Nemonymous Night (37 page)

*

Stub of pencil: Many people each holding one large word and, if they found the right order, the words would tell a significant story. They shuffled places in an arc, until a consensus as to an optimum order. A camera swivelled taking a panoramic photo of the story... but broke before the end.

*

The millions of warmongers in Klaxon-under-the-Ground swarmed from pillar to post, ready to stone even stones as well as each other—displaying a mob hatred simply engendered to stem the tide of love’s infections. A vital mutation or misalignment of possibilities.

*

Quite close to Clacton in Essex, there is Britain’s oldest recorded town, Colchester, its tall Town Hall pointing at the sky like a stretched wonder of the world—so attenuated you wonder if you’re in a surreal dream rather than a proper lifetime. The Water Tower is another land-locked kite of brick. The Castle an impacted rattle-bag of Norman stone, weathered to the gills. Yet a tree grows from its topmost tower. The Colchester Tree. Wet-weather fireworks of green. A ground-based kite-display beneath the empty sky.

I was brought up in Colchester from the age of eight.

*

“There is too much concentration on false endings. References to death. Half-hearted attempts to progress some semblance of a story-line—meandering like a blunt drill between the images—or like a Proustian discursiveness without Swann’s long-feathered perfections of prose or poetry. Not even managing to convey the believable, truly-felt astringency of human failings. Just attenuations of mock-philosophy or many wild side-glances from a big Bird Brother with a desperately flirtatious squawk or tail-flutter. Then role-playing a kitten so that its own feathers would be squashed under its own immediate paw.”

I listened to the speaker as he continued from the podium in Earth Tower Halls. His own lecture itself was indeed meandering like a blunt drill within already carved tunnels—also thrashing about in crazy dismay like a dying creature trying to reach some sense-bait at the end of its longest sentence. But he was reading from an invisible memory-aid that the technological advances of the new building supplied. Like a politician, he probably had not written the words—and was reciting them parrot-fashion. Even this my own interpolation was dragged kicking into the residual cavities or chambers of his very speech thus masquerading as his own words as dependant upon the hypothetical font used within the aforementioned memory-aid.

“My long-term hobby or labour-of-love: literary experiments in depersonalisation and seeking a unified morality from among the Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction: ‘difficult’ extrapolative empathy in the art of fiction writing: and creating/distributing the acclaimed but non-profit series of multi-authored anthologies entitled
Nemonymous
....”

*

The platforms were being queued haphazardly (and often over-vigorously) by those waiting for their turn to take the long trains that had now been shuffling steamingly within sidings for some hours of impending preparation. The hawling-tunnels had by now been freshly railtracked to furnish easier journeys to the Earth’s Core without having to travel overland. And most were eager to take advantage of these technological advances. The first public trips had been well-advertised and the demand was great. Ticket-only.

One of the platforms was so ill-queued only a few stragglers had self-consciously sidled there into makeshift positions of arrival’s order by mechanical memory-aid. They wondered if they were on the right platform, as they viewed the milling hordes on the opposite platform across the gleaming tracks. These few stragglers were evidently representatives of people who had already been to the Earth’s Core—and, in some cases, were still there, never having returned in the rather undependable transitions provided by the early ‘Heath Robinson’ Drills that had prevailed heretofore. Their tickets were for specific journeys whereby they could seek and then reclaim their lost selves… an adventure or quest that would be both exciting and linear. Several trainspotters or twitchers watched them from various signal-boxes in the vicinity, giving themselves (and hopefully others) some perspective to the early beginnings of the platform stragglers’ characterisation and potentiality within an unusually distinct plot-development.

A smartly be-suited Greg was a tall figure with pink chops sporting Victorian whiskers, which rather belied earlier sightings in other habitats of his working-class upbringing and work as a lorry-driver or amusement arcade attendant. Mike, Greg’s alter-nemo, was possibly the wise counsellor Greg truly sought, rather than just another version of himself.

