Authors: D. F. Lewis
“You don’t expect roads with uncut verges, edges with hedges—and pavements with long weeds—in the city,” was the reply, as if this explained everything.
“No,” said Ogdon... knowingly.
A few more customers had already arrived—without Susan noticing—in advance of the 2 a.m. busy period. She half-expected Mike, because a childless couple, as they were, could have a devilmaycare attitude with regard to the necessity of sitters or minders. Wishful thinking, perhaps, because another advantage of childlessness was quiet sleepful nights, but that was lost on Mike and Susan as they often spent most of the night awake in any event.
One of the new arrivals was Greg—an ex-office worker—who had been made redundant and often told of his experiences in trying to get back into that sort of work. But the longer it went, the harder it would be, particularly as his appearance was fast approaching the nature of the “hairy road” that seemed to be preoccupying her brother-in-law. Beth had not yet appeared from the loo.
Greg meandered on about a recurring dream: as if Susan was interested! But on he would meander: “I go back to the company I used to work for time and time again—and many of my ex-colleagues have been promoted—and I have to wander the corridors of a new office block... knowing it’s also the
same
office block—looking for a previous colleague who I used to be in charge of... so that he of all people can show me the ropes of the slightly different procedures…”
He gave a sob as if the dream were real and it certainly was real when he was dreaming it—so not much of a logic there. Susan felt sorry for him but was soon re-preoccupied by the arrival of Beth. A blonde curvier version of herself, with all the mutual envy and recrimination that that implied: filtering both ways.
By the time Crazy Lope arrived, not long after Mike’s own arrival, she knew all these people had not met in Ogdon’s pub tonight by coincidence. It was exactly 2 a.m. and she was not surprised when Ogdon bolted the front door—and all of them left together by the back one in the shadow of the liner in Dry Dock—if shadows could be cast at this time of day when most of the lighting was at foot level, dim though such lighting was. So late even the night buses had stopped running, parties or not.
They became a search party. For two missing children.
*
If children suddenly realise they exist, they ask themselves whereto the rest of their past childhood. Were they brother and sister, they wonder, or completely unrelated and, thus, perhaps, childhood sweethearts incubating a future marriage when they would tell their own children of their erstwhile romance resulting in their children’s own subsequent existence as children. But, for all they knew at this crosspoint of time, they may have common parentage, and they hugged in the cold darkness—in the vicinity of the open-walled market—one hug as childhood sweethearts, the next hug as siblings, believing they gambled on one hug being true, choosing, as it were, between a belief in God and a non-belief in God. Both equally comforting.
They had not
become
lost. They could hardly recognise themselves as lost, but lost they were. They realised that ‘becoming’ was not a necessary pre-cursor of ‘being’. Only adults didn’t understand that—and there were many years in the pipeline before Amy and Arthur would become non-understanding adults themselves. One pipeline, perhaps, leading to a more mature love affair, another pipeline to estrangement as argumentative siblings.
The late night bus passed in the distance, leaving a heavy silence. Although the darkness was cold, these two children were not cold at all. They had a carpet over them like a stiff blanket, having discovered it in a nearby dereliction, unpinned from the floorboards that it had once hugged as a soft underfoot surface—and, strange though it may sound, it was free of its floorboards because the floorboards had been stolen by a burglar for building a shed. Not that the children knew that history and only a dream could explain how the carpet’s subsistence survived its lack of foundations. It had sagged towards a cobwebby heart where red-eyed rats lurked but spared the children knowledge of the true extent of their maggoty existence. The carpet, surprisingly, had well survived the damp hollowness beneath it... and now provided a very serviceable blanket as the children speculated on the basic story-telling that underpinned their wherewithal as “babes-in-the-wood”. Better out here in the open city than in that ramshackle rat-den. A carpet was not as snugly body-hugging as a proper blanket would have been, but the sky seemed distant enough to hide the pin-pricks that were its perforations for heat absorption. The sky shaped itself to a larger body... and Arthur told Amy this was God’s shape and the sky hid the top flat where He lived and where, one day, they’d seek Him out in His bed. Arthur knew he, Arthur, lied, because city flats (especially top floor ones) were always seedy and bent out of any sane shape of comfort. Yet the concoction or myth gave a believeable context (i.e. God living in a city flat) and, thus, comfort to both of them, even the liar.
