a fascinating world and very funny too – irvine welsh
Adolf Hitler:
As loving Christians we read in tears the passage in which the Lord finally arose in His might and drove from the temple the brood of Jewish snakes. How great was His battle for the entire world against the Jewish poison. Today, after these two thousand years, with deep emotion we see that this was why He had to shed His blood upon the Cross.
Albert Speer:
Close study reveals that time is held within its limits but precariously, thanks only to non-stop human vigilance and swift correction of time’s excesses. Loosening the airship from consensual time required an audience too intoxicated for such vigilance — hence the trip to Scotland.
…………………….
Dad led me to an outdoor ceilidh where locals sat staring into mugs and tankards. Luftwaffe bombs fell far off to the east, rippling galaxies reflected in folk’s drinks. One manny tuned up a fiddle and then laid it down again. Them tunes of his were not yet ready for this night.
Groups criss-crossed the chequered dancefloor forming diamond-shapes and star-shapes. I curtsied to our lairdie Sir Lawrence Bram. Dad ordered a big whisky and we sat down at a table. Someone muttered behind my back, ‘Barman, some holy wine for our young Jan.’
More rumbles and flashes in the eastern sky. Shadow Jans shuddered, grateful I was here to shield them. Mum’s sister Nell sat beside us in her bowler hat, followed by her lame pal George. I said hello but dad drank on and ignored Nell’s weird stares.
George said soft, ‘The Northern Scot claims Adolf Hitler is speeding for Aberdeen in his Tausendjährigerheißluftballon.’ He squinted at his newspaper. ‘Which means thousand year hot air balloon, a birthday surprise from Albert Speer and the finest German boffins.’
George squinted again and read out: ‘ “Citizens await Wednesday confrontation and eye a sky ever more populous and complex, strewn from abyss to abyss with an unbelievable star-dusting. ‘Godspeed Mr Hitler’s airy Leviathan,’ their Prime Minister has declared, and resolve lights their faces and leaves their chests as sighs.’
He turned the page and read out: ‘Leaning backwards they let their imaginations explore distant galaxies and claim them for His Majesty the King. Souls spray through the void reddened by supernovae and faintly blued by starlight, Britishly showering the Milky Way in diagonal formations. From tonight there dates a brand new constellation: THE UNION JACK.” ’
There was a giant boom from the east. George flinched and his hand brushed mine beneath the table. I reached out and held it tight and we sat like this in silence, hand in hand, a fair old holy moment.
Yon fiddle started up again, quite unscared all of a sudden, and spoke up very well beneath galaxies shaped like music notes and Swastikas and other spacey doodles. We all watched the RAF’s roaring squadrons overhead and my heart sang out its thanks to God beyond.
Nell stood and danced fierce wiggly and then sat down on dad’s lap. Said bold Nell, ‘Herr Adolf Hitler dropped gas to make us believe we’re Stans and our kin are Ollies, though it didna really work, not on us, not on local sorts, no, though the pigeons arena half fidgeting and eyeing one another funny.’
‘No pal of the British Empire, yon,’ said George.
‘After a sore incident with a mousetrap,’ Nell went on, ‘Adolf Hitler banned the colour purple. But the ban wasna enforced completely, for purple’s there in rainbows, eeh?’ Smart talk to impress my dad, though her voice stayed spooked and croaky.
‘One day they gather in their Olympic Stadium, them slimy Huns, them grimy Huns,’ she went on. ‘The Manny Hitler runs onto the track in raspberry-coloured tights hung with bells and his many medals, and then bolts round the track, he does, one hand saluting and one parked upon his hip. Taking each corner smoothly he approaches with his jingling choir of bells, face sweating buckets behind its wee moustache, fearsome as a fly, unbelievably purple, shooing barking dogs that winna leave the soul alone.’
A beetle zigzagged across the dancefloor avoiding the black squares.
‘But then,’ said George, ‘he’s not a bloke you see in his Tausendjährigerheißluftballon every Wednesday, eeh?’
‘Right then,’ Nell said and clapped her hands. ‘Let’s hit Aberdeen and scope out this raging little fellow.’
Dad’s knees parted and Nell fell onto the ground. She tried to haul him down but he freed himself and sets off homewards. I said goodnight and followed him, near skipping after each eastern boom, slow and drowsy as I hummed the fiddle’s tune.
