by Rhys Hughes
His pencil moustache had been trimmed back to nothing: it was faith alone that kept it there now, a hint of a nimbus above his lip, owl-white. Adjusting his cravat, he winked a rheumy eye at his reflection, opened his front door and stepped smartly into the day.
And rebounded off the postman…
Letters flew like chopped up words in all directions. Harris steadied himself and cried, “Fifty years ago. Today.”
“What?” The postman regained his own balance and scratched a fleshy earlobe. Then he shook his head slowly, crouched down and retrieved his dropped catch, passing a small bundle to Harris, who accepted it with a magnificent, arrogant scowl.
The old lusts were flowing into his blood again. He could almost taste his youth. A high smoky rain above Simla; the snakes twisting beyond the veranda; a curry in khaki.
“Don’t you remember?” He felt the muscles in his jaw rubbing against each other. “Don’t you know? What we did for you, all of you, back then! Don’t you care?”
The postman shrugged, shouldered his sack and walked away. Harris glowered at his back. Not enough time to fetch his catapult and stones from the attic, unfortunately!
In his attic was a tea chest stuffed full of the toys of a long life. Once a month he unlocked it and rummaged around in the gloom and carefully inspected what his bony hands brought up from its depths and wondered how the devil such stuff came into his possession. Hookah, swordstick, tigers’ whiskers…
The catapult with the bag of special stones was in there too, and the stones were smooth red pebbles from the mouth of the Ganges; sticky with the oil of sins that had been washed off the devout over the entire length of the river. A fancy.
His attention was wandering again. Not good.
“Fifty years ago. Half a century. Thanks to us this town… Without us it wouldn’t be… Heroes, we are.”
He continued muttering as the letters fell from his hands one by one. Bills, a few promotional leaflets, one wrongly addressed postcard. Not a single message of congratulation amongst them! How could this be? It was strange, almost uncanny.
“Postal workers on strike again, I don’t doubt, delaying all the most important mail, can’t be any other explanation. Well, it’s time to fetch Paddy, I guess. Already late.”
Out on the street he flexed his limbs and winced as his joints replied with aches, a dialogue he refused to extend into a fully blown argument because there was no reasoning with the pains of decrepitude: they won every time. He proceeded down the pavement with his customary lurch, refusing to hunch his shoulders.
“Anniversary today,” he informed a woman who was pushing a pram in the opposite direction. “Sure to be a big celebration on the esplanade. Fireworks and brass band. Fifty years since.” And when no reply was forthcoming, he added, “Children welcome. We kept the future safe for the little ones. All for them, it was.”
But the woman was gone, increasing her speed as if escaping a beggar or lunatic. Harris huffed. The ignorant lower classes: breeding like hot cakes! With no respect for their elders, for history, heritage or culture. Drug addicts, most of them, bodies crawling with unearned tattoos: none had sailed the seven seas. That din they called music, mindless pounding. Outraged I am, he told himself.
He turned the corner and still failed to observe any preparations for any street party. No flags, bunting, balloons. No row of tables covered with overlapping tablecloths so that it seemed a single immensely long trestle had been inserted into the street like a ramrod into a thin musket, the kind Afghans used, ornate, accurate. The blighters! He frowned. Who were the blighters? Who?
Not the Afghans, that was certain. No.
The blighters were the people who lived in this street. Ignorant asses also. Fifty years ago he and Paddy…
It occurred to Harris that an elaborate deception might be in progress. Perhaps the mayor had arranged this silence, this emptiness, this absence of excitement, in the same way that friends sometimes pretend to forget an important birthday, clustering in the house of the victim, lights off, waiting to cry “Surprise!” when the dupe enters. An explanation plausible in the extreme. And yet.
Too playful for the seriousness of the occasion.
Could the mayor, already notorious for his hatred of jokes, risk such a stunt? Surely not. “Happy celebration day! Fifty years!” called Harris to another pedestrian. “Grand occasion.”
The pedestrian snorted in return, not viciously but as if in reflex to a riddle too bothersome to solve. “Ungrateful world, this one,” grumbled Harris. “Not long to go, thankfully.”
