The Gone-Away World (49 page)

Dr. Andromas gets out of the truck. He wears a top hat with a fine piece of gauze or mosquito net dangling lankly to his neck. Beneath it his face is white, with a tiny villainous moustache, and he wears a pair of aviator goggles over his eyes. His entire body is wrapped in a black cloak, which makes him look like a mummy or a sickly giant bat. For all that, he's not as tall as I am. It feels very odd, and somehow dangerous, to be looking down on him.

“Dr. Andromas?”

The doctor looks at me for a long moment, and then shrugs past on business of his own.

You have to worry about someone even mimes find creepy.

I
T IS
lunchtime, but the mimes are not eating. They are standing in a long, regimented line, absolutely still. They are not rigid, they are relaxed and ready, but motionless. Corpse quiet, expressions painted on, they attend Ike Thermite's commandments. Ike walks along the line, serious for the first time in my brief experience. And then he turns his back on them and spreads his arms like a bird. The Matahuxee Mime Combine follow suit, slowly. Ike brings his arm around and opens an imaginary door. He steps forward into an imaginary world. He tucks a non-existent chair under an intangible table. He invites them in.

The mimes cross the threshold one by one. Not one of them touches the door frame or puts a hand through a wall. There are too many of them to fit into the first room, and they get stuck, crowding around the entrance, jammed up together. Ike opens another door and goes farther into his imaginary space, brings the front half of the Matahuxee Mime Combine with him. The rest of the mimes fall into the first room, which is apparently a kitchen. They do the chores. They wash. They clean up. They step around one another, vault over nonphysical furniture. They cook. In the next room there's some heavy DIY going on. Mimes saw and chop, scrub the floor, clean the windows. They dodge flailing arms, lift bowls of soup in either hand, tightrope-walk along the edge of sofas, squabble, fight, duck and dive. Straight-backed and fluid, they do all these things in utter quiet, save for the occasional group sigh. Ike watches. This is the kata of the greatest mime in the world.

I am hypnotised, sad, thrilled and suddenly terribly homesick. I came here to talk to Ike Thermite, say hi, talk about old times, but suddenly I am not sure that I want to. I am very glad when K comes to give me a job. As I depart, the mimes are starting to practise their clown work: mops, umbrellas and plantain bananas are being passed out in solemn stillness.

Five minutes later I am swinging a sledgehammer to knock metal pins into the ground. These pins will hold up the main tent, so there are quite a few of them, and this task is vital and important. A lot of other people are doing the same thing, but these pins are given to me. It is a pleasantly percussive task.

There is a method to the execution of the task, a technique. The hammer is wickedly heavy and hard to control. Only a strongman could lift it and hammer in a series of separate actions for longer than a few moments. Only an idiot strongman would actually do it, and there are surprisingly few of these. The process of building a body which
can
lift a vast amount in an unscientific way is most often also the process of learning that the other way is easier. The trick is in Newton's Laws, of course: move the hammer and let its momentum carry it up, then divert it when it has the maximum kinetic energy but the minimum momentum, and bounce it off the metal pin or stake in such a way that the
re-action
can be used to complement the initiation of another upward arc. Much the same principle applies to the single-edged sword-form of Master Wu's Voiceless Dragon style.

In any case, I have familiarised myself with the heft of the hammer, with its balance and bounce, and with its pitfalls—it becomes slippery in the heat, it does not always bounce true, and unlike a sword it is heavily biased towards the business end. I have set up the pins in a long row. And now, prepared and quiet in my mind, I move along the line in a single unbroken motion. It begins with Snake Concealed (the weapon hangs behind the trailing leg, so that it cannot easily be seen, and the enemy must either accept this or seek to alter his position accordingly—the pins unwisely take the first option) and moves on to Stirring the Cauldron (a twisting motion which starts the weapon moving, preparing the first attack).

I flip the hammer up (Horse Rears at the Moon), and then I step forward. Parting the Hair (downward strike) followed by Cloud Hands (rolling motion) and back to Stirring the Cauldron. There is a little shuffle here which Master Wu insisted was called Walk Like Elvis, but Elisabeth asserted, not without some justification, that this was unlikely to be the original name. Still, I Walk Like Elvis. After three or four spikes have gone in smoothly, I add Cut Across a Thousand Troops (a swirl where the weapon makes a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, positioning me between two pins and at ninety degrees to my starting vector) and follow it with Wheels of the Master's Cart (rolling the hammer on one side, then the other) before taking the last six in quick succession (Babbling Brook and Parting the Hair bound together in succession), and then turning (Monkey's Dance), hammer still in motion, and driving them all another six inches into the hard ground. Thus returned to the beginning, I stop. My arms are not tired, but my heart is beating quickly, and my scabs are hurting. There are lines of pain aching through my chest, and little globes of heat inside the flesh where the bullets were. Still, job done—in perhaps three minutes. K told me it would take half an hour. Hah! See how my skills are transferable!

