Nemonymous Night Part 2

The empty enclosure at the start of the tour-it was discovered-was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping citizens as they took their time off in the zoo. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, the children bawling in disappointment: "Where are the animals, Mummy?"

"You told me this was a zoo, Daddy!"

The parents tried to pacify their children by pointing to the corridors of cages where the zoo proper, apparently, would start-or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. n.o.body, it was clear, took account of the insects that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. n.o.body realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for insects. They wanted to see big things in a zoo. Life needed big things in the city.

Soon after by-pa.s.sing the first enclosure, most visitors, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages-a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of exhibits. Kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other-and even uncomfortably close towards the visitors themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.

The remarkable fact-despite the circ.u.mstances-none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have a.s.sumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was one hundred per cent not a dream... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.

Mike turned towards the others and said: "Quite sweet, aren't they?"

n.o.body replied. They weren't so sure, because these initial cages seemed to house versions of the apes, a baby one of which had indeed featured in a dream dreamed by at least one of the party before entering the zoo grounds. Yet here, the apes could be clearly seen for what they were-apes with no potential to grow into man-mountains like Gulliver. That, Mike a.s.sumed, was what differentiated dreams from non-dreams. In the former, anything could grow into anything else. In the latter, things stood still ever as themselves. The status quo. They may be monsters in a non-dream, but they couldn't trans.m.u.te into worse or different monsters.

They wandered further into the maze of cages, Mike in the lead. As a hawler, he could see things more clearly than the others, since he had travelled further underground in his consciousness and established fixtures and bases from which all else could be interpreted and evaluated: thus neutralising their ability to terrorize. Terror did not breed more terror, but less. Hence, Mike's justification in dredging more terror and horror into view, so as to neutralise it. He had not thought these things consciously-but when between bouts of dream sickness outside the zoo grounds, this had indeed been clearer, with the dreams themselves adding a needed logic of their own. Here, inside the zoo, Mike-although an instinctive leader-learned, from this prior in-built experience of dream negotiation outside the zoo, that, paradoxically, he felt himself to be at a loss in the uniform non-dream world of reality represented by the zoo around them.

The next set of cages was frightful and, if it hadn't been for the certainty of his logic, Mike would have been quite perturbed by the sights as they unfolded. It was as much as he could do to pacify the others in the face of a tentacular monstrosity that even the infinite star-fields (and what potential life they could conceivably hold) would not have been powerful enough to make possible.

Here they found Amy and Arthur whom they had been seeking all night throughout the city. They were pressed up to the cage bars as if in some desperate embrace with the monster that was contained by them.

Yet, nothing, surely, could be nightmarish outside a dream, a nightmare being merely a species of dream. Yet the two children-as Amy and Arthur still were inside the zoo-seemed actually tied outside the cage to its bars not by ropes and bindings but by the long locking claws of the beast that the cage contained. Mike and the rest of the search party quickly shuffled ident.i.ties between them as none wanted to be responsible for leading a rescue mission towards this cage with a view to releasing the two children. Yet, this cowardly act could not be cowardly for long, because no sooner did one feel the cowardliness coursing through their veins than that same person felt an equal counterbalance of bravery... and they lurched forward to prise the children's fingers from the bars only quickly to realise that the fingers were not all the children's own-and cowardliness returned with redoubled force.

Meanwhile, Greg the office worker had rejoined the group unexpectedly-having followed the others after his lunch break into the zoo grounds-and had no time to be infected by the switching ident.i.ties caused by an alternation of cowardliness and bravery. He had no second thoughts but to rush towards the cage and pulled the children away from whatever it was that kept them bound to the bars. Indeed, there was nothing in the cage... except a threadbare carpet lining the floor, a carpet peppered with indeterminate tiny droppings and sown with holes that needed darning.

