Nocturne E-Book

Andrew Dutton

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 439

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Alfred Wayman is an enigma: solitary, strange and with no past. All that is known of him is his hatred of falsehood and obsession with the night sky. Friends and enemies speculate on his character and history; some aiming to understand him, others to destroy him. In doing so they reveal their stories and the loves, hates, jealousies and rivalries that make them who they are. Wayman thrives in darkness, but every night must come to an end and the night-creature must face the triumph of the light.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Fall Of Evening

The Fall of Evening

The Stars As They Truly Are

The Sky Through Other Eyes

No Oil Painting

Personal Statements

Miss Fastlane

Old Wash-Hands

Glyn The Pin

How High Is The Sky?

Can’t Do — Teach

Maps Of The Stars

The Astronomy Club

All In A Row

Evelyn (A Summer Evening)

Jilly the Shuffler

The Book That Waited

Bernard’s Star

The Triumph of The Light

The Loser Histories

The Clouds

Share The Stars

The Triumph of the Light

Nocturne

Wayman’s Sky

Andrew Dutton

Published by Leaf by Leaf

an imprint of Cinnamon Press

Meirion House

Tanygrisiau

Blaenau Ffestiniog

Gwynedd, LL41 3SU

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of Andrew Dutton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2020 Andrew Dutton.

Print ISBN: 978-1-78864-907-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78864-922-3

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset in Garamond by Cinnamon Press. Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress and by the Books Council of Wales. 

To my parents, for their love and support. 

Dad, we wish you were here to share this.

The Fall Of Evening

The Fall of Evening

‘Faced with the stars, we are but dull-eyed worms that can hardly see at all.’

Who said that, eh? Eh? Eh???

Fizzmonger

‘I don’t mind the Moon,’ importantly mused Wayman, ‘but I tend to disregard it. It’s mined-out; it’s of no interest to me. Moonlight may be balm for lovers but it drowns out the real sky. When the Moon is full, the lovers can have it all to themselves; that’s when I rest my eyes and get a full night’s sleep. The stars, now, they’re not for lovers. Lovers are too selfish; their vision is too limited, too narrow. They can have the Moon if they want, I suppose, but they should leave the good stars alone.’

Evelyn Lawton

‘Clear eyes and clear skies.’

Those were the only gifts he said he wanted from life. He loved the fall of the evening; he would will the sun downwards, waiting-out its reluctance to let go, he would watch the line sketched across the sky, the divide between the dying light and the gaining evening. He would wait patiently, faithfully, as the stars became visible, flittering and struggling to take hold. He would savour the coming darkness and glory in the failing of the light.

Fizzmonger

I read somewhere that people fear the dark because they have had it dinned in them that darkness is the blanket of evil. Wayman was different: it was a blanket all right, but a comfort-blanket in which he loved to be wrapped. Most people check weather forecasts to find the sun and dodge the rain, but Wayman didn’t much care for daytime weather; what he craved was a starry sky from sunset to dawn.

This is the nocturne, the nightlife of Alfred Wayman; there he was, every night, immune to cold, with the wonder-filled expression of the looker-up. You could have called that expression religious awe, but for the fact that he would have filleted you for saying it. With the stars, he said, he lived with beauty—and that made him far more an artist than a preacher. The preacher’s concept of heaven, of the heavens, he said, was pure folly.

Old Wash-Hands

If he were of a religious bent, he would have been of the sort that would sweep aside all robed, cassocked middlemen and demand a direct line to what lies above. And on his arrival at the golden throne, he would be the one who cried ‘move over, off my chair, there!’

Sabina Faslane

He could tell you the names of the stars, where to find the planets in any night’s sky, the position, the rise and set of any object. He had the heavens mapped behind his eyes. To be shut away without sight of sky—that would have been the worst punishment for him, had he ever stirred himself sufficiently to commit a crime.

His measure of wasted time was to count up—through cloudy nights, illness, pressing business of various sorts and Moon-interference—the number of times he had failed to look aloft.

Fizzmonger

He was all height and bulk and unfinished edges; simply all-over awkward. The light never fell on him in any way that was flattering or helpful to the plier of the brush. Light didn’t suit him, no.

Dressed habitually in a rough tweed jacket, an always open-collared check shirt and rather worn, stained trousers, Wayman always looked like the archetypal teacher, which is precisely right, filling his daylight hours with work and holding out for nightfall. Did he never sleep, I once asked him; how did he cope? ‘I save my dreaming for the daytime,’ was his only reply. He spun me a tale of being unable to remember what he had said in class, implying that he subjected his pupils to an unending stream of somnambulist unconsciousness, yet his students always seemed to do just as well as those of the teachers whose eyes saw a room filled with people, rather than whatever sleep-starved distortions appeared to Wayman.

In spite of his size, he drove a Mini; he made for a ludicrous sight in the driving seat, knees practically jammed against the roof, his body spread across two seats, looking like a man-in-a-can, the human equivalent of a ship in a bottle, the question forever being: however did he get in there?

Sabina Faslane

He once announced, with orotund self-mockery, ‘My only mistress is Urania!’ I begged him not to let anyone else overhear that one. What they would have made of it is too easy to guess.

Fizzmonger

There were rumours about him, of course there were. A nasty one persisted over years and was never choked off by disproof or scuttled by its own rank implausibility. Wayman was in any case the most sexless creature you could meet; as far as I could see he just was not interested. He was otherworldly.

