Stranger than Fiction

The story so far ...

Actually, you probably don't want to know too much about what's led up to this point; it would ruin the ending to the first novel. Suffice to say, at this juncture (for reasons that will become apparent once you've read both the first novel and the opening chapters of this one), Truth is taking Jonathan to meet his dead mother.

Chapter Three

For centuries mothers have been the butt of many a cruel jest, generally voiced in front of a live studio audience by their sons-in-laws — though rarely within their earshot and never within arm's reach. It is a unique position of power unequalled anywhere: fatherhood has always been considered tame by comparison. The fact that she's gestated you within herself for nine months gives her power. The fact that the husband started the ball rolling is neither here nor there. How many times he'd gone an errand for his mother to Mrs Witherspoon or Mrs Shawcross only to be met by the man of the house with the standard retort, "She's not in. Come back in half hour." They didn't know where the sugar was or the milk. She wasn't in. She who must be obeyed. Or if she was, they'd call indoors, "Mother! It's that Payne lad wi' a note from his mam." Being a mother was nothing to do with giving birth it seemed.
Jonathan's own mother ranked about nine point three on the matriarchal hierarchy scale and, had they ever felt the need to form an association (which The Dunameon made sure never happened — if only to keep their jobs interesting), she would've been a dead cert for a seat on the committee, maybe even the chair-lady. The only thing she had against her was that her Yiddish left a lot to be desired, her not being Jewish and all that. But she made up for it with the excellence of her pith.
She wasn't a bad mother. She loved her children. It was a commandment. They were both planned pregnancies and she'd conceived within a couple of months of the target date. Neither gave her much bother. She had morning sickness when she was supposed to and took a healthy craving for ice cream and pickles both times. Both pregnancies ran full term and her labours conformed to the expected norm; Jonathan took twelve hours to come into the world and his sister, eight. They should have been the perfect nuclear family only they couldn't have a dog due to Mary's asthma, so they had goldfish who kept dying. Besides a dog needed love and there was precious to go round as it was. Fish just asked to be fed and not much either.
Her offspring were not perfect though. She'd read Spock, Montessori and Gesell; child-rearing was a serious business not to be entered into lightly. But this was the North of England for goodness' sakes, there was no room for fancy new ideas on bringing up little ones here. Someone telling her how to preserve leftovers was one thing but instructing her on what to do with her children was quite another. It was the 1950's, a brave new world waiting to be explored, an age of optimism. It was true that all the demons hadn't died in the war, Communism was still out there somewhere threatening to bring down Western civilisation with trumped up promises of equality for all, but what had that to do with her? She had enough of a problem making sure her man went out with a full lunch box and came home with an unbroken pay packet. Sadly, the latter was not always the case.
If her children were not flawless then it'll come as no surprise to find that her marriage was also lacking in the perfection department. It was a wartime romance, as were so many, not thought through, a result of youthful impetuosity and unforeseen circumstance; the war hadn't been over by Christmas. They were led by their eyes and their hearts and the desire not to go to the grave with their virginities intact. This was less of a fear to her since she was convinced that a beastly Hun would surely deflower her toute suite if the shores of England were breached. Still, she would rather the deed was done by one of her countrymen and Henry was a willing enough candidate. She found the whole process over-rated. After The War there was time to take stock. She'd made her bed, she was willing to lie in it and let him get on with it. Not that her husband pushed himself on her, a fact for which she was eternally grateful, and for which he was duly rewarded on their anniversary and his birthday every year whether he felt like it or not.
They stayed together for the sake of the children. It had never been discussed, never been put into words, but they came from a generation where such duties were significant. In time though, even they weren't enough to keep them under the same roof. Quietly one Friday night after tea his father had gone upstairs, packed a case, and unceremoniously moved out. And, for once, he left his full pay packet on the dresser, unopened. Jonathan never knew what financial arrangements were made after they broke up. He got fed, clothed, was bought sweets and toys. There seemed no great loss. Today though, he didn't expect to see his father in the house. It wasn't where he thought of him any more.
