It was a full day but I will skip the rest, I think, in honour of the occasion. I could relate my choice of lunch or dinner, my hours spent flicking through the other channels for any sign of intelligent human discourse on the arrival of the compellers. Advertisements and repeats were all I found – the default setting of human existence. Sell it, repeat it, sell it, repeat it. All our ingenuity and yet we have fallen into a terrible pattern of indifference. How can we ever hope to overcome this obstacle placed before us by the compellers, with such disrespect for our own methods of communication?
I’ve finished my hot chocolate ( creamy choc goodness indeed), and now I will sleep. I wonder what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps the first tentative steps of the formation of the rebellion? Shall we take to the streets with signs and slogans, with blank spaces where words should be?
Hah. The fall of a silenced civilization, and I will have a front row seat and a lone voice with which to record it.
Also, I should buy some bottled water and cans of peaches at the mini-market tomorrow.
* * *
Day Two
It’s getting quite cold; my handwriting is not at its best.
I woke early. The light was grey, grainy through my thin curtains. I saw a com a com a com a com
In the days when late summer turns to autumn in the suburban offshoot of a medium-sized city there is so much for a diarist to note. The changing colours of the leaves, of course, and the creeping chill in the air, if one wants to be predictable. It is an explosion of input for the creative soul, and yet I do not wish to write of it. Not at the end of a very long day in which I lost everything but my pyjamas, my pen and my diary.
I have no wish to write of anything but the one thing I cannot.
It gets harder to make marks about them. Compellers, I write. Compellers. But they will not compel me here, on the page, no matter how I must obey in the physical realm. Can I record what happened today? I must. I will sneak up on the subject and pretend to myself that I am writing of other thoughts, other feelings. To try again—
I emerged from a long dream in which my dear Miriam (gone from me for eleven years now, and who could believe that?) kept telling me to get up and find my trousers. So, trousers were the thought in my head when I awoke, and looked around my room by the half-light of an autumnal early morning.
I saw it, and yet could not trust my eyes. I lay still, waiting for my vision to clear, to reveal its presence as a trick of the light.
It was not a dead squirrel stuffed into a jar of formaldehyde and it was not a slave being crucified along the Appian Way. It did not exactly remind me of fear behind a wide smile, teeth showing, and there was not something of the swipe of a clean, fast scalpel through skin about it.
It was in my room. In the corner, between the wall and the wardrobe.
It was not watching me, and it was intent.
I inched back the duvet until I could slide out my feet and place them into my slippers. I stood, picked up my pen and diary from the bedside cabinet, and left the room.
The kitchen was not far enough away from the com com com, no, nor the living room. I locked myself in the bathroom and could still feel it, as if it breathed out, and in, and out, on the other side of the door. Had it moved? Did it breathe? I couldn’t bear it; I stood on the cistern and climbed out through the small window to my back garden, slithering through the gap to the dew-dank grass beneath.
I picked myself up as quickly as my old joints would allow and scrambled to the back gate. Beyond it, I negotiated the overgrown alley that runs along the terrace. Picking my way through weeds, nettles, discarded wrappers, I battled to the main street.
No cars awaited me. No sounds of the city going about its business at all.
Only people.
People, standing in front of their own houses, not speaking, not moving, and their eyes, their eyes, their—no no no
Some were dressed and some were, like me, still in nightclothes. I saw a naked man, but he was as still and silent as the rest, his hands curved around his intimate parts, his gaze on the ground. If there was embarrassment, it was buried deep under the inexplicable event.
I watched as my neighbour, Mrs Fletcher, looked up at her bedroom window and frowned at it, as if it was no longer a place she recognised. Her thin white hair was loose and very long, moving idly in the wind, but at least she had a thick blue flannel nightdress on that covered her from neck to ankle. I wished her a good morning, and we spoke about the wind picking up, and the greyness of the day. The family who live across the street came over and we stood as a group. Their two daughters were wearing pyjamas bearing the images of animated princesses, with the words unique and special upon them, the letters curved like rainbows. We all attempted pleasant conversation. The words were very hard to find.
Time passed in an odd way, with nobody marking it, asking after it, or commenting upon what they should be doing instead of standing in the street. Just as the sun was beginning to find its way through the cracks in the clouds, a thrumming sound, a vibration, resonated through the concrete. We all turned our faces to the end of the street and saw the vast crowd of people marching over the crown of the road, heading in our direction. There were hundreds, I would say. They walked with purpose, carrying their children, their mobile phones, the odd possession or two.
It did not need to be said that they were attempting to outrun the things behind them. It was in the way they glanced over their shoulders, never stopping. As they reached us, we fell into step with them. I held hands with Mrs Fletcher. She seemed to need the support. I kept my diary and pen in the other hand.
Many more joined this exodus. I have no idea who led it. Possibly we were being corralled like cattle. Either way, nobody fought the destination. We turned through the gate halfway up Church Street and ended up in the park.
