A Long Trip to Teatime

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘Hurry,’ said the dancing and very agitated Albert. And the television screen flashed:

  HURRY HURRY HURRY.

  ‘The speed of light,’ Edgar said, his heart thumping so hard he could hardly hear himself think, ‘is 300,000 kilometres a second for one observer, but it cannot be so for another observer moving away from the first observer. And yet we know that the speed of light is always the same. So we have to make changes for the observers themselves – ‘

  ‘I’ve broken down the door,’ cried the voice outside. ‘Now I’m going to get to work on this big piece of iron. I’ll chew through that with my teeth, I think.’

  ‘Hurry hurry hurry,’ squeaked Albert.

  HURRY HURRY HURRY, flashed the television screen.

  ‘This means,’ gasped Edgar, ‘that if somebody’s running on top of a train that’s moving at the speed of light, he thinks he’s moving only at the speed he’s running. But to somebody standing watching the train, he’s running at c plus a thousand metres a second. It’s a question of one thing being relative to one person, or observer, and another thing being relative to another. That’s why it’s called Relativity.’

  ‘Owwwww,’ roared the great voice. ‘That hurt my front top teeth a bit, that did. Very tough metal, it is. But I shan’t be long, my boy, I shan’t be long at all. Owwwwww, terrible toothache.’ The roar seemed to shake the whole house. The thunder, as in sympathy, roared too.

  ‘Hurry hurry hurry,’ roared I mean squeaked Albert.

  HURRY HURRY HURRY HURRY HURRY.

  ‘So,’ gasped Edgar, ‘the only way for the man watching the man running on top of the train to see that man running at the speed of light and no more, because there is no more, is to make the seconds longer – the seconds in the moving system, that is, the train, that is. Something like that.’

  ‘What you mean,’ squeaked Albert, ‘is that space gets shorter in a moving system and time gets longer.’

  ‘What I mean is,’ said Edgar, and then, to his immense relief, he saw the trap-door moving. The heavy door began to rise, and there was the sound of sweet music, as if to welcome him to freedom.

  ‘Good luck,’ squeaked Albert. ‘Ah, I can see his fingers. I’d better get back to my hole.’ And he ran, while Edgar cried his grateful thanks. Edgar himself now ran and prepared to enter the opening revealed by the risen trap-door. He looked back to see a hand pushing in from the broken entrance and twisted metal of the wall-door. The hand was feeling about, a very hairy hand with broken finger-nails. The hand was beginning to fill the whole room.

  ‘I’ll get you now. I’m feeling around for you. Ah, what a lovely time you and I are going to have together, Edgar.’

  Edgar could see only darkness ahead of him. He entered it, his feet groping for stairs. But there were no stairs – only a long smooth chute. He shot down, sliding through the darkness.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Straight

  Through a Hole

  in the Desk

  DARK DARK dark dark dark, and a great wind roaring, but the thunder and rain were at the back of him and growing fainter. And then a hint of light, a glimmer of light, a glow of light, and there he was blinking in the light of day, though when he had started to slide down the chute it was already evening. He looked around him and saw thousands of people milling around, happy and excited, though some of the children were crying with over-excitement, and they were all dressed in a very old style – the women with huge bustling skirts and the men in grey top hats, carrying canes. He looked behind him to see the hole through which he had appeared slowly closing up and becoming part of the surface of a smooth wall. He looked up and saw a great roof of glass with the sun shining through. And then a tall man spoke to him. He said:

  ‘What strange clothes you’re wearing, boy. Are you part of the Exhibition?’

  ‘What exhibition, sir?’ asked Edgar, ready, now that he was safe, to be very polite and kind and smiling to everyone.

  ‘Why, the Great Exhibition, of course,’ laughed the man. ‘Do you hear that, Martha?’ he said to his plump little wife. ‘Do you hear that, Laetitia, Eugenia, Mary, Phoebe, Vicky, Ermintrude, Gertrude, Annie, Chloe, Alberta?’ he said to his many daughters. ‘This young fellow said What exhibition?’ They all laughed, though quite pleasantly. ‘Why, this is the Greatest Exhibition the world has ever seen,’ said the man. ‘There’s everything here. You need a railway train to take you round it.’

