The Transfiguration of Mister Punch (9 page)

Someone, somewhere must always perform His immortal and most Tragical tale. Our story. The crimes he contains within the wooden frame or brass chamber will seep out like black fog. ‘MAN KILLS FAMILY, POLICE OFFICER IN SHOOTOUT.’

Is time travel possible?

The World will choke upon Puppet Smoke.

Strings that are alive as serpents of flesh will now puppeteer the human and animal dead.

The stars will scream and burn.

Pits will open, turning the planet leprous.

From these wounds will emerge the living automata, the gilded demons, the Star Orchids, the insatiable Leeches with their hungering.

I am so sorry I dropped the Brass Punch book-end/doorstop. It might have been better had we not known. Yet, I am glad. For we have a chance. The battle could still be won by US...

The Puppeteers.

With the appearance of various societies, authoritative books and annual gatherings, there are now hundreds of us, and the numbers are ever growing. Perhaps you might be a secret puppeteer.

You might finish this book and take up something else rendered of wood and fabric. You might see an eye in a tree, and know the face within.

Something vast and warm whispers through me, to you now: a puppet is a book that you write with your hand and throat.

Like the puppets in a traveling Punch and Judy show, we age. We get knocked about, the paint chips off in places, we must be repainted and reborn over the years. There have been legends for centuries explaining the reason there are so few actual Punch puppets from the past existent. One tales goes that it is a secret tradition that puppet men are buried with their puppets. The little man dies with the big man. A variant sees the puppets burnt in a ritual that parallels the showman’s funeral. Tales are told that puppets follow their masters into the afterlife, like the tattoos of bushmen. Here they need no strings nor throats nor hands to sing, to fight, make love and kill. They dance and are one with their animators. Another tradition sees the sons of Punch Professors learning their father’s show, inheriting the puppets and frame and breathing another forty years of life into The Show.

He has come to me in dreams that varied between the splendid and screamingly hilarious to the terrifying and grotesque. The puppet shows of childhood all black and white and silver, filmed resplendent through a soft, creamy lens. I wake up refreshed, ecstatic. These were rare. Then, again... hard to put down but—I, embarrassed as I write, recall one drenched-in-sweat frozen nightmare of being ‘hagged’ by an androgynous part-Mr. Punch, part-harpie hybrid. This disgusting creature cackled and leered as it dug it’s foul little wooden paws into my chest. Its breath stank of sawdust, rusty nails and cheap gin. I am totally paralyzed. I am not asleep. I am not awake.

“Is you the little boy what made Mr. Punch? Ye might have given me a better and bigger chin chin chin, so take that that that!”

I woke up screaming with a feeling of total disgust and self-loathing that was far from healthy.

I hear your appalled cackle of revulsion and disbelief.

Do you dare claim that you have never been unrepentantly sick or demented?

I can’t believe that I ever dreamed of hurting anybody. I mean, really hurting anybody.

How could I have been such a monster for so many years? I do hope my horrible reputation doesn’t finally catch up with me. If it does, I hope my redemption will be enough to grant me a few peaceful days. I would rather perish by His mighty stick, let my brains spill, before I hurt another creature. Let me die with my own puppets in the fire, my soul takes flight as their painted eyes crack and peel, becoming as blind as I.

What kind of Holy Book did I put my hand upon, in the sacred Temple, surrounded by magicians? I had my choice, for such was their Way. All Gods were particles inseparable from the leer and the loon. The hook and the hump. The chin and the grin. The will to kill, to wink and blink, to grin and sin, to resist all and any attempts to be told how and what to be. What kind of Holy Book did I swear away my soul upon? Why, it could only be a strange new book I wrote myself. A BIBLE of the NEW FOOL.

In the beginning was The Swazzle, and the Swazzle was with Punch. From the silence of the void came a distant buzzing, as a deafening onslaught, as a blue and yellow cloud of locust.

It spill’d forth—and it made strange noises.

The smoke of the ‘motions’ in endless plumes all strings of scarlet and yellow billowed eternally across the void.

Do you think me mad, Dearest friend?

