Search Results for 'away'

”I had a funny dream last night”, said Mater when she eventually found Dido clearing up in the kitchen. Or more accurately perhaps, ’supervising’ as it was clearly Finnly doing the bulk of the work.

”It was very peaceful. A man and a little boy were fishing in a stream. “Fishing is what a true man does,” said the man to the boy. At that moment there was a tug on the line and the little boy pulled a huge trout out of the water. Enormous it was,” gesticulated Mater, flinging her arms wide to demonstrate. “The trout fought hard and got away, but not before … what on earth is the matter with you, Dido?”

“A trout,” murmered Dido looking strangely at Mater.

Aunt Idle:

“Don’t look so grim, Idle, we’re not staying,” Liz said, “We only came for a mince pie. We’ll be off in a minute but first I must have a word with Godfrey in private.”

What a relief, I can tell you! “I’ll go and get him, shall I?”

“No, I think I’ll have a word with him in his room, if you don’t mind,” she replied. “I think he has something to show me.”

Curiosity over ruled any shreds left of anxiety, and I had to bite my tongue not to ask straight out, not that she’d have told me. Always full of enigmatic little secrets, she was, always had been. It was never a hundred percent clear if she knew what she was talking about and was very clever, or if she hadn’t got a clue what was going on and was winging it. Anyway, the main thing was that she wasn’t staying long, so if we got through the next half hour without any more confusion ensuing, we’d be laughing. Feeling more inclined towards gracious kindness than previously, I beamed magnanimously at her and politely ushered her down the hall to room 8.

“Mr, er, Cornwall,” I didn’t know whether to call him Godfrey, and decided against it. His bill was in the name Crispin Cornwall, and I wasn’t about to have him flitting off with Liz and her entourage without paying it. “Elizabeth would like a private word, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Bloody Liz Tattler’s the last person I wanted to see,” he said. “Trust her to just happen to land on my secret hideaway.”

My hand flew to my mouth. “Did you say Tattler?”

“Finnley, what are you still doing here? Can’t keep away, eh! Well, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, you amuse me,” Elizabeth said graciously.

’Okay, bye, gotta go,” said Finnley, already walking quickly away.

After a few steps she stopped, paused reflectively for a moment, sighed deeply and turned back to Godfrey.

”She misses you. She is back into reading her friggin’ ‘Lemon Juice for the Soul‘ rubbish again. She always was a nutcase of course, but yesterday she was walking around shouting ‘We are like Tolkiens of the nonsense and marvelous!’”

Aunt Idle:

Trying to get a conversation out of Bert was like trying to prise a can of beans open with a nappy pin. If he’d been a bit more willing to discuss it with me I might have told him about the note, but I didn’t. I suppose he was disgruntled because I was more interested in that medical team buying up ghost towns than his bridge, so we sat in silence for the rest of the trip. Not that I wasn’t interested in the place on the other side of the river, but there was something very odd going on, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. That note, made from old maps at the Brundy place, then Flora’s card with the same name on ~ what the dickens was going on? Should I ask Flora point blank, or would that alert her that I was on to her? Might be better to be more subtle, see what I could find out before confronting her. I even thought of getting the remote view team to see if they could find anything out ~ although the results were so sketchy that might just be a wild goose chase, lead me off in the wrong direction.

“Take the next left, Idle, down this here track,” Bert said.

Miles away I was, so I didn’t hear him at first and had to slam the brakes on a bit sharpish. I caught Bert rolling his eyes at me and glared at him.

The track hadn’t been driven on for months, if not years ~ that much was obvious. We bumped along kicking up a cloud of dust for a few miles before the river came into sight, then the track followed the river for another half a mile or so, eventually petering out.

“We’ll have to walk from here,” said Bert, getting out of the car. I passed Bert the rucksack with the bottled water and locked the car. “You don’t need to lock the car here” Bert snorted.

“Habit,” I snapped, “Lead the way.”

Aunt Idle:

Bert came with me. Usually one of us always stayed home to keep an eye on Mater and the kids, but now we had that capable girl, Finly, to keep an eye on things.

It was good to get away from the place for a few hours, and head off on a different route to the usual shopping and errand trips. The nearest sizable town was in the opposite direction; it was years since I’d been to Ninetown. I asked Bert about the place on the other side of the river, what was it that intrigued him so. I’ll be honest, I wondered if he was losing his marbles when he said it was the medieval ruins over there.

“Don’t be daft, Bert, how can there be medieval ruins over there?” I asked.

