Authors: D. F. Lewis
O
: Dream sickness—heard about that? Well, I’ve got a cure for it in a fixing-device... or a fixing-person, a new job that I think we need to fill. Government’s not going to do anything about it.
CL
: Dream sickness, yes, but nobody admits to it existing. Nobody actually says those words in public.
O
: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!
CL
: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.
O
: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?
CL
: Yup. Don’t like holidays myself. They seem like a chore half the time. I just enjoy staying in my flat and mouldering away. (Laughs)
O
: Well, I know someone who went on one of those trips. They
do
exist, I’m sure, based on what he says.
CL
: Who’s that?
O
: That friend of Mike from his office. Greg, is it? He comes in here often on his own now—Mike’s gone north.
CL
: Has he?
O
: Yes, like all those others. Anyway, that trip Greg told me about—it was a submarine run by someone acting as Captain Nemo. But not an ordinary submarine, that Nautilus sort of was, as I understand it. This submarine had huge vanes on top like a helicopter—and it churned down through the sea-water scattering fish and so forth in a great big stirpool!
CL
: Sounds decidedly ungreen!
O
: To say the least—but apparently the vanes were a protective system as much as they were propulsion. Deep down where Nemo took all the passengers and taught all those trippers about really deep things, quite beyond you and I. And green is the thing, indeed, in many ways, dark green, right down there... emerald scenes, with emerald beasts of the under-sea. Frondy. So Greg said.
CL
: I thought it was all blue, the sea.
O
: So did I. But at the deepest—down there—are giant green squid that have civil wars, it seems. Tribes of the same breed wrestling in mounds of black mud. Absolutely mad.
CL
: Black as well as green?
O
: Apparently so. Nemo called these squid vermin “ancient kings of besmirched sperm-banks.” Greg remembered that as a line of old poetry.
CL
: Whales? Sharks? They’re in that same poem, I think.
O
: Well, mutant versions, apparently. I didn’t understand most of it. Greg seemed to know all about it, but he’d actually seen all these things. Seeing is believing, isn’t it?
CL
: Not so sure. Probably brings us back to your ‘fixing’ idea. Fictioning, similar, I dunno. You need a kiln for baking reality! (Laughs.)
Others who were listening laughed, too, as Ogdon bought another round of drinks, thus squandering his pub profits. Crazy Lope spat into his drink for luck.
O
: By the way, I had a funny dream last night. I knew it was a dream, without having to fix any true waking life that came before and after.
CL
: Oh yeh?
O
: One part of the dream wasn’t so clear—it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it—and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.
CL
: Like Tardis? (Laughs.)
O
: Maybe, but it had a Lounge bar as well as a Public one. I went into the Public and started chatting with someone, though I can’t remember who that was. I seemed to know this person, however. I owed him money, it seemed.
CL
: A him then?
O
: Yes, I’m sure it was a man. Anyway, I repaid with loose change. (Laughs.) A series of one p and half p coins. It couldn’t have been much or I would have used notes. Probably. Anyway, as I say, to the point, one of the coins was a quarter p! Smaller even than a half p—so tiny you could hardly handle it. I then knew it must be a dream, as everyone knows that a quarter p coin doesn’t exist in England and never did exist.
CL
: Exactly. Half p coins don’t exist now, but they once did. But never a quarter p. You’re right.
O
: Ah well, there are
some
truths to life one cannot doubt!
All laughed and nodded as more drinks were purchased. A few of the regulars wore flat caps and they decided to have a game of darts. The pub talk was evidently fizzling out for a while amid much merriment, yet mingled with worried private asides and surreptitious glances.
*
If there were horror lurking somewhere—nobody would ever know for sure. Yet, deep down, this horror was aware of itself and, even without a mirror, it knew it had slobbery gums and long teeth and a face wider than its head. Not absurdly dreamlike but monstrously, nightmarishly real—just waiting for its time to come.
*
Beth’s husband may not even have known his own name. He was nemonymous. Some of his friends recognised him and called him by a name they thought he was named. He was a working-class lad recently grown into manhood—slight fuzz on his upper lip—with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming Beth’s husband. Beth could easily have hen-pecked him to death because she was a strong, impatient character who paid no heed to her own original beauty and feared no spoiling of that beauty with any hard-nosed actions. In fact her face had become more pointy and as if scorched by a cold cutting East wind—whilst all the time it was her personality that had given the features this unwelcome cast. Her husband eventually became her right-hand man who defended her and somehow complemented her with the backdrop of his near-absence accentuating her presence. Not that he was a pushover. He had pub-going pals and a career in waste management, driving one of the firm’s largest lorries through the city and using his slippery guile to prevent the Authorities discovering what sort of waste he was transporting to the coalfields. It is reckoned that his intrinsic nemonymity helped with both aspects of logistics and surreptitiousness by making him able to drive skilfully under all radars, metaphorical or otherwise—and to dodge between the speed cameras... thus arriving in a timely fashion and in successful completion of the job. The envy of his colleagues. Thus, he was promoted—almost to Board level, but he still preferred to go AWOL and drive the lorries.
He met Arthur after Arthur grew up from being a child. They shared pints in The Third Floor—and not surprising since they both negotiated the city traffic in their own ways, one with a double-decker bus, the other with an articulated juggernaut. Arthur had a partner he called Amy and Beth’s husband a wife he called Beth—but neither woman met each other so they never knew who the other one really was. This was strange as the two men were close friends and often talked about the old days that many had forgotten—and this forgetting was perhaps because either the dream sickness still prevailed but hiding its own history of pandemic or the dream sickness had abated allowing real memories to subsist instead.
