(birdsong)
Orchard Falla is a Capistan-speaking young male man.
He suffers from aching teeth, gross anaemia and a marrow deficiency.
For his age and his condition, he is heavy.
There is no known photograph of him.
Orchard lives outside Arklow, County Wicklow,
and works in an ironmonger's that makes a profit selling chicken wire.
It is not known what he thinks of the Violent Unknown Event.
He is very noncommittal about the Responsibility of Birds,
though in an unguarded moment, he has described his enemy as the FOX.
This might be no more enigmatic
than a reference to his profession as a seller of chicken wire.
At least once every 24 hours, Orchard drives five miles to the coast,
ostensibly to collect the skulls of seabirds.
He often returns with one hidden in the toe of a pair of perished waders
he keeps in the back of his car.
Concealment is a precaution in case he is challenged.
His finds are usually limited to the jaw of an oystercatcher
or the head of a herring gull sliced from its tar-covered body
with the penknife given to him by his employer last Bird-Fall Day.
Orchard often spends his time at the beach, day or night,
staring at the sea with both hands clamped tightly to his lower jaw
in the unlikely hope of squeezing away the toothache.
In such a position, he stares fixedly to the southeast.
If he had turned his gaze 45 degrees and stared due east,
he might have faced the horizon that hid the Lleyn Peninsula of Wales,
which is what he wanted to stare at.
As it was, he misplaced his time, his energy and his anxiety
by staring at the horizon that hid Pembrokeshire,
which was much too far to the south.
Constance Ortuist Fallaburr
is a Sackamayer-speaking middle-aged female woman.
She would admit her interest in flight has been a long one.
Since the Violent Unknown Event
she has developed an earthbound shape due to an engrossed coccyx.
She harbours doubts about the Responsibility of Birds
and having an exaggerated respect for gravity, now shuns flight herself.
Constance has two houses side by side on the coast at Southwold, Suffolk.
The one on the left was rented by her husband,
aviation historian Melorder Fallaburr.
It served as a holiday home for air orphans.
The other house was for Constance's own use,
and was crammed with furniture thrown out from airport lounges.
It was called le nid
after the initials of Nathan Isole Dermontier,
who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1870.
Melorder said the story was a fabrication,
not least because the Eiffel Tower did not exist until 1889.
Constance replied that Dermontier must have jumped from Les Invalides.
Both houses have since been demolished
and the bricks used to strengthen sea defences.
Constance now lives in a house beside the main runway at Zürich airport.
And her favourite Tulse Luper story is The Cassowary.
A jet aircraft on a cloudless night began its landing flight path
20 miles due east from the airport where it was due to land.
For the first five miles, the noise from its engine disturbed no one.
At the sixth mile, an ornithologist on a reservoir
was irritated by the jet noise just enough
to give the aircraft a glance. He turned into a swan.
At the seventh mile, a naturalist and his wife saw the aircraft
through their bedroom curtains and turned into crows.
At the eighth mile, four children in a dormitory
saw it through a skylight and turned into herons.
At the ninth mile, seven nurses in an old people's home saw the plane
and turned into swallows.
At the tenth mile, 21 members of eight families saw the plane
and turned into gulls.
By the 19th mile, 24,927 people
in two towns, four villages and a camping site had seen the plane.
Most of them had turned into penguins.
When the plane exploded on the airstrip,
a cassowary stepped from the wreckage
and checked into the VIP lounge.
Melorder Fallaburr, the husband of Constance Fallaburr,
is a comparative-flight historian,
about to make his first flight from one of London's tall buildings.
What number, Melorder, is this building on your list?
It's in the top 20, but there's some trouble getting a permit to land.
Is it high enough?
It's a possibility, though the draughts are inauspicious.
I don't want to end up in the Thames. I can't swim, even if I can fly.
His last words in English were recorded on a tape recorder
in a hotel bedroom at The Crane at Bungay, Suffolk,
where he was making a survey of East Anglian decoy airfields
for the Imperial War Museum.
... two land mines dropped, making a crater big enough to hide a hayrick.
Present owner, Phoenix Insurance Company.
Decoy airfield half a mile from fork in Carrow to Redroads Lane.
From 11940, had lights and fires to attract enemy bombers.
Your researchers have surely told you that success has been very limited?
We all know there has been a conspiracy.
Only the failures have been recorded.
We are all too interested in Icarus and not enough in his father.
Melorder had been employed as a witness of the Violent Unknown Event,
and because of what he saw he had himself sterilised
as a precaution against making his wife pregnant.
He need not have worried. Most of those affected by the VUE,
male and female alike, became sterile anyway.
Melorder's brother-in-law, Rapper Begol,
had flippantly said that a true VUE mutant could only reproduce itself
with the aid of a placenta that had developed an eggshell.
