Part 17 (1/2)

He cursed and left the tea-room, paying the nightmare waitress; she worked the old-fas.h.i.+oned cash register as if she were issuing tickets for a dubious show in that other part of London he sometimes frequented. Being in so much of a hurry, he even forget to retrieve the large gratuity he had left under the bone china saucer: it had been intended of course for the waitress with the sunny smile who, like him, had taken such a sudden departure into the gloom of dusk. Perhaps intent on catching a train before it left. Air-raid sirens permitting.

The view through the c.o.c.kpit window-as the vast Circular-Saw penetrated the cavity-walls of Inner Earth-was not so much a panorama of the reality beyond the window but of a moment of strobe-history that the pilot who peered through the window was undergoing as he instinctively tussled with the controls.

His dream of strobe-history showed twin Earths that were on a collision course-through the wide vista of his vision. Instead of creating a huge explosion, they blended or merged in the same way that, once upon a time, the legendary man-city, having begun to bury itself beyond its own foundations, eventually encountered another city with initial splintering ricochets of architecture and hard core but then blended with it-thus making two places the same place but different.

The pilot of the Saw quickly regathered his present moment uncorrupted by any dream of strobe-history just in time to address the situation of a Drill making towards him.

My custom was to explore secondhand bookshops at the slightest opportunity. It needed guile to shake off Beth and the children-but, one day in Whof.a.ge, I had a rare success in subterfuge. We were about to traipse around a toy museum and, without giving them a chance to reply, I told them that I would be back in half an hour to conduct them onwards to the various amus.e.m.e.nts in the 'Klaxon City' amus.e.m.e.nt arcade that needed coins in the slots.

I had indeed spotted a wondrous curiosity shop on the approach to the toy museum, hidden to the view of my wife and children (and of most other visitors, too). But my expert tunnel vision having picked it out down a Sunnemo-less alley, I was convinced by my instinct that it would purvey a veritable trove of dusty books. And I was not mistaken. However, it proved not very different from what I imagined the toy museum to be, since in every corner there seemed to reside many ancient jacks-in-the-box, china dolls, jingle-jangly shoes, pop-up nursery rhyme books and colourful whips and spinning-tops-but here they were for sale rather than show. If I had known, I could have killed two birds with one stone by bringing my family here.

The books themselves were a dream. First editions galore with lightly pencilled prices on the fly-leaves, some even within the range of my purse. Others, of course, not. Many were Victorian, but mostly hardbacks (with original dust-wrappers) from the twenties, thirties and forties, children's dreams and adults' fancies.

I was surprised to discover an old stamp alb.u.m: full of colourful squares, oblongs and triangles (and even one large colourful trapezium of a stamp from Agraska), carefully affixed with sticky paper hinges. I imagined a child (now grown into an adult more long in the tooth even than myself) meticulously wielding tweezers, positioning his prize specimens at the optimum angle and sitting back sighing with pride. This boy would have eschewed even birdsong or playtime in the suns.h.i.+ne for such a close-ordered activity.

My surprise was generated by the fact that such an article was stacked with the secondhand books, bulging as it was with well-hung stamps. Some of the stamps looked ”rare”, but many must have been gathered together from a lucky-dip selection which children used to obtain by sending off a coupon from the Tiger or Lion or Eagle comics. The stamps used to come ”on approval”. But there were some examples of stamps in this alb.u.m that I had not been able to even dream about when I was that age.

I covetted that alb.u.m more than anything I could recall covetting before. I held a whole childhood between my fingers. But there was no price pencilled, presumably because the fly-leaf was covered with a highly stylised map of the surface world. So, that was where Saar was. And Andorra, San Marino, British Honduras, Monaco and St Helena. n.o.body ever seemed surprised that most of these small places had outlandishly large postage stamps. I looked round for the shop counter, fully expecting a wizened old man to be stationed behind it-one with pipe, toothbrush moustache and eyes bleary from poring over small print. But this was a day full of surprises-since a girl of surpa.s.sing beauty smiled at me from behind the counter, appearing as cool as her flowingly diaphonous dress of white...

