Authors: D. F. Lewis
He wondered why Go’spank traipsed in his wake, half-staggering, half-shambling back and forth in tides of indecision.
“Mr…”
“Yes?” he boomed.
“The shop shuts in half a trice.”
Go’spank was evidently concerned that the Weirdmonger would be angry at not previously being warned
before
he had the tickets unravelled for him at such great cost. Go’spank seemed to hold a stub of a ticket for dear life in his mitt-end, as the Weirdmonger’s booming voice belied the nervousness he shared with Go’spank.
Truth, sometimes, on a good day, can be felt as well as told. The Weirdmonger did not shrug, did not laugh, did not utter anything approaching the suspicion of a word... yet there were sounds of tongue clucks and palate cleaving, igniting a whole string of horror images: spilling from his mouth like regatta flags towards Go’spank. The only thing that could be said for the Weirdmonger was the free-flow of tears from his remorseful eyes, as Go’spank twisted amid the entanglements and coils of designer rudery. Rudery (a collective noun for rude things) was better, however, than, say, sweaty bird-heads: this being the giggly observation of an unseen onlooker. Better than the mounds of crusty scabs and curds of gangrenous pus from a million childhood accidental abrasions failing to heal. Better than corrupt organs that rotted because they had no owners to wield them. No more giggles. Only side-swipes at the absurdity of the situation from now a rather cool, detached onlooker. There was indeed a harvest of
healthy
rudery wrapped around Go’spank, a harvest of rudery, indeed, wielded by spectral athletes, gymnasts, body-builders and hawlers in yellow jingle-jangly shoes and invisible carpet-coats. Despite their already swollen appendages, the ghostly figures lovingly meted out more and more of their body-ends from the modelling clay of ectoplasm to form the ridged winding-sheets... swaddling poor Go’spank. Killed by kindness.
With his ultimate cliché thus uttered (tested for truth as well as timbre) the Weirdmonger left the environs of the shop for the purlieus of the nearest park. It was just one minute before the shop was due to close. Not that it really mattered now. The saddest part, if the truth were told, was that Go’spank’s whole life heretofore had been as preparation to be a spear-carrier in an onlooker’s scenario he would never understand, even given the chance.
But if Go’spank had been merely created for his own death, then what, if not who, was I? I, the onlooker, stared from the attic’s own attic of Sudra’s shop barely concealed among the ridges or narrower lobes of the roof. I gazed over the mudparks as they fitfully vanished towards the middle distance, even to a point where the war had re-started—as evidenced by the sight of new tannoys being built by combatants for sirens.
Like a geomantic zodiac, the mudparks formed the face of the man I’d known as the Weirdmonger, with brown eyes and even browner tears: above which hovered a creature with stubby wings: either a child bobbing upon a playground ride# (a ride so burnished it shone with pure invisibility) or an Angel that had been stripped to the bottom bone of meaning.
“Fly!” I shouted.
And it was.
#Stub of pencil: A third party claimed this was clearly a see saw.
*
Sudra was in her bedroom in the shoe museum listening to the newly prepared armies march-running towards war through the cutaways of Klaxon—measuring the pavy-crazed sluices between the lobes with the rhythmic onward march of their medium-pace limbs in running mode as opposed to any standard patterned walk. March-running is a forgotten art. Neat ranks of soldiers (mostly female) these were, keeping perfect pace with each other at the run, rather than the lift-and-separate of slow-motion goose-step or slightly quicker frog-march or general English slow marchpast for Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday. Memories of Things Past—a hypnotic echoing march-run as the various sections of army proceeded—half in and half out of Sudra’s dreamtime perception of them from her bedroom window—towards their billets in the various establishments of darkening Klaxon.
This was during the early stages of the war before sides had been picked, like children in the classroom exchanging bright coins of choice for the best runner on their team, leaving the solitary turnips to be the final choices. Sudra had earlier watched a strange individual visit her shoe museum—despite Crazy Lope (her doorkeeper) and his good offices to keep unpaying customers at bay—and she wondered if war was something that had come accompanying the visitor, rather than a genuine interest in viewing the shoes on mannequins’ feet. Ulterior motives... led to a neat withdrawal of the visitor back to the mudparks whence he’d first arrived (Go’spank’s dead body upon his back like a cancerous growth).