Cottages grew smaller and fewer and then disappeared. Moonlight turned the muddy track the rarest bluey silver. The air was much fresher out here and walking through the woods we smelled the sweetness of blooming snowdrops. The only local sound was water trickles and even they hushed as the moon rose through the north pouring whiteness like froth from glass to glass, higher and wider yet and more magical and – it was gone. Nah, thon wasna the moon at all because the moon was in the west. I was just awful tired.
Rabbits and squirrels twitched noses at a humming pylon, rabbits that threw the best ceilidhs in the woods, squirrels that didna see the point of such. I walked on for our home, holding stumbling dad up for the fresh air had him sotted.
The night played dominoes in space, scoring empty victories, and then doodled ten thousand screeds into the blackest depths of boredom. Och God the awful yawns of your night in triumph…
…
As a girl Nell got a brain sickness that left her no longer counted among the Broch’s sensible sorts. When the war came others’ lives were battered and swept away but Nell’s continued in a boring line that shoogled neither up nor down. Always she wore the same dark blue shabby dress and a bowler hat too big for her head. Odd the way her looks started to reflect all them great trials and larks her life had never had, as if her dreams had drew them in her face. Her thick eyebrows arched over and shadowed them bleak eyes of hers, and her face bloomed with a hardy bonniness with no real meaning.
The day we set off to see the balloon her form wasna great at all. She sat in the corner of our train compartment with extra blankness in her eyes.
‘I dreamt I was dirty,’ she blurted out. ‘That my hands and feet had taken root. Briars grew from my neck downwards. Frogs inhabited my hair. Thingies tugged my eyelids. Dratted things. They tugged my eyelids.’
‘Shame,’ said my older sister Wendy. Nell turned down Wendy’s bag of raisins.
George was there beside Nell. Dad was in the dining car. Mum had taken one of her transcendental turns and was babbling in bed, he said.
Woodland scenes passed by and smells of pine and rain faded through our air. I looked at Wendy’s face then, I remember. She was taking bites at the piney air, like it was ice cream. Her skirt fluttered very gentle. George smiled and Wendy blushed. A boring wee spell passed. The whole train was taking a breather, it felt like, before moving on for some unkent border. Then further up the carriage girls started up a dirty song about the Manny Himmler. No day off school for this trip, for we were already on our Easter break.
George leant towards Nell’s ear. I leant forward and heard him say, ‘The surest route to peace of mind is to make other people happy. I’ll be one unhappy dog if you dinna lie with me, Nellie.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Nell.
‘Lie as man and woman. Let’s please lie together on the famous Pleasure Beach tonight.’
Nell thought about this. Her answer was, ‘No, we shall dance this night. On the sand we’ll dance.’
‘Why do you always taunt me, Nell? You ken I canna dance.’
‘I will rhumba,’ she said.
George told me and Wendy, ‘I do not like cursing the Lord about my fate on account of suchlike getting no man nowhere, ken? Lately, though, I just canna help it and keep wondering what the heck’s it all in aid of, eeh?’
Went Nell, ‘I’ll rhumba with some big man, some big strong man, and say, “Och are you the one to love me up?” ’
‘You’ve an education, girls,’ went George, ‘so maybe you can tell me how come I must trail my gammy leg up and down stairs reading gas meters for a few stinking pennies and near demented by my pain, while the man responsible still zooms about in his lethal limousine and lives off the people’s sweat. Though don’t take that as rebel talk or that I’m some filthy Commie, no. I heard them Russians shoot cripples because they say we’re lazy!’
Wendy went to speak but Nell cut across her: ‘Oh shoosh,’ she told George. ‘Embrace your fate, man, and embrace the one who crippled you.’ Mum once told George the same.
‘Nell the sage,’ George said. ‘Nell the Buddha. You have the glazed eyes and the empty smile. Why not let me give you the swollen belly?’
George laid a hand on Nell’s dress and och near found a breast. Wendy’s calf pressed against mine.
Nell’s smile opened fine and natural (George’s smile opened like a rusty umbrella). She was like a kitten whose soft softness makes you want to hurt it. Chanting the magic word Tausendjährigerheißluftballon would right confuse her… Tausendjährigerheißluftballon, Tausendjährigerheißluftballon…
Them girls up the carriage cheered their song.
Dad walked in saying, ‘In every breast, we’re told, flitting from liver to spleen and back again, lives a wee birdie called the soul. The Catholic hunts this bird with bread and wine, the Jew with a golden ruler, the Protestant with plodding words, the cripple, it now seems, with his nimble fingers.’
Nell’s face began to stretch and droop, its muscles easing as she listened hard. She winked but dad ignored her. George was dead irked by her signals.
