‌The Proofreader’s Derby

(CORRECTED)

Part Two

For Merle Graaff

The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature.

– William Hazlitt

‌

Fluxman was lying awake in his bed, leafing through the coming day’s work in his mind, when water began to run beyond his window. It was not the patter of a garden sprinkler on a lawn or the spurt of a hose in a bucket, the usual suburban backdrop to his Saturday mornings. It was a river rushing in a gorge, breakers rolling against a shore. But it began as abruptly as if an enormous tap had been opened wide. He clenched his fists beneath the blankets and held his breath, listening, expecting the worst. He thought he heard people crying out, footsteps pounding on his stoep, the rasping of rushes against the hull of a wicker basket.

After a while, he stuck out his head and looked around. Everything in place. Slippers in alphabetical order on the carpet, papers drawn up in open file on the desk, curtains closed tight. Then his eyes widened to admit the watery play of light behind the brocade. He sat up in bed and tried to decipher this wash of colour and sound. Gingerly, he dipped a foot in the shallow pile of the carpet. Wall-to-wall had been known to hover, trembling over the abyss, long after the earth below had fallen away. Seemed solid enough. He stuffed his feet into the sheepskin slippers and went over to the window. He could sense the fluid pressure of water on the other side, and he paused, with his fingers brushing the edges of the two curtains where they met, afraid for the drowned world he might find beyond the glass. Then he took a deep breath and flung the curtains open.

My gardening days are over, he thought.

Where his front lawn had been – just last night, as he shut the window before bed, he’d reminded himself that it needed mowing – lay a vast reach of mud-brown water, fringed to the left by bulrushes and the right by palms, and dammed up in the distance ahead by a sheer cement quay topped by a metal railing. There were several small islands scattered around, mounds of foliage trimmed with beach sand. The scene was idyllic, if somewhat contrived, and oddly familiar. Fluxman was sure he had seen it before somewhere on his travels, but for the life of him, he could not say where. He scrutinized it carefully from front to back. The water was lapping at his house: beneath the window-sill, small waves spilled over onto the slasto paving of his stoep. In the shallows, his letter box stuck out above the surface, with the newspaper wedged in its throat; further out, the roof of the carport showed where his driveway had been. Beyond that, where the water deepened, the curved brackets of the street lights mimicked the necks of the wading birds he saw stilting among the rushes.

People appeared on the quay, rushing up and down, shouting noiselessly and pointing with agitated gestures into the water below. The object of their attention came into sight, floating out from behind an island: a young girl, bedraggled and half-drowned, clinging to a spar of wood and paddling weakly against the dirty current.

Fluxman had resolved long ago not to busy himself with the affairs of the world, especially not through sleight of hand – but this was an emergency, and he reached instinctively for his blue pencil.

Before he could wield it, however, there was a commotion in the rushes. A small head with a glazed eye peered over the horizon, as if an enormous seabird had poked its head out of its nest to look around, and floated closer, revealing the sleek curve of a neck, the ominous fork of a wishbone. Then the rushes yielded before the thrusting breast, and a duck-billed pedalboat came crashing through the greenery and surged into open water. Although it was shaped like a Muscovy, it reminded Fluxman of a letter from the Greek alphabet: a plump, inflatable delta.

There were two men in the boat, a middle-aged one in a straw hat and a younger one who might have been his son, both pedalling away furiously. Head held high, parting the waves with its fibreglass sternum, the duck made quickly for the girl. The watchers on the quay clustered at the railing, waving with their caps, urging the rescuers on. The waves in the wake unrolled like scrolls of beaten metal.

Now Fluxman remembered where he had seen all this before: it was the Wetland Ramble from the Zoological Gardens. He had wandered there once, with Ms Georgina Hole.

The duck bore down on the girl, then slewed to a halt and settled in the water. The younger man scrambled into the prow, where he might reach a helping hand down over an upswept wing. His companion, pedalling gently to hold the boat steady against the current, took up a canary-yellow camera and began to film the operation. A copybook rescue, Fluxman thought. He could imagine the gratitude in the girl’s eyes. Would she weep as her saviour hauled her aboard, streaming fresh water and wreathed with hyacinth? Would she cling to him as if she would never let him go? Would she fall in love with him, would she make him fall in love with her, fulfilling their destiny in the happy ending? Or would she overdo it, playing to the camera and weeping on cue, making him lose sympathy with her?

The hand of the rescuer closed around the girl’s wrist. A close-up was called for. Any cameraman worth his salt would capture it. Let his strong fingers slip on her goose-pimpled skin, let the grasp be almost broken, the girl be almost lost, before he drew her safely in …

At that moment, the duck lurched forward in the water.

Here we go again, Fluxman said to himself. Will nothing ever run smoothly again? Can nothing go on steadily to its conclusion? Must it always be one crude disruption after another?

The man kneeling in the prow teetered. The one with the camera stuck resolutely to his task. The duck twitched again, as if it had flexed its wings to fly only to find them useless, and both men went tumbling. Then something immense bore up from below, ramming into the bird, tilting its tail feathers up into the air and driving its head below the water. A buckled undercarriage of rods and paddles churned the sky to froth. A mouth opened, the mouth of a hippopotamus, with weeds and splintered fibreglass between its teeth; the black rock of its back shuddered and sluiced water, sank again below the surface. A momentary calm. Then the rock rose irresistibly for a second time and threw the bird over on its side. The men fell into the water. The wounded duck subsided and began to circle around the compass point of its own broken neck, while the watchers clawed up the stones beneath their feet and hurled them over the edge to drive off the monster. Once the water had settled, the older of the two rescuers could be seen clinging to a broken wing, with the straw hat jammed down over his eyes. There was no sign of the other. The girl was gone as well.

The rush of water, the roaring that had woken Fluxman that morning, continued unabated. He scanned the surface, looking as much for the source of this sound as for signs of survivors. Just beyond the carport, a stream of bubbles was boiling to the surface. Burst mains. Was the water level rising?

What difference did it make? Let the catastrophe go on without him.

Tucking his pencil behind his ear, he turned away from the window and drew on his dressing-gown. He went from room to room in his house. Everything seemed to be in order. He scrutinized it all in passing, to make sure it stayed that way, as he worked his passage to the kitchen. Enough excitement for one day; he needed toast, and coffee, and quiet columns of print. He looked through the window into the backyard. That also seemed to be under control. A slight agitation in the swimming-pool water, perhaps, a sympathetic stirring, an excess of bubbles.

He switched on the kettle, and its hiss soon drowned out the faint cries skipping shorewards over the lake outside.

*

Breakfast had no bulk without the newspaper. Fluxman dusted the crumbs off his plate into the sink and ran the tap to wash them away. Suddenly, he remembered the long-handled net for skimming leaves from the pool, lying in its brackets against the garage wall. It might just reach the letter box. He fetched the net and carried it through the house.

The breath of the wetlands enveloped him as he opened the front door. The water had stopped running and the silence smelt sour. On the far shore, the capsized Muscovy had been grappled to the quay. A man in leather shorts and an alpine hat was preparing to abseil down.

Fluxman weighed the net in his hand and measured the gap with his eye. He was still pondering his next step, when something stirred in the shallows and a body floated to the surface. For God’s sake! Would it never end? A filthy swell as green as soup ran over the slasto and swirled around his feet. He recoiled, but could not bring himself to withdraw. The body was floating face down in the water. He snared it with the net and dragged it in, until it bumped against the stoep, rising and falling with the wrack. He took a grip on one of the body’s rubber handles, felt the distasteful fret of it against his palm, waited for the swell to rise, and heaved it onto the slasto.

He was prepared for savaged flesh, for puncture holes and lacerations, but not for the chaos that met his practised eye, the jumble of sprockets and yellow vinyl and rubbery connective tissue, the ooze of blood and lubricating gels, the tangle of wiring beaded with solder. He rolled the bobber over, shuddering at the touch of gizzard flesh and bristles, the crab apple of the eye, the broken springs, the oily feathers, the webbed fingers, the shattered lenses, the sockets filled with ground glass and riverweeds. Beyond repair, he thought desperately. A cacophony of categories, a jumble of kinds, an elemental disorder, wanton and fatal. With the soggy end of his slipper, he thrust the body back into the water and watched it drift away. Beyond repair! Not once in all his long career had such an unholy perception entered his mind. His heart sank sickeningly and he willed it back into place with a cry. He felt peculiarly loose and disconnected. He gazed in alarm at the backs of his hands, at the palms and the wrists, at his arms, his chest, his thighs. Even as he was proofreading himself, he was walking back into the house, his knees and ankles buckling and squeaking like dislocated hinges. He shut the door behind him, stuffing newsprint into the crack beneath it, and walked again, leaving a trail of slimy footprints on the parquet – from the right foot only, like a one-legged man – to his study.

For an hour he sat at his desk, gazing at his papers without seeing them, turning things over in his mind. Several times he picked up the jar of buttons he used as a paperweight and absently stirred the contents with his forefinger. Then he took down the last official street guide to Alibia and opened it to Astra Vista, where he lived. He put his finger down on his neighbourhood. The error glared out at him. Where once there had been neat and orderly rows of houses just like his own, there was the Zoological Gardens. Or a chunk of it anyway. Gar … the map said. Gar. The rest seemed to have been left behind on the other side of the city. He paged to the place in the book where the Zoo was supposed to be, and found it occupied by several blocks of Astra Vista. His old neighbours the Armstrongs, from Number 93 across the way, had come off badly: in its new position, their front door opened onto the elephants’ enclosure. What else had been carelessly left behind in the relocation? The penguin house, several rows of cages belonging to the smaller primates, aviaries. Parrots, parrots.

