Authors: D. F. Lewis
Amy shrugged. She had her own two children to worry about and that’s why she did these housework jobs for the Letting Agents. Mike gave the impression that he’d once had a job better than checking on skivvies like her. Amy put the vacuum into the broom cupboard and left for the lift. She was confused about Mike. She did not even know the existence let alone the meaning of the word hawler.
Often, she even wondered who
she
was. A busy life made her like that. She laughed at herself as the lift left the floor behind.
*
At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.
*
Mike was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. Susan was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Mike surveyed the dips and dunes—almost
feeling
them with his golf mind—as he took stance for his first teeshot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, assessing the relief map between him and the hole... and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his clubhead for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.
*
Susan was silent. It was too early to start preparing Mike’s dinner. Her friend Amy had just left. The two women had a lot in common, both having two kids of similar ages and sexes. A good feminine chat whilst these kids were at school and the husbands elsewhere—that was always a good tonic. But now she was alone with her own thoughts. Often a dangerous thing to be sunk eye to eye with nemonymity. One needed other people to allow oneself to exist at all. And the potential of her family’s homecoming was not strong enough to radiate back in time to stiffen the sinews of her existence. One of her children was currently non-existent as was one of Amy’s children…
Susan shook her head. Two out of four children. She cried. She began to hear something breaking the silence, something she didn’t understand equally as much as she didn’t understand the words in her empty head. The sound of a cricket ball smacking the meat of the willow with a resounding echo... or, rather, a small white hard egg-pod being squashed to smithereens by the coal-pick beneath her feet, or between them.
*
Arthur Cole—despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc.—became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other passengers assuming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie girl who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn’t otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver’s sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surreptitiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of ratruns and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his ‘brainwright’: an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.
Since the days they lived with their single mother in an apartment intended for fewer than three, there had been long periods when Arthur was in and out of Care Homes, especially ones specialising in their own variety of ‘brainwrighting’... until Amy herself was old enough to take over such duties—their mother having vanished as had a replacement father figure who had been living with them for a while until eventually vanishing himself... gradually.
They couldn’t remember his name. They couldn’t even remember their mother’s name or, rather, they had deliberately blocked it out. The man’s name they had genuinely forgotten.
It was a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company’s inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver—despite all his driving documents being forgeries.
One day, he was destined to use his bus as a get-away vehicle (with passengers still on board) but that was irrelevant to the events that followed each other—at least semi-logically—in the guise of a story that stood by his side like a narrative thread he followed by means of the metaphysical steering-wheel of his life. Many of the events didn’t directly affect Arthur at all, but those events were directly affected by Arthur.
Returning to his childhood days—when the shadowy mother and father figures were still shimmering like technical interference on a TV screen—his ability to get his hands dirty by actually delving the fingers deep into what he took to be the earth’s crust (or rind) to obtain some purchase on its spinning (also as part of his messy damming river games for which he used the kitchenware substances) was really a dress rehearsal for driving a bus, although he did not realise that at the time, if he realised anything about anything. But certainly Amy—growing into a pretty girl and even prettier woman—knew instinctively that Arthur could control big things just with the flick of his finger.
Arthur dreamed one night of mixed ambitions competing with each other for the forefront of his brain (some eventually to be considered worthless and unmemorable by his waking mind) together with worries about death and guilt... and of crawling forward through a long hedge where it was relatively easy to proceed with only the slightest tear by plant-spike and sting by nettle, until he reached an impenetrable clump at the end edge of the hedge, whereby he had to retreat backwards with the spikes and nettles closing in quite violently as a result of the opposite direction of travel he was attempting to forge through the undergrowth which was resprung against his passage. The dream, however, was not quite so convoluted as the necessarily convoluted account of its own passage through Arthur’s mind. The words for all this had been lost in transit. Maybe, if he retraced his footsteps, clarity could be hauled back, although, no doubt, with some difficulty.
Another dream—this one more grounded in day-to-day life—was one of trying to park his bus each night outside his house, with Amy waving him into some very tight space between other vehicles. His back was once jammed right up to the vehicle behind, but it was only a small thing (a bubble car?) and this had quite a big gap behind itself to manoeuvre in reverse should it want to get out. Arthur’s memory was of something even smaller than a bubble car, but this was probably a later twisting of the truth in the dream to match the verities of waking life.
