— Call me Gut and you’ve got a deal, pop. But you’ll fancy my double face when you go pop.
— I don’t make a habit of going pop, I assure you.
— Okay, pop.
— Well, I think we really have arrived.
— No, we haven’t, Someone. I said we’d turn right as we entered the forest but you would go left.
— Left? I didn’t even see a fork. How do you expect me to see in this pitch dark?
— I told you, but you didn’t listen. As usual.
— Didn’t listen! I couldn’t hear a thing. Anyway you have the steering-wheel for heaven’s sake.
— You jerked my arm, Someone.
— I jerked it! How could I?
— Well, you did.
— I didn’t.
— You did, pop. During all that talk about my double face. You had your arm on mom’s and –
— Oh, dry up.
— Okay, pop.
— Well, you’ll have to go into reverse, Someone.
— No, I won’t. I never go into reverse.
— You’ll have to on this narrow road.
— Shut up, you bitch, the lot of you, I’ve had enough.
The door of the truck opens easily and slams behind me as I jump and fall through the dark into soft sandy ground up to my ankles, knees, thighs, hips, howl, help, help, and the bucket bangs against my head, hold on to me, pop, hold on to the edge of my top face. I grab the edge of his top face and slowly feel myself pulled up out of the sand which creeps down like a million ants or asteroids as I find a foothold on the truck and hold Gut Bucket tight, climb in, pant on the driving-seat with cold sweat prickling on my forehead and retch my guts into the double face the outer edge of which I hold in a paternal hug. The stench mingles with the smell of fuel.
— Thanks, pop. Empty now? I’ll just go and wash if you’ll excuse me.
Something lifts the front screen for him and he steps out onto the bonnet in the dark. A clanking follows and a soft flung thud and a swishing and hiss of steam. He steps back with a clean and shining inner face right to the rim.
— Well now –
— Just a moment. I want to get this straight. Who wins this point, who takes the blame for this?
— It doesn’t matter, Someone.
— Oh, but it does.
— We don’t win points any more, Someone, we travel together, we win and lose them together.
— Oh no we don’t. We had an agreement. I did the power, you did the steering.
— We both lose and win, Someone. You jerked my arm. I lost control.
— I didn’t jerk your arm.
— All right.
— God, I feel sick.
— I’ll make you some tea, pop. If you stop quarrelling with mom. And Dippermouth chimes four.
— I don’t quarrel, she does.
— I thought you’d emptied yourself, pop.
— Well, run along, Gut Bucket, less words, more action.
— Action! I like that, I saved him. I contained him. With which last word he vanishes behind the tarpaulin.
— Meanwhile I think perhaps we should try to reverse. If you feel strong enough I mean.
— Reverse! In this pitch dark?
— I’ll switch on the backing lights. Besides, I do the steering. You only supply the power.
— But how will you keep to the road? If you diverge one inch we’ll fall into the quicksands.
— Well, I’ll try. We’ll have to risk it, anyway. The road stops at the end of the blue zone. Look.
She switches on the headlamps on an army of blue trees that block a road without issue. She switches on the backing lights and floods the road behind us in the rear mirrors. The little orange dots on the control panel twinkle like stars over Hot Spots, Erase, Pot Drawer, Next Instruction. Slowly we make our reverse way and she steers well I must admit, I even agree as we move on a moonbeam through the dark.
We park in a bright clearing as the sun rises. Gut Bucket calls us, gonging flatly on his thorax so we step out and gratefully empty him of tea, drinking in turn from the top edge of his face as the sun shoots up the Good people! Sitting in the dawn. How goes my patient? I must see your scar, pull down your trousers, man.
— Madam, you shall not sit on me.
— Sit on you? Why should I sit on you? I only want to see, I have my rights, you know.
— Don’t touch my dad, old grandma.
— My, how you’ve grown, dear boy, since I pulled you out of him. What do they call you now?
— Dippermouth Blues, you stupid old woman.
— Charming. How you do wind your way up and down and around my affections. One keeps a bond, you know, I delivered you. Why, and your brother here, he came in useful for the placenta, didn’t you, Bucket boy, my, how you’ve grown.
— I delivered pop, fat gran, he clung to the edges of my top face in agony. Then he had early morning sickness into me.
— So he did, so he did. Trust a man to get it all the wrong way round. No sense of timing, none at all. Well, if you won’t let me see your little individual flan I can’t insist, but I’ll have to charge you for the space.
— What space?
— The parking space here on this ridge. You don’t think you can have it free, do you, not in the Blue Zone, why, you need a disc. We have to cope with a great scarcity of space and time, you know.
She sits on me, her two enormous buttocks in my face, and makes a primitive smell. Her hands rummage between my legs, Dippermouth lets off his alarm. Gut Bucket jumps about sonorously thumping his thorax, do something for God’s sake, so he gives a great big somersault and lands upside down on her head. She yells a sonorously muffled yell inside Gut Bucket and thumps her enormous buttocks up and down on my chest like a thousand hundredweight as her hands leave my private parts to grasp the bucket and free her head from the darkness that envelops mine as I choke and splutter inside the echoing bucket maaa — maaa — ah, breathe away she says to her distant self, laugh, I think he’s died.
Professor Head, friend and radio-astronomer asks no questions of these wide-awake eyes that hurt as they see people in the map-like shapes of their radiating coronas, inner meridians, latitudes and spirals. He has small eyes himself, one of them almost blind, the other watery, through which he peers at calculations held an inch away from it, wearing five-dimensional glasses. He merely says it depends, really, what one expects to see, and the scientific principle of perfect doubt works well with him. He teases the university’s non-scientists at dinner. Nurturing doubt needs much more care than nurturing spiritual life, he says. Scratch any humanist and you will find at least five quite irrational principles held perhaps unconsciously but as rigidly as any dogma, which nobody can question without causing total or partial collapse. You should know that, Laurence, in your own field. He teases interviewers on the screen. Ah yes, it takes a lifetime’s training to doubt everything, even one’s own observation, to treat each infallible proof as merely a working hypothesis which explains things until it has outlived its working usefulness and so ceases to explain them. Such as your eyes, Laurence, men get unsettled by your eyes.
— I came to ask you, but then, I don’t even know what I want to ask, except perhaps, why me? Sometimes I wish I could remember something.
But he answers no questions either, except in the curved way of light, like when you don’t understand something, continue as if you did, things will come clear later. You should know that, Laurence. Mathematics works that way. You start with nothing, treat it as something and in no time at all you have infinity or thereabouts. Storytellers do the same I believe.
— Yes, but I have no story to tell.
— You will, you will. In the last sentence.
He sits surrounded with the maps of light. We tap the silent telephones of outer space, we bounce our questions on the planets and the galaxies answer out of aeons. But they give no names, only infinities of calculations.