Years of practice had made of Fluxman a shameless scrutineer. He stepped closer to the wall and examined the peeling skin. Glacier ~ granite ~ grasslands ~ grike. It was Munnery’s ‘Dictionary of Geographical Terms’. His life’s work. The page proofs. Simoom ~ sinkhole ~ slickensides ~ solifluction. Fluxman tugged at a few dog-ears. Every page was securely attached with tacks or loops of tape, drawing pins or tees. Munnery had been known as the most fastidious of proofreaders, a stickler for sequence and consequence, a meticulous keeper of order. Finding the great project of his life in this disarray shook Fluxman. Perhaps he had come just in time. Or was he already too late?
When Munnery returned with the drinks, he found his colleague tactfully seated, flipping through the Phone Book, which he had taken from his rucksack.
‘A toast,’ said Fluxman. ‘To the records!’
This was the battle cry of the Society, the oath with which they closed their gatherings, and its import was not lost on Munnery. ‘The records!’ he echoed, and they clinked glasses. ‘Welcome back.’
‘My pleasure.’
They drank. Fluxman, examining his old friend for signs of deterioration, noted that his pullover was back to front. Why did Mrs Munnery let him wear the spikes inside? It would ruin the floors.
‘I thought you were gone for good,’ said Munnery.
‘That was the idea. But I’ve changed my mind, as you see.’
‘Why?’
‘Some observations I’ve made lately have led me to believe that looking the other way might not be the answer.’
‘It’s a fact that you’ve behaved very selfishly, turning your back on us when you might have done something.’
‘You misunderstand. My presence here is as selfish as any of my old refusals. I thought I could manage well enough as Alibia declined, preserving my own little corner amidst the ruins. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. While we still have the tools to wield against chaos, even if we choose not to, we may feel safe. While we are models of order ourselves, and stuffed with the assurance of our own solidity, we may hold ourselves up to one another as examples and reflect that there is something wrong with the world we live in. But when we ourselves succumb …’
‘Are we in danger, then?’ The question made Munnery anxious. He gulped his drink and began to pace up and down in the channels between the papers. ‘What do you think?’
Fluxman was tempted to say: ‘Open your eyes, man. Take a good look around you.’ Instead he said: ‘Let’s say I’ve seen signs of dissolution. Surely you’ve seen them too?’
‘Minor disorders, yes.’
‘In yourself?’
‘Not really, but I have noticed worrying signs in others.’
‘It’s to be expected that we proofreaders should hold out to the last, that we should be more resistant than the man in the street.’ The mugger on the fairway came into his mind, and he shivered. ‘Which is all the more reason to act now, in concert, while we still have our wits about us.’
Munnery had grown more agitated as they spoke, marching up and down over the pages on the floor, which stuck to the soles of his shoes in untidy wads. Several times he muttered, ‘Patsy …’ For a while, there was nothing but the rustle of his feet. Then he halted before Fluxman and asked: ‘What do you propose?’
‘To begin with, an emergency meeting of the Society. We must come up with a strategy. Late as it is, I believe we can beat back the plague.’
The mugger stumbled into Fluxman’s mind again, and so he told Munnery about him, and also about the bobber he had fished from the water. That reminded him in turn of the Wetland Ramble. ‘I’m afraid my house will be flooded while I’m gone. Would you mind putting the water feature somewhere else? I haven’t had much practice with such things lately … and it’s been a long day.’
With trembling fingers, Munnery unpinned some pages from the back of the door. Fluxman couldn’t help noticing that he left the leaves to float up to the ceiling while the pins spiralled slowly to the floor. There was an ordinance survey map beneath, and he studied it.
‘It can’t go back to the Zoo,’ he said with a worried face. ‘The Stoute Kabouter nursery school’s been squashed in there.’
‘That was probably Banes’s doing.’
In the end, Munnery earmarked a bit of virgin woodland on the escarpment and relocated the Wetland Ramble there among the trees. Constructive effort calmed his nerves at once. He fetched a canal, which was gathering slime behind the gasworks, and put that down in the reeds to make a sort of weir, and rounded everything off with some concrete tables and chairs from a picnic site and a circle of caravans from a roadworkers’ camp (long since abandoned). The effect was bound to be pleasing, as Fluxman remarked.
‘Let’s start looking ahead,’ said Munnery hopefully, ‘to the day when Alibia takes its place among the tourist destinations of the world.’
Dinner was a ratatouille, a veritable drumroll of pepper and aubergine, and a sirloin of beef. Dessert was more of the whiskey dashed over ice cream.
Then Fluxman, exhausted by the exertions of the day, bedded down in the lounge with the Phone Book under his head, while his host withdrew to his study to contact the other Members of the Society. Fluxman listened to the murmuring voice behind the door, and watched the searchlight beams toppling like gargantuan spillikins across the sky behind the window, until he fell asleep. And then it was just the rumble and clash of suburbs and streets under the cover to which his ear was pressed, a sound he had long ago grown used to, and was hardly able to dream without.
*
The next morning in Munnery’s lounge, the Proofreaders’ Society achieved a quorum for the first time in nearly a year. Fluxman had imagined that the others might be awkward in his presence, that his ‘betrayal’ would still rankle, but to his relief the atmosphere was businesslike and bellicose. Munnery had primed the Members and several were dressed for battle — Levitas in his broadcloth waistcoat, Banes in his worsted boilersuit. Wiederkehr was wearing his stetson. Consensus was reached before Mrs Munnery even had time to serve the tea. Those present reaffirmed that they themselves were all that stood between Alibia and its ruination, and that duty called them to make one last effort at restoring law and order. This initiative they resolved to pursue ‘jointly and severally’ (as Banes worded it): they would work as a team, coordinating their actions and lending one another support; but each would also take primary responsibility for a particular sphere of correction, and focus on applying those skills at which he was most adept.
Munnery was put in charge of transposition. The others were encouraged to place their personal collections of maps and plans at his disposal for the duration of the campaign. He would work closely with Figg on insertions and Levitas on alignment. Banes was assigned to reappropriation and given leave to commandeer statute books and municipal records, title deeds and carbon-copy invoices, and to take over and take back at his discretion. The director of restoration was Wiederkehr. It was surmised, rightly as it turned out, that his services would prove invaluable if any of his colleagues applied themselves too zealously to their own tasks. No one appreciated this more than Fluxman, who was responsible for deletions and removals, the most sensitive portfolio of all.
When the toasts had been drunk and the farewells made, when the last of the Members had gone off down the hill, each carrying a little tub of Mrs Munnery’s linguine, Fluxman was left alone to pack his bag. He stood at the window, where a clutch of stray proofs fluttered against the blinds, and looked out onto the sunlit green. Junior lay on his stomach on the grass, with his feet jutting over the bunker and a bucket of golf balls at his shoulder. He held one of the balls in both hands and rested his chin on it. Then, with a flick of his wrists, he sent the ball speeding towards the hole.