WEIRDTONGUE
The Glistenberry Romance
By DF Lewis
“I come here,” the Weirdmonger roared, “to sell Weirds, and Weirds are merely Words that materialize into all sorts of true existence the moment I release them from between my lips…”
Even these introductories squawked into the sky like forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born.
From ‘Weirdmonger’ (Back Brain Recluse 1988; Prime Trade Paperback 2003)
=====================
Today I lick porridge from a bowl, mapped with jammy smears.
Forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born? I tried to give myself time to absorb the implications brought by the visitor to my hospital ward. A visitor, he said with wide visibilities of Summerset from a tower on a hill, with the animal zodiac embedded in the fields and hills below. The vanishing sun (he said) silted, rather than lowered, into the broken horizon.
The Weirdmonger never had a name. He was the original nemophile. I had read of his doings. So far only one scribe had dared mention his existence. One scribe, one character. He told me by the end of his visit I would learn his true name. A historic moment. When a scribe’s away, the scribe’s creations do play, they say. Or at least the Weirdmonger said, and that at least made it true enough for me to remember as once being true even before he said it.
“Hey,” I suddenly said, “who are you?”
A nurse looked askance from the other side of the room, presumably at my raised voice. She had been told that the Weirdmonger was a close relative of mine. And I had not gainsaid this. Too late now. I looked appealingly towards her, hoping she would come over to double-check the relative identities of our two dark shapes sitting in the visitors’ alcove near the makeshift library. The nurse called this alcove a carrel. A private study-cubicle. I wasn’t sure. But I had seen many inmates entertaining visitors in this carrel over the years. This was my first time. I was rarely graced with visitors; I had called myself unlucky, bereft. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Visitors came in many different disguises, some lighter than others. And this one today was not exactly an imponderable, but an undesirable.
Many years before, I had spotted a certain visitor being entertained by another inmate; I felt sure it was not that inmate’s visitor by rights because the visitor resembled my mother, a woman who had looked plaintively over at me but left without visiting me. So, indeed, I knew she had visited someone whom she had not recognised at all. Brings tears to my eyes, even today.
During the posy of pauses encouraged by my thoughts, the Weirdmonger had idly picked up a loose book from the carrel table and riffled through it.
“Why are you here?” he said, looking up, instinctively aware that my mind was now empty.
“I have trouble distinguishing between being ill and being well,” I answered. There was a medical name for this condition, but it didn’t fit. I was never cold. In fact I suffered from the heat.
The sun was baking through the window even now as I watched tussocks being hustled by a dry wind.
“My own trouble is distinguishing between present and past,” he countered, with a glinting look of boastful waywardness.
I see him clearly. He has all the features that one associates with yesterday.
The nurse plucks my fingers from the bowl of book, teasing the letters n-e-m-o-p-h-i-l-e back upon the slowly reconstituting leaves and then leaving them outside to dry into w-e-i-r-d-t-o-n-g-u-e. The book’s frontispiece was never discovered as I had swallowed it. They always said I had swallowed the dictionary. Wordiness and worry, those were my fate. Maybe that was the cause of my ambivalent health. A mixed blessing, if being full of words actually meant I could dream with the requisite words that I was empty of any words.
At least I found the visitor’s name on the spine that I never attempted to eat, though it did show gnaw-marks. The nurse tried to hide it. Mummerset. Mummerset was the name. Gregory Mummerset. The name rung up all sorts of futures and pasts, without which this gift of the present would never have been granted. The ward had many inmates that were ever changing their minds. A hospital is made of many wards. We exchanged visiting cards cut from other spines. Then we tore them up.
Through the ward window could be spotted the back-end of the Weirdmonger’s medicine wagon that, as well as trundling away into the slow setting, also created it, brought it gradually into existence.
***
Nemo = Latin for ‘nobody’
Gregory was officially cured and excused further in-patient treatment, soon realising – as he did by virtue of the cure and his renewed powers of realisation – that part of the treatment he had just undergone in the hospital ward was the disease itself.
Nemophilia had been induced to remove any taint of nemophobia: a variant form of self-mythology. Indeed, by this induction of nemophilia – allowing vacuous urges to be released from their pent-up mind-trap by the hare-chase of hoped-for non-existence – revealed aspects of an extreme nemophobia (self-centeredness where everything was self and nothing non-self). Nemophobia was his more natural state of existence with no disease, which state of being was disease in disguise.
