Ozymandias' rockery

"See that, Len? That's limedust."
His seven year old son, Leonard, strains his seatbealt to look out the
window at the cone of peach-coloured sand in a passing field. It
flashes by like thigh in a peep show.
"Why's it orange? I thought lime was green."
"No, Len. You're thinking of the fruit."
"Why's it just lying there?"
"Because the farmers use it as fertiliser. Hold on a mo."
He pulls into a lay-by at the side of the road, turns the engine off
and hops out, crunching on gravel.
"Sorry, Len. Wait here - I won't be long."
He runs back down the road into the spider shadows of mountain ashes
that lace the way they came. The piece of stone he saw from the window
is still there, at the foot of a pillar of light, shining white as
chalk at the side of the road. He kneels to examine it - probably from
a spoil heap, dislodged from the hillside by rain. He knows the area
around Ryder Point is full of disused quarries, and other, smaller
stones must litter the slopes, but this one's a beaut. It's shaped
almost like a statue's weathered head, with soft-angled sockets,
feminine features, the curve of a chipped ear, which he strokes with a
thumb.
He clutches it, grunting, shifts the weight onto his biceps and rises
to his feet.
"What do you need an old stone for?" Len asks, as his father dumps it
in the back of the landrover.
"I'm thinking of building a rockery when we get back."
He climbs into the driver's seat, brushing dust from his hands and
coat sleeves.
"So we are going back then?"
"Of course we are. We can't stay up here forever."
He turns the key, coughing.

They left Dunwich around 3 o' clock on Friday afternoon. At two, he
listened to the phone ringing for the fourth time that day, resting his
elbows on the pages of a local newspaper. It rang feebly, like a drowsy
wasp sputtering in Autumn. He tallied the rings under his breath, but
soon lost count. When it finally stopped ringing he went to the foot of
the stairs and hollered, "Leonard! Pack your bags with three days worth
of clothes and whatever else you want to take with you. Now,
please!"
Leonard appeared on the landing, swaying and biting his thumb. He
looked at his father with a quizzical expression.
"Where are we going?"
"Up to your aunt's."
"Why?"
"I think it would be a nice idea."
Waving off Leonard's protest, he went to pack a twelve litre rucksack,
and didn't really think about what he was putting in it. He combed his
hair and placed the comb on the bedside table. He closed the curtains
and went to the bathroom to turn off the central heating. He turned the
hall light on and bolted the back door.
"Are you ready, Len?"
"Give me a chance!" came the reply.
And the phone started ringing again.

They stopped at McDonalds for tea. Neither of them had been there for
years due to Leonard's father's ethical concerns, which were largely
inherited from Leonard's mother. But he didn't have the time or the
money for anywhere else, not in his present situation. It was dark and
he'd driven the best part of a hundred and fifty miles, all the way
intermittently kneading his temples and remembering items he should
have packed, things he should have done before leaving.
Just carrying the tray to the table made his fingers moisten and his
hair feel steeped in grease; he recalled his comb lying on the bedside
table and clucked his tongue. Leonard tore into his Happy Meal, and
whilst delving into its innards, asked, without looking up, "Why didn't
you ask Miffy come with us?"
His father paused mid-chew.
"Miffy's?not right for us, Len. I don't think it would have worked, so
I called it off. You know how it is with women - you've seen the TV
shows."
"You said you'd be happy with any woman, so long as she loved you. I
think you just try to be unhappy, dad."

He spots another attractive piece of stone and slows down. In the
passenger seat, Leonard kicks his feet and clacks his way through his
father's tape collection, eventually selecting T'Pau. His father can't
find a suitable place to stop, and soon decides it would be too far to
walk back anyway. He moves the landrover back up a gear.
"This lady looks nice, dad," Leonard tries to show him the front cover
of the tape. "She's got hair like fire!"
"Don't play matchmaker, Len, there's a good boy. I think we'd do
better to survive without any Miffy's or Tissy's or Prissy's or Carol
Deckers. We could move to a monastery or something."
"I don't want to move to a monastery!"
"You don't want to go back to school, do you?"
"No," Leonard pouts, and sinks himself into a sulk.
His father turns his thoughts to rockeries and monasteries.

He found a rockery in their front garden while cleaning up the empty
cans that had been thrown there. It was buried in a shock of nettle and
dandelion, loose but intact. Whoever built it had started out using a
mixed bag of rock - from granite and masonry to lime and sandstone -
only to run out half way and finish the job with hunks of concrete,
which made the completed rockery look like it belonged on a demolition
site. He consequently removed most of the concrete and put it in a skip
down the road. He spent the ensuing days searching in vain for good
pieces of rock to finish the thing off properly.

