PUBLISHED 'MYTHOS' 1988
The Wilde Head was full of New Year revellers but all of them somehow missed the passing of
midnight.
There would be many questions circulating in the relatively calm aftermath at dawn, when most would be falling blearily-eyed into sleep where they stood, bemused by the lack of Auld Lang Syne and the usual shenanigans at the pinnacle of the party: could all their wrist watches have stopped, as well as the huge hands upon the pub clock-face glowering from above the shorts? Or had the New Year not come into being at all? Or, even more incredibly, were they now within some form of no man’s time neither Old nor New?
I had had some experience of time travel although I would have hesitated to admit this to the blustering locals in the Wilde Head’s Public Bar: that would have set their flat caps a-shaking and their heavy-duty tongues a-waggling. Even the smart-arsed yappers in the Lounge would have clucked behind my back, to hear such outlandery.
But, being me, I had my theories, The dawn had cracked a few hours before it should have done, according to the ready-reckoner ephemeris in my head. Easy, then, for me to reconcile the movement of various realities at the other end of the Lounge where several drunkenners were sleeping off…
I knew realities were supposed to interlock and enmesh into a perfect jigsaw, so as to give the appearance of the single reality that most people think they see (if they think about it at all!)
However, the realities I was witnessing during that false dawn were straining to depart and enter each other by the wrong apertures. The whole side-wall was a swelter of crawling creatures that wove in and out of their own treacly strands like a crazy maypole. The booze bottles lined up against the Courage mirror waddled in pairs of vein-crazed, sugar-glass vulture-moths, their contents visibly angling back and forth like a dosser’s first experience of bath water.
All this did not disturb me. What did disturb me more was that something began to wake up in my arms. I then realised it was the girl who’d been my snogger at the party: I’d been attracted not only by the promise of her clothes but by the clothes themselves. It would be pointless to describe her finery due to its change over night into something far more downbeat; and, now, I was concerned for her mental well-being in the face of such seeming nightmares that were going on around us. I smothered her eyes with kisses as they flickered open. “You’re the most beautiful creature in God’s Kingdom” I crooned.
Well, she had been beautiful, the night before.
When she was fully awake, I,tried to conceal everything from her with my head, ducking about like a right loon. But apparently my features were worse than what I was trying to hide! She imploded in my arms and became a shapeless lump of coal.
“Oi, Mistah, didya say you’d been a-timetravelling?” asked a nosey flat-cap from the other bar. “Fellah back there do say you’ve been all over time.”
Apparently, the party was still
going strong in the Public, unperturbed. I could also hear a pair of sucking noises in the Snug…
Funny, though, I couldn’t recall telling anyone that I’d experienced time travelling. Maybe they’ve read this, I unaccountably mused. Anyway, I did not react to the greasy upstart from the lower classes: I turned a flirting shilly-shallying shoulder, as I made my way from the Wilde Head on route to deliver the lump of coal on the Stroke of Midnight.