*
At the centre of the earth, there is a face—pock-marked, pox-mouthed—in three dimensions as faces should be if they front the heads that wear them. There is blood seeping from every pore, from every pustule... and the nostrils dangle a rubbery blood that bloats bigger and bigger without ceasing to be rubbery—neither exploding or imploding. And the tongue speaks through bubbles of blood hawled from a chestful of hard core: “For once this is no dream—this is fucking real—so deal with it!”
*
Mike took Susan’s hands. They had found each other yet again, destined, perhaps, to find each other time and time again. Each a romantic epiphany, but equally horrifically real in the implication of needing to find each other time and time again. This time they knew their children were lost and this accentuated the horror, coupled with a wondrous fruition and fulfilment if they could find them. While thinking of people—like John Ogdon, Crazy Lope, Greg the office-worker, Beth and Beth’s husband—Mike had forgotten his name, forgotten indeed that Beth’s husband was Susan’s brother, if in fact that was true. However, it was a search party, although ‘party’ was certainly the wrong word, too.
Mike tried to drag logic from the illogic of his mind, tried to explain something to Susan that he couldn’t really explain to himself properly—as they followed the others across the night landscape that lifted the city skyward.
“It’s like that TV programme, Suse, isn’t it—you know the one. Where they evict people from the house gradually. But this is the other way round, where people are voted into a scheme of reality which fits the reality as we see it…”
“Yes,” said Susan, neither encouraging nor discouraging his blurted rambling tones that cut the night air.
“…like now, tonight, it’s as if we’re fine-tuning everything, looking for new housemates, even children to complete the picture. But also do we know who is acting true to themselves, not emotions so much as nemotions…”
Mike’s wordy speculations were his method to avoid the critical repercussions of the search itself. Like doodling with philosophy as he might have fiddled with prayer-beads. Susan nodded. She’d heard Mike’s rambling thoughts before, very simply expressed on the whole but peppered with words she couldn’t understand like nemonymous, weirdmonger and big brother, although she had heard of the book “1984” and some other things that were relevant, having known them as part of a tribe consciousness rather than as a product of her own personal learning. Mike, she knew, was a hawler but, in her mind, she spelt it as ‘hauler’ and she didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed natural, nevertheless. The TV programme to which he referred was a mystery. He’d probably watched it when she was out working in Ogdon’s pub, a pub, thankfully, without a TV or a juke box.
*
Near to the open-walled market or underground station, there was a tall building, access to which was by lift—indeed a very complex lift system which Greg often used before he was made redundant from his job in that building. He used to entertain business clients and had to help them negotiate the lift system—changing on specific floors for different lift shafts of higher reach. Some shafts were more palatial and business-orientated than others, some so narrow they could only be used for brooms or very thin utility workers. The highest shaft reached the open air area, leafed over like a wood. From there, once, Greg was sure he could see the distant sea through the unusually clear sky into which the wood penetrated. He imagined a finer, less definable surface barely above the sea but otherwise imitating its waves and swells—a double skin in perfect unison, but the lower one liquid, the upper spectral. Perhaps the second one was the ghost of a giant flying carpet taking invisible human vessels towards Arabian Adventure or towards the darker motives of ‘suicide’ rather than ‘seaside’.
