Mike dreamed he had a new occupation back in the old days before real life itself became so dream-like – which was buffing up the drearinesses that seemed to build up when nice bright mornings drifted into the degeneration of late afternoons. He was on guard duty from 3.0 p.m., at which time darkness began to have the potential to wheedle its way into the daylight. So he grabbed his mop and bucket of sunlight liquid from the cupboard under the stairs and, by lunchtime, he had hung his uniform by the front door, with battery-lit buttons and luminous carnation in the button-hole. He placed his false ding-dong of a nose, bright red and bulbous, on the door-knob, to remind him to take it with him. But his mind wasn't in the right gear, somehow. He felt a trifle under the weather, despite the morning's sunniness. He looked from the window and saw a rocketship crossing the blue sky. Then a circular saw disguised as a UFO. It didn't look at all convincing. He looked down at himself and, come to think of it, and not to put too fine a point on it, he was not the fine figure of the man he thought he was. Who ever heard of putting the brightness back into twilight, anyway? He might as well go back to bed, he thought, because no doubt it's all part of a bad dream. But, too late, the rocketship suddenly slipped a gear, spluttered and finally stalled, crashing towards the house in which Mike stood and stared, now believing how convincing it was. Luckily it was indeed a dream (or else he did die and was subsequently dreaming whilst dead).
He looked at the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece (which his parents had arranged that very morning before light) wondering whether anything of such relative insignificance could be persuaded to take on a character larger than life. Tomorrow, his parents had been told, was to be his very first interview with Sudra Shoes. He kept looking up and looking down, and each time he looked up, he felt sick and sicker. As if the motion of his head up and down was a flight of nausea on a tilting sea of air. Finally, he decided, too late, that he was, literally, going to spew. No time to reach the fire-closet. So he used the vase of flowers. Later, he switched on the TV set, but could not focus its flickering or reality streaming. He was not used to reading between the lines and a sense of nausea revisited the alimentary canal around which he was built. He sometimes felt as if he had vomit running through his veins, instead of blood. Or something called Angevin. He failed his first interview, but passed a second one much later in life because the original failure became a valuable qualification, there having been a change of management. His parents would have been proud of him.
****
Indeed, I must have been dead, because I dreamed I was not Mike nor even myself. I was them. I was us. One thing was certain, I was older. But not wiser. The street was quiet except for the occasional tube train below. The lamps joined up worms of light in the darkness. Yes, the street was quiet, the distant drone of a rocketship several skies away. The lamps were finally doused in the early hours: all that could be seen was the sole glow of a first floor window in a ramshackle joint – and it was in that room where the Sudra Shoes real head office resided. The "we" that "I" had become climbed on to each other's shoulder's to view a middle-aged man at a word processor. He was so intent on his task, that he did not hear the sash-window slip its lead, nor our ingress to the room. It was not surprising, for we were quieter than the spluttering of his veins. Outside, the street was quiet. Inside, the room held for a split second a shop-soiled tableau of our frozen dummies. He must have been deafer than a porcelain venus-shell for he did not hear one of us tripping over the lumps in his beige carpet. We would have to be more careful next time, for any slip like that could have caused a havoc and a half. What a man! He kept up the nimble fingerwork on the keys, oblivious of us. One of us eventually looked over his shoulder and read what he was writing. It was in English, so we could not understand it. Outside, the street was still there, but we had completely forgotten it. Inside, we ranged wide, rummaging beneath the bed for valuables amongst his night soil, rifling his cupboards for any noon meat that was still sufficiently undecayed to be handled, cleaning out his pockets for powdered Angevin amid the fluff. Not that we were common or garden burglars. He must have been dumb, as well as deaf for, on seeing us, all he could do was point at his mouth. One of us laughed at him and the other laughed too. It was difficult to tell whether his tears indicated laughter or not. Funny that! Outside, the street had imperceptibly broken its bounds into morning – with everything, except daylight, which morning entailed. Inside, we had killed the man, for we could not bear his incessant silent laughter. It was so disconcerting. He must have been round the bend. His eyes were luminous. One of us (probably me) did the job well, cut his throat with his own scissors, took the adam's apple between the two blades and snipped. His death sicked all over the yellow screen. Illegible in life, illegible in death. Like the noises from the street outside, all leading hard and fast towards noon; people, cars, trains, kids, sirens merging into an inchoate groan. The saw-rocketships had been grounded, of course, till it was official night time again. Inside the room, we finished searching his bits and pieces. Now, what should we do? Listen, who did you think I was? I talked to myself, you know. Dispose of the body, before it's an incrimination. Speak up, won't you, I can't hear, for the noise in the street outside, it's so deafening: like the spluttering in my veins, the blood of my proud parents.
The sash window slid back of its own accord, yet I ignored it. I put the finishing touches to the words on the screen, English being a language with no hard and fast rules, merely taste and instinct and fear of the schoolmaster's cane. Better than flower-arranging. I was perhaps the only one awake in the whole of Inner Earth; so busy, I was sure to miss the lightning flash that was both sunrise and sunset. A diptych of dawn and dusk.
****
“Well, your dollship, how are you this morning?”
Sudra sat up, her cream-laced nightie cascading either side of her shoulders. Last night’s rouge was smudged below the eye-line. Your dollship, as Sudra had been familiarly called since a child, was now older than she had ever dreamed possible becoming. All would have pointed to a foreshortened future.
The arrival in her bedroom – a figure relatively recently appointed to the domestic staff ten years before – quickly dragged the heavy pleated yellow window-curtain apart, allowing Sunnemo to form dust-beams across the ornate gilt of the imported church furniture.
Upon a detached altar sat a particularly fine example of Sudra’s tiny companions (one of above average size) – its eyes staring solidly ahead, since only a sloping of its body could have shut them. Upon wooden box-pews – transposed here from a derelict chapel to below the wide bedroom window – squatted a row of older items: children’s toy-babies of stuffed cloth, wood, india-rubber, many dolls’ prams &c. In addition to these, each resting prettified heads on floor-scattered hassocks, there were examples of the jointed wooden dolls which were a marvel of cheapness, hand-made by the peasantry of Middle Europe. Some wire puppets hung from the ceiling like mobiles to counter boredom (or create comfort during tooth-ague).
Sudra often recalled, I suppose, her cruises along the River Danube, journeys conducted with careful preparation, bearing in mind her delicate condition – even in her prime years. The willowy islands (so beloved of Algernon Blackwood). The churches with bulb-topped spires. The stylised townships. The trinket shops. Emporiums – of sweet dolls and even sweeter dollops. The former for the mantelpiece (or the playpen), the latter for the less salubrious purposes of the soulless flesh. She smiled a false smile as she recalled her own in-joke on such journeys – mainly spent alone (other than servants, of course), sometimes with her Uncle Mike who was often more than just a friend and thus willing to participate in such jaunts.
She smiled ... then she didn’t.
She noticed that Arthur, the early-stirrer, was taking too much upon himself. Endearments and diminutives were barely dared to be spoken by any residual close relatives (among which even Uncle Mike was not counted), let alone by fire-brands recently raised to the position of boudoir-verger ... like this Arthur who continued to prepare for Sudra’s morning ablutions: filling the font with tepid water from the jug he had lugged here from the stone kitchen; feather-dusting the tops of the dolls as a part of the same ritual; remembering to stir the banked-up fire into life by means of poker and, more importantly, a well-trained mind-over-matter. Arthur was nothing if not determined to please.
“Is your dollship ready for her wash down?” he asked, with an ill-disguised smirk.
“I beg you not be over-familiar,” she said as one of her mottled legs flopped from the side of the bed, released, as it were, from its own erstwhile dream. She slid her feet into jingle-jangly shoes and pulled a toy pram nearer so that she could board it.
“It’s a term of utter respect,” he said, swinging his arm round the room to point out, one by one, the valued subjects that shared the spiritual aura of Sudra’s chamber.
Arthur went out of sight at that point, because, naturally, the wash down would be conducted in private, despite her disabilities. The sanctity of the moment was for Sudra alone.
Sudra alone was Sudra with her Danubian dolls which, I claim, was just another version of Sudra alone. But we can not allow ourselves to pry – even if we could do so – into the personal duties which each morning naturally brought forth from the unrinsed mouth of entropy.
Arthur, meanwhile, sat in the stone kitchen chatting the time of day with another servant, one by the name of Amy, a pretty girl.
“Her dollship’s not in a good mood this morning,” he said with a flash of what he assumed to be his second from best asset: his eyes.
“I dreamed about her last night,” said Amy.
Arthur took her hand. They shared a relationship which allowed simple touching. Nothing more. Even in an era with loosened corsets, as this was, servants customarily maintained the dignity of their parents. A love long won was a love long had. Sudden passions between strangers were little better than self-abuse ... upon each other.
“Not another dream? I wish I could patrol your sleep, Amy, to keep anything untoward from your mind.”
She formed a false smile at his overt jest, knowing, in her heart, however, that he was being deadly serious.
“Yes, her damned dolls came to life,” she continued, “and they complained they had not been made properly.”
Arthur nodded. He had heard recurrent tales about such a dream. A doll in particular – the one sitting upon the ornamental altar – often proceeded to bad-mouth Sudra about how its joints were too stiff. Only stick-puppets should suffer this way, it maintained. As if to demonstrate, the doll in question showed how sitting stock still belied its own fantastical nature of being able to move. The way Amy told the dream, there was an element of simply gossip, in the same fashion as all the servants chatted of this and that: viz. who was pregnant and what, indeed, they were pregnant with; legends of past and future; Viennese ring-roads on which Sudra and her Uncle Mike became lost seeking museums housing Hieronymous Bosch paintings; the half-siblings who fought over the use of the best servants in the house; the Abbey at Melk where Sudra was the first woman allowed to meet members of the arcane Brothership; salacious things to which many a blind eye was turned; evil matters which were so evil nobody even dared notice not noticing... They prattled, words falling over words, until retiring to their own crackly pillows or truckle-beds and their own insular dreams.
Despite their closeness as near-siblings, Arthur loved Amy. Not only for her good looks, but also for something more, like a comradeship against the odds. They were the only two within a mere arm’s length jurisdiction vis à vis the mistress Sudra. Give and take. Arthur and Amy gave, Sudra took. Except where orders were concerned! The other servants merely remained distant nervous little people, as far as Sudra was concerned. So distant, she often misjudged their sizes.
Sudra sensed that two of her servants – the only two she really saw close-up – were conducting a surreptitious romance. She predicted only a sad ending. After all, servants, by nature, tended, by the law of averages, to such endings. Her staccato thoughts were punctuated like the steps of her dolls which she dreamed they made around her bedside when she slept. Only an omniscient surveyor of these matters – and surely omniscience is as unlikely to exist as Jung’s collective unconscious – could possibly judge that Amy and Sudra shared the same dreams: a fact that would have shocked one of them more than the other and a dose of omniscience is not required to know which one!
As Sudra completed her daily tasks, she ensured that each little job of which she was capable was carried out thoroughly. Uncle Mike was due to visit today and he would, I guess, scold her in front of the servants should any detail be left uncrossed. She slowly garbed herself in her daytime gown – differing from the dressing version only by its lack of tasselled cord – followed by the slipping of feet into satin slippers. The head-scarf was tied into position with difficulty, but necessary to keep the church dust at bay. She tried to avoid the staring eyes of the altar doll, since she was not ready for its inspection – nor, probably, was it ready to inspect her, she thought. Nevertheless, it seemed to encapsulate – even from the corner of her eye – the soul of Middle Europe and the transfiguration of race and creed, politics and anti-Semitism, Anschluss and Ottoman/Austro-Hungarian angst that had threaded her family history like a river of psychosis and blood. The flickering stills of scrawny individuals, stick-puppets if simply by virtue of the bones poking through the flesh, moved nearer to the wire fences, trying to clamber them, but their joints failed at the last moment ... only to be caught in the cross-fire of dust beams.
