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WEIRDTONGUE 30, 34, 39, 44 & 49

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (30)

 

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 - with untamed tongues or tentacular languages that observed no traditions of meaning - whom 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.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (34)

 

Glistenberry sat, on one side, within the shade of the Tor-on-the-Hill, and beneath the sun of an over-hot British Summer, on the other.  The animal zodiac was snoozing, next to invisible … it was never awake unless in rain or cold.  Indeed, only a few people believed in the landscape containing or representing an animal zodiac at all.  You needed to go up in a helicopter so see it plainly.  And, even then, there were doubters.  And people scared of flying.

 

When the seasonal fairs and festivals and circuses and markets came to settle with their sails upon the ocean of green and earthy-compartmented farmland – one wondered whether that was a metaphor at all but, rather, the intrinsic truth about inward voyages to the self itself.  But, even in the bright sunshine, one found thoughts turning to darker visions that went above the heads of the jollifiers and holiday-makers and music-lovers and sight-seers.  Rudiments of myth and melancholy.

 

Today, carts and wagons and tent-carriers dotted the trunk roads towards this part of Summerset, building up in volume as the traffic cycles revealed their propensity to rhythmic jamming.  Together with henge-dwellers and romanies in caravans … plus ready-made canvas conveyances that were none of these vehicles but their own very special breed of transport particular to the ethos of the Glistenberry Romance.

 

 John Cowper Powys House was, however, a dark stone building lurking quite close to the Tor area (or as the locals called, Torus)  where the scratchings of the first animal sign could be discerned in the loose contours of scrubble underfoot.  An animal sign that belonged to no sane horoscope or natal chart.

 

It is that house to which we must later divert our attention.  New, as yet unnamed, protagonists are about to open the house's shuttered gloom and take root there – not as squatters, as such, but, rather, as budding contestants in some form of race that had not yet been defined (both in margins of eligible track for racing and the race's rules).  They had been given permission to camp out in the derelict, dark, damp house free of charge.  In the sun of daytime, the drawbacks didn't seem to matter so much.  It was only at night or in gloomy weather that the darkness, dampness and dereliction crept back.  A 'Big Brother' house with no  audience or other ways of spying on them … except by us.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (39)

 

Whether senile dementia is nemophilia or nemophobia, the result is the same. 

 

When Suzie left the hospital, after seeing her Mum, she took some time to recover her own equilibrium.  She popped into her local corner shop only to be confronted by its proprietor.  He told her that her newspaper delivery bill was owing.  She mindlessly listened to his rant before settling.  She was mad, not bad, she implied.  She only wanted a pint of milk, today.  They ended up inferred friends again.  She failed to realise the connection between him and the clown who had performed with Goldfrapp the weekend before.  The connection was that there was no connection at all which gave any thought that he might have had such a connection very strange indeed: and strangeness is strangely (in itself) the strangest connector of all.  Establishing a connection by needing to say there was no such connection.

 

Greg was still asleep when she got back to the flat.

 

"Don't bother to get up," she called sarcastically.

 

No reply. She shrugged. No connection, there, either!

 

 

*

Feemy Fitzworth examined his own hand.  It was certainly smaller than he remembered it but, literally while he thought about it, the hand's margins seemed to grow again with further inches of itself reconstituting even as he watched the process. A peculiar feeling for Feemy to feel.  He had recently grown smaller and smaller, scrawnier and scrawnier, ever since dragging his body back towards England from Poland.  Indeed, earlier, during transit, there had grown hazy yellow borders replacing the outer limits of his body – then vanished into thin air – then grew again as they replaced the new more inner outer-limits, leaving only bits to wrinkle and harden like stale food.  Today the process seemed to be in reverse again – new areas of body replacing new areas of yellow haze.  He couldn't account for such a reversal of a reversal of his body margins.  And which was the direction of emaciation, and which the direction of fattening, became as inscrutable as the difference between nemophilia and nemophobia.

 

 He should have taken the opportunity to ring his latest lady friend – Mrs Mummerset – because, soon, in fact in the last few lines of the previous paragraph, his fingers had grown too big to manipulate the holes in his mobile's tiny dial.  He wanted to reassure her about a few things including his continued love for her and to establish whether he could extend the various investments she had made in his business venture as well as in his very state of existence.  Words were more important than money.  Even words sent via mouthpieces rather than mouths.

 

Later, in what he saw as moments of greater clarity, he continued his trek across the desert between Middle Europe and the white cliffs of England. He watched the ever-widening motor-kites heading to bomb some of the remaining cities that had survived Hitler's first bombardment.  He felt he was being dragged down by more than just his own bodyweight.  He imagined he had grown a huge tail that was leaving a deep slimy trench in his wake and that some telephony company would probably take the opportunity to lay a land-line along it in due course.  He had left a charged-up webcam at one point in the desert pointing at his proposed onward route, a webcam with a connection to the tiny screen of his mobile, whereby he could now see himself progressing into the distance until his body eventually disappeared.

 

 

*

I woke up at the sound of her voice.

 

"Why did you just wake me?" I asked.

 

"But you spoke first!"

 

I couldn't see her in the dark.  I felt huge pouting or pulsing things on my face, things I couldn't differentiate from the skin of my face beneath them.  They were a  "Why did you just wake me?" monster in bits and as a whole – its interrogative hook actually now buried in my face.  But what had it said first – to wake my wife?

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (44)

 

During the height of the panic caused by the unexpected air-raid over Wagger Market, Suzie found herself hustled into a surprisingly available shelter that was almost 'fit for purpose'.  It was better than the ones in London – i.e. those hastily dug for the Blitz proper by means of Anderson Shelters in city-street gardens together with makeshift kip-points on Underground platforms – but, even so, it was too dark to see very clearly in this subterranean part of Summerset and the walls were still earthen without any attempt to finish them off by plastering.

 

 Later that night Suzie was to fall asleep with difficulty creating dreams that she was sheltering, along with others, within a bodily cavity still warm from continuous life that had been fortuitously provided by one of the terrestrially in-built 'animals' of the Glistenberry Zodiac.  But, whilst still awake, she was faced with harsh reality, despite the best intentions of those who had built this particular shelter.

 

At times, she also believed she was within a chamber that would soon be full of a deceptively pale yellowness, but she could not fathom this belief.

 

For a while, the shelter's inhabitants looked bleary-eyed, cowed, taciturn, rather than outright scared or at risk from suffering any renewals of noisy panic.  They could all hear, no doubt, the dull thumps of bombs distantly shaking the ground.  Suzie feared for the integrity of JCP House, even the pinnacled brick-built Tor stuck up high on the hill above Glistenberry for many centuries. The Abbey Ruins would be ruined even further, she thought.  She also feared for the safety of someone she did not know.  She ached for this very stranger's arms to enfold her.

 

Before finally falling asleep, she had cast glances around her co-shelterers, some now mumbling in odd twos and threes.  She forced back the dreams that teetered upon the brink of sleep's approaching onset.  She spotted – for real – a figure that looked remarkably like Mary of Mangle herself.  It was surely, indeed, that very woman. Suzie had often seen her on regular tours of JCP House. She looked less imperious, now, less certain of herself, but still with an air of tallness despite sitting down on the rough floor. Pitiful to see such a downfall, despite the imputed cruelties of her reign.

 

Mary of Mangle opened her empty mouth widely meeting darkness with darkness.  Some of her flunkeys and sycophants approached her.  One tried to force-feed her with a large amount or tripe-like slobber that the Weirdmonger had earlier been seen (if not seen by Suzie herself) cutting up as an elixir-of-life on his Market stall.  Mary of Mangle refused to swallow it but kept it in her mouth, like a spoilt child.  As some of the substance was now missing, the words she eventually emitted by its means - via the curds of it thick slobber – appeared incomplete: "Gout … Spout … Watch ... the … Sprout …!"

 

Others turned towards this sound of her 'voice', half-heartedly mystified.  Then they returned to further attempts at sleeping, as helped by what they put down as a dream.  If one was dreaming, then one must be asleep.  A great psychological help towards real  sleep itself.

 

In another corner, a rank-smelling man tossed and turned in his premature sleep, using a filthy rucksack as a pillow.  Suzie thought he would have been more comfortable without the pillow.  She bum-shifted away from that man as far as possible because he was now speaking of things in his sleep that she did not wish to hear together with the sound of farts she did not wish to smell.  She was, consequently, nearer Mary of Mangle herself who had, apparently, fallen asleep, still ruminatively chewing the curdish cud with a renewed air of sway and swagger and pride that only the oblivion of sleep could have brought to someone so fallen from grace.

 

*

Modal Morales picked up one of the papers in his shop.  There were news agency photos of a freak storm in Somerset.  Glastonbury Tor had been toppled.  Amongst the crowds that subsequently gathered (in one of the more detailed photos) around Glastonbury Abbey's shattered remains, Modal half-recognised a face he did not wish to recognise at all, one which gave him an inexplicable frisson of fear.  He fingered the black rosette in his lapel and replaced the newspaper in the delivery boy's pile – and looked up as the shop door went 'ding'!

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (49)

 

Mrs Celia Mummerset missed a number of people.

She still visited the living body of Mrs Rachel Milledges at the hospital whilst the real friend who used to exist within that body was missing, presumed lost forever. Mrs Mummerset also missed her own son: she knew not where or why. She kept her mobile switched on day and night in the hope he would ring – with the combined hope that her latest male admirer (another missing person) would also ring: from abroad where she believed he was currently travelling on business. She missed Mrs Lettuce Weggs who had drowned in her own septic tank. She missed another friend: Mrs Maria Morales who had died one wash-day…

The circumstances concerning this death of Mrs Morales are still sub judice or, at least, subject to a version of their own circumstantial evidence. Her son, Modal, one Monday morning, left his corner shop – having shut it with a card on the door saying "back soon". He seemed to have deterred most regular customers, in any event. He was intent, today, upon setting off to visit his Mum for some advice regarding the pests that had attacked him. She was an expert, he knew, upon old-fashioned complaints that bore names from old wives' tales and that only the old wives themselves - versed or steeped in the real past as they were - knew how to suffer properly or with dignity.

Ever since the pests – as he knew them – had attacked his shop, he had felt one such pest eating away at him from under his skin. To help palliate it, he needed simply for it to be named. His Mum was a wise woman, better than any doctor. Modal loved her in his own quaint way. In any event, he was, today, finally, at the end of his tether, having decided to shut up his shop and tell his Mum, without further delay, about his own worst fears. But he had forgotten it was wash-day. He should have guessed, however, judging by the breezy blue of the sky and the fulsome white billows of configured clouds veritably racing above him like the airy ghosts of cattle.

"Hi, Mum!" he shouted as he spotted her pegging out smalls on the washing-line. "How's Sidney the Suds and Albert the Clothes-Horse?" he continued shouting as he thus joked across the street from where he could already see her waving at him.

Yet, from that distance, he spotted that she seemed skinnier than her habitually jolly wash-day plumpness. Now as thin as when she was a young slip of a girl during the Spanish Civil War all those decades before. The matter somehow concerned the ancient rusty-handled mangle through which she'd just been strenuously wringing the sodden clothes. Nobody could later fathom exactly the nature of any available circumstantial evidence – other than that she turned out, upon investigation, to be quite dead, waving like a flag from where she was pegged out upon her own washing-line.

 

  FUTURE WEIRDTONGUE NAVIGATION:

 

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WEIRDTONGUE 4, 9, 13, 19 & 24

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (4)

 

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 that followed in the wake of his steaming, bubble-sounding meatcart (as he pushed - or more often pulled - its tiny sprung wheels) 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  (not only the times whence this scribe came but even his identity and whereabouts themselves) 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 sufficed 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 interfered 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 invisble thunderstorm.

 

It was then he heard his mobile ring - out-trilling the squeaking meat of the middle pan where he'd stowed it.

 

 FUTURE WEIRDTONGUE NAVIGATION HERE:

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WEIRDTONGUE (9)

 

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 the pouring of great flagons of thick black fluid as it was fed into various openings in the deck, as imputed fuel. Taking him - along finely 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 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, changing tack halfway through this his latest share of the dialogue.

 

"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.  Litle Chelly 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.  He was away with the fairies in his head.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (13)

 

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 the mind 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 bloke'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, both had forgotten the baleful glances between each other as 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 / 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 (but with no logical connection to enforce any consequence at all between what went before and what followed), 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 mother kept looking at her mobile, no doubt for text messages from her current 'bloke'.

 

"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 cart," 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.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (19)

 

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 later  - in 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.

 

 

 

WEIRDTONGUE (24)

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

YESTERFANG PARTS 3, 8, 14, 19 & 24

 

 

YESTERFANG (3)

 

The wide-flighted birds-of-prey cast their individual twirling shadows over the vast blank plateau – seeking the toddler Jawn – in absurd pretence of assisting the villagers scattered (in alternately separate and joined-up examples of handwriting) over different sections of the same plateau … with the additional precisions of shadow that represented more ground-based search-parties in seeming competition with those masquerading as such in the skies above.

