Muggles Bereaved Page 2
Meantime, the attempt to explain or locate God has long since been abandoned on Rowling World, though God is still recognised in shape of The Quintessence. That ‘He’ really does exist explains the retardation of Wobbeliser success. The Quintessence rates humanity’s fitness for inter-universal travel at C minus. A ‘must-try-harder’ rating familiar to us all. Quite unshakeably objective in the face of our puny efforts in a multi-world ant heap. And those whom the Gods would licence must, as a first step, deprive their children of access to drones and missiles.
In this weird universe which Lim inhabits, the slightly weirder Jim Bean, Lim’s class mate, who was and is ginger haired, thought of himself as a latter day Ron Weasley. It was a great comfort to a smaller than average lad who was constantly being called Duracell or copper-knob, the latter usually in the showers after rugby. His red curly mop and his red pubic hairs caused much mirth and, to Jim, much embarrassment.
“which of those pink wriggly things is your willy,” he was always being asked, “the little one or the really little one?”
I tell you this indelicate information because you must understand that bullies are, like Rowling’s Death Eaters, a universal constant. They flower where self esteem wilts under slap-happy parents or as a result of being called ‘stupid’ by a chemistry teacher or ‘beyond redemption’ by an art teacher who is himself a failed Degas. Transference of failure onto the scapegoat was the psychological aim and it was one art in which bullies of all ages, sizes and shapes had gained an ‘A’ grade. One of the early results of the Wobbeliser would be to prove that a coefficient of probability of bullying actually did exist. This ‘proof’ would hold until the Wobbeliser was replaced by a much more sensitive version of itself called the Newtonic Nubiliser. It would be named and switched on by Newton himself, who had been folded into what passes as Rowling World’s present by a ripple in Space-Time. Or Time-Space, I can never remember which. My mind flip-flacks every hour on the hour. But not in synch with the flip-flacking planet.
Lim, whose own, Chinese pubic hairs were spikey straight and not a bit short and curly like most others, was ashamed to be glad of the distraction afforded by poor Jim. He was aware that this scapegoating of Jim was unworthy in one bespectacled, hare-lipped, “4-eyes” with pubes like rampant black pampas grass. Even after contact lenses reduced his own role as an oddity. His nose could not be reduced even by the surgery investigated by his worried parents. So he befriended the red-headed Jim as a companion in adversity. Together, they saw themselves as members of a Brotherhood, Companions in a League of Honour. And Lim thought wistfully of a girl in the same year whom he first met on an exchange holiday. That girl who would make a perfect addition to the League were she not called Tracy and blessed with excessive avoirdupois. They were all three most definitely Muggles’ Muggles and freaks. Tracy was not just a freak because of her name, but because she was overweight and wore horrible black tights when Lim thought that a voluminous cheongsam would have been more appropriate. He tended to cover his nose with his hand when speaking, so why didn’t she cover her body with lots of clothing? If he was in her shoes, he would pretend to convert to Islam and wear a full burka. Or she could do the in-your-face thing like Camila Batmanghelidjh. Tracy’s redeeming feature, in Lim’s eyes, was an eidetic memory and a vast store of factual data. In time, he would come to see that her early disregard of ‘image-consciousness’ was also a great sign of her character. And she had nice glossy hair. Ginger Jim Bean could see no fault in her at all. If he was a Weasley, she could be his Hermione any day.
The real reason why Lim accepted that he, himself, was a freak was not the nose, or the extinct spectacles, or even the spiky pubes. It was not very Chinese to make much of physical attributes. But what set him apart was a certain set of capabilities. He could do things that no one else could. Not that he could control these ‘things’ or cause them to happen when they might have been useful. They just happened when they felt like it. They burst out of him as it were, but thankfully when he was alone. Or usually when he was alone. The lack of control stemmed from youth and inexperience much like the spontaneous antics of the kid goat who bounces into the air at the least provocation and skitters aimlessly about for the hell of it. You must have met one of those in a petting zoo. Cute at first but darned irritating when they will not stop head-butting your baby sister or jumping up on your back when you bend down to tie a shoe lace. They also eat the flowers that you carefully plant to trace the lines of a path in red white and blue. A goat redesigned red, red, blue, blue white edging is meaningless symbolism.