The morning wore on, Sunnemo dipped from sight. She whiled away some time re-dusting the doll pates ranged on pew and hassock. It had been a soul-wrenching few years for Sudra: not that she was alone in her boredom. It seemed to be the modern condition: people no longer seemed fulfilled. Aeons of TV had sunk without trace into dry river-beds of consciousness. Books were large-print and formulaic. Social interaction was self-motivated – and fundamentally ears were closed on things people didn’t otherwise want to hear. Eyes, ever open, unblinking, eager not to miss an ounce of life, but essentially once that ounce had been weighed it silted into loss and loess.
She heard Amy and Arthur weave their subtle endearments, sweet nothings which she imagined she imagined, but seemed real enough:
“Why does Sudra thinks she imagines us?”
“Well, she needs something to replace what most of us once had. A faith in something larger. When that awful man she calls Uncle was brought back with her from holiday abroad suggested making her bedroom into a church, she thought it would fill an aching gap...”
“But it didn’t, of course.”
Arthur touched Amy’s arm again. The touch was cold, but the erotic thrill was greater than that of a kiss or, even (or especially) of closer-quartered manoeuvres of love. Often the case that a forbidden contact – however slight and otherwise innocent – created man’s primal urge more efficiently than the hardest pornography and/or gratuitous violence. Not surprising, thought Sudra, as she locked eyes with the altar doll, awaiting Mike’s arrival.
“Can I touch you again, Amy?”
“As long as the other servants don’t see.”
“Most are still asleep. They’re not woken ‘til after noon.”
The stone font had towering curved walls that glistened from the morning’s ablutions. Once a kitchen, now a font. The stone needed changing, as its basin was worn almost through by the rubbing of babies’ heads during baptism. They could not see over the lip of the horizon where the dusty sunnemo-beams had earlier set.
They heard the hassocks’ straw crackle. Wooden box-prams creak as new woken souls rode each riparian moment. Sudra noticeably breathed, as she reached out for the altar. The imposing doll thereon had regained its soul. The eyes spoke to her, still unblinking. She sloped it down so that they could close and relieve her of boredom. But joints creaked to a halt in mid-backward pike...
The window curtain swung closed like a confessional, to reveal the Angel of darkness as darkness often revealed its own kind by enveloping it in deeper dark, as it painfully stalked from behind his absolution-proof voice-grille – a fence of wire puppets that lay love-entangled across his erstwhile hidden share of Sudra’s bedroom. A Father. Or Master. Or Camp Commander. Or Megazanthus. Not really an uncle, after all.
Bones now poked through cassock and hassock alike. She covered her eyes that no amount of folding hinge-like had managed to close. Sudra prayed to be alone.
“Well, how’s your dollship this morning?”
A kiss ... as, in a moment of Eucharistic Angst or Anschluss, a bready dollop passed between their crimson lips.
****
The east coast town was quiet, even in the middle of the afternoon. Then, he decided it must be early closing day. Wearing a cheese-cutter hat, with a neck-tray resting on his chest, the man shouted his wares, words enough for any mortal to get his tongue round:-
Bryant and May's Alpine Vesuvians!
Fusee matches that no wind expires!
Bryant and May's Alpine Vesuvians!
Their flame better even than coal fires!
An old sobersides driving a Growler cab across the other side of the chimney-potted street shook his fist at him and shouted:
"Ain't seen old Ogdon for at least six year, but you look a good bit like him!"
"My name is nothing like Ogdon's," retorted the match-seller.
"If you ain't Ogdon, then I'm not Dognahnyi."
"So you're not Dognahnyi, then, and there's an end to the matter!"
"If you were that Ogdon fellow, I'd come straight over and push those bleeding matchsticks right up your..."
Before he could complete his speech, along came another man to set out his stall. He shouted:
"Come, come, I don't want you scaring away my customers with your idle squabbles."
The pannet which this third man had been toting on his head was placed on the dusty pavement. Squatting beside it, he began to sort through the large bristly pink seeds it contained, taking a few as specimens and breaking them open to reveal the soft fleshy inner bodies.
"Shrimpo! Shrimpo!" he shouted with voice amain, as if he were baying prayers to some fish god.
The man with the matchboxes shrugged. Pointless anyone selling on early closing day. Worse even than the Sabbath. They were all certain to get their come-uppance, if they were noticed, in any event.
By now, the Growler man, perhaps called Dognahnyi, perhaps not – someone with an obsession about someone who answered to Ogdon – had driven further down the street, evidently in search of any unscrupulous fare. His black smudge came to a halt at just the distant point where the eyesight could have fooled one into believing it was a blind spot.
"Bryant and May's..."
"Shrimpo!..."
The two street calls merged into a right old hickory dickory.
The Growler was on its way back.
"I reckon you are that Ogdon geezer," the cabman called as he drew closer. "I been a-thinking down there, that you've been pulling an old woolie hat over my noddle. Whether your name is Ogdon or not – in fact I don't care less if it is Pogrom Panjandrum or Blasphemy Fitzworth – I still reckon it's you that owes me a seven shilling and a halfpenny."
As the Growler man spoke, his flinty eyes stared at the one with the match-tray.
"Did I hear you say Ogdon, old sobersides?" suddenly perked up the Shrimpo man.
"What business is it of yours, mister meddler peddler? My doings are with this cat-'out-a-pace bleating of fusee matches. So I'll trouble you to keep dumb and get on with your shelling."
Shrimpo, now down in his mouth and spitting on bits of beard, continued to crack pink blobs between the black moons of his fingers.
Meanwhile, miles away, yet close enough to be in the same town with the same early closing day, the dowager lady shrugged herself into the heavy costume: a rich attire that once a High Bishop could have boasted. Her name was Edith, a common woman's birth-calling – but, if it had not been for this particular name, she would have been someone else, a different woman, one who suffered breaching, pregnancy and finally death by Caesarean section...
She retrieved a mighty tome of oiled leather from beneath the pulpit, one with a smell that permeated the whole cliff-top church, being at once the mustiness of disused tombs and the rankness of yellow mists shimmering over those lake archipelagos in Upper Essex. She knew she was written into the texts of the book, not as Edith, but as Sudra. When an old man called Dognahnyi, who happened to be ensconced in a side-chapel, grunted, she scuttled off into the box-pews ... where, later the darkness would merge her with a congregation most of whom had hired Growler cabs to get there. Shapes like the black ghosts that some call shadows.
Hearing her whimpering, Dognahnyi lifted the heavy top cover of the tome. Despite the oil, it cracked loudly, echoing throughout the chapel. And there, under pink foxing, was her image illuminated into the first word:
Sudra was born into mortality, more as mere match girl than a Goddess; nevertheless, no man nor woman could know her body without also seeing the spirit that lived within it. Starting her mission in distant Inner Earth...
Dognahnyi could hear the starchy costume as it shifted with her breathing. She was by now at the back of the chapel desperately seeking a confessional. She evidently thought him to be a ghost, nay, a demon... He read on from another place:
Love her once, the man has no option but to love her twice, once as the man and once as the disciple. Either love or do nothing; for, as Nature cannot, will not change by its very nature, Man must change instead...
Dognahnyi wanted to seek her out, to tell her that it mattered not that she was a virgin who had known even more men than she had begat children. For him, she was still an icon. But he read on:
The lakes grow wider, the lands narrower and soon you will have nothing to tread but water. In verity, the entirety of Upper Essex and Lower Suffolk will fast become nothing but tapering footpaths between the oceans.
He looked up from the pulpit and saw the distant white womanly face stained with a blind spot. Yet her body was lit up as if by a flickering lucifer-match. And the salt water seeped amid the pews, like a diluted congregation of sea wraiths returning for a sermon about the loaves and fishes...
After a period of interminable incense and muttering prayers, she realised that, among the nuances of the increasing darkness, she was still alone and the meddler demon gone. She prayed to a vision of herself that was a mockery of ritual, before confessing to nobody that she was nobody.
The demon, who may have been called Dognahnyi, or may have been called by another name, skimmed over a limitless lake, till a Big Bird God harpooned it with a dislocated sharpened dorsal fin and forthwith set about squeezing the succulent pink flesh out of its bodily coffin ... ready for boiling in the end seas of Nature.
In the town, Shrimpo, too, had long gone, leaving a pink stain on the pavement where his pannet had stood, since it only too easily leaked the sea's saltblood. Whether he sold any that day, early closing day kept secret. Strangely Ogdon was his name – one who often conjured stories of his wife and unknown daughter both of whom he had lost, years before, in childbirth. Later that night, back home in the nearby creeks, he scribbled in his cod-oiled commonplace tome of weathered leather, ending with:
Rest easy, for I've long been dead
By the time these words are read.
In the fast-gathering twilight, before the lampers had had their high tea, a Growler cab was still parked in the otherwise deserted street. Two figures sat on top, where there was barely room for any driver and his mate. They had obviously settled their differences over money quite amicably as the silence was golden: matches were continuously flared to set the surging airs of darkness into retreat ... and they examined each other's face in the flickering rhythm, to see if there was any sign of Phossy Mouth disease and, no doubt, to test the reliability of recognitions during that time when history was such a slippery customer.
The Sunnemo Springtide night had come on more quickly than usual, it being early closing day. There was a windless, yet birdsonged, hush. Soon there'd be late worshippers as paying fares to take to Benedictus at the cliff-top church. And with that, the words were read.
The only one with a real name is the Angel Megazanthus, yet we still don’t what it is.
****
The dining-room, unsteadily illuminated by the demure candleflames in which pretty Sudra took such daredevil delight, was quieter this evening because one of the usual partakers around the long glistening oval table had been put to rest that very morning.… after a long illness, true, but one that had not prevented the deceased from dining with the others until the very end. So, the movement of the carriage clock had it all its own way, deepening the silence by punctuating it.
Around the table tonight, there were still the same number of places laid. Two ancient dowager ladies, whose sister’s funeral they had all attended today, spooned their soup with only the slightest of tinkles. Father and mother sat at each end of the oval, both formally dressed for dinner, as had been their wont the length of their marriage. His heavy moustache showed signs of soup droplets flickering in the light. Her floral choker moved in and out with the neck muscles – her large brooch of a golden angel looking more like an exotic insect in the rarefied glow. Sudra sat opposite the two dowagers. She was at that awkward age when she was too old to be put to bed early after a nursery supper alone with her Nanny (who was still an inhabi¬tant of the house) but, equally, too young to have a full-bodied frock or the attention of the others towards her attempts at sophisticated conversation. She, too, ate quietly, realising that, of all meals, this was the one where she was to be best behaved. Eating not only quietly, but uncharacteristically slowly. She almost felt herself to be a lady for the very first time – her face seemed a source of light greater than the candles. Nobody noticed her “coming-out”, not even Sudra’s mother, for she was caught up in her own ditherings, picking at her food in the same way as at her conscience.
With the scene set, there is nothing much to add. Photographs are like that, albeit this one owning an uncanny element of slow motion or potential strobing. No sound effects, other than perhaps a hint of a knock at the dining-room door. The two dowagers would perk up, eyes bowling...believing this to be their late sister. (But Sudra knew, in her own mind, that it was the aged Nanny come for her scraps).
****
My mother had a proper wind-up gramophone which revolved the dog-and-horn label at breakneck speed. I could hear it spinning from our garden. That year in Whofage, Sunnemo’s winter seemed to last all of it. Icebound chinks of light between the interminable angevin-snowdarks, lasting for weeks on end, until I even lost count of the months. In what hindsight proved to be the very middle of that boundless season, the water butt in the garden was impregnable. The pre-forms of ice had solved their own irreversible jigsaw overnight. Mother was frantic. Cooking in the copper-bottomed pot was simply not on. The boiler was overheating, too. I would have to sick up last night's supper to lubricate the friction of the house's various processes. I'd rather brave the crackling elements outside and take the wood-chopper to the butt, than put up with mother's nagging me to do just that. Meanwhile, thoughts and memories (even dreams) took up less space than time. A relative and I had fallen in love at the funeral – so-called cousins come together for this rare occasion: a funeral for someone or other, whom very few of those attending seemed to have known. Whoever had suddenly died was now a dead body still unsalvaged from a mini-Drillcraft that had sunk to the bottom of the Agraskan ‘ocean’. Hopefully a quick painless death that sensible people pray for themselves, before too late.