 

Jawn himself was oblivious to those interchanging patterns of pursuit as well as independent of the shuttling shapes in variously hopeful staged rescues of the yesterfang.

 

Jawn knew no such terms.  Simple-mindedness could never stretch that far.  And as each day went by, his wanderability knew no bounds. Only human minds that had been trained by self-enforced complexities could subsequently stay on board bodies that constrained their wild adventures by always returning home – if crestfallen – into the arms of loved ones.  With simple-mindedness, any wanderability was infinite.  Hence, Jawn running away … escaping into the bottomless pit of simplicity and honesty where no search-parties (friendly or otherwise) could follow.

 

In Hell, one needed the strongest fans possible to waft life-giving draughts of air towards any who had inadvertently wandered there.  The birds-of-prey screeched with scorched wings.  And the villagers stood far back from the flames for fear of being burnt into even blacker versions of their own rorschach blots.  Beyond the wild curtains of infernal orange, they saw the silhouette of Jawn, dancing and jabbing like the clown puppet of all dreams but yours.

 

Jawn, meanwhile, still toddled across the snow – having left a decoy in Hell.

 

In the distance, he saw – with simple-minded clarity – a cage-on-legs following him, evidently not deceived.  Motherly love knew no decoys.

 

 

 

YESTERFANG (8)

 

Having attuned his eyes to the haze of the hothouse, Jawn proceeded to pinch himself.

 

He was real. 

 

Events, admittedly, had  not been amenable to character-building as a real person in real situations, but Jawn was completely satisfied that he was real, had real emotions of surprise together with growth as an individual from toddler to his current stage of beard-teazled youth.  A young man in an ever-failing search for his lost youth as his own past vanished with each event transpiring towards completion – a past that indeed vanished, given the normal course of events of a typical young man’s mindless search for excitement and challenge.  However, to obtain a graspable sense of his own being, Jawn needed to be captured by each moment with such moments later being pulled from some future hat like magic tricks of himself to assist his natural development as a unified character facing a known and believable reality.  Thus, he needed to build yester-hives of himself along the way for when he needed to travel back there one day.  A phalanx of deja-vus that maketh the man. 

 

As long as the past moments thus stored were not false moments.

 

He felt unaccountably sad about the departure of Congreve.  He read too much into it to cause such sadness.  But, meanwhile, he needed to acclimatise himself to the variable levels of haze that stained the air around him, through which he glimpsed apparently blind girls in stiff plain frocks crawling about the floor continuously striking matches.  He felt the urge to pinch their legs but, when he did just that, his actions evoked no visible reaction to his presence as the girls merely continued to groan and mouth nonsensicals of sound.  However, he did eventually discern two other girls who were seated together on a sofa.  They beckoned him over.

 

“I’m Sarah,” one said.  A pretty girl who made no attempt to flirt with Jawn. She was just a person rather than a sexual animal. “You need to stop breathing so hard or it’ll choke you.”  She pointed to the atmosphere.  “You can’t smell it but it’s there all the time.  Sometimes you can’t even see it.”

 

“Leaks?” asked Jawn rhetorically, the first word he had spoken since Congreve’s departure.  He noticed that the atmosphere was clearing (as if in tune with Sarah’s prediction that it might) and he was now able to make a whole from the room.  A bare utility working-class parlour from a real post-war London.  Jawn recognised it from a depth of memory he didn’t know he possessed until this very moment.  Hopefully, not one of those false moments he had earlier feared, but a real memory during an equally real trigger of such memory as represented by the room.  He watched the blind girls curl into a corner and simper in a strangely satisfied manner.

 

“Don’t worry about them.  They’re not really there.  So blind they don’t exist.”  Sarah spoke with intelligent conviction, in contrast to her outward dizzy winsomeness as a vision of attractiveness.

Her words made a strange sense within the context, and Jawn turned to the other girl who looked even more becoming than Sarah.

 

“I’m Julie,” she eventually said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“You expected me?” said Jawn.

 

“Sort of.  Sarah didn’t believe me, but I told her you would come.  And that’s why the haze is clearing…”

“Well, now he’s here, what next?”  Sarah asked.  Both girls were a match for each other’s winning wit and wisdom.

 

Jawn turned to look at the corner where the blind girls had crawled – only to find them gone.  Despite the clearer view, things that had once been there weren’t there now, as if a new invisible or non-characterisable haze had intervened between him and them.  However, the room retained its character.  Not so warm.  And he felt the beginnings of a cough from the after effects. 

 

Jawn thought of Congreve and cried.  Then, just as suddenly, he shrugged off such thoughts as he turned towards his new friends, Sarah and Julie both of whom smiled at him, ready to participate in a silent vigil for memories lost - with new ones waiting in the wings … in the making.

 

Sarah, shivering, eventually got up to switch off the fan.

 

*

Congreve, having left the vicinity of the hothouse, laid down as close to the London Magnet as it was possible for any commoner to reach.  While the white snow around him gradually turned into faint tinges of yellow and, finally, to a deeper more diseased form of the same colour, he beckoned the wheeling shape of the vulture from the sky, inviting it to descend and cuddle him close with its huge white wings.  The hefty weight of the bird settled upon him, with a flutter of feathers, as the beak’s fang opened his face and fed on the brain.  Congreve – before the destruction of his brain – had known instinctively that was what the bird’s fang was about to accomplish – an assisted suicide for the loss of a loved one.  And despite the brain’s destruction, the remains of Congreve cried … cried for longer than Jawn had managed to cry in earlier reciprocity.

 

Eventually, the vulture lifted into the sky, itself temporarily stained by its lengthy feed, leaving a muckheap of a brighter red and yellow (separate and mingled), a muckheap that steeped the otherwise virgin snow of London’s Magnet precinct with its landmark of memorable colour.

 

YESTERFANG (14)

 

I  had to leave the place called Lewis sooner than I expected.  I renewed acquaintance with Sarah.  Julie was mysteriously no longer on the scene.  And Sarah’s skin appeared thicker, perceptibly wrinklier, as if she had been through a lot of heartache.  She maintained a youthful beauty, including the sleek charms of her race and colour, and at my then age of 22, I radiated an admiration towards her, one that I now wore like a badge of reciprocity, as I had learnt to be more confident about my own attractiveness as a human being.  This was despite my earlier disaster with the young teacher of fiction.

 

Indeed, it had been a one-night stand with the teacher in her place near the pier.  And I threw sickies thereafter as I could not bear her near me any more.  It was the beginning of my downfall in the city. I slouched most days around the backwaters eyeing houseboats to see if any were habitable, when I should have been in the classroom. I stopped writing altogether. But I always returned to the foster home, where I now stood out like a sore thumb amongst delicate fingers.  My sexual act with the teacher was barely describable, even within the realms of fiction.  It was neither erotic nor romantic.  It was because I had never done anything like that before, I suppose.  I was confused.  And she expected the pungent soul of my fiction also to be apparent in my own body.  She must have been bitterly disappointed at my clumsy pre-maturity. She, I guess, must have aged over night, and became again the humourless authority figure I had originally assumed her to be.  Prior to that night, she, too, had been innocent.  I never learned her real name.  Or which bits were true, and which not so true.

 

Sarah, on the other hand, found me down by the pier (why was I there that day so close to the teacher’s house – through guilt? hopes of meeting her again?).  It was off-season.  No day-trippers or saucy hats or laughing children with candy floss.  Just a wind off the turgid creeks.  Wind?  When had the weather returned?  I must have been so beached upon my own emotional breakwater, such matters had passed straight over my head.  It was symbolic of deeper things.  The return of weather along with a sense of reality.  A sense of futility.

 

As I say, I suddenly spotted the dark face of Sarah as it glistened like mangled eels between two piles of fishermen’s netting. 

 

“Hi,” I shouted.

 

This was not the first time we had experienced such a chance encounter in recent months.  I never mentioned Julie. Nor did she.

 

“Hi, Jawn.  You look sad.”

”There are no happy endings.”  I laughed as if this statement was just that – a happy ending.

 

“Had enough?”  Her face smiled, the teeth standing out with the striking whiteness of our earlier times together - against the skin that framed them.

 

“I don’t think this place was what it once was,” I said.  “Or it never was what I thought it was.  You see, I dreamed last night of a wardrobe and a lion…”

Sarah looked knowingly.  She must now be in her thirties, I guessed.  And I yearned for her arms to enfold me.  Not as a mother, but as a lover.  Instead, she quickly got up, took my hand (as of old) and we walked down the windy pier together as if there was an expanse of sea at its other end instead of creeks.

 

 

YESTERFANG (19)

 

When Count Congo arrived, Jawn was surprised that this was no fey gentleman in a portly decorated suit from turn-of-the-century Anatole France.  He was slim, decidedly manly-by-penchant and concerned to betray no quirks of behaviour that condemned him to any possible caricature (effeminate or otherwise).  However, he was accompanied by another gentleman who did resemble the inverted archetype of a person that Jawn had expected the Count himself to have been prior to seeing him.

 

“This is Lord Egg,” said the Count. 

 

Lord Egg himself strutted about heavily in a baggy black uniform sparkling with medals that he had obviously not won in any war for bravery.  He simpered like a huge woman.  He examined Jawn in his hammock as if visiting a patient in a hospital. 

 

 Count Congo eventually asked Lord Egg to leave the vicinity.  Lord Egg was obviously only expected to meet Jawn briefly and then leave, as if simply, by his presence, to bring out the Count’s own sharper articulations by contrast.

 

As the Count prepared to conduct the interview of the stranger-he-did-not-know-was-Jawn, Jawn himself saw that Lord Egg was crouching in the willowy shadows of darker yellow waiting to see if the Count failed in his endeavours to draw any salaciousness from an otherwise dry-baked cake that Jawn first appeared to be.  Congo and Egg were rivals in love if not appearance.  Their respective ranks unclear.  Perhaps they took it in turns to make the first attempt at conquering any innocent stranger who happened to sail into Proust on a chance tide.

 

The Nurse was also present in a secondary shadow by a frond of torn parchment.  Yesterday, Jawn had managed to claw himself from the darkness of mixed motives towards some position of empathy by seeing himself through her eyes via his own eyes.  Today, she seemed to be fully aware of the whole tableau vivant (the interacting ballet of desire and mimed confusion), even without Jawn’s empathic help.  She was the manipulator without needing any particularly adroit people-skills other than an air of womanly wisdom to organise affairs like a conductor of an opera composed by Poulenc or Debussy.  Today she looked more like a Nun than a Nurse.  Certainly not the family cook she yesterday pretended to have once been.  More Shakespearean than Proustian.

 

She soon departed to fetch the tea to accompany the plate of cake that the hammock-net had steeped in yellow sleep most of the previous night.  Her infusions of oriental leaf were currently giving off a burning haze in her ancient kitchen having earlier been thus fired into existence by the hob’s brightest gas-ring : piping hot within the capaciousness of a priceless samovar that came from an even more writerly precinct of preciousness than Proust city itself.

 

*

 

The scientist carefully prodded the dead beetle with his stethoscope with no idea of the context of any apocryphal findings so was quite gulled into believing it was what the earlier part of the sentence said it was: a beetle.  How it had infested a work of art in a gallery was neither here nor there.  His religion was amply provided with proof of nearly everything.  A scientist-with-faith was so convinced of his faith that even its unscientific nature was sufficient to increase its strength time and time again by circles of powerful kaleidoscopes of convincing illogic that even plain-spirited logic itself could not withstand.

 

An art parasite, therefore.  Things that fed off creativity like worms in sculptures or spiders that climbed the staves of music or one-bee bee-hives within blown bookspines.  These seemed so natural he needed no further empirical delays.

 

But the ‘beetle’ wasn’t dead.  He heard it breathing within the leathery outer-casing of itself that was also itself as well as its container.  By dint of such expression, it was clear that scientists were thus evidently clearer thinkers than fiction writers.  And he smiled in pride as he proceeded to search with some difficulty for one of his precision instruments of surgical investigation. 

 

 

 

 

YESTERFANG (24)

 

It didn’t go anywhere.  A bedrock whereby no body could have escaped except upwards. The body must still be there buried like a ghost with the visible remains of its cancer making it seem if it was buried forever with the cause of the body’s death itself outlasting it.

 

“Hey!  There’s nothing here except stinky muck!” shouted an eager student girl, commissioned to discover the tomb of the unknown soldier.

 

Her boyfriend gave her an excited kiss on the cheek as they playfully managed to cordon off the area of the digging as soon as they realised that this could be an important historical site.  Then they scooted off to find the professor so that he could give the grave his imprimatur of archaeological provenance.

 

“Is it Hiver Jawn himself?” asked another girl meeting them halfway.

 

“Yes, it could be.”

“All the burials were for the same person, the same body,” a loner student shouted across the field with a degree of impatience, being a stern clump-eyed individual who was jealous that he had not stumbled upon the find himself.  Knowledge made him unknowledgeable with the confusion caused by frustration that others were less knowledgeable than him.  Nobody knew his name.  But he was a student that everyone thought everyone else knew.

