Shey's dual occupation stems from a bridge conversion.
He is a member of the San Luis Rey Society,
a popular club of some 2,000 VUE victims
who were struck by the VUE on bridges over running water.
Shey holds membership card number 19.
Shey's bridge was the swing bridge known as the Centre Walk,
over the Treadle Canal, Liverpool.
Shey was walking to work the midnight shift
on the evening of the Violent Unknown Event when the warning bell rang
and the bridge shook as though struck by a barge.
Shey doesn't remember the next 56 hours,
but apparently he got up and kept on walking,
not to the shipyards but to the portside
where he stowed away, and three weeks later turned up in Hamburg.
Five weeks later he was in Vienna
tearing up English newspapers, rearranging the items
and pretending he was Tulse Luper.
Shey Fallenby and Tulse Luper have never met
but they do share a physical resemblance.
Tulse Luper paid for Shey to return to Liverpool,
has since collected Shey's collages, bound them into a book called,
at Fallenby's insistence, Tulse Luper and the Centre Walk,
and presented it to the VUE Library
Where it is catalogued under Hobbyist of the Absurd.
Its author, Shey Fallenby, is described as...
"A lover of crowds,
an anti-vivisectionist, a speaker of Glendower
and an eclectic opportunist who elusively remodels his personality
on an ever-changing succession of heroes."
Affinado Falleur, according to his wife, was paid £5,000
for changing his name and identity by deed poll.
The transaction took place in room 22 in The Crane Hotel, Guernsey.
Affinado was given a selection of ten identities to choose from.
Only two of these were different from the ten pseudonymous identities
in the selection normally offered by the VUE Commission.
The differences were the replacement of Van Hoyten by Gang Lion
and Madame Klaust by Cissie Colpitts.
From the list Falleur chose who he thought was Nathan Isole Dermontier,
the fifth identity in each list.
Falleur-Dermontier shared the £5,000 with his wife and then disappeared.
Falleur-Dermontier's wife
has three theories to explain her husband's identity change.
Falleur's name was wanted by FOX as an identity for a saboteur.
The Institute of Reclamation wanted a character without a history
to represent them at the repeal of the European Landscape Bill.
By assuming the name and identity of Dermontier
it might have been easier for Falleur to obtain a pilot's licence.
Apparently, according to Falleur-Dermontier's wife,
her husband could be identified by a grid
tattooed, branded or otherwise marked on the palm of his right hand.
The grid corresponded to the window of room 22
of The Crane Hotel, Guernsey
where the £5,000 in used notes had been exchanged.
The VUE Commission offered Falleur-Dermontier's wife anonymity,
but after perusing the possibilities, she declined.
Erek Fallfree.
Use of biographical material owned exclusively by Crow Films.
14 passenger trains a day stopped at Diss Railway Station, in Suffolk.
With the eight trains that stopped on a Sunday, that made 92 trains a week,
the number of presently known VUE languages.
With bank holidays and without cancellations,
Thomax Fallfresh, the Diss stationmaster,
could expect 4,730 trains a year.
Thomax was waiting for the 100,000th train.
That was the number he had formally agreed to see through Diss Station
before he returned to Wales and the Dovey Valley.
It was a promise he'd made first to his wife
who disliked flat East Anglia.
Secondly to British Rail who employed him on a VUE contract,
and only thirdly to himself.
He personally somewhat feared a return to a landscape of mountains
where the VUE had afflicted him with partial deafness,
a loss of balance on any gradient greater than one metre in 200,
and pigeon toes that were slowly and appreciably growing whiter.
Thomax, Jamaican by birth,
found his body was slowly developing random white patches.
It was a source of amusement to his Welsh wife.
His doctor's first diagnosis was Caucasian Empathy,
but that was cancelled when Thomax's wife, to her delight and hilarity,
discovered other colour changes on her husband's body.
Medical tests detected small, dilute traces
of carotin and melanin, dionin and ri-melanin,
pigments responsible for the colouring in feathers.
For now, an orthodox British Rail stationmaster's uniform
would hide the transformation from his staff,
but Thomax wondered how soon he could find a way out.
Which would come quickest, albinoism, a skin of many colours
or the 100,000th train?
All three alternatives
would mean him crossing the line into areas he didn't want to go.
Zachia Fallgillot. Biography ex-directory on medical advice
due to subject's allergy to public exposure.
Joyan Fallicory.
Error. Fallicory is the name of a place, not a person.
For biography of Tender Joyan, see VUE Directory under Joy.
Bird Gaspara Fallicutt, born Gaspara Gekle,
met her husband, Obsian Fallicutt, in the Air Force Cinema
at Birdlip near Gloucester,
when she was translating the Starfighter 143 flight manual
from the VUE language Hapaxlegomena into French.
Their common interest was not strictly films, but aero engines.
The Raven, Kes,
The Two-Headed Eagle, Only Angels Have Wings.
Gaspara widened Obsian's interest in films,
weaned him off documentaries, and introduced him to feature films.
But Obsian's enthusiasm remained desultory
until he saw The Birds by AJ Hitchcock.
Caged Heat, Blackbird...
Gaspara is registered in the VUE Directory
as an accredited sufferer of Dreams-of-Water, Category Three,
usually illustrated by the ripple sequence from Draining Away
by Mazy Reynard and Shey Talbot.
Gaspara's mother drowned in a ship's swimming pool
on a VUE benefit cruise in the Indian Ocean.
Sparrows Can't Sing, Wings, Three Days of the Condor...
