The Nonesuch and Others, Page 2

  “And that was it?”

  Barmy Bill gulped, tossed back his gin and poured himself another. His eyes were huge now, his skin white where it showed through his whiskers. “God, no—that wasn’t it—there was more! See, I figured later that I must have got myself drunk deliberately that time—so’s to go up there and spy on ’em. Oh, I know that sounds crazy now, but you know what it’s like when you’re mindless drunk. Jesus, these days I can’t get drunk! But these were early days I’m telling you about.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “Next—he’s coming back down the street! I can hear him: click, pause, click, pause…click, pause, stilting it along the pavement—and I can see him in my mind’s eye, doing his impression of a lamppost with every pause. And suddenly I get this feeling, and I sneak a look round. I mean, the frontage of this garden I’m in is so tiny, and the house behind me is—”

  I saw it coming. “Jesus!”

  “A thin house,” he confirmed it, “right!”

  “So now you were in trouble.”

  He shrugged, licked his lips, trembled a little. “I was lucky, I suppose. I squeezed myself into the hedge, lay still as death. And click, pause…click, pause, getting closer all the time. And then—behind me, for I’d turned my face away—the slow creaking as the door of the thin house swung open! And the second thin person coming out and, I imagine, unfolding him or herself, and the two of ’em standing there for a moment, and me near dead of fright.”

  “And?”

  “Click-click, pause; click-click, pause; click-click—and away they go. God only knows where they went, or what they did, but me?—I gave ’em ten minutes start and then got up, and ran, and stumbled, and forced my rubbery legs to carry me right out of there. And I haven’t been back. Why, this is the closest I’ve been to Barchington since that night, and too close by far!”

  I waited for a moment but he seemed done. Finally I nodded. ‘Well, that’s a good story, Bill, and—”

  “I’m not finished!” he snapped. “And it’s not just a story…”

  “There’s more?”

  “Evidence,” he whispered. “The evidence of your own clever-bugger eyes!”

  I waited.

  “Go to the window,” said Bill, “and peep out through the curtains. Go on, do it.”

  I did.

  “See anything funny?”

  I shook my head.

  “Blind as a bat!” he snorted. “Look at the street lights—or the absence of lights. I showed you once tonight. They’ve nicked all the bulbs.”

  “Kids,” I shrugged. “Hooligans. Vandals.”

  “Huh!” Bill sneered. “Hooligans, here? Unheard of. Vandals? You’re joking! What’s to vandalize? And when did you last see kids playing in these streets, eh?”

  He was right. “But a few missing light bulbs aren’t hard evidence,” I said.

  “All right!” he pushed his face close and wrinkled his nose at me. “Hard evidence, then.” And he began to tell me the final part of his story…

  Three

  Cars!” Barmy Bill snapped, in that abrupt way of his. “They can’t bear them. Can’t say I blame ’em much, not on that one. I hate the noisy, dirty, clattering things myself. But tell me: have you noticed anything a bit queer—about cars, I mean—in these parts?”

  I considered for a moment, replied: “Not a hell of a lot of them.”

  “Right!” He was pleased. “On the rest of the Hill, nose to tail. Every street overflowing. ’Specially at night when people are in the pubs or watching the telly. But here? Round Barchington and the Larches and a couple of other streets in this neighbourhood? Not a one to be seen!”

  “Not true,” I said. “There are two cars in this very street right now. Look out the window and you should be able to see them.”

  “Bollocks!” said Bill.

  “Pardon?”

  “Bollocks!” he repeated. “Them’s not cars! Rusting old bangers. Spokewheels and all. Twenty, thirty years they’ve been trundling about. The thin people are used to them. It’s the big shiny new ones they don’t like. And so, if you park your car up here overnight—trouble!”

  “Trouble?” But here I was deliberately playing dumb. Here I knew what he meant well enough. I’d seen it for myself: the occasional shiny car, left overnight, standing there the next morning with its tyres slashed, windows smashed, lamps kicked in.