 

The students gabbled. There were several theories about vampire-killers and how each version of Jawn (having visited several writers’ sites with their own stories to tell about him) was buried at different stages in his life from along the fictional spectrum that had been set up variously within and without mutual consultation between those responsible for each slant on his supposed existence.  A spectrum of death without the earlier life to support any subsequent death at all, let alone a spectrum.  It made more sense to those willing to widen their brainstorming to contain nonsense as well as the deeply serious repercussions of not brainstorming at all.

 

Each tomb or hive or pod or egg were dropped one by one in a ‘paper-chase’ of muckheaps along a yellow brick road … leading from clue to clue towards darkest Africa, counting each forgotten footstep from Congo to Zanzibar as if each were an earth-embedded beacon to light the future … downward if not along.

 

Away from the city after which he was named (or vice versa), Rider Haggard galloped upon a wild stallion of flying hooves towards the towering rough-hewn stone-carving that was his own gnarled and barren face overlooking, like a mountain, King Solomon’s Mines themselves.  Dive-bombed by vultures whiter than the blazing sunless sky.  And She-who-must-be-obeyed stalked into view, holding the youngest version of Jawn that had managed to remain unburied.

 

“Welcome, Rider, to the next stage,” she-called-She said.  “The hunting and hounding of the dreaded pest in the motor of carcinomal disease.   The God in the Machine.  Deus ex machina.  Tabula Rasa with no easy ready blank to scrawl over. Here…” (and she indicated the latest Jawn to be unhived) “…we have the hero you can call your own to use as you wish with words if not deeds.  The best pest-hunter of them all.  Just seek out Lovecraft and Poe and other writers of Horror in their namesake cities to accompany you towards this worthy goal that all worlds will thank you forever more for trying to do than for not doing at all because you knew you’d fail.”

 

In ripping yarns, there were no diseases at all.  This would be no ripping yarn.  No boyhood adventure.  This was a story built on muckheaps rather than imagination.

 

And  Rider  took Jawn from the black lady … and, then, as man and boy, mounted on steeds that snickered at even the slightest whisper in their pointed ears, they both set out to find the cities where writers factored in the same cities to help hold our future bones in sacred literary groves growing skeletons not trees.  Cities of Fiction.  Cities that hid the pest.  As well as the past itself.  The pair of them needed to exhume every trope till they reached the pest – a pest not nesting at the core-of-things (where the angel megazanthus was meant to nest) but on the edge – at the periphery – along the circumference – where we writers already worked around it without recognising it as the pest.  Till the Coming of Jawn.

 

Jawn thought Rider resembled a man he had once forgotten forever.  But Jawn was now too young to have ever known him in the first place.  Or till later.  And the question remained – would he be able strictly to remember someone he had not yet been able to forget?

 

And the young students, still gabbling, eventually reached the professor who smiled at their crazy brainstorming.

 

 

**These pests appeared to be a strange language of words with voices using the words as sights rather than sounds.  Mr Morales did not understand exactly what he was seeing but instinctively, if with nemophiliac distraction or detachment, he sensed that this language called  Weirdtongue was indeed called just that: Weirdtongue.  It was a genuine world language, rather than an experimental Esperanto-like attempt to draw in all the languages of the world (except Basque or Hopi) and turn them into an easily understandable communication system upon air or paper for even the simplest of mortals and peasants to use.  Esperanto had failed because it ceased to be organic or intrinsic to the meanings.  Weirdtongue, on the other hand, was more a religion than a language, but serving both purposes - a religion that needed no prior understanding, because its components stuck to the skin like burrs and poured meaning via the pores into the mind without the intervention of intelligence. Religion at its worst, even if all known religions were similarly bad enough to a greater or smaller degree. The vexed outcome was that not only meaning was injected but also poisonous thoughts that attached to the meaning like a particularly virulent type of fiction.  Not Horror fiction as such, but, in the same way as Classical Music was reputed to be fiction stories injected straight into the vein without the necessity of reading them first, this language of true fiction was black magical realism: a fundamentally weird-corrpted ‘langue’ that later turned into bodily cancers and tumours (euphemistically known as ‘pests’ in the jargon), starting with the tongue itself.  Quite a drawback for any language.

 

Maybe all that's too obvious to say.  But best to establish demarcation lines even if it's just for the sake of my own integrity.  Needless, also, to say that I had not yet grown closer to either of them than just a mere hand-holding.  They both seemed too good for me.  And far too pretty.

 

Also Julie told me that this place wasn't off Western Scotland at all but a loose-flung city of Utility housing striating and threading the backwaters of the north east Essex coast of England during the period just after when the big storm of 1953 had filled the creeks with dead bodies.  Apparently, I had been deceived more than once by first impressions.  Comes with the territory, I guess.  A delta with no river.  A community excited about a Coronation and a new Elizabethan era dawning.

 

Julie soon started whispering in my ear for fear of any official over-hearing: "Those weren't TV aerials you saw, Jawn.  But a miniature wind-farm." 

 

I recalled the forest of wire devices on the roofscape of chimneystacks.  So far, she told me, any prayers for wind in this weatherless world were unanswered.  And these potentially spinning icons to garner the forces of the world remained like rust-corroded weathercocks.

 

I failed to ask: if there was no weather, how come there had been a great storm just a few months before?  I should have asked.  I needed to become more pro-active if I was to survive here.

 

Eventually, the two girls and the officials together agreed that it may be a good idea that I became a writer.  A profession that – in those days – was respectful, societally helpful, personally lucrative and, above all, possible!

 

As a test they gave me a piece of paper and a Cumberland pencil.  An audition for authorship.  Below is a copy of what I wrote on that day in 1953.  It was of course not about me. The art of writing is to separate the self from the creativity.  It was a feat of imagination: a constructive fashioning of a real world from fiction.  Not magic realism as some fantasy fiction became to be known in later decades, but more a form of magic fiction. A hive of ideas where the bee-keeper was confident enough not to wear protective clothing. A literary suicide-bomber. I liked to strip away any insulation rather than resemble the cities on the snow-line that were insulated both literally and figuratively.  Anyway, without further ado, it was the first thing I ever wrote and read as follows:

 

VALUE by Hiver Jawn

Everyone has their value except me.  I was an unwanted child who remained unwanted for as long as I can remember.  My real mother didn't want me.  My foster mother soon didn't want me. The people in the children's home didn't want me even before I got there.  My friends didn't want me or they wouldn't want me if I had friends.  The school didn't want me.  Then the special school didn't want me.  The prison didn't want me as it was too full.  Finally I didn't want me. 

Then I met you.  You seemed to want me. I can never understand why you wanted me.  I asked you time and time again what possible value could someone like me have for someone like you.  You always smiled without answering.  So I had to keep asking.  The fact that you kept on not answering my question, I lost my temper with you one day.  You vanished that night, with my question still unanswered.  Leaving a single tooth under my pillow.

 

*

 

 

The next stage in the process was to attend lessons in fiction writing.  Jawn sat at the back of a large musty classroom using one of many ranked and age-seasoned desks with sloping lids upon which to rest one's work. There was a large window overlooking the houseboats on a creek which this place called Lewis boasted at each edge of its conurbation.  Many of these houseboats were derelict, but not as derelict as some that had already sunk into the mud over the years when the tide was out. 

 

The ever-blue sky promised sunshine.  Night was without stars or moon, but by that time Jawn was taken back to his foster home, where it was not the acceptable behaviour to have bare windows to look from.  Just the chitchat of peers. Broken by reward periods of windfarm spirituality as they listened to the vanes spin from the direction of the chimney-flue. One could only hear the vanes spin, never watch them as they only spun at night. Then to bed in a dormitory where most, if not all, were kept wake by each other's snores.  Or so it seemed.

 

Jawn remembered the day he had written 'VALUE'.  Julie had kissed him.  A delight he imagined he still felt as a tender caress on the cheek where she had lightly planted this kiss.  Sarah was over the moon with the subtle tantalus of its ending which readers thought they understood, but when in bed that night, they knew they would never understand.  There was no doubt that Jawn had passed his audition with flying colours.

 

When they left the red portakabin office, he was sure the surroundings had changed and that he had just exited into the city's centre itself not into its outskirts.  They took him to a pub, where the girls had cocktails and, bearing in mind his age, a soft drink for Jawn. 

 

He rarely saw the girls after he was transferred to the foster home – but when he did, it was by seeing one of them, if not the other, among the crowds in the streets.  He'd wondered how deep the affection each girl had for the other girl.  He wouldn't have minded if their mutual love was the reason for either of them failing to get closer to Jawn himself. But he once thought he saw Julie in the street arm in arm with a man.  He kept the whole dormitory awake that night, not with snoring but with weeping.  Till he fell into a dream about a white vulture.

 

The classes were well-ordered and strictly conducted.  The teacher – as a first impression – was a very strong authority figure.  It was only when one looked more closely at her face that it was realised that she was relatively young and pretty.  Her bearing had given her inauspicious age.  Jawn enjoyed it when she leaned over his desk to look at his work, judging his work as if he were drawing a picture and thus immediately able to assess the gestalt of lines that produced the picture.  Instead, they were spidery lines of handwriting that she scanned and so quickly judged.

 

"That's promising, Jawn," she said with an uncommon smile.

 

"Thanks, Miss."

 

"I hope you will be able to manage a sad ending this time.  Happy endings never happen in life."

 

He knew, however, that his masterpiece called 'VALUE' did have a happy ending, although it was interpreted by others to be downbeat.  He would never have passed the audition with an ending of overt happiness.  But it was happy enough for Jawn.

 

The teacher's ways of expression were in keeping with the mission statement of the class: "Confront, don't accept."

 

The economies of Lewis depended on fiction being downbeat and constructively depressing, if not confrontational.  Horrific in its implications if not in its slasher gasher violence or monstrousness.  Ghosts with a sense of their own potential subtly to eroticise.  Not a method of brainwashing but a certain instilling of a bleak mysticism that kept the masses indoors within their brown studies.  This replaced the invention of TV as a represser of the masses.  Visions of creativity buoyed up upon the sound of spinning vanes.

 

Jawn wrote things with sad endings that he never showed to the class teacher.*  Perhaps he took the mission statement far too literally, even to the extent of confronting confrontation itself.

 

* example here:  http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/09/16/the-meaning-of-life.html

 

 

*

I  had to leave the place called Lewis sooner than I expected.  I renewed acquaintance with Sarah.  Julie was mysteriously no longer on the scene.  And Sarah's skin appeared thicker, perceptibly wrinklier, as if she had been through a lot of heartache.  She maintained a youthful beauty, including the sleek charms of her race and colour, and at my then age of 22, I radiated an admiration towards her, one that I now wore like a badge of reciprocity, as I had learnt to be more confident about my own attractiveness as a human being.  This was despite my earlier disaster with the young teacher of fiction.

 

Indeed, it had been a one-night stand with the teacher in her place near the pier.  And I threw sickies thereafter as I could not bear her near me any more.  It was the beginning of my downfall in the city. I slouched most days around the backwaters eyeing houseboats to see if any were habitable, when I should have been in the classroom. I stopped writing altogether. But I always returned to the foster home, where I now stood out like a sore thumb amongst delicate fingers.  My sexual act with the teacher was barely describable, even within the realms of fiction.  It was neither erotic nor romantic.  It was because I had never done anything like that before, I suppose.  I was confused.  And she expected the pungent soul of my fiction also to be apparent in my own body.  She must have been bitterly disappointed at my clumsy pre-maturity. She, I guess, must have aged over night, and became again the humourless authority figure I had originally assumed her to be.  Prior to that night, she, too, had been innocent.  I never learned her real name.  Or which bits were true, and which not so true.

 

Sarah, on the other hand, found me down by the pier (why was I there that day so close to the teacher's house – through guilt? hopes of meeting her again?).  It was off-season.  No day-trippers or saucy hats or laughing children with candy floss.  Just a wind off the turgid creeks.  Wind?  When had the weather returned?  I must have been so beached upon my own emotional breakwater, such matters had passed straight over my head.  It was symbolic of deeper things.  The return of weather along with a sense of reality.  A sense of futility.

 

As I say, I suddenly spotted the dark face of Sarah as it glistened like mangled eels between two piles of fishermen's netting. 

 

"Hi," I shouted.

 

This was not the first time we had experienced such a chance encounter in recent months.  I never mentioned Julie. Nor did she.

 

"Hi, Jawn.  You look sad."

"There are no happy endings."  I laughed as if this statement was just that – a happy ending.

 

"Had enough?"  Her face smiled, the teeth standing out with the striking whiteness of our earlier times together - against the skin that framed them.

 

"I don't think this place was what it once was," I said.  "Or it never was what I thought it was.  You see, I dreamed last night of a wardrobe and a lion…"

Sarah looked knowingly.  She must now be in her thirties, I guessed.  And I yearned for her arms to enfold me.  Not as a mother, but as a lover.  Instead, she quickly got up, took my hand (as of old) and we walked down the windy pier together as if there was an expanse of sea at its other end instead of creeks.

 

 

*

 

"Can I ask where you got this?"