Melorder and his wife rarely lived together after he was sterilised.
Is it true you were married in a DC 110 flying over the Eiffel Tower?
That was the intention.
But by the time the chaplain recovered from airsickness,
we were over Les Invalides.
Will your wife watch the flight?
No. She said, "Too much entertainment,
and not enough research."
What about the timing?
For the inaugural flight, I intend to use lights,
so the most auspicious time would be in the evening, round about now.
I'll make it down into the shadow of the building
when the shadow is at its longest.
That shadow is important to you?
Consider the times it's rotated around this building.
I was born down there. My mother started labour in that shadow
and had to wait until it came around again before she was finished.
When his duties as an official observer were over,
he had turned to publishing an encyclopaedic history of flight
and to the formation of an aircraft museum at Rishangles.
It's said that, having started life in shadow,
that's how it will end for you.
No. I can't help them out.
I've no intention of fulfilling that particular forecast.
Besides, if I fail, it will ruin your producers.
The BFI, the Bird Facilities Investments, might never film again.
The VUE had affected Melorder's sight for the better
and his hearing for the worse.
And the muscles of his arms, chest and back
had become enlarged, engorged and strengthened.
His doctor referred to the phenomenon as petagium fellitis
or skin-wing aggrievement.
This characteristic persuaded Melorder
that his historical and theoretical knowledge of human flight
should be put to practical use.
I hear Armeror Fallstag has ordered you a wreath.
He should save his money. I'm not dying by gravity.
I'd rather be pecked to death by penguins.
Appis (Arris) Fallabus is a Regest-speaking young male man.
He is partially blind, sensitive to temperature and has poor circulation.
Nightly, he has to lubricate himself with Spanish oil.
(speaks Dutch)
Is it true that you are plagued with body lice?
Yes, it is.
Everything you can imagine, ticks, lice,
termites, tapeworms. Everything. You name it.
After a change in the weather, it's especially bad.
Worse in summer, and impossible to get rid of at sea level.
Within reason, I have been advised to make them moderately comfortable
by wearing wool. But I live with it.
Appis, whose comprehension of urban Dutch has not entirely disappeared,
had been born in Zeelem, an isolated village
surrounded by canals that only appeared to empty due to evaporation.
In winter, every inch of water in Zeelem turned to ice
and the body predators that worried Appis slept, froze
or otherwise temporarily capitulated.
It is said that you identify with swallows. Is this correct?
Yes, it's true. But nowadays, that's not unique, is it?
Appis would have been an expert long-distance ice skater
but his mother believed it was dangerous
for his poor circulation to spend too much time out of doors in the winter.
Appis's mother was not a victim of the Violent Unknown Event.
As she grew older and her son remained the same age,
she discovered a new worry for each new season.
She could not have too many seasons left,
so Appis patiently waited to be set free to enjoy immortality on his own.
Meanwhile, he managed a kite factory,
in some part satisfying a desire for unaided flight in himself
and in the 19 million other victims of the VUE.
Is it true your father was killed by a bird counter named Van Hoyten?
My father was at the Amsterdam zoo studying saltwater fish,
when Van Hoyten was employed there as a bird counter.
They quarrelled,
apparently because my father had a fox tattooed on his chest.
It was said they were rivals.
In the summer, Appis flew a stunt kite to intimidate the birds
who he blamed directly for his predicament.
I'm told you drink salt water to crack the ice in your pancreas.
I do? Perhaps you're confusing me with someone else.
My father was always experimenting, putting plaice in the canals
and stimulating the salt glands in pelagic birds.
What do you think of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds?
Well, the coincidences seem inexhaustible, obviously.
But I leave it entirely to the experts.
When flying his kite, Appis left swallows alone
knowing that a single bird of that species could be preyed upon
by a dozen different types of parasite,
and that was punishment enough.
Standard Fallaby has a DC3 single berth caravanette with a glass roof.
In winter, he hides it in caravan sites in the west of England,
ostensibly that it might escape the scrutiny of his sister Tasida Fallaby
whose attentions, says Standard, are not ornithological
and exceed those of an orthodox brother-and-sister relationship.
The VUE Directory Commission have, as yet,
not been able to locate Standard Fallaby or his caravan.
The VUE has contracted Standard's intestine and paralysed his legs.
He is obliged to cling to a hanging brace when asked to stand up.
He speaks Curdine.
Curdine is a cursive language
that deliberately fosters ambiguities and encourages punning.
Tulse Luper has said that in the larynx of the right man,
Curdine would be a superlative language,
an antidote to all the world's feathers.
Since the VUE,
Standard Fallaby has developed an interest in the Corvidae.
Every rook-nesting season, he parks beneath a rookery
somewhere in West England in sight of the Atlantic.