Gaspara's medical history also makes mention of après-radiance,
petagium fellitis and haemophilia. She spoke seven minor VUE languages
and was generally employed as a linguist and as an interpreter.
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, The Owl and the Pussycat...
In her spare time,
she checked foreign-language versions of IRR films
and did unpaid translation work for the VUE Commission.
Where Eagles Dare, Yellow Canary...
When her husband, Obsian,
became deeply involved in researching the filmic origins of the VUE,
Gaspara grew unsympathetic and began to share a great deal of time
with the archivist, Algaris Bardin.
Four Feathers...
She is helping him prepare a French version...
The Birds...
...of his Catalogue of Bird Film Titles.
Will Mr Tulse Luper please pick up a telephone? Thank you.
Obsian Fallicutt had a theory that the VUE was an expensive hoax
perpetrated by AJ Hitchcock to give some credibility
to the unsettling and unsatisfactory ending of his film The Birds.
Obsian is registered as a speaker of Katan with a six-part heart.
Like his wife, he is a sufferer of Dreams-of-Water, Category Three.
Obsian is also allergic to direct sunlight,
a disability alleviated by his obsession with the cinema
which normally keeps him safely in the dark.
After seeing The Birds one wet afternoon in a Leeds cinema,
Obsian left his job as a designer of artificial horizons
and joined a film laboratory as an optical engineer
to examine closely the technical expertise needed
to produce cinematic illusion.
With his wife, he plunged into a thorough programme of research,
viewing all the ornithological film material he could find,
not missing a reference, however tenuous, to be fully equipped
to make a definitive examination of Hitchcock's film.
He visited the Lleyn Peninsula,
discovering from clues in Hitchcock's film a farm outside Aberdaron
called Fay Mar, the name of the boat in the Hitchcock film
where the first bird attack had taken place.
The farm was run by an American Holiday Consortium
traceable to a Minneapolis Hospital, and then to the Hitchcock Estate.
Becoming an accomplished bird identifier,
there was one species in the film
which Obsian had always failed to identify.
It looked like a hybrid of rook and seagull.
Obsian christened it an Alfred
and hoping for a response from the Hitchcock estate,
he wrote off asking if this composite bird owed its existence
to the specifications of the director or a property manager.
After a delay he was answered by a scriptwriter's wife
that her husband could not answer any questions,
having seriously suffered from the effects of the VUE,
but she knew that the bird had been given a Latin title in the studios,
Corvus frugilegus atlanticus.
She added that her husband went to the Lleyn Peninsula
to look for locations.
She intimated that Obsian ought to continue his research.
Encouraged, Obsian now spent all his free time pursuing his theory.
Using the laboratory facilities, he began to build up an illicit library
of films with ornithological themes.
And he instituted an elaborate frame count
with a new 35mm copy of The Birds. Obsian worked such long hours,
Gaspara thought he was being blackmailed by FOX,
the Society For Ornithological Extermination,
and suggested he might like to change his name to avoid persecution.
Obsian, amused, said it was too late to contemplate such a deception
for it was obvious by now that he was being closely watched.
Two years ago,
Obsian began visiting California without his wife,
and six months ago, applied for a permanent resident's permit.
He is now living in a luxurious apartment at Bel Air,
ostensibly receiving an income from his editorship
of a screen magazine called The Hoopoe,
whose rare issues are concerned with birds in feature film making.
Gaspara has discovered this magazine is financed by the Hitchcock estate.
Wrallis Fallinway.
Typing error for Wrallis Fallanway. See Biography 13.
Ashile Fallko, like Marat, died in his bath.
Novelist, historian and ornithological journalist,
Fallko got into this bath about 11 pm, June 13th,
on the night of the Violent Unknown Event,
and was still in it on the 17th, four days and nights later,
a total of some 93 hours.
Severely paralysed, speechless and incontinent,
he was discovered by accident by a looter.
Admitted to hospital suffering from exposure, congested lungs, shock
and a rapidly developing skin eczema,
Ashile Fallko was slow to recover as he was slow to dry out.
The Directory declared him to be
a middle-aged female man speaking Ringer.
Against medical advice, Ashile insisted on returning to his flat.
He began to document his case
and then the case histories of other VUE patients,
to lobby for recognition of their condition
and to persuade international cooperation
to put aside funds for the rehabilitation of VUE victims.
Since his skin eczema was eased by submersion in warm salt water,
he dictated most of his letters, articles and stories from his bath.
Every room in the flat, including this bathroom,
was equipped with a microphone wired to a tape recorder in the hall.
It is said of Fallko
that if the VUE had not happened, then Fallko would have invented it.
A furious scourge and a shrill critic of institutions,
Ashile hounded the VUE Commission
and succeeded in getting five directors removed or dismissed,
and it is reported he developed a strong case
against Van Hoyten and FOX, and was waiting for an opportunity to use it.
Over a period of six years, he employed over 30 secretaries,
most of whom left, complaining of the workload,
the crowds in this bathroom, the smell
or Fallko's emotional and physical demands.
Fallko was periodically readmitted to hospital
suffering from exhaustion, depression or scalding.
Persuaded into the role of a contemporary Marat,
Fallko only needed a zealous executioner and a celebrated painter
to complete the necessary cycle.
The execution he had to commit himself.
It was said that FOX had finally trapped him in a technical hypocrisy.
The suicide weapon appears to have been a two-bar electric fire
and the images for posterity were taken by a police photographer.
The bathroom being wired for dictation,
the equipment recorded a last message.
(scream)
A message as poignant
as anything written with a pen which was also a feather.
