by Lewis, D. F.
And it was.
#Stub of pencil: A third party claimed this was clearly a see saw.
*
Sudra was in her bedroom in the shoe museum listening to the newly prepared armies march-running towards war through the cutaways of Klaxon—measuring the pavy-crazed sluices between the lobes with the rhythmic onward march of their medium-pace limbs in running mode as opposed to any standard patterned walk. March-running is a forgotten art. Neat ranks of soldiers (mostly female) these were, keeping perfect pace with each other at the run, rather than the lift-and-separate of slow-motion goose-step or slightly quicker frog-march or general English slow marchpast for Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday. Memories of Things Past—a hypnotic echoing march-run as the various sections of army proceeded—half in and half out of Sudra’s dreamtime perception of them from her bedroom window—towards their billets in the various establishments of darkening Klaxon.
This was during the early stages of the war before sides had been picked, like children in the classroom exchanging bright coins of choice for the best runner on their team, leaving the solitary turnips to be the final choices. Sudra had earlier watched a strange individual visit her shoe museum—despite Crazy Lope (her doorkeeper) and his good offices to keep unpaying customers at bay—and she wondered if war was something that had come accompanying the visitor, rather than a genuine interest in viewing the shoes on mannequins’ feet. Ulterior motives... led to a neat withdrawal of the visitor back to the mudparks whence he’d first arrived (Go’spank’s dead body upon his back like a cancerous growth).
One of the march-running woman officers was to billet in the shoe museum. She was introduced to Sudra by Edith who was now in temporary charge of billeting arrangements in the city prior to full-out war. Armies needed their sleep, and armies were made up of individuals who thought sleep would help later as acclimatisation to death.
The woman soldier who had splintered off from the synchronisation of her fellow march-runners when she’d reached her appointed billet (in this case, the shoe museum) was shown to a bunk bed in the attic’s attic.
“Rest here,” said Sudra with a smile. A fine figure of a woman who had loosened her tie on first sighting the equally attractive soldier. “If you need anything in the night…”
“I shall be fine,” said the soldier, listening to other sections of march-runners still rhythmically passing in the night, eager for their own billets elsewhere. The soldier slowly withdrew from her uniform while simultaneously covering herself with the carpet-blanket that Crazy Lope had earlier provided for the bunk, thus revealing nothing of her eager body.
It was like imagining one was in a dream simply for the sake of haunting oneself with it. A means to extend life. Wars often caused similar mentalities of false dreaming.
Sudra smiled, determined to bide her time. March-runners were now passing with the perceived sound of much smaller groups, silhouetted by sirens. Until only an odd pair of billetless march-runners echoed down the sluice-alleys that Sunnemo’s withdrawal into its nightmask had created from the once wide esplanades of a finer siècle.
As Sudra settled into a feather-mattress, she heard the war crackle into existence on a far ridge of Klaxon with mere Muskets of Mass Destruction.
*
“Wagger Market, Wagger Market, Come to Wagger Market!”
The Weirdmonger once had a stall of his own at torrid Wagger Market (a suburb of Klaxon)—but today at the fun-at-the-fair, stuff seemed as tawdry as the sun now seemed cool. The brown canvases, once pulled taut by hooks on ancient tenter-frames appeared soggy, threadbare, frayed... even worm-holed. The wares as chipped and crocked as the costermongers’ faces that tried to sell them from deeply-veined marble slabs, slabs so stained, the Weirdmonger knew that dead fish had once sat on them eyeing the customers... with imperceptible flicks of their tails…
No sign of the healthy human rudery that once hung from the tenter frames... much sought after by the mountain nomads as ornaments as well as carnifications. Nor were there now displayed those rolls and rolls of partly piled carpets and mats, with rough-sewn inner cylinders of space being home for numbers of creatures that had since become as legendary as they were once so far-fetched, despite their inarguable existence as forces for dream.
It was then the Weirdmonger was delighted to find a stall with a bit more get-up-and-go than the other downtrodden trestles of junk. It bore a sign with yellow lettering saying ‘Olden Days’ and a beautiful attendant who wore a name badge saying WAR. The Weirdmonger lowered his eyes from her buxom comeliness to the stall’s comestibles and purveyances of provender. These were all varieties of syrup, it seemed—ranging from some Happy Shopper stuff through branded Tate & Lyle—until eyes reached the more exotic end of the syrup market that stemmed from Far Samarkand and Ancient Cathay—flecks of spice generously lacing the aromatic glue-syrups and treacles, the slimy tentacles of which curled and coiled within the substance they themselves constituted, in and out of each other like tubular sinews of bee-honey.
