The Smell of Telescopes (10 page)

“Germs!” I shrieked, “spread no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the handkerchief!—snot, snot!—it is the sneezing of my hideous nose!”

A Girl Like A Doric Column

1....“Excuse me, is your girlfriend feeling unwell?” 

“I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

“Stop me if it’s none of my business, but she seems to have a... It appears that her... I mean to say...”

“Dribble it out man. What’s wrong with her?”

“Her head is made from blue marble.”

“What? Nonsense! Wait a moment, so it is! Somebody must have stolen the original and substituted this lifelike replica. Who would do a thing like that? Why didn’t I notice anything?”

“Gangs of pickfaces roam the subways. They target a victim and make a replica head from whatever materials they feel comfortable with. Heads which are already loose can be swapped in seconds. I bet your girlfriend had a heavy skull on a slender neck?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t particularly valuable.”

“To the right people it might be...”

“That sounds rather ominous. Please explain.”

“The gangs export them to China. I read about it in the paper. Huge demand for heads over there. They use them for ornamental purposes. It’s just not safe to take a lady out.”

“Good job I didn’t like her very much. But I promised her father to get her home in one piece before midnight.”

“Will he notice that her head isn’t real?”

“Absolutely. He’s obsessed with details. Besides, she sings for him in the parlour after supper. It’s a family tradition. I’d better confess and face the music, or lack of it.”

“Rather you than me. What will he do?”

“I shudder to think. He’s very protective. He works in the foundry. Perhaps he’ll boil my ankles over a red-hot girder. Why do relationships always have to be so complicated?”

“I asked myself the same question when my wife left me. The ceiling was falling down and she was fed up with getting plaster in her hair, so she just walked out. Packed a suitcase and went, without saying goodbye. She was run over by a steamroller.”

“That’s life, I guess. But what shall I do?”

“Maybe I can help. I’m used to dealing with vengeful fathers. It’ll cost you, though. I’m not a charity.”

“I’m willing to pay. What’s the price?”

“The girl. I collect females like her.”

“I’m not sure. She might not want to go with you. She’s very choosy with her affections. You are bald and ugly.”

“With a blue marble head how will she tell the difference? Come on, it’s either that or facing the father alone. If you’re worried about how I’ll treat her, put your mind at rest.”

“Well I’d like to know. It’s only natural.”

“Of course. She will be assisting my religious studies. I’m turning my house into a temple. It’s a sacred task I have lined up, nothing odd. Think of her as a foundation of spirituality.”

“I can’t argue with that. Let’s shake hands on the deal.”

“That’s more like it. You won’t regret this. I’m a professional and always guarantee my work. Wait and see. I bet if you have trouble with a father in the future you’ll seek me out.”

“I don’t intend losing another girlfriend’s head!”

“I think you’ll find most women have loose ones these days. Perhaps you’ll get lucky and meet a divorcee. They tend to use glue. But nothing is really secure on the subway any more.”

“The next stop is mine. You’d better follow.”

“The stop belongs to the railway, but I know what you mean. Shall I take your girlfriend’s arm to help her down?”

“She’s not yours yet. Come on, let’s jump off here.”

“We’re right behind you... Not that way, dear... You have a complex and exquisite network of veins, like a map of an antediluvian city ruled by intelligent reptiles... Mind the gap...”

2....“Well that was a cheap trick to play on me!” 

“Not at all. I fulfilled my side of the bargain. You have little to fear from that father now. A successful mission.”

“You replaced his head with a mahogany one!”

“Some people are never satisfied. I’m a pickface, but I work alone. You should have realised that when I talked so knowledgeably about China and the export market. But I’m only able to carve heads from hardwood. A marble head is quite beyond my ability.”

“Do you make a habit of this? How many commuters have you deceived? I ought to inform the transport police.”

“Don’t be churlish. Just give me your girl.”

“I guess you deserve her. But I feel nervous. Why do business-deals always have to be so complicated?”

“I often ask myself that question when I’m sitting at home, burning incense to the deity who lives in my broom-cupboard. He lurks behind the buckets and refuses to come out.”

“Heavens! I thought dry-rot was bad enough. What sort of god is he? Does he answer prayers or hurl lightning?”

“Neither, I’m afraid. I think he might be one of the Old Ones, left behind during the last ice-age. At night he plays the washboard with his gnarled fingers. I’m sure this music is what made the ceiling fall down. He lives on spiders and detergent.”

“Sounds like the Baby Jesus to me. Is he swaddled?”

“No, completely naked. When my temple to him is finished, I believe he’ll be more approachable. I’ve chosen the Dorian style of architecture for his sanctum, because it represents the last period when the Old Ones openly interacted with humanity.”

