Nemonymous Night (2 page)

He gingerly walked across the park ground. He wondered what stage of the housework Amy would by now have reached. Cleaning the bedroom carpet was never a joke and only attempted by Amy once in a while. He glimpsed Susan and her two children (including Sudra or Sundra) playing on the distant swings and he even thought he saw Susan waving at him. She wasn’t always that friendly. Mike was a hawler, after all, and most people instinctively treated hawlers with a cold respectful shoulder—or, otherwise, they would have given away their presumptive knowledge of any hawler’s identity. Mike, if he thought about it at all, believed himself to be the only hawler left in the country, if not the world, or the only
practising
hawler. He felt tears prick out at the thought of Amy. The ground was cousin to the carpet as he sensed his feet shudder, listen to his thoughts and plumb his sorrow. Others felt such shudders as imaginary earth tremors or, at least, that was the best thing to believe them to be. Upon any other way, lay madness.

Or a plate of sizzling beef. But, first, duty called as Mike plucked up enough courage to approach Susan and her children, leaving any residual thought of Amy to the vacuuming.

*

Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. Mike often created images like these in her mind.

“What to do,” she asked or stated. The carpet cleaner churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the earth wire failing.

She was back a few years before. Mike had not come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. She recalled that her brother had always been a bit of a loner, non-expressive and wild. He concocted experiments with household goods, mixing them into a chemical syrup by means of adding garden mud to substances like washing-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. These misalchemies were alive—at least in her brother’s eyes and Amy laughed as she remembered their mother’s remonstrations of despair while she tried to talk sense into her son but merely ended up communicating with the “cowpats” of mixture he had left in his wake. At least he did the experiments outside. And indoor fireworks only came out of Christmas Crackers in those days, so they were not an all-year problem: those sizzling wormcasts on the seasonal carpet. That was a Godsend.

Amy couldn’t remember her brother’s name. It was as if he had never existed. Her mother was a Mrs Cole, Edith to her friends. Amy was
afraid
of remembering her brother’s name because, by dragging it from the past, trawling it via the coarse-grained muslin of memory’s filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything Mike had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a booby-trap—and she continued scraping the lower surface of the vacuum across the grit in the carpet that had collected there like any dust collects there... from wherever dust and grit and, indeed, stains come from—a mysterious source only hawlers are able to fathom.

She couldn’t really countenance that Mike had more than one job on the go at once. She wanted to be his only subject—because being a hawler’s subject was not dissimilar to being in love. Unadmitted love, true, but love nevertheless. Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. A scene of a park so cultivated its grass was more like a plush lawn for the toes of effete royalty or fairies. She saw it in her mind’s eye, but failed to recognise the fey walkers that positively languished in its heady Proustian delights.

*

Amy had once been a child herself—self-evidently.

“Amy! Where’s Arthur?” screamed Mrs Cole. Edith looked out into the garden where Arthur should have been at this time of day, especially bearing in mind his slippers on the floor and his coat gone from the door-hook. Amy was nowhere to be seen. The meat in the oven was burning, so she rushed off to adjust the temperature gauge—knowing that slowly-slowly-caught-the-monkey. Amy was never a worry, as she spent her time not worrying. Someone who didn’t worry never gave worries, Mrs Cole knew this instinctively without articulating the thought. On the other hand, Arthur was a big worry—as he always worried about going out, worried about fulfilment, worried about the ever-increasing need to mix quantities of the world together to see what gave.

Mrs Cole, having finished with adjusting the oven, knew that one of her two children was bewitched and the evidence pointed to Arthur. She reached the apartment window again and eagerly scanned the inner square between the walls of the four blocks that formed it. There was a solitary fountain at its centre—and a few all-weather seats surrounding. Not much for children to do in the square but it was certainly better than the city streets amid which this square was a relatively safe oasis. She saw a huddled figure on one of the seats and, believing it to be Arthur, she called from the window for him to come in. She’d forgotten why she needed him to come in at this precise moment, but the need was one that had become a bee in her bonnet. The white face looked up. It was Amy. And Mrs Cole unaccountably shed tears... followed closely by desperation as she saw a taller figure enter the square. Anyone needed to enter the square via the apartment blocks—so the place was not exactly public but the security was lax. And where was Arthur? The figure in the square was too tall to be Arthur although he
was
growing too quickly these days.

Being at the higher end of the block, Edith Cole felt helpless, should there be any crisis moments in the square far below.

The head teacher had just announced his visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. He’d come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both... at once.

“Hello, Mr Clare,” said Mrs Cole, opening the door. She had put any problems to the back of her mind, as if she predicted even bigger problems arriving via Mr Clare.

“I’m glad to catch you in,” he announced, not waiting for an invitation to enter the flat.

Mrs Cole wondered why he hadn’t made an appointment. This was the second time he had arrived this way. She planted her feet on the ground, expecting the worst, bracing herself for something dreadful she didn’t really want to hear. But a carpeted floor several levels up in the air was hardly the
ground
, and she felt no assistance from this attempt to earth herself. “Get a grip!” she said quietly to herself between gritted teeth. She heard several conversations coming up to her from below—a cacophony of different groups of families in the cross-section of abodes beneath her feet. They spoke of frightening things, childish things, trivial things…

“What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?”

Mrs Cole was still an attractive woman and she knew Mr Clare better than he knew himself. She could see it in his eyes.