Even his age was a puzzle, outside of generalised guesswork; he had that kind of face, the born-middle-aged kind. Those possessed of imagination could reverse-engineer his lined and pitted features, take them backwards through how-many-years of assumed time, stripping away the process of growing and coarsening, relieving that face of lines and lumps, accumulated ballast and scarring, to find their way to a small, lumpen child of predominantly saturnine countenance and intelligent but troubled eyes, but even those imagineers could not truly say how many years had been shed in the process, as the ever-old are always ageless in their way. Nor could anything but the superficiality of how he once may have looked be guessed; there could be no prizes or acclaim for divining that this face, from an early age, looked up to the stars and showed all the reverence of which it was capable, so much was easy. Everything else about him remained unknown: his family, background, upbringing, history so far and life to come, the shocks and kicks that would shape him—all this remained as obscure and unknowable as if the man had lived thousands of years ago and all that endured was disconnected bones, fragments and theories. Nobody tries to play remember-when with Wayman; they simply meet with a blank wall. If you want to give him a past then you can infer one all you like with the bare materials available, but you will be indulging in blind guesswork, dressing his life with your own insupportable assumptions.

Sabina Faslane

His pronunciations of some of the names of the planets and constellations were peculiar, funny: ‘Joobiter,’ ‘Sat-earn,’ ‘The Orryon.’ One of his favourite constellations was ‘Boots.’ I noticed that he never even attempted ‘Ophiuchus.’ I shouldn’t snigger. It was, as nearly as he could come to such an alien state, rather cute.

Old Wash-Hands

I am ever suspicious of people who make idols, whether graven images or invisible, but fixed and dangerous ideas. Oh I had my eye on Mr Wayman from the very beginning. I can smell fanaticism and apostasy on a man.

Evelyn Lawton

Nobody knew anything about him, it was as if he had no past, none whatsoever. He never spoke of it. The only past that Alfred had was what we had given him, I mean the time that he spent with Bernard and me, our shared moments. He came to us as an unknown and remained an unknown to many; in many ways, even to us.

When you have no past, people quickly club together and knit one for you, all charitably gratis; it may not fit and you may not be so thankful, but that’s all you’re getting, and if you have nothing better to offer then that’s what you’re going to be stuck with.

That’s what happened to Alfred: a wild tangle of conflicting tales sprang up about him, some of which may have contained and concealed a little of the truth but likelier did not: the question is, was the real man ever portrayed in any way? Did he care whether he was or not? His concealment of his past led to the tossed-off speculation that he must have something to hide, which then became a tourist, a real trekker of a rumour and subsequently brought to rest, parking and locking itself into a state of accepted, solid ‘fact.’ People just don’t like it when there’s no story—in the way nature supposedly abhors a vacuum.

We do this all the time, chattering, gossiping, tacking dubious and downright false stories where they don’t belong, wantonly stapling dis-mis-information on to people’s files, so to speak. It’s just that with Alfred there was such a large hole to fill, a challenge, a real job of work.

Some conceal their names, first and middle names usually, out of an embarrassment that occasionally represents mere good taste. To do that is hard enough, but to cover up a whole past, a life, that takes a mighty effort. Alfred must have been in secret, silent, perpetual fear of turning a corner and colliding with some former acquaintance possessed of a long memory and no tact, someone overflowing with easy, loose-lipped recall.

Jilly Holdenbridge

I don’t think I ever met anyone more frightening. Intense. I remember one lesson when he decided to debunk the notion that the Romans came over here to “civilise” us all. To do this, he seized hold of Glyn Capstone, this harmless, colourless boy who was doing his best to avoid being seen by the teacher or any of us, stood him up in front of everyone and declaimed, shaking the boy with each word, ‘The Romans didn’t come here and say “you-will-be-civilised!”—No! They came here and said, “You-will-be-Roman! Or die!”.’

‘You understand the difference, I take it?’ he asked casually, dropping the pale, limp youth back in his seat without even glancing at him again. That lesson took place thirty years ago. I suppose you could at the least say that it went in, and stayed.

Evelyn Lawton

‘What qualities go to make a schoolteacher? The wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the character of a saint, the knowledge of a doctor, a midwife and a sea-lawyer. These, combined with skill and determination and the hide of a newspaper reporter, add up to the most difficult and rewarding profession.’

I think we can safely discount the patience; the saintliness too, at least in its traditional sense. The rest is a pretty good fit, although I could name someone who was far better. But then I’m hardly an unbiased witness, I suppose.

Fizzmonger

The power of darkness: it meant something different to Wayman, something very different from the traditional intent. There was not a scrap of evil to it, no fear, not for him. It was a power wholly of the good and if the power of darkness was to be exalted, then so much the better for the welfare of the world. The day, the sun, what did they bring? Toil and sunburn; ‘When did anyone ever suffer nightburn then, eh? Eh?’

Sabina Faslane

It was my first proper holiday with my first proper boyfriend and we had booked to go as far from our parents as possible, so far that a missed step would send us tumbling off the sharp edge of the south coast and nobody would hear the splash. We were in a farm cottage, which stood alone and remote at the end of a long, curving, unlit track hemmed in by tall, drowsing trees, which awoke and hissed, pssst, in suspicious whispers at the hint of a breeze. We had been out for a meal in the nearest town, a good half-hour walk away, and were still only halfway down that lightless track long after the late summer sun had guttered and failed, the trees closed and began to mutter rather than whisper, and ill-prepared, torchless, we clasped hands even tighter, no longer in that couple-ish way we had been enjoying, but more as lost children playing out a fairy story—the nastier, un-bowdlerised ones. We stuck to the path, straying and panicking into thickets a couple of times and, ominously, blaming one another as our alarm grew.