 

"It came down to me from my father.  It's just been stuck in a cupboard and, since you were coming here, I had a sudden urge to bring it along."

 

"Well, I'm very glad you did.  For the benefit of the people at home, I'll describe it.  The camera's view of it on the screen is simply not enough.  It is a painting, of certainly some age, but difficult to pinpoint the era, as the style is not one I recognise.  Layered in certain areas are some very precise mountings of a complicated design, which must have taken the artist months, if not years, of careful application.  It is breath-taking the scope of the work to turn a painting into a texture of real life.  If you look at the surface sidewise on, you see – or at least think you see – images of items that are not depicted in the design proper.  Even the frame, as you can see, if you look here […] contributes to the full effect.  Where do you think your father got it from?"

 

"He never told me but I get the impression it was passed down to him ... and there were secrets attached to it.  Vague tales of a disgrace.  And many legends associated with a distant relation's romance with … what can I say? ... someone with whom he should not have had a romance."

 

"Hmmm... Well, we can't speculate – especially as it might take away from its effect if it doesn't stand alone for what it is.  I must say I am very excited.  We don't usually have such striking objects – of obvious great value – to examine on this programme.  I can only relate it a to a period of art of which I've heard but not had the time or resources to follow up. I don't know if you can see, with the combined effect of the images (both frontward and sideward), a face, where one moment there were trees and the next buildings of some oriental character.  A face of a woman, that sort of evolves from shadows."

 

"Yes, when I was a child I had nightmares about it.  I saw all manner of things at different times.  Perhaps that's why it was eventually left in the cupboard.  To put paid to the dreams."

 

"I'm sure if we put this to auction, we would expect ... I don't know.  It should be insured, I'd say for 250,000 pounds."

 

"Good God!  You're joking.  Did you say 250,000?"

 

"Yes, at least that.  Would you allow us to get some other experts to look at it.  But wait, is this a signature here...?"

 

"I've never been able to make one out."

 

"I just glimpsed some letters just now as the camera lights reflected in a certain way.  Doesn't look like a real name.  Ah, yes, H.I.V.E.R .  That's French for Winter.  J.A.U.N.  Yellow?  Hmmm.  There <i>is</i> a yellowish haze to the patina.  I wonder if that's a signature or a title or just an accident of the light or a deliberate mystery. I don't know. The whole thing reeks of fabrication and if it wasn't for its obvious potential for provenance and undeniable great age, I'd say it was a deliberate attempt at obfuscation.  A modern artefact steeped in sepia and combed against the grain to look older than it is.  No other words, really. I'm not usually so imprecise, as you know, after all the years on this show.  Yet, the charm is winning. Its authenticity so real.  A vexed texture that is quite unfathomable.  So difficult to nail down.  A magnificent conundrum.  It's not a winter scene, that's for sure.  It's too dry ... too, clammy, what did I say, yellowish.  A bit like complex straw in places. But difficult without getting it out into natural light away from these cameras. In any event thanks for bringing it in.  You've made my day."

 

"You've made mine!  Thanks."

 

 

*

The 'painting' was lost in transit, before being inspected by other experts.

 

Or it became a prized exhibit that millions made pilgrimage to view in its purpose-built gallery in London.  But the snow only allowed a few of them to reach the frozen banks of the Thames, where the gallery was sited.  Worldwide criss-crossings of many new snow-lines did nothing to prevent the onset of stay-at-home tourism where art could only be seen by electronic means.  And books printed domestically from their only source on the internet by some new method that many called publication-on-reading. 

 

Or it was proved to be worthless, indeed a modern fabrication to give context to the crazy ideas of its creator.  He lived in a gas-generated city far beyond the edge of civilisation as we know it.  In fact his whole head was full of yellow gas that could only escape by manipulation of his lower vents.  An inner world that stank to high heaven.

 

Or it never existed at all.  It was just another configuration of fantasising dressed up as magic fiction.

 

*

At least  Jawn would be fully aware of its provenance at inception if not of its future beyond its source as something he created and left behind as a yester-egg for later discovery by others if not by himself.  It was his fiction-writing become visually textured.  In the same way as music was fiction injected straight into the vein, the 'painting' would derive (once completed) from fiction made into configured tree bark and stained by the weathering of the yellowy el niño that prevailed in the city where he next visited after vanishing beyond the end of the pier in long-forgotten Lewis: so forgotten literally nobody at all remembered its name. 

 

Equally, Jawn and Sarah were simply ideas from the furrowed head of the teacher who proceeded to erase them wherever she could find references to their existence: an easy process because all text had been forethought, late-labelled and written with a Cumberland pencil.  She loved Jawn more than she could ever remember.  But tears told a deeper story, tears she could never quench.  Her students could only then write happy endings, in misguided attempts to help her apparent plight.  Meanwhile, she had failed to find a single reference to Jawn and thus failed to erase it.

 

*

There was a boat at the end of the pier.  A fishing dinghy abandoned for the night at its fragile mooring, luckily still holding fast, but not for much longer.  The creeks had been overridden by the sea in a repeat performance of 1953; lobster pots loudly tapped against the pier's oaken legs, legs that in turn creaked and even splintered in the renewals of swell; ghosts of breezes had been the instigators of the weather's insidious return to the realms of climate; ghosts of real people to crew the dinghy towards as yet invisible coasts where the sea gradually thickened into land; and monsters beneath its hull lightly knocking the sea-seasoned planks as the dinghy plied the channels with moon-dripping oars.

 

Whether the monsters fully followed the whole voyage with their under-knocking is answered by the fact that Sarah continued to glimpse their horrific faces beneath the waves outside of slumber, outside of dream, outside even of creativity itself.  They were monsters true.  And the era of Jawn's pilgrimage towards eventual completion was now entering a monstrous phase, beyond the help of mortals, beyond even the help of nurses specially implanted there to hold his hand.  Without even a kiss farewell, she slipped gracefully and gratuitously off the end of the dinghy when he wasn't watching … and the softly plashing grooves of land-stirred sea now took the impetus from the mis-rollocked oars and eased him (alone) towards a cityscape of complexly textured straw and gesso ill-ventilated with turgid air-currents.

 

 

*

For once, Jawn somehow knew what to expect.  In the past as toddler and teenager, he'd felt instinctively what his life was all about – as a counter in a game over which he had no control.  Now he was more or less master of his environment, even over his own intentions within that environment.  He had grown up.  He had become a man.  A man of meaning as well as means.

 

He continued to dream of Sarah.  Her shiny black face approached his own sallow one – a smile across it.  Tears of happiness or sadness preceded the smile, but remained undefined by the smile.  Undefiled.  Jawn lifted his own mouth ready for the kiss … a kiss that never came. 

 

He mourned her departure without fully understanding when she had gone – or how.  Or where.  Death concealed an afterlife simply by remaining mysterious, unexplained and, most significantly, unnoticed.  She had left Jawn's world perhaps because of her sorrow about losing Julie. Or at losing Jawn himself before even having gained him.  Or at the thought of once losing a baby to the spinning vanes of misplaced memory and ill-conditioned faith.  But these were human interactions no longer directly concerning Jawn.  Just like the blind spot left in his heart by a man named Congreve.  And the half-remembered sight of blind girls with a smoking habit fit to conflagrate a whole city.  Not even snow could douse the flames.  A shimmering curtain of fierce flag-waving yellow reflected off the almost impenetrable bead-curtain of floating snowflakes.

 

He waded through the land-clogged edge of sluggish silent sea, because the dinghy could not reach as far as the confused borderline of wet and dry.  A tutelary gull imitated the wing-span of a much larger bird as its shadow scraped together a sense of departing moon and coming dawn. 

 

Jawn was welcomed ashore by a new protagonist.  One that Jawn in turn welcomed with a firm handshake and a stern eyeball-to-eyeball appraisal in studied mutuality  – instead of fearing  a newcomer as Jawn once might have done in his younger days when first exploring the strange worlds he faced.  After all, Jawn was the newcomer to the newcomer's world.  Jawn was indeed the stranger.  And the stranger was no stranger at all.

 

The new dawn glimpsed their meeting on the cusp of sea and land, between the edge of twilight and no light at all.  For there had never been a moon, it seemed.  That earlier 'moon' had just been a smouldering glimmer of another world beyond this world when a small blotched ring of light opened up in the sky and just as quickly closed again, revealing a soon-forgotten sign of surrender.  White was an offer of negotiated truce.  Yellow for unconditional surrender.  Circular flags of custom and convenience.  Here the moon was yellow.  Here the moon was too scared to exist at all.  Or, if not scared, shamefaced by the flowery sentences used to describe it and by the half-repressed sexualities of this city upon which it wished otherwise to rise and set.

 

Jawn watched the new city (or new to him) evolve beneath the slowly arriving light.  It was a painting he had painted with his mind's eye only a few night's before when still in a forgotten-named city.  However, here, in real life, it was no painting, but the series of brushstrokes themselves that made his breathing more difficult as if the very fibres caused him to gag and jerk.  The straw base hurt his bare feet, having left his thigh boots in the dinghy through over-excitement.  The shutters on the windows were clammed tight like diseased eyelids.  A cakey city within a sleepy yellow gulch. 

 

"Welcome to the City on the Plains, welcome indeed to pretty pretty Proust city," the stranger heard.

 

It looked hot here, but so intense in its own belief that it wasn't hot it made Jawn believe it was simply cool not baking hot at all.  And he heard a distant friction of sound against sound, gradually more tuneful: delicate and conversational like Chamber Music for string quartet, as he was taken to a woven billet beside the tangled bulrushes of a dried-out river basin, where this music served to replace the water-current with a soporific siesta of day-wide semi-consciousness.  In search of lost time. 

 

The gull widened its wings even further and vanished seaward. If sea there still was.

 

*

 

 

The next day, I discovered the stranger in his hammock drifting slowly from side to side against the more unnatural swings he was trying to instil out of pure contrariness towards what he thought was the capriciousness of gravity.  The jaundiced complexion – after the sea voyage in a mere dinghy – seemed to have now blushed back towards rude health.  He actually smiled as I approached the wickerwork den in which I had billeted him overnight.  His first night in Proust. A night of creaking dreams.

 

It must have been hotter than he expected because, I could see, he had covered himself with dried reeds to the extent of sweating several pounds off his bodyweight.  Last night, I thought he was about thirty.  Today, I'd guess he was in his early twenties.  However sudden his body changes were, he seemed to have taken them in his stride.  Time goes at different paces along with the self that experiences it. And I saw the stranger's self today was quite different from last night's self.  But not to the extent of becoming a changeling.

 

I am his Nurse, older than my years.  I am also a family cook. But, in my youth, I was an example of the delicious young females he'd likely find irresistible: one of those timeless quiet girls, shapely, too, as they bowled their hoops along the old-fashioned promenades before taking rides on one of the butterfly yachts as it skimmed the Ravellian water surfaces.  But now, I'm stouter.  More motherly. 

 

As I officiated over the stranger's shaving, I admired his body.  Never too old to look!

 

He wasn't sure how to take the joke, but the toy electric-shaver I gave him played music as he rubbed its business-end over his cheeks and chin and under the nose.  A tune that – he told me – reminded him of the <i>Pavane for a Dead Infanta</i>.  He eventually laughed at the device.  Proust had no electricity, in any event, battery or otherwise, and the rubbing had started a clockwork device inside not dissimilar to a music box.

 

I ignited the gas flames on a portable hob to heat a basin of water, so that he could have a wet shave.  Meanwhile, I guarded the blade with my life, before he was ready to test its magnetic powers of self-sharpening with each scrape he took.

 

The stranger, after he had been scraped, needed to be spruced.  Later he was due to meet the Count.

 

"I have to make thee pretty for Proust city," I crooned, as I took the mascara pencils and small tubs of rouge from among my store of oils and unguents and precious powders and disinfectant wipes.

 

*

When he saw the painting in the London Gallery, he could not believe his eyes.  This was just like his dream.  He had been there.  It was a real place despite the abstractions evidently employed to disguise it as a work of art.  Under an appliqué of teased papyrus he glimpsed a small beetle at rest.*  He went to inform one of the gallery officials that the whole place was probably infested with crawling life even to the extent of the works of art themselves being invaded by foreign bodies.  The official's face – under the peaked hat – listened to the complaint with patience.  So patient, he didn't know when the complaint had ended, and thus failed to respond at all ... failing also to recognise that the complainant's face had foxed rather than blushed with anger.

 

 

*When the official finally investigated with tweezers – upon realising the relative enormity of the complaint – it is said that he discovered the art parasite not to be a beetle as such but a small shiny black egg, leathery to lick.  He passed it to the museum's natural history department for further investigation.  Tomorrow a full report will be given to the authorities.  The complainant is being kept informed.

 

 

*

When Count Congo arrived, Jawn was surprised that this was no fey gentleman in a portly decorated suit from turn-of-the-century Anatole France.  He was slim, decidedly manly-by-penchant and concerned to betray no quirks of behaviour that condemned him to any possible caricature (effeminate or otherwise).  However, he was accompanied by another gentleman who did resemble the inverted archetype of a person that Jawn had expected the Count himself to have been prior to seeing him.