He steals a glance over his shoulder at the defaced statue head in the
back, and feels reassured. Then he looks at Leonard, who has given up
sulking and is thoroughly engaged in T'Pau's lyrics. The trip was a
good idea - he needed to get a little control over his environment.
Birmingham has been stifling him lately.
He takes the turning into Cromford and keeps an eye out for a parking
space. There are plenty; today, Cromford is a barren world.

Scarthins, however, is more crowded than he expected, though the
visitors move as if blindly. Some cram themselves in between the
leaning bookcases, running fingers along battered spines, squatting on
stools - others squeeze round corners, tracking the ticker tape labels
to the 'R' and 'S' of general fiction, getting lost in dead ends and
feigning interest in the local geography books. The women on the till
are in deep and fluvious conversation about the film adaptation of
'1984', made when the title was most apt and thus dubbed 'the film of
the year'. The smell of decaying parchment rises from everything.
Leonard in tow, he hugs the wall and moves along until he uncovers the
narrow staircase leading to the upper echelons and tea rooms. They
creep up in single file, moving past columns and drifts of books, extra
shelves built into cubby holes and tiny Lewis Carroll doorways barred
with great towers of atlases.
He drops Leonard off in the children's section and explores some of
the newly opened rooms. One is a small conservatory that backs out onto
a first floor garden. Sunflowers crowd the windows, blocking out the
sickly sun. Behind the door is a shaft of paperbacks arranged
precariously so that they perhaps resemble the bent neck of a cripple.
They are guarded by a paper sign:

'Rooting about in this heap AM STRENGSTENS VERBOTEN!
(Webensgefahr)'

He likes the atmosphere of the room, and the absence of other
consumers. After a more thorough scan at an easier pace, he roots
himself in front of one bookshelf. The books are all paperbacks from
the same series, first edition pocket books, orange and white,
dirt-encrusted and fragile.

The third shelf from the bottom:

Light on Moscow, My Finnish Diary, They betrayed Czechoslavakia, The
Truth About France, The Problem of India, The Remaking of Italy, How
the Jap Army Fights, Ourselves and Germany, Europe in Chains

The shelf above that:

The Great Illusion - Now, Aftermath, Planning the War, One Man Against
Europe, God in a World at War, Why Not Prosperity?, People's War,
Blackmail or War, The Attack from Within, The Press, The Case for
Family Allowances, Where do we go from here?

A shelf at his eye level:

Science and World Order, Health of the Future, The Future of Medicine,
Venereal Disease in Britain?

The top shelf:

I was Hitler's Prisoner, Young Citizen, One Man Against Europe,
Guerrilla Warfare

?by Yank Levy. He lingers on it for a moment. The his fingers, like
callipers, move to a political atlas, stuffed in at the end but
protruding like a fat lip. He opens it carefully and sifts through the
pages. Printed in 1940, it is divided into a hundred brief entries,
some showing tables of figures, others basic maps.

24. Danzig?.
36. Scandinavian Difficulties
40. The Dodecanese Islands
56. Jugoslavia, How Constituted
65. Oil in the Caucasus
70. European Suicide Statistics
82. Burma
96. The World's Coal Production
The top three are the United States - 352, 000, 000, United Kingdom -
231, 870, 000, and Germany - 186, 000, 000
97. The World's Oil Production
US - 166, 000, 000, USSR - 28, 000, 000, Venezuela - 26, 000,
000.
98. The World's Iron Ore Production
US - 37, 200, 000, USSR - 14, 000, 000, France - 13, 100, 000
99. The World's Copper Ore Production
US - 501, 000, Chile - 351, 400, Canada - 265, 800
100. The World's Tin Production
Malay - 43, 000, Dutch East Indies - 27, 700, Bolivia - 25, 600

Coal, oil, iron ore, copper ore, tin. Plinths of the modern world? He
closes the book, electing to buy it.

He moves around the rest of the shop, collecting three more books over
the next half hour - a collection of war stories, a history of the Holy
Roman Empire and a Virginia Woolf novel. They'll hold his own bookshelf
together if nothing else. He remembers that he has to be back for his
sister's roast dinner. She urged them both to save room for the lemon
cream pie -
"It's the lemon that curdles the milk and gives it that refreshing
tang!"

