The Gone-Away World

Chapter Eleven

WHEREVER I AM, it is the good kind of place. Well, small caveat: it is conceivable that I am dead, but other than that, it is the good kind of place. There are fields. You might term them pastures, although there are no actual cattle (poor Comrade Cow is lonely, somewhere), and hence no cattle-related by-products which might make you unwilling to run barefoot through them. These are fields of the sort envisaged as eternal rewards. In the distance there are mountains, but they aren’t mountains like my home—my old home—they are bigger, bluer and snowier, and as a consequence of this, looking at them doesn’t hurt. Nothing does, actually, which is jolly welcome. And there are shepherdesses. If you visit a museum almost anywhere in the world, you see shepherdesses like this; the fantasy is hard-wired into the lechers of our race. These shepherdesses are on the blowsy, wistful end of the filthy dream spectrum. They are, to be honest, nymphs. They titter, and they move in a way which can be described only as flitting. (Flitting is a form of locomotion which involves running on tiptoe, wiggling and bouncing, and having your clothes very nearly fall off.) They are winsome, albeit in a knowing way which suggests practice. When I look at them, they look back from beneath heavy lashes. When I look away, they pout. If they suspect I am able to see them in the corner of my eye, they stretch languorously, and make little whimpering sounds as of a person with a pleasant itch which needs careful scratching. It appears that I am a pagan.

I come to this understanding slowly, and it is primarily based upon the realisation that there is almost nothing about these ladies to suggest that they are virgins. Christian myth is not top-heavy (unlike nymph number twelve) with wanton heavens. In a good solid Christian story these girls would be covered up and singing hymns. That is emphatically not the case. These are women of blissful sexual emancipation (what the Evangelist would call, publicly, low moral character). If they sing at all, they are singers, not of hymns, but of the throaty, wicked kind of song where the chanteuse concludes her performance wearing nothing but a smile. Sadly they are also, damn the scruples I learned from Old Man Lubitsch and Aline and all the rest, lacking.

Don’t get me wrong: you can’t fault your nymph on deportment or diaphanous robes, and they have erotic intermittence absolutely nailed to the carpet. But get past the natural desire to grab a handful of Elysian backside and perform a bit of strenuous quality testing, and there are significant lacunae in their interpersonal skills, starting with a vocabulary which extends only a few hundred words beyond “Ooh, la la!” And though it is difficult to concentrate here—by reason of the pan pipes, the stretching and what appears to be a rolling Miss Nearly Naked competition—I am peripherally aware that “Ooh, la la” is not an expression often seen in classical Greek. The thought occurs to me, fuzzily, that I am spiritually misplaced. I am dead, but by some error—of a type with which I am extremely familiar—I am in the wrong afterlife, and while it is reasonably picturesque and full of (pretty but ill-educated and also curiously French) nymphs, I should really be getting along. I grasp a passing shepherdess by the least erogenous protruding part and attempt to secure some relevant information.

“Excuse me? Where am I?”

Titter.

“Am I dead? Is this my afterlife?”

Snort, giggle, bounce. The bouncing is interesting. I am distracted by it. She wanders off. I pull myself together, secure another one.

“I really need to go. This is lovely, and you’re all, really, very attractive, but I have things to do and places to be and I’m basically not your epicurean afterlife sort of person, I’m more the wild beauty, the thundering rivers and vast oceans sort of person. This is all a bit agricultural. So if there’s a door . . . ?”

Tee hee.

Grandmother Wu’s voice, in my head, suggests that this is a very special hell for intellectual, caring men. You can get your ashes hauled, get fed grapes and eat pastry all you like, for ever, but the whole thing will eventually drive you into a coma of self-loathing and ennui which will destroy your mind and turn your self-respect into a razor in the soul. If that’s the case, by the way, the Immortal Judge has sorely overestimated my integrity, but for the moment I’m still trying to get out of here.

“Anybody? I really want to get out of here!”

My wish is, in some measure, granted: I catch fire. This is not really what I was hoping for. It’s immediately recognisable: extreme discomfort and intense heat spreading from a point of initial ignition around the ankles upwards to my thighs and belly. I’m being burned at the stake. The invisible, intangible stake. Marvellous. Without the stench of burning and any sign of actual fire about my lower limbs, however, I conclude that this must be the onset of my translation to another inappropriate spiritual world of less pleasing aspect such as the Christian hell (returning to my roots, alas) described so forcefully by James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist, which the Evangelist read to us every year at Christmas time. So: to hell, thrashing in agony, because I have fallen down on my face. The nymphs pay me no attention at all as I writhe on the ground, which causes me to ponder the possibility that they are not true individuals but spiritual automata, and while I am thinking this, someone catheterises me, an intervention guaranteed to attract the attention of the patient. Thus, my journey across the infinite cosmos of the soul takes the form of me wincing and saying “ow,” and by the time I open my eyes, I have missed limbo and pandemonium and possibly the glimpse of heaven I was supposed to get to torment me for eternity, and am in hell.