“I didn’t say they were medieval, Idle, I said that’s what they looked like,” he replied.

“But …but history, Bert! There’s no history here of medieval towns! Who could have built it?”

“That’s why I found it so fucking interesting, but if it doesn’t fit the picture, nobody wants to hear anything about it!”

“Well I’m interested Bert. Yes, yes, I know I wasn’t interested before, but I am now.”

Bert grunted and lit a cigarette.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant just outside Ninetown for lunch. The midday heat was enervating, but inside the restaurant was a pleasant few degrees cooler. Bert wasn’t one for small talk, so I picked up a local paper to peruse while I ate my sandwich and Bert tucked into a greasy heap of chips and meat. I flicked through it without much interest in the mundane goings on of the town, that is, until I saw those names: Tattler, Trout and Trueman.

It was an article about a ghost town on the other side of Ninetown that had been bought up by a consortium of doctors. Apparently they’d acquired it for pennies as it had been completely deserted for decades, with the intention of developing it into an exclusive clinic.

“There’s something fishy about that!” I exclaimed, a bit too loudly. Several of the locals turned to look at me. I lowered my voice, not wanting to attract any more attention while I tried to make sense of it.

“Read this!” I passed the paper over the Bert.

“So what?” he asked. “Who cares?”

“Look!” I said, jabbing my finger on the names Tattler, Trout and Trueman. Bert looked puzzled, understandably enough. “Allow me to explain” I said, and I told him about the business card that Flora had left on the porch table.

“What does Flora have to do with this consortium of doctors? And what the hell is the point in setting up a clinic there, in the middle of nowhere?”

“That,” I replied, “Is the question!”

Corrie:

I woke up this morning with an idea in my head, and I don’t know if I was dreaming about it or if it just popped in, in the brief moments between sleep and waking. I made a connection with the topic I was doing an anthropology report on, and something I’d forgotten. No, not forgotten, it wouldn’t be true to say I’d forgotten it as it was always there at the back of my mind niggling at me that there was more to it somehow, but I hadn’t made the connection so obviously with the current project.

My research was about disconnection, and the separation agenda of the American channeling dream. At first I felt driven to explore particular areas and then piece by piece the puzzle that had nagged at me for years ~ I say years, it felt like years, but maybe it wasn’t so long ~ started to fall into place.

At first when I woke up the idea of censorship was in my head and the idea to start a petition and public awareness campaign about certain channeled texts that were withheld from public viewing, despite repeated requests for them to be public along with all the other texts. But then it occurred to me that censorship and omission wasn’t always deliberate. I mean, not a conscious choice to keep information secret, but something else. Almost like a case of some information not being seen clearly through the filters, yet for some reason dismissed as not fitting, and pushed away, almost unconsciously, and suppressed.

The text was about disconnect mainly, and there was some stuff about Nazi’s although the part about animals was the part that had stuck in my head, probably because I felt more connected to animals than Nazi’s. There were more animals growing up here than Nazi’s after all, Nazi’s was only something I’d heard about. But then it occurred to me that I’d been hearing more and more about Neo Nazi’s, in Europe mainly, forming groups and having protests. So that got me wondering about that too.

Anyway, the disconnect part: it was the reaction on the American channeling forums to the Ferguson riots that started me on this project, and Aunt Idle was full of encouragement when I started to explain to her what I was noticing. She said she had noticed similar things in her remote viewing circle online. Everyone seems to think Aunt Idle is losing her marbles, but don’t you believe it. She seems vacant and scattered but that’s only because her mind is occupied elsewhere.

The gist of this suppressed text was extreme separation, but it was the part about using words to seem enlightened to hide extreme disconnect that seemed to fit my project.

I did have to chuckle though, I wondered if I was being a racist by calling Americans disconnected as if it was a racial characteristic. More of a cultural thing, I suppose, can one be called a culturalist as if it’s a bad thing? I don’t see how you can study anthropology without a certain degree of separating into cultural groups though, even if it is shift anthropology. I’ll think about that a bit more later.

Working at the gas station was the only way I found to get away of that dead fish Inn. That and hockey.

Ever since Jasper died, I’ve tried to escape the stifling atmosphere of the family. I felt barely annoyed when mother left, I was already empty.
I tried to come back a few times, but it was too hard to look at the twin girls growing together, whereas I was denied this chance with my brother. Oh! I didn’t have anything against them, I would play the role of the caring and protective brother whenever necessary at school. But it was easier to stay outside and play hockey with my best buddies Joe and Callum.

