the empty green of Beckett’s Park, drowning in light, there on one of her scant five hundred afternoons. She has no sense of where she ends or where the world begins, and having never seen the lovely golden cranium that everybody else makes such a fuss of, May assumes she is without one; that the whole width of the day and its astounding skies are in a monstrously vast glass bubble balanced on her headless infant shoulders. She can feel the silvery drag of fish-skin clouds across the blue inside her, while the birdsong is sharp citrus fluttering on her tongue and makes May dribble. She does not discriminate between the clever, complicated house-shapes on Victoria Promenade’s far side, the polished farthing of the sun or the trees swaying, chimney-high, to lick the wind. Since all these things are to be found inside her absent head the child supposes them to be her thoughts, that this is what thoughts look like, square with blue slate hats, or tiny and on fire, or tall and whispering. The eighteen-month-old does not separate that second’s slurps and shivers from its scents or shapes or sounds, confusing the asthmatic distant skirl of an accordion and the measured progression of the little gas-lamps just across the road, with both phenomena from her perspective being things that seem to roll down avenues. Then it’s a different instant, with no gas-accordion wheezing out its wrought-iron notes at intervals along the street, and where indeed the street itself is vanished and forgotten as the child discovers she is moving in a new direction that entails a different vista. Floating effortlessly a few feet above the surf hiss of the carpet-grass, descending slowly to the miniature domain of further-off with its toy huts and shrubs and paint-fleck daisies, May doesn’t remember that she’s being carried in her mother’s arms until the bobble-coated chocolate drop is put into her mouth. The warm accompanying maternal mumble melting on the baby’s tongue is like the creamy sweetness in her ears. As she explores the varicoloured beads of sugar speckling the confection’s upper surface, the sensation becomes inextricable from the pointillist blur-burst of a nearby flowerbed that May happens to be gazing at and she’s immersed in an undifferentiated glory. She and the big favourite body that’s called May as well and which she’s a detachable component of seem to be standing on a hiccup in the ginger gravel underfoot, a bump with railings where their path squirts in a stony arc over a river like a very long old woman, splashing on its further bank to trickle off in pebble tracks amongst the weeds. One of the syllables her mother coos is “swan”, a sound that starts off with a slicing whoosh then curves away into a stately glide, and something somehow flares into existence in the private centre of May’s continuity, a thrilling white idea that flaps up into ghostly being, making a commotion. Swan. The word is the experience and it doesn’t matter if she sees one now or not. Shifting her weight, May loses herself and forgoes the universe in favour of the freckles on her mother’s throat. A spittle spray of toffee isles adrift upon a dermal ocean, floated on its pinprick ripples, each spot has its own unique identity seen from an inch away. This one is like a smoky lion’s head yawning, this one like a piece of broken horseshoe, each no bigger than a grain of salt. She focuses on their implied geography, on the relationship between these distinct and minuscule atolls. Do they know each other? Are the ones closest together friends? Then there’s the overall arrangement to consider, preordained and perfect, each spot where it should be on a map that’s here forever, purposeful and ancient like the constellations or the musical periodicity of lampposts. The giant beauty cradles May through time, through summer with the dandelion-clocks going off like steam grenades. There are so many leaves and branches to bear witness to, so many breezes to be met and all with different personalities, that it’s a million million years before they’re back in the same moment on the bridge again but this time without chocolate drops and crossing it the other way, from which a new and unfamiliar town is visible. A different angle is a different place, and space is time. Her future moments are the funny land in front of her where little things get bigger, not like in the funny land behind her where the things that seemed so large get littler and littler until they’re gone into a dust-sized past, she doesn’t know exactly where. Infinitesimal, the ant-cows from a minute or two’s time mature to mouse-cows and then suddenly are old enough for her to see their eyelashes and to smell where they’ve done their business, staring without interest at May over the top gate-bar of the cattle market’s wooden barriers. The fruit-and-pepper stink surrounding her, not in itself unpleasant, is attempting to inform her of its noble histories and pungent legend but the buzzing black dots of the story’s punctuation make it hard to understand and so her mother waves it all away. The breast and bounce and rhythm of May’s passage lulls the day into a distance as if it’s a picture in a confiscated rag-book. Nearby hooves and cobbles drop the volume of their conversation as a courtesy, and she’s exhausted just from all the breathing and the staring. Luminous pink curtains briefly drop on the theatre of real things, and May is hurried through a fascinating but incomprehensible scenario in which
