All language subtitles for Peter Greenaway - (1980) The Falls

(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.

I don't want to end up in the Thames.
I can't swim, even if I can fly.

His last words in English
were recorded on a tape recorder

in a hotel bedroom at The Crane
at Bungay, Suffolk,

where he was making a survey
of East Anglian decoy airfields

for the Imperial War Museum.

... two land mines dropped, making a
crater big enough to hide a hayrick.

Present owner,
Phoenix Insurance Company.

Decoy airfield half a mile from fork
in Carrow to Redroads Lane.

From 11940, had lights and fires
to attract enemy bombers.

Your researchers have surely told you
that success has been very limited?

We all know
there has been a conspiracy.

Only the failures have been recorded.

We are all too interested in Icarus
and not enough in his father.

Melorder had been employed as a
witness of the Violent Unknown Event,

and because of what he saw
he had himself sterilised

as a precaution
against making his wife pregnant.

He need not have worried.
Most of those affected by the VUE,

male and female alike,
became sterile anyway.

Melorder's brother-in-law,
Rapper Begol,

had flippantly said that a true VUE
mutant could only reproduce itself

with the aid of a placenta
that had developed an eggshell.

Melorder and his wife rarely lived
together after he was sterilised.

Is it true you were married in
a DC 110 flying over the Eiffel Tower?

That was the intention.

But by the time the chaplain
recovered from airsickness,

we were over Les Invalides.

Will your wife watch the flight?

No. She said,
"Too much entertainment,

and not enough research."

What about the timing?

For the inaugural flight,
I intend to use lights,

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

I'll make it down
into the shadow of the building

when the shadow is at its longest.

That shadow is important to you?

Consider the times it's rotated
around this building.

I was born down there. My mother
started labour in that shadow

and had to wait until it came around
again before she was finished.

When his duties as
an official observer were over,

he had turned to publishing
an encyclopaedic history of flight

and to the formation
of an aircraft museum at Rishangles.

It's said that,
having started life in shadow,

that's how it will end for you.

No. I can't help them out.

I've no intention of fulfilling
that particular forecast.

Besides, if I fail,
it will ruin your producers.

The BFI, the Bird Facilities
Investments, might never film again.

The VUE had affected Melorder's sight
for the better

and his hearing for the worse.

And the muscles of his arms,
chest and back

had become enlarged,
engorged and strengthened.

His doctor referred to the phenomenon
as petagium fellitis

or skin-wing aggrievement.

This characteristic
persuaded Melorder

that his historical and theoretical
knowledge of human flight

should be put to practical use.

I hear Armeror Fallstag
has ordered you a wreath.

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

I'd rather be pecked to death
by penguins.

Appis (Arris) Fallabus is
a Regest-speaking young male man.

He is partially blind, sensitive to
temperature and has poor circulation.

Nightly, he has to lubricate
himself with Spanish oil.

(speaks Dutch)

Is it true
that you are plagued with body lice?

Yes, it is.

Everything you can imagine,
ticks, lice,

termites, tapeworms. Everything.
You name it.

After a change in the weather,
it's especially bad.

Worse in summer, and impossible
to get rid of at sea level.

Within reason, I have been advised
to make them moderately comfortable

by wearing wool. But I live with it.

Appis, whose comprehension of urban
Dutch has not entirely disappeared,

had been born in Zeelem,
an isolated village

surrounded by canals that only
appeared to empty due to evaporation.

In winter, every inch of water
in Zeelem turned to ice

and the body predators
that worried Appis slept, froze

or otherwise temporarily capitulated.

It is said that you identify
with swallows. Is this correct?

Yes, it's true. But nowadays,
that's not unique, is it?

Appis would have been
an expert long-distance ice skater

but his mother believed
it was dangerous

for his poor circulation to spend too
much time out of doors in the winter.

Appis's mother was not a victim
of the Violent Unknown Event.

As she grew older and her son
remained the same age,

she discovered a new worry
for each new season.

She could not have
too many seasons left,

so Appis patiently waited to be set
free to enjoy immortality on his own.

Meanwhile, he managed a kite factory,

in some part satisfying a desire
for unaided flight in himself

and in the 19 million other victims
of the VUE.

Is it true your father was killed by
a bird counter named Van Hoyten?

My father was at the Amsterdam zoo
studying saltwater fish,

when Van Hoyten was employed there
as a bird counter.

They quarrelled,

apparently because my father
had a fox tattooed on his chest.

It was said they were rivals.

In the summer, Appis flew
a stunt kite to intimidate the birds

who he blamed directly
for his predicament.

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

I do? Perhaps you're confusing me
with someone else.

My father was always experimenting,
putting plaice in the canals

and stimulating the salt glands
in pelagic birds.

What do you think of the Theory
of the Responsibility of Birds?

Well, the coincidences
seem inexhaustible, obviously.

But I leave it entirely
to the experts.

When flying his kite,
Appis left swallows alone

knowing that a single bird of
that species could be preyed upon

by a dozen different types
of parasite,

and that was punishment enough.

Standard Fallaby has a DC3 single
berth caravanette with a glass roof.

In winter, he hides it in
caravan sites in the west of England,

ostensibly that it might escape the
scrutiny of his sister Tasida Fallaby

whose attentions, says Standard,
are not ornithological

and exceed those of an orthodox
brother-and-sister relationship.

The VUE Directory Commission
have, as yet,

not been able to locate
Standard Fallaby or his caravan.

The VUE has contracted Standard's
intestine and paralysed his legs.

He is obliged to cling to a
hanging brace when asked to stand up.

He speaks Curdine.

Curdine is a cursive language

that deliberately fosters ambiguities
and encourages punning.

