Nemonymous Night (34 page)

And today the voice scorched each Inner Ear... to
their
bottom bones. She was screeching for her boys to come in and not speak to strangers... and she stared across at the Weirdmonger, as if daring him to speak first. The boys, indeed, scampered to either side of her wide skirt.

“Git! We don’t need need you here.”

The Weirdmonger touched his chimney hat with the tip of two fingers, fingers that had grown webbed since he’d been known in these parts. Even Weirdmongers can change. Even plural can become singular.

The woman’s ancient great-grandmother Sudra had, if the truth were told, accused the Weirdmonger, in a dim past now beyond any torching out, of turning everything red. You’ve made bread red, she’d shrieked, YOU’VE TURNED BREAD INTO MEAT!

That was the day he had uttered the word which meant just one more gear up from breeding—where love was more a feast than anything else (if comparisons can be made so loosely). The word—even he had forgotten now... but it still seemed, from today’s evidence, to run free in this present woman’s blood. She had spoken instinctively…

“Don’t worry thyself,” the Weirdmonger said, with such simplicity, the woman immediately calmed down, held out her hand to him and smiled so generously, he wondered if laughter could possibly be as fulsome as her slicing grin.

“Welcome, Weirdmonger,” she said. “A stranger like you cannot be strange for long.” And she pushed her two boys towards him, uncaring whether they were being sacrficed to a demon or merely being introduced to a kind uncle.

The Weirdmonger offered to catch their ball. He held up one of his hands which was swollen like a huge keeper’s mitt or oven glove.

“Thou, throw,” he said.

And the ball, as if of its own volition, left the boy’s right hand straight into the safety of his finger cage which the Weirdmonger’s other hand had seemed to have become as his hands switched responsibility of catching.

There was always a catch. Even blind ones.

*

The room into which the Weirdmonger was shown was certainly not a showroom. Cramped, cluttered, yet beautifully cloisonné. The tassel on the blind clicked irritatedly against the window as a damp, then dry breeze absconded. A dry sound like a moth in a paper bag. A broken siren-breeze.

The woman frowned her two boys into the corner. They sank back into the shadows as if they were learning to swim or, at least, float... but silently failed to do so, smiles frozen on their faces like disguises for disgrace.

The kitchen, too, was nothing to write home about. There was meat stretched in strands from sink to worktop... like Christmas decorations. Sinews and threads of dripping muscle.

The Weirdmonger blinked. And the vision vanished. He dared not speak it... for obvious reasons. However, during the next few days, as soon as the boys had recovered from shyness, the Weirdmonger played trifling word games with them, like saying something along the lines of ‘bubble’ and a huge sooty one expanded from his mouth and—once complete—floated off. He’d say: a colour and, momentarily, the place where they were dallying—be it sitting-room or backyard—would blush to its roots with the colour chosen. Purple—and the trees swagging over the fence or window sill were like richly Royal garments or ecclesiastical vestments. Grey—and the boys laughed to think they’d returned to the days when films had a grey monochrome consistency; TV, too; black and white versions of Big Brother. Not that screens even existed at all now, even in colour. Screens had been kicked in ages ago, for all the right reasons. Visual image overdose had caused all manner of aberrations. Including no need for shoes as feet had become webbed and weather-proof like birds’.

He made as if to play catch with an imaginary tongue-tied ball of tumours, threaded throughout with veins and almost living morsels themselves. The boys cringed when they saw the Weirdmonger being so uncouth with his game. And the mother would cluck with distaste, despite being duped by phrases such as “Never you mind, my dear” or “Give me the benefit of the doubt” which flapped from the Weirdmonger’s mouth like platitudes with a demon’s wings disguised as an angel’s.

*

One day, the Weirdmonger uttered some words which didn’t quite take off. Whether it was a catch in the throat, a tickle caused by some misbehaving phlegm or a more serious seizure of bodily function, the words wormed out warped and wayward. He had meant to say, “Where is your father?” (and to himself, “Where is me?”)—the optimum of a love he was beginning to feel for these boys, his new-found foundlings or changelings or lostlings now found. One of them had the biggest ear he had ever seen. All the better to hear you with, perhaps. Instead the sense shifted... in a language so foreign-looking it represented the outset of a civilisation that had never existed—until now. The words’ exit was wrapped in cross purposes.

