Muggles Bereaved Read online

  The Men in Black who accompanied the US President’s bullet-proof and over heavy limousine were actors in sunglasses called ‘distr-actors’. They were only employed to give any assailant a mistaken focus when mounting an assault. The real defenders of the “Leader of the Free World, First Flip-Flack” were disabling sensors mounted on the car and in drones the size of a bee and just as noisy. But don’t give the CIA’s game away. A bumble-bee will come and get you.

  “Jeez, Lim, it wouldn’t worry me. I am sure you could manifest your levitation thing if you could keep calm enough. And think of your potential as a weapon! You nearly took Adebayo’s head off and he didn’t even notice the smell of burning hair! You could defend yourself against any bully with that invisible death ray! You could even hire yourself out as a hitman to the Mafia!”

  “Be serious, Jim. I’d have to kill a bully or quite literally disarm him just to prove a point to the Men in Black! And a Mafia hitman wouldn’t care who he killed whether the victim was innocent or a baddie. How would someone like me judge between the two.” The issue of morality was not figuring large in Jim’s fantasies.

  “It is still awesome, what you can do.”

  “But it isn’t right. Levitation requires energy and I do not know where the input energy is coming from. It is kind of scary. Suppose I have discovered a leak from a gravity volcano and suppose the volcano blows up. I could be projected into space!”

  “Awesome!” breathed Jim, half hoping that he would be around to see it. But did gravity volcanoes exist? He doubted that.

  They sat together on a bench at the far end of the South field, swinging legs marked by thistle scratches and nettle stings. Their brains ached with the effort of contemplation. Time to change the subject when your brain aches.

  “We should’ve worn long trousers,” said Jim sorrowfully, “those nettles sting like heck. Now the trousers will just irritate and make us scratch. Not what you want at the Prom tonight. The girls will think we have an infestation.”

  “That is a good word, that, infestation. Where’d that come from?”

  “We have animals, Lim, and my dad says that a plague of fleas is best called an infestation for the sake of the neighbours who keep coming round to borrow things like sugar and flour and stuff. It scares them off a treat. If they want flour we have an infestation of weevils and if they want sugar, it’s ants.”

  “I’ll remember that. Our dog Patch is always scratching and dragging his bottom across the carpet. And he could fart for Angle-land! I’ll tell the neighbours he has an infestation.”

  They giggled.

  “Didn’t know Angle-land had a farting team,” said Jim.

  “Well it does, and old Pongo, the Chemistry teacher is a founder member. I think he became a chemist so he could mask his bad habit.”

  “In a way, he’s a freak like us then,” offered Jim.

  “I guess so, but you and me are going to be super heroes and no-one needs a Fart-man!” Lim said this in all innocence of what was to come.

  “But I can’t be a superhero, I don’t have any Superpower,” said Jim, “You have all the Superpowers. Well, both of them as yet discovered.”

  “Well, Jim, think about it. You are the only person who is actually aware of my bursting-out stuff. There must be a reason.”

  “hmmm.” Jim was not convinced.

  “I think you are something to do with dragons, Jim. Flame red hair has got to be a clue.” Lim’s attempt to soothe Jim was, he admitted to himself, patronising.

  “Have you ever seen a dragon, Lim?” Jim was openly scornful.

  “Well no, but I haven’t travelled to China yet. And if dragons are to be found anywhere, that must be the place. I think they are Cantonese. I’ve learned a few words just in case.”

  “Words?”

  “Yes, words that you might speak to a Chinese dragon. They are actually Modern Standard Chinese, but I expect a dragon would understand them.”

  “Give me an example ,” said Jim

  “Hello, Mr dragon is... Nín hào lóng xiānshēng.”

  Lim said it in a voice that would not have disgraced the Chinese State Opera. But too high pitched and scratchy. Tones all over the place. If you want to hear it copy the words into Oogle Tranxlate and hit the sound button.

  “What else?” asked Jim

  “Wǒ wèi hépíng ér lái, which means I come in peace.”

  “Shouldn’t you begin with, please don’t incinerate me?” giggled Jim.

  Lim studied Oogle Tranxlate on his phone.

  “That would be- Qǐng bùyào fénshāo wǒ”

  Jim grabbed Lim’s phone and looked at the app.

  “But you said dragons were probably Cantonese and this says it is Chinese.”

  “Yes, and I said I had learned Modern Standard Chinese words and I know it is really Mandarin Chinese. But I expect dragons speak every dialect. Changing the subject, I am skipping the Prom tonight, we have a special feast at home. You can come along if you fancy some Zhàcài hé huǒtuǐ tāng.”

  “Wow, thanks Lim, but what is Jartsy Her Watery Tang?”

  “Not a bad try, Jim, it means pickled mustard and ham soup. It is one of my favourite soups. The Cantonese would call it, “Gāi Cōi Fó Touí Tōng”.”