As I turn to go in search of pies, I see a figure standing by the canteen tent. Ike Thermite is watching me. His eyes are round. Of course his eyes are always round. They are painted on. Still and all, somehow he is broadcasting considerable surprise, or so it seems. By the time I reach him, he is grinning.

“Tent pegs?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Usually,” says Ike Thermite, in the tone of one imparting a secret, “usually, we put the ropes around the pins before we hammer them in.”

Bugger.

But at least he does not want to talk about Matchingham, or ask me about my wife, and for this I feel an overwhelming gratitude.

T
HE CIRCUS
is a thing of many parts. It is a cakebake, a display of acrobatics (and mime), a sheepdog trial and a magic show. The sheepdog trial is something of a surprise. Amid the noise and haste, a lanky black Scotsman with a voluminous beard hurtles up on a quad bike; two Border collies, dappled, eager and curious, sit on the platform at the back. In a wheeled chicken-wire box are several Indian runner ducks. The collies are called something like Mnwr and Hbw, and the man himself—another K, of course—speaks for the moment only in sharp, irritated growls and yaps. The Indian runner ducks have no names, or at least no names they share with us, and are here to represent sheep. They have many of the characteristics of sheep without actually being sheep. They are fabulously stupid. They cannot fly. They gather together and, given the opportunity, dither and fall over each other. They are protected from moisture by a natural oil which permeates their outer covering. A short amount of time spent in their company is enough to make you want to kill them all out of frustration.

K (the Scotsman) flings wide his arms.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my name is K, and I will be your ringmaster this evening!” (Except it is actually “Hah-lo, leddies 'n' djentlemenn, ayem yer ringmasster thus evven-ung!”) And he launches straight into an explanation of the strong-eye and the weak-eye dog (the first being a dog whose face implies that he is a duck-eating psychopath, a creature of action who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals, suitable for starting animals moving at speed and cowing them into stillness, and for lethal action in the heat of battle; and the second being a gentle-hearted creature doing a job, friendly and mostly nonviolent, good for repairing rents in the flock, precise manoeuvring and charity work), then shows a few bits of black-belt duck herding, before segueing into a ringing denunciation of the Highland Clearances. Impressive that rage at this ancient political sin can survive the disintegration of the Highlands themselves, and pass, unmitigated, into the new world.

The mimes take their turn. In empty air they create a house, a street, a town, a nation under a capricious god. They rush around the world (backdrops depict ancient Gone Away places of mystery, like Venice and Delhi) in great confusion, an endless parade of slapstick and acrobatics against a scenery of sorrow and loss. The Matahuxee Mime Combine share a universe with us. They are mesmerising; they flip, bend, whoosh and custard-pie one another in a kind of restful quiet. They are sort of anti-Nietzschean clowns, who restore the ordinary simply by existing; a gentle remedy for the insidious forgetting which afflicts us. And then, out of nowhere, they create Dr. Andromas.

One moment Ike Thermite is engaged in a slapstick routine in the middle of the stage, and the next the mimes have apparently grown tired of him, and carry him off. There is a great clap of thunder, and everything goes dark, and there is Dr. Andromas, like a beggar king-in-waiting. He is dressed in a dusty tailcoat, a pair of disreputable trousers and fine, pointed shoes. His topper turns out to be an opera hat, with a folding skeleton inside which can be compressed for ease of carriage. One side of the skeleton must be loose or broken, because every so often Dr. Andromas's hat flinches and sinks on the left, and the good doctor removes it and punches it back out and flops it once more into position. His face, unveiled for the occasion, is white and startled, and he has waxed his preposterous moustache into tiny, pinprick points. He has fine androgynous features, the kind you look at and immediately think you recognise. I try picturing him without the moustache. I don't know him.

