by Martin Dukes
“Not with your clothes off at any rate,” chuckled Kelly. “It doesn’t matter though. You don’t sweat and you don’t stink. You don’t even get dirty.”
“Jesus. You mean I’ve got to wear these clothes forever then?” Alex glanced down at his clothes, as if seeing them for the first time.
“You should worry,” said Kelly, with a wry smile. “If I’d known I was here for keeps I’d never have worn these shoes. Still, poor old Roger Bradley is stuck in one of those funny green hospital gowns. You mustn’t ever stand behind him, unless you want to like, really freak him out. You can see his bum.” She giggled, covering her mouth. “Really hairy too.”
“He reckons he must be in a coma or something in hospital,” added Will, happy to join in with the mirth. “Like he’s off to have an operation or something.”
“What are the chances of getting sucked back in though?” asked Alex. “To Reality, I mean. I had the idea I was kind of stuck here.”
“You absolutely are,” said Kelly, “But sometimes people disappear. I guess they get sucked back into Reality eventually. Most of us here are daydreamers. We just kind of wandered into 'Sticia accidentally. But not all of us. I know for a fact Roger’s in a coma in hospital. That’s why he’s all got up for an operation. And …well,” she was suddenly serious, glancing from face to face. “Some of us are…dead.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Will, turning away, an expression of genuine anxiety on his face. “Don’t even talk about it.”
There was an awkward silence. At last Will scrunched a sheet of paper into a ball and threw it at a picture of a stag on top of a hill.
“What?...Like ghosts?” asked Alex at last, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Why don’t you just leave it alone?” Will said with a shudder. “It gives me the creeps.”
“We don’t know if we are or not,” Kelly continued. “Dead, I mean. Can you remember how you got here? What you were doing the instant you fell into ‘Sticia.?”
“Of course he can’t!” supplied Will, before Alex could open his mouth. “None of us can. I guess I was daydreaming, that’s all. I can’t remember though.”
This was Alex’s opportunity to say that it had been different for him, that he could remember every detail of the circumstances. He said nothing though.
“I woke up on the bowling green, down in the park,” said Kelly. “With absolutely no idea how I got there.”
“What about you?”
Alex gave her an edited version of his experiences. She nodded, picking at a loose thread in one of her shoes.
“But how do you know there are dead people?” asked Alex.
“Everyone knows,” she said, with a tilt of her chin. “Everyone. But I think it’s only a few of us. It’s like as if this instant,” she gestured around her at the frozen Statical world, “…was their last one. Here they keep on going for a while. In Reality they’re history. Ambulance turns up. Curtains. The End. Goodbye.”
“Yes, and goodbye, Kelly,” said Will emphatically. “I think you’ve officially worn out your welcome.” He gestured at the door. “I’m sure you’ve got other stuff to do.”
“Yeah, well. I guess I’ll see you around,” she said to Alex with a grin, getting to her feet.
Alex had found out a lot more about Intersticia by the time he went to bed. If you could call bed a pile of blankets in the corner of a room. It was hard to sleep. Will was curled up in the room next door. Alex had found that he was indeed unable to undress. It was quite impossible to undo his jeans or pull his top over his head. Fortunately, despite having taken on board a considerable amount of food and drink, he felt no need to go to the toilet, just as Will had said. He had never felt more alone in the whole of his life but strangely, although fear and self-pity competed for dominance within him, he proved incapable of tears. It was as though he had exhausted his supply of these earlier that day. He lay for what might have been hours, staring at the featureless expanse of the ceiling above him, whilst the day’s events replayed themselves in his mind. Everything here was so utterly strange. Thoughts of his mum, caught interminably in Wardworths, and his father, wherever he was, passed before his mental vision over and over again. Light from the weird ‘Stician moon painted a broad swath across the carpet. Alex reckoned that with a bit of effort he could close the curtains, but Ganymede’s warning still rang in his ears. Besides, some instinct continued to warn him that he should keep his ability to do such things to himself. But the floor was hard. At length, Alex climbed onto the bed. This was hard too, but after a while, in contact with his body, it began to soften. The pillow softened too until Alex drifted into a shallow and uneasy sleep.