Amy and Arthur lived together—and their neighbours must have assumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister. In real life, he was indeed a bus driver and didn’t, of course, need his sister working as his brainwright (a word he hardly remembered, if at all, from somewhere or other, like hawler, weirdmonger and nemonymous)—and he did not, naturally, park his bus outside the flats, but left it at the bus garage at the end of his shift—a shift that usually entailed the night bus. Amy was a counter assistant at one of the local department stores—but sometimes she filled in (for extra money) as a supermarket shelf-filler of disinfectants, washing-powders, cleaning-fluids, fabric-conditioners etc. She was on carpets at the department store, spending most of the day arranging for fittings, after the customers—with her expert help—had chosen the pattern and quality of the carpet they wished to buy.
Still, then, the horrors hadn’t yet started. Various strange words start to build up—as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did they know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself.
*
Mike and Susan lived together on the other side of the city.
Mike worked at a covered market—with his long-time caped colleague Crazy Lope (who should have been a Red Indian with a name like that but was more quite an ordinary girl-shafting ex-miner with an odd turn of corrupt phrase)—but it was the market itself that was the noteworthy element in the day’s work. The area of the city where it was situated was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. This is the first time—it has to be noted—that it has been made clear that most of the events under scrutiny took place in England. A fact that hadn’t been realised until this comparison with Eastern Europe became necessary: i.e. inadvertently slipped out, as it were, in the cause of geographical context. All accomplished without any direct narrative intervention whatsoever…
The covered market had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not
strictly
open-air or covered. On some days—when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom—it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these ‘walls’ looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. Mike dreaded going to work, in case he was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn’t belong to the city at all. The market work itself remained unclear, but Mike was good at it: he kept getting rises. Crazy Lope was not so lucky, if luck were indeed the cursor to success and failure in such settings.
Susan worked in a pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub—unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life—would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile, worked there—a real place she couldn’t avoid as she needed the money.
Mike and Susan lived in a top floor flat in the city centre with their two children, Amy and Arthur. They just about made ends meet, with the help of Government tax credits. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling as of yet more dreamers dreaming the covered/open-air market where Mike worked. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that sexual peccadilloes were rife with one or two men living there, one of these men the dreamer’s friend in real life, so you did need to visit him (although this was a dream and you weren’t really visiting your friend at all)—whilst, all the time, it was not dream for Mike and Susan who actually lived in that top flat, with their two children; it was their shelter, their life... where their ends met. Who had lived there before them was not relevant. Not relevant to Mike or Susan. Whether it be dream or real life.
When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything, that is, except survival of oneself and of one’s own. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn’t matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.
Tonight, as the beginning of the drama is homed in upon, Mike and Susan are sitting on the couch in their top flat, ready to speak to each other: the children recently put to bed after TV’s Children Hour: “Whirlygig” with Humphrey Lestocq and Mr Pastry. The Queen of England was still quite young and the end of the war was not more than about ten years old. The carpet was much older; and being new tenants they didn’t know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.
*
A vehicle—like a bus—doesn’t touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads.
Mike watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines—just the bars of the seats being seen from where he stood. It must have just gone under a bridge too low for its height and those passengers seated on the top deck were either crouched low or decapitated. Mike winced. It would be in the newspaper tomorrow no doubt—but why hadn’t the bus stopped? Or, rather, why had it now slowed? Not because of a bus stop, but because it had self-evidently just had an accident. A serious accident. Mike watched it wheel round the corner, thinking, as he did, of hit-and-run situations and where the bridge was likely to be. He couldn’t think of a low bridge in the area. Hit-and-run. Like having children, then forgetting them... only for them later to become your friends and you don’t remember them, so they are real friends, not your children, because your children can never be your real friends: too much customs duty to intervene…
He was on his way from work. He usually walked—and only caught the bus when it rained. Office work had its own life and customs; people who worked in offices were a certain breed. Mike wished he could work outside, like a labourer could or someone in an open-air market. Office-workers, on the other hand, not only watched ‘Big Brother’ on TV but talked about it in the office the next day. Office-workers had ambitions—of sorts. But the ambition usually involved jealousy rather than the intrinsic need to be promoted. Mike had been promoted beyond his own capabilities (as most office-workers were). He had the healing power—to make himself ignore how he was wasting his life in competing for petty duties... although, these days, he and his wife Susan were often invited to office receptions to entertain clients. This was a godsend to their social life and there was no obvious need for sitters, as nobody knew if they had children. They’d just watch TV otherwise—and bicker.