Agostina Fallmutt had started off her career as the official biographer
of Dr Frederich Karl Haberlein, the medical officer of Pappenheim,
the reputed discoverer of the first fossil remains
of the primitive reptile bird archaeopteryx.
On the title page of the biography she had written
Which of the two following objects were blown away in a gale
and drowned in the Solnhofen Lake:
Dr Frederich Haberlein or archaeopteryx?
At the time of publication, this enigmatic inference was ignored.
The biography in its first edition never sold more than 500 copies.
Agostina quietly continued to teach biology at Torquay,
spending weekends collecting material from the beach
to make collages for her friends.
Then Agostina wrote an article for the WSPB's journal, The Rooster,
reconstructing an imaginary conversation
between the two involuntary iconoclasts of Oxford University
who destroyed one of the last dodo specimens.
The traditionally dour readers were amused,
and she was invited to speak at ornithological meetings
and be interviewed for local television.
Her ability to combine wit and avian blasphemy made her popular
and her publishers printed
a second edition of her Haberlein biography.
The debate about bird origins was taken up on a wider front
and the enigmatic question on the title page of the book
became a shorthand and convenient way of summing up the complex issue.
Agostina Fallmutt was diagnosed as a female woman,
officially speaking Antoneen.
She was treated for mild epilepsy, high blood pressure
and was advised to take frequent rests.
She suffered from phantom pregnancies like Mary the First of England,
whose Portrait with a Parrot was pasted on Agostina's bathroom mirror.
Soon after the VUE, the hardier areas of skin on Agostina's body,
on the fingertips, palms of her hands, soles of her feet,
further hardened and new-toughened skin appeared on her elbows,
knees and ankles which coruscated just above the elbows
into protuberant gristle.
Agostina took to wearing loose-sleeved blouses
which kept the contours of her elbows hidden.
She gave no evidence that she was distressed
or unduly concerned by these unusual features.
They may have influenced a pamphlet she later published
on avian cobs, wattles, wens and casques.
With her change in fortune, Agostina went to Australia to study ratites,
flightless birds like the kiwi and the emu,
and more importantly, to research the fossil record of their ancestors.
Agostina's French mechanic in Adelaide named her La Solitaire
on account of the Ionely safaris she took,
driving in a battered Land Rover she called The Goatsucker.
La solitaire was also an extinct flightless pigeon
that had lived uniquely on the island of Rodriguez in the Indian Ocean.
It was described by François Leguat
as having round masses of bone on each wing,
enabling the cock birds to inflict damage on their rivals.
Agostina must have been aware of the coincidence but never remarked on it.
Agostina camped for 17 months without human contact in the Bar-She cave
near Lake Te-Anin on South Island, New Zealand,
where a colony of notorni, a ratite long believed to be extinct,
had unexpectedly turned up in 1948.
It was from this cave Agostina wrote out her theory of ratite revenge.
Ousted by greed and ignorance on the part of man,
the ratites were attempting a return to their former supremacy.
They had perpetrated the Violent Unknown Event
to transform man himself into a ratite.
When her thesis was published, not by the WSPB who thought it ridiculous,
Agostina was pilloried, and on a number of different levels.
Her landlady sought a court order to get her out of her flat in Torquay,
the paperboy burnt her newspapers,
her grocer accused her of stealing egg powder
and her publisher withheld royalties.
Agostina began driving her Land Rover in circles on the Torbay beach
until that too was forbidden by the police
who impounded the vehicle to search it for pornography.
At the onset of a phantom pregnancy,
Agostina took to staying indoors in the daytime to avoid further calumny.
She went walking at night.
The persecution ended tragically, for her body was eventually discovered
in a boat-and-tackle hut at Teignmouth.
It was difficult to establish foul play, so the verdict was ascribed
to delayed effects of the Violent Unknown Event.
This one.
The next two biographies have been blue-pencilled
by the Bird Foundation Industries.
Biography 72, ostensibly because it dealt with rival sponsorship,
and Biography 73, because Cottes Fallope, cartographer,
had been caught in an act of trespass.
However, there is reason to suppose
both biographies were curtailed because of their length.
It is intended to publish them later with other suspended biographies
if not in a subsequent edition of The Falls, then under separate cover.
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary,
accentor,
dowitcher,
dotterel,
bobolink,
gargny,
pratincol,
phalarope,
sanderling...
Before the Violent Unknown Event,
Pollie Fallory did indifferent bird imitations.
She had impersonated a nightingale for 27 nights
in a play called The Little Green Finches,
and she played a budgerigar with clipped wings
in a film called The Reluctant Singer.
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary...
Her act was accompanied by random fluttering gestures
and the habit of singing through an almost closed mouth.
When she employed an agent
he would always be telling her to open her mouth and freeze her arms.
Pochard,
serin,
siskin,
thrasher,
whimbrel,
whinchat,
willet,
junco,
goony,
fulmar...
After the Violent Unknown Event,
Pollie Fallory spoke Mickel-ease or Mickel.
It was a language full of alliteration, sudden turns of speech,
high registers, changes in volume and unexpected silences
in which the speaker took prolonged and exaggerated breaths.
Waiting for the next syllable in Mickle-ease
was like waiting for a child to scream after a fall.
Pollie quickly assumed a command of Mickle-ease
that stretched the human tongue and voice box
to influence the language of animals rather than the other way around.
... loon,
rail,
scaup...
In a belated response to the badgering of her former agents,
Pollie's body now stood rigid when she sang and remained that way,
ideally unaccompanied by the slightest facial or body gesture.
