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The Nemophile (6)
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Continued from HERE.
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The City of London, well beyond its Victorian allotment in time, suffered the blitz from wartime bombers, lighting up St Paul’s Cathedral while ground beacons poked the sky by means of spot-tunnels of light and crepitations interpenetrated the stained-glass-window-filtered shafts of Godness with more homely 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 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 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.
CONTINUED HERE.
====================
Continued from HERE.
===================================
The City of London, well beyond its Victorian allotment in time, suffered the blitz from wartime bombers, lighting up St Paul’s Cathedral while ground beacons poked the sky by means of spot-tunnels of light and crepitations interpenetrated the stained-glass-window-filtered shafts of Godness with more homely 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 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 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.
CONTINUED HERE.
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