The Hawler (part twenty-two)

All those children who had earlier left the city along with Amy and Arthur – or along with the foreshortened versions of Amy and Arthur as they subsequently turned out to be – were evidently seeking apertures in the earth but carrying out this search without any known conscious reason for so doing.

They had, however, in hindsight, been ‘lie-fixed’ to seek further apes for breeding – and these apes were said to live in caves. But that begs the question, how deep can a cave become before it loses its identity as a cave. Even Plato’s Cave was above sea-level. Surely, the deeper a cave becomes the more it approximates a pot-hole. In its turn, the deeper a pot-hole becomes the more it approximates a terrestrial oubliette or unhawlable cache – especially as there is no access from the surface to reach such an oubliette or cache.

On the other hand, the children themselves were, perhaps, apes in the making, having been force-fed some mutant form of Angevin to reverse the evolutionary process. History apparently was full of Angevin Apes and they played a large part at the Battle of Agincourt, but exegesis of primary sources (such as excision of any knowledge of the infections brought back to England by Henry The Fifth and his cohorts) has ensured that vital components of the need for apes today and what part they played throughout Toynbeean history are now largely forgotten.

Some children, as already hinted, did, however, remain in the city, either variably untouched by the ‘lie-fixer’ or simply too lame to travel far – and these children now ran wild, because many of their previous external authorisers as well as their own self-discipline were so badly dissipated by every attempt to corrupt all levels of society in age, wealth, creed and sanity.

These children often made visits to the now semi-derelict zoo, believing that its reputation remained as a rare area of surface land where dream-clarification and dream-justification were easiest to accomplish, as well as being a reputed seat for zoological learning, with or without implications to any history (alternate or not) … although the latter was not important to the children, even if they had understood it.

John Ogdon, now increasingly at a loose end as a result of his pub lacking customers for ordinary alcohol, also spent some time in the zoo for its dream qualities, but also masquerading, as an excuse for his presence, in the shape of the zoo-keeper, i.e. the Authorities’ last redoubt against civil unrest amid their pretence it was still a proper zoo where law-abiding citizens could spend a relaxing afternoon as well as to learn about Natural History or Zoological Biodiversity.

Ogdon had now ‘come out’ (to the surprise of every onlooker) as a cross-dresser, strutting as he now did amongst the cages and enclosures in high-heels and a beige frock. The children called him ‘Hilda’.

Crazy Lope was now rarely seen, except, in Ogdon’s absence, when it suited him to turn up in his cape and scare the children with his antics. It was believed that a few dark myths such as those depicted in old Nursery Rhymes were a vital factor in a child’s upbringing, and Crazy Lope was pleased to fulfil such a role. All light and brightness make Jack a dull soul, as the saying goes.

One day, a clutch of these residual children (now much thinner because of various imposed dietary factors combined with the ill-sustenance that general scavenging in the city enforced) turned up at the zoo for a desultory kickaround. The first enclosure was, as ever, empty. The cages and enclosures further into the real meat of the zoo were still no doubt at least partially inhabited by exhibits because they were fed by certain nightly manoeuvres of metabolism and airfly – but very few grown-ups went to check and any such remaining exhibits had inevitably become hearsay, as the children said they didn’t know or deliberately didn’t say anything at all. It was rumoured that the zoo’s many birds had died, claws-up on the cage floors … except for one giant creamy-white poultry-thing that gradually bloated as if its claw-ends had rooted themselves into the ground (via the riven cage-floor) like a massive feathered plant-thing feeding off some unfathomable nourishment. It deeply chirped, but eventually it was mostly silent, still pulsing with some form of dubious existence.

The children – for whatever reason – usually played football around the outside of the ‘empty’ enclosure which had once been assumed (at least in one of the interpretations) to exhibit barely visible insect-life. On the day in question, one child took his eye momentarily off the ball and pointed excitedly at the scrubby soil in the enclosure.

“What are those?”

The others peered over the enclosure’s barrier and gasped. Scattered all over the ground, within the enclosure, were what seemed to be hundreds of discarded toys. Clockwork ones, some budging slightly as if they had been insufficiently wound up. At a closer scrutiny, some were actually trying to burrow into the ground, making a very bad job of covering themselves for dignity’s sake – showing, perhaps, that they thought themselves to be little better than catmuck.

As Ogdon later determined (on his tour of duty as zoo-keeper), the contraptions had indeed been a multitude of mini-drills complete with gossamer vanes on their backs, each attempting – with some difficulty – to penetrate the hardened zoo floor. Meanwhile, in real time, the children were about to climb over the barrier to double-check the nature of what they still thought to be toys, toys with what one of them described as ‘cockpits’, but another child interrupted with a shout:

“It’s Lope! Scram!”

Crazy himself turned into the zoo, intent upon becoming the children’s routine nightmare of the day.

They scattered and vanished into all corners of the zoo, before gathering together instinctively like a flock of migratory birds, only to escape screaming with fright (or joy) by means of the now untenanted exit turnstile.

****
Later, Ogdon, still in full female regalia, was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.

He spotted an evidently off-duty double-decker bus trying to park neatly outside a block of flats and he admired the preservation of such civilised standards even in these outlandish times. The vehicle was having some difficulty because a mini-tipster dumper overlapped the bus’s usual allotted white-lined space alongside the pavement. Suddenly diverted, Ogdon stooped toward the sidewalk where he had spotted some feathery fur sprouting like white mould through the cracks between the paving-slabs, threatening to ooze further up and carpet the world with warm tessellated under-precipitation. He stooped lower to stroke it as if he felt he was in touch with something of which he was fond but would never begin to understand. Never eat yellow snow, was an army expression. It meant more now than ever, as he saw the mould grow mouldier.

Meanwhile, the bus had managed to budge the mini-tipster from its clamped spiky plinth into the kerbside gutter like a clumsily sizeable unwound toy. But, at that moment, a large explosion sounded from the Moorish quarter of the city and Ogdon found himself running with several others to see if he could aid the maimed and the dead.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty-three)

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