Georgian portico. Some clutched booklets labelled ‘Climate Conference’.
Though I tried desperately to suppress it, the sudden fever of my perception flared.
On many of the conference attendees, a ghostly extra arm was revealed. Some held their third hand over their mouth; for others it was over the eyes instead. Ribbons streamed into the sky from each of these limbs, holding them in place. Blue for a boy and pink for a girl; mint for money and blush for peers, silver for a spouse and salmon for fat-cats; gold for grants and green for the cause; blood for bureaucracy and fawny for the high moral ground. No doubt above obscuring clouds to end tangled in the claws of the big social beasts. A small minority were without an anomalous limb; light streamed from these individuals, though personal columns of grey spirit-rain falling from on high made them appear soggy and unkempt.
To try to shake this weird image I turned my gaze onto the building. Its roof was straddled by the huge figure of Punch, who was threatening all and sundry with an outsized hockey-stick and yelling that’s the way to do it! Tangled around his boot was a dirty banner, on which I could just about discern some words, perhaps: take no-one’s word for it. Rather than the traditional hat, Punch wore an American baseball cap upon which different acronyms appeared in turn: AMS, APS, GSA, AGU…
“Our guest speaker is from the conference. Proper scientist.”
“Oh, right. Which kind? Blind or mute or bright but dank?”
“Are you feeling okay? Please, please… pull yourself together.”
I tried hard. Very hard. In fact during the main talk I screwed my eyes tight shut and tried to recall the name and details of every man I’d commanded, by which means I hoped to block the merciless imagery of raw truth. I wasn’t disinterested in the subject, quite the opposite in fact; I was just afraid my perceptions would push me where I didn’t want to go, tempt me into challenges. Causing a fuss and upsetting Joanna would be disaster; this event had to be smooth and successful!
Uncomfortable with my closed eyes, Joanna prodded me, but I persevered. Those guys I’d lost were easy, still stinging, as always. After that the list soon became more difficult. Eventually I stumbled; the plan didn’t entirely work.
The speaker’s voice degenerated, becoming a lop-sided rhythm like the teletype chatter from those mainframe computers in old movies, repeating only: mod-el run mod-el run mod-el ruin mod-el run mod-el run mod-el ruin mod-el run…
I switched tactics and concentrated on a favourite song to blank out the litany, an atmospheric rock classic, but still my phenomenal perception leaked through, mutating the lyrics: They try to trumpet, theories they cannot defend, just what the world will be, we will see in the end.
I gave up blocking and opened my eyes. Fortunately the scientist had just finished his spiel. I spotted three parrot-headed people in the front row. These visions were still a shock sometimes.
“Who are those par… persons?”
Joanna glanced over. “Mainstream media, environment journalists.”
A woman at the rear asked a couple of mildly challenging questions. As one, the parrots turned their heads and eyed her beadily. The feathers of the nearest creature swiftly darkened and its beak morphed: long and curved. ‘My dear’, he crowed, ‘let me be your guide.’
“Shouldn’t the journos be asking questions like hers?” I whispered.
Joanna shrugged.
The last slide of the talk, titled ‘climate model projections’, was still displayed on the large screen before us. Prompted by the woman’s curiosity, I glared at the slide until it yielded detail: tiny coloured cars lined up on rails, like the fairground ride that had so gripped me. But cars were missing and others seemed very poorly tracked, especially those representing cloud effects. Many elastic-band connections were missing too. In fact the whole thing was a Noddy toy, cute but highly questionable. On such unreal playthings hung sums that could cripple the budgets of nations. Then, apparently from behind the slide’s content, a huge eye appeared, baleful and yellow, the pupil scanning this way and that, its owner trapped unacknowledged within the text and figures, for now. I knew this to be the uncertainty monster, the beast of which so few would speak.
On that extraordinary sky-ride I remembered glimpsing some civilisations suffering from nature’s catastrophes. Poor climate models had previous, supplied my rampant perception. For failing to anticipate El Nino, the Lambeyeque lords on their man-made mountains were burned. Modern societies are thankfully far less brutal, though otherwise surprisingly little had changed. We still worship. Pyramids would still crack once the intellectual fires of realisation raged; official cults will still crumble in the heat.