Hell is smaller than I expected. Indeed, it appears to be a long, narrow motel room. The infernal prison of Lucifer Morningstar is upholstered in a cheap hessian wallpaper. There is also a bed, which does not seem to be a surgical table or other torturer’s tool, although there is a drip in my arm and another in a place more intimate about which you already know. If there is a part of me which does not hurt, it’s being very quiet about it. The only properly hell-ish things about it are a strange, nauseating sense of motion and the dim awareness of hissing and gasping voices, or possibly a large river or ill-tuned radio set, nearby: whoossh-shweeddogga-dogga-dogga-shweee, and so on.

The Devil—for surely no one else would think to catheterise a ghost—appears to have let himself go a bit. His stomach is proudly rounded, and protrudes like a single vast breast implant over the belt line of a green-and-purple sarong. His face is demonically out of focus.

“Hi,” the Devil says. “I thought you were a gonner.” And he smiles, revealing imperfect but cheerful teeth. My spiritual certainty recedes. Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient. This is not a form ideal for offering blandishments or inciting fear. It isn’t even particularly reassuring. It’s just a guy who could use several years on a crosstrainer and a diet of lettuce so that he can view his ankles without the aid of a mirror.

“My name’s K,” he says. “Pleased to meet you. Don’t talk just yet. You’ve still got plenty of resting up left in you. Tomorrow we’ll see about getting some whole food for you.” But this last is already from a great distance, because now that I am awake again, conscious and possibly alive, I feel a great urge to sleep.

I sleep. I dream good dreams about being a kid, about Cricklewood Cove and Ma Lubitsch’s goulash and Old Man Lubitsch’s bees. I dream about Elisabeth and Jarndice, and Aline. I do not dream about sex, which means that the bit about Aline is quite short. I dream of educated nymphs playing poker and talking politics, and investigating crimes in a city covered in greenery and bioluminescent lights, where domesticated bison pull the trains (I am the mayor, but for all my power I can’t stop people from wearing red hats, which of course makes the bison belligerent and causes accidents every day). I dream about being a crab, which is less tedious than it sounds. I dream I am a playing card, but no one will tell me which one, and I cannot crane my neck to see.

I dream someone is burning bacon, and when I wake up, I find the Devil—K—swearing amid a cloud of giddy baconsmoke, working at a portable stove at the far end of the room. Mercifully, I am no longer attached to a bag by a thin piece of tubing protruding from my genitals, or I would probably be embarrassed. Indeed, even my drip seems to have gone. K looks back over his shoulder and waves. It’s not immediately obvious whether he does this because he knows I am awake, or because he can’t see me through the incinerated pig. I feel a moment’s guilt at being present for the death rites of a pig, because Flynn the Barman’s pigs did such sterling service not so long ago when we needed them.

K waves again, and this one is definitely for me. At his side stands a girl in batik, wearing the expression of one who told him the pan was too hot. She has short dark hair cut aggressively flat around one side. She marches through the fog of pig and stands in front of me.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m K.”

I must look confused. I thought K was the fat geezer. Some bloke with a dry mouth says this out loud.

“No,” she says. “I mean, he is. But I’m K.” As if that makes it all clear. My K—the original and still the most enormous—sheds his apron with a slightly despairing gesture and chucks the bacon remnant into a bin. He opens a narrow window near the stove, and instantly the smoke whisks out and the unmistakable sound of the road bores in. Yes. The silver whale. I am aboard Jonah’s bus. Jonah’s bus is my hospital, which is Satan’s hell. Satan’s hell is a camper van. K, somewhat troublingly, is not the same as K. I gurgle a bit. Frege is not the ideal companion for a man recently ventilated. K the corpulent shuts the window and shoots his companion a cross look.

“Don’t do that to him, love. He’s been shot. He’s addled enough as it is,” and to me, “I’m K. She’s also K. We both—many of us here, actually—have the same name. Not that we’re all the same person, you understand. We just use one signifier to encourage random reassessment of the nature of our relationships. We don’t like to make assumptions, yeah?”

“Except K likes to assume he can cook,” the girl says savagely. “And he can’t cook.”

“I haven’t demonstrated the ability to cook,” K murmurs placidly, “but it’s inaccurate to say that I can’t. Perhaps I’m just waiting for the right moment.”

“The right moment.”

“Yes,” says K, airily, “possibly I am waiting for a moment which is tactically advantageous. I will suddenly leap upon the raw food and render it cordon bleu in a fit of remarkable efficacy, and in doing so, I will change the world for the better.” He smiles.

The girl arches a sceptical eyebrow and does not speak. It is the more sceptical because of the way her hair is cut, which is most probably why it’s cut that way.

K (the fat one, not the sceptic) demands a moment of communion with his patient. He fusses over me. He consults something which looks a bit like a medical chart, except that it is clipped to a piece of orange Perspex which used to be a drinks tray in a bar called Viva Humperdink!

