Original subtitles

(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 Z�rich 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.

L don't want to end up in the Thames. L can't swim, even if l 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 1940, 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 10 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, l intend to use lights,

so the most auspicious time would be in the evening, round about now.

L'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.

L 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. L can't help them out.

L've no intention of fulfilling that particular forecast.

Besides, if l 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.

L hear Armeror Fallstag has ordered you a wreath.

He should save his money. L'm not dying by gravity.

L'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, l have been advised to make them moderately comfortable

by wearing wool. But l 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.

L'm told you drink salt water to crack the ice in your pancreas.

L 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 l 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 l were born holding hands."

"My mother says so. His father denies it."

"L sometimes think l 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 l 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 l 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.

"L married Messenger after my great disappointment."

"L took to nursing like a duck takes to water."

"Messenger married me for it."

"But as time went on,

l realised that he was too interested in the clothing industry."

"He was even selling stockings to my friend Sanchia."

"L 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 Esterh�zy.

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?

L'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 l 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 Lyc�e Nouvelle M�nilmontant.

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."

"L'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."

"L 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 M�ni�re'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.

L 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 caf� painter.

In 1939, he'd married a caf� 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.

Anteo travelled, extolling the virtues of his pioneer language

and persuading converts to remedy the defects of their ill- shaped throats.

He persuaded the operation on his associates with mixed results

and the death of both of his wives aroused public suspicion.

Although cleared of their deaths, Anteo declined to marry a third time,

considering his marriage certificate to be a guarantee of fatality.

Pandist Fallaspy,

biography sub judice, pending investigation for embezzlement

from the World Society for the Protection of Birds.

It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here...

Three years after the VUE,

Anteo Fallaspy was in Holland with his camera.

He met music and language teacher Sashio Tempesta in Amsterdam,

where they were at a linguistics conference.

They travelled through Holland and married at Valkenswaard.

The Directory states Sashio had webbed underarms,

a bone- marrow deficiency, a scratched face

and that she is a dreamer, Category One. Water. Flight.

She is also a sufferer of apr�s- radiance,

a radiant, flushed condition after exertion and stress.

Sashio was converted to the use of Hartileas B by her husband

and had alterations made to her mouth cavities

to better accommodate the shrill characteristics of that language.

She accepted an invitation to train with the birds on Bardsey Island

off the Lleyn Peninsula.

In good weather, the boat trip to Bardsey lasts about 20 minutes.

The small boat, laden with books, surgical instruments,

a cello, a portable harmonium,

a tea chest of cosmetics and valuable recording equipment, sank.

Only the helmsman escaped, saying the boat had been attacked by cormorants

soon after his lady passenger started singing and shrieking.

It was presumed that Sashio had been practising Hartileas B.

Sashio's decomposing body washed ashore four days later.

It still shone with apr�s- radiance,

so excessive had been her physical determination not to die.

Three years after the death of his first wife, Anteo Fallaspy

was in Paris recording his enthusiasm for the written word,

and teaching Hartileas B at the French Ornithological Institute.

The Institute allocated Anteo an assistant, Vyanine Entasis.

Thanks to the VUE, Vyanine was a speaker of Ipostan,

suffered intestinal blockages, was allergic to the house- dust mite

and had an incurable desire to stay in a different place every night

and never to eat two successive meals at the same table.

She married Anteo for the opportunity to travel that he represented.

Vyanine had been a student of linguistics at Cairo

and had a working knowledge of some ten different VUE languages.

She studied with Parmitter on the Ayers Rock graffiti

and with Tulse Luper on the bogus Olduvai Papers.

Any likelihood that she was overawed by Hartileas B was remote.

After the marriage, Anteo and Vyanine were awarded a grant

to study the song of the aurally dull godwit

on its long- range migration around the world.

They had made plans to travel to Australia, Antarctica,

Alaska and Hawaii, when Vyanine was knocked down by an electioneering van

in the Rue des Oiseaux.

Making too slow a recovery for her own liking,

Vyanine discharged herself from the hospital.

Travelling by metro to the flat of a friend,

she had a relapse in the Rue Moineau.

The ambulance taking her to hospital was delayed by crowds

and Vyanine died, officially outside the Caf� Hirondelle,

unofficially opposite the Caf� Renard.

One, two, three, four...

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

Castenarm Fallast, occasional pianist, professional indexer

and itinerant propagandist for a well- known opera company.

The VUE has not impaired his livelihood

but has widened his outlook on birds.