In summary, Nemophilia was the desire to be a nobody, but not simply a desire, but an intractable passion to self-efface or to become both nameless and unnameable. Nemophobia was its apparent opposite by hating that nemophiliac self.
In this way, nemophobia and nemophilia, whilst superficial opposites, were also part of a synergistic, symbiotic oxymoron-relationship, a situation that encouraged further self-effacement by needing to address the self-disgust created by the recognition of the self itself. It also created extreme wordiness of expression as a by-product: an unwanted side effect.
Meanwhile, the quality (or not) of the self itself did not matter; it was simply the very recognition of it (of any self) that created this paradoxical disease (akin but distinct from Dream Sickness, of which more, later).
His eyes skimmed the hospital release papers as he gradually recognised the surroundings of his own flat, still dishevelled from his absence, but about to be further dishevelled by his presence. The name ‘Gregory Mummerset’ was clearly printed at the top together with his real-world address (this flat) – followed by scrawled officialese, presumably a prescription for his own general practitioner or pharmacist. Gregory did not need to know. He cringed at knowing his own name. He’d rather be called the Weirdmonger. At least that name did not exist as a signpost for a real person.
There came a knocking at his door. He had been brought here only an hour ago by the hospital car. And the car’s driver had knocked upon leaving in the way Gregory imagined he had been taught to do, as a dress rehearsal for the real knocking that now had indeed arrived. Gregory did not believe in ghosts. But he was yet unaware of the power of fiction to produce them in real life. He was soon to learn many things as he was taken abroad on a Grand Tour to all the health spas of Middle Europe. Indeed to the Magic Mountain itself.
He lifted himself heavily from the table-seat (reminding him of the one in the carrel at the hospital) – and opened the door.
“Hiya, Gregory,” said the beaming face of his girl friend. She was soon remembered and Gregory gave her a light kiss on the cheek.
“How are you, Suzie?” he said. “I didn’t have chance to let you know that I was coming out today.”
“I somehow knew, when I saw the curtains drawn,” she said.
He looked over her shoulder as if he expected someone to be behind her.
“Why didn’t you visit me?”
She shrugged. “Mum has been ill. My hands have been full. Sorry.”
“I only had one visitor and that was yesterday.”
“You’ve only been in three days.”
“It seemed like years.”
“Are you feeling better?”
Gregory frowned. He did not know. Part of his bad health was not being able to differentiate good and bad health. “I must be better. Do I look better?”
“You look great. Aren’t you going to let me in?”
“I’ve got nothing in,” he said looking back into the room. “Are you alone?”
“Of course, I’m alone,” she said, taking it upon herself to cross the threshold, ignoring the half-hearted attempts to guard his territory against visitors.
Her shadow – at cross-purposes with the direction of the light – followed her in.
***
Gregory Mummerset was once a boy. He was from a poor family. Or he was told they were poor to excuse or explain the type of clothes worn, the meagre food and lack of television.
“But TV wasn’t invented then,” he thought, as if arguing with those who had somehow taken charge of his past.
He was, however, fully in control of his boyhood dreams. Nobody could intervene upon them. Meanwhile, those who wanted to intervene did intervene in respect of the actuality of his boyhood days themselves. Telling was interference.
He remembered – without fear of such interference – two recurring boyhood dreams in particular, dreams haunting that ancient sleep of his.
The first dream figured a credibly sized modern mobile phone (long before these things were invented) with a dial that most real old-fashioned black bakelite telephones boasted in those days. The sprung holes, however, in the tiny dial were impossible for normal sized fingers to push round, even a child’s.