  A railway train at once came chuffing up, and the driver and the stoker were none other than Bob Eccles and Boniface, the two sailors who had rowed Edgar from the ship to the island. ‘Get in the cab with us, young un,’ said Boniface. ‘And sing us a song to keep us in trim for the engine-driving.’

  ‘Where is er the er young er lady?’ Edgar asked. ‘Rhoda something.’

  ‘Rhoda Fleming?’ cried Boniface. ‘Why, she’s still there criticising. Doesn’t like being in the dark at all, so I opened up my shirt a bit as you can see for her to peep out. Come on, then, climb aboard young un.’

  Edgar was only too happy to be there in the cab, burning hot as it was and full of steam and oily metal. Off they went, chuffing away, and Edgar sang:

  ‘With the coke and the smoke and the choke of oil

  And the wheels go round like a dream,

  For despite the task and its terrible toil

  And the heat so hot that you nearly boil

  And the piston’s thrust and its tough recoil,

  There is nothing nicer than steam.’

  And Bob Eccles and Boniface came in with the chorus:

  ‘And you tap the wheels to see if they’re cracked

  When the wheels are not going round,

  But some come out with a contrary fact -

  It’s to see if the wheels are sound.’

  A railway train at once came chuffing up, and the driver and the stoker were none other than Bob Eccles and Boniface, the two sailors who had rowed Edgar from the ship to the island. ‘Get in the cab with us, young un,’ said Boniface. ‘And sing us a song to keep us in trim for the engine-driving.’

  The tiny voice of Rhoda Fleming came squealing from inside her owner’s shirt: ‘Far too much sound. I can’t hear myself squeal.’

  They all ignored her, especially as they had just arrived at the platform of a small railway station, where Mr Eckermann and Mr Eckhart and the little man who helped them in the office on the pier were dancing up and down, a parrot squawking and fluttering over their heads. ‘You can’t get off here!’ they shouted. ‘There’s no ticket collector.’ And a tiny voice cried:

  ‘Hector pecked her.’

  ‘We’ll see your passports, though,’ said the little man, ‘seeing as you’ve got here.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ growled Boniface. ‘Not if you’re not letting us ashore. You can’t have it both ways.’

  And then a horse thundered on to the platform from an opening marked WAY OUT. There was a lady on it cracking a whip. She called in a deep voice: ‘Come on, you. Fildi, hitherao, or I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life, you lump of lazarooshian leather, you.’ And then the little Indian appeared, saying:

  ‘My goodness, I am trying to get chocolate out of the chocolate machine, missi sahib.’

  ‘Never mind about that now. We’ve got to get on board this train here. I don’t see any van for the horse,’ she frowned.

  ‘No getting aboard,’ said Mr Eckermann or Mr Eckhart. ‘There’s no ticket-collector and there’s no ticket-seller neither.’ And both Mr Ecks waved the train away.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Bob Eccles. ‘On us way.’ And off they went. There was now a lot of dancing with rage on the platform, and the voice of the Indian could be heard very distinctly:

  ‘Oh goodness gracious, I have to be being in Bombay, yes, and no more trains till further notice.’ The lady began to whip him, but he always got out of the way of the stroke.

  ‘I’m terribly thirsty,’ said Edgar, and he was too, what with the heat and the coal-dust.
Boniface said:

  ‘Well, if you care to climb back over that coal-tender there, you can get on the train through the roof, and you’ll find what they call a refreshment-car somewhere or other.’

  Edgar found the baker-woman and Mr Quimby sitting among the chunks of coal. Mr Quimby was eating bits of coal with great relish and covering his face with coal-dust. ‘Delicious,’ he said. ‘And very well cooked, if I may say so, ma’am.’

  ‘It’s only coal,’ said the baker-lady, ‘and I think you’re ridiculous.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s all in the mind,’ Mr Quimby said. ‘In my mind this is delicious turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Yum yum,’ he went, crunching at a shining black lump with apparent enjoyment. Neither of them took any notice of Edgar. Edgar crawled over the coal and, on the leading carriage, saw there was a kind of trap-door with a gentleman dressed like Shakespeare leaning out. On his shoulder there was a mouse dressed in old-fashioned lady’s clothes. Edgar remembered both of them well. Mr Eden said:

  ‘It’s not possible that we’re going where they say we’re going, for it’s not on the map yet. Therefore there’s no such place.’