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary...
Except for an occasional patient smile, she indicated with her body
as little as possible that might reflect on her speech.
She was persuaded to relearn English
to reach and recruit a larger ornithological audience,
to add the VUE anthem to her repertoire
and to make a definitive version of the Bird List Song.
Pollie became a raconteur. She also did woman imitations.
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary...
The Violent Unknown Event had partially paralysed the face
of Afracious Fallows, enlarged his heart, thumbs and genitals,
made him scrofulous, softened and widened his feet
and thoroughly wrecked his career as a school headmaster.
Afracious regularly sought to relieve his depression
by driving a stolen car round a traffic island in Abersoch
until the petrol ran out or he was stopped by the police.
He made a living through petty thieving, mimicry,
Latin lessons, car stealing, bird identification and prostitution.
His greatest source of pride
was being secretary of the Abersoch Audubon Ornithological Society
and his rented beach house at Cappis Sand housed sick seabirds,
incompetent efforts at taxidermy
and eccentric systems of bird classification of his own invention.
Afracious strongly identified with Linnaeus and the hoopoe.
Three years ago, accused of embezzlement,
he was unanimously dismissed from the Abersoch Audubon Society.
To display his rancour and his erudition in one gesture,
he spent the 13th anniversary of the VUE
stealing from beach houses at Cappis Sand
owned by members of the Abersoch Audubon Society
who were not VUE victims.
He stole an umbrella from The Homestead,
property of Mr Herbert Armada.
A pair of plimsolls, size eight, from Orinoco,
owned by Mr and Mrs C Fretcalfe.
A pair of underpants from an unnamed beach house,
owned by Mr Harris Rippley.
A second pair of plimsolls, size five, from Oleander,
owned by Mrs Lily Armada.
An anorak from an unnamed property.
A pair of earrings from the unnamed property,
of Mrs Freda Baal, who at the time of the robbery was Mrs Freda Cowls.
A third pair of plimsolls from The Polyanna,
property of Mrs N Ipositan.
A black full-length overcoat from The Ole, belonging to Mr G Odfrey.
A fourth pair of plimsolls, child's size six,
from the unnamed beach house, belonging to Mr C Unrodriguez.
And a pair of brown shoes, size eight, from Endview,
owned by Mr and Mrs Stewupsson.
The Latin title Upupa Epops and the English name of the hoopoe
are spelt out by the initials of the stolen items and the beach houses.
If the responsibility was still in any doubt
the initials of the owners of the beach houses spell out Afracious.
Additional anagrams, and acrostics are fanciful.
Once put on the track the Abersoch detectives could not be held back.
Afracious was easily caught, as he intended to be.
He pleaded guilty
and asked for 27 other offences to be taken into account.
He was imprisoned for three years and released after two,
earning remission for permitting his mouth to be reshaped
the better to learn Hartileas B.
Hearty Fallparco is at present solely represented by this snippet of film.
Reputedly he is the boy in glasses holding the eagle.
After a night of vomiting and epilepsy, the VUE Directory notes
his destruction on the morning of the Event at Tampa, Florida,
by a hurricane christened by the weather station
as Birdie Number One.
(recites "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" in French)
Sallis Fallpinio, children's broadcaster in five languages,
visited Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, Yorkshire,
in the afternoon prior to the Violent Unknown Event.
Sometime between 4:12 and 4:25, along with some 310 other people,
Sallis walked in front of the Temple of Piety.
A carrion crow sat on an oak Watching a tailor shape his cloak.
"Wife," cried he, "bring me my bow That I may shoot yon carrion crow."
Subsequently, along with those 310 afternoon visitors,
Sallis suffered from petagium fellitis, loss of weight,
an ability to speak and write Cathaganian in its prime version
and an involuntary paralysis, intermittent and sudden,
locking the lower limbs in a stance that could persist for 40 minutes.
There was a little man and he had a little gun,
And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead.
He went to the brook and shot a little duck
Right through the middle of the head, head, head.
Sallis took a photograph of the grounds at about 4:15.
Her aunt is there, along with a friend of the family.
The closer to the temple the visitors wandered,
the greater their subsequent Cathaganian vocabulary
and the greater their weight loss.
At a range of 400 yards, a visitor could later command
a vocabulary of some 17,000 Cathaganian words
and normally suffered a weight loss of about a stone and a half.
An approach of under 50 yards meant a debilitating weight loss
requiring constant hospital attention.
As I went over the water, the water went over me.
I saw two little blackbirds sitting on a tree.
One called me a rascal, one called me a thief.
And I took up my little black stick and knocked out all their teeth.
Sallis, collector of nursery rhymes, playground songs and folklore,
believed in the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds
and was not surprised in the least at the VUE's malevolence,
knowing the traditional antipathy and antagonism
of man towards birds that begins its propaganda in the nursery.
"Oh what have you got for dinner, Mrs Bond?"
"There's beef in the larder and ducks on the pond."
"Dilly-dilly, dilly-dilly, come to be killed."
"For you must be stuffed and my customers filled."
Crasstranger Fallqueue knew both meanings of "flight"
having had to escape from vehement political persecution
by hijacking a plane.
Variously disguised as an acrobat who juggled eggs
and as a blind ornithologist, he eventually made a home in Wales
and settled on the Lleyn Peninsula.
The VUE is now his persecutor.
Crasstranger could have flown the aircraft he hijacked.
It could be said that his family had prepared him for it.
They experienced a fair share of underplanned flying
mostly unwillingly, from tenth-storey prison windows.
