WEIRDTONGUE
Or The Glistenberry Romance
(originally known as 'The Nemophile': http://www.ligotti.net/viewtopic.php?t=896)
Complete up to part 24.
(1)
‘ “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 we 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 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 frontispiece was never discovered as I had swallowed it. They always said I had swallowed the dictionary. Wordiness and worry, that was my fate. Maybe that was the cause of my ambivalent health. A mixed blessing, if being full of words meant one could dream with the requisite words that one was empty of them.
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.
(2)
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 inducing of nemophilia - allowing vacuous urges to be released from their pent-up mind-trap by the hare-chase of aspirational non-existence - revealed aspects of an extreme nemophobia (self-centeredness where everything was self and nothing non-self), this being his more natural state of existence when unaffected by disease, which state of being unaffected, paradoxically, was the same 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 face up to 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 left here only an hour before by the hospital car. And the 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.
(3)
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 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. They 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 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.
(4)
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 that followed in the wake of his steaming, bubble-sounding meatcart (as he pushed - or more often pulled - its tiny sprung wheels) 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 (not only the times whence this scribe came but even his identity and whereabouts themselves) 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 sufficed 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 interfered 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 invisble thunderstorm.
It was then he heard his mobile ring - out-trilling the squeaking meat of the middle pan where he'd stowed it.
(5)
“Want some tea?”
Suzie made herself at home, whilst Gregory 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 practice 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 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 dialed 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 it 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.”
(6)
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, for fear was not voluntary; love, for 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 reterospective 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 hot summer’s day when the tussocks were hustled by a dry wind. At times, his mind, if not him 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 googles 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 as a story within a story. Feemy 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, 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 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.
(7)
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 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. Thsi 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, so an ever-renewable source was paramount. So much so, the paying audiences themselves became depleted. A vicious circle that even the Weirdmonger had failed to address.
(8)
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. 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.
(9)
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. Its noise was gutturally similar to half-articulate human speech. Complete with glottal stops. Feemy watched great flagons of thick black fluid being fed into various openings in the deck, as imputed fuel. Taking him - by means of crudely engineered mechanisms of motive force as lubricated by the flesh of those who worked in the bowels of the ship - from one mist of memory to another. He remembered the stuff he used to sell from his meatcart, liquidised black-pudding, similar to the fuel in consistency, in look and, possibly, feel, if not edibility.
Feemy had only met the Captain the day before, but by that reckoning, based on memory of duration, the meeting must have been before the voyage started. Or, even, whilst it was still being planned.
The Captain told him that it may be Victorian in London, but the rest of the world would likely never to have heard of the Queen who had given the era its name.
The Captain was the tallest member of the crew but surely that feature wasn't the only qualification for his position in the ranks of navigation. Yet he was the only one who could reach the handle of the door to the wheel room.
As they eye-balled each other over the dinner table in the Captain's quarters, the conversation became flippant and casual, rather than the earlier seriousness concerning latitudes, sextants and galley-slaves.
"Where we're going they speak a language called Weirdtongue," the Captain said, nibbling on some slimy provender Feemy himself had contributed to the ship's victuals. Fishily slimy, despite being meat.
"Oh? Do they have people to translate? I thought they spoke Chinese where we were going," said Feemy.
"We changed tack halfway through the voyage. The cargo was moved halfway across the world so that we could pick it up to return it."
Feemy looked quizzical. Little Chelly would have enjoyed this small talk. Ludicrous as some of it was.
Feemy missed his small customers in the City streets around St Paul's and wondered how he had reached this particular pass in life. A drug-runner was never a job he was ambitious about as a boy. He'd rather have been a train-driver. He scratched his head. Not only was the conversation hitting double-notes of misfired music in the meaning, so were his own thoughts.
"Can you speak Weirdtongue?"
The Captain shook his head up and down and then from side to side, as if the very question was in a language he didn't understand.
(10)
Gregory and Suzie decided to celebrate his first day out in the world after hospital by going to the circus. This had been a childhood pleasure as a child. And conveniently a new circus had just hit town, as advertised by the tilting airship over the park - where the big tent had been erected and surrounded by a congeries of caravans. And a menagerie of lows, roars, yaps and squeaks.
They left the flat, then headed towards the park via his Mum’s place where he reclaimed the bank book he’d left in her safekeeping. She hardly said a word. In fact, she may not have been there at all, and Gregory possibly helped himself by using the front-door key that was kept in the porch under the slipmat.
They first visited a smaller tent with a board saying ‘Friques’, a sideshow beside the main attraction. This contained many creaturely curios that had been collected around the world, living, breathing, usually silent. One enclosure contained a creature so far into its own death, it must have been there and come back again, by the look of it, because it was extruding a substance that had become itself: a substance that was nothing any creature could have produced short of having died and become its own excrement with, in turn, its own excrement, i.e. an excrement’s excrement quite fouller than its origination covered by an effigy-skin of itself to make recognition possible. Padgett Weggs, however, did not recognise it was himself. For one thing, there was no mirror in the enclosure.
Usually in such shows, one is not allowed to talk to the exhibits. Suzie was quite aghast at the sight of this thing but soon realised it was the remnant of a war veteran, someone who had helped fight fires during the blitz, before being dossed out into modern times. Or so the poor blighter claimed through a series of glottal stops. It was always good to listen to the stories of old-timers, turgid in tone and register though they may have been. Humouring old-timers was an art in itself. Reliving their highs and lows of life. Encouraging them to prattle on about this, that and the other. Learning, where you could, aspects of life that were dying out with the people who had lived them for real rather than fictionally. While Suzie held this conversation with living history, Gregory left the stifling tent for a breather outside.
The park was a strange one and shimmered in the heat. So hot this summer, the grass had yellowed over and the distant church spire – beyond the boating-lake – was a reminder of times beyond reality. That was what heat could do. Make things tenuous. Less simple to understand. Almost providing a protection against the dark implications of transgressed time. Proustian, without the necessity of understanding what the word meant.
The airship was a mere speck on the horizon now, where the gasworks squatted. Obviously to land elsewhere in the conurbation. The Big Top was just opening its doors, if tent-flaps could be credited with such a description. A beady eye in one of the nearby caravans followed Gregory as he prepared to fetch Suzie from amongst the Friques. She liked somersaults. And tonight there would be acrobats, as well as clowns. And a ringmaster with a whip for the circling performers on hooves and claws and slimy long bellies.
(11)
Suzie wanted Gregory to return to the ‘Friques’ sideshow for a quick look at another exhibit. The main circus was not due to start for about thirty minutes, but he found himself reluctant to take unnecessary risks. Life was never risk-free, however, so one needed to create a balance between fear and fortitude.
He had not sensed being watched. So, the next moment, after the arbitrary tabulation, he was relatively relaxed as Suzie took him by the hand towards a very tall figure labelled ‘Captain Bintiff’. This evident once-man was stridently garbed in wolfwhistle leathers. He managed to talk despite the interference from a a tongue that appeared side-eroded by a rather tough proposition in sherbet dips or acid drops. Shaggily overthick … protuberant despite signs of premature docking. Stunted, indeed, from further growth by a symbiotic merging with a gum disorder that stretched - with such disorder’s own seeming volition - from its normal hidden lairs of disease where brown sockets hardly held the stained teeth in place for talking let alone for eating … stretched, indeed, to infect vulnerable tissues of the tongue. A tongue hinged by decorative rivets of icy steel. Tipped with a needle from an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone to prevent erosion at least in this business end of the organ as well as to be wielded as a particularly nasty device in the act of love-making. Not that Gregory could imagine anyone willing to submit to such advances.
“Why have your b