The first inkling that bursting-out ‘things’ were becoming more public was when Lim and Jim were clearing scrub at the end of the School South field. It was a punishment for some minor misdemeanour and involved pulling up waist high weeds and grasses so that the playing area round the cricket pitch could be enlarged. A tough assignment for merely passing notes and whispering in Pongo Chorley’s boring Chemistry class. It hadn’t helped when Pongo checked if they had been listening to him by asking Jim to name the element beginning with “T” with an Atomic Number of 22. Jim’s desperate search for a reply yielded the word “Turdium” and sealed their fates. The class bullies made a point of cackling loudly as if this was a brilliant joke. Lim, asked the same question, gave a more respectable answer of “Terbium”. This was a real element but with an Atomic Number of 65. Detention, which was not an element, advised Pongo, had a number too. That number was 60 minutes. They forebore telling him that 60 minutes was not a number but a time period. Such ripostes had a way of leading to doubled punishments.
At lunch break, they had been given strong leather gloves and they pulled weeds out with a will. Their efforts followed a law of diminishing returns, the weeds pulled per minute tending to zero quite quickly. When Lim grew tired of weeding and abandoned the work, he stood grumpily and swished an imaginary scythe about him, swinging side to side from the hip and arching his back for exercise. He had a book on Canadian military calisthenics and preferred 5 minute, limb-swinging workouts to hours of weight-lifting in a school gym populated by neanderthals. But also populated by a small group of some half decent pre-Olympians.
Suddenly there had been an almighty ‘swish’ and the grasses fell away before Lim’s swinging arm and empty hand. Well and truly scythed away at the root. When he repeated the motion, nothing happened and he thought he might have imagined it. Day dreaming had a strange effect on boys of his age. Hadn’t his brother been accused of faking a poltergeist attack, though both brothers knew that an invisible force had indeed smashed his father’s tropical fish tank? What else could have reduced parts of it to so much ground, powdered or melted glass? The brothers grudgingly accepted the lesser explanation that it might have been a manifestation of pre-pubescent psychic energy. That explanation came from a snooty and post-pubescent prefect and was much more acceptable than their father’s certainty that one of them must be responsible. Father insisted that the culprit should own up to the truth or they would both be punished. He did not realise that the alleged ‘poltergeist” was an agent of a very different kind which would become manifest in the not too distant future. His admonition that people who persisted in lies should be “very, very afraid,” would rebound on him when he himself persisted in ignoring possibilities. He was a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, but in the haughty moment of berating his children, he did not recall the famous quote;
“"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Owning up to their father’s impossible version of the truth would have been a lie, so the brothers accepted a rota of chores in punishment. Lim Gee Song managed to divert his designated chore out into the weedy garden of their home. He made short work of cutting down the weeds thanks to the ‘bursting-out thing’ which appeared in tune with his angry frustration at not being believed. The psychic scythe made manifest on the South field. He supposed that he might be a bit like the Hulk of comic book fame. Very da
ngerous when annoyed. He had scowled behind his contacts in an experiment attempting to reproduce the phantom scythe in calmer moments. But his feigned anger was not in tune with his nature. He was someone blessed with being able to see both sides of any argument and seldom got angry with people. Seldom. But it was a fact that he had given the afro-haired bully Adebayo a very sudden and strange ‘flat top’ without realising he had done it. Inches lower and Adebayo would have been the recipient of a craniectomy. Jim, the curly red top, had laughed at the sight of Adebayo with a flat, sizzling and smoking black mop, fused almost to glass-like reflectiveness and level enough to land a helicopter. It left Adebayo wondering where the smell of singeing hair was coming from. He did not attribute the mutilation to those wimps Lim and Jim or to any earthly agency. His West Indian mother was less tolerant. She saw it as a deliberate act of self-harm akin to acquiring a tattoo or a piercing and boxed his ears and grounded him for a month. Bullying gets its come-uppance in the West Indian culture. Seldom is it justly delivered.
