Part 4 (1/2)

”What's that?” shouted Susan, fl.u.s.tered but retaining the studied innocence characteristic of her.

There was what appeared to be a pier on stilts-of the seaside pleasure variety-reaching into or across a very shallow inner sea-not a sea so much as a series of dark gleaming puddles creating the feel of an elfin archipelago that had gone to seed, made from patches of black sand. Near this pier was a stained-yellow block-building of inferior architectural qualities which once-they guessed-had housed an amus.e.m.e.nt arcade. They thought they could hear the ghostly whirrings, blurps and chortles of erstwhile jollification.

And nightsome gurgles of waves against the pier's stilts.

”The pier's pillars are made of wood,” said Amy, as if in a speech she'd learnt parrot-fas.h.i.+on. She was desperately trying to be herself, not someone else. She needed to be herself-otherwise n.o.body could sympathise with her as a potential human being. The once thick-thighed oaken hafts were slowly decaying into the brine, even as she watched them. Wilting as boniness would.

They soon pa.s.sed this real or mocked-up (they weren't sure which) version of a seaside resort from Fifties England... not even something the city had ever boasted. But here it was. Seedy growing on seedy.

In the distance, beyond the puddly sea, they all saw two small figures-no bigger than match-stick marionettes-employing their own silhouettes to crouch and peer into or under-not a manhole cover but now, far from the city proper, the first of many under-underground oubliettes that peppered the northern night lands in an un-manmade state of existence.

”I can hear something,” said Mike. He heard it as if his feet were ears. A distant downward noise-not of underground trains that were what such noises pertained in the city but, rather, underground dogfights by second world war spitfires that felt just as much at home within earth as air. Yet, Mike didn't put his description of these noises into words. He was more concerned with the others in his party running away from his own position near the puddly sea towards the matchstick silhouettes that were sinking slowly into a surface which once seemed solid enough to bear their slightest weight as well as for them to walk upon.

Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls-the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls-otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city-but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn't grow. Brick is more p.r.o.ne to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south-but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imagination, because everything using the gaps had widened.

Edith and Clare, when they fell asleep, the walls vanished as if they had never existed in the first place. And when they woke up-the walls were back where the two girls knew the walls had always been. One twin tried to stay awake while the other twin slept... so as to check out the walls, but they could not sleep or wake without the other one sleeping or waking. They dreamed each other alive.

Edith and Clare were once quite young. Now they were old. If one of them died, they wondered if the other one would also die. Identical twins were one thing, but mutual twins were twins even a step beyond mere ident.i.ty.

Greg had two recurring dreams of characters that he called (from within each dream) Edith and Clare. In one dream, they were twin sisters and, in the other, complete strangers who meet up and conduct an even stranger relations.h.i.+p. In the latter dream, they did not live in a city wall but in a tied cottage near a tree with an enormous knotted girth of crusted bark-about twenty-five feet in circ.u.mference at its base but a normal amount of various branches emerging in a tangle from the tapering top of this over-sized cone-topped trunk-making it seem like a normal tree from about eight feet high onwards. A bottom-heavy tree that was called a Canterbury Oak.

However, each time, before Greg could pin down any memory of the tree's ident.i.ty or its significance to Edith and Clare, he woke up with a start into a situation he could not remember how he had reached in real life prior to sleeping, until a slow waking-up process reminded him.

He was on board 'The Hawler', a vast Drill thing, with helicopter vanes, that was to take Beth and himself underground on a trip to the centre of the earth by means of a well-trodden route from the Left Foot region of the city... as the Captain had informed them-and if the vertical chimney-tunnel was already ”well-trodden”, they asked the Captain, why the need for it to be a Drill at all?

”Because the tunnel has closed up again, as it always does... the tectonic plates ensure we have to forge the route anew each time we make the trip from here.”

The Captain's answer had an air of disinterest about it. But Greg and Beth nodded with full understanding. They had been astonished-when they first arrived on board-at the facilities of the Drill's interior. Very modern and high-tech but interspersed with antique or fine art accoutrements so as to make it feel more salubriously civilized than it actually was. They had to clamber through various tasteful 'floors' via attic-like s.p.a.ces and even smaller pa.s.sageways that one might have called open-ended oubliettes. In fact, the Captain teased them into a race from floor to floor so as to see which of them arrived first at their private cabin.

Imagine their disappointment, however, when they both breathlessly reached the highest floor in the Drill, at the furthest point from the Drill's leading edge of a bit-tip. Their cabin turned out to be a mock-up of a seedy city flat, with a damp smell, hung with stained and slightly bulging wallpaper... and a worn beige carpet or, dependent on the light, yellow carpet on the floor.

”There is always at least one thing that makes any event imperfect,” had said the Captain with a wry smile, as if this explained the inferiority of the couple's quarters within the Drill.

It was here within the damp bed that Greg had awoken from his by now fully forgotten recurring dream-Beth beside him. And, indeed, the cabin itself had reverted to its original state of a sleek comfort-zone of tasteful decor. Not one single sign of seediness or mildewy carpets or peeling wallpaper anywhere.

Greg recalled, with still increasing wakefulness, that, the next day, the Drill (and them within it) would be setting forth on its big adventure. He smiled to himself as he listened to Beth contentedly dozing beside him in the cabin's plush double bed. Her snores could not disguise the trial revving noises of the Drill's bit-tip as the pilot rehea.r.s.ed its re-ignition of spinning, even now at the dead of night. The Drill's launch would be quite well prepared by the time daylight appeared, Greg was sure-and a daylight firework display would be set off in celebration, with the sparks in cascades and their colours designed even to outs.h.i.+ne the sun... colours that would include black as well the more usual brighter colours of fireworks.