When Amy had heard that I was coming to the funeral, she could not help cringing. She'd only once seen me as a snotty-nosed kid wielding a heavy-duty catapult, with a blazing shock of hair and freshly grazed knees; but, when she saw me again across the empty grave, it was tantamount to love at second sight. I had apparently filled out into the dishiest male she'd ever laid eyes on, my finely chiselled face in a setting of sharp man-of-the-world garb, the flash of my smile lighting up the gloomy afternoon like low autumn sunnemo-light glinting between the huddled skeletons of trees. It was a wonder what empathy could manage in my self-confidence stakes. I, too, only had eyes for Amy. The last time I'd seen her, she was a prim and proper little madam, in best bib and tucker, with tightly coiled ringlets and Lilian Gish mouth – and a glance that could shrivel as much as it could stiffen. Now, she stood amid the boring, strait-laced, mourning members of her family, a real stunner with the low cleavage of her black dress and the wild, wild eyes rolling to and fro between the half-sky and my face, like the champion marbles that used to sparkle in my hand when I'd been a short-shinned lad in the back schoolyard.
Her inbuilt sexuality was not in the least tasteless for the current formal occasion of bereavement, but a bequest to life. I realised there must be a guardian Angel, a pantheistic being through whom life followed death as surely as death followed life. Momentarily, I forgot the concerns of my business life: I may even have been tempted to give away the fortune I'd made from Hawling to the first destitute who crossed my path – but that financial glitch only lasted a few seconds, whilst the holiness of sexuality would remain with me forever and ever.
Gradually, as the funeral service droned on, the staring eyes of Amy became locked with mine like antlers. A sensitive bystander may have witnessed our ghosts – wispy, curvaceous inner forms of ourselves, both with probers and containers – glide from our carnal bodies and then, whilst wrapped in each other's limbs, settle into the grave, as if the grave were the most inviting four-poster bed possible: then pulling the demure wraith-like curtains together with a flourish. The congregation dispersed piecemeal, as the workmen started to fill the empty grave and to stabilise the headstone that everybody had signed, as if it were a greetings card or plaster cast. Best wishes for the future. Get well soon. Many happy returns of the day. Good luck in your new home. Condolences on your bereavement. Drill-chocks away, old boy.
Amy and I were not seen at the wake – an unsurprising fact because everybody thought we had been tragically killed in a childhood accident as siblings – in the ice. One guest – if he had been recognised, which he wasn't – would have reminded the gathering that some deaths are salvageable. Meanwhile, meanwhiles mounted. Mother continued to encourage me from behind the frosted window which had been stuck on its sashes since I could remember. She waved and gesticulated in blurred outline. I could not catch her voice, although it was evidently shouting ‘Arthur!’ at the top of itself, from the evidence of her head's shape. But I did hear, in a muffled staccato fashion, the sound of the record as well as its spinning: a modern version of a ditty whose title I'd forgotten – sung by a young choirboy who was now dead, but whose voice was frozen forever on a plate of black grooves, until the day someone accidentally broke it. For some reason, I considered it natural that I could hear the record but not my mother's catcalls. Earlier in my life, I met a certain Sudra. I was, as ever, trailing a personality in my wake, like an advertising saw-plane. I was the sort who, whilst in somebody's company, seemed perfectly natural, convincing and generally a good egg, but, in hindsight, striking others as boastful and a bit of a wide boy. Empathy rampant, again, no doubt. Indeed, I knew that it became easy to think ill of me behind my back, to such an extent I was soon subject to every form of recrimination. Then, once seen again, others would be all over me, drinking in my every word, forgetting that the aftertaste that emerged from the heady wine of my conversation would later turn rancid in their mouths. In any event, Sudra fell head over heels in love with me or in love with the up front image she had of me. She particularly enjoyed the way I'd arrive in rhyming couplets:
Hiya, it's Arthur Arthur Poet Eater,
Come to see his little Rita.
She never understood my badinage, but it seemed to fit the mood – or created the right mood for itself.
We've gotta to go real steady,
Until our love is ripe and ready.
The verses were not even any good. Sudra thought she could have done much better. Yet the day always appeared to brighten up around me like an cosmic halo.
My off-the-peg kisses were more spontaneous than those made-to-measure tonguing affairs Sudra's previous boy friends always assumed she enjoyed. It was often a peck on the cheek, merely that, but it seemed to her worth all the kisses in the world for that one moment of halted time. Then, my hand fitted around hers like a perfect glove and, swinging this clenched fleshy parcel up and down, we fulfilled the promise of the day. But, then, we had to say goodbye until the next time. Our eyes met in parting, exchanging tear for tear and, finally, pushing up her coat collar above the ears, she'd skid her way home through the icy Sunnemo-Fall leaves. Then, gradually, my image slipped and she felt emerge a shadow which was never otherwise evident. She made home, she knew not how, for the Whofage streets were blurred by the driving drizzle. But, once home, without even bothering to make a cup of Horlicks, she snuggled deep under the ribbed electrically-heated bedding, her consciousness easily fulfilling the duties of sleep. Her nightmares grew gross with a reality that they could not possibly have had but, nonetheless, she did live through those horrible visions. The monsters were obviously theatrical, terrifying in their fancy-dress skins, false teeth and heavily pitted birdheads. It was the very theatricality that made her feel they were real, not phantasms of the night as they should have been – that, and the fact all were modelled on different versions of me. When she later told her friends that she could hear me speak in her dreams through her ears, they nodded understandingly, for they too had met me, past whom they could put nothing.
Here I am, Arthur Arthur Poet Eater,
Come to see his little Rita.
It didn't seem to matter that they were not our real names.
We've gotta go real steady
Until our love is ripe and reddy.
I then peeled her, easing off the skin with a long fingernail, starting with the frayed edges in her nether region, since I probably resented her implied criticism of my verses.
She woke screaming, as my jawful of teeth met within her. My tongue flickered where the fluttering of her heart should have been felt instead. And each time on waking in a cold sweat, she determined never to make the next date. She guessed she needed a boy friend, like most, who'd be nasty to her face, all mouth and trousers up front, someone whose memory would not later corrode on the back of her tongue. That was what a woman deserved, a man with no illusions nor false echoes. But it was never to be. When Sudra saw me again, she'd fall for my overt charms and walk hand in hand through the shopping malls once more, ignoring those obviously jealous looks of her gossipping friends. And, in my company, she was not scared of the shadowy creatures who often wolf-whistled under their breath from the dark shop doorways just after the ordinary late night spendthrifts and the nervous little people had gone home – because she knew in her heart that I was one of them, the only one to come out into the open, so far. And her heart would flicker with mixed excitement. Nevertheless, today, mother's water butt was threatening. Not in any sense of movement, but merely horrific with its aura of steadfastness. As if a prehistoric monster had slept alive for countless centuries, only about to be awoken by the kiss of the chopper-blade. I lifted the butt's slatted lid, being careful not to dislodge the precarious gutter pipe feeding it. The ice was in several ridged layers, as I imagined the world to have once been millenia ago. There was only sufficient light from the yellow duffle-coated sky to discover that I could not see to the butt's bottom. I was sure, however, that the curdled cloudiness moved sluggishly as if in some fortune-teller's crystal ball. But, in my mind, I was clambering the Klaxon hills near an earlier home. One that pre-dated Sudra, if not Amy. In fact, when I looked round, in the early stages of my excursion, I could see the industrial market community nestling against its central factory complex, the terraced streets fanning out, not in the strictly geometrical grid as I had been taught in the local school, but more in a convoluted maze of back-alleys and double dead-ended culdesacs. The tall chimney rising steeply from the very centre of the Angevin Factory was spouting black-clogging smoke into the icy sky and, then, across the surrounding hills, only for it to separate out into deserter armies marching across the Sunnemo-less yellow sky.
I tried to shake free of both poetry and preconception. Even doggerel. I had actually forgotten my own name for a few seconds as I surveyed the imposing scenery. I was now old enough to leave home. My mother was off, at that time, in Parismony acting out a second wild honey-moon, having departed by the steam railway which was the only real route out of Whofage along the ancient hawling-tunnels. From even where I stood on the last brink, before entering the more unexplorable dune regions, I could see the train adding its own billowing smoke to the steely air. It wound between the less forbidding escarpments on an endless fishbone track of which our old wives would gossip in hushed huddles. They hinted that the trains did not turn up in the distant Parismony Station, having lost themselves somewhere between here and there, just like these thoughts I was undergoing amid the back-doubles of my brain.
However hard I tried I could not pretend to lack pretensions. I had to sit down to recuperate. My ambition was to beat kids navy blue. I wanted to be a teacher, since I had always thought schools were too soft. I hoped the desks would shrink, with the kids still in them, tightening down upon their bones, the metal stanchions being rivetted extensions of young spines and the ink-scored desklids, with a life of their own, munching away at the kids' shorn heads as they bent in silent prayer. I had always thought there were creatures lurking within the impenetrable darkness of the school blackboard that, on the final Day of Megazanthus – when all the ticks and crosses were added up – were to jump out en masse and take over the souls of the poor little darling pupils. I enjoyed scaring the likes of the girls with such thoughts.
Thus, I was leaving home, not before time, to go to Teachers' Training College, and I was walking, rather than trusting to the train. It was not long before the ancient view of Whofage was left several crossed brows behind and, as I crested yet another untrodden sky-line, I saw the sharp icicle-like pinnacle of a pylon, poking from what was no doubt the midst of a forgotten city. Nobody had warned me that I might have to dodge around such communities, on the way to the Parismony. I suspected that in-breeding or inner-breeding in such places would have a lot for which to answer. I was intrigued. I persuaded myself nearer, against my better nature. I peered over into the gully where a few tied cottages surrounded a massive cathedral-like edifice more akin to the size and nature of Notre Dame or St. Paul's than a typical country church. Seemingly as a result of my glance, thousands of blackened birds (if they were birds) scattered off its gothic towers and domes into the yellow sky. I could vaguely hear the hymns of the villagers from within the mighty building, a Dies Irae fit to scare the Angel itself, and a blasting organ which scattered several more packs of wings to shuttle into the fast curdling air. A chorus boy's shrill cooing soon ensued, however, with notes made from audible ice. By then, empathy had unveiled that my mother had reached Parismony, despite the train losing a wheel at Leighton Buzzard. However, she became lost on the Underground system somewhere between Euston and Piccadilly Circus. It can only be hoped by means of a weakening empathy that the consolation of her love for me kept her body and soul together, as she continued to scan the deviously geometrical grid of the famous Underground map for some clue as to her release from the darkness and from the even darker people with dire glowing eyes like whom she herself may soon become. Her greatest consolation, however, was the faith that I, her son, would soon make the world a brighter place. She had a miraculous vision, between Liverpool Street Station and Shadwell, of me being shriven by the Angel Megazanthus, before a massive blackboard altar (which, thankfully, she did not realise was the business end of a tunnel leading to the worst form of imaginable Inner Earth). But, if the truth were told, pointy-winged schoolkids flocked from the sky and proceeded to tear most of my body into tiny little bits. Tossing these around between them like bullies' prize-takings, they effectively taunted and teased me with my own body-parts. Then they scuttled off, yipping and crowing, into the tunnel towards the Dark Playground. I looked towards this same mother who had eventually escaped the sucking hawling-tunnels that were the horizontal chimneys of an even bigger place than Inner Earth. Today, she pointed a distorted finger at the ice-chopper which dangled between my feet and hips. The record was evidently stuck, for the voice piped up plaintively in repeated unison with the gusts of angevin-snow. I wielded the chopper and, closing my eyes tight, brought it down headfirst into the bound ice. Whether the braying was in my head, I could not tell. But I felt shock troops move up my arm towards the brain in shuddering stages from the heel of the palm where the handle bit. A shower of sparkle-edged splinters flew into my face. The ice was only at first slightly dented, where the blade had entered, despite the force of my stroke. One last salvageable thought, however, reared its head higher than any monster could. I was to be married late in life, following a whirlwind romance with one of the girls of my dreams.