Further along he accosted another bystander with the words, “Yes it’s me. In the flesh. Fifty years later.”
But the bystander expressed no delight whatsoever.
Paddy Deluxe lived in the little house on the corner of the next street. Harris rang the antiquated doorbell, waited less than a minute. Paddy loomed in his own blazer as the door opened, elegant, almost regal, but with a faint odour of salad about him.
“Why the celery epaulettes?” blurted Harris.
Paddy answered, “The pact we made. When the fiftieth came round, we said. Symbolic of what we did.”
A shadow crossed the face of Harris. “I forgot! Totally slipped my mind. You’re right, old chap.”
“Am I?” Paddy was now racked with doubts.
“Leave them on, please,” insisted Harris, though Paddy had made no effort to remove them. “The symbol’s too important. Celery. Yes! Clever of us to think of that, to make such an association with what we did, with our achievement, our act.”
“I’m feeling shy now,” confessed Paddy.
Harris pinched his cheek. “A shy hero: the best kind! That’s true and it’s a fact that won’t change in the next fifty years. Fifty years! Can you credit it? So much time to pass.”
“Buckets of it,” agreed Paddy unhappily.
“My idea is this,” said Harris as he mopped his baldness with a silk napkin. “We won’t go directly to the esplanade but via the cemetery. Pay our respects to Castor first.”
“But he wasn’t really part of what we did,” pointed out Paddy with a sour smile. “He wasn’t with us all the way fifty years ago. He could have been but chose not to. He declined.”
“I had forgotten that.” Harris was stupefied.
“So let’s not trouble ourselves about Castor. Leave his grave in peace. For some other time,” suggested Paddy.
“You’re right, of course you are. How stupid of me! He simply doesn’t deserve to be included now.”
“It was you and me,” said Paddy.
“Fifty years ago, on this day, this very day. How very can a day be? This day must be more ‘very’ than any other. All other days are some or more, not very. Less very, at the most.”
“Just us two. The heroes. Pair of. A credit to our town.”
“Will there be statues, unveiled?”
“Of us? Today? Ought to be, even if there isn’t. Statues on pedestals for what we did. Are you listening over there?”
“Dumb oafs, the lot of them. Met enough today. Did you tune the radio to the news? Anything about the anniversary, our fine celebration? How many dancing girls?”
“Curiously silent,” frowned Paddy.
“Atmospheric static, I shouldn’t wonder,” opined Harris.
“It was an FM station. Frequency modulation, that stands for. Is less affected by disturbances in the…”
“Come on, we’re wasting time,” said Harris.
Off they went. The sea was visible between the shoulders of tall white houses. This was where the wealthy lived and some of them were sitting on wicker chairs on their balconies, eating rich breakfasts. Jam spreading, spoon tinkling, sugarcube plopping: it was a life of luxury up there, high on those platforms that extended like frowning brows over gardens full of tendrils and fashionable blooms.
Harris and Paddy took it in turns to shout upwards.
Chins jutted in reply, nostrils flared, eyebrows arched. Or else there wa
s no reaction at all. Bespoke disdain, high maintenance contempt. The rich snub not as we do, vocally, but with facial angles alone. Each to his own. And there the sea, not really a sea: an estuary of the widest river in the country. A low line of cliffs on the other side, blue and hazy. Yachts and tankers interposed. Sandbanks.
“Shall we stop for a drink first?” Harris suggested.
“A little early, isn’t it? The pubs aren’t even open. Do you think they’ll open especially for us? I do need lubrication. Dark beer, foaming at the corners of the mouth. Or is that rabies? Always get them mixed up. A full pint of ale for each drained hero!”
“Let’s try this one. Come on, let us in!”
“Open up! Open up!”
“We used to come here with Castor, didn’t we?”
“To play cards. Yes.”
“Open up, you foul hibernator!”
A window rumbled, a beefy face appeared, stubbled cheeks, nose of a pig, jowls of an ox. The most basic kind of landlord, with a tongue that could drive flywheels, if necessary.
