by Jeff Noon
“My poor little girl, how very sad that must be.” A pair of long, droopy tears were falling from the Doctor’s baggy eyes.
“Will you please deliver me to the cemetery, Doctor Sniffer,” Alice pleaded, “where I can find my true home.”
“Oh very well then! But quickly, child, before the Civil Serpents find me out for doing such a strangeness.” Doctor Sniffer then shovelled Alice through the gulping hole in the floor.
And so it was that Alice went sliding down a long chute of darkness.
Through darknesses and darknesses and darknesses, Alice slid; until, eventually, she slid out of the nether end of the chute and straight into a wooden cart that was fixed to the hindquarters of a beastly black mechanical auto-horse. She landed on the top of a mound of large, filled sacks that squelched dreadfully under her weight. Alice didn’t want to consider what was inside those sacks, because the smell rising from their contents was quite noxifying! She decided to climb out of the cart, and she would have done exactly that, had not the auto-horse then commenced to gallop off along the road at a terrifying pace, and without any need at all for a driver!
Within five-and-a-half rickety seconds or so, Alice was being driven around a place called Albert Square, where the Town Hall of Manchester magnificently loomed. “I do believe this auto-horse is not a horse at all,” she said to herself. “This auto-horse is an auto-hearse! I don’t think I want to be delivered to the cemetery just yet!” Alice jumped out of the hearse and cart whilst it was still travelling along at speed. She did slightly scrape her right knee upon landing, but this was a small price to pay for escaping a far-too-early visit to the cemetery! Unfortunately there was a larger price to pay: without her knowledge, Whippoorwill’s green-and-yellow feather had escaped her pocket during the fall.
The auto-hearse galloped off around the next corner, leaving the still-alive-Alice in Albert Square. It had stopped raining by now and the square was packed with people enjoying the lunch-timing sunshine. These weren’t the kind of people that Alice was used to, of course, because all of them seemed to have an animalised part to their natures. There were several Squirrelmen in the square; there were also Ostrichmen in the square. There were also Lama and Goat and Beetle and Cow and Dog and Snake and Trout and Gorilla and Antelope and Sparrow and Puma and Turkey and even Jellyfish-men and -women in the square. And all of these mix-ups were feeding their faces with greasy meat pies and slivers of fried potato!
There were also several even stranger creatures that Alice encountered in Albert Square; people jigsawed together with objects. Pianogirls for instance, and Soapboys, Curtaingirls and Wardrobing kids. “Why, everything except for the kitchen sink seems to have become a quite acceptable part of the human body!” Alice was only just thinking this random thought, when what should she notice gurgling through the crowd but a man with a kitchen sink in place of a head! This sunken creature dribbled past Alice, stuffing a sandwich into his plug-hole. Alice ran away as fast as she could! (Which wasn’t hardly fast enough at all, because of the closely knitted and knotted nature of the crowd.) Alice had to fairly iron her way between birdcaging girls and briefcasing boys and the mutated spectaclemen joined at the topiary to newspapering people of bicycle and bone! Alice felt ever so lonely, pushing her way through that crowd of strangely strange strangers, especially when they all seemed to press against her so, and to stare at her so, and to whisper abusive words at her, just so!
As though Alice herself was the strange one!
“The disease that’s called Newmonia seems to be troubling nearly everything!” Alice sighed to herself. “So many of these creatures resemble Pablo Ogden’s sculptures, and yet they seem to be perfectly real rather than perfectly automated. I suppose I must only do my best to ignore the stares and the whispers, and to continue my search for Whippoorwill and Celia and the five remaining jigsaw pieces. But the police will be searching for Captain Ramshackle; and they will also be searching for me!”
