with a rapier-like motion or as if wielding a freshly rifled bayonet fixed with a blade. And, straightaway, a creamy scum stretched between the two creatures, followed by another smaller creature emerging through it as if taking an audience call via silent curtains towards some stage of life.
This was a dream yet not a dream. Such dreams are spells cast by some confused magic of the mind. My wife Susan in real life never gets drunk, for a start. But it was one of those dreams that you know is a dream at heart but you can’t wake up from it and if you did you are deadly afraid that you will not find it a dream at all but a real life that you cannot avoid.
Many mousquetaires, with filmy wings, were now coupling across the floor of my dream. One of my French colleagues was pointing silently at the geometrical progression of the sliding bodies as their appendages spurted – and more layers of infolding curtains erupted like textured lava to reveal yet more of their kind. An insect swarm, an insect spawn, a thick honey river of sex and softly batting wings. Why I needed colleagues at all, let alone French ones, to accompany the action in my dream like a background music of crossed tongues and double entendres was not within the comprehension of my dream self. I used my eyes to appeal to my wife to see if she could solve the situation, so that she could wake me up and then I could be in bed with her again where we had both started the night.
SECOND MOVEMENT
And it happened just like that. Imagine the surge of relief as I opened my eyes on the familiarities of our bedroom scene. My wife snored beside me – perhaps still involved with rescuing me from my dream, or from her dream, or from our shared dream. The room was floodlit with the moon. One of those clear skies which come once in a Winter season, when the snowclouds disperse fleetingly and leave a gap of mock daylight in the night. I gazed at the bodies on the floor. Four of them. Dead bodies by the appearance of the wounds they sported but, nevertheless, bodies that appeared to move. Almost lovingly upon and among each other. Only four of them, however, dressed in some historic garb that reminded me of a swashbuckler by Alexandre Dumas. How I could rationalise all this with real life was beyond me, though rationalise it I did. How I reconciled all this with the context of our bedroom was impossible, though reconcile I did. It was like a spell. Three musketeers had become four. Come to think of it, there had always been four musketeers, if you counted D’Artagnon as well as Athos, Porthos and Aramis. A mistitled novel. And a Parisian city outside.
THIRD MOVEMENT
“It doesn’t sound plausible.”
“What?”
“Your dream.”
“Dreams are never plausible.”
“No, I mean not plausible enough to be real life.”
“What, you mean this real life?”
“You said the title was wrong. Real life doesn’t worry about titles. Only make-believe needs a title. Make-believe needs a label to make it real. A suspension of disbelief that is called a story or novel that people read and believe is real life. They expect it to have a title.”
I looked at her as she spoke. She was talking to me and – on the face of it – I was talking to her. My wife Susan in real life. She meant well. But often out of character.
FOURTH MOVEMENT
Dreamtime came before I could even give this version of my wife a reality check.
I had by now left behind the four men on the floor – those corpses that coupled with each other. It was a scene far too nasty for me to countenance, especially to consider as my own dream. If they were representatives of real life, then at least I wouldn’t be responsible for their existence on my bedroom carpet. Only if they appeared in a dream that I was dreaming would it be possible for me to take the blame: that would mean they came from my head: or been given to my head by an external force to dream about. But it was still inside my head.
If they existed outside my head – as they seemed to do (on the carpet) – then I was absolved.
Such a puzzle or predicament of the realities and dreams that I tried to fathom and compartmentalise was soon in the past – as I returned to the dream where my French colleagues smiled as they picked through the remains of the mousquetaires (same spelling as before) as if they were scientists dissecting specimens. My wife – fresh from a conversation we had just had about plausibilities – was also there with me in the same dream. But she looked inscrutable. I could not predict what she was going to say. I couldn’t predict anything about her in real life, come to think of it. So the dream was just a layer too far beyond any understanding of her intentions. We had been together for years. We were a good couple, though – made for each other. But I was at a loss most of the time. As with women in general I was ever in a pea-souper of a fog about what made them tick, especially her.
My French colleagues ignored us and our predicament. They were assured that this was THEIR real life at least and not a dream at all – and they proceeded with the intensive care they were now administering to the mousquetaires, believing them to be, I assumed, a rare species of terrestrial life that needed preserving. Dream or not, Natural Selection was in full sway, and these scientists were determined to defeat Natural Selection by salvaging any remnants of life in the sex-exhausted creatures, bringing them back to life, even at the cost of bending the rules of biology and good sense. Then, I suddenly realised – the mousquetaires were not land life at all, but sea-creatures, beached in our reality, dry-docked as it were: and the mating process in which they had just finished indulging had ended up almost killing them because they had not possessed their natural habitat wherein to conduct it. The sea no doubt acted as a lubricant for any frictions involved. Perhaps it was a different sea to the one I knew. A more oily, thick and turgid sea, a creamy sea, where refinery-rigs stirred rather than dredged or dug.
The Scientists, by now, were wrapping the central torpedo-like bodies in the gossamer wings the creatures had earlier sported prior to coupling. Another figure – and I was astonished to see it was my wife – had been given the job of carefully detaching other appendages from their central bodies. Call these appendages muskets, for want of a better word or, if a better word existed, it would bear a more cumbersome spelling. These ‘muskets’, then, came off quite cleanly, or with just a smidgin of mucus still clinging to their triggers. Each had a blade-like super-appendage: an appendage of an appendage, as it were, which was left intact. My wife seemed to be putting these bayonet ‘muskets’ into pickling jars.
FIFTH MOVEMENT
“What’s in those jars?”
I saw a shadowy hunched figure standing in the residues of moonlight cast by our bedroom window. I had woken, it seems, but the continuity of the dream was buzzing through my head. I would get up to hug this figure by the window. I had not yet noticed the snoring lump by my side. Otherwise I would have inferred that lump was Susan my wife, and that Susan indeed was NOT the see-through figure by the window. That figure indeed was replacing a lid on one of the pickling jars and it then swivelled – like a shop window mannequin suddenly come to life – with a plastic creak. The figure bore an iron mask and the voice was muffled into indistinguishable syllables by the clamped mouthpiece. Or so it seemed. But I deciphered the words for my own purposes:
“It’s a stick insect … or a stickleback … fixed in aspic.”
I’m sure none of that was said but I replied as if it had been said:
“Why were you dreaming about insects in jars just now?”
I ignored the fact that a stickleback, I knew, was a tiny fish; one that I collected as a child in jam-jars from the Walton-on-Naze backwaters. It did not seem to fit the context. Nor did a stick-insect, for that matter. A dream’s context seen in hindsight was never easily rationalisable or reconcilable. But here I was suffering from foresight of hindsight! Not, in any shape or form, a comfortable disposition to be in.
“I wasn’t dreaming. You were the one dreaming,” replied the fast diminishing figure by the window. As I went to hug the figure back into shape, even the iron-mask itself faded or became insubstantial: leaving the silhouette, for a split second, of just a flower, something like a tulip: and, being a silhouette, like all silhouettes, it was black. Only shadows are grey. Silhouettes have the deepest black despite their mere two-dimensionality.
I and the lump of what had been my bed-partner joined the other four on the floor, thus making six of us. We drew our muskets and fired. Leaving only the tears.
CODA
We were collected later as wrinkled drape-silhouettes (folded together like a patchwork quilt thrown off the bed or a carpet discarded because it was too thin) – collected by the French scientists for later investigation and dissection. They discovered at least one of us had a hip replacement. They mumbled of MOSQUECRISTOS and MINIZANTHI as they counted them and one scientist wrote notes; the spell-check would come later when the notes were processed. Or played.
****
BETH:
My Susan’s soft! I always knew she was softer than me. Twin sisters come in pairs of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, generally, and I was always the hard one, Edith. No, Clare, stop shaking you head... Oh, I see it’s the Drill shaking it! But nothing to see out there at all except damn rubble-storms, so you may as well listen to me as stare out there, ladies. And put your snobby books away. They’re full of words I don’t understand, and I’m pretty sure you don’t understand them either. Edith stop staring at that photo of your kids. They’re grown up now and can look after themselves, I’m sure. Amy included. She wanted to be someone different. Now she has the chance. Not many of us get that chance in life. BIG EARED ARTHUR ONCE DROVE A BIG BUS. Isn’t that an old Music Hall song? He can now drive a whole world to its centre given the chance, I reckon. Private Planet, Vehicle Earth, Private Person takes the World on holiday. See, I’ve still got some gumption, even words that I don't understand but still use for some reason, despite being put away by men into this yellow cabin. Greg’s as bad as Dog, I reckon. Greg and that Captain are hand in glove to keep us quiet up here in this top flat berth, while THEY see the Corelight rise above the new cities of Inner Earth through their own windows cleared by the vanes… They little realise, at the end of the day, that the Core is just like another Full Moon above the earth, casting silken curtains of light across the black waves of night’s chilly sea (what poem, did THAT come from?). Men! They think they’re heroes at every glimpse of a new adventure. I suspect the Core is really little more than a cake, baked hard like a lump of solid carpet, a misshapen lump of tufts to gag upon. Eating that cake opens a whole vista of lost time, they say. Let them eat cake. Hope it chokes them! Susan, you ask? Well, she always used to look after wounded birds she found in our garden. In fact, I think Our Father up in Heaven meant for her to stumble on every poor creature under the sun so that she could exercise her nursing skills as a potential earth mother. I remember her once sitting in the parlour, a lump of feather-filled blood on her lap and she cooed at this lump expecting it to coo back at her. And it did. She brought it back to life. But I say – what’s the point of bringing such shipwrecks of nature back to life once they’ve been left high and dry on a crag by an egg vandal who broke its shell and left the innards to wilt stinkily in the salt winds? But Susan always rescued them. Even as a child. I scolded her for being so bloody soft. Therefore, how, dear Edith, have I allowed myself to be relegated to a backseat in this Drill? How, dear Clare, are we all so cowed by a world slipping by within men’s hands. If everything is to have a happy ending, then we need to tell someone that it is us instinctive women (soft and hard alike) who must win – who must reach out to the Core where there are no dreams at all, no confusions of truth and lie, us women who must reach out to the Core where (when we are within it) we’ll know what is true and what is false – finally and clearly and undeniably. We are just biding our time, Ladies. Don’t let submission fool you. Submission is for Susan, not me. And even Susan, I reckon will be waking up to her strengths the nearer she gets to the centre of things.
****
"THE NEMO IS AN EVOLUTIONARY FORCE, AS NECESSARY AS THE EGO. THE EGO IS CERTAINTY, WHAT I AM; THE NEMO IS POTENTIALITY, WHAT I AM NOT. BUT INSTEAD OF UTILIZING THE NEMO AS WE WOULD UTILIZE ANY OTHER FORCE, WE ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE TERRIFIED BY IT, AS PRIMITIVE MAN WAS TERRIFIED BY LIGHTNING. WE RUN SCREAMING FROM THIS MYSTERIOUS SHAPE IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR TOWN, EVEN THOUGH THE REAL TERROR IS NOT IN ITSELF, BUT IN OUR TERROR AT IT."
-- JOHN FOWLES 1964 (FROM 'THE NECESSITY OF NEMO' IN 'THE ARISTOS')
****
The boy was browning off at the close of a long day in the hot sun.
His companion, a svelte girl without a stitch, turned her head as if to speak, but was stopped in her tracks, since the sun had abruptly disappeared behind the distant mountain and cast a long monster’s tail of a cold shadow over them both.
They squinted at each other, since the backs of their eyes retained the imprint of the scorching orb and its echoic reyn-bouwe.
“We’d better dress.”
“Yes”
Their words were in a foreign language.
They fumbled for their clothes since, having been taken unawares, their fear was mixed with confusion. They were no older than it took to be alone together in barely less than innocent nudity.
As the darkness gained further purchase, all they could see were the whites of the eyes; their pulse rate doubled in intensity; and, through the gloom, their hands found comfort in each other’s.
Towards the girl and boy, a shaft of sun hurtled, like lightning – from the side of the mountain, through a cutaway in the uniform rock but only for a second. It was sufficient to establish that their clothes had evidently been snatched whilst they were dozing in the torrid afternoon. The darkness, once renewed, engendered goose-pimples the length of their limbs and violent shudders along their spines. The cold was doubly cold from the contrast...
They had grown up together, since their respective sets of parents had been more than just good friends. During the endless nights of Winter, the grinding of their parallelograms of sex had disturbed the youngsters’ sleep and mingled with the snorts that the beasts made when they tested the peripheral defences of the campsite.
And the snorts were approaching now and the camp-site was more than a mile away. They never thought it would happen to them. Love childer, blessed with complementary grand trines in their natal maps, could never meet a nasty ending ... together.
But they soon discovered that nasty ends come to us all; the art of life is merely in the timing ... and death comes deadlier than expected.
Another sun-shaft beamed through a more substantial cut-away further down the mountain’s flank and lit the feral plain…picking out the still twitching shambles of rare to medium flesh. It glinted upon the scuttling carapaces of star-born winterer beasts, having eaten to their fill and no more. The sun finally slid behind the bulky foundations of the mountain, only to be gathered into the bosom of the earth for the closed sesame of night.
The parents were preoccupied, as they turned together in the hinged beds. They did not bother to pray that their children might discover erotic pleasure in the mutual perpetuation of interwoven ectoplasm.
BURNT TO CINDERS AMID THE SHYFRYNGS, was only one line of a forgotten song, hardly decipherable amid the lowing of wandering winterers.
****
I may not even have known my own name. I was nemonymous. Some of my friends recognised me and called me by a name they thought I was named. I was a working-class lad grown into manhood with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming nemonymous. I worked as a radio phone-in ‘agony uncle’. Although that may not have been me at all. I met Arthur after he noticed his ear was getting even bigger. I tried to ignore it by staring at his other ear. We shared pints in Ogdon’s pub – and then he worked behind the bar mixing cock-tails. He simply loved mixing things … sometimes mixing allotments of time together with events to make plots.
I had secret vices. I didn’t even recognise them myself, IF that is the same thing as secrecy. I wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England – a hobby and a method of saving money. I had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which I leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread – knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with my hard-padded fingers: as if tidying a rhythm of growing patterns of thick surface-veined underlay: except this underlay was a surface – but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. Arthur admired them when I brought samples into the pub. He was still not old enough, thankfully, to realise he was too young to understand.
****
I stared at the screen wondering where I fitted into the schematic movements of the symphony. Not that I could hear any music at all. Silence.
The screen showed a clouded yellow surface, yet mottled with – if it were real – stains or signs of wear. Not yellow so much, I guess. Maybe beige. Not a uniform surface. Again, if it were real, it would bear perceptible bumps or lumps in its fibre. Fibre? Or weave. Or web. Or net.
It is as if I had created this site with a number of codes: codes that began with < hawl > and ended with < /hawl >. I went to shut it down because I felt myself threatened by it, as if sucking me into it like a fly.
Now, I know deep down who I was. Or I was in the process of creating who I was. I was about to enter the intermittent and unsmooth flow of action. The yellowy web, hopefully, was to be the firewall or firefloor to protect me (or anyone else following me) from the dire horror that was a lurker on or within the threads of my discursive being. I was the headlease narrator, the one from where they all had their essence and being.
Except they had escaped!
They were soon to reach the Core where truths would shine out and dreams dissipate. I shuddered. I was losing control. Mike and his party were, I suddenly discovered, on the point of reaching some mountain cutaway within the largest cavity that Inner Earth possessed – and Corelight would skim through like REAL sunshine to reveal the sorrows of mankind, but also illuminating a way to heal them. Mike would gain all the credit. Not me!