We turned a sharp curve and to whoosh-breaths of relief saw the ghostly outline of the little cottage in front of us, nestled in the clearing we had last seen in bright sunshine. I heard the cottage keys jingle in his hand, while with the other he was pulling me, pulling me, towards safety. I broke from his grip; I stopped in the middle of that clearing. The trees still loomed and blocked out all but the cap of the sky.

‘Come on,’ he breathed, still sounding tense and urgent.

‘No. Look.’ my voice was no louder than his, as if I was trying not to scare off some exotic creature I had spotted lurking in the gloom. But it was what I could see in the clearing-above, the cat-black zenith, which had seized my attention. I could see my old friends, the summer stars, losing their place and slipping towards the horizon, but as my eyes adjusted in the growing darkness I could see that there were more stars, even in that hemmed-in patch of sky, than I had seen in my life; they were scattered, spilled, dusted across the unsullied blackness, revealed to me now they were no longer dazzled away by intruding lights. It was about midnight and I made a swift calculation that I had just a few brief, fragile hours to stand and let this sky wheel above me, revealing all this newness, this beauty, this treasure-store, usually hidden within and behind the familiar face of the sky.

‘Come on!’ He tugged at me, hurt me.

‘No!’ I hurt myself, pulling away.

‘C’mon!’ This time I dodged him in the dark.

‘No: the stars!’ I tried to be gentle, not bossy; it was so hard.

Another grab and yank at my arm showed that he had not understood.

‘Look! All those stars!’

‘Yeah, very good!’ He sounded as if he were speaking of a friend’s terrible painting and I dug in against another grab. I thought he was annoyed because I was denying him some other pleasures of the dark, I was even willing to grant him some, providing we worked things so that I could have an uninterrupted view of the sky, but there was something wrong, he was becoming angry and his next ‘Come on!’ was filled with a child’s fear, his lust overmastered by a still more powerful primal force and lacerated with cold claws.

‘Let’s go in, please!’

I thought that he was still stuck in the fairy-tale, fleeing the close, conspiring trees, but that was not it, not it at all.

‘Well I’m going in alone, do what you want.’ He moved away from me and my head turned instinctively upward once more, until I snapped round, shouting, ‘No wait, don’t turn on the…’ but I had guessed his goal too late and blades of light lanced out of the open doorway and windows, turning the clearing into a Halloween show and, worse, destroying my hard-earned night eyes: how I didn’t scream, cry and go inside and try to shred his face I do not know. He called me to him again, this time his voice deep and commanding. Ah, his self-confidence was returning, all with the flick of a switch. We didn’t last long after that. I could never forgive Mr Afraid-Of-The-Dark.

Fizzmonger

Now, what else did he come out with—how about this—‘In ancient times, people put their stories in to the sky, it’s how they came to name the constellations. They put their expectations up there, their hopes, all the pettiest and nastiest ones, usually. No wonder people can’t see the stars as they truly are: it’s too bloody crowded up there.’

Charles Durant Tobol

I think it may be said with perfect assurance that I do not yearn to be his friend. I do not know him, not in the sense that I could sum up his life or scatter anecdotes in the manner of a best man or eulogist. But I know more about him than he would be comfortable with. I know people, I observe them, I paint them; you cannot paint people without knowing them. That’s why when Wayman draws and paints, it’s only the stars and planets. People? He knows nothing of them. He just teaches their children to look backwards.

One more thing, however: remember the old saying— only the bad man lives alone?

Fizzmonger

I can just imagine what he would say had he seen what I did today:

‘Technology is turning us into a race of lookers-down, of lookers-inward. The first three people I saw today—and I nearly ran over two of ‘em—were walking along paying no heed to anything beyond their inner space, eyes glued on the little oblong of information in their hands. To them there was no sunshine, no daylight, no people, and, apparently, no prospect of imminent death. I bet you any money at least one of ‘em was looking up their bloody horoscope and, what’s more, it didn’t say, ‘Look out behind you!’’

Evelyn Lawton

Some people spun him a family background that would—possibly—account for him: full of melodrama, an absentee father, a cold and loveless mother, a locked-room childhood which forced him, making virtue out of necessity, to exalt loneliness for its own sake. Add a broken heart somewhere along the way, perhaps a dusting of other tragedies, something that made a compulsion to be alone beneath the stars explicable, anything to attach a story to him, any story.

Fizzmonger

It was the loneliness, the solitude, the self-exile, that’s what I could never understand: without the touch of flesh, all that time, how could he, did he, bear it? Loneliness is corrosive, whether chosen and volunteered or not.

Glyn Capstone

One time, Wayman seemed to me to sum up his entire personal philosophy, working with huge, maniacal strokes of chalk upon the big rolling blackboard:

‘IF WE FAIL TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY’

...he paused...

‘WE WILL FIND OURSELVES IN DETENTION UNTIL HALF-PAST FIVE’

God I was frightened of him—perhaps in awe of him. But there was something about him. He was the first, the only, to really reach me. That it was too late by then wasn’t really his fault.

Sabina Faslane

Wayman once said, ‘The dullest life can be set ablaze by starlight.’

I think he was talking about his own.