I'd ceased to have much truck with women, having found them overbearing and, in the main, quite unbeautiful. So, when I met Sudra again, with her sweet smile, I felt that the rest of my life would be as nothing without her and much of my past would begin to make sense, too. She even blotted out memories of the earlier Sudra and premonitions of Amy. Indeed, that Sudra was at the afternoon tea dance in a floral frock and yellow jingle-jangly shoes, dragged there, apparently, by Miss Clare, who had previously spent most of her waking hours (to the point of desperation) concerned with how to trap me in her increasingly threadbare web of feminine wiles. Imagine her disappointment, bordering on despair, when I took up with Sudra – the protégé she'd spent hours of otherwise valuable coffee mornings persuading to get out more, spruce herself up and dance a jig or two to the Palm Trio, even if it were arm in arm with Miss Clare herself. As I had often noticed, tea dances seemed to be exclusively feminine, even when I was there to break the pattern. I never understood why women wanted to dance with each other. Perhaps they felt safer. Then, that fateful Wednesday afternoon, I took Sudra right from under Miss Clare’s nose and launched her upon the gleaming dance floor as if virginity were only skin deep. Miss Clare, who had been a widow as long as she could remember, watched us glide to the lilting music, jealous of both Sudra and myself at the same time. Miss Clare’s emotions were so mixed, she turned redder and redder, until, by the end of that tea dance, she might have been recognised for a boiled beetroot at an identity parade. The Palm Trio had by now packed their instruments into battered cases and prepared, mumblingly, for their departure to a night spot where they were due to play tunes on behalf of ex-models, painted to the nines, in a salacious quarter of Whofage.
Miss Clare agreed to be Matron of Honour at the wedding, but not before she took us apart to say: "You know what you are doing?"
"It's about time I settled down," I said, examining Sudra's tiny hand that I still managed to retain, following the end of a dance.
"But after only a dance or two!"
"I know, Miss Clare, it's quick, but when you know it's right, what's it matter how long it took?"
The object of my intentions merely blushed a delicate pink. Miss Clare’s complexion had long since resumed its greyish tincture – she was being plain practical, since the two jealousies she felt for Sudra and myself had by now cancelled each other out. She became Godmother in fact of our first offspring. Meanwhile, Sudra had her own mountain of meanwhiles. Her dreams she believed to be her own. She never told anybody about them, least of all me. I had soon discovered that she had no character to speak of – not that Miss Clare hadn't warned me. But neither I nor Miss Clare realised that her life was mainly spent elsewhere, in those dreams, unadmitted even to herself. The night she dreamed of giving birth to Amy, she was semi-conscious for most of the labour, willing the bundle of flesh to get a move on into the open but, equally, seeing into the future of all her children. Amy would grow up a lovely girl, much in her mother's mould, despite still being a foetus with no obvious signs of beauty or otherwise. Miss Clare would do her duty, both toddling along to church, whilst I stayed at home making a fuss of my china doll wife. If I'd known then that Sudra's own mother was the same Sudra of my past, I may have taken a different course with the mapping out of memories. But then, other children would arrive, a brood of little me's, each so little different from the others, Miss Clare would believe they were all twins, despite the gaps between.
"You will have to stop!" she announced to me, one day.
"How can I, Miss Clare, when she wants me so much?"
"There's family planning. Sometimes I think you two have got a pair of thick skulls fit for each other. How often have I told you – every time you do it, does not have to end up in another pink parcel!"
"I know, but she says that we cannot kill our young even before they're conceived."
"That's balderdash, and you know it!"
But Sudra saw her children grown up. The dream was so realistic, she felt she knew each and every one of them, all their foibles, their pains, pleasures and hopes. As a mother, she was behind each set of their eyes, urging them towards a goal even she had not yet quite formulated. But, a dream, given half the chance, turns to nightmare, expunging all attempts to shake off its autonomous relentlessness. The children's heads were skinned to the very bone, so that there were deep neatly sliced shelves of red gristly flesh around the middle of the neck where the bodies proper ended. They spoke and laughed as if the skulls were real faces. The syncromesh of bones attempted to mimic expressions while emotions, in turn, travelled to the front, via the visibly pulsing brains. There was not enough of Sudra to divide up between them, with all so eagerly seeking her love. Miss Clare organised the funeral. I was there, of course, but I was so distraught, I could not even face mourning. The seventeen baby-sized coffins in seventeen prams slid behind the crematorium curtain, even before the Palm Trio had managed to tune up its specially rehearsed dirge. But the wake was a civilised affair, small beetroot sandwiches and even smaller talk. There was very little dancing, but plenty of tea. And, today, the angevin-snow cascaded so that I could hardly see if mother's shape was still framed in the window. Perhaps she'd gone to take the sapphire pick-up off the record. I shrugged to indicate the pointlessness of attempting to prove anything. The butt's barrel would rive asunder – there was no fluid down below anyway. It was packed solid throughout like a perfectly-fitting coffin. We might as well melt kind snow than something as brutal as this ice was turning out to be. If she saw me shrug, she gave no sign of it. The weather was by now becoming even more inclement and I fully expected to do a quick change act with a block of standing ice, the conjuror's climax instead of a cabinet with a body inside it. The butt's chocks came away. And even my thoughts became skewed, just like the ice wrenching and groaning out of shape. There were several icicles like spiked fingers erupting from the slit I'd started in the iron-grey surface. Meanwhile, there was no meanwhile for me. Yet someone returned to the house and discovered the whole place was a shambles and a half. The boiler had finally gone up, leaving mother no more than a shell of her former self, spun by the explosion like a juggler's plate: its tethered centrifugal force ignoring all possible frictions. Someone needed relentlessly to wield the diamond-sharp edge of the chopper, gouging further black grooves in her, in a no doubt fruitless attempt to quench the onset of her high-pitched whining. But that was before there arrived a sense of the shuttle of pointy wings settling in around a shivering corpse, with icy flakes of unused memory continuing to splinter off a non-stick brain. How did I kill the ice monster? By blowing gently on it with my warm breath? Telling it stories about things in my life? Boring it soft with the tenacity of my novels? Or did it kill me with its spiralling icy touch? Perhaps even the dead have doses of difficult empathy.
****
As he threaded the bright-lit quarters of the humming monstrosity, Captain Nemo viewed his fellow crewmen sleeping. Being a barrack-room philosopher, he speculated upon the nature of the journey. He, for one, would not be able to doze off so easily, especially with all the ceiling-globes still burning – fearing that sleep would thus bring spotlit monsters of nightmare.
He had just been back to one of his cabins or cabinets where he had re-grouped – decking himself in gentleman’s tweeds, burnishing is freshly shaved jowls and manicuring his sharp points. The wardrobes had been chockfull of swinging regalia and the aroma of rhino-gomenol. But he ended up with a mood-piece that Phineas Fogg may have worn.
Of the sleeping crew, Greg snored loudest. Earlier in the "day", Greg had teased the others with tales of salt-mines and pepper-mills, to which they were en route for more than a lifetime of labour amid the thirsty, sneezy realms of a yet undiscovered planet on the sinister side of Inner earth. Nemo forgot where the quote marks began and ended: some of the words were Greg's, but most were Nemo's own retrospective attempts at creating a private joke world.
Despite the apparent modernity of the Drillcraft's interior (the glistening clinical walls, the bulbless lights, the interminable smooth under-drive of its hidden power factors, the interconnecting cabins), it was furnished with squashy three-piece suites and four-poster beds dredged from old-fashioned history. Here, the off-duty crew lolled about, blowing invisible speech bubbles in their sleep. Nemo creased his brows and stared into each pair of stark-staring eyes to see if he could read their dreams.
His first subject slouched in a wide-winged armchair with grease marks where the head had missed the antimacassar. This was the pilot sporting his epaulettes less grandiosely in his sleep than he did when awake and alert. The dreams capered across the eyeballs like Saturday Morning Pictures. Nemo became annoyed as each dream came to a false ending and blended into the next one. He abandoned Flash Gordon in a predicament worse than death only to find himself following the eye-line of the Rocket Man into the chimney tunnels of pre-cataclysm Earth, where critters lurked...
But these were the critters Nemo had feared so much in his own dreams. So, he side-stepped to the next upholstered recliner where Greg himself snoozed. Nemo stared into staring eyes. Once upon a time, Nemo and Greg had played the Eyeball game for real (when boys in a mutually synchronised schoolyard) – but a sleeper has an unfair advantage over blinks. Herein, Nemo lost himself in a black and white movie from the now legendary Hollywood days. But this was a Film Noir, with only meagre light to place the protagonists into relief. Robert Mitchum's eyes were not only drooping characteristically, but closed, as he zombied around the incomprehensible plot. The film's undergrunts came faintly through Nemo's mouth, but the lips did not move. More sound than soundness.
The next sleeper was a woman. Her eye-lined dreams were rosier, more pastel, more romantic. As half a sun set into the whites, her lips made tentative kissing motions. Nemo knew this woman as Greg’s wife Beth. Somehow the old days had been forgiven and forgotten when the couple used to leave messages written on yellow 'post-its' stuck all over the refrigerator door for each other. Greg even loved her, loved her as much as he used to hate her when she emerged from the kitchen every Sunday, roast aloft on the spiked silver platter, as if she hoped it was his head, mouth propped open by a tongue swollen into a large fruit gland...
From the far end of the cabin, Nemo blew kisses back at Beth, whose eyes flickered gradually shut with the imminence of her stirring. He dodged from the cabin, before she was fully aware of his presence. He could not expect friendly small talk, with waking up in the morning being such a pain these days. However, even her evening endearments for Greg seemed laced with sarcasm – perhaps for old time's sake.
In the next cabin, Crazy Lope was already awake, which was not surprising. He had been suffering a bout of long cough which had recently turned into a bark.
"How are you this morning, Lope?"
"A trifle dicky," Lope replied.
"Have you tried sucking out the phlegm yourself?"
"It's getting my lips to the mouthpiece that's difficult."
Nemo felt asleep himself on hearing that conversation. He pinched Lope's arm, evoking an effeminate squeal. He asked Lope to pinch his own arm ... but no squeal at all. Nemo cursed. Lope was probably the only one awake.
Nemo, despite the doubts, wandered into the third cabin. This was as dark as a black pepper-mine or derelict hawling-tunnel. He could hear the pretentious snores of the inhabitants. These were the very critters which the crew were transporting to the outskirts of known Inner Earth, bordering on the untenable universe, to labour in the Angevin lands. Trying to dodge the extraneous limbs – whiplashing from between the gaps in their crates to snarl and snag his path through the cabin – he eventually reached the fourth cabin where those on heavy duty were propped up at the engine-computer control consoles. The dual read-out screens stared into the eyeballs of their respective human parasites, hypnotising fingers in some semblance of basic logic across the keyboards.
Nemo rested his hand on Edith's shoulder. He fancied her, but he did not stop for her to respond. Despite the armholes of her tunic revealing enticing swells of mature breast, he forged on towards the cockpit where he was supposed to be officiating. But he had one more cabin to negotiate – the one he dreaded most. It was a long, narrow room fitted like the utility-style parlours of the nineteen fifties. His dead parents sat opposite a dim, flickering screen that, unlike those in the previous cabin, bore only blurred images and shadowy figures moving like inhabitants of an ancient B movie, ill-preserved on corroded acetate. The man and woman looked up together, in clockwork motion. They smiled at the one they considered to be their son.
"Sit down for a while, it's not Christmas every year," said his mother.
"No, Mum, you're not here for me to sit next to." He could not stop himself from feeling sorry for her. How could you blame her for being a hologram?
