North Monday / Missing Link
NORTH MONDAY
The Villages were full of cityfolk down for the weekend period. The hot office cities were upon a lucky escape from their prison of streets and sparse parks between the headaches and highrises towards this village oasis of plaintive birdsong and its sounds of empty horizons and of trees. Everything was south from this point onward till the dusty weekend took over with its signal return to the hard treadmill of fulfilling lives and livelihoods back elsewhere.
Sunday had been travel day. Saturdays were interludes that filled the roads with more than just the car-spaces they would otherwise occupy given the propensity of avoiding traffic jams. So Sundays opened their petrol garage forecourts end-to-end for a free run towards the extra-mural greeneries that showed that the cluster of Villages was not too far distant down the dirt tracks that the atlas failed to contain in an attempt to isolate the cities and their wealth.
Because there were so many of the Villages to count in a single area, Jack wondered that, if they shuffled a bit towards each other, they would make another city: with rows of terraced houses starting up on end like the highrises they perhaps once wanted to become before they were built by the peasants who once lived in them before the snooty day-trippers took them over to watch even snootier peacocks strutting down the village street in search of tea-cups to overturn and toddlers to terrify. Jack watched the same peacocks from the car window as the country road’s slope free-wheeled him south of Sunday towards the bottom end of Monday: even with his car’s tank empty of petrol. They didn’t allow internal combustion engines in the cluster of villages. Only horse-drawn transport and the odd tractor.
Jack was here to meet another member of the cityfolk who worked in the same city as Jack, someone by the name of Susan who would be here in the Villages on a weekend break – and Jack would cross paths with her – as Jack (arriving upward Sunday, in time for the refreshing open spaces of the weekday week which he was due to spend here spotting wildfowl and fishing the lake for non-existent fish) would be able to have a quick meeting with Susan who would be off an hour later so that she could be back at work on Monday’s North face of the week’s workaday week in the city where they both worked. Susan had not only been on a weekend break, but also a dirty weekend break, inasmuch as she was spending her time in the Villages with another city worker by the name of Cecil who had taken a fancy to her standing by the tea urn while they exchanged notes on the latest report of fiscal studies that the government had told them they didn’t want till next Tuesday’s downward slope, at close of play, before they all went home amid the many heavy-breathing cars that took the cityfolk back and forth to the city from the town and yet back again to the city it seemed interminably until the next available weekend break or dirty weekend intervened to clean the lungs of the oily smog that lined them.
Jack had hoped Susan would come away with him but they hadn’t been able to match time off with the equally simultaneous desire to have the time off in the first place: and, in any event, as Susan soon said, she was already booked not to have time off from work so that she could have a longer time with her mother abroad in the autumn and she had to make do with a series of weekend breaks rather than squander time off by using up the weekdays for it. And Cecil, following the tea urn encounter, had suggested this coming weekend for a trip to the Villages: and Susan insisted and Cecil agreed that they should have separate bedrooms but there was nothing to stop them using the cover of darkness to make this weekend break into a full-blooded dirty weekend given both their propensities to do so. Jack frowned as he met Susan amidst a foray of peacocks that several other weekenders were fleeing.
“How’s Cecil?”
“Oh he left early. He couldn’t find the time to stay. An urgent call on the blower from the office.”
Jack now followed his frown with a smile. Had it really been a dirty weekend for Susan or had time been too short for that, although he couldn’t actually face asking Susan that question pointblank. It was already dusk and Susan was naturally steeling herself for the journey back to the town and the city areas upon the cusp of Sunday/Monday.
“I’ll let you go,” said Jack, now relieved that he was back in control of the Susan situation. It seemed Cecil had shot his bolt. No follow-through with that fellow. The call on the blower had been a fabrication. No office could have had such urgent business as to disrupt any dirty weekend of their employees. Sickies were frowned on, of course. But weekends that were registered and verified as dirty ones were veritably rewarded with extra pension.
Susan got in her car and Jack pushed it through the milling peacocks – and watched her rear unlit numberplate disappear down the slope of flashpoints that made all progress towards the time and place where she could jump-start the car into ignition and floodlight both back boot and front bumper … and join the polkadotted streams of traffic back to the town and city at this crossroads of weekend and week.
Jack sighed with relief. Although, he liked Susan enough to fancy her for his own variety of a dirty weekend, even a whole dirty week – but few women in the office could face quite such a long time canoodling with other office members of the opposite sex, though together as the same sex, a week could be spent gossiping about the others of the opposite sex to their heart’s content. Some of the same sex even practised on each other some of the dirtier aspect of dirty weekends. But that’s another time trail, another audit of the strange humanity that populated our world after the invasions of the Villages by the Cities in the guise of aliens. We all became larger than life, it seemed to Jack, when the weeks split off into different days, different directions of the compass and different slopes of proclivity.