“What do you codgers want at this hour of the morning? Bugger off, you miserable alcoholic tramps!”
Harris continued to pound and kick the locked door.
“Open up! Open up!”
“Wait a moment: I’m coming down. Where did I put that cosh?” cried the landlord and his head vanished.
Harris and Paddy waited to be admitted, grinning.
Bolts slid back, a heavy key turned, the door creaked open. And there stood the landlord, twice as large as his head had led them to believe, a bottle of stout in one hand, a fist in the other, a short length of lead pipe thrust in the belt of his trousers.
“Sick and tired of nasty little men like you coming round here at all hours causing grime and nuisance.”
Harris and Paddy exchanged amused glances.
“My dear chap, don’t you recognise us? Must we twirl? Would do if our bones weren’t sore. All the same.”
The landlord snorted. “Never seen you before.”
“Ha ha! You jest, surely you do. For we are heroes, the greatest within a radius of 115 miles, and today’s our day, the fiftieth anniversary of what we did. That’s quite clear.”
“Something to do with the war?” squinted the landlord.
“War?” snapped Harris. “Certainly not! It has nothing to do with war! It was much bigger than that!”
“Fifty years ago, we said,” added Paddy.
“What war happened fifty years ago?” demanded Harris. “And don’t be clever and quote some obscure conflict in Africa. What we did was of vital importance to this place!”
Paddy gazed at the clutched bottle of stout. “Is that for us? Why only one bottle? Whatever happened to generosity? I remember how it used to be. Back then. If a fellow came along on a tricycle selling chestnuts and burst his front tyre and scattered his wares in a roadside ditch… Well, the people would rush from the houses, pick them up, every last nut and chest accounted for, return them. None go missing. Just an example, nothing to do with real life, my father… And we made our wine from the flowers of the fields, fruits of the forest…”
He began to sob on the shoulder of Harris, who shook him gently but hissed urgently, “Don’t go getting Bradburyesque on me now, old chap. Keep your chin up. Lip stiff!”
“The upper, not the lower,” mocked the landlord.
Paddy quickly regained control of himself, adjusted his tie, swallowed twice, blinked and returned a dry gaze to the bottle. “I’ll ask you one last time. Is that meant for us?”
“Certainly,” admitted the landlord. His thumb was over the mouth of the bottle. Now he shook his hand vigorously, removed his thumb, took care to aim the frothing spray equally at both figures, seeking out those little gaps between clothing where bare flesh might be drenched with the greatest return of shivers.
Spume everywhere. Paddy and Harris jumped.
“On the house,” explained the landlord. He slammed the door, leaving the empty bottle spinning on the ground. It stopped and pointed towards the sea. The two men took its advice.
“My epaulettes are ruined!” Paddy moaned.
“And the ink is running on the backs of my hands!” Harris spluttered as he held them up to his friend.
“I don’t comprehend,” answered Paddy.
“You can’t even make out what the pictures are supposed to be now. All that effort for nothing!”
“What are they supposed to be?” wondered Paddy.
“Hands. We agreed on the symbolism together, didn’t we? To remind us of what we did when we did it.”
“You drew hands on your hands? Wouldn’t it be easier just to look at your hands as they already are?”
“Suppose it would. Doesn’t matter now,” sighed Harris.
“I forgot to draw hands,” said Paddy.
They walked on in silence. Around the next corner was the esplanade. So far there was no commotion, no crackle of anticipation in the air. The brass band clearly hadn’t started yet, nor the slap of feet of dancing girls, but soon they would. Perhaps when the heroes appeared in person. And then it would be unleashed: the tears and jelly of children, the crunching handshakes, rough but affectionate backslaps, whistle of rockets, buzz of kazoos, fawning of the mayor.
They quickened their steps, doddered faster, more efficiently, came to the turn, wheeled round. Nothing.
Not quite nothing: a few strollers, aimless. A dog. The usual esplanade business. Small waves quietly eroding a rocky beach. Wispy clouds. The gleam of the pavilion in early sun.