Beth, his wife, frowned but instinctively showed an equal balancing of love and caring beneath the brusque veneer. She would be his real-life counsellor, whilst maintaining a rather uncomfortable relationship with her own ‘road rage’. Once beautiful (and her alter-nemo Susan was still present just below the surface of the skin in a far more acceptable silhouette of femininity), she now had frown-lines tracking the crows’ feet on her face and (if revealed) the rest of her body.

The children Amy and Arthur would need to develop more naturally without being force-fed fictional epithets. Equally the older ladies Edith and Clare would be given even more shadowy roles than those granted to them in earlier days.

If Lope de Vega, Dognahnyi or Sudra were present at all, they were not among this shorter platform queue of so-called stragglers. They probably only had tickets for the more populous queues on other platforms. We perhaps shall never know.

This time, however, what was already certain, the main protagonists were due (by dint of the railtrack’s pre-laid direction within Inner Earth) to by-pass Klaxon City, thus hopefully enabling them an easier path towards the goals they thought they sought.

*

Another or the same train disappeared with great whinings of fire-cranked pain (fed upon nuggets of blackened Angevin)... down the steep slope towards the centre of the Earth, ratchetting upon funicular gravity-braces. Aboard this corridorless vehicle, mock-timed for other eras when steam was the only motive force behind such iron beasts of transport, those in one carriage were immediately disappointed that there was no on-board lighting. Amy and Arthur were scared, but Greg managed to light a spill (one he used for his pipe). The glow upon their faces was more than just ghostly. It was comforting, too.

They felt the juddering of the gravity-braces as they slipped across the sleepers of time as well as of dream upon another set of sleepers: themselves. The Sleeper Express for the ends of the world.

In timely fashion they skirted a visibly far-stretching dune-curved lobe within a gigantic cavity, lit only by a subdued Sunnemo. Greg quenched the spill as they watched awe-inspired the glistening tracks vastly undulate into the numinous distance with a renewed flurry of choking smoke or steam: inferred to be thus choking since plumes of such emissions had only been cursorily test-run within mock-ups of these cavities or chambers, but the authorities had hoped for the best—in that the natural vents of an organic planet would naturally cope with such human interventions as fire-cranked transport.

Then utter blackness again, eventually dimly inflamed by another spill.

Followed, a few hours later, by a bright chink of a few seconds as the pyloned city of Klaxon was by-passed—viewed between the margins of a lightning crack in an otherwise unilluminated cavity of Earth’s most elephantine junction of rail-tunnels. The train’s whistle—becoming more like a siren by dint of the echoing cavity’s configuration of space and sound—blasted out for the first time (with the shuddering imminence or immanence of seemingly religious ‘antipodal angst’) as the train continued its nigh unstoppable steam-driven course through a more benighted night than even those previously imagined.

*

Scene: Lecture Room of Earth Towers Hall, London. Delving further into
‘Nemonymous Night’
as a work of fiction, many reviews have pointed out how the characters remain fluid, difficult to nail down, even
not always the same person!
Therefore sympathy or empathy with the protagonists remains elusive. Normally a disastrous situation for the efficacy of any novel or set of novels. A sign of failure.

Hopefully, they are sufficiently
al
lusive to warrant further consideration in the light of the author’s intent (as far as I can ascertain without recourse to any debate on ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ upon which subject I currently keep my powder dry). That intent, then, however difficult it is itself to nail down (like the characters), seems to me—as I implied before—to stem from an attempt at making
any
empathy as untenable as possible. However, I’ve met this author head on (determined to play the game on my own terms) and I feel that one can put
yourself
in the role of Greg or Beth, whichever one is chosen to be more likely to be empathisable for you. The ‘vexed texture of text’ and/or ‘a novel growing up as it is written with very little retrospective revision by the author except for typos or grammatical mistakes’ help one in this attempt to empathise and become involved and to suspend disbelief in the—what is it?—SF novel within a Jonathan-Swiftian or Jules-Vernian or Marcel-Proustian ‘Inner Ear’ or perceived dune of trackable fictionality by drilling through for the oil of its plot. In other words, the empathy becomes more powerful from the fact there is little assistance by the author towards any empathy at all. You need, therefore, to insert yourself.