“How do you feel?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” K says, and apparently ticks a box on the chart which says “Don’t know.” “Basically,” K says, “you’re doing amazingly well. You had a lot of cracked and broken ribs and so on, and they’re . . . well, they’re broken, but they’re not dangerous. Both of your ankles are sprained, but not badly, which is frankly a bit miraculous. And you have bruising all over you, and of course you’ve been, you know . . .”

This one, I do know.

“Shot.”

K nods.

“But you’re going to live.”

Oh.

“How did you find me?”

K looks uncomfortable.

“Thank Dr. Andromas,” he says, and ducks behind the chart. Apparently Dr. Andromas isn’t a topic he wants to dwell on. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

There are several questions I do not ask. I do not ask them because I have studied the gong fu of Isaac Newton. Assumption Soames, insurrectionist and secret heretic, required that her students grasp Newton’s Laws at an early age, so I was familiar with them even before Master Wu appointed Newton a sifu and a person of consequence. On the ostensible basis that every righteous soldier must know his enemy, the Evangelist stalked and purred from the back of the classroom to the front—a teacher you cannot see but know is there is infinitely more imposing than one you can measure with your eyes—and pounced on dissenters and doodlers and demanded they recite the blasphemous catechism of the alchemist and sorcerer.

So: A body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by a net external force. And here I am, continuing in my state of rest. This is the Law of Inertia, something of which I have a great deal at the moment. Although I may also, pace Albert Einstein, be in motion—the jag of the wheels and the hiss of air around the bus strongly suggests it must be so.

Next, the awkward one, which is frankly slippery as a fish and wriggles away from your comprehension as you reach for it: The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed, and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. It comes out windy because it is naturally expressed neither in Latin nor in English, but in the murky cant of mathematics known as algebra. To the uninitiated, this law is so much noise, like the whistling around the bus. I am a master mason of both these temples. I speak not only algebra but also the language of the many-wheeled heavy transport. I know from the sound of the tyres that we are on an A-class road in medium repair, but that we are nowhere urban, because I can hear the dust and random gravel of the desert. I know that the bus needs a service, and that we are travelling at around sixty miles per hour, and that there is at least one vehicle of similar disposition close to us on the right. I know also that our front right tyre is somewhat bald and that its opposite number needs some air.

These things I know because I have kneeled at the feet of mechanical wizards and seen their secret texts. From my other initiation, the backhanded educational magic of the Evangelist, I know that Newton’s Second Law is rendered as F = ma, Force is equal to mass times acceleration. Force is measured in Newtons, and the everyday utility of this law can be assessed from the fact that almost no one knows that. On the other hand, almost nothing with cogs or an engine would work without it.

It is Newton’s Third Law—the one which Assumption Soames used to manipulate the world—which concerns me now: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Push an object and you will go backwards unless you brace yourself to offset the reaction. No force flows in one direction only. Now, a normal person, waking in an unknown bed, decatheterised and enveloped in the smoke of burned and carcinogenic breakfast biomass, would naturally ask a string of questions beginning with “Where am I?” or “How long have I been out?” or other questions more personal and vastly more dangerous. But I have been in this place before. The gong fu of waking from serious injury is also known to me. Questions like that lead in a given direction, or rather in two. They lead from the sickroom to the corridor and thence to the real world beyond, with all its demands and calculations and income tax returns and moral obligations; to weddings and women you love and to attendant catastrophes; and they lead backwards in time to the moment of injury and any matters bearing upon it, such as being blown up or sudden revelations of horrible conspiracies. Newton’s Third Law is to be approached with caution.

Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future. A man in need of breakfast. So that is what I am. I accept everything they say, and I wait while K (the batik-wearing sceptic, not the corpulent Lucifer) seeks out nutritious stuff which has not been immolated. And I set my eyes and my feet solidly on a path of painless emptiness for as long as it may last, because for all that I am on the mend in body, there is a dark place in my mind and in my heart which needs a little time before it may be stretched and probed and exercised, and before it is allowed to have an equal and opposite reaction. Because I sense something in it and around it which is alien to me, something boiling and hard, and it occurs to me, as I carefully turn my back upon it, and leave it in its ring-fenced, oxygentented, shadowed place, that this unfamiliar thing inside me may be rage.

I EAT BREAKFAST. I hobble around. Days go by during which I ask no questions and make a point of not answering any either. I do this not aggressively but vaguely, leaving anyone who tries to draw me out with the feeling they learned something, and that next time I will surely open up and let them know it all.

I do not let anyone know it all, least of all myself.

And so I eat and fugue and wander and listen to the chat, and sleep in K’s Airstream and listen to his deep, basso breathing when my chest twinges and I wake for a while. And through the days I sit with him, riding shotgun, even driving, watching the road go under the wheels and listening to the tyres. K does not ask any questions. Sometimes K turns up and she wants to know everything, which is almost as restful, because I can barely begin one prevarication before she runs off at a tangent and supplies me with another. There is a maze in my head, and I grow it out and up, and the monster in the middle fades away. This is a good thing. It works well. Until we come to Rheingold, and all the fences come crashing down.

