Nemonymous Night (7 page)

Sudra watched the city from the window, as if watching through the gaps left by her parents’ clinging, cleaving to each other. It was her birthday today and she was expecting a welcome hug and a bountiful gift—yet all she saw were the bodies of the people she loved dissolving in the growth of sunlight... until even the bones themselves tingled slightly and then vanished. She rushed towards them over the carpet but only gathered curtains to her instead of parental love. Yet, love is invisible—even when the people “doing” the love are there. And Sudra could feel the love around her, even if there were no arms to gather her closer to that love. It would soon be time for school—and she walked off to the fridge to fetch milk and the kitchen cupboard to fetch cereal... yet her feet were becoming more and more draggy as she tried to reach the kitchen, as if the carpeted floor (several storeys up) had a magnetism greater than the earth’s Core. Sudra could not even reach the body that was hers before it disappeared into the kitchen.

Mike turned round—forcing Susan also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he’d heard a shuffle or a whisper—but there was nobody there. He picked up the freshly delivered newspaper from the table—as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary—and read the main headline:

MAD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS

Without thought, he plunged it into his briefcase, and, waving a cursory backward greeting to Susan, he left for the office. Time had crept up on him and he was already dressed in his uniform of three-piece suit and bowler hat. This city lived in the Fifties and bowler hats were still evidently all the rage.

*

Mike had forgotten how he had been described in earlier parts so he assumed he’d always looked like this. Barely close-shaven hair in a crew cut before crew cuts were known by numbers for the respective choices of length. Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley were in the Hit Parade—milk bars full of pre-pubescent teenagers, because puberty was very late in those early days. The office—once he arrived—was full of massive desk-calculators (that, one day, could fit into the palm of your hand), surrounded by pipe-smoking jobsworths rattling at their numbered keys. Mike said a jolly good morning as he took his own seat in front of a calculator that was rare inasmuch as it had a ribbon of paper where his work was printed automatically for future posterity—churning out in endless ticketing spools as from an old-fashioned bus conductor’s hand ratcheter. Still too early for his mind to be on the job—and he thought back to his walk to work, past the covered market, where many office-workers emerged as if they had been sleeping there all night—past the Dry Dock, the pub where Susan worked, the zoo gates—and before he managed to summon up sufficient concentration of will-power to face the calculator keys, he took a quick browse of the newspaper, the main headline being:

CHILDREN STILL MISSING

An all night search of the innercity has produced no sign of the Angevin Twins—so further sweeps are soon to take place in the outer city towards the suburbs.

“They ought to try
under
the city,” said Mike to himself. The Angevin Twins were the first-born of an important city family that had first grown rich over the generations by means of coal-mining on the Northern edge of the city. Mike had seen photographs of that area—big towers with turning wheels threaded by clunking chains, silhouetted against a sky that was more often as black as coal as it was ever blue. The prevailing weather thereabouts had made sure of that. Most citizens travelled south on their holidays and not even the weathermen could explain why it was generally brighter in that direction. Nothing concerning geography or science could justify such differences—almost as if the city seeped darkness towards its head... bearing in mind that its map was a direct representation of a human body: either purposefully or purposelessly reflected by the evolving architecture, town-planning and urban scrawl set in motion by the founding fathers all those centuries ago. On that symbolic template, Mike knew that before one reached the holiday areas surrounding the city’s feet one needed to cross the standing water of a waste reservoir.

He looked into the mirror of the office toilet to remind himself of how he should have been described as a person—if anyone needed to describe him to any people who did not know him. He had just physically added to that standing water (of which he had just unaccountably pictured) and he smiled a smile which he decided was uncharacteristic of him when viewed in a mirror. He wiped his hands on a paper towel. Was this how hawlers were meant to look? A strong personal face with deep lines and searching brows. Black looks offset by sweet smiles? Only the nemonymous ones had tantamount to the blank expressions of those bodily projected ghosts on TV dramas—so he knew exactly what he was, down to the chipped toenails, even if he hadn’t yet dared tell Susan and Sudra.

The office work had taken a backseat ever since the news broke about the Angevin twins. Nobody had given them a second or second’s thought beforehand and maybe many of them knew nothing of their existence at all. The tea lady—pushing her steaming urn—had nothing else in her new gambits of conversation. Not long ago she had been on about the wayward progress of the latest evictions on ‘Big Brother’. Now it was whether the Angevin twins had been kidnapped or simply run away like the Famous Five had to Kirrin Island.

None had been prepared for the startling information—and how important it would be for the city and its life—until the population had woken up to such breaking news: hearing of the twins’ existence for the first time followed a few seconds later by more data upon their mysterious non-existence. The twins, before this extreme metamorphosis, had been surprisingly old for their age, so nothing was ruled in, nothing ruled out.

Mike tried to concentrate on his paperwork—without much enthusiasm—occasionally glancing up at his colleagues to whom he often remembered talking when times were more ordinary. It had indeed been a job where office politics often took sway—with alternating recriminations and reconciliations. Corporate entertaining of clients at sport and art arenas. Hitting the knuckle of the business with sensitive tweaking of figures and projections.

