by Rhys Hughes
He threw back his head and let loose a laugh; the first genuine laugh that had escaped his lips since Camille had left him. The mystery was an entertainment, as alluring as any tale told in the weave of Scheherazade’s nights. There was magic after all, or at least the illusion of it. Lawrence had to admire Mehmet for his skill and restraint. No flying carpets in his presence, no bottled genii uncorked under his nose like a vintage wine; merely a carefully planned splinter of wonder that would lodge in his guest’s eye long after he had returned home. How Mehmet had arranged for the carpet to double in size was an astounding trick, but Lawrence did not care to delve into its mechanics too deeply. He was satisfied with the result, and that was enough.
Of course, magic never came cheaply, and Mehmet had already stated his price. Lawrence was prepared to pay it for two reasons: he was amused (a rare enough occasion in itself) and also he was less embarrassed by the carpet’s new dimensions. He brewed coffee, retired to his study with the invoice, wrote out a cheque for the required amount, folded it inside an envelope addressed to Mehmet and wrote his own address on the back. He would take it to the post-office on his way to town and dispatch it with an echo of the pleasure he had once taken in dropping his early love-letters to Camille through the hungry mouth of the pillar-box. So long ago now. Not that the bundled Turk had redeemed himself in his eyes any more than Camille could, but there had been a genuine talent behind the prank. A talent that deserved some mark of appreciation.
He pulled on his coat, stepped out into the street, the envelope flapping before him in an outstretched hand. The weather turned moody in his presence; now it wept over some long-forgotten slight. The tears spattered on Lawrence, his scowls and hunched frame, the loose paving slabs that rocked under his feet. He duly reached the post-office, sent his reply to Mehmet’s wonderful joke, lingered over a long lunch in some gloomy wine-bar, considered how happy he felt himself to be. There was already, in one corner of his five-sided mind, some inkling that momentous events had not ended just yet; he toyed with the notion of extending recent developments. Supposing that the carpet doubled in size every day? What would happen if he refused to pay the new bill? Would the carpet cease expanding? Was he supposed to keep paying only until the dimensions he desired were reached?
He submerged such ideas in the mayonnaise of a limp ploughman’s and drank up his oxidised Retsina. His jaw ached. While he rubbed it with a greasy palm, a stool scraped close by his side. He turned to regard a work colleague, Tom (or Tim?) Morris from Marketing. Lawrence had played squash with him once; Camille had possibly been friendly with him a long time before, in some abstract college life totally at variance with all his own experience. Tom was a thin figure, nearly always enclosed in a tasteless suit with zany tie that supposedly indicated an individualism not at odds with company loyalty. It was all nonsense, Lawrence knew: his mother bought his clothes. Tom could scarcely even tie his own shoelaces. He nodded curt acknowledgement.
‘Hard times, eh?’ Tom took the stool, which happened to be higher than Lawrence’s own chair, and beamed down. ‘Drowning your sorrows? Join the club. Some of us are going to be let go, you know that. The Recession has really bitten deep this time. So are you going to take voluntary redundancy? I’m in two minds about it all.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Lawrence decided to be cruel. It would amuse him a little. ‘Our Department has no problems. It’s Marketing that is overstaffed. Jefferies realises this at last. No, my job is safe. I’m celebrating.’ He raised his glass. ‘To the future!’ And noticing Tom’s dour visage, added in a hearty tone: ‘Oh come now! What about taking each day as it comes, each little nibble at the great cracker called happiness, creamy and rich with the cheese-spread of ambition? Positive thinking man! Didn’t they teach you anything on that self-encounter course? Anything is possible, you make your own joy. What was it now? We are all strolling players, jesters who alight and perform in the global village?’
Tom shook his head. ‘I’ll see you around.’ He sauntered off in the direction of the bar and Lawrence returned to the more serious business of his wine. He could imagine his envelope, with his cheque, already being loaded on some plane for the journey to Turkey. But how to spend the rest of the day, the weekend for that matter? Lawrence had never liked weekends. Without Camille, they were hardly any better. He was free of certain duties, but not a whit more immune to the unspeakable drabness of long rainy Saturdays and mock-righteous Sundays. To blot them out at the bottom of a glass was no longer appropriate; not without a wife to disapprove.
