Authors: D. F. Lewis
*
Edith and Clare had resorted to the same building where—cutaway or not—they had, together with Beth, originally watched Klaxon’s ritual of Sunne Stead all those years before—watched it via the transparent offices of the building’s marigold-window (since repaired).
The room itself had since been cleared of any rubble or off-detritus, although the oil-painting—depicting the ‘Reyn-Bouwe’ earthfly—still decked the wall, its frame now cleaned of its infestation by an insect-nest.
The war was clearly visible to the two dowagers—as they smoothed off the mist from the marigold’s glass. Being battened down in here had been the only option left them short of joining in the war itself by means of their own lady-bodies. A sight of the warring millions seen from the Canterbury Oak’s hilltop was one thing—but viewing the same millions from
amongst
them was quite another. The hand-to-hand battles were literally a few inches from the dowagers’ window vantage-point, with the depth of combat beyond that only a guess. A guess or a dream.
“Look, Clare!” screamed Edith—uncharacteristically because being bookish she normally avoided any necessity of resort to hysteria.
She pointed at the room’s empty fireplace where its chimney-flue was in the process of dangling down a pair of large bird-legs accompanied by the growth of groping as well as squawking.
Clare quickly thrust large amounts of scrunched-up newspaper into the grate and lit them with a Swan Vesta, causing the legs temporarily to withdraw upwards from the tall thin flames—while she looked round for more solid fuel.
*
Greg and Beth had meanwhile taken refuge in a Lethal Chamber—this being the only means of protection from the ricochet damage created by the warring millions. This was a collateral or lateral irony because, normally, such places were intended to deal out death to those who found themselves there via various stages of imperviousness to sound-torch surgery.
As described in The Yellow Book, those Lethal Chambers were not to be lightly entered—but, luckily, Greg and Beth happened to be together when the war first ignited and they had the combined nous to take the path of least resistance (albeit the most unlikely for safety) where the interior of this particular Lethal Chamber, by dint of a lateral irony (an expression that bears repeating), turned out to afford a relative immunity.
Unlike Edith and Clare, they could not view the war by sight since these chambers did not boast such vantage-points as marigold-windows. However, despite the blast of renewed klaxoning by tannoy of air alerts, they could also hear the rushing frictions of combatant bodies as they barely crossed the outside like a freak weather-storm.
To hear but not see was frightening.
Greg
: I love you.
Beth
: I know. You’ve always loved me. Most women complain that men don’t tell them enough times that they love them. And it does need to be said once. But more than once—I wonder why they need to say it more than once, as if each time they have to say it, is because they feel themselves to have become a different person.
Greg
: I am desperate to remain myself this time. Now that I’ve finally reached who I am. (He is visibly weeping.)
Beth
: (reaching out to him) I know. I know, Greg. I know it’s you now. Hold on to that.
They listened to things climbing on top of the chamber, just above the roof of their heads. The chamber’s resident patients gurgled lightly in their sleep praying within their dreams for homelier hospices to host them than this one. Greg and Beth looked at them—knowing that such patients were safer in here than Greg and Beth themselves, by some further ratchet of lateral irony regarding ruffled feathers.
*
Sudra’s sure that tiny people were involved. How can big ones have threaded through the pigeon flap? Or the trail of crumbs which she discovers along their erstwhile route almost indicates fairy story characters, if not actual fairies. Whatever the case, the perpetrators are definitely not animals. Whilst animals are tiny enough and, at a push, may be capable of creating random music, they do not have the aesthetic nous of real folk. Indeed, although the music Sudra heard admittedly possessed an atonal quality, it was underlaid with a nagging harmony which, surely, excluded full-blooded haphazardness. Yes, she thinks, only real people can wield the refinement of soul sufficient to strum the air so hauntingly. By the widest stretch of the imagination, crude animal instinct fails even as a spare spear-carrier. On the other hand, the truth stares Sudra in the top of her head, if not the face. Angels, as is commonly the case, disguise themselves as ceilings, albeit, in Sudra’s chamber, crumbly ones.