Dad said, ‘Ach, I spit on them all.’ He faked a spit near George’s feet and told me and Wendy, ‘I suggest you spit upon them too.’
Wendy’s shaved calf pressed mine again. Fierce unbeliever, dad.
I didna want to spit, no. Christ is truth and love and light, I told myself. He is the bright black fruit that fell from the crosstree. This Sunday we celebrate the dark white fruit that grew again, a dazzling shadow of Himself.
Dad wiped whiskied globs from his beard and sat beside me.
Man was lost by eating of the forbidden fruit. He shall be saved by eating of the bidden fruit. We await the Second Harvest of the Christ-fruit, the recurring fruit, the pulsing fruit…
‘Why not lie with George, Nell?’ said dad with a nasty smile. He’d been listening in. ‘All day long the man carries a heavy load of weariness and pain. Why not lift this load with love? Lie together under starlight and George may repay you by flowering and becoming tough and ardent.’
‘Remind me, Jock,’ went George, ‘why you’re not off fighting.’
Nell struck George in the mouth with her hat. Like a dog he growled and caught the hat’s brim between his teeth.
‘Please dinna fight,’ pleaded Wendy. ‘Let’s just enjoy our day, eeh?’ She offered round her raisins.
George took some and chewed in time with passing telegraph poles. Nell put her hat back on and made a squeaking sound.
I flicked the window and made raindrops run and spill their sunshine. The train juddered east and I soon dozed.
Waiting there in Aberdeen, I dreamt, were Salvation Army hordes in full uniform, looking a wee bit lost. They gave one another gentle nods, a trumpet blew, and then Aberdeen Pleasure Beach was treated to their snaking march.
A great parade it was of mannies and wifies who’d never had a ride! Aye, the prim and hardly kissed were showing with a thousand raised flags and banners and fists and weedy voices that they were not all amazed by Adolf Hitler and his Tausendjährigerheißluftballon but instead by Someone far, far greater.
A gust of sea wind sharpened the pink glare of setting sunlight off their trumpets and then their flaggies and banners hung still as if for a roll-call, the whole beach filling with pinked threat. The Tausendjährigerheißluftballon neared as a British cannonade sounded far off in the distance — eight soft booms in the gloaming air. Lords and ladies stood and saluted. Marchers threw palms across their hearts, me among them, I now seen.
A horse-drawn carriage drove by. Reclining inside Wendy was near sinking among the satin of her dress, her face half hid by the ruffle of her hat. Beside her sat a manny in a black frock coat and waistcoat and bowler hat.
As the carriage drove past me and the Salvation Army, Wendy said something to the manny, who turned and looked at me from behind his specs. He had the features of a wise old lion without a mane.
Near frantic with clashing thoughts, I shot the sky with a pistol long hid in my bad dress.
…
We arrived in Aberdeen around eight o’clock.
Wendy’s steps along the city pavements had a strange sort of nervy grace. Her mouth was firm and tight but still a thing of rare Broch beauty. Her face held some dread though not a patch on Nell’s. Ah yes, our Wendy always had her grace, it seemed, though not a drop of smugness. But who can say what secret pride hid in that lanky stride of hers?
Her eyes lifted from the pavement and looked right at me. Nothing and no one could be hidden from this girl. Thirteen years of age and aye, she seen me whole. This is why her eyes were so sunk for one so young but also had their smiling glow.
Oh Wendy, a right legend you were to your sister! Years I studied your perfect blondeness with love and fury. And how elegant were your steps, each with a wee wiggle that seemed planned a hundred years ago, as if you’d long kent every last curve of your fate. As you walked along I wanted to ask you something with my eyes, to reach something I could hardly find a name for. And before I’d asked – Is this day it? – already you’d gave a single gloomy nod.
And then you gazed downwards. Was the fate that awaited us so very rough? It’s just the way things must be, your quiet hunchedness seemed to say. What strips away our joy will also strip our expectations and set us strangely free.
No words were spoke out loud, no. The city noise was right annoying, so much digging and hammering and assorted clatters, so annoying that I made myself enjoy it, Christ reminding me I was lucky to be here at all.
A posh wifie picked a story magazine from a bin and seemed disappointed by her find. A ratty manny staggered into a picture house showing a film called The Suffocator. These city folk had all forgot the best bits of themselfs, it looked like. These toffs and toughs and aye even these tinkers – were they not all Jock Tamson’s bairns yearning for good larks? But there they went jostling by one another as if they’d not a thing in common but a terror of blocking pavements or of meeting others’ eyes. The Broch had some such rudeness, true enough, and Elgin was awful bad, but surely nowhere else were folk split asunder the way they were in Aberdeen.
