Klaxon City (part twelve)

Greg and Beth were offered a chance to view more specialist operations upon Klaxonites who were suffering from a version of Bird Flew deeper than their own bodies, with diseased feather-spindles spreading their cancerous spike-ends unto the soul itself. Beth, even with her hard-nosed Essex-girl image, was reluctant to accompany Greg on this part of the tour. So Greg – putting himself in the hands of a masked surgeon – was taken on his own to not a lethal chamber as such, but something far worse. Lethal chambers would at least staunch the pain eventually.

Here Greg saw a patient – etherised upon a table – presenting a pink wasteland of body surface tussocked with Bird Flew. Apparently, this patient had earlier indeed managed flight as high as the highest pylon of the city and only flopping to earth with a wing-stressed bounce – because, otherwise, a mercifully heavy fall from flight would have ended his illness there and then. Illnesses tended to die with their patients. Except in the most diseased cases.

The surgeon was wielding a instrument like a pen-torch that emitted a beam of siren-sound more intense than any hearing could bear if that hearing had insufficient dream protection – which, luckily, had been provided for Greg by one of the dream stewards from Klaxon itself. Edith and Clare had washed their hands of the matter, pretending that it was impossible to offer such protection, but, simply, if the truth were known, they didn’t know how to do so. The dream steward who actually took over from the dowagers, in this respect, was a character by the name of Blasphemy Fitzworth, once cat’s meat salesman in Victorian London, who was so full of makeshift dreams he was able to find one perfectly suitable for concocting a particular madness that produced impossibilities such as engendering Greg’s immunity to the shrieking ‘pen-torch’ surgical instrument.

The patient himself was resistant to any application of Angevin ointment to help with humane plucking. So, the surgeon (equally protected by one of Blasphemy Fitzworth’s dreams) aimed the ‘pen-torch’ beam of sound towards the most obtrusive of the rooted feathers and seared hard at its clawhold for some hours, as Greg watched the surrounding flesh sizzle and then melt away from the column of healing key-hole sound. Eventually, the surgeon could yank the feather-spindle from its tenacious grip on the patient’s bony soul-matter. Only the patient’s resultant wild screaming at the top of his voice was the final danger of sound-deafening proportions to any onlookers. But, with that withstood, the surgeon and Greg left the patient to recover for a while – before they returned to attack the next feather’s root in a long line of such feathers carpetting the patient’s flesh.

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"An apple for your thoughts," announced Miss Clare in a moment of remorse amid those interminable kept-behind hours of dusk which come to all schoolchildren who strayed.

She watched the child in the front desk lean its head on the exercise book. It straightened its back into a yardstick, its eyes unblinking.

"Can I go home now?" its small voice asked.

"Well, I don't know - you're meant to be here finishing off the sums which you didn't do at the right time."

The child resumed its desultory scribbling. It was not the only one whom Miss Western had kept behind this afternoon. The three naughtiest kids from the same adopted family, Feemy Fitzworth, Padgett Weggs and Crazy Lope, had been sitting at the back of the formroom only a few minutes before, complete with smug we-don't-mind-if-you-keep-us-in-till-Kingdom-come expressions. She eventually sent them home because their mother would complain at them being victimised yet again. They certainly did deserve it. They used to be gypsies. But that was not the reason.

Meanwhile, the nemonymous child was now re-doubling its efforts to encourage monsters to doodle self-portraits in the arithmetic book. There was a certain peculiarity in that Miss Clare had completely forgotten the child's name. She would need to check it in the attendance records but the lines of black circles and red ticks told her nothing except perhaps that there were underlying patterns to existence in the small town she'd decided to work as a schoolteacher. The three naughty kids had more black circles than most, but that was only to be expected.

Miss Clare was suddenly aware that a stranger was sitting in one of the tiny desks - at the back of the classroom, where the depleting afternoon light could not now reach.

"Yes? Can I help you?" Her voice sounded distant ... even to her own ears. The moment of fright had been exceeded by annoyance at the intrusion.

"No, but I feel I can help you instead." Whilst his voice was louder than hers, it was like the undercurrent of a conversation in a house next door.

Miss Clare turned back to the nemonymous child to see if it had noticed the exchange, but its head was back on the desk-slope, eyes still wide open, whirls and coils of its doodles appearing to flow directly from its brow as well as from the stub of pencil gripped in its fist. The arithmetic book’s pages themselves were thus cross-hatched by prior scribbling with not a single sum in sight

The stranger - taller than the confines of the desk would have seemed to allow - left the back of the room and slowly advanced down the aisle, passing via varying degrees of shadow. If it had not been for this intrusion, Miss Clare would have by now lit the lamps, for it had quickly turned too dark too early to see very clearly.

"I've got some homework to give you, before you can go, Miss Clare ... about visions of meadows, endless childhood summers, the tenacity of feathers and the meaning of fruit-stones and flowers."

The voice had become more like an old 78 rpm record with a dog and horn on its label ... hissing and cracking in rhythm to the accompanying steps.

"Who are you?" Miss Clare asked, with fear now gradually dawning on her.

"I'm the one who can teach you of none-so-pretties, soft hobmadonnas and cuddle-me-to-you's, and pick them from under sun and hedgerow - and, later, with all learning done, we can play frog-hop, scotch-skip and dibstones for an everlasting gossamer twilight..."

The spoken subject-matter belied the speaker's attitude.

"Who are you, please?" the teacher cried, sitting as straight as a wooden set-square, protracting the hushed pause while the stranger manicured its claws and continued:

"I know the winged fairies who play in the pippin orchards. I spin tales at night from beneath the bed-clothes, where further down I dare not reach my toes for fear of hurting the coily things by the footboard. I'm a version of thee, I'm a version of others yet to come ... and soon I will join the procession between the night daisies, joining songs of such sad beauty..."

Inexplicably, the words gave to Miss Clare thoughts of tiny faces each with one finger placed on their pursed lips and of tenantless see-saws at sunset pivotting amid the twirling translucent girders of the golden hill-beams.

"WHO ARE YOU?"

He replied as quietly as he could. So quiet., it was easy to forget one had heard it in the first place. Miss Clare's eyes weltered with tears at the fading memory of his answer. There were now only shadows moving in the early evening breeze which entered from the window. She looked at the nearest desk scored with the anciently inked runnels, the incomprehensibly scored languages and graffitic tales of unlikely love. The pages of an arithmetic book fluttered over, full of nothing but interlocking black circles in meaningless patterns half-concealed by careless blots.

The following day, with the weather turning back towards winter, Miss Clare shivers. One of the three naughty kids has just asked if she believes in ghosts. There was meaning in the questioner's eyes. But at least even the naughty kids cannot summon sufficient courage to ask about curses and ancient gods and arcane rituals and such matters. The other tiny children giggle as they place their palms together like pink fleshy moths closing their dusted wings, this being morning prayer. Miss Clare prays, too, that she will truly forget the tall stranger's response to her frantic WHO-ARE-YOU last night. A silent response as he pointed at the vacant desk with the arithmetic book’s cross-hatched pages still fluttering like feathers.

(KLAXON CITY continued here: part thirteen)

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