Beth’s husband, however, had secret vices. He didn’t even recognise them himself,
if
that is the same thing as secrecy. He wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England—a hobby and a method of saving money. He had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which he leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread—knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with his hard-padded fingers: as if tidying a rhythm of growing patterns of thick surface-veined underlay: except this underlay was a surface—but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. He wanted one of his special carpets to be beige-coloured to match some future required necessity of appearance, one that fitted in with a retrospective destiny. There were mounds of these vexed textures of surface: each a fire-wall—or, rather, fire-floor—as if he were readying them to serve as an insulation device that even time couldn’t penetrate. A cover for the hawler. Only Beth’s husband knew how important his task was—masquerading as a rather effeminate hobby for one of such hard-bitten working-class background (or underground). Foregrounds were not even considered.
Edith Cole and Mr Clare controlled him from afar. But nobody now knew who they were or who they had once been.
*
Arthur, Amy and the other children had eventually reached the edge of the Northern Coalfields in search of the entrance to the vertical tunnel that would take them to…
It would take them nowhere. They knew this at heart, it is certain. The quest was for a quest, originally—yet now the quest had become this downward pit that led nowhere. An end in itself. The means to that end were just a subterfuge that contained their end like an insulation case around a live wire. “A fugue for a darkening city.” Beyond the end, they knew there were no further ends. Otherwise they would have given up in sheer terror. Or they hoped so. It beggared belief to believe otherwise.
They were not old enough, thankfully, to realise they were too young to understand.
*
I stared at the screen wondering where I fitted into the schematic movements of the symphony. Not that I could hear any music at all. Silence.
The screen showed a clouded yellow surface, yet mottled with—if it were real—stains or signs of wear. Not yellow so much, I guess. Maybe beige. Not a uniform surface. Again, if it were real, it would bear perceptible bumps or lumps in its fibre. Fibre? Or weave. Or web. Or net.
It is as if I had created this site with a number of codes: codes that began with
Now, I know deep down who I was. Or I was in the process of creating who I was. I was about to enter the intermittent and unsmooth flow of action. The yellowy web, hopefully, was to be the firewall or firefloor to protect me (or anyone else following me) from the dire horror that was a lurker on or within the threads of my discursive being.
*
Mike, Susan and Beth had reached the edge of the city’s Northern Coalfields at West Wednesday. They were not far behind the children. As they entered each suburb, they heard talk of the children’s prior passage through its streets, lifting manhole covers, peering into drainage/heating shafts, breaking into derelict houses to test the cellar floors and so forth.
Crazy Lope/Ogdon and Greg—calling themselves the Two and Half Musketeers—had reached the Left Foot of the city down south and were currently queuing up to buy tickets for the latest Jules Verne holiday-of-a-lifetime.
Journey to the Centre of the Earth—The Enjoyable Way
. Greg was to test it out for subsequent entertainment of his firm’s clients. CL/O merely felt like a holiday.
Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide who I’d follow. I knew that Arthur and Amy would, at least, survive what was indeed to happen because it has already been reliably recorded that Arthur grew up to drive a bus and Amy to clean flats. As to the others—and myself—any survival was yet merely hearsay.
The coin dropped on its milled edge within a gutter’s drainage slot.
*
Ogdon stared at the screen in his flat. He had started typing up his things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. “I am curious—yellow,” he whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. He scribbled in his bright red Silvine ‘memo book’. He was more a dreamer than a pub landlord, but he needed a proper job to bring in the beef—and why not combine that with his second love (drinking and indulging in pub talk)? Dreaming never brought in much money, even when one could turn the dreams into words. He actually wore a long cape when he was the dreamer—and called himself Crazy Lope. He wore non-descript clothes when working behind the bar, as differentiation. These days, Ogdon hardly worked in his own pub, for various reasons, and had got in a locum as a manager.
He spent much of most nights exploring (wandering)—mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city—areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, he imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy. It was all good meat for his dreaming (he saw fiction as miraculously feeding the multitude) and these airports were much more efficacious in this regard than the large city-centre area of the covered market—now divorced from its secondary role as an Underground station. And more efficacious than the now disused Dry Dock where gargantuan ships and liners used to arrive for riveting.
The western airport area—now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course—reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research. This one was in a place called Hawler—where was it?—in Kurdistan? Whether the city airports were connected with this middle eastern one in some way was uncertain, yet Ogdon believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface of the earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body... invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes’ owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.
Ogdon reviewed his own dreams. The fiction could wait, as he shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of his yellow screen.
He was quite aware that there was not enough detail, not enough provenance and not even enough providence in whatever had by-passed his mind. He recalled the city-centre zoo visit with some pleasure, but weighed down with equal displeasure bordering on dread. Had justice been done to this zoo? Mike was
still
not filled out as the real person he was. Some of the others had given a good shot at it and even gave a passing impression of having deep feelings and understandable impulses or intuitive intentions: mixed intentions, some logical, others paradoxical. All of them were like this, except, perhaps, for Beth’s husband. Ogdon at first thought Beth’s husband was the wild card. Little did Ogdon know, however, that he should keep a beadier eye on one of the children. A bewitched child. Yet nobody seemed to have put a finger on this. Give them time for nailing down.