Nemonymous Night (13 page)

Greg now sensed one of the helicopter vanes from the Drill’s back flashing by their cabin window like a camera shutter strobing or a dose of rarefied migraine or a foreign flicker at the screen’s edge as an old film was projected upon it.

*

Earlier, upon their first arrival in the Drill, Greg and Beth had met two unexpected additional paying-passengers on board. These were dowager ladies by the names of Edith and Clare—and nobody knew from the way they acted, whether they were just good friends, blood sisters or more than just good friends. If they were sisters, the family likeness was quite remarkable. The Drill’s Captain seemed to know these two ladies already—but he retained a professional approach to any passengers and had promised them all to show and comment upon the various sights through the window of ‘The Hawler’ during the coming trip.

The two ladies were avid readers in the Drill’s library, being particular fans of Marcel Proust’s
Du Côté De Chez Swann
—and there was also much promise of them sharing their reading passions with Greg and Beth, should there be periods during the trip when there would be time for all of them to kill…

*

Ogdon held his head in his hands after he had looked round his empty pub. The headlines of the newspaper in his hands spoke of the mysteries of
Angevin
which had taken away most of his customers—and even those who remained in the city stayed in their houses these days dreaming of drinking Angel Wine... or even drinking it for real.

Nevertheless, there was still activity in the city and, in the distance, he could hear the sound of serious clanking—so hugely riveting—so vastly ear-splitting and ground-grinding—he guessed it was another huge broken ship or liner being forcibly dragged for mending to the Dry Dock nearby. A gigantic contingent of shift-workers and trained apes were involved in its transport to this its temporary berth... and no doubt many of this contingent would be visiting Ogdon’s pub later... but with no bar staff left, he may as well lock the doors now.

However, before Ogdon could do so, he spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn’t his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke:

“Help me, I’m Greg.
Please
don’t let me be Mike. I know it’s easy to confuse us but I’m the one who’s on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I’m desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I
am
Greg.”

Ogdon’s own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.

“I’m Greg,” continued the face opposite. “Help me, I’m Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike.”

It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his glass across the bar and it smashed itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror’s contents.

But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice:

“I’m Greg. Please don’t let me be Mike.”

And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

*

Crazy Lope was settled in front of his drink of Angel Wine, surrounded by the customary sticks of furniture that populated the top flat of an inner city block. He had just switched off his wireless because, he guessed, the news was full of lies. His cape hung on the door-hook like a giant bird-of-prey at rest. He stared at the Angel Wine before daring to take a sip. It was sold like milk in the city these days, without fear or favour, to rich and poor, young and old, sane and insane alike. In fact, it looked like milk, but even whiter, creamier. The supplies had been freed up to prevent a black market emerging for it—yet a lot of money was still being made by those who
were
supplying it. From whatever source, nobody knew. Its original tradename was
Angevin
, but most customers in the city could only get their mouths round the English tongue—and soon Angel Wine (a very evocative name, as it turned out to be, from the mouth of whoever coined it) took over and now it was on all tongues.

Lope slowly raised the glass to his lips and allowed them to sip slowly, then sup noisily, lapping with a relish... not at all like milk to the tongue’s feel or taste, but more a slimy consistency with a fabricated flavour of aniseed which could not really conceal its insipid chemical quality: he sensed a deeper undertaste or aftertaste even more insipid. He was savouring not so much the taste or drinkability for a deadened thirst but more the mental effects that sped to his brain in a direct socket-to-socket fashion from the tongue, or so it seemed. The relishing experience prevented him from spotting that he had accidentally spilled some of the Angel Wine—in a slow motion of the liquid’s sluggish specific gravity—to his flat’s carpet.

*

Somewhere, in a clouded mirror, appeared a wide face—wider even than the mirror itself so that one could not see the face’s edges, howsoever they stretched beyond the mirror’s frame. Slowly, but as quickly as the time passed, the wide face grew cloudier and yellowier—and a beak emerged as part of a narrow face from within the original wide one that faded from around the second face, with a pecking and sharp-nodding combined.

“I’m me.
Please
don’t let me be other than me…”

And tears runnelled down the face like Angel Wine.

The words spoken, however, weren’t from an English tongue.

*

Sudra squatted with her young nude body upon a narrow ledge in the thin effulgence of the hedgy tunnel. Her companions snored nearby—in equally precarious sleeping perches—no doubt dreaming. They had just undergone a long but relatively easy descent so far—and it didn’t seem to matter that none of them truly appreciated the real purpose of their quest. A quest for a quest was the nearest they could come to it. In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts they would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times.

The hedge itself had almost
helped
their descent of passage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected—but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance. The only real problem was the soot-like substance that clung to the hedge’s twigs and branches, a damp consistency that Arthur seemed to recognise (but he kept his cards close to his chest) and that dampness tended to get down their chests causing coughs which they prayed were nothing to do with the more general sicknesses they’d heard rumoured in the city before embarking on this journey. The stickness (not sickness or even stickiness) of the two pursued creatures, suspected as substitutes for Amy and Arthur, was simply more than a dream away—despite their often hearing these creatures crackling (if not cackling) further down in the hedge towards even lower regions than anyone could imagine approaching without feeling the traditionally believed molten heat of earth’s Core.

Soon enough, Sudra herself dozed off on her ledge and dreamed. She dreamed of being a small girl again and of the Christmas when she was due to receive a pair of new shoes as a present. She knew it was a real dream because she was dreaming it far beneath the surface of the earth—and it mattered little that the events in the dream took place above ground and in the past and upon her old bedroom carpet. She simply knew instinctively within (and, later, from outside) the dream that it was a real dream and not real life—although the dream was
about
real life, a real life from the past, filtered by both her dreaming and waking minds—so it was uncertain whether the dream was exactly how the real events once were—but they were surely close enough to reality to be called a reflection of reality in the future of the past, Sudra’s past.