He should speak to Munnery. He picked up the telephone, but there was no dialling tone. Was he too late? Had Munnery finally been wiped off the map? He dared not think it. Through the window, he saw the telephone line from his roof slanting down into the water like an anchor chain. There was no time to lose; he had vacillated far too long as it was. He must go to Munnery at once. He fetched his rucksack from behind the bathroom door and began to pack: maps, spare pencils, sharpeners, the Phone Book, an apple or two, a packet of trail mix, a bag of pistachio nuts, a month’s supply of notepads, a torch, a flask of fresh water, a loaf of rye bread. He donned khakis and boots.

When he was finished, he gave his house the once-over, swiftly and thoroughly, focusing so intensely, his head began to throb. Then he took his alpenstock from the stand at the door and went out into the disjointed city.

*

The golf course at the Royal Alibian Country Club had once been the pride of the sporting gentry, but there was not much left of it now: spite and neglect had scattered most of the links to the four corners of the city. On any outing, one was bound to stumble across a bit of it somewhere, and so Fluxman was hardly surprised when the service lane behind his house gave onto one of the more scenic sections of the front nine. Rather, he was delighted. He was not a sportsman himself (although he was often taken for one, with his youthful physique and fine head of hair), but he liked to walk, and in the old days, when the Alibian landscape was more set in its ways, he had always resented the hold the sports clubs had on the city’s scenic parkland. The RACC had been the main culprit. It was one of the rare delights of the new disorder, he reasoned now, that he should find the property of the Royal, the long dog-leg fairway of the fourth, to be precise, seen and envied so often on the television during the Alibian Open, flung down here in his own backyard. It was pleasing for this reason too: another bit of the Royal, the celebrated eighteenth no less, had wound up at Munnery’s place, which was his destination, and it would be an auspicious symmetry to begin and end his journey on the course.

He set off down the fairway with an unaccustomed spring in his step, swinging his alpenstock at the sprinkling of copper-bottomed pots and pans he espied in the rough. Up ahead, in the crook of the dog-leg, among the pale trunks of bluegum and beech, the sun glinted on sheet metal. The corner of an office block or a shanty town, he surmised. On the other side of the fairway, kudu cows stretched their necks between the palisades of an iron fence to reach the greener kikuyu and spicy dandelions, and dropped their steaming pats among the dewy kitchenware. A pastoral idyll. It was a long time since Fluxman had worked up a sweat. He gazed about him curiously and began to whistle. I love to go a-wandering …

The grass beneath his feet, succulent and overgrown, the sky above, himself between, footloose and debonair … it brought back the proofreading rambles of his youth. Then it had been his pleasure to go out into the world to find respite from the imperfections of the page, to rest the rods and cones. I spy with my little eye … How things had changed. The world had become a perilous place, full of pitfalls and eyesores.

Valda-ree, valda-raa …

At least Munnery, thanks to his stubborn nature and particular expertise, was in his proper place, where he had always been, in a chintzy little bungalow on a hill overlooking Alibia – although everything else in his vicinity, the efforts of the Society notwithstanding, had changed. Or rather, he had been there the last time anyone looked. Please God, Fluxman said to himself, let him be home. And he marched on, resignedly jaunty.

The walking stick had been a gift from the same Munnery. It had appeared on the breakfast table one morning a few months back, where the spoon was supposed to be, along with a catalogue for camping gear. He should have deleted it immediately, but there was a note attached, in the hand he knew so well: ‘This small gift is a token of your colleagues’ esteem. I implore you, do not turn your back on us. Alibia needs you.’ Fluxman did not approve of such fakery. But he kept the stick. It was pointedly wrought in the shape of a pencil, and now the rubber knob and brass ferrule felt in his fist like a reminder of his civic responsibilities. This awareness lifted his spirits.

Valda-ree, valda-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha …

A bandit crashed out of the undergrowth. A thickset man in a bottle-green suit, tattered at turn-up and cuff, muddied at elbow and knee, shoes scuffed to rawhide, belly wobbling between the ripped tails of his shirt. He burst from between the trees and bore down on Fluxman like some animate guy escaped from the bonfire, grass sticking out of his collar and cuffs, greasy hair standing on end. Close kin to the monstrous bobber from the lake. Fluxman fell back, brandishing the alpenstock like a club. To his surprise, the creature stumbled to a halt and raised its own hands in surrender. A bloody head, as featureless as a turnip, covered with purplish bruises and stiff bristles, raw feet, and open hands, panting for air. In one palm, an ear was turned to the wind, in another, a mouth opened and closed like an anemone, trying to form words. ‘Police,’ it said, ‘police.’

Fluxman was skilled in the art of lip-reading and he understood perfectly, but he was in no mood to be manipulated. ‘Lay a hand on me,’ he cried, ‘and I shan’t be responsible for what I do to you.’

‘Thanks for asking, can’t complain.’

‘What do you want? Come on, spit it out.’

‘I’m the scum of the earth, master, but I’ve also got to live. I just need something to eat.’ The mouth in the palm opened wide in anticipation.

‘You disgusting thing!’ Fluxman waggled the stick threateningly. ‘Be gone, before I delete you.’

‘Or a job, master. I can carry the master’s bag.’

‘If I required the services of a porter …’ Even as he spoke, Fluxman felt the weight of the rucksack dragging at his shoulders. What had the rascal called him? Master.

‘Some change, then?’

‘I have nothing for you. Absolutely nothing.’

The sound of Fluxman’s voice had given the creature new bearings, and it lunged forward with both hands conversing wildly. Fluxman leapt lithely aside. The creature might well have caught hold of him, but in its rush, it got one of its blistered feet jammed in a cooking pot hidden in the grass. Going in circles, hopping and skipping in an effort to wrench off the pot, it reeled away among the trees. ‘Ciao for now!’ it called out as it went. ‘Pleased to meet you!’

Fluxman backed cautiously away, until he felt flagstones beneath his heels. Then he turned and ran, while the monster mumbled in the undergrowth behind him, palms chawing and champing, ranting to itself. He was in an alley, rushing headlong through a jumble of angled shadows, and he let its twists and turns determine his course, breaking always towards the light, to where the darkness was less impenetrable, slashing with his stick when the gloom thickened. Broken things crunched underfoot, as if the madman’s ravings had washed up here – chicken gristle and statuary, pieces of English, A-frames and I-beams, knick-knacks for the bar and doodads for the gym, dining-room suites, instant dinners, poems. A broken gramophone fell with a crash. Then the shadows were greyer, and the clutter thinner, and there was light ahead. A rectangle of sunshine traversed by people and cars.

Fluxman paused on the brink of the mundane to gather himself. He scraped the wreckage off the soles of his boots, mopped the sweat from his face and caught his breath. Then he walked to the mouth of the alley, where it gave onto the avenue, and glanced casually about as if he had just stepped out of his own front door. A broad boulevard with plane trees and pavement cafés, gleaming shopfronts full of mohair jerseys, potted meats and cans of petits pois, lamp-posts in the shape of lighthouses, benches in bus shelters like scalloped band-shells. Everything was running along so smoothly, so perfectly punctuated by parking meters and kiosks, so elegantly phrased into blocks and squares and loading zones, so idiomatically proper, that tears started to his eyes. Could this really be the Avenue of the Revolution? He looked around for a street sign. Nothing. What was it doing in these quarters? Must be a recent arrival.

He drank it all in: the clean-swept gutters, the fashionable throngs, the polished sedans. Everything seemed to be in order. Normal, well-proportioned faces met his gaze, eyes the recommended distance apart, brows smooth, noses straight, lips finely moulded, ears in pairs, perfect for supporting spectacles. Although he was not dressed for decent society, Fluxman tucked the stick under his arm, and falling in with the strollers, allowed himself to be carried along, breathing in the wholesome fragrances of baked goods and scrubbed bodies, recovering his composure.

In these troubled times, there was no activity more fraught with danger than wandering aimlessly in the streets. Something was certain to happen, and aimlessness only made it more likely that it would be unpleasant. Mindful of this fact, Fluxman sat down at a table under the canopy at Al Fresco’s. A waiter came.

‘Espresso, please. Make it a double.’

It was so long since he had sat at a café, and it felt so comfortingly familiar, that he was reminded at once of his old colleagues and the meetings of the Society. Displays of sentiment always made him uncomfortable, but a lump came to his throat as he looked about him and remembered the Alibia of yesteryear. A corn-roaster on the street corner stoked her charcoal brazier and a cloud of bitter-sweet smoke blew over him.

*

The Proofreaders’ Society of Alibia was as old as the city itself. In every age, the Members of the Society had gone quietly about their business, maintaining order without making a fuss. This modest dedication found expression in the items displayed upon their escutcheon: a blue pencil, a dancing-master’s shoe, a cobbler’s nail (the emblem of St Cloud) and the freckled bloom of the tiger lily.