Mike took one glance at Susan, Arthur and Amy, the three of them vanis.h.i.+ng towards the point on the dark horizon where they had seen the two small match-thin figures sink down into it-and he loped after them, conserving his energy because distances looked further than they actually were in the north's night land.

A number of black seagulls flapped their wings inefficiently above him as he plugged on beneath their migrating cloud. One defecated on him. Gulls were traditionally p.r.o.ne to a sod's-law more than any other foulness of the sky-certainly as far as human targets were concerned. But this was no normal birdmuck. It was gull vomit that stung the top of his head, searing his scalp through the hair. Gull's vomit-a sign of bad luck. Black gull's vomit-worse than the worst bad luck. All the vomit was spotted with blood-flecks whatever the gull's own body colour. So one could never be certain which type of gull had splattered you unless you saw the gull itself. And the sky's roof camouflaged any of the stub-winged birds that managed to coast or skim along its under-surface.

Ogdon sat on the customer's side of his pub's bar, staring into the decorative mirror behind the gleaming shorts and their optics. The reflective gla.s.s had the word C O U R A G E etched in swirls of artistic lettering at the top of the mirror: an advert for one of the bitters that were sold there. Ogdon could see his own face lower down between a bottle of rum and a bottle of vodka. But it wasn't his face but that of a Spanish playwright by the name of Lope de Vega who, Odgon always thought, was the author of ”La Vida Es Sueno”, but he also thought William Congreve had written ”She Stoops To Conquer”, so whether Ogdon was correct about any literary matters was anybody's guess! In any event, he imagined a dialogue between himself and the reflection in the mirror. There was n.o.body else to whom he could talk-the barmaid (a replacement for Susan) being down the other end of the bar and not seeming to have anything much in common with Ogdon; and she freely admitted to being a fan of the 'Big Brother' TV show and other Soap Operas. And it was now that no-man's-land of time between popular drinking sessions: and next to no customers were present to listen to his pub small-talk.

Ogdon: There is one people carrier.

Reflection: A people carrier?

O: Yes, a human being who's infecting the birds with a virus, and not vice versa.

R: Now that sounds possible, but how do you know?

O: Well, the birds are becoming more like red meat than white poultry-flesh when you cut them open.

R: As if they've got an animal disease?

O: Turning them gradually, from a bird into an animal or half and half. And they've caught it from us humans. Or they have just started to catch it from us humans. That's why many of them can't fly any more and only hop about. Their whole essence is somehow corrupted.

R: So, they don't need roofs to aviary cages any more in the zoo? Makes you want to cry.

O: There is one single bird that is in charge of all the other birds. Did you know that? A sort of Bird G.o.d. This Bird G.o.d is set to wreak vengeance...

R: Really? What do they call it?

O: Like all G.o.ds in religion, the birds know it with different names or no name at all.

R: If it's got no name at all, what do the birds think of when they think of it?

Ogdon pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket, placed it on the damp drink-stained surface of the bar and started to write out a few of the possible names for the Bird G.o.d. He then folded it up and returned it to his pocket. He had by now forgotten about the conversation... until the reflection brought him back by asking a further question: ”Can the Bird G.o.d, whatever its name, stop birds coming in contact with the people carrier?”

”It remains to be seen,” answered Ogdon, now forgetting his own point or why he had started the topic or even the whole topic itself-as if he had simply been doodling with words and concepts... in the composition of an abstract poem. If he thought the destiny of the whole world depended on the outcome of his thoughts, he would have been more careful with those very thoughts or just tried to be less thoughtful altogether.

”It's the beer talking” was a saying that Ogdon's mother often said-usually about his father, her husband. His mother was very wise, he thought, as he called out to the barmaid: ”Chalk up on the blackboard that drinks are on Happy Hour all night!”

He returned to his thoughts, desperately wanting the people who were caught up in these thoughts of his to be believeable, sympathisable figures: because, if not, there would be no way that the conflicts in store for them would be sustainable conflicts at all. These people were in danger, he thought, of becoming mere ciphers acting in a game, or a dream, or a lie. Little did he know, however, that the people themselves (Mike, Greg, Susan, Beth and so forth)-currently on the brink of enormous human significance-were essentially real: tangible bodies with flesh and blood, owning minds that could be hurt or filled with joy, thinking thoughts that could be clarified, confused or defused.

Meanwhile, by comparison, he, Ogdon, was the emptiest cipher of them all, less real even than his own reflections. Hence, the sheet of paper.

One viewpoint is that his dream is separate, insulated, uninfecting and uninfected.

An alternative viewpoint would be that the dream itself-this we read-was infected from outside.

Or, yet, as there always are three alternatives, the dream itself infected other dreams, other realities.

Reflection: The daylight firework-display on the open plateau of the Left Foot Region was indeed a sight to behold. It was intended as environmental context for the Drill's 'lift-off'. The bright primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous bangers were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one's retina. The wide s.h.i.+ny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices and slashes of display-accentuating how faded the sky's otherwise bright backdrop had become. Meanwhile, the revving throbs of the Drill's engine took sway as the sunlight sparked off the fast-revolving bit-tip at the Drill's lower leading-edge. The pilot could be seen grappling with the controls in his c.o.c.kpit as the bit-tip finally met the beachy terrain beneath it with a sickening crunch-both the bit-tip's self-induced sparks and the crunching noise now outdoing the firework display which had previously outdone all else.

Ogdon turned from the mirror and busied himself with more pressing duties that the current Happy Hour in his pub had created.