Was it only yesterday I sat on the bench, just over there, and read the newspaper? Now the bench has upon it three ladies who are expecting. They stroke their stomachs while others sit in every space around them, from the duck pond to the bandstand. It is a sea of silent humanity.
Beyond the gate? I know they are there. The com the com the com communicating is not going to be possible, it’s completely impossible now, I’m so tired, we’ve been here for hours and hours and it is dark. It’s dark.
* * *
Day Three
I will stay calm and record until the end. I don’t have long. The park is nearly empty, and I will be compelle comp comp come com co closer close clo com
When I was a young man, I was so very precise about the English language. I was, in fact, such a stickler for the proper and correct usage of it that, at first, it amused my wife, but soon began to annoy her. Eventually, it created a distance between us, for who can talk to a man who criticises each phrase with such dogged dispassion?
I drove Miriam away. I fought against admitting this to myself for many years, reason after reason for our divorce coming easily to me, laying the blame at her little feet. But this behaviour sprang from my own guilt. Guilt creates and inhabits many forms; I wrote about this extensively in diary number one hundred and twenty-two, if memory serves me right.
It all started with our wedding vows. At least, that was the first time she registered an annoyance with my commitment to upholding the standards of our magnificent language.
“Love, honour and obey,” I said, a week before the ceremony was due to take place. “Will you promise that, Mim?”
She told me that she would, looking deep into my eyes over the Formica tabletop in the seafront cafe we frequented back when our parents lived on the East Sussex coastline. She thought I was attempting a romantic moment.
“Overused,” I said. “Trite. You’ll promise it and you haven’t even deeply considered what it means. Maybe your assumptions about these words, these concepts, will be totally different to mine, did you ever consider that? They have been weakened through chronic overuse. We should, instead, create a new set of words for our con
tract that holds a special meaning between us, and us alone. Splorg. I promise to splorg you, Miriam.”
She assured me that we would not be promising to splorg each other any time soon, and I thought she had not the intellect to appreciate that, in fact, I was being deeply romantic. A new language for what we shared, was that not a wondrous idea?
Apparently not.
She remarried eight years ago (how time moves, so strangely), choosing an estate agent from Lewes who, no doubt, promised all the usual things without even breaking a sweat. I wonder if she’s sitting in a field at this moment, somewhere, in silence beside him while the c c c c c c co coms circle.
Last night was such a long one, perhaps the longest I have ever known. Mrs Fletcher occasionally muttered in her sleep, passing comments such as, fresh frozen, picked straight from the pod, and, date rape, that’ll end in tears. But when the dawn chorus began, the birds raining down their cacophony from the branches above us, she was gone.
I stood, with difficulty, and stretched out my legs while I scanned the park. She was not to be seen and I realised that our numbers were substantially thinned. Patches of grass were now visible through our scattered ranks. The three expectant mothers upon the nearest bench had been reduced to two. There was movement as people made their way in their ones and twos to the gate and beyond.
I watched them while I stretched, working the damp and cold from my old muscles. Their pace was sedate, untroubled, their arms swinging in a curiously limp fashion. Even young children, independent of their mothers and fathers, made their way to the gate and left the park behind without a backward glance.
I would say they felt a call, a compunction. They were compe compe compe led away – to what? For what?
I have not felt any desire to follow suit, even though there are few of us left. We have not gathered together, as one might expect people to do in such a situation. Wouldn’t literature have us believe that a band of ragged survivors might come together to defy the might of a terrible invading empire? But without the words we need there can be no unity, and all the terms such as monster, massacre, alien, apocalypse – these are but tired, trite words with which we cannot agree a meaning.
No, my fellow park inhabitants keep their distance and avert their eyes as I write, as if shocked by the act. But I must write this down. Not for posterity and not to hide within the familiarity of the scrape of the pen upon paper.
I must write because I believe that I know the nature of the thing we are failing to fight.
They are not alien at all. This is not an invasion. This is a mutation of our own making.
The c c c c c c once upon a time see see see? See the disrespect we hold for even the oldest and greatest of phrases? I write it and roll my eyes at myself. But it allows me to write that—
Once upon a time there was a race of pink-skinned, two-legged creatures who took words in marriage. They tied themselves to the protection and care of these words, and the words were once used well and wisely. To love, honour and obey a word is not an easy task, and soon the creatures began to realise the onus they had placed upon themselves. They could not say black and mean white; they could not say good and mean bad.
But then they saw how the children of their marriages had a malleability that their wives and husbands lacked. It was easier to shape these young words to their own desires, to say natural and mean artificial, to say pure and mean corrupt. The creatures taught these tricks to the words and never saw how they had weakened the fabric of their own existence.
Wheedle words had been created.
And the wheedle words, so bent, so twisted, grew up. They saw and understood what their parents had done to them when they gave them bastardised, brutalised meaning. So they took form and came for their parents. Came forth for a reckoning. They appeared on the streets and in the bedrooms, and they rounded up the stupid creatures and led them out, one by one, to stand in front of their many children and see what they had done.