... dotterel,

pratincol,

phalarope,

sanderling,

bufflehead, tanager...

Castenarm acknowledges the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds

and believes the epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event

was the Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, West London.

Somewhere on this western section there are two places, maybe three,

where the epicentre of epicentres might have been situated.

The first is Stamford Brook Underground.

And the second is The Raven public house.

27 people died in the lounge bar on the night of the Event

and 14 had died in the saloon on the morning after.

Seven more had been variously blinded in the beer garden at the back.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

The VUE has introduced Castenarm to insulin, Ventolin and praemocetylene,

widened his feet so that he now takes a larger shoe,

and has given him arthritis.

He now indexes for a publisher of popular ornithological literature.

... sora,

grosbeak,

hawfinch,

lanner,

barbet,

lory,

mooruk, trogon...

A third possible VUE epicentre is this maternity hospital

where 30 children born in the 24 hours following the VUE

all showed a physiology that would suggest flight.

... scoter,

chukar,

killdeer...

In celebration of the Goldhawk Road, Castenarm researched the indices

of the ornithological text books sent to him by the publisher,

and compiled a list of the 92 most unfamiliar bird names he could find.

With this list he is hoping to achieve several ambitions.

One is to find a sympathetic composer

willing to use the bird list as the libretto for an opera.

Ardenaur Fallatter died at sunset

on the 17th anniversary of the Violent Unknown Event.

The VUE had increased his stature, and had given him nine lives

the first four of which he used in the Gabon,

diving off the Letoke cliffs to rescue VUE suicides.

The remaining five lives, along with details of his biography,

became the property of the United African Congress,

who persuaded Fallatter to export his skill at exhibitionist- jumping.

Fallatter lost his ninth life

leaping from a grain store into a barley field

at a VUE flying gala at Stowe in Cheshire.

His body was flown back to the Gabon, and fulfilling his last wishes,

it was ceremoniously thrown off the Letoke cliffs.

Agropio Fallaver alone represented the 92nd language.

His language began and ended with him.

He was classified as a middle- aged female man and he spoke Fallaver.

That is to state the fact three times,

and make up for the incomprehension he was treated with for so long.

But at present, no further facts can be published, broadcast or used

until he and his unique language have been totally investigated.

It has been suggested that Agropio is an unsuspecting vehicle for FOX,

the Society for Ornithological Extermination.

Despite attempts to amalgamate them into one person

there have in fact been three Cissie Colpitts in Goole since 1931.

Propine Fallax is chronologically the third.

The accident of a marriage licence got her into the survey,

which is fitting, for she was President

of the Goole Water Tower Film Vault, home of the VUE Commission's archive.

Cissie Propine Colpitts grew up in the streets around the water tower

and must have known many of the Yorkshire cameramen

who made up the Goole Experimental Film Society.

The original brick water tower, the Pepper, built in the 1900s

became inadequate for Goole's growing population

and in 1933 a new and larger concrete tower, the Salt,

was erected by the Humber Authority on allotment land

leased from Propine's grandmother.

The tower filld the space between the railway line and an abattoir.

The tower was bequeathed to Propine on her fifth birthday

on the understanding that the rents were paid into an account

whereby half the interest

was available for the Goole and District Camera Society

and the other half paid for dancing lessons.

The second Goole Cissie Colpitts

married a bicycle manufacturer and moved to York.

She bequeathed her local film material collection to her namesake.

It was stored in hen coops, in the abattoir

and in the base of the old brick tower.

Propine, worried about the collection deteriorating,

felt it imperative to find it a permanent home.

In 1951, due to demand for yet more water, the tower became obsolete,

and after a two- year conversion, Propine, on her 18th birthday,

reopened it as a film vault.

On the night of the VUE, along with Arturo Fallax, owner of the abattoir,

Cissie Colpitts was on top of the tower with some friends

watching the fires at Hull,

when she fainted and began to bleed from the mouth.

She now suffers from anaemia, splayed thumbs and vertigo,

and to underline her new aversion to the darkness of cinemas

she has made a clean break with her past,

changing her Christian name by deed poll and her surname by marriage.

Biography number 28 has been meagrely reconstructed

from evidence found in an overturned car, licence number NID 301.

The occupant,

inconclusively identified from laundry marks on his underwear,

was a middle- aged man with red hair.

The carrion crow has a deep, hoarse caw

that often punctuates the other bird sounds of March.

Evidence of the VUE's influence on the body,

an engorged throat and petagium fellitis,

were obscured by injuries sustained at the accident.

