The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  His first attempt to create the necessary shift of weight had failed. It was the Samosa who had raised the single objection to holding the meeting of rulers on Dworkin Island at the midpoint of Happenstance. He had proposed holding it in Lackadaysia, the most northerly state, but his suggestion was rejected because of inadequate facilities there. Now he needed somewhere else to hold another heavy meeting and a reason to hold it. The first part of his desire was granted without much trouble. One of his overland spies reported that an abandoned conference chamber of the highest standard had been discovered on a beach in Afterthoughtia, the most southerly Happenstance state.

  “It once belonged to the Duchess of Cumberland,” reported the spy, “but she has gone on a long Crusoe Weekend with Jones and won’t be needing it.”

  “Very good,” said the Samosa of Flipside, “but we still need a good excuse to hold a conference there. Any suggestions?”

  The spy pondered deeply. “We could arrange a gathering to express our gratitude that the reader hasn’t entered this story as a character and that events before this paragraph have been mercifully free of postmodern trickery.”

  The Samosa of Flipside made a sweet and sour face. “Let’s keep it more simple than that. Why don’t we call an emergency meeting to debate the shockingly low cost of hats, shoes and restaurant meals and how milliners, cobblers and waiters are going out of business?”

  “That’s probably more sensible,” concurred the spy.

  “So that’s what we’ll do,” confirmed the Samosa.

  “There’s a hole here,” said the spy. “In the page. I can peep through it.”

  “I can’t see it,” replied the Samosa.

  “It’s well hidden. But I’m a spy and know what to look for.”

  “What can you see? Can you see the Peep of Bo? Is he peeping back at you? Do you think he has lipread any of our conversation?”

  “There’s nothing there. I can’t see anything at all.”

  “That’s lucky. I feel sure the Peep of Bo would do something like that if he got the chance. Maybe he doesn’t go out much anymore. The roads are so cluttered with sombreros and trilbies and fedoras and winklepickers and pumps and leftovers that even traction engines can’t proceed smoothly from place to place. A drunken horse is the only way to travel now!”

  “True enough. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “Go ahead. I’m an easy dictator.”

  “How heavily spiced are you inside your head?”

  “Just moderately, I think.”

  “Shall we go on a Crusoe Weekend together when all this is over?”

  “If you like.”

  Venus and Stupid

  The Goddess of Love was born from a shell. That’s why there’s something fishy about romance, at least according to Mr Wilfred Nobbs, who thought he was a beautiful woman but wasn’t. His attitude in this regard is the exact opposite to that of Alice Sweetdimple, the novelist who makes her living from romantic scenarios and never suspects that any water creature might have a hand, or fin, in such matters. Her most recent book, Celery Love Island, is doing well in bookshops associated with vegetarian cafes. But Mr Wilfred Nobbs never read material of that nature because he was too busy doing his hair and nails all nice.

  His general stupidity can’t be easily excused but there was a singular reason for his gender confusion. He once took a vacation to the Grape Lands and on his last day he entered a craftshop to buy a souvenir. Behind the teatowels bearing images of the Gumplung Clan and the bottled storms supposedly imported from Monsoonarco, he discovered a wall of shell encrusted mirrors. For a long time he gazed at the price tags on each while one of his hands counted the loose change in his pocket. The currency of the Grape Lands is useless in Bristol, where he came from, and he knew he had nothing to lose by spending every last coin.

  The owner of the shop seemed to appear from nowhere. “May I help you?”

  “That is not beyond the bounds of feasibility,” replied Mr Wilfred Nobbs, “for I am planning to purchase one of these shell encrusted mirrors.”

  “Behold, if you will, the finest example on my premises!”

  Mr Wilfred Nobbs blinked at the object in question. “I can see a shell but I can’t see the mirror part. It doesn’t look anything like a shell encrusted mirror to me. It just looks like a very big shell hanging on a nail.”

  “I assure you it is a mirror. The silvering is tastefully concealed!”

  Mr Wilfred Nobbs was utterly fooled by the confidence in the voice and manner of the owner of the shop and he departed with an empty pocket and the giant shell wrapped in paper under his arm. He returned to Bristol the following day, unwrapped the parcel and hung his souvenir in his bedroom. Every morning when he awoke and swung himself out of bed he yawned at the shell and sure enough he was confronted by an image. But he was too obtuse to understand that this image wasn’t his own reflection. It was the face of a beautiful woman with flowing hair and green eyes and sensuous lips and he assumed it was a true likeness.

  “I’m female!” he cried in astonishment. “And I’m extremely lovely!”

  The explanation for this reflective discrepancy is simple enough. The Goddess of Love, Venus herself, had grown so depressed at all the ugliness and hatred in the world that she had decided to take refuge in the shell that was her birthplace. She hoped to find some peace in her old home. By an astounding coincidence this was the same shell Mr Wilfred Nobbs had bought in that craftshop. Each time he approached the mirror to examine his reflection she thought someone was coming to pay her a social call and so she poked her head out to see who it was. It was always Mr Wilfred Nobbs, of course, which was somewhat disappointing.

  But after the initial shock was over for him he began to live as if he truly was a beautiful woman. He remembered the old saying that mirrors never lie. He did all the things that women do, unless they were physically impossible, and he cut down heavily on his male posturings. Unfortunately his knowledge of female behaviour was still coloured by his masculine inclinations, but he did his best. Once or twice he acted like an authentic girl, wrapping his head in a towel and being moody without justification. More commonly his efforts were only half successful and few real women were tempted to greet him like a sister.

  This unhappy state of affairs persisted for several months. One day he happened to walk past a bookshop and glance through the window. The shop was full of women. The new novel by Alice Sweetdimple, The Long Crusoe Weekend, had just been published and her readers had rushed out to buy a copy. Mr Wilfred Nobbs didn’t much care for books but he longed to be accepted by other ladies and so he entered the shop and tried to mingle. His efforts in this regard were extremely clumsy. At last pity was taken upon him and he was mildly befriended by a figure almost as beautiful as his false reflection.

  “A man at the launch of a slushy novel is a sinister concept,” gently explained this figure, “and he is always shunned by everyone.”

  “I agree,” said Mr Wilfred Nobbs, “and thus I’m grateful I’m not a man.”

  “But you are!” countered the figure.

  “No, I’m a woman. At least as much as you are. My mirror told me so!”

  The figure smiled. “I might have a very feminine shape and vocal range but I’m not exactly a human woman. I’m the Self Raising Flower, the last surviving ruler of the Happenstance lands. Why do you look so flabbergasted? Don’t you know what happened there? All the continents suddenly flipped over, nobody knows why, and everybody on them was squashed. Fortunately I was on vacation in Bristol at the time and so I survived. Without a home to return to, I distract my mind from gloomy thoughts by reading romantic books.”

  “Were the Grape Lands destroyed in the disaster?” Mr Wilfred Nobbs cried.

  “Not entirely,” replied the Self Raising Flower, “for they exist in the border region between planet Earth and Happenstance. They were flattened slightly rather than fully and all the juice from all the grapes ran into craters and under
ground caverns. In time this liquid will ferment nicely and I’m sure tourists will flock back there in large numbers.”

  “I hate it when people go abroad to get drunk,” Mr Wilfred Nobbs commented. “It offends my sensibilities and I have lots of those now because I’m a woman.”

  “No you’re not. Your mirror must be faulty and you should replace it with a new one. You most definitely are a man. Mirrors aren’t the only means of knowing what you look like. Written descriptions are another method. There’s no reason why you can’t have a short paragraph giving a few details of your appearance in the style of a romantic novelist.”

  Mr Wilfred Nobbs squinted. “Is Alice Sweetdimple here in person?”

  The Self Raising Flower shook her head. “She never attends the launch of her books or any other public event. She’s too shy. But I have the necessary ability to attempt a suitable pastiche. I’ll write it on the back of this envelope for you.”

  She did so and when she was finished she passed it to Mr Wilfred Nobbs who read it with trembling lips. It said: “He was a burly man with a large stomach but the most unpleasant aspect of his person was his face. Lopsided and puffy it was carpeted with stunted bristles and his thick lips were kissable to no degree at all.”

  “That’s my good deed for the day,” said the Self Raising Flower.

  “I suppose it is,” stammered Mr Wilfred Nobbs.

  “The truth is often harsh,” sighed the Self Raising Flower.

  “I want to shed tears but I can’t if I’m a man, so I’m going home instead,” he said. And he left the shop and returned to his house and took down his mirror and placed it in an old box and slid the box under his bed. Then he lay awake on top of the bed and gradually worked out the whole truth about Venus and he decided to follow her example and use his birthplace as a sanctuary from the cruelties of the world. The following morning he rose early and ordered a taxi and waited for it impatiently on his doorstep. When it arrived he jumped in the back, leaned forward and bellowed into the driver’s ear:

  “Take me to my birthplace!”

  The driver was one of those select few who have the ‘knowledge’, meaning that he had carefully trained himself in the precise location of every possible destination. As he sped off, he began a conversation of many parts. Mr Wilfred Nobbs covered his ears with his hands but that didn’t stop the driver talking at length about the weather, football, politics and economics. Finally he stopped the taxi and said, “Fifty pounds please.”

  “Are we here already?” Mr Wilfred Nobbs gasped.

  He paid the driver and stepped out of the taxi. He had expected to be conveyed to his mother’s womb and his mother had retired to a village in Spain, a much longer journey than this. He was standing in an enormous room full of gigantic furniture. The driver wound down his window and pointed at a large book resting on the floor under a monumental desk. Mr Wilfred Nobbs just shrugged his shoulders and the driver cried:

  “That’s your real birthplace. There are no wombs around here.”

  “But it’s a dictionary!” protested Mr Wilfred Nobbs.

  “Certainly. You aren’t a real person, you’re just a character in a story. You are made entirely of words, the words in that book. The dictionary is where all possible characters wait as unlinked words until they are born into a fiction.”

  “Ah well!” said Mr Wilfred Nobbs as the taxi drove away. With difficulty he climbed into the dictionary.

  Matters might have come to a strange but acceptable conclusion at this point, if only the taxi driver hadn’t made a small error. He had assumed that all dictionaries are the same and so hadn’t bothered to drive his passenger to the house of the author who created him. To save petrol he simply dropped Mr Wilfred Nobbs off in the study of the nearest successful novelist. It never occurred to him to ask what might happen after his passenger climbed back inside the dictionary. But this was the house of Alice Sweetdimple who was about to commence writing her new novel, Happenstance Holiday Romance.

  Mr Wilfred Nobbs dissipated himself among the pages of the reference book, shedding his component words at the appropriate places. But no sooner was he fully randomised than Alice Sweetdimple started looking up parts of him in order to complete her first chapter. All his carefully scattered words were snatched out and set down in a new context. But an essential masculinity lingered around these strings of letters, for his parts had not had sufficient time to become neutral. Alice Sweetdimple was dismayed by the results. Her constant use of male language eventually led her to accept a shocking fact about herself.

  She wasn’t a woman after all! She must be a man!

  Von Ryan’s Daughter’s Express

  Flann von Ryan was a railway engineer who studied under the great Kingdom Noisette until he knew how to build a steam locomotive out of whatever materials might be at hand. Accordingly he once constructed a replica of the Flying Scotsman from a set of bagpipes, a green haggis and a basket of kilts. It worked not very well. Suspecting that his tutor was keeping secrets from him, he expressed a desire to be instructed by the old masters, Cugnot, Trevithick and Stephenson. With only a slight sneer, Noisette fashioned mechanical versions of those dead figures to give the required lessons and the pupil finally had to concede that his education left nothing to be desired.

