The Angel of the Stories by John…

The Angel of the Stories by John Simmons: Episode 19

1 year ago

The band was ready but the weather turned against them. They had wanted to play, with the choir singing, in the town square. The whole town would be invited, there would be no tickets but it would be a public performance. Members of the band were nervous, so was the choir, and nervousness spread like a puddle as the bad weather delayed the performance from day to day. Perhaps Julia was the most nervous of them all. She still blushed when people looked at her.

It rained. It rained continuously and heavily and monotonously, raindrops falling from dense black clouds that filled the sky. The townspeople looked through the windows of their houses, or from beneath umbrellas as they walked or shop canopies as they sheltered. They noticed steam rising here and there because it was summer and the air was hot despite the rain. After the first day they sighed, after the second day they muttered, after the third day they cursed the black sky. No one could remember a year of worse weather, and they asked each other why they were being punished in this way? But they developed that resignation of people realising they are up against a natural force greater than their understanding.

The Mayor wandered the town in a plastic rain cape. He felt it was important to be seen.

On the evening of the fourth day of rain, many people strolled the streets of the town. Getting wet no longer seemed to matter since dampness had entered their bones. They simply wanted to get out. Inside their houses it was clammy and sultry; outside it felt fresher in the drizzle. The bars and restaurants set out tables and chairs on the pavements, and sun shades acted as umbrellas.

It was a brave attempt to carry on as usual. But well before midnight the streets were empty again, the lights turned off in the bars and in the houses too. There was nothing for it but to sleep.

Julia could not sleep. Like everyone she had grown accustomed to being wet, so she stood leaning on the railings that ran along the front of her rooftop. She looked over the rooftops of the town and along the jagged black horizon of mountains all around, realising that she could see the line only because the sky behind was illuminated with flashes of silver light. Then the first crack of thunder smacked the slopes of the valley and the echo bounced from side to side. It hadn’t stopped rumbling before another streak of lightning plunged like a knife into the middle of the town. Another roll of deep thunder followed, then more lightning, and now the rain drops were falling in stinging needles that splintered and splashed upwards as they struck surfaces on the ground.

Julia was transfixed by the storm. She had never seen anything quite like this, not even when she had flown in the storm some months before. Lightning flashes followed each other so fast that the town seemed lit by pulsating artificial lamps. Thunder threatened to burst her eardrums but she felt calm, expectant, wondering how it would end, already anticipating the pleasure of quiet after the storm.

But there was no quiet. Instead a mightier rumble than ever shook the town, made the surface on which she was standing tremble, rising up from beneath her feet rather than falling down from above. The tremor ran through the streets, the bricks and her body, making everything shudder. Looking over the town she saw houses wobbling like jelly, the ground beneath turning liquid, rolling like waves.

The houses wobbled but they did not fall. Julia, though, had been thrown from one side of the roof to the other, losing her footing and sliding down a once flat roof that now tipped at an angle. She plunged off the roof, out into the emptiness above the streets, without realising it opening and flapping her wings until she rose into the air above the town.

The tremor of the earthquake had been short-lived but it seemed to have halted the storm. The thunder and lightning ceased, rain no longer fell, but the town was left quivering with shock. Looking down, Julia could see the buildings shimmering but mostly intact. There were chimney pots missing, solar panels smashed, tiles shattered but the houses stood squat and proud. The greatest change was that the streets of the town had been transformed. Where once there had been hard tarmac surfaces of roads and stone slabs of pavements, now there were long watery mirrors as rivers flowed down from the hills through the town’s streets, gleaming in the sudden moonlight. The water surged and tossed objects around that it had ripped from the hills and houses above.

Julia followed the course of one of these rivers, flying above it uphill against the direction of the current. As she glided closer to the water she could see that it was thick with mud moving at the pace of a torrent. Mixed in the mud there were chairs, tables and household objects of every kind. They were all being swept down the flooded street towards the town square.

She reached a part of the town that looked completely unfamiliar. Water had transformed the appearance of every street but here was a sight that she could not place in her memory. She had been following the steep street that led up through the high town to the very outskirts. Here the poet’s house had been buried for decades under a mound of rubbish, but now she stared and could see no mound. Instead there were four walls, an open roof, a yard. The yard was empty and already drying, only minutes after the rain had stopped.

