Part 7 (1/2)

At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their 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 s.h.i.+p in Dry Dock. 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 despite its plastic and mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips. Amy had rescued it one day when she found it in the garden trying to bury itself in the ground, i.e. soil which Arthur had just loosened as part of one of his 'mixing' projects, when looking for new ingredients below the surface of top earth.

Hawling is not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the b.u.t.tons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashes and results in the lift-doors sliding aside... new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there is more to hawling than that-it's running a butcher's shop, listening to the carca.s.ses crack as you lay in bed at night. I was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth's soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on... and eventually extinguish with a dying wink... which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from my mine.

I watch Susan and Sudra running through an unkempt, s.h.a.ggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. I glimpse a figure in a cape watching them.

I woke in a cold sweat. I put one foot outside the bed to ensure at least the bedroom floor was still there. n.o.body snored beside me, mercifully, it seemed, because anyone sleeping next to me would have been infected by the same dreams that had just beset me... or were still besetting me.

My body was the most mysterious thing about me. I could easily fathom my own mind-but my body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that I-my mind-walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to me, obviously, because, if it had, I would certainly have considered myself mad. Bad enough even to skirt such touchy subjects amid the other thoughts, let alone delving into them.

One nemonymous creature of applause-with the merged thought that each member of the audience in the concert hall remained (to themselves at least) single ent.i.ties-sounded from the radio after Brahms' Double Concerto drew to its close. And I dozed off again.

At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.

And to my reasonable knowledge, I am a hawler, but at earlier stages I myself didn't realise this at all. I so wish I had. Things might have turned out differently. However, still not knowing for certain whether I am a force for good or a force for evil makes me draw back from fully exercising the creative strength I know I possess. I even deign to compete with that Ogdon person-who, one day, started writing his own novel in a city's fountain square between four apartment blocks one of which, as it happened, housed the young Amy. As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in the right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.

Meanwhile, I need to introduce Greg. My alter-nemo. This is a more nebulous form of alter-ego. The late John Fowles invented the 'nemo' in contradistinction to the 'ego' or 'id' in his book The Aristos. But such information inevitably interrupts the narrative flow. And narrative flow is the reason we are all here. One ambition that we all share, both as writer and reader.

Greg was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. His wife was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Greg surveyed the dips and dunes-almost feeling them with his golf mind-as he took stance for his first tee shot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, a.s.sessing the relief map between him and the hole... and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his club head for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line, currency crisis and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.

Arthur-despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc.-became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other pa.s.sengers a.s.suming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie girl who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, i.e. fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn't otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver's sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surrept.i.tiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of rat runs and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his 'brainwright': an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.

It had been a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company's inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver-despite all his driving doc.u.ments being forgeries.

Arthur believed, in his childish fas.h.i.+on, that all meat was going off, but not simply growing mouldy, but literally going off (eloping?) with other meats from different animals, fishes and fowls, mixing, blending, into new concoctions of meat with arcane bone maps-all because of global warming and the banking bubble.

These were big things. Global things. Symbolised by Arthur knowing instinctively that he could control big things just with the flick of his finger. Like the bus.

Amy, before she had met Sudra, had lived with Arthur-and their neighbours must have a.s.sumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister.

Still, then, the horrors hadn't yet started. Various strange words start to build up-as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did Amy and Arthur know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself. And worse still was having already lived through half of it via the creative medium of someone other than myself. Fixed for the wrong fiction, cross-grained against the truth, forming a diseased Canterbury Oak in my head. Or so it felt.

The area of the city where the covered market found itself was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. It had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not strictly open-air or covered. On some days-when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom-it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these 'walls' looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. I dreaded going near that place, in case I was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn't belong to the city at all.

Susan worked in Ogdon's pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub-unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life-would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn't quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile worked there-a real place she couldn't avoid as she needed the money.

I lived in a top floor flat in the city centre. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling that yet more dreamers dreamed of the covered/open-air market. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that you really did need to visit me there (although this was a dream and you weren't really visiting me at all).

My carpet was much older than any building that ever contained it; I didn't know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.

When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn't matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.

I could not shake off another dream. A dream of a hawler but, this time, in its misshapen form as Guy de Maupa.s.sant's Horla (or vampire).

A bus doesn't touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing to float, two pa.s.sengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

”We're trapped on this bus.”

”You can get off at the next stop. It's not like a plane.”

”Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can't get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it.

”To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it's all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare.

”I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape-until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life's problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It's relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable.

”Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can't really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes.

”A paradox-that I hate being trapped in my body but I'd give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can't face the outright blankness...”

”Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.

Captain Nemo took the controls himself as the Drill docked at Klaxon City. Their first stop-over on their journey to the Core via Inner Earth itself.

Just before this manoeuvre, the leading windows in the Corporate Lounge had sufficiently cleared to afford a view of another inner sea lit lugubriously by a now unprotected Core 'sun'. Their naked eyes had now been able to grow acclimatised to its combination of brightly icy scatter-orange and the contrastively wan effulgence actually given off from it (increasingly wan the nearer they approached it). The city of Klaxon was a vast collection of arabesque turrets peppering an out-of-place complex similar to a fin de siecle Paris on the banks of the Seine. And as the Drill burrowed nearer in a circling motion not unlike that of planes stacking up over an airport, Greg (invited into the c.o.c.kpit itself) watched Nemo grapple with the joystick which was on a hair-trigger relations.h.i.+p with the Drill's vanes, vanes that were currently working overload on vast amounts of mixed off-detritus. Greg feared that Beth and the two dowagers would be seeing even less than before from their rearward cabins. But that didn't worry him for long while he grew fascinated with the docking pinion (on one of the turrets) that seemed to s.n.a.t.c.h the Drill in the same manner as old-fas.h.i.+oned catch-nets on the ancient railways collected letters and parcels without the train stopping.

A jolt-and then, even through the sides of the Drill, the relentless sound of a multi-tannoy system on permanent klaxon that gave the city its name. Greg could hardly imagine living a whole life in such a place with that noise echoing in your ears all over the city. Always with you. Accompanying work, love and play.

”Much like living trapped within one's own body and its everpresent frightful tinnitus of antipodal angst,” said Nemo, as if having read Greg's mind.

Greg shrugged. He wasn't sure what Nemo was driving at.

I lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined me awake. I got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in my room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. It was very close to the ground without even s.p.a.ce for rat runs or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.

I wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.

I found myself delving into the wood of the floor as if I had found an opening in human flesh-a natural vent, rather than one I had forced open with my fingers.

That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to me until I discovered myself delivering them... through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And I felt its thoughts as if they were my own thoughts.

All this had been in Ogdon's novel, too. I could not shake it off sufficiently to warrant excluding it in my competing novel. I sensed Ogdon was intent on an unhappy ending for the world by means of the 'truths' he hoped to sculpt from his own version of those ”synchronised shards of random fiction and truth”. By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us. You can't destroy evils without having set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.