Sedgeweg, a crony of the Tuppers, had many toppings. Some of them were like lids and some like caps. One of particular note was the flat one, the one that decisively lacked fizz. That was unusual, but not unexpected, for Sedgeweg was a ringer, and a Tewkeston one at that, with the distinctive old red shawl and the calipers. His grip was firm, you could say that for him, and you could say much else. People did. Take a walk along the bridle path one morning, just after dawn, and you will hear of little else. Even the birds making a birdy dawn din seem to call out his name, although of course that is just our human fancy at work. Any bridle path hereabouts will be the same, in the mornings, crowded with folk who’ve risen early from their beds, wandering out of doors like sleepwalkers, heading nowhere in particular, with no particular business. It may be the pong of the bridle paths that attracts them, in their dozens, woken from dreams of pigs upon gravel, always the same dream, shared by so many, it is quite a wonder. After all, this is not pig country, hasn’t been for a hundred years or so, long before Sedgeweg’s time. By the time he came along it was all geese, or otters, or just vast tracts of cement. His parents had both been among those who poured the cement, without much in the way of skill, but with enthusiasm. You need to be keen to perform certain actions, when you’ve not been apprenticed to them. But Sedgeweg knew ringing backwards, he’d been trained to it. Lots were, once. You’d be surprised how readily he took to it, all things considered, by which ‘things’ I mean his dumps and flops and clownishness. Each in turn he struggled with, but defeated. He was a decent man. Some, on the bridle path of a morning, have it that he cannot count and never could, but they are wrong. A ringer unable to count would be a strange creature indeed, as strange in its own way as those otters that now prevail where once the pigs held sway. They are not quite like any other otters, or at least any you are likely to chance upon at a standard riverbank. Take your binoculars or a telescope and have a look, you’ll see what I mean. 

Chunk Theory is the theory that everything can be crumbled into chunks the better to apprehend its meaning. Chunks are very different to, say, lumps or clods or crumbs or bits, and must certainly never be mistaken for smithereens. The proper definition of the chunk is given in the standard work on Chunk Theory, Chunk Theory, A Primer, by the Theory’s original theoriser, Gustav Chunk. Chunk was, of course, not the name he was born with, it is a pseudonym he hit upon the better to identify himself with the Theory he propounded. When he was not writing about chunks, Chunk busied himself destroying all trace of his true surname, so successfully that today we know him only as Chunk and do not have an atom of evidence regarding his real name. There is even some doubt as to whether or not his first name was Gustav but, as the parlance of today has it, let’s not even go there.

Chunk was fond of demonstrating the beauty of his Theory by physically crumbling things into chunks, even things that do not readily lend themselves to crumblement. Faced with such a thing – a public telephone kiosk, for example – Chunk had no qualms about deploying hacksaws, axes, large heavy hammers and similar tools in order to effect his goal. He could regularly be seen marching about his town smashing things to bits, although when challenged he would protest that he was engaged in the “assisted crumbling of things into chunks”. And boy oh boy was he challenged! He made innumerable complaints that he was being followed about by municipal cohesion officials and coppers, arguing that such stalking was a form of entrapment. Much of the Primer was written in the waiting rooms of various courts and assizes where Chunk was due to face sanction.

He was the kind of man who tended to topple over when shoved with sufficient force, and this led him to refine his Theory in later years. Shoving and toppling were to be incorporated alongside crumblement and chunks without doing damage to the premisses of the original Theory, save for the sort of collateral damage one might expect. How it would all have held together is something we can only guess at, for the promised second edition of the Primer never appeared. Chunk himself was cagey whenever he was asked about it, which was seldom, as very few people – very, very few people – were remotely interested in his work. One Chunkist commentator claimed that only four copies of the Primer were ever sold, each of them to cronies with whom Chunk used to hang around in the streets of his town, laden with axes and hammers and slicers, eyeing up likely targets for assisted crumbling.

But there are other Chunkist commentators who hold radically different views. Indeed, the most intriguing feature of the whole business is that Chunkist commentators, disputants, devotees, fellow-travellers and hangers-on vastly outnumber the total number of people who have ever even laid eyes on a copy of the Primer, let alone read the damned thing. This signal fact has led to an offshoot of Chunk Theory known as Chunk Theory Theory, a field which has spawned an entire academic industry populated by beardy good-for-nothings who would be better employed digging drainage ditches, some of whom, apparently, actually do such drainage ditch digging, in between penning abstruse articles for the numberless Chunk Theory Theory journals.

I went to interview one such peasant scholar for this piece, but when I approached him, he shoved me with considerable force, and I toppled into the drainage ditch he had just completed digging. Such are the perils of Academe. I brush them aside, for I am both hoity and toity and I know where the bodies are buried. My father was a gravedigger, and his father before him, and they knew not only where the bodies were buried but on which side their bread was buttered, and they knew their onions too. You will rarely find a peasant scholar, Chunkist or otherwise, who knows such things. I was minded to follow the family gravedigging tradition, but I proved too weedy to handle a spade. Ironic, I suppose, that I end up flailing helplessly on my back at the bottom of a drainage ditch while a Chunkist starts to shovel chunks of crumbled earth over me, like a scene from a cheap horror film. But I shall abide, though I crumble to dust, dust in crumbled chunks, and in each crumbled chunk a worm that burrows.