I punched away at the keys (having failed to shut down the screen) to prevent his party from ever reaching that Core or its Nirvana. Meanwhile, with my eye momentarily off the ball, I saw from the corner of my head that ‘The Hawler’, the lubricated Drill that threaded the rubble-storms, equally nearing the same Core, was about to crash-land on the outskirts of the Core itself – near Agra Aska – where they would rescue young love from the dreaded SHYFRYNGS ... and using the powerhouse of this love, they, too, i.e. Captain Nemo and his party, would reach Nirvana – without me!
I was aghast and I re-punched the keys, creating codes and tags for a new site of my dominion and power. A new blog city. It would be a battle of wills. And I was sure to win. I was determined to seek the information I needed, information that someone was hiding from me. I was the headlease narrator. How could ANYONE be hiding anything from ME.
Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide which party I’d follow. The coin dropped on its milled edge within a hole in my carpet.
****
Later, I stared at the screen in my flat. I had started typing up my things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. “I am curious – yellow,” I whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. I scribbled in my bright red SILVINE ‘Nemo Book’. I spent much of most nights exploring (wandering) – mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city – areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, I imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy
I believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface of the earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body … invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes’ owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.
I reviewed my own dreams. The fiction could wait, as I shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of my yellow screen and turned to the Nemo Book with a pencil grasped like I used to grab it as a child: in the fist like a dagger.
****
NOTES: Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream. These viruses are similar to birds with revolving beaks like drillbits, each a little pesky explorer. They multiply by ease of dreams being soaked into the birds' lubrication-pores. Filters can and do work both ways. Each ‘bird’ burrows from, say, my dream into, say, your dream. It takes a bit of me to you, and a bit of you to me – mixing reality and dream, AS WELL AS you and me. Then extrapolate that at a geometric progression. Each ‘bird’ (or dream virus) has its own consciousness but that also multiplies as its mutation increases, not changing its Drill's body so much, but changing the clouded specifics of its mind, each specific mind becoming a human mind that thinks it has got a human body – plus interaction with other 'human beings' of their own kind as if it is real life on the surface of our world, but really they are self-imagined figments within the bird’s cockpit as it lays waste the skins of dream throughout a mass Jungian consciousness. I know it is difficult to grasp these concepts. I have faced the situation in my own mind that I myself may be one such dream virus (or, at best, a harmless dream spam): and I’m easing the skins to open up to the manifold plankton of dream-interstitialists. Birds of Plague riding their luck as they multi-dream – 'multi-' because there are lot of them in themselves but also 'multi-' because each Drillbit carrier has more than one mind (and often several) within its very cockpit , minds BELIEVING they are real human beings and not interactors in a fabricated drama or fiction. There are also human minds who have fallen off their own perch and ‘walk’ independently (or so they think) within Plato’s Cave. But that’s too deep for a notebook. But whilst we are on intellectual matters, I do now realise that LA VIDA ES SUEÑO was written by Pedro Calderón De La Barca, not by Lope de Vega. Meanwhile, the interaction of civil riots and religious troubles and suicide bombs (bombs that explode without fear for their own cockpits of self-assumed multi-mind) and global warmings/ global warnings feeding off each other back and forth. That list of possible Corekeepers: Megazanthus, Godspanker, Dognahnyi, Weirdmonger, Etepsed-Egnis, Azathoth. Dreams leak, books leak...
I TORE UP THE PAGE I HAD BEEN SCRIBBLING ON. AND I RETURNED TO MY DESK, ACROSS THE LITTERED CARPET, AND POWERED-UP MY SCREEN READY FOR EASIER TASKS. FICTION WAS ALWAYS EASIER THAN TRUTH, A GENERALISATION TO WHICH I WOULD NEED TO COME TO TERMS … EVENTUALLY.
****
He called her Tho, as a gratuitously eccentric shortening for Thora. He was Hataz. Always had been. In full.
Hataz was more oriental than he looked. He and Tho were not necessarily a match made in Heaven, yet fair enough for two lonely strangers who both admitted they needed somebody. Their single attempt at love-making proper had been a clumsy exercise, neither of the participants earning flying colours for their efforts. They didn't really get near enough to each other. They were probably scared of the final penetration: a fact left unsaid.
After that, by tacit mutual consent, they never indulged a blatantly physical approach again. Going to the only cinema left open in the city, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in derelict parks ... these activities were surely sufficient for people like them, because (as Tho thought) "spirit rode the flesh like aura".
They also played childish games unchildishly in Hataz's place, such as Ludo and Draughts – and, even, despite the size of the flat, hide-and-seek.
Inevitably, affairs of innocent convenience wind down and, today, Tho was bluntly determined to cut Hataz from her life before she became too enmeshed – not because the relationship was particularly claustrophobic, but simply because she was scared of a dream.
"A dream you've dreamed?" asked Hataz, genuinely puzzled at the sudden mention of dreaming. They had just returned from a concert in one of the riot areas of the city near the old Dry Dock – where a little known jazz combo called Erich Zann had given a desultory performance on vibes, flute and zither in an obscure unlabelled night club. Now, she had chosen this moment in Hataz's flat to make a prepared statement, one she had seemingly rehearsed in front of her wardrobe mirror.
"It's not a dream I've really dreamed, as such – it's strange, I can't explain it."
Hataz had started the evening hating the music. Now he was more confused than irritated – an uncommon feeling with him. Usually confident about life in general (if not with girls in the shape of Tho), tonight's disorientation was difficult to fathom. He had already felt vague indications of being unbalanced on previous dates, but nothing quite like now. Surely she was not going a roundabout way to ditching him. His pride, as far as the opposite sex was concerned, seemed fragile enough, already. For one peculiar moment, he felt these thoughts were not his, but Tho's. Osmosis? A twinning of auras?
"It was the edge of a dream, Hataz. I could see the dream in my bedroom, as if it had a transparent cover. Not really a bubble nor a balloon. Just a shapeless watery skin. Inside were all the nightmares I knew should have been in my sleep. I was awake, watching an independent dream that nobody was dreaming. There were glowing things that walked about. One of them I later saw was you, Hataz. Or someone who looked like you."
Tho coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural, but Hataz was fully aware that she was reciting something she had learned parrot fashion. It almost felt as if he were dreaming. And the recital was silent.
"One looked like me? What are you trying to say?"
He had the uncanny sense that he was also reciting something, learned without having remembered learning it.
"It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever."
There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz's flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from a forgotten airport.
In many ways, she didn't need to say the words. Hataz's new-found faith in the phenomenon of osmosis was nurtured by the silence, as she sprayed further implications and he allowed his inferences to burgeon. But, then, of course, her words would spill out autonomously, more visible than audible.
"I could see the host body's neck tightening," she continued, "bursting at the seams, as you tried to clamber out, except the seams were knotted veins rather than rows of stitches. Other creatures gathered at your feet – things I couldn't recognise, let alone describe. Some just a mass of wriggling tentacles. Others with more head than body. Tails and teeth. All chanting bits from an invented religion. To describe things in a dream makes remembering them more easy. The words and the names of the things seemed the most natural parts although, afterwards, they were the strangest. God knows how they were spelt. A good job, perhaps, that one can't remember every dream. But this dream was different, being one I was viewing from the bed, whilst still awake. It was growing in size, too. The dream's wobbly skin getting nearer and nearer, as it filled with more and more nightmares. Can't you see, Hataz, how I've been worried? I didn't know how to tell you. Nor if I should tell you at all."
"Do you want a drink?" Hataz asked, thinking that a psychologist would probably call this a nervous breakdown. She needed humouring, not scolding. He still couldn't shake off, however, the suspicion of a sting in the tail. Tho wanted to chuck him. That was bloody obvious, if nothing else was. In the meantime, though, she needed help.
"A drink? Yes, why not? A coffee, perhaps. Make it with milk if you've got plenty."
She heard him pottering about in the kitchen, as men did. Hataz imagined her hearing him – the chink of cups easing the silence more efficiently than the earlier exchange of words had done. Words were not really sounds, when they meant so much. Meanings were there whether one said them out loud or not. She shook her head. Or so Hataz inferred. How could she be thinking such thoughts? Thoughts were words injected straight into the vein. Surely she had intended to tell him of his host body in the dream with its skull splitting, tilting sideways from his own one which was inside it. Bone within bone. The brain slid down his face like porridge, hair brylcreemed with blood. It was strange she could describe things better aloud, than describing them silently to herself. Osmosis was telling him too much of what she thought.
He returned with the cups of coffee and placed then upon the small table between them.
"Are you feeling any better?"
He bit his tongue, without knowing why.
"All depends from what standard you are judging 'better'. I've never felt better, Hataz. It's as if I've never really been myself before. I was once a girl living in a dream. Now, I'm awake and I can see myself for what I am. No illusions. Just a dead-end girl who'll never be 'better' than average. You see, I was in that dream, too – eventually. Not one of the creatures slithering on their backsides. I was a finned figure that emerged from the shadows, soon after the body you once inhabited had disappeared. We didn't recognise each other, since we were both somewhat different than in real life. Then, I saw myself in bed, peering through the skin of the dream, from the outside of the dream, yes, peering at me in the dream."
"Tho, it was just a nightmare. You shouldn't take it so seriously. Everybody has at least one godawful dream in their lives – one that sticks with them."
He smiled. Was he on the point of ditching her?
"No, I told you, Hataz, I was not dreaming. I was awake. I was that girl in the bed. Fully conscious. Knowing exactly what I was seeing. And then you put one of your hands through the skin."
She screamed. A short sharp laugh that she had intended to come out as a full-blooded scream.
"Then your whole arm poked through," she continued, "reaching out for me with fingers that were webbed with some backward evolution. It was as if each fingernail were a tiny spinning drill. I screamed in real life, then – dreading that a dream without a dreamer could actually hurt more than just mentally."
Hataz sipped his coffee, sorry that he could not hear one of those droning aeroplanes. It must have been the fog that had cut them off from the sound of the thrumming traffic down below, interspersed with the odd clatter of overhead vanes or a fitful bomb-blast in another quarter of the city. He decided to let her have her head. No further point in interrupting or even commenting at natural breaks.
"Hataz, believe me, when I tell you, I was scared. So rotten scared, I closed my eyes, to blot out the dream."
"I bet you still saw the dream, though."
This time Hataz bit his tongue with the full foreknowledge of so doing. He had contravened his own rules of engagement.
"No, it was black inside my head. Not even a glimmer showing through the eyelids. The dream was not throwing out any light of its own. My bedroom was indeed as dark as it should have been, with the lamp off. That seemed to prove beyond all shadow of doubt it was a dream I'd been watching, not a dream I'd been dreaming. This must all sound so incredibly crazy to you – but when I felt the kiss upon my cheek and the strange words in my ear..."
"You became a Sleeping Beauty reversed, never to wake again!"
Hataz laughed at his own non sequitur. Humouring Tho had got him nowhere, so mockery had to be his next ploy. She reddened and simply stared through him into space. Having finished his coffee, he got up to look outside through the window. Not a glint. Not even a hint of anything beyond his gaze. Silence met silence through the glass. Eventually, with his neck aching, he turned back to face out Tho. It was about time she came to the point. And if she didn't, he would. At least one of them would have to cut the other from his or her life. But the vibes were all wrong. What he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.
Nobody.
The Nobody who was ever the essence of loneliness.
The milky coffee he'd prepared for Tho was untouched, left stirlessly to a look of barely lukewarm and growing a meniscus skin.
Near to bursting with a passion he had never previously experienced, Hataz headed for the kitchen. He sought the bread knife or, preferably, something slightly more surgical than culinary – simply to lance the boil that his whole body had become. Playing hide-and-seek didn't allow the hidden one to squat, thumb-plugged, inside the searcher, did it?
Hataz returned with emptiness in his grasp, planted his face in the grail of his own webbed fingers, shaking with the SHYFRYNGS. He later sipped the piping hot coffee to the sound of droning skycraft. Eventually, he heard a needle enter the deepest groove of all – and to the silence of Zann's zany zithers playing 'Nethermost Blight', he felt abysmally sad for someone he'd never find because it was himself. Azathoth's eyes poured out their sorrow. A thick cuckoo-spit bubbling from the centre of Infinity.
****
Backward girl doesn’t mean backward in the sense of having a few slates loose on her dolls-house. But backward in an inverted REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME way, the girl’s past already bewitched by the future she had yet to live. Hawling is another word for such a process, a process that was just about to begin that day many years ago when Sudra’s Mum asked her this question:
“Sudra, what do you want for Christmas?”
Her mother Susan stared as the small girl playing with her single toy – a log lorry that she moved across the carpet between the legs of the armchair. She pretended that the darkness under the seat was a secluded area where the driver could get out and stretch his legs. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the driver in the cab was firmly glued to his own seat, with his plastic legs and face all the same colour as the rest of him.
Whilst Sudra was imagining the procedure she had set in motion under the armchair, she looked up at Susan. Her father (Susan’s husband) was away long-term at the present time – and this fact lightened Sudra’s heart somewhat but she wasn’t old enough to gauge exactly the magnitude of the relief that this same absence also afforded Susan’s own spirits. Uncle Mike was due to visit before Christmas – and Sudra ever enjoyed his visits, if only because it put a smile on Susan’s face. And Christmas was a time for smiles. Even smiles of disguise.
Sudra trundled the log lorry from under the seat’s shadow – and parked it between two frayed lines in the carpet’s growth of pattern. She undid the mighty hawsers that kept the logs in place and proceeded, gradually, to reposition the load close to the roaring coal fire in the grate. Sudra basked in the pink heat. She felt that teasing the logs with the proximity of fire was rather a funny joke and she laughed before answering her Mum’s original question.
“Can I have a real doll, please … or a pet dog …. Or some new shoes?”
Susan smiled. Not the broad Uncle Mike-induced sort of smile, but a smile nevertheless. Sudra guessed that Susan guessed that Uncle Mike was, in fact, at that very moment, shopping for just such a doll to lighten Sudra’s Christmas morning. Far more fun to play with on that special day than clothes – even new shoes. Sudra, however, deep down felt that she deserved clothes as well as a doll, as well as a dog. Her clothes, for example, were more threadbare than the carpet. And her only pet was one she herself imagined.
“If it’s a doll, Mummy, can I have new shoes, too?”
“You have enough shoes, Sudra!” Susan frowned. Susan’s own shoes were little more than moccasins made from remnant squares of flooring – even more worn than the ill-tufted patches where Sudra kneeled, as she listened to a crack or splinter in some quirk of coaldust subsidence around a larger chunk … as the December wind moaned in the chimney.
“I only have one pair, one ugly pair,” piped up the plaintive face by the fire.
“Your Dad may get you some new shoes.”
“Where is Dad?”
“He’s visiting someone on business.”
Sudra wasn’t sure what the word ‘business’ meant.
“Is he going to the centre of the earth, again, for us?”
Susan laughed, despite herself – as she realised that Sudra hadn’t forgotten some of the white lies her husband used to tell them as an excuse for his regular absences. She also had her own armoury of excuses that she issued on his behalf, like “He’s off with Bunting hunting for rabbitskin” or “He’s carving stars for the night sky” or “He’s singing songs with Bobby Shaftoe and Little Tommy Tucker” or, indeed, “He’s on a journey to the centre of the earth, he really is.”
“How do you get to the centre of the earth, Mummy?”
“Well, you CAN dig straight down but also you could choose to go overland.”
Susan spoke the customary words as this was a well-rehearsed home-made Nursery Rhyme in the form of conversation. Customary words – whatever the words – often give young children comfort.
“Overland, Mummy?”
“Yes, overland to the centre of the earth.”
This part always broadened the smile on Sudra’s face. And the next bit of the exchange always brought the broadest smile of all.
“How can you go overland to the centre of the earth, Mummy?”
“By tricking, my dear … by tricking the Above and the Below and the Across.”