You’re one to talk! I know all about you. I saw you there that time, but you didn’t see me.

We can both keep secrets, eh?

Beloved Reader, my utter and only confidante.

Now you know.

Now you see.

For you wear Punch-coloured glasses now.

Odd thing is, I stopped remembering my dreams for over thirty years, until recently. I won’t tell you what it was that opened the floodgates into the dream-realm once again, for me. That is the one thing I shall keep to myself in this Book of Secrets with No Strings.

Now it is no longer Mr. Punch who comes to me in dreams. It is his companion. The Faithful one who never leaves his side, despite his master’s dreadful humanity, his monstrous behavior, his eternal crimes, the calms and rages, his ultimately wicked and irredeemable soul. It is of this little one I dream. The one who does not complain when his red silk ribbon of a collar gets so filthy from the filth of the streets of Men, that it develops a new and dirtier shine. It takes months or a sympathetic showman’s wife to replace the dingy rag.

He, beautiful little creature, is the biting, barking familiar to Mr. Punch the Magician. The sole-survivor of Punch’s homicidal rampage curls up next to his wooden heart. He will sleep and guard forever dear, dear Mr. Punch who is cursed to remain alone in the end, before repeating his hysterical, beautiful and abominable life.

Over and over again.

I be pleased as Punch now.

You ask me what am I going to do tomorrow?

I am going to go to a distant orchard I know and find some good wood to carve new puppets with. There are shows to perform, there is a world that must be saved from turning into an abyss. His voice must never be silenced. Let the savagely hilarious tale, Punch’s passion play, be told over and over onstage, as a prayer, as yellow and bright, blood red worry beads to count as an old man, in strange new churches, a tittering rosary, blossoming brains and roses projected onto clouds of fairy floss and in books.

Yes, in books.

Punch is ferociously beaten and collapses. He silently rests upon the ground. He seems to be dead. A physician is called to help the battered puppet. The Doctor enters.

Doctor: Are you dead, Mr. Punch?

Punch: Yes.

Although I might shed a tear for Mr. Punch’s eternal plight, he has not visited me at night since before some unspeakable accident I have finally almost forgotten, or the death of somebody I loved far more than my own soul.

There is strange joy, there are emerald and violet lights in the forest.

Fear cannot exist here, where everything is made of flames.

A beautiful and completely unfamiliar world has just opened up, relentlessly, magnificently.

What you see within the clouds and the grain of wood is real. The legs begin to move.

It took time. The changes began.

I took your soft, not wooden hand. We were unstoppable.

We have no choice anymore.

I enter this amazing Garden of Wonders and the show begins again.

The waves gently lap at the beach. Music comes from the distant pavilion.

Children’s laughter dances like an unworldly choir over the blue water sounds.

I am girded in armor, shod in lead, I have forged for a lifetime.

I dream of Toby.

The author would like to deeply thank Summer Yarrow Moe. You helped me lose my strings.

An Evening’s Entertainment
For Two Players

by
D.P. Watt

‘Do you want to make-believe that you are the old friends who talk and run and live through these pages? If so, the words and descriptions may help you to—not act, but
be
the parts!’

Mary Stewart,
The Land of Punch and Judy

So good to meet you. I’m delighted you could spare the time for us to have a chat and go through some of these rare materials together. Let me take your coat and bag... Oh, sorry; you keep the bag then. But it’s a relief to know how serious you are about acquiring the collection. To come with ready cash certainly gives one confidence in your intentions. I hope though that it will not preclude us enjoying each other’s company and relishing some of this truly incredible life’s work.

As you are aware I recently became the guardian of Henry Hawling’s exquisite collection of theatre memorabilia, gathered over a forty-five year period. I have been tasked, given that he passed away so suddenly and with no apparent heir, with disposing of the materials in a proper fashion... No there’s no need to fear, I haven’t approached any museums, or other institutions. You were the first person I contacted. I understand that you had a somewhat difficult relationship with Mr Hawling in the last few years. But, as you are one of the country’s leading private collectors I thought it important that the collection stay together, in the first instance. You are an expert; and it is expertise I am looking for in the assessment and relocation of these materials.