Duration 3.12

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 bear and raise a large family. She wanted the best gynaecological attention she could find for she anticipated labour pains of those of a wren laying the eggs of an ostrich. To that end, Betheda insisted on being close to the Maternity Hospital in the 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 own admission, sufficient excuse for herself and her family to be plagued by the VUE in both their houses. The family lived in various rooms and 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. And after the birth of her second son, Vacete, the Fallbutuses finally bought a town-house just off the Goldhawk Road, a house where in 1827 Audubon had lived while he worked on his "Birds of America". After her husband's death, Betheda seemed to spend all her time ferrying her children between the two houses. Eventually she was to ferry her grandchildren back and forth. And it was to see her daughter Cathine and her daughter's children that Betheda drove down to the Lleyn farmhouse, 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 from the rope by their legs. The nose of the elder child was bleeding, the blood 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 the sleeve of her dress for a handkerchief she saw a hoopoe was sitting in one of the palms. 

From that morning on, Betheda suffered from an excess of catarrh that blurred her speech, forced her continually to breathe through her mouth, tainted her food and irritated her digestion, making her life so wretched that she often contemplated suicide. She always said it was the excitement of immortality that prevented her from cutting her wrists, but it was more likely a concern for her grandchildren that made her accept her disabilities.