Sudra’s smile soon turned into a full-blooded laugh but, quickly, both the laugh and then the smile faded as she returned her attention to the log lorry – reloading the logs from in front of the fire. A coal spat and then settled as a flame bloomed then doused itself.
A loose thread in a garment or carpet or quilt is traditionally known as a ‘roving’ – and as Sudra decided spontaneously to scorch her log lorry’s wheels fast across the carpet away from the fire, one of its back wheels got tangled in one such roving. She imagined her imaginary dog that moment snaffling into the living-room with a tangle of meat in its long teeth (it often ate disused meat till it was raw) and forthwith snaffled out of the room again. Dogs were meant to be affectionate, loyal … but all this imaginary version did was suck meat off bones, then it ground the bones…
Sudra looked at the roving in the carpet. The carpet was her version of ‘overland’ – but here was a snag. She tried to lower her face so that she could bite out the roving thinking for one instinctive moment that her own teeth were the imaginary dog’s teeth. She found a sinewy roving of meat between two of her own teeth, which made her wince at the gums’ pang when she removed it with a yank.
Yes, a doll for Christmas would be lovely. Uncle Mike was probably buying it at this very moment. Travelling overland to fetch her a doll from the very centre of the earth.
“Stop dreaming, Sudra,” said Susan, as she stroked her daughter’s hair. The girl was now sound asleep coiled in front of the fire, log lorry forgotten. Uncle Mike would eventually arrive at the door and Sudra would skip fast to greet him, before Susan had a chance for her own pre-emptive cuddle and kiss.
Uncle Mike, if it turned out to be Uncle Mike, would not say what was in the package he put beneath the Christmas Tree. He did not tell them it was a real cabbagepatch doll with long doggy teeth and its own new shoes. But, of course, he would not arrive till nearer Christmas itself.
He had been roving overland for days, he would eventually claim, but now, by the warmth of their coal fire, he had reached the true centre of his world, here with Susan and Sudra.
****
When I was an old man, I fended off my own sleep as I watched Rover snoozing peacefully by the crackly embers of the fire. His customary contortions were a calming sight because I needed such routines as a ‘security blanket’.
On many previous occasions, the ensuing scene had been enacted. The knock on the door. The same number of beats to its unmusical rhythm. The entrance of a woman in a bustle, a woman who was as mysterious to me as I was, probably, to her. The routine words:
“How are you tonight, Sir?”
She stroked Rover absentmindedly, whilst performing a strange frozen curtsy.
“Still a little tired, despite dozing all afternoon,” I replied.
Rover stirred as the fire burst into fitful life – a roar of flame that indicated imminent extinguishment rather than reinvigoration of its wavering warmth or faltering light. The woman winced as she straightened her stance, closely examining the palm of her hand for dog hairs.
“Well, we’ll bring in your night nibbles, shortly,” she announced. “Anything special you fancy, Sir?”
There was no point in asking me this question, with there being traditionally only one choice available. Warm ox-tongues on the bone weltering in tomato purée. Tepid raspberry tea that bore all the signs of having once been scalding hot. Rare-cooked cervelle. Heavily fruited cakes, with oozing clotted cream.
A lower grade servant from the household’s hinterland, more thin-lipped and squeeze-eyed than the first woman, would be entrusted with the task of delivering the night nibbles. But a rigorous routine was not expected from her, because such a downbeat servant tended to say anything that first came into her head, although, by pure fluke, she would often repeat herself – an act of clumsiness rather than compassion.
I managed to prop myself further up in the bed. The bolsters were sometimes lumpy; they had things inside left over from my nightmares as a child. I needed these pillows smoothed and then plumped up.
My mother had been both plump and smooth. The fumes of her kitchen were still in my nose, even now. The large bosom leaning over to stir the steaming copper. The ironed out contours of her apron. Yet the smile was gashed straight across her face, offset by her sweet dimples, dimples which were so deep, I suspected her own mother of having trained them into existence with nightly probing of a knitting-needle. And such memories of childhood were the only dreams I allowed myself.
The door opened and the trayful was planted on my lap by a snag-toothed girl, one who did not have a smile for anybody, not even for herself.
“Thank you, my dear – it all looks too gorgeous to eat – but you’ve forgotten the tea-strainer,” I said.
Heaven forbid, but I had nearly forgotten to remember that well-rehearsed tail-end complaint about the tea-strainer. The snag-toothed girl scowled, drawing her eyes together like mating sea-creatures. SHE knew it was the lemon-squeezer she had forgotten.
Rover was by now fully awake, his doleful eyes mooning straight at me. The fire had become even darker than the rest of the room, despite an inner glow that was more a belief system than a fact. His tongue lolled like the contents of one of my sandwiches. No crumpets, after all. Nor those eagerly anticipated damsons and custard. There was, furthermore, only a mean pickling for the cheesy bits. And – horror! – the snag-toothed girl had left the room without saying the correct words: the almost religious response to my own recital of complaint. She had also forgotten to check the curtains. She needed a severe scolding.
I fully expected – with a sudden unexpected dread – the first woman’s return: to force down my food and, if routine could countenance the slightest hope, to lean over me with her large bosom and plump up my pillows...
Rover padded closer to my bed – his tail sweeping the carpet with echoes of his body’s swaying counter-rhythms – but his dog-bark croaks could hardly articulate familiar rituals, pitifully trying, as he did, to mimic the snag-toothed girls’ high-pitched whining sneer. Nevertheless, I was comforted by this nod by him towards a retrievable routine for making things better for the bed-ridden.
When Rover pounced on me with his licking, loving tongue, surely, surely, it was a mad spontaneity that made me punish him for his own simple dog-fangs sadly failing to compare with those huge jagged ones which I recalled poking from the servant girl’s mouth – even though, finally, he did successfully manage to mimic her earlier words: “I’ll fetch the bloody tea-strainer and squeeze your privates through it, if you don’t look out, Mister!”
****
The Drill broke through a fossil-bank close to Agra Aska, cartwheeling free from rubble-traction into the relatively clear space of a huge cavity close to the Core itself.
The city was laid out like a map, until Captain Nemo released the Drill’s parachutes, which worked jerkily in the unusual air consistency of Inner Earth. The map turned turtle but eventually approached more steadily, and Greg could see at last the famous Balsam River and its mighty Straddling Cathedral, whilst the Drill’s bit-tip intermittently scribbled over it like a biro nib in the soft putty-like effulgence of the Corelight.
****
Pinnochio’s nose grew longer when he told lies. Longer wooden teeth, too. Yet we have no easy way to judge lies in real life. There is a question whether a single lie, once told, creates other lies in its wake, then radiating, spawning more lies, new and different lies living off each other – like a butterfly theory of chaos – roving round the world like a disease till everyone tells lies, Russian Doll lies, until they return to the original liar himself who accepts them as truths – because he started them in the first place and he has persuaded himself, by being in denial, indeed has simply forgotten that he lied in the first place and that he had started them moving round the world. Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies…
****
As the Drill landed with a hefty banking towards the Straddling Cathedral, Greg laughed upon spotting a kite being flown by an Agra Askan citizen, a kite identical to a flying carpet … prancing higher and higher from its slanting tether. Greg was older and hopefully wiser than before with his bum-fluff moustache having by now matured into a full set of whiskers upon his pink chops. His eyes still betokened the rough and ready innocence of an artisan, but he now carried an instinctive articulative wisdom, even when not talking.
Beth Dognahnyi remembered that Susan, her sister, was, even at this same moment, approaching Agra Aska from a different terrestrial angle. She missed her. She missed her comparative softness and empathy. She was wasted on that Mike. Beth felt herself to be, on the other hand, too brittle, without the calming influence of her softer sibling – yet Beth tried to hide this by smiling at Greg. Often, however, a false smile is worse than a lie.
“Hey, some of those kites haven’t got people flying them!” suddenly announced Greg, as he pointed to one in particular with no obvious tether in its wake.
Agra Aska was indeed now alive with kites. Beth and Greg had left the ill-tilted Drill. Captain Nemo, the businessmen and the dowagers were nowhere to be seen. Probably still preening themselves prior to disembarking. Beth and Greg had made reunion soon after the Drill’s crash-landing by parachute. Beth was still wondering where Greg had been for the whole journey but didn’t question why she hadn’t questioned this before now. She however did complain about the dowagers and their over-eager book recommendations and the dreary yellow wallpaper in their rearward cabin. Beth and Greg knew perhaps that they were a template for love (albeit a forged or fabricated one) so they needed to act up their affection for each other at all times now that they had arrived in Agra Aska – and they wondered if their mission in Agra Aska was indeed a predetermined one for stamping this very template upon a younger couple who even at that moment were being touched by a bout of the SHYFRYNGS at the well-demarcated edge of an enormous Coremoon – a vast glowing pale yellow ‘half-sky’ that even at this moment reared its arc through a mountain cutaway towards the south end of Agra Aska.
By now, in this renewed light, the bustle of barges upon the Balsam River was beginning a noisy trade of richly woven carpets and Angevin spices. Yet there was far more description to be endured before Beth and Greg would be able to do full justice to their vantage point, viz. the interlocking sights and clandestine intricacies and heady implications of such a place as Agra Aska and its near neighbour: the Megazanthine Core.
****
As our tunnelling party approached – at last – the mountain cutaway of South Agra Aska, I am sad to report a death. I am devastated – to the extent that I am not sure I am still the Mike I think I am or the Mike I think I have always been.
The whole incident has taken a lot out of me. But rest assured there is a consistency of viewpoint, a conviction that what I am reporting is the unvarnished truth, however poignant or indeed tragic for me (or for Mike if he is still me) that it happened to be. It is difficult to be certain about anything after such a long downward trek, interspersed with hawl training that was imposed on us upon the intermittent appearance of service-tunnels alongside our main journey shaft. Both the girls, Amy and Sudra, were very game. They took all in their stride, despite the unfashionable carpet-coats and yellow clogs that any other young modern misses would no doubt spurn. Arthur has been a bit morose, weighed down to starboard as he is by a vast elephant ear. He has however acted as provender source, and there are no complaints on that score. Susan has been a real dream. I still love her.
Well, I can’t delay the incident’s telling, however long I dwell on trivialities to avoid addressing its terrible vision or loss. Sudra slipped in a momentary mess of darkness that smeared her vision, if not the vision of us others. We could see she was blinded by a mixture of darkness and a scalding flash of Corelight that was a freakish occurrence within her eyes alone: a combination far worse than the confusion of pure darkness itself. She hung over a mini-cutaway (one that was as nothing to some of the much bigger cutaways we had already experienced in our journey) but sufficient to waylay Sudra’s steps. Amy rushed to her assistance, grabbing her wrists: and then for an eternity of anguish, there Sudra hung. I, too, rushed, from a nearby tunnel where I was silver-plating pulley-hooks. A goodly task for an evening’s Corelight. But I mustn’t delay. I was there soon enough to see Amy kissing Sudra’s brow – as if in abandonment. Surrendering to an inevitable. Tears streamed down both girls’ faces in pangs of lost love and despair. I grabbed Amy’s ankles in an attempt to tug Sudra, via Amy, from the reaching abyss. I then managed to claw my way up Amy’s legs and hugged her thighs within her carpet coat, tears now streaming down my own face.
“We should have gone overland.”
These were Sudra’s words as Amy finally let go. And echoing through the abyss: Sudra’s screams of “New shoes, new shoes, new shoes, new shoes…” until even these strident sirens of hope faded into silence.
****
Sudra quaintly described them as “Redoubts” – but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, simply for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. “Redoubts” in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word “Côté” was written on one broken brick wall that they were now passing – almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces … all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.
****
I cannot now remember to what Sudra once referred when using the word “Redoubts”, but it does cause me to wonder yet again who let go of whom on the edge of death’s cutaway when Sudra plummetted to her own abrupt cutaway. Who saw what in whose eyes? They both held each other’s wrists. Did Amy let go … or did Sudra let go when she looked into Amy’s eyes – flimsily disguised by tears of fateful surrender – only to see someone other than Amy behind those same eyes?
Amy was distraught. I could hardly comfort her, as she wailed and wailed into the sleep period. Susan, surprisingly, for a bereaved mother, was quite calm, as if she had been released from a burden of bewitchment – as if what Amy had carried behind her eyes had been passed off to Sudra in that critical moment of broken wrist-links. Or Sudra’s own shadow – which I had never noticed – was a stronger shadow than even Amy’s shadow. Indeed, once that Amy had recovered from the initial shock, she seemed to enter a new strobe period, without the necessity of us others having to strobe in tune with her own strobes. She became distant, detached, finally re-attached, but calmer. I felt as if a suicide bomb must have exploded inside Amy’s head and she had survived it by simple virtue of being strobed-out of existence at the instantaneous moment the bomb ignited itself.
It is difficult to dwell on the repercussions of Sudra’s death. Indeed, I can’t recall Arthur’s reaction in any way whatsoever, but it did inevitably mean Amy spending more time with him in alternations of sibling rivalry and sibling bonding. Susan was stoic and – if I say so myself – so was I. And we now need to address the circumstances of our arrival in Agra Aska. "Ever look to the future", my Dad always said when he was alive. I always replied, in boyish pique, to his great astonishment, that such a tenet was a veiled threat, because futures often blighted pasts. That’s perhaps why I was destined to become mixed up with ‘hawling’, but then of course that word had not yet channelled its way down the generations to me in that period of my childhood (as it was later to do).
Agra Aska is now not at all what it was like in the distant strobe-era spoken of elsewhere, when John Bello and Joan Turner became young lovers to the backdrop of Ervin’s shriving – and the political war-machinations that surrounded David Binns, Dictor Wilson, Robert Orwell, Chesterton and The Archer-Vicar. Today Agra Aska is blander, albeit still maintaining the now famous Straddling Cathedral and the Balsam River trading business. It substantially thrives on the ANGEVIN cream that it mines from the Core – an export hawling business that will play a large part in the future of our campaign. So, yes, this IS a mining city that has settled within its own strobe-history as near to the earth’s Core as it is possible for any civilisation to be positioned in such a city-shaped formation, ie. in the manner of the more distant cities of Parsimon, Klaxon and London – but, despite this infrastructure, still maintaining a conveniently short direct two-way filter to the Corecombs of the Megazanthus itself. By the way, I’ve just mentioned London and this city (established at sea level directly above* the man-shaped man-city whence I and my party derived) is rumoured to harbour the domed cathedral of St Paul’s that was the original template for Agra Aska’s straddling version which, in its turn, is a vast structure that possesses the ornate and iconographised religious thoroughfare (aisle?) along the roofed bridge between two Babelline towers. The Balsam River torrents below this ‘bridge’, its relentless current leading to the tributaries of Abrundy and Tiddle.
*The under-surface or floor-division between London and its strobe-twin city beneath it (ie. man-city with Dry Dock and covered market) is a mere lightweight ceiling or carpet … or, rather, mere symbols of these things, in gossamer arcades of nothingness, barely differentiating between the two cavities or air-spaces that harboured each city. However, I assure you, the sea ‘unlevels’ do also help to maintain this division.
Having said that, I am minded to give my own personal impressions of Agra Aska as we emerged from the last earthen cutaway and viewed the ‘half-sky’ Coremoon settling above its silver pinnacles. We all heard a distant lonely flute. And a dog yapping. I hate dogs. Sudra would have been delighted. We knew it was a city, and indeed Arthur, with his over-extended left ear, could hear more than us – as city-life surely thrummed beneath us. Oh, by the way, I also spotted the ‘shipwrecked’ Drill lodged on a crag escarpment that bloated unnaturally from one of the Cathedral’s Babelline towers. But more of that later.
What I wanted to say, really, was that, for me, Agra Aska is the sea. It’s strobing in and out of existence so fast, beyond the scope of eyelids, that it appears to be a swaying creature of waves. Even the buildings are waves and the river just another channel of current criss-crossing other such channels at the culmination of forces that make me believe in a ghost of a pier which I watch shimmer more slowly in and out of existence. Of course, all this might have been just my imagination.