In former times, the Society had conducted its affairs in secret and jealously guarded the identities of its Members. But over the years, as the principles and practices of government changed, it came to exist more openly in the public eye. The modern Members no longer found it necessary to employ pen-names and passwords, and willingly submitted themselves to scrutiny, in accordance with contemporary requirements. Nevertheless, they wished to maintain the proper proofreaderly reserve. To kill both birds with one stone, they made a custom of holding their formal meetings at a private table in a public venue. In the years when Fluxman was Master, these gatherings took place bimonthly in a cubicle at the Café Europa. Though their purpose was to enable the Members to clarify questions of craft, they served equally to cement the bonds of friendship.

This was the era of Munnery and Wiederkehr, of Levitas and Banes, sharp-eyed and open-hearted men, and a meeting seldom failed to instruct or inspire. Someone might have struck an insoluble problem in the course of his work, a grammatical tangle that could not be undone, or a usage that had evaded the reference books. Someone else might have come across a peculiarity of spelling or spacing, or a rare typographical error. Banes, who loved legal documents, sometimes brought a questionable interpretation for discussion, a judgement that hinged on a misplaced comma or an ill-timed hyphen. Figg, the Treasurer, always looking for a penny to pinch, would demonstrate new techniques for extending the life of a pencil stub or a pink eraser. In the late hours, when the official business had been dealt with soberly, small glasses of sherry, and the thought that ordinary citizens were sleeping easily because good order was in the hands of responsible men, sweetened the camaraderie that bound them all to the professional cause.

Then signs of unrest appeared in Alibia. And no one saw them sooner or felt them more keenly than Fluxman. It began with an outbreak of error in the telephone directory, which was the great love and labour of his life. It was an unprecedented plague, not just in the frequency of the error, but in its nature. Strange animals started creeping into his proofs, species of error he had never seen before – letters turned inside out, flares of coloured print in the gutters, numbers joined at the head or hip. Some batches of galleys contained errors so odd they seemed to belong to another civilization. He did everything in his power to contain the outbreak; but there were inexplicable relapses on the page proofs too, as errors sprouted afresh where they had already been weeded out. Nothing could have been more distressing to a proofreader. Yet Fluxman did not discuss the problem with his colleagues. He waited impatiently for their regular meetings and the opportunity to unburden himself; but when he arrived at the Café Europa, the sight of their familiar frowns always discouraged him. The plague would subside on its own, he decided, and kept his concern to himself.

*

In these same years, the printer’s devil at the Alibian Star was a young McCaffery. Every afternoon, it was his duty to carry the galley proofs of that day’s edition from the printing works to the council chambers, where an official appointed by the City Fathers would read and approve them. The scooter ride across town was a welcome break in the gloomy routine of the boy’s day, and he made the most of it, pursuing roundabout ways to prolong his pleasure, and then taking reckless short cuts to make up for lost time. More than one person, forced to leap from his path as he raced through a yard or down a staircase, predicted that he would come to an unhappy end, which he did.

On an autumn afternoon, in a little-used alley behind the football factory, he rode head first into a stone wall and was killed outright.

The next day, the Star carried a photograph of the dead boy sprawled in the wreckage of his scooter, with a babble of broken type from the wicker delivery basket scattered around, and the galleys washing over him like cheesecloth billows in a pantomime.

*

The spate of error in the Book did not abate. It grew steadily worse, until Fluxman knew that he could no longer keep it from the others. He convened a special meeting of the Society. He worried endlessly about how his statement would be received. Would they think that he had lost his senses? That it was some uncharacteristic prank for their amusement? Anticipating laughter or derision, he prepared a carefully worded speech and, when they had gathered in their cubicle at the Europa, he rose to deliver it, although such formalities were usually waived. His apprehensions proved groundless. He had scarcely begun to describe his campaign against phantom addresses and wayward dialling codes, when he was drowned out in a rumble of assent and relief.

‘You haven’t heard the half of it,’ said Figg. ‘I didn’t want to complain, but I’ve been spending every spare minute at the Babcock, and I’m barely one step ahead of a total collapse.’

‘Same here,’ said Banes. ‘I haven’t had a weekend off in months.’

They all began to speak at once. Without exception, they had noticed alarming changes in the records under their command; and each of them, with the modesty native to the profession, had kept it to himself and set about restoring order in his own way.

Everywhere the trends were the same: not just rashes of missing spaces or jutting hyphens or simple transpositions, but massive disturbances and transformations that seemed somehow wilful, that actually resisted correction. Figg had spent so many of his lunch hours in the stacks at the library reordering alphabetically, re-sorting by category, invoking Dewey, that he’d lost ten pounds. Sure that someone must be sabotaging the catalogues, he’d lain in wait for them three nights running, armed with nothing but a pencil. Unbeknown to him, Munnery was also awake in the early hours. He’d burnt a barrel of midnight oil, drafting and redrafting the maps of the city centre, reattaching the numbers of the houses to the proper doors and gates, reorienting the points of the compass. On the other side of town, Levitas had been slashing and spearing until his arm went to sleep.

What were they to do? There was no simple answer. Figg was for alerting the City Fathers at once. The problem was too big for the Society, he said. It threatened good governance and the survival of Alibia itself. Fluxman argued against him. Such faint-heartedness was unheard-of in their long history. In any event, it was not their way to make a public hullabaloo, to be thrusting themselves into the limelight. They should sustain their efforts behind the scenes. When the City Fathers required their help, they would know where to turn.

Secretly, the problem had shrunk in Fluxman’s own mind; now that the weight of it had been shared, it no longer seemed so daunting. There was something cheering too in the prospect of a request for help from the City Fathers. The Society was no longer shown the respect it had enjoyed in the days of secrecy and subterfuge. A public acknowledgment of their importance would be a good thing.

The majority went with the Master.

Then Levitas had them charge their glasses, although it had not yet gone nine, and drink the health of the paperwork.

‘To the Records!’

Later that evening, when some of the company had already begun to drift off, Munnery produced the photograph of poor McCaffery. It had touched him, the small body among the smashed alphabets, despite the irritation of the caption: ‘Art of God delays early edition.’ His colleagues shook their heads over that cruel blunder and lamented the boy’s misfortune, but failed to see what it had to do with their own troubles.

*

An official in the Department of Public Works by the name of Toyk studied the same photograph with a dry eye and drew his own conclusions. What held his attention was not the dead boy, but the wall against which he had dashed out his brains; more specifically, the point where that fatal wall, which was made of a distinctive yellow stone, joined up with another more ordinary panel of red brick. As the official responsible for granting licences and approving plans, Toyk took a particular interest in the city wall, and especially in the preservation of those sections of it that had survived from antiquity. There was a building regulation expressly prohibiting the erection of any structure so that it abutted upon the wall. It was clear from the photograph that the law had been broken.

The following day found Toyk in the alley behind the football factory. He expected to do no more than serve notice upon some refractory citizen to demolish his illegal hen-house, or have the Department do it for him. But what he saw instead struck him dumb.

Toyk was a land surveyor by training. He went home at once and unpacked his instruments, scarcely touched since his graduation to matters of regulation. He bore theodolite and spirit level to the industrial zone, where it did not take him long to verify what McCaffery had already proved by example and he himself had inferred from observation: the football factory was on the move. It had drifted off its foundations and floated away to the south, coming to rest against the city wall and sealing off the alley behind. The distance was not great, but the effect was dramatic. Who could tell where the building would have ended up had there been nothing to block its course? Perhaps it would have fallen into the sea?

Quietly, to avoid causing panic among the people of Alibia, who valued stability above all things, Toyk made a cursory examination of the surrounding blocks. He discovered that several other buildings had wandered away from their official locations. First thing Monday, he decided, he would make a report to his superiors and seek permission to broaden his investigations.

*

The Members of the Society soldiered on, with the silence of the City Fathers ringing in their ears. They were all past exhaustion. But whereas some were ready to submit, others were determined to go on to the end, no matter the sacrifice. Factions arose. The meetings at the Café Europa, which had been called to discuss strategy, but which always ended in stalemate, grew more and more fractious.Voices were raised and threats levelled. Then one evening, pencils were pointed in anger for the first time in the Society’s history, and the meeting broke up in disorder.

In the small hours of that bitter morning, Fluxman stood sleepless at the window of his penthouse, looking down on Alibia. Tutivillus Heights was the city’s only skyscraper – in Alibia, the top of a six-storey block will brush the brow of heaven – and it made him feel immensely alert and far-seeing, and utterly detached from the earth. His eyes wandered from rooftop to rooftop, from street to street. He felt it. The building was swaying, a motion so gentle it would have escaped the notice of all but the most perceptive observer. It was not soothing at all; it filled him with foreboding. Then he recalled who he was and what he stood for. He erased his frowning misgivings from the glass before him with an eraser shaped like an egg, but they came back again and again.

*

Toyk’s report was an eye-opener. There was movement everywhere, not just in the outlying industrial zones, but in the heart of Alibia. The signs pointed to massive geological instability. Nothing would stay put. Structures were shifting closer together or further apart, skylines were rising and falling, streets were narrowing, views were opening up, cracks were appearing.

