by Lewis, D. F.
“Novels get you nowhere.”
*
The bendy bus threaded the lower streets, having eschewed the mainstream for the back doubles. The windows were scratched by scores of cavalier vandals, who had tried to smash them just with their gaze until getting the milled edges of their shiny shillings to the glass in a pique of frustration that their lives were going nowhere fast. Arthur was behind the huge steering-wheel as the wheel tried to take him more than he was able to take the wheel. Much water had passed under the bridge since that time he and his sister Amy were sent missing: and even he couldn’t remember the circumstances. He’d need a brainwright sooner. In a dream, he once believed he and Amy were some kind of Royalty with Franco-Anglo roots: and their disappearance had set the whole city into a quiver. Not at all like the true circumstances: just he and his grubby-faced sister taking their pluck in their hands to see if anyone really cared for them and escaping deliberately into the darkening streets rather than go home for tea. Just a test for their parents. To see if they had sufficient love to find them again. A crazy, mixed-up looking for nothing except for the goal of people looking for them. A quest for a quest.
The two children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets—of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction as A&A, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Most tried to discover each other’s names.
“Hey, are you…? How long have you been…?” asked one child with a polished face and knobby knees. She failed to give any information about herself, however.
“Too long,” said one of the posher kids. “There’s a hole that goes to the other side of the world. But where?”
Indeed, whither the antipodal angst?
In the distance, one of the other children heard the hum of traffic—as if the city had started to re-ignite—and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.
“But nobody will ever find it. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.
“There’s a bigger hole in my Mum’s carpet!” laughed a sarcastic rascal, one of the few children not part of his or her own pair. He remembered the high flat that most adults had told him existed somewhere—even if it were only in forgotten dreams; even the slightest infection of dream sickness itself could engender false imaginings of real things or real imaginings of false things. The flat was an archetype, especially with kids. A literally dreaded flat where an individual—who was once one’s best friend—spent most of the day and night in bed. Nobody suspected this could be God Himself—as such seedy, tawdry dread could not possibly be any part of a divine iconography. Even the flat carpet had tantamount to melted into the grooves of the floorboards’ ill-knotted and crumbly fibre.
The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play—seeking the bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore—having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it—and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.
*
Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra—feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids’ parts, but some did run away although they didn’t know why. But that’s another story—as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fashion that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.
Mike pointed into the sky, drawing attention—for Susan’s benefit as well as Sudra’s—to where he saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a lego-brick device or even a model of a toy lorry the size of a real lorry—but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus... followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada... until Mike realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys... soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter’s... until that shock became real as he watched one of them accidentally clip another—with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even his feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky—more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet—and Mike prayed that they would not crash anywhere near their own house... a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened their lives, which were far more valuable than property. He also hoped that Ogdon’s ‘Third Floor’ pub would remain intact. Then, quickly realising how vulnerable he, Susan and Sudra were in the open, Mike gathered Sudra up and told Susan to run alongside him—even though he didn’t know if running away from danger was actually running into it.
The grass was scorched by their frantic escape.
*
He is dreaming. He knows it is him dreaming but, in retrospect, it could be just about anyone dreaming—Mike or Greg, even Ogdon. Hardly a woman, however, could have dreamed the dream—or a child like Arthur. Yet nothing is certain in such novel circumstances as dreaming a dream such as the dream he thought he was dreaming. He felt himself to be a man, not only within the dream context but also outside the dream as the person eventually to wake from it—and having already entered it via deep sleep, he seemed to mine even deeper. The dreamer had in his arms a girl and she was almost offering herself to him in skimpy night-clothes or an even skimpier evening dress. At first, he thought it was his daughter and, since then, within the dream, he has no reason to think it was not his daughter. She had shortish curly or bushy blonde hair and she was a bit plump so not at all like his daughter in what he later would consider to be waking or real life. But she was his daughter in the dream and it seemed they were both accustomed to these surreptitious flings and she was kissing him longingly, lengthily—eventually with her tongue. He felt a climax ensuing as he was now convinced it was one of those dreams that often end abruptly at good or bad bits of it, and the dreamer woke in a sick sweat. And that is all he can remember of the dream, and whether he is still trapped in such a dream is quite unknown to anyone capable of knowing there is such a thing to know.
