by Rhys Hughes
Dr Wombat rotated his head as a waitress walked past with a wiggle. Then he answered, “That’s going too far.”
The men got up to depart and return to the university.
The Bones of Jones
I am lying on my back.
The truth is that I’m on my front.
That’s how easy it is for me to tell a lie when I am on my back. With no real effort, I can assert, quite convincingly, that I’m on my front and people are more likely to believe me than not.
I like to lie on my back. It’s my favourite position for lying.
My chin is made of wood.
I keep a miniature pig in a jar on a shelf.
That shelf is wooden and the wood came from my chin.
My face is much shorter now.
See what I mean? Lies, all lies. They rolled off my tongue like spherical giraffes on an extremely steep incline.
No, not at all like that...
I don’t try hard to lie when I’m on my back. It comes naturally. I suspect it’s something to do with magnetism, with the circulation of the molten iron that I use as a substitute for spinal fluid.
Having said that, I can also lie competently in many other positions. I’m not a pun trick pony, like Hayley Jude, who can only fib when she’s in a stable condition. Hayley, or Hay as everybody calls her, can’t lie unless she is utterly motionless, her muscles rigid, her breathing as shallow as it possibly can be, her pulse rate as low as a midget-diver.
I bet you didn’t know divers are used to explore midgets?
They aren’t, as a matter of fact.
And Hayley Jude doesn’t exist, I made her up, but only after she turned me down. Brutally. That’s what I do.
And it’s what she does too. Hay Jude.
Lying on my back, as I am, I can see the ceiling.
Seeing the ceiling is soothing.
This is because the ceiling is so high above me it might as well be a sky, but the sky of another world, a paradise planet in orbit around some other star, a daydream made real, a private heaven.
Utopia. Itopia. Wetopia.
The constellations have been painted on with luminous paint and how do they sparkle, you ask? Like low energy chemical reactions, that’s how, in other words exactly like what they are, rendering the simile redundant. Luckily it took voluntary redundancy, that simile.
The telephone rings... I turn my head to look.
I can’t recall why I put rings on it. The necklaces and bracelets are also a mystery. I must have thought it needed adornment when I was younger, but that was a mistake. It was fine as it was.
It doesn’t work anymore. The metal jewellery interferes with the circuits and makes them malfunction badly.
No, it makes them malfunction well. If the malfunction was bad it would be a low quality malfunction and the telephone would probably still work, but it doesn’t. It is merely a dead ornament.
Too bad. I hate talking to people I can’t see anyway. How do I know they aren’t pulling baboon faces, parading in underpants, frying plantains in bicycle oil on dangerous stoves? Too risky.
A star falls from the distant ceiling. A meteor.
It grows bigger as it approaches me and then I realise that it’s not really a meteor but a parachute with a badly fashioned ball hanging from it. The ball is a piece of paper that has been scrunched up.
Clearly it’s a message from my employers.
They can reach me anywhere.
And I’m always on duty.
The message lands on my chest and the parachute canopy, which is just a pocket handkerchief, settles over my face.
Snot funny. So I blow my nose in it contemptuously.
Then I fling it aside so I can see.
And now that I can see, I am in a position to turn the paper ball into a flat page again and read what is written.
Dear Corker,
Hope this finds you well or, if not well, then adequate; or. if not adequate, then bearable; or, if not bearable, then vicious.
It has recently come to our attention that the bones of a man by the name of Jones, who drowned a few years ago, have started telling the most appalling lies. His bones lie under the sea and the physical and moral shockwaves caused by these lies are causing a hazard to shipping. As our specialist Lie Detector we want you to do something or anything about it.
Will you do something, or anything about it; pretty please?
If you refuse we will slaughter you.
But it’s entirely your decision. Cheerio, buster!
Grillchin and the Team
What could I do? One doesn’t refuse Grillchin. I knew an agent once who refused him and that agent is now a gent instead, which sounds rather nice, but the insertion of that space between the ‘a’ and the ‘g’ of his identity was painful in the extreme and he never recovered.