  ‘Sure, sorr,’ said the mouse called Maria, ‘and isn’t it yourself that’s after taking the words out of my mouth itself?’

  ‘Hallo,’ said Edgar. ‘How are you both? I’ve met a mouse called Albert – awfully clever. Any relation of yours?’

  ‘Ah, well now, sorr, with a name like Albert he was bound to go far in his fizzology and his didicology and all the rest of the rigmarole.’

  ‘No such place,’ Mr Eden kept grumbling. Edgar was kindly allowed to enter the train by the roof (the train was certainly not travelling at the speed of light – WHICH IS WHAT, BY THE WAY? DO YOU REMEMBER? YOU DON’T? JUST YOU WAIT TILL YOU’VE FINISHED READING THIS STORY – I’LL BE THERE WAITING FOR YOU – nothing like it).

  Edgar found himself inside a compartment full of thin gloomy men with little gold crowns on. They were all bearded and had plenty of hair, as well as little gold crowns on their heads. Their bodies were mostly covered in chain-mail. One of them said:

  ‘You’ve entered feet first, I see. It would have been more entertaining for you to come in head first.’ Another one came out with a kind of growling piece of verse:

  ‘Cometh in head first, falleth on feet,

  Feet first he falleth, forelock in air,

  Maketh no difference the way he doth cometh.’

  ‘But that’s terrible,’ said another man, ‘My dear Eadward the Elder, you have a lot to learn about your own dear Anglo-Saxon language.’ Edgar was suddenly filled with awe. He said:

  ‘Are you – sirs – your majesties – the Anglo-Saxon kings of England?’

  ‘We most certainly are,’ said Eadward the Elder. ‘There’s Eadmund Ironside, and there’s Eadred, and there’s Eadward the Confessor, and there’s – oh, I can’t be bothered with all the names.’

  ‘I was learning all about you at school,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Really?’ said Edward the Confessor, looking really pleased. ‘So they teach all about us at school, do they? Well, that’s what I’d call fame. When we were at school there was absolutely nothing taught about us. That is what they call progress, I suppose.’

  ‘Boy,’ growled Eadward the Elder, ‘you can bring in foaming ale in alecups for us, or else mead in a mazer, and look sharp about it.’

  ‘I,’ said Edgar proudly, ‘am not a servant, your majesty. I’m a free boy.’

  ‘You are, are you?’ said Eadward the Elder, much politer now and sounding rather interested. ‘A new idea, that – free boys. Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.’

  ‘We seem to be there,’ said Eadmund Ironside, who had big bent sheets of rusty iron on his sides. ‘This is supposed to be the best part of the Great Exhibition.’

  ‘What is it?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Beasts. Monsters. Giants. That sort of thing.’ The kings spoke in turn, getting up yawning as the train puffed into the station. They took it in turn to settle their crowns on their heads and to comb their beards with their fingers, using the one little mirror set below the luggage-rack on the side of the compartment nearest the engine.

  Edgar did not like the sound of all this at all. He had just escaped from a giant, and he did not want to meet any more monsters, even ones as nice as the Blatant Beast and his mother. ‘All I want,’ he said, as he was jostled out on to the platform, ‘is to get back into the classroom.’ Nobody seemed interested. ‘To learn all about the Anglo-Saxon kings,’ he added. Then they all smiled and puffed themselves up, and one or two said: ‘Good good good.’ But they did not seem interested in suggesting ways of getting back to the classroom. King Eadmund (940-946) said:

  ‘Work hard at this king business and, who knows? – perhaps you’ll have lessons given about you. Better to be taught about than to be taught. I say – that’s rather good.’ He tried to repeat the phrase to his namesake Ironside, but that rusty-flanked man was not inclined to listen. There was a lot of jostling.

  Edgar saw, with sympathy, how the Edenborough Revue was trying to draw the crowd away from the theatre to watch its own little show, which it was trying to present on top of a pile of chicken-crates and mailbags.