Tulse Luper has said that
in the larynx of the right man,

Curdine would be
a superlative language,

an antidote
to all the world's feathers.

Since the VUE,

Standard Fallaby has developed
an interest in the Corvidae.

Every rook-nesting season,
he parks beneath a rookery

somewhere in West England
in sight of the Atlantic.

He has made a claim to the World
Society for the Preservation of Birds

to have discovered a rook subspecies,
Corvus frugilegus atlanticus,

whose diet is largely shellfish and
whose call imitates young seagulls.

The WSPB
has not recognised his claim.

(reads aloud in Curdine)

"My brother and I
were born holding hands."

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

"I sometimes think I took the first
small step out of the womb."

Tasida Fallaby is two years and seven
months older than her brother.

"He deferred to me."

"This contradicts what might
be read on our birth certificates."

"But then I have no patience
with bureaucracies."

"It's water off a duck's back
to them."

Apart from a thickening
of the exterior muscles,

the Violent Unknown Event
has only modified Tasida's interior,

leaving her exterior unmolested and
encouraging her belief in naturism.

"When I was 15, my hair was longer
than his, but he was taller."

"It didn't matter. He got over it."

The Directory credits Tasida
with a partially collapsed lung,

a singing tinnitus,
black-and-white vision,

a doubling
of the menstrual cycle,

and, unlike her brother, a twisting
of the intestine into tighter coils

so that Tasida suffers intense cramps
and often has malodorous breath.

"Malodorous" is a translation
of the adjective that she used

in the autobiography she presented
to the VUE Commission

to counteract the statistics
she was sure to find describing her

in the VUE Directory.

Tasida's autobiography runs to more
than 300 pages written in Curdine,

though the Directory has registered
her as a speaker in Katan.

At her insistence
the autobiography was read aloud

for the benefit of the Commission
who recorded the whole,

taking a greater part of a day
to do so.

"I married Messenger
after my great disappointment."

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

"Messenger married me for it."

"But as time went on,

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

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

"I told him to stop making
his business interest

break up our relationship."

Tasida has painstakingly learnt
a mechanical Curdine

so she might talk to her brother.

Since he only wanted to talk
about birds,

she pronounced ornithological terms

with an exactness
suggesting enthusiasm.

"It is essential that my version of
the facts be taken into account."

Curdine, notorious for ambiguity,

is certainly antipathetic to being
spoken mechanically.

Tasida therefore spoke it
with some courage, if not rashness.

Her blunt pronunciation contained
layers of unconscious innuendo

and the ambiguous imagery
had a hazardous relevance.

"...since a mere list of Commission
Statistics compiled by assistants

who don't know a ruff
from a decorated neckband,

it's bound to be unacceptable, and
on this Standard is bound to agree."

Lacer Fallacet, after the Violent
Unknown Event, had a dark head,

calloused hands and barked in Agreet
like a person unwilling to use words.

She owned a succession of voiceless
bitches, named after female aviators,

and her favourite Tulse Luper story.
Was The Photographer's Dog.

A naturalist took a photograph
of a dead dog on a beach.

The corpse was a week old...

Lacer Fallacet suffered from
rheumatism, muscular spasms

and a loss of taste buds.

She was classified
as an elderly female woman.

The VUE knocked three inches
off her height

and added three stone to her weight.

According to her godson Rapper Begol,
Lacer was born on Bardsey Island

where dogs hunted seagulls
and learnt to imitate their cry.

Before the VUE, Lacer
had variously been a child-minder,

a maths teacher and a pastry cook.
She had worked in Sweden

as a swimming instructress, a
dietician and a veterinary assistant.

Lacer married a pharmacist
from Brougan

and had two daughters
who married Russian pilots.

Her granddaughters came to
England on Bird-Fall Scholarships

and, having gained political asylum,
live in Canada.

- Puffin.
- Black-headed gull.

Whatever her other attributes,

Lacer Fallacet has not been able
to teach her dogs to fly,

though she may have witnessed,
on a visit to the Ukraine,

laboratory tests that suggested
dog flight was not impossible.

Six months after the VUE,

the first dog Lacer took up in a
plane was a spaniel named Harzy

after Frau 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?

I'm surprised that you of all people
can ask that question.

Mashanter was born in the Canary
Isles, though at times she denies it.

She now has an office
in Berkeley Square.

Her parents were Danish.

Her father was an architect
now employed building aviaries.

Her mother, a doctor,
drowned in a ship's swimming pool.

Do you think there's any point
in the IRR

making a separate case
for VUE victims?

On the night of the VUE
Mashanter was on holiday in Venice.

Apart from some migraine and insomnia
Mashanter suffered little physically.

Her metabolism was invigorated.

At night, she studied
ornithological literature.

She began to campaign for a better
appreciation of avian terminology.

Soon she was spending her
income in the magistrates' courts

paying fines for disturbance
of the peace, harassment,

being a public nuisance
and defacing public monuments.

Mashanter's favourite Tulse Luper
story was Sparrow Week.

To curb flocks of sparrows eating
one-third of its food production,

a nation organised Sparrow Week.

Day and night, for seven days,
the country's population

rang bells, banged saucepan lids
and shouted.

The sparrows, frightened to settle,
eventually fell dead out of the sky.

Flight exhaustion from the same cause
also killed gulls on the coast,

herons in the marsh,
eagles in the mountains

and pigeons on the town square.

On the seventh day,
Sparrow Week ended.

Next year two-thirds of the country's
food supply was eaten by insects

and the money standard
changed from gold to eggs.

Were you speaking metaphorically
when you said

you were preparing
to lay your own golden egg?

(laughs)

Can I take it that...

The compilation of the biography of a
living person is a sensitive matter.