*
Crazy Lope and Go’spank were ensconced in
Sudra’s Shoe Shop
during the course of the war which—by some accounts—lasted at least two decades of bitter in- and out-fighting. Other accounts gave a shorter period, by virtue of a time angle not dissimilar to Proust’s method of self-dissection with ‘selves’ sometimes overlapping but then becoming separate people with thus longer to live. Yet other accounts put the war as stretching even further into the future, where memories piled up to become tail-to-tail history books.
It is clear from other accounts that Greg and Beth eventually reached Agra Aska on an earthfly (disguised as a drill)—one called ‘The Hawler’—in company with Captain Nemo (aka Doghnahnyi), the pair of dowagers plus the nameless shadowy businessmen from the earthfly’s corporate lounge... there, as a select number of accounts attest, to meet up with Mike, Susan, Amy, Arthur and two Agraskans called Tho and Hataz.
Sudra had been left in Klaxon to set up a shoe shop as a business venture, since her alter-nemo had died in the hawling-shafts further towards the surface. And that business spread—in time—beyond both ends of its actual start and finish, because she failed keeping her own accounts in order. Sudra enjoyed selling shoes and the war meant plenty of unshod people, even soldiers who were served ill by the authorities regarding their need for these basic essentials. As such, there was no demarcation between civilians and military, even to the extent of there being a common uniform for everyone—even the same uniform for both sides in the war.
There was a third side in the war but the constituents of its army were invisible, if not completely non-existent (non-existence being a stage further towards disbelief than invisibility or nudity). Wars are difficult to conduct from three different angles of attack, especially without benefit of conspiracies, side-treaties, bluffs, feints and counterfeints—and so this third force of participants was kept shadowy on purpose (merely being referred to as Ogdonites in mysterious underbreaths).
The two main ‘known’ armies were simply known as Them or Us, depending on which side you were on or thought you were on.
Sudra had, by now, developed into a most beautiful woman and much of the remainder of our time in Klaxon will be concerned with her story, with little, if any, reflected taint from her earlier self or rumoured childhood as Mike’s step-daughter or her nightly dreams of a wicked blood-father who made her eat flesh-infested cabbages in the hope of keeping Name Flew at bay (or that was the excuse).
The war was her backdrop. Equally, Sudra’s story was the reason for the war because without her own story as
its
backdrop it would have lacked the forefront to give itself reflected point or focus.
*
The Weirdmonger, careless of the plots, meandered through park after park of scorched earth. He trod down tannoys to rid himself of their sirens—but not on purpose—simply making a bee-line for the shop that he knew was just beyond the last park of all. So he trod on concrete and sward just as readily as dune or lobe. Not even eschewing the mudpatches that prevailed in every single park. Dispersing children in their play. Elbowing bikes into untidy skids. Brusquely brushing aside attendant mothers and trainee nannies, as their prams escaped down some unlikely slopes towards where the war was still prevailing.
Each park merged with the next; some children’s playgrounds seemed to straddle two parks at once, with railings cross-sectioning ride from ride and, in some cases, splitting single rides in half. Boating-lakes, too, had paddle-boats that couldn’t land on certain banks, whilst others, of a different livery, could ply any part of the lake and put off on any towpath. The Weirdmonger could not fathom any of the rules and customs as he negotiated various rights of way and weaved between interlocking and overlapping mazes of bye-law and respective Klaxon-reclaimed or war-scorched jurisdiction. The further he travelled, the more he noticed the parks becoming shabbier and ill-kempt, railings battered down by winds and left unmended, pools allowed to seep at the edges, mud encroaching flower-beds and rockeries alike—even walkways sticky with a substance somewhat more akin to congealed cuckoo-spit than common-or-garden soil deposits. Or that was what the Weirdmonger wondered about in his crazy fashion, with or without the help of onlookers.
As the shop’s curved runnel or lobe (as his destination) grew taller upon the edge of his sight, he was finding his rite of passage through the parks more and more problematic. The natural onset of war-scorched areas was slowly impinging upon the parks. There was one children’s slide, for example, the silver sluice of which was inches deep with a texture of varying degrees of brownness and burnt yellow. Only a few individuals—of youthful persuasion—could be seen making merry... twirling on over-oily roundabouts and croaking swings, releasing fitful ochreous spillages from their central hubs or hinges. One boy with precocious chin hair called foul messages from the top of the slide. The Weirdmonger shrugged, as if to claim fellow-feeling with any who were left by parents to play in this godawful park... not like the neatly manicured bowling-greens and shiny primary colours of children’s rides boasted by the earlier paths and parks he’d crossed... crossed in dream with a good measure of foreboding.