I am going to tell you how I took my revenge on the monster Babinsky, but first I have to say a few words about the duckpond. Well, I don’t have to, but I want to, to clear my head. It was the kind of duckpond that had clouds of gnats hovering over it, and from which the ducks had long since fled, supplanted by swans, particularly savage swans, so rightly it ought to have been called a swanpond rather than a duckpond, but these terms have a way of sticking. At least for me they do. I tend to use the same names for things as I did when I was still tiny, which was a very long time ago, so long ago that I had never even heard of Babinsky. Nor had the world heard of Babinsky then, for he was yet to commit his terrible crimes. Funny to think that I grew up in a world so innocent.

This duckpond was one of the first ponds I came to in my days of eggy Wanderlust. You know how it is, when you stuff yourself full of eggs, hard and soft, and feel compelled to go a-roaming o’er the hills and the meadows until you strike upon a duckpond or two. I no longer eat eggs, and I no longer go a-wandering as I did in those days. When I had a belly full of eggs I had vim and a compulsion. Rare was the day I did not stamp across fields grinding daffodils underfoot, on my way to a pond, in the teeth of storms. The ducks are gone, and the swans make a din, but the gnats still hover, and now my head is clear and I can tell my tale.

What is that Holland-Dozier-Holland song, the one about “Empty silence surrounding me / Lonely walls they stare at me”? I would sing it to you if I could sing. Not the whole song, you understand, just those lines, to give you an idea of the circumstances in which I write. Solitude and silence and gloom – just the ticket. In the past, when Babinsky still roamed the earth, I had to write when and where I could, on the deck of a packet steamer or out in the wind and the rain on a pier or bundled in the back of a cab careering along broad urban boulevards. But now I can choose, and I choose a room of gloom. There is just me and my tortoise, Destiny’s Child, and we are content.

I was at the duckpond when I heard Babinsky’s name for the first time. Swans had already frightened away the ducks, and I was, in those days, very keen to learn as much as I could about the intricacies of swan behaviour patterns. I camped out in tentage at the edge of the pond for what I hoped would be a jolly fortnight. On the second day, reports reached me of a terrible enormity committed by Babinsky at a nearby farmyard. It was the kind of thing Truman Capote might have written about, but was certainly not a fit subject for a song by Brian and Edward Holland and Lamont Dozier. As for me, I had not become the word-drunk penman I am now, so it did not occur to me to write about it. No, I hid inside my rented tentage and blubbed like a baby. When I was done I hied over to the farmyard to see what horrors the monster had wrought. Then I vomited into a churn.

I was singing Hosannahs at a service in a consecrated cabin in the foothills of some very important mountains when next Babinsky struck. Earlier I told you I cannot sing, but Hosannahs are different. Try them and you will see. I felt it imperative to finish the Hosannah in spite of the havoc Babinsky had wrought, at an off licence in a village in a neighbouring foothill, and thankfully the rest of the choir agreed with me. How I treasure the memory of that mighty hymn of praise! It was like a slap in the face to Babinsky, or at least that is how it seemed. We did not learn until later that day that he had gone on immediately to down an airliner, using the same method as deployed by Colonel Stuart in Die Hard 2 (1990).

You may be wondering what the coppers were doing all this time. It grieves me to say that they were utterly witless. Their photo-fit showed a lugubrious man with a pencil moustache and pimples and one eye alarmingly larger than the other. In other words, almost the opposite of Babinsky. The tape recording they claimed was of Babinsky making one of his criminal demands turned out to be of Mick Jagger engaged in idle chitchat. Worse, the psychic investigator attached to the case was only able to communicate with long-dead Aztecs. I began to realise that if Babinsky were ever to be brought to justice, it would fall to me.

In truth, I wasn’t interested in justice. I wanted revenge. The farmyard, the off licence, the airliner, the countless other targets of his unquenchable criminality… it mattered not where or how he struck. I knew it was me he was after. And yesterday, at long last, I put an end to his reign of terror after, what, thirty, forty years?

I saw him at the duckpond. I went out that way partly for old time’s sake and partly because I still take a vague interest in the way swans conduct themselves. I saw a stooped and shambling figure walking a dog around the pond. Don’t ask me what kind of dog it was, I neither know nor care. How typical of Babinsky to be walking a dog around a duckpond, as if his soul was spotless! I rushed at him without warning and bashed him over the head with a spade, and he fell. I picked up the dog and wrung its neck and then I bashed Babinsky’s head in with repeated blows of the spade. Then I threw him and his dog into the pond, where the particularly vicious swans made short work of them.

I walked slowly home to my room of gloom with my spade slung over my shoulder, and then I stuffed myself with eggs. I felt young again.