****
Crazy Lope ran and ran through the benighted streets of London’s East End until he reached the giant portals of St Paul's Cathedral. Sanctuary was a living issue in the world that Crazy Lope inhabited and had reached a certain pitch of holy terror even after entering under the great Dome. He gazed up with wide eyes at the sublime paintings and statuary, and gradually heaved his chest to a silent standstill.
He tried to ignore the whispering of penitents in nearby pews, but he could not help noticing the four shadows that betokened their presence. He knew not who they should have been – but they were passing visitors from a nearby reality, that had filtered in cross country and cross time. They soon filtered away, too, leaving Crazy Lope alone with his God.
He shouted and his voice echoed around the vast open spaces of the Cathedral's interior. The echoes transfigured the words so that they could not be understood. Only Crazy Lope, the source, knew what he had uttered. Whether the departing shadows of the penitential quartet had caught the glimmer of meaning in the echoes of Crazy Lope's utterance before finally dispersing across the whispering galleries of space and time, one would never know. But Crazy Lope was pleased he had made the effort.
He knelt where he stood, closed his eyes and whispered:
"Which God I'm talking to, I shall never know. But whoever you are, do not be surprised that I, the mute and inscrutable one, can now speak clearly and openly to you. But I've been given tongues and they are flickering in the mouths of my wounds..."
The suffocating caul of his youth shimmered for a split second across his concentrating temples. He knelt deeper to the floor and continued:
"I see you with your skin hanging off ... but you remain good. I see you with yellow ivories in your mouth ... but you smile sweetly. I see you with eyes of pain ... but they can still see beauty. I see your limbs in calipers ... but they dance across the Ballroom of Heaven. I see you clearly ... but I cannot hear you. You play music on a splendid Grand ... but the keys are unheard by me. You blow a sad flute for the forest friends to hear ... but the birds are silent to me. Yet I know you can hear my prayer..."
He now laid face downward on the marble floor.
"As the journey is more significant than the destination, as the conversation itself is more important than its subject-matter, as the prayer is more important than he who prays or He who listens, as the form is more important than the content, as the novel is greater than its characters, as the problem is more significant than its solution, as time is controller of space, as the cross is bearer of the crucified, as the wounds feed the blood, as me, as you – I pray that I may understand why I do not understand and never will understand."
Crazy Lope was spreadeagled on a wheeling planet, exposing himself to the deep mystery of the universe.
"Come to me. Show me that you exist."
But God was too ill to come.
And the whole weight of London’s river – in denial as well as diversion – torrented through the body of St Paul’s Cathedral upon the natural group-orientated surface of migratory birds’ wings.
****
Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were dowager twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls – the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls – otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city – but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn’t grow. Brick is more prone to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south – but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imagination, because everything using the gaps had widened.
****
When the dowagers eventually disembarked at Agra Aska – faced with an undignified long-skirted clamber down one of the Babelline towers of the Straddling Cathedral – they certainly felt ill at ease that they hadn’t actually travelled ANYWHERE but had been confidence-tricked by means of a 'U Turn' within Inner Earth or some sleight of compass prestidigitation regarding the Above, the Below and the Across. The compensation, however, was that Agra Aska represented an oblique, if opaque, home from home – where all gaps went missing. Indeed, the whole of Agra Aska seemed to have landed within a blind spot so that they had to keep turning their heads to avoid not seeing it at all: and in the process saw only the legs of Clare (if you were Edith) or of Edith (if you were Clare) rather than any breathtaking views of their new home city that the descent of disembarkation would otherwise have entailed. It was rather like going into a bare room with bare floorboards, then imagining that if you took up the floorboards nail by nail you’d discover a carpet laid neatly UNDERNEATH them.
What they did particularly notice was the temperature, the feel of the air, the Aska Agran ambiance. It was not as cold as they feared from what they had been told of the increasing cold the further Coreward one travelled. The legends circulating among the surface cities represented the other extreme, ie. that the Core was red hot. Captain Nemo had indeed explained to them when they first signed up for the holiday that an effective blend of two legends prevailed. One legend that it was molten ANGEVIN. The other that it was frozen ANGEVIN. With the benefit of mixed myths, therefore, one could survive anything. He had laughed leaving the dowagers to fathom out what he had just explained. But it all seemed to make sense now. The Core itself could be seen spreading with a creamy consistency (outward from their fast diminishing blind spots) across half the sky, here more moon-like than sun-like, the quirk of refraction making it more yellow than white, followed by a blend of both colours when proto-incidence kicked in later during the natural diurnal process of Agra Askan sky systems.
Edith and Clare were the only Drill travellers who enjoyed an official welcoming party. A young couple, hand in hand – an emblem or living symbol of the love and affection that depicted the Agran Askan optimum ideal of existence, an ideal celebrating the beneficial hindsight effect of the curatively legendary times when the original young lovers in this city had had to endure one hellishly onerous quest as well as the religious shriving of their private parts in the process. Edith and Clare had arrived – partly in ignorance but partly knowing they would be using their trained counselling skills to further this ideal, and Mike (who had often acted as a radio phone-in agony uncle on the surface) would be supplementing their skills with his own special skills wrung from a mixture of hawling experience mingled with a semi-conscious self-condemnation for his own wicked thoughts and desires. The mixing of myths was the optimum, good and evil alike, used in the war against evil. The dowagers wondered if Mike’s stony path to his own ROAD TO DAMASCUS (or Road to Agra Aska!) had yet reached culmination. They could not yet see any sign of him or his party – expecting them, as they did, to appear duly shriven by the underfoot dangers of Inner Earth’s deepest pot-holing together with the hair-carpets on their backs. But they remained confident that they would soon arrive and bolster the dowagers’ own efforts to gather themselves to the tasks in hand. Any ANGEVIN smuggling could be left to the others. That was merely a by-product of the mock-holiday, one the dowagers could safely ignore – although they wouldn’t decline any of the profits once they returned to the surface!
The young Agra Askan lovers led them by the hands towards Agra Aska’s own version of the Parsimonic ‘folly’, lit from behind by a now wildly yellow innersky exploding into a balloon shape not dissimilar to the Augusthog icon or flying-pig kite glimpsed before in their travels. Followed by the quickly fading ghost of the Megazanthus itself with wings stretched between two infinitely distant horizons. The ladies would need their own brainwrights, to be sure, as they continued to fathom the real reasons for this their increasingly complex presence in an increasingly complex Agra Aska – all lies and dreams forgotten … at least forever.
****
They stuck to Arthur’s clothes and hair like burrs. They were rather unlike anything he had seen – during this particular war or any previous campaign – and if they were typical of the enemy’s weapons then he should really start saying his prayers, assuming he had any prayers left to say, or any God left to say them to.
As a child, he had been told by his mother that he was a bull in a china shop. And his over-sized left ear did nothing to minimise this reputation. But to BE a bull in a china shop (as she implied) was in his mind different to being LIKE a bull in a china shop. There was something about the phrase that suited his demeanour, his body being thick-set and charging around, as it did, flailing gangly limbs in gauche fits of passion. His mind took strange turns as he negotiated the by-ways of his youth and the changing patterns of self-image. Furthermore, he’d never entered a china shop. There weren’t any china shops in London in those days. A department store did sell some odd pieces of fine china and some less-than-fine crockery … but it also sold lots of other things for Sixties Britain. It didn’t, however, sell venus-shells. They didn’t know that anybody (including themselves) knew about one and that they might need to sell one, if they had known about it. Supply derived from demand, but you couldn’t demand something that hadn’t been advertised for use. Unless you invented something new in your mind and marketed it as part of a business plan.
A venus-shell was what his mother called the family’s favourite piece of crockery in Arthur’s childhood home. He wondered why it was called a venus-shell – but he and the other children (in turn by age) used it as a piggy-bank. It WAS shell-like, though, and the old denomination coins rattled around in its curlicue horn, as he later grew to describe one of its hollows. Much later, Arthur (and his sister Amy) were older and could use words they couldn’t find to use as children; they hadn’t known that many words existed so they hadn’t even previously looked for them. Words came naturally – unspecified except by the way they were used and the context given. Venus-shell was one such portmanteau word. The most likely scenario is that someone had told Arthur’s mother that it was called a venus-shell – and that someone was a man she had once known. Someone who was a stranger to Arthur, since he had left the house soon after Arthur was born. A man who one day appeared in the frame of the front door accompanied by the shadows that seemed to follow him – indeed shadows that followed him and nobody else. A man who wore a cape and loped rather than walked. A cove. A cad. A bounder. A rough diamond. Whose leaving present was what he called a porcelain venus-shell. Most shells of the sea variety weren’t readily breakable … unless you took a hammer to them with a purposeful gusto. Nobody appreciated it was fine Chinese porcelain until he told them – otherwise they’d have taken more care of it.
The stranger was eventually sent packing. Arthur still remembers his Mum talking about the dark form of this stranger slouching down the garden path along with his battered brown suitcase of china wares he sold from door to door.
Arthur suddenly recalled that it probably wasn’t a leaving present at all. More apt to have been a coming present, a stranger bearing gifts. But his mother had inexplicably allowed this rogue to come across the threshold on the strength of such a weak token of honesty and bonhomie which the venus-shell, on the surface, represented. It was an item that, Arthur assumed, could be bought in any local market (or car boot sale as many such markets had since become).
Even in those days, war or no war, Arthur prayed to a God that he knew failed to exist rather than to another God that he knew definitely did exist. But Arthur prayed that the stranger had never been part of his past, unaware exactly how that part in Arthur’s past had panned out and how many years it had taken. Arthur was too young at the time to remember the stranger at all, and only heard about him from the lips of his mother, in between her quips about china shops and about (even as a child) Arthur’s resemblance to a big-eared bull inside them.
The years passed. The stranger never returned and his Mum kept telling Arthur that he was a bull in a china shop. Arthur was the only one of her children who had any signal failing – so this bull accusation gave him a complex and he became what he was called.
Words stick to you like burrs, it seems. Which brings us back, in a timely fashion, I suppose, to God. A God who – as a sort of dubious present – had granted Arthur such abject uncoordination and clumsiness in both expression of verbal communication and articulation of the physical joints.
I lived round the corner from Arthur and his mother and the other siblings – and I eventually followed in the footsteps of the missing stranger. I felt sorry for the whole crowd of them and I took Arthur’s Mum out to dances. It was nothing more than that. I also picked on Arthur for special treatment and took him to football matches. The other child in the family, whose face I forget, seemed far more self-sufficient than Arthur. Well, she was a girl. He had accidentally smashed that venus-shell, you see, and was never likely to be forgiven. An accident in the making you might have said. His Mum calling him a bull in a china shop must have been very upsetting – but, in hindsight, it was unclear which came first, the accusation or the breakage, although I earlier assumed that the accusation had naturally been instrumental in causing the breakage rather than vice versa. And to deem the shell porcelain was just another means to accentuate the pain.
“Hiya, son,” I said as I watched his beaming earish face bound to the open door on one of those mornings when I came to fetch him to football. Except the bound was more a thump thump thump like giant apples falling from an apple tree.
His Mum loomed from behind him and gave me a grateful smile. I knew she liked me, but not enough for me to share her bed. I had accepted that and surrendered any hope in that direction.
You’ll bring Arthur back in time for tea, her eyes asked. I nodded.
“We’re going to win today,” Arthur said to the open air, hoping that the open air and I were the same audience. I took him by the hand and pointed to the sky, as if the weather would be to blame if we didn’t win.
He stumbled along, his huge frame – for a ten year old – swaying from side to side.
We had several quiet, private conversations, so I can’t repeat them now. None of them predicted our future together as business partners. But it was implicit, I guess, in all we said, as if the future was mapped out, frozen and immutable. He liked mixing things, he told me. I nodded as if I simply knew, without being a brainwright, that he sort of intended me to understand that he meant mixing to mean mixing myths, kneading lies together and sifting dreams so that they would interpenetrate. All a solution (in the true sense of that word) for life’s chemistry.
Arthur had stuffed the venus-shell too full of pennies; it was never designed to be a piggy bank, and literally imploded. I could have warned them about that, without even seeing it. And I never did see it. Knowingly.
Relatively late in life, Arthur went into porcelain as a career. He eventually ran a very popular website where you could order his wares. No door-to-door for him.
I was his partner in this business. I suspect all this was his way of exorcising the past, a way to tug out the stinging-nettles: all the unkind taunts from his family about lack of coordination. To be able to earn a living from fine fragile artefacts that needed to be shipped in carefully designed packaging was both ironic and triumphant. Thin and vulnerable as the flattened bones of fairies, he often said, his turns of phrase having grown maturity along with his business expertise. Not that Arthur wrapped the goods himself. My own part in the business was the packaging department which comprised of many girls from the local neighbourhood, all humming as they wrapped and stickered. The area benefited by our concern in terms of employment, a fact of which I know Arthur was very proud. His side of affairs was the marketing and finance. A third now shadowy partner was responsible for manufacture. I do recall Arthur’s beefy presence as it squatted like a giant toad with an elephantine ear at Board Meetings. He was now running – with my help – the ULTIMATE china shop and he was the archetypal bull, in more senses than one.
It was rather a large jump in the scheme of things from that smashed venus-shell to this growth into a soon-to-be-international corporation manufacturing and marketing fine porcelain. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like yesterday when we opened the first factory – where the product was further researched by experts in the trade that we had managed to poach from other concerns…
Arthur doesn’t spend much time with the business these days. He is into politics and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he became Head of State. I hear he’s having dinner with the current Prime Minister this very evening. Not the only one in attendance from the world of High Business, of course, but I’m sure he’d be considered the most important: even more central to the Prime Minister’s interests than that big noise from the Formula One racing-cars organisation. And they certainly smash up a good few of those!
Of course – humour aside – none of that may really have happened, but I often think it did. The years flew by too fast and missed sticking to the sides of memory.
“Hiya, son,” I say, as I enter the day’s diminishing Board Room this dark dismal November afternoon, as dusk gathers across the town’s rooftops like the barely translucent wings of creatures that roost there.
“I wonder if we’ll win today?” he asks.
Tears stream from his eyes as, in front of him, on the boardroom table’s gleaming wood (gleaming despite being unpolished for several days), he handles the jagged pink shards of what was once some childhood piggy-bank with a few old copper pennies mixed amongst the mutant shattered jigsaw of his life. He picks at the bones of the past: and tries to pluck a few from his suit and hair where they have got caught. Some hard and sharp, some sticky and soft.
In the distance, he heard terror grow: a new war: a new flock of birds that flew from China. If God listened, he had a clumsy way of doing it. He may be omnipotent and omniscient, but he hasn’t any ears, not even one.
“HEARING A CRACKING SOUND, ARTHUR OPENED HIS EYES AND STARED INTO THE DISTANCE TO WITNESS A WONDROUS LADY EMERGING FROM HER OWN CONCH-LIKE WOMB: A NEW WORLD BEING BORN.”
THE BOTTICELLI CODE BY RACHEL MILDEYES
****
The intense primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous suicide-bombs were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one’s eye. The wide shiny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices or slashes or sheets of black fire – accentuating how bright the daylight’s backdrop of sky had become.
Dognahnyi turned from his window and, after sweeping his curtains together upon their silent runners, he became relieved that his room had become relatively subdued: protected against the outside’s sharp relief: now a room with an atmosphere more fitting for the conference he was conducting with John Ogdon – sitting, as Ogdon was, in full feminine regalia, beneath the painting of the man with the salacious swan.
DOGNAHNYI: Celebration, but celebration for what, Hilda? Tell me that.