a baby girl is galloping an old man down a far-off foreign century after the people and the after-people have all gone, arboreal decades trampled in their gallivant. The distant walls of the immeasurable emporium, where these are visible between the baobabs and modified acacias, are themselves now only stockade rows of monster tree trunks with no trading posts or other signs of structured artifice apparent. Evidently nothing human or post-human lives and dreams in the inferior territory Downstairs, the hothouse bayous that were formerly the Boroughs. Pointing to the wood-web overhead and the unfolded sky beyond, May draws her racing grandfather’s attention to the lack of either birds or birdsong. Without breaking from his loping stride he hazards that this absence might imply a dreadful and illimitable cascade of extinctions. They run on in silence for a while, each inwardly considering this sombre possibility and trying to determine how they feel about their species vanishing along with a great torrent of its fellow life forms, sluiced into the drainage ditch of biologic obsolescence. Snowy in the end concludes he’s not much bothered, bare feet pounding out the years of unrestricted lichen. Everything, he reasons, has its length in time, its linger, whether that should be an individual, a species or a geologic era. Every life and every moment has its own location; still there somewhere back along this endless loft. It’s only here that mankind is no more, and when he and his granddaughter at last come back the other way with their preposterous pilgrimage complete he knows the centuries where Earth is habitable will be waiting for them, back at home amongst the sempiternal moochers and immortal rusted drainpipes of their own times, their own worn-out neighbourhood of heaven. Everything is saved, the sinners, saints and breadcrumbs underneath the couch alike, albeit not in the conventional religious sense of that expression: everything is saved in spacetime’s fourfold glass, without requirement of a saviour. Snowy thunders on in the general direction of the next millennium, whichever that might be, with his exquisite passenger bumping and jigging on her wolf-hide saddle stuffed full of anaemic fungus-fairies. Only when they notice that despite the lack of any avian presence there is yet the plaintive squeal of song reverberating in the unpacked auditory space of the great corridor do they slow to a halt, preventing them from rushing at full tilt into the pod of moss whales. Trailing emerald coiffures of algae, the handsome and posthumous leviathans crawl ponderously across a post-historic clearing through the pink light of another hyperdawn, calling to one another in their eerie radar-sonar voices. Awed and dumbstruck the two travellers note that while the creatures’ massive lower jaws and relatively tiny back-set eyes are undeniably cetacean, all appear to come equipped with an enormous pair of forward-thrusting horns, brow-mounted tusks that push to one side any overhanging branches which obstruct their path. Additionally, both their anterior and posterior flippers seem to have adapted into stubby legs that terminate in barnacle-encrusted hooves, each one the size of a bone omnibus, rhythmically splintering the world’s-end vegetation as like grey-green glaciers they continue their protracted slither, off amo
ngst the Brobdingnagian trees. Resuming their potentially unending expedition at a cautious walking pace, the temporal pedestrians engage in heated speculation as to the most likely origins of the extraordinary future-organisms. Snowy posits a scenario in which the drying of the planet’s oceans has precipitated a migration of the more adaptable marine life onto land in search of sustenance, but he cannot explain the glaring incongruity of horns and hooves. After some cogitation, May suggests that if whales are air-breathing mammals that chose to return to the aquatic state from which all life originates, it may be that during their brief adventure as land-animals they were related biologically to some unlikely genus such as, for example, an ancestor of the goat. The white-haired ancient crooks his neck to squint up at his rider and determine if she’s joking, though she never is. They carry on, and presently Snowy’s hypothesis of boundless seas reduced to salt flats prompting a migration onto dry ground is confirmed by glimpses of the period’s other mega-fauna, or at least that fauna’s astral residue. Milling about one of the now irregularly-contoured apertures set in the arcade’s creeper-covered floor, May notices the spectres of teak-brown crustaceans with shells four feet in diameter, like ambulatory tables. Later, they experience a moment of breathtaking wonder when the tract of forest towards which they happen to be walking suddenly uncoils itself, the detailed scene and its apparent depth detaching from the background to reveal a sky-scraping cephalopod, a towering ultra-squid perfectly camouflaged against its afterlife surround by means of the evolved pigment-receptors in its skin. Shifted to a presumably more comfortable position, next the tentacled immensity adjusts its shimmering disguise, its surface a spectacularly animated Seurat wash of colours that resolves into an almost photographic reproduction of the endless avenue about them. Snowy is reminded of the shifting pictures in the fire when he’s only