I collected my family who were impatiently kicking their heels outside the museum. Apparently, it was a natural history exhibition. Why I had originally thought it was a toy museum, I could not now fathom. What was abundantly clear, my wife and children had been bored and decidedly crotchety at my lengthy absence from their party. I blamed it on having been cut short and the nearest convenience a fair step away. And it had not been a particular pleasure, I a.s.sured them, standing next to all those sweaty individuals and the many 'nervous little people' who followed us around in Whof.a.ge. But my family soon oozed forgiveness when I changed my remaining ten bob note for 120 pennies at the 'Klaxon City' arcade. The old wizened fellow who sat behind the towers of copper quarter p coins in the change booth actually winked at me. He looked decidedly unhinged.

As I tried my luck on the fortune-wheel, which was supposed to give some inkling into one's future love-life and luck, I suddenly wondered why stamp collections always used to be conducted by short-a.r.s.e boys who did not have many friends with whom to go scrumping apples or building dens. I could not possibly imagine those unattainable angelic girls of my lonely childhood abandoning their china dolls and dressing-up hampers for such close-ordered activities as mounting stamps.

The fortune-wheel did not record any romance in store for me. In fact, the bad luck it indicated seemed to start with me somehow losing the stamp alb.u.m soon afterwards. Like the beautiful ghost who sold it to me, it must have slipped through my fingers.

For an indeterminate period, Greg, Beth and their two children, Arthur and Amy, toured the streets of Whof.a.ge, but instead of relaxing during this interlude in their train journey they were beset with an antipodal angst which involved thoughts that they may not get back to the station before the train left for Sunnemo. This was an undercurrent that made all their activities fraught with an anxiety, an anxiety that soon grew tentacles (giving new worries leg room) including one significant nagging doubt that they had already travelled to Sunnemo before and finished their lives there during a dream-but now the anxiety became more relevant because they feared that that was no dream and the real dream was this their seemingly endless temporary stay-over in Whof.a.ge. If the latter is a dream, why worry? Dreams can't hurt you. Or so the parents told the children.

Other factors lengthening the tentacles of angst included the so-called 'nervous little people' that seemed to plague them at every turning of the city. They were seeking ident.i.ties and, if this were a dream after all, then ident.i.ties could be stolen and used elsewhere. So one remedy of an angst as a dream had soon created a new angst! These creatures-of human persuasion-nevertheless chirruped like chickflicks on continuous strobe. One or two even sported beaks instead of lips.

Another tentacle of angst: Sunnemo was looming closer and if it grew even closer as a dull light source or even a surrogate nemo-moon, then there would be no need to return to the train to reach their destination at all! Greg decided to shrug off the angst and ensure he and his family at least pretended to themselves that they were enjoying their stay-over. Pleased, too, to see that Sudra's Shoes Inc. had a branch here as well as in Klaxon.

Edith sat in the Proustian arbour, holding the stalk of a flower pressed between the backs of her hands, the red bloom of involuted petals held at eye-level.

She posed for both painting and photograph, unsure as yet which of them would do her full justice. She held the angles of her body at their optimum level whilst masking the ugly birthmark on her forehead with the bloom.

The painter was standing by an easel at the far end of the inner garden, the long brush held aloft, his artistic thought processes apparently taking their time to percolate, and the palette upon his other arm mounted with wormcasts of corruptive colour, all chosen for Edith's complexion.

Further over to the side, where the neatly manicured topiary began, there was a tall tripod bearing an instrument with a retractable snout and a black cape flowing from its rear and the legs of a man curved over from under the cape and a bulb to squeeze and a flash like lightning and...

Arthur, as a small boy, shut the pop-up book with a crack. He twiddled with his left ear absent-mindedly.

The front of the board covers was decorated with the only abstract image in the whole volume and, with the dying light of the nursery fire, he discerned a pattern more suitable for carpets than murals.

The book had been left with him as a peace offering by his parents who had departed in a horse-drawn carriage for an evening at the opera. He had heard the clatter of hooves disappearing into the echoey Klaxon distance, leaving him alone in the house-or worse than alone, since the only other person left behind under the same roof was the family's ancient nanny. She sat in the corner by the fitful log fire, knitting-needles clicking, her asthmatic lungs rasping. He watched the sometimes insect-like, sometimes bird-like silhouette moving only very slightly in unfaithful rhythm to her deft st.i.tching.

He wanted to be a dare-devil. He wanted to stir her into realising that it was too dark in the nursery, since she could have blindly knitted on forever-and that her little charge was in danger of being s.n.a.t.c.hed by the Angel Megazanthus who, to the boy's certain knowledge, lurked up the chimney.

