Nowhere Near Milkwood

by Rhys Hughes

  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.”

  My relief was tangible but I concealed it well. “Really?”

  “A plaster replica. Like all religious, political and cultural relics, there are thousands of originals. Let me show you some others.”

  And he led me through a series of adjacent chambers, each of which contained a glass case with a skull resting on a cushion. Some replicas were superior to others. A few were too good, too flawless. Others were shapeless lumps of baked clay. Those of average quality were just right. The same probably holds true for the souls in my different bodies. There were no exhibits of any other description in the museum. This explained why we were the only visitors. Tiepolo declared:

  “Before the countries of the world were united, many museums in various lands all claimed to possess the one true skull. Once the states were merged, so were the museums, and then it became apparent we had a surplus of authentic heads. Now we pretend to display them here, but really they are in storage.”

  “You can’t throw them out in case one isn’t a fake?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Are you hungry? Let me buy you a meal.”

  I agreed to this proposal with alacrity.

  We left the building and took again to the air. Th
is time we landed at the edge of the city, beneath a smoking mountain. There was a cellar club in the side of this formidable cone of rock. It was called UNDER THE VOLCANO and was unlike any restaurant I’d ever visited. I wondered if this might be a possible venue for gigs, but it wasn’t that kind of place. Food was grilled over natural vents in the floor, behind which magma seethed. There wasn’t room for a performer. Tiepolo ordered two vast toasted cheeses and a jug of wine, and we alternately seared and cooled our lips until we were satisfied and tipsy. I knew he wanted to reveal something to me. He wiped his hands with a napkin and asked: “Where are you from exactly?”

  “Not from this age,” I admitted.

  “I guessed as much,” he replied, “so maybe I ought to fill you in on the history of the world state. That’s what I’ll do.”

  And he did. He told me a garbled account of my own time, when the Cussmothers had started the process of uniting sovereign governments. This centralisation of authority had taken millennia to complete. There had been relapses, some even recently, into patchworks of tiny kingdoms, but those were just glitches. The applied ideals of globalisation were too strong to reverse. There was a single supreme leader, the President, who ruled his global domain with a road of chrome, hard but shiny, though in reality his power was limited, or at least frustrated, by those who worked for him, in particular the Prefect of Police, of whom he, Tiepolo Bunter, was one of the finest examples ever. They were living in a fabulous era of prosperity and peculiarity. Or rather they should be living like that. But something had gone wrong, seriously wrong, recently. It had to do with a safety mechanism which had been built into the workings of modern dictatorship. Listen carefully.

  To stop the people feeling oppressed by the many injustices integral to the running of an autocracy, it had been arranged that the acting President would be regularly overthrown by an insurrection. After his overthrow, he would go into exile. Then chaos would reign. The people would realise their mistake and call the President back from exile. They would actually welcome the re-establishment of strict laws and unfair order. Anything other than the utterly random misery of no rule at all. These systematic insurrections provided a much needed release of pressure for the general populace. They were arranged by the Prefect of Police and his underlings. Each period of total chaos lasted an average of two or three months. This time, however, it had been raging for more than a year, so long indeed that the original insurrectionists had clustered into two opposing groups, the rebels and the revolutionaries, each dedicated to overthrowing the other, whom they considered to be the culprits of the disorder. It was an ironic and hazardous situation.

  “A year?” I cried. “Why so long?”

  Tiepolo said, “Every insurrection demands a different place of exile, to stop the people realising the thing is rigged. Our current President has been almost everywhere, even to Cus and Yam-Yam. This time he went to a region of drab lagoons. A place of grey skies.”

  “I saw him there,” I replied. “He was wearing a big wide hat.”

  “That looked like a crescent moon on his head? Yes, that sounds like him. Well this region of lagoons occupies the site of a lost city, a city with a romantic name which stood there ages ago. It was called Cardiff. Anyway, it seems there was once a road in that same city which kept all people stuck to it in a mystical manner. Once they stood on it, they couldn’t leave, at least not easily. Although this road has long since gone, its influence somehow remains. Our President wandered onto it by mistake as he searched for a comfortable place to spend his exile. Now he’s trapped there.”

  “Can’t you pull him off?” I spluttered.

  Tiepolo blushed. “We’ve tried that, but the mystic force is too strong. We used pulleys and levers, but nothing worked. The adhesion exists in the minds of the road’s captives. The true solution is for the President to free himself by doubting the road. So he must doubt the entire landscape first. A desperate measure but the only one.”

  “I see,” I said, “but I approached him rather closely. Why didn’t I get stuck?”

  Tiepolo frowned, and then he smiled. “He must have succeeded in doubting the power of the road for all others. He’s making progress! One day he will be free.”

  “To relcaim his authority?”

  “Exactly! To return organised corruption to the world!”