He has made a claim to the World Society for the Preservation of Birds
to have discovered a rook subspecies, Corvus frugilegus atlanticus,
whose diet is largely shellfish and whose call imitates young seagulls.
The WSPB has not recognised his claim.
(reads aloud in Curdine)
"My brother and I were born holding hands."
"My mother says so. His father denies it."
"I sometimes think I took the first small step out of the womb."
Tasida Fallaby is two years and seven months older than her brother.
"He deferred to me."
"This contradicts what might be read on our birth certificates."
"But then I have no patience with bureaucracies."
"It's water off a duck's back to them."
Apart from a thickening of the exterior muscles,
the Violent Unknown Event has only modified Tasida's interior,
leaving her exterior unmolested and encouraging her belief in naturism.
"When I was 15, my hair was longer than his, but he was taller."
"It didn't matter. He got over it."
The Directory credits Tasida with a partially collapsed lung,
a singing tinnitus, black-and-white vision,
a doubling of the menstrual cycle,
and, unlike her brother, a twisting of the intestine into tighter coils
so that Tasida suffers intense cramps and often has malodorous breath.
"Malodorous" is a translation of the adjective that she used
in the autobiography she presented to the VUE Commission
to counteract the statistics she was sure to find describing her
in the VUE Directory.
Tasida's autobiography runs to more than 300 pages written in Curdine,
though the Directory has registered her as a speaker in Katan.
At her insistence the autobiography was read aloud
for the benefit of the Commission who recorded the whole,
taking a greater part of a day to do so.
"I married Messenger after my great disappointment."
"I took to nursing like a duck takes to water."
"Messenger married me for it."
"But as time went on,
I realised that he was too interested in the clothing industry."
"He was even selling stockings to my friend Sanchia."
"I told him to stop making his business interest
break up our relationship."
Tasida has painstakingly learnt a mechanical Curdine
so she might talk to her brother.
Since he only wanted to talk about birds,
she pronounced ornithological terms
with an exactness suggesting enthusiasm.
"It is essential that my version of the facts be taken into account."
Curdine, notorious for ambiguity,
is certainly antipathetic to being spoken mechanically.
Tasida therefore spoke it with some courage, if not rashness.
Her blunt pronunciation contained layers of unconscious innuendo
and the ambiguous imagery had a hazardous relevance.
"...since a mere list of Commission Statistics compiled by assistants
who don't know a ruff from a decorated neckband,
it's bound to be unacceptable, and on this Standard is bound to agree."
Lacer Fallacet, after the Violent Unknown Event, had a dark head,
calloused hands and barked in Agreet like a person unwilling to use words.
She owned a succession of voiceless bitches, named after female aviators,
and her favourite Tulse Luper story. Was The Photographer's Dog.
A naturalist took a photograph of a dead dog on a beach.
The corpse was a week old...
Lacer Fallacet suffered from rheumatism, muscular spasms
and a loss of taste buds.
She was classified as an elderly female woman.
The VUE knocked three inches off her height
and added three stone to her weight.
According to her godson Rapper Begol, Lacer was born on Bardsey Island
where dogs hunted seagulls and learnt to imitate their cry.
Before the VUE, Lacer had variously been a child-minder,
a maths teacher and a pastry cook. She had worked in Sweden
as a swimming instructress, a dietician and a veterinary assistant.
Lacer married a pharmacist from Brougan
and had two daughters who married Russian pilots.
Her granddaughters came to England on Bird-Fall Scholarships
and, having gained political asylum, live in Canada.
- Puffin. - Black-headed gull.
Whatever her other attributes,
Lacer Fallacet has not been able to teach her dogs to fly,
though she may have witnessed, on a visit to the Ukraine,
laboratory tests that suggested dog flight was not impossible.
Six months after the VUE,
the first dog Lacer took up in a plane was a spaniel named Harzy
after Frau Esterházy.
But the first solo flight
was reserved for a three-year-old boxer bitch called Louise.
At Lacer's command, Louise jumped from a helicopter at 1,000 feet
and landed on loose straw in a field outside Copenhagen.
The second jump was from 2,000 feet and was unsuccessful.
The dog landed in a children's playing field.
Lacer was threatened with prosecution but the charge did not stick.
She was fined three kroner
for exercising a dog in a public place without a lead.
Nine days after the VUE,
Arris Fallacie gave evidence of being a dreamer-of-water,
Category One, Flight, which is nearly always illustrated
by the Bedfordshire Level Sequence from HE Carter's film The Last Wave.
Questioned, Arris found no difficulty
identifying his dream with the sample.
At the time of the VUE,
Arris was travelling to London from boarding school in Perth.
He was in a second-class non-smoking compartment facing the engine.
Both schoolboys developed identical VUE symptoms,
but the friend spoke Carn-est-aero and Arris spoke Itino Re.