So I sigh deeply, because that’s the correct way to sigh when one has to prepare for a voyage under the sea, and I turn on my side and reach out with my hand to punch the buttons of the bedside unit.
Punching them makes me feel better, but not much, so little in fact that it makes me feel worse, my knuckles anyway...
Then I press them properly, with my fingertips, and those buttons activate a motor inside my mattress which propels my bed on numerous little wheels out of my bedroom to a destination specified by the sequence of buttons I selected. A perfect system for men who like to lie in bed, and only marginally less so for men who prefer to be honest under the sheets.
The bed accelerates steadily, passes out of the house, doors opening and closing automatically to ease its passage, and now it is on the street, joining the flow of traffic, moving at an incredible speed.
I take cover under the duvet as the wind generated by my velocity ruffles my hair unpleasantly. Also I wish to hide from the stares and honks of ordinary vehicles and their passengers, who are unused to being overtaken by a bedstead. But soon I leave the city and find myself on a quieter road leading to the secret beach where my private harbour is located.
The bed bounces over the shingles and the motor grumbles when we get onto the sand. However, without any serious problems, it deposits me next to the jetty that I use to moor my entire ocean-going fleet.
For I have many craft that ply the waters of the deep blue yonder. I have yachts, schooners, clippers, galleons, caravels, longboats, catamarans, canoes, barges, galleys, yawls, hulks, cobles, dinghies, feluccas, cutters, dhows, junks, gondolas, sampans, punts, skiffs, and trawlers.
Unluckily, they were all bashed together during a stupendous tempest, and the hulls interpenetrated each other, and the whole thing is such a knot of vessels that it can’t be undone. So, when I put to sea, I do so simultaneously in every one, and it’s certainly an odd sight to witness Captain Corker strolling the deck(s) of that maritime mix-up, like a mini-minotaur in a maze.
But today, I need to dive below the waves, not swish over them, so it is to my submarine that I’m headed. I only have one submarine but it’s a good one. It was given to me by an inventor called Boppo Higgins and it is fast and reliable, quite roomy too; and, most importantly, very watertight. I jump out of bed, stroll along the jetty to where this machine waits, and climb down the ladder into the cockpit, which I seal by shutting a transparent plastic dome on a hinge over it. I pull levers and twist knobs and press buttons.
And so I’m off, heading for the seabed where the bones of Jones are lying, and thinking how terrible it is when bones avoid the truth. Why do they do that? Is it because the word fibia nearly sounds like fibber? But the word metatarsal nearly sounds like sent a parcel and no bone has ever worked successfully as a postman in my extensive and expensive experience, or even outside it. I regard it as an unsolvable mystery and maybe it regards me the same way. It would serve me right if it did. I like being served right.
In such cases, the waiter is efficient and puts every dish in its proper place and bows deeply before wishing me bon appétit. Better to be served right than served wrong, which me
ans being left with a service so rotten you twiddle your fork and spoon until they rust and the spaghetti never arrives. I am lucky never to have supped in such restaurants. I would still be there if I had, waiting for the meal, until the future itself became the pasta.
But none of that is important. It’s far more pertinent to say that, within the hour, I arrived at the precise spot where the bones of Jones were. I imagined they would be scattered randomly but, in fact, they had been arranged in a neat circle; too perfect a shape for the artistry of the currents to have fashioned. They were telling new lies even as I approached...
“I am a renowned opera singer,” said a femur.
“Scotland was put on the world upside down,” said the maxilla.
“Two plus two equals five,” said the sphenoid.
“Love is half an onion,” said a phalange.
“One quarter,” corrected the coccyx.
“I can’t talk,” said the mandible.
“Chairs are used as currency in Yuckystan,” said an ulna.