Soon we reached the royal rumpus of the Pleasure Beach. Drunkarts jigged on waltzers, some lobbed crabs at the Dunk-a-Dwarf stall, or at posher types on water dodgems, or kicked sand in faces, some did. A few girls were in clowns’ make-up and grinned and swanned about like clowns might, though they werena dressed a bit like clowns, and och they smelled so fine whistling sailors led them to the harbour for a nice fish tea. One boy had brought his own balloon-shaped kite which was flying well enough, but ach a drunk snipped the string and away it flew, all a bit sad and confusing and fair exciting. There was the odd scattering of gulls and tinkers.
A Madame Torch paraded herself outside a little tent, her bubs spilling from her gown. ‘I laugh at manly strength,’ she said. ‘I bring the strongest men to heel. Tonight it’s the turn once more of little Adolf Hitler.
‘There are proven methods for humbling that little worm of which I’ll say no more, save to direct you to my manual Purple Nights in which I recount my experiences in male’ – her eyes flashed – ‘dressage. Those interested in a private demonstration…’
She wiggled into a tent smiling at the men left drooling, her nasty words all topsy turvy in my head.
‘The hot air balloon,’ dad shouted at folk passing, ‘was invented in the mining village of the Broch in Moray, Scotland. One day young bride Wilma Uath was hanging her voluminous drawers out to dry just as her secret lover Bazzie lit a teabreak fag – three hundred feet below her –
‘You’re morbid, my dears, morbid,’ he shouted at a group of nuns. ‘Forget about your crucifixion, shave those morbid chins and have some fun!’ He raised his bottle of whisky.
Along the walkway squeaked a pram where beneath fluffy blankets kipped something rarer than a kipping rose. Dad bent to blow warm whisky breath through the pram’s blankets right to their kipping core, whose dreams were lit up by the firebreathers looking on.
‘ “Lost in the infinity above,” ’ George read out from his paper, “ ‘locals gulp air excitedly and seem to forsake solid ground, becoming dizzy, forgetful, ripe for pick-pocketing, though none occurs.’
George looked about him a bit quizzical and glum, then went on reading: ‘Such scenes suggest we have removed the bottom from the barrel of the national imagination, from the ultra-barrel of national myth, and have released a prehuman flood that cannot now be stemmed.” ’
He pocketed his paper and said, ‘The balloon canna be shot down, claims the Manny Hitler.’
Said Nell, ‘The right sort of squeak could burst it and send him plopping in the sea.’ George sighed and Nell asked, ‘Can anyone guess the fearless auntie who will squeak the deadly squeak?’
Well, I’d seen Nell say spells wrong in her tizzies and spill her potions and stub her whirling thumbs, but I also seen her float a fork once and make a crow drop dead. And so I muttered, ‘Yes.’
And didna she chant for all to hear: ‘The-fearless-aunt-is-guessed.’
A wifie passing with her collie went, ‘What?’
Nell withdrew into herself but again the wifie said it: ‘What?’
‘Jan, describe what shall unfold tonight.’ Dad’s words were an order.
Many folk had turned to listen. A breeze melted the beach’s sounds into the city din, as though the beach itself was listening in. Nell’s dark eyes stared into mine.
‘Tonight,’ I said at last, ‘my aunt will show the Manny Hitler’s birthday present isna fit for Scottish skies.’ Then louder, ‘No problem has she with the balloon itself. Swanky thing and sturdy too, no doubt, and well done to the Manny Speer and them boffins for their efforts. Nah, it’s him riding the balloon that’s the ruddy problem!’
Cheers ripped for this comment of mine and I went on, ‘We’re no nice day out for no dictator, Mr Hitler! No beasts of zoo to be pointed out and photied! You and your flaunting of your fancy big balloon — you’re still short a bollock, sir!’
Beer was shook and sprayed by a nodding drunkart and I ended with: ‘Tonight a magic squeak will burst the balloon and bring an end to war!’
Not a single sound. Poor girl’s off her nut, folk thought.
I was reddening fast and staring at my ankles, vexed at dad’s order and also Nell’s mad schemes, I must confess, but when sniggers didna come nor no other sound at all I looked up at the faces staring eastwards through thick fagsmoke.