Most puzzling, he reported, was the fact that some of these changes would later reverse themselves, just as mysteriously, as if a countervailing force were at work. One of his own juniors, a certain Bron, was on hand when two houses in Capitol Hill, the most sought-after of the hillside suburbs, having moved slowly but surely closer together for several weeks, suddenly sprang back to their original positions. The deviation, a matter of inches, had been perceptible only with measuring instruments, but the correction was so abrupt, it was visible even to an untrained eye.

A stitch in time saves nine. But it is the lot of ordinary people that they are seldom aware of the loose threads in the seams of their own lives. And a missing button, as they say in Alibia, leads to a lost coat. Months went by, and the citizens remained blind to the changes taking place around them. Then, at last, the observant ones began to notice the more violent reversals. Some of them, like the occupants of the houses in Capitol Hill, whose crockery had been rattled until it broke, put it down to earth tremors; others were inclined to speculate. Before Toyk had time to complete his investigation, there were letters to the Star suggesting that such upsets were symptomatic of chronic instability in the body politic, claims the City Fathers always denied.

Behind the scenes, Toyk’s report caused a furore. Even as they were pronouncing the whole region as safe as houses, the Fathers were issuing urgent instructions to Public Works to begin with repairs immediately. Soon the streets were filled with teams of men in orange overalls performing highly visible and ineffectual shoring-up operations – securing cables to walls, hammering posts into pavements, building retaining walls and dykes, digging trenches, sinking boreholes, grounding flying buttresses, pouring road metal into fissures.

These busy efforts had no effect. On any day of the week, in any close or wynd, one might see someone trip over a step where no step had been before, or pause to gaze anxiously into the black space that had opened up between a newly built wall and a newly grouted pavement. All it took was for the street signs to make one quarter of a turn, anticlockwise, and the city would be clogged with people who had lost their way.

*

Night after night, a shudder of restless fidgeting passed through the city. Everything that opened and shut was doing so, secretively and obsessively. Windows and doors, posts and rails, tongues and grooves, stocks and mitres were testing the bounds of their unions, engaging and disengaging, clasping and releasing, over and over, as if they meant to part company soon. Those who were awake to this experimental dissent shivered, and imagined that someone had walked over their graves.

*

The Proofreaders, persevering in wounded silence, were not spared the trials that befell ordinary Alibians. Figg was inserting some new arrivals into the Register of Births and Deaths one morning – it was supposed to be his day off, but he was slaving away as usual – when the threads that secured the bone-yellow buttons of his cuffs unravelled with a fizz, as if he had held a flame to them, and fell away. He gazed in consternation at the squiggles of black thread on his sleeves and the flakes of ash on the backs of his hands.

He turned his eye again to the page before him. ‘Knowing you enriched our lives’ Good Lord! There was something wrong with the paper. It seemed strangely pale, it was floating, curling up at the edges and drifting free of the desk. ‘Safe in God’s care’ And then he saw what the problem was: there was not a single full stop left anywhere. He paged backwards and forwards. Nothing. The leaves levitated, the edges feathered into deckle. The whole stack fluttered and began to reshuffle itself, as Figg hastily rolled up his sleeves. Then he pinned the concertinaed sheaf to the desk with one hand and took up his blue pencil with the other. He worked with feverish concentration until night fell, buttoning down line after line … caret, caret, caret … until he could hardly see straight.

In the end, he looked at his fist, lying like a leaden paperweight on the stack, and at the crumbled end of his pencil. He licked the dent in his forefinger and flipped through the pages. Twenty or thirty of them, newly buttoned, lay neatly on the desk … the rest mounted obstinately upwards. He checked the clock: he had not risen for more than seven hours. To save a minute, he had gone so far – God help him! – as to pass water in the waste-paper basket. But it was no good. Even as he calculated the extent of his commitment, the corners of the page under his fist, the page he had just finished correcting, twitched and curled into dog-ears. Exhausted, he fell back in his chair and watched the papers rising slowly into the air, gathering under the ceiling like cumulus, blown this way and that in the breeze from the fan, scudding against the mouldy cornices, sinking down in the four corners of the room. Enough was enough. He reached for the telephone.

‘This is the residence of Aubrey Fluxman,’ the machine began. ‘Should you wish to leave a message …’

*

Fluxman had also been working that morning, banging away at the typewriter, when the lenses of his spectacles began to vibrate. He knew at once that something catastrophic was afoot. He listened to the first breathless accounts of the unfolding drama on the radio while he tweezered a screw from among the hammers. Then he slipped into a serviceable tracksuit, with an elasticized waistband, and went out into the streets.

The fruits of that convulsive instant lay scattered everywhere. The riverside coffee bars and eateries stood empty. In the shadowy interior of the Hottentot, which he had frequented in his youth, a leather banquette coughed. He crept in to take samples, hooking red and brown buttons from their resting places with the end of his pencil. He ventured into the furniture factory as well, despite the warnings of the security guards, to see with his own eyes the dowelled dead in the basement, sprawled among scatter cushions as fat as puffer fish, looking for all the world as if they had merely lain down to rest. In the Gravy Boat, it was business as usual. Just hours before, the regular morning sprinkling of tea-sippers and French-knitters had rushed away in a panic when the armchairs inflated beneath them. But the proprietor was treating it all with the levity appropriate to a minor mishap. Half-price for standing room only, snacks on the house. Finding a pillar to lean against, Fluxman ate a Croque Monsieur and drank a beer, which he normally denied himself in the daylight hours. Later, he simply wandered through the unnaturally rounded afternoon, mourning every vanished quilt and pucker in the urban upholstery.

Although it was early, many businesses had closed their doors, and the streets were filling with people on their way home from work, clerks and secretaries stepping warily from the lobbies of office buildings, blinking into the light like people after a matinée at the cinema. The gondolas were packed with more than the usual quota of tourists and touts, the carriages of the funiculars were bursting. Everywhere he saw the same bewildered expressions, the same pursed lips, which might be suppressing laughter or tears, the same downcast eyes, as if people were hunting for fallen change in the cracks of the pavements. They hurried by or stood whispering furtively on street corners, avoiding one another’s eyes, clutching handfuls of their own clothing. Fluxman moved among them, wide-eyed, gazing at bare flesh between yawning lapels, coats held together with paper clips, safety-pinned cuffs and stapled shirt-fronts. On a corner near the station, a businessman was plucking the rubber-banded toggles of his duffel coat, and Fluxman, stooping to gather more samples, listened to that elastic adagio as if he had never heard music before.

Arriving home in the early hours, he let his answering machine stammer out its messages. Please to call Figg. Enough is enough: a meeting of the Society is in order. Then the worried voice of Munnery: Figg suggests a meeting. What do you think? Then Levitas, who hated speaking on the telephone. Munnery had called him too, and Wiederkehr, and Banes. Then Figg again, sounding drunk. The whole Society was in an uproar.

*

It became clear at last to the most faithful Members of the Society, standing by with their bundles of pencils, that the call for help from the City Fathers would never come. It was a bitter pill, but it had to be swallowed.

An extraordinary meeting of the Society was convened at short notice on the night after the great unfastening. They gathered at the Café Europa as usual, and although some semblance of calm had returned to the city after the disturbances of the previous day, each had a story to tell about the hazards he had faced just making his way through the streets to their rendezvous.

Wiederkehr had almost plunged into a crevasse that had opened up in the cobbles at his feet as he crossed St Cloud’s Square.

‘It may have been an unguarded excavation,’ Fluxman ventured to say. ‘You know how the procurers are always stealing the red lanterns.’

‘It was a dry dock,’ Wiederkehr said tetchily. ‘It gaped as suddenly as speaking. One moment there was solid earth beneath my bluchers, the next a black hole as big as ten swimming baths, with a catamaran lying in the deep end.’

‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I nearly broke my neck too,’ said Munnery. ‘Fell over a tombstone in the High Street. I transposed it at once with a mossy bench from the boneyard, but the damage had already been done.’ He showed them the torn knees of his suit.

Fluxman noticed, as he examined his friend’s frayed tweed, that his trousers were tied up with a length of typewriter ribbon, but he said nothing. Munnery had brought a bulging portfolio of maps with him, and while they spoke, he was readjusting the highways and byways with his blue pencil, and keeping an eye on the more irresponsible rezonings.

‘If the Fathers will not come to us, we must go to them,’ Fluxman said when it was his turn to speak. ‘We must do our duty for Alibia.’

‘About time,’ said Figg. ‘What shall we say?’

‘The simple truth: stop putting the cart before the horse. Take care of the paperwork, and the world will take care of itself.’

‘But who will believe it?’ said Banes.

As if to support his point, the first municipal reupholstery squad burst in through the batwing doors, clutching lumpy pouches full of leather-covered buttons, and waving bodkins as long as pencils. They fell to with a vengeance. Most of the patrons fled. But the Members would not budge, on principle, and boldly continued with their meeting. For their pains, Munnery got the sleeve of his jacket stitched to the arm of his chair, and might have spent the night there, had Wiederkehr not slashed him loose with a swift pass of his 2B.

*

Naturally, it fell to Fluxman to lead the delegation that went to discuss the problem of declining standards with the City Fathers.

