Link Arms with Toads!

by Hughes, Rhys

  He recoiled, confused and miserable. “Ms Sting! Such questions will be decided by committee. It is presumptuous…” He grinned unpleasantly, wagging a finger. “You must call it home from now on. There’s no running away. The cosmic radiation will kill you.”

  She turned to leave. “You’ve confused semblance with reality, image with modus. A city sculpted to impersonate a moon does not automatically become that moon. You are a lunatic!”

  He appreciated the joke. “But the way things feel is more important than how they actually are.” Again, he rotated his proboscis, tuning in to her recent thoughts. “If you felt our city was tugging at your elbow, then that is surely what it was doing.”

  Before she reached the door, she stopped and asked, “So what’s your real name? Is it less comfortable than your pseudonym?” Glancing at her elbow, she was shocked to notice a few unravelled strands. Alleneal was trembling, chomping on nothingness.

  “My mother was startled, Ms Sting. She was carrying me at the time. The monkey came from behind a curtain in the Repertory Theatre. Some say there is no link between the incident and my condition. Our family has a noble heritage. We have dominated Birmingham for generations. The Rattle clan is respected and feared. I pluck my face every day: soon I will try electrolysis. The surface of the moon is devoid of laughter. The gravity of my problems has been lessened.”

  Standing up, clutching the flag behind him for support, he mustered every ounce of dignity and announced: “I am Simian Rattle, Conducator of Lunarhampton.” He sagged and wept into the woodworm, unaware or uncaring that Melissa had already departed.

  Outside, the rain had stopped falling. Globules of moisture drifted sideways over the pavements. At last the sky was clearing: ribbons of cloud strangled denticulated peaks. Bouncing toward her convertible, delirious as a bubonic puppet, Melissa desperately tried to laugh, while a million heliographs flashed from crater rims.

  (v)

  To reach escape velocity, she knew she must never take her foot off the accelerator pedal. The mountains merged into a wall, a grey tongue. Her ears played a staccato rhythm: pressure was leaking from her improvised canopy. She had picked up one of the flapping sheets from the aeolipile and wrapped it round her chassis. She hoped the fabric was tough enough not to burst. Speed and style were the vital factors. Overhead, despite the sun, stars burned in a black sky.

  On the horizon, at the end of the road, a movement caught her eye. A tiny object was bounding towards her, growing larger at an astounding rate. Each leap was the width of despair. At last she made out a human form. It had a bucket on its head, connected by a length of hosepipe to an oxygen cylinder. A syringe glittered in a wrist. It was the squeegee merchant, charging with drawn sponge.

  They connected silently, his body rotating over her bonnet and off at a steep tangent. He left a soapy smear across her windscreen and she watched in her mirror as he gyrated into outer space, stretching a palm to accept payment. One way of clearing them off the street, she thought. But she made a symbolic movement toward her pocket. It was too late: he was already an orbital beggar. An inverted meteor, harbinger of failure, he vanished in a subsidised explosion.

  The speedometer was exhausted, lying horizontal on its right side, but her velocity increased. There was less friction, less of everything here, but now she knew she would make it. If a city wants to tug at your elbow, be firm with it. Do not permit yourself to be bullied. The music of the spheres washing in her head, Melissa allowed herself to dream of an asteroid shaped like a fake Gaudí house. It lay out there somewhere, in the void, beyond the adventures that awaited her on the alien worlds of Redditch, Bromsgrove and Kidderminster.

  (1997)

  The Expanding Woman

  It was the year Klingon became the official European language. Laura and I were present when the police broke down the door of the last Esperanto Institute to resist the change. There was fierce fighting in the cellars and gun smoke poured from the external vents. The global, pacifist dreams of Zamenhof had finally been upstaged by a joke. Not that the decree was issued in a spirit of fun. It was simply that a federal society required a common tongue and Klingon was the obvious choice. A modern bureaucracy must always place economics before taste.

