Nemonymous Night (17 page)

One could hardly tell that the carpet had once been yellow. Only Amy knew that.

The carpet’s companion accoutrements were rather down-market sticks of furniture in spite of the dusting and polishing by Amy who rather enjoyed the varnished gleam of knotted wood more than the clean lines of a carpet’s cleanliness. She needed dusting herself, even at her moderately young age.

*

“How are you today?” I ask.

Amy (who spent her childhood in this room) follows me about, as far as she can follow anyone in such a small room. Not surprisingly, she appears as if owned or, rather, controlled by the room while—with rather more panache than the situation demands—she keeps adjusting ornaments... also brushing dust into a pan.

“Not so bad,” she answers.

“News on the radio is bad again.”

“You mean about the…?”

“Yes. We’re not allowed to eat anything that comes from eggs. Not even…”

“I know, I heard it from Beth this morning.”

Amy has a pretty face, but when she speaks—even lightly, thoughtlessly—there’s a frown that appears and a deep divot within the frown’s area. Hair a fashionable matted brown, so very ‘her’ it’s only noticeable if it suddenly isn’t there. Apron fails to hide her sexuality and high-heels seem out of kilter with the dustpan.

“Best not to think of it,” I say. “How’s…?”

“Dognahnyi?”

“No, not him. I mean the girl... you... you know... you kick about with. You’ve been very happy I know with... what’s her name?”

I am delicately pretending to forget her name.

“You mean Sudra? No, that’s gone a bit sour. We had an argument... something very trivial... but she was so petty... I couldn’t handle it any more.”

“Sorry to hear that, Amy. What was it about?”

“Oh, something or nothing. A pair of shoes. See! You’re laughing!”

“Life turns on trivialities,” I say, knowing already about Sudra’s side of the story.

I am a comfortable pair of ears, I guess, although some may have different words and put capital letters where only small ones belong, laced with swearing! What’s the word? Counsellor, hmmm, Interferer, Meddler... someone who drags things from your soul to let it breathe more easily. I haul on your guy-ropes and see your tent rise again. I have some silly concepts about it but I’m sure my radio phone-ins do achieve quite a lot of good.

I’ve come a long way since my ancestors worked in the coal-mines. I’ve just discovered that one of them was a ‘hawler’. In the old days, he would have been involved in moving coal from the coalface, coal that had already been worked by others. I think the ‘w’ is a misprint in the 1901 census records I got off the Internet. Anyway, hawling is an art form in itself and one fraught with many logistical problems. Today, however, there are no coal-mines and therefore haulers have died out. Now, with the plagues, I reckon that butchering of meat may be within a hawler’s brief. Just a whimsical thought on my part. But I try to keep my mind busy, as there is so much to worry about otherwise. Perhaps, in fact, thinking about it, a brief for meat and poultry, especially as—God forbid!—the two seem to be blending in a very disturbing fashion. Cutting prime complex cuts from now badly understood novelties of meat that combine all sorts of animal and bird in one. But I hope it’s not what I fear. I love pure beefsteak so much—isn’t there a saying, almost a proverb, that everyone once knew but I never understood—that I, and others like me, are “so voracious we eat beef till it’s raw”?

A far cry from radio counselling! Then, I need to be precise and careful. No brainstorming allowed. I still have to think quickly on the hoof, however.

*

Today, I intend to visit John Ogdon in his pub but I doubt if anyone I know will be there and I hate drinking alone. John will be too busy to talk to me. The park is second best: a good place for thinking. Susan’s on my mind and Susan may indeed be in the park with her grown-up daughter Sudra. I still can’t believe in the coincidence that Amy has been close, if not intimate, friends with Sudra. I only knew Amy because, well, I was a sort of Uncle figure to her in the old days. Still am, I guess. I originally knew her mum before she gave birth to Amy. But that’s a long story. I met Susan (Sudra’s mum) quite independently, and Sudra already knew Amy quite well even at that stage. A sort of secret between me and Sudra that we both separately knew Amy.

