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The Nemophile (11)
The next part of the novel WEIRDTONGUE.
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continued from: HERE.
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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 brought me to see this thing?” Gregory asked Suzie. He failed to pay attention to her reply because of Captain Bintiff’s simultaneously louder articulations of mislanguage. Gregory had just remembered the hospital’s promise of a Grand Tour of Middle European health spas, including the famed Magic Mountain retreat in one of the more forgettably estranged countries that used to be part of the USSR. He looked at his bank book to see if it could bear any extraneous expenses not covered by the National Health Service. He never found it strange how his mind could so easily be diverted from interesting events with more mundane matters. It seemed all part of the parcel of his condition. He was shocked to find the account fleeced. And all his loose change having just been used for getting into ‘Friques’, no chance of a circus visit now.
He and Suzie tracked through the gloomier parts of the park, the sun finally silting into the broken horizon at the edge of the city where waste ground predominated and memories began regrouping in gaseous mists over marshland. Then a welling edge of moon grew to a gibbous horn double-tongued by the duty light-fairy blowing all manner of silent music in the shape of illuminations in the northern sky. They listened to the distant Circus fanfare of braying brass as it announced giant snails about to creep sluggishly around in strict formation amid silver-sarabands of glisten without any need of a ringmaster’s fire-tipped whips to spur further onward purpose beneath their slimy soles. An attractive trapeze-artist in a thong fell to her fate amid a shelob-spider’s safety-net of a web. Gregory knew all this because of the nemonities permeating the sticky summer night air with consciously air-borne fluff-balls of forgotten knowledge. However, some forgotten knowledge was so forgotten it probably was never remembered by anyone or anything, in that there was a single shadow following them quite divorced from their own two moon-forced shadows. Maybe a hybrid of all three.
CONTINUED HERE.
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========================
continued from: HERE.
========================
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 brought me to see this thing?” Gregory asked Suzie. He failed to pay attention to her reply because of Captain Bintiff’s simultaneously louder articulations of mislanguage. Gregory had just remembered the hospital’s promise of a Grand Tour of Middle European health spas, including the famed Magic Mountain retreat in one of the more forgettably estranged countries that used to be part of the USSR. He looked at his bank book to see if it could bear any extraneous expenses not covered by the National Health Service. He never found it strange how his mind could so easily be diverted from interesting events with more mundane matters. It seemed all part of the parcel of his condition. He was shocked to find the account fleeced. And all his loose change having just been used for getting into ‘Friques’, no chance of a circus visit now.
He and Suzie tracked through the gloomier parts of the park, the sun finally silting into the broken horizon at the edge of the city where waste ground predominated and memories began regrouping in gaseous mists over marshland. Then a welling edge of moon grew to a gibbous horn double-tongued by the duty light-fairy blowing all manner of silent music in the shape of illuminations in the northern sky. They listened to the distant Circus fanfare of braying brass as it announced giant snails about to creep sluggishly around in strict formation amid silver-sarabands of glisten without any need of a ringmaster’s fire-tipped whips to spur further onward purpose beneath their slimy soles. An attractive trapeze-artist in a thong fell to her fate amid a shelob-spider’s safety-net of a web. Gregory knew all this because of the nemonities permeating the sticky summer night air with consciously air-borne fluff-balls of forgotten knowledge. However, some forgotten knowledge was so forgotten it probably was never remembered by anyone or anything, in that there was a single shadow following them quite divorced from their own two moon-forced shadows. Maybe a hybrid of all three.
CONTINUED HERE.
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