A special audience was held in the oak-panelled council chamber. Fluxman presented their case. He showed how the seeds of decline had been sown in mischief and trivialities. He pointed to instances of looming chaos, like the great unfastening, and cited statistics on damage to property, loss of life and limb, and low levels of investor confidence. He painted a gloomy picture of a future in which everything was out of order, and nothing ran smoothly to a creditable conclusion.

‘If appropriate measures to secure law and order are not taken soon,’ he concluded, ‘it will be too late. Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured.’

The last echoes of Fluxman’s baritone clattered away in the rafters. There was a pause, and then, not the ‘Bravos’ and ‘Hear hears’ that would have done justice to his oration, not the grateful applause and relieved chatter, but catcalls and whistles from the peanut gallery. The City Fathers, perched like children on the bloated leather seats of the dock, with the toes of their shoes scraping the floorboards, looked down unperturbed.

‘We have teams at work this minute repairing the damage that has been reported, all of it slight,’ said Councillor Lumley, the father figure of refrigerator services. ‘Routine maintenance goes on apace. Everything is under control.’

In the back benches, a team of upholsterers clad in their characteristic leatherette dungarees and cotton T-shirts were reattaching buttons. Hearing themselves mentioned from the platform, they raised a ragged cheer.

‘All the maintenance in the world will be of no use,’ said Fluxman. ‘We need to look to our records.’

‘Nonsense! What good would that do?’

Distasteful as it was, smacking as it did of the party trick, Munnery called for a seating plan, which the Speaker duly produced, and demonstrated the point the Society was trying to make by transposing a few desks, councillors and all. Levitas realigned the chandeliers and shifted a rose window in the west wall to admit the setting sun. But rather than impressing upon the Fathers the seriousness of the situation, this made them think it was all just a game. They wanted Munnery to alley-oop them, like so many children, they wanted their desks rearranged so that they could be closer to the cafeteria or the cloakroom.

When Levitas dumped Lumley unceremoniously in the lap of a secretary whose name had been romantically connected with his own, the mood turned nasty. Security was summoned, and before they could even gather up their files, the Proofreaders found themselves manhandled from the chamber, with cries of ‘Fools!’ and ‘Traitors!’ flying about their ears.

*

Having resisted the Fathers the longest, it was Fluxman who took their rejection most to heart. That night, on his return from the Café Europa, where he and the others had drowned their sorrows, he went to his study. He opened the telephone directory and paged to the L’s. There were three Lumleys. Which was which? Never mind, he would dispense with them all. He took up his weapon of choice. He chewed the pink rubber, savouring its familiar tang, and gazed at the columns of names and numbers. They were restless, squirming and writhing, jostling one another. A riotous assembly. Setting his jaw, he drew three neat lines through the Lumleys and inscribed a curly bracket and a single delete mark in the margin.

Then his conscience assailed him, and he quickly restored the deletion.

*

As the disorder grew, so did the Fathers’ determination to overcome it. Team after team of brightly clad workers were dispatched to put things straight. In addition to the usual repairs and maintenance – attaching splints, driving in staples, welding railings, tarring poles, clearing pathways, burning firebreaks – they began to take an interest in the smallest details. Minders were employed to sit on park benches just to weigh them down, to cross the street whenever the little green man bade them walk, to cock the ears of the teacups in a westerly direction.

All this amateurish tinkering only hastened a spectacular descent into chaos. One morning, Alibians awoke to find that St Cloud’s Square had come adrift and rotated to the opposite quarter of the compass; had it not been moored in the south-east by the Musical Fountains of the Seven Martyrs, it would surely have floated away altogether. Glancing up as usual at the clock tower of St Cloud’s cathedral, as they filled their kettles at the kitchen sink, or threw open the shutters to do their morning exercises, or stooped to bring in the milk from their doorsteps, people saw nothing but sky.

On the outskirts of Alibia, among the sporting-goods factories and balsa-wood mills, in the peri-urban badlands, in the housing estates and low-cost townships, where the building regulations had never been applied with rigour and foundations were shallow, the disorder was precipitate. Whole streets suddenly banged together, like two halves of a book slammed shut by a reader, smashing everything in between, animate and inanimate, to pulp and tinder. Blocks of flats turned topsy-turvy, raining down the occupants and their possessions, and re-established themselves with their roots of cables and pipes twisted in the air, like so many baobab trees. People found themselves living on top of one another, cheek by jowl with exactly the types they wanted nothing to do with.

Through it all, the Proofreaders did what they could to preserve the proper boundaries between things. But in the end, maintaining order requires concerted communal effort. As fast as the Members corrected errors in one quarter, new – and worse – ones sprang up in another. Proofreading was thankless work, as they never tired of saying. And the fact is that without Fluxman, the great strategist, their efforts lacked design. Where Banes might be tempted to spend an entire afternoon taking back cups and saucers in the disorganized canteens of the General Post Office, or taking over buds on the rose terraces at the Botanical Gardens, Fluxman would concentrate on the menus or rearrange the phyla in the family trees. Moreover, Fluxman was possessed of the single most important tool in the proofreader’s bag: . For delete.

But what Fluxman would have done is immaterial, for he refused to do anything at all. He withdrew from the campaign; he stopped coming to meetings at the Café Europa. He closed his ears to the pleas of his colleagues and stayed at home, quietly minding his own business.

Everyone assumed that Fluxman’s withdrawal was a straight-forward protest against being snubbed by the City Fathers. Only to Munnery had he opened his heart. ‘Delete is a dangerous weapon,’ he said, hacking idly at the air between them with a sign as keen as a sickle. ‘I’ve always known it, of course, and I’ve always trusted myself to wield it righteously. But it’s no longer safe in my hands. Let me loose on this degenerate world, and there’s no telling what I’m capable of.’

A year passed. The city fell into ruins.

*

Now Fluxman, ensconced at Al Fresco’s with the espresso gone cold before him and the corn-roaster’s smoke stinging his eyes, had time to consider whether he had been right after all to wash his hands of the Society’s problems. He surveyed the passing parade. How odd that he should consider this shambles ‘fashionable’. What a change had been wrought since the great unfastening. Before then, it had shamed people to be seen with a thread out of place; now, no one cared about appearances at all. It was nothing but particoloured suits and patchwork as far as the eye could see. Men in dresses, women in bed-linen togas, winding-sheets and corsetry. The very idea of an outfit had become laughable. No matter how much care you took over your grooming, there was no telling if it would last. You might step out in a lounge suit and wind up in jodhpurs. Why bother?

The corn smoke turned to an exhalation of cigars, and through this fragrant haze, a vision of Alibia in its heyday rose up to taunt Fluxman. He saw the interval crowds in Opera House Square, a mass of swirling silk and manly gabardine under rafts of picture hats and lively conversation. Rows of gleaming limousines under the limes, the chauffeurs in their uniforms, scarcely less elegant than their dress-suited masters, so gloriously accoutred for motoring you would have thought they were commodores. He saw himself passing through the arcades, with a paper cone of chestnuts in the pocket of his frock-coat warm against his thigh, going down the steps to the river, where lovers were leaning on the parapets to watch the moon dissolve like a paper doily in the Indian ink of the water, passing purposefully out of the more fashionable avenues into the stonier quarters, where the houses huddled closer and closer together, turning their lichen-clad backs against the night, past a steaming horse, up an alley-way where the shadows lay thick and velvety as coaldust in every corner. There was a spring in his step, a hope in his heart. The heels of his brogues resounded like hammerblows on the flags, his breath puffed out in chubby balls of cotton wool, a chill breeze lifted the offhand gesture of his scarf. Winter had fallen here. Turning into a narrower passage, thrusting his fists deeper into his pockets, he came to a lighted window. From within he heard laughter, the crushed ice of a piano, the chime of glass against glass, the drayman’s chorus. Leaning close to the panes, he peered in, but they were misted over and weeping.

The earth shook and Fluxman knew at once that some larger-than-ever upheaval had declared itself. He uttered an uncharacteristic curse. To be facing the end at Al Fresco’s. It was not exactly becoming. At least he was sitting down. Another lurch and a thud like a boulder on a coffin lid. What could it be? He tossed the espresso, cup and all, into the gutter where it would not foul his clothes, and looked about. Everywhere people were running and falling. There, that was the problem: the department store on the other side of the Avenue of the Revolution. It was rocking on its foundations, bearing up and sinking back again, like a ferry aground on a sandbar. Squirts of dust and squawks of metal issued from the parking garage. You’d think the basement was full of hippopotamuses.Why was some brutal force always butting its head against the undersides of things? The strain was so immense that the end was bound to be shattering. The building would fly into smithereens. Hardly had the thought crossed his mind when the store flew into the air and vanished over the rooftops, scattering a potpourri of saloon cars and scented girls from the make-up counters. A flying building! There was a moment of blank embarrassment, while a cloud of red dust swirled in the gaping socket. Then something crackled in the distance and a shanty town appeared on the horizon, just where the store had diminished to a speck, grew larger with frightening rapidity, and fell with a crash into the hole. The impact caused several shacks to collapse, and all the rest to creak and shiver. Plumes of smoke rose up from the jumble of corrugated iron and splintery wood, and a river of moaning and wailing poured out.