Where necessary, and in nearly every
case where the subject wanted it,

various forms of anonymity were used.

The VUE Commission offered a choice
of ten pseudonymous identities

and Squaline Fallaize, the subject
of biography 10, chose identity 10

for she recognised
it for another bird victim.

She has requested that
accounts of her life should be brief,

unillustrated and translated for her
mother's benefit into Kath-a-ganian.

She also insisted
it be narrated by a woman.

"Squaline Fallaize had shining eyes,

yellow skin
and a blaze on her forehead

in the shape of the Austro-Hungarian
double-headed eagle."

(Kath-a-ginian)

"Squaline Fallaize had shining eyes,

yellow skin
and a blaze on her forehead

in the shape of the Austro-Hungarian
double-headed eagle."

"She spoke whatever language
took her fancy,

her whims influenced by her appetite,
which was usually small."

"She was known
as a reticent conversationalist."

"Squaline was paid a retainer
by the Language Commission."

"When it learnt
she was getting an appetite,

the Language University at Caracas

sent several senior professors
to her flat on Cappis Island."

"A large meal was cooked slowly
in her small kitchen

whilst the linguists sat on
the floor of her dining room

to listen to her fluency
in 47 languages."

"The two chefs and the waiter
who served the meal were paid for

out of a university expense account
reserved for ringing storks."

There is some evidence to suggest
that Squaline Fallaize is a fiction.

(telephone rings)

(speaks French)

Carlos Fallantly lost his wife...

...at the time
of the Violent Unknown Event.

She was a voluble, untidy woman...

...who made her own clothes...

...and washed once a week
in the water...

...wrung out of the laundry.

She was invaluable to her husband.

She looked after his poultry,

kept his accounts...

...and when roused...

...was as uxorious a wife...

...as Carlos could wish to have.

On the night of June 12th of the VUE,
Carlos's wife suffered a stroke.

Carlos transferred his affection
to a turkey.

The VUE Directory records for Carlos

a malfunction of the left ventricle,
bone-marrow disease

and, save for
the VUE immortality clause,

would have normally given him
six months to live.

Carlos had buried his wife
in the floor of his greenhouse.

The local authorities
had the body exhumed.

Now Carlos lived in the greenhouse
to keep his turkey company.

A fowl pest epidemic finally erased
Carlos's other poultry.

Two veterinary officials

came to make sure he had burnt
or buried all the corpses.

Insisting the one remaining bird
should be destroyed,

the vet promised to compensate Carlos
with at least a set of photographs.

These were taken as the vet
stalked the bird with his camera

whilst the vet's assistant
stalked the bird with a shotgun.

Carlos was not happy
with the photographs.

He is now awaiting trial at Clichy
for shooting the vet.

(sings)

Musicus Fallantly
had quickly acclimatised himself

to the effects
of the Violent Unknown Event.

A sufferer of petagium fellitis
and a speaker of Allow,

he moved to Port Madoc, learnt to
sing in Welsh, practised illusionism

and began a study of linguistics
he called aero-ethnography.

Musicus worked
on an Allow/Welsh dictionary

and adapted da Vinci's notes
on human flight

as a text for the VUE anthem.

Musicus also wrote
a Welsh/ Allow choral work

celebrating 92 early flight pioneers.

This work, of great complexity
and an excess of narrative,

proceeded
by listing categories of flight.

The characters were pilots,
night pilots, airmen, flyers,

aeronauts and female aeronauts,
birdmen and gullers.

A "guller" was an Allow word

for those whose attempts to fly
had taken place over water.

Icarus had been a guller.

Musicus called his work Sky Lists
and dedicated it to Van Riquardt,

the French patriot and pioneer airman

who threw himself
from the Eiffel Tower in 1889.

Cadence, Musicus's wife, said that
the film was a reconstruction

because the moving-picture
camera wasn't invented until 1895.

Van Riquardt had been a linguist

and a baritone
in the 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."

"I'm not hiding the fact that my
husband was a nationalised Canadian."

"He took his Canadian name from the
road where we lived at Kashabowie."

"The road had been named after
Lewis Fallan the lumberjack,

a second-generation
Patagonian Welshman like Wrallis."

"He'd worked for the Goldhawk
Company as a topman,

and he'd been crushed
by a giant redwood,

the ones you don't find any more
as they've all been pulled down."

"The second time
Wrallis felt the lake shake

he fell into the boat and
banged his head on the rowlock."

"When he sat up again he felt sure
he'd got something in his eye."

"He felt sick at the back of his
throat and nose, and his eyes ran."

"He was giddy for a long time."

"I learnt from my neighbours
it was common knowledge

that Lewis Fallan had been
awarded damages for his accident."

"The Goldhawk Company presented
his widow with a certificate

and a tray of eagle eggs and named
a road in Kashabowie after him."

"The road is supposed
to be exactly 57 metres long,

as long as the redwood
that crushed Fallan's chest."

"The third time,
my husband fell into the lake."

"Air in his anorak
must have kept him afloat

as he remembers nothing else."

"He was picked up
by a Goldhawk vessel from the weir

about ten in the morning.
He'd been in the water five hours."

"They gave my husband the day off and
said he was lucky they'd found him."

"Wrallis became blind two days later
and he kept falling over."

Wrallis Fallanway is registered
as a middle-aged male man

suffering from 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.

I noticed a brown sort of ball...

The third Custodian
was Catuso Phelpis,

singer and ornithological registrar.

Allia Fallanx, as pianist,
ornithologist, cataloguer,

apiarist
and expert on flying reptiles,

perpetuated and expanded
the Custodian tradition.

However, the publication of personal
details of VUE Commission employees

is forbidden. This embargo
does not extend to their families,

so it is possible to consider
the VUE history of Allia's wife,

Starling Fallanx.