OGDON: That the man-city is at last united?
D: (barking) Excuse the cough. It’s my way of laughing. Well, the city is certainly stirring.
Even as he spoke, the building trembled, moving the waxen blooms of flame to and fro in their holders.
O: Man-city is something we’ve lived with. We thought the Ancient Father built it that way in the shape of a figure, but have you noticed?
D: I know what you’re going to say. Something about me being a Barker?
O: Sort of. The man-city is gradually burying itself like that legend of watery Venice. You recall? Rubens painted it. But what I was going to say is that few have ever noticed (and I think I failed to notice it till recently) that our city, our man-city, is all there is. There is nothing beyond the airport arms.
D: Or beyond its other extremities? No geography except itself. You would have thought with helicopters we could have sussed that out before now. Doh!
O: You can feel it in the feet. We are sinking. The city is sinking. It wants to join some cosmic battle within Inner Earth.
D: That’s a bit romantic. By the way, is your – what do you call it? – your alter-nemo on board the Drill? That Drill they called ‘The Hawler’?
O: Yes, disguised as a shy businessman. Even the Captain’s been kept in the dark about that
D: Are there such things as shy businessman?
O: (Laughs, then barks in mockery of the other.)
D: Well, what about the other party? My beyoootiful recruit got rid of the bewitched one. That creature – if she hadn’t fallen – would certainly have queered our pitch. There would have been confusion galore of alter-nemo and alter-alter-nemo otherwise! Yet, I’m unsure if the shriving is complete. We need full penitence of all party-goers before we can set in motion the plan for widening (by strength of love) the sluice-gates of ANGEVIN towards the huge mouth that yearns for the white slimy flow down its twitching throat.
O: That’s a strange way to describe shortening the supply-line!! (Barks loudly).
D: There’s only one possible fly in the ointment?
O: The Megazanthus?
D: Hmmm. The Megazanthus is a loose cannon, true. We don’t know whether it yet has its own alter-nemos. Like Godspanker or Azathoth. No, Og, what I was really referring to is the SIMPLE need for an unhappy ending. That should clinch everything. The ultimate paradox. It’s not easy to bring off such a required tension, a tension from the tension of identical opposites … especially with Mike Wassisname working in another direction completely. So, yes, without our own version of tension, the whole ANGEVIN mine will spectacularly implode and, EVEN with the help of man-city, we’ll all end up in Queer Street!
O: I'm working on it, Dog. I am providing the ending. NOT Mike Smartarse!
****
The oases of the two City Feet were full of cityfolk down for the weekend period. The hot office city proper was upon a lucky escape from its prison of streets and sparse parks between the headaches and highrises towards these oases of plaintive birdsong and their sounds of empty horizons and of trees. Everything was assumed to be south from this point onward till work took over with its signal return to the hard treadmill of fulfilling lives and livelihoods back in the city near the covered market.
Sunday had been travel day. Saturdays were interludes that filled the roads with more than just the car-spaces they would otherwise occupy given the propensity of avoiding traffic jams. So Sundays opened their petrol garage forecourts end-to-end for a free run towards the extra-mural greeneries that showed that the cluster of oases within the City Feet was not too far distant down the dirt tracks that the atlas failed to contain in an attempt to isolate the city itself and its wealth.
Because there were so many of the oases to count in a single area, Greg wondered that, if they shuffled a bit towards each other, they would make another city scene: with rows of terraced houses starting up on end like the highrises they perhaps once wanted to become before they were built by the peasants who once lived in them before the snooty day-trippers took them over to watch even snootier peacocks strutting down the village street in search of tea-cups to overturn and toddlers to terrify. Greg watched the same peacocks from the car window as the country road’s slope free-wheeled him south of Sunday towards the bottom end of Monday: even with his car’s tank empty of petrol. They didn’t allow internal combustion engines in the cluster of oases. Only horse-drawn transport and the odd tractor. Maybe, a helicopter, at a push.
Greg was here to meet another member of the cityfolk who worked in the same office as Greg, someone by the name of Beth who would be here in the oases on a weekend break – and Greg would cross paths with her – as Greg (arriving upward Sunday, in time for the refreshing open spaces of the weekday week which he was due to spend here spotting wildfowl (before they finally died out) and fishing the lake for non-existent fish) would be able to have a quick meeting with Beth who would be off an hour later so that she could be back at work on Monday’s North face of the week’s workaday week in the city where they both worked. Beth had not only been on a weekend break, but also a DIRTY weekend break, inasmuch as she was spending her time in the oases with another city worker by the name of Dognahnyi who had taken a fancy to her standing by the tea urn while they exchanged notes on the latest report of fiscal studies that the government had told them they didn’t want till next Tuesday’s downward slope, at close of play, before they all went home amid the many heavy-breathing cars that took the cityfolk back and forth to the city from the suburbs and yet back again to the city (it seemed interminably) until the next available weekend break or dirty weekend intervened to clean the lungs of the oily smog that lined them.
Greg had hoped Beth would come away with him but they hadn’t been able to match time off with the equally simultaneous desire to have the time off in the first place: and, in any event, as Beth soon said, she was already booked not to have time off from work so that she could have a longer time with her sister Susan abroad in the autumn and she had to make do with a series of weekend breaks rather than squander time off by using up the weekdays for it. And Dognahnyi, following the tea urn encounter, had suggested this coming weekend for a trip to the City Feet oases: and Beth insisted and Dognahnyi agreed that they should have separate bedrooms but there was nothing to stop them using the cover of darkness to make this weekend break into a full-blooded dirty weekend given both their propensities to do so. Greg frowned as he met Beth amidst a foray of sickly peacocks that several other weekenders were fleeing.
“How’s Dognahnyi?”
“Oh he left early. He couldn’t find the time to stay. An urgent call on the blower from the office.”
Greg now followed his frown with a smile. Had it really been a dirty weekend for Beth or had time been too short for that, although he couldn’t actually face asking Beth that question pointblank. It was already dusk and Beth was naturally steeling herself for the journey back to the city proper upon the cusp of Sunday/Monday.
“I’ll let you go,” said Greg, now relieved that he was back in control of the Beth situation. It seemed Dognahnyi had shot his bolt. No follow-through with that fellow. The call on the blower had been a fabrication. No office could have had such urgent business as to disrupt any dirty weekend of their employees. Sickies were frowned on, of course. But weekends that were registered and verified as dirty ones were veritably rewarded with extra pension.
Beth got in her car and Greg pushed it through the milling faded peacocks – and watched her rear unlit numberplate disappear down the slope of flashpoints that made all progress towards the time and place where she could jump-start the car into ignition and floodlight both back boot and front bumper … and join the polkadotted streams of traffic back to the city proper at this crossroads of weekend and week.
Greg sighed with relief. Although, he liked Beth enough to fancy her for his own variety of a dirty weekend, even a whole dirty WEEK – but few women in the office could face quite such a long time canoodling with other office members of the opposite sex, although together as the same sex, a week could be spent gossiping about the others of the opposite sex to their heart’s content. Some of the same sex even practised on each other some of the dirtier aspect of dirty weekends. But that’s another time trail, another audit of the strange humanity that populated our world after the invasions of the oases by man-city itself in the guise of an alien. We all became larger than life, it seemed to Greg, when the weeks split off into different days, different directions of the compass and different slopes of proclivity.
He turned his attention to the City Feet inhabitants themselves who now promenaded under the trees in search of a breath of evening air amid the slowly depleting pride of increasingly diseased peacocks. Beth would by now be halfway towards the Motorway in the longest leg of the return journey to North Monday. For him it was still Sunday and he was feeling the residues of other people’s weekend breaks as they, these selfsame weekend breaks on the cusp of dirty ones, sort of slid away sheepishly until the next weekend break broke in its full glory at the edge of East Friday or upon the even more distant (distant from both weekends) reaches of West Wednesday. Dognahnyi had long gone back cityward – not man enough to man-handle Beth for even a weekend, let alone a whole week. Greg would give him a mouthful upon his own return cityward especially when they managed to touch base again around the office tea urn. That’s not the way to treat a lady, thought Greg. Greg could have put everything to rights, come any possibility of Beth staying on for the week in the oases rather than motoring back at the back-end of Sunday as she had just done. Beth needed a real man like Greg, Greg thought.
He cast a glimpse into the sky and spotted a huge spacecraft with vanes or terrestrial aircraft loosely disguised as a spacecraft that aliens would not be seen dead in. This had been a rare sight for years now following the peace treaty between the two City Feet and the man-city centre itself. Once there had been three separate fighting forces teethed up to kill each other with no side-treaties of any two of them against the other one … or even one against one against one in set triangles of pre-planned atrocities. But nowadays northward, the two City Feet were inseparable allies and controlled the oases from their base in Tuesday. Perhaps they had always been aliens in alliance, masquerading as townsfolk and cityfolk, and pretended to fight each other, even in the heyday of war.
Tuesday had no direction, no compass points. Tuesday was simply Tuesday. Greg looked forward to Tuesday during the coming week’s break from work in the city. He suddenly realised he should be shocked by the sight of the monstrous craft that now hovered over the oases with a throbbing and droning sound that made the eardrums squirm. Given its existence, transport to weekend- and week-breaks could be so much easier without the necessity of friction on the motorways. He could have just thumbed a lift on the spacecraft. Despite these strange considerations that plagued his thoughts as he watched the skimming giant metal behemoth clipping the treetops, Greg was truly scared out of his mind as such a sight, the implications of which had not really hit home. Too late to hit home, in fact, as he mindlessly watched a ladder ratchet forth from the largest undercarriage it seemed possible for any cockpit carapace of metal structure to bear.
It was evidently time-travelling as an artefact in itself, because it was suddenly sun-daylit as if by a mature dawn, whilst, here, in Greg’s world of the oases to which the artefact was travelling, the air’s colour was now on the cusp of dusk and darkness. Greg’s mind was back on a wet Wednesday afternoon weeks before when he had attended a lugubrious séance with some of his colleagues. Counter-travel, as it were, was the business of the office in which they all worked in the city, countervailed by some slipstream between science fiction and supernatural paralogistics that weren’t even paranormal enough to warrant disbelief. Yet it all worked. As they all did. Dognahnyi was a medium medium, but Beth was the best medium of the lot. Greg often just a bystander at the edge of each Third Thursday. Now that all paled into insignificance as the results of their Fortean labours – i.e. the gargantuan spacecraft from a war that was once fought tooth, nail & claw but no longer a war that stirred animosity – allowed one of its crew to climb – as grandly as climbing down a ladder could allow – to the ground. It looked like Dognahnyi.
The figure held out its hand as if inviting Greg to shake it. But the shadow cast by the daybright metal monster in the night sky blinded a blinkered Greg and all Greg could think of was the dying peacock in the cockpit he had spotted piloting the contraption of which it was part: a royal rooster that once preened itself as it hovered like an ancient helicopter, with joystick gripped by claw. If a spacecraft could strut the sky, this was surely the original model for one. Out of the days when the world both knew outward direction as well as context.
Meanwhile, Dognahnyi, if Dognahnyi it were, was speaking: “Greg, I forgot you were coming here this weekend and I meant to say goodbye, and Beth told me that you and her were – how shall put it? – good friends. I steered clear of her all weekend. I didn’t want to tread on your toes, as it were.”
As he spoke, Greg saw tears pricking out in the dark divination of a twilight doused. Whether they were his own tears, or Dognahnyi’s, was still a blurred issue, despite the jagged edges of the shards they soon became. He wished he hadn’t doubted. Dognahnyi and Beth had spent a clean weekend break together – and here, under the guise of an ancient war returned as a new one, was a peace-offering, even if the evidence of such making-it-up was merely made up from words spoken as meaning. The ends justified the means, even if Dognahnyi’s best intentions were merely to make it seem like he had best intentions, whilst all along he had intended the worst by having his way with Beth before Greg arrived. Beth had departed, so no source of enquiry as to the truth was possible in that quarter. She was probably rolling into home-base in the suburbs even at this moment, having negotiated the paths and by-ways of the motorway in her mind even if the wheels of her car knew different runnelled slipstreams of white and red necklaces of pixelled light … even to the point of threading the tunnels and criss-crossing boulevards of stop-and-start destinations. Home sweet home. Beth was now watching ‘Big Brother’ on TV no doubt with a mug of hot cocoa.
“Giant tea urn over the oases” was the headlines on the news. And the camera picked out Greg as he was led – or rather hawled – up the ladder into the body of the steaming tank-engine of mock-modernity that had once been a war machine that dog-fought the skies of time and space, between the interface of day after day towards the pole of perfection that magnetised us to the words until they petered out gradually amid a commentary that would have been worthy of prime-time entertainment of earlier centuries when reality showed itself as realities of me and you meeting up to interact as naturally as possible without contravening any rules of engagement in the thrust of our misplaced audit-trails towards a fishing-trip, towards a dash for birddog death and no further words except those of Greg and Dognahnyi as they spread their tails in a glorious fan worship and trip-switched the fictional stars in their spacecraft they named ‘Beth’ after its friction of bottom edge on top edge of shard-infested North Monday gradually…
****
Amy, once she had finished carpet-sweeping, turned over the vacuum and emptied what it contained. Not only flies fell out but hairs from a cabbage.
Amy was now hoovering the carpet of our Quarantine Quarters in Agra Aska. The Askan authorities had decided – a bit late in the day – that both visiting parties should be held together IN CAMERA, to ensure no leakage of disease or, indeed, of dream from the surface. The emblematic pair of young lovers from Agra Aska (and young lovers IN ACTUAL FACT) were also necessarily quarantined in the same room as us – bearing in mind that they had already come into skin-to-skin contact with the dowagers, Edith and Clare.
The room was an ornate one – and windowless – decidedly stuffy compared to the startlingly panoramic vistas that had first met us in Agra Aska. The room was eerie, too, in a nice atmospheric way, but an atmosphere soon to turn jaundiced, when anything haunting the room turned out to be more insidious than it was cosy, as any hauntings of that room were soon to do in all connotations of that thought. Yet, none of us (the room’s inhabitants) had suspected what fear truly was until the hauntings of that room made themselves plain … making themselves plain, but not without losing their dubiously inherent quality of mysterious eeriness.
Yet, none of us would yet know true fear until the later endgame was upon us, an endgame which hung above us like a slowly eroding cliff or impending cutaway of Inner Earth. That would diminish the Quarantine room’s hauntings to a handleable perspective, by comparison.
As we were earlier trooped – in Indian file – within the portals of the room’s entrance, many of us gave a wistful look at the crippled Drill squatting like a giant’s disused toy upon one of the Straddling Cathedral’s craggy towers. Many Agra Askan sightseers were staring moon-eyed up at it, shaking their heads. The members of my own pot-holing party gave versions of their own shriven glances at the Drill, equally as bemused by its sight as the locals were.
But, once inside the room, the wide-screen sights of Agra Aska themselves diminished to a fast-receding full-stop in the same way as an ancient TV would once disperse its black-and-white picture … upon switching the set off.
Captain Nemo seemed strangely diminished, too, outside the jurisdiction of his Drill. He slouched into a corner seat and sat there staring mindlessly at whatever transpired.
There had been no mutual welcoming between the two parties when we all started to interact within the room. Our meeting up in such strange circumstances was taken for granted and we started conversations as if we were finishing them.
Edith had initially been tearstruck by the sight of her two offspring, Amy and Arthur. They had been lost as small children and, despite much searching by the authorities, never found … eventually assumed to have wandered off into the Northern coalfields of the city’s Head region, from where few ever returned. She hugged them, made a low-breathing comment into her son’s ever-fattening earlobe cavity – and then withdrew, taking matters for granted, as the others seemed to do. This was part of the beginning of the room’s hauntings: ie. low-key reactions to high-key events.