The shanty town did not fit its new site at all well. On one side, it was jammed up against the wall of a bank. A dreadful bleating came from beneath those crumpled iron sheets. On the other side, a black hole yawned with unearthly anticipation. A goat plunged out of an alley and vanished down the abyss. A trio of mongrels chose a cannier path and raced out among the cars. Then the first human inhabitants stumbled after them and gazed about numbly. Almost at the same time, the habitués of the cafés and fast-food joints began to scramble out from under tables and chairs and hurry away down the Avenue.

Fluxman had a strong stomach. He took his rucksack in his lap, as if it were a frightened child, and scanned the tumult’s ebb and flow.

Most of the avenue dandies had run away at the first opportunity. But a gang of young bucks from the musical theatres were using their canes to drive the swarthy settlers back into the shanties. As fast as they were routed, others took their place. Then a whole tribe in luminous bubus came spilling out in a rush, men, women and children, reeking of woodsmoke and unthinkable foodstuffs.

As usual, when you needed a waiter there was none to be seen, and so Fluxman picked his way through the overturned furniture and scouted around inside. Fresco himself had scarpered through the back door. Fluxman fetched down a bottle of whiskey from a shelf. In the mirror behind the counter, he saw that he was wearing a velvet cap with an ostentatious aigrette – the sort of thing an Athos might have liked – and he threw it away with a weary sigh. Disconsolately, he clamped an assortment of notes under the spring-loaded tongue of the till. Then he secured the bottle in his bag, took out an apple to eat on the way, and went back into the street. The young bucks had commandeered a tram and stalled it in the middle of the Avenue. From this redoubt, they were launching attacks against the garish tribesmen, trying to drive them back into their uprooted town.

Fluxman hurried on his way. In the east, where the Avenue tapered away into twilight, it was raining cats and dogs. As soon as he was clear of the wreckage, he turned aside into a narrow street and went bravely into the dusk.

*

In days gone by, Maison Munnery, a squaredavel under moth-eaten thatch, had commanded a view of the old city, with the esplanade and the yacht mole beyond it; now it looked down on a jumble of factory roofs and chimneys. Unusually for Alibia, this industrialization had been gradual, a heaping up of cubes and cones and frusta like offcuts from a geometer’s bench, and it took Fluxman an hour to carve his way through it. By the time he broke out of that intricate litter onto the railway lines on the valley floor, night had fallen thickly all around. Munnery’s place was an oasis of glaring light on the dark hillside and Fluxman kept his eyes on it as he ascended. Climb every mountain … When he drew closer, he saw the military searchlight parked in the rockery on the slope behind the house, with its beam trained down on the putting green.

Munnery was practising, and Fluxman paused in the shadows to watch.

Alibia’s most famous par 5 had fallen into Munnery’s possession by chance. Returning from a jog up Capitol Hill one Sunday morning, he had found it laid out there like a gift. The sight of it caused a flutter in his heart. He should return it at once to its rightful owners. He went straight in and fetched down his books of maps and registers of title deeds, fully intending to make the transposition. But his pencil remained poised over the page, irresolute and feeble. He was an avid golfer and the thought of his own private practice green was more than he could resist. They would not even miss it at the club, he told his wife.

Little Horst, Munnery Junior, was now playing with a bucket and spade in the largest bunker. Mrs Munnery, Patsy as she was known, had just left him there, and her skirt was still caught up in her panties at the sides. She was sitting on the doorstep, wriggling her toes in the grass to rid them of sand. Fluxman had never seen her legs before, and he was struck by how pale they were. Munnery himself was wearing plus-fours in the MacLaren tartan and a mismatched pair of spiked shoes, one that was white with black fringes and one that was red all over. He affected a little shuffle and gave the ball a tap. It curved across the green, tracing an s in the dew, and rolled down towards the cup. Fluxman waited for the ball to drop before he stepped from his hiding place into the light. Mrs Munnery hurriedly untucked her skirts. Junior demolished a castle with a backhander from the spade. Munnery dropped his putter with a cry of delight and advanced to greet his visitor, embraced him warmly, and drew him at once through the bright doorway.

*

Settling Fluxman in his study, Munnery went off to pour them each a whiskey from the bottle his guest had brought. As soon as he found himself alone, Fluxman rose from the armchair he had been pressed down in and turned about on the mat, gaping in amazement. The room was papered with printed sheets. Not just the walls but the door, the window behind the desk, the cupboards, the shelves, the desk itself – every surface had a page stuck to it. There were even papers pinned to the ceiling, with their edges curling downwards, and untidy stacks on the floors, weighted by rusty cogs and crankshafts and lumps of wood, with their edges curling upwards. Between the reciprocal curves of ceiling and floor, Fluxman felt curiously suspended, like an afterthought in brackets. The papers rustled and waved, making visible an imperceptible breeze, and it seemed as if the room was breathing uneasily and muttering to itself.

Years of practice had made of Fluxman a shameless scrutineer. He stepped closer to the wall and examined the peeling skin. Glacier ~ granite ~ grasslands ~ grike. It was Munnery’s ‘Dictionary of Geographical Terms’. His life’s work. The page proofs. Simoom ~ sinkhole ~ slickensides ~ solifluction. Fluxman tugged at a few dog-ears. Every page was securely attached with tacks or loops of tape, drawing pins or tees. Munnery had been known as the most fastidious of proofreaders, a stickler for sequence and consequence, a meticulous keeper of order. Finding the great project of his life in this disarray shook Fluxman. Perhaps he had come just in time. Or was he already too late?

When Munnery returned with the drinks, he found his colleague tactfully seated, flipping through the Phone Book, which he had taken from his rucksack.

‘A toast,’ said Fluxman. ‘To the records!’

This was the battle cry of the Society, the oath with which they closed their gatherings, and its import was not lost on Munnery. ‘The records!’ he echoed, and they clinked glasses. ‘Welcome back.’

‘My pleasure.’

They drank. Fluxman, examining his old friend for signs of deterioration, noted that his pullover was back to front. Why did Mrs Munnery let him wear the spikes inside? It would ruin the floors.

‘I thought you were gone for good,’ said Munnery.

‘That was the idea. But I’ve changed my mind, as you see.’

‘Why?’

‘Some observations I’ve made lately have led me to believe that looking the other way might not be the answer.’

‘It’s a fact that you’ve behaved very selfishly, turning your back on us when you might have done something.’

‘You misunderstand. My presence here is as selfish as any of my old refusals. I thought I could manage well enough as Alibia declined, preserving my own little corner amidst the ruins. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. While we still have the tools to wield against chaos, even if we choose not to, we may feel safe. While we are models of order ourselves, and stuffed with the assurance of our own solidity, we may hold ourselves up to one another as examples and reflect that there is something wrong with the world we live in. But when we ourselves succumb …’

‘Are we in danger, then?’ The question made Munnery anxious. He gulped his drink and began to pace up and down in the channels between the papers. ‘What do you think?’

Fluxman was tempted to say: ‘Open your eyes, man. Take a good look around you.’ Instead he said: ‘Let’s say I’ve seen signs of dissolution. Surely you’ve seen them too?’

‘Minor disorders, yes.’

‘In yourself?’

‘Not really, but I have noticed worrying signs in others.’

‘It’s to be expected that we proofreaders should hold out to the last, that we should be more resistant than the man in the street.’ The mugger on the fairway came into his mind, and he shivered. ‘Which is all the more reason to act now, in concert, while we still have our wits about us.’

Munnery had grown more agitated as they spoke, marching up and down over the pages on the floor, which stuck to the soles of his shoes in untidy wads. Several times he muttered, ‘Patsy …’ For a while, there was nothing but the rustle of his feet. Then he halted before Fluxman and asked: ‘What do you propose?’

‘To begin with, an emergency meeting of the Society. We must come up with a strategy. Late as it is, I believe we can beat back the plague.’

The mugger stumbled into Fluxman’s mind again, and so he told Munnery about him, and also about the bobber he had fished from the water. That reminded him in turn of the Wetland Ramble. ‘I’m afraid my house will be flooded while I’m gone. Would you mind putting the water feature somewhere else? I haven’t had much practice with such things lately … and it’s been a long day.’

With trembling fingers, Munnery unpinned some pages from the back of the door. Fluxman couldn’t help noticing that he left the leaves to float up to the ceiling while the pins spiralled slowly to the floor. There was an ordinance survey map beneath, and he studied it.

‘It can’t go back to the Zoo,’ he said with a worried face. ‘The Stoute Kabouter nursery school’s been squashed in there.’

‘That was probably Banes’s doing.’

In the end, Munnery earmarked a bit of virgin woodland on the escarpment and relocated the Wetland Ramble there among the trees. Constructive effort calmed his nerves at once. He fetched a canal, which was gathering slime behind the gasworks, and put that down in the reeds to make a sort of weir, and rounded everything off with some concrete tables and chairs from a picnic site and a circle of caravans from a roadworkers’ camp (long since abandoned). The effect was bound to be pleasing, as Fluxman remarked.

‘Let’s start looking ahead,’ said Munnery hopefully, ‘to the day when Alibia takes its place among the tourist destinations of the world.’

Dinner was a ratatouille, a veritable drumroll of pepper and aubergine, and a sirloin of beef. Dessert was more of the whiskey dashed over ice cream.

