WEIRDTONGUE
by DF Lewis
The Glistenberry Romance
This novella started as THE NEMOPHILE on Thomas Ligotti Online
This novella was written 2006/7
EXPLORE THE NARRATIVE HOSPITAL
“I come here,” the Weirdmonger roared, “to sell Weirds, and Weirds are merely Words that materialize into all sorts of true existence the moment I release them from between my lips…”
Even these introductories squawked into the sky like forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born.
From ‘Weirdmonger’ (Back Brain Recluse 1988; Prime Trade Paperback 2003)
Today I lick porridge from a bowl, mapped with jammy smears.
Forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born? I tried to give myself time to absorb the implications brought by the visitor to my hospital ward. A visitor, he said with wide visibilities of Summerset from a tower on a hill, with the animal zodiac embedded in the fields and hills below. The vanishing sun (he said) silted, rather than lowered, into the broken horizon.
The Weirdmonger never had a name. He was the original nemophile. I had read of his doings. So far only one scribe had dared mention his existence. One scribe, one character. He told me by the end of his visit I would learn his true name. A historic moment. When a scribe’s away, the scribe’s creations do play, they say. Or at least the Weirdmonger said, and that at least made it true enough for me to remember as once being true even before he said it.
“Hey,” I suddenly said, “who are you?”
A nurse looked askance from the other side of the room, presumably at my raised voice. She had been told that the Weirdmonger was a close relative of mine. And I had not gainsaid this. Too late now. I looked appealingly towards her, hoping she would come over to double-check the relative identities of our two dark shapes sitting in the visitors’ alcove near the makeshift library. The nurse called this alcove a carrel. A private study-cubicle. I wasn’t sure. But I had seen many inmates entertaining visitors in this carrel over the years. This was my first time. I was rarely graced with visitors; I had called myself unlucky, bereft. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Visitors came in many different disguises, some lighter than others. And this one today was not exactly an imponderable, but an undesirable.
Many years before, I had spotted a certain visitor being entertained by another inmate; I felt sure it was not that inmate’s visitor by rights because the visitor resembled my mother, a woman who had looked plaintively over at me but left without visiting me. So, indeed, I knew she had visited someone whom she had not recognised at all. Brings tears to my eyes, even today.
During the posy of pauses encouraged by my thoughts, the Weirdmonger had idly picked up a loose book from the carrel table and riffled through it.
“Why are you here?” he said, looking up, instinctively aware that my mind was now empty.
“I have trouble distinguishing between being ill and being well,” I answered. There was a medical name for this condition, but it didn’t fit. I was never cold. In fact I suffered from the heat.
The sun was baking through the window even now as I watched tussocks being hustled by a dry wind.
“My own trouble is distinguishing between present and past,” he countered, with a glinting look of boastful waywardness.
I see him clearly. He has all the features that one associates with yesterday.
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 book’s frontispiece was never discovered as I had swallowed it. They always said I had swallowed the dictionary. Wordiness and worry, those were my fate. Maybe that was the cause of my ambivalent health. A mixed blessing, if being full of words actually meant I could dream with the requisite words that I was empty of any words.
At least I found the visitor’s name on the spine that I never attempted to eat, though it did show gnaw-marks. The nurse tried to hide it. Mummerset. Mummerset was the name. Gregory Mummerset. The name rung up all sorts of futures and pasts, without which this gift of the present would never have been granted. The ward had many inmates that were ever changing their minds. A hospital is made of many wards. We exchanged visiting cards cut from other spines. Then we tore them up.
Through the ward window could be spotted the back-end of the Weirdmonger’s medicine wagon that, as well as trundling away into the slow setting, also created it, brought it gradually into existence.
***
Gregory was officially cured and excused further in-patient treatment, soon realising – as he did by virtue of the cure and his renewed powers of realisation – that part of the treatment he had just undergone in the hospital ward was the disease itself.
[Nemo = Latin for ‘nobody’
Nemophilia had been induced to remove any taint of nemophobia: a variant form of self-mythology. Indeed, this induction of nemophilia – by allowing vacuous urges to be released from their pent-up mind-trap by the hare-chase of hoped-for non-existence – revealed aspects of an extreme nemophobia (self-centeredness where everything was self and nothing non-self). Nemophobia was his more natural state of existence with no disease, which state of being was disease in disguise.
In summary, Nemophilia was the desire to be a nobody, but not simply a desire, but an intractable passion to self-efface or to become both nameless and unnameable. Nemophobia was its apparent opposite by hating that nemophiliac self.
In this way, nemophobia and nemophilia, whilst superficial opposites, were also part of a synergistic, symbiotic oxymoron-relationship, a situation that encouraged further self-effacement by needing to address the self-disgust created by the recognition of the self itself. It also created extreme wordiness of expression as a by-product: an unwanted side effect.
Meanwhile, the quality (or not) of the self itself did not matter; it was simply the very recognition of it (of any self) that created this paradoxical disease (akin but distinct from Dream Sickness, of which more, later).]
His eyes skimmed the hospital release papers as he gradually recognised the surroundings of his own flat, still dishevelled from his absence, but about to be further dishevelled by his presence. The name ‘Gregory Mummerset’ was clearly printed at the top together with his real-world address (this flat) – followed by scrawled officialese, presumably a prescription for his own general practitioner or pharmacist. Gregory did not need to know. He cringed at knowing his own name. He’d rather be called the Weirdmonger. At least that name did not exist as a signpost for a real person.
There came a knocking at his door. He had been brought here only an hour ago by the hospital car. And the car’s driver had knocked upon leaving in the way Gregory imagined he had been taught to do, as a dress rehearsal for the real knocking that now had indeed arrived. Gregory did not believe in ghosts. But he was yet unaware of the power of fiction to produce them in real life. He was soon to learn many things as he was taken abroad on a Grand Tour to all the health spas of Middle Europe. Indeed to the Magic Mountain itself.
He lifted himself heavily from the table-seat (reminding him of the one in the carrel at the hospital) – and opened the door.
“Hiya, Gregory,” said the beaming face of his girl friend. She was soon remembered and Gregory gave her a light kiss on the cheek.
“How are you, Suzie?” he said. “I didn’t have chance to let you know that I was coming out today.”
“I somehow knew, when I saw the curtains drawn,” she said.
He looked over her shoulder as if he expected someone to be behind her.
“Why didn’t you visit me?”
She shrugged. “Mum has been ill. My hands have been full. Sorry.”
“I only had one visitor and that was yesterday.”
“You’ve only been in three days.”
“It seemed like years.”
“Are you feeling better?”
Gregory frowned. He did not know. Part of his bad health was not being able to differentiate good and bad health. “I must be better. Do I look better?”
“You look great. Aren’t you going to let me in?”
“I’ve got nothing in,” he said looking back into the room. “Are you alone?”
“Of course, I’m alone,” she said, taking it upon herself to cross the threshold, ignoring the half-hearted attempts to guard his territory against visitors.
Her shadow – at cross-purposes with the direction of the light – followed her in.
***
Gregory Mummerset was once a boy. He was from a poor family. Or he was told they were poor to excuse or explain the type of clothes worn, the meagre food and lack of television.
“But TV wasn’t invented then,” he thought, as if arguing with those who had somehow taken charge of his past.
He was, however, fully in control of his boyhood dreams. Nobody could intervene upon them. Meanwhile, those who wanted to intervene did intervene in respect of the actuality of his boyhood days themselves. Telling was interference.
He remembered – without fear of such interference – two recurring boyhood dreams in particular, dreams haunting that ancient sleep of his.
The first dream figured a credibly sized modern mobile phone (long before these things were invented) with a dial that most real old-fashioned black bakelite telephones boasted in those days. The sprung holes, however, in the tiny dial were impossible for normal sized fingers to push round, even a child’s.
The second dream was more difficult to describe, if not remember. Gregory could do with some interference to establish the full feel or contents of the dream. But he eschewed it. He required his dreams untouched by any hand, let alone a writer’s. He dreamed he was a woman of mature years and unbecoming looks, the wife of a man in charge of a race similar to a flat horse race from springable stalls or (to fit the era in which the dream happened within his then contemporary sleep), more like greyhounds in traps ready to catapult after the mock clockwork hare, ripening itself for the mad spin round the track. Yet the animals in this race appeared to be sizeable cattle of a strange rumination – and they were lowing in expectation of their own race, as he (or she) inferred. It was dark in the hall outside the ponderously-punctuated-by-the-sound-of-a-clock-ticking parlour where the dreamer was with her baby tuckoo. The moocows were readily pent-up by inferred stalls as evidenced by their crumpled horns and awkward demeanour … about to race along the even darker single-file steepness that vanished upwards like stairs in a small terraced house. The moocows kept twirling their mobile faces upon the spectator at the open parlour door. But what was the delay? A certain dread at even questioning it. The female dreamer’s husband was obviously having problems releasing the cattle because they started to turn ugly in tantrums of sluggish impatience. The dreamer abruptly slammed the parlour door in a panic which she failed to comprehend. A mother’s instinct to safeguard her baby tuckoo? And then she began to feel a deep pressure behind the shut door, gradually deepening further, visibly straining the lock and her ability to push back against it beyond reason. At that point, Gregory’s dream always ended when simpler, yet unreportable, words took over. And maybe the dreamer continued, whilst Gregory woke. Or Gregory truly became a permanent dreamer in a dream world, leaving a different boy to wake. Or he was baby tuckoo itself, aware of the dream by being in the dream. Inference or interference, which of these it was remained clouded. Even today there are no mobiles in dreams.
***
Blasphemy Fitzworth was, as many already knew, a cat's meat man who sold his wares throughout the winding catacombs of streets in Victorian London. The children followed in the wake of his steaming, bubble-sounding meatcart as he pushed – or more often pulled – its tiny sprung wheels. They were often cock-a-hoop with life, despite the mouching, slouching way of dirt and life that threaded their young bones with yellow marrowfat as well as feeding further redless pigments into their bloodcourses. They joyfully shouted 'Feemy' (a foreshortening of his name) when they heard his costermonger's cry in an indeterminate distance, slowly drawing nearer and nearer from (to them) impossible angles of approach:
"Gout cat! Spout cat! Watch their whiskers sprout, cat!"
The legend – not among the kids as they were too young to know – indicated that Feemy Fitzworth was a spy from other times, from other worlds alternating with ours, ever on the search for evidence of greater and (then again) greater Gods than those in which the indigenous peoples already believed. A step-ladder toward the noumenon. Ecumenical, if not economical, with the truth.
The choice of cat's meat vending as a disguise was first described by another visitor to our times, but facts got so crosswired, they have become ludicrously confused with where he was going or whence he'd just been and why. Some even believed that the scribe was Feemy himself. But that confusion was one confusion too far. A first straw that broke the linear dromedary's back. But none knew. None probably cared.
Chelly Mildeyes was one such kid, maybe a kid in disguise, who followed Feemy by becoming a spy upon a spy or, more likely, a reminder of the ghost she replaced. But that is only hearsay. Other texts may tell fresher truths, but today we can only be provided with this one, given any timely exegesis by external sources or not. She certainly mixed in with the other scrawny, tornly dressed kids with a will and a believability that makes any doubt quite parsimonious and self-demeaning.
She plumped a fist into the meatcart's back pan, evidently not eager to clutch at the valves of still heart-beating brisket melts (hence the fist rather than a clawing open palm), but to see if she could do it without Feemy noticing. A devilment for its own sake. Either to enhance her disguise in face of Feemy's own disguise or, more likely, because she actually enjoyed devilment for its own sake. She was soon halted from her childish dipping by the sight of Feemy saluting the sun as a sort of shading of the eyes against its glare. She thought he said he could see Great Old Ones gliding in with huge cattle faces from a direction he'd not expected. Their lowing filled the sky with a monotonous low-key invisible thunderstorm.
It was then he heard his mobile ring – out-trilling the squeaking meat of the middle pan where he'd stowed it.
***
“Want some tea?”
Suzie made herself at home, whilst Gregory Mummerset relearned the art of making the tea he had just offered.
“Hadn’t you better ring her?” she said, idly looking through the parlour window at the empty street.
“Ring who?” came the voice from the kitchen.
Suzie scratched the back of her neck. “Scat!” she said absentmindedly – more to herself than anything else. “Your Mum … to tell her that you’re out of hospital.”
“Oh … yes, I suppose I’d better. Not that she ever cared about me. She never visited. But you say I was only in for three days? Hmmm. But I don’t know her number since she moved.”