The group were pleased to escape the zoo-via the back entrance which was not far from the underground market. They hadn't paid to get in but, somehow, they needed to pay to get out-as a man stood at a turnstile with his hand out. But the two children went free. All were pleased to escape without having their faith in the clear dream/reality dichotomy of the zoo undermined. They knew, however, once outside the zoo, each and everyone would be susceptible to the dream sickness. They needed a drink, so they sought Ogdon's pub-but the streets round the market had somehow changed from a negotiable pattern to one of mazy confusion. The two children were no longer children-and, having been rescued from their kidnapping, they returned to a more adult appearance and behaviour, treating Mike as if he were a child. Mike couldn't see Susan any more-but a certain loyalty to her memory forced him to stick by his promises to protect her against the onset of dreams, giving himself a more steadfast or statuesque image: a landmark around which the dreams revolved but which they could not affect. Susan would soon be able to return to this fixed point of Mikeness given the time and the inclination. He hoped against hope. He still loved her. This facility to be a fixed point amid the whirlpool of dreams that existed outside the zoo was akin to the ability of hawling: reaching to the core of the earth for one's bearings-and mining them for certainties and immutable compa.s.s points of direction.

He looked up into the sky. There was something lovely about a sky that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from within themselves. A good hawler could plumb heights as well as depths for this brand of substance, sustenance and rea.s.surance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, the sky (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphanously from horizon to horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were weirdmongers and others of their name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew or at least hoped he knew for a while till he even forgot he was a hawler.

Susan woke beside her husband Mike in the bed she simply and unsurprisingly recalled falling asleep in. No better rea.s.surance could there possibly be for getting one's waking feet on the ground. She wondered how-in her dream-she seemed to be named Amy. And Mike had been called Arthur. She wasn't sure how long the dream had lasted, but the actual reality within the dream had seemed to last a whole lifetime-until she awoke some time during the zoo sequence. Mike (or Arthur) had a role to play that n.o.body else could. As with most dreams, its sense of reality was fast fading as she continued to reach a full waking state-and the name given to this role tantalisingly escaped her.

She soon saw Mike standing at the open bedroom window watching a jet liner slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give Mike a hug from behind. He would soon be off to the office and she to her barmaid's job. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his b.u.t.tocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. She yearned for the sea, where she had been brought up-yet the sight of the huge s.h.i.+p in Dry Dock on the city's horizon was more than just a little recompense. She listened to see if she could hear their daughter Sudra waking. This was her first day back at school. They had decided only to have one child-even though they both knew how difficult it was for 'only' children in later life. Mike and Susan both missed their brothers and sisters... almost as if they had once existed. Mike turned round-the sun etching his head like a black hole-and he took Susan in his arms, lifting high the bottom edge of her nightie so that she could snuggle up to him even closer. No fear of peeping toms-because the open window was a good Blackpool Tower or two above the now enlivening streets below. She felt him come inside like a huge welter of comfort-and the friction was just a side effect. It was at that moment Sudra had quietly opened their door-and she was old enough to laugh at her parents' predicament upon discovering they were being watched.

Sudra watched the city from the window, as if watching through the gaps left by her parents' clinging, cleaving to each other. It was her birthday today and she was expecting a welcome hug and a bountiful gift-yet all she saw were the bodies of the people she loved dissolving in the growth of sunlight... until even the bones themselves tingled slightly and then vanished. She rushed towards them over the carpet but only gathered curtains to her instead of parental love. Yet, love is invisible-even when the people "doing" the love are there. And Sudra could feel the love around her, even if there were no arms to gather her closer to that love. It would soon be time for school-and she walked off to the fridge to fetch milk and the kitchen cupboard to fetch cereal... yet her feet were becoming more and more draggy as she tried to reach the kitchen, as if the carpeted floor (several storeys up) had a magnetism greater than the earth's Core. Sudra could not even reach the body that was hers before it disappeared into the kitchen.

Mike turned round-forcing Susan also to swivel from the window in mid love-making embrace. He thought he'd heard a shuffle or a whisper-but there was n.o.body there. He picked up the freshly delivered newspaper from the table-as if shrugging off the extraordinary with the ordinary-and read the main headline: MAD WRESTLING BY THE ANGEVIN KINGS.

Without thought, he plunged it into his briefcase, and, waving a cursory backward greeting to Susan, he left for the office. Time had crept up on him and he was already dressed in his uniform of three-piece suit and bowler hat. This city lived in the Fifties and bowler hats were still evidently all the rage.