WE GO TO Rheingold to meet up with a few more folks who are part of K’s loose-knit caravan, some guys K says I will totally love. Rheingold will get a circus, and we’ll all hook up and then travel on and around and just live, which I gather is what K and his friends do.

Rheingold is not in the Border, exactly—but on a bad day, when the wind blows strongly from the north-west, and the pressure dips over Lake Barbarella, the Border can just about embrace it, swallow it whole, and everyone goes down into the cellars and waits to see what will be there when they come back up. Rheingold is like Hurricane Alley, with monsters.

In the manner of people who live on the edge of disaster, the lady townsfolk are very correct and proper, and not in the least fond of surprises or loose behaviour. Their job (self-appointed but no less legitimate) is to make sure that Rheingold persists, remains itself, and imparts to the next generation a sense of belonging. They are the walls of Rheingold. Like Ma Lubitsch, another bulwark against the capricious world, they set great store by trifles and commonplaces, and they hew to a church of Regular Meals.

The men here, by contrast, are crusty, loud and bombastic. Their job (self-appointed but no less real) is to carve out a space in which their mothers, daughters, wives and sisters can make the town. They do this by the energy of their actions, the strength of their backs and their convictions and a great deal of shouting. They construct and maintain and occasionally knock down and rebuild the town. They do manly tasks and they hunt or farm, till the soil and maintain livestock, and they fortify and watch over Rheingold in case it is attacked by something ludicrous or dangerous or insane.

And yes, there are broad-shouldered, termagant women, swinging a pick with the boys, and slender, spiritual men rolled around compassionate hearts waiting at home for them, or for some macho fellow with a lumberjack moustache who prefers the physical company of men to the alarming recesses of the female anatomy. There are boys who like boys and girls who like girls and all the variations in between. This world being what it is now, no one gives a pinch of orange tummyfluff who shares whose bed, as long as the whole thing is done in the appropriately formal style and nobody gets hurt.

We arrive, and there is a careful exchange of assurances. Folks in places like Rheingold are not careless in welcoming new people. There are rituals and testings to be observed, earnests of security and mutual humanity to be given on both sides. Rheingold does not wish to vanish, and K and his friends have no intention of ending their days as the gristle in a cooking pot. K goes out in his best sarong and his most unthreatening sandals, and with him goes K (a slender accountant with pale eyes) and K the batik sceptic, and they explain carefully that they are just passing through, carnival players, and they’d happily set up outside the town on the north side and maybe a little trade and respectable good times might be available to such of the good people of Rheingold as might wish to enjoy them. If (and only if ) this meets with the approval of the elders of Rheingold, K will summon one or two other persons of his persuasion and acquaintance, who might add colour and verve to the show.

The Rheingolders, for their part, emerge slowly, open-handed, respectful. They smile widely so that we can see they don’t file their teeth to cannibal points, and they all find excuses for taking off their shoes (small stones, itches, hangnails, broken soles and such) so that we will know they have toes instead of talons. There is a great deal of nodding and handshaking and back-slapping, and it is gradually established that no one has reversible knees or double-jointed thumbs or dorsal fins. At that point there is a certain amount of beer.

While the amber peacemaker flows among the men, K (the sceptic) wanders off and goes shopping, and chatting to the old women and young mothers of the town and getting a haircut, in a performance calculated as an earnest of intent: See, I need grooming products. Yea, indeed, I need grooming. Will none among you style me? I am a mammal, just as you are, and I need close contact and the nits picked from my fur. And after a while, the ladies of Rheingold take her in and give her cakes and ascertain that she is stepping out with a (quite fictional) young man named K (although she goes as far as to confide that his real name is Clifford, and that he is a recent arrival in the caravans) and that she intends to marry him as soon as time and decent convention permit, and that she is very much in love and not a little frustrated by the delay, because of course she cannot move into his Airstream, nor he into hers, until the formalities have been observed. This display of monogamy and right-thinking behaviour gives the lady Rheingolders an opportunity to wax earthy, to giggle and primp and to suggest in low voices that there must be ample places in a caravan where two young people of good character might divert one another to at least a degree of satisfaction, surely? Teehee and yes, says K, there are, but it’s hardly the same and one so wishes, etc., and yes, the ladies of Rheingold reply, quite true, and how desperately romantic it is, and the only person, my dear girl, quite the only person to cut your hair is Dame Lisa, and it so happens she will be here at four and why don’t you stay and have some more cake until then?

Dame Lisa arrives amid great ceremony and is ushered in, and pronounces K’s hair just lovely, of course, but my poor child the ends, but my, how daring that cut! Just splendid on one so young, thank goodness you’ve no chest to speak of or I should feel all outshone, and K, howling with inner hilarity, avers that a woman of Dame Lisa’s proportions need never be concerned that anyone, anywhere might ever be more feminine than she, and for good measure she goggles wretchedly at Dame Lisa’s formidable cleavage. This display of abject beta femaleness results in K’s immediate adoption as chief temporary protégée of the klatch, and she is eventually sent back to her Airstream reeking of three different perfumes and with her hair arranged to give her a rakish yet classic frontierswoman look. She has, along the way, secured promises from every matron, maiden and crone to come along and see the circus, and bring as many male relatives as they can legitimately muster. Indeed, there is already competition among the younger girls as to who will bring more young men and thus impress the wild, romantic, respectable, comfortably flat-chested, soon-to-depart and monogamous gypsy. As a consequence of this absolute female enthusiasm and the accompanying opportunities for respectable-yet-steamy-boy-Rheingolder-on-girl-Rheingolder-action, the issues of permissions and debates in council become moot. And thus the circus comes to town.

