by Paul Magrs
I had spent too long in service. I had spent too long about those old routine tasks in the house on Tavistock Square.
How long had I been there? I couldn’t even remember.
I found I was no longer blindly grateful to my mistress. Yes, she had taken me in. She had given me a new life. But hadn’t I paid her back by now? Couldn’t I stop being beholden to her?
I watched her skinny body advancing ahead of me, dodging round trunks and ducking under vines. Her wispy hair was one big frizz, coming loose from her bun. That straw hat of hers was battered to shreds. I began to feel something closely akin to panic. How long had I been a servant to this woman? When did I sign my whole body and soul over to her? And what had become of me in my previous life? How come I was destitute anyway?
The details were erased. They had run out of my head like sand from an egg timer. There were just grains left. I could feel my past ebbing away from me. As we hacked and hacked and hacked our way forward in the primordial forest, under the noonday sun, I felt my whole life shrinking around me, till its days were as closepacked and indistinguishable as the trees that surrounded us.
Mercifully we found a pool where the water was ice cold and good to drink. Delicious, in fact.
We didn’t stand on ceremony. Like the good bohemian she hoped she was, Mrs Mapp threw off the limp rag of her dress and waded in her slip into the cool bronze of the water. Quite daring, I thought.
Normally I would have been far more proper – especially in the presence of a gentleman – but we were in a different world now. I needn’t feel ashamed of anything, for once. That’s how it seemed in that mad moment. Everything was changed about and besides, I could feel my dusty skin calling out for that water. When I sloshed my way in, disturbing the sheeny mirror of the surface, it felt like my pores were drinking it in. The cold pebbles felt wonderful under my feet, slimily insecure as I minced along, wincing at the cold. I felt light as a prima ballerina as I sank under the surface, hoping the other two hadn’t taken any notice of my raggy underwear. Underwear that in those days, mercifully, covered rather more flesh than later underwear did. My scars weren’t on display. My oddity wasn’t so obvious to my companions. Though really, I don’t think either of them were that bothered about looking at me.
I turned coyly back to the bank, mostly submerged like a curious hippo – just in time to watch Mr Rupert strip himself completely bare. Goodness, but he had no scruples – nor anything to be ashamed of. He was all pink and gold and glorying in the afternoon. He came dashing into the water shrieking with joy and splashing us ladies. What a noise we set up in reply, splashing him back as he turned cartwheels and dive-bombed all about the place. Mrs Mapp was howling in quite an unfamiliar way.
For a moment I lay back and floated across the span of the jungle pool. Pausing only briefly to check that my wig was holding fast. I pondered what we had become in this place. Transported here we were like beasts. Like primitive people. We were strangers to ourselves. Capering about and forgetting ourselves.
Oh. And then I went too far and got stuck in the quicksand.
I almost died.
I tried to stand up and I couldn’t. Something strong had caught hold of me. The ground had turned hungry and I panicked. I screamed to gain the others’ attention.
I felt such a fool.
There I was, flailing about in the mud and coughing up my guts. This awful sinking feeling was my only reward for a life of drudgery, and this was my imminent and ignominious end. Here, in this Qab jungle, I would return to clay; to the muck that had spawned me.
Funny how you can go a bit philosophical as you’re getting sucked under.
I was also fighting for every breath.
By now, Mrs Mapp and Mr Rupert had come straggling to my rescue. They were wading carefully, very carefully, lest they got caught themselves in the same rotten flux. I reached out desperately and then I was clinging to my friends. Depending upon them.
The strength in my fingers was surprising to them, I think. Panic augmented my already considerable strength. I was bringing up red welts on Mr Rupert’s forearms as I gripped. He’d feel the bruises, I was thinking, as the mud started to give way with a long, obscene sucking noise . . .
I tried not to feel a fool. As they both said afterwards, it could have happened to anyone.
I lay about in our camp trying not to remember what it was like, thrashing about in that quagmire.
