Weirdtongue (40)

The inmates of JCP House were still mostly asleep when the erratic alarm started to wake them one by one. They all slept in the same dormitory; they managed to get along with each other despite the rather spartan living-conditions. The place seemed ages old with no damp-courses and only running water at certain times of the day. Although surrounded by countryside, they were near enough to the nearest town to have expected much better facilities. But they were handily situated for the various entertainments that passed through the area occupying the configured fields beneath the Tor. The various Circuses or Fairs or Festivals rather serendipitously wandered throughout the land, all arriving at this particular cross-section of place at one point or other during the year and never simultaneously. That immaculate timing was a miracle in times gone by. Not so miraculous, however, today, with the availability of mobiles. A ringtone reality that not even ‘travellers’ could avoid. Or maybe they would have arrived unsimultaneously whatever the means of communication? Books were not written about this nor was there any wider-spread information via the news agencies, and hearsay was, of course, heretic.

The occupation of the housemates – when not attending the entertainments – was the cataloguing of books for later research by others in different parts of the JCP Foundation. But not only cataloguing. They repaired the spines and bindings and stitching and varnished some ill-finished books and restored pages that had suffered deep foxing. It was even rumoured that a few of the specialised housemates were given authority to alter some of the books. An over-arching rule prevailed, however, that none of them were allowed to read the books, not even the specialists who could alter them. Anyone caught reading one of the books was inevitably punished. And one would have to resort to hearsay to establish the nature of that punishment. Alteration was therefore tantamount to faith.

The research itself into the books thus processed at JCP House took place elsewhere. Even these researchers themselves were not allowed to read the books from cover to cover. Each was given only a part of each book to read. The system of which-part-was-to-be-read-by-whom rose in a pecking-order or hierarchy of decision-making. But that is another story. Elsewhere.

The inmates at JCP House yawned as they each gradually reduced the level of the strident alarm when leaving their beds one by one. It was therefore in their interests to wake and rise as gracefully and quickly as possible, despite the propensity to be grumpy and sluggish. Gracefulness and good will seemed to reduce the level of the alarm in itself even before rising from the bed.

It was difficult to keep relationships secret in JCP House. Such close-quartered living conditions made things rather claustrophobic and the intermittent allowed visits (‘holidays’ was not a word allowed on any lips nor any of its synonyms) to the various outdoor entertainments hardly lifted the pressure-pot. One couple considered to be an ‘item’ called A and B (for ease of reference) were characters where, for once, it was not coincidental that they resembled real people. They were real people. It was coincidental, however, that they resembled a pair of fictitious characters called Greg and Suzie. The only difference between ‘A & B’ and ‘Greg & Suzie’ was that the former were real people and the latter fictitious. It made their love none the less, however. In either case.

A and B (resemblances to Greg and Suzie respectively) often used the same carrel within the house – a makeshift alcove combining an ancient chimney-corner and a draught-excluder papered with rather garish birdlife, preening themselves by depiction as well as by torn paper in place of feathers. The floors were carpeted plain beige, ill-tufted by wear from decades of housemates acting as cataloguers and traipsing with armfuls of books from source to study. Even centuries.

The source of books was refilled piecemeal by old-fashioned carts that doubled as provisioners for the kitchen which the housemates took turns to man. The same carts also took away the slurry. The housemates grew accustomed to the faces of the carters: garrulously grizzled countrymen in the main, interspersed with unsociable youths sporting precocious beginnings of tussocky beard growth that was dusted by the hot hustling winds in summer or given a seasonal icing come the cold winters so prevalent in the Torus area. The latter carters often doubled as supporting acts during the Glistenberry Festival. The former as roadies.

One day (during a long stint of ‘cataloguing’ from which memory had effaced any known beginnings) A turned to a page - ready to take authority over a proposed alteration. He knew when it was alteration day rather than simple itemising day. The morning had started with a treat: porridge laced with jam. Followed by ring-sausages upon a bed of ox tongue. A special day. But not special enough for pancakes drizzled with molasses by which really special days were portended. Still special enough to use an altering pen, however.

He smiled at B who shared the same carrel. She had guessed, too, this was a special day. The pancakes were missing because the carter in question had forgotten to bring the ingredients. The pancakes’ absence, she assured A, did not necessarily exclude this being a really special day. He laughed at her naivety.

They took a surreptitious kiss that the carrel was sufficiently private to conceal from the others. But then it happened. Inadvertently, A read a paragraph, instead of simply altering it.

The nurse plucks my fingers from the bowl of book, teasing the letters n-e-m-o-p-h-i-l-e back upon the slowly reconstituting leaves and then leaving them outside to dry into w-e-i-r-d-t-o-n-g-u-e. The frontispiece was never discovered as I had swallowed it. They always said I had swallowed the dictionary. Wordiness and worry, that was my fate. Maybe that was the cause of my ambivalent health. A mixed blessing, if being full of words meant one could dream with the requisite words that one was empty of them.

He did not read it just like that – from beginning to end – but piecemeal, as his courage coupled with curiosity grew. Whether he absorbed all its sense is doubtful. Even a straight reading would not have unlocked the whole sense. In fact part of him suspected it didn’t make any sense whichever way one read it.

He compounded his culpability by showing it to B who – by a gullible instinct too sudden to prevent – read the whole paragraph from beginning to end, not even piecemeal as A had done. She was shocked by her own action and stared guiltily at A. Then accusingly at him as if he had led her astray. How could he have done it? Even love couldn’t forgive what had just happened.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, trying to regather some semblance of self-possession.

And then they knew what their punishment surely was – as her words flew bodily from her mouth to his face where, initially, the interrogative hook buried itself into his skull: heat-seeking then homing in on the soft-bellied brain. He did not dare to reply to B’s question, in case his own words would attack her in the same way as her words had attacked him. The pain was redoubled by the fact that A and B were real people. He screeched in pain. And the voiced pain itself formed into a word contained within its own sac or cartoon bubble and flew like a vicious wasp towards B, emerging from its chrysalis at the exact moment of impact. The very words that had constituted the passage that had been read or misread in the book also summoned up their own letters’ sinews for attack - initially restrained, thankfully, by the varnish that another housemate (during earlier cataloguing and repair) had applied lightly to the face of the page where those words appeared.

Before the repercussions of repeated ricochet by attacking words could become established, A and B were quickly separated by some other housemates who had gathered what was happening and hustled to different parts of the house for dewording. Sadly, such a process of brainwashing made things whiter than white and less prone to love. Such enforcements became unreversable thoughtlessness as all thoughts were necessarily prefigured by words. A and B were later that very special day summarily evicted from the house by Mary of Mangle herself and sent their separate ways back to the fictitious life of concocted characters that resembled them but were not them. Never meant to meet again, even in fiction. They couldn’t even mourn the loss of their earlier deeply loving thoughtfulness for each other. To have loved and lost it is one form of sadness. To have never loved at all was sadness beyond measure.

'Weirdtongue' continued HERE.

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