“Try her mobile. She won’t have changed that. She’s had the same mobile through six husbands!” Suzie laughed. “Anyway, how are you really? Got rid of the gremlins?”
The word ‘gremlins’ was a euphemism for Dream Sickness, a plague of which had only recently been taken under control by the authorities. The difficulty was to trust that the doctors weren’t under its influence themselves because different forms of the complaint would have caused them to practise equally different methods of treating it. Now the plague was effectively under control, indeed almost one hundred per cent eradicated, anyone claiming to be suffering from it was immediately branded a malingerer or simply work-shy. Gregory was one of the very last patients credited with the validity of the sickness. In various forms, it had different names, most of which Gregory had now forgotten or been forced to forget as part of the treatment. It was still unclear if any form of the sickness was indeed just another way of saying it was a perception of it by someone who was also suffering from it (or not). The names were merely labels of convenience whatever the setting. Once one started studying these factors and sorting them out into the correct pigeon-holes, the hazier became the task itself that had started so clearly. Even writing about these factors at all made them worse. One started with a clear mind – but such clarity laid bare the implications of the sickness which in turn radiated back to the clear mind that one tried to remember as the one you had started off with before commencing the analysis with a subsequent confident hope of future synthesis … thus making even the earlier conversation about tea, mobiles and mothers just a misty memory from another world.
Gregory picked up the phone and dialled the number he found in a notebook as being for his Mum’s mobile. A man’s voice answered: “Yes?” There was a background noise of children shouting in play.
“Is Mum there?”
Suzie stared meaninglessly upon the tea’s meniscus as if scrying for omens, whilst Gregory held the phone away from his ear: his turn for staring … in disbelief. The clatter of wooden wheels outside the house filled the empty hot street with a sign of the Weirdmonger’s return. A wind-ballooning canvas zeppelin marked with signs of a circus… followed by a troop of clowns dressed in advertising sandwich-boards each bearing a single truth.
Suzie shrugged off what was hugging her like a winter coat.
Gregory, in turn, shook his head as he emerged from his own misty memory. He stared at Suzie. “Yes, I’d better ring my Mum. She may have my bank book.”
***
The City of London, well beyond its Victorian allotment in time, suffered the blitz from wartime bombers, lighting up St Paul’s Cathedral from ground beacons poking the sky with spot-tunnels of light and the crepitations interpenetrating such stained-glass-window-filtered shafts of Godness by means of smoke and fire. This was nineteen forty something – not even the narrator responsible for this tranche of fiction or reality being able to plump on the exact date, for fear of triggering unwelcome repercussions further along the time-line (back or forward). The river sounded far too close for this to be a sane London geography.
Padgett Weggs, a dosser who squatted within cardboard bedding quite close to the Cathedral, watched the sky in awe. The old-fashioned bomb-doors slipped their greyhounds of the night for racing against the suicide versions that rained in from the future. Slots of darker night opened up above Padgett. He both feared and loved these slots: fear, because fear was not voluntary; love, because love of his own ease of death would remove him from lovelessness and famine.
He saw more than he wanted to see. He was writing a book in his head. It was either a real book. Or a dream of book. Evacuee children with labelled suitcases carried books in their heads when they travelled miles along railtracks from their family for no greater retrospective safety in the countryside. Because one day the books themselves would explode more devastatingly than the blitz bombs.
Padgett’s book described Gregory Mummerset. A moon-faced man with a beard and glasses, mole on the left cheek. Quite a nice gentleman who had given his name to the Weirdmonger. Padgett needed to read till the end to prove or disprove that the Weirdmonger and Gregory were the same individual, if not the same body. Gregory was out of his depth. The things in his head made it feel bigger. He was getting older without having fully planned for death. It was as if life itself expunged death with a brainwash of busy projects and a false claim for fame. Fame was never immortality. He must have known, surely. His intermittent wife Suzie was just another shadow in a coat, even on a hot summer’s day when the tussocks were hustled by a dry wind. At times, his mind, if not himself, settled at the top of Glastonbury Tor watching the evacuee children arriving for their wartime billets. He made out a bit of the animal zodiac in the fields and hills around. Torus. He wondered if he was a child who would never find his mother again, even when computers later were to allow universal communication and searching into the deepest corners of memory and lost heritage. Blitzed search-engines of food-for-thought as firewalls or screensavers: far preferable to the cheap-cut spam these evacuee children would be faced with tonight.
The book also described Feemy Fitzworth the cat’s meat man as a story within a story. Feemy Fitzworth left the City and Victorian times in general and reached the coast where a harbour drifted into gossamer twilights, rather than the twilights coming to the harbour. He was due to take a voyage for the spice-trails in far off Cathay and Samarkand. Better than selling his version of cat’s meat spam. He missed Chelly Mildeyes, but all the children (including her) had vanished towards forgotten times in which it became unsafe to be born at all. Evacuated from history itself. Feemy’s face was lined. He was a rather stout person who enjoyed being jolly and noisy. Yet he loved the quiet interludes of fantasy that he was about to enjoy. Given the book’s ability to follow him there.
Padgett Weggs the dosser was fighting on more than one fiction front. It remained to be seen whether the nemonities between each front could summon up their sinews of reality. He lost the thread temporarily as a particularly loud firestorm erupted in spasmodically deliberate trials at creating the blitz bomb that would cause it. The Cathedral reddened in pain and grew dark again. He heard the river drawing ever closer, threatening to make the Cathedral a straddling one. He went back to his book, unfolding the corner of the page he had folded down inside his head.
***
Measured out in words. He paced down the street outside the block of flats, leaving Suzie posted at the window of his kitchen to watch him test out a theory. That the canvas wagon that they had seen passing was much bigger than even a huge circus tent, judging by the scale and perspective he was now rhythmically intoning under his breath from the water hydrant to the postbox.
And if this fact were proved, it would also prove that Gregory was still suffering from Dream Sickness and, not only him, Suzie, too.
***
Feemy Fitzworth watched the departing coast slowly vanish into yet another mist of memory.
The shanty-singing sailors were already getting into the swing of things, as the sails bellied out with a wind that belied that very mist.
The horizon, however, soon glowed with a orange worm wriggling along it – and the towers of a city that punctuated it like striated windfarms. The journey had been foreshortened towards this new coast. So much so that narration itself had taken a backseat, suffering its own form of writerly sickness more akin to blockage than dreaming. Continents of imagination diminished to a pinprick.
***
Weggs slowly unpeeled himself from the damp cardboard; dampened not only by the city’s gritty dew but also by his own liquefying incontinence.
London was waking to a blanket beige calm creeping up the sky as a forerunner of a timeless sun.
Ruins steamed, rather than smoked, in the rising heat. Time to regroup, before the next onslaught.
The dome of the Cathedral quickly bared itself of bovine Irreducibles, because, in any sane universe, they could only clamber there out of daylight hours. This dome: the Tor of his dreams inverted into a stone plateau that belied curved geometry except when one imagined it for real.
A crocodile of modern schoolchildren in Indian File, all with labelled satchels on their shoulders, momentarily ghosted past along Ludgate Hill on an imputed outing to see the inside of the wartime Cathedral.
***
The Weirdmonger sat in his medicine wagon, hatching more Weirds in the guise of Words. Nearby he heard the clowns – working beyond their own union’s demarcation lines of duty – pulling the guy-ropes of the canvas Big Top, with groans as well as the sea-songs they had learnt from musical dreams. Varicoloured smears dripped up their faces like tears returning to mascara. One clown in particular – unseen, yet thought of, by the Weirdmonger – plotted to punish any ringmaster who might throw custard pies at him that very night. He left one guy-rope over-loosened and a top pinion awkwardly sited within the rope’s purview of leverage.
Meanwhile, the Weirdmonger left his wagon – himself unseen – to resume hospital-visiting for replacement ringmasters. Too many had escaped, during the current plagues, making an ever-renewable source paramount. So much so, the paying audiences themselves became depleted. A vicious circle that even the Weirdmonger had failed to address.
***
The library was unusually silent as a pair of disembodied hands sorted various papers into the pigeon-holes of the carrel’s wooden face-facing wall. This was a writer who was lonely and did not benefit from the company of his own characters in the same way as these characters benefited from each other. They were firm and fast friends, these characters, when off duty, despite the lack of focussed delineation (so far) in being able to pick them out from any old crowd.
Hence, the need to sort names with personalities and then with physical features by means of the current collating in the abandoned library. Hence, too, the empty shadow – known as nemophilia – welling across him like a blanket mindset of inarticulate ink.
***
The sailors lowered their sails. The ship managed the rest of the long voyage into the harbour by means of a motorised force that was hidden from view. Its noise was gutturally similar to half-articulate human speech. Complete with glottal stops. Feemy watched great flagons of thick black fluid being fed into various openings in the deck, as imputed fuel. All this took him – by means of crudely engineered mechanisms of motive force as lubricated by the flesh of those who worked in the bowels of the ship – from one mist of memory to another. He remembered the stuff he used to sell from his meatcart, liquidised black-pudding, similar to the ship’s fuel in consistency, in look and, possibly, feel, if not edibility.
Feemy had only met the Captain the day before, but by that reckoning, based on memory of duration, the meeting must have been before the voyage started. Or, even, whilst it was still being planned.
The Captain told him that it may be Victorian in London, but the rest of the world would likely never to have heard of the Queen who had given the era its name.
The Captain was the tallest member of the crew but surely that feature wasn't the only qualification for his position in the ranks of navigation. Yet he was the only one who could reach the handle of the door to the wheel room.
As they eye-balled each other over the dinner table in the Captain's quarters, the conversation became flippant and casual, rather than the earlier seriousness concerning latitudes, sextants and galley-slaves.
"Where we're going they speak a language called Weirdtongue," the Captain said, nibbling on some slimy provender Feemy himself had contributed to the ship's victuals. Fishily slimy, despite being meat.
"Oh? Do they have people to translate? I thought they spoke Chinese where we were going," said Feemy.
"We changed tack halfway through the voyage. The cargo was moved halfway across the world so that we could pick it up to return it."
Feemy looked quizzical. Little Chelly Mildeyes would have enjoyed this small talk. Ludicrous as some of it was.
Feemy missed his small customers in the City streets around St Paul's and wondered how he had reached this particular pass in life. A drug-runner was never a job he was ambitious about as a boy. He'd rather have been a train-driver. He scratched his head. Not only was the conversation hitting double-notes of misfired music in the meaning, so were his own thoughts.
"Can you speak Weirdtongue?"
The Captain shook his head up and down and then from side to side, as if the very question was in a language he didn't understand.
***
Gregory and Suzie decided to celebrate his first day out in the world after hospital by going to the circus. This had been a childhood pleasure as a child. And conveniently a new circus had just hit town, as advertised by the tilting airship over the park – where the big tent had been erected and surrounded by a congeries of caravans. And a menagerie of lows, roars, yaps and squeaks.
They left the flat and headed towards the park via his Mum’s place where he reclaimed the bank book he’d left in her safekeeping. She hardly said a word. In fact, she may not have been there at all, and Gregory possibly helped himself by using the front-door key that was kept in the porch under the slipmat.
They first visited a smaller tent with a board saying ‘Friques’, a sideshow beside the main attraction. This contained many creaturely curios that had been collected around the world, living, breathing, usually silent. One enclosure contained a creature so far into its own death, it must have been there and come back again, by the look of it, because it was extruding a substance that had become itself: a substance that was nothing any creature could have produced short of having died and become its own excrement with, in turn, its own excrement, i.e. an excrement’s excrement more foul than its origination as covered by an effigy-skin of itself to make recognition possible. Padgett Weggs, however, did not recognise it was himself. For one thing, there was no mirror in the enclosure.
Usually in such shows, one is not allowed to talk to the exhibits. Suzie was quite aghast at the sight of this thing but soon realised it was the remnant of a war veteran, someone who had helped fight fires during the blitz, before being dossed out into modern times. Or so the poor blighter claimed through a series of glottal stops. It was always good to listen to the stories of old-timers, turgid in tone and register though they may have been. Humouring old-timers was an art in itself. Reliving their highs and lows of life. Encouraging them to prattle on about this, that and the other. Learning, wherever you could, aspects of life that were dying out with the people who had lived them for real rather than fictionally. While Suzie held this conversation with living history, Gregory left the stifling tent for a breather outside.
The park was a strange one and shimmered in the heat. So hot this summer, the grass had yellowed over and the distant church spire – beyond the boating-lake – was a reminder of times beyond reality. That was what heat could do. Make things tenuous. Less simple to understand. Almost providing a protection against the dark implications of transgressed time. Proustian, without the necessity of understanding what the word meant.