a little boy in Lambeth, waiting for his father to get home from work. All day long the October rain’s been falling from the broken guttering to spatter noisily upon the lavatory’s slate roof, down at the bottom of the yard outside. John Vernall, two years, getting on for three years old, sits by the hearth and rubs his palms together until the mysterious rolled-out threads of liquorice muck appear for him to brush away or play with. He’s been watching droplets on the century-old windowpane that has a faint green in its thickness, studying the form of the slow-crawling diamonds, an enthralled spectator at a liquid horserace. Some of the wind-driven beads go down at the first hurdle, failing to complete their long diagonal trajectory over the glass, their fluid substance dwindled and exhausted long before they reach the distressed wooden frame that is their finish line. Then there are plumper globules that appear to be more predatory and competitive, that hungrily absorb the hydrous leavings of their fallen colleagues and, with mass replenished and increased momentum, roll majestically across the glistening field to easy victory. When finally this inconclusive water-derby ceases to be entertaining, John squats on the homemade rug beside the fire and turns his wandering attention to the monumental Bible illustrations flaring into momentary being, engraved Doré vistas down between the sulking coals. Gomorrah’s doom lifts in a grey veil from the splitting anthracite, while on those wood or paper remnants used to start the blaze the twisting black flakes are recanting simonists, adulterers or virtuous pagans suffering their disparate arcs of the Inferno. In the coruscation and the crinkling ruby light, ash-bearded prophets work their scorch-mark lips unfathomably, their warnings snatched away into the chimney’s whistling throat, and somewhere in another land his mother and his grandmother are snapping at each other over where the money’s to be found for this or that. His baby sister Thursa grizzles, fitful in her wicker-basket crib, her strawberry shrunken monkey face clenched to a fist, disconsolate and anxious even in her sleep, cowed by the world and all the startling sounds it makes. There’s something queer about the dreary flavour of the instant and the small boy finds himself caught in a fog of indistinct presentiment that’s indistinguishable from a daylight-faded memory, the details bleached out like the pattern on their tablecloth. Hasn’t he had this darkening afternoon before, with Thursa making those specific noises in her crib, with Shadrach and the plagues of Egypt in the firelight, then a sizzling cat, then a volcano? Just before she utters them, John knows his grandmother’s next angry words to his and Thursa’s volubly upbraided mother will contain the puzzling phrase “no better than you should be”, and he is uneasily aware that the most thunderous element of these precisely synchronised and rapidly coagulating circumstances is not yet in place. That wondrous and terrible event, he thinks, unwinds from out the complicated click and rattle of his father’s latchkey which he can hear even now off down the passageway, commencing its insidious tinkle in the front door’s mechanism as a prelude to the coming symphony, the irrevocable unlocking of a new and cataclysmic world. His mother leaves her confrontation in the kitchen to find out what’s happening and the avalanche of the occasion smashes through their East Street home; reduces all the order of their lives to an undifferentiated panic matchwood. There is a commotion in the passage, with his mother’s voice ascending from a confused and uncomprehending mumble to a gasping, devastated wail. The uproar bursts into the living room accompanied by John’s sheet-pallid mother and two men the child has never seen before, one of whom is his father. It’s not just the flour-spill hair where once were copper bedsprings that has made a stranger of his parent, more the change in what he says and how he stands and who he is. There’s lots of gesturing and drawing circles in the air. There’s an unreeling list of madcap topics that the silent child somehow already knows before they’re spoken, a tirade of chimneypots, geometry and lightning, troubling phrases that nobody seems to pay attention to: “It’s mouth was moving in the paint.” John’s grandmother emerges from amongst the steaming saucepans, shouting angrily at the rotund and florid bald man who’s returned her son to her in this dismantled state, as if sufficient indignation might still somehow put her offspring back the way he was; as if insisting on an explanation could force such a thing into existence. In the embers now John notices a crumbling sphinx on fire, a martyring, a poppy banquet. Everyone except for him is weeping. Haltingly and incompletely, it begins to dawn upon him that nobody save for he himself and possibly his baby sister was expecting this to happen. The idea is as inconceivable as if John were the only person in the whole of London who could hear, the only person who had ever noticed clouds or realised that night follows day. The people and the furniture and voices in the peeling-paper Lambeth living room are like an indoor hurricane of tears and waving hands, with at its epicentre John’s new white-haired father standing and repeating the word “torus” dazedly, the shape of things to come. Returning his attention to the fire he has the fugitive impression of red light and trailing darkness