Before picking up Leonard, he checks that the hardback edition of 'The
Struggle for Mastery in Europe' is still where he remembers it being.
It is; complete with a short letter inside written by the author, A.J.P
Taylor, and addressed to the previous owner, in reply (or so he
gathers,) to a complaint about a section of the book. The envelope is
clean and creamy as wet plaster - he opens it with carefully,
discretely.
"You are absolutely right?" the letter begins - he skims the rest and
puts it back in the envelope, allowing the black waves of handwriting
to comfort him in their odd way, and hang in the air as if they were
tricks of light, before dissolving.
As he turns to go, he is confronted by another visitor - an old man
the shape of an origami crane, his jaw jutting forward, his forehead
bearing down, hard-edged as a slab, his visible teeth in the process of
turning to the colour of limedust. The old man nods at 'The Struggle
for Mastery in Europe', and speaks with the confidence of a poet.
"Unsettling, isn't it? The letter, I mean. Like a sort of time
capsule, wouldn't you say?"
"Yes, it arouses a strange feeling," he agrees. "Um. I wonder where
all the unbought books will go."
"Oh yes?"
"Well?.they can't keep opening up new rooms to put them in. They've
got to go somewhere else at some point?.presumably."
"Yes, it's sort of like an elephant graveyard! They just keep finding
new rooms though, don't they? Tell me," the old man moistens his lips.
"Tell me, have you read the Shelley's Ozymandias?"
"No. I haven't."
"Ah! 'Look upon these works, ye mighty, and despair.' The letter, you
see - it reminds me of that poem. The gist is that Shelley meets an
antique traveller, as he calls him, who has seen the remains of the
statue of Ozymandias, the Egyptian king. And written on the base of the
statue is 'Look upon these works, ye mighty, and despair.'
"Now, he obviously meant there to be some great achievement to look
at, a great city, say, but there's nothing but desert around. So at the
same time as understanding how those words came to be engraved upon the
statue's base, we have that other voice. The voice that asks us, in the
same breath, with the very same words, to despair at what this means,
that all things will come to dust and sand. Who, or what is this voice?
Where does it come from? Do you not find a similar voice haunts
Taylor's letter to the former owner?"
The old man shows his tinted teeth.
"I see what you mean. That's what's perhaps so fascinating about it,
yes?that it's haunted. It has a haunted feel to it, I guess."
He scratches his ear, thinking, 'What a load of bull!' The old man
seems to be moistening his lips in preparation for another round of
hushed conversation, so he quickly cuts him off:
"I'd better pick up my son and pay for these."
"Oh yes? Very good. Splendid talking with you."
They shuffle past each other.

"Come on, Leonard."
"Will you buy this, dad?"
Leonard slips a slim paperback into his hand. He adds it to his
bundle, and they walk down the stairs together.

On the way back, he sees a square stone building at the side of the
road, roughly the size of a pillbox. He recalls it vaguely from years
back, when he came this way on the grocery round with his own father.
They pull in, and he gets out to sniff about. Two of the building's
walls have fallen in, and the roof has collapsed completely into the
bare body. He moves some of the rubble out of the way and selects two
relatively clean, firm pieces of stone to put in the back of the
landrover. A pigeon caroos from the treetops.
"Isn't that looting, dad?"
"No, Len. No one's going to do anything with that old thing until it
becomes dangerous. Then they'll just clear it all away."
They drive off.
Around them, the world opens out like a crumpled map, into wide
valleys and fields bordered by dry stone walls. Leonard asks, "When
you're done with your rockery, are you going to mend some of these
walls then?"
He looks out at the walls, and some of them are indeed in a state of
disrepair. The farmers have put up wire fences behind the weaker
areas.
"I might."
"Bet you can't. I've see it on TV. You have to do years of training to
do it. You have to be born into a wall building family."
"Well, the farmers obviously can't afford to pay wall-building
families anymore."
Leonard goes silent for a while, then:
"Were we a wall-building family before we moved, dad? They said on the
telly that in a way it's like building the pyramids."
"I don't think we were, no."
"Did granddad build walls?"
"No, no. He worked at the quarry though."
Leonard perks up, excited.
"Really?"
"Yeah. For a while, that is. Then he worked at the lead mines, and
manned the furnaces at the firebrick factory some time after that. None
of it was really very good labour. You had to work all day six days a
week just to stay alive."
"Wo! So we're pretty lucky then?"
"That's right."

He takes another glance at the stones in the back, and thoughts of
monasteries creep once more into his head. Then, for a moment, he can
taste the lemon cream pie, and smell smoke on the hearth, and hear the
telephone ringing in the hall, and considers the possibility of
possession.