(The Lady is a Tramp)

Starling Fallanx, singer,
firework enthusiast,

wanderer, collector of berets,
bird hats and cardboard boxes,

authority on the nightingale,

was struck down by the VUE near
a late-flowering hawthorn bush

on the road into the Manifold Valley.

Starling met Allia
just eight hours after the VUE.

They were both suffering
from sore feet.

After some wanderings,

with or without the VUE's
disorienteering experience,

she moved into the Tyddyn-Corn
Farm with her children and hats

when Allia became the Fourth
Custodian of the Boulder Orchard.

She likes green grass
underneath her shoes

Perhaps finding it difficult to
cripple a moving target,

the VUE's interest in Starling
Fallanx has been sporadic.

But now she has settled
she can no longer taste salt,

open her eyes under water, wear
velvet or smell hawthorn blossom.

But she can teach her daughters
the 32 songs of the nightingale

and astonish them
by locking her Achilles tendons

to grip apples with
the soles of her feet.

She likes the theatre
but she never stays late

Of all the VUE's attributes
Starling felt the most,

and, at the same time, the least
enthusiastic about, was immortality.

Barring accidents she would outlive
her daughters and granddaughters.

Her kinship with her
great-great-granddaughters

would be so diluted that she could
scarcely claim a relationship.

She ought by then to be back on the
road, maybe starting another family.

There would be chances
to begin again.

She goes to opera
and she knows every line

She goes to Shakespeare
and she thinks him fine

She goes to the opera
she knows every line

On the long drives
to distant jazz clubs,

Starling kept an eagle eye on
the fields looking for scarecrows,

the only site to be buried in

if a VUE victim wished to
terminate a relationship with birds.

She likes to go swimming
down in Abersoch Bay

She goes to the eisteddfod
and she stays wide awake

Ipson and Pulat Fallari were brothers
in fiction and half-brothers in fact,

or, thanks to Tulse Luper,
maybe the other way around.

Either way they were inseparable.

Ipson Fallari on the right
is marginally the eldest,

his mother being Iloge Kyle, who was
the elder twin sister of Cloge Kyle

who was the mother of Pulat. The next
improbable fact is more difficult.

The 14th VUE Directory
declared the brothers to be dead,

shot in an airport hotel
in Medina Sidonia

by the only legitimate son
of their father.

The Directory is then silent
for two years

only to resurrect them
in the 17th edition,

this time spelling Ipson as Ipsan.

The father of the Fallari brothers,
Crozier Fallari Raphael,

was a feathering and marbling
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 Icarus.

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.

After the birth
of her second son, Vacete,

the Fallbutuses finally bought
a town house off the Goldhawk Road

where in 1827 Audubon had lived while
he worked on his Birds of America.

After her husband's death,
Betheda spent her time

ferrying her children
between the two houses.

Eventually she ferried her
grandchildren back and forth.

And it was to see Cathine
and her grandchildren

that Betheda drove down to the Lleyn
farm, the House of the Two Palms,

on the evening
of the Violent Unknown Event.

She arrived at five o'clock in the
morning, two hours before dawn.

Her grandchildren had strung a rope

between the two palms that fronted
the garden to the west.

Both children were hanging
by their legs.

The nose of the elder child was
bleeding, dripping onto the gravel.

The younger child had a bruised
forehead and was singing.

As Betheda took this in,
she started to sneeze

and then to blow bubbles
of mucus from her nose.

Groping in her sleeve
for a handkerchief

she saw a hoopoe was sitting
in one of the palms.

From then on Betheda suffered
from an excess of catarrh

that blurred her speech, forced her
to breathe through her mouth,

tainted her food
and irritated her digestion,

making her life so wretched
that she often contemplated suicide.

She said it was the excitement
of immortality

that stopped her cutting her wrists.

But more likely a concern
for her grandchildren

made her accept her disabilities.

(speaks Welsh)

Cathine Fallbutus,
after six years in America,

returned to the Lleyn peninsula
and the House of the Two Palms.

Now a divorcee with two daughters,
she planned to buy a guesthouse.

As a child she had known
the Tyddyn-Corn Farm

and half in jest had always planned
to marry its owner.

Now the owner was gone
and the farm was empty.

Cathine contacted the farm agents,
found out the highest price offered

and bettered it, and in anticipation
of owning the farm,

bought a can of paint called Canary
Ochre and painted the front door.

Against the whitewashed walls, the
door could be seen for several miles.

The agent gave Cathine the key and
with her two children she explored

the house, barns and outbuildings
that fronted the Boulder Orchard.

On the eve
of the Violent Unknown Event,

Cathine and her daughters
were at the Tyddyn-Corn farmhouse.

In a yard in front of the house on a
washing line strung between two trees

was a rag,
possibly a dishcloth or floorcloth.

It might have hung there for months.
It was grey with age or dirt.

Menenome, Cathine's eldest daughter,
asked her mother what it was.

Cathine replied that it was a clout.

The children were amused at such
a dead-sounding monosyllabic word.

Their laughter surprised a ewe...

That night, the VUE struck, maybe
in the Boulder Orchard, maybe not.

Cathine, the following morning,
was found unconscious in bed.

The Boulder Orchard
became a restricted area

and the Tyddyn-Corn Farm remained
unoccupied for a further six years.

Cathine was registered as a
Maudine-speaking young female woman

with a passion for symmetry.
Her body reabsorbed her breasts

and the top digits
of all her fingers and toes.

Not uninfluenced by her mother,
Cathine reverted to her maiden name

and legalised Fallbutus
as the surname of her children.

Adept at all languages,
Cathine relearnt Welsh

and opened a guesthouse
for VUE victims at Aberdaron,

living quietly, rejecting numerous
and persistent offers of marriage.