He drank up, abandoned the wine-bar, walked into town and purchased a small bag of groceries, just enough for a modest risotto. The walk back, through fallen leaves, despicably beautiful in Lawrence’s eyes, was one in which each step seemed to be accompanied by some unseen presence weighing him down with woes as heavy as cauldrons. He opened his garden gate, tramped solemnly up the steps to his back door, entered the house, deposited his provisions on his kitchen work-surface and set to work. He wondered about the conversation with Tom. It was, in fact, the first he had heard about prospective cuts in the workforce, but his blasé approach was more than justified. He was one of the best workers in his Department, he knew Jefferies socially. If anything was afoot, he would know about it. Indeed his relationship with Jefferies was so secure that he had managed to take his four week holiday without giving any sort of notice. Jefferies would have tolerated this behaviour from no other employee.
Other thoughts, as he chopped vegetables with savage delight, included the imminent return of Camille. How should he react to this prospect? There was not enough time to train a guard dog and mantraps were difficult to come by these days. To change the locks would be far too prosaic a solution; he would studiously avoid that course. Obviously the best thing to do would be to simply let her take whatever she chose and to ignore her. This would disconcert her more than any frantic defence with elaborate snares or court injunctions.
The risotto was a poor example of the form: Lawrence decided that it suited his present self-image. He enjoyed the tasteless meal with another bottle of Greek wine in front of the television. Then he sat in the chair for long hours until the sky turned dark and the screen bade him a good night. He yawned once, cast a sly glance at the carpet and made his slow, painful way up to bed. He fell asleep quickly; this was most unusual. And the dreams came again: Mehmet waving and bowing at him, only this time the Turk had the face of Tom (or was it Jefferies? Curse the fluidity of dreams!) and the pipe he smoked had its own words for him, the Ottoman head reciting some verse or other while the doors in Mehmet’s abysmal room opened and closed like the portals of the soul. Lawrence shook his fist at Mehmet, but the Turk merely looked at him and opened his mouth, green ink dribbling down his chin.
The next morning, Lawrence woke up without a leg. ‘I don’t much care for this!’ he cried as he surveyed his stump. There was no pain or phantom sensation. The leg was quite simply gone. But where? Leaning over the edge of the bed, Lawrence looked underneath. His leg was not there. It was beyond absurdity. ‘How?’ Lawrence struggled not for understanding, which he knew would be a mistake, nor for recompense, but for the point of the joke, which doubtless had disappeared along with his leg. ‘Why?’ he asked. But he knew the answer to this. The blame lay in the clouds, their grief. Under the pillow, another invoice awaited his nervous fingers.
He hopped out of bed, clutching furniture for support, dressed somewhat in the manner of a sartorial stork, and made his way painfully down the stairs. At the bottom, under the letterbox, lay the confirmation of his answer. The cheque he had posted to Mehmet had been returned. Scooping it up, he surveyed with bland annoyance the smudge of green that covered the front of the envelope like a mossy sigil. In the rain, the ink had run into an abstract no more pleasing than any to be found in the average art gallery or handkerchief. The thoughtful post-office had returned it to the still legible address written on the back. In the lounge, Lawrence was forced to raise an eyeb
row, although he had already anticipated the sight. The carpet had doubled in size yet again. It now covered an area nearly equivalent to that of an honest rug. Mixed emotions assailed him once more; pleasure at the carpet’s new-found confidence and consternation about his leg.
Lawrence studied the envelope again. There was nothing for it now but a second attempt at sending the thing. He rummaged in the little room under the stairs and emerged with an old wooden crutch (abandoned there since that day when he had broken his leg launching himself off the wardrobe onto the bed in a vain attempt to spice up his and Camille’s flagging sex life) which though wormeaten and uncomfortably short was in reasonable working order. He rewrote Mehmet’s address and swung himself back out into the world. Fortunately, the weather was more clement this morning. As the wooden end of his crutch tapped the paving slabs, Lawrence seemed to detect in the rhythm a curious echo of the looms in Mehmet’s shop. He shuddered and shook his head.