When dad left, I felt betrayed. I still wonder why he didn’t take me with him on his adventures. Jasper says I’m better here at the moment. I don’t know what’s better, but that’s the only place I can be with no money and no education.

Corrie:

“Get away from that door Prune, you nosy parker!” It wasn’t the first time I’d caught her eavesdropping outside room 8.

“Begone, thine tawdry wench, spaketh not thus to thine majesty or I’ll have thee hung drawn and quartered!” she replied in a whisper as she slid past me and ran down the corridor.

It suddenly dawned on me that this funny speaking Prune had been doing lately was something she was picking up on from behind that door. I inched closer to the door, bending down to press my ear to the keyhole. I was slightly off balance when the door flew open suddenly, causing me to stagger right into the room. Caught red handed, I could feel the blush rising as my hand flew to my mouth. There sitting on the end of the bed was what can only be described as an Elizabethan wonder woman superhero.

I backed out of the room quickly, but not so fast that I didn’t see what was on the bed behind the woman. It was the flying fish that had gone missing from over the fireplace.

Mater:

I am picking some grass for the guinea pigs. Delicate wee things; they don’t handle the heat well and I have moved them to the shelter of the shed. The wind has come up strong and I am enjoying the cooling it brings with it. The long grass bends away from me as though seeking safety from the scissors I hold in my hand. For a moment the wind subsides and I can feel how the sun is burning my neck so I take refuge in the shade of a tree.

Thinking time.

I heard Prune crying out last night in her sleep. She had already fallen back asleep when I went to check on her. It crossed my mind when she cried out that she may have seen the ghost too. I asked her about it in the morning but she did not seem to recall her nightmare.

“I slept liketh a log but I thanketh thou for thy kindness in asking dearest Mater,” she said to me.

”Enough of that cheek!” I told her, but was privately relieved she was okay.

Anyway, It has been twice now. I wake and there he is, over by the antique oak chest in the corner of my room. At first I can’t move or call out. And by the time I can he has gone. When I say “gone”, I don’t mean he walks out the door. He just sort of fades away. He has his back to me so I can’t tell you what his face is like. All I can tell you is that he is tall and he has on a blue robe, in a silky fabric, almost like a dressing gown with a tie in the middle.

There, I have told you now. You may be thinking it is just a silly old woman’s dream. But you don’t get to my age without having plenty of dreams, and this was nothing like any dream I have ever had.

“I heard Mater calling Aunty a trollop,” announced Clove ceremoniously.

“What’s a trollop when its at home?” Corrie looked up with interest.

“A tart I think. Prune! get away from the door. I might not be able to see you but I can smell your stinky feet. Go have a bath or something.”

“Ye are the stinky tarty trollops” said Prune, feigning stately dignity as she poked her head around the door. “Dunna yer spake that way to her whose feet yer not fit to touch or nothing! Ye tarty trollops,” she added for good measure.

The knock on the bedroom door awakened Crispin Cornwall.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“It’s Clove, I’ve brought your supper, sir.”
Crispin eased his limbs into action and shuffled over to the door. As soon as he’d been shown to his room in the early hours of the morning, he’s lain down on the bed and slept like a baby, not stirring until the knock on the door. It had been seventeen weeks since he’d last slept, not that he needed sleep in the usual sense, but sometimes even the Great Travelers needed a complete break with the physical. Dragon’s teeth, he said to himself, it made a body stiff though, all those hours of inactivity.
“It’s beans on toast, Aunt Idle said you weren’t fussy,” the girl said, politely enough, though she looked him up and down. “The laundry and shower room is down the hall, thataway, sir.”
Crispin took the plate off the girl, the corner of his lip curling up in amusement. “Look like I need a wash, do I?”
“Sorry sir, didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just that most guests ask for a shower when they get here, dust on the road and all. Will there be anything else you want? Pot of tea? Bottle of wine?”
But Crispin Cornwall had already closed the door. Clove heard the lock click. Rude filthy old fart, she thought to herself.

Corrie:

It was the look on Aunt Idle’s face when she saw them that scared me. There’s something strange going on, and not just everyone acting weird, that’s pretty normal around here, but this was a different kind of weird.

