Nemonymous Night Part 1

Nemonymous Night.

Lewis, D. F.

Prelude.

This book is like a child clumsily finding its feet upon a carpet: a s.p.a.ce and a foundation that seem to be its whole world. The book starts out to navigate this world, to become practised at walking, to become schooled, loved and loving, finally prepared for death.

Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.

Each page will therefore eventually grow up into another later page of the book. This process is the story. This is the truth of its fiction. The growing-up of a book in difficult times.

These words are not a pretentious authorial introduction to the book. They do not even represent the book's own intrinsic prologue. They are part of the growing-up process. They are part of the plot.

Nemonymous Navigation.

The carpet was quite ordinary. n.o.body around was an expert on the manufacture of carpets, so all that could be said about it was some reference to ordinariness. Even the stains were ordinary. Years of wine and grime. Years of mishandled vacuuming. The careless knees of toddlers as they scorched their model cars through the rough of tufts. The odd tread of strangers.

The pattern was non-existent since the carpet possessed a plain beige colour-originally with nothing to recommend it except its unpretentiousness. Yet, despite these various negatives, the items of furniture that pressed its pedestals, castors and broad-beam bases into the pile were rather pleasant in an antique fashion-but whether these represented genuine antiques was anybody's guess. They were rather down-market sticks of furniture in spite of the dusting by a previous owner who rather enjoyed the varnished or polished gleam of knotted wood more than the clean lines of a carpet's cleanliness.

The carpet itself had no mind of its own-obviously.

Nothing could be inferred about its soul. If it had thoughts, it kept them to itself. There is a theory that inanimate objects feel themselves to be so real that n.o.body-even with the wildest imagination-can imagine them as imaginary. And if anything is deemed unimagined or unimaginary or unimaginable then it is incapable of existing in fiction, fantasy or dream-but merely in real life. And it is true that many actual things yearn to be imagined rather than to exist for real... simply for the pleasure of being fantasised about. This carpet was no exception.

It must feel trapped not only by the webbed st.i.tching of its underlay, by its carpet tacks keeping it tight to the skirting-boards and by the downward press of the mock antique bric-a-brac and furniture, but also by the knowledge of its essential reality as a floor-covering, with no possibility of weird elaboration or of weaving into the character of something unreal... thus to make it worthy of imagining or dreaming about. For example, that day, there were deep misunderstood mumbles in large areas of the carpet's jurisdiction-come down to it together with the pad of two spread-soled solid feet and the prod of two sharp feet as they moved about amid the lugubrious talking that belonged to the feet's owners-or so the carpet would have a.s.sumed given the carpet's ability to have such a.s.sumptions.

"How are you today?"

The man who spoke was Mike. Deceptively heavily-built. Physically distracted, but he strode through the room as if he owned it. A lorry driver's face.

The woman followed him about, as far as she could follow someone in such a small room. In contrast to Mike, she appeared as if owned or, rather, controlled by the room while-with rather more panache than the situation demanded-she kept adjusting ornaments... also brushing dust into a pan: a secondary pursuit. Given name Amy. More a girl than a woman but with a woman's manners. She said very little. Only direct questions could stir her into response.

"Not so bad."

She had a pretty face, but when she spoke-even lightly, thoughtlessly-there was a frown that appeared and a deep divot within the frown's area. Hair a fashionable matted brown, so very her it would only be noticed if it suddenly wasn't there. Ap.r.o.n failed to hide her s.e.xuality and high-heels seemed out of kilter with the dustpan.

Mike was definitely older: more in his mid-forties, compared to her mid-twenties. His own greying hair and stubbly beard were far more noticeable as distinguishable features-compared to the straight 'herness' of Amy's hair. Suit a bit bedraggled. Shoes solid brown with laces-the type men had worn for years, in and out of offices. The fact he was pacing about the room exposed his nervousness despite the aura of confidence and command that Amy only saw. Or only Amy saw.