Mike had forgotten how he had been described in earlier parts so he a.s.sumed he'd always looked like this. Barely close-shaven hair in a crew cut before crew cuts were known by numbers for the respective choices of length. Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley were in the Hit Parade-milk bars full of pre-p.u.b.escent teenagers, because p.u.b.erty was very late in those early days. The office-once he arrived-was full of ma.s.sive desk-calculators (that, one day, could fit into the palm of your hand), surrounded by pipe-smoking jobsworths rattling at their numbered keys. Mike said a jolly good morning as he took his own seat in front of a calculator that was rare inasmuch as it had a ribbon of paper where his work was printed automatically for future posterity-churning out in endless ticketing spools as from an old-fas.h.i.+oned bus conductor's hand ratcheter. Still too early for his mind to be on the job-and he thought back to his walk to work, past the covered market, where many office-workers emerged as if they had been sleeping there all night-past the Dry Dock, the pub where Susan worked, the zoo gates-and before he managed to summon up sufficient concentration of will-power to face the calculator keys, he took a quick browse of the newspaper, the main headline being: CHILDREN STILL MISSING.

An all night search of the innercity has produced no sign of the Angevin Twins-so further sweeps are soon to take place in the outer city towards the suburbs.

"They ought to try under the city," said Mike to himself. The Angevin Twins were the first-born of an important city family that had first grown rich over the generations by means of coal-mining on the Northern edge of the city. Mike had seen photographs of that area-big towers with turning wheels threaded by clunking chains, silhouetted against a sky that was more often as black as coal as it was ever blue. The prevailing weather thereabouts had made sure of that. Most citizens travelled south on their holidays and not even the weathermen could explain why it was generally brighter in that direction. Nothing concerning geography or science could justify such differences-almost as if the city seeped darkness towards its head... bearing in mind that its map was a direct representation of a human body: either purposefully or purposelessly reflected by the evolving architecture, town-planning and urban scrawl set in motion by the founding fathers all those centuries ago. On that symbolic template, Mike knew that before one reached the holiday areas surrounding the city's feet one needed to cross the standing water of a waste reservoir.

He looked into the mirror of the office toilet to remind himself of how he should have been described as a person-if anyone needed to describe him to any people who did not know him. He had just physically added to that standing water (of which he had just unaccountably pictured) and he smiled a smile which he decided was uncharacteristic of him when viewed in a mirror. He wiped his hands on a paper towel. Was this how hawlers were meant to look? A strong personal face with deep lines and searching brows. Black looks offset by sweet smiles? Only the nemonymous ones had tantamount to the blank expressions of those bodily projected ghosts on TV dramas-so he knew exactly what he was, down to the chipped toenails, even if he hadn't yet dared tell Susan and Sudra.

The office work had taken a backseat ever since the news broke about the Angevin twins. n.o.body had given them a second or second's thought beforehand and maybe many of them knew nothing of their existence at all. The tea lady-pus.h.i.+ng her steaming urn-had nothing else in her new gambits of conversation. Not long ago she had been on about the wayward progress of the latest evictions on 'Big Brother'. Now it was whether the Angevin twins had been kidnapped or simply run away like the Famous Five had to Kirrin Island.

None had been prepared for the startling information-and how important it would be for the city and its life-until the population had woken up to such breaking news: hearing of the twins' existence for the first time followed a few seconds later by more data upon their mysterious non-existence. The twins, before this extreme metamorphosis, had been surprisingly old for their age, so nothing was ruled in, nothing ruled out.

Mike tried to concentrate on his paperwork-without much enthusiasm-occasionally glancing up at his colleagues to whom he often remembered talking when times were more ordinary. It had indeed been a job where office politics often took sway-with alternating recriminations and reconciliations. Corporate entertaining of clients at sport and art arenas. Hitting the knuckle of the business with sensitive tweaking of figures and projections.

"How's your wife doing at The Third Floor?"

Mike's colleague-what was his name?-had actually spoken to him. The first attempt at conversation for several days.

"OK. Do you know her boss? Ogdon he is. He often serves behind the bar. Strange bloke."