On that day Jonathan lost more than a father. He lost his mother too. He was too young and self-absorbed to turn to, let alone talk to, so she turned to God who always had time for her when she had time for Him, and didn't ask childish questions for which there were no known answers like, "But why did Daddy leave?" From merely being a believer she turned — it seemed overnight — into a zealot.
He was unsure how he felt about seeing her again. He was unsure about everything but this in particular took the biscuit. She would only be a few years older than him now, assuming they brought her back as she was when she died. Truth confirmed that this was the case. He'd never asked where they were going. Truth led the way and Jonathan just knew it was to their old home on Marvin Avenue. He tried to marshal his thoughts but those that weren't AWOL already were deserting fast. Still the place was like a ghost town: no cars, no people, no animals. Just heavenly music.
"Does that sound have to be on all the time?" he finally asked of Truth.
"Whassa matta? Youa noa likea Musak?"
What was this thing with Truth and accents? Jonathan had wondered about that before and never got a satisfactory answer. "No, not any more. The first ten minutes was OK but now its beginning to get on my wick."
"I'll see what I can do." With that he paused and shouted up at the sky, "Oy Celia! Can you change the record or something?"
After a few seconds the music stopped abruptly but not before the needle had been scraped across several grooves. The silence that followed was incredible. It was as if the entire universe had ground to a halt, which was in fact the case. Jonathan could even hear his own heart beating. Well, it sounded like his heart.
"Why are we going to see my mother?" He finally had to ask it.
"I thought you'd never ask."
"So?"
"Well, it's like this: we've been told this time that we've got to get the macroverse right like I told you. He's fed up having to have big bangs every few million years. There not cheap for a start. So, before we do this one we've got to try and suss out where we went wrong the last four times. Which means we've got to go through every one that's ever existed — with a nit comb — to make sure why they screwed up and to try and stop it happening again."
"That's going to take forever."
"Very nearly only time's been put on hold until we're finished. You're quite lucky to get me actually. I was supposed to get the end of the alphabet but Lust wanted to meet Valentino and so I swapped with her. I've got the Macs through to Q, so, as you can imagine, I'm sick to my back teeth of Scotsmen. Much sicker than you could ever be. Though be assured, in the next life, if you happen to walk out of a shop in Edinburgh without paying, they will be so much nicer to you. In their own Neanderthal way they're actually quite sweet. If you like that sort of thing. And, of course, I've had my fill of the Irish too t'ank ye very much."
"So I've got to go back?"
"'Fraid so."
"I'm not going to be a mongoose or anything?"
"No, no, no, no," machine-gunned Truth, "Weren't you paying attention earlier? More like a twinkle in you father's eye."
"So what the good of all this?"
"Well, basically people are fashioned in two ways: there's what they inherit and then there's what they experience. You can usually do damn all about either. But who you are and what you've experienced in the past will affect how you react to new experiences in the future. Don't you remember our little chat in the train about all this? It a sort of karmic thing. For goodness sake, it was only seven billion years ago." The last bit was a joke but its humour totally missed its mark.
Jonathan looked around at the empty streets. "So tell me," he began, "If this isn't the Rigby that I thought I fell asleep in yesterday, what is it?"
"Good question." Was this Truth's new catch phrase? "Actually, we're in, what we call in the trade, a "MeGeLan Field:" a memory generated landscape."
"You mean if I forgot what the street looked like we'd fall through a hole in the ground?"
"In theory, yes, but in reality you can't ever forget."
"Come on, my earliest memories go back to when I was four, a Guy Fawkes Night, and that's only a few sketchy images. And the next ten years are little better."
