13 The Fly is Assailed with Self Doubt

PART THIRTEEN: The Fly is Assailed with Self Doubt. Jiggery-pokery and Self-examination.

(With a shriek more like that of a stuck pig than that of the noble and articulate scion of an aristocratic clan of escutcheoned tormentors, the Gadfly fled.

It is said that he was last seen unbuckling his armour behind the modestly concealing trunk of a bulrush and flinging his medals into the pool.

But there may be more to come on that story.)

Half way up a bulrush stem, covered from head to foot in cream cake and with a dead toad’s head rising from where her eyebrows began, the Fly was in no mood to indulge tom-foolery.

–What, she thought, -is this silly boy playing at? After all his blathering jiggery-pokery he absents himself from the action at the crucial moment and now returns to give me the cold shoulder. One moment he is down on his bended knees and the next he is showing me his heels. I have had enough of irrelevant body-parts. I deserve substance.

It must be admitted that she had no idea of her present appearance. She would have been mortified had this been brought to her attention, but at the moment nobody was pointing fingers. The Gadfly was pointing his toes, certainly, but they were pointed in quite the opposite direction, as he scrambled to leave the here and now and find a safer hiding place somewhere in an imagined and distant future. He was looking for a time and a place where there were no Toad-Things, Spiders or Blitzkrieg Dragonflies.

As for the Fly, she was unaware of the imminent confluence of all three of these in the space which for the present was occupied by one of them alone, that is to say, herself.

-Hey, she called in a gravely and comehitherish tone of voice, spraying mouthfuls of cake in all directions. –hey, you, the Honourable Gadfly! Come back!

In spite of the nonchalance she strove to project the Fly was actually beginning to feel rather alarmed, not to say confused, sad, lost and abandoned. Perhaps jilted and left waiting at the altar would be to put words into her mouth prematurely, but it seemed to her that things were moving in that sort of generally depressing direction. Worse was to come.

She tried to form a picture in her mind of her present situation, thinking in logical steps, as if working on one of those numbered puzzles where dots are joined up to produce an image; but no picture emerged. Many of the dots were missing. Somewhere along the line she had lost the plot. She came to the conclusion that she had no idea at all what was happening to her. She wondered if her fall into the Spider’s banquet had caused a slight concussion or perhaps even a violent case of indigestion with some hallucinogenic side-effects.

Rather like a person who has been involved in a catastrophe and is reading about it in the newspaper, she was beginning to wonder if she had really been present at all.

In her case though, the catastrophe was not in the past, it was ongoing. Was she dreaming? Was it herself she inhabited just now or had her mind had been placed by sorcery in someone else’s body? Or was she dead? She recalled her answer to the Spider: -I came from Death. The spirit of the dead rat on whom she had lived when only a little maggot seemed to whisper to her: -We all go home in the end you know. She wondered if this was the end.

-Stop it! She said, steadying herself. This won’t do at all! She paused, clinging hard to the reed stem, and looked about her, gathering her thoughts.

Everything seemed normal. The scene around her was as she remembered it: the yellow rushes to the left and to the right; the pool shimmering in the dusk below; the sticky strands of the Spider’s web, perfect in their silver geometry apart from a bulls-eye of tumbled cream in the centre. Even the Gadfly’s retreating legs were recognisably ordinary. And yet something was out of whack. There was a displacement somehow in the order of things. Nothing was quite right.

-Dreams have the same effect, she thought. Perhaps this was a dream. But the environs were too real, too well-remembered, too solid for that. She could feel the rough bark of the reed under her hands and feet, and the time of day was as it had been and should be, with the evening light shining on the stems of the reeds and the shadows lengthening and turning slowly to a deeper chocolate colour It was all as she would have expected for that hour.

A slight breeze, announcing the approaching evening, swayed the reed. The leaves began to rustle. And then there was another sound, half heard, but still far away in the distance, faint, and coming closer.

Preoccupied with her own thoughts she paid it no attention.