He turned his attention to the Village People who now promenaded under the trees in search of a breath of evening air amid the slowly depleting pride of peacocks. Susan would by now be halfway towards the Motorway in the longest leg of the return journey to North Monday. For him it was still Sunday and he was feeling the residues of other people’s weekend breaks as they, these selfsame weekend breaks on the cusp of dirty ones, sort of slid away sheepishly until the next weekend break broke in its full glory at the edge of East Friday or upon the even more distant (distant from both weekends) reaches of West Wednesday. Cecil had long gone back cityward – not man enough to man Susan for even a weekend, let alone a whole week. Jack would give him a mouthful upon his own return cityward especially when they managed to touch base again around the office tea urn. That’s not the way to treat a lady, thought Jack. Jack could have put everything to rights, come any possibility of Susan staying on for the week in the Villages rather than motoring back at the back-end of Sunday as she had just done. Susan needed a real man like Jack, Jack thought.
He cast a glimpse into the sky and spotted a huge spacecraft or terrestrial aircraft loosely disguised as a spacecraft that aliens would not be seen dead in. This had been a rare sight for years now following the peace treaty between the Towns, Cities and Villages. Once these had been three separate fighting forces teethed up to kill each other with no side-treaties of any two of them against the other one … or even one against one against one in set triangles of pre-planned atrocities. But nowadays northward, the Cities and Towns were inseparable allies and controlled the Villages from their base in Tuesday. Perhaps they had always been aliens in alliance, masquerading as townsfolk and cityfolk, and pretended to fight each other, even in the heyday of war.
Tuesday had no direction, no compass points. Tuesday was simply Tuesday. Jack looked forward to Tuesday during the coming week’s break from work in the city. He suddenly realised he should be shocked by the sight of the monstrous craft that now hovered over the Villages with a throbbing and droning sound that made the Eardrums squirm. Given its existence, transport to weekend and week breaks could be so much easier without the necessity of friction on the motorways. He could have just thumbed a lift on the space raft. Despite these strange considerations that plagued his thoughts as he watched the skimming giant metal behemoth clipping the treetops, Jack was truly scared out of his mind as such a sight, the implications of which had not really hit home. Too late to hit home, in fact, as he mindlessly watched a ladder ratchet forth from the largest undercarriage it seemed possible for any cockpit carapace of metal structure to bear.
It was evidently time-travelling as an artefact in itself, because it was suddenly sun-daylit as if by a mature dawn, whilst, here, in Jack’s world of the Villages to which the artefact was travelling, the air’s colour was now on the cusp of dusk and darkness. Jack’s mind was back on a wet Wednesday afternoon weeks before when he had attended a lugubrious séance with some of his colleagues. Counter-travel, as it were, was the business of the office in which they all worked in the city, countervailed by some slipstream between science fiction and supernatural paralogistics that weren’t even paranormal enough to warrant disbelief. Yet it all worked. As they all did. Cecil was a medium medium, but Susan was the best medium of the lot. Jack often just a bystander at the edge of each Third Thursday. Now that all paled into insignificance as the results of their labours – i.e. the gargantuan space raft from a war that was once fought tooth, nail & claw but no longer a war that stirred animosity – allowed one of its crew to climb – as grandly as climbing down a ladder could allow – to the ground. It looked like Cecil.
The figure held out its hand as if inviting Jack to shake it. But the shadow cast by the daybright metal monster in the night sky blinded a blinkered Jack and all Jack could think of was the peacock in the cockpit he had spotted piloting the contraption of which it was part: a royal rooster that preened itself as it hovered like an ancient helicopter, with joystick gripped by claw. If a spacecraft cold strut the sky, this was surely the original model for one. Out of the days when the world both knew outward direction as well as context.
Meanwhile, Cecil, if Cecil it were, was speaking: “Jack, I forgot you were coming here this weekend and I meant to say goodbye, and Susan told me that you and her were – how shall put it? – good friends. I steered clear of her all weekend. I didn’t want to tread on your toes, as it were.”
As he spoke, Jack saw tears pricking out in the dark divination of a twilight doused. Whether they were his own tears, or Cecil’s, was still a blurred issue, despite the jagged edges of the shards they soon became. He wished he hadn’t doubted. Cecil and Susan had spent a clean weekend break together, and here, under the guise of an ancient war returned as a new one, was a peace-offering, even if the evidence of such making-it-up was merely made up from words spoken as meaning. The ends justified the means, even if Cecil’s best intentions were merely to make it seem like he had best intentions, whilst all along he had intended the worst by having his way with Susan before Jack arrived. Susan had departed, so no source of enquiry as to the truth was possible in that quarter. She was probably rolling into home-base in the suburbs even at this moment, having negotiated the paths and by-ways of the motorway in her mind even if the wheels of her car knew different runnelled slipstreams of white and red necklaces of pixelled light … even to the point of threading the tunnels and criss-crossing boulevards of stop-and-start destinations. Home sweet home. Susan was now watching TV no doubt with a mug of hot cocoa.