“And the girl is a sacrifice to him?”

“Oh dear, no. I need her to hold the roof up. I’ve got a dozen with blue marble heads lining the lounge. When there’s enough of them to take the weight, I’ll knock the walls down.”

“Hey presto! An instant temple!”

“That’s the idea. He’s far too small a god to digest a whole female in one go. For sacrifices I rely on my wife.”

“I thought you said she left you?”

“She did. But I rushed out after the steamroller and peeled her off the asphalt in a single flapping sheet. I rolled her up under my arm and stored her in the downstairs toilet.”

“You sentimental old fool. How touching!”

“Whenever he gets frisky and starts playing his damned washboard, I tear off the required length and feed it to him on a pole. My wife doubles up as a blanket on cold nights. I think I prefer her after the accident. But she’s getting shorter every month.”

“This is my stop. I’ll take my leave of you here. But I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid. I’m also a pickface.”

“I should have known! You have fingers like chisels.”

“I specialise in brass heads. I made a switch when you looked away. Now you shan’t finish your temple.”

“You swapped her blue marble head for a brass one? That’s a breach of contract. Give it back this instant!”

“You misunderstand. I can’t blame you, considering what your brains have to sit in. It’s your head I picked.”

“So you have! That’s really brassed me off. You’d better return it. How will I ever enter an ironmonger’s without losing face? You’ve ruined me. Come back here for a good polishing!”

“Sorry, I have to deliver a parcel to China. But look on the bright side. You’ll be able to fry mushrooms on your cheeks. Haven’t you wanted to do that for years? It’s not all doom.”

“What will my god say? He’ll be absolutely livid.”

“But mine will be enraptured. I’ve also got a broom-cupboard with a resident deity. He’s the last of the
Older Ones
, who are much older than the
Old Ones
. Apart from the
Oldest Ones
they’re the oldest
Ones
of all. He plays the spoons all evening. I suppose diabolism and skiffle must be connected somewhere along the line.”

“It’s not fair! I’m a widower!”

“So am I. My wife was a steamroller. She blamed herself for rolling over a pedestrian and committed suicide.”

“But what about my temple? It was so ambitious.”

“I’ve decided to adopt your idea for my house. Perhaps it will keep my god away from his blasted spoons. He’s bigger than yours so I’ll have to build a larger temple. He’ll need a higher roof and girls just aren’t tall enough. Let me think it over.”

3....“Excuse me, is your boy-friend feeling unwell?” 

“I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

“Stop me if it’s none of my business, but he seems to have a... It appears that his... I mean to say...”

The Orange Goat

Ye who boil are still among the kitchens; but I who bake have long since gone my way into the region of cellars. For indeed strange cakes shall rise, and secret crusts be filled, and many diners shall pass away, ere my ovens be seen of men. That’s one way of putting it. Another is that all my efforts to perfect the blueberry pie had failed miserably, and I hoped to hide my mistakes underground. 

It was summer in Monmouth, and the market with its imps was filled with exotic goods and mundane bads. A maddening wind blew across Monnow bridge and the pub signs were playing cricket with wasps. I had rented a basement in the ‘Green Dragon’ for my experiments and regular explosions shook the building, turning the patrons upstairs a matching colour. Fire was my boss; steam, my lover. I hungered to find the alchemical formula for pastry—the philosopher’s scone.

Now that Myfanwy had vanished, meals resembled amputees, lacking a tasteful limb. She had a way with blueberries no other mortal possessed. The man who succeeded in duplicating her recipes would monopolise trade in this rare commodity. And it was I, Gruffydd ap Slack, cheated suitor and unsuited comprador, who’d come closest thus far. The only pretender to her crumb-dusted throne, I should have been a respected elder of the county. But I didn’t even own my own house.

I opened the oven door and drew out, onto an iron skillet, my latest creation. Misshapen and sinister, it exuded a noxious smell. I jabbed my thumb into the covering and the pie erupted, spewing molten blueberries over my smock and frown. Something was still wrong! There was a flaw in the matrix. I carried the cyan volcano to my bench and cut off a sample for my microscope. It had caramelised.

“O, Myfanwy, my lost love! How did you do it?”

Licking away my tears, I ran up the steps to the taproom for a cold beer deep enough to jump into and drown.

I was on my third glass when the door of the pub swung open and a weary traveller entered with his goat. 

His face was a mass of wrinkles, but one beneath his right eye was younger than the others and I recognised it. Struggling to extricate my shoe from my drink, I hopped away from his presence. It was too late to escape; he caught sight of me and flung his broad arms about my neck, a gesture of affection which also served to keep him upright. His stained apparel (including trousers with bulging pockets) was buttoned with hot smells from ninety-seven realms.