The mother wept. For she didn’t know who the boys’ real father was—having been taken in her sleep between one dream and the next. She had felt for some time that there was some deeper meaning to the Weirdmonger’s words. She examined her own right hand. For as long as she could recall, it had been swollen like an oven-glove and the left one articulated like a cage with a trapped pellet of dry dung rattling in it like a ball valve.

The Weirdmonger was sad and deep kissed her. And she vanished like a fast shrinking red balloon into the fundaments of his being. The boys laughed and laughed till they died of it—or the Weirdmonger dropped the ball, whichever came first.

The Weirdmonger was then free to leave the Klaxon Keys—his feet crunching thistles like hollow bones. He held his chimney hat on against the dry wafts of air. Sunnemo never seemed to set any more, or it became a volcano called Mount Core. “Grey!” he shouted at it, with as much feeling to the word as he could muster. And he smiled at the black and white movie upon which he lived and had his being... before the screen blew its circuits, vanishing—as old-fashioned TV sets used to do—into a fast diminishing white dot.

Except he was never to know it wasn’t white, but red.

*

It was a May war. Perhaps earlier, perhaps later, but May maybe was the best guess. Klaxon seasons were as slavishly followed as their months, despite the weather-mad waywardness of Sunnemo itself. Sudra watched her billeted soldier guest with beady, if not steely, eyes. Eyes both looking and looked at. She suspected the soldier (often now glimpsed intimately and seen to bear a body fit for all sorts of use and not only for cruelties entailed by war) of being someone else. Too much of a coincidence to believe it was Amy or a May-masqued Amynemo returned for a further bite at the cherry of Sudra’s doom. Thus singled out from those thousands, if not millions, of march-runners—ceremonially making the relentless churn-churn rhythms of footwork by-passing the Klaxon sluices in pursuit of military glory—why would it be Amy herself snatched from these very churning ranks as chosen by higher authorities to billet in the shoe museum during the course of the war?

Sudra also watched the watcher—the man who had mysteriously visited the museum in past months, both as regular customer and as an inspector of museums. Dealt with by Lope, following the unexplained abscondment of Go’spank. This man stood outside staring up at the imaginary salacious silhouettes that were not silhouettes at all but shadows of the window-blind itself rattling in noise-breezes rather than at any sights that the blind itself concealed. Sudra watched a watcher outside in the city sluice thinking he was looking up at an attic’s attic-window watching Sudra but really watching the empty spaces she left behind so as to darken in her wake like stains of deceptive movement—as she later surreptitiously sought her soldier guest in places where they had not yet darkened sufficiently to tease with the nipply buttons of military undervest or see-through camisole that dressed the fleshy spaces below the eyes that looked and the eyes that were looked at.

Lope could be heard floors away straightening the mannequins in their demonstration shoes. Much of the museum depicted earlier periods when shoes were more in keeping with not squashing the toes, but after toes had gradually pointened with layers of white poultry flesh—eventually hardening into horns or curlicues that no chiropodist could possibly cut—mannequins had taken on the role of stolid lifelessness more in keeping with hand-puppets that had lost the hands that worked them from within as if the puppet-skins were soft body-hugging chambers and the hands coxcomb flamingos shrunk to the size of gristle-flags. If mannequins could walk at the dead of night—with the cracking of bone that once typified derelict butcher-shops in hawling-days—then they surely no longer walked there now. Any footstep heard on the breath of night was Sudra’s own or Lope’s slow lope (so slow it had become rather a slouch or shamble) or, in recent times, the soldier’s boots deadened by the thicker carpets she had insisted upon for step-comfort as well as insulation against the gullible spaces between floorboards and the cavity-rock.

Lope told Sudra of the man who visited the museum being someone he once knew as a younger man (both of them, he and Lope, often, it seemed, the
same
young man). Indeed, the watcher wore a cape similar to Lope’s. Rumoured to be in league with the Ogdonites—but nobody in the know or otherwise was meant to be aware of this the war’s third force or whether Ogdonite officers wore capes sufficient to hide themselves against the chameleon backdrops of Klaxon’s lobes and dunes cresting the upper profiles of the city’s more habitable chambers.