Mike was a hawler, although he would have spelt it differently had he known the word at all. At this stage, it was unclear what a hawler was-or what a hawler did. But Mike knew he was one and probably knew what one was and what one did, even if he didn't know the name itself. Not a transporter of heavy goods along the roads, as that was a haulier. In the old days, a hauler (sic) was involved in moving coal from the coalface, coal that had already been worked by others: a lifetime of chip chip chip, only for the hauler to haul it off. An art in itself and one fraught with many logistical problems. Today, however, there were no coal-mines and therefore haulers had died out-or needed to diversify. Some claimed that butchering was now within a hawler's brief, even if they only dreamed of the word hawler and later forgot it. A brief for beef, and it is true that Mike loved to consume steak-there being a saying, almost a proverb, that everyone knew but failed to understand whilst otherwise consciously understanding it to the hilt-that Mike, and others like him, "were so voracious they ate beef till it was raw".

In many ways, when perspectives were collected at the end of the day, this did not mean anything and gave no clue as to the nature of hawling.

Mike had left the house. Amy was upstairs making the bed. He wanted to visit the pub but doubted if anyone he knew would be there and he hated drinking alone. The park was second best: a good place for thinking. Susan was on his mind and Susan may indeed be in the park with her two children, one of which was bewitched... or so Susan once told Mike. Mike had usually steered clear of married women especially if they had children, but life was never simple. The bewitched child was a case for a hawler... a nameless child who often dreamed most of the night. While most people dreamed throughout the hours of sleep, very few among them actually remembered all the dreams that had disturbed the felt equilibrium of their rest. But Susan's bewitched child remembered every single detail of what followed her and of what she followed, sometimes the same thing, follower and followed. The child was nameless and so were the inhabitants of her dreams. One day she'd have proper names for them. Proper nouns.

Susan had a name for her bewitched child but she did not tell Mike because if a hawler's magic was to work, he must not, in any circ.u.mstances, know the name of the child whom he was attempting to hawl. The child must remain nemonymous-which was a word for a sort of cross between anonymity (only wholly real things could be anonymous) and a subliminal or aspirational state of non-existence.

Much was inexplicable, yet it would become explicable when put into practice and seen for what it was. Mike suspected that this child in question (Susan's bewitched offspring) was named either Sudra or Sundra because he thought he had heard Susan calling the child by a similar name but, naturally, he tried to put the fact out of his mind, so that his hawling would be more effective when the time came. He even put the fact of his ability to out of his mind. Yet another word that evidently had gone missing somewhere along the fading spectrum between two or more minds-but there was, so far, n.o.body narratively compos mentis around these parts to reconcile any differences.

He gingerly walked across the park ground. He wondered what stage of the housework Amy would by now have reached. Cleaning the bedroom carpet was never a joke and only attempted by Amy once in a while. He glimpsed Susan and her two children (including Sudra or Sundra) playing on the distant swings and he even thought he saw Susan waving at him. She wasn't always that friendly. Mike was a hawler, after all, and most people instinctively treated hawlers with a cold respectful shoulder-or, otherwise, they would have given away their presumptive knowledge of any hawler's ident.i.ty. Mike, if he thought about it at all, believed himself to be the only hawler left in the country, if not the world, or the only practising hawler. He felt tears p.r.i.c.k out at the thought of Amy. The ground was cousin to the carpet as he sensed his feet shudder, listen to his thoughts and plumb his sorrow. Others felt such shudders as imaginary earth tremors or, at least, that was the best thing to believe them to be. Upon any other way, lay madness.

Or a plate of sizzling beef. But, first, duty called as Mike plucked up enough courage to approach Susan and her children, leaving any residual thought of Amy to the vacuuming.

Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. Mike often created images like these in her mind.

"What to do," she asked or stated. The carpet cleaner churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the earth wire failing.

She was back a few years before. Mike had not come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. She recalled that her brother had always been a bit of a loner, non-expressive and wild. He concocted experiments with household goods, mixing them into a chemical syrup by means of adding garden mud to substances like washing-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. These misalchemies were alive-at least in her brother's eyes and Amy laughed as she remembered their mother's remonstrations of despair while she tried to talk sense into her son but merely ended up communicating with the "cowpats" of mixture he had left in his wake. At least he did the experiments outside. And indoor fireworks only came out of Christmas Crackers in those days, so they were not an all-year problem: those sizzling wormcasts on the seasonal carpet. That was a G.o.dsend.

