by Lewis, D. F.
“What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?”
Mrs Cole was still an attractive woman and she knew Mr Clare better than he knew himself. She could see it in his eyes.
At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their head teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur’s hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large truck. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl’s keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it as if it were real plastic with mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips.
“Would you like to stay for dinner, Mr Clare?” Edith had advanced from offering tea to giving him the chance to share the meat sizzling in the oven. He had not really answered but had decided to occupy the armchair in front of the old-fashioned TV, without even a word. The fact he had caught Mrs Cole at home seemed in itself sufficient to create a successful mission.
The trouble was that not one of them knew what the others were thinking. Yet there had to be a lot of sympathy for all of them and that sympathy cost more sympathy, growing and growing cumulatively as the events overtook them at later stages some of which would never be known, let alone described. Each person would take turns to feel... to feel deeply... for the others and themselves. All that was needed was patience. Meanwhile they were simply playing at life, without understanding any of its rules.
*
Mike was quite ordinary and nobody around was expert on what made any man tick—so that all that could be said about him was his ordinariness. Not exactly nemonymous—in the true sense of that strange word we all grew to know... eventually... despite its difficulty to say or to understand, because that would have implied that he was anonymous to the point of non-existence. And Mike sure could lift a few spirits with just a few chosen words from beneath his mask of ordinariness. He lived a full and useful life because of his ordinariness rather than despite it.
Although ordinary, he felt responsible, more responsible for the world’s affairs than he had the right to be. At an early age, he had felt the hawling power in his mind, in his hands: a power that actually was fed by the ordinariness that was his essential default. He saw—instinctively—layers of people passing down a lift shaft, spending time on each floor till they either reached the ground or the top. These layers of people were going both ways, in fact, not just down, passing each other, sometimes changing direction more than once, but staying, for a while, nevertheless, on each floor—getting to know the others on that floor, then proceeding on... downward, after all, or, yes, upward. Hawling was not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the buttons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashed and resulted in the lift-doors sliding aside... new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there was more to hawling than that—it was running a butcher’s shop, listening to the carcasses crack as you lay in bed at night. He was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on... and eventually extinguish with a dying wink... which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from Mike’s mine. It was all this... and more. Mike would only discover the ‘more’ when the time was ripe or if he became mine, if not me, himself.
He had just watched Amy Cole riding up and down the utility supply shaft of some inner city tower. Her brother, whose name was unknown or forgotten, was the one she was seeking, having lost him in childhood, when they were both suddenly orphaned. Their mother had been hauled off from them one unexpected day whilst they both played outside among the makeshift dams and rivers of slurry which pleased her brother so much. Amy even lost Amy, lost, at least, who she was and what her years were or bloodcourses were.
Mike had then watched someone else. Susan and her two children running through an unkempt, shaggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. They were all chased by a figure in a cape. Mike desperately wanted to help them but, temporarily, his hawling skills were stunted by the experiencing of the traumas of other families slipping through several dissolving floors towards a huge pit in the earth.
Mike woke in a cold sweat. He put one foot outside his bed to ensure at least his own bedroom floor was still there. Amy snored beside him, mercifully, it seemed, free of the dreams that had just beset him... or were still besetting him.
*
Mike often reminisced about the time he worked in an office, mostly as an administrator, but also as a consultant or salesman, a business that often concerned very complex financial matters. He used to entertain clients at sporting events or orchestral concerts, lunched important representatives from other Companies, attended Board Meetings across the country, driving all manner of distances in a day. He couldn’t do this now, but, in those earlier days, he used to manage stress much better. It was almost like a dream. He had a family, then, too—Susan was his wife and his two children Amy and Arthur. Amazingly, they were still his family today, having put up with him all these years. The children had grown up, of course, and left home. It was just him and Susan now. Susan went out to work and he stayed at home: a token househusband. So, there was a lot of time for reminiscing.
His body was the most mysterious thing about him. He could easily fathom his own mind—but his body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that he—his mind—walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to him, obviously, because, if it had, he would certainly have considered himself mad. Bad enough even to skirt such touchy subjects amid the other reminiscences, let alone delving into them.
Those corporate entertainments he remembered as uncomfortable sessions, when he often felt invisible. Eyes grazing him, edging even nearer but, just as quickly edging away to gaze elsewhere. He used to try to fathom the faces in the dance of business and artifice—and wondered if any real minds lay behind them, as they tried, like him, to balance a drink and plate, whilst making small talk before the concert started. Brahms’ Double Concerto with Nigel Kennedy and Robert Cohen playing the violin and cello respectively—the concert music easing away the thoughts, as Mike merged with the rest of the audience who, eventually, clapped as one entity: one nemonymous creature of applause with the merged thought that they remained single entities.
*
The clues as to what a hawler really is sometimes come together piecemeal, often obliquely—rarely in great moments of clarity.
Amy had finished the vacuuming. The man she knew as Mike often popped in so as to see how she was doing. He evidently fancied her. She needed to be checked by someone at least and Mike was representative of the Letting Agents. He needed to follow the rules and rub a finger over a sideboard top to see if it collected dust. He turned a blind eye to the carpet. In any event, Amy’s job did not reach beyond vacuuming it—and any deeper cleaning would have to be commissioned from a specialist steam-cleaning organisation. Mike usually trusted her to lock up after she finished. A good working relationship. No doubt, one day, he would try more than just fancy her from a distance—she knew. Men were like that, despite the existence of a wife and two children. He referred to his wife as ‘the wife’, but perhaps hawlers were allowed to have more than one wife; indeed, one day, believing X was his wife, whilst, the next day, believing Y was his wife—and on those separate days, he was only aware of either X or Y respectively, depending on what day it was. Hawlers were a confused bunch... if there were more than one hawler in the first place, and Mike may have been the only one.
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 wa
s 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.