 

"This is Lord Egg," said the Count. 

 

Lord Egg himself strutted about heavily in a baggy black uniform sparkling with medals that he had obviously not won in any war for bravery.  He simpered like a huge woman.  He examined Jawn in his hammock as if visiting a patient in a hospital. 

 

 Count Congo eventually asked Lord Egg to leave the vicinity.  Lord Egg was obviously only expected to meet Jawn briefly and then leave, as if simply, by his presence, to bring out the Count's own sharper articulations by contrast.

 

As the Count prepared to conduct the interview of the stranger-he-did-not-know-was-Jawn, Jawn himself saw that Lord Egg was crouching in the willowy shadows of darker yellow waiting to see if the Count failed in his endeavours to draw any salaciousness from an otherwise dry-baked cake that Jawn first appeared to be.  Congo and Egg were rivals in love if not appearance.  Their respective ranks unclear.  Perhaps they took it in turns to make the first attempt at conquering any innocent stranger who happened to sail into Proust on a chance tide.

 

The Nurse was also present in a secondary shadow by a frond of torn parchment.  Yesterday, Jawn had managed to claw himself from the darkness of mixed motives towards some position of empathy by seeing himself through her eyes via his own eyes.  Today, she seemed to be fully aware of the whole tableau vivant (the interacting ballet of desire and mimed confusion), even without Jawn's empathic help.  She was the manipulator without needing any particularly adroit people-skills other than an air of womanly wisdom to organise affairs like a conductor of an opera composed by Poulenc or Debussy.  Today she looked more like a Nun than a Nurse.  Certainly not the family cook she yesterday pretended to have once been.  More Shakespearean than Proustian.

 

She soon departed to fetch the tea to accompany the plate of cake that the hammock-net had steeped in yellow sleep most of the previous night.  Her infusions of oriental leaf were currently giving off a burning haze in her ancient kitchen having earlier been thus fired into existence by the hob's brightest gas-ring : piping hot within the capaciousness of a priceless samovar that came from an even more writerly precinct of preciousness than Proust city itself.

 

*

 

The scientist carefully prodded the dead beetle with his stethoscope with no idea of the context of any apocryphal findings so was quite gulled into believing it was what the earlier part of the sentence said it was: a beetle.  How it had infested a work of art in a gallery was neither here nor there.  His religion was amply provided with proof of nearly everything.  A scientist-with-faith was so convinced of his faith that even its unscientific nature was sufficient to increase its strength time and time again by circles of powerful kaleidoscopes of convincing illogic that even plain-spirited logic itself could not withstand.

 

An art parasite, therefore.  Things that fed off creativity like worms in sculptures or spiders that climbed the staves of music or one-bee bee-hives within blown bookspines.  These seemed so natural he needed no further empirical delays.

 

But the 'beetle' wasn't dead.  He heard it breathing within the leathery outer-casing of itself that was also itself as well as its container.  By dint of such expression, it was clear that scientists were thus evidently clearer thinkers than fiction writers.  And he smiled in pride as he proceeded to search with some difficulty for one of his precision instruments of surgical investigation. 

 

 

*

I managed to fetch up on the 'beach' of mixed sea and land that presented the edge of Proust's coastline.  Don't put words in my mouth!  Yet, I sense my thoughts – these thoughts – will one day be turned into writing, crystallised into print … and I can only hope the translation does justice to the original.  I hope there are no half-measures with regard to the truth of my thoughts, with regard to their narrative thread as a record of what actually happened to (and of what I actually thought as) Sarah.  And I repeat: don't put just any old words into my mouth!  I'm worth more than that.  Neither put any colour in my skin, no beauty in my face, no shape in my figure, no intention into my gratuitousness of free will, no faith into my frame of aspirations, no love for Hiver Jawn than simply that of a mother for a son or a lover for her lover or a subject for her personal version of what many call God.  Only I know the truth of why I slipped silently from the boat into the sea, allowing Jawn to travel onward to the next city in solitariness.  Only I can keep such cards close to her chest.  Only I can check the verities of time and endlessness.  The rudiments of myth and melancholy.  And, yet, none are my words.  They are, at most, my own thoughts, perhaps, in someone else's words.

 

I managed to stagger into the fibrous jungle as yet uncleared to make room for further city.  The gloom made the jungle's basic hues too dark to see, but I guessed them to be shades of yellow, as if stained by some internals gases of the world via rock-hid geysers or warm-water springs in the form of miscoloured blood.  Sea-water still dripped from my dress, clinging to me as if I had never known anything except innocent nudity all my life.  I heard groans.  I saw a human shape strewn between the woody fangs of deadfall plant-life.  It was Jawn, I soon discovered.  He was not aware of my presence.  His face bore the mark of teeth.  His limbs, too.  Half-chopped, with clumsy attempts at half-healing by means of lint and gummy plaster.  His belly showed signs of being penetrated completely by teeth.  At first, I assumed it was a wild animal that had attacked him. Or tried to eat him.  Remains of a loosely-woven net was round his left leg, a part of him that remained visibly untouched.  His tongue was half-chopped, too, as with a knife, showing a neater cut.  Crumbs as if from pastry or cake crusted the outside of his nostrils.  He snorted deeply as if finding it hard to breathe … or bleed.  The wounds barely revealed evidence of a clogged stream of blood – so much so its remains were mere flecks of a spent sluggish flow hardly worthy of the word seepage let alone haemorrhage.  There was more an appearance of flesh desiccating or crumbling out into a muckheap of curded yolk kept for centuries.  His eyes were filled with tealeaf tears, evidently hot to pass as he winced at every weep.

 

I did not dare look below his belly or higher than his thighs.

 

And yet, none are my words.

 

I wondered whether I could help.  I am no nurse.  I may not even have been there at all.

 

 

*

The gallery was dark as an even darker figure ghosted with a heavy pace towards the famous 'Yesterfang Panoply' between the margins of its intrinsic frame … then very carefully (so as not to awaken any shrill siren of sensed intrusion) it re-inserted a piece of the work's clumsy jigsaw beneath the subtle appliqué of hardened fibrositic flesh-tints.  The work was back as one. Its pest repositioned. The pest of all worlds. The work was now re-become an aesthetic gestalt that nobody visiting the gallery had noticed wasn't what it should have been or what it once was.  With beating heart but now lighter feet, the figure left without attracting the notice of any alarm by ill-thought touch or broken radar beam.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED

 

 

 

YESTERFANG 1 

Part I 

In all dreams but yours.

 

It is a fact universally ignored that most babies, since possessing ready-made minds more complicated than the minds of their later selves, are forever foolishly intent upon seeking - for a mind's mis-perceived tabula rasa - a greater condition of complexity that ever tantalisingly recedes from the moment of birth onwards.  A vicious circle of retrospective trickery interacting with false-bottomed cabinets of complexity. This explains the existence of ghosts, if not of God.

 

John, by contrast, was the exception that proved the rule: born simple-minded and thus seeking greater simple-mindedness as a final goal.  It was a heat wave in the country when and where he was born.  His tiny new-born body was placed not in front of an electric fan for cooling purposes – but, using a special cavity or cradle for new-born babies within the fan just behind the spinning metal vanes, John spent most of his memory days - before false memories took sway - in such a position, often stirring, when his mother switched off the fan to feed him by pushing her nipple through the safety-guard.

 

Growth meant increased danger.  As his body developed, the nearer his outer limits of skin approached the whirring vanes.  He needed to be released at the precise moment his young mind would have forgotten the whole experience or replaced such memories with new ones.  Already he would have forgotten he was being preyed upon by false memories.  It was too late to even apply hindsight.  Now, this explains the existence of God as well as of ghosts.

 

John was simple-minded enough to know, somehow, that he needed to be more simple-minded to deal with the adventures he was about to face when orphaned out to those who were even more simple-minded than the child they called 'Jawn' because that's what he called himself.  This was a country of intense winter all year long.  Mechanical fans only existed as prototypes in ancient books of tissue-paper diagrams.  He pointed to one and called it 'Mama'!

 

"Jawn, don't coo so.  That's not your Mama.  I'm your Mama now."

 

The simple woman took Jawn into her arms.  He had travelled the icy steppes with a wagon train of gypsies and now she had her wish.  A child to cuddle.  A child to leave her ways to.

 

 

*

Yesterfang, s. [Eng. yester and fang.]

That which was taken, captured, or caught on the day preceding.

 

"That nothing shall be missing of the yesterfang."

-- Holinshed: Descript of Scotland , ch. ix

 

Entry in LLOYD'S ENCYLOPAEDIC DICTIONARY 1895

 

 

*

"Jawn, Jawn, where be ye?"

 

His 'Mama' called out.  He was now old enough to wander from her apron strings.  His legs strong enough to have outgrown the old fan threefold.  But today this was the first time he didn't reply, running back smiling eagerly - having tested out (for long enough) the tolerance of his 'Mama' to withstand his increasingly courageous wanderabilities.  Today his wanderabilty seemed ever-lasting.  Ever-lasting to the point of extreme anxiety and the rest of the bewintered village alerted to the fact.

 

Yesterday, he had run off as far as he had previously dared.  But eventually he returned scraping his snow-shoes along the crusted ice sluices prepared as pavements during the deepest part of unrelenting seasons of biting cold.  He said he had been captured by 'snow sprites', but nobody believed because … well, there he was : his presence conflicting with that very claim.

 

But today there was no such claim.  Perhaps he had been captured yesterday after all.  Evidence of the present moment fills out the wide screen of current preoccupations and makes today seem to expunge yesterday as well as tomorrow.

 

The grizzled elders searched the blinding white horzions with shaded eyes hoping to see Jawn transform from imperceptible speck to the welcome sight of an insectoid blot wheeling its spindly arms like windmill vanes … then into full shot as Jawn himself. The only child in the village.  The one who never returned – not yesterday nor all the days before, even during that period before his first arrival in the village.

 

If they had been more experienced with children as well as with a perspective of time itself, this may never have happened.  His 'Mama' shut herself behind bars, as one would a caged dangerous animal with sharp talons.  She saw this as the only way to punish herself for her carelessness.  A safety guard against any such eventuality in the future. Escape was not like running away, she thought to herself without really understanding why she thought it.  She sobbed and remained unfed  … because, this being the purest possible present moment (with no context from past or future), the others fully believed her to be what she claimed to be: a wild caged animal with no hope of taming.  And there she stayed till she died, because the future never came.

 

 

*

The wide-flighted birds-of-prey cast their individual twirling shadows over the vast blank plateau – seeking the toddler Jawn – in absurd pretence of assisting the villagers scattered (in alternately separate and joined-up examples of handwriting) over different sections of the same plateau … with the additional precisions of shadow that represented more ground-based search-parties in seeming competition with those masquerading as such in the skies above.

 

Jawn himself was oblivious to those interchanging patterns of pursuit as well as independent of the shuttling shapes in variously hopeful staged rescues of the yesterfang.

 

Jawn knew no such terms.  Simple-mindedness could never stretch that far.  And as each day went by, his wanderability knew no bounds. Only human minds that had been trained by self-enforced complexities could subsequently stay on board bodies that constrained their wild adventures by always returning home – if crestfallen – into the arms of loved ones.  With simple-mindedness, any wanderability was infinite.  Hence, Jawn running away … escaping into the bottomless pit of simplicity and honesty where no search-parties (friendly or otherwise) could follow.

 

In Hell, one needed the strongest fans possible to waft life-giving draughts of air towards any who had inadvertently wandered there.  The birds-of-prey screeched with scorched wings.  And the villagers stood far back from the flames for fear of being burnt into even blacker versions of their own rorschach blots.  Beyond the wild curtains of infernal orange, they saw the silhouette of Jawn, dancing and jabbing like the clown puppet of all dreams but yours.

 

Jawn, meanwhile, still toddled across the snow – having left a decoy in Hell.

 

In the distance, he saw – with simple-minded clarity – a cage-on-legs following him, evidently not deceived.  Motherly love knew no decoys.

 

 

*

Jawn was an ordinary boy and, almost unremarkably, became an even more ordinary boy – whereby he had grown out of his childhood adventures upon the plains of snow and reached, eventually, the cities where the snow didn't thaw or turn mushy but nestled along the interstices of buildings like a cold-friendly insulation for edges, corners and jagged dirt.  However, in the city of London (named after the writer Jack London as many of the cities on the cusp of snow and more-snow were similarly  named after writers) there were visibly yellow patches of lying snow in the more unsalubrious inner precincts.  Throughout the suburbs, however, the busy citizens swept the snow clear with makeshift diggers but never revealing the nude pavements and doorsteps.  It was a losing battle, in any event, because the sky ever re-filled with swarming volumes of upper grey that turned whiter and whiter with every glance downward.  'The ghosts of killer bees' represented only one of the trite analogies that Jawn heard others used because inhabitants of a writer's city such as London often adopted misfired turns of phrase as if words themselves (however clumsy) steeped the cobbles with enthralling mixtures of meaning amid the ever-changing swathes of snow.