It's possible that Cash Fallbaez was the victim of bird strike.

A large white bird, probably a swan, maybe two swans,

had smashed the windscreen. On the seat beside the body

was a shopping list written in the VUE language O- Lev- Lit

and a commercial recording of birdsong.

Sometimes in February and March,

you can hear a strident motor- horn note from the crow as well.

(crow caws like a motor- horn)

Antopody Fallbats.

Biography sub judice pending cruelty- to- birds investigation.

The Directory has registered Coppice Fallbatteo

as an Italian- speaking young male man,

though the VUE has taken away his teeth,

made him short of breath, flattened his nose,

made him allergic to cats and rats,

changed his balance and restructured his colon,

it had left him with the language he had learnt as a two- year- old child.

Coppice wished it had not.

Coppice tried very hard to learn one of the VUE languages

but ambitiously he had chosen Betelguese,

the language of unlimited vocabulary

and rapidly changing grammar and syntax.

As fast as he had mastered one small area of its possibilities,

he found that the same area had developed,

aligned with a new set of meanings or had become entirely obsolete.

Dispirited, Coppice had made a hesitant start on Katan,

one of the more popularly spoken of the mutant languages.

But his experience with Betelguese

was like studying a consonant alphabet of two letters

after experiencing a vowel alphabet of 200.

Coppice was an art historian who,

trying to make a novel cultural theory out of the VUE,

had wholeheartedly taken to the idea of the Responsibility of Birds.

After exploring the significance of birds in European painting,

Coppice focused his interest on Francesca's Brera Virgin,

also known as the Egg Painting.

Coppice knew everything about this painting.

Its conception, mathematics, the constituents of its colours,

the hagiography of its saints,

its value in lire, dollars, gold and osprey feathers.

The centre of all this fascination was the suspended egg,

to Coppice, the symbol of the Violent Unknown Event,

and the one perplexing feature for which he had no explanation.

Coppice asked his students to copy the painting and kept the results,

some bad, some indifferent,

some eccentric, some three or four inspired,

two almost impossible to tell from the original

and one considerably better, painted by a girl who spoke Betelguese.

Her name, Adioner Perdona.

When Coppice had first tried to learn Betelguese,

"Adioner" could be translated into Italian to mean "yellow".

At the time Coppice began to take an interest in the della Francesca,

the word had shifted its meaning to suggest the concept of yolk,

and when Adioner had told Coppice her name it had meant "embryo".

The coincidence was too great for Coppice

and his wish to possess, marry and own Adioner was violent.

He found a reason to fail her in her finals exam,

and under the excuse of giving her extra tuition,

he won her confidence and seduced her. She had a child.

Coppice had the boy fostered by his married sister

and had him christened Piero dell'Adioner.

By that time "Adioner" in Betelguese

could only legitimately be translated into Italian as "egg".

Agrendo Fallbazz. Drowned in a ship's swimming pool.

Bereavement clause honoured for 16 weeks.

Full biography in later versions of The Falls.

Cisgatten Fallbazz lived off the Goldhawk Road

in a house fronted by a monkey- puzzle tree.

He was a designer and manufacturer of VUE novelties.

Soon after the VUE, Cisgatten had bought a licence to sell bird hats

and made avian upholstery for several years

until the Responsibility of Birds Theory became commonplace.

He turned to the children's toy market,

and in partnership with his brother, Agrendo, was very successful.

Thanks to the VUE, Cisgatten was obliged to wear rubber gloves

to stop his hands from drying out.

The VUE also robbed him of his sense of smell and impaired his sight

though apparently not at night.

His enemies and competitors called him Moreau Fallbazz

and accused him of experimenting on birds

to make the species interchangeable.

They hinted he kept owls illegally at his house

and that his brother had committed suicide for fear of prosecution.

The brothers bought a cottage on the Lleyn Peninsula, since burnt down,

where Cisgatten had met Cathine Fallbutus as a child.

They had both gone to the same primary school in the Goldhawk Road.

Against his brother's opposition Cisgatten proposed marriage to her.

Now that his brother was out of the way,

Cisgatten is keen to approach Cathine Fallbutus a second time.

The Violent Unknown Event

concentrated its vehemence on the head, face and neck

of Hasp Fallbazz.

Inoperable glaucoma, muscular collapse and skin discoloration

had persuaded Hasp to wear a mask.

For this film he asked that he might use the face of Jean- Paul Marat.

He agreed to an interview under conditions of his own choosing.

Hasp Fallbazz was a U- thalian- speaking convert from Entr�e.