“Griffins are monkeys in disguise,” said one of the cervical vertebrae, to which another responded, “Swans dwell in nests of solid yogurt.” But the first objected to this, “Swans don’t exist at all!”
“Squeezed coughs think like weasels,” said the scapula.
“Chums are hexagonal,” said an astragalus.
“Jokes are always unfunny,” chuckled the humerus.
“Gloves knit themselves,” said the patella.
“Diameters hate cheese,” said a radius.
“Unless it’s in a pi,” countered the ischium.
“Glue is pear cider,” said the clavicle.
And so on. It was very disturbing and I was disturbed.
The submarine designed for me by Boppo Higgins has lots of prehensile tentacles and mechanical arms that I can control from the cockpit, and there are signalling devices that enable me to communicate with anything on the outside in a myriad of practical and impractical ways.
I can, for instance, shoot beautifully scripted letters enclosed in tungsten canisters for the recipient to read at their leisure, once they have recovered from being struck on the noggin by the things.
Or I can make the hands on the ends of the arms perform sign language in known and lost tongues, and, it goes without saying, that I can broadcast sound at any volume and frequency I might desire.
I had decided on this occasion to send my messages to Jones with the aid of a large xylophone that extends from the prow of the vessel, which happens to be shaped like a gigantic head, incidentally.
The xylophone juts like a callous sneer from the mouth.
For some strange reason, bones and xylophones instinctively understand each other. I fiddled with the necessary controls and one of the mechanical arms played a nice little melody on the instrument.
This melody said, “Why don’t you cease your untrue chatter and try to be more respectable in future, you bones! Don’t you appreciate the atrocious havoc you are playing with the serenity of the sea?”
Then I played a few more notes and these notes said:
“You are upsetting the fish, whales, coral reefs and all the other entities in the surrounding waters. Also, you are spooking the crews of merchant ships that pass overhead; for the vibrations of your lies pass through the hulls and into the dreams of sleeping sailors and when those sailors awake they believe things that can never be. For example: that the moon grew from a seed planted in a very big garden, or that ants are driven by clockwork.”
I continued playing notes on the xylophone and the gist of my words was that bones should rest in peace, or at least tell the truth if they really felt they had to speak, and that I, Pop Corker (that’s my full name), had no intention of letting the bones of my skeleton behave so despicably.
At last they answered me.
“We never lie,” they chorused.
“That is the biggest lie of all, you liars!” I tinkled.
They shrugged metaphorically.
Before I could say or do anything more my submarine was rocked by a sudden disruption in the water around me. Some object was approaching at an unadvisable velocity. The bones seemed to be full of trepidation and I craned my neck in the cockpit, struggling to see through the bubble what might be the cause of the shockwave. Then it appeared.
It was a diver in a bulky suit riding a sledge pulled by more than a dozen seadogs. He swooped low and skimmed the seabed and yanked the reins just in time, halting his crazy rush inches from the circle of bones. Then he dismounted and strode with slow motion strides into the centre of the circle of bones, where he kneeled and began playing with them.
I frowned. No, he wasn’t really playing. He was picking them up one at a time and repositioning them, making the circle slightly smaller, contracting it so that it covered a lesser area of the seabed.
The bones remained silent during this procedure.
Either he hadn’t noticed my submarine, or else he had deliberately chosen to ignore it, so I xylophoned a protest.
“What do you think you are doing? Unhand those bones!”
Without rising from his knees, or even glancing back over his shoulder, he laughed while continuing with his work.
The sensitive microphone on my hull picked up his subsequent words and relayed them to me. “No, I won’t stop. I am an artist and this is my art. You are obviously a barbarian if you want to prevent me from finishing this masterpiece. I dive down every day and make the circle of bones smaller by a tiny amount. It is my art and I am an artist. So there!”
I paled at once, for I recognised the voice.
“Grillchin!” I barely whispered.
“Yes,” he said, indicating with a nod of his head the seadogs, “and that is the Team.” He must have had his own microphone and amplifier to hear what I had said. But he wasn’t angry with me.