  The platform was crowded, and everybody seemed to be trying to get into a large theatre whose entrance was in the station itself. Edgar saw, with sympathy, how the Edenborough Revue was trying to draw the crowd away from the theatre to watch its own little show, which it was trying to present on top of a pile of chicken-crates and mailbags. He heard Tommy Carlyle lamenting:

  ‘Och aye, lads, it’s the way o’ the worrrld. They dinna ken the guid when they see it.’ Then he was knocked off his chicken-crate by a couple of bullies, jostling towards the theatre entrance. Edgar didn’t want particularly to go into the theatre, for he did not consider that that was the way home (meaning to the classroom, with home afterwards), but he was so pushed and pulled by the crowd, which was mostly dressed in the style of the days of Good Queen Victoria (may heaven send her peace, but she couldn’t compare with our own Queen Edith Swan Neck), that he was forced into the huge hall – which must have had room for about ten thousand people – and kept on being forced forward towards the front. (The best seats were in the middle and back, but these were mostly already taken.) And then who should come bustling towards him, hitting other members of the crowd out of the way (they didn’t like this: one old crocodile in a bonnet, little crocodiles holding on to her skirts, cried: ‘This is no way to treat a lady, young man’) but the dog who had called himself King Edwin of Northumberland. Edwin at once told the crocodile: ‘We’d know how to deal with the likes of you where I come from, which is Northumberland, and I’ll trouble you to call me Your Majesty, old crocodile as you are.’ Then he said to Edgar: ‘Come. We’ve got the best place in the whole house all lined up for you, my boy.’

  He grabbed Edgar with a very horny paw and led him through a door which said EXIT and kept on saying it (‘Exit exit exit exit’) and down a long corridor and through another door which said nothing, then up some stairs, then to a place with huge red velvet curtains at one end, and all the time Edgar was breathlessly trying to say: ‘Why where what who.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Edwin, ‘you’ll be giving pleasure and profit to thousands. The stage – the theatre – the glamour of the greasepaint and the terror of the footlights – if only I’d not been king I’d have been ready for those myself, you know. Sometimes, in my gorgeous palace, waited on forepaw and hindpaw by bowing servants, I dream of the life I missed. The stage.’

  ‘You sell cold drinks for a living,’ said Edgar.

  ‘Do I? Do I?’ growled Edwin. ‘Ah, they’re here for you now.’ And there appeared two people Edgar had not wished to see again, even though they had done him no real harm – Mrs Echidna and her son the Blatant Beast. BB said (and he was wearing a very smart suit of silk that glistened and sparkled and waved like moonlit water):

  ‘I don’t t
hink there’s any need to tell you how really deeply both mother and I regret all this. But he would insist, you see. Thwarted was the word he used, wasn’t it, mother?’

  ‘Thwarted,’ agreed Mrs Echidna very sadly. ‘He would never allow himself to be thwarted. It’s all most regrettable, but we have to think of the tourist trade. He’d tear the Castle down, of that I’m quite sure, and as for what would follow – ‘ She shook her head and wobbled on her snake-tail as though likely to faint with the horror of what might happen after the tearing down of the Castle. ‘But he’s agreed to give you a run for your money, if that’s the right expression.’

  ‘Really,’ said Edwin, ‘for the money of those who’ve paid to come in and watch.’

  ‘Treachery,’ cried Edgar. ‘Ghastly horrible treachery. I’m getting out of here.’

  ‘Ah, no, you’re not,’ said BB’s two faces with genuine regret. And he gestured to behind Edgar. Edgar turned to see a whole army waiting, led by a French king who cried ‘Pour l’honneur de la France.’

  ‘There are plenty of kings around,’ said Edgar. ‘I’ll say that.’

  And then there was loud music from a brass band, a fanfare which Edgar already knew, for it consisted of the first four letters of his name.

  ‘Allez,’ called the French king, ‘a la gloire.’

  ‘That,’ said the dog-king Edwin, ‘means go to glory. We used to have a lot of French spoken in Northumberland. Well, then, now, you sir, you’re to go on stage.’ The two dwarf servants, Bolingbroke and Etheredge, cackled, and then they pulled the curtain apart, and then Edgar tottered on to the stage.

  There was loud clapping as he appeared. He blinked out into the darkness, wondering whether he ought to bow. But he was too upset, though not now very much frightened (let’s get it over with, he kept telling himself), to put on a good stage performance. And he was also amazed to see what the stage scenery consisted of. It seemed to him at first vaguely familiar, then it seemed more familiar, then at last it was wholly familiar. It was the inside of his school desk.