What’s a nearing Tausendjährigerheißluftballon sound like, you’ve maybe wondered, eeh? Well, I heard sighs like the wind make in your curtains and then hums like the flight of the shining moon. Yes, the moon adrift on starry seas was the sound of this balloon and it wasna your ears that heard it – it was them tiny birring hairs upon your ears! Upon your neck and arms as well, birring like rubbed legs of grasshoppers, a bit. And then I seen the thing.
Though I wasna aware I was seeing it. I thought I was seeing a squadron of Banff bailies, them biggest whitest clouds that mean get indoors and sharpish. Big bailies looked fine enough, true, but none ever made my throat gag with its fearsome beauty…
An oblong shape it was, a gigantic airship of sorts, towed by normal airships floating in formations that looked towed by a thousand gulls. Messerschmitts and Heinkels were looping it like our good earth round the blazing sun, their drones the only engine noises, aye, for from the airship casting a North Sea shadow like a cathedral then a fiend then an eagle the length of Banff there came just a faintest hum. It really was so awful huge and fine, a floating township with curved surfaces painted with giant blond sober sorts draped on one another’s muscles, gazing soft and winsome at waterfalls and rainbows and eagles and Swastikas and torches and all looked right grand glinting in the evening sun. And what made your throat clam wasna any single bittie but the unbelievable glory of the craft itself. The cheek of it. The plain showing off. Ach the Tausendjährigerheißluftballon!
A man’s voice said, ‘Only a Christian could imagine such a craft.’
Folk turned around and stared, but there was raging in no eyes and anyway the speaker was a man of cloth, a grey-haired minister at that. There was silence for some good hard thinking until a wifie said them Nazis weren’t Christians and dad said aye they were, and then we were off and running with all and sundry chipping in their thoughts.
Strange to think the craft’s glints were really sparks from the very fires of hell, tracing on our sky Satan’s wish to see us worship this Hun invention, Easter all forgot. Surely there was nae defeating a foe capable of such, I found myself thinking, for who on earth might save us? Such a craft might tempt Christ Himself to float down here for a better lookie, and peering up we mightna even notice…
The Big Wheel and other attractions squeaked among themselfs, deserted. Snoring drunkarts were being woke to see the sight, some trembling at the airship’s bonniness and some at the mighty terror. Posh folk in a covered stand squinted into opera glasses and gasped, and oh there was Harry Lauder and there was Cheeky Benny Souter and also wee John Mills from the pictures.
‘Och,’ went Wendy as dad hugged the two of us. Nell was in such a tizzy she sat rocking back and forth in tears, and dearie me but her petticoat was awful tore and grubby. George was gone.
I looked again. It seemed the airship was now a shining eagle gliding with much grace. My heart became a rose. Another was fast blooming in my brain. A flash emptied the sky of all but the airship’s eagle beak, which said, ‘Do you see Me?’
I said, ‘I see, I see.’
…
George was sitting at a booth with a hose clamped to his nose!
His spirits seemed much better now, for he was airing all his woes. Others aired theirs in neighbouring booths, as hoses clamped to their noses fed their whines to a contraption aiming upwards. The Whinonotron, a banner above it said, and them clamped noses didna half feed it grief:
‘And theng the pipes burst and I couldnga eveng make a cup of tea… chews his toengails… The exclusiong angd humiliationg at bops angd ceilidhs… ungsightly staings… I dreamt two fat badgers peered at my buttocks and theng clungg ong for dear life. After a week of constangt badger pressure my buttocks lost their curve… such dreadful paing… It rainged and it rainged and it rainged… The badgers waddled free shaped like buttocks. Ngo onge gainged ing this exchangge…’
I pushed through the huge crowd for a better look.
Sometimes the whine vibrations tickled George’s nose, it seemed. Sometimes he found it hard to breathe and express his woes. But of course he just went on feeding these frustrations into the machine.
A man in a white coat stood staring at it and then climbed the podium beside it. Into a microphone he said: ‘Floundering, babbling, in stuttered mid-sentence, so to speak, without a full-stop or exclamation mark, having reached no final conclusions ethical or spiritual, Great Britain on Wednesday the twenty-first of April will be stunned into silence, finally and irrevocably.’
There were mutters from the crowd. The man spoke on: ‘There will be no encores, no curtain calls. Yours will be a bit player’s hush, acknowledged if at all by bored platitudes and yawns. Fulminators of Parliament and public bar should accept this simply as a mercy hushing, a pruning necessary for the species’ soul-health, the world’s Easter gift from the Father of us all.’
