Nowhere Near Milkwood (5 page)

“Agly matent,” said the first.

“Shell wi koll hom?” asked the second.

“O’ll du ot!” the first insisted.

“Nu, ot wes my odie. Lit’s foght fur thi roght!”

At this point I understood what had happened to language. Vowels had evolved. If monkeys, ragtime and milk can evolve — into humans, jazz and butter — then why not vowels? The problem was that they hadn’t evolved into anything
else
. There was simply nothing for them to change into other than themselves. They were only letters, after all. But they had done their best with what they had. Each vowel had turned itself into the next one along in the alphabet. The last one had looped round to the beginning, like a sequence of support bands in a Swansea pub. The instant I worked this out, I had less difficulty grasping the meaning of such sentences as I heard in my subsequent adventures, which is why I now render them in an ordinary manner, for these
subsequent
adventures began almost immediately.

I said: “Don’t slay me. For some reason, I love life.”

Together they cried, “Which cause do you support? The rebels or the revolutionaries?”

“Neither,” I returned. “I’m a musician.”

They stroked their beards. “That’s feasible. There was a musician once who was washed up on the Aracknid Islands. He had many arms. Word went round he was available for gigs and many theatre managers booked him. They assumed he would be able to play lots of instruments at the same time. But his arms were tentacles, and he just stood there on stage, unable to play anything!”

“I’m better than that,” I confessed.

“They pitched him back into the sea,” came the reply.

I said, “My destination is the Isle of Chrome.”

The one with the blue scarf declared: “That’s the only decent place in this land. Follow the path to its end. It forks once. Choose the right road. The left goes all the way to Paraparapara.”

“Which is beyond a joke,” said his opponent.

“Beyond
three
jokes,” corrected the other, though he didn’t specify what they were.

Then they returned to fighting.

I didn’t loiter to watch who won. That’s too immature a thing for me to do. I stole clothes from some dead warriors and continued along my way and the path became a road and I reached the fork I’d been warned about, and I bore to the right.

Now the landscape was softer and more civilised. The sky was filled with balloons and aeroplanes with mystic pictures painted on their wings. Groups of men marched up and down beside me. It made me nervous. I wore no scarf and thus was safe, for it quickly became apparent that the colours blue and red represented the similar but opposed philosophies of
rebellion
and
revolution
. With neither hue about my neck I declared my neutrality, trusted by none, but keeping my heads on my shoulders, apart from my long lost one, rather than on poles or plates or pickled in jars, all of which I saw when I passed the camps of one or other of these armies. I’ve never been a political animal, just a beast of mysterious origin and equally peculiar sorts. Safer that way.

I passed through small towns and then larger, and I slept in orchards and stole fruit. My health was adequate by the time I approached the outskirts of a vast city. It occupied a whole island and was reached across a bridge of tarnished gold. I walked along it and found myself standing at the entrance of a gateway which had been left open. A note fixed to one of the stone lintels announced: GONE TO LUNCH, PLEASE REPORT TO POLICE STATION ON YOUR OWN. And I passed through and searched for the building in question. Few citizens were out, for it was lunchtime, but I soon found the specified edifice. I assumed I had to register my presence there. The Station also featured a gate, but this one was guarded. A small boy levelled a primitive gun at me and I raised my hands in excessive surrender.

“Just following instructions,” I said.

He shook his head and wiped his running nose with a dirty sleeve.

“Will you let me in?” I asked.

He prodded one of my stomachs with the barrel.

“Then I shall leave,” I sighed.

He shook his head again and I grew annoyed.

“Listen here, young man,” I began, “I can’t stand here for the rest of the day, or for however long you think I ought to, because I’ve come a long way, through time as well as space, and I want to do the right thing and settle down here and find some work, for I’m a musician, so let me register my arrival, or whatever I’m supposed to do, and do it fast so I can be on my way looking for gigs, or I’ll be forced to snatch that gun from you and break it over my knee, do you understand?”

He didn’t, so I did. And he burst into tears.

A tall man came swaggering out of the building. He was imposingly absurd in his uniform, which was faded and unwashed. He wore a helmet of patently daft design and a long truncheon on his belt which interfered with his walking. He cried:

“What’s going on here then?”

And I answered, “The youth of today have no respect, neither in the today of the past nor the today of now. It’s the same lack.”

“I might dispute that,” he cried with a frown, “for everything changes over time, and in our era we make much use of chrome, whereas former civilisations favoured flint, iron and plastic. Thus I declare our modern lacks are more shiny than ancient ones.”

His speech was nonsense, but he observed me with profound interest.

“The boy was unreasonable,” I added sourly.

“Really? This surprises me. Percy is our most trusted sentry. The position of guard to the Police Station is hereditary and his father died before he was born. He is now seven years old and can actually aim his musket. He was much less use to my predecessor, who knew him only as a foetus and gurgling infant.”

“Your predecessor?” I asked.

“Giotto Pucker, the Prefect of Police.”

“And you are?”

He snapped to attention. “Tiepolo Bunter, the latest holder of that honourable title.”

“I see,” I said. “The big cheese.”