We have circled our wagons and made camp at a convenient yet non-intrusive distance from Rheingold, and it is morning on the day after our arrival. From out of the shady purple in one quarter of the sky comes a lonesome bus, ancient and sputtering diesel, with metal showing where the paint has flaked away. It is something of the order of a twenty-six-seater, and it is about as far from the smooth contours of K’s Airstream as you can get and still have wheels. Saggy tyres skid and squirm on the road, bulging perilously because there’s hardly enough air in there to keep the rims off the asphalt. The engine pops and bangs and little clouds of soot emerge, still burning, from an exhaust pipe which hangs pathetically between the rear wheels on a length of what appears to be stocking elastic. This wreck-in-waiting draws level with us, and almost everyone scurries back from it. The bus is painted a patchy blue, rusted away around the edges, and it has been savaged and snapped. This is not so much a bus as a dying warrior. And in each starred, dusty window a weird white face is pressed against the glass, white of skin and black of eye, contorted in a spooky sneer or a wild grin or an open howl: Munch’s painting replicated over and over.

The doors open, and the driver hops down from his seat. He waves and grins.

“Hi!” says Ike Thermite. “I’m Ike Thermite,” in case anyone has forgotten, “and we are the Matahuxee Mime Combine!” He springs lightly to the ground, and behind him come the mimes, all popping joints and pins and needles from the journey. A moment later he is whisked away by K and K and carried shoulder-high around the buses. I am alone with the mimes.

We look at one another. No one says anything. It’s like sharing a lift to a funeral. After a moment I wave at them, a bit hesitantly. One by one, they wave back in a perfect imitation. My uncertain wave starts with the nearest one, is picked up by the next before it can fade, and ripples away to the back.

And then, just as the wave starts its return journey, there is an odd little commotion. The mime on the far side spots something on the horizon, shudders and hides behind the next one in. The mime being used for cover looks sharply in both directions and dashes for K’s bus. The revealed mime scurries behind the next in line, who also declines the honour and hurries away, leaving the little man crouched, bandy-legged, peering around an obstacle which isn’t there. He spins and dives behind mime number four, who stares in horror into the haze and remembers a pressing engagement elsewhere. And so too with the next, and the next. A few seconds later the petrified mime is peering into my face and we are the only two people around. Slowly a single shaky finger extends, and then an arm, and the mime points back along the road. Huge, round eyes like a puppy’s make a silent appeal.

Okay, already. Hide behind me.

I look in the direction indicated by the pointing finger. There’s a small dust cloud now, and at the business end of it another vehicle: a covered military surplus truck which has seen better days, with a couple of bullet holes painted on the side and some weird scratches, and dings pretty much everywhere. The canvas section has been replaced with wood, panels reclaimed from some old-style restaurant or stately home, and a sort of caravan has been constructed. Daubed in foot-high letters along the side is magic of andromas. The painter knew more about carpentry than pigment, because the pigment has dribbled, and the whole thing looks less like a gypsy wagon than a scary melted waxwork. I glance around at my concealed mime, and find him gone. The Magic of Andromas stops exactly parallel to K’s Airstream. The driver’s door opens, and grey dust like graveyard sand trickles out onto the ground. A scuffed black patent-leather shoe touches the ground. It makes no noise.

Dr. Andromas gets out of the truck. He wears a top hat with a fine piece of gauze or mosquito net dangling lankly to his neck. Beneath it his face is white, with a tiny villainous moustache, and he wears a pair of aviator goggles over his eyes. His entire body is wrapped in a black cloak, which makes him look like a mummy or a sickly giant bat. For all that, he’s not as tall as I am. It feels very odd, and somehow dangerous, to be looking down on him.

“Dr. Andromas?”

The doctor looks at me for a long moment, and then shrugs past on business of his own.

You have to worry about someone even mimes find creepy.

IT IS lunchtime, but the mimes are not eating. They are standing in a long, regimented line, absolutely still. They are not rigid, they are relaxed and ready, but motionless. Corpse quiet, expressions painted on, they attend Ike Thermite’s commandments. Ike walks along the line, serious for the first time in my brief experience. And then he turns his back on them and spreads his arms like a bird. The Matahuxee Mime Combine follow suit, slowly. Ike brings his arm around and opens an imaginary door. He steps forward into an imaginary world. He tucks a non-existent chair under an intangible table. He invites them in.