  The fact that Klingon was cheaper to standardise throughout schools was largely due to the enthusiasm generated by the more neurotic pupils. Nobody had ever wanted to learn Esperanto, despite its phonetic spelling and absolutely regular verbs. It lacked glamour. Klingon, with its gruff militaristic timbre, appealed equally to the bullies and the bullied. It had originated as a cult among obsessive, solitary disciples of escapist science fiction in the closing decades of the twentieth century, growing rapidly in popularity on the campus, where new phrases were exchanged by timid freshers huddled in padded anoraks.

  We watched the scrap until hunger drove us away. As we took a short cut across the hovertrain tracks, Laura turned to me with an exclamation of surprise. In the dying light, only the gleam of her myriad nose rings confirmed her identity. I am not suggesting that paranoia is a necessary survival trait but any attempt to fit in with the new world order should be applauded. If the federal government intended to give every advantage to the misfit and sociopath, it made sense not to discourage such latent qualities in my own psyche. I squinted in the direction of her seemingly detached finger, extended to the shadows.

  “What’s the matter now?” I demanded.

  She gripped my elbow, bruising the bone. “Something’s there, animal of unknown species.” I like the way she talks when startled, panicky yet rational. There was a snort in the weeds.

  I stumbled over the rails. Vandals had sabotaged the electromagnets with disruptors made from anvils and loops of wire taken from bundles of forged banknotes collected by the police. Regular raids on the remaining National Health hospitals unearthed millions of fake eurodollars printed by starving nurses in Radiography departments. After confiscation, these were incinerated by fraud squad flamethrowers, but the technetium strips that survived were dumped on landfill sites and retrieved by scavengers who haggled with them on council estates.

  “It took the wrong evolutionary path,” I hissed, still referring to Klingon, but Laura assumed I meant her unnamed monster. A coil snared my foot and I sprawled, trousers ripping at the knee. She helped me extract myself from the tangle, hurling it aside.

  Homemade disruptors rarely derailed trains because express services were fitted with scoops to catch the devices. I had discovered an easier way to interfere with commuter schedules, a technique of manipulating my environment that served to reduce stress. I would make use of it later, after humouring Laura in her belief that a beast was stalking our realm. I could see almost nothing in the gloom but groped my way vaguely to the spot from where the snort had emanated. It was quiet now. Laura was irritated with my poor night vision, my scepticism.

  “Didn’t you see it? It was enormous and hairless.”

  The embankment was suddenly pitted with frozen light. NARCISSAT had risen in the east. A vast mirror designed to relieve the winter darkness of the Shetland Isles, it had been cracked by a meteor and sent spinning in an erratic orbit that covered London.

  “I note a footprint. I agree it’s somewhat large.”

  “Surely a human couldn’t make that?”

  As the satellite passed overhead, catching the shattered remains of the Greenwich Millennium Dome, I knelt and tested the depth of the print with my hand. I chewed my lip in disgust.

  “I believe it’s the spoor of the expanding woman.”

  Laura sighed in disappointment. She knows exactly which urban myths inflate house prices and which bring an area into disrepute. The Genetic Circus had been in town during the summer. Had an unhappy exhibit chosen to flee into the overgrown gardens of our district, media interest would have generated considerable investment from outside. The expanding woman can generate nothing but calorific value.

  The expanding woman owns a chip shop. Over a period of a month,
she doubles in size, giant chins swelling like udders. Her maximum width has been estimated as that of a piano. The type of piano is never specified. I have rarely seen the expanding woman at perigee, when she eclipses her husband and children. She is always civil to customers. Her chip shop is an example of insidiousness. Many locals, even the greasiest ones, avoid our street because of its noxious allure.

  I have a theory. I believe the expanding woman submits to extensive liposuction during each new moon. The fat that is removed is used to fry the chips. Also, she sustains herself by eating the garbage in our bins. This may explain why the expanding woman is so confident of taking early retirement. She has no need to buy cooking oil or food. If the operation is performed with makeshift equipment, bicycle pump and garden hose, for example, the savings must be substantial.