Mike had answered, as if he had learned his lines parrot-fas.h.i.+on. Ogdon was known to most people. He used to run a pub near the office to where everyone had resorted at lunchtime for a boozy crush and exchange of business gossip. More was gathered at such gatherings... than gathering the proper statistics back at your desk. Life was human. Life could not be contained within restricted socks. Booze loosened the tongues and then facts flowed, too.

"Yes, Ogdon. I know him. In fact, I knew him before he was a pub landlord. He used to sit for days in a square between tower-blocks, by a fountain, writing novels..."

Mike's colleague might have continued, had not Mike himself brought the contrived conversation to an end with a throwaway line: "Novels get you nowhere."

The bendy bus threaded the lower streets, having eschewed the mainstream for the back doubles. The windows were scratched by scores of cavalier vandals, who had tried to smash them just with their gaze until getting the milled edges of their s.h.i.+ny s.h.i.+llings to the gla.s.s in a pique of frustration that their lives were going nowhere fast. Arthur was behind the huge steering-wheel as the wheel tried to take him more than he was able to take the wheel. Much water had pa.s.sed under the bridge since that time he and his sister Amy were sent missing: and even he couldn't remember the circ.u.mstances. He'd need a brainwright sooner. In a dream, he once believed he and Amy were some kind of Royalty with Franco-Anglo roots: and their disappearance had set the whole city into a quiver. Not at all like the true circ.u.mstances: just he and his grubby-faced sister taking their pluck in their hands to see if anyone really cared for them and escaping deliberately into the darkening streets rather than go home for tea. Just a test for their parents. To see if they had sufficient love to find them again. A crazy, mixed-up looking for nothing except for the goal of people looking for them. A quest for a quest.

The two children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets-of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction as A&A, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Most tried to discover each other's names.

"Hey, are you...? How long have you been...?" asked one child with a polished face and k.n.o.bby knees. She failed to give any information about herself, however.

"Too long," said one of the posher kids. "There's a hole that goes to the other side of the world. But where?"

Indeed, whither the antipodal angst?

In the distance, one of the other children heard the hum of traffic-as if the city had started to re-ignite-and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.

"But n.o.body will ever find it. It's only a way to make us hope," said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures a.s.suming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.

"There's a bigger hole in my Mum's carpet!" laughed a sarcastic rascal, one of the few children not part of his or her own pair. He remembered the high flat that most adults had told him existed somewhere-even if it were only in forgotten dreams; even the slightest infection of dream sickness itself could engender false imaginings of real things or real imaginings of false things. The flat was an archetype, especially with kids. A literally dreaded flat where an individual-who was once one's best friend-spent most of the day and night in bed. n.o.body suspected this could be G.o.d Himself-as such seedy, tawdry dread could not possibly be any part of a divine iconography. Even the flat carpet had tantamount to melted into the grooves of the floorboards' ill-knotted and crumbly fibre.

The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play-seeking the bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (G.o.d)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore-having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children's ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it-and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.

Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra-feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids' parts, but some did run away although they didn't know why. But that's another story-as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fas.h.i.+on that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the gra.s.s neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright s.h.i.+ny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.

Mike pointed into the sky, drawing attention-for Susan's benefit as well as Sudra's-to where he saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a lego-brick device or even a model of a toy lorry the size of a real lorry-but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus... followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada... until Mike realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys... soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter's... until that shock became real as he watched one of them accidentally clip another-with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly cras.h.i.+ng into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even his feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky-more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet-and Mike prayed that they would not crash anywhere near their own house... a strange priority as even just one of them cras.h.i.+ng into the park itself would have threatened their lives, which were far more valuable than property. He also hoped that Ogdon's 'Third Floor' pub would remain intact. Then, quickly realising how vulnerable he, Susan and Sudra were in the open, Mike gathered Sudra up and told Susan to run alongside him-even though he didn't know if running away from danger was actually running into it.

The gra.s.s was scorched by their frantic escape.