“Giant tea urn over the Village” was the headlines on the news. And the camera picked out Jack as he was led – or rather hoisted – up the ladder into the body of the steaming tank-engine of mock-modernity that had once been a war machine that dog-fought the skies of time and space, between the interface of day after day towards the pole of perfection that magnetised us to the words until they petered out gradually amid a commentary that would have been worthy of prime-time entertainment of earlier centuries when reality showed itself as realities of me and you meeting up to interact as naturally as possible without contravening any rules of engagement in the thrust of our misplaced audit-trails towards a fishing-trip, towards a dash for death and no further words except those of Jack and Cecil as they spread their tails in a glorious fan worship and trip-switched the fictional stars in their liferaft they named ‘Susan’ after its friction of bottom edge on top edge of shard-infested North Sea Monday gradually…
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The link was not missing.
John stared coldly at the gold necklace – whether gold or gold-coloured he wasn’t sure, then and now. He knew, however, that it had a missing link yesterday when – as part of his regular duty of care in owner of his late parents’ property – he examined the necklace’s glittery existence. Yes, he had stared it at yesterday, as he stared at it the next day, as maybe he still stares at it tomorrow. The link was missing on all previous occasions. The necklace had always possessed a missing link within John’s living memory. Thirty three circles of interlocking gold links – when there should have been thirty four. His Mum once told him that it should have thirty four because her late husband (John’s Dad) had bought it for her 34th birthday.
Then, one day, not long after, a link snapped and her late husband joined the whole necklace back together again. In his shed, his wonderfully appointed shed, he had used cutting and welding equipment to create a necklace of thirty three links, thus discarding the unreliable broken link (without mending it).
When John inherited the necklace upon his Mum’s own later death, he had counted the links meticulously so that he could ensure it was the same necklace she had always proudly shown him – fetching it from its click-tight box (she never wore it) and placing it in little John’s upraised palms just for a minute or so of reverent silence – of wordless but mouthed counting – then replacing it in tissue paper for its latest ensconcement in a long line of such.
There had indeed been thirty-three links.
Today, though, the day after yesterday, he was stunned to count thirty four links. He counted again, sure he had made a mistake. No, he was right, definitely thirty four links.
The missing link was missing. Or, rather, upon further consideration, the missing link was not missing. He wasn’t sure. John was never sure, it seemed in the light of today’s events. If it were missing, there must be a gap the size of a link. Then the missing link would be simply missing as opposed to being not missing, but still there. The strange audit trail took his mind away from the mystery and towards tussling, joyfully, with states of missing and not missing to calm his tangled nerves … giving his worries the ability to go missing, too, as it were, without the need for John’s conscious volition to calm his own nerves about such worries … although this was all quite beyond even John’s twisted logic. He needed his late Mum’s placid logic and the comfort of her Nursery Rhymes. He could even imagine his Dad banging in the distance from his beloved shed. He had died longer ago than John felt he was able to remember. But a comfort nevertheless.
He recalled his Mum telling him how his Dad had repaired the broken necklace – making an unbroken necklace whole again, if not exactly, then, the same necklace. The man had a kind soul and John hoped he had inherited that, too. With steady grey-iron eyes and a skill for making things and unmaking things, his Dad had once demolished his shed when it grew too old to be a shed. John somehow remembered, either in fact or by hearsay, that his Dad had not demolished it with a sledgehammer but meticulously plank by plank – even though the planks were rotted through and quite worthless: extracting each nail with the bifurcated end of a hammer in a devotionally meticulous slowness – even though the nails were rusty and beyond use. His Dad had sworn there were seventy seven planks in the shed – he knew this as he had once made it himself. But now laid out on the lawn there were only seventy six planks, enough to make John’s Dad cry.
John could now put the necklace over his head – the thirty fourth link just giving sufficient slack which the previous thirty three links hadn’t possessed. There was no catch. It was a necklace that was donned and doffed like this without any mechanism for breaking its circle then completing it again once it was around the neck. He wore the necklace – for the very first time – with filial pride. He felt as if his beloved parents were watching him. He tried to think a link, some clever end that would bring the story back to its beginning, John’s story, John’s life – thus making a whole. The whole felt very untidy. It couldn’t be a whole because it had actually grown a hole as large as the missing link, leaving his life just hanging there forever, a loose end.
That was before the thing round his neck began to tighten with a series of single clicks. John became the missing link, someone who had never existed at all, the phantom child of childless parents, parents with nobody to leave their goods. Every life has a catch somewhere.
It was enough to make any good man cry, as he hammered on the door of Heaven.
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