  Laura nodded and we descended through the nettles, over a wall into our yard. The rusty swing cast an ominous shadow across the untidy lawn, telling the time with its relative slant. NARCISSAT has largely replaced the sun as the luminescence of choice for outdoor timepieces, though the recent adoption of metric minutes means we have less opportunity to idle in our gardens. I unlocked the rear door and we entered the kitchen. The house was playing up again, nervous system sparking. I have doubts about the benefit of printed circuit wallpaper.

  While I watched teevee, Laura set about reprogramming the scrambled domestic functions. The News Channel offered an account of the Esperanto rebels and the battle. The report was in English with Klingon subtitles. Soon it would be the other way around. A journalist in a pale suit stood outside the Institute while faint explosions echoed from within. Tatters of green flag whipped his ankles. The walls were daubed with messages in clotted blood, something that neither Laura nor myself had seen. As the story progressed, I grew increasingly concerned. Helicopters circled and settled on the roof, disgorging soldiers.

  “Laura, come and look! We’re being interviewed.”

  She joined me on the sofa and frowned. “That’s not right. We didn’t talk to anyone. They must have generated computer doubles!” She was more infuriated by the fact her doppelgänger had the wrong accent than by the process itself. I snapped the teevee off.

  “What happened to reality after the millennium?”

  She shook her head. “We had to make it different, you know. How can we go on otherwise? It’s a joint effort.”

  “I suppose so. But living constantly in the future is exhausting. I just hope it’s worth it in the long run.”

  Laura chuckled and went off to brew a drink. She knows I will never regress, despite my complaints. There are communities who have reverted, but they hold no interest for me. She returned with a pair of peppermint tea bags dangling from her earlobes. The joke depressed me. I decided to retire to the spare bedroom, the one that overlooks the hovertracks. If a mysterious creature really was loose in the neighbourhood, I wanted to make certain it left my vegetables alone.

  Laura removed one of the tea bags and popped it into her mouth. She will never allow a malfunctioning kettle to deprive her of a nightcap. I turned away and wearily climbed the stairs, glad to be free of her vice. I was once addicted to her fresh wit and menthol sense in a similar way, but something had happened. She was no longer the female I knew. Perhaps my earlier doubts about her identity were based on subconscious insights rather than my nurturing of neuroses in preparation for learning Klingon grammar. But if she had been an impostor since the day we first met, how would I be able to verify the difference?

  News Channels were able to create convincing replicas, so there was no telling what governments were capable of doing. I had often suspected the majority of Londoners were copies rather than originals but it never seemed important. Now, in my own house, the possibility was chilling. In Laura’s case, there was an extra dimension to her disparity, elements of unearthliness that suggested an alien source. I imagined the population split between official doubles, sanctioned by the Federation, and agents planted by extraterrestrial authorities.

  Having worked for the Environment Ministry in the Somerset lagoons, tagging bison with radio-collars, I was acutely aware of the attachments affected by my fellow humans. Naive visual statements were not enough to explain the continued popularity of body piercing. Nobody could remember why the trend had started, so many decades ago, though some cited tribal instincts in revolt against the present. What if Laura’s nose rings, and those of her kind, were monitoring tags for intelligences from a distant galaxy? Control through fashion, a trick.

  NARCISSAT was already setting, tumbling toward the flooded counties of the west. I stood by the window and watched the mirror dispensing bad luck all the way to the infected towns of Wales. When the light was gone and the shadows thickened on the embankment, I detected a vague movement in the thistles. Was this Laura’s monster? I could hardly deny something ravenous had been at our bins, yet the expanding woman was reason enough for the disorder. I had no desire to multiply entities beyond necessity, especially when the entities were horrid.

  I opened the window and leaned out. The window box betrayed various signs of recent activity. In the moss that separated the petunias there was a miniature crop-circle. On this modest scale the usual explanations for the phenomena — whirlwind, hoax, mating hedgehogs — were more absurd than the possibility that an alien spacecraft had used the location as a landing strip. I brushed the scarred moss with a finger, wondering again about the print on the hovertracks. Filled with a sudden urge to revolt, I called down in the forbidden Esperanto:

  “Kiu vi estas? Kien vi iras? Ne iru en la gardenon!”

