1001 Nights Cast

People told him that learning to speak British Romani was silly. ‘Why not learn a useful language’ someone said, ‘like Spanish or Mandarin Chinese—languages that will help you communicate in the future?’ Because he wanted to learn a language that reflected the world in deeper ways, a language that cannot help but be absorbed out of existence by other words rising around it, a language being inundated, that cannot be saved. This was his reply, but he never let the words leak out.

* * *

He’d first heard Bettye’s voice when he was 12 years old, vibrations so mellifluous and rare that in that moment his life was changed. In the years since then he’d rifled through boxes in charity shops, with each infrequent find a longed-for event. But every unearthing was accompanied by a growing sense of injustice: how could such a voice reside solely in the dust of charity shops? Why did no one else know the wrongness of this burying? And what had stopped her voice in 1980? Was it death? Or was it some other, non-fatal calamity? Decades passed before transformed technologies revealed to him that he was not alone in his admiration and that the wondering of others had found the answers he sought: The machinations of the music industry had cruelly left her voice unheard while lesser voices assailed her from every radio. Then one day there’d been a knock at her door and an altogether different kind of deal had been struck. Now she was doing their work in Las Vegas, and under their guidance of modesty no longer sang.

* * *

Last Tuesday had been his fourth meeting with Danny and Tony and things were going well. So well, in fact, that he’d started to think of them as his. Hazel and Esther had never returned after he’d offered them roll-ups and let slip that his familiarity with certain passages of the Old Testament was merely a by-product of repeatedly listening to Cry Tuff Dub Encounter chapters 1—4 by Prince Far I & The Arabs. Mindful of wasting his lucky second chance, he exercised more care with Danny and Tony, even managing to gag his urge to ask if they’d made any plans for Christmas.

‘I’ve only been in The Truth for a year and my family aren’t in it’, Danny had said during their first meeting. ‘But Tony’s an Elder and his whole family are with him.’ He’d wondered what state Danny had been in when they’d knocked on his door that first time and where his friends had been when it mattered. He’d searched his face for remnants of that isolation but couldn’t discern whether he’d found them or placed them there. But it was irrelevant either way, and by the time they’d left he’d successfully engineered the first dispute. ‘No, no, no’ Danny had said with upstart proselyte’s zeal. ‘That’s not The Truth as I understand it, Tony.’

* * *

The moment he saw the white blooms of the rabbits’ tails they dived for cover and were gone. He sat on the hillside and surveyed their domain from above, its network of burrows shaded by small trees, the close-cropped grass of the field surrounding it. He looked at his watch. Danny and Tony would be at his doorstep in minutes. He wondered how many times they’d knock on his door before succumbing to the anticlimax of his absence. His mind wandered to their post-Armageddon earthly paradise. It was appealing in the way that the secluded warren before him was, not least because he couldn’t help but impose on it the light-bathed painted illustration that he’d seen in one of their magazines as a child in the 70s, a wheaty rural idyll in which discord was unknown and the smells of fresh cut grasses filled the contented nostrils of its multi-ethnic inhabitants. Was he being unkind? Should he leave Danny as he is? Miles overhead a passenger plane divided the sky in two, the arrow-like force of its advancing tip at odds with the distant tractor sounds lazily wafting past his ears.

The rabbits resurfaced, his stillness having given them a false sense of privacy. They hopped and scratched and thumped the dirt, hopped and scratched and touched noses. Suddenly one of them stared straight at him and was transfixed. ‘In 1726 the good people of Giessen executed the gypsies at the crossroads beyond their walls. They even did the children. It’s commemorated in the copperplate print you saw. This is the The Truth, not that make-believe thing your Witnesses inhabit. And the moving target of my little white tail ensures my visibility to predators. This is The Truth of nature’s brutality as you’ve observed it. There can be no paradise on Earth. Armageddon + time = more of the same. This is The Truth as your mind knows it, as is the fact that rabbits cannot talk. Yes, their people have been put against walls and shot for refusing to fight. But that does not make them free of aggression. Remember the silence that lives in Las Vegas and keep faith with yourself. Today you’ve treated them mean to keep them keen now stick to your plan and convert Danny back. The shadow of this tree says it’s time for you to go. Leave our hinterland so that the crows can return to peck the eyes of our young, the foxes can position themselves to pounce, and the gun of the farmer can rain hot pellets onto our shrinking voiceless island in the world of men. Paradise on Earth? My bunny arse.’