  The boys sat in a dreamy, food-bedecked heaven while behind them, unnoticed, a steady and silent phantom scythe, driven by Lim’s wishful thinking, levelled all the scrub. Jim, who did not relish being the ‘Ginger’ at the Prom, grasped the opportunity to escape from the role of wallflower. And, in truth, he thoroughly enjoyed the soup and the other seven dishes on the Lim dinner table. Eight dishes was an auspicious number. It was also a meal designed to save Lim’s mother from cooking for the next two days. Jim’s healthy appetite somewhat dented her plan, but she was delighted at his evident joy.

  Chapter Two – Tracy Makes Her Mark

  Tracy stared at the treacle tart Mum had placed before her. It glistened glutinously and the pastry flaked like the softest imaginable shortbread. The hummocky pillows of treacle lay under a snow-white coating of double cream. She thought of engulfing that whole slice in a single gulp, wrestled with that thought, then pushed the plate abruptly away from her. Something had awakened in her, something important and urgent. It said, you must lose weight if you are to be my champion. It wasn’t credible or logical that ‘something’ had voiced such a demand. Was this Voldemort addressing an acolyte or Harry reaching out to her from, well from wherever J.K.Rowling had vouchsafed to keep him, somewhere in her mind. Maybe it was just that slim girl trapped within screaming for help.

  Tracy knew that this was just the idling of a mind bereft and bereaved of Harry Potter. She also knew that the allure of comfort food was just another substitute for affection. And she also knew that an overeaction to her weight gain might be just be the call of another inner demon, one of those twin sirens, anorexia or bulimia. She knew because she was constantly being warned of all these things by media, schools and parents. She had to reduce weight to avoid the Gorgon called Obesity and to satisfy that foul monster sexiness. She had to eat well and not pander to the demands of the Sorcerers of dieting. She had to avoid idle Potter fantasies and put all her energy into her exams. Not much to ask a teenager to sift through in pursuit of her own self. And this teenager knew that such a battle was hopeless and was destined to whip the cycle of comfort eating through guilt and into overdrive. Just what you need when facing A Level exams.

  Yes, Tracy also knew that her companionship with the people of Hogwartz was a fantasy born of her love for the wonderful stories of togetherness in the cause of truth. It was reinforced by a sense of bereavement because the Hogwartz saga had ended with “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”. She knew that Harry and Ron and Hermione had become a surrogate family and being parted from them was real pain. A fictitious family who were a substitute for friends who might love her for the self that dwelt within all this treacle-tart induced bulk. It was the fantasy of this valorous friendship that ha
d saved her from those ever threatening Death Eaters called Loneliness and Depression. And she knew that she needed to use this safe platform as a springboard into the reality of a muggle’s muggle world. Like Lim and Jim, she had yet to ponder the significance of an acceptance of Muggledom as a reality openly spoken of by adults and children alike. She knew only that J.K.Rowling’s concept of the muggle had steeped itself into the consciousness of old and young. It was now axiomatic that all humans were Muggles and this transcended race and religion and culture and language in a wonderfully unifying way. Being a muggle brought entire nations together leaving only the nationalistic dictators and High Priests wandering angrily in a wilderness; a wilderness of dwindling mass support from people now unwilling to accept a life of sycophancy. What a pity that the 97 year old Rowling could not be persuaded to write a few more Potter books. After all, how strenuous could writing be compared to her summertime surfing and winter snowboarding?

  Out in the wide world, you might be an Ayatollah to your sycophants, but you were just another muggle to most of the people who were forced to endure your ministry. You might command politburos and legions of soldiers, but you would be disappointed if you thought the marching soldiers could not be closet Muggles themselves. They were all Muggles first and your cadres second. Their aching feet pointed high and stamped out the requisite goose steps in perfect synchrony, but their minds had them running towards a certain brick wall at platform 9¾ at King’s Cross railway station in London. There were no disciples of Mao’s Little Red Book any more, but there were billions of followers of the ethos of Harry Potter and Dumbledore. J.K.Rowling was the real Man, well, the real Woman actually. Oh yes, Tracy knew all this, teenager or not.

  That Tracy did know all these things was because she was an avid reader with an eidetic memory. She also devoured everything she could find about the China which had provided friendship in the person of Lim Gee Song. It did not matter that she probably knew more about China than Lim himself. It did not matter that Lim had never set foot in that great country or that he did not speak Mandarin like the Han Chinese. It was good enough that he spoke some Cantonese, the language of the high born southerners, though overlaid with the inflections of his Penang born parents. He also had that gene which afforded the black hair and the brown almond shaped eyes and, modestly concealed from her, spiky straight pubes. It did not even matter that she, Tracy, had the benefit of her eidetic memory and could write enough Chinese characters and speak enough Modern Standard Chinese to gain an A grade at GCE. She could only be a China groupie. Lim was the real thing, albeit with a disproportionately wide nose.

  When Lim shyly confided that he saw Jim and Tracy as worthy members of the Companionship of the Spectacles, his own fantastic escapist world, it had set a glow in Tracy’s heart. Lim had explained this in a blushing, half-apologetic way, as if the Companionship, though his creature, was but a poor thing. Perhaps he felt it was indeed a poor thing, because it was his own creation. Even after he adopted contact lenses, it was still the Companionship of the Spectacles. Tracy learned of his mysterious powers and though never having seen them in action, she trusted implicitly in their existence. A part of her acknowledged that they were unlikely to be that real, but she would soon experience gratitude for their saving grace. It would come with the day of the Crouching Tiger, the day when a truly Hidden Dragon also helped save her from harm.