  We lapsed into a silence that was by turns glum and hopeful. Finally I spoke to myself, but loudly enough for him to hear: “All my working life I looked for the right gig, for a place that actually wants to hear me play. As a last resort I came to the future...”

  “A fine resort. We have crystal piers.”

  “You misunderstand me. Even the future isn’t my venue. I’ve seen the instruments you have here and none are capable of sounding G sharp, not easily at any rate. I know that I’ll never want to master instruments that can’t play my favourite note.”

  A profound feeling of self-pity came over me, but it was at this point that Tiepolo sprang his suggestion.

  He cried: “Since I first set eyes on you, I realised you might be the answer to my prayers, and I pray every night, to Drigg and Peekant, sometimes to Bridget, once to myself. Yes, I pray and have prayed many times for one such as you to come along. One did recently but some idiots threw him into the sea. Anyway, now you are here and I have been given a second chance. I didn’t befriend you and give you a guided tour because I’m a nice man. On the contrary, I’m a horrible one. I did it because I guessed you could be useful to me. And useful to society. I want to offer you a job. It has nothing to do with music. Because you have so many arms, you always assumed that a career in music was your best option. Your failure in this area is a shattering not of your life, as you believe, but of an empty dream. Fate has reserved you and your mutation for something much bigger.”

  Then he made his offer.

  And I accepted.

  Woman was not made from a man’s rib, but from that one area of his back where an itch is beyond a scratch. I always imagined a President would never feel short of female attention. I believed he would have his pick of girls and their physical charms. I soon learned this was not the case. If anything, success with the ladies becomes even more elusive than before. Bearing in mind my life has been once of enforced celibacy, this is a remarkable statement. I find myself in the position of having negative allure. Don’t ask. I’m not able to explain. If I could, it might rub off on you, if it hasn’t already. Best not to know.

  I’m sitting at my desk. It’s a grand desk. I have other desks in other offices and I’m currently occupying them all. At this one I am relaxing. I’m indulging a new hobby, the writing of fiction. I’m composing little stories as practice for writing what you are reading now. These stories won’t be read by anybody, but that doesn’t matter. I’m honing my skills. I doubt I’ll even finish any of them. I’ve just started a new one. This is how it begins:

  “Come into my parlour,” said the domestic goddess to the handsome devil.

  That’s how I met my wife.

  Her name was Reshmi and she had long black hair.

  My name is Ug and I am from 20,307 BC.

  I am bald. A sign of strength.

  But she overpowered me when I first saw her. Muscles count for nothing when the heart which feeds them blood begins to melt.

  I shake my head, scratch out the third line and rewrite it thus: “Her name was Lola and she had nuclear bosoms.” Yes, that’s more like it! More racy. I’m learning fast. This is more fun than the official report writing I have to do at my other desks. Now I hear a noise outside the door. The sound of a man clearing his throat. This signal is used instead of knocking for urgent situations. I call for him to enter. It’s my Prefect of Police. He is holding something pale and grinning under one arm. I flinch but quickly recover my composure.

  “Good morning, Mister Caretaker President,” he says.

  I throw down my pen. “What’s up now, Tiepolo?”

  “Another assassination attempt, I’m
afraid.”

  I squint and mutter, “Successful?”

  He shuffles his feet. “Yes.”

  I shudder once and then cry: “Well, let’s fix it. Not a big deal really. How many have we got left, by the way?”

  He holds up the plaster skull. “Several thousand. There are storerooms under the museum. We’re on schedule.”

  I accept this news with relief. “Good.”

  “Shall I fit this one now?”

  I wave a consenting hand and he proceeds past my desk and through the open windows onto the balcony of my tower. Fragments of previous skulls crunch under his feet. The crowd surge below in the public square. My headless body, the one punched all those centuries ago, sways to the rhythm of collective feet, not my own. The mob are departing. Tiepolo fits the new false skull onto the pillar of my neck. He glues it there, and suddenly there is a President standing on his balcony again. The assassins have been cheated. This is the job that fate has decreed for me, perhaps the only one. But there are hobbies as well as careers. I’ll get back to that point later. Meanwhile, let me add that there are speaking tubes which run from each of the offices and merge into one hollow pipe which curls around the leg of the President on the balcony and up his waist and torso and over his right shoulder. It ends in a flared amplifying horn and any of my mouths can talk through it from the safety of our desks. We take it in turn to make speeches.

  Tiepolo returns through the windows, wiping his hands on a cloth to free them from the grease associated with my neck. I ask him, “What other news?”

  He replies: “The real President has already started doubting his mud tower. Soon he’ll be free to reclaim his position. You’ll be his Caretaker no longer.”

  “I’m ready for that,” I say, but this is untrue. I’m enjoying myself too much here. So I add, “Anything else?”