Free Nemonymous Night by D. F. Lewis

(a sickness that most people, even children, had forgotten).
    One child thought of the maps that had been on board—in the maproom. A wall of maps overlapping each other. This child then told his other half about it: “They were wall-sized maps on hardboard, one on top of the other, hinged at the top where the ship’s horizontal false ceiling ended in meeting the vertical—and you needed to lift one map to see the one underneath, lifting them again and again until you reached the wall itself. Some of the maps are blank, some very complicated with lots of wavy lines…” He tried to take a breath as he took a long run at describing everything that went through his mind. He had the word-power and the enthusiasm to match it. His listener was in awe.
    Other children, with similar memories, could hardly describe them. “The walls were red,” one of them said (a girl with bushy blonde hair), meaning to say they were read like a book.
    “There was a map of a railway,” answered another precocious child who held the hand of an older child with fuzz on his top lip, the latter not seeming quite so ‘with it’ as the younger one.
    “On the wall?”
    “Sort of under the wall. You had to lift the top wall up to see under it—and the first map under it was of a railway, not a map of rivers, roads or mountains—only tracks crawling all over it like centipedes.”
    “Funny map to have on board a ship!”
    “Yes, but most people these days think about trains, rather than boats, planes or cars.”
    “Do they? What about helicopters? Do you count them as planes?”
    Children crowded in to listen, whilst others searched the distraught area where the ship had once been stationed—still trying to locate the hole to the centre of the earth—and beyond.
    “Some people remember the times when grown-ups used to travel to work.”
    “Commuting,” chimed in a bright spark from the back of the crowd.
    “Yes, something like that—but they say you remember the open platforms in the countryside and the platforms you used but now a bit changed, mixing up the direction or if you had changed to the right platform for the next train—going back in the same direction as you came, while you are mixed up because most of the other passengers are collecting themselves on the opposite platform to the one you are on—and you’ve forgotten whether you were travelling to work or travelling back home having already been to work…”
    The chatter soon dissolved as the kids departed in dribs and drabs, having given up any chance of locating the pit entrance hereabouts. The chatter thus faded into the distance and, simultaneously, became more like chatter fitting for children to chat.
    *
    During their lunch-break from the office, Greg and Mike visited Ogdon’s pub on the third floor of the New Trocadero. Mike was disturbed to catch Susan and Ogdon canoodling behind the bar when he and Greg arrived—but Susan quickly rectified herself with some careless excuse. Sympathies for all parties have been meticulously crafted by the implied omniscience of someone who stands behind all the characters. If only he or she were more up front with this task instead of keeping everything between the lines. And given these sympathies, one can try to imagine the sorrow in Mike’s heart at this sign of seedy affection between Susan and Ogdon, plus the shame he felt at his colleague Greg also witnessing the tawdry scene and the further shame felt, indeed, by Susan herself. She quickly changed the subject, whilst serving Greg and Mike their lunchtime booze.
    “The ship’s gone, then.”
    Mike nodded. The huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock—not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit—had long become a fixture on the city’s skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance—presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been