More mutters and now some boos. ‘So says the Manny Hitler,’ the manny went. ‘I, Professor Golt, beg to differ.’
The crowd relaxed. The professor tapped the machine with a baton. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Listen closely.’
Not a sound from the spectators.
‘A whine sounds not only in the octave in which it’s emitted,’ the manny said, ‘but also in the octaves above and below its key. If you examine closely the air thus released, you find that its electron spin resonance is a series of harmonic overtones. These can obliterate molecules – yes — because molecular motion is a form of vibration, and in the presence of the correct audio stimulation or ‘irritation’ molecular activity ceases. If the whiner aims his nostrils in just the right direction, therefore, the target’s molecules become hyper-irritated and lose the will to exist.
‘And here is where I made my leap, for I came to realise the military potential of these vibrations! By harnessing their power in one mighty weapon – the Whinonotron you see before you – we can store and fire at Herr Speer’s quaint dabble in aeronautics a vastly amplified electron spin resonance, an ESR-modulated signal not from one whining Scottish nose but from many!’
Seeing the airship nearing he tilted his machine a few degrees, waved his baton and told his volunteers to whine ‘fortissimo’: ‘It’s the drip-drip-drip of fault-fingdingg that gets me downg… Sometimes I thingk I’ll just roll over angd die, I ngeed a ride so much… Extortiongate pingts… My husbangd says ngo womang cang be a devout Catholic angd ngot have ngo babbies… My mother made a big mistake by ngot telling me such thinggs as it doesnga pay to be lame angd kingd angd inngocengt angd ongly leads to heartbreak… Them darnged Engglish… I was married finge angd hongourable at our church but was ngever told the real truth about life as mang angd wife…’
In the first row of spectators stood our Wendy. She’d turned pale since first seeing the airship and her eyes seemed full of shadow. There she stood, all still and focused, her crossed hands hid in the folds of her dress. My eyes followed hers and on the far side of the crowd this is what they seen: a tall army officer with shining eyes and teeth and smart blond hair. The corners of his lips rose and his eyes shone even more.
He turned to the fine girls present, for a moment locking eyes with each in turn. He met Wendy’s gaze for slightly longer and cleared his throat. Wendy straightened her dress, ready if he came over and introduced himself. Then he turned thon shining smile on another girl and then another. Had Wendy reached his heart? Well, who could say?
She was wiping her eyes with a hanky. An old wifie put her arm around her and whispered something, her face a rage. A lump was in my throat. Ach when I think of Wendy standing there, it’s not her tears I see. It’s her near empty bag of raisins and her chapped elbows, like a boy’s…
Whiners whined on: ‘I’ve had seveng bairngs ing twelve years angd singce the last two I have beeng so sick angd tired… Ngo onge ever helps me up the stairway… I was operated ong twice angd my husbangd promised ngo more babbies but he soong broke his promise angd ngow I must have angother… Och my inggrowng toengails… I cry all the time cos I am sick angd scared angd dinnga kngow what ong earth to do cos I cannga have ang abortiong due to my husbangd’s faith…’
On the outskirts of the crowd shuffled three Great War veterans with staring eyes leaking light and fluids. Each was carrying a set of bagpipes and grumbling into its mouthpiece, a right depressing copy of the Whinonotron. Seemed these poor gents just couldna stop blasting at the Hun!
Oh one had toppled to the ground, struck by a prune flung by a drunkart. A laugh went up from a blonde girl, too wee for Wendy. The sun was gone.
From his booth George whined, ‘His attitude to me has changged and ngot for the better, ngo. The old congtempt has giveng way to a certaing smug magngangimity. Whengever we meet there’s an embarrassed kingdlingess ing his words angd gestures. He is very ngice. Previously, bengeath his taciturng frongt there had at least beeng occasiongal curiosity about my crippled life. Ngow he is weirdly serenge. My every word seems to bore him or worse, to faingtly amuse him. I just cannga stangd it! I sengse he’s beeng pokingg the wifie he kngows I love…’
A nearby boy whined, ‘Somethingg terrible happenged to my cousing Maggie angd I dinnga ken what to do. Maggie is thirteeng angd completely deaf angd doesnga go to school except for deaf school every Friday. Her mum makes her play ing the cellar angd last week my ungcle donge somethingg to her ing there angd she is afraid to tell her mum as she is liable to starve the girl, for she doesnga cherish her daughter onge singgle bit. I’m afraid that Maggie is goingg to have a mongster of a babbie angd last ngight I listenged to her belly to see if I could hear onge roaringg away ing there, but I couldnga. This disgustingg secret is such a burdeng…’
From behind me came a squeak.