He licked his lips. “Yes, now that the President is stuck in exile. But let’s not waste time standing here. You look like a unique individual, a special visitor to our city, and you should permit me to give you a guided tour of our major attractions.”

I accepted the offer. He barked an order to the guard and the gun was lowered. It was safe to pass. I followed Tiepolo through the gate. As I did so, I asked:

“Will Percy be your sentry for life?”

“Yes, and no more. If he survives to old age, he will doubtless serve one of my successors as faithfully and stupidly as he has me. It’s unlikely I will last here much longer. Prefects of Police change quite rapidly. It’s the enormous stress of the job.”

In the grounds of the Station stood a series of statues on plinths. One was labelled with the word RADISH, but the sculpture which loomed up there was not a vegetable. It was a man. Peculiar. I noted that Tiepolo was excited by my appearance. He kept measuring me with his eyes. Against my expectations, he didn’t lead me into the Station itself, but up a ladder bolted to a wall. We gained the roof. It doubled as the landing pad for a curious flying machine. I blinked. It had more of the salad about it than any viable engineering principle. It soon became clear this device was going to convey us between the most notable features of the Isle of Chrome, if it didn’t destroy itself first.

“What precisely is it?” I enquired.

Tiepolo beamed. “An invention of my most capable employee. The celerycopter!”

“Is it safe?”

“Of course not! Get in!”

His tone didn’t encourage a belief that any objection was possible. I seated myself inside the contraption and he joined me. Vinegar dripped from the control panel onto my knees. The whole thing was more rickety than my very first gig, performed when I was in college over the public address system of a residential block for students. My reward for that show had been a week locked in a communal tumble drier in the deep basement, while the clothes of the students grew more and more thirsty for a wash, and armpits became so sweaty that young lovers ended their affairs, but they felt the cost was worth it to get back at me. Anyway, the machine lurched into the air at last and Tiepolo steered us over the red turrets of the domestic areas. And so my tour began. And it took all day. He was grooming me for something, I gradually learned what, and I was both thrilled and appalled. But first a few highlights of my trip, for they were genuinely impressive.

Imagine a temple as grand as a guitar must appear to an ant. This was the Temple of Bridget, a girl from long ago, worshipped as a goddess because she punched off the head of the man who destroyed G sharp. I chewed all my lips at this news. I nervously asked my pilot if this story was a myth or whether he believed it. He shrugged. Then I wanted to know more about the man she had attacked. Had his description been preserved? Tiepolo shook his head. Nothing much was known about him, but he must have been evil, ugly and an idiot. To destroy a note was a mean crime, but he had done it. If the glorious Bridget hadn’t punched off his head soon after, he might have proceeded to spoil the other notes too. That is why the world was grateful to her. I smiled painfully. Her Temple was amazing, and to continue my earlier simile, if an ant encountered a guitar it would surely feel an overwhelming sense of utterly submissive frustration, for it would know it had exactly enough legs to play every string at once, and yet wouldn’t be able to stretch far enough across to do so. It would probably crawl into the hollow body instead and reside there, sobbing formic tears.

We also visited the Bowl of Tunes, a stadium where all performable songs ever composed were played chronologically in relays by prisoners and slaves trained in the art of music. I say
performable
because anything which featured a G sharp had been censored, and the instruments had been modified over the ages to render the playing of that note impossible or at least very difficult and subject to monstrous penalties. We alighted in the centre of the Bowl and listened for quarter of an hour. These G sharpless melodies were a heavy emotional burden on the shoulders of my ears, and I was grateful when we departed, though the strains of the current piece, the ‘Wurst Hassle’ song, an irritating hotdogger, followed us into the low clouds. And these clouds were like curtains covering my shame, which was climactic. Then we flew onward and landed next to the National Museum.

I expected something mighty from such an institution, for Tiepolo had informed me there was now a one world state and that the words
national
and
global
were synonymous. The Cussmothers, it seemed, had realised their political dreams. Their meddling in my own time had led to all this. Over the centuries, the secret seeds they planted in the separate countries of the world had sprouted and grown and tangled themselves into one big permanent knot. That’s a bad analogy. A better one might be that the plots and schemes of my former colleagues were the acids which dissolved borders until there was only one country left in the world, the world state itself, governed from this city which was also an island. Not bad for a musical band! I felt a brief pang of regret I hadn’t remained with them during their time of success, but in fact our fates were still linked in a remarkable way. Not that I had an inkling of this yet, though Tiepolo kept looking at me in a significant manner.

We entered the museum and approached the first exhibit in the first room and he pointed at the glass and said: “Music was a martyr to him. This belonged to the dirtiest traitor to melody.”

A shudder ran the length of my body, starting as a slight quiver and ending in a tidal wave of flesh which crashed against one set of ankles. My shudders have enough room in my frame to gain phenomenal power. I regarded the skull on its cushion and panted: “The lost head of the man who destroyed the note G sharp? The head which was punched off his shoulders?”

“The very one,” winked Tiepolo.

I sobbed. “What a marvellous woman that Bridget was.”

“You have become curiously sentimental.”

I gripped the edges of the case to stop myself fainting. “Yes, but this is a totally unique exhibit.”

Tiepolo laughed. “One of many. It’s a fake.”