“Now listen, Owain,” I said, “it’s nasty manners to greet an enemy like a friend. Have you forgotten our feuding over the hand (and elbow) of fair Myfanwy? She who betrayed us both by refusing to choose between my excellence and your roguery?”

“No, Gruffydd, I remember. But it was boring standing at my corner of the scalene world—there was nothing to see over the edge—so I decided to return. Why are you trying to jump into a beer? Many changes have taken place in my absence!”

It was impossible to neglect him. I bought him a stout and we stood together at the bar, exchanging histories. Fashions had changed. Now that it was acceptable to walk the streets without trousers or soul, or with someone else’s instead of your own, our original disagreement looked absurd. I told him how an imp had stolen my keepsake pie—the last known example of Myfanwy’s craft. Since then, I had struggled to recreate it artificially, to no avail. He clucked his tongue and muttered.

“I owe you a canine and an explanation. But first, permit me to ask what milk you utilise for the dough?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sheep’s! You mean to say there are others? I am less experienced in the world’s ways and angles than you. I didn’t reach my corner, Hyperborea, before turning.”

He handed me the reins of his goat. “Here you are.”

I scratched my head. While it was obvious his journey back had been stressful, I couldn’t envisage what manner of sufferings, however hairy, had caused him to disorder mammals in such a blatant fashion. I tugged the goat’s beard to prove it wasn’t fake.

“Owain ap Iorwerth, you are a dunce! If you owe me a canine, which you don’t, why pass off that as one? It’s a caper!”

Parting the froth on his beer with a comb, he grinned. “Not so. Do you recall that time on the Monnow bridge when I slapped your back? The tooth you coughed loose was a canine, and I picked it up after you left. It’s an old tradition in Wales—as I’m sure you’re aware—to make a necklace from the teeth of vanquished boars and bores. I hung it from my neck on a string and took it abroad.”

I felt in my mouth for the gap and nodded. This gum had healed, but others yearned to be ruined on blueberry pie. Ignoring my cries of, “How tensile the filling?”, Owain proceeded with his account. Pies and caries both require plugging with amalgam, but my curiosity was extracted, root and all. When the love-triangle whose sides consisted of himself, myself and Myfanwy had shed its cosines, mainly due to that slacks-and-spectres scuffle of our adolescence, he had hastened off to Zipangu, the remotest isle in the atlas. There he spent his money on green tea and train rides and quickly found himself penniless.

Desperate for a coin, he took my tooth from his necklace and placed it under a pillow. But in Zipangu they don’t have fairies, or even imps. They have gnoles, in kimonos, and when he awoke he was astounded to find himself sleeping not on a groat, but a goat. That’s the way they arrange matters over there. Perhaps those gnoles are hard of hearing. Anyway, he rode the ruminant back to Wales, and here it was, my property, though he doubted that it would fit over my tongue.

“I was going to keep it for myself, but I felt pity for you when I heard your story about the pie. What was the name of the imp who conned it from you? Ochre Fingers? I assumed so!”

My brain was spinning. It’s common knowledge that the best pie has myriad ingredients that you won’t find in the cookbooks. The tooth is one of the most important—it’s added last, right at the point of eating, and imparts the crucial flavour which distinguishes a mother’s cooking from everything that comes after; milk teeth have the best texture for this, which is why cakes never taste so momentous to adults. If this goat was really a transformation of my pointed pearly, then it might provide the missing component in my project. I yowled.

“By using the milk of my tooth in my pastry, I can inject a dose of childhood into my pie! What a boon!”

Owain plucked my sleeve. “Not so hasty! The goat won’t be enough by itself. The flour has to bind in a particular way with the milk, rather than at random. There are a million ways a pie can rise, but only one of these was Myfanwy’s. Think of pastry molecules like a stack of oranges. The row on the bottom determines how the others are going to behave. We need a specimen from a genuine crust, a seed, to shepherd the atoms into tasty formation, else it will fail.”

I shook my head. I’d already thought of cloning the pie, ransacking the imp’s stall one midnight after he’d snatched it, but he had devoured it whole. Owain rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “The essence of the flavour may still be contained in the imp’s body?”

“Yes, he’s too small to digest the filling in less than a decade. I bet a blueberry is larger than his heart.”

“Well then, boyo, you’re in luck.” Lowering his tone, Owain devised a plan to seize Ochre Fingers and weld him to the goat. He used his comb to write the equation in the remaining foam of his beer—I checked his calculations and nodded my agreement:

(Goat (kidnapped imp) + flour) + (blueberry)³ = PIE.

