Nemonymous Night (18 page)

And to my reasonable knowledge, I am a hawler, but at earlier stages I myself didn’t realise this at all. I so wish I had. Things might have turned out differently. However, still not knowing
for certain
whether I am a force for good or a force for evil makes me draw back from fully exercising the creative strength I know I possess. I even deign to compete with that Ogdon person—who, one day, started writing his own novel in a city’s fountain square between four apartment blocks one of which, as it happened, housed the young Amy. As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in the right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.

Meanwhile, I need to introduce Greg. My alter-nemo. This is a more nebulous form of alter-ego. The late John Fowles invented the ‘nemo’ in contradistinction to the ‘ego’ or ‘id’ in his book
The Aristos
. But such information inevitably interrupts the narrative flow. And narrative flow is the reason we are all here. One ambition that we all share, both as writer and reader.

Greg was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. His wife was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Greg surveyed the dips and dunes—almost
feeling
them with his golf mind—as he took stance for his first tee shot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, assessing the relief map between him and the hole... and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his club head for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line, currency crisis and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.

*

Arthur—despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc.—became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other passengers assuming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie girl who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, i.e. fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn’t otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver’s sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surreptitiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of rat runs and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his ‘brainwright’: an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.

It had been a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company’s inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver—despite all his driving documents being forgeries.

Arthur believed, in his childish fashion, that all meat was going off, but not simply growing mouldy, but
literally
going off (eloping?) with other meats from different animals, fishes and fowls, mixing, blending, into new concoctions of meat with arcane bone maps—all because of global warming and the banking bubble.

These were big things. Global things. Symbolised by Arthur knowing instinctively that he could control big things just with the flick of his finger. Like the bus.

Amy, before she had met Sudra, had lived with Arthur—and their neighbours must have assumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister.

Still, then, the horrors hadn’t yet started. Various strange words start to build up—as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did Amy and Arthur know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself. And worse still was having already lived through half of it via the creative medium of someone other than myself. Fixed for the wrong fiction, cross-grained against the truth, forming a diseased Canterbury Oak in my head. Or so it felt.

*

The area of the city where the covered market found itself was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. It had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not
strictly
open-air or covered. On some days—when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom—it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these ‘walls’ looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. I dreaded going near that place, in case I was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn’t belong to the city at all.

Susan worked in Ogdon’s pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub—unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life—would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile worked there—a real place she couldn’t avoid as she needed the money.

I lived in a top floor flat in the city centre. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling that yet more dreamers dreamed of the covered/open-air market. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that you really did need to visit me there (although this was a dream and you weren’t really visiting me at all).

My carpet was much older than any building that ever contained it; I didn’t know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.

When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn’t matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.

I could not shake off another dream. A dream of a hawler but, this time, in its misshapen form as Guy de Maupassant’s Horla (or vampire).

*

A bus doesn’t touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing
to
float, two passengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

“We’re trapped on this bus.”

“You can get off at the next stop. It’s not like a plane.”

“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I’m trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it.

“To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare.

“I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape—until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable.

“Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes.

“A paradox—that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”

“Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.

*

Captain Nemo took the controls himself as the Drill docked at Klaxon City. Their first stop-over on their journey to the Core via Inner Earth itself.

Just before this manoeuvre, the leading windows in the Corporate Lounge had sufficiently cleared to afford a view of another inner sea lit lugubriously by a now unprotected Core ‘sun’. Their naked eyes had now been able to grow acclimatised to its combination of brightly icy scatter-orange and the contrastively wan effulgence actually given off from it (increasingly wan the nearer they approached it). The city of Klaxon was a vast collection of arabesque turrets peppering an out-of-place complex similar to a
fin de siècle
Paris on the banks of the Seine. And as the Drill burrowed nearer in a circling motion not unlike that of planes stacking up over an airport, Greg (invited into the cockpit itself) watched Nemo grapple with the joystick which was on a hair-trigger relationship with the Drill’s vanes, vanes that were currently working overload on vast amounts of mixed off-detritus. Greg feared that Beth and the two dowagers would be seeing even less than before from their rearward cabins. But that didn’t worry him for long while he grew fascinated with the docking pinion (on one of the turrets) that seemed to snatch the Drill in the same manner as old-fashioned catch-nets on the ancient railways collected letters and parcels without the train stopping.

