The Hawler (part twenty-one)

Beth was more impatient than her sister Susan – so she was eager for the Drill to reach its destination and their holiday to begin proper. She had been told to bring all manner of things in her luggage, including respectable swimwear and a high factor suncream. So her expectations were quite sufficiently filled with excitement. But, all in all, she didn’t really know what to expect.

The mention of Susan in her mind reminded her for a moment that Susan had faded from her life in recent times. In fact, Susan had faded from many lives including anyone who was interested in her fate, along with her husband – what was his name? – Mike? Beth could hardly visualise them – and the excitement of each moment prevented memories to fill the less than momentary gaps between those very moments. But they were all later symphonically saved by the portrait dreams (more of which later in this movement).

The actual logistics of the Drill’s journey itself, the means as it were to its ends, she would need to leave to her husband Greg to describe or rationalise or reconcile or extrapolate upon. All she herself could recall was that the Drill’s first penetration of the earth’s crusty rind was carried out with a tremendous amount of vibrating, as the helicopter-like vanes on its back took the strain of the task of industrially churning the excess waste from the downward path’s terrestrial backflow … in fact those very vanes creating that rubbly backflow, as the Captain had called it when warning them about it before the journey started. A wonderful invention this Drill, she assumed, but she failed to appreciate the scale and the complexity and exactly how the various interconnecting devices worked as a synergy of ‘human coning’, as the Captain called it.

Thoughts of the Captain again reminded Beth of Greg. She hadn’t seen her husband for several days and she assumed he must indeed be with the Captain, in the secure cockpit ambit of the lower Drill … being shown better views (better than her own views) via windows nearer the bit-tip. All she could see through her own cabin window or the library windows was the passing sameness of crazy-paved slabs of lubricated earth – lubricated by a creamy oil that the Drill exuded from several ‘pores’ or ‘gills’ along its hull to ease the drag of friction or the danger of gouging by rogue rocks. After the initial teeth-grinding vibration, the Drill’s journey so far had been relatively smooth, give or take the odd crunchy jolt.

Thoughts of Greg had in turn reminded her intermittently to connect herself to the ‘lie-fixer’ – although she didn’t call it that. It was more like the need for beauty sleep or sunbed treatment . It was a contraption that looked indeed more like a sunbed than a science-fictional synapse adaptor with throbbing electronics (which it effectively was). She simply needed to lay on it and be reminded … literally.

It was a rather refreshing and feminine activity to have to do. Far better than those mud baths she took regularly for her complexion. The mud, actually, on board the Drill, derived from loess.

In the Drill’s ornately leather-bound book-lined library, Beth often met up with the dowager ladies, Edith and Clare. It was akin to the coffee-mornings which Beth used to conduct in the City – when Greg was out at work. The turning over of gossip and the planting of metaphorical daggers. Edith and Clare were however more intellectually inclined than any of the previous members of Beth’s hen parties. There was classical music going all day in the library at least as an undercurrent of sound – such as Philip Glass’s Akhnaten or Wagner’s Parsifal. The two ladies often knew the exact name of the music being played and details of the composers. They were also very well read, trying to get Beth into reading Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time. Beth, however, soon gave up – without even finishing the first volume: Swann’s Way. The sentences were far too long for her and too florid – and nothing much happened to the characters (whom she couldn’t really visualise in any event) and what was all that about dunking a petit madeleine cake in a cup of tea?

Beth accidentally picked up a fantasy book entitled Crazy Lope & Godspanker by someone or other, but the first sentence put her off: “The carpet was quite ordinary.” Surely, there were better ways to start a book, she thought. In any event, she didn’t like Fantasy or Science Fiction – and certainly not Horror. The blurb on the back cover mentioned it was an ‘alternate world’ fiction treating of the rabbit plague in Fifties England where the rabbit’s disease – myxomatosis – mutated and spread into a human-to-human disease, thus wiping out the population. Dreary stuff, she thought, slapping the book back on the table, next to Proust.

Edith finally found some classics for Beth such as the Brontës and Jane Austen, until Beth did manage to find some pleasure in this middle-of-the-road literature, even without fully understanding all the social undercurrents of the historical settings. She did however have a good laugh at the title Wuthering Heights. She thought of the Drill as wuthering depths! Dickens and Shakespeare could probably wait for the return journey, suggested Clare. If there is a return journey, thought Edith.

The two ladies were very touchy-feely and Beth finally decided that they were not her type of people, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in such confined spaces. Like coach trips on the earth’s surface, one tried to mix with the other passengers to help the time pass much more pleasantly. Polite standards and talking terms needed to be manicured.

All three of them shared the loess treatment in the form of white mud baths – to tone up their otherwise scrawny bodies. Beth cringed however one day when she spotted Edith eating a bit of it as she wallowed in it.

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At night, after several weeks of these dreary waking hours between her bouts of sleep, Beth dreamed. She knew they were dreams because she was now so far underground, they couldn’t be anything but dreams. She slept in the cabin meant for her and Greg, but by now she had almost forgotten she had come on holiday with Greg. There was not even any intercom to the cockpit, where she assumed, if she assumed anything at all, Greg was being guested by so-called Captain Nemo – hobnobbing as men of the world tended to do.

The dreams were almost literary, if not literal. Quite beyond her control. No doubt her mind had been affected by the middle-of-the-road fiction or literature she had been fed by the dowager ladies. Each dream was a short prose portrait of each person she had once known and thought she had forgotten.

At first, there was, of course, Susan. She saw Susan’s pretty face, prettier than her own, but when they were younger, Beth had been the prettier. Susan spoke and hoped Beth was OK. This particular portrait approached the nature of a nightmare as Beth thought she saw Susan in near-darkness, naked, being scratched by a spiky hedge-like thing.

Mike, too. He, however, was more forthcoming with the circumstances of his scratched-face plight. He smiled at Beth, nevertheless. Beth tried to remember what Mike had done as a job in the city. Was he a warehouseman at the covered market or a lorry-driver in waste management or an office businessman or even a bus-driver? Mike answered but when she woke up from the portrait, she had forgotten what he had said.

Arthur reminded her of someone she once knew as a child, but she couldn’t now place him as a grown-up. She dreamed of him – much thinner – mixing some foreign substance into her bath of loess treatment. Amy was a similar portrait, except Amy was with another girl called Sudra, and they both fought over a pair of yellow shoes (crazy stuff, dreams!) and Beth couldn’t really differentiate one portrait from another.

Ogdon, the pub-keeper, was always a good friend to Beth. He was still this friend even from within his carefully constructed portrait. Like all the other portraits, it was described at great length with elegant words in a carefully crafted syntax of prose. The semantics were fluid, however. Delightfully so.

Beth woke from the Ogdon portrait with a start. The Drill had just jolted so violently all the light had been sucked from the cabin.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty-two)

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