Old Wash-Hands

Galileo went blind after using that famous telescope of his. What if that is the decreed punishment for those who attempt to unseat the occupants of heaven? As people these days would put it, ‘I’m just saying.’

Sabina Faslane

Every crank with an obsession fancies themselves a Galileo; persecuted as they try to usher in a new age. Wayman wasn’t like that. He just wished people would break away from the old one. To remember Wayman, all you have to do is to watch the sky. But do it properly.

Glyn The Pin

Crusty old bastard. I mean, seriously.

The Stars As They Truly Are

Fizzmonger

‘Ah!’ pronounced Wayman as he swung open the door and we stepped outside, ‘Now that smells like a night!’

I wondered how the hell he could smell anything; I didn’t understand how completely still air could deliver a shocking blow as if from a crystal fist. I dabbed my nose, I felt some dampness around its tip, which I took to be blood. Wayman disregarded my sniffling and strode to his goal, his love, the darkness.

As I had expected Wayman to live perched on a hermit’s crag, I was very little surprised to find that his description of living ‘at the top of town’ turned out to be some hybrid twixt a literalism and an arch joke. He meant that he lived where you could look down on the rest of the town, at the point at which you ran out of town altogether. It was near-exile; almost the perfect spot for one who wished to cultivate and commit to loneliness. Balanced on the top of a steep hill and, at its rear, after a small garden hemmed in by a knee-high dry stone wall, giving out on to flat, featureless grassland with open fields and moorland in the hilly distance, there was more than a touch of the lunatic preacher’s wilderness about the vista; it was dark-skies territory of course, Wayman lived at such a height to be near the stars—nothing else. But still he complained of people—of what they brought; their pollution, their spillings, their leftover light. People, he groused, were excruciatingly talented at staining the sky.

I first saw the expanse at the back of his home in a midday light; filtered through a grimy cloud-deck it was flat, light, even and unremarkable, emphasising the colour-drained featurelessness of the interminable grasslands, the steppe that rolled and then finally fell off a cliff or spilled over the horizon, somewhere far away. There was a road across the flatness at a distance, hidden by a fold of land but undeniably there, making its presence felt whenever Wayman wanted pure, uninterrupted dark night. Cars would crawl along it, scraping the sides of the sky with their double-barrelled searchlights, bumping and dipping through the anonymous strip that cut through the emptiness. They sometimes cost Wayman his night-eyes and that got him mad. To him, these intruders and his nearest neighbours conspired to leak light, blasting the dark in any thoughtless way with porch-lights and open curtains, bonfires and barbecues, torchlight waving across the stars, even latterly those silly little light-sticks that sucked the sun’s rays and then parcelled them out in irritating, parsimonious quanta throughout the night.

Wayman’s house looked unlived-in (yes, I abused his hospitality and sneaked more than a few looks, I searched more than a few corners). The place had a look of neglect and decay such that it was easy to imagine another bad winter would see it shiver, crack, slide and tumble into shards and rubble. I parked on the base-camp slope of the cracked, weed-riddled driveway and struggled upwards, past the neglected garage; through its cracked panes I could see Wayman’s infamous Mini, ill-fitting and swallowed by the shadowed space within. The house was much like the garage, held together by not much more than flaking paint and the simple habit of standing. The windows were just swirls of thick muck, fossilised remnants of the last half-hearted attempt to wave a cloth at them. Those windows, the front door too, were hung with lace curtains that had become moth-wings, ready to melt at a touch.

Within, it was plain that this was the lair of a night-creature, an outdoor one too, a dun and dull-white space bereft of shades of colour or any relief from the monotony, little acquainted with light. Yes, there was not much use in there for colour vision. Modernity intruded only in the form of a fridge and washing-machine, both hidden as if they were misunderstood things, looted from another age and concealed in this house of years-gone. Wayman lurked in the back room, which was just as drab but slightly better-kept than any other though still neglected, brown and comfortless, with books-books-books scattered around, some actually on shelves but mainly in wobbly stacks on chairs or on the floor, scattered teetering structures always with the smallest volumes at the bottom and the largest caught in mid-wobble at the top, or face-down on a smothered table, on the mantelpiece, in the grate and even the cold and unused fireplace. Anyone else would have begged to excuse the mess; with Wayman I knew that if I didn’t like it, I could take a flying leap and, besides, what was I doing there nosing, eh?

His bed seemed unslept in: a rumour was that he never slept, that he taught during the day, went home and used up the last daylight by reading, to stare at the stars until the thieving dawn came again to take away his happiness.

I searched for anything that would speak of a past, something I could attach to the man and the years that made him; to frame him, forge him. Naturally, I looked for pictures; why would I not? Some hint of his heritage and family, or at least his taste in oils, watercolours or acrylics, concretes or abstracts, but there was nothing. No clues. I need to know this man, I told myself, in order to paint him. But things had gone far beyond that, even in the earliest days. I drew my observations, of many sorts, from many visits. What happened, developed rather, was strange, unintended; I had meant to study my subject, get to know him, see him in many lights, decide on how to render his face, yet somehow the meetings carried on into, what, some sort of apprenticeship, some attempt to pass on his passion, to persuade me from faces and to draw and paint something more important, eternal? I was not convinced and yet continued to visit, long after the portrait was gathering indifferent dust.