"No, 'fraid not. They're all still there, deep down in your memory stack, but they're there. This place is the living proof. Look up there." He waved his arm at the attic window of the house they were passing — it was broken. "See that?" He saw it. "You only caught a glimpse of that one day when you were eight. You were trying out a new pair of roller skates and you fell over on the other side of the road and just happened to catch a glimpse of the window out of the corner of your left eye, but here it is, accurate in every detail."
How could he argue?
"So, how is it all done?"
"With mirrors."
"Eh?"
"Loosen up. I'm joking. Sheesh, you are a grouch when you sleep late. We Dunameon don't use nut and bolt machines, but, on the hyperphysical plane there exist what I can best call components that when combined have certain effects, like mixing a Mickey Finn. Well when component 'A' is put beside component 'B' then any electrochemical traces within a certain radius are concretised. Viola! It's kind of like a chemical reaction."
"What if I only thought I saw something?" That was a sensible question.
"Then it wouldn't be in the memory stack." He stuck his tongue out in a very childish manner. "But if you haven't seen something then the system extrapolates whatever it is from what you have seen. So, even though you've never seen Mhari Tremble au natural, if that crops up in our travels, then she will be appropriately endowed with the necessary accoutrements — and probably well endowed to boot knowing your tastes."
Mhari Tremble? Who the hell was Mhari Tremble?
They had now reached the end of the street where Jonathan's mother's house was. It was one of those sepia-tinted moments that should've been framed and left on the mantelpiece to gather dust. He no longer felt particularly inclined to quiz this strange being as to the mechanics of his parlour tricks; or would it be 'hypermechanics'? The street was not one he had particularly avoided when he was alive but then neither had he gone out of his way to travel down. There had been virtually no one left there who might have remembered him, indeed the few older neighbours were so frail that they practically never set foot outside their doors and, if they had, the likelihood of their noticing — let alone remembering — Jonathan were remote in the extreme. He'd never done anything memorable. Maybe he'd broken a window or two in his time with a cricket ball but that was about it. None of that mattered. It didn't even matter that this was some Dunameonic mock-up of reality. His feelings of disquiet weren't rational. He didn't even pretend that they were. But they were familiar. And there's comfort in the familiar.
This was it, the crucible of his youth, the place where, for better or worse, he'd been concocted.
He'd never been one for hanging around in the street as a lad. Not when the beach was so close. He'd never seen the point. It wasn't as if he'd grown up in a time where there was the slightest chance of his being attacked, more likely scolded and told to get himself home. Even in Winter he'd preferred the surprising sense of security he found there but he could still see why Masefield had called the sea 'lonely.' It was such an exposed part of the town but, with its huge stone wall on one side, the dark sea on the other and the slate grey cumulonimbic loom above, somehow it enclosed him — he was the eye of the storm, even if there wasn't a storm. He certainly had no specific recollection of being down on the beach in the throes of a storm but then the human mind was a pretty unreliable means of storing data, always mixing things up and substituting one thing for another. He might not have remembered the storm but he would've remembered the thrashing afterwards. He remembered that cumulonimbus clouds could reach up to 40,000 feet and they were the 'cloud nine' people talked about being on. His shore was not a place for building sand castles. It was a place to think. He built a sandman once, the keeper of dreams. When he thought of this street though he 'remembered' a face at every window watching him — he was forever being watched. That's what his mother said — "Jesus is watching you" — and the intent was always to catch him out, never to spy him doing a good deed. No one ever saw that. They blinked when he did them. He didn't even suppose Jesus had seen him do good either.