“I don’t believe it,” gasped Harris. “They can’t have forgotten, it’s just not possible. Beyond all reason.”
“A trick, must be. Some kind of practical joke.”
Harris groped forward, clutched the railings, hung his head over them, stamped his feet in turn. “Fifty years.”
“An illusion, I tell you!” persisted Paddy.
“Don’t be absurd. This is reality: the shocking neglect of tradition, the loathing of the old values, of heroes, the advent of cynicism and apathy, the end of civilisation. How could this massive and deep emptiness be a mirage? Who might construct such a travesty of a celebration day? No power on earth is cunning enough…”
“You’re wrong. Mondaugen could do it.”
“Karl Mondaugen, the mad inventor? Yes, why not… He has devised a machine to mask the crowds, to veil the festival. He never liked us, was always friendly with Castor. I bet Castor arranged this with him before he died. A projection of some kind. Holograms. How do we switch it off? The mayor is here and the people…”
“But we can’t see them. Yes. The only explanation.”
“All here, behind this screen, beyond the mirage. Cut the air with your arms, like this! Shred the illusion, reveal the truth! I want to be applauded and admired. Standing ovation.”
“We deserve it. For what we did. Our sacrifice!”
“Let’s force him to turn it off. Twist his arms, break his legs. Like we had to do once before. To that fakir. A high smoky rain above Simla. Not Simla, India, but Simla, Wales.”
“I think it’s spelled Cimla,” said Paddy.
“I don’t doubt. But now. To Mondaugen’s house! Full speed ahead, full anger, full bitterness, full pride!”
“Make way for the vengeance express!”
“That’s the spirit! Wine from flowers of the fields, you say! Do you mean dandelions? A diuretic, so I’ve been informed. Got a lady drunk once. Not on wine. On gin. Her bloomers gave me blisters. Or was it the other way around? Lost days.”
“The past is another country. So is Hungary and Surinam. Have I used that joke before? If not me, someone.”
“Hurry, hurry! Twist that sneak’s foreign nose. I even thought poems would be written about us, dramas performed, films acted. Maybe they have been in the real world, behind this three dimensional screen. Fifty years today. Valorous, us!”
“Have you developed a stutter, dear boy?”
“Not yet. I
s it too late, do you think? Onward! Let’s ask this little girl if she wants my autograph…”
“I don’t believe she does. Nor mine. To be frank.”
“Shocking language from a child! When I was her age I did anything a stranger asked me to. It was expected. Same went for you, I imagine. Yes of course it did. Tradition.”
“The world has gone to the dogs. The dogs have gone to the cats. The cats to the rats. A ratastrophe!”
“Worse. The rats have gone to the foreigners.”
“Mondaugen lives here. Let’s ring his bell, force our way in, make him wince! Damn hologram projectors! Smash the bleeding thing on the floor.
Get an apology from him, cash also.”
“Tell me, did you get any mail this morning?”
“Not a single letter expressing gratitude or wishing good luck! What sort of a projector can do that?”
“Mondaugen’s a sly devil. A genius too!”
The door swung open slowly and the desiccated face that peered out resembled a dried mango slice so accurately that Harris and Paddy licked their lips without wanting to.
“Yes, yes?” rasped the inventor. “Yes, yes? Do you want something? What business have you with me?”
Harris and Paddy barged forward, yelling and thrusting Mondaugen aside with the shoulders of unsung heroes, always harder and less well rounded than those of the sung variety. The inventor yelped, collapsed into a corner, his fall broken by a machine that made cushions and spat them out under falling men. But the impact destroyed the machine and its cushions remained unborn.
“Where is it? Your damn projector?” cried Harris.
“Projector?” croaked Mondaugen.
“For your bloody foreign holograms!” shrieked Paddy.
“I don’t know what you mean… Please don’t touch anything! These machines are very delicate! The product of decades of research! All of them prototypes, irreplaceable!”
“What’s this?” roared Harris as he nudged one device off a table with his elbow and kicked it to bits.