The Hawler (part eleven)

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 firms’ 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 being able to drive skilfully under all radars, metaphorical or otherwise – and dodging 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 < hawl > and ended with < /hawl >. I went to shut it down because I felt myself threatened by it, as if sucking me into it like a fly.

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.

(Continued as part twelve)

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