When Coppice had first tried
to learn Betelguese

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

Bwythan Fallbutus was Betheda's
eldest son. Until he was killed,

he was the officially appointed VUE
Commission's linguistic expert.

He lived just off the Goldhawk Road

within three minutes' walk of his
mother, whom he visited every day.

Wish to possess...

The VUE had given Bwythan
a bone-marrow deficiency,

wattles and cobs along his backbone

and a foot disease
that shredded his toenails.

He could drink salt water
without harm

but felt listless away from
the influence of chlorophyll.

Bwythan could speak
14 VUE languages

and interpret successfully in
nine of them at a diplomatic level.

And it was Bwythan who had organised
the examination of Agropio Fallaver,

the sole speaker of the language
named after him.

Although Bwythan
came to the private opinion

that Fallaver was somehow a fake
manoeuvred by FOX,

the Society for
Ornithological Extermination.

...an antidote
to all the world's feathers.

Bwythan has privately researched
the 10,000 most popularly used words

in 43 of the main VUE languages and
produced a comparative dictionary.

From this research he wrote a book,
The View from Babel,

to explain, or attempt to explain,

the gift of tongues
and the fragmentation of language.

A fox watched a crow...

In trying to do this,

and in his associated search
for a common linguistic denominator,

he successfully demonstrated
that the names of birds

were important key words.

It was rumoured that because
of the conclusions of his research

Bwythan was run down by a white
van, registration number NID 92,

on a zebra crossing
in the Goldhawk Road.

A van with this registration had
been seen outside his house

an hour before the accident.

The police later found the vehicle
on a deserted airfield.

It was supposed the assailant
or assailants had escaped by air.

...what you lack are wits.

Cathine's daughters,
Menenome and Olivine Fallbutus,

spent the summer months
in the company of a red chair.

In honour of this chair
and in his pursuit of Cathine

the toy-maker, Cisgatten Fallbazz,

had given Menenome
and Olivine a picture book.

Menenome, perpetually
eight years old, spoke Maudine,

was prone to toothache
and nosebleeds,

and was happiest hanging
upside down like a bat.

She sang a lot, swam well,

and like a velvet scoter, could stay
under water for five minutes.

Olivine, perpetually four years old,
a Maudine speaker,

frugivorous and neuralgic,
spent much of her time asleep.

When awake,
she accompanied her sister

in an extended dance, song and talk
marathon with the red folding chair.

Dragged along the tide line,
floated in the sea,

tied to a breakwater,
the chair only lasted a summer

and always had to be replaced.

Menenome remembered one word of
English which she taught her sister,

though Olivine
may have remembered it.

They used the word
to describe the VUE's malevolence.

They pronounced it with a fierce,
sharp, monosyllabic stab.

The word was "clout".

Vacete Fallbutus
was Betheda's youngest son.

Mother and son seldom communicated

because Betheda disapproved
of how her son earned his living,

though Vacete rarely left
the vicinity of the Goldhawk Road.

Vacete could do all the tricks
of the body conjuror's repertoire.

He could waggle his ears,
spit 80 yards

and blow smoke rings through
his nose. He was a gifted petomane.

There were dubious and dangerous
tricks that Vacete would do

for special prices in the
public houses of the Goldhawk Road.

He stayed in The Swakeley,

named after the collective noun
for immature carrier pigeons,

in The Wheatsheaf, changed from
The Wheatear because the publican

had no belief in the Responsibility
of Birds, in The Goldhawk,

and on the night of the VUE, Vacete
was found sightless and breathless

in the beer garden
at The Raven public house.

He was running in small circles.

The blindness was impermanent,
and only returned

when the light was less than f11
on the Weston scale.

Later Vacete became allergic to
travelling at speeds over 10mph,

unless it happened
when the light was under f11,

when he couldn't see
how fast he was going.

Lf, in spite of all precautions, he
did see light flashing by at 15mph,

he was sick, painfully giddy and
found it hard to catch his breath.

His personal hero was Reichfelt,

the patriot airman who threw himself
off the Eiffel Tower in 1909.

Vacete's family
scorned the hero worship,

knowing Vacete was scared of heights.

To prove them wrong,

Vacete climbed the railway bridge
in the Goldhawk Road and leapt off.

He survived the jump,

but under the bridge the light
registered less than f11.

Stumbling in small circles,
temporarily blinded,

Vacete was run over by a white van.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds

name as many birds
as you can think of.

(buzzer)

Great northern diver, red-throated
diver, black-throated diver,

bean goose, barnacle goose,
red-breasted goose, snowgoose...

Astra Fallcas was
a very responsive interviewee

in Falluper's ornithological survey

filmed some 18 months before
the Violent Unknown Event.

...whimbrel, curlew,
redshank, greenshank,

marsh sandpiper, terek sandpiper...

It is difficult to interview Astra
again, for he has disappeared.

Everything points
to his having gone to earth.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

In a hospital ophthalmic test

after the Violent Unknown Event,
Astra amazed his examiners

by recognising three-dimensional
shapes in almost total darkness

but they noted his ability
did not extend to written letters.

Pratincole,

phalarope,

sanderling...

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

name for me as many birds
as you can that start with B.

(buzzer)

Blackbird, bar-tailed godwit,
black-tailed godwit, bobolink,

black vulture...

Astra was an experienced
speleologist and ornithographer.

...booby...

Through the VUE,
he'd combined these interests

to identify himself
with the Caprimulgiformes,

the birds that flew at dusk or
twilight, and a year after the VUE

he disappeared
on a night ferry to Le Havre.

(buzzer)

Capercaillie...

