Nemonymous Night (11 page)

*

Mike was a solid figure of a man. Not at all like Greg with Greg’s slight figure despite the years that had thickened his facial growth. Not wide so much as bushy. But that was Greg, and attention must perforce spotlight Mike again for a while. And Mike was still doubtful about his own beginnings—barely remembering even the shadowy figures who had been his parents in the Fifties. He had compassion, however, having long forgotten the earlier years as a child when he played pretend games in the garden and up the bullace tree—sometimes masquerading as Davy Crockett in a long-tailed fur hat, sometimes as an even more distant memory: the creature he inscrutably called a hawler (although the spelling was doubtful). All that concerned him now were naturally the concerns of today—his middle years—as he and the party with which he had joined were trekking northward to what was loosely named the city’s Head Region.

Until recently, he had been working in the city centre’s covered-market, living a frugal existence—together with Susan, a pretty woman who, unlike her sister Beth, had failed to gather frown-lines during her middle years. When she and Mike had decided to live together, she already had a daughter called Sudra who was now herself growing into a pretty woman with pig-tails, a style that was too young for her. Sudra laughed often. Yet she had an aura of malevolence or, at best, bewitchment about her. She, too, was in Mike’s party, together with her two similarly aged friends Amy and Arthur, friends of doubtful relationship with each other, with nobody questioning this because there were some lines drawn beneath which it was impolitic to delve. Amy worked as a domestic cleaner, Arthur a double-decker driver—both salt-of-the-earth citizens who would never have dreamed of travelling north... unless times were extraordinary.

How extraordinary the times had become only hindsight could know. The identities of Amy and Arthur—it was believed—had been stolen by lostlings or foundlings or changelings who had escaped with much of their victims’ past cloying to them. These were apparent children masquerading as the children Amy and Arthur had once been in earlier perhaps less extraordinary times. This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.

The five of them trekked because public transport had long since departed, having been earmarked for some important matters ordinary citizens like them were not considered suitable enough to know about. As he strode along, Arthur imagined the stuff underfoot—the party having finally left the pavemented area of the city streets—to be residue of his childhood ‘experiment’ games with household substances. This was probably his own version of a retributive past coming back to haunt him. Amy smiled as if she could read Arthur’s thoughts. Arthur, however, soon became preoccupied by what evidently preoccupied Mike... and what gradually preoccupied all five of them.

The sky was slowly, surely and imperceptibly becoming more of a roof than a proper sky—as if they had entered a much larger version of the city’s open-sided covered-market—which, incidentally, Arthur now recalled was where Sudra’s stepfather worked as a waste manager. Having a roof—one might have thought—would have afforded protection from the weather, but they all still felt a soaking drizzle as though rain had been replaced by some variety of sprinkler-system.

Nobody mentioned the colour. Indeed, could darkness be any colour other than black or, at best, grey? A monochrome of darkness, gathering in around them more like mist than darkness proper. Yet, they could still see the even darker shapes hunching upon the distant terrain towards which they hiked. Nobody mentioned the colour, as it did not come up in conversation, bearing in mind the preoccupation caused by the difficulties underfoot.

“Hey! Look—are they volcanoes?”

Mike pointed at the rough cone-shapes each with an odd flame-like plume fitfully being spat by what he assumed to be some of earth’s many apertures.

Sudra quaintly described them as “Redoubts”—but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. “Redoubts” in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word “Côté” was written on one broken brick wall that they were now passing—almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces... all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.

Yet, what was that?

“What’s that?” shouted Susan, flustered 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 amusement 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-fashion. She was desperately trying to be herself, not someone else. She needed to be herself—otherwise nobody 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 passed 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 prone 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 identity.

*

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 relationship. 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 circumference 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 identity 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 spaces and even smaller passageways 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 décor. 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 rehearsed 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 outshine 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 vanishing 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 prone 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 glass 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 Sueño”, 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 nobody 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.