  He could see it in my face. “You know what I mean, all right. Listen, couple of years ago there was a Flash Harry type from the city used to come up here. There was a barmaid he fancied in The Railway—and she was taking all he could give her. Anyway, he was flash, you know? One of the gang lads and a rising star. And a flash car to go with it. Bullet-proof windows, hooded lamps, reinforced panels—the lot. Like a bloody tank, it was. But—” Bill sighed.

  “He used to park it up here, right?”

  He nodded. “Thing was, you couldn’t threaten him, you know what I mean? Some people you can threaten, some you shouldn’t threaten, and some you mustn’t. He was one you mustn’t. Trouble is, so are the thin people.”

  “So what happened?”

  “When they slashed his tyres, he lobbed bricks through their windows. And he had a knowing way with him. He tossed ’em through thin house windows. Then one night he parked down on the corner of Barchington. Next morning—they’d drilled holes right through the plate, all over the car. After that—he didn’t come back for a week or so. When he did come back…well, he must’ve been pretty mad.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Threw something else—something that made a bang! A damn big one! You’ve seen that thin, derelict shell on the corner of Barchington? Oh, it was him, sure enough, and he got it right, too. A thin house. Anybody in there, they were goners. And that did it!”

  “They got him?”

  “They got his car! He parked up one night, went down to The Railway, when the bar closed took his lady-love back to her place, and in the morning—”

  “They’d wrecked it—his car, I mean.”

  “Wrecked it? Oh, yes, they’d done that. They’d folded it!”

  “Come again?”

  “Folded it!” he snapped. “Their funny science. Eighteen inches each way, it was. A cube of folded metal. No broken glass, no split seams, no splintered plastic. Folded all neat and tidy. An eighteen-inch cube.”

  “They’d put it through a crusher, surely?” I was incredulous.

  “Nope—folded.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Not to them. Their funny science.”

  “So what did he do about it?”

  “Eh? Do? He looked at it, and he thought, ‘What if I’d been sitting in the bloody thing?’ Do? He did what I would do, what you would do. He went away. We never did see him again.”

  The half-bottle was empty. We reached for the beers. And after a long pull I said: “You can kip here if you want, on the floor. I’ll toss a blanket over you.”

  “Thanks,” said Barmy Bill, “but no thanks. When the beer’s gone I’m gone. I wouldn’t stay up here to save my soul. Besides, I’ve a bottle of my own back home.”

  “Sly old sod!” I said.

  “Daft young bugger!” he answered without malice. And twenty minutes later I let him out. Then I crossed to the windows and looked out at him, at the street all silver in moonlight.

  He stood at the gate (where it should be) swaying a bit and waving up at me, saying his thanks and farewell. Then he started off down the street.

  It was quiet out there, motionless. One of those nights when even the trees don’t move. Everything frozen, despite the fact that it wasn’t nearly cold. I watched Barmy Bill out of sight, craning my neck to see him go, and—

  Across the road, three lampposts—where there should only be two! The one on the left was OK, and the one to the far right. But the one in the middle? I had never seen that one before. I blinked bleary eyes, gasped, blinked again. Only two lampposts!

  Stinking drunk�
��drunk as a skunk—utterly boggled!

  I laughed as I tottered from the window, switched off the light, staggered into my bedroom. The barmy old bastard had really had me going. I’d really started to believe. And now the booze was making me see double—or something. Well, just as long as it was lampposts and not pink elephants! Or thin people! And I went to bed laughing.

  …But I wasn’t laughing the next morning.

  Not after they found him, old Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill. Not after they called on me to identify him.

  “Their funny science,” he’d called it. The way they folded things. And Jesus, they’d folded him, too! Right down into an eighteen-inch cube. Ribs and bones and skin and muscles—the lot. Nothing broken, you understand, just folded. No blood or guts or anything nasty—nastier by far because there was nothing.

  And they’d dumped him in a garbage-skip at the end of the street. The couple of local youths who found him weren’t even sure what they’d found, until they spotted his face on one side of the cube. But I won’t go into that…

  Well, I moved out of there just as soon as I could—do you blame me?—since when I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. Fact is, I haven’t thought of much else.