The second dream was more difficult to describe, if not remember. Gregory could do with some interference to establish the full feel or contents of the dream. But he eschewed it. He required his dreams untouched by any hand, let alone a writer’s. He dreamed he was a woman of mature years and unbecoming looks, the wife of a man in charge of a race similar to a flat horse race from springable stalls or (to fit the era in which the dream happened within his then contemporary sleep), more like greyhounds in traps ready to catapult after the mock clockwork hare, ripening itself for the mad spin round the track. Yet the animals in this race appeared to be sizeable cattle of a strange rumination – and they were lowing in expectation of their own race, as he (or she) inferred. It was dark in the hall outside the ponderously-punctuated-by-the-sound-of-a-clock-ticking parlour where the dreamer was with her baby tuckoo. The moocows were readily pent-up by inferred stalls as evidenced by their crumpled horns and awkward demeanour … about to race along the even darker single-file steepness that vanished upwards like stairs in a small terraced house. The moocows kept twirling their mobile faces upon the spectator at the open parlour door. But what was the delay? A certain dread at even questioning it. The female dreamer’s husband was obviously having problems releasing the cattle because they started to turn ugly in tantrums of sluggish impatience. The dreamer abruptly slammed the parlour door in a panic which she failed to comprehend. A mother’s instinct to safeguard her baby tuckoo? And then she began to feel a deep pressure behind the shut door, gradually deepening further, visibly straining the lock and her ability to push back against it beyond reason. At that point, Gregory’s dream always ended when simpler, yet unreportable, words took over. And maybe the dreamer continued, whilst Gregory woke. Or Gregory truly became a permanent dreamer in a dream world, leaving a different boy to wake. Or he was baby tuckoo itself, aware of the dream by being in the dream. Inference or interference, which of these it was remained clouded. Even today there are no mobiles in dreams.
***
Blasphemy Fitzworth was, as many already knew, a cat's meat man who sold his wares throughout the winding catacombs of streets in Victorian London. The children followed in the wake of his steaming, bubble-sounding meatcart as he pushed – or more often pulled – its tiny sprung wheels. They were often cock-a-hoop with life, despite the mouching, slouching way of dirt and life that threaded their young bones with yellow marrowfat as well as feeding further redless pigments into their bloodcourses. They joyfully shouted 'Feemy' (a foreshortening of his name) when they heard his costermonger's cry in an indeterminate distance, slowly drawing nearer and nearer from (to them) impossible angles of approach:
"Gout cat! Spout cat! Watch their whiskers sprout, cat!"
The legend – not among the kids as they were too young to know – indicated that Feemy Fitzworth was a spy from other times, from other worlds alternating with ours, ever on the search for evidence of greater and (then again) greater Gods than those in which the indigenous peoples already believed. A step-ladder toward the noumenon. Ecumenical, if not economical, with the truth.
The choice of cat's meat vending as a disguise was first described by another visitor to our times, but facts got so crosswired, they have become ludicrously confused with where he was going or whence he'd just been and why. Some even believed that the scribe was Feemy himself. But that confusion was one confusion too far. A first straw that broke the linear dromedary's back. But none knew. None probably cared.
Chelly Mildeyes was one such kid, maybe a kid in disguise, who followed Feemy by becoming a spy upon a spy or, more likely, a reminder of the ghost she replaced. But that is only hearsay. Other texts may tell fresher truths, but today we can only be provided with this one, given any timely exegesis by external sources or not. She certainly mixed in with the other scrawny, tornly dressed kids with a will and a believability that makes any doubt quite parsimonious and self-demeaning.
She plumped a fist into the meatcart's back pan, evidently not eager to clutch at the valves of still heart-beating brisket melts (hence the fist rather than a clawing open palm), but to see if she could do it without Feemy noticing. A devilment for its own sake. Either to enhance her disguise in face of Feemy's own disguise or, more likely, because she actually enjoyed devilment for its own sake. She was soon halted from her childish dipping by the sight of Feemy saluting the sun as a sort of shading of the eyes against its glare. She thought he said he could see Great Old Ones gliding in with huge cattle faces from a direction he'd not expected. Their lowing filled the sky with a monotonous low-key invisible thunderstorm.
It was then he heard his mobile ring – out-trilling the squeaking meat of the middle pan where he'd stowed it.
***
“Want some tea?”
Suzie made herself at home, whilst Gregory Mummerset relearned the art of making the tea he had just offered.
“Hadn’t you better ring her?” she said, idly looking through the parlour window at the empty street.
“Ring who?” came the voice from the kitchen.
Suzie scratched the back of her neck. “Scat!” she said absentmindedly – more to herself than anything else. “Your Mum … to tell her that you’re out of hospital.”
“Oh … yes, I suppose I’d better. Not that she ever cared about me. She never visited. But you say I was only in for three days? Hmmm. But I don’t know her number since she moved.”
“Try her mobile. She won’t have changed that. She’s had the same mobile through six husbands!” Suzie laughed. “Anyway, how are you really? Got rid of the gremlins?”