Amy couldn't remember her brother's name. It was as if he had never existed. Her mother was a Mrs Cole, Edith to her friends. Amy was afraid of remembering her brother's name because, by dragging it from the past, trawling it via the coa.r.s.e-grained muslin of memory's filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything Mike had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a b.o.o.by-trap-and she continued sc.r.a.ping the lower surface of the vacuum across the grit in the carpet that had collected there like any dust collects there... from wherever dust and grit and, indeed, stains come from-a mysterious source only hawlers are able to fathom.

She couldn't really countenance that Mike had more than one job on the go at once. She wanted to be his only subject-because being a hawler's subject was not dissimilar to being in love. Unadmitted love, true, but love nevertheless. Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. A scene of a park so cultivated its gra.s.s was more like a plush lawn for the toes of effete royalty or fairies. She saw it in her mind's eye, but failed to recognise the fey walkers that positively languished in its heady Proustian delights.

Amy had once been a child herself-self-evidently.

"Amy! Where's Arthur?" screamed Mrs Cole. Edith looked out into the garden where Arthur should have been at this time of day, especially bearing in mind his slippers on the floor and his coat gone from the door-hook. Amy was nowhere to be seen. The meat in the oven was burning, so she rushed off to adjust the temperature gauge-knowing that slowly-slowly-caught-the-monkey. Amy was never a worry, as she spent her time not worrying. Someone who didn't worry never gave worries, Mrs Cole knew this instinctively without articulating the thought. On the other hand, Arthur was a big worry-as he always worried about going out, worried about fulfilment, worried about the ever-increasing need to mix quant.i.ties of the world together to see what gave.

Mrs Cole, having finished with adjusting the oven, knew that one of her two children was bewitched and the evidence pointed to Arthur. She reached the apartment window again and eagerly scanned the inner square between the walls of the four blocks that formed it. There was a solitary fountain at its centre-and a few all-weather seats surrounding. Not much for children to do in the square but it was certainly better than the city streets amid which this square was a relatively safe oasis. She saw a huddled figure on one of the seats and, believing it to be Arthur, she called from the window for him to come in. She'd forgotten why she needed him to come in at this precise moment, but the need was one that had become a bee in her bonnet. The white face looked up. It was Amy. And Mrs Cole unaccountably shed tears... followed closely by desperation as she saw a taller figure enter the square. Anyone needed to enter the square via the apartment blocks-so the place was not exactly public but the security was lax. And where was Arthur? The figure in the square was too tall to be Arthur although he was growing too quickly these days.

Being at the higher end of the block, Edith Cole felt helpless, should there be any crisis moments in the square far below.

The head teacher had just announced his visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. He'd come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both... at once.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr Clare," said Mrs Cole, opening the door. She had put any problems to the back of her mind, as if she predicted even bigger problems arriving via Mr Clare.

"I'm glad to catch you in," he announced, not waiting for an invitation to enter the flat.

Mrs Cole wondered why he hadn't made an appointment. This was the second time he had arrived this way. She planted her feet on the ground, expecting the worst, bracing herself for something dreadful she didn't really want to hear. But a carpeted floor several levels up in the air was hardly the ground, and she felt no a.s.sistance from this attempt to earth herself. "Get a grip!" she said quietly to herself between gritted teeth. She heard several conversations coming up to her from below-a cacophony of different groups of families in the cross-section of abodes beneath her feet. They spoke of frightening things, childish things, trivial things...

"What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?"

Mrs Cole was still an attractive woman and she knew Mr Clare better than he knew himself. She could see it in his eyes.

At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their head teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur's hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large truck. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl's keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it as if it were real plastic with mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips.

"Would you like to stay for dinner, Mr Clare?" Edith had advanced from offering tea to giving him the chance to share the meat sizzling in the oven. He had not really answered but had decided to occupy the armchair in front of the old-fashioned TV, without even a word. The fact he had caught Mrs Cole at home seemed in itself sufficient to create a successful mission.

The trouble was that not one of them knew what the others were thinking. Yet there had to be a lot of sympathy for all of them and that sympathy cost more sympathy, growing and growing c.u.mulatively as the events overtook them at later stages some of which would never be known, let alone described. Each person would take turns to feel... to feel deeply... for the others and themselves. All that was needed was patience. Meanwhile they were simply playing at life, without understanding any of its rules.