*
The children arrived at the Dry Dock—but the ship had been moved back to the sea during the night. Each pair circled the area where it had stood for months between stanchions, breezeblocks, gantries and giant chocks. This was where they suspected the hole they sought would be found—a service tunnel bled from the ship’s hull for off-loading unfiltered substances: leading into the intricacies of the earth’s valves. Not that they possessed those words to describe it. They merely had dreamed them, beamed f
rom elsewhere, during the returning onset of the dream sickness (a sickness that most people, even children, had forgotten).
One child thought of the maps that had been on board—in the maproom. A wall of maps overlapping each other. This child then told his other half about it: “They were wall-sized maps on hardboard, one on top of the other, hinged at the top where the ship’s horizontal false ceiling ended in meeting the vertical—and you needed to lift one map to see the one underneath, lifting them again and again until you reached the wall itself. Some of the maps are blank, some very complicated with lots of wavy lines…” He tried to take a breath as he took a long run at describing everything that went through his mind. He had the word-power and the enthusiasm to match it. His listener was in awe.
Other children, with similar memories, could hardly describe them. “The walls were red,” one of them said (a girl with bushy blonde hair), meaning to say they were read like a book.
“There was a map of a railway,” answered another precocious child who held the hand of an older child with fuzz on his top lip, the latter not seeming quite so ‘with it’ as the younger one.
“On the wall?”
“Sort of under the wall. You had to lift the top wall up to see under it—and the first map under it was of a railway, not a map of rivers, roads or mountains—only tracks crawling all over it like centipedes.”
“Funny map to have on board a ship!”
“Yes, but most people these days think about trains, rather than boats, planes or cars.”
“Do they? What about helicopters? Do you count them as planes?”
Children crowded in to listen, whilst others searched the distraught area where the ship had once been stationed—still trying to locate the hole to the centre of the earth—and beyond.
“Some people remember the times when grown-ups used to travel to work.”
“Commuting,” chimed in a bright spark from the back of the crowd.
“Yes, something like that—but they say you remember the open platforms in the countryside and the platforms you used but now a bit changed, mixing up the direction or if you had changed to the right platform for the next train—going back in the same direction as you came, while you are mixed up because most of the other passengers are collecting themselves on the opposite platform to the one you are on—and you’ve forgotten whether you were travelling to work or travelling back home having already been to work…”
The chatter soon dissolved as the kids departed in dribs and drabs, having given up any chance of locating the pit entrance hereabouts. The chatter thus faded into the distance and, simultaneously, became more like chatter fitting for children to chat.
*
During their lunch-break from the office, Greg and Mike visited Ogdon’s pub on the third floor of the New Trocadero. Mike was disturbed to catch Susan and Ogdon canoodling behind the bar when he and Greg arrived—but Susan quickly rectified herself with some careless excuse. Sympathies for all parties have been meticulously crafted by the implied omniscience of someone who stands behind all the characters. If only he or she were more up front with this task instead of keeping everything between the lines. And given these sympathies, one can try to imagine the sorrow in Mike’s heart at this sign of seedy affection between Susan and Ogdon, plus the shame he felt at his colleague Greg also witnessing the tawdry scene and the further shame felt, indeed, by Susan herself. She quickly changed the subject, whilst serving Greg and Mike their lunchtime booze.
“The ship’s gone, then.”
Mike nodded. The huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock—not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit—had long become a fixture on the city’s skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance—presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed—was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who—despite the frantic searching by the Authorities—were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper…
“Nobody seemed to notice,” said Greg. “It’s not as if the sea is close by, but they must have re-cut the river to the sea overnight, too! Amazing what they can do.”
“I heard the groaning of sheet metal throughout the night, but I couldn’t wake up properly—to check,” announced Ogdon.