The language conversion was abrupt and complete.
Their last collaborative work in English had been a mild punishment.
Arris began to spend more and more time asleep.
He developed a stammer round the letter H,
a lung inflammation and a shrinkage of the stomach wall.
He was sent to a dietary counsellor
at the isolation hospital at Bryne Boars, Chesil Beach.
But Arris never arrived.
On the train journey, searching for the toilet to be sick,
he opened the wrong door and fell into the path of an oncoming train.
Mashanter Fallack was registered as a speaker in English and Karnash,
with a knowledge of Allow-ease.
To identify herself with the victims of the VUE,
she insisted in speaking Karnash in public.
(speaks Karnash)
English to her was a language
prepared to debase ornithological nomenclature to an unacceptable level
demonstrating the paucity of the English concern
with the phenomenon of the Violent Unknown Event.
Do you think these film biographies are going to profit the VUE victims?
Of course. Think of who's involved, the IRR, the BFI, the COI,
the European Section of the WSPB, not to miss the Directory Commission.
These bodies have access to a viewing public that covers half the world.
Do you think public money is well spent on making films like this?
Do you ask about the public money being paid to all these people
in all these government offices?
I'm surprised that you of all people can ask that question.
Mashanter was born in the Canary Isles, though at times she denies it.
She now has an office in Berkeley Square.
Her parents were Danish.
Her father was an architect now employed building aviaries.
Her mother, a doctor, drowned in a ship's swimming pool.
Do you think there's any point in the IRR
making a separate case for VUE victims?
On the night of the VUE Mashanter was on holiday in Venice.
Apart from some migraine and insomnia Mashanter suffered little physically.
Her metabolism was invigorated.
At night, she studied ornithological literature.
She began to campaign for a better appreciation of avian terminology.
Soon she was spending her income in the magistrates' courts
paying fines for disturbance of the peace, harassment,
being a public nuisance and defacing public monuments.
Mashanter's favourite Tulse Luper story was Sparrow Week.
To curb flocks of sparrows eating one-third of its food production,
a nation organised Sparrow Week.
Day and night, for seven days, the country's population
rang bells, banged saucepan lids and shouted.
The sparrows, frightened to settle, eventually fell dead out of the sky.
Flight exhaustion from the same cause also killed gulls on the coast,
herons in the marsh, eagles in the mountains
and pigeons on the town square.
On the seventh day, Sparrow Week ended.
Next year two-thirds of the country's food supply was eaten by insects
and the money standard changed from gold to eggs.
Were you speaking metaphorically when you said
you were preparing to lay your own golden egg?
(laughs)
Can I take it that...
The compilation of the biography of a living person is a sensitive matter.
Where necessary, and in nearly every case where the subject wanted it,
various forms of anonymity were used.
The VUE Commission offered a choice of ten pseudonymous identities
and Squaline Fallaize, the subject of biography 10, chose identity 10
for she recognised it for another bird victim.
She has requested that accounts of her life should be brief,
unillustrated and translated for her mother's benefit into Kath-a-ganian.
She also insisted it be narrated by a woman.
"Squaline Fallaize had shining eyes,
yellow skin and a blaze on her forehead
in the shape of the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle."
(Kath-a-ginian)
"Squaline Fallaize had shining eyes,
yellow skin and a blaze on her forehead
in the shape of the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle."
"She spoke whatever language took her fancy,
her whims influenced by her appetite, which was usually small."
"She was known as a reticent conversationalist."
"Squaline was paid a retainer by the Language Commission."
"When it learnt she was getting an appetite,
the Language University at Caracas
sent several senior professors to her flat on Cappis Island."
"A large meal was cooked slowly in her small kitchen
whilst the linguists sat on the floor of her dining room
to listen to her fluency in 47 languages."
"The two chefs and the waiter who served the meal were paid for
out of a university expense account reserved for ringing storks."
There is some evidence to suggest that Squaline Fallaize is a fiction.
(telephone rings)
(speaks French)
Carlos Fallantly lost his wife...
...at the time of the Violent Unknown Event.
She was a voluble, untidy woman...
...who made her own clothes...
...and washed once a week in the water...
...wrung out of the laundry.
She was invaluable to her husband.
She looked after his poultry,
kept his accounts...
...and when roused...
...was as uxorious a wife...
...as Carlos could wish to have.
On the night of June 12th of the VUE, Carlos's wife suffered a stroke.
Carlos transferred his affection to a turkey.
The VUE Directory records for Carlos
a malfunction of the left ventricle, bone-marrow disease
and, save for the VUE immortality clause,
would have normally given him six months to live.
Carlos had buried his wife in the floor of his greenhouse.
The local authorities had the body exhumed.