  But first she had to deal with the treacle tart. She could take a stand against a mother whose auto-pilot made her say, “Waste not, want, not dear,” and “there are people in Africa who would be glad of that tart.” An unlikely comment for African people who yearned for food items like millet, not for the highly processed food of the West. But Tracy did not want to wind up her mother’s very evident Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and send her into a paroxysm of counting the pins in her sewing basket or recycling her brassware cleaning routines. Young as she was, Tracy was in many ways a carer to her parents and family. Low key and subversive, but a carer nonetheless. She managed to distract her dad from that extra can of lager by being plaintiff about needing to visit the library. She got her brother to bath more regularly by pushing a friend to flirt with him for the knowing purpose of increasing his hygiene and resistance to infections. Of course, she realised that there would be a downside when the ‘crush’ that he developed fizzled out, but she was wily enough to deal with that too.

  Her own ‘crush’ wandered from Lim to Jim and she happily made it into a fantasy syndrome, the Lim-Jim syndrome. She giggled as she thought how an addiction to dieting could flip=flack it into a Slim-Lim-Jim syndrome. In time, she would copy her imaginary friend Hermione and settle on the No 2 in the Companionship, Jim. Jim was so cuddly and helpless and truly pathetic in his lack of any Superpower. Him. she could help and mould and, yes, manipulate. MAN-ipulate, she stressed. Appropriate that there was no such thing as WOMAN-ipulate, but that was presumably God’s plan. Give men the dominion over the world and make women the real power in the background. Stuff and nonsense. Idle spectacle-ulation. She had a meeting of the Companionship of the Spectacles to attend in the park known as The Walks. So away with day-dreaming.

  It was Saturday, and Bertram Mills great circus had come to town. The last of the circuses to have lions, tigers, a black panther and a fearless trainer armed only with a long stick and a chair. The big tent sat in the recreation ground unimaginatively known as ‘The Walks’. The process of delivering the circus had turned the grass into a slurry pit under the churning wheels of the circus trailers and caravans. Oogling “the Walks, King’s Lynn” would have given Tracy more insight. The recreation ground was a historically important manifestation of concern for people’s welfare and recreation. A description of 1773 tells us that much, and oddly enough repeats the story in both flip-flack worlds and every universe;

  “‘The new walk or mall, from the bars of the workhouse to Gannock-gates, is about 340 yards long and 11 yards wide between quick hedges; at convenient distances on each side of the walk a recess is left in the hedge in a semicircular form, where benches are fixed, on which twenty people may fit together.”

  The appearance of this story in every universe was not demonstrably true, for no-one could ever visit every one of the infinite number of universes to check. But when the existence of Space-Time welds was revealed by Isaac Newton, it was discovered that such a weld pinched together the fabric of Space-Time in a way which created a warp singularity that was in the same location wherever you were. Don’t ask anything more about it or Newton will bore you witless with explanations which are beyond everyone else’s understanding. Except Hawking, who was never inclined to tell tales about Newton, Hooke or anyone not concerned with accessibility failures in public buildings.

  ‘The Walks’, which was not itself a warp singularity and was even at the bottom of the sea in some universes contiguous to Tracy’s, was later expanded into that huge playing field on which the Big Top of Bertram Mills and all the trailers and caravans now sat. Tracy, Jim and Lim ‘fit together’ on one of the 5 person park benches on the side of the long walk and quietly debated the business of the Companionship of the Spectacles. The 20 person benches had long since rotted away and had been succeeded by supposedly vandal-proof cast iron and wrought iron 5 seat replacements. In the days of the Companions of the Spectacles, quiet conversation became a substitute for thumbing away at a screen on a mobile phone. Thumb surfing had become passé thanks to hackers and advertising hawkers. These people, together with spammers, phishers and pharmas were ruining social media. TV had killed itself with repeats, sycophancy, clubby-ness and lobbyists and social media were now close behind in the self-destruction stakes.

  The written mission statement of the Companionship was still evolving. To date, Jim had pencilled in his notebook the following;

  1) To keep alive the memory of Harry Potter and his works (easy bit)

  2) To fully evaluate the powers of one Lim Gee Song

  3) To reveal the said powers of other Comp
anions of the Order

  4) To decide on the beneficial use of said powers.

  Jim was proud of the wording, especially of item 4. His father was a former and was always rabbiting on about ‘beneficial ownership’ and described everything as ‘said’. It was ‘said’ person, ‘aforesaid’ clause, ‘said’ emolument and Jim supposed he was ‘said’ son and mum was ‘said’ mother. Jim’s income was certainly his aforesaid and aforespent pocket money. Whatever the provenance, which was another of dad’s words, item 4 was, Jim decided, a masterpiece of drafting.

  “What does it mean?” asked Lim, bursting Jim’s balloon.

  He knew perfectly well what it meant but had detected a certain chest-swelling pride in one of the Companions.

  ‘’Obvious innit,” said Jim