He is dreaming. He knows it is him dreaming but, in retrospect, it could be just about anyone dreaming-Mike or Greg, even Ogdon. Hardly a woman, however, could have dreamed the dream-or a child like Arthur. Yet nothing is certain in such novel circ.u.mstances as dreaming a dream such as the dream he thought he was dreaming. He felt himself to be a man, not only within the dream context but also outside the dream as the person eventually to wake from it-and having already entered it via deep sleep, he seemed to mine even deeper. The dreamer had in his arms a girl and she was almost offering herself to him in skimpy night-clothes or an even skimpier evening dress. At first, he thought it was his daughter and, since then, within the dream, he has no reason to think it was not his daughter. She had shortish curly or bushy blonde hair and she was a bit plump so not at all like his daughter in what he later would consider to be waking or real life. But she was his daughter in the dream and it seemed they were both accustomed to these surrept.i.tious flings and she was kissing him longingly, lengthily-eventually with her tongue. He felt a climax ensuing as he was now convinced it was one of those dreams that often end abruptly at good or bad bits of it, and the dreamer woke in a sick sweat. And that is all he can remember of the dream, and whether he is still trapped in such a dream is quite unknown to anyone capable of knowing there is such a thing to know.

The children arrived at the Dry Dock-but the s.h.i.+p had been moved back to the sea during the night. Each pair circled the area where it had stood for months between stanchions, breezeblocks, gantries and giant chocks. This was where they suspected the hole they sought would be found-a service tunnel bled from the s.h.i.+p's hull for off-loading unfiltered substances: leading into the intricacies of the earth's valves. Not that they possessed those words to describe it. They merely had dreamed them, beamed from elsewhere, during the returning onset of the dream sickness (a sickness that most people, even children, had forgotten).

One child thought of the maps that had been on board-in the maproom. A wall of maps overlapping each other. This child then told his other half about it: "They were wall-sized maps on hardboard, one on top of the other, hinged at the top where the s.h.i.+p's horizontal false ceiling ended in meeting the vertical-and you needed to lift one map to see the one underneath, lifting them again and again until you reached the wall itself. Some of the maps are blank, some very complicated with lots of wavy lines..." He tried to take a breath as he took a long run at describing everything that went through his mind. He had the word-power and the enthusiasm to match it. His listener was in awe.

Other children, with similar memories, could hardly describe them. "The walls were red," one of them said (a girl with bushy blonde hair), meaning to say they were read like a book.

"There was a map of a railway," answered another precocious child who held the hand of an older child with fuzz on his top lip, the latter not seeming quite so 'with it' as the younger one.

"On the wall?"

"Sort of under the wall. You had to lift the top wall up to see under it-and the first map under it was of a railway, not a map of rivers, roads or mountains-only tracks crawling all over it like centipedes."

"Funny map to have on board a s.h.i.+p!"

"Yes, but most people these days think about trains, rather than boats, planes or cars."

"Do they? What about helicopters? Do you count them as planes?"

Children crowded in to listen, whilst others searched the distraught area where the s.h.i.+p had once been stationed-still trying to locate the hole to the centre of the earth-and beyond.

"Some people remember the times when grown-ups used to travel to work."

"Commuting," chimed in a bright spark from the back of the crowd.

"Yes, something like that-but they say you remember the open platforms in the countryside and the platforms you used but now a bit changed, mixing up the direction or if you had changed to the right platform for the next train-going back in the same direction as you came, while you are mixed up because most of the other pa.s.sengers are collecting themselves on the opposite platform to the one you are on-and you've forgotten whether you were travelling to work or travelling back home having already been to work..."

The chatter soon dissolved as the kids departed in dribs and drabs, having given up any chance of locating the pit entrance hereabouts. The chatter thus faded into the distance and, simultaneously, became more like chatter fitting for children to chat.

