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Authors: D. F. Lewis
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of Royalty with Franco-Anglo roots : and their disappearance had set the whole city into a quiver. Not at all like the true circumstances: just he and his grubby-faced sister taking their pluck in their hands to see if anyone really cared for them and escaping deliberately into the darkening streets rather than go home for tea. Just a test for their parents. To see if they had sufficient love to find them again. A crazy, mixed-up looking for nothing except for the goal of people looking for them . A quest for a quest.
The two children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets—of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction as A&A, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Most tried to discover each other’s names.
“Hey, are you…? How long have you been…?” asked one child with a polished face and knobby knees. She failed to give any information about herself, however.
“Too long,” said one of the posher kids. “There’s a hole that goes to the other side of the world. But where?”
Indeed, whither the antipodal angst?
In the distance, one of the other children heard the hum of traffic—as if the city had started to re-ignite—and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.
“But nobody will ever find it. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.
“There’s a bigger hole in my Mum’s carpet!” laughed a sarcastic rascal, one of the few children not part of his or her own pair. He remembered the high flat that most adults had told him existed somewhere—even if it were only in forgotten dreams; even the slightest infection of dream sickness itself could engender false imaginings of real things or real imaginings of false things. The flat was an archetype, especially with kids. A literally dreaded flat where an individual—who was once one’s best friend—spent most of the day and night in bed. Nobody suspected this could be God Himself—as such seedy, tawdry dread could not possibly be any part of a divine iconography. Even the flat carpet had tantamount to melted into the grooves of the floorboards’ ill-knotted and crumbly fibre.
The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play—seeking the bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore—having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it—and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.
*
Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra—feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids’ parts, but some did run away although they didn’t know why. But that’s another story—as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fashion that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet
The two children plodded the dawn. Then they saw other pairs of children plodding in from different streets—of similar ages, if quite various looks or breeds. Some were going in exactly the same direction as A&A, others more off-centre. Two were particularly smart, dressed in a material that could be described as brushed velvet in varied pastels. Most tried to discover each other’s names.
“Hey, are you…? How long have you been…?” asked one child with a polished face and knobby knees. She failed to give any information about herself, however.
“Too long,” said one of the posher kids. “There’s a hole that goes to the other side of the world. But where?”
Indeed, whither the antipodal angst?
In the distance, one of the other children heard the hum of traffic—as if the city had started to re-ignite—and the odd flash of tall red metal as it wheeled between the distant openings of terraced streets was glimpsed by the children as they looked down the streets from their own end.
“But nobody will ever find it. It’s only a way to make us hope,” said a shrill voice from the now increased crowd of children as they crouched over a likely-looking manhole cover. Yet, some of these, in dribs and drabs, even single pairs, had often investigated such ground-level apertures assuming they were at the very least the top edges of oubliettes.
“There’s a bigger hole in my Mum’s carpet!” laughed a sarcastic rascal, one of the few children not part of his or her own pair. He remembered the high flat that most adults had told him existed somewhere—even if it were only in forgotten dreams; even the slightest infection of dream sickness itself could engender false imaginings of real things or real imaginings of false things. The flat was an archetype, especially with kids. A literally dreaded flat where an individual—who was once one’s best friend—spent most of the day and night in bed. Nobody suspected this could be God Himself—as such seedy, tawdry dread could not possibly be any part of a divine iconography. Even the flat carpet had tantamount to melted into the grooves of the floorboards’ ill-knotted and crumbly fibre.
The children shrugged off anything that should be beyond children. Their games were ones that only children could play—seeking the bomb-hole where some of them used to play when they were even smaller children on some (god)forsaken Recreation Ground beyond the back of the back of council estate terraced houses. The city had bomb-holes galore—having suffered many raids in the war during the blitz... but none deeper than the legendary bomb-hole which was the children’s ultimate goal. No parents would understand it. The children themselves barely understood it—and why they had to find it... and to lose themselves in the process of finding it or merely seeking it without finding it, whichever turned out to be the case.
*
Mike was in the park with Susan and Sudra—feeding the swans. Sudra was not one of those children who ran away or even threatened to run away. A false threat, on most kids’ parts, but some did run away although they didn’t know why. But that’s another story—as all endless quest stories (in an open-ended intaglio of triptyches or trilogies) ultimately become: in the same natural fashion that anything without an end eventually ceases to have a middle. Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet
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