Nowhere Near Milkwood Read Online Free PDF Page A

already, a distant and unobtainable memory, and it sprang awake for the first time. So there was novelty and nostalgia at exactly the same moment... Wheels inside my soul had been set in motion, springs I never knew I owned were winding down and powering unique feelings in my heart in the same way that windmills can be employed to drain knees, stir pots of stew or ventilate shipyards, anything unexpected but perfectly valid, just never attempted before.
    The audience was spellbound and from the darkest corners watched things not human or alive. I realised they were the angles where walls met the ceiling. Even geometry had been seduced by the gutsy magic. That’s quite a first, I think. I’ve never heard of that happening before. I suspect they cried afterward, those intersecting planes, slaves to theorems, tasting amusement on their sentient debuts.
    It was done. One minute to the hour. Sixty seconds left to perform my infinite song! I didn’t think it was possible. Yet I wasn’t ready to give up faith. I needed some sort of reputation, I was desperate for recognition, and this was the only opportunity within sight. So I hefted my banjo like a frying pan and mounted the stage.
    I was going to play an extract from my song. At the start of the gig, I’d planned to play as much of it as possible. I’d revised this intention when Bridget, Satori, Grampa and Rag had run over their alloted times. Toni had kept it trim, but only in the same way that life is short, which is always a saying but only generally a truth or feeling. It had became clear to me that I should just play a dozen verses of ‘And Dug The Pigdog A Tomb’, and then just one verse, and then just one line, and then just one bar, and then just one chord, but now I knew it ought to be only one note, a single note, the best note in my favourite song, the best note in musical history, the one perfect note.
    That’s all I had time for, but it was enough. The note in question and also in answer was G sharp, not any old G sharp, but the G sharp in the sixth line of the 498th repeated verse of ‘And Dug The Pigdog A Tomb’, a G sharp which is superior to all other G sharps in all other compositions due to its context, what came before and after, but I was going to attempt the audacious and remove it from its context while retaining its quality of ultimate superiority. If I could pull that off, I could tug anything, so guard your hair and teeth, doubters!
     
    Much later, when I sat in a different bar on my own, I worked out how it had gone wrong. Do you know the words to the song I chose? They loop round on themselves, which explains how that tune lasts forever. The first line is a standard opening. It goes, “A pigdog came on the lawn,” and the second line continues, “and walked around alone”, and it’s like a promise of a lazy story, but the third line subverts this by saying, “Then gardener swung a hoe,” and the fourth adds, “and broke its funny bone”, to which the fifth line responds, “Then all the pigdogs came grunting”, which may not have been deliberate of them, but in fact was, because, “and dug the pigdog a tomb”, is the sixth line, and the seventh explains what they did with this tomb, which was “And they carved upon its door,” and now the eighth explains why, “for the eyes of pigdogs to come”, at which sombre point the song reverts to the first line again, which is the text they carved there: “A pigdog came on the lawn...”
    And on and on to eternity. Dig it?
    Actually it’s a horrid song, because the pigdog wasn’t dead when they dug it a tomb, just injured in the elbow joint, and they ended up burying it alive while it begged for mercy.
    Like I said, this is a variation on the original, but popular music works that way. I’m not bothered by accusations of plagiarism or anything of the sort. Besides, what does it matter to me? Can I be sued in court? I hardly even own a crust of bread. More likely that a crust of