Part 1 (1/2)

Nemonymous Night.

Lewis, D. F.

Prelude.

This book is like a child clumsily finding its feet upon a carpet: a s.p.a.ce and a foundation that seem to be its whole world. The book starts out to navigate this world, to become practised at walking, to become schooled, loved and loving, finally prepared for death.

Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.

Each page will therefore eventually grow up into another later page of the book. This process is the story. This is the truth of its fiction. The growing-up of a book in difficult times.

These words are not a pretentious authorial introduction to the book. They do not even represent the book's own intrinsic prologue. They are part of the growing-up process. They are part of the plot.

Nemonymous Navigation.

The carpet was quite ordinary. n.o.body around was an expert on the manufacture of carpets, so all that could be said about it was some reference to ordinariness. Even the stains were ordinary. Years of wine and grime. Years of mishandled vacuuming. The careless knees of toddlers as they scorched their model cars through the rough of tufts. The odd tread of strangers.

The pattern was non-existent since the carpet possessed a plain beige colour-originally with nothing to recommend it except its unpretentiousness. Yet, despite these various negatives, the items of furniture that pressed its pedestals, castors and broad-beam bases into the pile were rather pleasant in an antique fas.h.i.+on-but whether these represented genuine antiques was anybody's guess. They were rather down-market sticks of furniture in spite of the dusting by a previous owner who rather enjoyed the varnished or polished gleam of knotted wood more than the clean lines of a carpet's cleanliness.

The carpet itself had no mind of its own-obviously.

Nothing could be inferred about its soul. If it had thoughts, it kept them to itself. There is a theory that inanimate objects feel themselves to be so real that n.o.body-even with the wildest imagination-can imagine them as imaginary. And if anything is deemed unimagined or unimaginary or unimaginable then it is incapable of existing in fiction, fantasy or dream-but merely in real life. And it is true that many actual things yearn to be imagined rather than to exist for real... simply for the pleasure of being fantasised about. This carpet was no exception.

It must feel trapped not only by the webbed st.i.tching of its underlay, by its carpet tacks keeping it tight to the skirting-boards and by the downward press of the mock antique bric-a-brac and furniture, but also by the knowledge of its essential reality as a floor-covering, with no possibility of weird elaboration or of weaving into the character of something unreal... thus to make it worthy of imagining or dreaming about. For example, that day, there were deep misunderstood mumbles in large areas of the carpet's jurisdiction-come down to it together with the pad of two spread-soled solid feet and the prod of two sharp feet as they moved about amid the lugubrious talking that belonged to the feet's owners-or so the carpet would have a.s.sumed given the carpet's ability to have such a.s.sumptions.

”How are you today?”

The man who spoke was Mike. Deceptively heavily-built. Physically distracted, but he strode through the room as if he owned it. A lorry driver's face.

The woman followed him about, as far as she could follow someone in such a small room. In contrast to Mike, she appeared as if owned or, rather, controlled by the room while-with rather more panache than the situation demanded-she kept adjusting ornaments... also brus.h.i.+ng dust into a pan: a secondary pursuit. Given name Amy. More a girl than a woman but with a woman's manners. She said very little. Only direct questions could stir her into response.

”Not so bad.”

She had a pretty face, but when she spoke-even lightly, thoughtlessly-there was a frown that appeared and a deep divot within the frown's area. Hair a fas.h.i.+onable matted brown, so very her it would only be noticed if it suddenly wasn't there. Ap.r.o.n failed to hide her s.e.xuality and high-heels seemed out of kilter with the dustpan.

Mike was definitely older: more in his mid-forties, compared to her mid-twenties. His own greying hair and stubbly beard were far more noticeable as distinguishable features-compared to the straight 'herness' of Amy's hair. Suit a bit bedraggled. Shoes solid brown with laces-the type men had worn for years, in and out of offices. The fact he was pacing about the room exposed his nervousness despite the aura of confidence and command that Amy only saw. Or only Amy saw.