The airship was a mere speck on the horizon now, where the gasworks squatted. Obviously set to land elsewhere in the conurbation. The Big Top was just opening its doors, if tent-flaps could be credited with such a description. A beady eye in one of the nearby caravans followed Gregory as he prepared to fetch Suzie from amongst the ‘Friques’. She liked somersaults. And tonight there would be acrobats, as well as clowns. And a ringmaster with a whip for the circling performers on hooves and claws and slimy long bellies.
***
Suzie wanted Gregory to return to the ‘Friques’ sideshow for a quick look at another exhibit. The main circus was not due to start for about thirty minutes, but he found himself reluctant to take unnecessary risks. Life was never risk-free, however, so one needed to create a balance between fear and fortitude.
He had not sensed being watched. So, the next moment, after the arbitrary tabulation, he was relatively relaxed as Suzie took him by the hand towards a very tall figure labelled ‘Captain Bintiff’. This evident once-man was stridently garbed in wolfwhistle leathers. He managed to talk despite the interference from a tongue that appeared side-eroded by a rather tough proposition in sherbet dips or acid drops. Shaggily overthick … protuberant despite signs of premature docking. Stunted, indeed, from further growth by a symbiotic merging with a gum disorder that stretched – with such disorder’s own seeming volition – from its normal hidden lairs of disease where brown sockets hardly held the stained teeth in place for talking let alone for eating … stretched, indeed, to infect vulnerable tissues of the tongue. A tongue hinged by decorative rivets of icy steel. Tipped with a needle from an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone to prevent erosion at least in this business end of the organ as well as to be wielded as a particularly nasty device in the act of love-making. Not that Gregory could imagine anyone willing to submit to such advances.
“Why have your brought me to see this thing?” Gregory asked Suzie. He failed to pay attention to her reply because of Captain Bintiff’s simultaneously louder articulations of mislanguage. Gregory had just remembered the hospital’s promise of a Grand Tour of Middle European health spas, including the famed Magic Mountain retreat in one of the more forgettably estranged countries that used to be part of the USSR. He looked at his bank book to see if it could bear any extraneous expenses not covered by the National Health Service. He never found it strange how his mind could so easily be diverted from interesting events with more mundane matters. It seemed all part of the parcel of his condition. He was shocked to find the account fleeced. And all his loose change having just been used for getting into ‘Friques’. No chance of a circus visit now.
He and Suzie tracked through the gloomier parts of the park, the sun finally silting into the broken horizon at the edge of the city where waste ground predominated and memories began regrouping in gaseous mists over marshland. Then a welling edge of moon grew to a gibbous horn double-tongued by the duty light-fairy blowing all manner of silent music in the shape of illuminations in the northern sky. They listened to the distant Circus fanfare of braying brass as it announced giant snails about to creep sluggishly around in strict formation amid silver-sarabands of glisten without any need of a ringmaster’s fire-tipped whips to spur further onward purpose beneath their slimy soles. An attractive trapeze-artist in a thong fell to her fate amid a shelob-spider’s safety-net of a web. Gregory knew all this because of the nemonities permeating the sticky summer night air with consciously air-borne fluff-balls of forgotten knowledge. However, some forgotten knowledge was so forgotten it probably was never remembered by anyone, in that there was a single shadow following them quite divorced from their own two moon-forced shadows. Maybe a hybrid of all three.
***
The bottom fell out of the market. Feemy Fitzworth – originally fresh-faced with hope in a new career overseas – was now crestfallen, faced with a ship that had abandoned him in a place that could only talk a language called Weirdtongue and an indigenous people who could barely speak any language at all. He could recall the ship vanishing into its own new created distance, tall captain waving from the wheel bridge, and Feemy left with no resources other than buying a cart and selling meat for cats to whomsoever he could find. Two problems: no money to buy a cart and no cats.
What was more, he was no longer effectively ‘Overseas’ as such, now being on this side of the seas. Where he’d come from was now Overseas. Overseas was a moving feast of geographical sense-patterns. Neither sane or insane. Just a fact. And any ambitions for adventures and a new start in the new ‘Overseas’ thus took on a more parochial turn for fat-licking Feemy and left no attractions for this once keen and jolly inhabitant of life.
***
After crossing the ambient park on that memorable nightwalk back to my flat near the marshland part of the city, a light petting session between Suzie and I ensued without further thought of tongues or snails, the first session for however long I had been in hospital. Yet, before this, something has not yet been reported as far as I can see; Suzie and I had inadvertently seen another ‘Frique’ which probably both of us regretted seeing, particularly because, one day, we vowed to be parents if we could ever adjust our weight in the scales of petting. Petting above our weight was never something to be taken lightly.
The exhibit was signposted ‘Tuckoo’ and evidently a baby version of this so-named creature, if not the only version possible, with its adulthood stunted at growth. It had a rubber eraser for a head … and so that’s the end of that. Nipped in the bud. It was always thus unless I could recover my own non-singularity as an information source.
***
Padgett Weggs saw the end of the war. He vanished from the St Paul’s Cathedral area and tried to make a living from dossing in the Clockhouse Estate of Coulsdon, which was in a sort of no man’s land between London and the Surrey Badlands. He had dreams – which he put down to – well, what else could you call it? – dreaming. No one had diagnosed Dream Sickness then, let alone Nemophilia.
One dream was particularly vivid and was sufficiently vivid to make it appear to be a dream of a single dream that he only dreamed once – whilst, effectively, it was a recurring dream over several years. He was an exhibit in a Freak Show that masqueraded as a novel; and, furthermore, he was not just a cipher, not simply a cardboard character in this ‘novel’. He was, indeed, destined to be a major protagonist in far-reaching events that several people controlled but controlled only partially in each case. His problem – until he was next given treatment – was fighting against the substance that was both created on his behalf alternately as sustenance and effluence for and from his body but eventually both becoming (as substance) his body itself, without any emotional septic-tank or stand-by Irreducibles to take or milk the strain.
***
Gregory stared at Suzie – and at their respective mothers who had separately and independently interfered by visiting during the couple’s first session of light petting on return from the park. Both circus and friques forgotten or at least pushed to the back of Gregory’s and Suzie’s minds where any dream sickness sucked but could not stick.
Suzie’s Mum had been ill whilst Gregory had been in hospital. A traditional homely illness like flew or migraine. She was now on the mend and had arrived at Gregory’s flat concerned that he we was about to renew his ‘evil influence’ on her daughter. The guy’s weird, she thought. And Gregory simply knew she thought this so there was not much love lost between them. With many episodes of Lost lost, too, with no TV available in the hospital, he couldn’t help thinking, with a wry smile.
Gregory’s Mum loved Gregory, hence her many failed attempts at visiting him (and no-one else) during hospital visiting hours. Currently, with any dream sickness relatively subdued, Gregory and his Mum had forgotten the baleful glances between themselves while she visited other patients in the visiting carrel, patients she had pretended to be the real Gregory. Equally, mundane matters resumed their importance in day-to-day life with no possible escape into fantasy, real or otherwise. There was a difference between known fantasy and fantasy disguised as reality. But, now, such whimsical concerns – inevitably raising their heads from time to time as they still did – had no option but to retract into their snail-shells, impatiently awaiting the return of any signs of dream sickness or, better still, nemophilia or nemophobia in the minds that controlled such intrinsically uncertain demarcation-lines between (i) reality, (ii) fantasy and (iii) reality/fantasy combined, whilst changing perceptions confused any such ambitions by often being in danger of seeing the actual definitions of (i), (ii) and (iii) as each other’s definition.
In consequence, Gregory’s Mum, showed delight in having rediscovered her son in company with Suzie whom she quite liked despite disliking her mother who was also present. Despite this, Gregory noticed that his Mum kept looking at her mobile, no doubt for text messages from her current boy friend.
“Why has my bank book been emptied, Mum?” Gregory suddenly asked, with a look towards Suzie, as if eye-balling his own mother was not possible whatever the provocation.
Suzie’s mother looked embarrassed and made as if to depart.
Gregory’s Mum looked up from her mobile which had trilled to indicate the arrival of a message.
“It says that he wants more money sent overseas so that he can buy another meatcart,” she said quite innocently, as if changing the subject of Gregory’s bank book was the furthest thing from her mind. In fact the two things may well have been connected.
***
Padgett looked at his own skin. It did not look right, did not look hard and fast, secure, watertight, soultight, Weggstight. Could it roll off the bones in curds and separates of released being? As well as trundling away into the slow setting, the setting also created itself, brought itself gradually into existence. A pioneer and his wagon vanishing from slow sight towards a no man’s land in hope of fool’s gold or great cattle ranches … the setting of a soul into a horizon only the soul knew existed.
He’d dossed there, dossed here, dossed all over the place, in all times and conditions of his own choosing, like a god of a god that was him. No achievements except that of achieving failure as an acceptance speech to himself. And the corrupting skin continued to roll back to reveal the Weirdmonger and, in scatologies of vexed text, he screamed: ‘Bring it on!’ And the trundling continued overland where indigenes were speaking in weirdtongues only understandable if one could listen enough to one’s own in-built Tor of Babel as it overviewed the wide riparian realities of fiction and astrogony as they (these realities) threaded the white-water nemonities in chase of some great eschatological hare of meaning or noumenon between banks of whimsy and nonsense. Banks built from half-rotted bookspines.
***
Despite interferences, Gregory’s life rather entered a plateau stage where mundane matters continued to prevail. He sorted out his mother. He loved her dearly but wept buckets at how thoughtless she was. She was ever the sucker for the confidence-trickster with a fast buck business scheme needing investment. But this last one was the last straw. A fat man who wanted to set up a series of fattening food outlets all over recently tariff-free Middle Europe took the ticket. He wasn’t even good looking and hid all his defects under a jolly confidence in the ways of business … and of love. He had absconded with all Gregory’s savings which Gregory had entrusted to the ‘power of attorney’ of his mother whilst he was non compos mentis in hospital. Why had he entrusted them to his mother of all people? He had nobody else. And, despite all the examples of why he shouldn’t trust her, he did trust her. Mothers were like that. She had brought him up on a pittance and, despite exposing him to all manner of drunken step-fathers and the intermittent periods of ignoring Gregory completely, she had seen them both through. Gregory was Gregory because he was his mother’s son. She deserved trust even if she couldn’t be trusted.
Suzie couldn’t be trusted. He often doubted she existed at all. Just wishful thinking that he could hold down a relationship. Yet she was there most of the time. Proof was in the eyes, both their eyes. He should have given his bank book to her, no doubt. But she didn’t have his blood, his provenance. She and her own mother were pawns in a bigger game they didn’t understand. A game which even Gregory himself, at the moment, didn’t understand.
Gregory shrugged. He almost preferred it when he wasn’t being sensible. Sensible meant worrying, having concerns, form-filling, lying awake at night with no possibility of dreams, linear plots of life, practicalities, no imagination, no risk taking, no vision sharing, no circuses, no clowns…
***
The clown with a black rosette in his flirty lapel was removing the masking cream from his face. Tomorrow they would be lowering the rigging of the Big Top ready for trundling away from this caravanserai to another. He was deeply honourable, deeply serious, yet acting the fool made him feel that he was ever plotting against the unplottable or representing a ‘clandestiny’ that made him a spy amid the frighteningly absurd existentialism around him – and, in the end, it was not laughs he was after, but sobs. Maybe not even sobs, but cries of terror and despair. And that need in him to hurt, of course, hurt him more than if he wasn’t honourable, wasn’t serious.
Nevertheless, he took no blame for the pretty trapeze artist’s fall, because he had earlier retightened the loose pinion in the airy gods of the tall wide tent. He had done this primarily, however, because he knew there was no point in booby-trapping himself. You see, soon after the original business with disabling the props, he was told by the Weirdmonger to act as replacement ringmaster (instead of being clown) for that evening’s performance …
There was nothing worse for a clown to be than a ringmaster. Tears were in his eyes like wobbly transparent snailshells. Let’s hope (he hoped) that, in the new catchment area for the Circus, real ringmasters would not be too thin on the ground.
***
Feemy Fitzworth formed newer and newer fats the more he was described, as if the words themselves – employed by many writers to characterise his body and mind – were ingested by the noumenal construction of ‘Feeminess’, swelling it beyond its otherwise normal configuration as a real or normal person. In other words, Blasphemy ‘Feemy’ Fitzworth – the legendary cat’s meat man who was once so lean and fit – became the very vein-proud mound of pulsing meat itself that he once used to sell (when diced into chosen cuts) as a supply of the cheap piecemeals for any Victorian pets parented within the precincts of Dickensian London.
