The Special Wallpaper, Chapter Two

Sonica fired up her speaker-stack space-car, and she and Joe drove.

Putting the start of the fen road behind them they pointed their prow towards town. There appeared no limit to scenery or sky, and it was old to Joe, the oldest of places. His life had begun in so many ways when Nottingham sprang into being, and he’d had other reasons besides to shunt the town where he was born to here. Now our hero marvelled at his earliest instance of a crumbling wall, fixed in its corner of forgotten park not by the mists of time but sunbeams so brilliant as to etch the old stones’ grain. Beneath endless blue Joe and Sonica sped by antique ruination, deep dark Thomas Cole arches overhung with creeper and vine.

“It goes on forever,” Sonica gasped.

Remarkable as the wallpaper was, Joe’s hunch told him otherwise.

They broached Boston Marketplace as intersecting cross-current a whirlpool of summer heat. The height of day, bounded by encircling façades of tall trade-houses, had ever coursed its season round that turbid architectural bowl. Thermal eddies, invisible but felt on the cheeks as any wind, broke against low marble walls and fan-sprayed from statues and monuments. Each noiseless crash threw such spicy remembered rills across the theatre of tide and motion that for Joe, soon their import was unseen no more.

What adventures there had been.

Here the cascading radiance flushed to intermingled opposing liveries, these purple, those orange, as a pair of space-armies waged eternal war over resonant heated space. Their writhing bulks dashed themselves to two-tone foam on department store frontage, while into Joe’s field of vision began to spill moonlit alleyways and manhole-covers and implausible monster-trikes. Commercial art, run off by some overworked Pre-Nottingham Earth draftsman for the price of a drink? If only that man, whoever he had been, could have tasted the thrill which tingled through Joe whenever he dared dream of racing with those mutant road-hogs.

The cowboy was wrong to draw a rigid dividing-line. Joe hadn’t forsaken this. It had helped. He’d learned about good and evil from toys.

Our hero sensed behind Sonica’s bumper a regular tsunami meeting its fate on the church’s weathered wall. That was going to mean some sky-spume scaling above their heads to touch the very azure, and as predicted, Joe presently began to perceive its span. He must have looked at least a little like Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, thunderstruck, as the titan within took on form.

Not the copper-coloured knockoff cast in cheap plastic, his body an oversized rip of something else, which had set our hero back a princely one pound ninety-nine from the shack down by the boarded-up supermarket’s car park. Not to Joe. Never to Joe. He’d known from the moment of purchase he was onto something special. Here was a vacuum-molded Olivier’s Richard the Third, who would greet Joe’s other toys not in comradeship, but with an out-thrust ring-finger that they might all kneel and kiss their new king.

That was who Joe saw before him, terrible and vast. The detachable head, machine-triceratops of unknown provenance, might have gnashed up asteroids between those corrugated teeth. The eyes smoked from engines of evil industrious in the foundries of its brain. Beyond the godlike proportions of this most frequent archenemy our hero gazed on legions of star-dreadnoughts arrayed against the infinite.

Then Sonica hit that heat-funnel which would carry them clear, and proceeded to coast. Such surges as she navigated now ran parallel, outriders speeding on either side of the space-car. They were gold and silver and sapphire and ruby, a gleaming host of mechano-stallions, their armour-plated flanks furrowing the frothy warm. One of the musclemen who straddled these mounts turned his head, and through the rushing haze cast Joe a square-jawed grin of familiarity and fondness. These chiselled champions on their spring-loaded steeds had been a brotherhood. Times without number had Joe wound their little keys, and sent them cantering forth with all the hopes of creation resting on them.

They’d defeat the archenemy. They always did.

To the Custom House these shining ones nobly escorted Sonica, until her cerise chassis was through the bottleneck which led from the centre of town. Then they receded like fading light-blurs for the whirling swirling arena, plunging to their accustomed round, where their valour had always been needed and would be forevermore.

Was it really all still here?

Joe forced himself to remember it was not, that it was only illusion.

Yet hadn’t he devoted his life to espousing a philosophy that what you believed in was real, so long as it was real to you? How was this any different?

Why not do as his subconscious urged, and tell Sonica to turn the car about?

Joe knew why not.

Now the sun was beginning to sink. Staring on what that phenomenon had been in days before it bore the least relation to Nottingham, our hero was fairly hushed.

Sonica’s engine throbbed along Boston’s forgotten rows. Joe could feel it in his thighs. That time of the evening was near, and the first hints of perfume were touching the dusk.

They were coming.

Other toys.

Or so Joe had thought of them once. He knew better now. Like many a boy before and since, he’d had to learn the hard way.

Forget fashion criticism, Joe thought weakly. Let he whose discoveries hadn’t been at this moment sit in lofty objectivity over its excess. For it was the candy-coloured T-shirts, easily as much as the sweetness they hugged, and their silly slogans which had read so provocatively then. It was the eyelashes longer and darker than nature ever made, the lips which glimmered inch-thick with gloss. Joe guessed that unless you’d lived through that heady plaid skirt era, you’d never know the depths which an oversized hairgrip and lacquer-slick tresses plumbed in him. Indeed, our hero wanted to shrink in his seat lest Sonica intuit his interest in the three-quarter-length woolly socks. She however was having palpitations all her own, at chunky-soled sneakers and hand-crocheted mini-dresses and rucksacks so small that a girl might have struggled to fit her lipstick inside.

