Dr M'Kolo

Ever since Dr M’kolo had done that thing with maths that had astonished everyone and proved that wave and line functions were interchangeable in every situation bar none, science had lost its way somewhat. No longer could people say for certain that Darwinian evolution trumped Divine intervention. No longer could astronomy measure the distances between the stars any better than a four year old. No longer could we be certain that if we mixed two chemicals together we would reap the same results every time. This had been going on for some time now and people had begun to dabble.

Backstreet alchemists were springing up in places that would have seemed most unlikely before. The old Byre theatre in St Andrews had closed as a theatre – the final nail in the coffin was that people now realised that reality was far stranger than fiction – and reopened as a laboratory for weird and wonderful experiments with matter. Old Pumpkernel, the new owner, explained to any who asked that the building’s thick old walls and huge barn doors were perfect for the ins and outs, and bangs, of his trade. It wasn’t a trade he tried to hide, as men had done in days gone by, alchemy was the perfect expression of the possibilities brought by the new uncertainty Dr M’kolo had wrought.

My allotment opened off Abbey Court, not far from Pumpkernel’s newly renovated workshop and I met him one day early on as he was helping a Parcel Force truck reverse out of a narrow three point turn. The back left wheel had gotten stuck in a pothole and between us and the driver, and two or three of Pumpkernel’s sweetly brown roll-ups, we eased it out in no less than ten minutes. Relieved of the awkwardness we usually feel upon introducing ourselves to strangers in the street, he invited me in for coffee – partly, I suspect, to use my extra hands to carry-in the boxes he had just had delivered.

What I found inside astonished me. The theatre bar was as far as I had ever gotten in the olden days, theatre being a bit too esoteric an art-form for me to appreciate but they did do a good range of ale. Pumpkernel had gone the whole hog. Where once the bar had been was an olive green anodized zinc village green-sized pond, dark and wet and steaming almost imperceptibly. The rafters were hung with hooks dangling leather bottles and massive iron stirring ladles. The glass panes throughout were soot-stained and I imagined for an instant that they were like human eyes closed against the wonders they had seen, lest they implode and see no more.

Pumpkernel poured me some coffee from the Kona machine on the old box-office counter and offered me a plate containing Hobnobs and Quality Street toffees. I declined the plate but thanked him for the coffee. He showed me around, explaining that the great steaming pool in the old bar was absorbing any malefactory elements within the plumes of gas that he created. I nodded, not quite sure what to say, Formula 1 and roof tiling being more my areas of expertise. The main theatre itself he was using as a foundry and mechanics workshop, there being much new equipment he said he was inventing as he went along. Glass-blowing was mainly done outside the main doors on cool Summer’s nights when the wind was from the East. The main event though, he maintained, was upstairs, in the loft.

I had followed this strange wizened man this far, I was hardly likely to cease now. Besides, I reckoned I liked his manner. He might be odd, but these were odd times and odd was hardly a word that could be used now – I had heard on the radio that a boy in Samarkand had dreamt-up a dragon and that it now existed; all things being as possible and all former beliefs being abandoned. But where would it all end? At the top of the stairs I found where it all began.

Pumkernel asked me, politely, if I wouldn’t mind finishing my coffee – he hated waste and didn’t like spills – and leaving the cup on the small magazine table by the door. Once done he typed a code into the door-lock and bade me enter the room within. There were displays on the wall explaining biological transmutations and nuclear transmutations and cupellation. There was a picture of Pumpkernel when he was a lad of twenty-some with wild blond hair and a gown with a hood. There was a map on the floor in pure white vellum twenty feet by twenty feet. I knew it was a map because I could see where we stood on it. And yet nothing was drawn on the vellum bar a compass in many dimensions. And yet I could see not only where we stood on it but where everything in the town stood. And more than that where everything in the country, the world, the universe stood. For on that seemingly blank stretch of calf-hide the history of the multiverse was somehow exposed to my mind. I was seeing as God sees and I was God.

He cackled and popped another toffee in his mouth. ‘You see?’ He said to me. ‘You see what we all are and have never known before? Dr M’kolo has done a very great thing in setting us free, he has. Now I want you to step out onto the map and become at one with the wonders of a Nature that has always existed and yet which, at the same time, has never and cannot exist. Please, take off your shoes.’

I took off my shoes and stepped into the map. I would now ask you to do the same. Wherever you are, whatever your current views. Step into the map and know what M’kolo knew and Pumpkernel knew and what I now know.

Now, would you like to finish your drinks first? I don’t know what would happen if we had a spill.