As he slipped the envelope through the slit of the pillar-box, he remembered Mehmet’s arcane reply to one of his questions. ‘A foot for a foot,’ the wily Turk had said. Lawrence was contemptuous. He had always loathed literal-mindedness; in this case it was a sad betrayal of the subtlety he had attributed to the carpet seller. Perhaps he had meant a foot of flesh for a foot of rug? This was marginally more acceptable. Whatever the answer, Lawrence decided that he would take yet another day off work. It is not every morning that a man wakes up to find that his leg has vanished, walked off on its own as it were, left him out on a limb. He was completely stumped.
The day passed. Lawrence shut himself away in his study and consulted a selection of medical textbooks. He had not expected to find any explanation of his particular problem, but surprisingly there was limited documentation of similar cases. Legs, arms and even heads had disappeared overnight in at least a dozen other cases. There was even a name for it: Spontaneous Deconstruction. The phenomenon was exceedingly rare, utterly inexplicable and probably had little to do with diet or lack of exercise. As he studied the individual cases, the telephone rang no less than four times, but he ignored it. Probably Jefferies wanting to know where he was. Well he was too busy to worry about that. He would return to work tomorrow, he decided. The loss of his leg would not be a disadvantage to his career: he worked with his head.
That night, the dreams were more mocking than ever. Mehmet floated before him with his leg tucked under one arm, wagging a finger in some weary disapproval. Lawrence railed and shouted his defiance, but Mehmet merely raised the leg to his hideous lips and began to smoke it like a pipe, ill-smelling vapours steaming from the tips of the hollow toes. Lawrence reached out to snatch the leg back, but Mehmet suddenly seemed a long distance away, down some infinitely long corridor exposed by the opening of one of his infernal secret doors. So Lawrence was reduced to pleading. ‘Please return my leg,’ he said simply. Mehmet shrugged at this and this shrug was a negation that admitted of no compromise. The figure and the room faded and Lawrence awoke.
His left arm had disappeared. There was no arguing with the truth of this. Lawrence realised it as soon as he tried to prop himself up on his elbow. The elbow had vanished with the rest of his arm. Beneath the pillow, as always, the latest invoice crackled as he drew it out and crumpled it into a tight sphere. He lay on his side and wept. It had been a terrible week all in all, and this did not help. Slithering out of bed (and taking most of the tangled bedclothes with him) he reached out for his crutch, raised himself unsteadily and greeted his reflection in the wardrobe mirror. He looked like a broken man, a cloven executive, half gone or half there, depending on how you looked at it. Lawrence decided that he would rather not look at it at all. He dressed and, shirt sleeve and trouser leg flapping ludicrously, made his way down to the lounge and around the rapidly expanding carpet to the comforts of the coffee-pot. He certainly felt lighter in body, if not in spirit.
In the kitchen, he learnt the reason why his second cheque had not been posted successfully. A local station on his portable radio informed him that a postman had been knocked over by a hit and run driver while in the process of collecting the day’s catch from the pillar-pox Lawrence had used. The impact had split his sack and sent the letters flying across the road, over neighbouring walls and into private gardens. Not all had been recovered. The postman had been seriously injured in the incident. The Police were eager to contact an employee of a local company who had been made redundant that very morning and who apparently had greeted the news by speeding off in his car.
Lawrence guessed instantly that his letter had been one of those not recovered. It was an irony reminiscent of some contrived fiction. He felt almost as if he were the unlucky character in a macabre and rather affected short story. He hastily scrawled another cheque (finding the utmost difficulty in holding the paper down as he wrote) and folded it inside yet another envelope. Bad luck three times in a row he would not accept. Holding the letter between his teeth and his coffee in his hand, he somehow managed to propel himself back through the lounge. As he did so, the telephone started to ring. He ignored it and puffed out his cheeks. When he returned to work—not today, of course —he would have to leave instructions with Jefferies that he was not to be disturbed at home even if the matter was urgent.
He did not even bother to glance at the carpet—which now covered most of the floor—until he tripped over a crease on one side, spilling his coffee over his remaining foot. He dropped to his knee and shook with mirth. A crease? Mehmet was slipping up. He smoothed the crease out and tried to stand. The rotten crutch splintered as soon as he placed his weight on it, sending him back down to his subservient position. He flailed around on the floor, his giggles of despair turning into tears of hatred. It was odd to admit it but the carpet seemed to be holding him down, like a viscous sea. Entrapped, he struggled against the swirling patterns, hierograms whose meaning was beyond his ken, symbols of an alien consciousness.
