ROLLO

Story by Robyn Hitchcock
Originally appeared in Raygun magazine, October 1993
Reprinted without permission.  Sorry.  Had to do it.

        In a very overgrown garden on the south coast of England, I found a
rusty breastplate.  It was wedged under a collapsed chimney, half ensnared
by the ivy, bust as I tugged it away, I knew that it was sound.  A doomed
nettle straggled through the corner where the left arm went, and as I
pulled that nettle up, I could see the crest of arms on the breastplate.  A
wolf peered through a portcullis.  It looked as though it was thirsty.  I
held the piece of armor over my chest long enough for a snail to attach
itself to my shirt.

        Through curling brambles I lumbered to a window frame that lay on
some dank bricks.  The frame was open and from it gushed a spray of bramble
roots.  Gazing down the line of thorns that jagged up from the bramble, I
saw a metal finger beckoning from the heart of the roots.  The finger
turned out to be one of five all belonging to a tarnished metal glove.  I
tugged at the finger, but couldn't  free the glove from the brambles.  But
I did feel my feet wobbling on a sheet of corrugated iron.  On impulse, I
bent down and grasped the rusty flaky edges.  Something fluttered in the
bushes.

        With an effort, I raised the sheet of corrugated iron a foot or two
above the rich, damp earth, but it was so latticed with pale creepers that
I could not fully upend it.  I had to coax  the corrugated iron up from its
resting place by flapping it up and down like a slow, metal wing.
Eventually, I had it pushed up next to my chin and could almost breathe the
worm-riddled soil beneath.  I flung the troublesome metal wing back, but
instead of a satisfying crash, the thing nearly sagged against the
brambles.  "A boxer on the ropes," I thought.  "Would it counter attack?"

        Before my boots lay a tender square of soil, chocolate black.
Colorless tendrils twined through its almost edible surface.  I saw a
marble eye peer sightlessly up through the earth and a thousand wood lice,
that's roly-poly bugs over here, scuttle along their branch lines
bewildered and jolted by their sudden exposure.  A wood louse the size of a
railway carriage would mean business.  And there it was- an upside down
foot.

        "Over here!"  It was a woman's voice.  "No, here."  Whatever it was
lay in the bush behind the ruined chimney.  "You must be able to see now."

        "What should I be looking for?" I inquired.

        "I'm the head!"

        "Head of what?"

        The voice snorted with muffled contempt but said nothing.  I had,
by that time, slid as far as possible into the thicket that billowed out
behind the chimney.  Rods of elder fanned out from a miniature clearing.
In that clearing sat the helmet and visor of the suit of armor, resting
atop a rusty, enamel bowl.  A surprisingly vivid purple feather jotted from
the helmet's top.

        "Hello," said the helmet.  In person it seemed more friendly.

        "How do you do?" I replied.

        "I'd do a lot better with the rest of me attached," replied the
helmet, frankly.

        The incongruous thing was not that the helmet spoke, but that it
spoke with a female voice.  The voice sounded no more than 30, but the
armor could have been there for a century.  "I can get your foot for you,
if you like?" I replied helpfully.  "And I think I saw your hand in the
brambles."  There was no reply from the helmet. The sky had a bruised look,
but the air was still.  I found a wild strawberry at my feet, remains of
the abandoned back garden from Queen Victoria's day.  I rolled the
strawberry around on my tongue and swallowed it.  The helmet belched.
"Sorry."

        I approached the helmet for the first time and squatted over the
lilies that blossomed around it.  Nothing inside was visible.  I moved
behind it and casually brushed the purple feather.  What happened next was
so fast and so unlikely that I can barely describe it.  An electrical qu
iver shot from the purple plume through my fingers, propelling me backwards
and upright.  As I fell to my feet, a shriek of a thousand female
voice-some appearing to yell "no!" and some others "yes!"- blared in
constant all around me.  It was louder than a football crowd, reverberate
and shrill, but dying away without an echo.  As it did so, the visor
snapped upright and a raw tongue of flesh, the dimensions of a skinned
rabbit, shot briefly out into the gentle evening air and retracted.  I had
only time to glimpse it crawling with ants.  The visor slapped down after
it.  "Bloody hell!" said I.  "What did you do that for? I had only brushed
the feather by accident."  There was no further sound from the helmet.  I
turned and blundered out into the open air.  A flock of dark birds wheeled
out to sea and then headed inland.  Without thinking, I began to collect
the armor.

        My arms were laden with breast plate, shin guards, elbow joints and
feet.  As I passed the remains of the chimney, a small iron door half way
up opened, revealing a violin.  It seemed in surprisingly good condition,
but my arms were too full to investigate.

        "Hang on!"  The women's voice came again, urgently echoing through
the area.  "Don't look yet."

        "I'm not," I yelled back, "but I've got most of you with me."

        "You have?  Bring it here, then.  What are you waiting for?"