Those promised new shoes had been important to her as a very young girl that Christmas: more important than anything else before or since. Even the flies in the cabbage were forgotten when she turned her mind towards the prospect of the new shoes that she had been promised. The flies in the cabbage had been originally important because she’d been instructed to clean the cabbage ready for supper and the task had now taken on a frightful dimension when she discovered a nest of black stringy flies at its heart. All she needed to do, however, was to think of the new shoes (which she imagined as supple yellow leather with blue laces)—and then all the troubles that beset her young mind seemed to be assuaged, healed, removed to a new dimension where she did not exist and if she did not exist there why should she worry about anything that happened in that dimension? This was not exactly an out-of-body experience but more a projection of a troubled ghost from her body into areas where that ghost could be left to cope with problems by paradoxically escaping the same problems otherwise besetting her real self—here—today.

She dreamed about all that in the future but once upon a time she had lived through it all for real, indeed lived through all such thoughts as real thoughts. She tried not to recall who had told her to clean the cabbage. It was probably her late father (whose name she had since blotted from her mind). He had been a nasty man. She hated him and pitied her mother. She was later pleased when he died and Susan eventually remarried, and Mike became her stepfather. But in those old days Sudra pitied Susan having to live with such a nasty man as her real father. It had been Susan who had promised Sudra the new shoes—and, as the words ‘new shoes’ returned to Sudra’s mind, the thoughts of her father, then and now, dispersed into forgotten memories, yet memories that lurked and silently threatened to return should she lower her guard. So as to prevent this eventuality, she kept repeating the words, ‘New shoes, new shoes’, time and time again, until the words ‘New shoes’—more and more quickly said—took on a new meaning, almost a new sound, a new single word: ‘Newshoes’ and she could not even visualise its spelling, least of all fathom its meaning.

“Flies in the cabbage” became another expression or mantra which she tried to enchant with her chanting repetition of this phrase’s syllables. “Flies in the cabbage, flies in the cabbage”, trying to weld the words into unbroken letters and unbroken fragments or phonemes or morphemes. Yet, on this occasion, the spell didn’t work and it brought her dead father to the bedroom door, staring at her, beady-eyed and smiling. Sometimes, smiles were evil. Indeed, smiles were always evil. People only smiled if they wanted to get something out of you, achieve something, delude someone. A smile was always a lie. Even her mother’s smile, Susan’s smile, hid something below it. And at that moment, the dream became a nightmare as a swarm of flies flew from her dead father’s mouth and nose.

She woke with a start. Not from the dream she was dreaming but from the dream she was dreaming
about
.

“New shoes, New shoes, New shoes,” she quickly chanted as she found herself in her dark bedroom—at the cusp of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. She smiled to herself as she saw a shadowy figure with a prodding horizontal beard at the place where its chin should have been—with a long cape-like body silhouetted against an even darker backdrop, a backdrop that seemed to ooze the natural darkness into the room. She hoped she knew who this figure was. She convinced herself she knew the real colour of the cape-enveloped shape, because red wine often did look like black wine when Susan left a bottle of it in a dark corner. The figure placed a package on the bed, with a crinkly paper sound, together with its heavy weight upon her feet that were in the part of the bed where the package had been laid upon it. She sighed and fell asleep with a sense of satisfaction, submitting herself to dreams she was destined not to remember when she woke up on Christmas morning.

The Christmas bells woke her with a steady tolling—and the sun surprised her with its Winter power as it shafted through the ceiling-light and also surprised her how it had not woken her before the bells had woken her. “New shoes” were the first words she spoke—both an incantation and an expression of truth as she pounced out of bed intent on reaching the package left at the end of the same bed from which she had just pounced. The words doubled up on themselves in unnecessary repetitive patterns as if to delay the time before she opened the package, because, even if she herself didn’t realise what was happening, everything-else-that-could-think thought that she would be devastated by the contents of the package and anyone describing these events needed to spend as much time describing these events as possible to delay the inevitable—describing aspects of the room, its carpet, the sunshine, the bells, all of which were quite untrue—in the increasing desperation of preventing the young girl from reaching the package in which she believed were lovingly wrapped new shoes of supple yellow leather and blue laces that she had been promised for Christmas, new shoes with feminine trimming, small studs on the soles to create sparks on the pavement, vestigial spurs on the heels to allow her to pretend she was an elf or fairy—and toecaps of silver beauty that would spark more naturally than the studs without any sharp friction, sparking in the sunlight that still shafted through the ceiling-light as she finally, inexorably reached the package, eager to unwrap it without caring whether the wrapping-paper was torn in the process because the all-important things were the package’s contents, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes that she would wear all day, that perfect Christmas Day—and Boxing Day, too. And, in the end, she reached the package without much help or hindrance from outside forces and she started to unpeel the various wrappings as if it were a pass-the-parcel game for one person. A cunning game for first thing on a Christmas morning. She could not hear her mother stirring—although she sensed the front room fire was already blazing. And, at last, there they were—the new shoes in all their glory. She whispered “new shoes” through her milk teeth, with awe and wonder and an intoxication beyond any angel’s wine. She was past all possible excitement. This was now a tranquil moment, amid the hubbub of her busy childhood. A moment to cherish forever. If a moment could indeed last forever. The new shoes were no disappointment. Supple yellow leather, indeed, and black laces. Not blue laces, but that didn’t matter. The colour of the laces was only a minor detail. These were perfect shoes. The new shoes to complete a childhood. All else could be forgotten.