The Hawler (part eight)

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 or 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 news – and how important it would be for the city and its life – until the population had woken up to the breaking news: hearing of the twins’ existence for the first time followed a few seconds later by news of 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 reignite – 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.

(continued as part nine)

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