Rachel ‘Chelly’ Mildeyes – one of the many tiny child-followers of Feemy’s ancient costermongering – was, of course, the keenest hero-worshipping example of those ‘pied-pipered’ urchins who not only enjoyed being darkened by Feemy’s shadow but also slipshod by his meatcart’s greasy trail. However, now, today, in her older and wordier time of life, Chelly has eventually become one of the many writers who threw (and still throws) merging masses of meaning in his direction, not only serving to bloat out his shape, but changing that shape’s very personality from an erstwhile energetic time-traveller – one who heroically hunted down monsters that other writers had gratuitously thrown to the ‘reality’ wind to subsist as new plagues – into one of those very monsters he once thus hunted!
***
Gregory spent many days trying to spin untruths about the past (or unspin truths). This helped him reconcile some of his own behaviour – behaviour which was ostensibly so out-of-character – with his own views of his mother’s attempts to make castles from the shifting sands of her fading love-life. For Gregory, on the other hand, Suzie (his own love-life) was a time-line to a trapeze-act which he could actually hope to grasp in the future. They together followed the Weirdmonger’s circus and its head-clown – a clown who, when in non-clown civvies, sported a black rosette and a cross-ply three-piece suit (whatever the weather) – to other towns and other sites in even stranger parks. Gregory told Suzie he wanted to be a ringmaster, after all. Suzie – in some bemused response more fitting for a ‘Big Brother’ contestant – said he would do well in the Circus of the Tourettes (as it was called) and she would tease out support for him when approaching the caravan or medicine-wagon where such decisions were made. Diary-rooms were not always purpose-built, you see. Dairy-rooms, too, as the bovine racers slowed to a near-halt towards the border between reality and fiction.
***
Padgett Weggs shed yet another carapace of self as he wandered London’s haunts. The whole of history became a circus – a flighty kaleidoscope on one hand, a droning bomb-alley on the other. Middle-Fast fighters churning across the sky in the hope of finding the saint who carried his own skin.
***
Rachel Mildeyes squinted, making her eyeballs feel like snails trying to escape gooey shells. She was at least as old as these bowls of sight: now milky-grey on the surface but with glimpses of ancient feistiness that gave little suspicion of the deceptive mildness of her youthful glances.
She was essentially her own language that she had grown to name Weirdtongue. However, having been given the language or, rather, captured by the language, it actually named itself from her own lips or writing-nibs. Many years a student of the bibliographic catalogues that she so meticulously itemised in her own special carrel at the University of Tourettes Library, she eventually found herself steeped in the various byways and mazes of the wordprint’s lettering itself: a vexed texture of text that had trapped her in its trammels even though she once started life as a simple-minded soul clad by Chellyhood, one who traipsed after city costermongers amid other trilling and cooing urchins of the streets: trying to wring sustenance from the dried-out poverties of fate.
Working out how she had ended up in a University Library as a cataloguer made the sense of each shorter sentence trip out more clearly. The words unravelled into linear stretches of healthy and unmistakeable meaning. She had a knack at the art of logical pigeon-holing and, during the Flew Plagues, she suddenly slipped through a meathole left by the careless Feemy Fitzworth straight into the timeless pursuits of clerical/ administrative work and general office duties in a more mundane world at the edge of Victorian London not too far into its future, indeed a tiny tangent of time in the form of one of those transparent sticky corners used for pasting snapshots into a photo album.
Rachel eventually married Churles Fitzworth – Feemy’s brother – and gave birth to Suzie. Rachel herself had been ill lately with added complications of thought. As had Suzie’s boy friend, Gregory. Now Rachel was worried that Gregory (having been prematurely released from hospital) was leading her astray by following fortunes that even Dick Whittington would have refused to follow, cat or no cat. Yet, it all made perfect sense, with most complications now gone. And she smiled – not at her worries about her daughter Suzie that she tried to put out of her mind but at the clarity of her own thoughts, untouched (hopefully) by any taint of vexed texture of text. She did not need to put out of her mind that Gregory’s own mother was caught up in the business ventures of an ever-fattening con-artist named Feemy Fitzworth because, despite Rachel’s seeming omniscience, she had no idea about these unlikely coincidental connections between the protagonists of her now renewed encroachment of vexed texture of text as she desperately spiralled her fountain pen towards the end of the latest page, with all hope of straightforward sentences of thought now flown completely out the library window into the night.
Rachel slept, head cornered by her arms resting on the carrel table. She needed to sleep off any further vexing of her audit trails. Simplicity became the only cure for an imaginary sickness that was often mistaken for dreaming. Later, upon waking into this renewal of simplicity, she explored the books themselves, rather than merely listing them into a catalogue. This act of listing, in the normal course of events, was the only remedy for complications, but now that she had indeed regathered her own natural simplicity she could actually read the books with impunity, rather than just listing them. She was unable to find any record of informal Dream Sickness or its complications technically named Nemophilia or Nemophobia. It was as if these illnesses had never existed. Medical books were only for hypochondriacs, in any event. She sighed with relief as simplicity continued to flood back into her soul, fading her complications until, eventually, they were written in invisible ink. Any antipodal angst, meanwhile, became funnels of real visible ink pouring away anti-clockwise through the newly released vent of her over-active imagination.
***
Gregory and Suzie arrived on foot – as the Tor and its hill slowly disappeared behind a duskful of mist, a phenomenon that reminded them of a full-blown night sown with melted light crystals from earlier dreams. The circus tent, recently pitched in a nearby field, was almost as big as the Tor and its hill put together, with the canvas filled by a lambency that betokened the dress rehearsals of the acts within. The myriad of caravan windows created glints or sparkles in contrast to the huge uniformity of the canvas canyon glowing by their side.
“I wonder which one?” said Gregory. He looked at Suzie, both of them tired and smeared by their mixture of walking and hitch-hiking since leaving London. Sleeping rough like many such rough sleepers who were already in the vicinity of the tent in readiness for the whole festival of which the circus was the focus. Not only rough sleepers on the spur of the moment’s excitement, but also professional dossers who felt at home in such a gathering.
“Which one?” echoed Suzie. “Which caravan? I expect it’s the one nearest the tent.”
Gregory suddenly felt a surge of depression as he realised there would be much more competition for the role of ringmaster than he anticipated when it had first been mooted that there was a ringmaster shortage – but, of course, that had been in the snootier parts of London. Here, however, it would not be a foregone conclusion, after all. During such preambles of misfired decision-making, Gregory suddenly stumbled over one of the rough sleepers or dossers, little hoping that this was the man he had really come to meet. Suzie had meanwhile taken up with a non-sleeping group nearer the tent, evidently some trapeze-artists trying to persuade her to train with them, as she must have looked lithely attractive and potentially air-borne. Their light prattle of gossip moved the light crystals about with the renewed glint of fireflies or fairies but, then, Suzie glanced back to see if Gregory was making any progress towards his own aims of a circus life, but saw only a pair of snaky shadows slithering into one. Or was that Gregory there being led by the hand in the company of a sharp-suited gentleman sporting a black rosette in his lapel? Nobody could tell the Chiefs from the Indians in this ever-darkening arena beneath the Tor, especially as each disguised the other by the careless merging of identities as once happened when London was first evacuated by the use of false or interchangeable labels on suitcases and satchels..
***
It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Feemy Fitzworth no longer needed a physical meatcart to tote his wares around Victorian London – but, if pinpointed, it was the moment when he became the meatcart himself. So many words had been ingested by his ‘persona’, swelling his glands into even fattier tissues – and he used the steaming heat of the weather that often attacked London in those days to cook the slices he would later slice from his belly quarters and hocks from his hind-calves and heifers from his humpback. A walking carvery.
But without the words he would never have found himself in such a (lucky?) position where he was a self-perpetuating purveyor of cat’s meat for the clipped-back folk of Lower Thames Street. The words used on his behalf immediately turned into fat or flesh or sometimes pre-cooked meat upon his previously lean-shanked hams as soon as they hit the vicinity of his mean gait in front of the soon-to-be-discarded meatcart, discarded, at first, by becoming a ghostly meatcart being towed behind him amid the excited imaginary coos and shrieks of now ghostly children, who had died from food poisoning or simply been stuck up chimney-flues. The cart – in later dreams if not in ghostly form – soon took on the traits of the Weirdmonger’s medicine wagon on Weirdmonger Wheels. Cat’s meat liquidised into doses of linctus to stave off Flew or Quinsy. But then, when the shape of a giant circus tent grew from the canvas wagon, Feemy left the dream before it finished, and dreamed of other things, like the tall Captain Bintiff and his way of talking Weirdtongue. Then, as already indicated, Feemy became the meatcart himself simply because the words said so.
Yet, worse dreams returned to frique and vex the mind of Feemy. He could not endure the strain of toting himself round the streets as a mound of steaming dung disguised as meat (as it later became). He would often doze off within the shade of St Paul’s Dome during the unseemly summers that a backward echo of global warming surprisingly caused without any history books noticing … listening to the ghostly Luftwaffe bombers from the future, while pre-filling the role that Padgett Weggs would later play in a similar position on the pavement (60 years’ hence) as he filled out the silhouette that had once been Feemy’s.
Captain Bintiff stood statuesque against his own larger silhouette, wagging a huge protuberance from his mouth – a rude gesture that Feemy wondered if the school playground chant would be spell enough to ward off the curses from the sound of language thus produced: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names or words will never change me.
Or even ringtones.
***
Gregory Mummerset woke at dawn. He and Suzie Mildeyes had pitched their tiny tent when it was really too dark to do so – and the rain that had seeped in towards their sleeping-bags they blamed on their own amateurish efforts of tightening the guy-ropes rather than on the low quality of the tent itself. They always bought things too cheaply. The buy one get one free mentality that meant people these days put up with shoddy goods just for the sake of a bargain. They feared the ground would become muddy which was an unwelcome feature of the festival held here for some years now in the shadow of the Tor.
Upon yawning, he crawled from the front flap, pleasantly surprised that the sunlight had replaced the rain with its own promising shadows that had nothing to do with the shadows of the night before. Earlier darknesses had been shaken off with the change in direction of his thoughts. Suzie slithered in his wake, then stretching as she stood, smiling at the new atmosphere and the fresh concerns. Many other campers travelled on their bellies to leave their overnight shelters … some with guitars strapped to their backs.
The larger tent that held one of the performing stages was glistening with dew. In the distance, they squinted to see the larger erection of scaffolding which would later bear the main acts. ‘Goldfrapp’ was headlining tonight, the group they had come all this way to see. See and hear. Seeing music was the only way to hear it, especially if there was more to the music than just the sound. Gregory enjoyed loud music when it was in enclosed spaces veritably vibrating the ribs of his body. It was only then he could actually feel he was living within the music. He rather doubted that open fields or tents would do justice to the claustrophobia he felt was needed to contain the sounds.
Goldfrapp’s supporting group ‘Nemophilia’ was already rehearsing in the nearby tent (currently closed to the public), filling the fields with haphazard shafts of jagged music startled from synths. Either tuning up or the real thing, Gregory wasn’t sure. In his quieter moments, he rather enjoyed Classical Music, even the more avant garde versions to which one needed to acclimatise (almost self-brainwash) before the seemingly strident sounds reached the parts of the soul most other music couldn’t reach. He also enjoyed the sedate conversations of chamber music … Schubert, Brahms. Then, in other moods, the decadent prefiguring of modern warfare in turn-of-the-century Mahler followed by moto perpetuos by Shostakovich. ‘Death In Venice’ music by Mahler reminded him of his earlier dreams-of-promise visiting all the Middle European health spas as part of a necessary convalescence from too much dreaming. The mountains were pulmonaries of shiver-veined delight.
He shook off his own shivers – on this fresh morning after a close-stitched night of dripping canvas – by taking Suzie in his arms. He kissed her lightly on the lips and then looked into her eyes that were aglow, awet even, with both a waking love and a desire to live life for every moment it could give them free from any cloying dream. They were, for once, real. They were here. And, as Nemophobia took sway with true rhythms of pre-cast musical score rather than improvisation, they drew breath to lengthen their next kiss together.
Gregory and Suzie, hand in hand, left the communal tented area to visit the various side-shows and sales-stalls and other New Age paraphernalia, whilst listening to a mix of rehearsals blending in and out of each other as the distances changed the angle of each musical attack. Some music – great music – is fiction injected straight into the vein, thought Gregory.