Mike was quite ordinary and n.o.body around was expert on what made any man tick-so that all that could be said about him was his ordinariness. Not exactly nemonymous-in the true sense of that strange word we all grew to know... eventually... despite its difficulty to say or to understand, because that would have implied that he was anonymous to the point of non-existence. And Mike sure could lift a few spirits with just a few chosen words from beneath his mask of ordinariness. He lived a full and useful life because of his ordinariness rather than despite it.

Although ordinary, he felt responsible, more responsible for the world's affairs than he had the right to be. At an early age, he had felt the hawling power in his mind, in his hands: a power that actually was fed by the ordinariness that was his essential default. He saw-instinctively-layers of people pa.s.sing down a lift shaft, spending time on each floor till they either reached the ground or the top. These layers of people were going both ways, in fact, not just down, pa.s.sing each other, sometimes changing direction more than once, but staying, for a while, nevertheless, on each floor-getting to know the others on that floor, then proceeding on... downward, after all, or, yes, upward. Hawling was not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the b.u.t.tons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashed and resulted in the lift-doors sliding aside... new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there was more to hawling than that-it was running a butcher's shop, listening to the carca.s.ses crack as you lay in bed at night. He was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth's soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on... and eventually extinguish with a dying wink... which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from Mike's mine. It was all this... and more. Mike would only discover the 'more' when the time was ripe or if he became mine, if not me, himself.

He had just watched Amy Cole riding up and down the utility supply shaft of some inner city tower. Her brother, whose name was unknown or forgotten, was the one she was seeking, having lost him in childhood, when they were both suddenly orphaned. Their mother had been hauled off from them one unexpected day whilst they both played outside among the makeshift dams and rivers of slurry which pleased her brother so much. Amy even lost Amy, lost, at least, who she was and what her years were or bloodcourses were.

Mike had then watched someone else. Susan and her two children running through an unkempt, s.h.a.ggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. They were all chased by a figure in a cape. Mike desperately wanted to help them but, temporarily, his hawling skills were stunted by the experiencing of the traumas of other families slipping through several dissolving floors towards a huge pit in the earth.

Mike woke in a cold sweat. He put one foot outside his bed to ensure at least his own bedroom floor was still there. Amy snored beside him, mercifully, it seemed, free of the dreams that had just beset him... or were still besetting him.

Mike often reminisced about the time he worked in an office, mostly as an administrator, but also as a consultant or salesman, a business that often concerned very complex financial matters. He used to entertain clients at sporting events or orchestral concerts, lunched important representatives from other Companies, attended Board Meetings across the country, driving all manner of distances in a day. He couldn't do this now, but, in those earlier days, he used to manage stress much better. It was almost like a dream. He had a family, then, too-Susan was his wife and his two children Amy and Arthur. Amazingly, they were still his family today, having put up with him all these years. The children had grown up, of course, and left home. It was just him and Susan now. Susan went out to work and he stayed at home: a token househusband. So, there was a lot of time for reminiscing.

His body was the most mysterious thing about him. He could easily fathom his own mind-but his body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that he-his mind-walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to him, obviously, because, if it had, he would certainly have considered himself mad. Bad enough even to skirt such touchy subjects amid the other reminiscences, let alone delving into them.

Those corporate entertainments he remembered as uncomfortable sessions, when he often felt invisible. Eyes grazing him, edging even nearer but, just as quickly edging away to gaze elsewhere. He used to try to fathom the faces in the dance of business and artifice-and wondered if any real minds lay behind them, as they tried, like him, to balance a drink and plate, whilst making small talk before the concert started. Brahms' Double Concerto with Nigel Kennedy and Robert Cohen playing the violin and cello respectively-the concert music easing away the thoughts, as Mike merged with the rest of the audience who, eventually, clapped as one ent.i.ty: one nemonymous creature of applause with the merged thought that they remained single ent.i.ties.

The clues as to what a hawler really is sometimes come together piecemeal, often obliquely-rarely in great moments of clarity.