So we spent nights together in that wilderness-garden of his, pondering light, the most ancient of light. I wore a heavy coat, even on ‘warm’ nights I kept it handy, and tried to protect my feet from the seeping cold—once my feet and hands feel the chill as it leaches in, I am lost—I yearned for the flick of a switch and for instant heat, but was told firmly that such self-indulgence would upset the lens, distort the sky: Wayman said that the air shimmered quite enough without artificial aid, thank you very much—the stargazer must remain perished in order to pursue his little rituals, so it seems.

Sabina Faslane

‘Miss, Miss, is it true Miss, that Mr Wayman’s got one that’s twelve inches?’

Heeheeheeheeheeeheee!

Alfred had warned me about this sort of thing.

‘Sir, sir, are you going to use your telescope tonight?’

‘Probably.’

‘Will you be looking at Mars?’

‘Probably.’

‘And looking up Uranus?’

‘I rather think you will be looking at yours, stuck indefinitely in the detention room, if you try that tired old jape again, boy.’

Heeheeheeheeheeeheee!

Alfred didn’t take kindly to his stars being made a smutty joke.

Fizzmonger

The only thing that looked at all cared-for—not new, just cared-for—was the curious structure that dominated the garden. Brown, boring-looking and wooden, with a small door at one end and strange rails running a short distance from its front and back, it occurred to me that this thing was designed to split in two, for the halves to be pushed back, to reveal what was unlikely to be a collection of forks, rakes and hoes, given the certainty that the garden received little attention apart from the periodic, violent application of a blunt scythe. The other curiosity about this structure was that it sat directly where any sane man would have placed his garden-chairs, table and parasol, but these things, apart from the two unfortunate, ancient plastic chairs upon which we sat out there, had been abolished from the place, ousted by this cumbersome oddity.

‘Run-off shed,’ explained Wayman, gruffly and too briefly. Had he been any sort of a normal man I could have made a lame joke about it being the place he would ‘run off’ to when he and his missus had a tiff, but, well… it went unsaid.

‘It’s in there, my telescope. When you’re fit to use it you’ll see the stars, the good, proper stars, as they truly are: no nonsense, no horror-scoping and no artist’s bloody impressions.’

So that was why this old shed, although seasoned, was clean, neatly patched in places, kept sealed from the weather, varnished and... loved. I suffered a rush of childish wanna-wanna desire; I wanted to see within, I had to! It would have been like staring inside Wayman’s heart.

‘Things to learn first. Telescope later. I may even relent and show you the Moon. Even I admit it looks good through that.’

I would get my treat—but first I had to be good. How had I ever been drawn into this business?

Charles Durant Tobol

If it had been pure, proper misanthropy that motivated the man, I could at least grant him credit for that. But that wasn’t it, not it at all. Besides, who says he was alone? That damn painter was always there, even after his job was long-since done; as for that little Missy Fastlane, her car was seen often enough heading in the direction of his eyrie. Some say it was parked outside his house at the onset of twilight and still there when another twilight came. Well, he had to have some way of keeping warm in the dark, did he not?

Sabina Faslane

I envied Alfred’s equipment, I wanted to be taken in his shed, I would have liked to spend the night with him… you could keep them coming for ages, for ever. He wouldn’t have laughed. Probably best not to.

Heeheeheeheeheeeheee!

Fizzmonger

He talked, but rarely of anything but the night sky. ‘I’m not as day-blind as people say behind my back—yes, I know they call me The Daylight-Dodger. I don’t just notice the stars, you know. Take tonight for instance. I notice the trees, even though they are losing shape, melting in the twilight, and soon to blend into one silhouette, but with the light that is left I can see that their limbs have filled out, their skeletal fingers are now dressed fresh with renewed leaves, there are geese in flying, jagged v-shapes overhead honking in triumph, returning heroes all, and there are the bats, silent and flittering, moving so quickly that their flights seem disjointed, discontinuous; they’re accelerating particles, disappearing in and out of thin air.’

‘Are you quoting from something?’

‘If I borrow words, I will always say so. Always credit your sources.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that it’s not just by the rising of Spica that I know that it’s Spring. My eyes are not always closed to the daylight.’

But I could sense his impatience: his enemy was not only rosy-fingered dawn but also crimson-taloned sunset as it hung on, shredding the curtain of the sky.

‘Come on Wayman; it always comes to sunset, doesn’t it, with you?’

He had the goodness to smile at that; thinly, but remarkably, the gentle jibe seemed to twitch at a nerve, he became a little defensive, as if suddenly challenged to prove that he was a whole man, not just a dweller in night’s shades. But still he chafed silently against the persistence of the light.

He claimed to enjoy watching the trees bud and thrive after winter death, the swifts play sky-high games in summer, listening to the owls’ cries as twilight came; he told a funny story of one long summer sundown, looking across that endless grassy expanse and seeing a woman walking a dog, trying desperately to control it as it broke from her and chased a bird which flew in curling, turning, wheeling corkscrew flight up and down close to the ground, daring and tempting the dog, which ran in its own furious, grounded curves and turns, forced to mimic the bird’s spiral motions, barking furiously as the agile bird teased it, and, orbiting them both, running and lunging to clip a lead on the leaping, bouncing dog, the poor owner, panic and exhaustion showing on her face as she was constantly defeated and outpaced, run dizzy by dog and bird.

The thought of Wayman genial, patient, bathed in evening sun, bird-watching and adoring earthly nature, well, it was ridiculous. He was there to police the sun, to see it off, and that was all. These were all the excuses of a man who was watching, time-filling, waiting for the light to die so that there was only night and stars. In winter, of course, he did not have to stage his vigil; it was dark even before he had drawn the last lesson of the day to an end. It was a surprise he didn’t just vanish with the sun and abandon his charges either to quiet study or open riot.