 

Jawn had earlier been captured by a vast vulture between his home village and London, then left to pine in an igloo-like nest upon the bleak slopes of a land-locked ice-berg.  There he learned not to question his own simplicity and how he had survived so far amid the bodily mechanics of sustenance and waste.  He recalled his Mama who had cared for him and tried to follow him as he reached realms of yesterfang that knew no tomorrows, only recurrences of capture by the past – receding as well as growing into realms of a previous time that more readily contained all the ingredients of life without the inbuilt future of needing to function like an on-going human body. 

 

He watched the cage-on-legs peer up at him in his perch upon the berg.  Then, after peering, it receded into the future that Jawn could no longer reclaim.  He knew its inner-revolving vanes – imperceptibly frame-fast – were his Mama's sad heart beating with a deep sorrow at losing her surrogate son and were, too, the quickenings of a life that she must lead once escaping back to the village with her soul intact and her veins unpunctured by icicles.  Motherhood, in those days, was the tragic act of losing children rather than finding them or birthing them.

 

Once she had gone – seen as upper striations vanishing upon strobing legs – Jawn found himself old enough and strong enough to manage the descent from nest to ground. The vulture wheeled in the sky as if proud of some feat of gestation by timeslip as represented by Jawn's descent.  Jawn had learned a lot, including the lesson that learning, for him, helped rather than hindered simple-mindedness.  That was his greatest gift, he felt, as he suddenly spotted the distant towers of London, where his adventures and character-building were set to take place. But equally he now had to trudge through a white-out of blizzards that soon took the towers away again or turned them back into blind spots that looked just like the towers themselves.  Which of these it was remained uncertain simply because Jawn only saw what he saw without interpretation.  He needed all his wit and wisdom just to keep warm and fed.

 

 

*

The day before the islands of yellow snow appeared (across the park's courtyards or frozen lakes within the city centre) many strangers to the city had been seen clanking with chains into the candle-flickering municipal buildings - having crossed that very terrain stained today by misfirings from their frightened bladders yesterday.  Jawn, although still a young shaver, stared down at the offensive crystal-hard puddles with mature disgust - having decided that he was simply lucky not to have been among those gathered-up strangers.  He was always racing yesterdays against their own todays.  Thus his ability to skirt the adventures he was not yet man enough to handle.  It was straightforward if one were straightforward enough to keep it that way.  Eyes focussed on birth, rather than on death, despite growing the other way.

 

"Where be ye from?" asked a voice behind him. "You look Shakesperean to me … no you have the cast of being Dickensian."

 

Jawn turned to look up at a full-grown man whom he was soon to know as coming from the city of Congreve and calling himself Congreve because Congreve hoped he was the only one in London to be from Congreve.  Those from Congreve or called Congreve couldn't be trusted and he didn't want to meet any of them!  So he simply tempted fate as the best possible way of avoiding people called Congreve and landing other people he met with that potential problem instead of himself.

 

"I'm not from any city … yet," said Jawn, his voice still unbroken, despite the beginnings of beard growth on his chin. 

 

Congreve – who had not yet introduced himself to Jawn as an older person should first introduce himself  to a younger one in view of the dangers that youths faced when accosted by those older than them – was a man of inscrutable looks combining times past and times future with cross-sections of expression fleeting across his face in counterpoint to each other.  Trust.  Mistrust. Grim selfishness.  Openhearted jollity.  Grizzled sarcasm.  Smooth courtesies.  Blank poker-face.  Teeming emotions.

 

"Are you old enough to want a lass of your own?" he asked, having finally settled on the mood of interrogation.  "I know where you can get one in London."

 

Jawn wondered what was in store for him if he should decide upon one answer or another.  He vaguely understood that sex would soon play a large part in separating one day from another.  But he had never remembered the urges that he would one day need to quench.  He looked up at the ice-spotted darkness of the sky.  He shivered and decided to cold shoulder Congreve.  Sex would come soon enough without the insinuations of third parties.  Congreve kept pace with Jawn as Jawn tried to shake him off.  Perhaps Jawn had been unlucky after all in not being rounded up into relative safety as a stranger to the city like the strangers yesterday.

 

 

*

Along the snow-line, the cities were strung as upon a crystal necklace – London, Ligotti, Dickens, Auster, Shakespeare, Congreve, Beerbohm, VanderMeer, Sebald, Fowles & Updike. Composite city-flakes each with its symmetry of icy artistry.  Named by Nature after writers now forgotten by most, whilst their respective genii loci were still apparent to those few students who studied such studies-in-hindsight or were old enough to remember studying the books for real.

 

Jawn knew little of the background of the city where he discovered this period of his youth had once taken place.  London was comfortable with its own name – as if the word was built into its very soul and sewers.  The mysterious figure of Jack London himself who'd lent his name to its white-crusted roofs and roads was the city's God – a God that each snow-line city boasted for themselves with a different and competing name, although they all referred to the same God via Jungian principles that nobody amy longer pretended to understand.

 

Congreve of Congreve had misheard Jawn saying his name was Jung and at the very point when he befriended the youth whom he called Jung, he pronounced the J like a J not a Y.  Indeed, even Congreve thought Jawn was still too 'young' to be approached for sexual favours – much to Congreve's credit.  Yet, during some cold nights they did hug each other (like rugby or football players) as a source of warmth or counterbalance to the loneliness that London foisted even upon its most sociable citizens.

 

There seemed no 'character' to any of the snow-line cities because their corners and edges were rounded off by snow … or rounded up or down for ease of memorability.  One needed to fraternise with the citizens within their very houses to gain some inkling into any city's 'character' … and the citizens of London were far and few between, in a similar manner as their houses were thinly interspersed between the sprawling prisons-for-strangers-to-the-city wherein both Jawn and Congreve feared was their own destiny to moulder.  So Jawn began to trust Congreve, as second best – against his own nature.  Like it was only yesterday he had dreamed of the sky-spinning vulture pouncing to peck for juicy innards beyond the chest-cages of unrounded-up strangers-to-the-city like Jawn and Congreve by means of its whitened jaw-bone or fang.  Jawn and Congreve had run like devils across the white lawns – laughing like friends of old.  Neither knew the vulture was their friend also.

 

 

*

Jawn and Congreve – one particularly cold night – spotted the towering U-shape of the Magnet pointing to the sky whence the ice melted in evidence of internal warmth within its gas-driven circuits.  This bare landmark indicated they had at last reached that part of London where services-to-men were carried out, if not exactly in the open (because of the cold) but within hothouses.

 

Jawn had long since learned that the yellow patches of snow he had witnessed on his first night in the city were not the residue of piss-laden strangers-to-the-city but the underground resources of what was supposed to be natural gas leaking beyond its usual catchment areas of pipes. Nor was the lighting in the municipal buildings from candlewax but from the same supplies of gas.

 

 Like the sewers themselves, the gas-pipes had been built beyond the past and were now threatening to seep into the present on yesterday's turn of enforced breakdown made manifest today by some undiagnosed perversion of yesterfang's natural course of capture become release.

 

As the two of them had now been in the city for some months they were no longer strangers-to-the-city by default of their own lack of capture, having dodged the wide-ranging stranger-culls by ingenious methods of daily travel along hidden ice-sluices and nightly bivouac within a series of disguised igloos made to look like real buildings covered in snow.  Now, by that same default, Jawn and Congreve were real citizens – and always had been – so no authority could now dredge up a forgotten law to capture them in retrospect.  Hence, their new-found ability to make use of the services provided by the hothouses.

 

"They very warm inside," said Congreve with a smile to his young companion.  A mutual respect had grown up between them, and Congreve's earlier lust had since been turned into manly fondness – a far healthier relationship for Jawn to enjoy.

 

"The gas?"

 

"Heated to the gills, Jung.  To the gills."

 

"Why can't we smell it?  The stains are getting worse.  There must be more leaks."  Jawn gave a boyish smirk as he already knew the answer.

 

"The stenches were taken out because they cost too much.  It happened first in Auster then spread like wildfire along the snow-line."

 

"So we must be smelling them all the time – the leaks, that is – without really smelling them…"

 

The conversation was like one they had rehearsed earlier to keep the bonhomie and camaraderie buoyed up.

 

"They get the strangers in the prison to breathe them in…"

 

"Ah … I see.  What do we do in these hothouses?"

 

"Girls … and more girls!"  Congreve laughed.  "I'll introduce you as a newcomer who has recently ceased to be a stranger-to-the-city and then leave you there for a few hours.  I'm not really interested in girls myself."

 

"How do they know I'm ready … old enough … for girls?"

 

"It's a rather exact science," Congreve said with a tone of seriousness and an intelligence he did not really possess.  "They set fire to your lower hair and if it is impossible to successfully light a cigarette from the resultant flames before these flames start burning your body-parts then they know you're not yet old enough for girls and have to wait till the hair grows back and they can try again."

 

"Hmm… sounds dangerous with all the gas-leaks about."

 

"It's a tradition of several centuries, Jung.  And they take enormous risks to keep traditions going to thwart any kickback from dangerous yesterfangs."

 

"Ah, I see."  But Jawn never did. He had earlier dreamed of his first entry into a hothouse as a greenhorn, including the girls' clucks and giggles as they divested him to inspect the area to be touched by a matchflame, their honest sighs of relief as the cigarette was ignited from the burning hair with Jawn not uttering even the suspicion of a painful cry, his subsequent glimpsing parts of the girls' enticing forms through the inadvertently gaping armholes of their stiff plain Spartan clothing, and finally being formally invited to break his sexual fast … or, on the other hand, he winced as he already felt the scorched repercussions of the burn-test upon his person, a test he'd self-evidently failed by screeching awake from the painful dream. The only real lasting image from the dream was a gas-driven fan in the corner of the room which he called 'Mama', much to the amusement of the others in the dream.

 

Notwithstanding the dream, Congreve – in real time – introduced the one he called 'Jung' into the stifling atmosphere of the hothouse without answering any further questions – merely wishing his young charge good luck and perhaps goodbye.

 

 Jawn couldn't yet see the inhabitants of the room nor, upon looking back, Congreve's departure from or through or behind a sudden onset of yellowish gas or smoke or steam or a haze-of-all-three.

 

 

*

Having attuned his eyes to the haze of the hothouse, Jawn proceeded to pinch himself.

 

He was real. 

 

Events, admittedly, had  not been amenable to character-building as a real person in real situations, but Jawn was completely satisfied that he was real, had real emotions of surprise together with growth as an individual from toddler to his current stage of beard-teazled youth.  A young man in an ever-failing search for his lost youth as his own past vanished with each event transpiring towards completion – a past that indeed vanished, given the normal course of events of a typical young man's mindless search for excitement and challenge.  However, to obtain a graspable sense of his own being, Jawn needed to be captured by each moment with such moments later being pulled from some future hat like magic tricks of himself to assist his natural development as a unified character facing a known and believable reality.  Thus, he needed to build yester-hives of himself along the way for when he needed to travel back there one day.  A phalanx of deja-vus that maketh the man. 

 

As long as the past moments thus stored were not false moments.

 

He felt unaccountably sad about the departure of Congreve.  He read too much into it to cause such sadness.  But, meanwhile, he needed to acclimatise himself to the variable levels of haze that stained the air around him, through which he glimpsed apparently blind girls in stiff plain frocks crawling about the floor continuously striking matches.  He felt the urge to pinch their legs but, when he did just that, his actions evoked no visible reaction to his presence as the girls merely continued to groan and mouth nonsensicals of sound.  However, he did eventually discern two other girls who were seated together on a sofa.  They beckoned him over.

 

"I'm Sarah," one said.  A pretty girl who made no attempt to flirt with Jawn. She was just a person rather than a sexual animal. "You need to stop breathing so hard or it'll choke you."  She pointed to the atmosphere.  "You can't smell it but it's there all the time.  Sometimes you can't even see it."

 

"Leaks?" asked Jawn rhetorically, the first word he had spoken since Congreve's departure.  He noticed that the atmosphere was clearing (as if in tune with Sarah's prediction that it might) and he was now able to make a whole from the room.  A bare utility working-class parlour from a real post-war London.  Jawn recognised it from a depth of memory he didn't know he possessed until this very moment.  Hopefully, not one of those false moments he had earlier feared, but a real memory during an equally real trigger of such memory as represented by the room.  He watched the blind girls curl into a corner and simper in a strangely satisfied manner.

 

"Don't worry about them.  They're not really there.  So blind they don't exist."  Sarah spoke with intelligent conviction, in contrast to her outward dizzy winsomeness as a vision of attractiveness.

Her words made a strange sense within the context, and Jawn turned to the other girl who looked even more becoming than Sarah.

 

"I'm Julie," she eventually said. "We've been waiting for you."

"You expected me?" said Jawn.

 

"Sort of.  Sarah didn't believe me, but I told her you would come.  And that's why the haze is clearing…"

"Well, now he's here, what next?"  Sarah asked.  Both girls were a match for each other's winning wit and wisdom.

 

Jawn turned to look at the corner where the blind girls had crawled – only to find them gone.  Despite the clearer view, things that had once been there weren't there now, as if a new invisible or non-characterisable haze had intervened between him and them.  However, the room retained its character.  Not so warm.  And he felt the beginnings of a cough from the after effects. 