The mimes cross the threshold one by one. Not one of them touches the door frame or puts a hand through a wall. There are too many of them to fit into the first room, and they get stuck, crowding around the entrance, jammed up together. Ike opens another door and goes farther into his imaginary space, brings the front half of the Matahuxee Mime Combine with him. The rest of the mimes fall into the first room, which is apparently a kitchen. They do the chores. They wash. They clean up. They step around one another, vault over nonphysical furniture. They cook. In the next room there’s some heavy DIY going on. Mimes saw and chop, scrub the floor, clean the windows. They dodge flailing arms, lift bowls of soup in either hand, tightrope-walk along the edge of sofas, squabble, fight, duck and dive. Straight-backed and fluid, they do all these things in utter quiet, save for the occasional group sigh. Ike watches. This is the kata of the greatest mime in the world.

I am hypnotised, sad, thrilled and suddenly terribly homesick. I came here to talk to Ike Thermite, say hi, talk about old times, but suddenly I am not sure that I want to. I am very glad when K comes to give me a job. As I depart, the mimes are starting to practise their clown work: mops, umbrellas and plantain bananas are being passed out in solemn stillness.

Five minutes later I am swinging a sledgehammer to knock metal pins into the ground. These pins will hold up the main tent, so there are quite a few of them, and this task is vital and important. A lot of other people are doing the same thing, but these pins are given to me. It is a pleasantly percussive task.

There is a method to the execution of the task, a technique. The hammer is wickedly heavy and hard to control. Only a strongman could lift it and hammer in a series of separate actions for longer than a few moments. Only an idiot strongman would actually do it, and there are surprisingly few of these. The process of building a body which can lift a vast amount in an unscientific way is most often also the process of learning that the other way is easier. The trick is in Newton’s Laws, of course: move the hammer and let its momentum carry it up, then divert it when it has the maximum kinetic energy but the minimum momentum, and bounce it off the metal pin or stake in such a way that the re-action can be used to complement the initiation of another upward arc. Much the same principle applies to the single-edged sword-form of Master Wu’s Voiceless Dragon style.

In any case, I have familiarised myself with the heft of the hammer, with its balance and bounce, and with its pitfalls—it becomes slippery in the heat, it does not always bounce true, and unlike a sword it is heavily biased towards the business end. I have set up the pins in a long row. And now, prepared and quiet in my mind, I move along the line in a single unbroken motion. It begins with Snake Concealed (the weapon hangs behind the trailing leg, so that it cannot easily be seen, and the enemy must either accept this or seek to alter his position accordingly—the pins unwisely take the first option) and moves on to Stirring the Cauldron (a twisting motion which starts the weapon moving, preparing the first attack).

I flip the hammer up (Horse Rears at the Moon), and then I step forward. Parting the Hair (downward strike) followed by Cloud Hands (rolling motion) and back to Stirring the Cauldron. There is a little shuffle here which Master Wu insisted was called Walk Like Elvis, but Elisabeth asserted, not without some justification, that this was unlikely to be the original name. Still, I Walk Like Elvis. After three or four spikes have gone in smoothly, I add Cut Across a Thousand Troops (a swirl where the weapon makes a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, positioning me between two pins and at ninety degrees to my starting vector) and follow it with Wheels of the Master’s Cart (rolling the hammer on one side, then the other) before taking the last six in quick succession (Babbling Brook and Parting the Hair bound together in succession), and then turning (Monkey’s Dance), hammer still in motion, and driving them all another six inches into the hard ground. Thus returned to the beginning, I stop. My arms are not tired, but my heart is beating quickly, and my scabs are hurting. There are lines of pain aching through my chest, and little globes of heat inside the flesh where the bullets were. Still, job done—in perhaps three minutes. K told me it would take half an hour. Hah! See how my skills are transferable!

As I turn to go in search of pies, I see a figure standing by the canteen tent. Ike Thermite is watching me. His eyes are round. Of course his eyes are always round. They are painted on. Still and all, somehow he is broadcasting considerable surprise, or so it seems. By the time I reach him, he is grinning.

“Tent pegs?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Usually,” says Ike Thermite, in the tone of one imparting a secret, “usually, we put the ropes around the pins before we hammer them in.”

Bugger.

But at least he does not want to talk about Matchingham, or ask me about my wife, and for this I feel an overwhelming gratitude.

THE CIRCUS is a thing of many parts. It is a cakebake, a display of acrobatics (and mime), a sheepdog trial and a magic show. The sheepdog trial is something of a surprise. Amid the noise and haste, a lanky black Scotsman with a voluminous beard hurtles up on a quad bike; two Border collies, dappled, eager and curious, sit on the platform at the back. In a wheeled chicken-wire box are several Indian runner ducks. The collies are called something like Mnwr and Hbw, and the man himself—another K, of course—speaks for the moment only in sharp, irritated growls and yaps. The Indian runner ducks have no names, or at least no names they share with us, and are here to represent sheep. They have many of the characteristics of sheep without actually being sheep. They are fabulously stupid. They cannot fly. They gather together and, given the opportunity, dither and fall over each other. They are protected from moisture by a natural oil which permeates their outer covering. A short amount of time spent in their company is enough to make you want to kill them all out of frustration.

