The Hawler (part thirteen)

But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they were lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. I have told lies in dreams, for example, and the character I felt myself to be from within the dream knew full well that he was telling lies, i.e. that I was telling lies – yet all this as seen from outside the dream after waking was yet another lie in a way, an untruth, a falsehood, because I could hardly then remember the details of the dream and I am now making up what happened in the dream just for an exercise in fancification … making conversation as it were … stringing words together to create an interesting scenario which I can later work up as a story for the dinner party I was later due to attend in real life.

Someone stared across at me over the table, winking in tune with the candles, as if she knew that I knew that she knew she was telling lies. Her face was a cutting one when she was interrupted or gainsaid. I could tell she had once been very pretty, but now her character intervened and made the face carry the ingredients of an underface like a bird pecking for worms. I recognised her from the dream in which the lies had started their concertina domino-rally from unreality into reality – crossing some bridge that linked untruth with truth..

“What is a liar?” she suddenly and unexpectedly asked, thus causing such a non-sequitur to become an intrinsic constituent or continuation of the prandial conversation that was already taking place before she again so skilfully interrupted it.

“A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses – and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.

I know that I am not a liar. I am perhaps the liar. I am in control of a dream in which everyone else is a participant within that dream’s ambit – an ambit I’ve allowed the dream to have. The liar is the one who makes what he does absolutely true. This the knack that I now settle down with as a comforting prop, while sleep overwhelms the dream with its own brand of seeping darkness. It doesn’t matter that I drown in death, because I am certain in my own way that I shall survive it by lying about its aftermath. After life. After death.

She lifts her skirt as she leaves the dinner table, wondering who had been due to sit in the chair opposite her, partaking of bird soup ladled from a huge chipped tureen. A dinner guest who hadn’t turned up – as the host had explained – because he had died suddenly that very afternoon.

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Greg returned from the dinner party and stared at himself staring back at himself from the chipped wardrobe mirror. Wondering, extrapolating, brainstorming, lying – and none of it made the context obvious. The woman opposite at the dinner party he rather fancied, despite her aggressive nature. Beth was her name – introduced by the host in such a way as Greg suspected match-making. Another lie in the making.

Back in his flat, the face in the mirror began to talk. Greg’s face – showing not a mixed race, but a mixed class. The barely sprouting fuzz on his upper lip belied his youth, but the eyes spoke a working-class directness and a raw but instinctively astute naivety together with mechanical awareness … whilst the moving lines of his lips forming the speaking mouth indicated a more academic or professional or at least clerical/ administrative slant. The face spoke and he could not stop it speaking.

Pinnochio’s nose grew longer when he told lies. Yet we have no easy way to judge lies in real life. There is a question whether a single lie, once told, creates other lies in its wake, then radiating, spawning more lies, new and different lies living off each other – like a butterfly theory of chaos – moving round the world like a disease till everyone tells lies, Russian Doll lies, until they return to the original liar himself who accepts them as truths – because he started them in the first place and he has persuaded himself, by being in denial, indeed has simply forgotten that he lied in the first place and that he had started them moving round the world. Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies…

Greg smiled as he realised that the face in the mirror had come to a halt … frozen like a sepia photograph of one of his Victorian ancestors … gradually growing yellowy, staining the surface with feathery fibres between the beige-ridden silver backing of the mirror and the front glass itself: spraying apricotty ice follicles across. He imagined, not a nose growing longer with each lie, but a small white feather beginning to sprout from every pore of the skin. One feather per lie. The originally bendy bone of each feather’s spindle fused with the bones beneath the skin, all their flossy sprigs striving but failing to be animal fur. Everyone’s blood is normally red, whatever the skin colour, yet the thickening plume-spindle bones of the werebird’s new covering turned it into an utterly pure white consistency dripping to his flat’s carpet…

(THE HAWLER continued here: part fourteen)

Later:
In continued search of the children, Greg & Beth take a trip on a Jules Verne holiday down south, while Mike & Susan end up at the top of a very deep well or pit in the northern coalfields.
Recommended background reading for the former scenario:
WHEN I WAS AN OLD MAN Zest 1998

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