in a sunset arbour following the world and Snowy’s weathered, almost corrugated thighs are dappled by sliding and elongated rose ellipses, an elegiac radiance filtering through sculpted voids in the waxed dinner-plate leaves of the canopy above him. With his darling burden he strides on into a reprised cryptozoic, all of history in his blisters. For a period they travel in the midst of an inquisitive and scuttling company: the amiable shades of table-crabs who seem to be endeavouring to communicate by tapping an adapted fore-claw on the moss-occluded boards of the immortal boulevard, an inarticulate crustacean Morse. Riding her grandfather as if atop a howdah the grave eighteen-month-old prodigy quotes Wittgenstein, to the effect that even if a lion could speak, mankind would not be capable of understanding it. As if in mute acknowledgment of this persuasive observation presently the entourage of furniture-sized arthropods abandon their attempts at conversation, losing interest, clattering away en masse between the monstrous bolls of that terminal orchard. Everything is doomed with beauty. Later there are further whale-goats and a huge tree-mimicking variety of octopus that they’ve not previously encountered, with impassive garnet eyes easily missed in the surrounding column of bark-patterned skin, and liv
er-coloured suckers on what first seem to be overhanging boughs. May formally proposes they should call the species Yggdrasil after the Nordic world-tree, given that taxonomy itself will surely be extinct by now and that the splendid creature thus must otherwise go nameless in eternity. The motion, after a debate and vote, is passed unanimously whereupon the baby and her wrinkled steed persist with their excursion through the final foliage, amongst incurious monsters. After wading in the magma of four thousand serial dawns Snowy and May elect to make their temporary bed amid the shivering mimosas of a twilight mile somewhere in the next century, if indeed there are centuries anymore. As the old man remarks while fashioning a shelter from the shirking greenery, the base-ten counting system and conceivably the whole of mathematics must have surely disappeared from the inferior territories downstairs by now. From this point on, where science and faith and art and even love are only fossil memories, he and his granddaughter must venture past the end of measurement itself, perhaps even beyond the unavoidable demise of meaning. The unlikely pair consider this new, unsuspected lower register of desolation whilst they messily devour their last remaining specimens of snow-queen Bedlam Jennies, prudently expectorating the pink eyeball-pips into the flinching and fastidious vegetation trembling about them. At the bottom of their wolfskin tucker-bag there are now only a few snapped-off chorus girl limbs much like shapely and anaemic doll-parts, with a sparkling dragonfly debris of wings. Above, cut into slices and trapezohedrons by the silhouetted branches, an unfolded constellation that is possibly hyper-Orion – Snowy notices three displaced repetitions of the famous belt – is stretched across the settling indigo, a malformed tesseract of ancient lights. Replete and comfortably sluggish after their fungal repast, the juice of tiny women sticky on their chins, they slide into the hypnagogic drifts of ghost-sleep mumbling and holding hands. Around their hide are brittle crunches, fracturings, reports distantly audible beyond the blurred peripheries of their awareness, probably the cringes and contractions of the cowering shrubbery within which they are nested and so swiftly filtered out by a receding consciousness. Gorged upon visionary arctic truffles both the baby and her ancestor are borne on an eidetic surf of faerie imagery, unwinding madhouse dioramas with a miniaturist intricacy that is bottomless and sometimes borders on the terrifying: at hallucinatory Elizabethan frost-fairs stand bare-breasted ladies in preposterously large hooped crinolines with decorative motif snowflakes made of lace around the hems. Each has a flattened palm raised to face level for inspection, smiling in delight at the scale reproduction of herself that seems to balance there, complete in every detail, beaming down approvingly at the almost infinitesimal homunculus perched on her own hand, peering into a vertiginous regression of excruciating and exquisite pulchritude, a mesmerising vortex of wan femininity. These are the dreams the dead have when they’re Puck-drunk. After an incalculable interval they shrug away their gem-encrusted drowse, refreshed despite the Midsummer Night alkalis that have been coursing through their slumbering ethereal systems. Waking, unsurprisingly, to the same shade of dusk in which they bedded down, not until Snowy lifts their wolf-pelt satchel do they realise with bewilderment that while they napped the previously almost-empty sack has been mysteriously replenished, filled now to its brim with an unusually picturesque mass grave of conjoined Thumbelinas. Still more inexplicably these are not the albino strain responsible for their nocturnal visitations, but are rather the more ruddily-complexioned type familiar from the traveller’s own now-remote home century. Not wishing to examine their gift horse’s dentistry the bony veteran ties the pixie-bag about his shoulders, crouching while May climbs aboard. It calls to mind