The word ‘gremlins’ was a euphemism for Dream Sickness, a plague of which had only recently been taken under control by the authorities. The difficulty was to trust that the doctors weren’t under its influence themselves because different forms of the complaint would have caused them to practise equally different methods of treating it. Now the plague was effectively under control, indeed almost one hundred per cent eradicated, anyone claiming to be suffering from it was immediately branded a malingerer or simply work-shy. Gregory was one of the very last patients credited with the validity of the sickness. In various forms, it had different names, most of which Gregory had now forgotten or been forced to forget as part of the treatment. It was still unclear if any form of the sickness was indeed just another way of saying it was a perception of it by someone who was also suffering from it (or not). The names were merely labels of convenience whatever the setting. Once one started studying these factors and sorting them out into the correct pigeon-holes, the hazier became the task itself that had started so clearly. Even writing about these factors at all made them worse. One started with a clear mind – but such clarity laid bare the implications of the sickness which in turn radiated back to the clear mind that one tried to remember as the one you had started off with before commencing the analysis with a subsequent confident hope of future synthesis … thus making even the earlier conversation about tea, mobiles and mothers just a misty memory from another world.
Gregory picked up the phone and dialled the number he found in a notebook as being for his Mum’s mobile. A man’s voice answered: “Yes?” There was a background noise of children shouting in play.
“Is Mum there?”
Suzie stared meaninglessly upon the tea’s meniscus as if scrying for omens, whilst Gregory held the phone away from his ear: his turn for staring … in disbelief. The clatter of wooden wheels outside the house filled the empty hot street with a sign of the Weirdmonger’s return. A wind-ballooning canvas zeppelin marked with signs of a circus… followed by a troop of clowns dressed in advertising sandwich-boards each bearing a single truth.
Suzie shrugged off what was hugging her like a winter coat.
Gregory, in turn, shook his head as he emerged from his own misty memory. He stared at Suzie. “Yes, I’d better ring my Mum. She may have my bank book.”
***
The City of London, well beyond its Victorian allotment in time, suffered the blitz from wartime bombers, lighting up St Paul’s Cathedral from ground beacons poking the sky with spot-tunnels of light and the crepitations interpenetrating such stained-glass-window-filtered shafts of Godness by means of smoke and fire. This was nineteen forty something – not even the narrator responsible for this tranche of fiction or reality being able to plump on the exact date, for fear of triggering unwelcome repercussions further along the time-line (back or forward). The river sounded far too close for this to be a sane London geography.
Padgett Weggs, a dosser who squatted within cardboard bedding quite close to the Cathedral, watched the sky in awe. The old-fashioned bomb-doors slipped their greyhounds of the night for racing against the suicide versions that rained in from the future. Slots of darker night opened up above Padgett. He both feared and loved these slots: fear, because fear was not voluntary; love, because love of his own ease of death would remove him from lovelessness and famine.
He saw more than he wanted to see. He was writing a book in his head. It was either a real book. Or a dream of book. Evacuee children with labelled suitcases carried books in their heads when they travelled miles along railtracks from their family for no greater retrospective safety in the countryside. Because one day the books themselves would explode more devastatingly than the blitz bombs.
Padgett’s book described Gregory Mummerset. A moon-faced man with a beard and glasses, mole on the left cheek. Quite a nice gentleman who had given his name to the Weirdmonger. Padgett needed to read till the end to prove or disprove that the Weirdmonger and Gregory were the same individual, if not the same body. Gregory was out of his depth. The things in his head made it feel bigger. He was getting older without having fully planned for death. It was as if life itself expunged death with a brainwash of busy projects and a false claim for fame. Fame was never immortality. He must have known, surely. His intermittent wife Suzie was just another shadow in a coat, even on a hot summer’s day when the tussocks were hustled by a dry wind. At times, his mind, if not himself, settled at the top of Glastonbury Tor watching the evacuee children arriving for their wartime billets. He made out a bit of the animal zodiac in the fields and hills around. Torus. He wondered if he was a child who would never find his mother again, even when computers later were to allow universal communication and searching into the deepest corners of memory and lost heritage. Blitzed search-engines of food-for-thought as firewalls or screensavers: far preferable to the cheap-cut spam these evacuee children would be faced with tonight.