Pink-purple was one particular evening’s stubborn sunset, forced down by the weight of Wayman’s will for dark and night, but still staining the horizon rosy-bloody, out of spite. Waiting as ever to win the contest, Wayman held forth—as ever.

‘We are losing touch with the sky, the stars. People are ill acquainted with the truth of the sky and so they fall prey to twaddle, to nonsense. It’s remarkable that the less freedom a person has, the less they can see the stars. They are held back by tiredness from overwork, too drained even to step outside and away from the glare and look up, they are living too squashed-together in light-polluted shanties, they are made to work under artificial lights when the sun is down and they should be free.’

‘The stars only live now in sayings; “ill-starred”, “star-crossed”, “lucky stars”, our whole blasted language is infected with it. “The fault is not in our stars…” Why can’t they leave the bloody things alone?’

He spoke as if he were the guardian of the whole damn sky.

I learned quickly how to blaspheme in his universe. When I told Wayman that his night sky looked empty and dull to me, well: he gave me a deadly, poignant look.

‘I thought there would be more stars, brighter, filling the whole sky.’

‘Hmph, what, whirling and blazing like Vincent’s pinwheels? Typical of a painter.’

I truly thought there would be more of them and that they would burn more fiercely, yes, just like Van Gogh’s spiral swirls. But there seemed to be so few; it took a good look once every month on a dark night and you’ve seen the lot, you’re done. The same stars circle round us endlessly, they don’t change. I had an idea that we drifted slowly though the heavens and that there was always something new to look at, an ever-changing backdrop to the Moon and the slithering planets, I thought that was what must be of such interest to the madmen squinting through their close-field lenses. But the stars don’t change; they are just there, always there. I didn’t treasure that; it didn’t remotely impress me. But instead of taking against me, he grew kind in his way and undertook to train my light-dazed eyes in the arts of the dark.

Old Wash-Hands

Those black-night vigils, I see them as an act of prostration before a pagan sky-god, an act of abject, fawning apostasy.

Fizzmonger

I continued to offend, however.

‘And what about the colours, Wayman? That sky is so dull. White-on-black in the main, a little orange, a few puny reds, watery yellows, but mainly white-on-black, white-on-black, what about the colours?’

‘It’s an evolved universe, not your piddling paint-pot! And you can’t set up a scaffold and “restore” to your peculiar tastes, it is what it is, astrophysics rules out there, not bloody colour theory!’

Wayman grumbled on, cursing painters and their ignorance, artists and their impressions, but he managed a small concession as his mood returned to relative benignity.

‘There’s one called the Garnet Star, I’ll show you, it’s the reddest of all the stars, like a little drop of blood on black velvet. There are beautiful double-stars, deep-red opposing emerald green, yellow offset by purple, very well yes, it’s mainly oranges, reds, yellows, whites, but there are blues, greens, violets… you will see more clearly when you’re fit to use the telescope.’

Charles Durant Tobol

Night is the enemy of colour and so it is the enemy of art. By the principle of my enemy’s enemy, I should therefore ally with Night. But it already has an ally, a worshipper, who excludes that possibility. My enemy’s enemy is not my friend.

Fizzmonger

What we had in common, that old stargazer and I, was light. He was concerned with its gathering (and the exclusion of certain undesirable sorts), I with its interpretation. We pursue a curious relationship with light. We can be its makers but are not its masters, and we never will be—the reverse, rather. If we do its bidding it will be good to us, but if we attempt to chase it, to outdo it, it will outpace us with silent contempt and make our efforts look foolish. If ever we manage to gain on it, to match its velocity point-to-point, it will punish us by robbing us of time, of causality; it will make everything we know turn in upon itself, collapse. Light is radiation and radiation kills, is that not so? Light cages us, contains us and dominates us. My peculiar involvement with light is not a violation of the rules, but could come close to offending. I have sought to catch it, trap it, freeze it, represent it and imply its passage in a still frame. I have attempted to paint its portrait. It is an integral part of every face I have painted (but of course) and it has been the heart-and-soul subject of every piece of work I have ever shaped.

Charles Durant Tobol

Wayman was, at least to some extent, an art-hater. Not that it compensated for his faults. He once railed to me (in what was, almost, an admission of owning, of being owned by, a personal past, for it was surely of his own experiences he spoke) against ‘artists’ impressions’ of the stars and planets in books and the media, the overheated imaginings that portrayed ancient cities on the Moon, or burning Venus awash with pretty blue oceans and inviting, cooling forests, alien spacecraft saucering across our sky and thumbing their noses at Einstein, and, worst of all for Wayman, vistas of alluring darkness stuffed and studded with parti-coloured, brilliant, almost reachable waterfalls of stars that were so inimical to the truth, the dullness, of his monochromatic nights.

Fizzmonger

He may not really have been a daylight-dodger, but he was certainly a Moon-dodger. He knew her movements as intimately as anything that swam aloft, but he would respond with tactics of avoidance, minimal exposure to her dazzle.

I sat in that garden again on one of those many nights, clutching a very meagre drink and trying hard like a good student to learn the star-patterns, but my eyes kept being drawn away to the Western horizon, a neck-crick from where Wayman was pointing and lecturing; the crescent, earth-lit Moon was settling to the horizon like a coin rolling into a slot and I felt it drawing me, pulling me across the emptiness, to merge with its fading light.