At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their head teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur’s hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large truck. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl’s keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it as if it were real plastic with mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Mr Clare?” Edith had advanced from offering tea to giving him the chance to share the meat sizzling in the oven. He had not really answered but had decided to occupy the armchair in front of the old-fashioned TV, without even a word. The fact he had caught Mrs Cole at home seemed in itself sufficient to create a successful mission.

The trouble was that not one of them knew what the others were thinking. Yet there had to be a lot of sympathy for all of them and that sympathy cost more sympathy, growing and growing cumulatively as the events overtook them at later stages some of which would never be known, let alone described. Each person would take turns to feel... to feel deeply... for the others and themselves. All that was needed was patience. Meanwhile they were simply playing at life, without understanding any of its rules.

*

Mike was quite ordinary and nobody around was expert on what made any man tick—so that all that could be said about him was his ordinariness. Not exactly nemonymous—in the true sense of that strange word we all grew to know... eventually... despite its difficulty to say or to understand, because that would have implied that he was anonymous to the point of non-existence. And Mike sure could lift a few spirits with just a few chosen words from beneath his mask of ordinariness. He lived a full and useful life because of his ordinariness rather than despite it.

Although ordinary, he felt responsible, more responsible for the world’s affairs than he had the right to be. At an early age, he had felt the hawling power in his mind, in his hands: a power that actually was fed by the ordinariness that was his essential default. He saw—instinctively—layers of people passing down a lift shaft, spending time on each floor till they either reached the ground or the top. These layers of people were going both ways, in fact, not just down, passing each other, sometimes changing direction more than once, but staying, for a while, nevertheless, on each floor—getting to know the others on that floor, then proceeding on... downward, after all, or, yes, upward. Hawling was not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the buttons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashed and resulted in the lift-doors sliding aside... new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there was more to hawling than that—it was running a butcher’s shop, listening to the carcasses crack as you lay in bed at night. He was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on... and eventually extinguish with a dying wink... which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from Mike’s mine. It was all this... and more. Mike would only discover the ‘more’ when the time was ripe or if he became mine, if not me, himself.

He had just watched Amy Cole riding up and down the utility supply shaft of some inner city tower. Her brother, whose name was unknown or forgotten, was the one she was seeking, having lost him in childhood, when they were both suddenly orphaned. Their mother had been hauled off from them one unexpected day whilst they both played outside among the makeshift dams and rivers of slurry which pleased her brother so much. Amy even lost Amy, lost, at least, who she was and what her years were or bloodcourses were.

Mike had then watched someone else. Susan and her two children running through an unkempt, shaggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. They were all chased by a figure in a cape. Mike desperately wanted to help them but, temporarily, his hawling skills were stunted by the experiencing of the traumas of other families slipping through several dissolving floors towards a huge pit in the earth.

Mike woke in a cold sweat. He put one foot outside his bed to ensure at least his own bedroom floor was still there. Amy snored beside him, mercifully, it seemed, free of the dreams that had just beset him... or were still besetting him.

*

Mike often reminisced about the time he worked in an office, mostly as an administrator, but also as a consultant or salesman, a business that often concerned very complex financial matters. He used to entertain clients at sporting events or orchestral concerts, lunched important representatives from other Companies, attended Board Meetings across the country, driving all manner of distances in a day. He couldn’t do this now, but, in those earlier days, he used to manage stress much better. It was almost like a dream. He had a family, then, too—Susan was his wife and his two children Amy and Arthur. Amazingly, they were still his family today, having put up with him all these years. The children had grown up, of course, and left home. It was just him and Susan now. Susan went out to work and he stayed at home: a token househusband. So, there was a lot of time for reminiscing.

His body was the most mysterious thing about him. He could easily fathom his own mind—but his body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that he—his mind—walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to him, obviously, because, if it had, he would certainly have considered himself mad. Bad enough even to
skirt
such touchy subjects amid the other reminiscences, let alone delving into them.

Those corporate entertainments he remembered as uncomfortable sessions, when he often felt invisible. Eyes grazing him, edging even nearer but, just as quickly edging away to gaze elsewhere. He used to try to fathom the faces in the dance of business and artifice—and wondered if any real minds lay behind them, as they tried, like him, to balance a drink and plate, whilst making small talk before the concert started. Brahms’ Double Concerto with Nigel Kennedy and Robert Cohen playing the violin and cello respectively—the concert music easing away the thoughts, as Mike merged with the rest of the audience who, eventually, clapped as one entity: one nemonymous creature of applause with the merged thought that they remained single entities.

*

The clues as to what a hawler really
is
sometimes come together piecemeal, often obliquely—rarely in great moments of clarity.

Amy had finished the vacuuming. The man she knew as Mike often popped in so as to see how she was doing. He evidently fancied her. She needed to be checked by someone at least and Mike was representative of the Letting Agents. He needed to follow the rules and rub a finger over a sideboard top to see if it collected dust. He turned a blind eye to the carpet. In any event, Amy’s job did not reach beyond vacuuming it—and any deeper cleaning would have to be commissioned from a specialist steam-cleaning organisation. Mike usually trusted her to lock up after she finished. A good working relationship. No doubt, one day, he would try more than just fancy her from a distance—she knew. Men were like that, despite the existence of a wife and two children. He referred to his wife as ‘the wife’, but perhaps hawlers were allowed to have more than one wife; indeed, one day, believing X was his wife, whilst, the next day, believing Y was his wife—and on those separate days, he was only aware of either X or Y respectively, depending on what day it was. Hawlers were a confused bunch... if there were more than one hawler in the first place, and Mike may have been the only one.