Mike was a hawler, although he would have spelt it differently had he known the word at all. At this stage, it was unclear what a hawler was-or what a hawler did. But Mike knew he was one and probably knew what one was and what one did, even if he didn't know the name itself. Not a transporter of heavy goods along the roads, as that was a haulier. In the old days, a hauler (sic) was involved in moving coal from the coalface, coal that had already been worked by others: a lifetime of chip chip chip, only for the hauler to haul it off. An art in itself and one fraught with many logistical problems. Today, however, there were no coal-mines and therefore haulers had died out-or needed to diversify. Some claimed that butchering was now within a hawler's brief, even if they only dreamed of the word hawler and later forgot it. A brief for beef, and it is true that Mike loved to consume steak-there being a saying, almost a proverb, that everyone knew but failed to understand whilst otherwise consciously understanding it to the hilt-that Mike, and others like him, ”were so voracious they ate beef till it was raw”.

In many ways, when perspectives were collected at the end of the day, this did not mean anything and gave no clue as to the nature of hawling.

Mike had left the house. Amy was upstairs making the bed. He wanted to visit the pub but doubted if anyone he knew would be there and he hated drinking alone. The park was second best: a good place for thinking. Susan was on his mind and Susan may indeed be in the park with her two children, one of which was bewitched... or so Susan once told Mike. Mike had usually steered clear of married women especially if they had children, but life was never simple. The bewitched child was a case for a hawler... a nameless child who often dreamed most of the night. While most people dreamed throughout the hours of sleep, very few among them actually remembered all the dreams that had disturbed the felt equilibrium of their rest. But Susan's bewitched child remembered every single detail of what followed her and of what she followed, sometimes the same thing, follower and followed. The child was nameless and so were the inhabitants of her dreams. One day she'd have proper names for them. Proper nouns.

Susan had a name for her bewitched child but she did not tell Mike because if a hawler's magic was to work, he must not, in any circ.u.mstances, know the name of the child whom he was attempting to hawl. The child must remain nemonymous-which was a word for a sort of cross between anonymity (only wholly real things could be anonymous) and a subliminal or aspirational state of non-existence.

Much was inexplicable, yet it would become explicable when put into practice and seen for what it was. Mike suspected that this child in question (Susan's bewitched offspring) was named either Sudra or Sundra because he thought he had heard Susan calling the child by a similar name but, naturally, he tried to put the fact out of his mind, so that his hawling would be more effective when the time came. He even put the fact of his ability to <hawl> out of his mind. Yet another word that evidently had gone missing somewhere along the fading spectrum between two or more minds-but there was, so far, n.o.body narratively compos mentis around these parts to reconcile any differences.

He gingerly walked across the park ground. He wondered what stage of the housework Amy would by now have reached. Cleaning the bedroom carpet was never a joke and only attempted by Amy once in a while. He glimpsed Susan and her two children (including Sudra or Sundra) playing on the distant swings and he even thought he saw Susan waving at him. She wasn't always that friendly. Mike was a hawler, after all, and most people instinctively treated hawlers with a cold respectful shoulder-or, otherwise, they would have given away their presumptive knowledge of any hawler's ident.i.ty. Mike, if he thought about it at all, believed himself to be the only hawler left in the country, if not the world, or the only practising hawler. He felt tears p.r.i.c.k out at the thought of Amy. The ground was cousin to the carpet as he sensed his feet shudder, listen to his thoughts and plumb his sorrow. Others felt such shudders as imaginary earth tremors or, at least, that was the best thing to believe them to be. Upon any other way, lay madness.

Or a plate of sizzling beef. But, first, duty called as Mike plucked up enough courage to approach Susan and her children, leaving any residual thought of Amy to the vacuuming.

Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. Mike often created images like these in her mind.

”What to do,” she asked or stated. The carpet cleaner churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the earth wire failing.