Chapter Four
Alex was awoken by the sounds of Will moving about in the next room and slipped quickly from the bed, all too conscious of the faint creaking of its springs. Will didn’t seem to have noticed but Alex felt a flush in his cheeks nevertheless when his new friend came in with one of the manna rolls and a mug of water.
“Breakfast,” he said. “If you can call it that. I’d offer you more but…”
Alex raised a hand. “Yes. That’s fine. I know….Thanks, Will. I’ll pay you back when I get some of my own.”
“Oh, that’s alright,” said Will, in a tone of voice that managed to suggest otherwise despite his best efforts to the contrary. “I don’t like to get too low, that’s all. Kelly lives on the edge, see. She can’t organise herself properly. She never lasts out all week and then she has to come scrounging off everybody else.”
“She seems okay though,” ventured Alex, brushing crumbs off his jeans. “How did she get here? Daydreamer do you think?”
Will shrugged. “How do I know? How do any of us know? All I know is we daydreamed ourselves into here. Most of us, anyway. That’s what Ganymede says. I guess we have to believe him.”
And that was the terror of it. Most of the people of Intersticia were, like he and Alex, caught in their daydreams, caught in a moment. There were exceptions; Roger Bradley, he of the hospital gown, amongst them. They couldn’t remember. They had simply appeared in Intersticia, with no inkling of what they had last been doing in Reality. But some of them were dead. Such was the spectre that stalked Intersticia.
Outside, everything seemed pretty much as it had been the previous day. The clouds were exactly as he remembered them. Flying objects were amongst the stranger sights in Intersticia. A distant flock of birds hung motionless beyond the church tower. There was no one about as Alex set off for the park, unless you counted the stiffs. There were plenty of those. You would have thought they’d have gathered dust, but there was no sign of it as Alex brushed experimentally at a young man’s shoulder on Copeland Street. He journeyed via Wardworths, so that he could say hello to his mum, and have another go at getting himself back into Reality. Ten minutes of head shaking later Alex continued along the ring road past the accident, having accomplished nothing except a mild headache. There were moments, even now, when he still entertained the notion that this might be a dream of some sort, but with increasingly little conviction. It was with a slow pace and a heavy heart that he made his way down the parade to the bandstand. He was almost there when a ‘Stician came running up behind him, startling him from one of a succession of gloomy thoughts. The newcomer was a balding middle aged man, lean as a whippet, clad in tight black running bottoms and a red vest with two white bands across it.
“’Morning,” he hailed Alex, passing him by without stopping.
By the time Alex had mounted the steps to the bandstand the runner was already halfway around the large pool that occupied the Western end of the park, dodging briskly amongst the frozen strolling stiffs. Alex had, of course, been acquainted with the idea that he shared this world with others besides Will and Kelly. Nevertheless the jogger’s cheery greeting still sounded a discordant note in the silence of the park.
There was no sign of Ganymede. Alex waited in the bandstand for a time that he had no way of measuring but seemed a great deal more than
was reasonable. The clouds remained perfectly immobile. The leaves on the trees were as still as though they were frozen in crystal. Only his pulse marked the passing of the seconds. Alex counted his heartbeats for a while. At last the dark shape of a dugong (or a manatee) came into view, crossing the park purposefully from North to South, finally disappearing behind the tall poplars by the football pitches. Its dark body undulated slightly as it swam through the quiet air. Bizarre. After this brief excitement drew to a close Alex went for a little stroll around the park, always ensuring that he was in sight of the bandstand. He had a good look at all of the stiffs, wondering at the moist, glossy surface of eyes, at a little girl on a scooter, strands of blonde hair lifted in the non-existent breeze.