He'd taken his camping equipment,
his savings, his maps,

a supply of food
and a cassette tape recorder.

For three years Astra's sister
received picture postcards,

all of which featured cave systems.

Then came a last postcard from Peru

saying that Astra had found
a colony of guacharo, or oilbirds,

at San Luis Rey and was
preparing a paper for the WSPB

on echolocation sensibility
in birds.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds

tell me as much as you can
about the Bittern.

(buzzer)

The Bittern is one of
the Ardeiformes, Botaurus stellaris.

This Bittern,
Botaurus stellaris stellaris,

is a crepuscular animal.

Five years ago, Astra's sister and
three of his former caving friends

went to Peru
to see if they could find him.

They spent four months
in the cave systems of Tualito,

searching, asking local people
and leaving provisions and equipment

at useful cave landmarks.

They also left tape cassettes
of some of Astra's favourite music.

But with no result.

Some 24 hours before they
were due to return to England,

Astra's sister was in the
Castcatapel cavern at Tualito

when she heard the Bird List Song
echoing along a deep cave system.

She was convinced that Astra was
responsible for, characteristically,

the treble frequencies
were accentuated,

the instrumental backing
to the song had been tuned out

and only the high-pitched
female voice was audible.

David Fallcash.
Directory error. Non-VUE victim,

entered into Directory
due to false representation.

No criminal charge pending.

Bewick Fallcaster is an alias given
by the Directory Commissioners,

only knowing at the time of the first
edition the maiden name of his wife.

Since there have been
no objections from him

the name has been ratified
and is legal.

Seven days after the VUE, Bewick
registered as a VUE victim at Zagreb,

suffering from intermittent amnesia,
a singing migraine,

ravenous appetite
and decalcification of the teeth.

14 days after the VUE,
Bewick was in Budapest,

where he described a VUE tinnitus
to a radio engineer

who attempted to convey the nature of
the condition with a tape recording.

To mask the insistent
repetitious sound,

Bewick composed 92 variations
on his tinnitus theme

and at night, to help him sleep, he
played them back through headphones.

Bewick sent his family money,
fragments of taped music and slides.

The money was in different currencies

and the music was always recorded
in the neutral spaces of a studio,

so it was to the slides
that Bewick's family turned

to search for clues of Bewick's
whereabouts and state of health.

When asked why Bewick
didn't return to his family,

Bewick's wife had
four possible answers.

A change in name
obliterated a sense of place.

Bewick Fallcaster is dead and
the money, taped music and slides

are sent by an imposter,
perhaps on behalf of the FOX.

Tinnitus might be contagious.

Bewick Fallcaster
was busy collecting music

for an encyclopaedic
work of biography.

Catch-Hanger Fallcaster
had been a teacher.

She had taught Russian to Germans
and, before the VUE,

would not have claimed
knowledge of ornithology.

(buzzer)

Stork, heron, swallow,

swift, penguin, cassowary...

The VUE had made Catch-Hanger
three inches taller,

paralysed her index fingers
and improved her eyesight.

She now taught Abcadefghan
to anyone who wanted to learn.

Abcadefghan is often used
in papers on engineering,

metallurgy and radiophonics.

It is said that Lapps and Finns
can understand Abcadefghan,

which is not
that scientifically valuable

since there aren't that many
technical papers in these languages.

Catch-Hanger
has translated Tulse Luper's

Birds of the Northern Hemisphere,

establishing pronunciation
equivalents for the Falconidae.

She has also started work
on a Abcadefghan English primer

that is based largely
on three nursery rhymes,

Goosey Goosey Gander,
Who Killed Cock-Robin?

And I Shot a Little Duck.

Before the VUE, Clasper Fallcaster,
Bewick's mother-in-law,

had always been very sensitive
to natural forms of electricity.

Brushing her hair produced
sparks that lit her bedroom,

and she reluctantly entered
any building

that did not have
a lightning conductor.

The VUE
had magnified this sensitivity

and Clasper was now allergic
to large expanses of water.

She kept away from the coast,
inland lakes and large rivers,

and she was apprehensive
of open-air swimming pools.

Her sense of direction
became phenomenal,

but family car rides now had to be
planned to avoid bridges over water,

and, in England, to especially avoid
the towns of Bath,

Leamington, Harrogate
and Tunbridge Wells.

The city of Clasper's nightmares
was Venice.

Her sensitivity to the Earth's,
electric field

was favourably compared
to night-flying migrational birds

that could accurately navigate
without the moon and stars.

Catch-Hanger's brother, Felix,
was a furniture designer.

The VUE struck him when he was
on a subway train in Toronto,

which he pronounced Ter'ono,

so customs officials took him for
a local and ceased to search him

for the feathers he imported
to plump up his sofas.

The subway train driver
was killed by the VUE.

Felix was trapped for 12 hours
without lights beneath Lake Ontario.

As a result, he was nervous of
the smell of leather in the dark,

a professionally
debilitating experience.

Felix was sure he'd twice bumped into
his missing brother-in-law.

Both times it wasn't
a facial recognition.

First came a furniture auction in
the house of a musician outside Nice,

where Felix recognised a repetitious
tune being played on a broken piano.

When Felix investigated,
the pianist had gone.

The second meeting was in a
drugstore at Fr�re Jacques, Delaware.

Felix had queued
behind a man wearing earphones

who filled in, then abandoned,
a customs declaration form,

copying an address with
difficulty from a printed envelope.

The address was Catch-Hanger's.

The man bought a postcard of the
Fr�re Jacques Municipal Bandstand

and a cassette
of birdsong of the Great Lakes.

These items in due course turned up
the 14th time

Catch-Hanger celebrated
her fifth wedding anniversary.