It wasn't too difficult to make defenestration
look like ambitious mimicry of birds.
The family passion for aeronautics was a useful cover for assassination.
Crasstranger's grandfather, a language schoolteacher,
earned the first Slovak degree in aeronautical engineering
and had pursued a wish to fill the skies with aircraft,
a wish that was only fulfilled by his pupils on Saturday afternoons.
Crasstranger's uncles had outwitted one another in flying stunts,
and his father, developing a motorised parachute,
littered his speech with artificial sibilants
to encourage lightness of body by the lightness of speech.
Crasstranger considered his father's linguistic mannerisms
were a worthwhile course to develop in any attempt to identify with birds
and he urged VUE victims to express themselves by singing, not flying.
He now earned his living as an aeronautical journalist
and as a flight historian.
His knowledge of the facts and feats of air pioneering
were rarely contested.
He knew that the man who threw himself off the Eiffel tower
in April 1911 was not the patriot airman Nathan Isole Dermontier,
nor the Welsh baritone called Van Riquardt,
but was an Austrian clothing manufacturer called Reichelt
testing a parachute-coat of his own design.
Any amount of historical inaccuracy, misguided heroic identity
and misrepresentation could not disguise what was for Crasstranger
a supreme example of the folly of aspiring to emulate the birds.
Romanese Fallracce was struck by lightning
in the early hours of June 13th
in the year of the Violent Unknown Event.
Fallracce, singer, arborealist, community organiser,
spent most summer weekends with her husband and her two sons,
camping in and around the Black Forest.
On the evening of the VUE, the Fallracces had pitched two tents
at an approved camping site near Villingen.
After a quarrel with her husband, Romanese slept in the family car,
and at about six in the morning,
she was woken by rain drumming on the car roof.
To loosen the guy ropes on her sons' tent,
Romanese left the safety of the car and was struck by lightning.
Onlookers said that for five seconds or more,
Romanese's scarlet anorak appeared to shine brightly
as though illuminated from inside.
Romanese then fell into a sitting position,
and finally flopped over into the drenched pine-needles.
The pattern of her underclothes was stencilled in burn marks on her body
and the metal in her brassiere had melted
and spattered small burn marks down her back.
She was rushed to a casualty department at Freiburg,
where she recovered to find herself a victim of the Violent Unknown Event.
A Freiburg newspaper singled her out as a special victim of the VUE
and Romanese herself did little to put the record straight.
She grew to believe
it had been the very essence of the VUE that had struck her.
She became a Bavarian celebrity.
With her husband and her two sons, and a growing band of adherents,
Romanese visited the site of her lightning strike every June 13th.
Six years after the Event, she was still introduced at VUE functions
as the woman who was struck by VUE lightning.
The VUE victims in her audience took a certain comfort
from seeing Romanese naked to the waist
standing on a rostrum talking confidently about her experiences.
They could believe that the VUE was comprehensible as an electric shock,
random in its choice of victim,
arbitrary in the scale of damage it could do
and bizarre in its peripheral effects.
They were conveniently, if erroneously, reminded
that lightning was supposed never to strike twice.
By Romanese's example, they were thus immune from future disaster.
There was the explanation of the VUE's immortality characteristic,
to be immortal was synonymous with being immune to lightning strike.
The mild idolatry accorded to Romanese
was encouraged by her husband. Her sons were less convinced.
Especially when she developed symptoms like a loss of memory
and outbreaks of uncontrollable grief that shook her body
and dangerously lowered her temperature.
Last year, Romanese's name was entered in the VUE Directory,
as a middle-aged female woman speaking Candoese
and suffering from intermittent nervous collapse
and involuntary hypothermia.
She refused to visit the site of her lightning strike,
though her sons occasionally made the pilgrimage.
Rapid conifer growth and the cutting of firebreaks
have increasingly made the local geography unfamiliar.
Ascrib Fallstaff.
Pernicious inclusion of fictional character. Criminal charge pending.
At an open-air concert at Phoenix, Arizona,
Armeror Fallstag is reputed by his fans and promoters
to have flown 310 metres, and they are not speaking metaphorically.
Is it true, Armeror Fallstag,
that when you flew for the first time you were airsick?
(speaks French)
All fledglings on their first flight regurgitate their food.
Did you use feathers?
No way.
How far did you fly that first time?
However far it was, it was certain...
It is thought Armeror could have flown further,
but he caught his foot in railings...
Did you fly near the sun?
...and was pulled down by the crowd.
No way.
How about night flying?
He came regularly to Britain to visit all the accredited VUE sites
and a lot of the unaccredited ones as well.
I find it difficult to judge any distance from the ground.
What do you do about landing in the dark?
Armeror was a generous donor and had made speculative plans
with an American Foundation to purchase Bardsey Island
as a sanctuary and last resting place for severely afflicted VUE victims.
Is it true what they say about flight?
He was not as yet successful,
though in anticipation of eventual entombment on Bardsey
many VUE victims were buried in mainland cemeteries near the island.
Wings indeed. You don't need to die.
What are your opinions about powered flight?
It was a wrong turning.
Do you think that the Wright Brothers are to be praised or cursed?
The Wright Brothers should have stayed put and made bicycles.
Originally intent on an academic career
rewriting Victorian novels with the benefit of hindsight,
he was side-tracked by an interest in music to make a fortune,
which he sunk into property, literary ephemera and psychic drawings.
On the whole, fine flying birds have negligible walking ability
and it is not easy to empathise with an ostrich.
Do you believe it was Haberlein who discovered archaeopteryx?