Amy had grown into a fine physical woman, but Edith left unsaid her own suspicions of what or whom actually lived inside her head. Amy meanwhile cleaned the carpet with an automatic sweeping motion – a tangled tussle of an affair as the carpet was mostly long-shanked with what looked like human hair. Some patches had been crew-cut which made the sweeping easier.
She later started polishing one of the paintings. One had a gilded frame but not much to speak of within its margins. A haunting of an image that was as faded as the flock wallpaper around it. However, the aura of the room’s general ornateness maintained itself despite the tawdriness of individual furnishings.
Clare retained a hands-on affection for Edith . Neither Amy or Arthur recognised Clare from childhood days as their headteacher.
“What’s your name?” asked Clare, suddenly turning to one of the two young Agra Askans in love with each other.
“Tho,” replied the girl.
“Hataz,” replied the boy, simultaneously, even though he hadn’t been addressed.
“Quaint names,” said Clare, almost for Clare’s own ears, if not Edith’s.
The two lovers seemed just as subdued as the rest of us. Perhaps we knew the exact nature of the room’s hauntings before such hauntings made themselves plain.
Greg and I were seen talking in a desultory fashion. We knew we were mutual alter-nemos – and when such individuals met, they often had empty conversations, and this was no exception. A shadowy businessman from the Drill’s Corporate Lounge took no heed of what we said, because he knew he would learn nothing new by so doing. The other businessmen were busy disappearing into their own shadows, by sidling towards corners of the room that were not any of the more usual four corners of the standard cube-space that the room apparently was. Human-coning was another expression which brought back memories to some of them, but not to others.
Susan was the least subdued. She now found Beth rather unsatisfactory as a sister, the latter having lost much of her grit. Susan had always depended on Beth’s get-up-and-go when they were younger and here, suddenly, Susan was (uncharacteristically) the only one in the room with any vestige of creative impulse. Even I felt jaded. What was more, Beth hardly reacted to the news of Sudra’s death. To Susan, it felt like pummelling a large slime punchball that was too heavy to swing.
The hauntings perhaps were that there were no hauntings in the room. Meanwhile, one of the gilt-framed paintings started to emit a whiney pathetic klaxon, of which nobody, including me, showed awareness.
The two dowagers – in undercurrents of recitation – spoke aloud parrot-learnt excerpts from Marcel Proust’s DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN – and there was also much promise of them sharing their literary passions with the others, should there be periods during the Quarantine when there would be time for all of us to kill.
As to food, there were ‘cold numbers’ in bowls, numerical shapes of indeterminate flaccid cooked-meats in an unwarmed reconstituted form.
Once Amy had finished the housework, we all started looking for beds.
****
Ogdon spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn’t his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke:
“Help me, I’m Greg. PLEASE don’t let me be Mike. I know it’s easy to confuse us but I’m the one who’s on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I’m desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I AM Greg.”
Ogdon’s own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.
“I’m Greg,” continued the face opposite. “Help me, I’m Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike.”
It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his glass across the bar smashing itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror’s contents.
But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice:
“I’m Greg. Please don’t let me be Mike.”
And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.
****
Time didn’t stand still and I dreamed of hawling through the trammels of past ages as if carding wool from tangled spools.
I fell in love with the picture as soon as I had entered the house. Strangely enough, it was the frame that first attracted me (because there were several other artefacts in its vicinity vying for my attention); it trailed golden vine leaves between studs of even deeper, finer gold. Evidently wood, but spiritually real gold. Gorgeous, true, but nothing compared to what was within its marginalia.
Once drawn into the actual canvas itself, I was enchanted by a little mid-Victorian girl playing by a stream, with a hoop leaning against her – but no way could she have bowled it across the rutted field towards the archetypal thatched cottage where her mother beckoned her to come in. A dusk scene, presumably, but above all its intrinsic charm was quite inexplicable: maybe it was the red flowers spotting the girl’s pinafore or the twined green tendrils curling like eels from between her feet towards the mother or the fact I thought I could actually listen to the gurgling stream.
I acquired the painting with the house and, luckily, the vendor did not add much to the asking price to cover it. She was a dowager lady of advanced years retreating, she said, to her daughter’s to while away the evening of her life and, so, had no room for such a large painting.
“You sure your daughter won’t want it?” I asked mock-concernedly for I could not bear the idea that I might lose such a potential prize.
“No, dear, she’s never been a lover of this particular painting. It reminds her too much.”
****
When you live with someone for a long time, you begin to discover traits and quirks that you did not even begin to suspect during the earliest honeymoon days. It’s only the test of time that will reveal if those changes (each one small in itself, but taken as a whole may well represent a complete sea change) can mature into something that you can continue to love and cherish or whether they are ingredients that will eventually turn the whole meal into a mess of stinking offal
As with a person, so with that painting.
The mother by the cottage door was in a patch of deepening shadow, I noticed. I could have sworn that when I first cast my eyes upon the canvas, the face had been lit up by the horizontal beams of the setting sun. But now the sun was vaguely further behind the trees, I thought. The girl’s face was now infinitesimally nearer to the surface of the stream as if to catch her own reflection before the light finally faded. Her hoop was not a hoop at all! It appeared to be more like a brown snake, thicker on one side of the circle, thinner at the other, like an endless ingrowing whip. The red dots on her pinafore was some substance seeping from the flesh...
I must not give the wrong impression. It was only over a long period that such changes emerged. I would get up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep or because I had been fitfully dreaming of the eventual end result of the painting if I didn’t do something about it. I would storm downstairs, only to be relieved to see that it was not as bad as I thought.
But it was always slightly different every time I looked at it. Until I could imagine that the vines of the frame were beginning to implicate co-existence with their cousin tendrils in the picture.
The girl became more aligned with the dark stream, more like an unwholesome, unnatural beast than a human, her flesh flowing as one with it.
The mother was nothing but a stain of darkness or had she gone in, shutting the door after her, despairing of her daughter ever returning from her twilight play?
And when the moon came out, I turned its face to the wall.
If anyone visits me (and the visits of my many friends who used to flock to my social events in my younger days had now begun to tail off, as they often do when you get older), but, if anyone did come, they would question me about the painting with its back to the room.
And I would tell them that it was none of their business! I would play a transcribed symphony on the grand piano … to stop them hearing the gurgling tinnitus in my ears.
****
Dreams are dreams. But hauntings that are not hauntings are the most fearful hauntings of all. In the quarantined darkness, being careful not to wake the others, I surreptitiously slid the chamber pot from under my truckle-bed and, as my hissing was spent , I recalled a visit to a dilapidated house in a dilapidated countryside with this written above the door:
THE MEEK SHALL INHAIRIT THE IRTH, AS LONG AS WORTER CONTINYOOS TO FLO UNDER BRIJJES.
****
In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts they would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times. The hedge itself had almost HELPED their descent of passage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected – but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance.
Being inside that Quarantine room was worse than any hedge-shriving – but we were eventually evicted one by one, having proved our ‘purity’ through dream-detector games and obstacle courses controlled by klaxon or tannoy. We also had to kill the ‘mole’, before the last one could emerge from the room. And this was by a daily vote. Hardly a game. More life and death, I’d say. I was sure the ‘mole’ was Amy – for obvious reasons. But, by some quirk of semi-alliances or double-bluffs, it turned out to be Captain Nemo who was the ‘mole’ – Captain Nemo (aka Dognahnyi, according to Beth) whose blood was eventually on all our hands. In fact, he and I were the last ones quarantined in the room whilst all outside surveillance had been withdrawn (we’d been assured) – so it’s just between him and me what actually happened.
Nemo’s blood may have been METAPHORICALLY on the others’ hands, but I had his blood – literally. But I’m not admitting to that. I quickly draw a veil of denial over such matters. I effectively retract my own overblown omniscience on that score. I even clip the wings of my omnipotence simply to avoid a Horla’s shame. And I trust Ogdon turns a blind eye, too – wherever Ogdon now is, if he exists at all. It’s probably just him against me, now. Ogdon against ‘Mike’. Or possibly just me. Endgame impends.
****
In the covered market area of man-city, Ogdon remained alone amongst those known to the authorities by actual name. The rest of the citizens were at best nameless or, more likely, nemonymous. Ghosts, if they exist at all, don’t exist as such: but float in inexplicably verifiable shades of non-existence barely beyond the threshold of sound or feeling. Other than Ogdon, any residual souls left in man-city – who felt the vague sinking feeling that often accompanies the beginnings of anxiety, later fear and finally terror – were such ghosts bordering on lies or dreams.
And the stirrings of clockwork driving will-powered machinations beneath the Dry Dock and covered market gave the impression that the city’s airport arms were beginning to whirr, almost spin, like sluggish propellers. And huge angel-shaped wings of earth flew upward in mountainous slab-cascades on each flank of the body politic or body civil, as the city’s cantilevered sous-centipedes of diggers started to delve a far more awesome shaft than a million Drills (in the shape of ‘The Hawler’) could or would ever have ever been able to excavate so as to make room for their communal passage downward toward Inner Earth.
Ogdon sat in his deserted pub – surrounded by smashed glasses and toppled barstools. His teary face was in his hands. He couldn’t actually believe what he was doing. Yet, relentlessly, automatically, he was man-handling a huge key in the pub floor, ensuring the massive tessellations of clockwork remained taut, on a hair-trigger of sprung power – to drive the city ever downward. It seemed appropriate that a pub turned out to be the powerhouse, not only of drunken small talk or wild boozy brainstorming, but also of the more momentous or eschatological concerns of mankind – put into ratchetting motion by this morally-neutral hawling process of unbelievably gigantic proportions. Yet Ogdon sobbed, as he began to stroke the ape in his lap.
Endgame rampant.
****
As we emerged into Agra Aska, the relief from claustrophobia was tangible.
The sky was still halved by a scimitar of Corelight, like an overripe sun that had bloated beyond its capacity to shine through clouds like a yellowmanker custard.
A vast winged angel-icon on splints floated overhead and we guessed this was just a tethered kite-symbol or a free-agent balloon-emblem that pre-figured the real angel-thing itself – when the doors of the Core eventually opened to reveal the Megazanthus swagged in its mucus strands of rancid cream. But like telling lies, guessing was only one minor stage further along the spectrum of truth.
Amy put her hands over her ears. I couldn’t understand how the silent image we all watched could have caused such a reaction. Perhaps she heard something that we didn’t. A metaphorical Sunne Stead within her own brain? Or, as she told me later, the sound of a robotic machine cranking into ignition but so well-oiled it tip-toed, just as she tip-toed herself in the shoes she had managed to salvage from Sudra’s stowaway mini-wardrobe that Sudra herself had secretly carried all the time, as it turned out, during her rite of passage with us through Inner Earth.
Beth slouched to a distant seat by the Balsam River to watch the trading-barges in their resplendent flag finery and drape-carpets. She remained confused by the incriminating nature of Captain Nemo’s identity as the ‘mole’ or ‘burrower’. Yet, confusion WAS at least a stage further on the truth spectrum most of us had not even approached!
Edith, Clare, Greg & Arthur were taking holiday snapshots (with the help of Tho and Hataz) of the Straddling Cathedral. They took each other in smiling poses. Arthur even stretched his ear to its fullest extent, as he stood saying ‘cheese’ in front of a statue of a former Agran by the name of Chesterton III.
But where was Amy now?
Endgame not quite so rampant, after all … yet.
****
I could see she needed to speak to someone in her own class. Years a lady, and now she had to resort to nightly shake-downs on patches of dusty floor that considerate souls would mete out by the inch. Her name she said was Madame de Swann, but I doubted if that was her real one. She appeared to be of mature years.
“Can I call you Aimee?”
“You may, if that were really my name.”
“It seems to fit. You’re like something from Proust or Colette or Katherine Mansfield or Anita Brookner or Elizabeth Bowen.”
“Or Baudelaire or Mallarmé... No, No, why should I need to have to come from anything at all?”
I could see she was irritated. The mane rippled like a sea, the face her beach of damp powdered sand. The hair was indeed greyer than fair, propped up at the front like a hedge in a nineteen forties style, ill-fastened at the sides with beetling hair-clips. However, it was the look, the content rather than the form, that intrigued me most.
My attention slipped to the voice. I tried harmonising my own tones and registers of speech with the contralto echoes of hers; it was as if the sound was not taken from the chest but from her past, when she’d held audiences in the palm of her shell-like hand.
“Can I help you in any way?” I ventured.
I had discovered her inside a two-bit café near to a nameless place (an area between two well known tourist attractions of Agra Aska). She was sitting in front of a large wall mirror; so at first I thought there were two of her; twin sisters upon a sheen’s breath, as the Poet once put it. I sat myself at the next table, so close I could easily stare into her wayward eyes; the sea had already withdrawn leaving glistened pools upon them. She was picked out by the awkward late afternoon light that entered between the posters on the café window. I simply knew she knew that I wanted to talk to her. And vice versa. Too old to be a pick-up, I should have had no qualms. Too old to be picked-up, she eventually answered me with not even the slightest turn-away of the head.
“You could only help me, if you’d met me twenty years before.”
The remark was even more cryptic in the foreign language she spoke. I shrugged it off for what it was; a dream talking; hope expanding into the past as well as into the future, but merely skirmishing with the seedy present moment.
“You’d think they’d clean up this city for the tourists, wouldn’t you?” It felt like taking pot-shots with words: hoping at least that the target would stop wavering about.
“Yes, I stood in some finds...” She held up her dainty foot at a sharp angle so that I could see underneath the high-heel shoe. I was astonished someone of her age could balance on such dagger- points, like a filler novelty act in an anachronistic vaudeville.
“Were you indeed a famous singer, Aimee?”
“More famous than some. Put now I’m just an entry in a thousand discarded diaries.”
“Will you sing a song I’ve written?’
I held out a tattered score. I’d carried it in my back pocket for as long as I recalled owning the pocket.
“In here?” She turned to look at the waitress who was scowling at us from over the steamy counter.
“Why not? It may bring others in, and surely they need more clients than simply the two of us.”
She saw what the score was. I thought I caught a half-smile hovering in her look. “I see it’s called ‘Aimee’,” she said.
“In this city, one ceases to be surprised at coincidences,” I answered.
She stood up. I then knew she was a Diva: for common songstresses of the old school squat sing. I, for one, croon above my own finds.
She was not quite so old as I had originally believed. The dress shone upon her pedigree flanks. The breasts relayed the blurring flow of shimmer and sea light. She hummed her voice into tune, as the Poet said, like a coterie of ambivalent musicians using colours as well as sounds for the ultimate accompaniment. But I never really understood poetry.
I tapped my fingers on the unpercussive table, finding it difficult to keep up with the other rhythms of the city around us, for the surface was tacky with ancient meals. I opened my mouth, as if that would encourage her to follow mine in a composer’s lip-reading, a listener’s sight-reading.
She eventually sat down without singing the song, though I could have sworn there had been at least something in the air (not my song, but one that had been written by one of her past lovers).
“Did you not like my song, Aimee?”
“I liked it very much, my dear.”
I turned to the waitress, seeking confirmation that Aimee had not sung it at all.
“It’s got a nice tune, Mister, I’ll say that for it...” Her voice was coarser than the Diva’s, despite the youthful breasts.
I turned back to Aimee, for somehow I knew I would love her more than any song could sing. But she had already disappeared into the gathering mysteries of the straddling night. I heard the distant tolling of the engulfed cathedral and shuddered.
“But you needed a proper singer to sing it rather than you,” the waitress continued, as she sat back into the coffee-coloured gloom of the counter. I then heard the waitress trying to mimic my song.
I looked into the large mirror on the wall and saw Sudra sitting where I was sitting, but its steamy surface swam with an uncertain gloss: Usher’s tarn dimming in the man-made light of early evening.