Max Fallcaster,
Bewick's father-in-law,

was an architect's photographer.

Before the VUE, Max had illustrated
a classic textbook series

on European rural building.

After the VUE, he studied ornithology
and photographed nests.

He is now planning a book

on the buildings
of man and bird in symbiosis,

storks on Bavarian chimneys and
swallows on English country houses.

It may be
with his father-in-law in mind

that Bewick photographed
these pigeon roosts.

Max watched his son-in-law's slides
with critical interest,

offering a geographical position
for Bewick's whereabouts

based on his knowledge of nests
and vernacular architecture.

Orian Fallcaster

had Orian Bye entered as his name
on his birth certificate,

Orian Oddmansson stitched onto
his first pair of swimming trunks

and Orian Setolier printed on
his first lifesaving certificate.

Nine months after his mother
expired in a ship's swimming pool,

a fourth set of adoption...

Before his biographical material
could be compiled

yet another set of adoption papers
has been taken out on Orian's behalf

and his name is now Orian Niagara,
thus putting him, much to his regret,

officially outside the scope
of this present collection.

What do you get when you cross
a chicken with a cement mixer?

A bricklayer.

On which side
does a chicken have most feathers?

On the outside.

Which birds
can lift the heaviest weights?

The crane.

"Throper Castor Fallcaster, born in
an egg, 11:41 pm on June the 13th,

the year
of the Violent Unknown Event."

That was the tiny inscription written

on every egg in Throper's
secret collection.

For true mythological accuracy

it should have been written
on a swan's egg,

but they were protected.

What kind of bird
do you find down a coal pit?

A mynah bird.

Throper, oologist, infant polymath,

collector of bird jokes in English,
Greek, German and Vionester,

was Catch-Hanger's youngest nephew
and the survivor of twins.

His brother Idis had perished of
embolism, and his mother of grief.

As to his father,
no one knew where he was.

Pursuing the Leda connection, gossip
made Bewick Fallcaster the father.

Catch-Hanger denied it.

Heard about the woodpecker?
It's boring.

The VUE changed the colour of
Throper's hair and darkened his eyes.

His average pulse rate had quickened
and he began to speak Vionester.

Most Vionester is spoken

with the teeth,
if not the lips, tightly closed.

When the lips and teeth were parted,
it was only to whistle.

Why did the owl owl?
Because the woodpecker woodpecker.

Throper collected eggs,
perhaps because it was forbidden.

A few domestic birds were exempt
and occasionally Max Fallcaster,

Throper's uncle, notified Throper
of an abandoned nest.

Why do birds fly south in the winter?
Because it's too far to walk.

Throper devised a way
of drawing a photographic picture

of the spots and freckles
that characterised eggshell markings,

and devised a Responsibility
of Birds Theory of his own.

What is a certain way
to get a wild duck?

Buy a tame one...
Buy a tame one and annoy it.

Cutting photosensitive paper
to wrap around the egg,

Throper placed a fibre-optical light
source through a pinhole in the shell

and exposed the film
through the shell.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
For some fowl reason.

From the negatives he made slides and
projected them onto his bedroom wall,

making detailed and scaled drawings
to present to the VUE Commission

along with his personal conclusions.

What's red, white and black?
A sunburnt penguin.

In recognition of his effort, the
Commission sent him an ostrich egg.

Raskado Fallcastle
was a retired ship's navigator

turned farmer who invented maps

from the black-and-white hides
of his dairy herd.

The Easter before
the Violent Unknown Event,

while staying with his sister-in-law
near Hereford,

Raskado met Gandy Ova,
a cartographer

employed
by the Ornithological Society

to plot the distribution of owls
in the Black Mountains.

Raskado and Gandy exchanged maps.

At 11:41 on the evening of the VUE,

Raskado and Gandy Ova
were standing under a hot shower

in a caravan site wash house on land
owned by Raskado's sister-in-law.

The following morning,
Gandy Ova's body,

covered in red and white blotches,
was found on the wash house forecourt

and the local police accused Raskado
of murder by scalding.

The police confiscated the cow maps
as evidence.

Refused bail,
Raskado was held for seven days

before the full details
of the VUE were known.

The imprisonment,
the bereavement, a sense of guilt

and rapidly developing VUE symptoms
of deafness and nausea,

unbalanced Raskado's mind.

On his release he bought a rifle,

slaughtered his herd and tarred out
the white patches on their hides.

With money from the knacker's yard,
he bought building materials

and attempted to reconstruct the
wash house on his Suffolk property

as a memorial to Gandy Ova.

Then, learning of the Theory
of the Responsibility of Birds,

he bought a shotgun
and two untrained retrievers

and began a vigourous campaign
of ornithological slaughter,

incinerating the corpses every Friday
in the reconstructed wash house.

When the police began circulating
his photograph, Raskado left his farm

and found his way
to the bird sanctuary at Minsmere

to continue his onslaught.

After three days of mayhem,
Raskado took the cow maps,

the clothes Ova had taken off in the
shower house and a can of petrol,

and burnt himself to death in
a bird hide in the marsh by the sea.

Appropinquo Fallcatti spoke Agalese
and Orthocathalian

and was classified a an elderly male
man with a body temperature of 109�C,

the average temperature
of sedentary passerines.

Appropinquo lived on the sea front
at Barmouth,

in a two-roomed ground-floor flat
that faced the Atlantic.

Fallcatti started his working life as
a veterinary ornithologist in Turin,

staging musical pageants,

until book reviews under the pen name
Gargeny earned him enough

to give up his surgery
and concentrate on the production

of what he called "ecological" dramas

that earned him the derision of
theatre critics and biologists alike.

Even public sympathy for
dramatised natural history

in the years after the VUE did
not make Fallcatti a household name.