During their lunch-break from the office, Greg and Mike visited Ogdon's pub on the third floor of the New Trocadero. Mike was disturbed to catch Susan and Ogdon canoodling behind the bar when he and Greg arrived-but Susan quickly rectified herself with some careless excuse. Sympathies for all parties have been meticulously crafted by the implied omniscience of someone who stands behind all the characters. If only he or she were more up front with this task instead of keeping everything between the lines. And given these sympathies, one can try to imagine the sorrow in Mike's heart at this sign of seedy affection between Susan and Ogdon, plus the shame he felt at his colleague Greg also witnessing the tawdry scene and the further shame felt, indeed, by Susan herself. She quickly changed the subject, whilst serving Greg and Mike their lunchtime booze.

"The s.h.i.+p's gone, then."

Mike nodded. The huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock-not unlike the famous t.i.tanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit-had long become a fixture on the city's skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance-presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed-was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who-despite the frantic searching by the Authorities-were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the s.h.i.+p somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper...

"n.o.body seemed to notice," said Greg. "It's not as if the sea is close by, but they must have re-cut the river to the sea overnight, too! Amazing what they can do."

"I heard the groaning of sheet metal throughout the night, but I couldn't wake up properly-to check," announced Ogdon.

Meanwhile Susan's sister Beth and Beth's husband had entered the pub. A childless couple, but they had great sympathy with those who had lost children overnight.

Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but n.o.body listened.

"I went to his room-and he said he would show me his if I showed him mine. So I escaped back down the stairs, helter skelter. A long way from his flat to the ground. Heh heh! The sea, you say? It's not far to the coast from here, really. I once went..." He spat into his drink before he continued, oblivious that n.o.body was listening to his series of conversational non-sequiturs. "There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga-and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills-and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like 'Angerfin' on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing...."

n.o.body paid any attention to Crazy Lope's failure of communication, a failure even with himself. He didn't fill up the whole screen.

Greg and Mike soon left the pub, intent on returning to the office where the computers continued to work throughout their lunchbreak, like huge sensory calculators with amputated keys. Each man felt the other was a website, a blog city, a click on the right point bringing everything up in various stages of construction. Either that or they were slightly merry from imbibing on empty stomachs.

Beth was beautiful but she often seemed bitter... or strident... transferring furrows to the face that seemed out of place there. Her personality had changed the character of her face. Her sister Susan was less physically attractive, yet her nature was calmer, more amenable-not necessarily kinder or smarter than Beth, but less p.r.o.ne to have mind rage at the slightest setback. Patience was something Beth deeply lacked and her non-descript husband took the brunt of her short temper-to the extent of having any of his own personality stripped from him, like a gossamer upperskin peeling off and jettisoned: left just to cling on, for dear life, to the cast shadow in his wake.

When Beth's nephew and niece disappeared, Beth initially failed to react sufficiently: but as soon as she did take initiative on her sister's behalf, Susan stopped being simply bemused at losing two children she somehow hadn't realised she had. Beth had at first retained her habits, however-arriving in Ogdon's pub rather late and with cool nonchalance-yet later her inbuilt stridency took inevitable sway and she felt there was nothing to do but burn the candle at both ends, tussling insistently, if not violently, with the Authorities, whilst chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: "What children?"

"Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up..." Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid-unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children's disappearance and their parents' subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.

The dream sickness-like a 'flu pandemic-caused queues at doctors' surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn't know they suffered... but, unlike a 'flu pandemic, the dream sickness was inspired by an inference regarding an infernal ma.s.s-hysteria linked to a ma.s.s-suicide syndrome rather than to any individual's pain or conscious disability.

Many parents set up search parties-because Arthur and Amy were not the only ones believed to have inexplicably gone missing. Some search parties overlapped with other search parties. There were petty rivalries, even bitter disputes between them, believing their own children were being sought by other parties and vice versa.

Meanwhile, wells were dug all over the city towards the Northern coalfields. Separate queues were set up at these wells to reflect the medicine queues further south, as if some unknown synchronicity was sought to provide an explanation factor linking two imponderables and hopefully making them ponderable. Some children who hadn't yet run away from home played sandcastles around the wells-damming and river-construction games mocked-up from various substances abandoned by gardeners in allotment sheds previously rifled by unknown hands and given to the children. Weighing bucket against bucket was a common daily reality even though it sounds more like something they should have dreamed about... being tantamount to a waking sickness, a.s.suming anyone could get their heads around such a concept.