‘You’re falling for it; the seductress,’ snapped Wayman sharply and without sympathy; the teacher had spied the pupil whose attention was wandering. I was to learn more of his peculiar disdain for the Moon.

‘That intruding attention-seeker! Miss Look-At-Me, drowning out all but the brightest stars when she is at full strength and an irritant when waxing or waning. It’s the first and last thing most people will ever look at should they bother to raise their eyes aloft. The crescent Moon is pretty and happily not long-lived, it sinks away and the fools coo as they would cute-cute at a baby, pretty-pretty, ooooh. And they pay attention to nothing else. The Moon is a light-polluter, a blessed vandal!’

The Moon had eased its curved back into a bath of dun clouds; its glow was stifled for a short time, but then reborn, transforming that smothering mass into a diaphanous veil, shot with imperial purple and brilliant gold. It reminded me of Anna Keyes, fruitily nude but for her silk scarf around her willowy body, tempting me one night from work, tempting with blood-rushing success…

‘You’re falling for it again.’ Wayman’s cracked, dissatisfied voice called me from a warm bed, warm skin to touch, back to the cold and the growing dark. The clouds rallied and thickened and claimed the sinking Moon and Wayman was happy that one enemy was vanquished, but he kept a cautious eye on the horizon, watching for the advance of another.

‘Do you know the collective name for clouds?’

I didn’t. It was a teacher’s question anyway, twisted cousin of the rhetorical.

‘An annoyance. No; a blight.’

Sabina Faslane

‘Are they still there, Miss?’

‘Still there? What?’

‘Still up there; in a line. Can you still see ‘em?’

‘Good gracious, that was ages ago. Weeks. Jupiter and Saturn may still be where they were—relatively—and Mars too, sort of… but Venus isn’t visible any more, it sank behind the Sun a while back, and as for Mercury, it’s well-named, it moves quickly, it broke the line first and fastest of all. And incidentally, you’ll notice that the world didn’t end.’

The girl simply shrugged. The planets weren’t lined up anymore and the stupid world hadn’t ended; I couldn’t help the dig, they’d got a day off out of it and she wasn’t interested any longer.

Given that they lived under it day and night, it was odd to me how people never understood the workings of the sky. Some thought that we were on an endless rocket-ride combined with a carousel, the stars constantly refreshing in an impatient whirl that almost left contrails through its dizzying speed, nothing ever the same from night to night; others assumed that the stars were locked, changeless, dead, or crawling sclerotically across a reluctant, resistant night. None had as much as asked about it, never mind looked for themselves, unbidden. I yearned to put her right, to put them all right, to talk about the sky, the true sky, the stars as they are. But… there was a curriculum, a job to do. I lured the child and the others back to History, as far as they were ever willing to come.

That had always been my problem, assuming that people should know what I took for granted. I had recognised this at an early age: I said recognised, not overcome.

Fizzmonger

There still fizzed within me some of that boy-child excitement as Wayman, ponderous and purposeful, unbolted and slid open that curious old shed of his and pushed its square-coconut halves back to the stops of their short rails. I was going to see the telescope, the famous telescope; I was to be brought closer to the heavens! But excitement was swallowed by surprise, the anticlimax of disappointed expectations. Telescopes, I thought, were meant to be slender, elegant, simple; you look in one end and the far-travelled light meets your eyes as it comes in from the other. I had expected to see a larger version of the plastic toys I’d played with as a kid or the pay-slot magnifiers at the seaside. This thing, however, was, well… elegance and slenderness were scarcely features. Like its owner, it was huge, hulking, overbearing and almost-not-quite-totally ugly. It stood on a low, strong pillar set in concrete, was arranged with complicated sets of jutting arms, weights and what looked like a small electric motor. It did not look the least like an arrangement of skilfully-ground lenses to capture starlight and hurl it at the appreciative eye; in fact, along with its complicated driving and aiming mechanisms, its fat, round, dark mouth was better suited to spitting out ordinance and choking smoke, aimed as it was at some unseen enemy in the grassy wilderness beyond.

Sabina Faslane

My telescope, my first, beloved telescope; it’s still with me, in a place of honour. I spent hours with it, bent over the eyepiece, making myself familiar with new sights, new stars. It was only a small thing, four-and-a-half inch mirror, (a white tube mounted on a light wooden tripod like an artist’s easel, I could pick it up and move it around effortlessly, to my chagrin it didn’t need to be housed in an observatory dome but stored in our spare room). I had just set it up one night and was training my eyes to track the fading of the twilight when I realised that for some reason I was not quite alone in the quiet back garden.

From the thick, unruly bushes, which formed a sort of no-man’s land at the end of clashing suburban gardens, came suspicious swishing, cracking, snapping sounds: something was coming, a cat perhaps, or that damn fox that was driving my mother mad by crapping on the lawn in the dead of night, but no, whatever this was had no stealth, no grace; it was clumsy, blundering, loud and there was definitely more than one of it. A tramp, a burglar, one of those terrible strangers that my parents feared would snatch me away if I stood out there alone at night? It took the application of hard rational thought and a measure of stubbornness to quell the fear that rose inside my belly, but I have always sworn never to surrender to fear of the dark.

When the three figures emerged they were, for me, far worse a prospect than any night-stalker. It was Carla Bradley, older than me, who was at my school and a thugette, accompanied by her nominatively appropriate best mates Tessa Salt and Kerry Buttrey. We regarded one another with our usual mutual hatred, spiced with a little surprise.