Mr Rupert went off jauntily with his hunting knife, promising us wild pig for supper, and the mistress and I sat complacently by our fire.
My underwear was steaming on the clothes horse we’d built out of branches and I was wrapped in a tartan picnic blanket. As we sat talking quietly, it felt for the first time as if we were equals.
But who was I kidding? However long we were in the place, and no matter how many adventures we shared, when it came time for returning to civilisation, we’d be back in our old roles, surely.
That was if we ever got returned.
I was questioning now whether I even wanted such a thing.
‘You’re lookin’ very contemplative, Brenda.’ She’d never seen me be anything but busy.
‘I reckon I am,’ I said, a little stiffly. I suppose I was still embarrassed about needing to be rescued. I’d done a fair bit of swearing and cursing, too, while I was struggling against the rising mud.
‘We’ve been here only a day or so, but everything feels so different. Do you feel that, Brenda? We’ve been castin’ off the shackles of respectability . . .’
She shivered. I put myself in her shoes for a moment. She was inside her own invented land. She must feel liberated. Excited.
‘What do you think of Mr Von Thal?’ she asked me suddenly. A strange hesitation in her voice. I hardly knew what to say. I thought my admiration was all too plain whenever he was near or his name came up. I felt my ears burn bright with blood when he talked to me. I was full of blushes for that man. Had she never noticed?
‘I’ve always thought of him as just a boy, really,’ Mrs Mapp went on. She didn’t wait for my thoughts on the matter. ‘But recently he has started to remind me of my older brother, Duncan. In lots of ways he really does. And then to see him swaggerin’ about in Duncan’s old clothes like that . . .’
‘He’s a very romantic figure,’ I put in. ‘Glamorous. Adventurous. He looks like a hero now.’ I was picturing the base of his neck and the little hollow where it met his chest. And the broadness of that chest, especially when he flung off his ruffled shirt.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Now that he is in my world. I’ve changed the boy into a man . . .’
She fell to musing for a while. And I was thinking: she loves him! She really does! And I knew it all along. I had seen it all earlier, hadn’t I? Before Mrs Mapp even knew about it herself.
Then I thought: what chance do I stand now of him ever looking at me in any way other than as a servant?
But what chance did I ever stand? I was being ridiculous. Look how old I was, and look at him. And our backgrounds . . . and everything else. The sun and the damp were getting to me. The humidity was making my mind reel with ludicrous fantasies. I should be happy to hear that my mistress was at last coming to her senses. I should be delighted that she was responding to Mr Rupert’s courting ways. Because, of course, that was what was going on. He’d been beating a path to her door for a long time now, and only here and now in Qab was she starting to bend to his insistent pressure.
I could have wept. Sitting there under that blanket. Damp to my bones and still hacking up algae. Fingering black mud out of my clogged ears.
And then the screaming started.
‘Mr Von Thal!’ Mrs Mapp cried, and was on her feet in a flash.
He was under attack! Some way into the jungle there was all this clattering and shrieking. Then there was an unearthly wailing and crying, coming from an unknown creature.
I struggled to my feet, still swaddled in tartan and ungainly as I lumbered after Mrs Mapp o
n my bare feet. What use was I going to be in a fight? Mrs Mapp plucked up her brolly and sallied fearlessly forth into the trees.
And there we found Mr Von Thal face to face with a hideous insect-type creature standing about seven feet tall. It was like a mantis, or one of the ghastly specimens standing about in glass cases all over the house in Tavistock Square. Bloated to incredible size. Mandibles a-twitching and lithe acid-green legs darting about. Its eyes were the worst thing. They were like silvery metal, agleam with hateful intelligence.
The thing was fighting Mr Rupert for the dead piglet he had brought from his hunting trip.
‘Ladies, keep back! I have it! I can . . . I can deal with the beast . . .’
He lashed out with his gory knife, liberating a stream of nasty green blood from the creature’s muscular arms. But the arms were closing around our hero and pressing his body to that hideous thorax. What would it do to him? Those serrated limbs could slice him apart in seconds . . . and was it poisonous? Could it paralyse him and turn his flesh to mush? And drink him up right there in front of us?