Now Carlos lived in the greenhouse to keep his turkey company.
A fowl pest epidemic finally erased Carlos's other poultry.
Two veterinary officials
came to make sure he had burnt or buried all the corpses.
Insisting the one remaining bird should be destroyed,
the vet promised to compensate Carlos with at least a set of photographs.
These were taken as the vet stalked the bird with his camera
whilst the vet's assistant stalked the bird with a shotgun.
Carlos was not happy with the photographs.
He is now awaiting trial at Clichy for shooting the vet.
(sings)
Musicus Fallantly had quickly acclimatised himself
to the effects of the Violent Unknown Event.
A sufferer of petagium fellitis and a speaker of Allow,
he moved to Port Madoc, learnt to sing in Welsh, practised illusionism
and began a study of linguistics he called aero-ethnography.
Musicus worked on an Allow/Welsh dictionary
and adapted da Vinci's notes on human flight
as a text for the VUE anthem.
Musicus also wrote a Welsh/ Allow choral work
celebrating 92 early flight pioneers.
This work, of great complexity and an excess of narrative,
proceeded by listing categories of flight.
The characters were pilots, night pilots, airmen, flyers,
aeronauts and female aeronauts, birdmen and gullers.
A "guller" was an Allow word
for those whose attempts to fly had taken place over water.
Icarus had been a guller.
Musicus called his work Sky Lists and dedicated it to Van Riquardt,
the French patriot and pioneer airman
who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1889.
Cadence, Musicus's wife, said that the film was a reconstruction
because the moving-picture camera wasn't invented until 1895.
Van Riquardt had been a linguist
and a baritone in the Lycée Nouvelle Ménilmontant.
Musicus Fallantly's eldest son Vanrick was named after Van Riquardt
but although interested in his father's illusionism,
he had no interest in choral work, language or self-propelled flight.
He became a sound recordist.
"Dear sir, In reply to your query about Wrallis Fallanway,
my husband was on artificial lake 11 early on the morning of June 13th."
In this dry overflow gully, Wrallis Fallanway began his post-VUE life
after three hours of artificial resuscitation.
His body had been found floating above the weir
on the Lake Marmion Complex, Ontario.
"At half past five, he said the lake shook three times,
the ripples coming from the edge of the lake towards the centre,
the reverse of what would happen if you threw a stone into the water."
"I'm not hiding the fact that my husband was a nationalised Canadian."
"He took his Canadian name from the road where we lived at Kashabowie."
"The road had been named after Lewis Fallan the lumberjack,
a second-generation Patagonian Welshman like Wrallis."
"He'd worked for the Goldhawk Company as a topman,
and he'd been crushed by a giant redwood,
the ones you don't find any more as they've all been pulled down."
"The second time Wrallis felt the lake shake
he fell into the boat and banged his head on the rowlock."
"When he sat up again he felt sure he'd got something in his eye."
"He felt sick at the back of his throat and nose, and his eyes ran."
"He was giddy for a long time."
"I learnt from my neighbours it was common knowledge
that Lewis Fallan had been awarded damages for his accident."
"The Goldhawk Company presented his widow with a certificate
and a tray of eagle eggs and named a road in Kashabowie after him."
"The road is supposed to be exactly 57 metres long,
as long as the redwood that crushed Fallan's chest."
"The third time, my husband fell into the lake."
"Air in his anorak must have kept him afloat
as he remembers nothing else."
"He was picked up by a Goldhawk vessel from the weir
about ten in the morning. He'd been in the water five hours."
"They gave my husband the day off and said he was lucky they'd found him."
"Wrallis became blind two days later and he kept falling over."
Wrallis Fallanway is registered as a middle-aged male man
suffering from Ménière's disease, migraine and apoplexy.
His lips grew calloused, his tongue diminished
and a nictitating membrane on his left eye
operated involuntarily in conditions of bright light,
making his vision sparkle with refracted lights.
"They sent me a certificate
which said that the Goldhawk Fisheries Company named the lake,
number 11 lake, after my husband, the Wrallis Fallanway Lake."
"They gave me a case of stuffed fish. They look like flying fish."
"Here's hoping my knowledge of my husband's case can help you."
"Sincerely yours, Asecretor Fallanway."
Allia Fallanx is the fourth Custodian of the Boulder Orchard,
the recognised geographical epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event.
The Boulder Orchard's first permanent Custodian was HE Carter,
painter, film-maker, banjo-player, hydronomist and indexer.
The second Custodian was Rapper Begol,
photographer, embryologist,
saxophonist, fire-watcher and writer of Egg Tales.
I noticed a brown sort of ball...
The third Custodian was Catuso Phelpis,
singer and ornithological registrar.
Allia Fallanx, as pianist, ornithologist, cataloguer,
apiarist and expert on flying reptiles,
perpetuated and expanded the Custodian tradition.
