Read Online The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Moorcock
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to the local Rialto with a mood of grim melancholy. There werenât too many happy endings in The Big Combo or They Drive by Night . Mum loved gangster pictures, preferably featuring misunderstood brutes: James Cagney, George Raft, Robert Ryan, James Mason, Sterling Haydenâthe kind of men she would never have allowed into our house in real life.
On that evening I quickly became used to the fog. I pretended I wore a fedora and a trench coat like a character in those American thrillers we loved so much. I experimented with the odd menacing cough. And, enjoying the echo of my own footsteps, I made my way accurately home.
My mother still had her pinafore on, the souvenir Brighton one Iâd bought her that summer. Our last holiday together. She had been worried sick, she said, though she seemed perfectly cheerful as she got supper ready. She hadnât lost her wartime habits. Her relief at seeing me safe always overcame her anxiety. She needed to stay busy. Her friend, Mr Ackermann, had given her a job working at his toy stall in the market. She sold mostly Japanese tin toys, cheap and dangerous. I think he only kept the thing running so she had something to do.
Mr Ackermann was of a keen-minded, philosophical disposition. He planned for the long term. Mum was intensely material, mercurial and of the moment. A tolerant woman, too, she fought with herself not to trap me. Iâve mentioned how she had become a superb liar, one who told and retold her lies until they formed an intricate fantasy so twisted through with strands of intense, bleak reality they often seemed thoroughly true. She became hugely anxious that someone would find out that she invented her stories. From fear of discovery she talked too much. If she stopped talking she knew she would die. She was terrified that someone would successfully challenge her accounts. The stories had almost no intended malice in them. They were fantasies to cheer herself up or give authority to her opinions. When she wanted to be hurtful she wasnât all that good at it.
I felt the strain when she lost touch with her audience! She forgot what sheâd told to whom. Much of her energy became devoted to keeping one individual from meeting another in an effort to hide equally rich and intricate lies. Her life took on all the desperate intensity of a Whitehall farce. She would close doors on unexpected visitors, hide others in cupboards and talk loudly over a conversation she didnât want you to hear. Comedy in retrospect, but nerve-racking while it took place. Only Mr Ackermann seemed unaffected. Maybe he believed her. His own early life before escaping to England had been equally fantastic as he was pursued across Europe by Nazis.
I know one or two of Mumâs brothers believed she and their other sisters were putting on airs and graces, but they were just the innocent affectations of the petit bourgeois and easily understood and forgiven as mere wish fulfillment. My mother was Sarah Bernhardt compared to the others. Both her sisters were envious, afraid and amazed by what she made of them all. They were simply characters in a mighty novel she carried in her head and, to be fair, her heart. She created a Com é die Humaine of her own, longer by far than Gone with the Wind. My mother was flattered when men said she looked like Vivien Leigh. They soon discovered she was as confused and vulnerable as Leigh was said to be. And then they tended to fade away, back into the crowded pubs of Brookgate.
Mum went to bed. âGood night, love,â she said. I stayed up reading. There was no late-night telly in those days.
Before I got ready for bed I looked up the Carmelites in my dadâs old Encyclopædia Britannica . He had bought it on the installment plan when he had thought to better himself before the war. Mum had made the rest of the payments. Itâs where she got the details of all the foreign trips she told everyone she was making. It was almost
On that evening I quickly became used to the fog. I pretended I wore a fedora and a trench coat like a character in those American thrillers we loved so much. I experimented with the odd menacing cough. And, enjoying the echo of my own footsteps, I made my way accurately home.
My mother still had her pinafore on, the souvenir Brighton one Iâd bought her that summer. Our last holiday together. She had been worried sick, she said, though she seemed perfectly cheerful as she got supper ready. She hadnât lost her wartime habits. Her relief at seeing me safe always overcame her anxiety. She needed to stay busy. Her friend, Mr Ackermann, had given her a job working at his toy stall in the market. She sold mostly Japanese tin toys, cheap and dangerous. I think he only kept the thing running so she had something to do.
Mr Ackermann was of a keen-minded, philosophical disposition. He planned for the long term. Mum was intensely material, mercurial and of the moment. A tolerant woman, too, she fought with herself not to trap me. Iâve mentioned how she had become a superb liar, one who told and retold her lies until they formed an intricate fantasy so twisted through with strands of intense, bleak reality they often seemed thoroughly true. She became hugely anxious that someone would find out that she invented her stories. From fear of discovery she talked too much. If she stopped talking she knew she would die. She was terrified that someone would successfully challenge her accounts. The stories had almost no intended malice in them. They were fantasies to cheer herself up or give authority to her opinions. When she wanted to be hurtful she wasnât all that good at it.
I felt the strain when she lost touch with her audience! She forgot what sheâd told to whom. Much of her energy became devoted to keeping one individual from meeting another in an effort to hide equally rich and intricate lies. Her life took on all the desperate intensity of a Whitehall farce. She would close doors on unexpected visitors, hide others in cupboards and talk loudly over a conversation she didnât want you to hear. Comedy in retrospect, but nerve-racking while it took place. Only Mr Ackermann seemed unaffected. Maybe he believed her. His own early life before escaping to England had been equally fantastic as he was pursued across Europe by Nazis.
I know one or two of Mumâs brothers believed she and their other sisters were putting on airs and graces, but they were just the innocent affectations of the petit bourgeois and easily understood and forgiven as mere wish fulfillment. My mother was Sarah Bernhardt compared to the others. Both her sisters were envious, afraid and amazed by what she made of them all. They were simply characters in a mighty novel she carried in her head and, to be fair, her heart. She created a Com é die Humaine of her own, longer by far than Gone with the Wind. My mother was flattered when men said she looked like Vivien Leigh. They soon discovered she was as confused and vulnerable as Leigh was said to be. And then they tended to fade away, back into the crowded pubs of Brookgate.
Mum went to bed. âGood night, love,â she said. I stayed up reading. There was no late-night telly in those days.
Before I got ready for bed I looked up the Carmelites in my dadâs old Encyclopædia Britannica . He had bought it on the installment plan when he had thought to better himself before the war. Mum had made the rest of the payments. Itâs where she got the details of all the foreign trips she told everyone she was making. It was almost
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