Mrs Mapp went wading in, smashing at the brittle hide of the animal with her umbrella. She was using some language I would never have expected from her.
‘I can do this! Just keep back!’ Mr Rupert insisted.
‘Mr Von Thal!’ my mistress shouted imperiously. ‘One thing is called for here, in order to disable this brute. You must’ – and here she raised the point of her brolly high about her head – ‘stab the thing in the eye!’ Which she did, with a hefty and well-aimed poke of her ferrule.
The mantis screeched the most hideous protest and its arms flew up to its damaged, swivelling eye. A gout of black ichor showered down on the three of us and Mr Rupert took immediate advantage of the thing’s distraction. He scooped up Mrs Mapp and took hold of my arm and he barrelled us backwards, away from the jerking limbs of the swaying mantis.
‘STAB IT!’ Mrs Mapp was howling. ‘Don’t run away yet! Make sure it’s dead! Stab it in the other eye! Hoik its brains out! KILL THE BLOODY THING!’
She was ranting like a madwoman. But Mr Rupert knew better than not to obey. As the mantis pitched forward on to the grass, still screaming about its eye, Mr Rupert fell upon it with his knife and made short work of it.
I actually felt a bit ashamed of us then. Bringing disaster and death into this innocent, primitive place.
We returned to our poolside camp in rather subdued fashion. We were lathered in horrid black and green fluids.
‘You have made a dangerous world for us to explore,’ Mr Rupert told her.
‘I thought you said that this place was not my responsibility?’
He shrugged and looked rather grim. We sat by the fire and I kept stoking it up, and making sure that our torches continued glowing bright. The jungle beasts chattered and gibbered all night and I don’t think I slept a wink.
All day was spent wending our way deeper and deeper into the woods while Mr Rupert related more of what he knew about the esteemed Professor Quandary.
‘I believe I have known the professor longer than I have known you, Mrs Mapp. It’s hard to recall the exact sequence of things. You and I met that summer at Lyme Regis, didn’t we? I was just down from Oxford and you were there with your uncle. Specimens, yes, of course. Well, by then I knew Quandary. I believe I showed off to you, rather, when we first met, about some of the pickles I had been in already, so early in my career. Remember my telling you . . .? Well, Quandary was involved in all of those.’
The lustrous mud of the forests was giving way to rockier terrain. The plants were stringier and hardier here and the going was tougher. We weren’t allowed to take many rest stops, though.
‘Quandary was in Oxford for a while, lecturing . . . he wasn’t attached to any college . . . he just sort of turned up one day. He appeared in a flash. Everyone spoke about him in awed whispers. There was a lot of mystery about him. Everyone had heard something about him . . . some little whisper of the legend.
‘That was the year he invented a special kind of paint, which, when used, somehow read the minds of the room’s inhabitants and projected them on the walls, which was marvellous for parties. And we were involved in the search for the Antarctic Phoenix, and so on . . .
‘It isn’t really worth enumerating all of our adventures now. I believe Brenda here is already an aficionado of our published accounts anyhow. She knows the kinds of things we get up to, hmm?’
I nodded and smiled and found I was too breathless to say very much. The air was definitely becoming thinner as we tackled these ever-steeper slopes.
‘Anyhow, as to the question of Quandary’s provenance, Mrs Mapp, I simply don’t know. It’s been such a bally rush and a hoo-ha, every time I’m in the professor’s presence – I’ve never had any chance to ask about his background or his past. So the truth is, I really don’t know where he comes from originally, so to speak. I don’t know what his secret is, for I am sure he must have one.
‘I do have some suspicions. Some very strange suspicions. He will let something slip now and then, some reference to – I don’t know – politics or some super kind of motor car or an unfamiliar monarchy, and it won’t be quite right. It is like the professor is trying to remind himself all the time of relevant details about our society. He is brilliant about most things, but hesitates and stammers over details with which even a child brought up in this country would have no trouble.