There were times, however, when he didn't go down the shore quite so much. Like most seaside towns Rigby was visited several times in the years by carnival folk who would run fairground attractions for a week and then move on further up or down the coast he supposed. They didn't set up their stalls on the beach itself but the esplanade was too close for comfort. Sure, he had been to the fair with his dad many times — his mother didn't care much for them — and there were things he enjoyed, like the candy floss and the dodgems, but there were also aspects that scared him. There was a dark mystery to the place. One day it wasn't there and then it was. There was something unnerving about that. And it would vanish as quickly. Fairgrounds have always been a subject of fascination for writers. People love to read about the unknown, about lives so different to their own that they're hard to comprehend. They were freaks. Even though they rarely had proper freak shows — alligator boys and headless women — there was sometimes a small side-show with one or two interesting booths. The pictures were enough to frighten him. He'd never been in one. Curious as he might have been about some aspects of life, other things disturbed him. In a similar vein but on another level the whole weirdness of the place got to him. It's impermanence. It was so anomalous. The fact that it only came to life at night. The way the fairground folk seemed to prey on the townspeople All very quasi-vampiric. The people behind the counters and on the rides were a breed apart. They looked like he did — two eyes, a nose, a mouth, four limbs — but they appeared somehow different too. In time he began to hear stories, from schoolmates at first and then from other sources, about the things that happened in the shadows behind the trailers. Some of it scared him. Some of it excited him. This was another world. His was so small and he had traversed its length and breadth for all his life it had seemed. No one would ever think to call Jonathan an explorer, a traveller, perhaps, better still a wanderer, but never an explorer. This other world was something different altogether. It demanded investigation but only on its terms. They — the fairground folk — watched you all the time and there was always something behind those eyes that he didn't understand or trust. They held onto their words too. The tallest tales were about them coming to town and leaving with some of the children — boys and girls — the boys to be put to work as slaves, the girls to be used for unspeakable practices; some of the boys, too, it seemed. God, he was so gullible! His earliest sexual fantasies — before he knew what was happening — were about being taken away by fairground folk. Always he was naked. They never actually did anything to him — his imagination didn't know what exactly could be done to him — but there was always the threat of something and that excited him. His first wet dreams frightened him because they were so full of everything the fairground embodied: darkness, mystery and sensuality. They were like the fairground. He never had any control over them. They came at night. And then they were gone.
Now he was going to have to face his mother. Or, at least, his memory of her. Could that be worse? What if he only remembered the bad things? Were there any good things? No, that wasn't fair.
"What'll I say to her?"
"How about, 'Hi, Mom, I'm home. What's for tea?'"
"Was that a serious suggestion?"
"What do you think? I don't know. I've never had a mother."
Jonathan had never thought about that.
"What does it feel like?"
"Not bad actually. But now and again it'd be nice just to slope off home after a hard day's truthing and have someone say I should've been home an hour before and my dinner's in the dog."
"Will I have to kiss her?"
"I don't think it's obligatory. If you don't want to. What a daft question. What are you, eight?" He supposed it wasn't a very mature question but he didn't want to kiss her. He couldn't get the image of Judas out of his head for some reason. This was all happening too quickly. He could see the house now with its hideous pea green door. He stopped, frozen. Truth tugged at his arm, but he wouldn't budge.
"Come on, for goodness sake. She won't bite you. I don't imagine. I mean, she wasn't in the habit of biting before, was she?"
"Look, do we have to do this right now?"
"I know I said time had been stopped and all that but, I mean, Jonathan, I've got another six-million two hundred and twenty seven thousand and six chumps like you to get through before we can get this show on the road again and there's a prize for the one of us that gets our quota in first. At the moment, Joy's ninety-seven ahead of me and I'm losing ground by the minute, thanks to you."
"Sorry." It sounded sarcastic; he actually meant it.
"Look I don't mean to be hard on you but this thing's bigger than the both of us. An' Ah'm jist doin' ma job an' 'at."
Jonathan started walking again, slowly, as if he was on death row. Now they were at the bottom of the steps. Dead man walking. That was a film wasn't it? And a play! On the BBC. Or was it Channel 4? Now they were at the top. It seemed to take no time. Having got him this far Truth wasn't standing on ceremony; he shouldered the door because it was stiff and there it lay — open. And an all too familiar voice from the living room was heard to say, "Is that you Jonathan?"