Weirdtongue (19)
Continued from: HERE.
aka The Nemophile (19)
It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Feemy Fitzworth no longer needed a physical meatcart to tote his wares around Victorian London – but, if pinpointed, it was the moment when he became the meatcart himself. So many words had been ingested by his ‘persona’, swelling his glands into even fattier tissues – and he used the steaming heat of the weather that often attacked London in those days to cook the slices he would later slice from his belly quarters and hocks from his hind-calves and heifers from his humpback. A walking carvery.
But without the words he would never have found himself in such a (lucky?) position where he was a self-perpetuating purveyor of cat’s meat for the clipped-back folk of Lower Thames Street. The words used on his behalf immediately turned into fat or flesh or sometimes pre-cooked meat upon his previously lean-shanked hams as soon as they hit the vicinity of his mean gait in front of the soon-to-be-discarded meatcart, discarded, at first, by becoming a ghostly meatcart being towed behind him amid the excited imaginary coos and shrieks of now ghostly children, who had died from food poisoning or simply been stuck up chimney-flues. The cart later - in dreams if not in ghostly form - soon took on the traits of the Weirdmonger’s medicine wagon on Weirdmonger Wheels. Cat’s meat liquidised into doses of linctus to stave off Flew or Quinsy. But then, when the shape of a giant circus tent grew from the canvas wagon, Feemy left the dream before it finished, and dreamed of other things, like the tall Captain Bintiff and his way of talking Weirdtongue. Then, as already indicated, Feemy became the meatcart himself simply because the words said so.
Worse dreams returned to frique and vex the mind of Feemy. He could not endure the strain of toting himself round the streets as a mound of steaming dung disguised as meat (as it later became). He would often doze off within the shade of St Paul’s Dome during the unseemly summers that a backward echo of global warming surprisingly caused without any history books noticing … listening to the ghostly Luftwaffe bombers from the future, while pre-filling the role that Padgett Weggs would later play in a similar position on the pavement (60 years’ hence) as he filled out the silhouette that had once been Feemy’s.
Captain Bintiff stood statuesque against his own larger silhouette, wagging a huge protuberance from his mouth – such a rude gesture that Feemy wondered if the school playground chant would be spell enough to ward off the curses from the sound of language thus produced: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names or words will never change me.
Or even ringtones.
CONTINUED HERE.
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