Before I came on to the podium here today, I scribbled out—at the last minute—with this small stub of a pencil (holds it up to applause) a few more notes as analogy and to serve as my own
aide mémoire
. I’ll read them out verbatim: “The method of fiction in ‘
Nemonymous Night’
. Like trying to crawl through a long horizontal hedge. It’s easier than you thought. Coming out at the end of the hedge—find oneself lodged on a cliff-face. No way forward. Yet, the hedge going backwards has turned itself against you. More nettles. More spiky obtrusions pointing in the wrong direction…”

*

The first regathering of its steam by the train within Inner Earth was at Whofage. It would be folly to pretend that this was anything other than a short cessation for reprovisioning or renewed fire-cranking or water/carbonised-angevin re-stocking. The passengers were intended to stay in the vicinity of the station awaiting announcements from the mini-tannoy system that had been set up merely within the hearing-range of the station itself. Whofage had no ambition to become another Klaxon, it seemed. Whofage’s tannoys could hardly be heard, except for a pitiful cartoonish squeak punctuating the steam-burnished hiss of the mighty iron beast that still billowed visible smoky off-detritus into the crowded atmosphere.

It is also folly to use the word ‘station’—as it was more like an old-fashioned halt from that idyllic period in English history depicted by ‘The Railway Children’. Greg and Beth, together with their own two children, stretched their legs along the dark-roofed platform—amazed that a cavé was provided, one not dissimilar to the buffet used in the film ‘Brief Encounter’. Steaming samovars of freshly-infused concoctions of Indian leaf, plus various tiers of cream or coconutty cakes. And a large old-fashioned clockwork clock that told surface time, for the benefit of the smooth throughput of surfaceers such as Greg and his family. Amy and Arthur shuddered in their thin-limbed smocks, because the station was merely a dank, troublous tunnel—such as those tunnels punctuating the canals of surface England whereby Narrow Boats plied their own ancient, sluggish, chilly, gloom-filled, chugging paths of broken water—and the
shyfryngs
were almost second nature. Even Beth felt the gnawing to the very bottom bone. They were all relieved to get into the relative cosiness of the cavé, where they could replenish their stock of good-will and pluck.

Upon their alter-nemos’ first visit to Whofage, they had not been able to explore the city at all. In fact, a passing subterfuge of memory seemed to tell them that they had by-passed this city altogether in the Drill, just as, on this journey, they had by-passed Klaxon. Therefore, there was a temptation to leave the jurisdiction of the squeaky tannoys in the station and just poke their heads out for a moment and view the vistas available, including the previously unknown pyramid on the hill (equivalent in historical interest to Klaxon’s Canterbury Oak or, on the surface, the Colchester Tree)—and, having discussed the chances of managing this without missing the train’s departure (i.e. discussing these chances with the buxom white-overalled tea-lady behind the cavé’s counter)—they took off on Poliakoff-type adventures within the purlieus of Whofage and beyond the catchment area of the station premises, let alone just its tannoys. And perhaps those adventures are worthy of a whole book in themselves.

They were surprised, for example, that there were many other passengers on the train—judging by the very short queue of them that had boarded on the train’s first inward outward-journey. Many of these shadowy individuals eschewed a trip round the city, but a number did take the same risk as Greg and his family took. How many managed to get back to the train before it departed remains an exciting conundrum of rushed running and panting moments of dire stress. Each a book in itself.

The city was rather Eastern European in atmosphere, with a mighty cathedral on huge stilts that seemed to be around every corner they turned. No sign of the pyramid on the hill and there were rumours that it had toppled a few years before—killing three million citizens in the process. The city was a strange contrast to the close-ordered darkness of most of the erstwhile train journey—with muffled sirens from the front pullman—as well as being an equal contrast to the fleeting vistas of Sunnemo-lit dunes or lobes that took the continuously curving railtrack upon their backs. For something to be a contrast to two quite opposing contrasts simultaneously said a lot for the power of Whofage as a contrast.