Then I realised the incongruity of the situation.
“It was you who asked me to investigate these bones in the first place and stop them from further lying!” I cried.
“Of course. Why shouldn’t I? I don’t want them telling fibs when they are fated to be merely the component parts of a superb artwork. I gave you the task of preventing them from lying, nothing else. Plus good art really needs someone to view it to make it complete. That’s the other reason I wanted you here. At the moment it’s only a work in progress though.”
“What exactly does it mean?” I wailed. “Because the continual shrinking of a circle of bones, or indeed a circle of any kind, seems a pointless exercise. I have nothing against conceptual art and yet—”
“A pointless exercise?” he roared. “On the contrary, Corker dear boy, you are utterly wrong. I am making a point.”
I tried to laugh but no sound emerged from my mouth, and I had forgotten the xylophone equivalent of a chuckle. A circle that steadily contracts will end as a point of no dimensions, of course.
“What would Jones say about this?” I finally managed.
“That’s none of your business. Just be grateful you have a chin made out of wood rather than iron bars like me.”
“My chin isn’t really made from wood,” I said.
“Isn’t it? That’s not what your miniature pig told me and, in fact, he’s here now, so take the matter up with him.”
And the diver finally rotated his head until I could discern his face in the circular window. Jammed against the glass was a tiny piglet with mischievous eyes who winked at me sardonically.
“But he lives in a jar on a shelf,” I protested.
“So you admit he isn’t a lie? He outgrew the jar and now lives here, in the helmet of my diving suit. As for the shelf, it was very shelfish to keep him there on his own, you rotter. Now he is happier.”
I couldn’t dispute this. Or rather I could but didn’t.
“Right, I’ve finished. I’ll be back here tomorrow at the same hour. In the meantime get them to stop lying, Corker!”
And he clambered up and once again in slow
motion he remounted his sled and jerked the reins and the seadogs pulled him away across the seabed and back to the surface of the ocean and thence to land. I hate the way Grillchin has no understanding of the difficulties his agents face in the line of duty. I hate the way he cooks falafels on his lower visage.
Now he was gone I felt vindictive and vengeful.
So I reached out with the mechanical arms and picked up those bones of Jones and tore apart the circle. I didn’t make a geometrical shape of my own but carefully fitted the bones together properly.
I thought that if I could reconstruct Jones I would be able to persuade him as a complete skeleton to stop lying. Whole skeletons are more reasonable than individual bones. That was my hypothesis.
Slowly but surely the bones slotted into their correct positions and I tied them in place with lengths of seaweed. The entire process took several hours but finally the skeleton had been reconstructed.
And then I gaped anew. For this man wasn’t Jones.
It wasn’t a man of any kind.
It was the skeleton of a female. And I knew who.
“Hayley Jude!” I shrieked.
“Hello Pop,” she retorted.
“But you don’t exist. I made you up.”
“Sure you did. And now you made me up for real.”
“What shall we do next?”
“Take me with you and I’ll be your wife.”
“That’s against regulations but I think I’ll do it anyway. Grillchin will be furious and murderous when he finds out. He’ll set the Team on us to tear me apart. I’ll have to change my identity.”
“Do it. Put on weight and get a job as a policeman and call yourself Cop Porker instead. He’ll never know it’s you.”
It was a good idea. I couldn’t open the cockpit to let her in because that would have flooded the interior of the submarine and I would have died, but I picked her up in the mechanical arms and we rose together out of the sea until we reached the air. Then I took her ashore.
My motorised bed was waiting for us. We climbed into it and snuggled up tight. I ordered it to convey us to the residence of Boppo Higgins, for I had been struck by an inspiration. Boppo is such a good inventor that he can invent a device that will extract my skeleton and replace it with Hayley Jude’s. Then I will return to the seabed and substitute my own bones for the missing ones. The entire task could be completed in one day.