  And I suppose old Bill was right. At least I hope so. Things he’d told me earlier, when I was only half listening. About them being the last of their sort, and Barrows Hill being the place they’ve chosen to sort of fade away in, like a thin person’s ‘elephant’s graveyard,’ you know?

  Anyway, there are no thin people here, and no thin houses. Vandals aplenty, and so many cars you can’t count, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  Lampposts, yes, and posts to hold up the telephone wires, of course. Lots of them. But they don’t bother me anymore.

  See, I know exactly how many lampposts there are. And I know exactly where they are, every last one of them. And God help the man who ever plants a new one without telling me first!

  Dear Diary—

  Yes, it’s me again…I bet you thought I’d died, right? But no, I just went away for a while; or rather I got away. It was a bad case of GAFIA: Getting Away From It All. Mainly from London, from Barrows Hill and the Thin People.

  I thought I had forgotten about the Thin People; I tried to forget about them, putting them down to my temporary addiction, my “penchant” for alcohol. Incidentally, that was why I started corresponding with you, Diary…I thought, maybe if I told it all to you, maybe if I described how well I was getting on, how I was winning over my, er, “urge”—in fact my compulsion—to imbibe almost every-damn-thing from beer to mouthwash to ciggy-lighter fuel, that would be much better than bearing my booze-sodden soul to some tooth-tapping trick-cyclist, some shrunken shrink, some fingernail-munching counsellor, some pallid pack of lying Alcoholics Anonymous groupies, and like that.

  In fact—on looking back—it was just such cynicism that kept me from these barely possible remedies; that and the fact that I considered myself “strong,” hated to admit my addiction to anyone other than myself…and to you, of course.

  And the thing is I honestly can’t remember whether or not I was in trouble with my drinking before Barrows Hill and the Thin People, or if it came on later. If it was before, then I might be able to say that everything that happened was simply an attack of the dreaded dt’s; might even dismiss the episode entirely. But on the other hand I can’t seem to recall a previous problem. Or maybe that’s just how it catches up with you, by stealth. But if it was after Barrows Hill—

  —Well, that’s what worries me.

  Okay, Diary, I accept that I was a drinker—in fact some kind of drinking fool—but not until after she’d dumped me.

  She, yes…

  A little less than three and a half years ago, Diary, you were made up of page after page about her. Until she left and I ripped them out, burned them to ashes, and buried the ashes in the old lady’s garden downstairs, like some kind of grave. And if I hadn’t got out of Barrows Hill…well, who knows? Maybe I’d still be grieving and putting down flowers on that grave even now. But I did get out, because of the Thin People. And because of what happened to Barmy Bill.

  The Thin People, who came out of their thin houses at night to do their thing—“tea-leafing,” thieving, as old Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill, the old codger who told me about them, called it. And where’s Barmy Bill now, eh? Either he had the weirdest, most inexplicable and horrible accident of all time—to end up square like that, an eighteen inch cube with his flattened face on one side—or the Thin People did it to him after he talked to me. And at the time, I wasn’t willing to take the chance.

  Accident? I didn’t think so. Thin People? Well, the trouble is I thought I’d seen one of them…maybe. So they were either real or it was a bad case of the dt’s. Whichever, it had scared me enough I packed my bags (plastic bags, that is) and portable typewriter, and got out.

  And as for Lois or Lori or Lorraine (shit, I can’t even be sure of her name now) I’ve done almost as good a job of forgetting her as I thought I had done of forgetting the Thin People. So may your poor buried ashes rest in peace, Diary.

  But as for the Thin People—

  —I hate to admit this, but there have been reminders…

  Diaries go year by year, usually. And so do you, Diary. Or you should but you’re three years out of date, just a notebook now. Still, what the hell, I can talk to you because you’re not a shrink and you can’t talk back. Or maybe you can.