When, at the end of the South field, Lim had almost scythed the legs off his startled, red-headed friend Jim, things had become serious. The ‘almost’ was actually a design feature of the Superpower which could not act to harm any creature having the life force, whatever that creature was. There is a caveat to that, of course. In the small print. It could harm anyone who had given himself over to the Dark Force to the extent of incorporating excessive volumes of Dark Matter within. You probably think that Dark Matter mingling with ordinary matter would lead to an annihilation of both in an enormous burst of energy. Well, you have now learned you are wrong. Dark Matter and Light Matter can mingle thanks to the Boyd-Karlssohn meniscus which interposes itself whenever both are present. So take that knowledge into your own universe and gain a Nobel prize or whatever is your equivalent. In Lim’s universe it was nothing as bizarre as a prize invented by a man who had given the world dynamite so that it could blow itself up more efficiently. Try moderately hard and you may be able to guess what the major prize was called in Lim’s world, just a flip-flack away from you. Yes, the Nobel prize was there called the Phoenix. But bear in mind also, when a planet or universe flip-flacks, no-one notices any change because there isn’t any. Only transfer by a Wobbeliser or Nubiliser could put you and yours into a strangely different world where Nobel prizes became Phoenixes and where long dead geniuses came to life. One day there will be travel agents with degrees in astro-physics. Only then will ordinary mortals travel safely across time and space. The present class of travel agents would deliver you into an abyss claiming that though it was a work in progress it had a stunning view.
The incident with Adebayo and the near scything of Jim worried Lim a lot. He knew nothing of the properties or limits of this Superpower and he did not want to become an inadvertent serial lopper of limbs and heads. It meant that he had to get away from difficult situations and nasty people. Nice people like Jim too, perhaps. He might get a reputation for being a coward, or a recluse, but that was better than leaving a trail of amputees or being a serial killer. The worry was that bullies would see an easy target and keep on coming after him. Jim, valuing their friendship, insisted that he could leap over the blade of any scythe, phantom or not. Jim was not going to lose one of the only friends he had for a small thing like an accidental amputation. Of that he openly boasted. They agreed that they should continue their association but with Jim maintaining a mean free distance of 2 metres between them. This suited Lim who was also somewhat averse to Jim’s tendency to deliver exuberant hugs to his friends. Or to his friend, singular.
A partial remedy came to Lim when a Boarder and Youtube addict showed Day Boy Lim a gruesome video of a young Buddhist monk burning himself to death without even moving or screaming. An unwanted and gruesome video that should never have seen the light of day. But Boarders were so deranged by school food and rule by Prefect and House master that they favoured the depiction of the grisly fate of others. They were also prone to depravity because of an overindulgent matron who modelled herself on “Nursie’ in Blackadder II. Turning away from both video and Boarder in disgust, Lim nonetheless recalled reading about elderly monks who sat knowing, but immobile, before the approach of death and became strangely mummified in the process. Thereafter, he welcomed bullies and staunchly endured the insults and assaults with a calm and holy smile while inwardly chanting what most would observe to be a Buddhist mantra. Most of those observers who were not bona fide Buddhist monks, that is. But the bullies were just pea-brained idiots and they soon tired of Lim’s quiet and accepting stare, quite unaware of the inwardly intoned “Omm, Omm, Omm” being a mere confection. They were also a bit worried about the blood trickling from Lim’s nose and ear. Their worry was about the likelihood of a police ‘collar’, not about any injury to their victim. Luckily, the bleed from Lim’s ear was caused by a squashed pimple, not a fractured skull. Chinese people are not much afflicted by pimples having wonderfully smooth skin with closed pores and the quality of ivory. However, late in life they ape a well desiccated prune when any wickedness has steeped into their brains. So said Lim’s father, whose desiccation had come early owing to the intense UV and cosmic radiation he had experienced as an RAF test pilot. He was a lovable old prune without a stone in his soft heart.
