The Nonesuch and Others (3 page)

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…!

…Back home, I checked it out in a book at the library. A mole cricket, sure enough
—
genus
Gryllotalpa
—an “injurious insect.” Well, the damn thing very nearly injured me, for sure!

So there you go, Diary: a flash-back of sorts, reminding me of those Thin People in Barrows Hill who might or might not have been a result of my drinking. Except now I’m pretty sure they weren’t. I mean, there are so many things in the earth—and on this Earth—that we don’t know about. Okay, so people know about mole crickets.
Some
people do, even if I didn’t. But what if there are other things, species that are unknown, that no one has ever seen? Or if they have seen them, did they know what they were seeing? And I’m not just talking about the Thin People…

So what am I talking about, eh, Diary? Well, it’s this new thing. Except (God help me) I’d been drinking again, and can’t really be sure. But I’m pretty sure…

A fair was in town. Now usually, these days, a fair is no big deal. In England they’ve sort of dried up, lost a lot of their appeal; not to kids—no, of course not—but among parents. I mean, who can afford them any more? The rides and sideshows are too expensive, and you need a cast-iron stomach to handle the greasy rubbish they sell from the fast-food stalls. What’s more, it’s a very rare fair that doesn’t attract rain. It can be bright and summery in the morning—“autumnal” in the case in question—but from the moment those big artics and painted wagons start rolling in, look out! Here come the thunderheads.

This fair, however, was unusual. It came annually, in late August or early September, and was as big as any three standard fairs rolled up in one…because it
was
three fairs joined up and working as one, creating what the proprietors knew would be a big local attraction on one of their last gigs of the season. Big, garish and very noisy, yes. Flashing lights, tubular neons and coloured balloons; the rumble of generators versus a calliope; the smell of grease, friction, sawdust; the hoarse-voiced Loreleis at hoopla stalls and coconut-shies, all of them vying with each other to lure you to financial doom; the penny slots, Ghost Train, Freak House, Hall of Mirrors—the whole bit.

I say the fair was “in town” but in fact it was in a field on the outskirts, the same field every year. For several weeks I’d been noticing (barely) the big bright posters. They hadn’t made much of an impact; wrapped up in my work, everything else was peripheral. But last Friday morning on my way into town on the bus, as I passed the field in question, I saw the first of the artics starting to arrive. Down the road there was a long string of them. And not a cloud in sight. It made a change.

Saturday morning, a friend of mine called me. Just out of bed, I answered the phone. “It’s George,” he told me. “Haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays! Watcha doing these days? Still tied up with your big-deal, high-pressure job? Still doing the cub reporter bit—that ‘Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olson’ sort of thing?”

“If you mean am I still a journalist? Yes. No big deal; I just like to write, that’s all.”

George was an interior decorator…that’s what he called himself, but all he did really was patch over cracked ceilings with wavy-patterned, quick-drying cement stuff, and then paint it to make it look good.

“Me?” George answered. “I’m free this weekend, and I wondered if you were, too.”