Indeed, Alice did then notice a policedogman growling at the edges of the crowd, so she immediately pushed her way deeper into the tumult of strangeness, hoping to find a breathing space there. But the crowd pushed and brushed and tushed against her so much that Alice was eventually squashed up against a stone statue in the centre of Albert Square. Alice noticed that it was carved into the exact resemblance of Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha: in other words, Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. “So this is why they call this place Albert Square,” Alice realised: “Prince Albert must have died a long, long time ago, just like I must have died a long, long time ago; after all, we do share the same first syllabub.” (A syllabub is, of course, a dessert made from cream beaten with sugar, wine and lemon juice; I really do think that Alice meant to say syllable!) “Alice and Albert,” Alice continued to herself; “maybe I was correct when I pretended to Doctor Sniffer that I was dead…”
Alice was so full of sadness at her own demise. “Am I dead, or am I not dead?” she wondered, with a small cry. “And when is a garden not a garden? And is a bean here, or is a bean not here?” Alice was becoming ever so confused with her own beanness.
But Alice quickly shrugged off her confusion, so determined was she to find her way out of this puzzle. She started marching once again through the clinging crowd until she arrived at the Town Hall’s grand entrance. Here she encountered a liveried doormandog—half a man, half a guard dog—who demanded to know her name and her business. “My name is Alice,” Alice replied, “and my business is to retrieve a spidery jigsaw piece that rightfully belongs to me. I believe that the Civil Serpents are keeping it inside the Town Hall.”
“I’m afraid I cannot allow you entrance,” the doormandog growled back. “That would be more than my bone’s worth. You have no business here!” And the doormandog growled so fiercely then that Alice was forced to run backwards into the crowd of Newmonia sufferers, through which a whole pack of policemandogs was now snuffling, asking questions of everybody. Alice decided to hide herself behind a rather colourful umbrella woman. “I really am getting nowhere at all,” she cried, once hidden. “The future seems to be so completely against me; how can I possibly hope to presently find my past?” Alice then looked up towards the large and impressive clock face that adorned the Town Hall’s tower; the time was rushing towards noon. “Oh dear!” Alice added and subtracted to herself. “I must have spent simply hours in the police cell! It’s coming up to exactly twelve, and in nearly exactly two hours’ time and also nearly exactly one hundred and thirty-eight years ago I should have been present at my writing lesson with Great Aunt Ermintrude!”
Alice saw then that a single green-and-yellow feather was floating above the Square. “Why, that looks like one of Whippoorwill’s feathers,” she cried. “Maybe the whole parrot himself is flying around this Square somewhere? I must look out for him!” And Alice did look out for Whippoorwill, but only the single feather of him was to be seen, floating along on a slight breeze. “Whippoorwill!” cried Alice to the single feather (having nothing further to cry to), “if you keep on losing feathers at this rate, why, very soon you will not be able to fly at all!” She then dug deep into her pinafore pocket for her feather. Of course, she found only the seven jigsaw pieces. “Oh flutterings!” Alice howled. “That’s my feather floating up there! I must have dropped it getting out of the auto-hearse!” Alice reached up into the air to recapture the feather, but no matter how high she reached, she could never quite reach it.
And just as Alice was reaching her very highest high in order to grab at Whippoorwill’s escaping feather, the Town Hall clock started to slowly ding-dong its clanging song of middaying chimes. At the very first of the chimes, Alice felt a soft hand softly stroking at her shoulder. She thought that it must be the paw of a policedogman, come to rearrest her, and she pushed it away, but when she eventually spun around to view the stroker, imagine her surprise to find a normal man waiting for her there. This normal man was utterly and onl
y a normal man—not a single trace of animality—and he was jacketed in a deep and blue velvety suit, complete with a deep and blue and peaked and velvety cap. Over his left shoulder lay the straps of a deep and blue and velvety bag. Everything about him was velvety!
“Who are you?” asked Alice.
“They call me Zenith O’Clock,” responded the normal man.
“Who do?”
“Time calls me Zenith O’Clock, because I was born upon this very minute exactly thirty-eight years ago, when the sun was at its veritable height.” Zenith reached up to point at the Town Hall clock (which was ever-so-slowly chiming its way through the second of its dozen ding-dongs).
“It’s your birthday?” Alice cried.
“It is indeed the anniversary of my birth.”
“Many happy returns!”
“I sincerely hope never to return to this day.”
“Why ever not?”
