A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too. Light comes in through a high triangular window. A sort of wickerwork light shade hangs down. Apart from the bookcases and sagging shelves, the only item of furniture is an old-fashioned writing bureau with square holes to lose papers and bills in. My grandmother had the same sort. Still does, I guess. On the writing bureau are two piles of paper – one white and blank as starched shirts, the other a manuscript laid in a special lacquer tray. I cannot help myself. I sit down and begin reading page one.
Goatwriter worked all morning, trying to reconstruct the fragments of the truly untold tale which whispered before dawn, but it was as taxing as tracking tacks in a jonquil junkyard. Mrs Comb mangled wrangled sheets. Pithecanthropus returned the engine of the venerable coach. Goatwriter finally got up from his writing bureau to look up the correct spelling of zwitterion in his dictionary, but got sidetracked by gustviter and lured farther away by durzi and theopneust. Drowsiness ambushed. Goatwriter’s last thought was that his dictionary was an impostor pillow, or possibly vice versa.
When Goatwriter awoke from his nap and returned to his writing bureau he thought he was still dreaming. The very pages he had written pre-snooze – they were gone! Impossible! Mrs Comb, he knew, never touched his writing bureau – there was only one explanation.
‘Thief!’ cried Goatwriter. ‘Thief! Thief!’
Mrs Comb rushed in, dropping pegs. ‘Sir! Whatever’s to do?’
‘Burglarized, Mrs Comb, while I lay sleeping!’
Pithecanthropus burst in clenching a French wrench.
‘My reconstructed truly untold tale – spirited away!’
‘But how could it be, sir? I was hanging out the washing but I seen nowt!’
‘Perchance the thief is diminutive, and gained ingress and egress through the exhaust pipe!’ This seemed rather far-fetched to Mrs Comb, but she followed Goatwriter and Pithecanthropus outside to the venerable coach’s stern. Pithecanthropus knelt, sniffed the tyre-track mud. He grunted.
‘An unwashed rodent?’ verified Goatwriter. ‘Slightly bigger than a mouse? Aha! Then we m-may conclude that the thief is a dirty little rat! Come, friends! We m-must apprehend this scallywag and teach him a thing or two about copyright law! My dear Pithecanthropus – lead the way!’
Pithecanthropus read the ground with his brow furrowed. An anvil cloud lugged past its sluggish mass. The tracks led off the beaten track, down the path not taken, through a sleepy hollow, over a tarn of brackish bilgewater. Mrs Comb caught sight of him first. ‘Whatever next by ’eck!’ A scarecrow, nailed to a ‘T’, staked into the lip of a dyke, in a sorry state. His eyes and ears were pecked away, and wispy hay bled from a wound in his side whenever the wind bothered to blow. Goatwriter approached him. ‘Ahem. Good day, Scarecrow.’
Scarecrow raised his head, slower than moons over mown meadows.
‘Frightfully sorry to trouble you,’ began Goatwriter, ‘but have you seen a dirty little rat scurry by carrying pages of a stolen manuscript?’
Scarecrow’s mouth twitched more slowly than violence of violets. ‘This day . . .’
‘Splendid!’ said Goatwriter. ‘Can you tell me which way the thief went?’
‘This day . . . we shall sit with my father in Paradise . . .’
At that very moment, two hellhounds hurdled the dyke, sank their slavering fangs into poor Scarecrow, ripped him off his T, and savaged him to windblown tatters. Goatwriter was knocked backward by a lashing paw. Pithecanthropus leaped and swept Mrs Comb into his arms. All that remained of the scarecrow were rags nailed to the wood. Goatwriter tried to recall what to do and what not to do with rabid dogs – play dead? Look them in the eye? Run like billy-oh?
‘That’ll learn ’im,’ growled the top dog, ‘to give the plot away!’
‘Wot shall us do with these three, boss?’ sniffed the underdog.
Goatwriter felt the heat of their breath. ‘Good doggies.’
‘Ee talks like a writer,’ growled the underdog. ‘Smells like one. Is one.’
‘Ain’t got the time,’ the top dog barked. ‘Our maker is getting away!’
‘I want to practise on Beardy first!’
Pithecanthropus got ready to defend his friend, but the hellhounds bounded away over the rises and falls of the margins until they were blots on the wizened horizon. ‘Well!’ exclaimed Mrs Comb. Then she realized she was still nesting in the arms of Pithecanthropus. ‘Put me down this very instant, you mucky lout!’
A door bangs downstairs and the manuscript zooms out of focus. My heart goes seismic