More marmalady substances squatted like set jellies without the help of containers to hold them up. Thick cut & thin cut. Peppered with peels. Peels like orange ones. Or peels like lumps of hairy hide. All sitting incoherently within clear syrup as well as cloudy... like pickles or foreign bodies or sizeable splinters of rind or hardened skin. The top-notch syrup was not from the deepest, strangest Orient but from the Pacific Islands. Petals floating in silken tides. Tiny nugget-sown lagoons of amber wreathed with garlands... teased back and forth by weltering waterfalls.
Some syrups actually moved by their own volition—seething, gurgling, even burping—as bubbles broke towards the meniscus of more turgid marmaladery (at the lower end of the range). A single syrup was effervescent, as a series of prickling sensations cascaded into existence—microscopic air-pockets tingling to the Weirdmonger’s imaginary touch. Then, he spotted letters floating about in it. Making words. Unmaking words. Poems being slurped and sloughed between the walls of the transparent jug. The words ‘Olden Days’ abruptly ratcheted into view, locking into some serendipitous significance beyond any semantic meaning. Telling, perhaps, of the particular stall that sold these sinuosities of syrup. Then—just like an ugly duckling—a lonely letter ‘g’ floated into view through the undulating avenues of aspic—and joined up just as the Weirdmonger’s attention returned to the stallholder. Syrup, as well as silence, was golden. He felt dazed, as he momentarily bent his head under an impending emotion. This emotion was strong, more golden than anything. But then he was startled by the thought that came into his head—unannounced. He knew the game was up. His sluices of logic had been blocked by plaits of gooey love.
WAR smiled meltingly.
“Would you like to buy some syrup, Weirdmonger?”
“Yes, but can I ask why you call yourself WAR, WAR? I recall wars as men all mouth and trousers who fought till they found that fighting was harder than drinking.”
“My father died of a broken heart over a botched result at his own World War.”
WAR seemed even more pretty when she spoke serious. The Weirdmonger wondered what heights of passion she might engender if she actually talked dirty. He nodded as if he understood without the necessity of her continuing. Apparently, her father had lived his whole life upon the hope of winning the World War.
WAR said that she was continuing the investigation at the behest of some paternal beyond-the-grave power which could not be defied. When a corpse got its claws into an issue, there was the devil to pay.
WAR herself turned as white as a ghost, gaunt and stare-eyed... as she fiddled with the jars of syrup. A haunted woman. Prettiness draining from her by the second. The bitterness of something that wouldn’t let go even in death. She sighed. Her eyes glazed as her father’s eyesight spun from them like wasps. She wielded long cultivated fingernails which she scratched along the nearest trestle—as if playing noughts and crosses for real and in earnest. From the middle of her head there sounded two v
oices clicking like miniature wooden dolls—foully swearing. Then WAR slumped forward…
The Weirdmonger now heard the voices inside his own head. He shook his head to free these poor creatures of his thoughts. Wagger Market resumed its business, oblivious of the tragedy. Nobody even bothered to clear up the huge mound of slime till the various corpses that had formed within muscley folds of it had disfigured.
*
The Weirdmonger had stayed away too long. The blanched thistles crouched like forgotten cruel love affairs—and he whistled with delight as he recalled the games of Catch he’d played here during those hotter days of youth. Not that he’d grown any older. Weirdmongers never did. And he was the only one left. Perhaps the only one that there ever was.
The landscape had changed. Cooler. Wetter. Strangely brighter. Or was it whiter? Paler. He tried to juggle the words. Despite the dankness, things looked shrivelled, burnt, desiccated... even more so than when Sunnemo had shone strong and high, during those endless days of his... youth. Yes, why not say the word? Even if it meant little, if not nothing. Agelessness was a burden that many carried, but the Weirdmonger carried it with some style and panache. Why use two words when none would do?