  Along the street, other windows were raised. I waited for soldiers, searchlights, the paraphernalia of trouble. Distant voices mumbled, fell into silence again. Bored with the irony of it all, I retreated, sitting on the bed, shaking. How long could any of us keep this up? The pressure to ignore the date and begin a straightforward life was immense. At last I rose and fled, down to the living room.

  Laura was ransacking a cupboard for a torch. “The animal is outside and it’s talking to itself in Esperanto.”

  “I am inclined to doubts,” I sighed.

  “No, I heard it. Come on, we’ll get it this time.”

  I trailed her through the kitchen and into the garden. Looming over the far wall was a giant head, tongue lolling in a steaming mouth, horns curling forward over oily lashes. Fireflies perched on its lips, burning the dusk like flecks of luminous spittle.

  Laura hid her face in her hands. “It’s grotesque!”

  “No, I think it’s a cow,” I replied.

  “What are you talking about? They were outlawed nearly twenty years ago. Is someone illegally breeding them?”

  “I guess so. No other explanation. There’ll be a reward if we catch it. Which of our neighbours could it be?”

  We approached the creature warily, stepping lightly on the volcanic dust that coated the path. It seemed docile enough, watching us through the widest eyes I have ever seen. But before we reached it, a thunderous rhythm paralysed our resolve. Something new was coming closer, confusing the experience. Across the tracks, visible as a deeper absence of light, a gargantuan shape crushed the sky. It was the expanding woman, sheathed in stiff leathers, a Stetson pulled down over her brow, mounted atop her husband. She tugged the reins looped round his neck and he increased his pace. In one huge hand she swung a lasso.

  Laura frowned. “I can’t see any futurism in this.”

  “Nor I. We better leave them to it.”

  We crept back into the house and held each other in the little room under the stairs. She was close but cold.

  “Laura, suppose the expanding woman is just fat? Not a myth at all, not a living urban legend, but a human being? She may be the last genuine person on the planet for all I know. I mean, everybody is trying so hard to be what the century wants that we’ve lost ourselves. What if there is nothing mysterious about her great size?”

  She draped her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t giv
e up now. Would it help if I came up with a scientific explanation? Perhaps she’s a mirage, a woman whose image has been magnified by a convex lens of polluted air. It’s all that benzene in our atmosphere.”

  I grimaced. There was less free oxygen available these days, a fact with one unexpected benefit. Fewer cell-damaging oxidisers had increased the life expectancy for anyone who survived the toxins. I already felt a chain of years bearing me down. To be born in a previous century is hard enough, a previous millennium is unbearable. I remained sullen and Laura lost patience, her nose rings signalling.

  “What did you expect? Did you think ordinariness was ever a choice? How can we continue living simply when the date is futuristic? Blame the numbers, everybody has to work for them.”

  “But I’m overdosing on imagination!”

  There was little more she could do for me. Yet some comforts thrive in complexity. The teevee can offer much.

  In the spare bedroom, I wait by the window with the remote control. During a party last month it fell into a bowl of rum punch. It has never been quite the same since. It can now influence the hovertrains. I check my watch and raise the device, aiming it at the tracks. The Philadelphia to Waterloo express is due any minute now. It amuses me that after three thousand miles of transatlantic tunnel, a voyage can come to grief in an Ealing allotment. With the appropriate buttons I can make a train pause, fast forward or rewind. Tonight I intend to try an experiment, something truly futuristic. I will change channels.

  (1998)

  All Shapes Are Cretans

  “All Cretans are liars.”

  – Epimenides the Cretan

  The college contains a chapel that is never visited. We were bored one night and decided to explore the secret recesses of the building. Wrather remembered a key on an obscure library shelf; I recalled a hammer in a dusty storeroom. His arguments were more persuasive. The lock turned with difficulty but the heavy door swung quietly on ancient hinges. I was surprised at our sense of exhilaration. The interior was not at all creepy. We lit the warped candles at the altar and waited for the flames to settle. There was no dust and very few cobwebs.