Sudra
: I had a dream last night.

Lope
: The Weirdmonger again?

Sudra
: No, it was just that our guest was showing me out of the window the leading-edge of a vast surface city passing slowly through Klaxon’s cavity as it worked its way towards the Core.

Lope
: There have often been rumours of a man-city.

Sudra
: It was difficult to see it all in one go to define its shape. It was just a vast city—with buildings, and streets, and people clinging on to what they could to help themselves stay with their homes—and I did see a long area or runway that must have been an airport oozing through Klaxon brick like knife through butter. It must have been a dream. How otherwise did it avoid coming through here? (She pointed to the long corridor of shod dummies that made part of her museum.)

Lope
: And the carpet is untouched. It would have ripped it to shreds if a city had passed through it, surely.

Sudra
: Yes. However, the soldier took off the top of her uniform and I could see shapes sliding through her flesh, like bones on the move…

Lope
: Must be a dream. Like that married couple from Clacton.

Sudra
: Yes, that was a dream definitely. But sometimes I think the city dream passing through here is still going on even though I’ve now woken up. Look out the window. Its walls in silhouette marching like staircases or collective chimney-stacks—all taking their slow-motion march-past—to war, via war, from war. One bit, the other day, like a vast model of a ship, got stuck in a chamber, and is still lodged there as if it’s landed itself on a cliff ledge—a cliff ledge to it but part of Klaxon to us. Guess it depends on the perspective, rather than on whether it’s a dream or not.

Lope
: Yes, I wonder whether dream is a relevant term any more. If all is dream, it does come down to perspectives rather than an easy excuse of dreaming. Turkey-halting, I call it.

Sudra
: Why?

Lope
: Well Turkey is both a bird and a country.

Sudra
: Yes, but how many times is the globe melting—making all countries one?

The conversation itself was being dreamed by Amy as she rested in her bed between battles. Between perspectives.

*

Arthur as a child enjoyed mixing experiments in the back garden—often watched by his younger sister Amy. He’d requisition household substances—Fairy liquid, white powdery Surf, Dettol disinfectant, creamy-white cleaning-fluids, soaps of all sorts and consistencies, dishwasher tablets, table salt, left-over food and so forth—then proceed to imagine he was a top scientist, plying thick pastes of such concoctions to looser fluids and hardened surfaces of impacted sponge or crystalline solids. ‘Requisition’ was a posh word for creatively transfer from one place to another. His mother Edith failed to notice much of her stock of kitchen lubrications had gone missing over time or she turned a blind eye to the ‘messes’ that Amy tried to tell her about if only she’d go down the garden to see.

Arthur saw himself as a top scientist. His experiments led to much global good. Even Amy was astonished when watching Arthur flick the tail of his Davy Crockett hat from his eyes as yet another steam creature erupted into the sky like a wet version of a firework display.

Sometimes, Arthur was also a top surveyor or geographer. Indeed, he often made dams from his ‘messes’ mixed with earth—and a moat of suspiciously multicoloured ditchwater around an island whereby his toy soldiers had a field day training amidst a sticky alien landscape of Tide and Toilet Frog.

He laughed as Amy turned up with a watering-can and flowerpot.

“I don’t need those.”

And she went off sobbing her heart out. Brothers weren’t easy monsters in her world of blurred growth and incipient humanity.

Arthur continued shaping swill into barely erect castle-battlements on his island, fostering insect-nests to take root to give some semblance of unpredictable inhabitants threading in and out of the maze of half-frozen messes that the winter weather had brought about.

Often, he’d put his larger ear to the ground to see if any larger inhabitants were about to emerge, and being larger, noisier, too. The insects, if insects they were as opposed to chemically-induced mites of impossible lifeforms, merely created a relentlessly mild buzz barely above his young hearing-threshold.

He stared back at the tower-block where he saw Edith waving at him. Apparently this was the day for his schoolteacher’s visit, someone who was most definitely not on Arthur’s side in the race for Natural Selection amid a competitive world where children were no longer offered flying-starts. Amy turned on her heels, dropping the watering-can, but managing to keep grip on her flowerpot for dear life.