Nemonymous Night (part three)

At the centre of the Earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.

And to my reasonable knowledge, I am a hawler, but at earlier stages I myself didn’t realise this at all. I so wish I had. Things might have turned out differently. However, still not knowing for certain whether I am a force for good or a force for evil makes me draw back from fully exercising the creative strength I know I possess. I even deign to compete with that Ogdon person – who, one day, first started writing his own novel in a city’s fountain square between four apartment blocks one of which, as it happened, housed the young Amy . As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in this right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.

Meanwhile, I need to introduce Greg. My alter-nemo. This is a more nebulous form of alter-ego. The late John Fowles invented the ‘nemo’ in contradistinction to the ‘ego’ or ‘id’ in his book The Aristos. But such information inevitably interrupts the narrative flow. And narrative flow is the reason we are all here. One ambition that we all share, both as writer and reader..

Greg was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. His wife was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Greg surveyed the dips and dunes – almost feeling them with his golf mind – as he took stance for his first teeshot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, assessing the relief map between him and the hole … and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his clubhead for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.

****
Arthur – despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc. – became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other passengers assuming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn’t otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver’s sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surreptitiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of ratruns and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his ‘brainwright’: an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.

It had been a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company’s inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver – despite all his driving documents being forgeries.

Arthur believed, in his childish fashion, that all meat was going off, but not simply growing mouldy, but literally going off (eloping?) with other meats from different animals, fishes and fowls, mixing, blending, into new concoctions of meat with arcane bone maps – all because of global warming.

These were big things. Global things. Symbolised by Arthur knowing instinctively that he could control big things just with the flick of his finger. Like the bus.

Amy before she had met Sudra had lived with Arthur – and their neighbours must have assumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister.

Yet, then, the horrors hadn’t yet started. Various strange words start to build up – as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did Amy and Arthur know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself. And worse still was having already lived through half of it via the creative medium of someone other than myself. Fixed for the wrong fiction, cross-grained against the truth, forming a diseased Canterbury Oak in my head. Or so it felt.

****

The area of the city where the covered market found itself was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. It had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not strictly open-air or covered. On some days – when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom – it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these ‘walls’ looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. I dreaded going near that place, in case I was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn’t belong to the city at all.

Susan worked in Ogdon’s pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub – unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life – would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile worked there – a real place she couldn’t avoid as she needed the money.

I lived in a top floor flat in the city centre. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling as of yet more dreamers dreaming the covered/open-air market. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that you really did need to visit me there (although this was a dream and you weren’t really visiting me at all).

My carpet was much older than any building that ever contained it; I didn’t know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.

When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn’t matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.

I could not shake off another dream. A dream of a hawler but, this time, in its misshapen form as a Horla (or vampire).

****
"The meek shall inhairit the irth, as long as worter continyoos to flo under brijjes."

The words carved into the plaque above the door, despite being misspelt, were vaguely familiar to me, as if it were a line from a poem that I had learned by heart as a child - a real sledgehammer of a punishment, it had been - but which even parrots couldn't memorise perfectly, for love or money (or even birdseed).

The whole situation had the feel of a dream (even from within the dream itself), but also a version of deja-vu that had been implicated with reality's spectrum at its least believeable point. Life for me had indeed become a precarious offshoot from the circle which, as a child, I thought to be endless. And here I was touring an area that I'd not toured before ... even further west than geography could substantiate.

I was so dog tired and parrot pickled, this place with the funny words outside, purporting to be an inn as it did, became almost half welcoming. I was rather surprised how countryside could look run down. Cities and towns, yes. But for forests, hills, rivers and fields to be dilapidated, dirty brown grass, with shaggy trees and misshapen hedgerows, droopy horses pissing twenty four to the dozen, doleful cows dragging their red-raw udders along the stubbly ground, threadbare sheep tugging pitifully at the tussocks for sustenance only to spew them out again with yawning bleats ... well, this was not really the hiking trip I'd first envisaged when sitting in my top flat in the city.

Even the odd building or two were either stinking cowsheds or detached slums with doors hanging off - and urchins in the yard playing ugly.

I had today passed under a high aqueduct carrying Narrow Boats along a stretch of canal. These garish craft I jokingly depicted as nervous aeroplanes or stream-lined parrots. I laughed, suspecting that real aeroplanes must have hidden strings - how could they stay up in the sky, otherwise?

That had been my one proper act of sight-seeing all day. And I did not now feel like erecting a tent tonight. I desperately yearned for a real bed with clean crisp sheets and plump pillows. The day had been like a dream with life thrown in for good measure. Like those crazy canal boats, I felt I wanted to moor myself for the night on the firm ground of sleep, as it were, in the hope of real dreams making more sense.

Having forced my way through a clutch of foul-mouthed brats, I knocked on the door beneath the plaque. The building was, unusually for this area, in reasonable repair, each window shutter on two hinges and the pebbledash less like a dreadful disease than that on the walls of other buildings hereabouts. Even the soot stains were minimal, if slightly yellowier. It was a pity, therefore, when the front door abruptly toppled inward upon my knocking.

A beautiful wench was standing in what must have previously been a dark hallway, since she blinked furiously at me. Not that I myself considered that I was an intruder, more an unexpected visitor, a stranger losing his strangeness by the second. It wasn't my fault that this place had half the look of an inn: a single shutter was not only open upstairs but had the word HOSSPISS crudely painted on it. Could the fact that my polite knocking had caused the door to collapse in a shower of splinters be laid at my door?

"Yes?"

The voice was as lovely as her face ... except the teeth were rather protruding. Her shortish frock flowed around her thighs like silky satin. Her unhaltered breasts were seemingly full plum-tipped and readily graspable. But then I noticed the chipped china chamber-pot positioned between her feet.

"Excuse me ... I don't know, but ... I thought you were an inn ... I'm very tired ... have you a room for the night?"

"With a bed?" The wench's question took me by surprise. "You see, we have some guests who don't need beds - even at the start of their stay."

In the distance behind me, I heard the unmistakeable sound of a canal boat horn. I even thought I could hear the rattle of lock paddles being worked, followed by the surge of water from the pound. Did I really want to stay here at all. Perhaps a ramshackle barn or, even, a haystack would suffice.

I whimpered a reply to the wench and fled so peremptorily I thankfully couldn't retain in my mind what we may have had time to do together. So, it was a mystery how I knew the inn had coffins, instead of real beds, slum coffins which would fall apart soon as one laid one's weary body upon their back-scratcherfuls of crumbly earth.

****
As I sluggishly returned to a waking state in the city, the anaemic amnesic parrot that remained for a while in my head couldn't remember much about the dream at all, let alone why my subsequent dreams featured the buxom wench necking me in her dark hallway ... amid an incessant splattering noise between her feet.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty-nine)

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