The fields came to life with birdsong – not to be outdone by the music – and other animal life urged forward to graze both in the stylised shapes of the configured landscape and for real as living breathing creatures. Lowing cows traipsed in a line up the slopes towards the Tor itself, a slow race, a becoming breed.
***
“Wagger Market! Wagger Market! Come to Wagger Market!”
The salescries – distant cousins of the strident costermongery in the streets of earlier England – echoed from stall to stall in the light of the shortening shadows. An ice-cream van also interspersed such cries with its own tacky ring-a-ding-ding tunes as it wended from one side of the site to the other hoping that the heat of the morning would fill mouths with more than just mutual desire.
The Weirdmonger had set up his own stall selling the traditional rudery in proud-veined shanks hung upon the vertical canvas counter shivering in the hot wind and allowing individual items of fleshy dislocations of such rudery to shake and rattle like a Cuban backing-track: a sound seemingly at ease with the random rehearsals of emergent music from various stages being set up around the outskirts of the market.
The Weirdmonger’s stall rarely sold rudery 'on the hoof' – but, today, he was pleased with some of his ‘living’ stock – as opposed to the usual oven-ready or ‘new body’-ready amputations and castrations. This being a major selling opportunity during the Glistenberry Festival, many of his wares, this morning, were, therefore, still attached to the people whence they would soon be freshly ripped given a successful sale. Many figures stood with their tongues hanging out in the hope of paying customers for these fleshy pink flannels they had been known to fatten up with bits of real human lung or animal lights or simply words.
Captain Bintiff was the main mannequin – just for show like those huge flagons of coloured liquid that used to appear in ancient Chemist-shop windows – standing tallishly beside the Weirdmonger with his mouth appendage teasingly tipping out and withdrawn then flashing out like a snake in full length fleetingly glimpsed then withdrawn again – thus tempting buyers to the stall with this intermittent rudery. Blowing kisses and then snarling. Raising his Captain’s hat, bowing then spitting viciously. All showmanship. Crude tongue-sticking at its artistic best.
Gregory and Suzie eschewed approaching the stall with the rudery. Perhaps they suspected echoes of something they wanted to forget. Or perhaps it was because the Weirdmonger had no special buy one get one free offers.
***
Still within his night’s billet of self-ballooned air near Wagger Market, Padgett Weggs tossed and turned, dossed and dreamed, tossed and turned again, over-dosing, indeed, on dreaming of Feemy Fitzworth dreaming of Padgett dreaming of Feemy, both of whom were dreamed in turn by other snatch-within-snatches of dreamers till one reached, by inference, the head-lease dreamer.
Padgett dreamed a voice saying in his own voice: “A human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. A bodytrap. I'm inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it. Then the bodytrap further swells with the words used to describe it yet inexplicably tighter and tighter around my shrinking self. To escape its trammels would be certain death. I wonder how I ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a ‘blank’ – while incapable of waking up from the dream that this is so. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them like this one I’m describing for you, nightmares with terrifying situations I thought I could never escape – until, with great relief, I would indeed wake up and leave it all behind as a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s real problems are as nothing compared to those real-seeming problems one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body with their words? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness that is me within my body finally vanishes as it surely will. A paradox – that we hate being trapped in our bodies and find it a devastating imposition to be thus trapped – but we’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because we can’t face the outright 'blankness' if we cease being trapped there!”
An answering voice: “Our faces are pressed up against the mortal shell like a child wanting to go out to play but kept indoors like the 'invalid' in The Secret Garden.”
A third voice: “Life is indeed an imposition but you need life itself to realise the imposition has been tricked on you when you weren't looking!”
A fourth voice (a real one waking the dreamers): “Wagger Market! Wagger Market! Come To Wagger Market!”
Followed by the shivering of ringtones.
***
One stall was headed up ‘Ringmaster’ – behind the counter of which stood a man in a sharp suit sporting a black wind-teased rosette in a loose-flapped lapel. The rosette was particularly unnoticeable bearing in mind the colour of the suit. Gregory failed to notice it, whilst Suzie noticed it but without noting it. Their eyes were more for what the rosette-bearer sold. Make-up still stained the bags under his eyes, despite an attempt at earlier removal with unmasking-cream but Gregory and Suzie were not to notice that till later.
The stall’s wares were rings of all sorts. Rings as light- or heavy-weight cosmetics for fingers. Some flange or rivet rings. All in different metals with or without precious stones embedded. There were food rings, like doughnuts. Avant garde or artistic rings like rancid meat in continuous sausages and rings of what looked like human flesh but rather more respectable than the rudery they had just been inspecting on a previous stall ... and rings that were balloons filled with air worthy of any circus act or juggling with smoke-rings or sculpting into elastic shapes of interlocking rings by prestidigitation or sleight-of-hand. A ring cycle – where the motive force was derived from stepping along with the whole body inside the rim of the ring. And other more unrecognisable rings bordering on the edge of not being rings at all.
They bought a ring cycle each with a view to easing their passage around the festival site. The rain did not look as if it were returning, so mud would not be a problem, they thought. The stall-holder did warn them that these devices were not good in mud … unless one further invested in ‘snow-tracking’ spindles to act as a gritting device outside the rim of the ring. Gregory and Suzie – after a little tiff – decided on eschewal of the tracking and then slowly and precariously step-wheeled off amid their own giggles and stares from other festival-goers.
“Good God!” said Gregory. “There’s the lead-singer of Goldfrapp!”
Suzie looked to see someone fleet past in their own ring-cycle, evidently far more proficient at such self-transport than Suzie and Gregory.
“How do you know it was her?”
He laughed as if he hadn’t really convinced himself as to the true identity of the other ring-cyclist. Followed by a non-sequitur that he’d rather like to have Goldfrapp music as a mobile ringtone.
***
Death is a hobby. I try to collect death stamps as well as death rings. I have an old-fashioned mobile with a tiny ring-dial into which I can’t put my fingers for navigating its numbered holes and I await the final call from our maker for the due date of my death rather than me ringing Him first. Instead, much later, after years of waiting for the call, a letter came with a death stamp in its top right-hand corner bearing a symbol that would later turn out to be very important. A symbol that would remain a mystery till this book has illustrations or artwork because, so far, words have never really been enough to firm up the intangibilities as easily as they had fattened Feemy.
Modal Morales looked into a mirror ringed with the lit colours of electric bayonet bulbs. He removed the black rosette, as his thoughts drifted back from the screensaver of dreams that he usually could ignore due to the numbness of its familiarity – yet retaining, without volition, the echo of the symbol that had not been dreamed properly – a strange phenomenon, as one would have thought it easier to remember things that had been dreamed properly.
He started painting his face, affixing the bulbous red nose, and black rouge on the cheeks, and popping shut a line of black rosettes down the front of his baggy ‘Andy Pandy’ suit. He would be on stage with that night’s headlining group in just one hour. Nerves were not often Modal’s bag. But tonight he was unexpectedly anxious. He looked at his passport as if to gain confidence from his own identity, proud of some of the visas branded on the watermarked pages.
Death has more to offer when a mirror reflects the face that would soon be dead: not a synergy as such but a love affair with incidence. Fatted calves crawling further up the legs to corrupt the genitals.
***
In a piece of music by Charles Ives, the sounds of a small-town celebration are represented – i.e. competing marching bands, political discussions, fireworks and women unloading picnic baskets. Yet this was as nothing compared to what the tall silhouetted figure of Abraham Bintiff heard as he stood Tor-like on the hill above dawn-glit Glistenberry. Yet even if he heard fireworks, none could be seen. Rehearsals on various stages set up around the site did however contribute to the impression of competing bands.
Earlier in the twilight of dusk and (again) dawn itself both of which seemed to have one flash of pure darkness between, those milling about the festival site would have glimpsed up and saw Bintiff whom they took to be the familiar dark tower spasmodically poking a huge whip of deeper darkness into a lashing of the stars. Without realising it, as they fell into hushes of puzzled awe, they spoke their own versions of the Weirdtongue and Goldfrapp languages, mixed with the shifting frames of music as the often strident rhapsodies and pavanes moved in and out of each other with equally purposeful and random reflections of what was later to happen in our growing story of Bintiff’s ensuing battle with the clown Modal Morales. That plot of a battle itself would have its own battle with another plot, i.e. the adventures of Feemy Fitzworth as he wandered, like a centaur, the more oblique corners of our vexed texture of text, trying to sell his own steaming hindquarters as cat’s meat.
***
“Don’t you just love new words that take root...?” stuttered Chelly Mildeyes accompanied by her blonde-haired amanuensis, as they both sat down at the table. Chelly’s back hurt and it showed. It was cramped in the makeshift carrel behind the Glistenberry Festival’s main performance area. Despite her great age, she did not intend to dominate the proceedings. Yet they did need a chairperson to steer matters quickly before the next group took to the stage and released the relentless rhythms of their circus-themed glamrock act. Then nobody would be able to hear themselves speak.
The participants of the conference had arrived at the site inspecting their ill-fastened late-labels tied on their satchels or briefcases, as they had been rushed here from various centres of creativity before tidying up their own lives, let alone anybody else’s life in the real or fictitious worlds of which they had been given at least temporary charge. They were all ostensibly writers but one or two of them could not remember writing anything.
In delayed response to Chelly’s opening gambit, Padgett Weggs fidgeted awkwardly in his stained sleeping-bag as he tried to make it (with him in it) fit into a chair. He was cold despite the heat. He was always cold. Something to do with what he thought had been written about him, and what he would write about himself given the chance. Then said: “Yes, rockgroups here need some new names to get them noticed.” He laughed. “What about Weirdmonger...” He glanced to another conference participant who bore that very label. “Megazanthus? Weirdtongue? The Tenacity Of Feathers? Klaxon City? The Hawler? The Mutts? Lovecraft?…”
"There was once a group called HP Lovecraft,” proffered an inscrutable old man with a moonface, beard, glasses, mole on left cheek. “...but should we not get down to the main item on the agenda?”
“That being the battle of plots?” excoriated the Weirdmonger with a sneer, grabbing back the words he’d just uttered (with the delayed addition of a question mark) before they became irretrievable truths. He did not want them wasted on the current company. Even single neologisms from his mouth became separate believable dictionaries of semantic force. He gnawed on one of his own wares from his stall, an item of amputated rudery turned into a sausage ring capable of edibility with or without its continuous core of rancid gristle which (if present) could be eschewed before corrupting the palate.
“Well, we want to sell this serial to the TV companies – and we need to agree on where it’s going...” said another old man with a much longer beard and narrower face. “And we need to be clearer not only about its direction but the language used. Vexed texture of text? Weirdtongue? Phooey! Clarity is everything.”
There were many cups of tea and cakes handed out around the table. But this did not indicate it was a tea party.
“I suggest we concentrate on Feemy Fitzworth as a centaur or living meatcart,” suddenly said Padgett Weggs, “because … well … I think he is part of myself and I can tell you things about him that even he himself wouldn’t know. Undreamabilities of depth. We could have him wandering the fantastical lands of the world selling cat’s meat meeting adventures. An illimitable amount of it the more words we use. The more the merrier. Get those words working!”
“I think there is more mileage in a brand new character – that clown ... what is he called? Modal Morales? And the rejuvenescence of an older character – Captain Bintiff – now with a long tongue. There is much potential dramatic tension there and an impending battle between them, a battle that could be quite spectacular as an ending. A far sparer, clearer…” (a nod towards the gent who had spoken about clarity) “…outcome and path towards that outcome…” The last speaker, Jane Turpin, in satin chic – sitting next to Chelly Mildeyes as her amanuensis and spokesperson – sighed as these and other comments were overtaken by loud strumming from the nearby stage together with a startlement of synths. The conference participants stared into their teas as the makeshift carrel began to shake. One of them, however, started to tear his notes and ran off…
Gregory and Suzie (divorced from any proceedings of debate or questionable direction) stood at the back of the equally makeshift audience as the next group's lead singer strutted towards the mike. A few large bovine animals with human heads followed in dance routine as the synths recovered from their own startled beginnings – and a clown with black rosettes down his baggy front and with mispainted cheeks took uncertain charge of a mock keyboard as a ludicrous prop while the lead singer herself entered a fine series of preparatory trills. The participants of the audience held up luminous items of marine snail-life and waved them in the air like peace candles amid the darkness which would nevertheless fail to shift … moving in time to the resonant driving chords that shook their own human ribs in increasing volume. The tenuous sky somehow (by a magic fiction slowly emerging from its shell of magic realism) acted as a cathedral-roof or cut-off point echoing back the sounds satisfyingly, if deafeningly. This was a group called Gilded Fripperies, Gregory discovered from a torn snail-lit programme planted in his hand by someone who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Yet the distant drumkit said ‘Gelded’ not ‘Gilded’ … or ‘Geldof’. Too far to see properly.