Amy had finished the vacuuming. The man she knew as Mike often popped in so as to see how she was doing. He evidently fancied her. She needed to be checked by someone at least and Mike was representative of the Letting Agents. He needed to follow the rules and rub a finger over a sideboard top to see if it collected dust. He turned a blind eye to the carpet. In any event, Amy's job did not reach beyond vacuuming it-and any deeper cleaning would have to be commissioned from a specialist steam-cleaning organisation. Mike usually trusted her to lock up after she finished. A good working relationship. No doubt, one day, he would try more than just fancy her from a distance-she knew. Men were like that, despite the existence of a wife and two children. He referred to his wife as 'the wife', but perhaps hawlers were allowed to have more than one wife; indeed, one day, believing X was his wife, whilst, the next day, believing Y was his wife-and on those separate days, he was only aware of either X or Y respectively, depending on what day it was. Hawlers were a confused bunch... if there were more than one hawler in the first place, and Mike may have been the only one.

Amy shrugged. She had her own two children to worry about and that's why she did these housework jobs for the Letting Agents. Mike gave the impression that he'd once had a job better than checking on skivvies like her. Amy put the vacuum into the broom cupboard and left for the lift. She was confused about Mike. She did not even know the existence let alone the meaning of the word hawler.

Often, she even wondered who she was. A busy life made her like that. She laughed at herself as the lift left the floor behind.

At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.

Mike was at his golf course, during those heady days when he was a businessman. Susan was at home faithfully caring for the two kids whilst Mike surveyed the dips and dunes-almost feeling them with his golf mind-as he took stance for his first teeshot of the day. Golf was instinctive, knowing the contours, a.s.sessing the relief map between him and the hole... and as his arm swung back, he trawled the air with his clubhead for the invisible creatures that would eventually guide his tiny hard white ball above the alchemically magnetic layers of ley-line and geomantic quirk that only these creatures could fathom.

Susan was silent. It was too early to start preparing Mike's dinner. Her friend Amy had just left. The two women had a lot in common, both having two kids of similar ages and s.e.xes. A good feminine chat whilst these kids were at school and the husbands elsewhere-that was always a good tonic. But now she was alone with her own thoughts. Often a dangerous thing to be sunk eye to eye with nemonymity. One needed other people to allow oneself to exist at all. And the potential of her family's homecoming was not strong enough to radiate back in time to stiffen the sinews of her existence. One of her children was currently non-existent as was one of Amy's children...

Susan shook her head. Two out of four children. She cried. She began to hear something breaking the silence, something she didn't understand equally as much as she didn't understand the words in her empty head. The sound of a cricket ball smacking the meat of the willow with a resounding echo... or, rather, a small white hard egg-pod being squashed to smithereens by the coal-pick beneath her feet, or between them.

Arthur Cole-despite all his damming games with the sand, earth, household chemicals etc.-became a bus driver. His sister, Amy, used to stand by his side, all the other pa.s.sengers a.s.suming this to be a flirtatious bus-driver groupie girl who often stood by the steering-wheel chatting about this, that and the other, fancying anyone in trousers especially if his control of a huge vehicle like a bus gave his manliness an edge it wouldn't otherwise have had. But in this case, it was the driver's sister disguised as a bus driver groupie, telling him surrept.i.tiously when to turn left and right amid the maze of ratruns and back-doubles that the city had become in recent years. She was his 'brainwright': an old word for someone who acted as a brain for someone else.

Since the days they lived with their single mother in an apartment intended for fewer than three, there had been long periods when Arthur was in and out of Care Homes, especially ones specialising in their own variety of 'brainwrighting'... until Amy herself was old enough to take over such duties-their mother having vanished as had a replacement father figure who had been living with them for a while until eventually vanishing himself... gradually.

They couldn't remember his name. They couldn't even remember their mother's name or, rather, they had deliberately blocked it out. The man's name they had genuinely forgotten.

It was a miracle that Arthur managed to find a job at all, let alone such a responsible one as a bus-driver in the city. The fact that his sister was always at his side dressed as a flirtatious bus-driver groupie had been missed by the bus company's inspectors. Arthur was a good instinctive driver-despite all his driving doc.u.ments being forgeries.

One day, he was destined to use his bus as a get-away vehicle (with pa.s.sengers still on board) but that was irrelevant to the events that followed each other-at least semi-logically-in the guise of a story that stood by his side like a narrative thread he followed by means of the metaphysical steering-wheel of his life. Many of the events didn't directly affect Arthur at all, but those events were directly affected by Arthur.