Nevertheless, when Alex next looked up, Ganymede was there, regarding him across the litter strewn concrete shallows of the children’s paddling pool. An involuntary spasm of alarm passed through him. Alex took a moment to compose himself, taking a deep breath, before making his way to the bandstand past a frozen toddler on a red tricycle. This time Ganymede had dispensed with the accordion. He looked Alex up and down in a manner that suggested no more than vague disapproval.
“So…. Alex,” he said at last. “And what have you got to tell me then?”
Strangely, Ganymede seemed less intimidating than yesterday. Today he seemed no more than strangely unsettling. Alex was about to run through a list of personal details, when Ganymede held up his hand.
“No. Not here I think. We shall go to my office.”
He spoke each word slowly and with exaggerated precision, grinning through his tangle of beard in a way that was sinister rather than in any way reassuring. Beckoning to Alex, he led the way towards one of the big houses that backed onto the park. In a length of ancient wall, a green painted door stood open, giving access to a garden as unkempt as Ganymede.
“So what were the circumstances of your entry into Intersticia?” asked Ganymede, when he had let them into a ground floor office. It looked just like a tramp’s office should; piles of paper everywhere. A great many unwashed mugs stood about amidst the chaos. On the top of a filing cabinet a kettle stood on a little primus stove next to a neglected pot plant. By this time Alex was actually delighted that the interrogation had begun. The long silence had been bearing down on him.
“Wardworths,” said Alex. “I was in a queue.”
“Really? You can remember that?” said Ganymede, studying him thoughtfully. “I had expected you to say you woke up and found yourself in the allotments, or some such place. Interesting.” He stroked his beard, dislodging an occasional crumb of.
Alex told Ganymede an edited account of events, leaving out his minor interferences with Statica and his previous brief visitations there. Ganymede, who had put on small, half-moon glasses, sat at his crowded desk and made notes in a surprisingly neat hand.
“Hmm,” he said, when Alex had finished, and then, “Hmmmmmm.” A more purposeful tug at his beard caused a little cascade of crumbs to fall into his scarf .
“Well,” he said at last, when the crumb supply was apparently exhausted. “The next Gathering is tomorrow. I shall see to it that you receive your material allowance. This will consist of; three blankets, a tea cloth, a jug for fetching water and a cup. You will also receive a quantity of manna. You may fetch water from any watercourse. Interstician water flows there as well as Statical. The manna will sustain your body between Gatherings. In return for this you must work. To begin with I shall ask you to assist various ‘Sticians in their tasks. This will enable you to grow to know the folk amongst whom you now dwell. In the meantime I shall consider your case and think of some work appropriate to your needs.”
“How long do you think I’ll be here?” asked Alex, bringing to utterance the most pressing question of the moment.
Ganymede shrugged, sighed deeply and put the cap back on his ball point pen with exaggerated care. It was as though Alex’s question had wearied him deeply, had extinguished the last tiny spark of hope he had nourished for humanity.
“Who knows?” he said, shaking his great shaggy head slowly. “Who knows indeed? It is not in our power to decide. We may be called back to Reality. We may not. And time in Intersticia cannot be measured by traditional devices. There is no movement of the sun across the sky. Even the night here is no more than an artifice, created here for the convenience of mortals used to measuring the passage of time by nights and days. You will have noticed by now that the moon here is not the one you are used to in Reality.”
Alex nodded.
“But how can time carry on here, for us, when it’s stopped all around us?” he asked. “That’s impossible isn’t it?”
Ganymede laughed, a bitter laugh, Alex thought.
“Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so,” he said. “You mortals measure time in little arbitrary chunks which it pleases you to call seconds. And you maintain that there should be sixty to a minute, because some astronomers in Babylonia thousands of your years ago determined that it should be so. That’s nonsense. Time is indeed broken into fragments, tiny particles of existence. The Angels measure time in “instants”, four of them to a “moment”, thirty seven moments to a “while”. What do mortals know about time? What do mortals know about anything? Precious little.”
If Ganymede had been trying to imply that he wasn’t actually a mortal himself, he was doing a good job of it. He stared hard at Alex and steepled his fingers in front of him, leaning back in his chair to get a wider viewing angle.