‘I thought he might be a foreign spy at one point. A German, perhaps. With his bluff manner and very precise ways. Or perhaps a Russian – that big bushy beard of his. But I don’t know. There are other things . . . his watch, for example. It’s like no device I have ever seen before. Incredibly advanced . . . it emits the strangest noises. And his knowledge of scientific matters . . . sometimes it seems impossible, the breadth and depth of his knowledge. But again, he appears to be holding some things back - as if the sum total of his knowledge is something he has to hide and prevent pouring forth; like that whole thickset body of his was a kind of dam.’
We were dragging ourselves past rocks and boulders now. They were curiously gemlike under the blazing sun. Ahead of us was a ridge like a jawful of broken teeth. It was as if Mr Rupert was trying to distract us from the harshness of our environment by bombarding us with words.
‘I don’t know, though. I’m not sure what I’m saying even . . .’ he mused, pausing and wiping the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. He stared into the far distance, his mind still focused on his mysterious friend. ‘He is like a demon in human form, with his tempers and rages and brilliant inspirations. But you see, Brenda, Mrs Mapp, though I have been his loyal companion on escapades all over our world, under and above it – and now in a different world altogether – I hardly know the professor any better than you do, through your chance encounters with him or reading about him in the Fitzrovian Spree.’
Now followed the final assault on the most perilously steep part of our ascent. We could still stand upright, but only just. It wasn’t very comfortable, staggering and reeling after my two companions, sending flurries of sand and shale down the rock face behind me.
Mr Rupert still talked, though by now his words were punctuated by some rather heavy breathing. ‘One thing, however. One recent thing. To do with his present incarceration. One thing that disturbed me because it demonstrated a side to the professor I hadn’t encountered before. Something strangely disquieting. When we were here first, a few weeks ago, and we were taken to the city . . .’
Ah! And here we were, all of a sudden.
Mr Rupert fell silent as we came to the top and drank in the scene before us.
It was as if, as we surmounted that craggy spine, we didn’t quite know what to expect. The vista before us was astonishing. It quite stopped my breath, even though my lungs were bursting and crying out for air. Beside me Mrs Mapp was in quite the same stupefied state: staring at the lush valley below, nestled and cradled by multi-hued and misty mountains. Yet in Mrs Map
p’s reaction, there was also a sense of satisfaction, I think.
She looked like a woman who had – in some sense – come home at last.
Before us, far below, lay the splendid city of Qab.
To me it looked like a marvellous mishmash of all kinds of architectural styles, from all over the world. I saw towers, minarets, onion domes and spires. I saw things that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Venice or Florence, and other buildings, crammed hugger-mugger, that seemed to come from our Far East or Arabia. I saw humble stone dwellings planted in rows and spirals, radiating out from serried ranks of palaces, glimmering gold in the sun. One vast building dominated all, however. It was a lumpen castle, shaped a bit like something gigantic termites might build. Its towers leaned eccentrically, peering out all over the city. Its windows were luminous slits.
What was most striking, apart from the chaotic sprawl of styles and types of building, was the sheer profusion of life that was in evidence, all over Qab. We could see narrow streets and they were teeming. Strange beasts hauled carts and servants bore their mistresses along on sedan chairs. Crowds gathered in market spaces and along commercial streets. The endless, restless tussle of the day’s business was going on in this fabulous place, just as it did in every other great city. To those down there, all of this might even have seemed mundane.
My mistress and I were speechless. Mr Rupert was not.
‘Sublime, is it not? Oh, look at this land, Mrs Mapp. Your land. Qab. Is it everything you dreamed it would be?’
‘Hmm? Oh yes,’ she gasped. ‘Oh yes, indeed.’
Now I was watching the birds wheeling and dipping around the chimneypots and towers. Huge birds, they were, screeching and cawing and returning to their nests in the city’s highest roosts.