***
Following attendance at the festival’s main stage, Gregory Mummerset and Suzie Mildeyes later yearned for the more gentle melody of lullabies rather than the thumping thumbprints of sound pressed into the soft-imagined carapaces of their once new-born heads. They returned to their tent along with raging migraines: potential op-art dreameries if sleep should help to dull the pains alongside its more customary provision of creative gliding through the fripperies of unreality.
They had enjoyed the ‘circus’ stage-show but the delayed diminishment of competing sounds – rehearsed as well as unrehearsed – from all corners of the benighted site did little to encourage the curative qualities of sleep. The tent was cross-skewed itself as if hordes had skirted it during the collateral damage caused by some ill-reported war here among the valleys beneath the long-tongued Tor. The ground’s mildewy discomfort gave sleep further excuse to keep poking from its shell, antennae quivering in search of further delay.
The couple looked pitifully into each other’s eyes; leaning forward from time to time while lightly kissing away the tears. They were out of depth. Gregory even feared he might need to return to the hospital. Mildeyes and melody-boxes. Somersaults and summersets. The cavortings of a clown. A group called Friques in a side-tent. Safety-net spiders spinning big tops for pops. Marionettes hanging half-dead between the tangling spools of sleep’s slow withdrawal and the crazy-paved merging of two migraines. The incredible Mister Kite. A dark shadow swooping in…
***
Blasphemy Fitzworth was aboard the fair-sailed Glittenburier as it entered a new harbour of choice without visible steam or sound. Captain Bintiff had long since left this particular texture of truth upon the original craft of Feemy’s destiny with a crew chosen from several of the other voyages that had since intervened yet remained strangely unreported by any of our correspondents in the field. Where Bintiff had gone, nobody in these parts even pretended to know. Feemy’s new Captain if he had a long tongue certainly hid it with a short one. As hidden as his name. A nemophile with emptiness for a face.
Despite the beauty of the fantastical turrets (each a hill-topping Tor in its own right) built upon each new brow of dream, there was a wholesale war afoot here, too, and here and here – with many wild machinations of politick and bent magick. Feemy tried to retain his innocent task of selling meaty parts of himself to the natives – but natives who prided themselves as more civilised than Feemy felt they had no need of such meagre off-cuttings of grease and gristle. They had edible luxuries (rich in protein) hidden within their own humps, but failed to be able to reach round to mine them. Yet, simply knowing luxuries were there (just behind them) made the natives feel confident enough to near starve rather than buy provender from the likes of Feemy.
These natives were native of nowhere. Nemophobes in the main, however, they vigorously sought a name for the land that Feemy had now reached as well as names for themselves … names for the land where they (these as yet nameless ones) purportedly lived amid the mass of hill-topping Tors and nightly-lit circuses and festivals galore in each valley cleft. If any reader has a name for this land and its natives before we visit its veils and piques again, please let it be known. If, indeed, any reader wishes actually to enter as a real character into the throes of the story towards bolstering, even curing, these various vexed textures of destiny or truth known as Weirdtongue, please also make yourself known to the narrative hospital.
***
They said Gregory had an interesting name. Mummerset was unusual yet real, unlike Suzie’s ‘Mildeyes’ concocted from nice-sounding words like Mild and Eyes and Melodies and not so nice like Mildewy, as inherited from her mother Rachel (Chelly), whilst Suzie’s biological father Churles Fitzworth was not even acknowledged as a person let alone a name. Feemy indeed never had a brother at all let alone one called Churles except possibly the tumorous hump he called a backpack. Facts that make fiction tick. Nemophilia laced with its opposite.
***
When in the Narrative Hospital, Gregory, as you will recall, had been promised subsequent recuperation in Middle Europe with trial convalescences in each of its famous health spas, including the Magic Mountain in Austria, the Yellow Valley in Poland, the White Water Retreat in Slovenia, the Middle-Eye Clinic in Slovakia and even as far west as the Swiss Alps where more nameless institutions paraded as Concentration Camps that never really existed except, perhaps, in the rough-cuts of Padgett Weggs’ imagination.
Whilst recovering from the night’s concert in the tented village, Gregory remembered the promise made to him so glibly at the hospital. He wondered if promises once made fade away to nothing compared to the real promises they once were when first spoken. Promises should be in writing.
“The promise must be in writing somewhere,” said Suzie. “I’m sure I read about the spas somewhere. On paper headed with the hospital’s name and signed by someone in charge …”
“Well, one would have thought so, wouldn’t you? Because things that are simply promised into the heat of the air are little better than fairy tales!” Gregory looked stern. They had enjoyed the show by Modal Morales and his group but now, like promises themselves, any sights and sounds were quickly fading, the stage names not only fading but changing as time passed. He remembered being visited at the hospital by the Weirdmonger who wrote a few things out on the carrel table for Gregory, not only descriptions, but prescriptions, too. But a hospital visitor is necessarily several rungs below ‘someone-in-charge’, even though this particular visitor did have his own medicine wagon. Maybe the signed papers had been left behind in Gregory’s flat – or given to one of their mothers for safe-keeping. They both laughed at the unspoken thought.
They took a breather outside the tent – as more oxygen could ease headaches. The Tor stood sentinel on its hill, now tongueless as proper dreams resumed and the made-up ones faded.
***
Darkness and humour feed off each other. I often feel I'm darker the funnier I've been. The universe itself is a porridge-pot full of jokes and dreams – smudged or smeared with blood like jam upon its lumpy surface. An empty pot would leave me only with despair itself, despair no more productive of darkness than anything else. Filling the pot – i.e. with a porridge of jokes and other bric-a-brac of life – brings out the concept of true despair, a deeper despair because you can't reach deep enough into the pot to grab it and thus test out how truly it's despair itself. An easily discovered despair which exists in the form of an obvious despair amid its own emptiness can be measured and contained and eventually dissipated. I shall have no truck with despair so easily measured or dissipated. I want my despair hidden or filled by jokes and dreameries of life – and thus it becomes a deeper, direr and more dreadful despair ... forever.
Not even death can reach the despair. Or stop the jokes.
***
Feemy Fitzworth reached another corner in his life, sailing into the predominantly land-locked countries of Middle Europe. River courses were sometimes hardly wide enough for the ‘Glittenburier’ to negotiate but the Captain was astute enough to treat them like the open sea: a cumulation of rivers, a culmination of currents as a single current. Thus, the ship reached territories normally closed to ships, opening new markets for self-perpetuated meat that allowed Feemy to text back to Mrs Mummerset in England that he was making their combined fortunes. Her investment was safe.
But then the ship reached the Yellow Valley purported to be in Poland but, in actual fact, strung along its exact borders with elsewhere. In these parts, many convalescents and invalids and consumptives were banned the use of meat and forced to eat nothing but rocket salad. They were also told to breathe the pulmonaries day and night to send the mountain air in sick wafts towards an ancient city where a trumpeter marked the time of day by emerging sporadically from the top of a church tower like a cuckoo from a Swiss clock. Feemy was captured and press-ganged into hidden kitchen duties for clandestine midnight feasts that the inmates of the Yellow Valley health spa arranged so as to staunch their craving for meat. Meanwhile, the ‘Glittenburier’ sailed on Feemilessly towards Modern Samarkand.
***
The Glistenberry site was eventually empty, its tussocks hustled by a dry wind – but a few residual ring-cyclists crisscrossed the dark arena where once the biggest tent was pitched. But it turned out they were ghosts of ring-cyclists and some of them even stayed ring-cycling during the twilit preamble to sunrise – their feet pitifully pedalling like hamsters in water-wheels – seeking not only their real selves but also the joys they once possessed when the festival was in full swing. Even the mud was dried into cracked sculptures and made to lie silent below an imaginary blanket of rock music echoing from the past in potential conflict with the more gentle threnodies of nature’s renewal. Some cyclists even fell out of their rings in an ungainly fashion but, mercifully, because the main advantage of existing as a ghost was being largely immune to embarrassment, they just as quickly vanished into thin air where any form of embarrassment was not relevant given the fact they might have remained to suffer embarrassment had it not been for that quickly forgotten moment of overlapping embarrassment and non-embarrassment at the precise point of vanishment that ghosts could only manage by blushing first.
Other than the ghosts, two figures of male persuasion – accompanied by a blonde-haired young lady whom we once knew as Jane Turpin – were now seen to cross the derelict site in officious stride. One was inordinately tall and silent. Not tongue-tied as such, but consciously stern and serious, as if words would fill him with unwanted meaning. The other was shorter and had swollen cheeks, sporting a black rosette in the lapel of his sharp suit. He appeared to be talking to himself so as to allow his cheeks to subside but the silence nevertheless prevailed. Jane carried a basket with two guns lying side by side like lovers. The men would need two seconds before the rituals of battle could ensue and she was now talking frantically on her mobile in an attempt to create more time or to kill time, both of which really meant the same thing.
***
Many miles from Glistenberry, the Yellow Valley wound like a dried-out ribbon of land between once high man-made riverbanks, vaguely considered to be a continuous groove or growth of pre-civilisation interfering with some of the more vicious geographies of racial history in the middle contours of the twentieth-century. Many local rumours were better accredited, however, inasmuch as they claimed that the common weather conditions thereabouts gave the valley configuration’s name its colour and had no bearing on the outcome of any wars in or out of history books. But some competing formal histories (rather more political than geographical) suggested, rather less certainly than the rumours, that there was a single man (a national hero to some, the direst villain to others) bearing a name that was a vague colour followed by a misty vision self-defeatedly veiling the very histories that seemed to prove he once existed. A name currently so vague, it is impossible yet to interfere with its delayed crystallisation till it (the name) appears in person during any attempts at recording how the world changed as a result of his deeds and any bearing these deeds had on Feemy’s sojourn in Middle Europe. That man’s name? Yellowish Haze.
Feemy, meanwhile, was still serving secret feasts at the Yellow Valley health clinic – using his own meat by a regular bloody tweezering of his difficult-to-reach hocks and hams … yet not telling anyone whence the meat came for fear of being accused of force-feeding cannibals. Soon, however, the words that could be spared for describing Feemy and his doings would very likely soon run out – thus diminishing any further fattening of his person and the consequent meat on or off the bone. And without meat, he would be without a job. Words would be needed elsewhere in view of the fact that the sheaf of official papers – which Feemy surreptitiously read when they were accidentally left in one of the clinic’s carrels – stated that a patient from England by the name of Mummerset was expected. Feemy tried to establish – by further study of the papers – how many words would eventually be needed to make Mummerset’s visit as real or believable as possible and, even perhaps, as was intimated, to make his visit central to any additional hospital procurements. The papers themselves already carried many wasted words.
Feemy scowled at the top paper. It was headed IMPORTANT and was signed by someone called Jane Turpin. The name was familiar to him. He underbreathed a few words to himself. Luckily they were inaudible, so were not wasted.
***
Gregory and Suzie went through the envelopes that had arrived whilst they were away in Glistenberry; far more post than might be expected in this age of the email: mostly bills and one official-looking envelope from the National Health Service. Their respective mothers could be seen in the block’s communal garden wielding clothes pegs amid raised voices that the kitchen window couldn’t disguise. A mummer’s play that struck the young couple as quite amusing, especially as the two women were both excessively made-up.
“What’s it say?” asked Suzie.
“They’re sending me to recover in a clinic near Krakow.”
“Hmmm, I’ve not heard of the NHS forking out for people to get better abroad!”
“I know, but there was one man visiting the hospital just before I came out – I think he was once a patient there himself – but he said he’d been on a Grand Tour of all the cities that were artistically important during the Renaissance. He went through some papers with me. But he vanished before I could read them all. Something about rigging or safety-nets. Didn’t make much sense. Can’t say the prospect of all those art galleries appealed to me. But I’m not turning my nose up at it. Pity you can’t come with me.”
“We’re not married.”
“Common law?”
“Don’t think they’ll pay for me. What does it say exactly?”