“How’s your wife doing at The Third Floor?”

Mike’s colleague—what was his name?—had actually spoken to him. The first attempt at conversation for several days.

“OK. Do you know her boss? Ogdon he is. He often serves behind the bar. Strange bloke.”

Mike had answered, as if he had learned his lines parrot-fashion. Ogdon was known to most people. He used to run a pub near the office to where everyone had resorted at lunchtime for a boozy crush and exchange of business gossip. More was gathered at such gatherings... than gathering the proper statistics back at your desk. Life was human. Life could not be contained within restricted socks. Booze loosened the tongues and then facts flowed, too.

“Yes, Ogdon. I know him. In fact, I knew him before he was a pub landlord. He used to sit for days in a square between tower-blocks, by a fountain, writing novels…”

Mike’s colleague might have continued, had not Mike himself brought the contrived conversation to an end with a throwaway line:

“Novels get you nowhere.”

*

The bendy bus threaded the lower streets, having eschewed the mainstream for the back doubles. The windows were scratched by scores of cavalier vandals, who had tried to smash them just with their gaze until getting the milled edges of their shiny shillings to the glass in a pique of frustration that their lives were going nowhere fast. Arthur was behind the huge steering-wheel as the wheel tried to take him more than he was able to take the wheel. Much water had passed under the bridge since that time he and his sister Amy were sent missing: and even he couldn’t remember the circumstances. He’d need a brainwright sooner. In a dream, he once believed he and Amy were some kind of Royalty with Franco-Anglo roots
:
and their disappearance had set the whole city into a quiver. Not at all like the true circumstances: just he and his grubby-faced sister taking their pluck in their hands to see if anyone really cared for them and escaping deliberately into the darkening streets rather than go home for tea. Just a test for their parents. To see if they had sufficient love to find them again. A crazy, mixed-up looking for nothing except for the goal of people looking for
them
. A quest for a quest.

The two children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets—of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction as A&A, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Most tried to discover each other’s names.

“Hey, are you…? How long have you been…?” asked one child with a polished face and knobby knees. She failed to give any information about herself, however.

“Too long,” said one of the posher kids. “There’s a hole that goes to the other side of the world. But where?”

Indeed, whither the antipodal angst?

In the distance, one of the other children heard the hum of traffic—as if the city had started to re-ignite—and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.

“But nobody will ever find it. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.

“There’s a bigger hole in my Mum’s carpet!” laughed a sarcastic rascal, one of the few children not part of his or her own pair. He remembered the high flat that most adults had told him existed somewhere—even if it were only in forgotten dreams; even the slightest infection of dream sickness itself could engender false imaginings of real things or real imaginings of false things. The flat was an archetype, especially with kids. A literally dreaded flat where an individual—who was once one’s best friend—spent most of the day and night in bed. Nobody suspected this could be God Himself—as such seedy, tawdry dread could not possibly be any part of a divine iconography. Even the flat carpet had tantamount to melted into the grooves of the floorboards’ ill-knotted and crumbly fibre.

The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play—seeking the bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore—having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it—and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.

*

Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra—feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids’ parts, but some did run away although they didn’t know why. But that’s another story—as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fashion that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.

Mike pointed into the sky, drawing attention—for Susan’s benefit as well as Sudra’s—to where he saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a lego-brick device or even a model of a toy lorry the size of a real lorry—but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus... followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada... until Mike realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys... soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter’s... until that shock became real as he watched one of them accidentally clip another—with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even his feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky—more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet—and Mike prayed that they would not crash anywhere near their own house... a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened their lives, which were far more valuable than property. He also hoped that Ogdon’s ‘Third Floor’ pub would remain intact. Then, quickly realising how vulnerable he, Susan and Sudra were in the open, Mike gathered Sudra up and told Susan to run alongside him—even though he didn’t know if running away from danger was actually running into it.

The grass was scorched by their frantic escape.

*

He is dreaming. He knows it is him dreaming but, in retrospect, it could be just about anyone dreaming—Mike or Greg, even Ogdon. Hardly a woman, however, could have dreamed the dream—or a child like Arthur. Yet nothing is certain in such novel circumstances as dreaming a dream such as the dream he thought he was dreaming. He felt himself to be a man, not only within the dream context but also outside the dream as the person eventually to wake from it—and having already entered it via deep sleep, he seemed to mine even deeper. The dreamer had in his arms a girl and she was almost offering herself to him in skimpy night-clothes or an even skimpier evening dress. At first, he thought it was his daughter and, since then, within the dream, he has no reason to think it was not his daughter. She had shortish curly or bushy blonde hair and she was a bit plump so not at all like his daughter in what he later would consider to be waking or real life. But she was his daughter in the dream and it seemed they were both accustomed to these surreptitious flings and she was kissing him longingly, lengthily—eventually with her tongue. He felt a climax ensuing as he was now convinced it was one of those dreams that often end abruptly at good or bad bits of it, and the dreamer woke in a sick sweat. And that is all he can remember of the dream, and whether he is still trapped in such a dream is quite unknown to anyone capable of knowing there is such a thing
to
know.