Weirdtongue (54)

Continued from: HERE.

(Slightly amended: 2 Sept. 2006)

In the same way as a character becomes thinner without words, when a novel doesn’t have enough words it becomes a novella or novelette. And if you suck out most or all of the words – as the monster Simplon threatens to do – then you have only a story left, or even a prose poem or vignette, followed ineluctably by the blinding blankness of an empty page. I doubt whether the last paragraph of the previous chapter represents Simplon’s natural words at all. They seem too sincere. Too optimistic. Too deft.

I now need to pre-empt Simplon's cynical methods of by-passing the Narrative Hospital, pre-empt them with the use of his own ideas about the finale, thus saving this work at least as a novella. In this way, I cauterise it. Preserve it at its current length and consistency.

The circus finally left its pitch near Wells Cathedral and travelled England’s new deserts along the banks of the dried-out yellow river towards Glistenberry – if only for old time’s sake. The Weirdmonger wished to sell his remaining desiccations of rudery at a makeshift Wagger Market. Just one more Death’s throe before the final curtain.

The Torless hill was no longer a Magic Mountain. The Weirdmonger wondered if perhaps the whole Earth itself was the Magic Mountain with a trick or two left up its volcanic sleeve to perform at the greatest Festival of all. Wishful thinking. Or perhaps just another Death in Venice. Or Suicide in Samarkand.

Yet it was a glorious day. The sun stood still, it seemed. And thousands built a massive stage near the ruined Ruins of Glistenberry Abbey. No longer a need for a tent like the Big Top. The whole world could today look and listen, with no entry fee at all. No cost to read about it. Just, hopefully, a magnificent panoply of art and entertainment.

Rutland Boughton’s opera The Immortal Hour was performed with flair and majesty. Followed by the guest appearance from the realms of reality itself by that fine group Goldfrapp. Finally a recitation of Proustian prose to the backdrop of chamber music by Saint-Saens. And four girls called the Supremes – a name borrowed from reality. Their smiles were broad. Their youth rediscovered without having to grow old first.

The Weirdmonger proudly acted as Master of Ceremonies, wrapped in nothing but bronzed and tattooed skin. He’d forgotten his wild youth when the words on his skin had been ruder. Today they were mellifluous and meaningful. Body-words newly branded by the fire of passion in his loins.

Then it became more of a circus again, rather than a music concert. First a clown with red rosettes who made origami models of sea-vessels with newspapers and sculptures from balloons and dreams from ring-cycles of smoke. He even tricked the audience into believing it was real magic.

Then the etched ‘writing’ of snail trails and trapeze acrobatics against the bluest sky imaginable, beating any wash-day into a cocked hat.

And, with a brassy flourish, Mary of Mangle strode from one side of the stage, Captain Bintiff from the other. Hugely tall figures that seemed to walk on stilts without the necessity of stilts. They mock-fought for the possession of the Weirdtongue. Cut and thrust. With stage blood. Until both of them shared their fleshy plunder with the silence of an eternal deep-throated kiss.

As an echo of Shakespearean power as well as a quaintly miniaturised mirroring of the kiss they had just witnessed on the stage, our two main protagonists, Gregory and Suzie, emerged from separate air-raid shelters to share their own long (if not eternal) kiss. Only ceasing to catch their breaths. Their names or lineage now irrelevant to their love.

As a coda to the performance – a perhaps more serious moment by which the New Glistenberry Festival would be most remembered – there bloomed, in increasing stridency, Penderecki’s 'Threnody for Stringed Instruments', while six million bony human creatures emerged from the ground, flushed from their lairs into freedom, ready to clamber, like stick-insects, over the hopefully soon-to-be-grassed-over-grazed-over-again fields of the Summerset Zodiac.

We shall never know whether the Weirdmonger recognised the clown with red rosettes. Because, as dusk swells within our vision like fairy gold, we must head back towards our own reality.

“Gout cat! Spout cat! Watch their whiskers sprout, cat!” – a costermonger’s cry gently echoed as it silted into the horizon of the wonderful place we’d just left. Never to return.

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Apocryphal epilogue: HERE. This foreshadows DFL's next novel 'Hiver Jawn' (Don't Eat Yellow Snow.)

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