He starts by reading the letter aloud: “’Gregory Mummerset has been granted a place at the Yellow Valley Clinic for specialised treatment so that he can become faceless again and taken out of the limelight and put into a story that nobody reads because it is unpublished so he can be better fitted back into the humdrum working world’ … and, look at this bit in the letter … yes, reading between the lines of the new story, I’m to help pay my way in the clinic’s kitchens as rehabilitation or a sort of New Deal work experience. Helping the cooks and suppliers cater for all the other patients. Oh, I get it! Our NHS doesn’t pay the bill. I’ve got to work to earn my convalescence!” He laughed ironically. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch! Exporting ill people abroad! Not made faceless but taken off the face of the earth as far as this government is concerned! They’re pretty damn clever!”
“Stupid, I say!”
“Yes. I feel faceless enough already. If it weren’t for all these envelopes and my name on them…” (he fanned them out like playing-cards) “…I’d even forget my name was Mummerset!”
Gregory’s share of the above dialogue (if not Suzie’s) is no doubt apocryphal or merely misheard. I have little evidence that he actually thought he was in a story let alone about to be transferred to a different story. All evidence points to the fact that he simply believed he had been ill, had just returned from hospital and that his amnesia (a symptom of his illness technically known as nemophilia) had now been cured. He had just enjoyed a weekend break with his girl friend near Glastonbury Tor and was now about to be helped back into employment in his home town. However, his apparent reference to the Yellow Valley Clinic* is interesting. How did he know of its existence? For that matter, how do I?
*The Yellow Valley Clinic – known as the Choker when translated from the local language’s rough cuts of dialect – was originally a hospital for consumptives during the Second World War. It seemed to be a strange place to site such a hospital because a self-perpetuating gentle smog or curdled mist – evidently needing no modern-day exhaust fumes to bolster it – swept along the ribboning valley from sources it has always been difficult to identify. Hence its Choker nickname. In the fifties it shook off its image, if not the gentle smog itself, by catering for more amenable illnesses than those afflicting the lungs or, even, the body generally. In other words, they began to cater for illnesses of the mind, where there was no need to have official reports about the weather conditions including the breathability of the air in the gardens. They just needed patients and doctors – and the rest seemed to take care of itself. An ideal front. There was a plaque on the gateway’s structured left support – a drawbridge-type operation disguised as a door dovetailed into the castellated edifice itself that had seen more bellicose days than even those of the Second World War – and this plaque honoured a local freedom-fighter hero who had lived many more years than mortality would usually allow, a life with several names, the most famous name of which was Yellowish Haze. At the time of Gregory’s period of internment in the clinic, he was overdue for this character’s next appearance in the homeland’s cyclic challenge-and-response, hence this simple observation as to his existence, if not to his complete history, as a footnote within a footnote. Regarding the clinic’s own claim to have spa facilities, it is indeed a legend that I cannot currently address for lack of space or, more vitally, because of the availability of the requisite words without adversely affecting further necessary procurements by the narrative hospital itself.
***
The Weirdmonger perched on his wooden seat, gently touching the pulling-power for his medicine wagon with the end of his whip, as if the heat made them both lazy. The first time anyone had even considered what motivated his wagon and, equally, the first time we’ve been granted a glimpse of the scrawniest steed that could possibly exist and still be able to pull a wagon or absorb words enough to give any expression of its appearance in the shape of a living creature, as if all its meat had been given away to the poor and any spare words squirrelled away for describing it now surrendered to worthier narrative causes. It snorted as each weirdmonger-wheel toppled clumsily – with timbered creaks – from hillock to hillock in the dry hustling sounds of the insidiously hot sunless winds.
The continental shifts of history re-territorialised his route across the European seas, turning them into a burnt land-mass, one that had succumbed to the global wars of warming – thus providing a logistical ability to transport by wagon his wares of rudery from Wagger Market on the outskirts of far-off Glistenberry in Summerset towards the Middle European zones of heretofore ... all carpeted by a beige desert reflecting the tender twilit skies, skies that gave off an intense heat in contrast to the intrinsic cool look of pinkness that filled the air between the arch of their horizons. Yet this was not so. Words enough to maintain the fraud are not available. But humour him. Let him wander in his imagination in natural default. Sometimes not having the right words (or any words at all) makes things seem more real.
He saw a distant disturbed duststorm churning into a section of greyed-out pinkness. He spotted the blotchy ink of rorschach shapes within its moving weather-systems, betokening a racing stampede of cattle, a situation that often faced Rowdy Yates and Gil Favor in the once popular and prime-time black and white ‘Rawhide’.
“Get those dogies moving!”
The Weirdmonger laughed at his own sudden outburst of song. Then upon another horizon he discerned an indeterminate vehicle – even less focussed than his own medicine wagon – carrying what he imagined to be Gregory and Suzie towards Krakow. But why Suzie? She was not expected at the Clinic. She would likely not be allowed to enter it. Maybe her mother – with different narrative motives – had insisted that she should accompany Gregory, although Gregory’s mother (or even Gregory himself) had bigger motives since any motives concerning money were always big motives. In fact, Gregory and Suzie had both sensibly agreed that she would not accompany him. But against all the odds – buttressed by love – they had set off together, tears streaking their faces, intent on saying farewell, as if she had boarded a train to kiss the departing loved one as he set off on his journey but staying on the train when the whistle went for the train’s own departure. Or in denial that the train would ever leave.
Their eyes weltered as the couple crossed the arduous deserts of the Weirdmonger’s imagination. They kissed each other and pined. They were now fast coming to the conclusion (in their heart of hearts) that it was too late for Suzie to disembark separately from upon whatever they had both earlier embarked. Yet they knew (in an even deeper heart) that she must disembark.
The Weirdmonger returned to consideration of the weather-systems of his newly word-populated plains of continental shift. There were many freedom-fighters in the war – a war that had beset and would continue to beset this region – some of them still alive in fact, others simply alive in history books, a few even yet to be born but already decked out in their legendary paraphernalia at the point of impending birth. Most were called after weather-systems, as if such names were imbued with more than just humanity. It was that a single dust mote in a duststorm could be a hero. A telling maxim worthy of any cause. It was also that such factors as natural motion and alternating visibility / invisibility and elementary permeability and drenched dews and muggy evenings and the ballooning-air that came at unseen, unfelt moments of the night and conscious dusks that knew it was dusk or called dusk by others and mellow mists and drained skies and red-tinged dawns and yellowish hazes and purply twilights and the hidden monsters of fogs and many more such ambient textures of vexed climates, all of these factors actually came to personify (even anthropomorphise) those who had ambition to be freedom fighters and heroes. Those who felt steeped in destiny were rocked by its tides into a gentle waking to the cause.
The Weirdmonger sniffed. He farted. He had bad wind.
***
When Gregory arrived at the Clinic – along with a red-faced Suzie on his arm hoping the ground would swallow her rather than face accusations of seeking free admission on his coattails – they were both surprised to see that they would need to report to Reception, then to wait patiently on a wooden bench in a waiting-room decked with tasteless paintings and peppered with light reading in the form of stale Hellos or OKs. He thought he would have been welcomed and ceremoniously shown to his en-suite room overlooking the steaming lake. This was worse than being an Out Patient. Suzie grasped his hand as she explored the lacklustre photographs of mini-celebrities in squalid pose.
When in waiting-rooms, it is a common anxiety that the official at Reception has not noted your arrival correctly in accordance with any system of waiting-in-turn and other patients are being seen before you, even though their appointments are scheduled later than your own. This included a feeling that other people were looking through you rather than, at least, round you. Gregory suffered this concern (technically known as nemophobia) to such an extent that he frequently asked for evidence that he was in his correct position in the ‘queue’, forcing any receptionist to keep renewing acknowledgement of his existence.
Today, he had been informed, there would be an unfortunate delay. A man had been brought in on a stretcher, suffering from injuries as a result of a duel. An emergency, no doubt, but Suzie, after Gregory had told her about the latest excuse for ignoring his presence, said that duellists shouldn’t be treated on the National Health Service.
***
When the train pulled into the station at Yellow Valley, the medicine wagon could just be seen on the brow of one of the higher rising riverbanks overlooking the castellated edifice by the steaming lake. Whether the occupant of the wagon could see the alighting passengers of the train as clearly as they could see him, it remains doubtful – particularly as one of the endemic hazes was even then interposing a veil, doubled upon by the fumes of the halting, then shunting, train. Proustian in colour woven with the flowering of dyed cattleyas.
However, earlier, the air had been clearer and nobody could have missed seeing the very long stretcher being carried by a blonde-haired lady and a man with a black rosette through the rarely lifted drawbridge-door.
***
Feemy had been relieved of kitchen duties to lend a hand in the operating theatre. He was not aware of the earlier repercussions of the injured man’s arrival or the nature / context of his ‘accident’ or the companions who had been involved in whatever had happened. He now watched further acts of unrehearsed surgery – his own hands full of something slimy that was still being uncoiled from the man’s mouth – and wondered if this thing was about to be excised as a separate living creature and, if so, whether it would be given up to the clinic kitchens for a subsequent word-processing as a recipe supplementary to the ingredients of Feemy’s own decreaturefication. Wordtongue soup, no doubt, this evening for all inmates – or perhaps plenty of material simply to be frozen for later use.
***
The soft plash of oars as the dinghy floated across the steaming lake, its occupants sporadically glimpsing the Choker’s castellated shape in the yellow gloom. Modal Morales and his right-hand girl Jane were searching for any face that floated upside down in the murky waters, making any recognition impossible to predict because of the wrinkled weathering by water or, indeed, the murkiness itself. They had already delivered one tall man with an untamed tongue to the Choker, but he wasn’t the only one dead or nearly-dead or nearly-alive whom – with untamed tongues or tentacular languages that observed no traditions of meaning – they needed to round up or trawl for the Choker. There were 6000 of them at the last over-exact count (i.e. another 5999), each a live body or corpse or zombie representing a 1000 others within itself like Russian Dolls in layers upon layers of thickened warhide or rind formed from hardened flesh, all previously gassed by the yellow steam given off by the lake, because they (when previously normal people) had not been given the antidote to prevent such toxic intake by the lungs. Consumption upon consumption in complication of or interference by Bird Flew. The Choker sure had its work cut out for the foreseeable future.
Suddenly the dinghy grounded to a halt upon a mass of such bodies, many bony and thin (belying the scope of their contents, mental or physical), elongated in height by the torture they had suffered at the hands of history. They were intertwined like fleshy rush-mats from shore to shore. Some moaned, others weltered noisily with mud upon their whipping tongues, a few as silent as the previous silence broken only by plashing oars and the wet raw planky vessel itself. Modal, knew deep within himself, that this was a dream. He was the Clown of Dreams, and within certain layers of these dreams-within-dreams or dreams by other dreamers infiltrating his own dreams, his job was to lighten and entertain the audience of co-dreamers with antics of farce or black humour, cart-wheeling in his baggy suit through false doors to baths of custard or slews of porridge beneath his huge skidding banana-feet – all a front or subterfuge, when he reached the bottom dream or the head-lease dream, for him being the reincarnation (or actual equivalence) of Yellowish Haze himself now set to put right the wrongs of centuries, including all those killed by history rather than by natural death.
***
Gregory was separated from Suzie at some point between his own separate dreams. He found himself waking time and time again from an operation on his head (he felt fingers manipulating his brain) as he glassily stared up at faces that floated in the yellow gloom of the theatre. This was not the convalescence he had expected. Not the lazy afternoons in a wicker chair by the side of the lake to which he had looked forward, being waited on hand on foot with all manner of medicinal cocktails. This was deep-rooted surgery itself. The convalescence, in hindsight, had been conducted at the previous hospital ward back home, a pre-illness convalescence, as it turned out, as he had then not been ill at all before then. Rest and care and recuperation and, yes, convalescence, prior to the disease hitting him. A vital pre-cursor (or pre-cure) to an illness that was incurable. It should always have been such with incurable illnesses. Because most incurable illnesses led to death, with no subsequent chance of convalescence. So best to have it first.
He fell back into dream. This was an anaesthetic of most confused proportions. He saw himself again as Baby Tuckoo, now a little older, a toddler with a new toy. A toy electric-shaver which, when he rubbed its business end up and down his cheeks and between his nose and lips and his chin (as a grown-up man would do with a real electric-shaver), played music.
***
The Weirdmonger backed up his wagon (amid the alert of reverse hooting) towards the Choker’s drawbridge-door. Eventually, one of the Choker’s flunkeys carrying a slimy eel-like mass of rudery in his arms came out of a side door and loaded it on the wagon. The Weirdmonger gently touched the wagon’s scrawny steed with the end of his whip and trundled off, having paid cost-price (with some means of illegal tender to the flunkey) for this new stock-in-trade. Glistenberry Fair was his next stop.