Returning to his childhood days-when the shadowy mother and father figures were still shimmering like technical interference on a TV screen-his ability to get his hands dirty by actually delving the fingers deep into what he took to be the earth's crust (or rind) to obtain some purchase on its spinning (also as part of his messy damming river games for which he used the kitchenware substances) was really a dress rehearsal for driving a bus, although he did not realise that at the time, if he realised anything about anything. But certainly Amy-growing into a pretty girl and even prettier woman-knew instinctively that Arthur could control big things just with the flick of his finger.

Arthur dreamed one night of mixed ambitions competing with each other for the forefront of his brain (some eventually to be considered worthless and unmemorable by his waking mind) together with worries about death and guilt... and of crawling forward through a long hedge where it was relatively easy to proceed with only the slightest tear by plant-spike and sting by nettle, until he reached an impenetrable clump at the end edge of the hedge, whereby he had to retreat backwards with the spikes and nettles closing in quite violently as a result of the opposite direction of travel he was attempting to forge through the undergrowth which was resprung against his pa.s.sage. The dream, however, was not quite so convoluted as the necessarily convoluted account of its own pa.s.sage through Arthur's mind. The words for all this had been lost in transit. Maybe, if he retraced his footsteps, clarity could be hauled back, although, no doubt, with some difficulty.

Another dream-this one more grounded in day-to-day life-was one of trying to park his bus each night outside his house, with Amy waving him into some very tight s.p.a.ce between other vehicles. His back was once jammed right up to the vehicle behind, but it was only a small thing (a bubble car?) and this had quite a big gap behind itself to manoeuvre in reverse should it want to get out. Arthur's memory was of something even smaller than a bubble car, but this was probably a later twisting of the truth in the dream to match the verities of waking life.

Amy and Arthur lived together-and their neighbours must have a.s.sumed they were husband and wife or (more likely these days) boy friend and girl friend, rather than brother and sister. In real life, he was indeed a bus driver and didn't, of course, need his sister working as his brainwright (a word he hardly remembered, if at all, from somewhere or other, like hawler, weirdmonger and nemonymous)-and he did not, naturally, park his bus outside the flats, but left it at the bus garage at the end of his shift-a shift that usually entailed the night bus. Amy was a counter a.s.sistant at one of the local department stores-but sometimes she filled in (for extra money) as a supermarket shelf-filler of disinfectants, washing-powders, cleaning-fluids, fabric-conditioners etc. She was on carpets at the department store, spending most of the day arranging for fittings, after the customers-with her expert help-had chosen the pattern and quality of the carpet they wished to buy.

Still, then, the horrors hadn't yet started. Various strange words start to build up-as if against the dam of sanity: connections and misconnections which fracture and fragment dream and mix it with real life: an impending doom that gradually increases in sickly strength. In fact, little did they know, but the impending part of the doom was worse than the eventual doom itself.

Mike and Susan lived together on the other side of the city.

Mike worked at a covered market-with his long-time caped colleague Crazy Lope (who should have been a Red Indian with a name like that but was more quite an ordinary girl-shafting ex-miner with an odd turn of corrupt phrase)-but it was the market itself that was the noteworthy element in the day's work. The area of the city where it was situated was not at all English in atmosphere but had a dark magical realism more akin to Eastern Europe. This is the first time-it has to be noted-that it has been made clear that most of the events under scrutiny took place in England. A fact that hadn't been realised until this comparison with Eastern Europe became necessary: i.e. inadvertently slipped out, as it were, in the cause of geographical context. All accomplished without any direct narrative intervention whatsoever...

The covered market had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not strictly open-air or covered. On some days-when the rain clouded in with untimely gloom-it looked more like a warehouse, especially after the market attendants closed down the sides with temporary wind-breaks: the entrances between these 'walls' looking more like the beginnings of downward spirals to underground railway stations where the peasants under-crossed the city between the various farms and smallholdings which employed them on the perimeter of the city. Mike dreaded going to work, in case he was dragged down and became mixed up with these transit groups who didn't belong to the city at all. The market work itself remained unclear, but Mike was good at it: he kept getting rises. Crazy Lope was not so lucky, if luck were indeed the cursor to success and failure in such settings.