I swayed out into the quiet street on alcoholic points, wondering why the Madame de..... name she'd given me had gone from my mind. Nameless or no, I’d always love her.
****
I had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed myself – by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the man-city Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner – to believe that Mike was my real name.
In our eventual hotel room in Agra Aska, on one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which I lifted to show Greg (my alter-nemo) – as demonstration of Nemonymous Navigation leading to Nemonymous Night then Nemonymous Numinousness (Numinosity) – including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went with the ANGEVIN trade.
On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens’ MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist – depicting an unknown youth (not dissimilar to Hataz) who had a large white swan sitting on his lap … a foundling fondling the long neck as the swan itself acted rather salaciously.
The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a silent runner, mis-implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, I could hear some of our Agra Askan fans chanting. Since the shenanigans in Quarantine House, we’d literally become hotel-bound celebrities, a fact which was more that most of us could bear, even though, paradoxically, we’d been trying all our lives to seek out such celebrity for ourselves!
Amy did a spot of cleaning now and again to keep her hand in. She yearned after the state of her prior ordinariness more than any of us.
Eventually, there came the day when we all made our first close encounter with the Core itself. Or what we had before loosely named the Core, later-labelled as … well we’ve not reached that point yet.
I say all of us, but we left Greg behind as ceremonial rearguard. He said goodbye to Hataz and Tho because, as part of the first encounter with the Core, we were due to deal with their carefully-nurtured symbolic young love and – not so much ‘sacrifice’ them but rather tender them to the ‘caring arms’ of the Core itself, a ceremony only such initiated celebrities as us could carry out every generation or so. Human Coning to the Nth degree. We’d been given a very instructive and well-crafted black-skinned book entitled THE NEMONICON about it all – much to the delight of Edith and Clare. The prose was Proust perfect.
As in the earlier intimation of a legend concerning the Parsimonic ‘folly’, the Core was at the top of a peak within a neighbouring lightly-valed cavity to that of Agra Aska itself, and you could see the Core (from Agra Aska) as almost a rounded half-sky of beige- or yellow-coloured light, but then the nearer you approached the more it became the whole-sky and an unknown colour … by contrast, however, strangely diminished (yet still relatively huge) when we were right up close to it at the highest point of the peak. The veiling effect of proto-incidence, perhaps. Or so our book hinted.
I was the first gingerly to touch the shimmering skin of the Core. I saw within a giant sleeping form of an angel, breathing in tune with some strobe rhythm that was relative to the reality of the ‘angel’ rather than our own reality. It was half bird, half beast, I guess. Its mane was an underlay or weave of feathers vestigially carpeted by patches of yellow fur and an archipelago of raw underskins or red meat. Yet this vision of its nature was unclear through the Coreskin. Its vast furled wings were lifted from time to time – in its evidently dreamful slumber – to reveal millions (I say millions, but there may have been more or there may have been less) of naked human beings in eternal carnal embrace (I guess eternal, judging by the book’s further hints). An interwoven slobbery population of white, brown and black limbs and torsos of flesh, but their heads (and thus identities) mercifully hidden by the nesting techniques of the ‘angel’. STUB OF PENCIL: THE PRODUCE OF THIS ARTHURIAN MIX OF HUMAN SUBSTANCES WITHIN THE CORE WAS DEPENDANT ON THE INCUBATION/CHEMICAL PROCESS OF THE ‘ANGEL’ ITSELF.
We all kissed Hataz and Tho farewell before passing them through a breach in the Coreskin.
And distantly we heard the voices of Agra Askans in a chorus of: “Wonderful, Counsellor!”
It was awe-inspiring.
Before leaving the site of our first encounter with the Core, I looked down towards the lower nipples of the Core sac, where the Letting Agents (again mentioned in the book) were siphoning unrefined wads of ANGEVIN cream into wide-mouthed pipes – and onward, via arcane hawling procedures based on creative gravity, I guess, to the earth’s surface. Except, as I wasn’t to know at that stage, there was nobody then on the surface. The game was surely up, even before we knew about it. But confusion often brings the most unexpected clarity. I did not cross bridges before I came to them whilst I kept my own cards close to my chest. The others seemed to be quite out of their depth.
I took the hands of Susan and Amy as we proceeded to descend from the Core, our first job done. STUB OF PENCIL: BETH AND GREG MAY HAVE TO BE THE NEXT COUPLE ‘SACRIFICED’, WHEN THE TIME CAME, EVEN THOUGH, WHEN COMPARED TO HATAZ AND THO, THEY WERE RATHER TOO LONG IN THE TOOTH TO BE CALLED YOUNG LOVERS! EDITH AND THE RATHER GENDER-INDETERMINATE CLARE, EVEN MORE SO.
As we reached the lower slopes of Corepeak, I even wondered if what we had just seen was the REAL earth’s Core. Or was there a core within a core? Or even a series of ‘Russian Doll’ cores? Bizarre thoughts, maybe. STUB OF PENCIL: MERE UNTRAMMELLED CORESPEAK.
****
"It's easy to imagine the subject of this painting being alive. Merely look at the face, the limpid eyes shining through near tears, a hint of blusher on petal cheeks, shapely lips on the point of moving in speech..."
The guide indicated a large oil painting in a gold-studded frame, mixed sprays of flowers subtly overlapping the abstract margins.
"The girl it depicts, as you can see, has been wonderfully caught, no older than it takes to have the beginnings of womanhood in the lines of her dress. And, indeed, the dress is a work of art in itself: drapes of creamy silk edged with the frailest lace that paint has, in my view, ever conveyed, and a bodice of finely embroidered tulips. See the undulating curves created by her legs, as she sits inside that marvellous dress, all part of a dream that the artist has, perhaps inadvertently, captured with merely a few instinctive flowing movements of his brush. And the wonderful shoes."
The guide's words brought out details of the painting, summoned them, in fact, from invisibility – if only for a few fleeting seconds.
"But I suppose it only makes it sadder, with this being such a living image of beauty, that she is now dead – scientific examination having proved it was painted at the turn of the century."
A lady in the audience, one holding a Henry James novel, sobbed. She seemed to have a similar hairstyle to the young girl in the painting: natural undulant curls of rust-brown hair, its heavenly composure dependent upon the deft positioning of lemon-white ribbons, neatly concealed beyond the abstract margins. The guide strained to see who had sobbed, but the crowd had closed ranks. Nothing for it, but a tentative continuation...
"The artist? He – or she – remains a mystery. The painting is unsigned, undated, with no documentation to give it provenance, in a frame unlike any other, depicting an angelic composure in composition that, to my mind, fits no known fashion of social history and, so, I'm afraid we can only stand and gaze in sheer admiration."
The crowd began drifting off piecemeal, the sobbing lady among them. Most recalled nothing within the frame except a rather self-conscious still-life in yellow flowers. Or, eventually, just a yellow or pink matt finish with no articulation of subject other than surface.
"Only Sudra’s eyes are able to see Heaven."
The guide muttered these last words almost silently, before becoming an indistinguishable part of the departing crowd. And, at night, there was nobody left in the Gallery to witness the meeting of composition and decomposition: a pair of abstractions walking proudly hand in hand.
****
The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond Beth’s control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.
At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan’s pretty face, prettier than her own, but when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.
Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circumstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or a bus-driver or a radio phone-in counsellor? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.
Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn’t now place him as a grown-up. The big ear seemed out of place. She dreamed of him mixing some foreign substances or murky mythologies into a huge tin bath. Amy was a similar dream portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought tooth-and-nail over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn’t really differentiate one portrait from another.
Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so. She feared he was now dead. The portrait dream showed him alive, however.
****
The various Cores were not ‘Russian Doll’ within each other, as it turned out – but, rather, side-by-side cores in different geographies of lateral time like North Monday, West Wednesday etc. The strobe theory of history was now debunked and many scholars now questioned its validity as a basis for much of what had happened and what was about to happen.
Let me baldly state that my credentials are impeccable and I can’t be blamed for any misinformation as to what level of narration I actually work within. I am – to myself at least – all-knowing. If others know more than me, then, self-evidently, I do not know them.
Beth and Greg – whilst Mike and his party were still present in the vicinity of the one KNOWN Core – took advantage of their historic potential and eventually entered a rent in the Coreskin themselves … disguised as young lovers. Consequently, they are now – like Sudra and Nemo/Dognahnyi – as good as dead within the known transpirals. Greg and Mike did not say much to each other in advance of this event, because alter-nemos are notoriously anti-social among themselves. Beth did say goodbye to Susan with a hug, however.
Edith and Clare prepared themselves for a similar ‘sacrifice’ by South Saturday. They continued to absorb much fine literature on the assumption that whatever their brains carried outside the Core would be carried within it, too. This was ‘sacrifice’, not ‘self-sacrifice’, after all. Perhaps they depended on some form of osmosis.
The pair-of-young-lovers permutations of ‘sacrifice’ among the residual members were still undecided. Mike argued the case for himself and Amy being one pair, whilst Susan would bring up the rear accompanied by Arthur. We may never know the outcome of that, although we could guess. I simply don’t know.
****
Meantime, man-city further stirred downward, the fly in fate’s ointment. Clockwork without clockwork was the easiest and clearest way to explain its method of propulsion, now that Ogdon was no longer available to wind it up.
****
“Isn’t it time to count our blessings?”
The voice was one of two halves. The first few words of the question were spoken by the landlady Mrs Ewbank – and the last two words I found MYSELF blurting out, to fill in the gap she’d left, because, startled by a noise in the corner of the lounge, she had turned her head and not completed the sentence.
Instinctively, I had also turned … whilst speaking the necessary words to complete the question started by Amy. (You see I could call her Amy these days, following a relationship between us igniting.) The place was not exactly haunted, but dispossessed. Emptiness was something that lived and breathed. The room had been empty for some while, all the unfixed objects removed to other rooms (including the beige carpet) … leaving only the chintzy wall decorations. Redecoration – even amid the beginnings of a passionate love affair – was something very much on our minds.
Amy Susan Ewbank – when I first arrived in October with my battered, bulging, almost ballooning brown suitcase and other more shapeless luggage and bric-a-brac – was a landlady from hell, by the look of it, but she soon grew on me. And me evidently on her. In any event, Mrs Ewbank had shown me to my bedsit, my North October room. My East November room was her own room. And my West December room was back to the original North October one. Although lovers, we couldn’t sleep very well together, our tossing and turning having given us bruises and wild insomniac dreams. They say waking dreams are the worst sort. Real SLEEP dreams have the benefit of not being real.
Despite all this, we were now setting up home together, adjusting the nest Amy had once shared with her late husband. The undertakers had been very late, apparently … and she had tales of living with him long after the doctor had finally declared him dead. She told me all this, between the practical conversations regarding carpet cleanliness, houseproud dusting and the efficient bartering at the nearby corner shop. It was a terraced road in the working-class part of town, riddled with back-doubles and rat-runs … but it soon became home to me. Indeed, we were the only house with a bay window. Amy was very proud of her bay window. It would soon be Christmas. Most of the house was hung with paper chains of various pastel shades, and shiny baubles and a Christmas Tree with a white angel-icon (with furled wings) proudly atop its green brushfire crest. That Tree was in the hall. The sitting-room (lounge, parlour, front room, call it what you will) was empty even of THESE seasonal fineries. Redecoration of the Do-It-Yourself variety would proceed, even throughout Our Lord’s Birthday, we vowed. Love knew no stinting on nest building. As long in the tooth as we were, true love had first encountered both Amy and myself with some surprise. Getting on a bit? Well, we could remember black and white TV. And not just hazily.
The purpose was to expunge any trace of Mike Ewbank. The man Amy had once married and, for all I really knew, had done away with most cruelly, gulling the doctor and other authorities in the process. Most widows are guilty of something, I assumed. But I’m only a man. What do I know? I’d give Amy the benefit of the doubt, even though that doubt cast a shadow as long as a Grandfather Clock. Which was Amy’s pet expression, let it be known. The only item that could still be safely associated with Mike Ewbank was indeed his Grandfather Clock (bought in India) that stood in the hall – currently next to the Christmas Tree. Everything else of Mike’s was gone. I had not even been shown a proper photograph of him; yet that grainy black and white photograph of some shadows in the backyard was supposed to be him, but you couldn’t see the face because the exposure was half-cooked. The subject of the snap looked more as if it had snail-white tentacles than arms. And a red sucker for a nose. But that’s only my wishful thinking or, rather, whimsical fancy. I boasted a good sense of humour and I have to insist – the snapshot really made me laugh inside. The backyard had little changed since Mike’s day, I was told, including the outside toilet which was once the only toilet but now served as the emergency one, if an emergency toilet was ever required, which it hadn’t been since the start of my stay as a lodger in the house. The inside toilet was next to the brown-stained bath upstairs. The enamel facilities outside didn’t have a proper seat and the chain cranked; indeed it hardly worked at all. And it all clammed up in the Winter, visually like the yellow crust on some of Amy’s speciality hot puddings.
Christmas was almost upon us, on that dull, overcast, unseasonably mild day when Amy heard the strange noise in the corner of the empty lounge. She shrugged it off and continued, as if she hadn’t heard me complete her sentence.
“…our blessings?”
I nodded, humouring her. I did love her, despite the loss of both youth and figure. I would do anything for her. Even summon up enthusiasm for decorating or steam-cleaning the carpets – AND the celebration of Christmas, which had always seemed a bit pointless to me during my single days. I hated tawdry Yuletide finery, and Amy seemed, for whatever reason, to hoard the tawdriest of it all – no doubt pulled out, like long-eared rabbits from hats, every year … just to serve another tour of jollity.
“When’s he coming?” I asked. I knew that some salesman was due, but I had forgotten whether he was selling emulsion paint or Christmas hampers. I knew we couldn’t really afford either commodity. He surely wouldn’t be selling both. His name was Mr. Lope. He had been before. Once recently he sold us some brushes and brooms. And I’m sure it was the same man who tried to palm off some cheap toys from a famous Science Fiction film until Amy and I managed to assure him that we were childless. He had only to look around us, after all. Did this look like a child’s home? Forget the Christmas Tree, for a moment, because it wasn’t up that day, it still being North November. Or the wrapped presents that stood at its base, giving off an air of childishness and magical wonder. Not childish, though, more child-like. Whatever the case, I was always cross when Lope came out with his favourite saying about … yes, about crosses.
Lope’s rubbery toys had tentacles and too many toes to be human. I had laughed at them, garish images, that they surely were, of a corrupt culture stuffed down the throats of undeserving children. I laughed as I imagined Lope turning up today dressed like Father Christmas. That would take the ticket. And before I could blink, old crazy Lope in his damned cape was already in the hallway, being welcomed by Amy. I hadn’t heard the doorbell go, evidently. I shivered, as a draught had been let in. His voice was a series of grunts, as Amy helped him off with his cape. He scuttled into the empty sitting room all smiles and limp waves as he spotted me standing within the alcove of the bay window. Not dressed as Father Christmas – thank goodness – but sporting the worst kind of check suit and cravat, hardly hiding what a spiv he surely was. I didn’t trust him at all and I wondered how Amy had been duped, over the years, by this regular visitor. Surely Mike Ewbank would have sent him off with a flea in his ear – as I surely should, too. My feet were not yet sufficiently under Amy’s table to warrant this taking of the bull by its horns just yet. And as Lope and I clumsily shook hands, at a loose end, because there was nowhere to sit, Amy offered us coffee in the kitchenette.
“We all have our crosses to bear,” said Lope, with the air of a proud non-sequitur, as he took a kitchen stool.