Meanwhile Susan’s sister Beth and Beth’s husband had entered the pub. A childless couple, but they had great sympathy with those who had lost children overnight.
Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened.
“I went to his room—and he said he would show me his if I showed him mine. So I escaped back down the stairs, helter skelter. A long way from his flat to the ground. Heh heh! The sea, you say? It’s not far to the coast from here, really. I once went…” He spat into his drink before he continued, oblivious that nobody was listening to his series of conversational non-sequiturs. “There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga—and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills—and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like ‘Angerfin’ on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing….”
Nobody paid any attention to Crazy Lope’s failure of communication, a failure even with himself. He didn’t fill up the whole screen.
Greg and Mike soon left the pub, intent on returning to the office where the computers continued to work throughout their lunchbreak, like huge sensory calculators with amputated keys. Each man felt the other was a website, a blog city, a click on the right point bringing everything up in various stages of construction. Either that or they were slightly merry from imbibing on empty stomachs.
*
Beth was beautiful but she often seemed bitter... or strident... transferring furrows to the face that seemed out of place there. Her personality had changed the character of her face. Her sister Susan was less physically attractive, yet her nature was calmer, more amenable—not necessarily kinder or smarter than Beth, but less prone to have mind rage at the slightest setback. Patience was something Beth deeply lacked and her non-descript husband took the brunt of her short temper—to the extent of having any of his own personality stripped from him, like a gossamer upperskin peeling off and jettisoned: left just to cling on, for dear life, to the cast shadow in his wake.
When Beth’s nephew and niece disappeared, Beth initially failed to react sufficiently: but as soon as she did take initiative on her sister’s behalf, Susan stopped being simply bemused at losing two children she somehow hadn’t realised she had. Beth had at first retained her habits, however—arriving in Ogdon’s pub rather late and with cool nonchalance—yet later her inbuilt stridency took inevitable sway and she felt there was nothing to do but burn the candle at both ends, tussling insistently, if not violently, with the Authorities, whilst chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?”
“Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid—unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.
The dream sickness—like a ‘flu pandemic—caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they
suffered... but, unlike a ‘flu pandemic, the dream sickness was inspired by an inference regarding an infernal mass-hysteria linked to a mass-suicide syndrome rather than to any individual’s pain or conscious disability.
Many parents set up search parties—because Arthur and Amy were not the only ones believed to have inexplicably gone missing. Some search parties overlapped with other search parties. There were petty rivalries, even bitter disputes between them, believing their own children were being sought by other parties and vice versa.
Meanwhile, wells were dug all over the city towards the Northern coalfields. Separate queues were set up at these wells to reflect the medicine queues further south, as if some unknown synchronicity was sought to provide an explanation factor linking two imponderables and hopefully making them ponderable. Some children who hadn’t yet run away from home played sandcastles around the wells—damming and river-construction games mocked-up from various substances abandoned by gardeners in allotment sheds previously rifled by unknown hands and given to the children. Weighing bucket against bucket was a common daily reality even though it sounds more like something they should have dreamed about... being tantamount to a waking sickness, assuming anyone could get their heads around such a concept.
*
Much further south, towards the holiday ‘feet’ of the city-shape, other queues formed near ranks of parked silver craft that had been earmarked and then advertised as vehicles for tours beyond the city toward the sea in pursuit of adventures of which Jules Verne would have been proud.
Crazy Lope and John Ogdon had booked for an undersea tour, but then decided against it. This would have been under the tutelage of a rather outlandishly garbed and dramatic Captain Nemo (or so it was blurbed in the brochure), cashing in on a vogue for such old-fashioned fantasy trips. Booking avoided queues but cost a lot more. Greg said he wanted to accompany them, but currently there wasn’t a vacancy, unless a late cancellation arose. At that stage Crazy Lope and Ogdon had not yet cancelled. Greg wondered if he really shouldn’t accompany Beth, Susan & Co. in search of Arthur and Amy. A holiday seemed a bit of a cop-out compared to participating in a pukka search party. Mike himself kept his own counsel.