SYLVIE'S RIDDLE
Authors: ALAN WALL
The Edgar Allan Press Limited
Alan Wall 20
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Alan Wall has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
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88 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of biding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imp
osed on the subsequent publisher.
ISBN: 978-
I
-9090
18
-
12
-9
Cover
T
he Edgar Allan Press Ltd
NOTE
In 2003 I was awarded an Arts Council/ AHRB Fellowship to work for a year with the particle physicist Goronwy Tudor jones of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Birmingham University. The aim of the Fellowship was to promote understanding between the arts and sciences. The collaboration proved fruitful. It continues to result in new work. We have already published various essays together, such as 'Extremities of Perception'
(Leonardo).
This novel is the first book-length result of that fertile year. I am greatly indebted to the Arts Council of Great Britain and the AHRB. It would be hard to express my gratitude to Goronwy Tudor Jones himself, whose gift for exposition let me catch a glimpse of the astonishing insights of modem physics. This book is dedicated to him.
I am also indebted to the Royal literary Fu
nd for RLF Fellowships at W
arwick University and Liverpool john Moores.
Contents
Mystery Play
City of Ghost
Living
on
Air
Through the
Lens
The Riverside Gallery
Wolf Morning
The
Convenience of Women
Earth, Water, Fire and Air
The Second Interval
Through
a
Lens
Backwards
A Man of Peace
The Burn Lecture
Water Goddess
Euland
Ariadne's Bobbin
The Motel Route
to
Wisdom
Doll's House
Nudes
Clapar
è
de's Drawing-Pin
Mirada Fume
Marks of Light
Genius
Lenses
and Constellations
Five-Star Hotels of the Spirit
Conf
essional
The Fade on the Greatcoat
Back at the Signum
Inquisitorial Lens
Inside the Labyrinth
Spe
ci
al
Dispensation
Quorate
Duet
The Tra
gic Lecture
Rising Waters
The Shipwreck of the Singula
Coda -228
To
GORONWY TUDOR JONES
If this should be written on the mind, then always in a fugitive ink ...
FRIEDRICH EULAND
Mystery Play
The man finds enough money in his greatcoat pocket, once deep blue but now greying with age, to buy a coffee. Only as he sits down to drink the coffee does it occur to him that he has no idea where the money came from. Nor for that matter the greatcoat. And where did he come from?
He drinks the coffee. Although he remembers the word
coffee
he has no knowledge of the taste. A taste of hotness, gushing down a drainpipe. He fumbles through the pockets of the unknown coat. There is a card. He takes it out. An oblong piece of plastic, blue and red. A library card. The name is written in black ink: Owen Treadle. He drinks more of the coffee; now he can taste only scalding milk. A cow's udder dunked in a cauldron. He rises from the formica table, stained with ten thousand cheap meals and as many cigarette butts, and walks across to the counter. The woman behind it in her sky-blue overall stares at him without interest.
'Do you know Owen Treadle?' he says.
'Owen Treadle.' She repeats the name slowly, non-committally. Her blonde hair is permed. The perplexity in her eyes is magnified by her thick glasses. He sees a shoal of tiny fishes in a bottle, the subaquean thrash of cold silver flesh. 'Owen Treadle. Rings a bell.'
'Do I look like him?'
'What?'
'Do I ring a bell? Do I ring the same bell the name just rang?
*
Do you think I might be Owen Treadle?' Where all these words were coming from, he had no idea.
'Well, I'd have thought if anyone should know that it would have been you, darling. Wouldn't you say? Are you going back to the hostel?'
'The hostel.'
'St Clare's, my love. I think that's where you normally come from, isn't it, when you come at all? But you've never told me your name, all the different times you've been here.'
Outside he stopped the first person he met.
'Could you tell me the way to St Clare's?' The old man, bent but cheerful, had a plastic bag in his hand, swollen with potatoes and a cauliflower. The man in the greatcoat looked from the cauliflower to the little old man's head; one was shinier and smoother. That was the one you mustn't boil. He remembered.
'Carry on along that road until you come to the bridge over the canal, and it's opposite the steam mill.' He heard a piston from another century shrieking in spite and potency. Heard pitmen in thin seams, wheezing with emphysema. Heard the sound of history begrimed. Was that where he had to go back to then? Back into the filth of history?
He found Saint Clare's with no trouble. In fact, once he had started walking towards it he realised he hadn't needed any directions in the first place. The streets around him seemed to hold their own information, and now they were sharing it with him. Once inside its door, past the glass window on the left where the uniformed man nodded him through, he knew where to go. He walked up the steps to the second floor, and then along the corridor, pale green paint all around, tropical vegetation gone milky and anaemic, till he came to Room 2
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. Inside, Alfred was sitting as usual on one of the beds, a leather-bound copy of the Bible open on his lap.
'Hello Owen,
’
he said. 'The flies on his face are only there because they want to be. Did you hear the buzz of the traffic outside?'
Owen sat on the other bed without
taking off his great
coat. He stared at the much smaller and older man. A goatee beard, yellow and stained. He should wash that. His head largely barren but with a scrubland of whitish hairs straggling on either side. Bright blue eyes. No glasses though, even though he was reading. Unusual that. Blue eyes are often the weakest.
'Have you started remembering anything yet, Owen? You've already been here two days. You normally start to remember by now.'
'What should I remember, Alfred?'
'I'm not telling you. It changes every time. Each year I learn something different. Each year you come, that is. So I'm not telling you.'
Later they sat next to one another in the refectory. Neither of them joined in as the Christian soldiers were exhorted onwards, and their colleagues sang about what a friend they had in Jesus. They ate. Owen found smells, tastes, sensations on his gums and tongue, and tried to slide them into the silk pockets in his mind, or let them swish smoothly through the interstices. They left when the meal was over. Alfred whispered quietly to him: 'Same escape route tonight?'
'Which route would that be?' Alfred looked at him with interest, a fragment of cabbage still snagged in his goatee.