Dr. Andromas introduces himself (gestures grandly to a banner bearing his name in self-important letters), and the mimes lean on things all around him and giggle silently. He capers stiffly, loses his hat, finds it and draws from it in quick succession two carrots and a lettuce, slightly gnawed. He ponders these, apparently unsure where they can have come from, and leaves the hat sitting on the table behind him while he goes to confer with a mime on the other side of the stage. A rabbit scuttles out of the hat in pursuit of the carrots. The audience goes wild. Andromas turns around, and the rabbit bolts for the hat. Andromas lunges for it but misses, then jams his arm into the topper, and pulls out three metres of orange silk, a sink plunger and the shapely leg of a young woman. This last is sharply withdrawn, and a slender arm emerges and slaps him across the face. He recoils and jams the hat in a panic onto his head. A moment later he sighs and takes it off again. The rabbit is back.

At this point Dr. Andromas steps up a gear. He passes the rabbit to a very young Rheingolder, who takes it with some misgivings until the rabbit parks itself firmly on her lap and falls asleep. Dr. Andromas silently requests from the gentlemen of Rheingold a simple favour: might he have the loan of a gentleman's watch? (Asking for the watch involves a great deal of careful gesticulation and the miming of cogs. It gives the clear impression that pompous Dr. Andromas believes he is dealing with imbeciles who don't speak mime like any proper person.) The townsfolk of Rheingold recognise without difficulty that they are invited to dislike this persona, and they laugh at his popinjay manners and his battered dignity, and Andromas preens and assumes that this is all down to his massive comic talent. It's a contract, and everyone is behaving quite according to their assigned role. The audience is thus perfectly prepared for The Trick.

The Trick follows a predictable pattern. Dr. Andromas takes the watch, and wraps it for safe keeping in a green pocket handkerchief. Then he gives a genial, reassuring wave and smashes the little green cloth bundle repeatedly with a wooden mallet. Several hundred people giggle and gasp. The owner of the watch winces and chuckles tolerantly and silently wishes himself elsewhere. His wife clutches at his arm with nervous good humour. Everyone knows it will be all right. But a look of dismay passes over the doctor's greasepainted face. He looks in the handkerchief. He rattles it, and—somewhat alarmingly in the context—it goes
tinkle.
A single stray cogwheel falls out and rolls across the table. Dr. Andromas freezes. He raises one hand in a conjuring sort of a way, and then drops it again. He rattles the handkerchief.
Tinkle.
A sickly little grin appears on his face. He trots over to the side of the stage and talks urgently to one of the mimes. The mime shrugs. More mimes are called in, and the discussion grows animated. Ike Thermite is hurriedly brought out and does a creditable double-take when informed of the problem. Wrathful Ike despatches a mime to give Andromas a sound bollocking. The Rheingolders cheer and chuckle. Dr. Andromas makes his way to the front of the stage.

Andromas composes his face—impossible moustache and all—into an expression of the most profound regret. He clasps his hands. He is beseeching Rheingold in general, and the owner of the (currently deceased) watch in particular, to be merciful. He gestures to the table, the rabbit, to all the good things he has done. He gives the audience to understand that, in all his years, he has never made such an error as this. But he has, today, experienced the first pang of senility. He has blanked. Possibly tomorrow, when the pressure has abated, he will recover himself. Right now . . . he has forgotten the second half of the trick.

And he opens the handkerchief, and pours a stream of sand and cogs and glass fragments into his open hands.

There is absolute silence. It isn't, of course, the silence of horror, although it's sort of bleeding in that direction. It is the silence of demand:
Make it okay,
Ike's audience is saying.
This was funny and now it's scary and you have to make it be okay.
Ike Thermite steps forward and whispers sharply in the doctor's ear. An ultimatum, apparently—Dr. Andromas looks around for salvation. The mimes desert him. Alone in the middle of the stage, Andromas fretfully wraps the pieces up and makes a few passes over them, but nothing happens. The mimes silently dismantle the scenery. They take the Alps away, and Loch Ness, and everything else, and the lights all go out except for the one which picks out Dr. Andromas like the accused on the witness stand. And finally he cries, on his knees, and this has turned out to be a very other kind of show from the one everyone was expecting. It is, on the one hand,
quite clear
that Dr. Andromas doesn't know how to put it all back together, and it is, on the other,
very unclear
whether this means the watch or the world, or whether there is a difference. An awed, awful quiet settles on the people of Rheingold. There is a sniffle from one of the sturdier matrons and a murmur of mourning from the men. Dr. Andromas is the bearer of an awkward truth. Andromas himself rubs desperately at his moustache until it droops. His huge girlish eyes open very wide, and he allows a single tear to make its way down his face.