"I'm not a hologram, my dear," she said, as if she had read his thoughts.
"Have some consideration for your mother," chipped in his father. "She got up at an unearthly hour today to get the Christmas roast on."
Nemo left the cabin, tears streaking his face as the good-to-honest, rain-sodden earth once did in his urchin days of catapults, cap-guns, marbles and conkers. His mother had given the game away, for nobody surely would have heard of holograms in the nineteen fifties. She had always been only one belt-notch away from premature senility even when she was really alive. He cast a glance back at his father who returned a knowing look – pitiful in the extreme. Nemo's searching for himself in the mine of youthful memories was like delving into a bag of Smiths Crisps to find the crinkly blue tourniquet of salt.
In the cockpit, he was astonished to find the whole Drill on automatic free-wheel. The craft was cruising the urban universes of Inner Earth, before traversing the more dangerous outspaces that, he knew, bloomed with many overlapping black-hole bubbles. His so-called co-pilot of a female persuasion roosted in the lead seat, a bright red coxcomb staircasing her longback neck, her lips already hardening into a puckered kiss that became more like a beak than anything else. Her eyeballs had slewed to the midpoint cheekbones and Nemo assumed that all they were seeing were the compartmented blurs of inner space – or yet another episode of Twin Peaks. Nemo took hold of the joystick and plunged it into a manual gear. The Drill lurched and spun on its centre of gravity for endless seconds of pure terror, it bit-tip whirring uselessly. Nemo could hear the screams of the other crew-members in the lower bellies where he had just completed a one man's rite of passage. He stuffed the single earphone into the one large grooved-out ear that sprouted on the side of his head – but, deep within the tinnitus of the craft's communication system, he could still hear the stifled screams of the crew.
Before he thought about dying himself, he spotted a yellow 'post-it' on the cockpit window. He plucked it off like an idle feather off an even idler portion of dead poultry.
"Don't forget you may be an alien, too, Nemo," it said in recognisable manuscript. He smiled – how could he have possibly been fooled by all those implanted memories into thinking himself to be a human being? He was not really fooled by the sticker, either. As he heard the backward-buzzing of an ancient aeroplane as it took off from one of the airport arms in man-city, his mouth's last speech-bubble stated he was not even an alien, but a machine.
But Nemo was none of these things, not even a hologram. Just a buzzing. More sound than soundness.
****
I forget whether my memory is as good as it used to be.
I once knew how it all ended, but now I despair of remembering it. All I can do is make various attempts at retracking – rat-tracking through the sewers of the past.
I decided to pay another visit to the house where, all those years before, events transpired which mythology has all but subsumed. It is said that the past is a monster waiting to return from the direction of the future, with white-flecked lips and accusing eyes. But, I vowed to ignore such fears and to face out any residual shame from such ill-reported times.
Could the house be in the mind, thus not just a simple train journey away? I sat in the shuddering carriage watching the leather window-strap swing from side to side. I itched to tug the red-painted alarm chain in the slot above the warning to passengers not to lean out. The tunnels seemed to be prolific – dark interludes in an otherwise straightforward succession of events. From all available evidence, there was no other passenger in the long corridorless train. But how was I to know for certain either its length or population? Only by disembarking.
I pulled down the arm-rest from its niche in the carriage’s upholstery and leaned my greasy head of hair upon the lightly engraved antimacassar. I desperately wanted to dream, in case reality had played me false and would land me in an incomplete scenario of trackless trains heading for infernal countries of Inner Earth.
I did dream, I think. I saw a plain of prams. I saw visions of others who had dreamed before me – lands where history had come clean and laid bare the bones of its villainous participants – scores of skeletons clacking above the sleepers, like the tail-to-tail bony carapaces of unfreighted flesh – cities of scientists who went mad with religion – plain upon plain of inverted mountains....
I woke with a start. I had not been dreaming at all, only dreaming that I had. The train was pulling into a station, since I saw white boards flashing by with its name written up in clearer and clearer, and yet unattainable, definition.
I had embarked at Parismony, since the house I sought I knew to be near Agraska. During my last days in the hospital, I had ranted, it seemed, in my sleep, about the Black Mountains, where Creature Beings perched and spoke in the same Celtic lilt as I, the dreamer. Such Beings, through me, spoke goldenly of a Race older even than themselves which represented the most important group of Beings which Time and Space could ever encompass. And that Older Race, in turn, spoke of even greater Beings who managed to exist, in spite of their intrinsic untenability.
Now, as the train drew to a juddering halt, I, in a moment of misplaced logic, wondered if there were yet other Beings immeasurably greater than even those. And so on, ad infinitum and, perhaps, absurdum, until...
“Until you come to Man himself.” A porter, or one I took to be such, had opened the carriage door for me and spoken as if continuing a conversation. In the dim flickering lights of the wind-swept platform, I saw his face possessed an imbecilic cast, topped off with a purple schoolboy’s cap far too small for the large-eared head. Snot bubbled at one enlarged nostril. After he took my luggage, I saw he had a graveyard lurch, as he headed towards the station house and its waiting-room.
As I followed him, I heard the train shunting behind me, steaming up for the rest of its journey and, fleetingly, I turned to see faces pressed up against the grimy windows of that hissing beast. They were yearning with their bird-eyes and I do not know whom I pitied most, me or them, as they sashed up and down upon the surface of the glass in a strange indulgent rhythm of farewell.
The thing in the cap motioned me towards a gas-fire which warmed one corner of the waiting-room. I rubbed my hands slowly above its glowing grid of orange bone, my mind inevitably drifting from the more natural courses of my thought-patterns. I had come to revisit the house, where I believed I had once been granted a vision of the future – when mankind would amount to nothing in the scheme of things. But now I suspected that the monster of white squelch that I had faced then, had traversed the interlocking entropies of unimaginable existence from hyper-spiritual worlds, not as a precursor of Earthly colonisation, but as an emblem of the truth that had prevailed prior to the onset of reality itself. Or, at best, tangential to it.
One can learn to grow less afraid of any monster, if it is believed it is real, rather than a concoction of one’s own terrified mind. Such is the crux of the matter, since I now realised (in the true sense of that word) I had come to this spot to lay the ghost which I myself once created, and I would achieve this by proving beyond reasonable doubt that it was truly real. And still is. Hence this rite of passage across the cracked meadows of Inner Earth.
To staunch the onward tread of worse and worse nightmares that are not nightmares at all, I needed to ascertain that the house contained a true monster of flesh and blood in its own terms, a monster that I could rationalise, encapsulate and even believe explicitly when it spoke of forthcoming human doom in its characteristic voice of slimy conviction. Only by believing the truth of its message, could I exorcise and, consequently, nullify its effect.
I left the station behind me, as I trudged the once familiar country lane. There was the house. But, no, not yet, just a head of woods, grown together to present a common front to the hurricanes now so prevalent in this part of the world. A seat of green amid the swirling greys surrounding a new Canterbury Oak.
I was grateful for the warm-up in the waiting-room. How long I had been there listening to the ludicrous tales of the overgrown schoolboy, I could only measure by the growth of beard. He told me that the house was no longer in situ, since it had contracted a teetering, cancerous stair¬well and collapsed in upon itself, even before the seasonal hurricanes had become endemic. I could not believe him, of course, because he also told me that I was a different person to the one who had come here all those years ago – not the one who had been frightened by the skeleton of a railway ticket-collector in his platform booth. He looked bemused when I countered by saying that I had not been afraid of the skeleton as such but by the plump worm for which its bones acted as home. And the pigeon perched on its skull.
My dismay was great when he said he wanted to come with me to find the house. However, he spotted another train steaming towards the station and he went off to categorise it, number it and wave it through.
I left the woods behind me and, just as one of those lilty Creature Beings cut a screaming wedge of yellow light in the sky’s blanket of night, I spotted the house itself, just as I think I remembered it.
But, incredibly, it was careering towards me out of the past, with steam churning from every chimney-stack.
Lights were being flashed on and off in every window, whiteness slicking down the glass like net curtains of foullest slime. The monster had actually become the house, rather than remained an inhabitant of it. I put my fists to my ears to dull its pained bellowing – it had originally come to destroy the whole of mankind, but had merely managed to get up a sufficient head of steam to destroy only myself.
I realised I had, since my earliest times, absorbed the vile imaginings that this monster had created. Its metagalactic imprimatur was to mythologise the only tenable beings in existence who happened to be Earth’s humans – and I now knew I had rescued the future for humanity. By fixing the monster under the impenetrable varnish of my creativity, I also fixed its dreams of us and made them real. As I sucked its Inner Earth into my brain, the better was our chance to become angel-eyed and paramount – shimmering creatures in our own right with grains of honest phantasy – happily wandering among the gildenspires of the Heavenly City on the surface.
I am that house, I am that train, I am that ghoulish schoolboy, I am that ideologue weirdmonger...
I made myself actually become that monster. And, without me, you would never have been you, with desires and dreams and fancies and loves, all fit for gods and goddesses. You would have been mere puppet-jerks of Older and Younger Races, with a blood-engorged worm in the night-hutch of the head to replace that human brain of infinite possibilities.
To stop my own head from exploding into a thousand bone-shards, I ask you, please, I beg you, to hold me close – let me nuzzle in your cosy lap, so that such love and care will enable me to bear man’s worst nightmares on your behalf.
But I look up and see that awful schoolboy’s moon-face leering at me imbecilically, the maggot-riddled flesh slowly drooling from the sicker bones within – and my despair at forgetting how it all ended is never-ending.
****
"You've only had a wicked dream," Edith said, with a kiss upon wide-eyed Arthur's shivering brow. Arthur looked up at his kind-hearted mother, wondering if, one day, she'd be proved wrong – but, now, tonight, then, forever, he was happy enough to trust her ... otherwise he would have died of fright without first having the grounds to grow old enough, old enough to understand. Meanwhile, or much earlier, or never at all, in a London office, a cleaning-lady said: "I had a good go at the thing last Monday."
And whatever the 'thing' happened to be, she was just leaving as I arrived for work at the office. I acknowledged her – in my usual flick-tail fashion – and busied myself with the day's dockets. They had piled up since the evening before. No rest for the wicked, I thought – an expression I never fully understood, one which ancient housewives used on washdays. I always remember my father, too, as he painstakingly painted ‘best-by’ dates on our own pet hens’ eggs. Whilst, soon, my colleagues would be arriving brimful with horrific stories of British Rail, London Transport and the M25 ring road. I always tried to arrive before the office was strictly open. That obliged the likes of Beth and Greg and Sudra (and Arthur, of course) to say a good morning to me first, since I had already become master of my own castle when the others had not even lowered their own draw-bridges to get in. It took the embarrassing edge off the day.
That silly biddy of an office cleaner (or batting-lady as they used to be called in my younger days), what on earth had she meant by a "good go at the thing" last North of Monday? She was all mouth and padding. I surveyed my desk. The blotter was spotless and the squat jars of creamy Angevin correcting-fluid lined up like soldiers on parade. I lifted the telephone handset – yes, it faintly smelled of that hygienic spray which the batting-lady applied to it during her regular North Monday morning shiftwork. The dockets themselves were paper-clipped and neatly splayed in a semicircle as if a conjuror had made one sweep of a deck of trick cards. What she must have meant, then, was that she had bottomed-out the drinks vending-machine. It had stunk to high heaven the day before yesterday. Nobody had dared use it. Except Arthur, of course: the office idiot. Arthur would say anything for a laugh: like there were "black thingies doing the breast-stroke" in the lemon tea. Then, jump-start Greg had perked up at the expression breast-stroke and obtained a drink for himself, which he gulped with one inverted hiccup. "Life itself is a risk," wide-boy Greg had said to silly-arse, big-hearted, big-eared Arthur. "You could get killed crossing the road soon as miss a strobe."