‘Well, fuck me; it’s Swotty Goldilocks. Nice, eh?’ This was her playground tone, the precursor to a push, a slap, a thump in the face, anything that took her nasty fancy. My instinct was retreat, to fall back to the house where my parents may see what was happening and bawl away the attackers, but my telescope, my telescope, I couldn’t leave it! I had already taken a few steps backwards but I stopped by the telescope, ready to defend it, for had these vicious little gits worked out how precious and fragile it was, they would have delighted in doing whatever damage they could.

‘Snotty Faslane’s gonna get her head kicked in, in her own little pretty garden,’ crooned Bradley, gesturing to Salt and Buttrey as she did, but her lieutenants hesitated, one a staggered second behind the other, as they spied my hand fall on the mirror-end of the telescope tube.

‘Wassat?’ spat Salt; I treasured the dawning of fear in her face. She, Buttrey and Bradley were faced with a short, fat tube surmounted by a sight and an open, dark mouth, pointing in their direction. Spot-frozen, nervous and twitchy, Buttrey looked to her leader for orders and assurance, but got neither.

‘A gun! She’s got a gun!’ Buttrey’s frightened voice came out as a cough, which broke down into a choke.

‘A gun, a fuckin’ gun! Fuckin’ cannon!’ Salt was infected with Buttery’s panic and with athletic spins, swift and competitive as sprinters, they bolted for the wild patch they had come through. Bradley looked minded to tough it out, but within moments her face crumpled and I saw her too vanish into the gathering dark without even a last gift of a threat of what would happen ‘next time.’ I could hear all three as they crashed through the bushes, I could almost feel their skin scraped and their faces and eyes poked by the sharp springy twigs as they fled in terror towards whichever hedge they had originally hopped to begin this misadventure. I could hear them for quite some time after, they didn’t spare the yelling and I must confess it was most enjoyable. But then silence regained, the night had fallen fully and it was mine again.

Fizzmonger

‘I want you to understand something before you put your eye anywhere near that eyepiece.’ Wayman had reassumed his classroom manner. ‘Something that will help avoid unnecessary disappointment. Up to now, everything you have seen of the Sun, Moon and stars has either been your own naked eye observation or, at the other extreme, pictures in books or TV. You need to understand that such pictures are taken by the biggest and best telescopes or even by robots that have achieved the most exquisite images; furthermore, those images are sometimes overlaid, tweaked and improved by computers that do a paint-by-numbers job to make things look their best. Now that’s not what you’re going to see: this is a good telescope and I’m proud of it,’ he paused, patting the solid base of the thing as if it was a pet, ‘but it doesn’t do close-ups and it doesn’t do camera-tricks. What you may see can be impressive, but compared to what you may have seen before it may seem nothing at all. I’ll show you the stars, the planets and some beautiful nebulae that look like spiders’ webs patched across cracks in the universe, star clusters like swarming beehives or overflowing jewel-boxes, I’ll even find you an alien galaxy or two to wonder at, but even then I warn you that a small-boyish part of you will still feel a bitter crash of disappointment that you’re seeing no neatly-framed picture, no dazzlingly enhanced colours, that sometimes you’ll only see what appears to be a blob, a smudge, a semi-luminescent patch that looks as if something’s been spilt in the sky and then half rubbed away. If you know what that object is, how far away it is, how old its light is when it comes off the mirror and though the eyepiece to meet your gaze, then you’ll retain your sense of wonder and be duly impressed, but if you forget all that in a mad rush of desire for an instant cosmic close-up then you’re going to wind up feeling just a little bit sad.’

Clearly I was not to be allowed at the eyepiece without this final pep talk; I told myself that I felt perfectly relaxed about that, but then I suffered an involuntary twitch—let me at it! He showed me Sirius: he told me that it was the brightest star in the sky, then undermined its impressive status by adding that if all things were equal it would not be special at all, although when I put my eye to the lens that dent in its glory was utterly forgotten: I had never seen a star blaze before—it flickered and danced like a flame, a white-hot point as if it were the head of a blowtorch cutting through from the other side of the sky. It didn’t twinkle, that makes it sound cute and loveable, not to mention far, far too slow, it burned wildly as if it was on the brink of spectacular self-annihilation, it seemed animated with an uncontainable energy, scarcely able to stay still in the sky. The telescope held firmly to its target, its motor grinding slowly and contentedly tracking the wild star’s movement patiently and tenaciously as I remained gazing in awe for a far longer time than I would have credited, thinking of nothing but that light, of how I could not possibly describe it in words and finally wondering if I could ever capture and commit its brilliance to paper and paint. Wayman had worked his magic.

Charles Durant Tobol

Clouds blight his sky at every compass point, from horizon to zenith! Hide his stars, blind him!

Fizzmonger

‘Do you have a favourite star, Wayman?’

‘What on earth makes you believe that I would be so foolish?’

‘Sorry.’

But then again I had noticed softness in his voice whenever he mentioned (and, I’m told, mispronounced) exotics such as Spica, Arcturus, Antares, Fomalhaut. I learned the names of the stars from him, over time, and not just the bright, dancing ones. For instance, there’s a long chain of stars in the Spring sky, it strings across half the sky and yet is featureless, full of nothing, snaking along low-down, faint, barren; but it has one star, just one, that stands out. Its name is Alfard—oddly reminiscent of Alfred, don’t you think?—and it translates as ‘The Solitary One.’