***
The yellow gloom in the theatre is a sign of disease, i.e. the sepia prints of yesteryear forced through on the back of inflamed or marinated skins of passing time normally not perceptible except for this very inflammation or jaundice. Regarding the nature of the disease, it is not commonly known that places, houses, rooms etc. suffer from their own non-human form of nemophobia or nemophilia, and in this non-human form, indeed, the difference between the two complaints is even narrower than in the human form. Whether dream sickness is one of the symptoms of either or both, it is impossible to tell unless one believes the evidence of ghosts that only haunt the 'area' in question, if evidence can be obtained from them and, if so, whether the evidence is worth obtaining in the first place. It is thought that it was once recorded by DF Lewis in one of his long-lost books (lost because it was never a book in the first place but merely a temporary website) that Padgett Weggs (the original character that appeared in the first listed publication of DF Lewis) often listened to the droning of wartime bombers from Middle Europe as they approached the skies above London's St Paul's Cathedral (a frightening experience to those who had not seen the later cinema films depicting such frightening experiences). He would seek shelter in various underground facilities set up for the purpose, deliberately dug to interfere with real danger by the interposition of surrogate forms of assumed safety, thus releasing the disease more easily to future places, i.e. from the drains and sewers constructed by earlier Victorian engineers: pipe-systems that were now on their last legs and more dangerous to approach than actually sitting outside above ground on the pavements when the bomber planes replaced their threatening distant droning with themselves in full-bodied noise-in-vision. And the danger of disease from these ancient pot-holes of human effluence later infected the real utility living-rooms of the Fifties England (where DF Lewis spent his childhood), and steeped the public baths in melted rust by allowing dyed water to stain the dirty bodies with worse dirt than that they were trying to scrub off the bodies together with acts of public philanthropy by provision of libraries despite only being able to stock deeply foxed books and no carrels ... until history (as formulated by cinema and, later, by TV) turned a blind eye to these figuratively derelict forms of architecture whereby such places and buildings and rooms soon became just raw material for creative art by rebuilding civilisation as a fiction or, at best, a dream, all subject to implosion or disease, with wild tendencies towards non-existence at the end of the sentence which seemed to contradict any such existence by the buildings etc. at the beginning of the very same sentence. A circus of wild wordplay.
***
Modal Morales, sipping his morning tea, thought of his mother.
Today, he wasn’t the Clown of Dreams; he was back as the man everyone else thought so ordinary when he wasn’t seen dreaming the day away – and they had no clue of his other life in a reality that was more real than reality itself by means of a New Magic, dreams being only just one of many methods (both spontaneous and deliberate) by which such magic could happen. He was now simply the man who ran the corner shop, handed out the early morning papers to the delivery boys and kept his business open late because otherwise he couldn’t make ends meet.
Whether he himself knew he was the Clown of Dreams became doubtful even to him. But I’m sure he knew even at some superficial level that he was the Clown of Dreams but he probably had no inkling whatsoever of an even deeper level where the Clown of Dreams could make the air turn yellow in sepia backdrops of pastness with warplanes appearing bigger and baggier than jumbo-jets: old propellered flights of fighters from the Nineteen Forties but with their wings almost stretching from horizon to horizon amid sudden noises-in-vision chasing the noumenon towards the brow of the impossible made possible simply by using the words themselves. Making anything floppier or simply bigger than its proper size seemed to be among the funniest ways for any clown to make people laugh and, by laughing, believe. He sensed that this Proustian slapstick caused the massed ranks of memories to well up from the slightest trigger of tea-tasting.
By thinking of his mother, he laughed at her funny ways. She frequently said history was full of people named someone the something or someone of something, and she proceeded to speak out her list of Henry the Eighth, Hereward the Wake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, Ethelred the Unready ... Yellowish the Haze.
His mother gigglingly added the last one (after the whole series of more familiar historical names) as a sort of mother-and-son private joke but, like most nonsensical nursery rhymes, the reference had no obvious meaning, other than its custom and comfort of usage in those far-off days of his infancy when any memory was ever within his power because he could capture all the memories at once whilst, now, in tawdry middle age, there were too many memories even for the biggest possible butterfly-net to capture.
He told his mother that he loved her more than “all the money in the world plus sixpence”.
As part of that era of custom and comfort, she had her washdays each and every Monday when the wind was always, it seemed, blowing harder and drier than on the other days of the week. Blousey Mondays with white clouds skimming across the bluest sky of all. Strange how the colour blue ever seemed associated with brilliant whiteness as in the tablets of blueness one put into the washing-copper as the sheets were boiling. His mother, if she had lived in a different age with better educational opportunities, would have been a scholar, but she never understood she was a scholar, because she was never educated enough even to have such self-awareness. And, with this instinctive intelligence and in the tradition of the historic characters named in her earlier list, she went on to name her various washing implements as Penny the Copper, Mary of Mangle, William of Washing-Line, Sidney the Suds, Albert the Clothes-Horse etc. ,
Modal often asked her why she did this and she replied: “Because they are part of honesty and tradition, stretching back centuries into our country’s history. You should be proud of the clean-living working-classes you come from and the well-scrubbed habits I know you will carry on into the future when I’m dead and gone.”
Little did his mother realise that, later, the world would be full of dirt both in fact and thought, with even nice respectable people swearing with four-letter words plus road rage and low TV thresholds and diseases caught in hospital (rather than before) … and, indeed, the hospital staff’s uniforms were so crisp and clean and well-starched, back then in his Mother’s day, and this was taken for granted. But not now.
The history books themselves had grown tarnished with mistruth as infected by the rather glib lies of the modern media about more immediate happenings … and thoughts as well as deeds have now become increasingly unclean. He was glad she had died when she had died, not even knowing about TV programmes like ‘Big Brother’.
He asked her once why she didn’t have a proud ‘historic’ name for the wooden clothes-pegs with which she fixed the rigging of the washing-line beneath the sailing clouds each Monday. She stared at her son as she considered his question … and she cried. Somehow he knew she was thinking of his Dad, the man she had deeply loved for many years until he died. But the Clown of Dreams still never worked out why his mother never gave each clothes-peg a proper name as she did with every other washing implement. He found it inexplicably sad. I find it simply inexplicable.
***
Modal Morales had roots – he knew – in Spain, but the family had been in the UK for well over two centuries, and he wondered how or why an arrival in England by a Spanish family could have occurred as a feasible event all that time ago, and no amount of research, he discovered, could focus on the root cause of the event but merely on its fact. He knew little of history and even less about geography. And geneaology was not even a word on the tip of his tongue.
His family had been subsumed by the local culture long before his own mother was born, and the only signs of these Spanish roots was when she failed to prevent herself cursing mildly in a form of spontaneous Spanish – with only vague resemblances to actual Spanish – as she struggled over the weekly wash. She even tried to hide her roots by studying English history and pretending she had roots there instead. The motivation was unclear. But her son failed to follow her example into such interests of local colour other than, perhaps, simply by remembering the names of real and fictional personages from history that she used as incantations or nursery rhymes to help him into an afternoon nap for a tired-out toddler.
She had died an anonymous Englishwoman with a strange name. A simple soul with strong standards of right and wrong. One who wielded spells without realising it. Serious-minded but, at a deeper level, with a place in her soul where a joke resided, a joke she never succeeded in exorcising or in even becoming fully aware that she actually needed to exorcise it. The punch line was misheard, at best.
His own looks favoured her looks rather than his dear old Dad’s. Modal Morales had her snub nose, her sallow complexion at the same time as appearing as if his skin had been tinged earlier by darker pigments that had since vanished. He had her seriousness, her apparent uprightness, whilst the joke had transferred to him, upon her death, but the difference was that he knew he had to exorcise it. Masquerading as a corner shop proprietor with the deep sense of a Protestant work ethic, he patiently awaited the day “when the circus arrived in town” – an expression his Dad had used, not his mother, an expression Modal never understood, but it seemed right and appropriate for life and its inevitable shortening by death. He guessed, too, that his Dad never understood the expression but Modal hoped that when the circus indeed arrived – for both his parents – they were given positions or performances suited to their needs. He hoped, for example, that his mother was not simply reduced to washing the clowns’ costumes but, if she’d preferred, been allowed also a trapeze-trick of her own in the airy heights of the Big Top. And his Dad a custard pie of his own. Or, at least, a ringmaster’s uniform. Rather than simply sitting in his caravan alone whilst the others performed, his Dad would have made a good ringmaster. But an even better clown. He hoped.
Modal sighed, as his thoughts took flight – and then subsided back to more mundane matters – as he returned to the shop’s delivery book, in which he pencilled payments and orders for the various magazines and newspapers for which he arranged house-to-house dissemination by hand. It was also a convenience store for local customers who had forgotten the odd item when shopping at the out-of-town supermarket.
Surrounded by the heady aromas of washing-powder, Blue Daz, Surf, Tide, Fairy Snow, and the neutral smells of tins with smelly foods inside. And a small Off Licence, too, which was a money-spinner, but still difficult to wring a proper living from all the time he spent serving behind the counter. He rented out DVDs. And held a small stock of CDs. Old Sixties stuff, Rolling Stones, and Pavarotti, and country-and-western compilations, a few light classical CDs although Modal preferred less light music and often wandered towards both Pink Floyd and Penderecki, mixed with modern things like Goldfrapp, Keane, Snow Patrol, then Top of the Pops compilations from the eighties…
There was part of himself he did not like. A propensity towards laying traps or loosening safeguards. He had yet to address this dark interior within himself – so it would be presumptuous for us to address it prematurely. He silently mouthed the names pencilled and erased, pencilled and erased, in his delivery book, listing them internally off the page: some with their real names others with ones he had made up for them: Baby Tuckoo, Blasphemy Fitzworth, Jane Turpin, Cartwheel Crazy, Mary of Mangle, Gregory Mummerset, Sallow Haze, Suzie Milledges, Padgett Weggs… All of these had recently cancelled their paper deliveries, one or two leaving their bills unpaid. Two of those names were definitely real. Others used as subterfuges, no doubt. He laughed, and then someone came into the shop for some porridge.
***
Rachel Milledges wished she was like her daughter Suzie. Not only young, with a world of life still above the river-line, but also still relatively unreal, fictitious, bereft of any worries because being unreal or fictitious meant you did not have a mind to contain the nemo-angsts that would later beset you once the reality began to creep in. It is a lesser known fact that all fictitious characters once set in motion – created, written about, talked about, (above all) read about – would inevitably start their first gradual transformations with tiny threads of pure physicality and even purer mentality snaking along the fictitious vacuums so skilfully put in place by the writer as potential containers for life itself, even the very DNA needed to make that life work. However crassly written. In fact, there is one theory that crassly written fiction more efficaciously contains the seeds of magic fiction, whereby the characters step off the page and enter the room where you are reading it. How this is managed only centuries of research would nail down. More instinctive, than artful.
Rachel, meanwhile, had a grudge. Many rumours – or interferences or interventions from the narrative hospital – in her later stages of real life as a previous fiction character had confused and, finally, corrupted the aspects with which she earlier prided herself when still half-fiction and half-real. First a shadowy, presumably beautiful, woman with the Mildeyes name: an author herself, one who wrote the most legendary books of both truth and fiction, quoted at either end of other writers’ fictions. A proud source of wisdom and visualised as a mystic of the first water, as well as a shimmering reflection of pure womanhood in its optimum form. But optiMUM was the thin end of the wedge. She gave birth to Suzie (at first in fiction, later in real life) and the radiation back of that very act turned Rachel Mildeyes into Mrs Milledges with daily concerns of washing, cleaning and baby-bathing. She found herself friends with two other aging biddies by the name of Mrs Mummerset and Mrs Morales, who equally loved nothing better than a packet of Blue Daz. Rachel Milledges only had herself to blame.
Suzie was ‘walking out with’ Mrs Mummerset’s son Gregory. He was a no-hoper. Still mostly fictitious, he spent most of his time wandering amid a maze of inconsistent plots, seeking a purpose for living, and finding himself simply the football not a player, pushed from pillar to post, flailing between periods of loving Suzie and being in various hospitals where Suzie did not even visit. He’d later merely find himself in danger of becoming a permanent exhibit in a Friques sideshow where bits of him would be seen to have been stretched and other bits shrunk. Never to know real life in any other form. A twisted version of some other fiction he was never meant to be.
Yet it’s not set in stone. Many had escaped the Friques show and were now on the way towards fruition as living, breathing, thinking people who had taken the fiction by the scruff of the neck and walked out of it in the manner of true legends as well as truth