The Hawler (part fifteen)

Mike was a solid figure of a man. Not at all like Greg with Greg’s slight figure despite the years that had thickened Greg’s facial growth. Not wide so much as bushy. But that was Greg, and attention must perforce spotlight Mike again for a while. And Mike was still doubtful about his own beginnings – barely remembering even the shadowy figures who had been his parents in the Fifties. He had compassion, however, having long forgotten the earlier years as a child when he played pretend games in the garden and up the bullace tree – sometimes masquerading as Davy Crockett in a long-tailed fur hat, sometimes as an even more distant memory: the creature he inscrutably called a hawler (although the spelling was doubtful). All that concerned him now were naturally the concerns of today – his middle years – as he and the party with which he had joined were trekking northward to what was loosely named the city’s Head Region.

Until recently, he had been working in the city centre’s covered-market, living a frugal existence – together with Susan, a pretty woman who, unlike her sister Beth, had failed to gather frown-lines during her middle years. When she and Mike had decided to live together, she already had a daughter called Sudra who was now herself growing into a pretty woman with pig-tails, a style that was too young for her. Sudra laughed often. Yet she had an aura of malevolence or, at best, bewitchment about her. She, too, was in Mike’s party, together with her two similarly aged friends Amy and Arthur, friends of doubtful relationship with each other, with nobody questioning this because there were some lines drawn beneath which it was impolitic to delve. Amy worked as a domestic cleaner, Arthur a double-decker driver – both salt-of-the-earth citizens who would never have dreamed of travelling north … unless times were extraordinary.

How extraordinary the times had become only hindsight retained a clue. The identities of Amy and Arthur – it was believed – had been stolen by lostlings or foundlings or changelings who had escaped with much of their victims’ past cloying to them. These were apparent children indeed masquerading as the children Amy and Arthur had once been in earlier perhaps less extraordinary times. This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.

The five of them trekked because public transport had long since departed, having been earmarked for some important matters ordinary citizens like them were not considered suitable enough to know about. As he strode along, Arthur imagined the stuff underfoot – the party having finally left the pavemented area of the city streets – to be residue of his childhood ‘experiment’ games with household substances. This was probably his own version of a retributive past coming back to haunt him. Amy smiled as if she could read Arthur’s thoughts. Arthur, however, soon became preoccupied by what evidently preoccupied Mike … and what gradually preoccupied all five of them.

The sky was slowly, surely and imperceptibly becoming more of a roof than a proper sky – as if they had entered a much larger version of the city’s open-sided covered-market – where, incidentally, Arthur now recalled was where Sudra’s stepfather worked as a waste manager. Having a roof – one might have thought – would have afforded protection from the weather, but they all still felt a soaking drizzle as though rain had been replaced by some variety of sprinkler-system.

Nobody mentioned the colour. Indeed, could darkness be any colour other than black or, at best, grey? A monochrome of darkness, gathering in around them more like mist than darkness proper. Yet, they could still see the even darker shapes hunching upon the distant terrain towards which they hiked. Nobody mentioned the colour, as it did not come up in conversation, bearing in mind the preoccupation caused by the difficulties underfoot.

“Hey! Look – are they volcanoes?”

Mike pointed at the rough cone-shapes each with an odd flame-like plume fitfully being spat by what he assumed to be some of earth’s many apertures.

Sudra quaintly described them as “Redoubts” – but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, simply for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. “Redoubts” in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word “Côté” was written on one broken brick wall that they were now passing – almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces … all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.

Yet, what was that?

“What’s that?” shouted Susan, flustered but retaining the studied innocence characteristic of her.

There was what appeared to be a pier on stilts – of the seaside pleasure variety – reaching into or across a very shallow inner sea – not a sea so much as a series of dark gleaming puddles creating the feel of an elfin archipelago that had gone to seed, made from patches of black sand. Near this pier was a stained-yellow block-building of inferior architectural qualities which once – they guessed – had housed an amusement arcade. They though they could here the ghostly whirrings, blurps and chortles of erstwhile jollification.

And nightsome gurgles of waves against the pier’s stilts.

“The pier’s pillars are made of wood,” said Amy, as if in a speech she’d learnt parrot-fashion. She was desperately trying to be herself, not someone else. She needed to be herself – otherwise nobody could sympathise with her as a potential human being. The once thick-thighed oaken hafts were slowly decaying into the brine, even as she watched them. Wilting as boniness would.

They soon passed this real or mocked-up (they weren’t sure which) version of a seaside resort from Fifties England … not even something the city had ever boasted. But here it was. Seedy growing on seedy.

In the distance, beyond the puddly sea, they all saw two small figures – no bigger than match-stick marionettes – employing their own silhouettes to crouch and peer into or under – not a manhole cover but now, far from the city proper, the first of many under-underground oubliettes that peppered the northern night lands in an unmanmade state of existence.

“I can hear something,” said Mike. He heard it as if his feet were ears. A distant downward noise – not of underground trains that were what such noises pertained in the city but, rather, underground dogfights by second world war spitfires that felt just as much at home within earth as air. Yet, Mike didn’t put his description of these noises into words. He was more concerned with the others in his party running away from his own position near the puddly sea towards the matchstick silhouettes that were sinking slowly into a surface which once seemed solid enough to bear their slightest weight as well as for them to walk upon.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part sixteen)

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