I have usually steered clear of married women, but life’s never simple. I didn’t admit to myself then that I really fancied Sudra (more than fancying her mother probably), but that’s taking us into an even longer story. I thought both of them were a case for a hawler... and I even began to use that terminology on my local radio counselling programme. It even caught on as a name for a sort of modern-day shrink. It was worth a few shillings too in the bank account. Still is.

Much is inexplicable, yet it will become explicable when put into practice and seen for what it is. I suspect that there is more to Sudra than meets the eye. She often tells me about her dreams and they are CRAZEE!

I now gingerly walk across the park ground. I wonder what stage of the housework Amy will by now have reached in her top flat. Amy is always doing housework, these days, as if it takes her mind off other things. Ewbanking the ‘yellow’ carpet is only attempted by Amy once in a while. I glimpse Susan and Sudra. Neither of them are particularly friendly to anyone, but I guess they have a soft spot for me. Fame opens doors, in many way.

I am a hawler, after all, and most people instinctively treat hawlers with respect even if I haven’t any real qualifications for this line of business. I feel tears prick out at the thought of Amy. I wish I had been kinder to her when she was a girl. Her Mum Edith always turned a blind eye.

I imagine a plate of sizzling beef. My stomach tells me something that words can never explain. An empty nagging pain. I look up into the sky. Not even a flying pig! But, no, I am wrong. There is a flying pig, of sorts, that day. And a hot air balloon with people on board who surely have an enduring love for flying, even with any mechanical aircraft whatsoever now grounded (perhaps meaninglessly grounded—and do keep listening to the news on the radio and all may be explained). As ever these days, there are a few outlandish kites (including the flying pig) that citizens have taken to flying from the ground in some subconscious grief, no doubt, at the disappearance of anything else in the sky. But, first, I need to pluck up enough courage to approach Susan and Sudra, leaving any residual thought of Amy to the vacuum.

*

Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. But that was part of herself she had ignored or not even known so as to be
able
to ignore it. The talking revealed more. She expected a role that she hadn’t yet been given. The as yet missing part of herself meanwhile visualised me carving joints of unrecognisable meat. The ribbing thicker than most poultry but with a vague appearance of a fish’s backbone, whilst with the floppy feel of sirloin as it slid too easily off the T-spine.

“What to do,” she asked or stated. The vacuum churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the earth wire failing. Her missing part viewed a vista of a dull pinky yellow sun smoked over with clouds of birdlife as seen from a distance. A craggy sea and a giant submarine with rotors just nosing into view from the creamy waves. A cruise liner was halfway up the steep side of a cliff, dry-berthed if not literally shipwrecked. This was a concoction of several dreams, if she had but realised or known she was effectively (at some unconscious level) sharing in a vast communal vision just below the threshold of knowledge or even belief.

Her actual conscious self meanwhile brooded on the real past. I had not quite come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. Her brother Arthur 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 washing-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. Symbolic, in hindsight, of mixing dreams, too, just like those to which we have all needed to grow accustomed in recent years because of the world’s difficulties. Fixing dreams, too.

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 Godsend. One day, they’d invent daylight fireworks for the outside! She laughed to herself. Why had nobody thought of daylight fireworks before, so potentially au fait with the way the world was now going, with street riots meaning there was always a strict curfew during any dark hours.

Amy was scared to recall the past because, by dragging it onward through time, trawling it through the coarse-grained muslin of memory’s filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present’s more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything I had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a booby-trap—and she continued scraping 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.

Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. Her missing part now viewed a scene in a park, a park so cultivated its grass 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. A man she knew instinctively (yet still unconsciously) was named Swann walked past with a girl, her sleek
fin de siècle
dress buttonholed with cattleyas.

*

In the past, Amy’s mother, Edith, having finished with adjusting the oven, 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: a man writing. She grew suspicious.

Clare, a schoolteacher, had just announced her visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. She’d come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both... at once.

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

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 ship 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 buttons, 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 carcasses 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, shaggy 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. Nobody 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 entities—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.