I scowled. We could indeed sit up at the breakfast bar on stools – which we all duly did, leaving the chintzy spaces of the lounge to sigh and settle without us. The sudden noise in the sitting-room’s corner could be forgotten, at least for a while. I sensed whatever it was in the corner, if anything, had given the impression of being afraid of us, rather than vice versa. The noise had been more one of gulping in anxiety rather than creating an anxiety for others, even though Amy had earlier looked momentarily startled. And the room now empty – with the sounds of Lope, Amy and myself undergrunting distantly in the kitchenette – the thing, WHATEVER IT WAS, decided to emerge into the open, when none of us were in the room. To become more of a force, than an undercurrent. I could only guess at its behaviour, because the thing only made its presence felt properly when there was nobody around to feel it.
The yellowy ‘wallpaper’ in the empty sitting room was a sort of flowery fabric cotton material pasted over from about three-quarters of the perpendicular surface downwards … above which a wide border of even more floweriness squared the circle of the living-space. So the room was not truly empty because these hangings sat proud from the wall, almost like a continuation of the curtains. And walls can almost fill a room, I guess, as do chimney-breasts … and the alcove created by the bay window is also an almost tangible ‘thing’. Recently, I had studied the corner where Amy heard the sound or noise coming from. She told me that the Grandfather Clock once stood there in the old days when she got on better with Mike. Which was not surprising, really, because the wall fabric was dingier as if a coffin had been leant on end against it there during the Second World War, in readiness for the air raid’s latest casualty. But, probably, that was mere fancy on my part. I am a serious person and this is a serious attempt at narrating events I did not understand at the time, but possibly do better understand now. A few weeks before, I had felt the wall at that point with my fingers – gingerly, at first, as I studied the pattern. The flowers seemed – what’s the right word? – wilier, wirier, more like filaments or tendrils that are quite unbotanical. And, under the touch, they almost throbbed with life. I didn’t get the same feeling in other parts of the sitting room, as I spot-checked various different places: on the chimney-breast (still warm though it was from a recent fire) and under the bay window: chilly and crusty. Only in the corner, where the Grandfather Clock had once stood, did the wall pattern seem different, alien almost, with geometrical angles. I couldn’t quite fathom it as if it were a mystery maze in an old childhood pop-up annual. I often used my one good ear to press to the wall at that point but I heard nothing untoward.
So, as I say, please do not underestimate my powers of recall, blemished as they might be by whimsical fancy and a sense of humour that often gets the better of me, together with a use of words that can often seem more to cloud the issues than crystallise them. But the mystery itself was simply like that. Clouded. Ungraspable. A bit like my love for Amy.
The three of us, me, Amy, Mr Lope, sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchenette. The tall clock in the hall lugubriously struck the hour. Only one strike for 13 hundred hours. There was also a dinner gong in the hall which, Amy claimed, resonated with the clock at the time of striking. We hadn’t used the gong recently, since there did not seem much use in gonging each other to dinner when there were only two of us. Assuming, of course, there were only two of us. Today there were definitely at least three. Lope had reluctantly declined a meal with us, so not even today would the gong get an outing. He had dragged a heavy suitcase from the hall – where he’d previously left it – into the kitchenette, scratching (if not ripping) our kitchen floor quite badly, but, for some reason, all three of us had at first turned a blind eye to this damage. It would have been embarrassing to bring it up, I suppose. After the coffee, we expected him to reveal whatever he had brought for us to buy in his heavy and unwieldy suitcase. Indeed, he descended from the bar stool and proceeded to unfasten the old-fashioned locks on the case, with a sprung click from each thumb.
“But before I show you…” He suddenly stood up again, with a smile, a beaming countenance which belied the sickly gutturals of his voice. “I’d like to ask how your clock in the hall is these days. I couldn’t help notice that it struck just now slightly off key and wouldn’t you simply just love to own a tuning-fork for clockwork clocks like that one?”
It was a joke, of course. Off-beat humour that went with the smile, if not the voice.
Amy glanced at the kitchenette window, as if she had just spotted someone darting a look at all of us around the breakfast bar. It may have been a broken-winged bird flapping foolhardily too near the glass or a scrap of litter in the air – except it was a decidedly windless and uncomfortably clammy day for the period just before Christmas – just ripe for influenza. Meanwhile, in the empty lounge, I tried to imagine all sorts of things going on. The air thick with insects and the wall-fabric being torn in shreds from the brickwork by busy creatures that had come down the chimney. Anything (even phenomena quite as preposterous as these my waking dreams) seemed preferable to extending any small talk with the likes of Mr Lope. I could not see what Amy saw in him. During my temporary lack of concentration, Amy had opened the back door and was seen talking to someone outside. She was waving vigorously, having indicated to whomever it was to get lost. Obviously a trouble-maker, since we lived in an area which was definitely over-supplied with all sorts of trouble-makers, of all ages and sizes. We had not yet had a brick through the bay window, but only time would tell. I got up to see with whom Amy argued the toss and saw it was Mr Lope himself who had been told to leave in no uncertain terms. I hadn’t noticed the altercation nor his shifting from the breakfast bar to the backyard. He must have evidently crossed swords with Amy and I smiled that it was overdue that he should receive this come-uppance, but I was still bewildered by the order of events that I had just this minute missed. I noticed Lope’s suitcase was still on the kitchenette floor like a traveller’s trunk or a mobile coal-bunker, with the huge scores or, even, grooves in the kitchen floor that led up to its current position near the cooker.
Amy hitched up her frock in a moment of sudden self-awareness of the dissheveled picture she must present. I knew there was now no way out for Lope other than through the backyard gate into the cobbled ginnel where the dustbins were kept, and from there he could get back to the main road. I didn’t want to interfere, since it was going all my way without me pushing in any direction whatsoever.
She slammed the backdoor and returned to the breakfast bar, red-faced but triumphant. What’s up, I nearly asked. But I kept a dignified silence, knowing she would explain when she was good and ready. The moment seemed sacred. We were alone together. The world had been pushed outside. And the minor jealousy I had felt regarding Amy and Mr Lope could now be forgotten. The scene that had seemed farcical at the time was nothing of the sort. It had been a natural progression of events, reactions and counter-reactions, and I had merely missed the linking moments during my involuntary daydreaming a few minutes before. Indeed, daydreams can seem shorter than they actually take to daydream them. All had now fallen into a logical and sweetly serious communion between two lovers: Amy and myself. Not even the memory of Mike Ewbank could intervene during this special connection of two souls – except when, soon, the tall clock in the hall struck twice for 14 hundred hours, decidedly off-key as Mr Lope had earlier implied.
But then the gong in the hall went.
Abruptly, the gong gonged so very loudly one could not possibly blame any resonance from the clock. It was an autonomous sound that could only be caused by someone or something in the hall outside our kitchenette bashing it with the padded hammer.
There followed complete silence. Now our moment of quiet contemplation and mutual romantic communion had turned sour. It was still the same nature of silence or soundlessness, but one now filled with foreboding and fear, rather than with the sweet nothings from a pair of middle-aged lovers. How can two silences be so different from each other? It was as if my daydreams had escaped the mind that had created them and were filling the air with invisible night terrors or panic attacks. A crazy wild thrashing of mental horrors that were, even as we stood and stared, with the dying of the light from the kitchenette window, sensed all about us, even if we couldn’t actually see them with our eyes.
We decided to ignore them, by talking.
“What happened to Lope?” I asked, with a calmness returning to my face by virtue of a stage actor’s skill that I didn’t know I possessed until this moment. Or so I supposed.
Amy’s face equally became a carpet of emotions as she shrugged off any of the false fear we had both just felt. “He was rude and look at our floor!” She pointed at the near trenches in our kitchenette. It was at that moment we both realised that Lope had left without his suitcase. Full of tuning-forks and replacement pendulums for clocks and missing minute hands and keys to wind things up and replacement trombone arms and stair-rods. The thing was probably crammed with his wares. One of his previous brushes was hanging by the coal scuttle which we had earlier filled to take into the empty sitting-room to help warm the place up. This brush he had sold us last time. The wiry spikes were tailor-made to sweep up coal dust and even chunkier bits of coal. We wondered if he had any more in his case. At least his brushes and brooms were quite useful, unlike the musical cutlery and makeshift metal hinges he had told Amy he was selling this time. None of it sounded very Christmassy, in any event. We laughed. We actually both laughed at the unspoken thoughts. Still, there may have been some metal puzzles in Lope’s case, so that we could try to disentangle them on Christmas evening. Some of my favourite childhood toys were those looped-together rings and silvery angular shapes mingled together in a real confusion that ever needed unlocking. Most of my childhood toys, however, had become buried in mis-memory.
We pulled and tugged and dragged Lope’s erstwhile trunk into a cupboard beneath the sink, stowing it along with the several other shapeless packages already there, the nature of which Amy had long since forgotten, it seemed. We would postpone investigating any contents until long after Christmas. One thing was clear – Amy and I were much more careful than Lope must have been, because we had made no marks on the lino between where Lope had left it and across to the sink.
Then, we proceeded to out-stare the length of the night. At least, we out-talked it – and I had no further attack of the daydreams, helped by the fact that it was no longer daytime. But waking dreams can beset you at any time, day or night. We talked through the silence, neither of us actually daring to venture out into the hall towards the empty lounge. Past the clock. Past the gong. We guessed the Grandfather Clock was probably the ring-leader. Didn’t take much imagination for that.
“It’s quiet.” Amy said it almost to herself. There was more going on than either of us could admit. Her words hid more than they revealed, naturally enough. That is typical of most people most of the time. She looked towards the kitchenette window as if expecting many coiling tentacles to be slicking white cuckoo-spit down the panes. Goodness knows what was already smearing itself against the bay window of our sitting-room. We dreaded to think. The sky had been empty of weather during daylight hours, and now it seemed teeming with it, even if you couldn’t see it because of the darkness. A weather full of feathers. Our love had become a craft. We needed to nurse it through the interminable dark hours. Just as carpentering perpendicular wooden trunks for Grandfather Clocks had once been a well-honed craft, to which many generations had been apprenticed, according to the history books. But I sometimes wondered if fiction was possibly more reliable than so-called history.
“Yes, it’s quiet,” I replied, as if proving, by that very statement, the lack of observation in our own behaviour (Amy’s and mine) and how it affected the environment of our home amid our otherwise ever more intense observation of the external things that might harm us before the coming of morning.
“Mr Lope won’t come again.” Amy said these words like a statement, even though I knew it was more a tentative spell against further visitations, a spell that might not work.
“What’s he called? I mean what’s his … Christian name?” I asked. Certainly the conversation was a stylised one. We didn’t need the answers to our queries, only the breaking of the silence that they enabled.
“Greg. I think it’s Greg. He’s always been a commercial traveller … of sorts. He helped get the fabric for most of our walls. He brought many rolls of it in canvas bags. He said walls needed thick linings. Mike always believed him to be right.”
Her husband, Mike, then, I realised, had encouraged Greg Lope’s visits to the house, in the past, when he (Mike) had still been alive.
At that point, we heard North Christmas carol-singers trilling from the front door and ringing it vigorously like Hallowe’en trick-and-treaters.
We tried to ignore their eventually raucous attempts at God Rest You Merry Gentlemen. A shame, really, as all they probably needed was some loose change.
The silence soon regathered its forces. We forgot to speak to each other. We had even given up that particular subterfuge. The tall clock in the hall had temporarily stopped striking the hour. I scowled at Amy for not having wound it up recently. She claimed she didn’t have a key. The third strike and we’d both be out.
The next thing I recall was the key-ring she plucked from her frock pocket, so as to prove she’d changed her mind … trying to disentangle the smallest possible key in the world from the curlicue bands of steel that bound it to the ring.
Then, there were tips of fingers or things that looked like fingers feeling under the kitchenette door towards us, making crosses in the air. I leant my body steeply against this door, as if I were a full-blooded builder’s strut designed to prevent architectural slippage or settlement. The whole city around us seemed to thrum in stress.
****
Ogdon was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus’s usual allotted white-lined space alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. NEVER EAT YELLOW SNOW, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.
Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could add to the maimed and the dead.
Later he would indeed be found dead in a state of RIGOR MORTIS or SHYFRYNGS… leaning at his body’s slope upon the large still-turning clockwork-key in his back.
****
It was not exactly a TV interview. It was more Candid Camera. The four remaining Drillmates were left de-briefing the whole affair in advance of what they expected to be a grand climax, the exact nature of which was still unclear. The interpolations of any interviewer are left untranscribed..
SCENE: A disused Agra Askan grocery, lit inexplicably with arc-lights. A painting of The Archer from the old days was on the wall near some droopy turnips on shelves, looking remarkably like Thatcher.
MIKE : It was wonderful to see the peacefully happy look on those youngsters’ faces as they slipped through the coreskin. It made everything seem worthwhile.
SUSAN : I have a funny feeling, that it’s not all over. Surely, Sudra is coming back. That was a dream – that part – wasn’t it? I was told it was a dream.
MIKE : Who by? No, that was not a dream, I’m sorry to say. Nothing is a dream when underground. Although, I suspect the zoo was not all it was cracked up to be when we were told it was dreamless. We should have guessed. The zoo is not underground. (Mike nods to the unseen interviewer).
AMY : Since my change, I’ve taken nothing for granted. I don’t even take myself for granted. At times, I think the city itself is coming after us – a suicide-bomb strapped to its waist, ready to blow the Megazanthus and its coreskin to smithereens.
MIKE : A suicide-bomb? That must be the covered-market, then?
AMY : Yes, one must assume so. And I once dreamed I operated a car bomb near the bridge. It was terrible.
ARTHUR : We must get back to the Drill. I know Nemo had many muskets stowed in a cabin somewhere. I heard him tell that to one of the businessman when he thought I was too far away to hear what was being said.
SUSAN : Surely muskets will be like flea-bites on an elephant when the city arrives!
MIKE : There’s no telling. Sometimes things are more symbolic than physical. I learnt at least that during my tour of narrative duty.
AMY : (smiling) You mean you KNOW things? I’m sure I don’t, even though I’ve been programmed to know everything.
MIKE : I don’t think any of us even approach knowing anything.
AMY : But you know you were meant to be a hawler, if everything had gone to plan?
MIKE : Hasn’t everything gone to plan, then? I don’t even know what a Horla is, after all this time. Something to do with time and memory and dragging things from deep inside one?
AMY : A hawler is many things. It also means dragging things from inside other people as well as from yourself.
MIKE (Remembering the incident with Captain Nemo): Well, I think I’m beginning to understand. It’s like loving rare beef … as a sort of symbol. Hmmm.
SUSAN : Don’t forget the birds. That angel in the core reminded me of a huge diseased bird. Despite the good it was doing to its nestlings.
ARTHUR : But there’s no doing good simply for the sake of doing good. At the end of the day, the whole thing is being driven by the milking of Angel Wine from the Core, and selling it up the line. (Nodding to the interviewer) …Yes, I know that’s unproven, but it makes common sense.
The interviewer then left the grocery, someone who had been hidden by the TV cameras rather than revealed. Even as he left, his cape concealed his real configuration as truth or fiction. The four Drillmates’ conversation continued after the arc-lights were switched off, but we have no means to continue our surveillance of what they said.
****
Mike started by staring directly at Susan. She was wearing a pointed silver brooch of the Angel Megazanthus at her throat – dangling from the finest thin chain of gold. Looked decidedly dangerous, but she’d always worn the most aggravating decorations, ever since she had every part of her body pierced as a young girl. Most of that had gone now, except for this hanging brooch. She was now just like any other middle-aged woman of her generation, inscrutable and cold yet with feasibly stylish winsome ways which she was able to use, as ever, to get her own way. People never changed, he thought.
He felt that no new words spoken between them could possibly add to or subtract from the past. The climate of their relationship was fixed – a thing frozen in a vast jar of emptiness, yet hanging there within a consistency slightly thicker than air: viewed from all sides at all times.
Except Mike felt that t