He shrugged. He had returned to the Klaxon Keys to renew acquaintanceships, if not with the original contacts of his “youth”, but with their progeny. He had recently travelled—further than anyone could imagine—towards lobes and poles of Inner Earth where few appreciated his art-with-words, an art of uttering a word or phrase or saying which then immediately became a self-evident truth. The Weirdmonger’s watchword was ‘one word, one truth’ for generations—but sometimes he needed to visit people able to have faith in this facility, thus to regain his self-confidence. Some, for example—in (god)forsaken clans of siren-driven wastes shadowed by Canterbury’s gravity-logged Oak—had merely stared at the Weirdmonger, open-mouthed, expecting their own words to issue forth as true as his. And they never did. Others had not even bothered trying, especially amid the coming war, failing, as they did, to understand anything the Weirdmonger said. Yet, here, back in Klaxon, he hoped at least the people retained a modicum of empathy with ‘one word, one truth’, not that anyone could truly empathise. If they did, they’d be Weirdmongers, too.
He shrugged again. He watched two boys throwing a ball to each other, with, between them, a puddle that the relatively weaker Sunnemo had failed to dry up... although, judging by the hover-flies sprinkling about above it, there was steam rising…
The Weirdmonger could hear the nagging voice of the two boys’ mother: a descendant, no doubt, of the woman he had known on his earlier sojourn in these parts... and for the likes of the Weirdmonger, knowing was not knowing nearly enough, there being far more about people than the people themselves or others could possibly imagine. The Weirdmonger recognised that knowing was tantamount to not-knowing, until he spoke the word, and then he’d know someone to the bottom bone of the soul. One word, that was all it took. One word from the Weirdmonger.
And today the voice scorched each Inner Ear... to their bottom bones. She was screeching for her boys to come in and not speak to strangers... and she stared across at the Weirdmonger, as if daring him to speak first. The boys, indeed, scampered to either side of her wide skirt.
“Git! We don’t need need you here.”
The Weirdmonger touched his chimney hat with the tip of two fingers, fingers that had grown webbed since he’d been known in these parts. Even Weirdmongers can change. Even plural can become singular.
The woman’s ancient great-grandmother Sudra had, if the truth were told, accused the Weirdmonger, in a dim past now beyond any torching out, of turning everything red. You’ve made bread red, she’d shrieked, YOU’VE TURNED BREAD INTO MEAT!
That was the day he had uttered the word which meant just one more gear up from breeding—where love was more a feast than anything else (if comparisons can be made so loosely). The word—even he had forgotten now... but it still seemed, from today’s evidence, to run free in this present woman’s blood. She had spoken instinctively…
“Don’t worry thyself,” the Weirdmonger said, with such simplicity, the woman immediately calmed down, held out her hand to him and smiled so generously, he wondered if laughter could possibly be as fulsome as her slicing grin.
“Welcome, Weirdmonger,” she said. “A stranger like you cannot be strange for long.” And she pushed her two boys towards him, uncaring whether they were being sacrficed to a demon or merely being introduced to a kind uncle.
The Weirdmonger offered to catch their ball. He held up one of his hands which was swollen like a huge keeper’s mitt or oven glove.
“Thou, throw,” he said.
And the ball, as if of its own volition, left the boy’s right hand straight into the safety of his finger cage which the Weirdmonger’s other hand had seemed to have become as his hands switched responsibility of catching.
There was always a catch. Even blind ones.
*
The room into which the Weirdmonger was shown was certainly not a showroom. Cramped, cluttered, yet beautifully cloisonné. The tassel on the blind clicked irritatedly against the window as a damp, then dry breeze absconded. A dry sound like a moth in a paper bag. A broken siren-breeze.
The woman frowned her two boys into the corner. They sank back into the shadows as if they were learning to swim or, at least, float... but silently failed to do so, smiles frozen on their faces like disguises for disgrace.
The kitchen, too, was nothing to write home about. There was meat stretched in strands from sink to worktop... like Christmas decorations. Sinews and threads of dripping muscle.
