WHERE
IS WAFTING MAN?
Where can he be, that Wafting Man whose name was "Wafter" Willims, although it was really Bryn? The last time seen he was sitting there, right there where you are not sitting now, in a different house and indeed another dimension. It was he who was that rusty man of many a useless lyric and three four or five chord strum, yet with the ability to make most idiot busking acquire the status of classics among those who heard them, which were almost noneone. He could have been a famo man, despite the habit of his friend The Excellent Kid (himself a rocking popster of same fictional status) to write small yet wordy scenarios ridiculing his musicoid ability or as was implied in said texts lack of. Yet this was merely affectionate parody, for no matter how many well-arranged pages of chord sequentials and lyriques Kiddo put down for posterior, never could he achieve the simplicitode and dumb chuckle of the Wafting One's eg I've Got the Scringes or Putting Green Man. But where is Wafting Man? Is he under the sofa? Is he up on the roof? Could he perhaps be far away and overseas and nowhere near his questioner at all? Or might he be over there in the crowd wot thronged about the City Centre here in Pilmo Hub, not visible for his mobbedness or maybe for his extreme change of look since last looked at?
These are the thoughts that tromped through the thinkery of Excellent Kid, now known as RJ Bordello but without the RJ, at least to those who knew him. Unchanged for lo these umpteen years, still long of hair and wearing, surely they can't be the same black PVC strides, black sandals, black T-shirt WITH NOTHING ON IT!!! but more black, and bright orange glasses, Bordello had written 5002 songs, had more than 57 musicians join and leave Bordello Band, was playing regular Saturday nights at the Windbreak Inn and had 403 demo tapes returned with sorry it's not quite wot we're looking for at the moment. He had worked for the local paper as a ragged wretch for 11 years, when he had suddenly gone stark staring bonkers, jammed the boss's head into a stapling machine, taped an egg inside the manager's hat, and poured a printer's hat of ink up the nose of that blithering idiot of whom there's always one in the office and he couldn't stand. He had then sprayed his resignation in pretty fluorescent colours across the front of the building and treated himself to the luxury of a nervous breakdown which gave him ample material for his next 500 approx songs. And that was at least two years after he had last seen Wafting Man sitting in the front room where he was sitting.
Bordello's current situation was that of struggling musician and songwriter and he was being plagued by unhappy feelings that he no longer really existed save to ask the question "Where is Wafting Man?" in order that Wafting Man's whereabouts might be explained in an informative and entertaining manner.
This was quite true, apart from the informative and entertaining bit.
However, given the nature of the world in which Bordello now found himself, it was quite possible that he might be brought back to at least provide a little colour to some future scene, when we might be provided with a glimpse into the musical world of the Kid, also known as Zombie Ramshackle and, er, that's it. He brightened at the prospect, and allowed a rare smile to tickle his lips.
Where Wafting Man was at this moment was in quite another time and space, if time and space could be said to play any part in his situation, which they could. The time was whatever it wanted to be and the space was that in which he stood. Around that space was an otherwise empty room; white walls, floor and ceiling and lit without a light source. There was a chill in the ambience, and Wafter in his patterned shirt and sleeveless blue jumper thought perhaps it had always been this way, when suddenly it wasn't.
"Wafter Williams, aka The Natterjack Toad, aka The Forgotten Man, aka Druid Woodlice."
"?"
"Are you, or are you not, the man wot writ the very classic and barely known songs I've Got the Scringes and Putting Green Man?"
"Yes I did, voice without a face wot seems to speak without words being said."
"You're in the wrong story then, we were looking for Chunk Bedrock, Hero of the Galactic Empire. Can we drop you anywhere?"
So it was that Waft was replaced from whence he came, but six feet to the north so as not to be crunched into the pavement by the falling safe from beneath which he had been plucked the previous nanosecond.
"Phew! That was a stroke of luck!"
And he continued walking down the road, as in his all-but-forgotten classic Walking Down The Road, leaving behind him a group of startled labourers who had expected him by now to be little more than an ickysplatt on the stones, and who immediately left the story forever.
Waft was back in his home town of Pilmo after a gap of several years involving college, getting a job, leaving it, journeying to the stars and beyond (possibly not really) before deciding to return to his previous pointless existence as a cipher in somebody else's fiction. Already he had met absolutely nobody he used to know, and as he wandered through the pulsating mediocrity that constituted the heart of the city he wondered again why on earth he had allowed himself to be recreated. The Hub was no place for an adventure, its citizens seemingly intent on doing completely unnoteworthy things like shopping and, well shopping anyway, it was a shopping centre after all. However, as he approached the mighty forest that bisected the Hub, Armadillo Grove, he saw, sitting on the edge of the ornamental fountain and tall pointy abstract thing-nobody-knew-what-it-was-and-nobody-liked-except-the-Council-who-had-paid-for-it-with-everybody-else's-money, a familiar figure seated by a large sack and surrounded by pigbins. It was apparently feeding them from the sack with chucklenuts for which pigbins will be exceeding brave and perch on one's hand or other convenient bit. Waft caught a few mumbles which seemed to indicate that the pigbins were the figure's only real friends; then it threw the last of the chucklenuts from the sack, and as soon as they realised there were no more the pigbins took off en masse and headed for the bottom of town, where, had Waft been able to see that far, he would have seen another figure with a large sack sitting in the ornamental gardens in the shadow of a tall pointy abstract thing-wot-etc.
