The Hawler (part nine)

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Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra – feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids’ parts, but some did run away although they didn’t know why. But that’s another story – as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fashion that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.

Mike pointed into the sky, drawing attention – for Susan’s benefit as well as Sudra’s – where he saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a lego-brick device or even a model of a toy lorry the size or a real lorry – but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus … followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada … until Mike realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys … soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter’s … until that shock became real as he watched one of them accidentally clip another – with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even his feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky – more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet – and Mike prayed that they would not crash anywhere near their own house … a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened their lives which were far more valuable than property. He also hoped that Ogdon’s ‘Third Floor’ pub would remain intact. Then, quickly realising how vulnerable he, Susan and Sudra were in the open, Mike gathered Sudra up and told Susan to run alongside him – even though he didn’t know if running away from danger was actually running into it.

The grass was scorched by their frantic escape.

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The children arrived at the dry dock – but the ship had been moved back to the sea during the night. Each pair circled the area where it had stood for months between stanchions, breezeblocks, gantries and giant chocks. This was where they suspected the hole they sought would be found – a service tunnel bled from the ship’s hull for off-loading unfiltered substances: leading into the intricacies of the earth’s valves. Not that they possessed those words to describe it. They merely had dreamed them, beamed from elsewhere, during the returning onset of the dream sickness (a sickness that most people, even children, had forgotten).

One child thought of the maps that had been on board – in the maproom. A wall of maps overlapping each other. This child then told his other half about it: “They were wall-sized maps on hardboard, one on top of the other, hinged at the top where the ship’s horizontal false ceiling ended in meeting the vertical – and you needed to lift one map to see the one underneath until you lifted them again and again, until you reached the wall itself. Some of the maps are blank, some very complicated with lots of wavy lines…” He tried to take a breath as he took a long run at describing everything that went through his mind. He had the word-power and the enthusiasm to match it. His listener was in awe.

Other children, with similar memories, could hardly describe them. “The walls were red,” one of them said, a girl with bushy blonde hair, meaning to say they were read like a book. Or perhaps she did.

“There was a map of a rail network,” answered another precocious child who held the hand of an older child with fuzz on his top lip, the latter not seeming quite so ‘with it’ as the younger one.

“On the wall?”

“Sort of under the wall. You had to lift the top wall up to see under it – and the first map underneath was of railway tracks, not a map of rivers, roads or mountains – only never-ending caterpillars and points.”

“A peculiar map to have on board a ship!”

“Yes, but most people these days think about trains, rather than boats, planes or cars.”

“Do they? What about helicopters? Do you count them as planes?”

Children crowded in to listen, whilst others searched the distraught area where the ship had once been stationed – still trying to locate the hole to the centre of the Earth – and beyond.

“Some remember the times when grown-ups used to travel to work.”

“Commuting,” chimed in a bright spark from the back of the crowd.

“Yes, something like that – but they remember the open platforms in the countryside and the halts and junctions they used but now slightly altered, confusing the direction and whether one had changed to the correct platform for the next train – going back in the same direction as you came, whilst you have doubts because most of the other passengers are collecting themselves on the opposite platform to the one you are on – and you’ve forgotten whether you were travelling to work or travelling back home having already been to work…”

The chatter soon dissolved as the kids departed in dribs and drabs, having given up any chance of locating the pit entrance hereabouts. The chatter faded into the distance and, simultaneously, became more like chatter fitting for children to chat.

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During their lunch-break from the office, Greg and Mike visited Ogdon’s pub on the third floor of the New Trocadero. Mike was disturbed to catch Susan and Ogdon canoodling behind the bar when he and Greg arrived – but Susan quickly rectified herself with some careless excuse. Sympathies for all parties have been meticulously crafted by the implied omniscience of someone who stands behind all the characters. If only he or she were more up front with this task instead of keeping everything between the lines. And given these sympathies, one can try to imagine the sorrow in Mike’s heart at this sign of seedy affection between Susan and Ogdon, plus the shame he felt at his colleague Greg also witnessing the tawdry scene and the further shame felt, indeed, by Susan herself. She quickly changed the subject, whilst serving Greg and Mike their lunchtime booze.

“The ship’s gone, then.”

Mike nodded. The huge funnelled monstrosity in dry dock – not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit – had long become a fixture on the city’s skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance – presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed – was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who – despite the frantic searching by the Authorities – were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper…

“Nobody seemed to notice,” said Greg. “It’s not as if the sea is close by, but they must have re-cut the river to the sea overnight, too! Amazing what they can do.”

“I heard the groaning of sheet metal throughout the night, but I couldn’t wake up properly – to check,” announced Ogdon.

Meanwhile Susan’s sister Beth and Beth’s husband had entered the pub. A childless couple, but they had great sympathy with those who had lost children overnight.

Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened.

“I went to his room – and he said he would show me his if I showed him mine. So I escaped back down the stairs, helter skelter. A long way from his flat to the ground. Heh heh! The sea, you say? It’s not far to the coast from here, really. I once went…” He spat into his drink before he continued, oblivious that nobody was listening to his series of conversational non-sequiturs. “There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga – and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills – and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like ‘Angerfin’ on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing….”

Nobody paid any attention to Crazy Lope’s failure of communication, a failure even with himself. He didn’t fill up the whole screen.

Greg and Mike soon left the pub, intent on returning to the office where the computers continued to work throughout their lunchbreak, like huge sensory calculators with amputated keys. Each man felt the other was a website, a blog city, a click on the right point bringing everything up in various stages of construction. Either that or they were slightly merry from imbibing on empty stomachs.

(continued as part ten)

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