Lim’s practiced stolidity became second nature and lead inexorably into a second bout of ‘bursting-out’ things. Lim had practiced sitting in the Buddhist lotus position as an aid to meditation and his newly adopted fatalistic acceptance. He had watched Youtube yogi bouncing up and down on very soft mattresses in pathetic attempts to levitate. And quite by accident, while flexing cramped muscles, he lifted gently off the floor and hovered for a full ten seconds about four feet off the ground. Calmness and stolidity fled as he recognised what was happening and he fell back in a disorganised heap, bashing his undercarriage quite hard on an unwinding heel. But this new bursting-out activity could not at first be reproduced on demand. He wondered what on earth was happening to him, mere muggle that he was. Was it real or was it all imagining? Luckily, or unluckily, Jim, his red-haired buddy, had observed both varieties of ‘bursting-out’ and was quietly confident in Lim’s ability. He was also very supportive of the secrecy of their Brotherhood.
“Lim, old bean, I saw what you did to that grass and I saw you doin’ that levitatin’ thing. It’s awesome! Can you teach me to do it?”
Lim grinned at someone called Jim Bean calling him “old bean” as if in an act of adoption.
“Sorry, Jim, I can’t even make it happen when I want to, much less explain it or teach it. And it worries me. Apart from anything else it breaks all Isaac Newton’s putative laws of motion.”
“He’s coming to the school next week for the Hooke memorial lecture! We can tell him all about it.” enthused Jim.
“I doubt anyone will be talking to Newton after he has said his piece about Hooke. They hated each other’s guts and Hooke was furious when he realised that Newton would outlive him. Do you think the Headmaster will let us get within ten yards of Sir Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor and Hawking scholar? No chance. Besides, what do we say, ‘Hey, Isaac, your new First Law of Motion is wrong and so are the second two! And why are those laws so late on the scene given that space flight is happening right now?’ That seems a non starter. He would look at us like Richard the Third eyeing the two little Princes. And Newton would need and welcome new targets after the death of Hooke.”
“Well, write to him. He has a column in “Established Scientist” magazine. And he publishes the “Alchemical Arts” himself.”
But enthusiastic though Jim was, he was not about to gainsay the school’s number one academic, Lim, the one he Jim, had hilariously mis-named the Victor Laudanum. And Jim knew little enough about the current Lucasian professor, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was in the news for several reasons, both for a new framework of logic extending his calculus and for his practice of certain dark arts which he favoured in his post-alchemy phase. He was using the co
llider at CERN to validate his theory about dark forces binding the constituents of the constituents of quarks. Heresy indeed. Newton wasn’t satisfied with the Higgs Boson or any of the ‘fundamental particles’ and he was onto a method of tying gravity into field theory in a way that required the existence of a God and the ability to cast spells. In short, Newton had lost his marbles, or his fundamental particles at the very least. But, in his current frame of mind, he might welcome a letter from the school’s ‘Victor Laudanum’, Lim. Lim had the final word in his conversation with Jim;
“News of my supposed abilities would get me labelled as insane or sensation seeking. And the bullies would latch onto it like Alien face-huggers. It would scare friends away and it might attract the attention of The Men in Black.”
Everyone knew or thought they knew about The Men in Black. Some kind of government agency favouring black as befitting their clandestine activities. It also offset their tendency to have little paunches as black is very slimming. In Finland it was The Men in White who only operated in the snow and in Papua New Guinea it was simply the Mudfolk. The Shah of Gondwanaland had the improbably named “Shah-dows” in his entourage. All of these agents wore dark sunglasses and so the actual ‘Men in Black’ could boast that they were the only totally co-ordinated spooks on the planet. It pissed off the Mudfolk and the Finns no end.