Radiance

One of the Calliopes leaps off the graph. Her nose sharpens to a wicked silver point. She dives down from the x-axis and the image shifts: a whale shearing through quilts and blankets and veils, sending up splashes of thread behind her.

The pin holds it together, so nice and so neat

That is a pin everyone wants to meet!

The spaces between Mr Bergamot’s tentacles fill with stars, with worlds none of the living or the dead have seen before, shuffling together like cards, like the squares of a quilt, lying one atop the other. All the while the bouncing cartoon callowhale dives through them.

Well, that silk is a universe and so are the laces

The cotton and linen are vast starry spaces

Where nothing goes quite as it goes where you go

And no one you’ll meet will be someone you know

And the fantastic pin that we mentioned before?

Is a callowhale swimming through infinite doors

The stars coalesce into a cheerleader with GO WHALES! stamped on her megaphone. She throws nebulae into the air like pom-poms.

So cheer on the whales and treat them with care

Don’t tease and don’t poke, don’t startle or stare

Without them, the silk would slide right off the linen

And who knows what trouble we all would be stuck in!

The cheerleader frowns and explodes into a puff of animated smoke. The slide whistle slides again. Mr Bergamot takes over once more, and the image he holds changes to Calliope with an enormous thermometer in her mouth and a cold compress on her head.

Now sometimes a whale can get hurt or get sick

Though their hearts are so strong and their skin is so thick.

But we can’t go without, not for one single day

So they make a new whale to play callowcroquet!

A baby whale appears in a shower of glittery fireworks. It wears a lacy bonnet and shakes a rattle with its fin. Calliope and her baby wind up a pair of croquet mallets and whack Jupiter and Saturn through identical hoops.

Marvin the Mongoose, darling of Capricorn Studios, brings it home, while Bergamot’s tentacles fill with smiling faces:

Oh, the life of a great callowhale is amazing!

We hope you’ll forgive us our upside-down phrasing

And the next time your loved one gets vaporised flat

Just remember the pin, and that will be that.

A smattering of awkward applause picks up. The octopus relaxes his arms, the filmstrip clicks off, and our performers bow. But Marvin can’t resist starting up again, high-kicking into a reprise:

If our song has got you spinning

Just go back to the beginning!

OH! A callowhale isn’t much of a whale!

Not a bug! Not a cat! Not a fungus or a snail!

“May I ask a question?” Arlo interrupts the mongoose’s encore.

“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry,” Cythera says, and she means it.

“I understand the girls. But what did you do to me and Horace? We never touched the kid. We drank bottled water. We never did anything.”

Calliope the Carefree Callowhale blushes, two perfect magenta circles blazing on her turquoise face.

“We ate you,” she says sheepishly.

From the Personal Reels of

Percival Alfred Unck

[MARY PELLAM, dressed in a black leotard and stockings, her clavicle and shoulder blades moving as delicately as swan bones beneath her skin, applies makeup in her gilded mirror. SEVERIN UNCK watches her, recording every stroke of the liner crayon with her dark pupils.]

SEVERIN

I don’t want you to go.

[PERCIVAL UNCK balances his camera, Clara, on a dressing table with small blue horses painted all over it. He steps into frame and kisses Severin on the forehead before bending to hoist her up onto his hip.]

PERCIVAL

Mummy and Papa have to go to rehearsal. She’s going to be Isis in The Golden Ass, which is a bit naughty for your age, I think, but you can watch it when you’re…let’s say eight. There’s a donkey in; he’ll make you laugh. Mummy is going to come in at the end and save the day. Won’t that be wonderful? She’ll wear a lovely big crown with an asp on it and carry heaps of roses in her arms. [pause] An asp is a poisonous snake. But very holy.

SEVERIN

I don’t want you to go.

MARY

You can come along if you like, darling. You had loads of fun when we were rehearsing The Great Train Robbery.

SEVERIN

I ate candy and rode the train. But it was dark in there. In the…

PERCIVAL