Monday, May the 1st, 2006
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Testimony Of A Tundist, part three. The first two episodes appeared on April 29th and 30th.
Slowly but surely, my banjoing fell to rack and ruin. The fireworks factory hands, all four hundred and fourteen of them, began to find other amusements for their lunchtime revels: skittles, boules, chuck-mattress. The day came when I did not even bother to wheel myself up onto my plinth, banjo in one hand and a clutch of song-sheets in the other, and nobody noticed, and nobody cared. I knew then that I would have to leave. I was penniless, witless and, twenty three hours out of twenty four, distraught and fraught. And insomniac.
Why? I could not have said, in those grim days. Only in retrospect can I see, so clearly, the admixture of yearning, numbskullery, and a scarcely perceptible throb of impossible glory which nestled in the root of my being. Or to put it another way—what was it about that Vest that the sense of it prowled through every nerve of my body? I was certain that it was the Vest, and not the man who wore it. I was equally sure that it was not even the Vest itself, but the Vest's glow… perhaps simply the glow, the shimmer.
In the first days after that singular encounter by the pond, I would be plucking some happy-go-lucky sea shanty to a blissful crowd of factory workers when the glow would impinge upon me, pellucid and incandescent, and of a sudden I would be all butterfingers, and my fluting voice would crack. As weeks passed, the glow did not merely cause the odd hiccough in the middle of a song, but led to me breaking into uncontrollable sobs, tossing my banjo aside, and wheeling myself away, away.
As the tocsin rang and the workers trooped back to their posts, I would sometimes overhear them exchanging theories about my indisposition: drink, tumour, neurasthenia, the jangles, snapping synapses. I half-believed half the theories myself. Strangely, I never tried to locate Glew, wearer of the glowing Vest. As it was, I could barely recall what on earth he looked like. Had he stood before me with the Vest absent or covered, I knew I would never have recognised him.
On with it: I left the factory, bound I knew not where. I lived for months on hawberries and handfuls of water cupped from streams. I was dallied with by a wandering band of rogues who bent the spokes on my wheelchair. A stinking barn was my haven for the winter. In February I found a crate of liquorice abandoned and hawked its contents in a scattering of dreary hamlets. One day I was covered in soot, I cannot remember how. In March, in an orchard, I fell out of my wheelchair, and lay in the damp grass mewling through the night, until rescued at dawn by a cherry-cheeked farmer's wife who gave me another haven at her hearth for a brace of days, until her goitred son strode home from hunting and pitched me out the door with curses and a bludgeon. April found me moping in a fishing village. In May, through a combination of luck, low cunning, and a road accident, I attended a Tundist gathering. Let me tell you about it.
I was squelching my way through a reeking ditch not ten miles east of Flappings, that dim and abominable fishing village, when ahead of me, making an assiduous study of toadstools, I saw Glew, or a man I took for Glew—a man, at any rate, who wore a glowing vest. Destiny's darning-needle pierced my soul. If that sounds laughably melodramatic, laugh—but laugh in the knowledge that I am being painfully sincere. Quaking, I wheeled myself frantically through the mud towards him. I was far too excited to greet him with a wayfarer's cheery “hello”.
“Is that the Tundist's vest?” I blurted. He sprang upright, dropping a little inspection fork from his right—no, left—hand, and fixed me with what can only be described as a steely glare. His face was like most faces.
“Trap frap moon,” he said. Nonsensical as the words were, he freighted them with meaning. Meaning what? My hearing is often muddy. I decided to ignore his remark, and repeated my question. The man's countenance changed. He assumed the mask of a simpleton. I had, you see, made it quite clear to him that I was no Tundist. If you have a copy of Binder, read the section on modes of greeting and farewell. Binder—not I—will tell you the exact words with which I would have replied, had I then worn the Tundist's Vest. But no, he knew me for what I was—a Strob.
I said I would not quote from Binder, but I am tired, and a short extract will do no harm: Tundists divide the world cleanly into two populations: on the one hand, themselves, and on the other, everyone else, non-Tundists, whom they term Strobs. In their traffick with Strobs, the Tundists display an air of simple-mindedness, almost a cretinism, by which means they hope to discourage any intercourse or engagement with the non-Tundist world. In this sense, perhaps, they are exclusive and cultist.
But, might I add, it would be wrong to construe from this that we Tundists distance ourselves from or despise the world. The matter is far more complex. It is Binder's one lapse. Should his book one day be reissued, I hope to ensure that a corrective footnote is inserted. We are, you will recall, worldly-wise, and our reluctance to go blabbering about, proclaiming our Tundism willy nilly, is based upon the stern directive issued by Diocletian Birdbag in that great foundation stone of our Vestery, the Gruesome Pages, the only copy of which is housed in a heavily-guarded marble monstrosity in the Pavilion of Tund, to which no map that I know of will direct you.
“You are not Glew, are you? Do you know Glew?” I prattled. The man began to drool and mumbled something incomprehensible. “Where did you get that vest? It is tremendous! Can I get one?”
I am afraid I babbled on like this for some time. While I was doing so, the man retrieved his fork from the muck, carefully wiped it clean with a fork-cleaning cloth and, placing half a dozen toadstools into his punnet, slung it over his shoulder and started to walk away from me. He let out a couple of yelps and continued to drool. With hindsight, I have to say that he rather overdid his pretence of doltishness, but it worked a treat at the time. As he made off, I followed him.