Julia slowly came to rest on the ground in the courtyard. At this high point above the town the water had already retreated; she could see it flowing muddily downhill, with pots and pans and furniture bumping along in its ooze. Behind her was the house, a small house that glistened with a film of water over its surface of stones and tiles.

Minute by minute it became easier to see. Daylight spread across the sky and the town showed its shapes in more and more detail. Timidly a man emerged from a house a little way along the street, testing the situation as if uncertain of its reality. Then his neighbour came out from the next door and they talked with increasing animation. They had survived. So had the town. Soon they would have to count the cost but for now survival was enough.

*   *   *

In the middle of the town square was a tall stone cross erected centuries earlier to honour inhabitants of the region who had left to explore the New World. They had sailed the expanse of ocean in the hope but not certainty that they would strike land.

The Mayor looked every inch the explorers’ descendant as he stood on the plinth of the memorial, with the cross at his back. Water lapped around his feet. The town square was deep under water for it was a natural bowl into which the street-rivers had poured. But the Mayor stood erect, as if about to address the invisible crowd. He would stand there for a couple of hours, a picture of defiance, until the flood waters receded, while the Norwegian painted the scene from the balcony of a house that overlooked the square.

When the water disappeared, it left behind a thick layer of mud. Planted in the mud were different items of furniture: chairs, tables, cabinets, benches. Mixed with them were pots and pans and cups and plates, household basics of every kind. People had dumped these objects over many years, covering them with earth and bricks and sand, forming the mound that had covered the poet’s house. Now the objects had been washed into the centre of the town, and that washing had restored them to a serviceable condition.

So the Mayor thought. 

He descended from his viewpoint on the memorial. His boots squelched in the thick mud, sometimes he sank in up to his knees but he pressed on. Earlier in his career he had been a furniture dealer and now he went around the square, inspecting the items in what seemed like a muddy auction. He tapped the surfaces and ran his hands over them; he rocked each piece and found they were all surprisingly sturdy. Like driftwood on the sea shore, the jetsam furniture peeked out from the mud that lay thick over the town square.

As the Mayor moved from table to chair to chair to table, other people started joining him. Soon they began talking, commenting on the furniture and the flood; talking about everything that had happened, not knowing if they believed it or not. The noise level rose and as it rose it became more and more optimistic. They had avoided disaster. They were unharmed. They were relieved at their survival. They could make something better out of all this.

The Mayor caught the mood and he began to make suggestions. That table’s really not bad – it will scrub up, you know, will look fine. Why not take this one? It’s a good chair, just needs a clean. In no time at all the idea took hold that a clean-up would be a quick way to recover from the trauma of the earthquake and the flood. Everyone was seized with the rightness of that thought. They rolled up sleeves and trousers, they brought cleaning tools, shovelled mud and scrubbed with brushes, the men and women side by side. There was a frenzy of activity but they were all working towards the same purpose.

The Mayor made a speech. It came out quite naturally, it was unlike his usual speeches, without a trace of political cunning.

“My friends, we’ve been blessed and I don’t know why. But we should be thankful anyway and we should celebrate. If we work together we can make our square as good as new. We’ll make our town as good as new. And we have all this furniture that we can use to come together. These pots and pans seem to be telling us something, these cups and glasses and plates, these knives and forks. If we work through the day we can gather here later and we can eat and drink whatever we all bring for sharing. We’ll ask our band to play for us, we’ll hear that new song. And our life will go on all the better for what has happened.”

People approved his words. They clapped and laughed and chattered. Now there was no stopping them. The Mayor had never felt more popular and he enjoyed walking through the crowds as they went about their cleaning. The news of the evening party spread from mouth to mouth and no one raised a word of dissent.

It was a day of activity. There was no shirking, everyone played a part, working towards the restoration of the town by the end of the day. In mid-afternoon, at the top of the town, the Mayor stood with the lawyer, the librarian and the Norwegian. They walked together into the yard of the poet’s house, the Mayor wiping away a tear that ran down his cheek. They hardly noticed the aftershock of the earthquake as they slipped into the house itself. It passed, as if the house had now stretched itself awake. By the time they re-emerged, half an hour and a meeting later, they had decided to co-opt the architect onto their committee, stipulating that the essential reconstruction and restoration needed to have the roof left at least partially open.