The Hawler (part twenty)

It is common knowledge, of course, that Beth’s husband had in truth remained in the city – within a safe-house – whilst Greg was currently in the Drill masquerading either knowingly or unknowingly (it mattered little which of these) as Beth’s husband … thus providing Beth’s husband in the safe-house with an alias or, even, an alter-nemo (a more subtle form of alter-ego). Notes to be clarified, scratched the stub of the pencil as it wrote out various repercussions regarding this knowledge.

Beth’s husband, in this way, was rather proud to have become Beth’s real husband, there having been a rather complex arrangement between various parties – including Beth herself – for this situation to prevail. Beth had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed herself – by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the City Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner – to believe that Greg was her real husband. Meanwhile, her really real husband – as yet nameless – arranged various factions back in the city regarding the transport and distribution of the Angevin substance and its offcuts.

The only source for the raw materials that made up Angevin was the cream substance found to be cached at the earth’s Core. As in all scarce resources cherished by certain factions of humanity, there was both a cost and a danger in harvesting it. Or mining it, if that’s a better word.

(1) The logistics of travelling to the earth’s Core, (2) grappling with the ‘Corekeeper’ whose name needed to be fixed and thus neutered for prevention of its impeding the necessary work in the broadly difficult mechanics of the harvesting process itself (details of which will have to be left to kick in later, so that the full implications can hit home in full relevancy), (3) the harvest process itself, and (4) the hawling of the ‘cream’, ie. transporting it back to the Earth’s surface where most of humanity lived and where it could be refined in the ‘Dry Dock’ facility (a mobile industrial complex that was used to fool the other wings of the City Authorities). Meanwhile, barrels of the stuff are in impenetrable containers stockpiled within the covered market (the underground part of it for obvious reasons) and the purest form of it (worth millions of pounds) are now held, by all accounts, in certain enclosed areas of the city zoo.

All these mechanics (some unspoken) – including the inevitable ‘hawling’ process which was more difficult than the earlier harvest process – weren’t necessarily listed out as logically as it seemed. Most of it is a mere summary of Beth’s husband rehearsing the whole tangled process from beginning to end … rehearsing it in a rather fragmentary conversation that he was conducting with a new Angevin recruit who sat with Beth’s husband in his flat housed at the top of the safe-house.

The recruit was evidently female and behind a veil which she twitched from time to time giving her co-conversationalist tantalisingly sexy glimpses of her inscrutable face.

“Regarding point (3), has anyone got any nearer nailing the Corekeeper’s real name?”

Her voice was lilting in a rather Welsh fashion. Her shoes intermittently were scrunching the carpet, rumpling it up towards the table where various official papers sat, papers instrumental to the conference that was still proceeding between the two of them.

On one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which Beth’s husband would later lift to show to the female recruit as part of revealing the Nemonymous Navigation intrinsic to the whole master plan for the contraband and its later distribution – including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went before it.

On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist – depicting a naked man with a beard who had a large white swan sitting on his lap … and he was fondling the long neck in a rather salacious fashion.

The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a Twin Peaks trademarked silent runner, implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, a night bus could be heard faintly droning past. Helicopters weren’t allowed over any part of the city these days.

The flat otherwise was quite neat, as if a cleaner and/or decorator had worked quite hard to spruce it up, but it still showed indelible signs of previous seediness.

Beth’s husband had evidently taken quite a time to answer the recruit’s latest question but, after a while, he pulled a paper from the table. The other as yet untouched papers were neatly stacked – in tune with the rest of the flat – bearing some form of ranked typescript. The paper he had actually picked up, however, was torn along one edge and bore handwriting. He passed it to the recruit.

“That’s the latest guesses. I can’t dignify them with any other word!”

She sniffed the paper, finding it to waft a faint aroma of stale beer. It was a mere list of smudged names.

Corekeeper (Coretaker): Infinite Cuckoo, Godspanker, Dognahnyi, Megazanthus, Weirdmonger…?

The sixth name was illegible and Beth’s husband shook his head when the recruit asked about it.

“Well, we know it’s not Dognahnyi,” he said, “because that’s already there in the list. Indeed I know it’s not Dognahnyi at all, because…”

But then he decided to decline stipulating his reason for it not being Dognahnyi.

“Are we any nearer nailing it?”

He shook his head at the déjà vu question, then continued: “A more pressing matter is that there are various factions at this very moment travelling towards the Core, some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial … some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing…”

“What for? Isn’t such confusion self defeating …. dangerous?”

Beth’s husband shook his head and said: “If it weren’t for the – what shall we call it? – confusion, where would we be? We’d be just like that rabbit frozen in the open by the headlights of an oncoming car.”

The recruit nodded and briefly slipped aside the lower half of her veil to reveal the pique of a smile.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty-one)

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