Peering at the patrons in the pub, I deemed our present location an unwise spot for the discussion of our scheme. So I led Owain down to my cellar. He squinted in the smoky light of the furnace, studying the pie charts and schematics which adorned the walls, detailing sundry examples of the baker’s art through the ages, including the very first quiche, a sand-and-millet masterpiece designed for King Zoser. My old rival noted the bed and basin in the darkest limits of the room; his raised eyebrows brushed the low ceiling inquiringly.

I purpled in the gloom. “This vile dungeon is my home as well as my place of work. I tried to woo Myfanwy with a clock and carrot; the clock came with an irate pastor. While I was absent, setting out for my corner of the scalene world, he invited his friends round and they took over my residence, barring the entrance with a lofty door of brass, fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, fastened from within. Even now the trespassers are seated at my table of ebony, singing the songs of the son of Teios, over some flasks of the red Chian wine. I’m an exile.”

“We shall remove them, Gruffydd. Show me how your ovens work; they are the best in Monmouth, are they not? We’ll bake a Trojan Pie for the squatters. I see! The blue is inserted here and the berries there. The bellows are pumped and the ingredients are fused in this chamber and swaddled in pastry. A fabulous device! Well, the goat can go in one, the imp in the other, and then we’ll fan the flames. The goat is a tooth; the imp is sore, like a gum. They’ll fit together superbly!”

“I don’t understand what good that will do.”

“We’ll carry the finished pie to the front of your house, ring the bell and run away. When the pastor and his chums look out of the window and spy it, they’ll think it’s a divine gift. Opening the door, they’ll drag it in. Imagine their panic when the goat-imp combination jumps out of the crust! They are sure to believe it’s a devil and flee your home. Then you can reclaim your premises.”

I was delighted by this suggestion and stuttered my gratitude. My emotion was rawer than a simurgh egg.

“It’s Myfanwy I want! She had no time for me when I lacked talent, but she’ll be impressed by an identical pie. If you and I can both come back from our exploits, so must she!”

He was consoling. “Imitation as the sincerest form of flattery? It is a maxim I am fully in accord with. Scamp along now and capture Ochre Fingers, while I light up the coals.”

From the sparkle in his eyes, I gathered he didn’t need a match. Up the stairs I went, passing through the taproom, where Owain’s unfinished beer stood meekly. I picked up the comb next to it and completed his sum more to my liking, giggling dreamily.

PIE + trousers + soul = Myfanwy.

Myfanwy + Gruffydd = near bliss for months.

The year has been a year of disappointment, and of feelings more intense than disappointment, for which there is no name in Wales. After hurrying out of the ‘Green Dragon’, as instructed, I made my way across Agincourt Square to the market. I found the imp and skillfully bundled him into my trousers, which after all might not be my own, smuggling him back to the cellar. Strangely, Owain had gone. So had much of my flour. But the oven was blazing and the goat was tethered to my bellows. I proceeded without my confederate and baked a vast pie, carrying it on my back to the front of my residence. There were a dozen crumbs on the doorstep but I trod on them all and tolled the rusty bell. 

Hiding behind a bush, I watched as the portals swung open and hands reached out to snatch the gift. A voice announced, “Another one!”, which bewildered me, but I remained at my vantage until a great howling within the house caused me to stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, like a soul sewn into a sail, while no less than seven pastors burst from the building with pale countenances, each forehead stamped with a bruise the shape of a hoof. I raced forward but—to my profound alarm—found the portals closing again. By the time I gained the threshold it was locked and belittled my fists. I glanced through a window, and beyond a rent in the sable draperies, saw treachery.

Owain was dancing with Pan, or so it seemed; there was steam enough to veil their motions in mystery. Scattered about like Sabine attire lay relics of pie. It was plain that Owain had baked himself into one during my abduction of the imp, conveying it (I guess not how!) to my porch and thus gained admittance. The second pie had cleared the house of pastors and now the unnatural intruders were in cahoots, and in my kitchen. As I engrave this tale in pastry with a wooden spoon, I hear rumours above in the pub. Owain ap Iorwerth sells a beautiful pie, not of blueberries but oranges, and he has stitched a toga from peel for his familiar, which in return provides milk for his dough.

Now I comprehend why he bulged when he entered the pub; in Zipangu, so I’ve read, there are mandarins in every pocket. That’s natural. Wiser than me, he’d worked out that blueberry pie couldn’t entice Myfanwy back to Monmouth; she’d sniff a threat. Better to try a different flavour! He must have evolved the plan at his furthest point, while staring out over the void beyond his corner. And the reason why his right eye was younger than his left? He’d been winking to himself throughout Asia, all the way back across the fruitless desserts.