Then Fluxman, exhausted by the exertions of the day, bedded down in the lounge with the Phone Book under his head, while his host withdrew to his study to contact the other Members of the Society. Fluxman listened to the murmuring voice behind the door, and watched the searchlight beams toppling like gargantuan spillikins across the sky behind the window, until he fell asleep. And then it was just the rumble and clash of suburbs and streets under the cover to which his ear was pressed, a sound he had long ago grown used to, and was hardly able to dream without.

*

The next morning in Munnery’s lounge, the Proofreaders’ Society achieved a quorum for the first time in nearly a year. Fluxman had imagined that the others might be awkward in his presence, that his ‘betrayal’ would still rankle, but to his relief the atmosphere was businesslike and bellicose. Munnery had primed the Members and several were dressed for battle – Levitas in his broadcloth waistcoat, Banes in his worsted boilersuit. Wiederkehr was wearing his stetson. Consensus was reached before Mrs Munnery even had time to serve the tea. Those present reaffirmed that they themselves were all that stood between Alibia and its ruination, and that duty called them to make one last effort at restoring law and order. This initiative they resolved to pursue ‘jointly and severally’ (as Banes worded it): they would work as a team, coordinating their actions and lending one another support; but each would also take primary responsibility for a particular sphere of correction, and focus on applying those skills at which he was most adept.

Munnery was put in charge of transposition. The others were encouraged to place their personal collections of maps and plans at his disposal for the duration of the campaign. He would work closely with Figg on insertions and Levitas on alignment. Banes was assigned to reappropriation and given leave to commandeer statute books and municipal records, title deeds and carbon-copy invoices, and to take over and take back at his discretion. The director of restoration was Wiederkehr. It was surmised, rightly as it turned out, that his services would prove invaluable if any of his colleagues applied themselves too zealously to their own tasks. No one appreciated this more than Fluxman, who was responsible for deletions and removals, the most sensitive portfolio of all.

When the toasts had been drunk and the farewells made, when the last of the Members had gone off down the hill, each carrying a little tub of Mrs Munnery’s linguine, Fluxman was left alone to pack his bag. He stood at the window, where a clutch of stray proofs fluttered against the blinds, and looked out onto the sunlit green. Junior lay on his stomach on the grass, with his feet jutting over the bunker and a bucket of golf balls at his shoulder. He held one of the balls in both hands and rested his chin on it. Then, with a flick of his wrists, he sent the ball speeding towards the hole.

*

Fluxman took his leave. He meant to go straight home and set to, but now that his thoughts had turned to the work at hand, he found himself drawn from the path again and again to tinker at the wayside. Little things to begin with, minor repairs to an unhyphenated split pole fence, a badly spaced milestone , a broken win-dow pane … but in the end, an italicized townhouse complex detained him for the better part of the afternoon. The place was an eyesore, nothing but curlecues of stucco and folderols of wrought iron. It took him half an hour to introduce some Roman columns of a plain, upright kind, and another to summon a vine-leaf screen to hide the whole thing from view. He should have referred the matter to one of the others, he thought afterwards, as he went wearily on his way, Figg or Banes would have made light work of it. Or he should have stuck to what he knew best: Strike it out! Away with it!

The effort had exhausted him. He felt uncomfortably disordered. Twice he had to fetch a wandering eye back from the crook of his arm and reattach a limb with conjunctive sinew. And in this agitated state of mind and body, he thought of Ms Georgina Hole, his former fiancée. It was half a year since she had broken off their engagement, and a quarter since she had entered his mind. He went towards her flat.

No one answered his knock. Was she still manning the charity kiosk at St Cloud’s on weekday afternoons? He could wait. He sat down on the doorstep and looked around. The place was getting tatty. When she came in, he would have to tell her to take better care of herself, and offer to lend a hand. He made a few emergency repairs to pass the time, but his thoughts kept drifting. Soon he fell asleep.

He dreamt of Georgina. He dreamt that she had stopped at the Good Cockatoo on her way back from work to share a meal with Bibliotheker, a fund-raiser and friend, whose advances she had been stubbornly resisting till now. On this day of all days. It was ten before she arrived home, and then she found her old flame slumped asleep against the doorpost. He half-opened his mouth, not to accuse her, but to explain that he had come to seek her blessing, even if he had lost her affection. But his tongue was as thick as blotting-paper in his mouth. She prised the rucksack from his embrace and led him inside, made him stretch out on the settee among the ungrammatical scatter cushions and overstuffed pouffes. She unlaced his hiking boots and loosened his bandanna. As she drew a blanket over him, his hands rose of their own accord and held her. To his surprise, she did not rebuff him. He measured the columns of her thighs with the upsilons of his outstretched fingers and thumbs. Then his hands slid over the parenthetical curves of her hips, smoothed a shiver out along the ridges of her ribs and the rounds of her breasts, paused for breath at the full stops of her nipples, rose again over her shoulders, felt the flutter of lashes against their palms and fell away from her flesh in amazement, as she drew back and receded, plunging him into an exclamatory darkness. He reached for a page of her in his mind. Not a jot, not an iota must be lost. Then his eyes and hands moved over her surface, proofing the metrical skeleton concealed in her warming limbs, reconnecting joint to joint, easing the flow of words like water over skin, making her fluent, feeling the prickle of his own gaze on the backs of his hands, tracing with the crumbling nib every pore and fold, every tendon and sinew, the popliteal hollow, the pillowed lips, the pressed ear, the whorled navel, delete and close up, wound and heal, the wet whisper of the font, the long alliteration of her throat, the elliptical flesh of her face, the bone beneath, the tongue between, the mouth, composing every square word of her into a perfectly ordered meaning, into a sentence that meant exactly what it said. Yet when he awoke, dishevelled and alone, this meaning had escaped him.

*

It was Munnery’s idea to remove the Restless Supermarket to the countryside, where they could work on it without fear of injuring passers-by. They had decided to act more circumspectly in such matters, and so the implications of the removal were first examined from every angle. What if it harmed the very people it was meant to help? What if it led to shortages in the surrounding suburbs, to a critical want of staples, to starvation? When such questions had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction, the renowned transposer went to work. He found an abandoned aerodrome in the hinterland, at the end of a country road, and put the Restless Supermarket down there, lock, stock and barrel. On the vacated site, Figg inserted a small section of the Rainbow Chicken Farm to tide the locals over until more permanent measures could be taken. Then the Proofreaders boarded their bus, specially chartered, and took the slower route into the interior.

Even from a distance, when the old control tower had just appeared on the horizon, the Restless Supermarket could be heard grumbling and groaning. Fluxman drew up in the parking lot near the delivery bays, and they disembarked into the noisy air. Then he led them inside and down a corridor to the manager’s office. On the other side of a flimsy wall, they heard the contents of the building churning like an angry sea, and some of them slumped a little, and some puffed out their chests.

A closed-circuit camera, the sole survivor among a dozen installed to combat shoplifting, was still relaying its impressions of the store to a television monitor on the manager’s desk. At first, it appeared to them that this camera had also broken down, and that the screen contained nothing but meaningless static. But then among the squirming motes they began to distinguish fragments of sense, flickering here and there, and they drew fearfully closer and gazed at the screen as if it were a window into the inferno.

The interior of the Restless Supermarket was barely recognizable. The entire space was seething, alive with an indiscriminate, indefatigable jumble of tins, jars, bottles, packets, boxes, bags, all mingled into one substance, whose textures eluded them, being simultaneously soft and hard, fuzzy and sharp, perishable and indestructible. Each element remained vividly itself for as long as they focused on it, and then dissolved back into the irreducible compound as soon as they relaxed their attention. It was like trying to watch one wing in a wheeling flock or one brick in a striding wall, although such things gave no inkling of the frenetic movement, the ceaseless and senseless changing of places with which the products had been charged. Occasionally, the ribs of a shelf gleamed white in the roil, or a chequered floor tile flashed like a tooth.

They stood there mesmerized, and might have gone on standing there until they lost all will to act, had Fluxman not roused them by clapping his Phone Book open on the desk.

Quickly, before they could lose heart, they constructed makeshift desks of cardboard cartons, laid out the documents they had brought with them in their portfolios alongside jars of pencils and rubbers and rulers, and gathered inventories, advertisements, ledgers, marketing plans and flow charts from the filing cabinets. Munnery and Levitas launched into the engineering, locating salients in the soup, righting gondolas and levelling refrigerator units, realigning shelves in the proper parallels, with aisles of the optimum width between, rearranging sections and departments to create a rational flow of custom. Wiederkehr repaved and Figg repapered. And then the two together set about repacking the shelves, tidying up the debris as they went.

It was an enormous labour. The product substance was hard and soft, impenetrable and yielding, solid and liquid. It resisted their efforts to cut into it, to separate parts from the whole. A single item grappled from its clutches and put aside on the end of an empty shelf, in a little white clearing, would maintain its integrity for a moment. But then the substance would begin to exert its viscous attraction, and soon the item would be jiggling and turning on its base, and floating free again into the general mass, where it would be whirled away into restless anonymity. The shelf itself would come loose and be lost in the uproar. The categories had to be built up painstakingly, row by row, line by line, and all the while chaos threatened to overwhelm them.

The Proofreaders worked in shifts. When they were exhausted beyond endurance, they lay down and slept with their twitching hands clasped between their knees. When they were famished, they transposed a tin of something from the stock.