The book also described Feemy Fitzworth the cat’s meat man as a story within a story. Feemy Fitzworth left the City and Victorian times in general and reached the coast where a harbour drifted into gossamer twilights, rather than the twilights coming to the harbour. He was due to take a voyage for the spice-trails in far off Cathay and Samarkand. Better than selling his version of cat’s meat spam. He missed Chelly Mildeyes, but all the children (including her) had vanished towards forgotten times in which it became unsafe to be born at all. Evacuated from history itself. Feemy’s face was lined. He was a rather stout person who enjoyed being jolly and noisy. Yet he loved the quiet interludes of fantasy that he was about to enjoy. Given the book’s ability to follow him there.
Padgett Weggs the dosser was fighting on more than one fiction front. It remained to be seen whether the nemonities between each front could summon up their sinews of reality. He lost the thread temporarily as a particularly loud firestorm erupted in spasmodically deliberate trials at creating the blitz bomb that would cause it. The Cathedral reddened in pain and grew dark again. He heard the river drawing ever closer, threatening to make the Cathedral a straddling one. He went back to his book, unfolding the corner of the page he had folded down inside his head.
***
Measured out in words. He paced down the street outside the block of flats, leaving Suzie posted at the window of his kitchen to watch him test out a theory. That the canvas wagon that they had seen passing was much bigger than even a huge circus tent, judging by the scale and perspective he was now rhythmically intoning under his breath from the water hydrant to the postbox.
And if this fact were proved, it would also prove that Gregory was still suffering from Dream Sickness and, not only him, Suzie, too.
***
Feemy Fitzworth watched the departing coast slowly vanish into yet another mist of memory.
The shanty-singing sailors were already getting into the swing of things, as the sails bellied out with a wind that belied that very mist.
The horizon, however, soon glowed with a orange worm wriggling along it – and the towers of a city that punctuated it like striated windfarms. The journey had been foreshortened towards this new coast. So much so that narration itself had taken a backseat, suffering its own form of writerly sickness more akin to blockage than dreaming. Continents of imagination diminished to a pinprick.
***
Weggs slowly unpeeled himself from the damp cardboard; dampened not only by the city’s gritty dew but also by his own liquefying incontinence.
London was waking to a blanket beige calm creeping up the sky as a forerunner of a timeless sun.
Ruins steamed, rather than smoked, in the rising heat. Time to regroup, before the next onslaught.
The dome of the Cathedral quickly bared itself of bovine Irreducibles, because, in any sane universe, they could only clamber there out of daylight hours. This dome: the Tor of his dreams inverted into a stone plateau that belied curved geometry except when one imagined it for real.
A crocodile of modern schoolchildren in Indian File, all with labelled satchels on their shoulders, momentarily ghosted past along Ludgate Hill on an imputed outing to see the inside of the wartime Cathedral.
***
The Weirdmonger sat in his medicine wagon, hatching more Weirds in the guise of Words. Nearby he heard the clowns – working beyond their own union’s demarcation lines of duty – pulling the guy-ropes of the canvas Big Top, with groans as well as the sea-songs they had learnt from musical dreams. Varicoloured smears dripped up their faces like tears returning to mascara. One clown in particular – unseen, yet thought of, by the Weirdmonger – plotted to punish any ringmaster who might throw custard pies at him that very night. He left one guy-rope over-loosened and a top pinion awkwardly sited within the rope’s purview of leverage.
Meanwhile, the Weirdmonger left his wagon – himself unseen – to resume hospital-visiting for replacement ringmasters. Too many had escaped, during the current plagues, making an ever-renewable source paramount. So much so, the paying audiences themselves became depleted. A vicious circle that even the Weirdmonger had failed to address.
***
The library was unusually silent as a pair of disembodied hands sorted various papers into the pigeon-holes of the carrel’s wooden face-facing wall. This was a writer who was lonely and did not benefit from the company of his own characters in the same way as these characters benefited from each other. They were firm and fast friends, these characters, when off duty, despite the lack of focussed delineation (so far) in being able to pick them out from any old crowd.
Hence, the need to sort names with personalities and then with physical features by means of the current collating in the abandoned library. Hence, too, the empty shadow – known as nemophilia – welling across him like a blanket mindset of inarticulate ink.
***
The sailors lowered their sails. The ship managed the rest of the long voyage into the harbour by means of a motorised force that was hidden from view.