I was so tired. Each lurid metaphor lashed, another ravage of my notions. A victim of truth, I was masquerading, just going through the motions. My head ached; only sleep granted remission.
The main lights were switched off for the meet-and-greet, emphasising rows of candles on a shelf that ran around the walls. A teenager in hippy gear was still lighting the last few. The atmosphere veered to religious. I bumped into the woman who’d asked the questions. As soon as the thought formed in my mind that she’d been brave to speak up, my powerful curse of a gift delivered a curious means to help her.
“Avoid black,” I whispered. “Go see the bishop and then St. Mac. To glimpse the monster, consume curry. For the children, read important or impotent. Ask what’s up.” She nodded, and left. I felt like a spy in a movie; I wondered what on Earth this all meant.
A large glass of wine later, I was feeling a little more relaxed and my pitiless apparitions had almost faded away. The first two or three leavers were drifting to the door. I’d survived the event without upsetting anyone.
I fetched up by a table where Joanna was rattling on non-stop to the scientist speaker. I noticed the temperature chart on one of the hand-outs was rather out of date; stopped about five years back. Joanna paused to top up her Pino Grigio from a strategically placed bottle.
“What’s your view on the hiatus?” I asked airily, trying to appear cool by displaying my awareness of a leading-edge topic.
The scientist simultaneously smiled and frowned and drew a deep breath, but between these conflicting signals seemed temporarily unable to gather his words.
Oh damn. Even as Evelyn turned back to face us, I saw the eruption coming.
“Denier!” she shrieked. Her blaze of red hair and shining hazel eyes suddenly held power, something far beyond her own strength and wit, something she had long ago submitted to. Pale circles of faces aligned against me, alerted by the code-word, their defensive expressions deeply etched by candlelight. The shadowy source of Evelyn’s power bulked up behind her, feeding on the eager ire of the crowd, flickering tongue measuring threat. I’d seen this unholy, treacherous beast before, glittering orbs from its mother, inspiration, dark heart from its father, fear. But now it saw me. In the outraged whispers of the faithful I heard its hiss of interdiction and knew I was marked out. Via the running flame of unfounded rumour it would know me elsewhere now, would exclude me, malign me, taint all words from my tongue so that the tongues of others would taste only bile and ashes whether I spoke truth or logic or just mere opinion.
I was strangely unmoved; their angry fire didn’t heat me. The sheeple followed the pied viper’s tune, I countered calmly with dilemma.
“So, stabbing with a dagger you purchased by stealing the currency of six million brutal deaths vitally enshrined, somehow enhances your moral position?” One very expensive dagger.
Evelyn and the worm flinched. Unexpected response. Recovering swiftly, they spat back. “Garbage!”
My beautiful wife stared at me as though I’d gone mad. I’d let her down after all.
I sighed. “Bile and ashes,” quietly. “Bile and ashes,” louder.
Recall: home.
Later, on the Tube, Joanna asked if I was still drinking; secretly, she meant.
“I gave that up, it only works for a few hours.” After that the merciless truths ma
rched back, and I was in a much worse state for meeting the assault.
“I realise that last tour was hard on you, losing Boddy.” Sergeant Alan Boden. Truth was damning me, but I could have saved him.
I brushed my hand across the folder she’d brought from the talk. Out from good science oozed slick confirmation bias and the sting of noble cause corruption; one corner was sticky with something still more ignoble. Leaving my hand in place, I wondered, chicken or egg? A delivery came back to my mind akin to that from a stand-up comedian, minus any actual jokes.
You see attacks require noble defence, questions only commonplace answers. So the worm grabs himself a can of devil sauce and the smiling assistant, well, she labels it dirty, then the dons dish it out in the broth. Now most of the faithful see demons! Daily there’s a dance to deride them and deal them a fatal blow, yet one can’t fell a foe that is fable. Result: many decorations for trying.
A deluge of detail followed, but I snatched my hand away, feeling sullied. Maybe it was a joke, after all. My fingers smelled of climate-gate, like schoolchildren and ammonia.
“It isn’t all a conspiracy, you know. The global warming thing.”
My vision revealed the squirming intrigues of corrupt interest groups as merely maggoty infestations; sometimes handy feed for the great worms, sometimes squashed by their passage, never aspiring to such