At last, patches of stillness appeared in the tumult. And then a solid shelf or two. The seething died down a little. One day, the space between the shelves and the rafters cleared momentarily and revealed a row of dangling signboards: Tea & Coffee, Breakfast Cereals, Dairy Products, Pet Food, Household Cleaners … The Proofreaders gave a weary cheer. Already, in the mind’s eye and the mind’s nose, they saw the master chefs of Alibia walking enraptured down the gleaming aisles and smelt the aromas of feasts to come. But the battle was far from won. The superstructure was refractory. The gondolas floated off half-laden. The dairy went sour. The overtaxed shelves collapsed. The products kept bubbling back into substance. No sooner was one aisle restored to order, than another rose up clamorously, shedding labels and price tags in promiscuous profusion. From his headquarters in the back room, Fluxman rallied his colleagues again and again. He would not submit. And at the end of a week, the basic shape of the enterprise had been secured.

Night had no meaning in the Restless Supermarket. They laboured on, raising up pyramids of tins and cans, stabilizing barrows of fruit and vegetables, racking and stacking, piling and puzzling, until the shelves began to settle down, rising up and subsiding in waves, as if by general assent, as if a rumour of defeat had run like a swell from aisle to aisle.

Glaring absences became visible. Baked goods were required, said Munnery. They brought in quantities of Chelsea buns, Madeira slabs, Lamingtons, pita-bread with hummus. What about the liquid refreshments? They brought in whiskey, wine in boxes, soda water, ice. Everyone needed something special, some little extra. They added mops, marinades, wonton dumplings, asparagus spears, noodles in the shape of shells. Wiederkehr became quite inventive, importing strings of vanished delicacies he remembered from his childhood. He and Figg devised entirely new dishes, and arranged the ingredients on the shelves by menu, season and refinement of taste, constellations so subtle that only gourmets would appreciate them. Meanwhile, Banes was making his way down the aisles for the last time, straightening labels and marking down prices. Something like peace and quiet descended and endured.

It was then that they noticed the absence of Fluxman. As soon as the tide had turned, he had left his post and gone into the butchery. The air smelt of blood. There was mopping up to do. He must excise sawdust and broadcast desiccated coconut, just as an interim measure. He must delete sub-standard carcases in the freezer room. Munnery found him there, sweeping behind a stiff downpour of plastic curtain, and gave him the news: the sun had risen over the Alibian Sea and the Restless Supermarket was at rest.

*

Although the Wetland Ramble was gone from Fluxman’s yard and a patch of forest rustled in its place, a muddy breath still clung. In the stench that blew into his study, a mixture of dung and waterweeds and feathers, gnawed bones and half-hatched chicks entombed in eggshell, there was a lingering reminder of captivity.

Having risen to shut the window against this poison, he stood gazing at the beeches silvered in moonlight, while a flock of noisy gulls scattered into the heavens. Then he returned with a sigh to the blighted landscape of the Book. The breeze had rifled spitefully through his pages. As he leafed back to his bookmark, his eye fell on:

Lombardo WH Saphire St Imprl Mnt 878-4322

oologi dens Cnstntia

Lombat, D 34 Burrows Rd Blk Hl 642-1986

Lomnitz Z Refinery Rd Pkld Dl 486-0051

Just how the missing half of the Zoological Gardens had landed up in the L’s was anyone’s guess. He had been searching for it for five days; finding it by chance was an affront to his professionalism. He wrung the neck of the blue pencil in the sharpener and put its point down on the first o in oologi …

On second thoughts, he fetched some of Munnery’s catalogues off a shelf and found the section on animal life. He saw that Figg had already been busy among the marsupials. The cage must be bursting! Fluxman deleted a couple of bars in the reference material, a koala and the chubbiest of the kangeroos. And then he thought – what the hell – and put a line through the whole lot of them.

*

The campaign to recapture the Restless Supermarket had been intended as a trial run to prepare the Members for the war of attrition that lay ahead, and it achieved this end. A division of labour was established, and an armoury of weapons tested. A point was made. What remained now was to repeat the point over and over again on a grander and grander scale.

But the Restless Supermarket outdid itself, for Fluxman at least. It proclaimed itself the great offensive against error. It exhausted every potential, it surpassed every anticipation. From that moment on, everything that remained to be done became routine. The initial topographical work – arrangements for mountains, forests and streams, ocean currents and seasonal rainfall, reservoirs and dams, the restoration of mineral deposits and rock faces, the replenishment of slag heaps and landfills – all this could not but seem like a faint echo of flooring and shelving and plumbing.

When it was time for a bit of town planning, Fluxman’s interest quickened. The residential areas and office parks and industrial zones had to be unshuffled and restored to their proper places. There were green belts to loosen, highways to unravel, pylons to restring. The displaced masses of Alibia had flung down their makeshift houses in the buffer zones: now the appropriate social distance could be restored between the haves and have-nots, the unsightlier settlements shifted to the peripheries where they would not upset the balance, the grand estates returned to the centre where they belonged. There was wasteland to play with, and blasted veld, and dead water. The possibilities seemed endless. But when he got down to it, it was no more difficult, and indeed no more important, than the sorting and packing and pricing of boxes and tins on a shelf.

The city pulled itself together. Slowly, the recognizable outlines of Alibia reappeared, as street after street and block after block was knocked back into its familiar, ordinary shape.

It was not a riddle, a puzzle, a paradox, as many supposed. Every little victory had to be earned. The boffins of the Proofreaders’ Society worked overtime. Levered up by their acute pencils, whole paragraphs of the world came and went. Their eyes crossed and recrossed every line of the city streets until the most crooked found their truest delineation. With every hyphen that tacked a building to its neighbour, knit one, purl one, with every colon that suggested a passage from one block to another, with every dotted line that restored a highway to the symmetry of coming and going, the earth drew Alibia tighter to its bosom. It should have been a spectacle, but it was not.

In the corrosive solution of tedium that flowed from this realization, Fluxman’s qualms about his own excesses were dissolved. If ever he went too far, he told himself, and deleted more than was strictly necessary, he could always call on Wiederkehr to undo it again. He became ruthless. First it was dittographies in the Book, people and places, like the Lumleys. Later it was the minor irritations, like that Goosen who refused to answer questions about the price of eggs, and that Schneider who had to go setting up a business with a Sartorius. And then it was the human detritus he found in the margins of the city, the erroneous ones, the slips of the hand, the tramps, the fools, the congenitally stupid, the insufferably ugly. They were incorrigible, he reasoned, and doing away with them, at one painless stroke, was more humane than trying to improve them.

His colleagues shared these frustrations. First Munnery, and then Figg, and then all the others began to create their own amusements – which they passed off as ‘improvements’. In certain areas of Alibian life, they said, there was simply no point in returning to the past. Levitas, for instance, redesigned the Alibian Alps to allow for more pleasant skiing in the foothills and more hazardous climbing on the peaks. He put the General Hospital up on the snowline where the air was more salubrious, and he put the Hotel Grande down on the beachfront, with its wings stacked one on top of the other, so that every room had a sea view, and he gave it a casino and a Ferris wheel and a miniature golf course, because he himself was fond of simple pleasures. The people of Alibia were so grateful for these alterations that Banes, intent on eclipsing the example of his colleague, embarked on a public-spirited campaign of his own. He reappropriated mansions for the homeless, he reassembled the Royal Alibian Golf Course in the wilderness (Munnery was allowed to keep the eighteenth), he reunited families who had been separated by the upheavals. These acts made Banes something of a hero to the lost and the loveless, to widows and orphans, to the homeless and the unemployed.

Experience taught them that nothing is perfect. They reconciled themselves to the errors of judgement and perception that beset the best-planned operations. It rained loafs from Buurman’s Bakery and fishes from the munchipal reservior. The streets were littered with crutchers, rhinocerous products, muslin fundamentalists, celeried employees and their pardners, bonsai boababs, dawgs.

When the waste material piled up, they called for Fluxman. It was enough to make him feel like a street sweeper.

*

In time, everything was returned to its proper place, which sometimes was not the place it had started out, but the place it deserved to end.

Alibia basked in its imperfect glory. Even the Members of the Society – Fluxman aside – had come to consider one error in five pages acceptable. Who would notice the odd waterfall flowing upwards to its source, the icicles on the fronds of the palms, the gondolas marooned in a stream of concrete? Who would begrudge such flaws, or even perceive them, when there was a promenade beside the sea, a bandstand in the park made for old-fashioned melodies, a tavern at the end of a fogbound wynd? The bells of St Cloud’s rebuked the faithless on the hour, the waves kept beating against the quays, the metronome of a searchlight kept time in the absence of the sun.

When peace had been restored, the City Fathers afforded the heroes a victory parade, the grandest that had ever been seen, proceeding now on foot through the streets in a blizzard of ticker-tape, now on barges down the river, and now on sleighs across the frozen canals, and arriving finally at the triumphal arch through which they all passed, first the heroes and then those who had come to honour them, vanishing as they went, drawing the offspring of error after them, and abandoning the city to a state of flawed completion.

All except Fluxman, that is, who came behind in his dignified way, sweeping the last of the delenda up from the gutters with his hoop and stuffing them into his bag. When the streets were clean, he went down to the white beach in front of the casino, where his coracle was moored, rowed out into the bay, and emptied the bag into the water.