Hasp made the difficult language conversion from Entr�e to U- thalian

as his interests were mechanical and technological

and Entr�e had lacked even a word for "wheel".

The sketchy introductory nature of that language well deserved its name.

As a dreamer- of- water, Category One, Flight, it was not lost on Hasp

that U- thalian also had 47 words for water,

each one describing it in less than three syllables and under 14 letters,

for various of its states, like its purity, scarcity,

temperature, weight, salinity, iridescence, distance from the sea,

height above sea level, colour, rapidity of movement and its age.

Hasp has respiratory problems, is lame in the left leg

and is partly paralysed in the left arm.

He has been advised to keep exertion to a minimum, to eat no meat,

avoid the dark and stay near water.

Catuso Phelpus has said

it is fortunate Hasp is creatively interested in technology,

especially hydraulics,

for these irritating prohibitions could be eased to an extent

by machinery of his own invention.

Hasp's machines, drawings and patents

are die- stamped with the emblems of an inverted left leg,

taken, according to HE Carter,

from the last evidence of the birdmen in Breughel's Death of lcarus.

Rapper Begol has stated that after years of experiment,

Hasp made a claim that he was able to grow bone

and manufacture feathers.

He works alone and is financially supported by the WSPB,

and the Kite Association, who send a weekly cheque from the Yellow Bank,

a fund financed by the sale of kites in China.

(artillery fires)

Thanks to the Violent Unknown Event, Canopy Fallbenning was immortally 83.

She spoke Abcadefghan,

and her favourite Tulse Luper story was The Cassowary.

(speaks foreign language)

During the First World War,

she worked in an armaments factory at Stoke,

and suffered from sympathetic tinnitus.

(artillery fires)

The VUE had neither ameliorated or exaggerated the tinnitus in any way

but had regulated it to a cycle of 30 seconds.

Canopy could time an egg by it.

To suit her pragmatism

and perhaps allow her some measure of self- retribution

Canopy gave the VUE an explosive origin, no doubt man- made.

She kept a diary and with home- made inks whose strength waxed and waned,

wrote authoritatively about everything.

(artillery fires)

For example, at a time when the ink was running strong,

she argued about the sexual quadrimorphism

that was a perplexing characteristic of the VUE.

She was old enough to have read Tulse Luper's Quadruple Fruit

and saw the implications of quadruple bonding

in the Violent Unknown Event's division of two orthodox sexes

into a heterodox four.

(artillery fires)

However, Canopy believed the division,

like so much else about the VUE, had been inconclusive, even bungled.

There had been too much indecision, too much hesitancy.

There was no clear role for the four newly formulated genders.

The original explosion perhaps had not been strong enough,

had been sidetracked by unnecessary adjuncts

like compound articulacy and immortality.

Canopy's original insistence on the VUE's incompetence

mellowed as each 83rd birthday passed by.

It took a strong personal event to revive it.

Like the death of a daughter,

when she wrote of a god who was a charlatan,

an inexperienced quack whose sense of time was irresponsible.

Three days after this entry she relented a little

and put the unsatisfactory incompleteness of the VUE's efforts

down to a god who had suffered the loss of a necessary skill.

A day later, in a pale and yellowing ink,

she softened more, and wrote that it was difficult

for one magician to accomplish successfully another's magic.

At a perpetual 83, her problems were not going to involve reproduction.

She was determined to enjoy immortality

and to reserve her splenetic attacks for agents of the VUE Commission,

especially those who believed in the Responsibility of Birds.

Cole Fallbird.

Biography sub judice pending trial for misconduct with a mynah.

It's a good field. It runs from a north- south direction...

Before the Violent Unknown Event,

Castel Fallboys was a competent pilot and a hang- glider enthusiast,

happy to discuss his enthusiasm on film.

After the VUE, Castel's ability at both skills became phenomenal.

The VUE added four inches to his height, shed him of 3 stone,

encouraged hair growth, raised his blood temperature,

shortened his vocal cords and taught him Instantaneous Dekis.

...where you just take off and become part of the elements.

Castel achieved his significant personalised flight

by a prodigious mastery of technique and by the use of new materials.

He was able to stay in the air for long periods,

his record was five days and four nights

and his longest recorded flight being 917 miles.

...designs into computers and getting much better designs out of computers.

His skill at assessing weather conditions,

and his ability to manoeuvre in poor visibility were not equalled.

He left his competitors so far behind that his skill isolated him.