However, the publication of personal details of VUE Commission employees
is forbidden. This embargo does not extend to their families,
so it is possible to consider the VUE history of Allia's wife,
Starling Fallanx.
(The Lady is a Tramp)
Starling Fallanx, singer, firework enthusiast,
wanderer, collector of berets, bird hats and cardboard boxes,
authority on the nightingale,
was struck down by the VUE near a late-flowering hawthorn bush
on the road into the Manifold Valley.
Starling met Allia just eight hours after the VUE.
They were both suffering from sore feet.
After some wanderings,
with or without the VUE's disorienteering experience,
she moved into the Tyddyn-Corn Farm with her children and hats
when Allia became the Fourth Custodian of the Boulder Orchard.
She likes green grass underneath her shoes
Perhaps finding it difficult to cripple a moving target,
the VUE's interest in Starling Fallanx has been sporadic.
But now she has settled she can no longer taste salt,
open her eyes under water, wear velvet or smell hawthorn blossom.
But she can teach her daughters the 32 songs of the nightingale
and astonish them by locking her Achilles tendons
to grip apples with the soles of her feet.
She likes the theatre but she never stays late
Of all the VUE's attributes Starling felt the most,
and, at the same time, the least enthusiastic about, was immortality.
Barring accidents she would outlive her daughters and granddaughters.
Her kinship with her great-great-granddaughters
would be so diluted that she could scarcely claim a relationship.
She ought by then to be back on the road, maybe starting another family.
There would be chances to begin again.
She goes to opera and she knows every line
She goes to Shakespeare and she thinks him fine
She goes to the opera she knows every line
On the long drives to distant jazz clubs,
Starling kept an eagle eye on the fields looking for scarecrows,
the only site to be buried in
if a VUE victim wished to terminate a relationship with birds.
She likes to go swimming down in Abersoch Bay
She goes to the eisteddfod and she stays wide awake
Ipson and Pulat Fallari were brothers in fiction and half-brothers in fact,
or, thanks to Tulse Luper, maybe the other way around.
Either way they were inseparable.
Ipson Fallari on the right is marginally the eldest,
his mother being Iloge Kyle, who was the elder twin sister of Cloge Kyle
who was the mother of Pulat. The next improbable fact is more difficult.
The 14th VUE Directory declared the brothers to be dead,
shot in an airport hotel in Medina Sidonia
by the only legitimate son of their father.
The Directory is then silent for two years
only to resurrect them in the 17th edition,
this time spelling Ipson as Ipsan.
The father of the Fallari brothers, Crozier Fallari Raphael,
was a feathering and marbling café painter.
In 1939, he'd married a café proprietor's widow
in the Carcenne District of Brussels.
To this lady he'd given a son, Tason Raphael.
Next year, Crozier Raphael joined the British Royal Air Force
and met the refugee Walloon twins, Iloge and Cloge Kyle.
Crozier was killed at Dunkirk
and the Kyle twins each had a son in the same three-hour period.
They were christened Fallari, their father's second Christian name,
and reached their 18th birthday before being aware
of yet another and legitimate stepbrother.
Thinking of themselves as twins of twins,
Ipson and Pulat believed they possessed charmed lives,
took great physical risks, became air couriers and learnt to fly.
They practised parachuting and worked for a circus.
One New Year's Eve they climbed Cologne Cathedral,
and for an encore, crossed the Rhine jumping from ice floe to ice floe.
They ended up in the freezing water, and against expectation, survived.
But the Violent Unknown Event abruptly changed their luck.
From now on they were to share only the symptoms of high blood pressure
and perfectly synchronised blackouts.
They were obliged to relinquish their pilot's licence.
For Ipson it was not an enormous loss.
Pulat took any chance he could to sit at the controls of a small plane
and taxi it in small circles until the fuel was exhausted.
Ipson spoke Allow-ease and Pulat spoke Capistan.
Allow is terse and impersonal, full of abbreviations and imperatives
as though invented for use on a parade ground,
or for the writer of instruction manuals.
Capistan is a lazy, gentle language, spoken from the front of the mouth
and requiring unusual amounts of saliva and exposure of the tongue.
The two languages are as remote from one another as appears possible.
The brothers' adroit, inexhaustible crosstalk was at an end.
Previous to the VUE,
only one event in their lives had so come between them.
That had been Ipson's marriage to Stachia Lacquer.
The introduction of the third party
stretched fraternal loyalties intolerably.
After two years of impossible situations, swapped identities
and frustrated privacy, Stachia had walked out.
There was no way of persuading the VUE to leave.
The half-brothers had experienced several years of VUE's malevolence,
when, with a party of naturalists, they visited Medina Sidonia
on a forced fuelling stop.
