The Hawler (part five)

The ceiling was quite ordinary, plain white, with a central rose whence the electric flex dangled towards its own pendant lampshade and bulb. In ancient days, before ceilings were invented, they would have had strange beliefs about ceilings, no doubt. That they were ghosts in disguise would have been the strongest and strangest. Some even believe that today.

John Ogdon – landlord of the pub where Susan worked – was dreaming of over-flying his own pub in a helicopter, except the roof was hidden by the large overhanging buildings in the same street. Either warehouses or tall covered markets, the dream didn’t allow him to remember. He did remember, however, another dream when he was at a family dinner, believing himself to be one of the adults, so it was quite a surprise to find himself placed with the children on a lower table adjacent to the main table. It was only later he lost touch with himself and, after a period of being literally a down-and-out, had struck a patch of good luck and been given the job of managing a downtrodden pub in the city.

He thought he saw his old friend Crazy Lope, a tiny figure negotiating the ratruns and back doubles: and at this time of day it was not surprising that he was one of very few individuals en route between two ends of their own business … hardly a time to be idly wandering, Ogdon thought, as his dream helicopter banked and disappeared further into the dark horizon of his sleep,

****
There was some kind of race through the house, but it was unclear who was racing whom and whether it was me or him or her or us or you being chased – but certain was it that the house was a palatial one or rather a large stately house through the ornate rooms of which visitors would normally be guided. All I knew (if it was me) was that I seemed to possess far more stamina than I expected myself to possess at my age – and nimbleness. As the paintinged walls sped past, I managed to keep well ahead of my pursuers, negotiating the various corridors and, even, the ups and downs of trapdoors, oubliettes and attics. Yet most of these areas were well lit and it remains unclear (even today) whether the race was in earnest, life and death, or merely a game.

The helicopter hovered about the country house, it seemed, for hours, hanging from the white ceiling that was the sunless sky. It was reconnoitring or spying for forces that remain mysterious until this very day. At points, one could even just discern the goggled pilot sitting stiffly in his bulb.

****
John Ogdon looked up from his paper, as Susan walked into the bar for her turn of night duty. Despite his down-to-earth occupation (if supplying processed alcohol via a pub was indeed down-to-earth rather than spiritual by intoxication), he had been day-dreaming about floating above the sparkling sea in the early morning, upside down in a helicopter or balloon (more likely the latter as there seemed to be no noise) where the scintillating waves’ expanse between four identical wall-to-wall horizons was a ceiling or watery underside of some far firmer roof beyond it. Day-dreaming was quite different from doing it during the night. Less control.

Ogdon shrugged. He needed to get back to the state of the bar’s surface – preparing himself to get his own hands dirty. The pub’s cleaner was missing – hauled off to attend to some personal morbidity, apparently. He laughed at his own turn of phrase. He would also need to persuade Susan (officially a barmaid) to get stuck in.

“How’s Mike?” Ogdon’s voice failed to disguise his own irritation at the happenings of the day. The inner laughter at the wordy surrealism of his own mood was already wearing off. His face looked more like a policeman’s than a pub landlord’s. His stomach flatter than that of his own caricature.

“OK. But the roof’s leaking. That’s why I’m a bit late.” Susan never questioned her own state. Life was to be accepted, whatever what. She was half attractive, half determined to accentuate the other half.

“Children?”

Susan had to think for a moment. Life sometimes took you by surprise, even with its own ingrained acceptance of fixtures and habits. How could one forget one’s own children? It was their bedroom that was leaking.

“A bit damp.” She laughed.

Without explaining her quip – but depending on previous information she had given Ogdon, she looked out of the pub window before embarking on the cleaning which she didn’t really need to be told to do.

She caught a glimpse of a figure of a caped man disappearing into the black backdrop of a huge liner in dry dock, as if he had nearly been caught ear-wigging their conversation. The cranes on the liner and its gantries reminded her more of an old-fashioned coal mine where chains hauled up and down the man lifts. She knew it wasn’t that, but it seemed more appropriate that it should be. She heard the distant clanging of heavy-duty engineering – and she wondered, perhaps for the first time, how the liner had been transported here (so far from the river or the sea) and for what reason. This area had, she knew, been the site of a dry dock for several generations.

****
Tonight, Susan’s sister was coming in together with her husband, Susan’s brother-in-law, but at the moment there was just one solitary pub regular talking about a dream he had the previous night. He was talking to himself, in truth, but Susan pretended to listen to enable him to believe that he was not just talking to himself, although he was.

“I was part of a crowd coming into the pub – a special rough cider was being offered at cheap price from a wooden cask. I wasn’t me in the dream but someone else. Good job as I don’t usually like cider and even though it was just a dream, I could really feel the bits of real apple with my tongue…”

Susan nodded as she proceeded to polish the bar, ready for the 2 a.m. rush. Why there was always a rush at that time was mysterious. Probably because various parties threw out their guests roughly at that time.