He knew that the shop towards which he travelled on foot housed not only itself but also the one he was destined to love. The Weirdmonger had endured his own fair share of past times... and he predicted that there would also be many wax figures of historical humanity in the shop, depicting ancient customs or educational themes. Tableaux of timely remembrance. One word from him and such fabrications would take on new tones, if not a life of their own. The words the Weirdmonger spoke flew from his mouth with the garb of essential truth, words like butterfly-birds and poisonous insects, words like flowers in free flow and historical primary sources, words like dragon-scales forming, eventually, into real dragons. Dragons with wings even bigger than the flames their mouths spewed.
He laughed. There was the shop. Sudra’s shop. That’d bring the Weirdmonger’s pretensions down a peg or two. He felt as if he were a child again, entering his first museum, harness held tightly by leather leads as he toddled in front of his mother on tenter hooks.
The Weirdmonger had indeed been a normal child before he’d thrown youth away like a crumpled sweet-bag. That was the day he realised that the words which he believed were true actually became true. Faith was everything. Faith dictated reality. And he had been his own father was all that he recalled—a strange fate for an even stranger sire—and he as the older Weirdmonger had taught the younger Weirdmonger how to throw words like balls in a game of Catch. Popping boiled humbugs or acid drops or aromatic crystallised figs from mouth to mouth. Perhaps his father was the true Weirdmonger, and the true Weirdmonger (so-called) was the true impostor. Words became impossibly tangled as soon as the concentration dropped and the years passed by, consigning his father to merely an oil painting of himself stippled with misdirected pellets—and the Weirdmonger (now the true one) went out into the world, park by park. But the world was hot and dry—and the parks were deserts of Inner Earth. But now they were global-cooling, artistically speaking. Today, the parks were wet and soggy—terribly muddy, denying the flowers’ plots any ambition other than the extrapolated brown blooms upon wilting stalks, each one weeping yellow tears for a poet called Charles Baudelaire. Even the park-keepers had given up their watering-cans... and you know how officious they once were when school caretakers.
The Weirdmonger nodded as if he heard his father in his head. The shop stood there, now, tall and stately—with the waxen exhibits he expected staring through the windows, wielding axes like ancient Northumberland Reivers or French Angevin Kings, denoting the precise historical moments, bringing
then
to
now
with all the force of precariousness. History made real—whilst any students of his would become part of some fantasy world which learned the lessons head on. These wax figures, he was aghast to see, however, were simply shaped like shoes in odds and not pairs.
The Weirdmonger nodded again. He was his own son as well as his own father and now as the former he had returned to the turning pages and the juggling words as he did as a student—with the words sprinkling the air above the print like hover-flies, depleting the print by their very presence or, rather, the print had left the page and become the hover-flies themselves. He paid for his museum ticket at the kiosk—a guide-book to shoeboxes from Crazy Lope for a round tour, complete with ear-muffs and learning devices that were stuck straight into the body’s veins. Go’spank smiled as he passed over the long spool of tickets, saying: “Enjoy the trip.”
As if (the Weirdmonger thought) the parks hadn’t already been enough. He looked back wistfully to see over-sized birds, with stubby wings, failing to fly from the last park. This was the first time he’d noticed how the mud had stopped all Nature in its tracks... as if mud was an effluent with which Nature had tried to oil itself but, in the process, had over-egged the cake that had been left out in the rain.
The Weirdmonger toured the Shop on the Borderland with torchbright eyes—or that was how he was subsequently described by an unseen onlooker. There were many oil paintings of shoes... and a whole host of nemonymous figures wearing them... their names queueing along the wainscotting beneath their wildly daubed likenesses, making the museum more of a modern gallery of ultramodern pretension than a potentially tedious array of educational wax figures, speaking in misalignments of recorded voice or reported speech.