They befriended the airport controller and his wife.
As was usual when meeting strangers,
before long the Fallari brothers had communicated their complex origins
to the amused delight of the airport controller's wife.
At three the following morning,
the airport controller burst into the Fallari hotel room
and shot at Ipson and Pulat with an emergency distress pistol.
The controller turned out to be Tason Raphael,
the Fallaris' stepbrother, the only legitimate son of their father.
All three were found unconscious. They'd blacked out.
The Fallaris with high blood pressure
and the stepbrother with alcohol.
From this incident and with assistance
from Tulse Luper's fictional account of the Fallaris,
the Commission Directory drew its conclusions.
A close scrutiny of a plane's passenger list leaving the day after
would show, if not the names of Ipson and Pulat Fallari,
then the names of Ipson and Pulat Raphael,
save Ipson's name had been spelt Ipsan.
(birdsong)
Stachia Lacquer was an authority on vegetable oils.
She was a portrait photographer, a writer and an illustrator.
Stachia finished writing and illustrating The Tar-Barrel Crow
five years before the Violent Unknown Event,
and three years to the day before she met Pulat Fallari.
Stachia Lacquer had gone to Madras to cremate her father
who had been killed in a public disturbance.
She was drinking lemonade on a hotel veranda
when Ipson Fallari fell on top of her.
He'd been tightrope walking the balustrade of the veranda above.
He was awaiting the return of his half-brother Pulat
from conducting a party of English naturalists in Sri Lanka.
Stachia suffered a sprained wrist, a bruised shoulder
and a sliver of lemonade glass had sliced into her thigh.
She was in hospital for three days.
Ipson stayed with her and afterwards helped her to convalesce.
On Stachia's recovery, they flew to Hamburg and got married.
Five days later, Pulat, Ipson's half-brother, found out.
Determined not to be disturbed, he played down its significance.
He helped them set up house on the Vogelstrasse
opposite the statue of Haberlein, the discoverer of archaeopteryx.
For three months, they vastly enjoyed each other's company,
then Pulat began flying long trips, alone to towns without airfields.
Eventually he crashed in North Africa and broke both legs.
Ipson found him and promised to repudiate the marriage.
For a time this worked, then Ipson began seeing his wife again.
Again Pulat found out, and crashed at sea.
He turned up five months later on Smith Island in the New Hebrides.
Stachia suggested Pulat should come and live at the Vogelstrasse.
But after months of impossible situations, swapped identities
and frustrated privacy, Stachia could stand it no longer and walked out.
She wrote and illustrated a story
about a wooden chair that grew back again into a tree,
bore fruit and propagated a forest of chairs.
The story was bought by a seed company
and Stachia wrote their advertising copy.
With funds from the company's publicity account,
she built up an aviary of tropical birds
in Mexico City and then in Amsterdam. Before long she met Van Hoyten,
the Head of the Ornithological Department of Amsterdam zoo
and they were living together at the time of the VUE.
Stachia's VUE complaint is rare. It has been diagnosed as
de faire blessure or the opening of old wounds.
The first sign was inflammation of the skin
around an old scar tissue on her left elbow.
Stachia had fallen on her elbow when she was three years old.
This was followed by the opening of scar tissue on her ears.
Her ears had been pierced when she was seven.
Then bleeding under her arm. Stachia at 15 had cut herself shaving.
Scar tissue on her thigh started to bleed
and she was brought to hospital.
It was the scar from the Madras lemonade glass.
Stachia has spent most of her life in hospital since then.
A recipient of blood transfusions,
prone to persistent low blood pressure and periodic blackouts.
The Directory Certificate states Stachia's condition was caused
by blood emulsification due to an inability to absorb organic oils.
Stachia Fallari is registered as an Allow speaker but rarely speaks.
Her doctor says his patient felt that terse, impersonal Allow,
full of abbreviations and imperatives was antipathetic to her sympathies.
She is now learning Capistan, the language that is lazy and gentle
and requires unusual amounts of saliva and exposure of the tongue.
Aptesia Fallarme, for the purpose of this biography,
has been persuaded to adopt a pseudonymous identity.
It's relevant that she chose a bird victim who was also an actress.
In this unprofessional capacity,
Aptesia received dedications of thanks.
Aptesia Fallarme is supposed to have been the model for the character
Happy Enido in Leo-dee-nine's novel A Sea-Vue.
"She could fill a warm porcelain bath in 20 minutes,
a warm tin bath took a little longer."
"To fill a cold tin bath in less than an hour needed other inducements
like a view of the sea, a cow being milked, or the sound of a waterfall."
Much has been written about Aptesia Fallarme,
most of it exaggerated and most of it scurrilous.
The fair-minded Tulse Luper said, "She was a waterfall on legs."