A jolt—and then, even through the sides of the Drill, the relentless sound of a multi-tannoy system on permanent klaxon that gave the city its name. Greg could hardly imagine living a whole life in such a place with that noise echoing in your ears all over the city. Always with you. Accompanying work, love and play.

“Much like living trapped within one’s own body and its everpresent frightful tinnitus of antipodal angst,” said Nemo, as if having read Greg’s mind.

Greg shrugged. He wasn’t sure what Nemo was driving at.

*

I lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined me awake. I got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in my room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. It was very close to the ground without even space for rat runs or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.

I wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.

I found myself delving into the wood of the floor as if I had found an opening in human flesh—a natural vent, rather than one I had forced open with my fingers.

That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to me until I discovered myself delivering them... through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And I felt its thoughts as if they were my own thoughts.

All this had been in Ogdon’s novel, too. I could not shake it off sufficiently to warrant excluding it in my competing novel. I sensed Ogdon was intent on an unhappy ending for the world by means of the ‘truths’ he hoped to sculpt from his own version of those “synchronised shards of random fiction and truth”. By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us. You can’t destroy evils without having set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.

*

Tears came to my eyes as I looked back at the various paths I could have picked on... chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so I could make the turning towards the goal I had once set myself.

In the distance, I heard the lonely sound of a helicopter—vanes clacking lugubriously—followed by the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty.

I returned to my sleep.

*

I woke from a dream. This had been a real dream. A dream that I had once published a series of fiction magazines called ‘Nemonymous’. Now simply a dream that could not be believed. Other dreams had not even been dreams. They had been visions thrust upon me by some narrative trickery with which a mad Ogdon was trying to force me down byways that my destiny had no right to encompass.

I knew a real dream from a false dream. The former often contained words I’d never use, words I didn’t understand. Or was it the other way? Distinction was clear, if not the terms of the distinction.

*

The ceiling was quite ordinary, plain white, with a central rose whence the electric flex dangled towards its own pendant lampshade and dull yellow-glowing bulb. In ancient days, before ceilings were invented, they would have had strange beliefs about ceilings, no doubt. That they were ghosts in disguise would have been the strongest and strangest. Some even believe that today. Sheets of whitened surfaces marching through the city at the dead of night, like frozen wafers or thin slabs of
Angevin
. Much like Charles Dickens’ walking coffins in
A Tale of Two Cities
. Far more believable, I believe, than the spontaneous combustion of Krook in
Bleak House
. Floors paradoxically seemed far more dependable. If not the ground itself.

John Ogdon was dreaming of over-flying his own pub in a helicopter, except the roof was hidden by the large overhanging buildings in the same street. Either warehouses or tall covered markets, the dream didn’t allow him to remember. He did remember, however, another dream when he was at a family dinner, believing himself to be one of the adults, so that it was quite a surprise to find himself placed with the children on a lower table adjacent to the main table. He dreamed, too, of Klaxon City where the inhabitants spent their whole lives in ear-muffs, dodging around the backstreets eager to find sound-proof specialist clinics where they could remove their muffs and clean out their ears once in a while. They all looked dogged but cowed. Come morning, the dull yellow Core in their sky would bring no relief from the klaxon. At least there was never any wind, in fact not much weather at all. He then dreamed of his alter-nemo Crazy Lope, a tiny figure negotiating the rat runs and back doubles... hardly a time to be
idly
wandering, Ogdon thought, as his dream helicopter banked and disappeared further into the dark horizon of his sleep. I’ll leave him to his dreams. They are now redundant, as are the rest of his machinations with the pen. He only wanted unhappiness for us all. I at least seek a happy ending. Not just a quest for a quest, as he did.