The regular nodded, too, as in agreement. He was not invited to the parties in the first place.

It was at this point that Susan’s brother-in-law swaggered into the bar.

“The road’s hairy!” he shouted, as if his sister-in-law would understand.

“Where’s Beth?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, following on – she’s got a loose hair to clip back into place,” he announced sarcastically: his way of saying she had gone straight to the loo.

“Hairy road?” queried Ogdon from the other side of the bar, where he was emptying the fruit machine.

“You don’t expect roads with uncut verges, edges with hedges – and pavements with long weeds – in the city,” was the reply, as if this explained everything.

“No,” said Ogdon … knowingly.

A few more customers had already arrived – without Susan noticing – in advance of the 2 a.m. busy period. She half-expected Mike, because a childless couple, as they were, could have a devilmaycare attitude with regard to the necessity of sitters or minders. Wishful thinking, perhaps, because another advantage of childlessness was quiet sleepful nights, but that was lost on Mike and Susan as they often spent most of the night awake in any event.

One of the new arrivals was Greg – an ex-office worker – who had been made redundant and often told of his experiences in trying to get back into that sort of work. But the longer it went, the harder it would be, particularly as his appearance was fast approaching the nature of the “hairy road” that seemed to be preoccupying her brother-in-law. Beth had not yet appeared from the loo.

Greg meandered on about a recurring dream: as if Susan was interested! But on he would meander: “I go back to the company I used to work for time and time again – and many of my ex-colleagues have been promoted – and I have to wander the corridors of a new office block … knowing it’s also the same office block – looking for a previous colleague who I used to be in charge of … so that he of all people can show me the ropes of the slightly different procedures…”

He gave a sob as if the dream were real and it certainly was real when he was dreaming it – so not much of a logic there. Susan felt sorry for him but was soon re-preoccupied by the arrival of Beth. A blonde curvier version of herself, with all the mutual envy and recrimination that that implied: filtering both ways.

By the time Crazy Lope arrived, not long after Mike’s own arrival, she knew all these people had not met in Ogdon’s pub tonight by coincidence. It was exactly 2 a.m. and she was not surprised when Ogdon bolted the front door – and all of them left together by the back one in the shadow of the liner in dry dock – if shadows could be cast at this time of day when most of the lighting was at foot level, dim though such lighting was. So late even the night buses had stopped running, parties or not.

They became a search party. For two missing children.

****
If children suddenly realise they exist, they ask themselves whereto the rest of their past childhood. Were they brother and sister, they wonder, or completely unrelated and, thus, perhaps, childhood sweethearts incubating a future marriage when they would tell their own children of their erstwhile romance resulting in their children’s own subsequent existence as children. But, for all they knew at this crosspoint of time, they may have common parentage, and they hugged in the cold darkness – in the vicinity of the open-walled market – one hug as childhood sweethearts, the next hug as siblings, believing they gambled on one hug being true, choosing, as it were, between a belief in God and a non-belief in God. Both equally comforting.

They had not become lost. They could hardly recognise themselves as lost, but lost they were. They realised that ‘becoming’ was not a necessary pre-cursor of ‘being’. Only adults didn’t understand that – and there were many years in the pipeline before Amy and Arthur would become non-understanding adults themselves. One pipeline, perhaps, leading to a more mature love affair, another pipeline to estrangement as argumentative siblings.

The late night bus passed in the distance, leaving a heavy silence. Although the darkness was cold, these two children were not cold at all. They had a carpet over them like a stiff blanket, having discovered it in a nearby dereliction, unpinned from the floorboards that it had once hugged as a soft underfoot surface – and, strange though it may sound, it was free of its floorboards because the floorboards had been stolen by a burglar for building a shed. Not that the children knew that history and only a dream could explain how the carpet’s subsistence survived its lack of foundations. It had sagged towards a cobwebby heart where red-eyed rats lurked but spared the children knowledge of the true extent of their maggoty existence. The carpet, surprisingly, had well survived the damp hollowness beneath it … and now provided a very serviceable blanket as the children speculated on the basic story-telling that underpinned their wherewithal as “babes-in-the-wood”. Better out here in the open city than in that ramshackle rat-den. A carpet was not as snugly body-hugging as a proper blanket would have been, but the sky seemed distant enough to hide the pin-pricks that were its perforations for heat absorption. The sky shaped itself to a larger body … and Arthur told Amy this was God’s shape and the sky hid the top flat where He lived and where, one day, they’d seek Him out in His bed. Arthur knew he, Arthur, lied, because city flats (especially top floor ones) were always seedy and bent out of any sane shape of comfort. Yet the concoction or myth gave a believeable context (ie. God living in a city flat) and, thus, comfort to both of them, even the liar.

(continued as part six)

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