 

Jawn thought of Congreve and cried.  Then, just as suddenly, he shrugged off such thoughts as he turned towards his new friends, Sarah and Julie both of whom smiled at him, ready to participate in a silent vigil for memories lost - with new ones waiting in the wings … in the making.

 

Sarah, shivering, eventually got up to switch off the fan.

 

*

Congreve, having left the vicinity of the hothouse, laid down as close to the London Magnet as it was possible for any commoner to reach.  While the white snow around him gradually turned into faint tinges of yellow and, finally, to a deeper more diseased form of the same colour, he beckoned the wheeling shape of the vulture from the sky, inviting it to descend and cuddle him close with its huge white wings.  The hefty weight of the bird settled upon him, with a flutter of feathers, as the beak's fang opened his face and fed on the brain.  Congreve – before the destruction of his brain – had known instinctively that was what the bird's fang was about to accomplish – an assisted suicide for the loss of a loved one.  And despite the brain's destruction, the remains of Congreve cried … cried for longer than Jawn had managed to cry in earlier reciprocity.

 

Eventually, the vulture lifted into the sky, itself temporarily stained by its lengthy feed, leaving a muckheap of a brighter red and yellow (separate and mingled), a muckheap that steeped the otherwise virgin snow of London's Magnet precinct with its landmark of memorable colour.

 

 

*

Sarah was a girl who originally had ambitions to make something of herself.  From a working-class background, she had a chip on her shoulder which made her avoid otherwise typical working-class pursuits – such as hen parties and hanging round town centres on boying activities.  Her parents had long since slipped into TV Hell whereby their eyelids drooped in nightly boredom at the 'excitement' of each night's programme schedule.  They had no life except thinking they were living.  Sarah was determined not to fall into the same trap.  Watching her parents being sucked into an old-fashioned close-down screen of snowy reception was worse than any future episode of Dr Who could have portrayed. 

 

She had hair that hung down her back in a rather over-girlish way, like an Alice in Wonderland but one who had lost her Wonderland.  Even her dreams were forgotten by morning.  Dreams of intense heat or intense cold, where the events were either so melted or so frozen they could not follow any linear path, particularly any paths of memorability. Puberty came and went without any problem.  She was mature enough to ride over all the body-changes that this entailed and came out the other end as the same Sarah that went in.  She had an eye on University.  But was overtaken by events.  Because on just one night of weakness she forgot all her own self-made rules of rectitude and ambition by allowing her drinks to be spiked at a party – then herself.  She had a child she put behind her just like the dreams she once had.  She met Julie, soon after.  And yet one more direction emerged in which her life could follow.

 

In contrast to Sarah, Julie was essentially from the top drawer.  A girl (with a bob) who had a yearning for a bit of the rough that her posh upbringing had intended to turn into a blind spot where she could not wander – as if violence, cruelty, sex itself were on the other side of tracks she could not even view from her secluded bedroom window in suburbia.  The internet changed all that in a distant future when Julie and Sarah felt they were now as old and as unfulfilled as their parents once were.  And they made friends in that virtual world.  Choose your own path to adventure – where the choices fanned out into a million possibilities, one of which was a fantasy land far more scrutable than a literary Wonderland.  Fantasy and reality mixed with poker-casino spam and porn sites – screen-sacrificers that in turn mixed their own spells within far more innocent areas of surfing.

 

Sarah and Julie were cyber-heroines trying to find minds to personalise themselves.  The internet was an effficient smoother-out of the classes.  It made us all vulnerable.  It even made the innocent feel guilty. And what Sarah and Julie would have been in real life – if they had been allowed to live a real life without being entrapped by the world wide web – would have been quite different.  They filled the cyber-heroines' minds with their own minds until they subsequently feared losing their own minds and sensed other minds touching the edges of their minds from all directions like a kaleidoscope of Venns.  Until they didn't even sense this touching upon the tender edges of their fragile personalities.  Because the original personalities had changed so radically (over time) that they could no longer sense the violation of themselves by others.  Because, too, they were these others. They had been entrapped within these new ball-games of identity when young, but – eventually having failed to rediscover the yester-eggs laid on their backward path (like a Hansel and Gretel who had wanted to follow a line of white crumbs earlier dropped for themselves) - they soon became as old as they felt when outside the screen and as young within. 

 

Moreover, Sarah became certain she had become Julie, and vice versa.  But even that certainty was built on shifting sands.  Or on surf-scuffed snowfields. Until they met a fixing-force called Hiver Jawn.

 

 

*

Jawn heard a familiar vulterine voice through the ear-wax of his ears that told him to be wary; belief was not part of it; not even an issue; at his relatively young years he was not to be fooled by a fictionalised system of communication called the web; the only form of power in London, after all, was a yellowy gas  that hissed from under ground-surface in streams of the thinnest possible slime; the web was far beyond the capability of such a non-electronic source of motivation, being so tenuous, so dream-like using screens-that-had-no-surface-at-all; reality was an empty-ended screen which he entered and exited at will, along with his two new friends called Sarah and Julie; they denied their roots elsewhere; they were as real as him; here and now; they didn't need to fool anyone; they were not oldish gentlemen trying to groom gullible youngsters; Jawn had no fears from the likes of Sarah and Julie; you could trust they were whom they seemed to be, they assured him; they were as real as him; a Joycean monologue that pulsed in and out, up and down, till all three left the hothouse hot foot for greater adventures along new paths they could choose at whim; like facing the red and yellow zombie muckheap that squelched in their wake; dangerous to look at, dangerous to love, dangerous to know; but nobody mentioned the Magnet; it was just a towering U-shaped unsnowed-upon monument that people saw without seeing and didn't know without knowing they didn't know; snow at least would have disguised it.

 

 

*

 

Julie and Sarah took Jawn by both hands, as if to lead him from the room, if not from the hothouse proper.  They had no truck with thoughts of deeper realities – or lesser ones.  They were here and now.  All else was subterfuge to try prove they were fiction.  They were far from fiction. They were worth more than that. They were two genuine girls with caring hearts and a new charge for their hearts to care about.

 

Jawn saw that one of the blind girls had returned and was now squatting in a corner near a small old-fashioned bakelite TV set.  She was vigorously puffing post-concupiscently (Jawn inferred) on a cigarette.  Jawn was not old enough thus to infer with the use of any words beyond his current vocabulary but he inferred, too, that he was due to pre-fashion many words for each tomorrow's yester-hives that he would lay like eggs-of-self awaiting a particular future self to send it bowling back along the same egg-laid trail for the benefit of his younger self.  Or so he inferred.  An inference without actually thinking at all.  He was so intrigued by his two new attractive friends that he did not even bother with thinking.  Merely living for the moment, as his own urges continued to develop with the two girls' hands in his own hands: more erotic for him than any full-blooded love-play.  He had also abandoned Congreve, not even bothering to devote one of his yester-eggs as a Congreve hive.  He would never think of Congreve again.  And he wondered why he now started a repetition of his crying.

 

Outside, the full surge of winter made the relative temperature in the hothouse (which seemed very cold compared to its own intense heat that had welcomed Jawn when first entering it) seem like a very balmy warmth.  White-out piled upon white-out in shuddering blindnesses of bladed blizzard - except for the barely noticed never-snowed-upon monument: either u-shaped or n-shaped, depending on the ability to encompass its form as well as its purpose, while mostly seeming to have neither.

 

Noticed or not, the two girls escorted him through its vibrating archway*.  If archway it were.

* When one needs a dream sequence, it's difficult to differentiate it from reality when the reality - into which any dream sequence is inserted – already has its own elements of dream-likeness.

 

As Jawn, Julie and Sarah passed through the archway of the Magnet, it was as if they left a black and white world of reality and entered a colourful dream like The Wizard of Oz. Passing from reality to dream, without leaving one or entering the other.  Black and white with no memory or premonition of blood yolks.

 

*

An upright egg, as large as an average nine-year old child, was half-hidden by its own whiteness against that of the snow and half-revealed by its oval sky-reaching sensuality as a shape: almost pliable, despite the shell.  A foreign form amid the natural rough-hewn carpet of frozen precipitation. 

 

The egg watched the three human figures disappear through the archway, watched them via a little chink of a crack towards the top of the shell, whence a tweaking beak also cutely tried to emerge.  The egg itself and the owner of the beak (within the egg) seemed to be two separate conscious beings.  The wide-wheeling form of a white vulture loomed (along with its even larger shadow) from the sky and eventually settled beside the egg, whereupon its fanged beak proceeded to dig into the shell from the opposite direction to the tinier beak within it – and the whole egg imploded with a slime of red and yellow … a new muckheap to landmark the terrain, with the half-eaten semi-formed creature that constituted part of this very muckheap slowly dying amid an elastic scum of wasted life. Meanwhile, the vulture took flight, now with increasingly lumpy attempts to soar, after a semi-satisfactory feed upon its premature prey.

 

*

Jawn gaped at the vision that confronted him.  He felt he had trekked for many miles, whilst another part of himself believed the transformation had been instantaneous.  The snow had disappeared and he viewed a city bare of any such white insulations of privacy.  He believed this to be a miraculously thawed London.

 

As if reading his mind, Sarah (still holding his hand) said: "Welcome to Lewis."

 

"Julie, having now released her shared of hand-holding with Jawn during their unquantifiable rite-of-passage added: "Lewis is not on the snow-line.  Not disguised by weather. Here it's what you see is what you get."

Jawn laughed.  He had somehow heard of the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, those Western Isles of Scotland, including its capital Stornoway, whereby, for him, there was some root racial memory threading back to some of his ancestors - a family of four (parents and two young children) in nineteen-seventies England - who had holidayed in Lewis, the year before holidaying in Glastonbury.  But now – as Jawn watched its first impressions unfolding -  Stornoway seemed to have become a vibrant modernistic city instead of its original state as a simple isolated market town for crofters and fishermen. No connection with his ancestors.  No connection, even, with itself.  Certainly none with him.

 

Sarah pointed into the distance as a long helicopter like a red railway train from those far-off days of seventies England soared into view … skimming the rooftops with hardly a clatter.  He even doubted  it was a helicopter, although one of the girls assured him it was. Not so modernistic, after all, as a city, perhaps, as there were old-fashioned TV aerials on chimneys which the flighted vehicle nearly clipped. Looking more closely, after the vehicle had landed, the brickwork and shapes of the city emitted a certain tang of architectural accidents in misapplied surveying so typical of England during the nineteen-fifties and sixties.  An overview of sentiment that did not derive from Jawn, but hinted at by the otherwise light gabble of his two attractive friends

 

Not only was weather here not instrumental in the city's character as it had been along the snow-line, Jawn also noticed no weather whatsoever, unless one called a sunless blue sky a type of weather in itself.  The temperature was temperate.  He shrugged, as the girls (still gabbling) led him down towards the edge of the city, where the red 'helicopter' had settled.

 

 

*

I must have imagined the red carriage flying like a helicopter.  The prefab or portakabin was really a well-rooted set of makeshift offices where immigrants were processed, docketed, earmarked and assessed for work.  Julie told me – as she continued to hold my hand in the waiting-room – that I would eventually need to be economically productive or I would be sent back to the snow-line.  Sarah, meanwhile, was talking to a peaked official about my case.  That I was sixteen years old.  And that I was an orphan suspected of a blade birth whereby most of my characteristics had been lost in the subsequent desectioning and I needed to reconstitute before being able to work in Lewis.  An egg without a chicken having come first … or second.

 

I had fallen in love with both Sarah and Julie.  I hadn't told them.  Nor, doubtlessly, were they competing for my affections! 

 

LLOYD'S ENCYCLOPAEDIC DICTIONARY (1895):

 

brain-wright, s. One who thinks or devises for another.

(Halliwell : Cont. to Lex.)

 

 

(51)

 

It was like Chinese Whispers in reverse – overhearing some whispering as each new pair overhears the words overheard by the previous pair without the necessity of repetition until reaching the first pair who overhear it all over again in puzzling counterpoint. Not even puzzling, if memory has lost the ignition of the original ‘whisper’ by the time it returns as a full-bodied theatrical aside.  It’s strange how words can seem to live without the necessity of re-articulation: becoming a living, breathing force themselves until one wonders if they need human intervention at all, passive or active.

 

Suzie returned to Glistenberry and was amazed how the spirit of the place  - its genius loci – had changed since the frique storm.  The hill where the toppled Tor had once stood seemed somehow bigger, more mountainous, more magical. In the Abbey grounds, the ruined Ruins were somewhat sadder.  Less magical, but more grindingly religious.  The Chalice Well Gardens were water-logged and carried a swamp fever variant of riparian cancer – as if the Yellow River itself had threaded the European deserts with the consequent further staining of its namesake appearance from the lack of colour-fastness in the painterly sand dunes that it undulated above and below to reach these very gardens. In some quarters, yellow was a brave colour – symbolic of heroic acts.  But today, in Glistenberry, Suzie was disturbed by the insidious personality the colour had gained by transit and transformation between Middle Europe and Summerset.