  Let’s turn one or two of your pages back to find that time I took a holiday in Cyprus. The sun, the sea, and the sand. And no booze. I was over it. I had a good job up in the north-east, Newcastle, and I was in control. All those bars, those alfresco tavernas—all that cheap Keo beer in big brown bottles—that Metaxa, clear Ouzo, dusty resinata? Hell, no! No way! Make mine a diet Coke. Water, even. How clean can you get?

  And I would look at the holidaymakers in the Cypriot night—all tipsy, some stoned, others flat out—and think, “God, what clowns we make of ourselves!” But now, when I think about clowns, I think of something else.

  Clowns: they used to scare me as a kid and still do, even more now. But I’ll get to that.

  Out there in Cyprus, however, well it was a great holiday. Only one thing spoiled it; one little nothing kind of thing, a dream I had that turned into something else. And here it is as I wrote it down in your pages, Diary:

  …I think I was dreaming about those Thin People that Barmy Bill told me about—I think I probably dream of them quite frequently, but can’t remember too much about it when I’m awake. Just as well, I suppose. Old Bill told me they looked a lot like men in the daylight—not that they were out very much in the daylight—but that at night they were more themselves. At night they unfolded themselves, like a joiner’s wooden ruler but fifteen feet long and incredibly thin. He said it was their science, totally different from ours, which let them manipulate matter differently. That was how they could do things with their bodies; even with…well, other bodies. Bill said their joints must be similar to the joints of certain insects…

  So that’s what I was thinking, or dreaming, as I came awake in my hammock under the grapevines, in the garden of the hotel where I was staying, near the British military base in Dhekelia. Or was it?

  Perhaps what I saw as I slowly woke up reminded me of that time in Barrows Hill. So that I wasn’t so much dreaming as reflecting—constructing or maybe reconstructing one event from the other—until both events merged, flowing into each other in the surreal interval between true dreaming and full consciousness.

  But as for what I actually saw as I awakened…well, that was more dreamlike than a dream! In fact, and if I didn’t know it now to be a natural phenomenon, I would have to say it was nightmarish.

  Who am I kidding, it was nightmarish!

  Close by. In the cropped grass, I noticed that a small area of the ground was moving…

  Now consider: the place where I was staying was rather rare on a Mediterranean island, insofar as the
garden had real grass. And the owner was very proud of it. He watered it daily and cut it twice a week—despite that it didn’t need it. I saw him watering and cutting away at it that morning. Maybe that’s what caused it, made the earth damp and brought about a disturbance.

  Anyway, a small patch of ground nearby was moving. And lying there on my side in the netting—surfacing from what was probably a deep sleep—I saw a run of cropped grass blades parting as the soil beneath them bulged upward, forming a hummock three or four inches long and two across.

  Then the earth broke open, and this thing nosed its way out. Emerging slowly at first—shaking the soil off its furry little body—it came out, and I knew at once what it was. It was a mole! Or at least the first part of it was, the first couple of inches.

  But a mole with antennae?

  And I think I can be forgiven for believing that I was still asleep and dreaming…because then the rest of it pushed its way out.

  Okay, those first couple of inches: I saw these legs—mole legs, covered with bristling fur—then the dark hairy snout, and a furry mole body. So far so good. But not really. Because sticking out from the snout were these antennae, and halfway down the mole body was an oddly jointed pair of insect legs! And if I hadn’t been awake before, well I certainly was by then.

  The rest of the body emerged—the thorax, as I now know it to have been. No fur, just three inches of unpleasantness, of long, folded-back spiky-tipped wings, and another pair of those thorny insect legs. Until finally it was out in the open.

  I looked at it wide-eyed, and this thing looked back at me, through eyes like tiny red faceted beads. Then it shook itself one last time, opened its wings and flew. I heard the whirring—ducked as it seemed to come right at me—almost fell out of my hammock as it buzzed close overhead…

  Later I spoke to Costas, the owner of the hotel. He laughed when I told him how I’d nearly fallen…and he told me what I’d seen: a mole cricket. There weren’t too many of them, but neither were they very rare. My opinion: those nightmarish little bastards should be rare! And extinct would be even better…!