Majority Powels said,
"She was a creature designed to render the services of an oasis."
"The water poured from her skin,
from the corners of her mouth, from her nose."
"As to the orifices more specialised for the expulsion of water
the audiences were rarely disappointed..."
"...and in the little bathrooms of the suburbs,
the water splashed upon the carpet
and they clapped and threw coins into the bath."
"In summer she was asked to stand on bare patches of lawn in the garden."
Aptesia herself was responsible for part of her exaggerated reputation.
Within months of the VUE, she was travelling far and wide,
exploiting her new characteristics
at disreputable fairgrounds, obscure cabarets and eventually
in the house of a photographer in Barons Court, West London,
where Leo-dee-nine must have seen her.
"The opening of an umbrella was enough."
"Every minute this human waterfall would shake her body like a dog
and wring out her hair."
"HE Carter would run in with a dressing gown
embroidered with a running faucet."
"At the clinic, she was kept away from the radiators
as she soon fogged the room."
"She got locked in the surgery cold store
and an orderly had to chip away the ice with a nail file."
"After an appearance at Palm Springs, she collapsed,
suffering from nervous exhaustion and obesity."
"The hospital arranged a programme to regulate her output."
"Then, against advice, she allowed her name
to be used by a plastic-swimming-pool manufacturer
and the hospital discharged her."
Aptesia's latest and much publicised ambition is to have a baby,
though she is frightened that the baby might drown at birth.
Starting at the buzzer, in 30 seconds
name as many birds as you can think of.
(buzzer)
Partridge, parrot, peacock, bluetit, coal tit, willow tit, bearded tit,
marsh tit, long-tailed tit, great tit, woodcock...
One factor that influenced the selection of names
for all the other Violent Unknown Event victims
was a collection of interviews filmed 18 months before the VUE
by Erhaus Bewler Falluper.
...whooper swan... - (buzzer)
Starting at the buzzer, in 30 seconds,
tell me as much as you can about the emu.
(buzzer)
The emu is the national bird of Australia...
Falluper, a statistician interested in assessing the public's knowledge,
conducted one particular survey by asking 41 interviewees
three elementary ornithological questions.
To assure a random sample, Falluper chose to use all the names
in the same Public Records Office file as himself.
Seven of these 41 subjects later became VUE victims.
And Corntopia Fallas was one of them.
Although happy for us to use material of her filmed before the VUE,
Corntopia had no wish to be photographed at the present time
for her sleep would be disturbed.
For Corntopia spends the cold months in hibernation in this cottage
a few miles from the Boulder Orchard on the Lleyn Peninsula.
The VUE had lowered Corntopia's body temperature
and slowed her circulation. She suffered badly from the cold.
She was happiest when asleep and she dreamt of water.
The dreams, said her doctor,
compensated for her experiences of the Event,
when she had been rescued from a serious forest fire.
You can see the black part there...
Rapper Begol, Second Custodian of the Boulder Orchard
and friend of Corntopia's,
was working as a Forestry Commissioner at the time of the VUE.
- He remembers the fire. - We thought we'd won the battle.
The wind changed, whipped the fire up again.
It started going round the hill.
About the first of May, Corntopia emerges from her hibernation,
and needing little sleep in summer,
is prepared to work up to 18 hours a day
on the weekly WSPB magazine, The Rooster.
Starting at the buzzer, in 30 seconds,
name as many birds as you can that start with W.
(buzzer)
Whooper swan, widgeon, wagtail...
To announce Corntopia's return the magazine printed on its cover
a photograph of the will or the poor-will, known as the sleeper,
a bird that lay dormant for weeks without detectable heartbeat
in the cliff crevices of the Sierra Nevada.
...wagtail.
In case of reprisal associated with the death of his two wives,
Anteo Fallaspy made use of a VUE Commission pseudonymous identity.
At the time of the VUE, Anteo Fallaspy was in Germany.
A trained philologian, inventor of fictitious languages and a traveller,
he carried a camera to record his enthusiasm for the written word.
(whispering)
On the night of the VUE, he was in Stuttgart at the Hotel Mack.
Anteo received retractable thumbs,
soft, serrated, fleshy earlobes and a six-part heart.
Registered as a public speaker of Capistan and privately of Althuese,
his major language credential is as inventor of Hartileas B.
Anteo Fallaspy's interest in this new language
has nothing to do with the normal ambition
of creating the invidious universal language,
but is about furthering communication with vertebrates,
mainly birds and their precursors, the reptiles,
along the lines anticipated by Messiaen and Max Ernst.
Anteo had undergone an operation on his tongue
to reshape the spaces of his mouth to approximately coincide
with the proportions of the singing apparatus of the starling.
He chose the starling for the variety of noises it could make,
its ability to mimic, its dual plumage and its sociability.