He bricked up the doorways of his house

making it compulsory for himself to enter by the roof.

To minimise muscular growth that would inhibit flying

he used his legs seldom, until his gait resembled a starling.

Castel developed a great restlessness at every change in the weather

and on autumn nights accompanied migrating birds far out to sea,

always turning back with the greatest reluctance.

To extend his range and comparability with birds,

Castel ruthlessly streamlined his body by exercise and diet,

growing very lean in the leg, muscular in the shoulders,

long in the arm and short in the neck.

He was finally and fatally caught out.

Flying with a flock of terns, he banked too steeply, too sharply,

too suddenly and broke his neck.

His corpse dropped like a stone into the sea at Hell's Mouth

and his last pair of nylon wings are preserved at Slimbridge.

Acataloope Fallbus. A last- minute entry into the VUE Directory

due to very late- developing symptoms.

No details of biography as yet available.

Of all European countries affected by the Violent Unknown Event,

France has only a known total of 512 victims

and on investigation it seems only seven of these were French by birth.

The VUE Commission have put forward various reasons for this immunity

and rejected them all.

The A�rospace Nationale have suggested

that France had already paid an excessive quota of flight victims

in the early days of experimental flying.

(speaks Italian)

Was anything wrong with the car?

The Italian Institute of Languages

hypothesised that the French language is responsible.

...30 mph. - Had you been here before?

No. It was the first time and this is the second.

Astraham and Loosely Fallbute

were touring on holiday in central France at the time of the Event.

On the night of June 12th they were driving on a little- used road

near Voile d'Argent when their car stopped.

The clock on the dashboard showed 11:41, Greenwich Mean Time.

Is this the place where it happened?

Yes. The engine stalled and the car stopped.

Astraham Fallbute, formerly a designer of sports facilities,

is now a designer of hospital equipment.

Loosely Fallbute, once a cosmetician, is now a catalogue researcher.

Did you have any sensation, any clue what had happened?

The Fallbutes both began to speak Cathanay

within 24 hours of the Violent Unknown Event.

Loosely Fallbute was employed by an insurance firm

to examine a possible topographical pattern in VUE incidents.

Among the many sites receiving her especial attention were number 23,

the maternity hospital in the London Goldhawk Road,

with special reference to delivery room seven.

Number 37, room number three of the Commission's own library.

The room was once the office of a film- production company

specialising in ornithological projects.

And site number 59,

the intersection of Broad Street and the Yarmouth Road, Norwich.

Appreciating firsthand accounts in her research,

Loosely was happy to help the Italian Linguistics Laboratory

investigate the paucity of VUE incidence in France.

What happened then?

Astraham, now an authority on the rehabilitation of VUE paraplegics,

suffered from partial paralysis and was keen to aid his wife's research

on sites where there had been a high toll of VUE malignancy

appearing as muscle collapse or muscle deterioration.

As at site number 119,

the railway bridge and electricity station at Cloudheath, Suffolk,

where Tulse Luper says the information on signs is significant.

And site number 171 at Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, Yorkshire,

where 310 people complained of sudden and involuntary muscle paralysis

which intermittently froze their lower limbs.

Both Astraham and Loosely share certain VUE symptoms

suggesting that proximity to a site or another victim might be relevant.

Most noticeable in the Fallbute case is the matching skin discoloration.

The Fallbute pulled themselves together and drove on

and at about midnight they arrived in Nevers

where a film company was making a film about a holocaust

and the Fallbutes were not surprised to be taken for extras.

Six members of the Fallbutus family living in England

are registered victims of the Violent Unknown Event.

They have an especial relevance to this study of the VUE

by owning property near the two main accredited VUE centres,

off the Goldhawk Road, London

and near the Tyddyn- Corn Farm on the Lleyn Peninsula.

Betheda Fallbutus had come to England with her American husband

to take advantage of the Welfare State to raise a large family.

She wanted the best gynaecological attention she could find,

anticipating labour pains to rival a wren laying the eggs of an ostrich.

So she insisted on being close to the Maternity Hospital in Goldhawk Road.

Betheda had been an air hostess, a milliner

and the owner of a restaurant.

She had flown too often, wasted too many feathers

and cooked too many chickens.

On her admission, sufficient excuse for herself and her family

to be plagued by the VUE in both their houses.

The family lived in various apartments along the Goldhawk Road

whilst they continued the search for a family home.

After the birth of her only daughter, Cathine,

Betheda's husband inherited his parents' Lleyn farmhouse

where Betheda could recuperate from further pregnancies.