Monday, 28 August 2006

Hooting Yard Fan Fiction

This is my stab at Hooting Yard Fan Fiction.
The crust was thick, a composite mixture of beeswax, lime pickle and bread-crumbs, it encased his entire body from head to foot. This situation had lasted for so long now that the few people he counted as friends had all but forgotten him. Occasionally one or more of these acquaintances would meet at bus stops or behind packing cases in abandoned dock yards and, after the elaborate greeting rituals necessary in these dark times, would try to recall "that odd fellow," "used to wear battered oilskins," "always rattling on about his damnable pamphlets," "Oh, what was his name?" Soon their conversation would drift to the more pressing topics of ornithology, bandages & the crippling Neet's Foot Oil shortage. So the memory of him languished.
This was, of course, all part of his design, to escape a time where he had been ignored and misunderstood, to reawaken in an age of greater reason where he would be seen as the champion of clearheaded thinking, feted as the arbiter of high taste and moral rectitude.
One person had not forsaken his memory, though she had forsaken every other memory she had ever had, as she stared out of the window at the ducks frolicking in the shallow pond to the rear of the Panghill Maximum Security Facility For The Terminally Bewildered. Her plastic wristband informed anyone that cared to look that her name was Chew M. (Miss) , that she was to be given one blue pill on Saturdays and six orange pills on Tuesdays. The nursing officers called her Marigold.
It was the 13th of January, St. Mungo's feast day. In an apparently deserted farm house near Fellahreppur a complex machine began to function. The first signs of the machines' activation were indicated by a series of rusted whisks rotating above a flagon filled with iron filings and lavender seeds. A large piece of plywood, painted white, decorated with twelve unrelated heraldic devices, began to gently waft up and down with a particularly pleasing motion. Flaps fitted into the side of the heavy gauge iron box fanned three paddle wheels on the interior which, in turn, broke the wax on the hasps around the bauxite block triggering the oiled mirrors set in the recess of the ventilated tea chest to oscillate and cause the collapse of the Hopkin's flange thus allowing the vinegar solution to dissolve the plugs and release the brake on the torque wheel as the Novick jets sprayed a fine yellow mist towards the cocooned figure lying prone on the crumbling chaise. It was only a matter of time now.
Three weeks later the ludicrously emaciated figure of a man twitched and groaned in a shaft of cruel sunlight filtering through a tattered gauze curtain. The reanimation was nearly complete. Swinging his spindly legs off the chaise his stockinged feet came in to contact with the rough wooden floor, so far so good. He groped in a befuddled fashion towards a dusty escritoire and pulled at a hidden lever on the underside releasing a secret draw containing a polythene bag of nourishing slops which he gulped down noisily.
By mid-July he was as recovered as he would ever be. Taking an old tweed jacket from a nail bashed into the rear of the front door he put it on and rummaged through the pockets looking for a packet of boiled sweets he dimly remembered putting there many years ago. He found nothing save for a crumpled piece of paper. Smoothing the sheet out he read the inscription with growing dismay. It read "Hail Dobson! Redeem my from my incarceration. M. Chew (Miss)". He tossed the note into a rusty bin and pulled on a pair of reindeer hide boots he had found in the room. Opening the front door he turned and took one last look at his sanctuary before striding off towards a distant lighthouse on the horizon. He was puzzled by just one thing. Who the hell was Dobson?