The Weirdmonger blinked. And the vision vanished. He dared not speak it... for obvious reasons. However, during the next few days, as soon as the boys had recovered from shyness, the Weirdmonger played trifling word games with them, like saying something along the lines of ‘bubble’ and a huge sooty one expanded from his mouth and—once complete—floated off. He’d say: a colour and, momentarily, the place where they were dallying—be it sitting-room or backyard—would blush to its roots with the colour chosen. Purple—and the trees swagging over the fence or window sill were like richly Royal garments or ecclesiastical vestments. Grey—and the boys laughed to think they’d returned to the days when films had a grey monochrome consistency; TV, too; black and white versions of Big Brother. Not that screens even existed at all now, even in colour. Screens had been kicked in ages ago, for all the right reasons. Visual image overdose had caused all manner of aberrations. Including no need for shoes as feet had become webbed and weather-proof like birds’.
He made as if to play catch with an imaginary tongue-tied ball of tumours, threaded throughout with veins and almost living morsels themselves. The boys cringed when they saw the Weirdmonger being so uncouth with his game. And the mother would cluck with distaste, despite being duped by phrases such as “Never you mind, my dear” or “Give me the benefit of the doubt” which flapped from the Weirdmonger’s mouth like platitudes with a demon’s wings disguised as an angel’s.
*
One day, the Weirdmonger uttered some words which didn’t quite take off. Whether it was a catch in the throat, a tickle caused by some misbehaving phlegm or a more serious seizure of bodily function, the words wormed out warped and wayward. He had meant to say, “Where is your father?” (and to himself, “Where is me?”)—the optimum of a love he was beginning to feel for these boys, his new-found foundlings or changelings or lostlings now found. One of them had the biggest ear he had ever seen. All the better to hear you with, perhaps. Instead the sense shifted... in a language so foreign-looking it represented the outset of a civilisation that had never existed—until now. The words’ exit was wrapped in cross purposes.
The mother wept. For she didn’t know who the boys’ real father was—having been taken in her sleep between one dream and the next. She had felt for some time that there was some deeper meaning to the Weirdmonger’s words. She exami
ned her own right hand. For as long as she could recall, it had been swollen like an oven-glove and the left one articulated like a cage with a trapped pellet of dry dung rattling in it like a ball valve.
The Weirdmonger was sad and deep kissed her. And she vanished like a fast shrinking red balloon into the fundaments of his being. The boys laughed and laughed till they died of it—or the Weirdmonger dropped the ball, whichever came first.
The Weirdmonger was then free to leave the Klaxon Keys—his feet crunching thistles like hollow bones. He held his chimney hat on against the dry wafts of air. Sunnemo never seemed to set any more, or it became a volcano called Mount Core. “Grey!” he shouted at it, with as much feeling to the word as he could muster. And he smiled at the black and white movie upon which he lived and had his being... before the screen blew its circuits, vanishing—as old-fashioned TV sets used to do—into a fast diminishing white dot.
Except he was never to know it wasn’t white, but red.
*
It was a May war. Perhaps earlier, perhaps later, but May maybe was the best guess. Klaxon seasons were as slavishly followed as their months, despite the weather-mad waywardness of Sunnemo itself. Sudra watched her billeted soldier guest with beady, if not steely, eyes. Eyes both looking and looked at. She suspected the soldier (often now glimpsed intimately and seen to bear a body fit for all sorts of use and not only for cruelties entailed by war) of being someone else. Too much of a coincidence to believe it was Amy or a May-masqued Amynemo returned for a further bite at the cherry of Sudra’s doom. Thus singled out from those thousands, if not millions, of march-runners—ceremonially making the relentless churn-churn rhythms of footwork by-passing the Klaxon sluices in pursuit of military glory—why would it be Amy herself snatched from these very churning ranks as chosen by higher authorities to billet in the shoe museum during the course of the war?
Sudra also watched the watcher—the man who had mysteriously visited the museum in past months, both as regular customer and as an inspector of museums. Dealt with by Lope, following the unexplained abscondment of Go’spank. This man stood outside staring up at the imaginary salacious silhouettes that were not silhouettes at all but shadows of the window-blind itself rattling in noise-breezes rather than at any sights that the blind itself concealed. Sudra watched a watcher outside in the city sluice thinking he was looking up at an attic’s attic-window watching Sudra but really watching the empty spaces she left behind so as to darken in her wake like stains of deceptive movement—as she later surreptitiously sought her soldier guest in places where they had not yet darkened sufficiently to tease with the nipply buttons of military undervest or see-through camisole that dressed the fleshy spaces below the eyes that looked and the eyes that were looked at.