No way.
With the advent of the VUE, he began to collect VUE artefacts
and is now negotiating to buy the fossil archaeopteryx
found by Dr Haberlein in the Solnhofen Lake.
It is presently the property of the Natural History Museum in London.
This fossil was sold to the British Museum by Haberlein in 1862
to provide a dowry for his eldest daughter
and is the subject of Fallstag's best-selling record
Abigail and the Early Bird.
Yet he was eminently a failure was he not?
What's your opinion about the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds?
The imagery of birds is vast and unlimiting.
You can take what you like...
Armeror, a sufferer of poor vision
and taker of Flutinol for intestinal problems, speaks Foreignester,
though when he sings, the lyrics are full of references in French,
a language he refuses to speak on account of his animosity to Blériot.
...arranged to meet Tulse Luper at...
As an American citizen on a visitor's visa to Britain,
he is obliged to seek a permit from the American Embassy
before realising a flying project at Dover
where he hopes, he says, to further discredit Blériot
who could only fly the English Channel with the help of an engine.
One last question, Armeror. If indeed you can fly,
why did you use professional aircraft to get you to Britain?
- To help exhaust the oil supply. - Armeror, thank you very much.
Combayne Fallstoward agreed to meet us here in the porch of her house.
So we waited.
Combayne Fallstoward was immortally 19.
It was she who wrote The Boulders of Flight.
It was published about the time
she celebrated her 19th birthday for the 30th time.
After its publication, she wore black and lived with her dog at Merle
in attempted isolation.
The house had been owned in the 19th century
by the American historian Austin Carter Scops.
Scops had two galleries or wings
built onto the original, rather prosaic farmhouse
that he inherited from his grandmother, and here he displayed
the badly scarred and fractured statues of Hermes and Eros,
that he had acquired from various European collections.
It was suggested he stole most of them from public gardens,
and the scarring and fracturing was caused by his unceremonious haste
in removing them from their niches and pedestals after dark.
After his improvements, Scops had grandly called his house
The Winged Samothrace in emulation of that statue now in the Louvre.
This name was perhaps not unnaturally accredited to Combayne Fallstoward,
the house's new occupant, apparently much to her annoyance,
but it did not go unnoticed that she signed her letters
on more than one occasion with the initials WS.
The Directory classified Combayne as a young female woman
speaking Untowards and suffering from timidity.
11 years ago, a tree on this site was the subject of an unfinished film.
The film was made by Geoffrey Fallthuis,
student pupil of Tulse Luper, and at 19,
the shortest and youngest of the Luper admirers
who supported the Luper programme
for an unassisted naturally evolving landscape.
The tree, a wych elm, had been planted on this site
on the south bank of the Thames, when it was the garden of a broker
who apparently specialised in importing timber
for manufacturing musical instruments.
Due to coincidences of date, name and geography,
Geoffrey Fallthuis chose to structure the cutting copy of his film
on Anton Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra,
a choice cemented by the knowledge that another Schoenberg pupil,
Hans Eisler, had composed a work to a tree,
an oak that had survived the bombing of Berlin.
Three months after his modest film exercise,
Geoffrey Fallthuis joined an ecological foundation,
studied tree culture and went to America.
Seven years later, he married Corntopia Felixchange,
a soprano who eventually joined the Metropolitan Opera Company.
Geoffrey Fallthuis was in Ontario at the time of the VUE,
supervising the planting of conifers.
The VUE gave him a bone-marrow disease, incipient petagium fellitis
and a neuralgia that Fallthuis was able to partly anaesthetise
with nicotine and aspirin.
Fallthuis, in acknowledgement of his VUE disabilities, took a job
giving him time to travel with his wife on her singing tours of Europe.
Eventually his wife was invited to London to the Royal Festival Hall
and Fallthuis visited the South Bank for the first time in 11 years.
One September evening at dusk, whilst his wife attended a rehearsal,
Fallthuis stepped out of this door to look again at the tree
which had been the subject of his last film exercise.
Much had changed.
The buildings he had filmed in their early stages of construction
were now long completed.
And the tree had gone.
Heavily supported by chains at the time Fallthuis had filmed it,
the tree became a potential danger to pedestrians and had been cut down.
Fallthuis lit a cigar and walked along this balcony
to a position he could not have anticipated
as a camera position 10 years before.
While standing about here, no doubt leaning on the balustrade like this,
he fell.
Or he was pushed. Or he jumped deliberately.
One witness is on record as saying that at the time Fallthuis fell,
there had been a pistol shot.
Anton Webern had been shot.
He too had been standing on a balcony.
The lighted tip of his cigar had made him the target after curfew
for an overzealous American soldier in 1945.
The connection was not lost on Fallthuis's wife.
She demanded and got an inquiry. 11 witnesses came forward.
But the evidence was so conflicting the coroner passed a verdict
of misadventure abetted by delayed effects of the VUE.
Corntopia Felixchange lobbied the IRR
to provide funds to remake her late husband's film
with a new musical structure that would reflect Webern's Five Pieces
and provide her with a vocal part.
The work was to be dedicated to all VUE victims.
An early friend of Fallthuis's, Nye Galibo,
who appears in this, the fifth part of the original film,
generously agreed to compose the new music.
As yet neither the IRR nor any other body
have come up with the funds to make Corntopia's film
and in deference to VUE victims the music has, in the meantime,
been used to accompany some of the VUE biographies in The Falls.
Insubstantial entry.
Merriem Falltrick appears only once in all 14 editions of Directory
as deaf-mute, with cerebral palsy and wings.