I laughed at the double-barrelled nicknames which I meaningfully threw around about my office colleagues like invisible gravestones. But, whatever the case, I usually preferred the vending-machine's hot chocolate but lately most of its ingredients were revealed as congealed at the bottom of the plastic beaker. And, amid these dregs, I had re-lived events from the night before, events which had involved drain-pipe Arthur (he was a drip) and a beat-nick girl who was a stranger. "What shall I choose for horse's dovers?" she had asked pointblank. Her escort, cock-eye Arthur, looked askance for a fleeting moment, then, with the irritant of light dawning, suggested the prawn cocktail. "I dunno, I feel like something garlicky and, yes, cheesy, with a touch of tomato." The strange-look girl giggled as she brushed a sprig of hair from in front of her heavily made up eyes, as if that helped concentration. Arthur peered quizzically at the menu. He'd seen menu cards before, but these were tantamount to body-size! It did serve as a blind. He could kill shock-jock Greg for landing this female stranger on him tonight of all nights. Hallowe'en was a night Arthur usually spent at home with his mother and, instead, here he had to conduct a form of baby-sitting. Or should he call it baby-eating? (Looking after her whilst he ate, you see.) He laughed at his own silent joke.
"Did you say something, Arthur?" asked the girl stranger.
"Oh, no, I was simply rehearsing the order."
Arthur's lame reply passed muster okay, but he blushed to the roots of his hair – and beyond. Her voice piped up again: "What are you having for horse's dovers?" He winced at the repetition of the clumsy childish joke expression for hors d’oeuvres. He winced even deeper upon noticing that she had tucked her linen serviette into the top of her dress, hanging over her small bosom, hemmed corners in her lap. It already bore a noticeable stain. "Oh, I think I'll go for the seafood tureen," he answered, in a humouring tone. Outside could be heard the shouts of trick-or-treaters echoing down the street. A train trundled underneath the restaurant towards Inner Earth – a regular sound in this part of London. Despite its position, however, the restaurant was posher than the usual ones Arthur patronised. The waiters were polite, if officious, and one particular handsome fellow had passed a tiny crumb-hoover over the tablecloth as if it were some ritual to rid the settings of previous eaters. Such devices irritated Arthur, as did those scalding flannels ridiculously packaged in cling-film which Indian Restaurants handed out following their curry and tandoori concoctions, as if the finger-bowls were not enough. Yet, no such exoticisms in this place. This was a meat and two vedge joint, if an up market one. Here, apron-string Arthur could have brought his mother – someone who ever moaned about bean shoots and other such "foreign muck". Surreptitiously looking around the side of what seemed to be an ever-growing fold-over stand-up menu card, Arthur indeed decided there was not much to choose between the girl and his mother. What was age between people like that?
"Oh, I don't think I can eat much tonight."
Now she says! Why ever suggest coming to a restaurant, in that case? Loud-mouthed Greg had a lot to answer for. Arthur, even Arthur, had taken out more companionable dowager Aunts than this slice of female near-humanity was proving to be! He laughed again. Absurdity was sometimes preferable to common sense. Indeed, some events were more memorable because of their negative points. And what was existence without the stickability of memories? Bad memories were preferable to none. Black letter days, if not so good as red ones, stood out – became landmarks in an otherwise waste-ground of amnesic blandness. Or had he got his red and black confused? Death was the ultimate amnesia, of course, without which there could have been no life in the first place. And as I continued to re-live that dream-restaurant scene by scrying the office beaker's dregs, I was wondering why beakers were called beakers, but then buxom Beth bustled in, wielding heavily cosmeticked cheeks.
"The buses were at a standstill right across London Bridge – and I could have walked quicker," she said with a toss of her aspirin-crushed-upon face. Beth was younger than her plumpness portended. She often referred to her old husband as if she were about to change him for a newer model. A newer model like Greg for example. Characteristics piled up in no logical order. Beth all over. Stork-leg Sudra was said to have a man at home, too. As far as looks were concerned, Sudra was a different bar-room talking-point altogether. Thus, she easily managed to provoke jump-start Greg. A case of mutual sexual harrassment: a self-perpetuating series of back-biting and back-scratching. And, believe it or not, wide-boy Greg actually thought himself to be sexy with that cheap medallion dangling upon a blatantly hairy chest. All mouth and trousers was Greg. A man's man. Or various words to that order.
The first phone to ring was always on my desk, a phone sleeping, as it were, with one ear cocked. Then, if it wasn't placated, it hunted round the other phones in a strict order, an order set quite arbitrarily by the original engineers whose blueprints turned out to be little better than pink blancmange. I failed to understand why everybody else was so damn inefficient. I picked up the beast with one fell swoop of my arm in a well-rehearsed arc.
"Yes?"
I had had never been taught telephone etiquette. It was jump-start Greg reporting in sick – as he had done, it seemed, every North Monday morning since Kingdom come. In the meantime, chirp-cheap Sudra had arrived late, shaking out her frilly umbrella from a sudden shower, as if the umbrella were a large vampire-bat fresh from skinny-dipping. She looked round to see if she was the last to have arrived.
"How was it this morning, dear?" Buxom Beth didn't even look up from her under-sized newspaper, as she offered small talk to stork-leg Sudra. "We got stuck in a tunnel for half an hour," Sudra replied, her pretty face seeming smudged with smuts of soot. Beth tutted so loudly, I thought it was someone breaking combs under the desk. That village idiot is late again, I said to myself, in reference to big-eared Arthur. He was beyond a joke. I would have to report him upwards, before long. Sudra was combing out her long locks, with swishing sighs. She evidently wanted to look as nice as possible before venturing into the ladies' rest room to put the finishing touches to her demeanour with the help of a full-blown mirror and buxom Beth's loan of cosmetic. Meanwhile, I returned to the beaker's dregs and the strange girl in the restaurant also blamed loud-faced Greg for this evening. Arthur was fast becoming a dead bore – always dithering with pointless thought. There had never been any question of horse's dovers, of course. Prawns were never red enough. Pinkness was worse than no colour at all, to her mind. Worse even than beigeness in carpets. Why couldn't he have a sense of humour? Still, she had a lot to learn from others, even from daft cases like Arthur and she abruptly brought him back into the land of the living with her considered choice for her main (and only) course (or entrée as they called it here). The better class of waiter whom the restaurant employed had made the decision from among all their life-size menu photographs far more difficult. The waiters were indeed all relatively young and good-looking. The one picked was eventually escorted into the kitchen by the leathery head chef, for his neck to be tapped with one of those new-fangled gold-plated spigots restaurants seemed to provide these days. But then, a solitary trick-or-treater made a raucous sally into the body of the restaurant, in search of donations for his bonfire. He sported a Megazanthus mask, a mask looking remarkably like Greg's face. The girl shrugged and looked to simple-sample Arthur for even simpler enlightenment. She was bereft of the hidebound niceties that longevity instilled. Consequently, Arthur threw off his "village idiot" soul and thought thoughts with a sudden dawning of dark pleasure, thoughts that the girl probably was a real tasty starter of a once dead Horla-girl. He signalled to a disused waiter who was a bit too long in the tooth to be toothsome and asked for the A La Carte menu. Meanwhile, back in the land of the wicked, my office phone, having broken into a feat of renewed trilling, I pretended to have heard the fax machine by the window break into life and wandered over to it, evidently to see what was written on the slippery paper which would have slid from between the rollers. In this way, the phone ceased on my desk and started ringing on wide-boy Greg's.
Big-bosomed Beth raised her head lackadaisically and began to stare at the shrill creature with a look sufficiently old-fashioned to make a prize-fighter curl up in his corner. There was very little point to her consternation since the blower's pesky pinecat screeching, if unanswered, would soon renew its petulance elsewhere. So, she picked up the nearest phone extension by its wildly whipping tail at the first suspicion of the tongue-click which prefigured the full-blown spat of stinging sound hunting over to her desk. And, finding the fax machine had not given birth, I wondered why people called phones blowers. There was no accounting for words. A close squeak. Beakers. No rest for the wicked.
Beth's face was ashes. Sudra's a picture of cosmosis interruptus. Evidently shocking news had been imparted via the phone. They were pointing madly at Arthur's empty desk and then at the offending drinks vending-machine. I creased up. The machine had been gargling on Angevin for days, as if whatever creature lived inside it had drunk all the variously flavoured fluids for itself and was about to explode through the narrow dispenser. I abruptly had a very strange imagining – by means of an instinct drawn from word association rather than from a grasp of reality – an imagining that jump-start Greg moonlighted in drag, masquerading as the office cleaning lady each Monday morning with a disguise more impenetrable even than buxom Beth's cosmetic face-mask. Better than that Megazanthus mask I had seen him wearing in the dregs. But what about poor simple-sample Arthur? Bottomed out beyond even a joke's joke, now. No rest for his wicked belly. There was the sad sound in the office of comb-teeth snapping one by one. And, months later, Arthur entered in clothes that reminded me of those I had worn only the day before. "Surprise! Surprise!" he said. "Hi, Arthur, sit yourself down and have a nice cup of tea," I said, in turn offering him a seat beside the framed picture of his dead mother, the latter being a present he had given me. Arthur and I had become fast friends, ever since the office redundancies. In fact, we had previously been rather kept apart by the job ... both of us preferring to be homebirds, watching TV or doing odd jobs. Better than negotiating the realms of commuting any day.
"Thanks for the Birthday present," he said, stirring the tea I had soon prepared.
"It's nothing. Don't think any more about it."
I noticed he was sporting all the items of clothing I had only wrapped yesterday ... before leaving the parcel on his doorstep. He replaced the cup on the saucer, stood up, preened himself and strutted his outfit with a quick flourish.
"I thought you'd like them," I said.
"Yes," he said, "but I'm afraid they must have been frightfully expensive."
"Well, to be absolutely honest, Arthur – they're slightly body-soiled and I managed to haggle the price."
"Oh, they seem OK." He gave his own length the once over, as if expecting to see stains he'd previously missed.
"They look much better in a mirror," I suddenly said for no accountable reason, staring at the black wallpaper. He smiled, recognising something his mother always used to say, no doubt. It was as if his mother made me say things from the grave ... despite her having been cremated. Later, I switched on the TV – not for Arthur and I to watch it as such but for it to act as a sponge for our otherwise awkward silences. There was ‘Big Brother’ on but neither of us followed it. Well, strange to look back on it now, but the programme almost followed us. Two characters, with a few seconds delay, mimicking our strained faces and clumsy gestures ... and Pinteresque exchanges. Then the weather forecast came on and I decided to speak my mind for the first time that evening: "It's getting a bit hard on my pocket, you know, Arthur." He nodded. He seemed as if he knew exactly what I meant – but, for the sake of something other than completeness, I elaborated: "All these clothes I keep buying you as presents ... the cost is leaving me well – how shall I put it? – embarrassed." He nodded, this time with a gaze of mystification. I continued: "Buying necessaries for two is stretching my resources to their limit. It's not my fault that your mother only left you a small annuity." He looked away and pretended an interest in tomorrow's coastal temperatures. A cold snap coming, apparently. But the map on the TV screen was of no surface country I could recognise.
Man-city was usually a quiet place, although it slightly cheated by having sleeping policemen humps to deprive the rat runners and back doublers of their self-indulgent conduits of least resistance. Office commuters were evil people at the best of time. If not mere nervous little people. Luckily there were fewer and fewer offices these days to draw them into the city. Arthur remembers his mother saying (when they lived in man-city): "A good marriage is one where each of you have clothes that can only be worn if you have to have help in dressing, for example, a top where the buttons are at the back..." As a child, he would nod. As a grown-up, he would repeat his mother's sayings. I would react with wide eyes and cooing noises. Bearing in mind its name, it was inevitable, I suppose, that man-city ended up completely demolished ... towards the end of Arthur's childhood, a period when puberty was a burden rather than an awakening. He still possesses an old map with man-city shown. There was an oval street. Never ever been anything like it, since or before. An endless street of terraced housing, two crescents in one, with odd numbering...
