Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) is one of two stories that appeared in the magazine that year as a result, I believe, of Michael Moorcock’s friendship with the writer (Moorcock brought them to Ted Carnell’s attention, and also provided a short essay on Peake in the same issue in which this piece of fiction appears).
The story itself begins with a description that evokes the grimness of post-war Britain:
That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly armchair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head.
And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges—not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human—like father. p. 57
When the narrator’s mother starts nagging him he feels suffocated, and leaves the house, getting on a bus to The Corner House restaurant in Piccadilly. There he befriends a woman, and he goes back to meet her on subsequent nights (although he wonders why she is always already there when he arrives, and remains seated when he leaves). Eventually, they arrange to marry.
The final section provides (spoiler) a nightmarish denouement—when his bus arrives late at the registrar’s office he sees, from the upper floor of the vehicle, a group of freakish individuals in the room where he is to be wed:
To the right of the stage (for I had the sensation of being in a theatre) was a table loaded with flowers. Behind the flowers sat a small pin-striped registrar. There were four others in the room, three of whom kept walking to and fro. The fourth, an enormous bearded lady, sat on a chair by the window. As I stared, one of the men bent over to speak to her. He had the longest neck on earth. His starched collar was the length of a walking stick, and his small bony head protruded from its extremity like the skull of a bird. The other two gentlemen who kept crossing and re-crossing were very different. One was bald. His face and cranium were blue with the most intricate tattooing. His teeth were gold and they shone like fire in his mouth. The other was a well-dressed young man, and seemed normal enough until, as he came for a moment closer to the window I saw that instead of a hand, the cloven hoof of a goat protruded from the left sleeve.
And then suddenly it all happened. A door of their room must have opened for all at once all the heads in the room were turned in one direction and a moment later a something in white trotted like a dog across the room.
But it was no dog. It was vertical as it ran. I thought at first that it was a mechanical doll, so close was it to the floor. I could not observe its face, but I was amazed to see the long train of satin that was being dragged along the carpet behind it.
It stopped when it reached the flower-laden table and there was a good deal of smiling and bowing and then the man with the longest neck in the world placed a high stool in front of the table and, with the help of the young man with the goat-foot, lifted the white thing so that it stood upon the high stool. The long satin dress was carefully draped over the stool so that it reached to the floor on every side. It seemed as though a tall dignified woman was standing at the civic altar. p. 63
The narrator stays on the bus and, after riding around for a while, eventually goes home. He now loves his mother and father, and never goes out again.
I wondered if this was an allegory about leaving home, only to see horror in the outside world (he variously refers to members of the group he saw as “malignant” and “evil”), and then wanting to return to an earlier time (Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen).
An interesting piece, but perhaps rather too dream-like to be completely satisfying.
** (Average). 3,500 words.
1. Mervyn Peake’s Wikipedia page.