We play cat’s cradle with our meridians, slowly, soothingly, and it quietens the neural cells in their untempered morse along the growing muscles of my love for Something. Soon we have wrapped ourselves and swing gently in our hammock. The boat chugs down the river and Dippermouth sings in a cloppeting counterpoint to the drum-like moon that bounces back his signals.
— What’s happened to the others, Something?
— You mean the journalists?
— What journalists? No, I mean the other moons.
— Oh, them. They’ll come back in time.
— Which do you think will come back next?
— I don’t know.
— I thought you knew everything, Something.
— Well, not everything. I only follow my instructions.
— Secret instructions, girl-spy?
— If you like. But they get bent and broken.
— You mean I break them?
— Well, when you break your word, it creates density and upsets the definition. And that confuses me.
— So I lose a point again.
— You win points too, Someone.
— I do?
— Yes.
— Does it mean, then, that you lose points when I win?
— All things have a balance. But sometimes we win points together, Someone.
— Like now?
— Like now.
— I love you, Something.
— You don’t have to say that.
— I don’t say it out of necessity but from freedom of choice.
— Freedom can mean the bending of a word, even to breaking point.
— Oh, don’t start proving your point again.
— I haven’t any points to prove, Someone, you have. I only follow my instructions.
— Who gives you your instructions? Why don’t you tell me things?
— But you have no interest in things as such, you said so yourself.
— Did I? Me, with my five geometries? I thought someone else said that.
— No, you did, Someone. You show such idle curiosity. For a psychogeometrician, I mean.
— Would you prefer a busybody?
— At least a busybody really wants to know.
— My busy body feels so tired. You’ve tired it with your secret laws, for forty-eight thousand million years or so, like a White Dwarf, you said so yourself. What do you expect, a Blue Giant?
— You chose the way, Someone. I told you it would take a long time. You build up such atmospheric resistance.
— Me? Resistance? But I love you, Something.
— You don’t have to say that.
— Haven’t I proved it?
— To your satisfaction.
— I do everything you ask. I play it your way.
— Oh no, Someone, you make me play it your way. You chose opaqueness. You don’t hear things, you see what you want to see, you insulated the crater of your ear with cork –
— Me! But the surgeons did that, and the fat woman, I didn’t want it, I yelled, surely you –
— It all comes to the same thing, Someone, you with your five geometries should know that. And so I find it hard to get through to you. The layers of atmosphere distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition.
— Even like now?
— Even like now.
— I feel so tired, so tired.
— Would you like Dippermouth to show you another film?
— No. Perhaps. Where do you suppose this boat will take us?
— Wherever you want it to take us.
— You sound jolly helpless, I must say, for a girl-spy. Why don’t you follow your instructions and your secret laws?
— I follow them.
— Or have you lost contact with base? Base! Ha! Now I understand. When you say you follow your instructions you mean you follow your base instincts. Well, why didn’t you say so? All this talk of laws and meridians within, you had me quite perplexed. Good girl. Come let me rouse your base instincts.
The hammock slowly diswraps us as I rouse my ascendancy over her and we separate into people observing each other in the act of love, good people. I prove my point and feel as pleased as a turkey-cock.
— Would you like to read my dial now, dad, says Dippermouth when he can get it in edgeways. His voice bounces off the moon as from a drum. I give him a paternal pat which sets off the alarm.
— Stop it, dad! Stop!
— Sorry, son, sorry. There, no harm done. Stop, says the moon.
— No harm! Just you wait, I’ll probably die before my time, you great clumsy oaf.
— How dare you talk to me like that? Oaf, says the moon.
— Well at least I tell the truth. Not like ma who’s got herself all besotted with you, truth says the moon, already on the edge of that theatre, sotted with you the moon says, that big round hole you came out of like a sinking nincompoop –
— What do you mean, round hole says the moon, you warned her? How? Compoop the moon says.
— I warned her. Not to give you a hand.
— What! And, says the moon.
— But, oh, no, Someone. I play it your way.
The moon says your way as Dippermouth imitates his mother with a snarling simper and I want to hit him but Something stops me. The atoms of our will-power collide a little in a short-drawn battle but the well-being in the pleasure of my turkey-cock has drained me and I defer to her with a flourish of face-saving. Dippermouth’s dial now saved grins mockingly at a quarter-to-nine or the alternative and dips into his creaking oscillations as the boat chugs down the river.
The boat chugs down the river through the weeds that enmesh its chugging progress. A crocodile slowly slices the forewater. The decoy blonde runs screaming from the burning hut and leaps into the river. The crocodile slowly slices the rearwater towards her. The fat unshaven captain nonchalantly emerges from his small square cabin and watches the decoy blonde struggling in the weeds with the crocodile slicing the water towards her. He throws out a life-belt at her, or a lasso perhaps, and draws her towards the boat, slicing the water quicker than the crocodile. He yanks her dripping onto the boat-deck and she faints into his arms. Now I remember they did all this before, on a big liner, with the other blonde. I played detective but took no notes or pictures by way of evidence, relying on my brain which couldn’t retain the immense complexity of plot and motivation. Good man, says Stance, can you repeat, we’ll do a take this time.
— You only see what you want to see, Someone. Why do you want to see this tripe?
— It has a certain disconnecting charm. Anyway, if you see it too, you must also want to see it.
— I want to know you better by looking through your eyes.
— And through Dippermouth’s dial. You mothered him after all.
— You fathered him.
— I really don’t see how.
— You don’t see anything worth while.
— Worth whose while?
— Your while. My while. You try to live without causality, pretending that each moment has its own separateness, that anyone might come or go in that one moment like an electron. Why, you might as well ask for the moon.
— Oh dear, here we go again with your mystifications.
— I speak with perfect clarity.
— I’ve noticed that when people say a thing has perfect clarity they merely wish it had.
— People perhaps. You like people, don’t you? You have no interest in things. But people consist of things.
— Oh come, Something, I have a high regard for you. You know I have. Anyway stop throwing that phrase at me. It doesn’t apply to me. I didn’t say it, someone else did. He did. Stance. The man in the film.