I was interrupted from my revery by my stomach bubbling. Arthur said it reminded him of his experiments in the garden with kitchen fluids. I hadn't eaten for ages. But I decided to ignore it. Arthur was fiddling with the TV trying to find something else not to watch. He never seemed to return to his own home. He used my place as if it were his. "Pardon me," I said. The noise in my stomach was getting worse, almost flatulent, starting to interrupt my speech as I tried to pursue our earlier conversation with words which I meant to be as cruel as they sounded: "You'd take the clothes off my own back rather than open your wallet..." I dared not look down, since my stomach noises were fast resembling that of a pet dog or, even, a wild bird. Indeed, I felt such a creature gnawing then pecking my toes. "...and I now find ,” I continued, “that you can afford to go to the pictures every afternoon – and seeing all those horror films can't be good for you..." Cinemas seemed a waste of time to me. The films they showed always became old ones that TV later showed when nobody was watching. Meanwhile, the noises were attached to me in some way as if the stomach itself was an autonomous animal. I wriggled in my seat. I could only see two bloated noses. Cold as ice. Death was such whatever the heat. Even eggshells melted on the last sell-by day of them all. Cremated dreams.
Simple Arthur switched off the TV and put on my carpet-coat. It was time for him to go to the pictures. I hoped the cinema screen would also be black and the films projected on it even blacker. That would serve him right. I expect he meets buxom Beth on these trips to the pictures. I wonder what happened to that eyelid-batting Sudra. She must still be young enough to be office-bound. Each sleep's clumsy commuting back into consciousness remained a rancid starter, a beakerful of curdled yellow blood prefiguring the day's tasteless banquet. Or, worse still, she might be married, despite his death, to that jump-start Greg, and caring for his creature comforts. Combing that wide-boy’s broken locks. Filing his wayward teeth. Grooming his goatee and pink chops. Waxing and oiling his scrawny chest. Pampering his bready thighs. Blowing gently upon his belly-button. Preening his prawn starter. But I no longer possessed a mind where to wield such surreptitious surrealism, indeed no thoughts at all with which to fill out the necessary forms and dockets for the well-ordering of my soul. Indeed, my last thought was being thankful that, despite being female, I never became a mother myself – with nobody thus burdened with carrying the relay baton of my existence by means of the resurrection of my mind's meanderings amid the cold dregs of an uncertain future. Or, perhaps, my very last thought was thinking of that strange, if now very familiar, girl in the restaurant with train trundling below – a girl called Amy not so strange as to be a complete stranger to me of all people.
I sobbed and placed my hungry lips, in turn, to each fleshy spigot that I had raised from my fresh-opened wrists. Blood, they say, is God’s own correcting-fluid.
****
The visitor’s presence was doubtless intended to cheer Greg up – but with doctors so busy and most hospital visitors being patients themselves, any old Tom, Dick or Harry was sent with a soggy bunch of grapes. Never a Florence Nightingale. Nor an Angel with a shining face. A buxom nurse hurriedly passed through, her hands dripping with something that looked like human remains.
"It's a bundle of laughs being here, eh?" suggested the hospital visitor.
Greg scowled, but the visitor's reaction confirmed that Greg had not managed to scowl at all, but simply smiled.
"You can smile, but me and my wife Susan have been put through the hoop recently..." the visitor said. He twirled a finger above his head, as if to demonstrate the godawful hoop to which he referred.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
Incredibly, Greg was listening to the visitor's troubles, whilst the intention was surely vice versa. But listening didn't necessarily change anything.
"Yes, me and Susan, we've been having a spot of trouble in the waterworks area," the visitor continued.
"Oh dear, that must have been awkward."
"They got us both in adjoining beds separated only by a discreet curtain."
"I know the sort," Greg said.
Indeed, Greg had noticed that the hospital had curtains all over the place – presumably to spare blushes. One day, Greg would invent curtains which actually came together with silent runners and did not gape upon the patient's most private moments of ablution or body dispersal. And then he imagined a scene where hospital porters pushed contraptions between the beds like sparkling beach-hut confessionals on wheels. But if the patient was really noisy, there would be double-glazed versions with heavy velvet drapes.
"Well, one day," said the visitor, breaking the track of Greg's future daydream, "they replaced the floral curtain on silent runners with a glass wall, one with a light frosting, so they only needed a net-curtain."
Somehow, the visitor had inadvertently confirmed Greg's as yet unformulated invention. Greg nodded, although, of course, he was in two minds as to the visitor's sanity. Looking at the visitor's nether region, Greg could see that the visitor himself must have recently undergone an operation. Whatever the case, the visitor had actually made Greg believe in suffering-windows and privacy partitions. False memories played fast and loose with Greg's future belief-system.
The visitor paid no regard to Greg's condition. Did he not know Greg was in for Angevin overdose as well as for a wisdom tooth?
The visitor continued undeterred: "Susan, you see, had a swollen tongue and I had a permanently swollen..."
"Yeah, and I've got a splitting pain in my head," Greg interrupted.
And Greg abruptly pulled down the four-poster's double-layered leather blind over the bright shining face. But Greg could still hear the blighter. Greg hoped there would be sound-proofing in Heaven – and no bloody angels.
But, later, there was a half-hearted attempt by a real Angel to contact Greg, an attempt that failed abysmally, to such an extent that Greg ended up himself trying to re-establish contact with the alien intelligence (if not an intelligent alien) – only to discover he was on a crossed-line with a lady called Susan. She shut the hardback, having riffled through its pages in search of its end, picked out the can from the flip-top and listened. Being religious, she thought Greg was one of God's messenger-angels. She was not sufficiently religious to have full faith in the existence of God Himself, so an agent, as she assumed Greg to be, was, presumably, more believeable than the principal.
"Wishful thinking if you think a message from me is a message from God," Greg said. Greg tried to conceal the noise of the recognisable traffic outside by cupping his mouthpiece nearer to what it was a piece of.
"Who are you, then? A salesman? Or one of those dirty, filthy..."
"I assure you, Susan, I'm not any of those things – we must be at crossed purposes..."
She took her ear away, thankful that Greg was at the other end of a line rather than directly there. She had evidently abandoned him to the ranks of the cranks, without herself questioning Greg's knowledge of her name. He wondered how he had managed to cross wavelengths with Susan. He could not possibly believe that their mind-entwined contact had been at either extreme of a taut wire stretched between two hole-punched bases of tin-cans now empty of their runny baked beans or chunky soup: a telegraphic device, if rudimentary, that always seemed to work, if only during earth-bound childhoods. Another one of Greg's inventions. An early one, perhaps.
It was a nonsensical statement to claim that a complete stranger like Greg was actually sitting just outside Susan's kitchen door, where she sat book-browsing; a nonsensical statement that made less nonsense than saying Greg wasn't, because Greg was.
Greg then heard a key go. This was someone, he assumed, who had more right to be in Susan's house than a complete stranger: her husband Mike, fresh from hospital-visiting, doffing his over-things in the hall so as to enter the chintzy parlour with a petal-based cone of forgiving flowers – or, perhaps, wanting-to-be-forgiven flowers. Only to find that Susan wasn't there. She was in the kitchen, consigning the unspeakably jagged-mouthed baked bean can back into the flip-top waste-bin – wherein Greg heard the residue of muck resettle around its restored constituent: heard it as if it was inside his head.
There followed a further half-hearted attempt to contact Greg – once more failing totally. He needed to resort to guesswork, he guessed, to pinpoint his avenue out of Susan's kitchen, a place which, for all he knew, had become the sole extent of the universe.
He watched helplessly as the strangest stranger possible in the guise of her husband started beating Susan to a tomato puree as punishment for talking not rubbish but to rubbish. Meanwhile, with this particular God's message undelivered, Greg returned to Inner Earth to initiate another one. Indeed, it is said that the mad are saner than the sane – which makes them mad indeed. That trite tale of a one-eared man in the country of the completely earless told of a situation which must have sent the sanest man mad, him seeing things which nobody else could see. Well, Greg was now very much in that position.
Now out of hospital, and consigned to his own devices, Greg was the only person in the world who had actually seen the mad Angel monster that lurked invisibly at the back of everybody's mind – a sure sign of severe sanity. And he knew that part of town down near Ogdon’s pub, with a mind sufficiently pliable to picture the covered market where the Underclass congregated, taking advantage of the many competing soup kitchens – not a million miles from the Dry Dock, it seemed. It took a smidgin of invention. So, now, Greg had to close his eyes. He hoped it was not too much to ask, because, self-evidently, without being in complete darkness he wouldn't be able to empathise with those inhabitants of the country of the earless. Furthermore, he appreciated that closing eyes in a lighted sitting-room was not exactly the same as being blind. So, to improve the effect, he switched off the light, before closing the eyes. Squeezed them tight, so that any residual floaters were drowned.
One night, when the moon had vanished behind a clutch of dead stars, there was a stirring among the dossers near the covered market down by the Dry Dock. Dreams were reaching their heads. The Angel was awake, forking away with its eyes' stares. It never slept. It was able to stay awake, slipping into real dreams, rather than the false ones of the surrounding dossers.
Darkness was constituted of black straw – a not unfamiliar phenomenon when everybody was snoring. Then the Angel saw the poking through of the sucker, the same size as an elephant's trunk, a trunk covered in smaller suckers like women's pouting kisses. The mangey head was even larger than the Angel had predicted from the leading sucker – covered in ripe yellow wounds and weeping sores, each edged with hair not unlike ranks of eye-lashes. There were no real eyes to speak of, to cross swords with the Angel's. Others might not have realised it, but the full-length version of this creature (the whole of which the angel had not seen) haunted all waking and sleeping moments – thankfully, however, beyond the retention of waking consciousness. Now, Greg opened his eyes...
The all-clear siren sounded. Back at the Dry Dock. Soon, morning would buckle the prison-bars of night as he heard again the competing cries of soup kitchens touting for his beggary and sirens aching for the next war. But that was wishful thinking on their part, since Greg was sitting or lying in a warm lighted room – or within a train or aeroplane or water craft – or bathed in sunshine amid nature's and man's wise accoutrements – with a book or magazine open. Yet, he had nothing but madness to invent himself. And even madness would not last.
Meantime, having been steeped overnight in sanity, he simply sloped off alone by the Dry Dock, waving his albino trunk like a blindman's stick before me. Or a wireless engineer's trial aerial connection...
"I don't think it's working," said Greg.
Having now been given a home by the hospital, he found himself twiddling the knob of the wireless, trying to tune the voice a little more clearly, yet, give or take a little background static, the voice that said "said Greg" was far less audible than the voice that purported to say what Greg said.
Giving up the ghost, he clicked the wireless fully off. The room's consequent silence was heavy and he began to hum tunelessly so as to break the monotony. He stared at the wireless' sound-vent, a tightly woven wickerwork surface that pre-dated the invention of stereophonic twin-loudspeakers by about a half century. The voices had been so muffled, when the tuning-bar was lit up, it felt as if the vent was knitting closer: noises trying to break free from their prison of valves.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" That was Edith Cole. She always came into the sitting-room at about this time of day and asked the same question. A heart of gold. But a tongue like jagged glass.
Greg turned round from the lace-trimmed backgammon-table, where the bakelite wireless set sat, and nodded. He did not want to converse with this woman who he considered to be the older version of an erstwhile sweetheart of his, in case she noticed that he was about to dismantle the built-in speaker. Lodgers had no right to meddle with the landlady's equipment.
One couldn't help smiling that Edith once gave a previous tenant called Mr Dognahnyi a piece of her tongue. Not that Mr Dognahnyi's crime deserved such punishment: merely replacing a light bulb in the smallest room upstairs. She had wanted to check the wattage. Still, Mr Dognahnyi hadn't lasted long under Edith's regime. But Greg should not be so presumptuous as to call Edith by her Christian name. She was a stickler for standards. And her tea was sixpence a pot. Nice tea, though, and well-strained.