One of the march-running woman officers was to billet in the shoe museum. She was introduced to Sudra by Edith who was now in temporary charge of billeting arrangements in the city prior to full-out war. Armies needed their sleep, and armies were made up of individuals who thought sleep would help later as acclimatisation to death.
The woman soldier who had splintered off from the synchronisation of her fellow march-runners when she’d reached her appointed billet (in this case, the shoe museum) was shown to a bunk bed in the attic’s attic.
“Rest here,” said Sudra with a smile. A fine figure of a woman who had loosened her tie on first sighting the equally attractive soldier. “If you need anything in the night…”
“I shall be fine,” said the soldier, listening to other sections of march-runners still rhythmically passing in the night, eager for their own billets elsewhere. The soldier slowly withdrew from her uniform while simultaneously covering herself with the carpet-blanket that Crazy Lope had earlier provided for the bunk, thus revealing nothing of her eager body.
It was like imagining one was in a dream simply for the sake of haunting oneself with it. A means to extend life. Wars often caused similar mentalities of false dreaming.
Sudra smiled, determined to bide her time. March-runners were now passing with the perceived sound of much smaller groups, silhouetted by sirens. Until only an odd pair of billetless march-runners echoed down the sluice-alleys that Sunnemo’s withdrawal into its nightmask had created from the once wide esplanades of a finer siècle.
As Sudra settled into a feather-mattress, she heard the war crackle into existence on a far ridge of Klaxon with mere Muskets of Mass Destruction.
*
“Wagger Market, Wagger Market, Come to Wagger Market!”
The Weirdmonger once had a stall of his own at torrid Wagger Market (a suburb of Klaxon)—but today at the fun-at-the-fair, stuff seemed as tawdry as the sun now seemed cool. The brown canvases, once pulled taut by hooks on ancient tenter-frames appeared soggy, threadbare, frayed... even worm-holed. The wares as chipped and crocked as the costermongers’ faces that tried to sell them from deeply-veined marble slabs, slabs so stained, the Weirdmonger knew that dead fish had once sat on them eyeing the customers... with imperceptible flicks of their tails…
No sign of the healthy human rudery that once hung from the tenter frames... much sought after by the mountain nomads as ornaments as well as carnifications. Nor were there now displayed those rolls and rolls of partly piled carpets and mats, with rough-sewn inner cylinders of space being home for numbers of creatures that had since become as legendary as they were once so far-fetched, despite their inarguable existence as forces for dream.
It was then the Weirdmonger was delighted to find a stall with a bit more get-up-and-go than the other downtrodden trestles of junk. It bore a sign with yellow lettering saying ‘Olden Days’ and a beautiful attendant who wore a name badge saying WAR. The Weirdmonger lowered his eyes from her buxom comeliness to the stall’s comestibles and purveyances of provender. These were all varieties of syrup, it seemed—ranging from some Happy Shopper stuff through branded Tate & Lyle—until eyes reached the more exotic end of the syrup market that stemmed from Far Samarkand and Ancient Cathay—flecks of spice generously lacing the aromatic glue-syrups and treacles, the slimy tentacles of which curled and coiled within the substance they themselves constituted, in and out of each other like tubular sinews of bee-honey.
More marmalady substances squatted like set jellies without the help of containers to hold them up. Thick cut & thin cut. Peppered with peels. Peels like orange ones. Or peels like lumps of hairy hide. All sitting incoherently within clear syrup as well as cloudy... like pickles or foreign bodies or sizeable splinters of rind or hardened skin. The top-notch syrup was not from the deepest, strangest Orient but from the Pacific Islands. Petals floating in silken tides. Tiny nugget-sown lagoons of amber wreathed with garlands... teased back and forth by weltering waterfalls.
Some syrups actually moved by their own volition—seething, gurgling, even burping—as bubbles broke towards the meniscus of more turgid marmaladery (at the lower end of the range). A single syrup was effervescent, as a series of prickling sensations cascaded into existence—microscopic air-pockets tingling to the Weirdmonger’s imaginary touch. Then, he spotted letters floating about in it. Making words. Unmaking words. Poems being slurped and sloughed between the walls of the transparent jug. The words ‘Olden Days’ abruptly ratcheted into view, locking into some serendipitous significance beyond any semantic meaning. Telling, perhaps, of the particular stall that sold these sinuosities of syrup. Then—just like an ugly duckling—a lonely letter ‘g’ floated into view through the undulating avenues of aspic—and joined up just as the Weirdmonger’s attention returned to the stallholder. Syrup, as well as silence, was golden. He felt dazed, as he momentarily bent his head under an impending emotion. This emotion was strong, more golden than anything. But then he was startled by the thought that came into his head—unannounced. He knew the game was up. His sluices of logic had been blocked by plaits of gooey love.