“This is a dreadful day for me, a dreadful day, I tell you! And very sad I am to be living it. Your name is Alice, isn’t it? Your full name is Alice Pleasance Liddell?”
“My full name is Alice Pleasance Liddell, but how in the world did you know that?”
“I’ve seen you before, but only in books.”
“Only in books?” asked Alice.
“Only in books, as you say. Only! Books can never be only; they can only be always. Oh, but all this talk of books is bringing back my sadness!”
“But it’s your birthday, Mister O’Clock!” cried Alice; “upon this day you should only be happy!”
“I cannot be happy,” Zenith replied, “because I’m suffering from a terrible disease.”
“But you look perfectly healthy to me,” Alice responded. “I’m so glad to have met another purely human being. Surely you can’t be suffering from the Newmonia?”
“I have a more deadly disease: I’m infested with the Crickets, you see.”
“You’re infested with cricket?” misheard Alice. “The game with a bat, a ball, three stumps and an umpire?”
“Crickets, I said! Not cricket! Cricket in the plural and with a capital C: that ravenous cloud of reviewing insects. I’m a writer, you see.”
“And what do you write, Mister O’Clock? Timetables?” (Alice was quite pleased with her joke.)
“No, no,” replied Zenith, “I have found it impossible to time a table, although I once tried. A table is much too wooden to make more than a breath of a move, once every nine hours: except at dinnertime, when it may well make a sudden run for the kitchen.”
“So what do you write?” insisted Alice. “Fiction or non-fiction?”
“I write neither fiction nor non-fiction. Rather I write Friction.”
“And what is Friction, pray?”
“I write in the language called Frictional. I’m a writer of Wrongs.”
“Whatever’s a Wrong?”
“A Wrong is a book that the Crickets don’t consider to be right, preferring their stories to be told in Simpleton rather than Frictional. They rub their dry wings together, these Crickets, making a terrible response to my work in the noisepapers.”
“But what’s so terrible about your Wrongs?” asked Alice.
“Well, I’ve written two Wrongs up to now: the first was called Shurt, and the second was called Solumn. And the Crickets hated both of them. This is why I’m so sad upon my birthday.”
“Do you always spell your book-titles with too many U’s in them?”
“I can’t help it, I’m afraid. I can’t help going wrong. Shall I read you a little passage from one of my books?”
“If you wish,” replied Alice.
Zenith then reached into his velvety bag, to pull out a copy of the book called Shurt. It had a bright azure cover, decorated with an illuminated pair of yellow shirts. Zenith shuffled through the pages of his book until he found the passage he was looking for. “This is a love poem called ‘Nothing Rhymes With Orange.’ Are you ready for it, Alice?”
“I hope so: except that nothing doesn’t rhyme at all with orange.”
“Excellent! Then I’ll begin…”
And this is the poem that Zenith began:
“Nothing can rhyme with an orange
Except the pocket on a kilt,
When a sporran is misspelled
To a sporrange with a lilt.”
“What do you think of it so far, Alice?” Zenith asked.
“Well,” Alice answered hesitantly, “you told me it was going to be a love poem, but I can’t find any trace of love in the words.”
“But that was only the first verse.”
“How many verses are there, all together?”
“Only two.”
“Oh joy!” Alice said (quietly to herself).
And this is the poem that Zenith continued:
“An orange can rhyme with nothing!
The people cry in ignorance:
Forgetting in their ignorrange
That words can be made to dance.”
Having finished his poem, Zenith looked at Alice with an expectant gaze. The crowd of Prince Albert’s Square was closing in on Alice and she was feeling very uncomfortable, with the crush and the request for yet another of her honest opinions. “Well,” she began, “I’m afraid I still can’t see why you call it a love poem.”
“But I’m in love with language! Can’t you see that?”
“Does this love allow you to make up words like sporrange and ignorrange, just so you can make orange rhyme with something rather than nothing?”