Susan worked in a pub in an even more unsalubrious section of the city. It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up. Well, it certainly fitted the bill, but she enjoyed working for the landlord called Ogdon. Anyone dreaming about this pub-unlike Susan who worked as a barmaid within its walls in real life-would be drawn towards it against their will, believing its regular drinkers to be rather low down in the scale of humanity. Both forbidding and attractive at the same time, but mainly forbidding most of the time; it was paradoxical that the attraction won when the forbiddingness was stronger than the attraction. But like all dreams, one couldn't quite get to the bottom of it. Susan, meanwhile, worked there-a real place she couldn't avoid as she needed the money.

Mike and Susan lived in a top floor flat in the city centre with their two children, Amy and Arthur. They just about made ends meet, with the help of Government tax credits. Anyone dreaming of this top floor flat would have the same feeling about it as the other dreamers felt about the pub where Susan worked and the same feeling as of yet more dreamers dreaming the covered/open-air market where Mike worked. A certain dread mixed with attraction: imagining the flat to be dirty, with threadbare carpets, rickety beds, greasy cookers, dubious bed-covers. And a feeling that s.e.xual peccadilloes were rife with one or two men living there, one of these men the dreamer's friend in real life, so you did need to visit him (although this was a dream and you weren't really visiting your friend at all)-whilst, all the time, it was not dream for Mike and Susan who actually lived in that top flat, with their two children; it was their shelter, their life... where their ends met. Who had lived there before them was not relevant. Not relevant to Mike or Susan. Whether it be dream or real life.

When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything, that is, except survival of oneself and of one's own. If buildings carried dreams (or, for that matter, if dreams carried buildings), it didn't matter because all one was concerned with was those buildings giving shelter or giving work.

Tonight, as the beginning of the drama is homed in upon, Mike and Susan are sitting on the couch in their top flat, ready to speak to each other: the children recently put to bed after TV's Children Hour: "Whirlygig" with Humphrey Lestocq and Mr Pastry. The Queen of England was still quite young and the end of the war was not more than about ten years old. The carpet was much older; and being new tenants they didn't know exactly how old or who had once trod its threads.

A vehicle-like a bus-doesn't touch the earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads.

Mike watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines-just the bars of the seats being seen from where he stood. It must have just gone under a bridge too low for its height and those pa.s.sengers seated on the top deck were either crouched low or decapitated. Mike winced. It would be in the newspaper tomorrow no doubt-but why hadn't the bus stopped? Or, rather, why had it now slowed? Not because of a bus stop, but because it had self-evidently just had an accident. A serious accident. Mike watched it wheel round the corner, thinking, as he did, of hit-and-run situations and where the bridge was likely to be. He couldn't think of a low bridge in the area. Hit-and-run. Like having children, then forgetting them... only for them later to become your friends and you don't remember them, so they are real friends, not your children, because your children can never be your real friends: too much customs duty to intervene...

He was on his way from work. He usually walked-and only caught the bus when it rained. Office work had its own life and customs; people who worked in offices were a certain breed. Mike wished he could work outside, like a labourer could or someone in an open-air market. Office-workers, on the other hand, not only watched 'Big Brother' on TV but talked about it in the office the next day. Office-workers had ambitions-of sorts. But the ambition usually involved jealousy rather than the intrinsic need to be promoted. Mike had been promoted beyond his own capabilities (as most office-workers were). He had the healing power-to make himself ignore how he was wasting his life in competing for petty duties... although, these days, he and his wife Susan were often invited to office receptions to entertain clients. This was a G.o.dsend to their social life and there was no obvious need for sitters, as n.o.body knew if they had children. They'd just watch TV otherwise-and bicker.

Mike's office was only round the corner whence he had just turned. It was an Advertising Agency with some really creative people-but Mike worked in Administration and only allowed creative jobs from time to time. One would never have known it was an Advertising Agency, because the building was a plain Sixties-built tower block with nothing to recommend it. It wasn't like that open-walled Eastern European market that plagued Mike's dreams as his real workplace but one he could never find afterwards. He wasn't paid much-hence the need to work overtime, as he had tonight. He shivered as the rain set in-and he wished he had caught the bus despite the vision of the freshly topped one that had disappeared from his memory by placing a street corner between it and him.