As the figure rose, sighing "luv them pigbins", Waft suddenly realised that it was none other than his old pal, the all-in-black, long-of-hair Bordello, except that it was all in white with a crewcut and it was somebody else.
So on he tromped, a pointless man in a pointless town doing a pointless thing, in search of a plot.
It might be instructive at this juncture to explain the ways and means of Armadillo Grove. Some years back Pilmo Council had tried to tame it, and to this end had sent teams of surveyors to work out just how far it extended. None had returned. they sent a further team. None had, you guessed it. They sent intrepid adventurer Chunk Bedrock, who had in fact re-emerged in another dimension where he became a galactic hero, but as far as the Council knew he never returned. Eventually, by means of some of the higher forms of mathematics and state-of-the-art technology, a team of chartered scientists had come back to them with the information that Armadillo Grove was a nexus of cosmic forces which converged at that point to form an area which defied all normal rules of the space-time continuum. This meant, they said, that it ate people, and was best left well alone. They were almost completely wrong, but it did mean that the Council decide to leave it as it was, however that might be, which is exactly what the Grove had paid for, mostly in coconuts and beans. The surveyors were currently in a far-flung tropical paradise sipping Euphoria Sunsets and dancing to strange musiks, and the scientists were really members of the Art Conspiracy.
The Grove was, in fact, the earthly extrusion of something else; nobody has ever been able (or willing) to determine what, but there have been stories of strange animals poking their heads out of the bushes, deciding they don't think much of what they see, and poking them back in again. These are all untrue, as animals such as the girophant and tringlemetimbers are, of course, quite common in stories such as these (ie they are therefore not strange). Don't worry about it.
Wafter had been in the Grove many times, and had never encountered anything more frightening than the stare of a wol, but the many myths surrounding it and the fact that it was possible to wander lost for days (or forever) (or 4 days) kept most people out. This was the scene of many a childish story concerning boggleymen and garglywomen, and in this way the presence of the Grove enriched the lives of those with whom we are barely concerned. Its spiritual effects were far more influential than its physical ones, as it stretched only from Juynbluym Street at the far north of the Centre to Old Fred Street two blocks away, and covered less than an acre of the Hub, but once you got in it, it could keep you there forever if it felt like it. To say that it was much bigger inside than outside would be like saying that an egg was just the tiniest bit eggy, but more of an understatement.
Wafter's reason for entering the Grove in the days when he was little more than a nerk was to visit the legendary Scringestone of legend. He fancied it was these pilgrimages that had kept him for so long free of the Scringes; actually his total lack of Scringedness, celebrated in his classic but little-known song I've Got The Scringes (irony), was due to the Scringes being an invention of his own imaginings. It's the Warbles you've got to watch out for, as in the classic but little-sung song I've Got The Warbles, by Mr Warbles on the Warbles label, which can even now be found in its hundreds in all the record collections of a thousand bedsits, no not really, only under Mr Warbles's bed. As our hero (Wafter, not Mr Warbles, who is merely an incidental character with a toothbrush moustache and a bottle-green cardigan) recalled the many warm, sunny days he had sat and meditated in the shade of the Scringestone under the pouring rain, he was completely unmoved by nostalgia, but instead decided to visit his friend Mervyn who lived in the lighthouse at the top of the cloud-busting skyscraper that was the Civil Centre, wherein dwelt all the sundry cogs, dead-heads and mercenaries who saw to the running of the city, read newspapers, did their nails and let the select few actually do all the work, although nobody seemed to know who these select few actually were.
As Wafter subwayed beneath the main road of Regal Facade and carried himself safely under the snarling taxis, trundlebuses and personal transport devices weaving in and around each other in a bid to be first to the next set of traffic lights, Bordello turned the corner holding a divining rod which he had just purchased from a hardware shop under the assurance that it was just the thing for tracking down erstwhile colleagues, it having been trained over several television shows that specialised in surprising people with their long-lost relatives, friends and strangers, and fine-tuned over the lyrics to the popular but little-liked Oh I Am The Wafting Man. Suddenly the rod jerked, twitched, sang a few bars of Putting Green Man, zanged towards the subway, threw Bordello over its twig, and leapt into the nearest litter bin waving a banner proclaiming "This is where I belong!"
"Ripped off again," muttered the Bord, and stomped off to the Grotto coffee bar for a sulk and a dose of caffeine. We shall not see his like again, until the next time.
The Civil Centre had a front of a dozen pairs of doors, as usual all of them locked except one, and Wafter joined the queue of council house applicants, housing benefit complainants and various assorted hopefuls filing through the bottleneck. As he settled down to a good 90 minutes' shuffle, a little boy with his mummy turned to look.
"Are you him?"
"No, I'm me."
"Oh, I thought you were the singing strumming man who writ all those classic but little-famed songs about I've got the somethings, and thingy blue man."
"Maybe I'm him then."
"Coo gosh! Really?"
"Could be!"
"Wow! Mum, it's Faded Mohair Billy, the man who sings I've Got The Dingies and Potting Shed Man!"
Mummy turned and slapped him round the head. "Don't be stupid, Faded Mohair is a poor grey man from the swamps of Kernow who died ten years ago and is now serving petrol on the moon! That man's sunburn red, was born ten years from now and tosses pancakes in Omelette Emperor!"
Ho hum, thought Waft.