Seeking a reputation with the British
Ornithological Establishment,

Fallcatti with his wife
and adopted son came to England.

To attract attention

he wrote a biographical series
on celebrated ornithologists,

and canvassed
for commercial sponsorship.

In conjunction with the BFI,
the Bird Facilities Industry,

Appropinquo Fallcatti
organised critical screenings

of films with an ornithological bias.

To ingratiate himself
with Tulse Luper

he anticipated showing a little-known
film called A Walk Through H

or The Reincarnation
of an Ornithologist.

This film had been used
by Van Hoyten to reinforce the view

that Tulse Luper was incapable of
distinguishing good jokes from bad,

and was described by Gang Lion
as "a piece of cinematic guano."

However, nobody could find
a copy of the film

to check on Van Hoyten's
sense of humour

or on Gang Lion's
ability to tell film from birdshit.

It was consequently believed
that the film no longer existed,

or indeed had ever existed,
but was a hoax set up by Fallcatti

to dupe a public eager to identify
with any ornithological red herring.

Some members of this public
had been persuaded that Tulse Luper

was merely a pseudonym for Audubon.

After this unsatisfactory
introduction to the British public,

Fallcatti moved to Barmouth.

In the evening,
when the light was not too bright,

he ventured out
and sat in this promenade kiosk,

sometimes with his wife,
sometimes alone.

Fallcatti is now planning
a dramatised version

of the Violent Unknown Event to rival
the Passion Play at Oberammergau.

Agrimany Fallchester
was arrested and fined �80

for exploiting the area round the
Boulder Orchard for financial gain.

If he had not pleaded guilty and
not cooperated with the authorities

the fines would have been
ten times that amount.

A not-guilty plea would
have easily been refuted.

The police had film
of Agrimany collecting material

from around the Boulder Orchard site
on three occasions.

Thanks to the Event,

Agrimany spoke Glozel
in the Northern Hemisphere version,

had a six-part heart,
incipient petagium fellitis,

enlarged ischial muscles

and suffered from various
mild and seasonal skin changes

which are associated
with moult in birds.

Finding his London relatives
appreciative of samples

taken from the Boulder Orchard
during his duties as a soil sampler,

Agrimany was persuaded by an uncle
in the bird-token market

to keep him supplied with suitable
mementos for the tourist trade.

Eventually, with his girlfriend,
Agrimany began operating on his own,

packaging three or four items
in a plastic bag

and selling them
through a friend in Aberystwyth.

Agrimany cooperated
with the authorities

to demonstrate the sort
of material he was collecting.

Organic items were favoured,
especially the skeletons of birds.

His girlfriend's handwriting on a
label accompanying a crow wishbone

started the police
on their investigation.

Agrimany says that his prosecution
was a test case

to deter others from entering
a potentially very profitable market.

Biography unavailable. Subject
suspected of being blackmailed by FOX

over a tar-and-feathering
prosecution.

It is useful to believe
the Boulder Orchard

is indeed the epicentre
of the Violent Unknown Event,

if you want to believe in the Theory
of the Responsibility of Birds.

Both mythologies,
and they are myths,

appeal to those
with a vested interest in ecology...

The Commission
interviewed five people

who claimed to be Ostler Falleaver.

Not one of the five spoke in
a fully authenticated VUE language,

and they all made the identical
obviously prepared statement

that denies any credence
in the Boulder Orchard.

(speaks French)

The VUE Commission assumes that this
multiple identity has been prepared

to confuse the identity of the real
Ostler Falleaver, who in 1946,

as a college graduate, we understand
is featured in this photograph.

Until this is sorted out, we can only
usefully quote the VUE Directory.

Ostler Falleaver is a middle-aged
sufferer of respiratory problems,

glaucoma, involuntary speech
and compound schizophrenia.

Edio Fallenby was classified
as an elderly female woman.

She spoke Untowards
with a Yorkshire accent

and suffered from fluttering
eyelashes, excess numeracy

and a high blood temperature.

Edio came from a very large family,
sisters, brothers, aunts, nephews,

cousins, grandparents,
and great-grandparents.

Between the Second World War
and the Violent Unknown Event,

as many of the family as possible,
met for a fortnight's holiday

on one of the beaches
on the East Yorkshire coast,

Filey, Scarborough, Saltburn,
Redcar, Whitby and Bridlington.

They occupied more
than one guesthouse at a time,

and gathered on the beach
in fine weather and in bad,

staking out a territory
known as the Fallenby camp.

They were noisy, exhibitionist,
friendly, energetic,

gregarious and generous.
The VUE wiped them all out.

All except
Edio Fallenby and her husband.

Edio was an officer
in the Woman's Voluntary Service,

and at the time of the VUE,
when news arrived from the west

of a disaster of large proportions,

she was made responsible
for the welfare of her neighbourhood.

Windows were criss-crossed with tape,

and sterilised dustbins in the back
alleys cooked soup to feed 5,000.

Every household container
was filled with water

and left standing in the street
in case of fire.

When the first fears
were not realised

and the help needed
was of another kind,

Edio Fallenby and her neighbours
went off to the hospitals.

The soup was sold to a pig farmer,
the windows were stripped

and water in the containers was
used to wash down the pavements.

Several containers were never claimed
and stood in the streets

as a reminder of the sort of disaster
usually expected of a Violent Event.

Shey Fallenby's occupation
in the VUE Directory

is listed as a ship's plumber,
retired, or ephemerologist.

Either way, Shey drove a green van
in circles in Tooley Park Nurseries

because, being a VUE hallucinist,

he was not officially permitted
to drive on a public highway.

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 apr�s-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 Fran�ois 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 Bl�riot.

...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 Bl�riot

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.

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