        Suddenly, the setting sun shone through the trees, and as I made my
way to the clearing, I glimpsed a huge black guinea fowl hopping around the
helmet.  But no sooner had I stepped into the clearing that the bird
disappeared.

        "Have you got all of me?"

        "Um, there's no right hand, actually."

        "Ah, where did you leave it?"

        "I don't know," I protested.  "It's your body.  What was all that
business about anyway?"

        The helmet suddenly went lifeless again.  It was as if it had been
disconnected.  Cautiously, I laid the pieces of armor out before the
helmet, in the range of its vision, as it were.

        "I remember...I left it in the chimney."  The voice reactivated
itself.  "Could you look?"

        "Um, there's a violin there.  It looks quite new."

        "Oh, that belongs to Rollo."

        "Rollo?"

         The helmet went dead again.  She clearly had a problem with
questions.  A black pointed bird rocked on its heels among the lilies as
the sun disappeared into the sea.  I was about to prod the breast plate
with my foot when I felt the terrible electricity beginning again.  I
stopped before the shriek that I knew would have come.

        "Turn around.  Don't look."

        "I'm not staying.  I've got to make a phone call.  I hope you enjoy
your body, though."

        "It's all right.  It won't take a minute."

        I sighed and turned to face the chimney.  "How many people were in
that helmet?" I wondered.  From the top of the desolate column of bricks, a
solitary frond hung in the still twilight.  Without a sound, something hard
and cold shoved me in the back between my shoulder blades.  I stumbled and
whirled to face her, if indeed it was a her.  The armor had soundlessly
reassembled itself and stood before me.  It seemed shinier in its
re-integrated form.  The visor was down, and it pointed aggressively
towards me like a beak.  The whole thing was about my height, and its right
arm was in a black sling concealing a missing hand.

        "Um, could you open me please?" came a sort of little-girl voice.
Evidently, it was still female.  I was angry.

        "Sure, where's a can opener?  I don't know who you think you are,
but I bet you're full of tomatoes."

        Despite myself, I took a step close to the armor.  At least we
hadn't had the electricity when she slapped me on the back.  Again, she
seemed to ignore the personal remarks.

        "I just can't see you properly with this," she gestured to her
mask.  "I was wondering what you look like."

        "Probably the same as you, give or take a few molecules."  I
growled and picked up a stick.  It was about three feet long and with it I
cautiously began to push up her visor.  The hopping black pointed bird was
doing its mechanical stomp in the lilies and momentarily distracted me.
When I looked again, I dropped the stick in shock.  I had been expecting,
maybe, a loud speaker behind the visor or ball bearings or a clear plastic
bag full of jelly.  In reality, I got hair.  Great long tresses of dark red
hair fell, tumbled with blessed release over the harsh metal breast plate.
When the torrents of locks could fall no further, I was left looking at a
thick curtain of hair two feet long and who knows how deep.  She was
obviously back to front.

        "It's the hair," I said by way of explanation.

        "Blast it," came a muffled voice from the back of the helmet.  "I'm
the wrong way around.  I'll have to dismantle myself.  Don't look."

        This time I stood well out of the way.  I spun around just as the
figure began to sneak up on me.  She offered me her left hand.

        "Pleased to meet you," she said.  Her visor was up.  "I'm Katherine."

        Katherine was as pale as a blade of grass that had grown all of its
life under a stone.  Her face was round, but her nose was long.  She had a
greenish hue with purple eyes that vibrated against golden irises.  Her
parents must have been very unalike.

        "There's going to be a storm.  Where's Rollo?"

        "Where is he usually?"

        "Well, that depends on where he is."

        "So, where is that, usually?"

        Katherine tried to brush away a strand of chestnut hair from her
brow with her right hand.  Realizing that it was missing, she sighed and
used her left.

        "Ah, this time of day I'm not sure."

        The hopping black bird was drinking from the enamel bowl that had
but lately contained her head.  Risking another silence, I asked, "How long
were you dismantled?"  She paused.  She obviously heard the question.  She
looked at the blackbird.  A clump of elder flower brushed its white delta
against the purple feather on her helmet that matched her eyes.  Then she
looked at me.

        "It's not my hand that's missing.  It's Rollo's."

        "You mean you leant him yours?"

        "Exactly."

        "But didn't you just ask me to look for it?"

        "I thought you might find Rollo."

        "If I found the hand, you mean I might find Rollo with your hand."

        She looked puzzled.

        "If I found your hand, the hand that belonged originally to you,
it would be attached to him, and so finding the hand would then constitute
finding him?" I inquired.

        "It's my hand," she said.  "He's got it."

        "So," I asked, "what happened to his hand?"

        "Em, he never really had one."

        For the first time, she asked me a question.  "Can you imagine a
one-handed violinist?"

        "I can imagine one."

        Then she asked me a second question.  "What are you called?"

        "Rollo," I said.


THE END.