WAR smiled meltingly.
“Would you like to buy some syrup, Weirdmonger?”
“Yes, but can I ask why you call yourself WAR, WAR? I recall wars as men all mouth and trousers who fought till they found that fighting was harder than drinking.”
“My father died of a broken heart over a botched result at his own World War.”
WAR seemed even more pretty when she spoke serious. The Weirdmonger wondered what heights of passion she might engender if she actually talked dirty. He nodded as if he understood without the necessity of her continuing. Apparently, her father had lived his whole life upon the hope of winning the World War.
WAR said that she was continuing the investigation at the behest of some paternal beyond-the-grave power which could not be defied. When a corpse got its claws into an issue, there was the devil to pay.
WAR herself turned as white as a ghost, gaunt and stare-eyed... as she fiddled with the jars of syrup. A haunted woman. Prettiness draining from her by the second. The bitterness of something that wouldn’t let go even in death. She sighed. Her eyes glazed as her father’s eyesight spun from them like wasps. She wielded long cultivated fingernails which she scratched along the nearest trestle—as if playing noughts and crosses for real and in earnest. From the middle of her head there sounded two voices clicking like miniature wooden dolls—foully swearing. Then WAR slumped forward…
The Weirdmonger now heard the voices inside his own head. He shook his head to free these poor creatures of his thoughts. Wagger Market resumed its business, oblivious of the tragedy. Nobody even bothered to clear up the huge mound of slime till the various corpses that had formed within muscley folds of it had disfigured.
*
The Weirdmonger had stayed away too long. The blanched thistles crouched like forgotten cruel love affairs—and he whistled with delight as he recalled the games of Catch he’d played here during those hotter days of youth. Not that he’d grown any older. Weirdmongers never did. And he was the only one left. Perhaps the only one that there ever was.
The landscape had changed. Cooler. Wetter. Strangely brighter. Or was it whiter? Paler. He tried to juggle the words. Despite the dankness, things looked shrivelled, burnt, desiccated... even more so than when Sunnemo had shone strong and high, during those endless days of his... youth. Yes, why not say the word? Even if it meant little, if not nothing. Agelessness was a burden that many carried, but the Weirdmonger carried it with some style and panache. Why use two words when none would do?
He shrugged. He had returned to the Klaxon Keys to renew acquaintanceships, if not with the original contacts of his “youth”, but with their progeny. He had recently travelled—further than anyone could imagine—towards lobes and poles of Inner Earth where few appreciated his art-with-words, an art of uttering a word or phrase or saying which then immediately became a self-evident truth. The Weirdmonger’s watchword was ‘one word, one truth’ for generations—but sometimes he needed to visit people able to have faith in this facility, thus to regain his self-confidence. Some, for example—in (god)forsaken clans of siren-driven wastes shadowed by Canterbury’s gravity-logged Oak—had merely stared at the Weirdmonger, open-mouthed, expecting their own words to issue forth as true as his. And they never did. Others had not even bothered trying, especially amid the coming war, failing, as they did, to understand anything the Weirdmonger said. Yet, here, back in Klaxon, he hoped at least the people retained a modicum of empathy with ‘one word, one truth’, not that anyone could
truly
empathise. If they did, they’d be Weirdmongers, too.
He shrugged again. He watched two boys throwing a ball to each other, with, between them, a puddle that the relatively weaker Sunnemo had failed to dry up... although, judging by the hover-flies sprinkling about above it, there was steam rising…
The Weirdmonger could hear the nagging voice of the two boys’ mother: a descendant, no doubt, of the woman he had known on his earlier sojourn in these parts... and for the likes of the Weirdmonger, knowing was not knowing nearly enough, there being far more about people than the people themselves or others could possibly imagine. The Weirdmonger recognised that knowing was tantamount to not-knowing, until he spoke the word, and
then
he’d know someone to the bottom bone of the soul. One word, that was all it took. One word from the Weirdmonger.