The Hawler (part nineteen)

Sudra squatted with her young nude body upon a narrow ledge in the thin effulgence of the hedgy tunnel. Her companions snored nearby – in equally precarious sleeping perches – no doubt dreaming. They had just undergone a long but relatively easy descent so far – and it didn’t seem to matter that none of them truly appreciated the real purpose of their quest. A quest for a quest was the nearest they could come to it. In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts they would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times.

The hedge itself had almost helped their descent of passage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected – but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance. The only real problem was the soot-like substance that clung to the hedge’s twigs and branches, a damp consistency that Arthur seemed to recognise (but he kept his cards close to his chest) and that dampness tended to get down their chests causing coughs which they prayed were nothing to do with the more general sicknesses they’d heard rumoured in the city before embarking on this journey. The stickness (not sickness or even stickiness) of the two creatures – suspected as substitues for Amy and Arthur – whom they pursued were simply more than a dream away – despite often hearing these creatures crackling (if not cackling) further down in the hedge towards even lower regions than anyone could imagine approaching without feeling the traditionally believed molten heat of earth’s Core.

Soon enough, Sudra herself dozed off on her ledge and dreamed. She dreamed of being a small girl again and of the Christmas when she was due to receive a pair of new shoes as a present. She knew it was a real dream because she was dreaming it far beneath the surface of the earth – and it mattered little that the events in the dream took place above ground and in the past and upon her old bedroom carpet. She simply knew instinctively within (and, later, from outside) the dream that it was a real dream and not real life – although the dream was about real life, a real life from the past, filtered by both her dreaming and waking minds – so it was uncertain whether the dream was exactly how the real events once were – but they were surely close enough to reality to be called a reflection of reality in the future of the past, Sudra’s past.

Those promised new shoes had been important to her as a very young girl that Christmas: more important than anything else before or since. Even the flies in the cabbage were forgotten when she turned her mind towards the prospect of the new shoes that she had been promised. The flies in the cabbage had been originally important because she’d been instructed to clean the cabbage ready for supper and the task had now taken on a frightful dimension when she discovered a nest of black stringy flies at its heart. All she needed to do, however, was to think of the new shoes (which she imagined as supple yellow leather with blue laces) – and then all the troubles that beset her young mind seemed to be assuaged, healed, removed to a new dimension where she did not exist and if she did not exist there why should she worry about anything that happened in that dimension? Not exactly an out-of-body experience but more of a projecting of a troubled ghost from her body into areas where that ghost could be left to cope with all the dark problems that would otherwise beset her real self – here – today.

She dreamed about all that in the future but once upon a time she had lived through all this for real, indeed lived through all such thoughts as real thoughts. She tried not to recall who had told her to clean the cabbage. It was probably her late father (whose name she had since blotted from her mind). He had been a nasty man. She hated him and pitied her mother. She was later pleased when he died and Susan eventually remarried, and Mike became her stepfather. But in those old days Sudra pitied Susan having to live with such a nasty man as her real father. It had been Susan who had promised Sudra the new shoes – and, as the words ‘new shoes’ returned to Sudra’s mind, the thoughts of her father, then and now, dispersed into forgotten memories, yet memories that lurked and silently threatened to return should she lower her guard. So as to prevent this eventuality, she kept repeating the words, ‘New shoes’, ‘New shoes’, time and time again, until the words ‘New shoes’ - more and more quickly said - took on a new meaning, almost a new sound, a new single word: ‘Newshoes’ and she could not even visualise its spelling, least of all fathom its meaning.

“Flies in the cabbage” became another expression or mantra with which she tried to enchant with her chanting repetition of this phrase’s syllables. “Flies in the cabbage”, “Flies in the cabbage”, trying to weld the words into unbroken letters and unbroken fragments or phonemes or morphemes. Yet, on this occasion, the spell didn’t work and it brought her dead father to the bedroom door, staring at her, beady-eyed and smiling. Sometimes, smiles were evil. Indeed, smiles were always evil. People only smiled if they wanted to get something out of you, achieve something, delude someone. A smile was always a lie. Even her mother’s smile, Susan’s smile, hid something below it. And at that moment, the dream became a nightmare as a swarm of flies flew from her dead father’s mouth and nose.

She woke with a start. Not from the dream she was dreaming but from the dream she was dreaming about.

“New shoes, New shoes, New shoes,” she quickly chanted as she found herself in her dark bedroom – at the cusp of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. She smiled to herself as she saw a shadowy figure with a prodding horizontal beard at the place where its chin should have been – with a long cape-like body silhouetted against an even darker backdrop, a backdrop that seemed to ooze the natural darkness into the room. She hoped she knew who this figure was. She convinced herself she knew the real colour of the cape-enveloped shape, because red wine often did look like black wine when Susan left a bottle of it in a dark corner. The figure placed a package on the bed, with a crinkly paper sound, together with its heavy weight upon her feet that were in the part of the bed where the package had been laid upon it. She sighed and fell asleep with a sense of satisfaction, submitting herself to dreams she was destined not to remember when she woke up on Christmas morning.

The Christmas bells woke her with a steady tolling – and the sun surprised her with its Winter power as it shafted through the ceiling-light and also surprised her how it had not woken her before the bells had woken her. “New shoes” were the first words she spoke – both an incantation and an expression of truth as she pounced out of bed intent on reaching the package left at the end of the same bed from which she had had just pounced. The words doubled up on themselves in unnecessary repetitive patterns as if to delay the time before she opened the package, because, even if she herself didn’t realise what was happening, everything-else-that-could-think thought that she would be devastated by the contents of the package and anyone describing these events needed to spend as much time describing these events as possible to delay the inevitable – describing aspects of the room, its carpet, the sunshine, the bells, all of which were quite untrue - in the increasing desperation of preventing the young girl from reaching the package in which she believed were lovingly wrapped new shoes of supple yellow leather and blue laces that she had been promised for Christmas, new shoes with feminine trimming, small studs on the soles to create sparks on the pavement, vestigial spurs on the heels to allow her to pretend she was an elf or fairy – and toecaps of silver beauty that would spark more naturally than the studs without any sharp friction, sparking in the sunlight that still shafted through the ceiling-light as she finally, inexorably reached the package, eager to unwrap it without caring whether the wrapping-paper was torn in the process because the all-important things were the package’s contents, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes that she would wear all day, that perfect Christmas Day – and Boxing Day, too. And, in the end, she reached the package without much help or hindrance from outside forces and she started to unpeel the various wrappings as if it were a pass-the-parcel game for one person. A cunning game for first thing on a Christmas morning. She could not hear her mother stirring – although she sensed the front room fire was already blazing. And, at last, there they were – the new shoes in all their glory. She whispered “new shoes” through her milk teeth, with awe and wonder and an intoxication beyond any angel’s wine. She was past all possible excitement. This was now a tranquil moment, amid the hubbub of her busy childhood. A moment to cherish forever. If a moment could indeed last forever. The new shoes were no disappointment. Supple yellow leather, indeed, and black laces. Not blue laces, but that didn’t matter. The colour of the laces was only a minor detail. These were perfect shoes. The new shoes to complete a childhood. All else could be forgotten.

She woke she knew not from which dream within which other dream. The nightmare was not the contents of any dream but not knowing how many dreams she had to travel as dreamer and dreamed to get back to her real self. “New shoes,” she whispered through her milk teeth or through her old yellow teeth or through her toothless mouth. “New shoes,” she repeated as she walked to her bed on bare floorboards, the carpet gone. All that she was sure about was that the laces had tied themselves.

Sudra woke on her shelf in the hedgy tunnel and smiled.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty)

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