Greg had surreptitiously left the search party. If a maroon-party is an elongated picnic, then a search party is a day’s hide-and-seek game which lasts endlessly into an equally everlasting twilight—except, in the city, twilight didn’t exist, changing, as it did, from day to night with the flick of a seeming switch. Mike and Susan soon lost hope in the efficacy of their companions—and had not seen Greg sloping off to look at his old office block. Ogdon, Beth and her partner, together with Crazy Lope, were fiddling with dustbins and not really getting stuck into the search proper—their excuse being a lack of stamina. Only Mike and Susan themselves, the would-be parents of the lost children, maintained a hard workload of search. They did hide themselves, sometimes, to test out the others’ search capacities and were continuously disappointed when they kept on being undiscovered in whatever easy hiding-place they found. So if not them, what chance the children? As yet, nobody even knew the names of the children.
In one test hiding-place, Mike and Susan had stayed a little longer. They had stared into each other’s teary eyes and fondled their bodies between them... acting more like new sweethearts than seasoned spouses. They even believed, for an instant, they were themselves the children they sought! Meanwhile, time itself gradually dammed up against the tangible delay the two of them set up to test the other seekers’ ability to undam it.
*
Dixon of Mason & Dixon was said to have been born in a coal mine. The two children had been forgotten somehow. Just silly worded day-dreams had intervened with certain members of the search party as they took a well-deserved rest at dawn beneath the shrinking shadow of the liner in its Dry Dock berth, floating upside down amid their clouded thoughts, as if the brightening sky were its sea. One word kept coming to Mike’s mind and he couldn’t fathom how he fully understood its meaning without actually understanding it at all—and why it kept returning to his mind unbidden or untranslated. He wasn’t even sure it was a real word:
côté
. Looked French, but was it? This was the sort of effect of dreaming a word during a night’s sleep rather than the flickering tail of a day-dream at dawn, whilst the party rested from what—he now remembered—was a desperate search for two children. He looked at Susan who also stared dreamily towards the towering Dry Dock—and her eyes later told him that they had forsaken their duty by not earlier informing the Authorities about the children’s disappearance. Many others in the search party had by now wandered off in twos and threes. Greg was the last to leave, as he would soon be due at work in his office. He shuffled papers as he walked away quite quickly for fear of being late. The excuse for his night’s wanderings was now lost on him. If it were children that were missing, surely the police would have been informed. On that evidence (or lack of it), he knew that no children were missing at all. A logic that seemed quite straightforward, as Greg entered the lift to take him to the top floor. Business-life always avoided any thought of crazy dreams and, for the next eight hours, he would not have the luxury of using his imagination.
Much of the building—including the lift that slowly lifted him between the walls of its inner space—represented a reality that could bear no imagination to be applied to it... although many of its constituents such as the walls that were towards its top, certain parts of the basement boiler room and rooftop garden, some of its I.T. (for example) yearned to be less real so that they could be imagined into existence for some satisfying or evocative fiction work. But the building was there, tangible, safe as houses in a scheme of actuality, and, therefore, it failed in its ambition to cease existing so as to become a shimmering fantasy fit for the wildest imaginings. Greg had the same feeling about himself. He was convinced he was less real than Mike and Susan (for whose lost children they had all been supposedly searching)—and these two were dozing at the moment near the open-air market and they did not know Greg had left them to go to work. The others in the search party were also more real than Greg himself, but that left him with the mystery of why he had forgotten their names. This begged the question—were things (living or dead) more real with names than without? If so, Greg knew his own name was Greg, which fact gave him a sense of well-being, although tinged with a subconscious regret at the loss of unreality that this entailed.
The power to imagine was perhaps the very Act of Creation in the first place.
*
Amy and Arthur slipped from beneath the carpet as the sun slowly lifted its upper edge above the market. Streams of office-workers emerged from the various wide entrances of the underground system—entrances so wide they almost blended into each other. They shaded their eyes as a shard of sunlight sharply sloped into a tall office block like a seaside aero-act. All grabbed their briefcases to their chests and hustled onward to their desks, fearful that, one day, they themselves would commit their own seaside act in some token of devastation... which was odd because, unless they dreamed it, they feared the devastation itself less than causing the devastation themselves.
Arthur helped Amy stand up—and they both shuffled upon the carpet, now using it as a lower surface rather than the upper one it had been when serving as a blanket against the night chill.