Much further south, towards the holiday 'feet' of the city-shape, other queues formed near ranks of parked silver craft that had been earmarked and then advertised as vehicles for tours beyond the city toward the sea in pursuit of adventures of which Jules Verne would have been proud.

Crazy Lope and John Ogdon had booked for an undersea tour, but then decided against it. This would have been under the tutelage of a rather outlandishly garbed and dramatic Captain Nemo (or so it was blurbed in the brochure), cas.h.i.+ng in on a vogue for such old-fas.h.i.+oned fantasy trips. Booking avoided queues but cost a lot more. Greg said he wanted to accompany them, but currently there wasn't a vacancy, unless a late cancellation arose. At that stage Crazy Lope and Ogdon had not yet cancelled. Greg wondered if he really shouldn't accompany Beth, Susan & Co. in search of Arthur and Amy. A holiday seemed a bit of a cop-out compared to partic.i.p.ating in a pukka search party. Mike himself kept his own counsel.

Long ago, Mike (or others on his behalf) believed he was a hawler but, with a generally increasing number of inscrutable dreams, that concept had vanished into some forgotten sump of tribal consciousness. The only thing known about a hawler was that there was no fact to know about a hawler. A hawler being a wide-faced creature that sat at the centre of the earth was an earlier description-but whoever or whatever created that description had since disappeared and thus become unaccountable for it.

Greg, meanwhile, remembered the zoo visit with some clarity. His face was a bit effeminate-and one could easily imagine him performing a drag act as a hobby. A Danny La Rue manque. He was a loner but people in the office where he worked thought he was a rather pleasant individual and they believed many of the stories he told about his non-existent life. His suits were immaculate. His jokes tasteful. His visits to the loo kept to the minimum as he hated mirrors. The zoo, too. Rather good at his administrative job, a whizz with the keyboard and could build websites at a flick of his wrist-or so it seemed. A pity he had such awful, guilt-ridden dreams about a daughter he'd never had. n.o.body knew about this, of course.

He missed Mike. Mike had once worked in the same office, but with the domestic problems that later beset him, he had left and moved to the other side of the city with his wife and children. They seemed somehow distinct from the Mike and Susan with whom Greg had since become re-acquainted on the screen... in the era of televised search parties pre-occupying the 'Big Brother' reality-show mentalities of the gullible public. And Amy-one of the children-was later found grown-up and vacuuming carpets without even knowing Mike was her father. But that's an earlier story since abandoned for whatever reason. Or a later one yet to be told. n.o.body was quite sure.

Crazy Lope was Ogdon's alter ego. And vice versa. The fact that one set of relations.h.i.+ps between them could overlap another yet opposite set continued to make it possible that they remained separate people, despite the evidence otherwise. Writing fiction was his first love-often about a vampire called a Horla after a French writer's story of the same name-but this had soon fallen by the wayside. n.o.body could earn money from writing such rarefied fiction-so he proceeded to put it on an antipodal back-burner whilst deciding to open a pub (his second love).

Ogdon gave himself an evening off from time to time, as pub life was generally very hard. But he spent most of this free time behind the other side of his bar, talking to regulars, if not to himself. Conversations on either side of the bar did differ, but it was all basically the same: 'pub talk': loosened tongues amid boozy brainstorming.

Ogdon: It's like fixing a painting with a special cold varnish, so it doesn't fade, or even change. Paintings can change, you know.

Crazy Lope: Change?

O: Yes-fixing dreams is one thing, like making sure we remember them a few hours after we wake up. But far harder is to fix reality itself-stopping it slipping or sliding into dream. That's the fixing I'm talking about.

CL: I didn't know you knew about such things. I've often had dreams which get confused and, sooner or later, lost forever. Does that happen to real things, too, then? I suppose you might be right.

O: Dream sickness-heard about that? Well, I've got a cure for it in a fixing-device... or a fixing-person, a new job that I think we need to fill. Government's not going to do anything about it.

CL: Dream sickness, yes, but n.o.body admits to it existing. n.o.body actually says those words in public.

O: I know. I think it's better called dream spam than dream sickness!