Zenith looked rather upset at this outburst of cricketing, and Alice was beginning to regret having spoken her mind. “But those words are my own creation!” spluttered Zenith. “They are Frictional words: I conceived them; I gave birth to them! I nurtured those words so they’d grow up to be big and strong and powerful; so that one day they could find themselves being accepted into a Simpleton dictionary! That’s my desire, you see, Alice: I make play with old words, twice nightly—why, sometimes even thrice nightly!—just so they can breed new words. But you—especially you, Alice—you must understand my desire; having been such a close friend of Charles Dodgson?”
“You know about Mister Dodgson?” exclaimed Alice.
“I know all about you, Alice,” replied Zenith. “I’ve seen pictures of your likeness in the books called Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Charles Dodgson wrote them both about you.”
“I know this already!” Alice explained, impatiently.
“But when Charles Dodgson wrote about you, he called himself Lewis Carroll: having decided, like myself, to hide behind a nom de plume, which means a feather name.”
“So you’re not really called Zenith O’Clock?”
“Of course not! What a silly name that would be!”
“So what is your real name?”
“You want to know my nom de real, Alice? Now that would be telling. But what are you doing here in Manchester, Alice, and in 1998 of all ages?”
“I fell through a grandfather clock’s workings,” Alice replied. “And I need to get home in time for my two o’clock writing lesson.”
“Maybe you should look up your history in the Central Library.”
“But why should my history be in the library?” Alice demanded.
“Because you’re famous in this age, Alice. The history of your life is contained in a book called Reality and Realicey.”
“Whatever does realicey mean?”
“Realicey is a special kind of reality: the world of the imagination, and it’s so much more powerful than everyday existence! Witness your ability to discourse with me, Alice, all these many years after your real life! Maybe I should write my third book about you. I would call it Through the Clock’s Workings and What Alice Found There.”
“But that’s a silly title, Mister O’Clock! Because I’ve found hardly anything at all in my travels through the clock: I still have another five jigsaw pieces to find, and my parrot called Whippoorwill, and my doll called C
elia, who’s a kind of Automated Alice.”
“Automated Alice…erm…that gives me a new idea…I will write a trequel!”
Alice wasn’t sure how anybody could write with treacle; wouldn’t the words come out all sticky? “If you really are such a clever writer, Mister O’Clock,” she asked, “could you please tell me what an ellipsis is?”
“An ellipsis is the three dots that a writer uses to imply an omittance of words, a certain lingering doubt at the end of an unfinished sentence…”
“Oh thank you! I have found at least one of my lost objects!” And then Alice found another lost object, because a feather came floating down from the Square’s air into her fingers. “This is a Whippoorwill feather!” Alice squealed.
“Whippoorwill?” said Zenith. “What a wonderful nom de plume. In my trequel, I will turn this feather into a tickling ticket for you.”
“Why should I need a tickling ticket?” asked Alice.
“That’s the only help I can give you, Alice; do you hear me? Or else the Coincidence Bureau will surely arrest me. Oh but I’ve just realized; perhaps I’m already writing the book called Automated Alice, and we two are merely characters within it?”
Alice wanted to ask what he meant, but just then, the Town Hall clock reached the twelfth of its slowed-down ding-dongs, and the writer’s hand came down to stroke once again at Alice’s pinafored shoulder. It was noon. It was that very softest of touches, the breath of friendship, amidst strangers…and then he was gone…
ALICE
LOOKS UP
HERSELF
HOW very sad Alice was to have lost hold of Mister O’Clock’s normality, amidst the pressing concerns of the six-of-this and half-a-dozen-of-the-other crowd, this ever-changing throng that was pushing into her tender flesh from all sides. Pushing and pushing. In fact, pushing and pushing and pushing! Alice felt like she was being squashed flat by strangeness! But at least she knew what an ellipsis was, or at least she thought that she did. “If I can only find my way back home before two o’clock, 1860,” she announced out loud to nobody in particular, “I could then finish my homework! But I must still find Whippoorwill and Celia, before I can go home. Wherever can they have got to?” Alice looked all around the Square of Prince Albert, until her eyes were filled with tears. “Oh dear!” she spluttered. “I’m crying so much that the whole Square seems to be filling up with water!”