 

Despite the wonderful image of the now Torless hill as the very Magic Mountain of legend, the stripping out of the inferred animal zodiac from the surrounding fields by the storm had deterred the various fairs, festivals, markets and circuses from returning to occupy its landscape.  Now an essentially tarnished landscape.  Many failed to see the magic in the 'mountain', in any event.  But Suzie did.

 

Thus, attracted by the sole residual attractiveness, that of the so-called ‘magic mountain’, Suzie decided to spend the day searching for G on its slopes.  Even under them if she could dig far enough with her bare hands.  She knew she loved G.  But she’d forgotten why.

 

Cattle still grazed its lower slopes, but with even more dolorous mooing and lack of stamina.  Their race of ruminants was well and truly over.  It could be called sadness, but if one overhears the word too often it sounds like a seaside resort: sadness-on-sea … shading away into mere sandness … and the once hopeful spice voyages to Cathay and Samarkand now bogged down in silt.  Abandoned for the sake of recrimination.  Persia and Ur sinking into underground rivers of nuclear waste.

 

If only Suzie had known she could have avoided all the heartache of slope-scouring.  G was in the name Glistenberry all the time.

 

*

There was one circus that still returned to the vicinity.  Not as close to the Torlessness of Glistenberry proper.  But towards Wells where a cathedral still squatted despite the desecration of its views.  Modal Morales was now chief clown and was never palmed off with the ringmaster’s job.  He still resorted to some dirty tricks – it was in his nature – like the loosening of an odd trapeze or the acidifying of the odd custard pie – but he always regretted his actions and spent lifetimes of self-denial to nurse his victims back into health.  He was a walking hospital that had damaged its own patients in the first place.

 

He no longer wore black rosettes on his baggy Andy Pandy suit, but red ones, as he recently discovered his father Coco used to wear red rosettes when clowning was a reputable profession and you could appear on TV along with stars like Mr Pastry and Clive Dunn.  Children loved clowns then.

 

In sight of the cathedral, the circus was climbing the sky piecemeal and crawling the ground in ill-defined maps of lost islands. Modal was not too hoity-toity to mess in and help set up the Big Top and attend to the animals’ ablutions.  He did not even think about what was what or who was who. He tried to switch off his mind and, with it, the recent dream sickness of losing his Mum's joyful skill in walking washing-lines. When he wasn’t working, he simply watched the hazy ring-cyclists crossing the sky-line limned against the hugely setting sun either side of the louring cathedral.

 

The Weirdmonger – after seemingly centuries (judging by the clock in his heart) of scouring the world for the Elixir of Life – had returned to the circus as a safety-net consultant, and not its boss.  Nobody now realised there was, indeed, no top authority within the circus.  Very few in fact knew that the Weirdmonger was now amongst them again unless they accidentally overheard the fact. They vaguely heard it rumoured, however, that the embarrassment he had once suffered on Crackerjack was of more importance to him even than the Elixir of Life, having extended his journeys across the whole of Europe simply by the magnetic force of aspirational vengeance. But hardly anyone believed rumours.

 

The circus had become a leaderless commune and anarchy was just another tight-rope act. 

 

The Weirdmonger just sat in his medicine wagon dreaming of the old days of Wagger Market and of when he spent ‘centuries’ rubbing thoughts into his brain via the forehead - or was that just an attempt at erasing the tattooed letters?  You could still see the residual livid scar of the P and the even fainter remains of E, S and T if you looked close enough.  But nobody dared. 

 

At night you could hear Baby Tuckoo crying.  Nobody rocked his cradle.  Just another eraserhead.

 

 

(52)

 

Yellowish Haze started his incredible heroic adventures in concentrated war effort by a complete pre-briefing in a hospital ward that was situated beyond the door that acted, when open, as a bridge for the stagnant moat.  There he exchanged secret passwords with his linkman by the name of Simplon, masquerading as a doctor.  Apparently Haze needed yet to endure many further processes to his body as if his earlier rehearsal of mere swirling around the salt-mine was nothing but child’s play when compared to the real thing.  However, during that previous rehearsal, he had lost a lot of body fluid in the form of sweat and urine seeping through all his skin-pores as had been evidenced by the staining of all the available surface salt configurations or sculptures in such a huge cavity underground.  But now that admittedly difficult liquid process needed to become an even more difficult gaseous one.

 

“Not many men have the ability to turn into gas,” said Simplon with gravitas. 

 

Haze shrugged – he was destined for this glory because of his name, no doubt.   He did not query such a paradox as a name preceding what the name was not yet famous for or had not yet created the fame for itself in hindsight.  Such tributes by naming usually followed a different direction.  God was only called God after the event.  He shrugged again.  Saint Yellowish Haze.  Sounded good.  He now smiled.

 

Simplon was doggedly fingering an over-large human tongue on a plate, earlier organ-donated – as Haze had witnessed – by one of the dinnermen who worked in the hospital kitchen.  It had been already been stitched with various loose ends to help manipulate it. It was not, however, a genuine Weirdtongue – as it would have to be far longer and plumper and juicier  to have been a Weirdtongue.  It was said that there was only one genuine Weirdtongue in the whole world and this had been smuggled from country to country disguised as a whole human being. 

 

The tongue in Simplon’s ward was of secondary weirdity.  It served its purpose however as Haze’s proposed transfiguration in an almost religious process of speaking in tongues.  This tongue could be worked like a magical trick to split infinities when babbling and Simplon read a rather abstruse spell of summoning gas with his own tongue in counterpoint to the puppet tongue on the plate.  Simplon yanked on one of the strings and the tongue jabbered loudly, using the plate as if it were a rather large tooth and Simplon’s cupped hand as a distant echo-chamber or mouth.  Haze was amazed how the intricacies of such a ceremony had ever been invented from scratch because each part in the process seemed to follow one unlikely event with an even unlikelier event time and time again.  Growing ever beyond description or ratiocination.  Only wild guesses could follow any logic in the presumably strict rotation of spell and counter-spell. 

 

Haze watched – with increasing nemophobia – his own skin growing into an ectoplasmic gas with each tug on the tongue’s tags by Simplon.  How Simplon’s body itself avoided the process was mysterious and, indeed, from time to time, Simplon had to burn off some of his own product of gas with a cigarette-lighter.  Simplon was a lugubrious fellow with tall features and a sunken smile.  He talked with a deep voice that the tiny tongue in his mouth did not seem capable of producing, even with the barrel chest available as part of Simplon’s propensity to breadth as well as height.  Soon all Simplon could see was Haze’s namesake swirling around the room with a noxious stench that had been deliberately instilled to protect against unexpected leaks by revealing the existence of such leaks through the sense of smell.  Simplon opened a valve in a dialled gasometer on the ward’s wall and watched the wild ribbons of yellowness that had been Haze vanishing into the complex pipe systems that threaded the underground of wartime Europe. 

 

“Damn!  I forgot to tell him which way to go!” Simplon said to himself.  Shrugging nonchalantly, he picked up the puppet tongue and commenced to munch it as a means of destroying the evidence.  He instinctively picked up his mobile and rang someone abroad but whoever it was couldn’t hear what he said because his mouth was full.  Mrs Celia Mummerset shrugged and wondered who had called.  Whoever it was had withheld their number, she noted.  She wondered if it were her dear long-lost son.  Or that no-good Feemy Fitzworth.  Wasn’t her dear friend Chelly (who was now sadly suffering nemophilia) née Fitzworth before she was Mildeyes or Milledges? Or was it Chelly's daughter Suzie?  Mrs Mummerset would never understand anything.  At least you can’t lose a mind if you never had one in the first place!  She laughed.  Then shrugged.  Time for her afternoon snooze: a restful dozing in counter-rhythm to a wheezing cough that threatened to rattle the prison-bars of her asthmatic chest.  She’d forgotten she’d left a pan of porridge on the gas stove.

 

 

(53)

 

It is a joy not a job.  My name is not Simplon.  I am a simplon. Employed by the JCP Foundation.

 

 I was one of those simplons who attended the meeting here:  http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/08/weirdtongue-23.html even if I am not directly mentioned.  I think, however, I was directly mentioned but I’m too busy today to have a look.  The links are simply too many for me to untangle them all. Some days I simply don’t care.  Let the inconsistencies have full reign. I work my hands to the bone, in any event.  Just because I forgot some of the pre-briefing details for Haze’s journey in the Nazi gas-pipes doesn’t necessarily make me a bad person. Indeed mistakes make a good person, a believable person.  And that is important when dealing with such matters as we have before us here.

 

So I didn’t pop up simply from nowhere.  My job – yes, my joy – is to simplify and iron out the wrinkles in wash-day sheets, wrinkles that seem to appear willy-nilly simply by looking at them.  I am often unvexing the texture of text itself.  I correct the mistakes and that includes my own mistakes.  I am no perfectionist. I simply give hindsight a fighting chance.

 

For example, there is some difficulty with the Fitzworth lineage and its various miscegenations.  Feemy’s brother Churles, where does he come in?  Who really is Suzie’s father.  And Mildeyes, Milledges, Fitzworth, many a map makes a maze before the birds flew home.

 

And there is the conundrum of Padgett Weggs and Captain Bintiff.  The latter was the original carrier of the Weirdtongue. That’s all I know. And Weggs?  Who is he?  Who is he?  Who is he?

 

And what happened to G’s earlier ambition to be a ringmaster in a circus?  And who is G?  Why has he lost touch with the plot?  His name’s important.  All our names are important.  I should know.  I feel so bereft without a proper one.  Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise. We shouldn’t let the thin edge of the nemophiliac wedge drop everything into darkness.   Grrr!  I get so impatient sometimes.  A simplon is simply inbuilt with various angsts and phobias.  It helps with untrammelling others if you know what they’re going through from personal experience.

 

And Feemy is becoming thinner and thinner the less time we spend using words about him. Almost like gas himself. Or the stench of decayed meat. My job is to re-summon the words about each character so that they can reclaim their own body.  A delicate job, as too many words makes them fatter than they should be.  A fine balance to be struck.  And I’m not sure any simplon has been trained enough (or fundamentally contains the requisite potential) to make such responsible judgements.  The remuneration of existence is sometimes just not enough to recompense us!  Stress is counter-productive.  I wanted to make my position clear.  However, I foresee coming back to this chapter some time in the future so as clear out some of the ludicrous words: like ‘miscegenations’ and ‘nemophiliac’ above and even the vexed phrase ‘unvexing the texture of text’ itself.  There is a much better way to communicate – and that’s pithily.  Succinctly.  Simply simply.

 

Also we have the passages of purple prose themselves.  I need to return and use all my simplification skills.

Take for example the following paragraph:

 

G told Suzie he wanted to be a ringmaster, after all. Suzie – in some bemused response more fitting for a ‘Big Brother’ contestant – said G 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 employment decisions were made. Diary-rooms were not always purpose-built, you see. Dairy-rooms, likewise, as the bovine racers slowed to a near-halt towards the border between reality and fiction.

 

You can find it here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2006/07/26/

 

That whole chapter is abominable, not just that single paragraph.  I will now return to change the above paragraph to:

 

G - who needed a job after leaving hospital - told Suzie about some laughable ambitions of becoming a celebrity on TV.  He would drink more milk to help keep his bones strong and his teeth white for smiling.  And she would go with him regularly to the local Job Centre Plus as moral support. There, they made him keep a job-seeking diary. It’s a joy, not a job, they said.

 

Not too bad.  Needs more work, perhaps, before I make the final alteration. Revision and exegesis are hard taskmasters. 

 

That last bit needs to go.  Exegesis? It just popped out before I could self-censor it.  Hmm.  My head is slowly vanishing at the thought of this whole chapter being edited out during any future publication process.  Without the words I simply cannot exist.

 

Even if I do disappear through retrospective editing, I shall feel it a job worth doing.  Indeed, a joy.  As a result of all our work (including my own work as a simplon that may vanish before you have the chance to see it)  there will be a new majestic Festival for Glastonbury that should even rival Wagner’s Bayreuth.  Perhaps I’m the sad ghost of Thomas Hardy.  But no room for doubters.

 

 

(54)

 

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

 

I now need to pre-empt his cynical methods of by-passing the Narrative Hospital by saving this work at least as a novella.  I sadly need to cauterise it.  Preserve it at its current length and consistency.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

This relates to one of Gregory’s ‘lost’ backstories or apocryphal dreams, whereby he saw the nurse from the original hospital ward (one of many such wards he frequented later) caring for a puffy part of a word in her lap.  It looked like a large single letter, with various tiny pink-stained orifices, and Gregory eventually made out it was an E after she had painstakingly finished separating the letter’s limbs from the curds that surrounded them.  It started to bleat plaintively from one of the orifices.  Then Gregory made out it wasn’t an E but an M, the nurse having turned it 90 degrees, and now it mooed dolorously, if quietly, as an undercurrent to the sound of the air conditioning.  He then saw several of the patients were fondling (with their own variety of nursing care) other letters of the same word. 

 

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*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.

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