“There’s something odd about you,” he said after a lengthy pause.
Alex thought, this was a bit rich coming from someone as manifestly weird as Ganymede, pot calling kettle black and all that. It was, of course, impossible to bring this to utterance.
“Yes,” continued the hairy old vagrant. “Decidedly odd, and I can’t quite see what it is. That troubles me. You wouldn’t be holding anything back would you? Because I really wouldn’t advise it.”
Alex shook his head adamantly, feeling sure that his cheeks must be flushing in blatant contradiction of this. But if they did, it appeared to escape Ganymede’s attention.
Alex had lots more questions for Ganymede too but on the other hand he had no wish to prolong the interview any longer than was absolutely necessary. He was delighted when Ganymede waved him away and hunched down over his paperwork as though Alex no longer existed.
“I’ll show myself out then, shall I?” he said hesitantly.
Since there was nothing but a grunt from his host, Alex made his way back to the park, pausing in Ganymede’s garden to admire the splendid collection of gnomes, half buried amongst the rampant undergrowth. A shadow passed before him. He glanced up in time to see a dugong (or a manatee) pass majestically overhead. It was a strange world alright. He frowned. The dugong (or manatee) disappeared behind the row of poplars by the football pitches.
Kelly was waiting for him in the bandstand, sitting on the balustrade, swinging her bare legs. She was definitely pretty, Alex decided, confirming last night’s first impressions. She gave him a warm smile as he approached.
“Ganymede not eaten you then?” she said.
“He wasn’t too bad,” conceded Alex, going on to give her an account of his interview.
“He must like you,” said Kelly, with a low whistle, when he had finished. “He was horrid to me.”
“Who are the Angels anyway?” asked Alex. “I thought Ganymede was the main man.”
“He is, sort of…..” agreed Kelly. “He’s Head of Sector. But this sector is only a hundred square miles or so, and there must be thousands of sectors all over the world. Ganymede runs the sector, the Angels run the world. They run Ganymede in fact. Although I don’t think they always get on. I’ve heard him grumbling about their interference. I saw some once,” she said. “Angels, I mean… I know it sounds mad, especially when you’ve just got here. There’s lots of mad things about ‘Sticia. You’ll see. Doesn’t make ‘em not true t
hough. I guess you’ve seen the manatees.”
“Or dugongs” said Alex.
“Whatever…What’ve you got there?” She nodded at the small bundle of manna rolls that Ganymede had given Alex to last him until tomorrow’s Gathering.
“Manna,” conceded Alex, reluctantly. “I’ve got to give three to Will, to pay him back for last night.”
“How many does that leave?” asked Kelly, an acquisitive glint in her eye.
“Six,” said Alex.
“Six. That’s loads. You can spare me one then can’t you? I’m starving. Please.” She fixed him with a look of such concentrated pleading it would have shamed a spaniel. Alex’s resolve crumbled.
“Alright.” He unwrapped his bundle and gave one of his manna rolls to Kelly, feeling surprisingly good about it. He took one himself too, reckoning it must be around lunch time. They were walking towards the other end of the park by now, Alex tagging along after Kelly as she ambled towards the South gate.
“These Angels then? Were they like, you know….proper angels… wings, haloes, the whole job?” asked Alex.
“Absolutely,” laughed his companion. “Lovely wings too. Like big white doves or something; and kind of semi-transparent. Dead impressive really. I guess they do it because they think we expect it of them. You know…like the false night they do for us. No, they turned up at the next Gathering after that dude chucked himself off the car park. I gather Ganymede really got it in the neck over that. ”
“Why? Was it Ganymede’s fault?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I think the dude’d just had enough. You wait and see how you feel after a couple of weeks of living like this. If you can call it living, I mean,” she said, with a laugh tinged with bitterness.
“What else would you call it?” said Alex.
“It’s an existence,” she said, stopping suddenly to regard him thoughtfully. He had the impression she was weighing him up in the way Ganymede had been doing.