Aye, poor Aunt Nell was squeaking at the airship. As if conjured by this squeak, the wind arrived howling and circled round the beach, stiffened and reared up and then seemed to shudder deciding not to haul the beach off into space.
‘Witness the night’s translucent fluid,’ cried Professor Golt, ‘the alert and shifting stuff of its darkness, conjuring matter from thin air and rejecting every form.
‘Then observe,’ he said as the wind faded, ‘as the night stops playing games, reveals its serious and eternal face and settles quietly down to watch, anticipating something ultimate tonight.’
Aberdeen’s ak-ak guns got booming.
The crowd let up a cry and scattered.
Dad came up and took my hand. We approached squeaking Nell and looked around for Wendy. George removed his hose and staggered on his crutch towards us. Came the thought: the Lord has sent him to embrace dad and convert him to the faith. Dad will embrace George and make him feel a whole man again just as he himself, a spiritual cripple, has been made whole.
Good Spitfires and Hurricanes were in action too, but everything shot at the airship bounced off its surfaces somehow or shot out the other side or was magicked into nothing: GONE.
I grabbed dad’s shirt and went, ‘Where’s Wendy?’
A hiss emerged from the airship and a deeper hum and then a drone. The ghost of a beam of light flickered. We watched as fire jumped from person to person as if some invisible flamethrower had been turned upon them. Folk flared up and staggered and crumbled into ashes, spectators running screaming, us four all unhurt but down went Madame Torch. Veterans hugged but couldna kill one another’s flames. An army general stood froze in blind panic, sparks falling like hot snow and relighting his cigar.
Burnt limbs didna smell too bad, I found myself thinking, still not understanding that death was in the air. Nell was now jitterbugging and curling bony fingers and squeaking on. The beam swept fast and steady and och God right this way. I was too stunned to move. A curving line of fire crackled through the sand. A mounted policeman rode off screaming with his hands clasped to his head.
Dancing fine and slinky Nell stepped towards the beam. It moved away from her but still she danced straight for it. Aunt Nell wanted the beam to cut her down.
A hiss like a candle’s last and then a fleshy sizzle. A donkey dropped to the sand, its bloodspray catching Nell. The drone deepened and the beam turned to scorch elsewhere. The donkey died glaring at its innards: to hurt the pain.
‘Have you seen my sister?’ I asked a many who keep running.
An army lorry drove by carrying not an ak-ak gun but a massive mirror angled at the airship. The beam swept this way again and met the mirror and then rebounded upwards. A gigantic boom echoed high above like deepest thunder. The airship wobbled and the beam jolted here and there and rebounded again off the lorry’s mirror. A louder boom above. More lorries appeared and the beam swept round at random killing many but also rebounding off mirrors. Again booms clattered through the sky.
With one almighty bang and flash the airship exploded in a million pieces.
Down fell bits of mangled steel and bone and skin followed by gull feathers. Hush from all watching on the beach.
Then cheers went up and caps and pipes and beer sprays. There was kissing too and good hard jigging and many shouts and roars, the Professor claiming his contraption killed the Manny Hitler and ended this long war.
Maybe Nell was trying to block the beam and save my life, I told myself, though all can see nothing stopped or slowed it. Surely she hadna sinned and tried to let herself be killed, and surely not right before her niece. Though Christ let Himself be killed before His kin, though His death saved us all from sin… Eeh?
Then bone and skin and steel left our hair and clothes and rose up through the air.
Hush again as with open mouths all watched this miracle occurring not just on the beach but all over Aberdeen, as them million pieces returned and rejoined one another in the sky.
Moments later there it was, now glowing blue: the Tausendjährigerheißluftballon reborn.
Quiet from folk and dogs and gulls circling overhead as everything good and local took a moment to stare and wonder. ‘Believe and it is so, believe and it is so,’ mum always said and indeed it was so with this exploding and then unexploding craft. German boffins were awful smart — this much I’d learnt off newsreels — but the world had secret plots no newsreels told of, I kent fine well, and yawning gaps that young girls might fill with the wildest fancies. Them circling gulls began to cry to one another and also down to us, it seemed, but it felt like they were fooling with my head and mixing sense with rubbish. A weird thought came: maybe they’ve joined them Axis powers and grant a word of truth for every hundred lies…
‘And ngow this reversal of time!’ whined a man still in his booth. ‘This shameful Hungish prangk!’
