WAXWORK IDOLS
Beware Waxwork Idols. Wax is a strange, elusive material that refuses to stay fixed in one shape. It’s the same with waxwork effigies. You never really know where you stand with them. One moment they’re solid and straightforward. They appear to be clearly defined objects with familiar contours and recognisable features. The next, they melt in front of your eyes, and within a few seconds become something else, something quite different, something that you no longer recognise, something that you didn’t think existed.
I visited the Anticlock Waxworks Museum yesterday. I hadn’t been able to sleep after a particularly stressful night at Infinity, so I thought that a trip to the Waxworks might take my mind off my problems.
The Waxworks Museum had only recently reopened. The Anticlocks had closed all museums when they seized power. The Safronikans had a completely different idea about what sort of exhibits there should be in a museum – naturally enough. Every ruling power needs to see its own view of the world reflected in what is on display in a public museum – hence the need for waxwork idols.
All the Safronikan `heroes’ were melted down and turned into candles for the benefit of Anticlock citizens. It was a kind of symbolic assassination of the enemies of the Anticlockwise Empire. These subversive Safronikan wax idols were incinerated one night and transformed into a shapeless bubbling liquid. The Anticlock authorities filmed the whole process and replayed it endlessly on the state media TV channels with a suitably uplifting voice-over: `this is the fate that awaits all those who resist the onward march of the Anticlocks. You will be burned alive and reduced to a formless mass of molten liquid…’
Anyway, be that as it may, they renamed the museum the General Terrevotox Waxworks. General Terrevotox was the most successful, bloodthirsty and notorious military commander in Anticlock history. They erected a larger than life waxwork statue of Terrevotox at the entrance to the museum. It was thirty feet tall.
Once inside, I soon discovered the lengths they had gone to in their efforts to obliterate all vestiges of Safronika from the landscape of Anticlockwise. I passed by row after row of waxwork figures all glorifying the supremacy of Anticlock power: military leaders, politicians, lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, national and local dignitaries.
All these wax effigies had one thing in common. Throughout their lives each one of this select band had sworn absolute allegiance to the Anticlockwise Empire. Their bodies and faces were carefully sculpted into the acquiescent shapes of Anticlock dogma. Each of them in their own way epitomised the spirit of the Anticlock Empire: self-assurance, self-belief and self-satisfaction. They knew that they were in charge. They knew that they were always right. They were all singing from the same hymn sheet.
It wasn’t my hymn sheet. I was overcome by a sudden feeling of nausea. I didn’t belong in this phoney wax catacomb where the truth had been buried beneath an avalanche of molten wax.
I’d seen enough and walked rapidly towards the exit. As I emerged into the street outside, I was confronted once again by the towering figure of General Terrevotox, his disdainful waxwork expression looking down on me.
I stopped to stare back at him. In my mind’s eye I transformed the face of Terrevotox into a different expression. He no longer looked so sure of himself. I imagined him as a circus clown, a cartoon figure with a yellow face, blue eyes, a red nose, a grey mouth and a black moustache. 
It was a pathetic, impotent gesture on my part I know. But the absurdity of his reconfigured face in my mind’s eye underlined the ridiculousness of all the waxwork idols inside the museum. They were simply performing an act for the benefit of their audience, the good citizens of Anticlockwise.
Had the Snoops been able to read my mind, I would have been arrested on the spot as an enemy of the state. I would have been melted down, reduced to a boiling mass of molten wax and reshaped into something more accommodating.
Inwardly, I wasn’t impressed by General Terrevotox and his cronies. But the Waxworks Museum had reminded me of two important lessons of life in the Anticlockwise Empire. First, if you are to survive, you need to assume the shape of a wax ornament and mouth all the appropriate clichés that the state wants to hear. If you don’t, you are soon eliminated. Second, all life is temporal. We can keep our shape in this world for only so long. Eventually we all pass on to a different state and are transmuted from solid to liquid before dissipating into thin air. We are all subject like wax to the metamorphosis of time.
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