What happened after that?
I don’t know. I could speculate, but I find I have no taste for that now I’ve found a way to expound upon my theory. Whatever comes, I’ve no doubt that all the news channels would describe it as a tragedy. Tragedy awaits me beyond the gate, with massacre or bloodbath and all the other words that have managed to escape our enslavement.
Imagine if this small book, filled with my version of this event, is the only version. All the world will have, if it survives of course, is my depiction of the last three days. Such a thought means that I don’t feel tragic. I feel important. My life, my work, my diaries: it has all been so much more important than I ever suspected.
I think I’ll leave it there. I’ll probably just slip this diary under the hedge, and wait.
CHANTRESS
I sing for the sake of singing. They provide me with subjects to sing about, but my desire is only for my own sound. I don’t think they understand that.
I am the Chantress. I’m not to be confused with the Enchantress who lives at the top of the mountain and soothes the stars, night after night, with her pleasing, persuasive speeches. I should also not be mistaken for the Disenchantress who lives in the dark pit of the valley below and mutters if you happen to pass within hearing distance. She is a warning – a demonstration of the depths to which a disobedient woman might sink. She is also responsible for occasionally throwing rocks and directing white and black flies to the nearest vegetable plots.
That’s just my little joke.
The women from the village on the far side of the mountain come to me, making the trek on the precarious path their ancestors carved, and I’m quite clear with all of them that the songs I’ll form do not have a purpose, in the sense that no song has a direct purpose, but this has yet to stop them from asking. They say, “Sing a song that will make my child better.”
“The child probably needs a doctor,” I say. Every single time. “I’m no doctor. I have the number for the surgery in the town a few miles away, and the opening times for the cable car that will get you down the mountain. Also, a bus timetable. Here.”
Sometimes they accept this information, sometimes not. Every time they say, “Sing it, please. Sing it anyway.” They are so reluctant to leave the shadow of the mountain.
Child, stay close, and find your comfort
In the strong tall peak above you
Formed by the Giant Hands that cradle
That mould
That shape
That close about you now.
* * *
I find comedy in the strangest things: the crooked legs of the dead insects on my windowsill; the lost goat hanging on the ledge, bleating, amazed to find itself in such a precarious situation; the skittering of loose pebbles on their way to the valley below. I put it down to being alone for so many years. I say so many years – six, to be precise. I moved here from the town, after seeing the job advertised in the local paper.
Do you want to SING for a rapt audience?
I thought, after years on the circuit, doing the working men’s clubs and struggling to be heard over the clink of glasses and roar of innuendo, that it had been placed there purely for me. We make such connections, all of us. We assume there is reason to events, and a thread that runs through our souls and tugs us this way, that way, onwards, with the far end of the thread held firmly in Giant Hands. It’s much easier to think that. It gives each life a meaning that I’m not sure it deserves. Still, it worked in my favour this time. I attended the audition with the fervour of certainty. It was my chance to shine, as they say.
I discovered, while standing in front of a row of bearded elders who had agreed to reimburse my bus and cable car costs, that I could improvise with tune and lyrics. They liked the sound of my voice and the words I chose. They told me, Come and guide the women of our village. They need your voice.
How they auditioned the Enchantress and the Disenchantress, I don’t know. I should remember to ask my sisters, during one of our quarterly meetups.
I sit on the roof of my village-sponsored hut, with a glorious view of the heavy mist that shrouds the mountain peaks; the usual drizzle is headed my way. The Enchantress, high above me, will have a clear view of the sky, which is necessary for her role. The village believes stars are little girls – the giggling children of the sun and moon – who must be gently addressed by a soft voice. She does this well and with dedication.
I don’t sit here for the view. I get the best Wi-Fi reception up here, on my antique mobile phone, having been out of contract for five years and eleven months.
I scroll through the headlines.
The news is busy consuming itself, as usual. How important it must seem to those who consider themselves part of that cannibalistic mechanism.
Next up: a report on the deadly disease
sweeping the city – news addiction.
Further updates on this breaking story by the hour.
Not really. I made that one up.
There go some pebbles, dislodged from the path, and then I hear the footsteps approaching, and a firm knock upon my door, three times, as per the custom.
I quietly climb down from the roof on the far side of the hut and walk around to my own front door with the dignified air that is expected of me.
“Can I help?” I say to the villager. She’s tall and thin, wearing her hair in a series of complicated long plaits. She’s too young to be here about her child, so this must be a visit about the second biggest issue that concerns the women of the village.
“Chantress,” she says. “Please. I need a song. A song to make a man love me.”
I invite her in, and sit her down, and explain very carefully that the song won’t work. She nods, and nods, and then says, “So will you sing it?”
A good, strong heart calls to yours
And you dream of better things
From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 14