As he flapped ineffectually, his rage turned to blind panic. He was indeed caught in the netting of this mystic web. It was as if the square of carpet was a cutting from another universe, a patch stitched over the fabric of his more familiar cosmos. His awareness of his own world receded, sliding against his identity like pebbles drawn along a beach. He could still hear the telephone, but now it was as distant as the cry of a whale. The hands of the clock above the mantelpiece seemed to be spinning far too rapidly. The wan light and cold shadows outside the window wavered and shifted direction. Unbelievably, he saw that morning had already spun into afternoon; his carpet was a raft on a sea of hyperactive time. As he attempted to focus his will, he knew that he would be swallowed whole, like Jonah, in the matrix of the design.
He summoned up all his reserves of courage and crawled towards the edge of his shimmering isle. It was something akin to scaling a sheer wall, his nails tearing at the fabric, his single leg scraping against the smooth weave. At last, gasping and wheezing, he gained the edge and threw himself back into a more homely reality. He recovered his breath and glanced at the clock. The hands had slowed to a normal speed, but a dart of urgency pierced his forehead and made him wince. The telephone was still ringing, but he could no longer comprehend its nagging persistence. All he knew was that if he did not hurry, spittle flecking his lips, he would miss the last collection of the day from the pillar-box. And if he missed the last collection, he would have to forfeit another bodily part.
From the utility cupboard at the back of the house, he took a broom in lieu of a crutch and jerked himself out of his front door and into the windswept street. Bristles tickled his armpit as he hobbled towards his destination. The envelope was clenched tightly between his teeth; nostrils flared he wove through startled pedestrians like an injured jackdaw, squeezing between strolling couples and groups of chatting students (one of whom—a girl with a magnificent blaze of red hair and a bunch of battered roses—offered him a look of such subtle power that he was momentarily reminded of Camille). In the distance, he could see the postman op
ening the little door on the side of the pillar-box, reaching inside with sack and gloved hand. ‘Wait!’ cried Lawrence, but the postman ignored him. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to increase his pace.
His way was blocked by a grizzled figure who reached out and gripped him by the shoulder. Lawrence regarded his wild gaze with the resignation of utter despair. He recoiled as the harsh odour of alcohol stung him in the eyes. ‘Well, well! What do we have here?’ the figure said, slurring its words. ‘My old friend Lawrence! It was me, you know. Yes, it was me. The man in the car. I ran him over. They’re after me now. Letters everywhere, like thistledown, like feathers from the wing of some ill-omened bird. But don’t think you’re so lucky. Jefferies wants to see you. I won’t be alone.’
Lawrence tried to escape. ‘Tom, you fool! Let me go!’ He hopped in anguish as the postman closed the little door, locked it and hoisted the sack over his shoulder. ‘I’ve got to post this letter!’ He twisted around and bit Tom’s wrist, drawing blood. But Tom merely shook him into submission, glowered once and snatched away the envelope. ‘Please give it back!’ Lawrence pleaded, but he knew that such an appeal would have the opposite effect. He burst into tears again. Tom laughed, his own tears mingling with his victim’s on his creased shirt, and savagely kicked Lawrence’s brush away. Lawrence crumpled to the ground and appeared, for one astonishing instant, to be a man embedded in the pavement. Tom’s eyes grew very wide. Clutching the letter, he made off at high speed, overtaking the postman who had already climbed into his van and was starting up the engine. ‘Come back!’ Lawrence moaned.
His dreams that night were particularly horrific, not least because he had been anticipating them all evening. After the incident with Tom and the letter, he had crawled back to his house, raided his wine-cellar and proceeded to try to drink himself into oblivion. But for once the wine had little or no effect. It was almost as if Mehmet was determined that he should remain sober for what was to follow. In the dream, he saw that Mehmet was playing a vast drum with his arm and leg as sticks, a pounding rhythm that throbbed like blood. What disturbed Lawrence the most was the fact that his arm seemed to be aiding the carpet seller, curling its fingers into different positions to alter the pitch of each blow. It was hideously enjoyable music. Lawrence found himself pleading with the Turk: ‘Please do not take my head. I work with my head.’