"Yes, please, Mrs Cole." She had evidently not seen Greg's earlier nod. "Nasty day." He nodded again, this time towards the rain-blurred bay window, which looked out on several different bus routes. No 67 went into town, and out towards the football ground the other way. No 45... No 22... No 56... And so forth. He often used No 22, having much business at the warehouses on the periphery of the city. Other than playing Patience with a deck of nothing but double-headed Queens, he enjoyed looking at all the audio equipment, the various breeds of loudspeaker, complete with tweeters and woofers, Nicam Stereo TVs, personal headsets, digital sound-quality and so forth. Pity Sickness Benefit couldn't allow him to afford to buy any of them. Still, nice helpful young men were there who knew him for what he was. One even gave him an adaptor plug free of charge telling him his shaver was on the blink. The young man said Greg needed a transformer. But an adaptor plug would do just as well. The shaver was still on the blink, but it was the thought that counted. Greg wondered what they'd think to invent next. Drills for pimples?
With Edith now pottering in the kitchen, clinking frangible crockery and tinkling sugar-spoons in an attempt to order her utensils into some system of order, Greg turned to his screwdriver-set which he had purchased at one of those DIY warehouses soon. He was preparing the ground for removing the back of the wireless, to see if he could straighten out some of the voices. Dramatic plays were a real devil when the rush-hour was on. He could only hear one word in three, if that. Perhaps he should have a shave first, in view of his grizzled chin. But now he could hear the tray coming nearer, bearing, no doubt, a steaming samovar, a jug of milk, a crystal bowl of sugar cubes, a silver strainer, a wedge of lemon, a cup, a saucer and a teaspoon. He dug into his trouser pocket in search of a sixpence. Charity didn't go far these days.
Suddenly, the wireless burbled into life. He had not twiddled any of the knobs. A bus was passing in rather a heavy-handed fashion, as if it were over-loaded. (The house was on a hill). No doubt the number 45 on its way to the cattle market. But Greg had never heard of unsuppressed static causing a wireless actually to turn itself on without the intervention of some other motive force. Through the hiss, he could hear a voice saying, "You remember hospital radio? Well, the plays are all different on this wireless. It's not even a public channel, Greg."
He tried to speak back through a mass of ill-tuned mush, his prised-open mouth healed over with the thickest spider-web his tongue had ever had the misfortune to be tangled up in.
"What's the matter?" shouted Edith.
Throwing all caution (and her long-held standards) to the wind, she smothered his spiky kisser with her own less spiky one. But it was too late. Greg was doornail dead, if still slightly warm. She withdrew his fingers and thumbs from the ten-pin adaptor plug, with herself already in too much shock to notice a new shock. All plugs meant death in her book. A numberless bus driven by a big-eared driver grunted by, also unnoticed ... and late. Listening to Beethoven's late string quartets, as Greg often did, he wondered whether they would have been any different if they had turned up early or, even, on time.
Greg had other quaint thoughts, like believing he was the reincarnation of an Angel, like believing things that beggared belief, like the Mona Lisa's smile being that of a woman who has just dined off her husband. He found himself worrying, too: needless worries in the main such as next day's weather or the imponderables of death. He even fretted over his vasectomy. He imagined the seeds, or whatever they were called, building up behind a dam of pomegranate rind, until the pressure, one day, would make his testicles explode in cascades of Angevin. Even the actual origin of such nagging worries in his mind he blamed on the vasectomy – some of the seeds seeping back up his bloodstream, eventually reaching and then curdling the chemicals of the brain. No wonder he had spent half his life already in the funny hospital.
In two (or even three) minds about the nature of reality, he worked hard at crystallising it into something fixed and certain. Dreams could not bother him since he spent sleepless nights keeping them at bay, mainly by counting the silent nightingales to which he listened. But, sometimes, his many invented children in far corners of the house could hear him shouting at the top of his voice: "Get thee hence, damn dreams!"
Greg had eaten Susan. Or so he thought. On one of those rare nights of peaceful slumber, without even the suspicion of a rogue dream, he woke up before daylight, feeling decidedly full. He looked at the pillow next to him, expecting to find his dear wife of some years' standing laid out in the trench she had gradually worn into the mattress – a trench deeper than his own, for no reason he could fathom, since their relative weights were roughly equal. She was gone. Perhaps for a light surreptitious snack. Or a glass of Angevin. Or to calm the nightmares of his multitudinous children. They still had fifty prams in the garage.
Greg's belly swelled to pregnant proportions, which he decided was Susan not agreeing with him (which had always been her custom). Bile was rising in his gullet, except it tasted slightly odd – not his normal style of indigestion. There were bits of stringy poultry-like gristle on his tongue as if he had gnawed at his own innards. There was an undertaste, too, which reminded him of childhood nosebleeds. The children, by their very nature, ignored his frantic shouts; they'd heard them all before. Meanwhile, the enormity of his crime slowly dawned on him. Burying their heads one by one under pillows to dull the dire dirges of Dad, even his children became as non-existent as dreamerless dreams. The neighbours eventually called the police who discovered Susan in the fridge barely alive but with an inscrutable half-cooked smirk on her face. The shelves had been removed to make room for her. Nobody could explain the huge mound of bubbling come in the bedroom, so this was diplomatically omitted from all police reports.
After treatment, Susan met someone called Mike whom she married. He was able to bless her with the delights of several children – real ones this time – something Greg had not possessed the bottle or the nous to do. So it was a most happy situation and, what was more, Mike couldn't abide Beethoven's string quartets, whatever their punctuality. Mike enjoyed clicking his fingers to boring middle-of-the-road ditties and dire dirges with a samba rhythm. Mike's children buried headfuls of ears under pillows and prayed longingly to an Angel for a different Dad called Greg. And dreamed of having no heads for sharp ears to grow on ... and a card sharp saw a likely looking victim idling along the opposite side of the busy street. Another mortal young enough to fail to "find the lady". One with no nous and a decided no-way code. The pavement dealer loved streets. Always a dosser, once a dosser. He hated shopping precincts. The sound of traffic was part and parcel of his act. The eyes in the sides of people's heads, where ears should have been, were engendered by the necessity to avoid jay-walking: a deck-shuffler's bread and butter, since such people tended, paradoxically, to notice him more – in spite of or, rather, due to their over-active weather-eyes.
Yes, the trickster spied, beyond a trundling truck, the young joker: this the prestidigitator's next sucker. And, lo and behold, the boy started to cross the street between the trucker's tail-lights and the staring beams of a sleeker beast, with a lady at the steering-wheel. It would seem, so as to miss giving the boy a glancing blow, the lady would have to swerve – together with a touch of a touch on the foot-brake.
"Stupid kid!" Susan said so quietly, she may not have said it at all. She would have shouted it, had she not despised traffic hogs who loudly cursed everybody, disowning any blame. But the real reason why the expostulation faltered between voice and lip was the finger-twisting gesture from the down-and-out card sharp on the pavement, a man whom she vaguely recognised as someone from her past.
Yet there was nothing worse than stale terror except, perhaps, terror undergone vicariously. Susan remembered where she had first met that plug-ugly conjuror. At that time, too, he'd been semi-circled by a splay of cards (all Queens) – each upside head joined to another upside head, with scarlet and black spots more akin to a geometrical dose of the plague than items of gamble. She shook off the memory by concentrating again on her driving. But too late. Horrifically late. The boy – the one who had been tempted to cross the road to "find the lady" amid the man's fan of icons – had actually ensured that a real lady found him instead. Susan killed the ignition with a mindless flick of the wrist and a consequent fingers' twitch of the switch. She stumbled from the car to investigate what or, worse, whom she had spread like jam – dreading, in her middle somewhere, that it was the worst possible victim: a big-eared male child at the dawn of its life – snuffed by her wheels – a boy whose gamble came before he'd guessed.
The card sharp was standing now. Even if the incident was half his fault, surely that meant the other half was his credit, not blame. And he smiled to himself. He picked up his white stick and waggled it like a vestigial trunk at the invisible traffic. Or a wiry wand with ability to pick up signals from the dead.
Upon alighting from the car, Susan had toppled and both her heads hit the concrete of the street. And a yolk spilled from the top one. She was not Susan, after all, but a two-headed Angel. And that was perhaps why she couldn't focus on foot-brakes. Water on the brain. Ruptured pomegranates in the unbifurcated middle areas.
Young Greg wondered who they'd get to visit him in hospital this time. Not a nightingale, he'd be bound. Not the card sharp. Not the dosser. Not even himself as an older man. A wireless puppet, perhaps, with more motion than impetus.
Whatever the case, no curtains could be invented to stop the Elephant Man's trunk poking through.
****
Dognahnyi had assumed control of everything, including the main port of the only island in Inner Earth. The previous owner then went missing as soon as the deal was signed, causing his senile wife, beautiful daughter Amy and half-witted son Arthur to be thrown into near ruin: with only the guarded respect of the other islanders bolstering their waning spirits. Amy often found herself, thereafter, standing signal watch upon her father's erstwhile private wharf. Even in the endemic coastal fogs steaming off Sunnemo’s reflections in the Angevin Sea.
The new man whom Dognahnyi placed in charge of the Island was called Greg. A handsome man. A cunning man. One who kept his alter-nemo under nightly house arrest – rather than allowing him, some said, to be adversely affected by the Island moon. There were, of course, the various islanders who gradually went missing, yet nothing could be laid at Greg's door. He had emasculated the police force, in any case, and their investigative duties were conducted with a diffidence that made Amy's idiot brother appear suitable for high political office on the mainland.
Amy knew her way about the emotions of others with a fine-tooth comb. One in particular loved her, nay, adored her. That was the Island’s butcher. He was young enough to be of some use to Amy – and that was not merely his supply of cheap briskets and spare ribs. In fact, he wanted her to live at the butcher shop where he could lard her all over on cold winter evenings, when the cruel cut of the Island’s nemo-moon scythed the night sky with its rhythmic whishing sound imported from the siren yellow from which its was magically made as a moon in the first place. But, no, Amy needed to return to the old homestead where her ancient mother and mind-bottled brother awaited the comfort of her company. "Bring them, here, Amy – there's room enough." The butcher pointed to the ceiling, as if beyond its yellow stipple lay the palace of her dreams.
"No. Greg and his alter-nemo would take over the homestead soon enough – and what would my father say if he returned?"
Amy's voice was deceptively gentle, yet underlaid with a stroppier edge than the Island moon could possibly wield. The butcher gazed at the inscrutable face. What could he say in response to such unquestionable beauty? Nevertheless, with the sound of cracking meat-bones in the cellar outdoing that of the sharp icicles crepitating outside the window, he said with a faltering tone: "Your father will never return: he can now be little more than the beefen sides down under this shop: you know that: I know that: and, above all, Greg knows that."
Amy could not weep although she found her eyes doing so.
Arthur struggled with the lid of the water butt. His mother had said she wanted its ice breaking. Why she needed the ice breaking he had not thought to ask. Ice breaking was tantamount to cracking open the hardest veneer of reality itself. How he was to do it with his scrawny arms presented a further mystery. He might need to await Amy's help. And, yes, why did he need to do it now, of all things, when the ice would be at its sturdiest and thickest, with the siren yellow moon itself little more than a shard of frozen sky, albeit with the shine come off its newness. He saw it still retained white daylight in its horn, even if well past the shadow-tide of that horn’s sound.
He took the axe which he had dragged from the shed and brought it down with a splintering crunch – causing the surface of the butt's ice to craze over with a map of unknown lands. No sign of the Island's shape in the patterns, he mused, upon examining the convoluted inner geography which far outstripped the fantastical archipelago of thoughts in his mind. During this lull, he thought he could hear footpads beyond the susurrus of the homestead's trees – no doubt Amy returning from her dalliance with the butcher. Arthur smiled. The butcher was always kind to him – unlike that sallow, high-boned individual whom Greg sent round to collect the tithes. Yet when a lengthening howl ricocheted from Inner Earth to Heaven and back again, he knew one thing for certain: it was not his sister Amy.