Stephany Falltrix is trying hard to shake off
the crippling effects and influence of the VUE on her mind and body
and argues that the inclusion of her disabilities in this film
is not going to help her recovery.
One of her afflictions is an allergy to the colour red.
For the moment, in lieu of her biography,
she has presented to the VUE library as evidence of her determination
a book of red-painted pages.
Her slow but steady progress, which we respect,
is indicated by the red pages progressively becoming whiter.
Tolley Falluger, historian, classification theorist,
bird counter and authority on animal migration,
normally lives on a boat in the Bardsey Island Straits.
He has proposed theories, for those wishing to believe
in a concerted effort on the part of birds,
to have found a viable parliament of fowls.
These have so struck the World Society for the Protection of Birds
that they have muzzled him.
His brother, Vassian, believes Tolley was sent to the Tasman Archipelago
to study the Steven's Island wren, whose entire population was killed
by a lighthouse keeper's cat in the first four months of 1894.
Vassian Falluger long believed that the Violent Unknown Event
was a mass hallucination perpetrated by the WSPB
on a public who felt guilty about bird slaughter.
Then he changed his mind, or had his mind changed for him.
His former feelings on the VUE were prompted both by sibling rivalry,
his brother being a celebrated, if censored, enthusiast
for the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds, and by his mild symptoms,
slight ornith-a-graffiti, a containable petagium fellitis
and a preference for travel in spring and autumn.
Vassian's conversion relied on two fortuitous events,
a visit to the Boulder Orchard
and a present of a facsimile edition of the Havell Double Elephant Folio
of Audubon's Birds of America.
The visit was initially a professional one.
He was asked to design the lettering and take photographs
for the publicity material for a new VUE Opera
that took as its libretto the names of 92 birds.
The Folio was given to him by Allia Fallanx,
at that time the resident Boulder Orchard Custodian.
Vassian saw one phenomenon reflected in the other
and considered both of them to be interchangeable.
For Falluger, Audubon had replaced Tulse Luper
as the Violent Unknown Event's master strategist and cataloguer.
With the obsessive enthusiasm of a true convert,
Vassian drew and photographed the Orchard,
and filmed it on every film stock he could lay his hands on.
He taped the Orchard's birdsong,
yearly counted the leaves on its 11 trees
and scrupulously measured the root growth.
He calculated the value of the Orchard's apples in sterling,
dollars, gold and osprey eggs.
Vassian claimed he discovered in the disposition of the rocks and trees
a system of passageways that, in miniature,
matched the pilgrim tracks of the Lleyn Peninsula
and the known routes of migrational birds in the Northern Hemisphere.
Vassian's programme for the next ten years
includes a full-scale model of the orchard
recreated in metal and plastic, an illustrated plant life,
where he claims the most successful plants in the orchard
are the cranesbill, ragged robin and bird's-foot trefoil,
and a project to deposit a handwritten copy
of the 92 VUE bird names in every public library in Great Britain.
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds, name as many birds as you can think of.
(buzzer)
Honey-buzzard, osprey.
Wren, sparrow, starling.
Swallow, gull, buzzard.
Tit, bluetit, coal tit, great tit, little tit and many others.
Before the VUE, Erhaus Bewler Falluper was a master cataloguer,
an enumerator and a collector of statistics.
He inaugurated grand and extensive projects
that other less gifted statisticians completed.
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,
name as many birds as you can that start with the letter C.
In the five years before the Violent Unknown Event,
amongst other unfinished projects,
Erhaus conducted 17 surveys about the state of the public's knowledge
of natural landscape and all that was in it.
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,
name as many birds as you can that start with the letter P.
- (buzzer) - Pigeon...
The value of these surveys is doubtful.
The results were erratic and arbitrarily catalogued.
True to form, all 17 incomplete surveys
have, in various ways, spawned further projects.
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,
name as many birds as you can that start with the letter L.
This particular survey on bird knowledge is no exception.
Lark.
- Linnet. - Lapwing.
I can't think of any.
- Lark. - Lovebirds.
What are those things in the zoo with the...
- The... - (buzzer)
At the buzzer, tell me as much as you can about the cuckoo.
(buzzer)
The cuckoo is about 30 centimetres long.
Indeed, Falluper's random choice of interviewees has been borrowed,
the VUE Commission choosing people whose surnames,
like Falluper's own, begin with the letters FALL.
Whilst acknowledging his output,
his detractors accused him of manufacturing fictions,
and deliberately confusing identities,
also of not knowing the difference between a good joke and a bad one.
(buzzer)
His supporters thought these accusations were often true,
but they believed that Falluper's half-fictions were by-products
of his compulsion to draw up maps, index disaster
and break chaos into small pieces that he might rearrange them
in a different way, perhaps alphabetically.
...in the penguin family.
But Falluper's supporters had no illusions about his jokes.
They knew he was too serious to have a sense of humour.
They come from the Falkland Islands.
Falluper asked his questions of 41 people.
In the VUE Directory, there were exactly double that number of persons
whose surnames began with the letters FALL.
Of the 41 persons Falluper interviewed,
seven were to become VUE victims.
These seven, like Falluper himself now speak Abcadefghan,
have superlative night vision, are welcomed at children's parties,
can whistle well, fear flying, loathe the FOX
and inaugurate projects that others less gifted invariably complete.
- Curlew. - Black crow.
- Swallow. - Sparrow.
Jackdaw.
(buzzer)
- Dodo! - Dodo.
Little grey ones.
