Thursday, July the 28th, 2005

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It Was Dusk

It was dusk, and wantons had gathered in the spinney. Beyond the spinney, across the lake, was the running track where Bobnit Tivol had sprinted his way to immortality. The trackside, where once lupins had flamed forth, was now overgrown with charlock and bindweed and blackish darnel, clumps of which were thickest by the old well, where long, long ago the Woohoohoodywoo Woman had cast her spells. When they marked out the track back in 1934, they had forgotten about the well. They had forgotten about the hornets, too, and the wasps, and the bees, all of them drawn to the field for as long as anybody could remember, and never successfully exterminated. Even the sulphur bombs detonated by old Halob's squad of flying insect killers failed. Back then, of course, old Halob was not yet old, but he had already cultivated a certain gravitas. Punctilio came to him later.

Now the ghosts of old Halob and fictional sprint champion Bobnit Tivol haunt that long-abandoned athletics venue. That is why, at dusk, over in the spinney, the wantons gather. Dressed in flowing gowns stitched together from fire-damaged curtain material, the wantons descend upon the spinney armed with baskets of peppers and peapods and potatoes, brimming baskets from which the peppers and peapods and potatoes tumble and are strewn as the wantons skip along the path that leads to the spinney. No wanton stoops to pick up the fallen veg, as dusk falls, for they like to lay a trail. They make no secret of their gathering in the spinney across the lake from the ruined running track. All the townsfolk know they are heading there, at dusk on the third Thursday of each month, the skipping wantons with their baskets, but they are never followed. In the town, shutters are shut and lamps lit, and in their gloomy rooms the people switch on their radios, loud, and listen to dance band music of the golden age, and distract themselves with card games and charades, for they try not to think about the wantons in the spinney summoning up the ghosts of Bobnit Tivol and old Halob.

By the running track itself, as dusk grows deeper, the hornets and bees and wasps no longer stir. They go wherever flying insects go at night, or they sleep, if such creatures sleep, in their nests, hidden in the brambles and the bindweed. Often the field that once saw Bobnit Tivol run round and round in record time is engulfed in mist. Why do the wantons gather in the spinney across the lake, instead of here? Before we find out, there are some blots to contend with.

You have negotiated the blots, as a kayak negotiates rapids. Well done. Now we must discover why the wantons gather in the spinney. It is because they believe that phantoms are imbued with special powers if they are made to cross a body of water. The wantons want Bobnit Tivol and Halob, or their spirits, to materialise among the slumbering hornets and wasps and bees of the derelict running track, and then to pass over the still silent lake, and thus to come to them in the spinney. These athletic ghosts, empowered by water, will be given offerings of peppers and peapods and potatoes, and then the wantons will send them into the town, to do what the wantons want done. But nobody yet knows what the wantons want, for on no third Thursday have the ghosts come shimmering across the lake to them. No, the wantons wait all night, skipping while they wait, in circles, their gowns flowing, and at dawn they skip away from the spinney, their baskets empty, back into the town where radios still blare, where the shutters are still shut, into the dawn of another day when no one will speak the names of Halob or of Bobnit Tivol, not today nor evermore, for of course neither the wily trainer nor his protégé ever existed in the first place, and if their ghosts do appear, it is only once a month, one misty night, in the wild minds of the wantons who skip in the spinney.