K (the Scotsman) flings wide his arms.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my name is K, and I will be your ringmaster this evening!” (Except it is actually “Hah-lo, leddies ’n’ djentlemenn, ayem yer ringmasster thus evven-ung!”) And he launches straight into an explanation of the strong-eye and the weak-eye dog (the first being a dog whose face implies that he is a duck-eating psychopath, a creature of action who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals, suitable for starting animals moving at speed and cowing them into stillness, and for lethal action in the heat of battle; and the second being a gentle-hearted creature doing a job, friendly and mostly nonviolent, good for repairing rents in the flock, precise manoeuvring and charity work), then shows a few bits of black-belt duck herding, before segueing into a ringing denunciation of the Highland Clearances. Impressive that rage at this ancient political sin can survive the disintegration of the Highlands themselves, and pass, unmitigated, into the new world.

The mimes take their turn. In empty air they create a house, a street, a town, a nation under a capricious god. They rush around the world (backdrops depict ancient Gone Away places of mystery, like Venice and Delhi) in great confusion, an endless parade of slapstick and acrobatics against a scenery of sorrow and loss. The Matahuxee Mime Combine share a universe with us. They are mesmerising; they flip, bend, whoosh and custard-pie one another in a kind of restful quiet. They are sort of anti-Nietzschean clowns, who restore the ordinary simply by existing; a gentle remedy for the insidious forgetting which afflicts us. And then, out of nowhere, they create Dr. Andromas.

One moment Ike Thermite is engaged in a slapstick routine in the middle of the stage, and the next the mimes have apparently grown tired of him, and carry him off. There is a great clap of thunder, and everything goes dark, and there is Dr. Andromas, like a beggar king-in-waiting. He is dressed in a dusty tailcoat, a pair of disreputable trousers and fine, pointed shoes. His topper turns out to be an opera hat, with a folding skeleton inside which can be compressed for ease of carriage. One side of the skeleton must be loose or broken, because every so often Dr. Andromas’s hat flinches and sinks on the left, and the good doctor removes it and punches it back out and flops it once more into position. His face, unveiled for the occasion, is white and startled, and he has waxed his preposterous moustache into tiny, pinprick points. He has fine androgynous features, the kind you look at and immediately think you recognise. I try picturing him without the moustache. I don’t know him.

Dr. Andromas introduces himself (gestures grandly to a banner bearing his name in self-important letters), and the mimes lean on things all around him and giggle silently. He capers stiffly, loses his hat, finds it and draws from it in quick succession two carrots and a lettuce, slightly gnawed. He ponders these, apparently unsure where they can have come from, and leaves the hat sitting on the table behind him while he goes to confer with a mime on the other side of the stage. A rabbit scuttles out of the hat in pursuit of the carrots. The audience goes wild. Andromas turns around, and the rabbit bolts for the hat. Andromas lunges for it but misses, then jams his arm into the topper, and pulls out three metres of orange silk, a sink plunger and the shapely leg of a young woman. This last is sharply withdrawn, and a slender arm emerges and slaps him across the face. He recoils and jams the hat in a panic onto his head. A moment later he sighs and takes it off again. The rabbit is back.

At this point Dr. Andromas steps up a gear. He passes the rabbit to a very young Rheingolder, who takes it with some misgivings until the rabbit parks itself firmly on her lap and falls asleep. Dr. Andromas silently requests from the gentlemen of Rheingold a simple favour: might he have the loan of a gentleman’s watch? (Asking for the watch involves a great deal of careful gesticulation and the miming of cogs. It gives the clear impression that pompous Dr. Andromas believes he is dealing with imbeciles who don’t speak mime like any proper person.) The townsfolk of Rheingold recognise without difficulty that they are invited to dislike this persona, and they laugh at his popinjay manners and his battered dignity, and Andromas preens and assumes that this is all down to his massive comic talent. It’s a contract, and everyone is behaving quite according to their assigned role. The audience is thus perfectly prepared for The Trick.

The Trick follows a predictable pattern. Dr. Andromas takes the watch, and wraps it for safe keeping in a green pocket handkerchief. Then he gives a genial, reassuring wave and smashes the little green cloth bundle repeatedly with a wooden mallet. Several hundred people giggle and gasp. The owner of the watch winces and chuckles tolerantly and silently wishes himself elsewhere. His wife clutches at his arm with nervous good humour. Everyone knows it will be all right. But a look of dismay passes over the doctor’s greasepainted face. He looks in the handkerchief. He rattles it, and—somewhat alarmingly in the context—it goes tinkle. A single stray cogwheel falls out and rolls across the table. Dr. Andromas freezes. He raises one hand in a conjuring sort of a way, and then drops it again. He rattles the handkerchief. Tinkle. A sickly little grin appears on his face. He trots over to the side of the stage and talks urgently to one of the mimes. The mime shrugs. More mimes are called in, and the discussion grows animated. Ike Thermite is hurriedly brought out and does a creditable double-take when informed of the problem. Wrathful Ike despatches a mime to give Andromas a sound bollocking. The Rheingolders cheer and chuckle. Dr. Andromas makes his way to the front of the stage.