Six out of the seven, like Falluper,
have kept their post-VUE physical appearance hidden.
The seventh victim has permitted her likeness to be used
as an aid to the finding of her husband.
If it had been necessary,
Falluper could have invented the Violent Unknown Event.
It certainly effaced him. There have been no more grand projects.
It is said that Falluper has changed identity and become a catalogue clerk
working nights in an office in Whitfield Street, London W1.
- Deerhen. - Lighthouse bird.
Sepoy.
- Chubb. - Buzzard.
Grastled Fallusson invented so much fiction about himself,
the Directory cannot vouch for any version of his biography.
Castral Fallvernon,
curator of photographs and pictures for the VUE Commission
lives and works in a disused aircraft on the outfield at Heathrow.
Three years after the Violent Unknown Event,
to aid VUE victims afflicted with a variety of avian paranoias,
Castral approached the Airport Authority
for help in developing a rehabilitation programme
based on visual stimulation.
Sleep in the tail, breakfast over the wing,
office up front, lounge in the cockpit.
Legolas Varda bought me a mynah bird.
Within six months, Castral could offer a prospectus
including bird-recognition therapy, exercise in a flight simulator,
lepidoptery, ornithological taxidermy and free-fall parachuting.
Progressing patients are assessed by their reaction to visual material
on tapes, slides and film,
accompanied by a great deal of specially composed music,
full use of the VUE languages and a wealth of bird anecdote.
Filmstrip 17 was a favourite project
with apparently considerable curative properties.
It certainly introduced Castral to her husband,
who as a self-styled flyer, modelled himself on William Cody
and until the treatment of filmstrip 17,
was persecuted by the thought that an attack from the air would blind him.
Castral's appreciation of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds
and the Value of Personalised Flight was equivocal
and could be typified by her copy of the da Vinci flying machine.
Aircraft vibration loosened a drawing pin holding it to the wall.
The picture had swung round so that the machine flew upside down.
Castral had not seen fit to put it back the right way up.
The pictures in filmstrip 17 were taken from an early collection
of black-and-white photographs of birds kept in zoos.
Most of the photographs had been heavily retouched.
In some cases, they had been virtually recreated with a brush.
Maybe this was instrumental in the filmstrip's high success rate.
Either that or patients were intimidated
by the eye of the marabou stork.
The timorous may have identified Castral with that stern eye.
She had no room for failures.
Capercaillie, lammergeyer, cassowary...
Leasting Fallvo wrote plots, fictions, lyrics and narratives.
She likes the theatre...
Among his clients were second offenders, alibi hunters,
newspaper editors, con men, dramatists and bored children.
The audience, the pay and the state of the Fallvo imagination
dictated the swing of each narrative and its outcome.
...down in Abersoch Bay. Abersoch. A-B-E-R-S-O-C-H...
Before the Violent Unknown Event,
an Earth reconstructed from Fallvo's entire imaginative output
would have been populated only by homo sapiens and a few bushes.
The VUE changed all that.
...pratincol, phalarope...
These are the photographs...
Fallvo was in Bavaria in a ski lift at 11.41 on the evening of the VUE.
In an ensuing accident he lost the use of both his legs,
but as to actual VUE symptoms, Fallvo was slow to be affected.
Carlos was not happy with the photographs...
A year after the Event, Fallvo began to speak Oso-leet-ter,
a plain rhythmic language
suitable for the telling of a steady uncluttered narrative
and an Earth reconstructed now from his output
would be populated by birds and a few piles of brick.
...in a haversack,
along with the silver spoon from his mother's second-wedding presents.
However, he lost his English-speaking audience and his earnings slumped.
To earn money he came to the VUE Commission with a proposal
to establish a library contributed to solely by those afflicted by the VUE.
...auklet, noddy...
Eventually, there were enough VUE products to demand a catalogue.
Fallvo volunteered to put it together. The Commission agreed,
provided Fallvo produced the catalogue in English.
...and cucumbers...
Fiction was poorly represented and Fallvo himself
saw to it that the nearly empty shelves looked more respectable.
Among his works in English were
The Madras Lemonade Glass, The Tyddyn-Corn Clout,
Bird Tales of the Eiffel Tower, A Walk Through H,
A Turkey for a Wife, The House of the Two Palms,
The Dogs on Bardsey Island, The Tulse Luper Suitcase,
Protest at the Golden Egg, The Missing Composer,
The Making of Hartileas B,
The Wash-House Corpse, The Red Chair and many others.
It was said that if the VUE had not happened,
then Leasting Fallvo could have invented it.
...skua...
With the preposterous Violent Unknown Event receding in everyone's minds,
an need for new fiction persuaded Fallvo's clients to reemploy him.
...scaup...
Seven years after the Event, Fallvo was more prosperous than ever
but there were two penalties.
First, the slowly encroaching influence of the VUE on Fallvo
was affecting his eyesight.
...Anthior Fallwaste...
Second, the VUE was persuading him he had no memory worth preserving.
Both these facts improved his standard of living further.
The first because he could rely less on observation
and the second because he was forced to keep reinventing.
...a bird scarer. The conventional sanctuary...
Fallvo's circle of contacts and clients continued to increase.
Whether they treated his narratives as allegories
or as metaphors of their own difficulties has to be researched.
Anthior Fallwaste has achieved
what so many immortal VUE victims have failed to do.
He was successfully buried on the site of a bird scarer
the conventional sanctuary
of those seeking to irrevocably terminate a relationship with birds.
And that is the end of The Falls.
The next name in the Directory is Artesian Falma.
Subtitles: IMS