“I have so got to get myself one of those,” Sonica moaned with longing.

Joe had heard enough today about denying himself, and more than enough from Gala.

Even the cowboy, who was him, didn’t know.

He asked Sonica to drive on.

When the Boston girls were left behind, and night all but fallen, Joe finally called a halt. His voice was quiet.

Where they were might at first have passed for nowhere in particular. It was only after Sonica had put on the brakes that she saw. Ahead was the fen road, and to their left, Joe’s house. They were right back where they started.

“That’s impossible,” Sonica exclaimed, scrutinizing her Galactic Positioning System then giving it a dainty bang with her hand.

“Some destinations cannot be deferred,” said Joe, still in the same tones. “Earlier I tried to tell myself so. Run, even for a lifetime, and they find you.”

He climbed out onto the footpath, and took a shaky step or two into silence and gloom.

There was the wind, striking up.

Joe had known it would. A sudden snap, and he froze as artificial light framed him in a lurid square.

That was the man who lived next door, hurrying into his seldom-used parlour to make the telephone call.

It was happening again.

Joe’s knees hit tarmac in that merciless skewed polygon where black shadow or stark relief were the sum.

Nothing stayed confined. He shouldn’t have gone all the way to the end. Now what had been in the living-room would follow him out of here.

If it knew how to step on it like Sonica, that was. Happily, that black pit of the psyche where Joe stowed what he could not face was as sluggish as molasses before the silken sonic-boom. In an instant her strong second-gender hands were hauling hard at Joe’s arm, and by the next had slung the whole of him limp upon her passenger-side cushions. So it was that with muttered imprecations against boys you couldn’t take anywhere, Sonica etched scorch-marks on a stretch already scarred and soon gale-ravaged fenland and buckling herbage and the man next door’s front room were lost in the darkness behind her Wednesdays.

The night train, its windows aglow, glided overhead as Joe and Sonica rounded the railway bridge which was journey’s end. By retracing their route they’d found Joe’s house was there where they’d left it, or rather this one was, the last traces of light in the sky those of a summer’s day which had barely known a breeze.

That notwithstanding, neither voyager was in any great hurry to see the front door again. By mutual unspoken accord they parked behind the house, and went in via the conservatory.

Less than an hour ago, Joe had witnessed the destruction of a chapter in his life. Now it welcomed him home again with smiling promises of a lasting equilibrium. Course of Empire had become game of chance, each canvas a card to be shuffled and switched across the surface of a playing-table. Order and sequence meant nothing.

It wasn’t the sort of thing everyone was handed and told to cope with.

For the first time, Joe began to consider whether he might not be growing too old for the path he had chosen.

“I had to,” he said to Sonica, still weak but adamant. “I should not have rested but for knowing that that place is indeed here too. The others, however, must not be told.”

There was nobody in the garden at this late hour, and Joe guessed where they’d all be. He and Sonica proceeded upstairs together once more and sure enough found their three friends, for speaking of masterpieces, it looked like they were just in time. After today, the attic’s one electric bulb throwing soft shade on goldmines and treasure-troves of the long-ago brought Joe to the brink of tears.

“You firing on all cylinders, Daddy-O?” Mini-Flash Splitsville asked him.

The Special Program didn’t miss much. Joe was struggling after some show of reassurance when a triumphant tap of crayon-tip sounded from the writing-desk.

All afternoon long that corner of the attic had fermented in the heat, as if it had been a chocolate cake bakery going on full blast. Now stockings and bunches and a radiant red flush strode from the aromatic oven beaming, paper in hand. The magazine competition had required entrants to design a costume for the star of what had then been an upcoming stage musical, with front-row tickets in the offing for this “fabulous high-flying fairy ballet extravaganza of the year.” Again Joe wondered what his Mother had been thinking. The same question however was applicable to Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, who’d drawn 4-H-N attached to a mind-bogglingly elaborate Kirby-wire apparatus which was holding her in mid-air above a Flashball court. At one end of this the artist had added Mush, watching.

“Well, you haven’t done absolutely what you were supposed to, Mini-Flash Pseudangelos,” Sonica commenced. “If you’ll read the instructions again, and carefully this time – ”

Joe laid a gentle hand on his travelling-companion’s shoulder, while Mini-Flash Splitsville stepped in at once to smooth over any impasse.

“Always had you figured for talent, kid,” she grinned to her erstwhile classmate. “The square never looked so good. Your narrator shut her down on Drenthis, and it’s like I’m pinning the same ponytail all the way to the same silky drawers.”

“Stuffied-up, they’ve got what boys want,” agreed Mini-Flash Pseudangelos.

Joe hoped more than ever his project would culminate in that one joining his Special Program masterclass, because she had a lesson or two to learn about appropriate conversation.

“And there’s Mush!” added the cowboy.

“I mean, in point of technique it is very good,” Sonica conceded at last.

Our hero thought so too. He and his company gathered round, all finding something to praise in the drawing and telling its creator how well she’d done.

Maybe they could stay. At least for a little while longer.

After all, if Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was entering the competition, they’d have to allow twenty-eight days.

END OF CHAPTER TWO