She was back a few years before. Mike had not come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. She recalled that her brother had always been a bit of a loner, non-expressive and wild. He concocted experiments with household goods, mixing them into a chemical syrup by means of adding garden mud to substances like was.h.i.+ng-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. These misalchemies were alive-at least in her brother's eyes and Amy laughed as she remembered their mother's remonstrations of despair while she tried to talk sense into her son but merely ended up communicating with the ”cowpats” of mixture he had left in his wake. At least he did the experiments outside. And indoor fireworks only came out of Christmas Crackers in those days, so they were not an all-year problem: those sizzling wormcasts on the seasonal carpet. That was a G.o.dsend.

Amy couldn't remember her brother's name. It was as if he had never existed. Her mother was a Mrs Cole, Edith to her friends. Amy was afraid of remembering her brother's name because, by dragging it from the past, trawling it via the coa.r.s.e-grained muslin of memory's filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything Mike had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a b.o.o.by-trap-and she continued sc.r.a.ping the lower surface of the vacuum across the grit in the carpet that had collected there like any dust collects there... from wherever dust and grit and, indeed, stains come from-a mysterious source only hawlers are able to fathom.

She couldn't really countenance that Mike had more than one job on the go at once. She wanted to be his only subject-because being a hawler's subject was not dissimilar to being in love. Unadmitted love, true, but love nevertheless. Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. A scene of a park so cultivated its gra.s.s was more like a plush lawn for the toes of effete royalty or fairies. She saw it in her mind's eye, but failed to recognise the fey walkers that positively languished in its heady Proustian delights.

Amy had once been a child herself-self-evidently.

”Amy! Where's Arthur?” screamed Mrs Cole. Edith looked out into the garden where Arthur should have been at this time of day, especially bearing in mind his slippers on the floor and his coat gone from the door-hook. Amy was nowhere to be seen. The meat in the oven was burning, so she rushed off to adjust the temperature gauge-knowing that slowly-slowly-caught-the-monkey. Amy was never a worry, as she spent her time not worrying. Someone who didn't worry never gave worries, Mrs Cole knew this instinctively without articulating the thought. On the other hand, Arthur was a big worry-as he always worried about going out, worried about fulfilment, worried about the ever-increasing need to mix quant.i.ties of the world together to see what gave.

Mrs Cole, having finished with adjusting the oven, knew that one of her two children was bewitched and the evidence pointed to Arthur. She reached the apartment window again and eagerly scanned the inner square between the walls of the four blocks that formed it. There was a solitary fountain at its centre-and a few all-weather seats surrounding. Not much for children to do in the square but it was certainly better than the city streets amid which this square was a relatively safe oasis. She saw a huddled figure on one of the seats and, believing it to be Arthur, she called from the window for him to come in. She'd forgotten why she needed him to come in at this precise moment, but the need was one that had become a bee in her bonnet. The white face looked up. It was Amy. And Mrs Cole unaccountably shed tears... followed closely by desperation as she saw a taller figure enter the square. Anyone needed to enter the square via the apartment blocks-so the place was not exactly public but the security was lax. And where was Arthur? The figure in the square was too tall to be Arthur although he was growing too quickly these days.

Being at the higher end of the block, Edith Cole felt helpless, should there be any crisis moments in the square far below.

The head teacher had just announced his visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. He'd come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both... at once.

”h.e.l.lo, Mr Clare,” said Mrs Cole, opening the door. She had put any problems to the back of her mind, as if she predicted even bigger problems arriving via Mr Clare.

”I'm glad to catch you in,” he announced, not waiting for an invitation to enter the flat.

Mrs Cole wondered why he hadn't made an appointment. This was the second time he had arrived this way. She planted her feet on the ground, expecting the worst, bracing herself for something dreadful she didn't really want to hear. But a carpeted floor several levels up in the air was hardly the ground, and she felt no a.s.sistance from this attempt to earth herself. ”Get a grip!” she said quietly to herself between gritted teeth. She heard several conversations coming up to her from below-a cacophony of different groups of families in the cross-section of abodes beneath her feet. They spoke of frightening things, childish things, trivial things...

”What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?”

Mrs Cole was still an attractive woman and she knew Mr Clare better than he knew himself. She could see it in his eyes.

At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their head teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur's hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large truck. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl's keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it as if it were real plastic with mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips.