by Martin Dukes
Alex gathered Will was referring to the frozen people, one of whom Will slapped casually on the back as he walked past.
“Most of us hardly notice them anymore. They’re just…you know…”
“Part of the furniture?” supplied Alex.
“Yeah. Something like that. You see there are actually three states of existence. So Ganymede says. There’s Reality. That’s what we both dropped out of accidentally, like; there’s Statica, that’s the frozen moment of Reality that’s all around us; and there’s 'Sticia, that’s us and everything else that doesn’t belong to Statica. Weird I know. It still freaks me out when I think too hard about it. You’ll get used to it, though.”
“I don’t want to get used to it,” said Alex, with feeling. “I just want to get out of it.”
“Don’t we all,” said Will, with a hollow laugh. “I shouldn’t hold your breath though. I’ve been here ages.”
”Define ages,” said Alex warily.
“I don’t know,” said Will, a little irritably, as though this were a foolish question. “Just ages and ages.”
As they approached the park there were fewer pedestrians around. A large lorry was negotiating the roundabout in front of the imposing formal entrance with its marble pillars and its ornate wrought iron gates. Some moron had spray painted his name across one of the piers in large ill formed letters. The park was a popular haunt of morons after dark. Idiots, cretins and other losers went there too. Will seemed to be anxious to get there quickly. He lengthened his stride as they approached the gates. Alex and Will passed through, hurrying down the parade, past the war memorial, past skateboarders, kids on bikes with stabilisers, mothers with buggies, the usual crowd on a Saturday afternoon, but immobile now, and utterly silent.
“Odd isn’t it?” said Will, noticing Alex’s bemused expression. He pulled Alex aside to avoid his imminent collision with a pink Frisbee, paused in mid-air, at head height, half way across the parade.
“Yes, I think you could say that…What’s that?” said Alex, stopping suddenly. There was music, the first sound he had heard here, other than Will’s voice. It might have been an accordion.”
Will had carried on. “That’ll be Ganymede,” he said over his shoulder. “Come on. You’d better introduce yourself.”
“Who’s this Ganymede, then?” asked Alex, hurrying to catch up.
“He’s the Main Man,” said Will. “The Obergruppenfuhrer. The Head Honcho. The Top Dog. Watch your step. He’s on a bit of a short fuse, and well…he can do magic. Sort of. I don’t really believe in magic myself, you understand. But I don’t know how else you can explain it. This guy argued with him once and Ganymede struck him dumb. Completely mute. Never spoke again. I didn’t see it myself but that’s what they say. So. Like I said…Watch your step.”
It was obvious enough that Will was genuinely scared of this Ganymede character, despite the light-hearted tone of his voice. Feeling a tiny thrill of apprehension, Alex moved up a little closer to his new friend. Will was pretty much all he had just now.
In the bandstand was an elderly vagrant of some kind, leaning against one of the pillars that supported the roof. He was playing the accordion that Alex had heard as they approached along the parade and looked up as they climbed the steps. The tramp was wearing fingerless gloves, a battered felt hat and at least three layers of coats. He had an enormously bushy beard and wild grey hair, so that he looked like a picture that Alex had once seen of Karl Marx, founder of communism. The tramp continued to play the accordion as they entered the bandstand, seemingly unaware of their presence.
“So where’s this Ganymede then?” asked Alex, out of the side of his mouth, looking curiously at the tramp.
“Er, this is Ganymede,” said Will, shuffling his feet awkwardly. There was a distinctly nervous edge to Will’s voice. He stepped forward, dipping his head ever so slightly as though not sure whether he should be making a bow. “Ganymede, I.. er.” He glanced apologetically at Alex. “I mean…..What did you say your name was?”
“Alex.”
“I found someone new,” he finished lamely.
The tramp played a last few wheezing notes on his accordion and turned his gaze upon Alex. He had eyes like laser beams. Alex could see why Will was nervous. It felt like Ganymede was looking right through his eyes and into his head. Nor was he much liking what he found there.
“So,” he said, stretching this word out more than was strictly necessary and injecting into it a disagreeably sarcastic tone. “A new recruit… Welcome to my little kingdom.” A nod of his shaggy head, a wave of his free hand encompassed the park and presumably all that lay beyond it. Alex judged from Ganymede’s tone that he wasn’t going to be rolling out the red carpet any time soon. It had a rough, gravelly edge to it that fairly set Alex’s teeth on edge. He didn’t say anything at all for a while after that, merely considering Alex through narrowed eyes as though he thought he might be a dangerous criminal. Alex and Will stood awkwardly. Will fidgeted with his papers.
“I’ve done my quadratic equations,” he said at last, when speech of some kind began to seem absolutely essential. He offered them up in Ganymede’s direction.
Ganymede didn’t so much as spare them a glance. Alex thought this rather rude, but kept his opinions to himself for now.
“Well,” he said, addressing Alex. “You’d better know the rules. This is my sector and everyone in it answers to me. You will be given food and drink sufficient to sustain you, and bedding materials. In return you will perform any work task I consider appropriate. Without question…… Is that understood?”
Well, it wasn’t. But Alex found himself nodding nevertheless. Ganymede approached Alex and loomed over him in a manner that he found most disconcerting.
“You will not interfere with the staticons in any way. Likewise you will not interfere with any aspect of Statica. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Alex, cautiously, as Ganymede continued to glare at him.
There was a long and rather awkward silence during which Alex had to work hard at not shuffling his feet and keeping his eyes cast down.
“Very well,” said Ganymede at last, nodding his head slowly. “You will come back and see me tomorrow. Then I shall assess you properly… Goodbye.”
There was such utter finality in the way Ganymede said this that Alex and Will immediately turned on their heels and withdrew, doing their best not to run.
“Hey!” roared Ganymede behind them. “William! Where do you think you’re going?”
Will looked like he’d been shot in the back. He rushed back with his papers, pressing them into Ganymede’s outstretched hand. Then they both ran.
They didn’t stop running until they reached the park gates. Will, like Alex, was not a natural athlete but had the added disadvantage of carrying with him a rather prominent paunch. He hunched panting, head bowed, hands braced against his knees.
“What’s his problem?” asked Alex, in outraged tones, when he could get his own breath.
“He’s always like that,” said Will between gasps. “Everyone’s scared to death of him. Well maybe Paulo isn’t. But Paulo’s a bit different.” He looked up. “Come on. I suppose you’d better stay with me tonight.”
A large number of questions continued to suggest themselves to Alex’s mind. One of them, -”What does Will mean by ‘tonight’ when time is meant to be frozen?” was soon answered in an emphatically visible way. It was going dark. Although the clouds remained stationary in the sky, the heavens behind them began to darken. A moon, not quite the same moon that Alex was used to, began to edge itself up above the clock tower of the boys’ school. It was a slender crescent moon, but the dips and hollows on its surface were subtly unfamiliar. Finding this somewhat unsettling, Alex did his best to ignore it as he followed Will back across Cardenbridge, to a small terraced house in Gladstone Street. Here, what Alex was already beginning to think of as a ‘stiff’, a young woman, was opening the door to what might have been a neigh
bour. There was room for Alex and Will to squeeze past and into the hall.
“I usually sleep in the back bedroom,” said Will as they mounted the stairs, past a child clutching an electronic toy. “Some of us sleep outside, but it’s too cold for me at night. Besides, there’s plenty of houses like this that are easy enough to get into.”
In the back bedroom there proved to be no bed, only a stack of boxes and an area of clear floor on which there was a large pile of blankets. It was dark in here, although the fake ‘Stician moon shed a pale rectangle of light on one wall. Will produced something that looked like a candle and snapped the end off it, whereupon it began to glow, bright enough to cast sharp shadows around the room.
“Lightstick,” explained Will. “We get eight a week. I guess they last a couple of hours or so. And as for blankets. Well, you can never have too many of them. And these are ‘Stician ones of course. Ganymede gets them for you. You can’t sleep on any of the beds ‘cause they’re all hard as rock. ‘Floor’s as good a place as any. You’d better share some of my stuff tonight. Ganymede’ll fix you up tomorrow, I guess.”
Alex looked around him with interest as Will set about pulling the blankets into two roughly equal piles. It was impossible to tell without touching them which objects in the room were ‘Stician and which Statical. Alex supposed the scatter of papers on the top of packing case must be ‘Stician, likewise the biro and the glasses case.
“Are you keen on maths then?” asked Alex, indicating the scrawled figures on the paper.
“Not likely,” said Will, with a hollow laugh. “That’s the whole point of it, see. Quadratic equations! I ask you. I didn’t even know where to begin. Dan Cutler up in Thurston had to show me how to do them. But that’s the point. Ganymede won’t give you anything to do you can easily do. He’s a sadistic sod. He’ll find out all about you tomorrow and then he’ll make you do something you hate. Look at poor old Mrs Patterson. She’s about a hundred and fifty years old and she has to shovel a big pile of sand from one end of her street to another. Next week she has to shovel it all back again. Best thing you can do is say you hate reading books or something. Maybe he’ll give you a nice pile of paperbacks to work through.”
Alex considered this, which on the face of it seemed just another example of the arbitrary power of the adult world to impose pointless labour on the child. The difference was that Ganymede could do it to other adults too.
“What if I just refuse to do it? The stuff he tries to make me do, I mean.”
“Then you’ll get rather hungry I’m afraid. Ganymede holds all the aces here. He doles out the rations too, you see. If you don’t come up to the mark you don’t get the grub. You’ll starve.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you could die here,” said Alex warily. “How would that work, then? This is crazy. All of it. I’m going to wake up and snap out of this…any minute.. now.”
He said this with a lack of conviction so obvious, even to him, that his last sentence trailed off into a vague mutter.
“Don’t go holding your breath on that one!” scoffed Will, a sadistic gleam in his eye. “Yeah, you can die alright. This old dude got fed up of the whole shebang and chucked himself off the top of the multi-storey. Nasty. He just lay there for ages and no one knew what was going to happen to him. Someone went and fetched Ganymede of course, and then….” Will shuddered. “All of us who were there got this terribly scary feeling, like we ought to make a run for it. I wasn’t there to see it myself, but they say…they say…” Will took of his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. He seemed unable to continue. Silence settled over the little room.
“What?” asked Alex cautiously, sensing sudden dread in Will. He felt a vaguely prickly feeling across his scalp at the same time.
“Nothing.”
Alex did not pursue the issue for now. Besides, as though to break the spell, Will reached behind a vacuum cleaner box and came out with a bundle of cloth. This, he carefully unwrapped. Inside were a few of what looked like bread rolls. He offered one to Alex.
“Here,” he said. “Manna. It’s good actually, but you do get awfully bored of it after a while.” He looked dreamily at the wall behind Alex’s head. “Do you know, I actually dream of chocolate. Crisps would be nice too, and maybe a big juicy burger with lots of ketchup. But you know what I miss most – Cake.” He gazed, misty eyed into the middle distance, pronouncing the word reverently, as though invoking some deity.
It was clear from looking at him that Will’s relationship with cake had indeed been a passionate and enduring one.
The roll tasted lovely, like cheese and garlic with herbs. Alex took big, jagged bites off it. The events of the last few hours had driven bodily needs out of his mind. Now though, his stomach reminded him how hungry he was. The roll was soon eaten. Alex was still hungry but there was only one roll left and he didn’t feel that he should ask for it.
“Why don’t you get some chocolate?” he asked. “There’s loads of it around in the shops.”
“Are you joking?” asked Will. “First of all everything Statical is solid as a stone and can’t be moved. Secondly, even if you could it’s like a capital offence to do so. Ganymede’d go ballistic. Didn’t you hear what he said?”
Alex remembered the items he had helped himself to from Boots; the sandwich, the chocolate, the apple. He was about to say that he had found that he could move Statical things and turn them into ‘Stician ones, when a little voice of caution inside him told him to keep his trap shut. Besides, at that moment there was another voice.
“Paulo can,” it said. “I’ve seen him do it.”
A girl came into the room. She was small, with long dark straight hair and large brown eyes. She might have been about Alex’s age. Alex’s relationships with the world of girls up to that point had been marked by mutual suspicion if not downright hostility. This didn’t mean, however, that he was incapable of noticing positive things about them. She was pretty, Alex thought. There was something elfin in the delicate line of her chin and nose.
“Oh, hi Kelly,” said Will with a sigh that a sensitive person might have thought wasn’t very welcoming. He nodded at Alex. “This is Alex. He’s new,” before continuing, “Anyway it was only a tiny little match Paulo picked up; hardly earth shattering.”
“More than you or me could do,” said Kelly, having first greeted Alex. She came into the room and made herself comfortable on Will’s pile of blankets, whilst their owner looked on in consternation. She looked him up and down with her dark eyes, a wry smile on her lips. “Come on Will, break out the rations, there’s a good chap. What kind of hospitality do you call this?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t got a lot left,” said Will, showing signs of anxiety.
“’Course you have,” said Kelly confidently. Before Will could object or in any way physically intervene, she reached behind a stack of picture frames and came out with another bundle. This she began to unwrap.
“You’ve got to watch Will,” she told Alex in a matter of fact voice, as though he wasn’t even there. “He’s basically okay, but he’s not what you might call a big sharer.”
She handed Alex another roll and took one herself. “Thanks Will,” she said. ‘Can I tempt you?”
“You’ve got a cheek,” grumbled Will, flushing about the cheeks somewhat, but taking one anyway. “These have got to last until next Gathering.”
“That’s only two days away,” said Kelly. “I don’t suppose you’re going to starve. I bet you were going to let Alex here have just the one and then sneak away and have a couple of private ones on your own.”
“I was not!” protested Will, but blushing furiously in a way that tended to confirm this notion. “Anyway, what’s it to you? I don’t remember inviting you up here. You’re always sticking your nose in things where it’s not wanted. Why don’t you p..”
“What’s the Gathering?” Alex asked hurriedly before things got nasty. He felt rather embarrassed for Will.
Kelly
made no sign of leaving. She sat with her back against the wall and took a good long swig from the side of Will’s water jug. She told Alex that the Gathering was a weekly meeting of the folks who lived in Intersticia. It took place in the park and everyone came from miles around. Ganymede gave them news, issued instructions, allocated new work tasks and gave out the manna that the ‘Sticians would have to make last for the next seven days. Those whose work or attitude pleased Ganymede were rewarded with more manna. Those who fell from favour received barely enough to survive.
“You’ll probably be introduced properly at the Gathering,” said Kelly, when Alex told her he’d already met Ganymede. “He’ll want to size you up tomorrow and find out as much as he can about you. Don’t tell him anything you don’t have to. He wants to find out how you tick, what your weaknesses are; that kind of thing. He doesn’t like surprises, Ganymede. He likes everything to run, just so.” She grinned at Alex, her long hair falling over her eyes. She flicked it away. “It’s a pity he doesn’t hand out new clothes. I’m sick of these ones. Look at this..” She indicated the front of her top. Alex looked at her chest as briefly as was consistent with actually having done so. “I guess I must have spilled ice cream on me just before I got dropped into ‘Sticia and now I’m stuck with it forever. You can’t even take them off.”
“Really? What about…?” began Alex, thinking of an obvious objection to this.
“You’ll never need to,” Kelly said, following his drift. “How long have you been here? Have you ever needed a wee?”
She was right. Nature had not called.
“I guess it’s in case you get pulled back into Reality,” said Will, moving things on. “You don’t want to turn up back there in a completely different set of clothes. Questions would be asked, wouldn’t they?”
“Weird,” said Alex. “No baths in ‘Sticia then.”