So he broke wind. And a distant siren fortuitously boosted the noise.

She jolted in her wicker chair. Her neck creaked, turning a stern gaze upon him.

”Ptcha! There are places for such noises.”

”I know, Nanny Edith, but my tummy-ache-and the fire's going out-and I'm worried sick about the darkness.”

”I know what will sluice out your belly, young man, a good dose...”

At that moment, soot billowed from the chimney, as silently as an army's secret striking of camp at the dead of night. It caught his eyes, so he heard no more of her mad ramblings. She did however absent-mindedly brighten up the end of a candlewick.

He returned to the pop-up book to bury himself in its pages, whilst yearning to hear the hooves which bore his parents homeward from the Klaxon opera. He kept at least one ear p.r.i.c.ked, despite the utter dread of what he expected to hear with it. Nanna's bones cracked loudly as she lifted herself from the wicker-claws of the chair to attend to the fire, perhaps to entice a few more flames from the glowing ruby embers...

...and Edith, elsewhere, elsewhen, had by now lowered the glowing bloom and positioned it between the points of her bosom.

That part of the face bearing the stain of the birthmark lacked features and, possibly, substance, too.

It was as if one could look straight through her head at the point which oriental mystics had once believed to be the site of man's invisible Third Eye or, at least, an optical illusion of one. And through it, could be seen the blacker eye approaching from behind.

The hair of the painter's brush was known intuitively to be manufactured from a dictator's moustache. He had dipped it in a generous mix of strange paints. It formed a colour but at the same time not any colour under the Zodiac.

The tripod camera had lifted the photographer's legs into the air like wings and was in the violent process of flapping around the garden, a huge insect-bird of a creature, clicking insanely. Nowhere to go, it could not bring itself to halt the wild careering-until it became entangled in the ivy trellises of the arbour. There it flinched for a few seconds, with fitful bursts of fire from its black beak and the squeezings of purple venom for a naughty boy's tummy, until it died...

...like the fire in the grate.

Nanna Edith had by now lit the oil lamp hanging above the boy's cot. He could vaguely see the remains of a dead ent.i.ty woven in and out of the wire fireguard. In disgust, he threw the book towards the fire and, despite falling short, it proceeded to pop and crack. He made his way to the cot to crawl between the covers. And, then, while he dozed, he imagined he heard hooves clopping on distant cobbles.

As Nanna bent down to give him a little peck on his petally cheek, he heard her churning, phlegm-clogged breath and saw straight through her head-and through this head he saw a bloated spider-bird glistening in the crook of the ceiling. The little boy squeezed his eyes tight, praying for sleep; even nightmares would be preferable to such reality...

...and the man into whom Arthur was eventually to grow woke with a start. It was freezing in the garret and he had a job to do. Not before fulsomely farting, he quickly dressed in darkness, picked up his heavy-duty paintbrushes and departed into the s.h.i.+vering Klaxon square, to await the arrival of the bosses with the ladders. He stamped his feet to rid himself of pins and needles. He felt along his hardening top lip-yes, coming on nicely. Even rind-growth was, in itself, a would-be ent.i.ty.

The Sunnemo dawn, when it painstakingly arrived, was colourless and cold. The hooves of the decorators on the cobbles could just be heard.

The man's ambition was to paint on palace walls in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch, whilst a thousand Popes screamed inside.

And nurseries exploded within him as the brain bloomed red. A bogus waking fetched the thud of his parents' hooves clopping up the stairs. He prayed they couldn't have fruited each other with him in the first place. The real frighteners, however, would come when the little boy stopped dreaming.

Though I never lived during that kingdom of war-the one that blitzed London-I could easily imagine the colourlessness (or, rather, variegated brown) in every wet afternoon, prefiguring the contrast of night's man-made lightning. Seances were being held amid the chintz of every blitz-free sitting-room; tears being shed in every outhouse; tender hands held, over and over again, in every beach hut and every park.

Well, for every every, amen. I shook my shoulders-not a shrug as such; more of a shudder. I tramped the back-end streets, wondering if I had been transported in time to those very afternoons when shapes emerging in fragile freedom from the night's shelters (the Underground included) became the slowly nudging together of lightly-fleshed ghosts in the hope that something worthwhile or tangible would emerge by this serendipity of touch. Ghosts, I guessed, were to be everybody, even you and me.