  In the years that followed, Von Ryan married and his wife gave birth to a daughter. Chuffia her name was and her aptitude in technical matters was already astounding before she could walk properly. She converted her own pram into a tram. The overhead cables were a hazard in the house and her parents soon severed them with clippers but they recognised her talent and sought to encourage her. Von Ryan imparted all his engineering skills to her and by the time she was eighteen she surpassed him in theoretical and practical knowledge. It was at this time that she announced her intention to take a holiday in the company of her boyfriend, a steam enthusiast named Bram the Stoker.

  Chuffia and Bram debated the merits of various destinations including Italy, Darlington, Middle Bo and Zipangu before settling on Ireland, original homeland of her father. Bram’s father also hailed from that place. The young couple boarded the ferry at Swansea and sailed to Cork and after a minor scuffle at the train station with very tiny men they caught a train to the far west. When they arrived in Tralee they were tired but also excited. They took a room in a small hotel and then they went out for a meal and a drink in an appropriate pub. The barman asked them where they had just come from and when they answered Cork he narrowed his eyes and asked:

  “Did you have any trouble with very tiny men?”

  “Indeed we did,” replied Chuffia as she sipped her creamy pint.

  The barman leaned on his pump handles. “Mostly leprechauns, those very tiny men, with maybe a few goblins and gnomes thrown in. They are agitating for their own transport system. The government isn’t very sympathetic and I predict a major confrontation soon enough. It’s a sorry state of affairs. Why won’t the government simply give them a rail network, you might ask? After all the leprechauns have done for Ireland, they certainly deserve it. I’ll tell you the answer: it would have to be a narrow gauge railway, with major emphasis on the narrow, and the politicians don’t want to be associated with anything narrow, it’s bad for the reputation of the country.”

  “That’s very short sighted of them,” said Chuffia.

  The barman shrugged. “Sure it is. But Ireland isn’t really noted for its trains. There used to be a line that ran from here across the Dingle Peninsula to the sea, but that was torn up years ago. The farmers didn’t want it crossing their fields. Only one locomotive ever ran on it and I heard people say it was inappropriate for its function.”

  “Can you describe it?” pressed Chuffia.

  The barman frowned. “Not really. Let me see… If I remember correctly, and there’s a good chance I don’t, it had a driving wheel diameter of 914 mm, a pair of 343x457 mm cylinders and an overall weight of about 39.6 metric tonnes. Does that help?”

  “Sounds li
ke a TDR Class PN2,” commented Bram the Stoker.

  “That sounds familiar,” agreed the barman, “but it was dismantled long before I was born. All my memories of that particular engine are prenatal.”

  “Drink up,” said Chuffia to her boyfriend.

  He did so and they both left the pub and returned to the hotel. They rested and planned what to do on the following day. Chuffia suggested walking the whole of the Dingle Way, the 180 kilometre footpath that begins in Tralee, heads west over the Slieve Mish Mountains and then loops around the entire peninsula, a seven or eight day trek. Bram promised to keep pace with her. They both agreed it would be a pleasant change to cover such a large distance with their own legs instead of utilising some steam powered apparatus. They slept soundly that night and set off at dawn into the clammy mist and bovine vapours.

  “This drizzle is very fine,” observed Chuffia.

  Bram misunderstood her. “I wonder if it has won any competitions?”

  “And this dew is very slimy.”

  “Perfect for greasing the palms of the judges!”

  Chuffia shook her head. They trudged in squelchy appreciation of the scenery. Spiderwebs and brambles tried but failed to block their progress. But soon they wandered off the official path. The problem was that some of the markers planted at regular intervals to indicate the route were missing and many gates they had to pass through were locked. They found themselves walking along the main road and searching for means to rejoin the path. This situation was less than ideal and the lorries that rumbled around each blind bend made the venture genuinely dangerous. The rain increased in force and the wind grew stronger and the landscape gloomier.