The coffee morning people will come. They must see that not all the carpet has been hoovered. What will they see? Still on my knees, I let my gaze fall from the door to the floor.
Down and down. An old grey carpet, in patches worn down to its foundation of warps and wefts, and beyond the carpet bare boards. I smooth my skirt and bend closer. My face is drawn down to a worn corner of the carpet where only islands of wool remain on a sea of lattice threads. Here there are a hundred islands not of delight but of darkness. Only on some of the islands through the thick wool foliage something glitters and beckons – tiny grits of glass which miraculously survived my last hoovering a fortnight ago, now the glittering fragments have been cast up on the islands. Marooned. Marooned. All is flotsam and jetsam here. I ask myself what it would be like to sail on that darkness and visit those greyly haunted isles.
Others are there before me. Dustballs sail like galleons on the dry sea. From one end of the hall carpet to the other is one hundred and twenty-eight days for an individual dust particle travelling steadily by day and by night. A dustball however can do the journey in less than a week. These apparently unwieldy structures are in fact well designed to catch the draughts that come in under the front door. I marvel at their construction. For instance, the piece of fluff nearest me has a structure based on interlocking helixes. Weaker threads, which coil in looser arabesques, run up and down, linking one curve of the spiral with the next, and serving to trap dust particles and other fragments within the structure.
The strongly coiling helixes are made from human hair – mine and Philip’s mostly. The threads without much spring in them seem to come from a dog, though when we last had a dog in the house I really can’t remember. Never mind all that now. They are showing me fear in a dustball.
Magnificent though the dustballs are – as complex as a human brain while yet as graceful as a sand-yacht – they are only the crippled and mindless emissaries of their master. Their complex cerebral coils do not allow them to speak. Nevertheless it is plain that they have been sent to summon me. I dare not breathe, watching to see what the dustball’s message to me is. Like all others its twisted skeleton is made of human hair and in this case mostly mine. It was a sly joke on the part of the master to send this creature to me – a sly joke or a grim warning.
My hairs cannot be rescued from the thrall of the dustball. They are so fine and the convolutions they have been put through are too intricate. They would snap before I could actually extricate them. The dustball itself teeters for a moment and then succeeds in anchoring itself on the fibres of the carpet. It displays itself to me with all the pride of a herald. Its web gleams and sparkles in the artificial illumination of the hall light. Through the grey fibres of its belly-lining I can just make out an angry core of red fluff, some breadcrumbs, even a couple of pieces of wood. Tendrils of the dustball reach up at me. It means that I am to follow it.
Silently we move off. How can I describe it all? Me with my impoverished vocabulary. For instance only a minute or two ago I described the carpet I kneel on as ‘grey’. Now that my eye follows the dustball as it navigates its course between the islands of carpet wool, I see what an inadequate word ‘grey’ was, for the islands even in this poor light are a riot of greens and ochres and other colours that are unknown to the larger world of nature. Nor is it true that if one lands on one of these islands one will find only grits of glass, for now when I look upon the forests, which like mangrove swamps come down to the edge of sea, those forests which first seemed deserted are in fact aswarm with tiny specks of white dust, thousand upon thousand of them. Sometimes they sit alone; sometimes they come together in shapes vaguely reminiscent of human faces and dance as dust-devils. Further inland in these forests of mystery one sees tendrils of hair raising their necks like dinosaurs. Towering over the rest of the forest they are yet sensitive to the slightest breeze.
And the sea itself! The sea which is not a sea. There are so many sorts of sea down here. Many are like the one we travel on now, fixed and rigid with its waves set in dead matter. But there are other seas which are vast pools of dancing energy. Indeed there are seas within seas, so that within this Sargasso expanse of stagnation there are areas of uncontrollable turbulence. Within the dead sea, other microscopically small seas move, and down here there are philosophies which we know nothing of.
No, I can never describe it all. And in any case I am quite distraught with fear, thinking of my destination. By now the dustball I am following has reached the edge of one of the largest islands. This time the dustball does not so much anchor itself on the coast but wreck itself against it. Marooned, marooned. There are nothing except wrecks that travel in or on this sea.
The dustball can go no further. I am to make my way into the interior alone. I will find other guides shortly. The tresses of the dustball wave as if in farewell – but there are I am sure more complex messages in the pattern of the curving of its tresses, if only I could read that pattern.
Reluctantly I turn to press on through the woollen jungle alone. Rather, my eyes do. It is my eyes, only my eyes, that travel, for my body, my huge and earthy body, lies collapsed on the carpet behind my eyes. I cannot imagine that I shall ever have the power to move my body again, now that the glittering dust is in my eyes. The weirdest thing about my journey now is the silence of the forest. The carpet is alive with activity and its undergrowth rich in smells – old socks and mouse-droppings particularly – but everything in the forest proceeds in perfect silence. Threads are snapping and crumbling into dust, small clouds of bluish gas break free from decomposing fragments of food, mites toil through the pile forest looking for stain pools to browse beside, tiny eggs are being laid and hatched, at every moment more tiny particles of dust descend from the upper air to land in the forest – and all in perfect silence.
Threads from some forgotten fabric loop in vast arches over this part of the forest. Up one of these bridges I can see that a white mite is painfully toiling. It does not know where it is going; its search for decay is random and, since there is no intention behind it, it is perhaps not even a search. My lost eyes follow the mite to the top of the bridge. From here one has a view of some thicker threads lying collapsed below and perhaps what may be a dustball in the earliest stage of its formation. It is a riot of disorder, but a frozen riot, an abandoned dinner-party. It seethes and yet is dead.
At length I perceive another mite at the far end of the bridge of hair. It rears itself up on its stumpy tail. It has been waiting for me. It will be my appointed guide to my meeting in the forest. It stands at the foot of the bridge waving its two blobby white arms. It reminds me of an air traffic controller. And with reason. I am still too high and too distanced from the forest. I must shrink my concerns.
It turns away and I creep behind it. There are more of its friends concealed in the foliage near by. We scurry over the rubble of fibres, paper, earth and cloth. Many of the mites we pass in the forest are actually much smaller than my guide and these little creatures scavenge a living from the leavings of the larger mites.
Here all is in fragments, detached from its origins. And if one comes to one of the roads that run through the forest, one does not follow it, for the roads run nowhere, for these roads have been designed by the principle of evil; that is to say, they have not been designed at all.
At last we come to a clearing in the forest. The floor of this clearing is formed by the thick brown lattice of the carpet’s warp and weft. The atmosphere is chill and damp. In the midst of the clearing, I see a huge silvery white coil of wool has succeeded in entwining itself round one of the threads of the lattice. Its serpent sheen is streaked with black, it ripples, and I perceive that it is in some sense or other alive, for its shaking comes from its sporing, and its fibrous stuff spreads all the time a little further around it on the base of the carpet. Closer. Closer and closer. Come yet closer. I see that I have arrived at my destination.