Anyone At All

From ‘ The Scouring Tout’ column, The Martlet, March 28

Walking backwards should be uncomfortable and disorienting, and in this case, it was, initially, but soon we were oblivious to the discomfort, and our hike, though peculiar in manner, was automatic in execution.  We chatted away as we walked about our expectations for Pmurehia, in an altogether natural way for the both of us, and when we were about a mile and a half along we found ourselves suddenly walking forwards once more, as though our bodies had swivelled around without our noticing.  There was subsequently the sensation of travelling downhill, although there was no visible dip in the land.  But then, to the north of us, the trees began curling into the horizon which conveyed to me we were approaching a cliff.  Next thing the world began to slowly turn all round us, and at once we advanced on a horizontal axis, then a vertical one, then a horizontal, then vertical, and back and forth, back and forth.   It was like the Earth was not round in shape, but neither was it flat; it appeared instead to be a surface of multiple flat sides with sharp edges.  Manyagonal, you think? I put forth as a suggestion to my racist companion. 

After the disorientation passed, the surface we were on evened out once again and we were back to the European normal.  We saw before us the first motorway of this new country and it was unlike anything I had seen on the continent previously.  A long imperious motorway, cleanly marked, exquisitely signposted.  The Germans with their autobahn had better watch out, for Pmurehia may give them a run for their money with this sensational feat of infrastructure.  Ahead of us, further along the road, we saw a town at some distance, perhaps only a few miles.  We walked, forwardly, and forgot all about the unusual bending of the physical world we had just experienced.  We weren’t long getting there and I must admit it turned out to be a delight of old towncraft.  I can truthfully say I had never seen a place like it before.  And neither had my racist companion, whose knowledge of foreign districts was respectable, if unreasonably biased.  The town had a snug and friendly finish which I believed would look positively charming in the wintertime – I say this only, my dear Phelimer, because personally I prefer the winter above all other seasons; but as summer towns go, this one positively chimed in the light August bestowed.  The streets were your best picture of brown cobblestone and each of those cobbles shimmered with a godly intensity.  And the buildings: they were not lofty things, but at least slimmer and more dignified than what we have in Carrickphelimy (our houses being notoriously small and fat as you well know) and the walls were also luminous, done in oft-washed white, in the glaze.   I caught a few shop windows and each of them appeared glutted with books.  I swear to you, people, I had not seen more bookshops in one place since that time I stopped at Hay-de-why!       

There was little evidence of modern convenience in the town – no maintenance stores, or satellite discs, or giant loudspeakers at the town square.   And what people we saw in those first minutes had a classic sort of flair about them.  Everywhere you looked the attire was dapper and refined.

We came to a small bridge near the middle of town and when looking over it we saw a river was flowing underneath, one not of the common or Carrickphelimy variety.  It was more gunkway than waterway, to be sure, for in place of unadulterated aqua there was this jet black goop which went along slowly, gurgling intermittently.  A man soon approached us.  He saw us looking over the bridge in wonder, had twigged we were outlanders, and was happy to set about enlightening us. The man didn’t say his name, but he looked to me like a Hans.  He was wearing a yellow homburg hat, black leather boots, and a suit of green twill adorned with tassels and every other bell you can imagine, his style like a total Bohemian seizure.  Luckily, he had English on him, good English by my estimation, but not enough for my racist companion who I caught in the act of wincing whenever a pronunciation flub occurred.

It is ink, he told us.

Ink? we said.

Yes, ink, he said.

Hans proceeded to inform us about the region’s abundance of ink and how it flowed through the country as water was inclined to do in the rest of the world.  And it circulated and gushed in assorted hues.  For example, blue ink, he told us, sprang from the fountain in the town centre, and you could get the colour red from the well out the road.  But deep black, being historically the earliest and most popular shade, oozed in greater plenitude.  Having only limited rainwater to subsist on, huge costs were incurred on the import of H2O from elsewhere, but these were balanced out by a booming publishing industry, one which made it a desired haunt for scribes the world over. Or any other occupation or vocation or mere pastime associated with print media.  If you weren’t a reader in Pmurehia, you were a writer, though you were likely a reader too, if you were a writer.  And if not a writer, you may have been a printer, or an editor, or copyeditor, or stenographer, or painter.  The robustness of the industry meant too that anyone could be published.  That is, anyone at all.  It didn’t matter what bilge you had to hand, you could have it in book form in a jiffy if you went to Pmurehia, where they had more ink than they had paper to slop it on.  A billion copies of your appalling opus, bound in fine leather and translated into 7,247 languages?  Not a problem.  You just needed to get there to get published.  And not a lot of people knew where it was, or how to get there.  The land was unmapped so largely inaccessible by post.  And obscured by a snag in space and time.  Most who got wind of it simply failed to make their way there to accomplish that daring reverse march. 

When I asked Hans about technology, and how the industry was contending with advances in the field, being as a number of devices to enable the electronic capture of words now existed, he stated that in order for the country to function these technologies had to be banned outright.   A country run by ink would not tolerate digital processors, no matter how slick the machines were. 

When I asked him what he himself did for a living, he smirked and said, Guess! 

A writer?  I asked. 

Ah, so you Irish really are Scholars, he replied. 

And Saints too, don’t you know, added my racist companion.