‘Aye!’ went another. ‘Keep your thievingg finggers off our time! Scots time is ngot for wheechingg!’
Went the first, ‘Is it ngae engough for you boffings to have trangsformed space? Space is for playingg with, aye, we cang all mess about with space… But for God’s sake dinga you eejits mess with time!’
No sign now of the whirling beam but bombs began to drop from Heinkels, their explosions juddering my skull. Again I asked dad about Wendy but he didna seem to hear. His eyes were gleaming.
Cowering in a crashed bus were performing freaks from the Pleasure Beach, Skinnymalinkylonglegs and Pyro the Firebreather with his blackened teeth and tongue and a tiny freak of nature sobbing into tiny hands. Boooom and the bus and all aboard were splattered far and wide.
A Heinkel dropped straight for us four so me and dad got running for dear life. Still the plane was coming and I was praying very hard and screaming screaming screaming and the Heinkel weaved and fell like a drunkart and hit a half-built icerink that burst into bonny flames, they really were so bonny, there were claps and cheers as the plane exploded once again, and then the best explosion yet, and what a long time it would be before that rink seen any skating…
Here it comes! a wifie shrieked pointing up at the airship.
It had drifted right above us and spread out parts like wings. Soon it stopped its drifting. Happy where it was, the bonny thing. I hummed to block out its drone and Nell’s near death and growing doubts about our Lord’s.
From the airship a loudspeaker boomed down something like ‘Aloo! Aloo!…’ A hatch opened awful slow. Folk around us screamed again, for what sort or size of bombs might Hitler drop himself?
The drone got louder. The airship’s load was falling. Must have been a thousand bombs for they were blotting out the moon.
All wish to flee had gone, for what would be the point? A mass of stuff was falling straight for us and not a thing would stop it. As it met and split the moonlight into many speckled shades I seen it wasna black or grey like bombs but a fierce dark red and then I kent that this was blood and it hit my head right sore and my tongue got licking and this blood was human if I was a day… Yet more fell and near blasted me from dad…
I cried and cried for Wendy…
Dad and me afloat on blood with arms spread like eagles or our Christ…
I seen George float through a bombed-out school hall with no roof, past dead soldiers and then mirror shards that divided his shrieks among themselfs… Nell in her bowler hat turned and put a bloody finger to her lips…
She climbed upon the stage so’s the bloodflow couldna reach her. She began to dance, swinging her hips and arms and flouncing about in thon same old tatty dress. George came to rest beside the stage.
At its edge Nell sat and hitched her dress up and dipped her feet in flowing blood. She crossed and re-crossed her long legs and rubbed blood up and down them.
And then it was that some strange strength took hold of George. He made a growling sound and seemed to rise and tower over his old self. His jaw had a toughness I’d never seen before. A right fine-looking gent, he’d become, a mighty Highland Errol Flynn!
Awful slow, he climbed onto the stage. Nell edged away. He gripped her hair.
At first Nell sank back on the altar, one arm up to guard her face, but then her legs opened up and invited George inside. The blitzing outside ceased, it seemed like. Through the hall wafted a smell of not fresh feet. Dad’s hand went across my eyes.
I pulled it off and this is what I seen: upon the stage, lit a faint pale blue, Nell and George’s bloodied bodies locked. In that light they seemed in a different time. They sobbed and pleaded and rode together and made promises they wouldna keep. They reached a place beyond which there is only God and a rareness without a name. Ken?
…
My heart yearned to sleep now in this balcony or even better on a soft Banff bailie. Nell snored lightly huddled down on the stage with George, himself lying flat and staring at the sky. I prayed that other sick and alone and tore asunder souls might please find some small relief.
Beside me dad stared upwards too, as from this neverending night was born another one even louder and brighter and more confusing, a million booms and flashes and mirror pieces blasted into stonework… Finally my head floated off into strange starry plots involving Wendy and flashing moon attractions and other fancies…
Who kens how long such dreamy moments really last, eeh? Just long enough, this night, for me to shake off the night’s grave doubts, awaken as a good Christian once again, and rise to start looking for my sister. The airship was drifting home.
Aberdeen let out a long quiet sigh while across the sea the morn sky built a sparkling city of its own, its glimmering palaces and temples and soft high shrines.
……………….
Sources: Maldoror by Lautréamont, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz, and Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.
contact: sean.murray.dublin@gmail.com