Andromas composes his face—impossible moustache and all—into an expression of the most profound regret. He clasps his hands. He is beseeching Rheingold in general, and the owner of the (currently deceased) watch in particular, to be merciful. He gestures to the table, the rabbit, to all the good things he has done. He gives the audience to understand that, in all his years, he has never made such an error as this. But he has, today, experienced the first pang of senility. He has blanked. Possibly tomorrow, when the pressure has abated, he will recover himself. Right now . . . he has forgotten the second half of the trick.

And he opens the handkerchief, and pours a stream of sand and cogs and glass fragments into his open hands.

There is absolute silence. It isn’t, of course, the silence of horror, although it’s sort of bleeding in that direction. It is the silence of demand: Make it okay, Ike’s audience is saying. This was funny and now it’s scary and you have to make it be okay. Ike Thermite steps forward and whispers sharply in the doctor’s ear. An ultimatum, apparently—Dr. Andromas looks around for salvation. The mimes desert him. Alone in the middle of the stage, Andromas fretfully wraps the pieces up and makes a few passes over them, but nothing happens. The mimes silently dismantle the scenery. They take the Alps away, and Loch Ness, and everything else, and the lights all go out except for the one which picks out Dr. Andromas like the accused on the witness stand. And finally he cries, on his knees, and this has turned out to be a very other kind of show from the one everyone was expecting. It is, on the one hand, quite clear that Dr. Andromas doesn’t know how to put it all back together, and it is, on the other, very unclear whether this means the watch or the world, or whether there is a difference. An awed, awful quiet settles on the people of Rheingold. There is a sniffle from one of the sturdier matrons and a murmur of mourning from the men. Dr. Andromas is the bearer of an awkward truth. Andromas himself rubs desperately at his moustache until it droops. His huge girlish eyes open very wide, and he allows a single tear to make its way down his face.

And just as Dr. Andromas falls down onto his face and his hat drops off to reveal not the balding pate I had somehow expected but a lush crop of messy hair cut sensibly short, the rabbit abandons its cosy perch and hops back onto the stage. And of course it is wearing a watch around its neck. Yes, that watch. The lights come back, and the mimes are sitting among the audience, and behind the stripy fabric of the circus tent, which is drawn aside, the scenery is all set up: the old world, in a single panorama, mixed with the new: the waterfall at Alicetown, the Westery Mountains, where what must at one time have been a great lake or an inland sea falls over a cliff into something which may have been the Indian Ocean. The first wonders of the age. The crowd erupts with relief and delight. Noise like thunder. Bright light. Joy.

At which point a thing happens to me. The chain of mental dominoes is very simple; the results are not. Complexity arising from simple properties: this is called chaos. The name is very apt. I am drowned in chaos. The woman in front of me claps, vigorously. She whoops. She moves her head. She has a lace band tied round a smart ponytail, and from it a sweet wash of jasmine rolls up and over me. Jasmine. And lace. Leah, in the church in Cricklewood Cove. And immediately thereafter, Leah with Gonzo. Cordite, pain and asphalt.

All the walls come down inside my head. I am betrayed, murdered, rescued, healed and bereft. I have saved the world and been rewarded with five shots in the chest, booted out to die in mid-air on a dusty road. I am toxic waste. I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes. And if there is one thing I will do, before I die in truth, it is this: I will find Gonzo Lubitsch, and I will know why. I will know when, and whether they felt guilty, or whether they laughed at me. I will make him tell me everything. I will make them tell me. Gonzo and her. Her, and Gonzo. I will ride the wind and arrive like a storm, and I will compel answers. I am almost screaming, and my eyes are filled with power and heat. I must be wrapped in boiling shadows. The world must surely be responding to this, making physical my fury, dripping acid from my skin. Although, if so, the man in the seat next to me is taking it remarkably well.

I will avenge. I will have recompense, oh yes. I will.

I am about to surge to my feet. I am about to run out and steal a truck or a bus, and charge off, chase them down. I will travel across the world, if I have to. I will go on for ever. I am inexorable. I am wronged. I am Nemesis, meting out just deserts. Any second now, I will begin. Any second now.

Except that I can see only one conclusion to that course. The road has a logic of its own, a violent, inexorable pressure towards some kind of fearful reckoning. If I chase Gonzo, I must catch him. If I catch him, I must confront him. We will fight. It will end when one of us is dead. Perhaps I will have to kill Leah too. And these are not my footsteps; Gonzo is the man of action. It is Gonzo who rushes in head first, who leads with the chin, gets back on the horse, takes no prisoners.

I am not Gonzo Lubitsch.

And so, when movement comes back to my limbs and I flee the circus tent into the dark, I do not steal K’s bus and charge off in hot pursuit to who knows what bad end. I walk out into the night with a fire in my gut, and I do what Gonzo Lubitsch, in his whole life that I know of, has never really done.

I think.