When Aunt Idle nearly suffocated me with that big hug while she was trying to hide that piece of paper, I didn’t think anything of it. Probably hiding another bill I thought, not wanting us to worry about the debts piling up. Mater wandering off like that was pretty strange, but old people do daft things. I knew all about it because I’d been reading up on dementia. They imagine things and often feel persecuted, claim someone stole their old tea set, things like that, forgetting they gave it away 30 years ago, stuff like that. So I wasn’t worried about either of them acting strange when Clove and I decided to go treasure hunting in the old Brundy house, we just decided to out and explore just for the hell of it, for something to do.

The Brundy house was set apart from the rest of the abandoned houses, down a long track through the woods, nice and shady in the trees without the sun glaring down on our heads. Me and Clove had been there years ago but we were little then, and scared to go inside, so we’d just peeked in the windows and scared each other with ghost and murderer stories until we heard a bang inside and then ran like hell until we couldn’t breathe. Probably just a rat knocking something over, but we never went back. We weren’t scared to, it was further to walk to the Brundy place and there were so many other abandoned houses to play in that were closer to home.

We weren’t scared to go inside this time. It was a big place, quite grand it must have been back in the day, big entrance hallway with an awesome staircase like in Gone With the Wind where Scarlett fell down the stairs, but the stair carpet was all in shreds and some of the steps banisters were broken, but the steps looked sound enough so up we went, for some reason drawn up there first before exploring the ground floor rooms.

Clove turned left at the top of the stairs and I turned right and went into the first bedroom. My hand flew to my mouth. I wonder why we do that, put a hand over our mouth when we’re surprised, well that’s what I did when I saw the cat mummy on the bed. I didn’t scream or anything, not like Clove did a minute later from the other side of the house. It wasn’t a mummy with bandages like an Egyptian one, it was just totally desiccated like a little skeleton covered in bleached leather. It was a fascinating thing to see really but the minute I heard Clove scream I ran out of the room and down the landing. It’s not like Clove to scream. Well who screams in real life, the only time I ever heard screaming was in a movie. People usually say what the fuck or oh my god, they don’t scream. But Clove screamed when she saw the room full of mannequins because to be fair it did look like a room full of ghosts or zombies in the half light from the shuttered windows. She was laughing by the time I reached her, a bit hysterically, and we clutched each other as we went over to open the shutters to get a better look. It was pretty creepy, even if they were only mannequins.

They were kind of awesome in the light, all covered in maps, there were 22 of them, we counted them, a whole damn room full of map covered mannequins in various poses, men, women and kid sized. Really clever the way the maps were stuck all over them, looked like arteries and veins, and real cool the way Riga joined up with Boston, and Shanghai with Lisbon, like as if you really could just travel down a vein from Tokyo to Bogota, or cross a butt cheek to get from Mumbai to Casablanca.

We hadn’t noticed at first that we’d been shuffling through a load of paper on the floor. The floor was covered in ripped up maps, must have been hundreds of maps all torn up and strewn all over the floor.

“There’s enough maps left over to do one of our own, Corrie” Clove said, reading my mind. “Let’s take some home and stick them all over something.”

“We haven’t got a mannequin at home though” I replied, but I was thinking, why not take a mannequin home with us, and some maps, and decide what to do with them later.

So that’s what we did. We gathered up the biggest fragments of map off the floor and rolled them all up and used my hair elastic to hold them together, and carried a mannequin all the way home. The sun was going down so we had to hurry a bit down the track. Clove didn’t help when she said we must look like we’re carrying a dead body with rigor mortis, that made us collapse laughing, dropping the mannequin on its head. Once we got the giggles it was hard to stop, and it made our legs weak from laughing.

We got home just as the last of the evening light disappeared, hauled the mannequin up the porch steps, where Aunt Idle was standing with her hand over her mouth. Well, that was to be expected, naturally she’d be wondering what we were carrying if she was watching us come up the drive carrying a body. It was later, when we unfolded the maps, that the look on her face freaked me out.

Bert remembered running away when he was a kid. He had run away often. But he never got very far. They always caught him and took him back. The foster homes might look a bit different on the outside, but to him they were all the same. So he just kept running. These memories flitted through his mind as he watched Mater carefully shutting the front door so as not to make a noise. He watched as she she set down her backpack on the porch chair to check the contents and, obviously satisfied, she closed the bag and swung it on her back.

Aunt Idle:

My hands were shaking so much I could hardly light a cigarette after reading the note. I got it lit and sucked in a lungful, exhaled right into the shaft of sunlight and froze. And I don’t mean cold, it’s hotter than hell, I mean I quit shaking and couldn’t move because that smoke was doing some very peculiar things in that sunbeam. Looked like Penmanship with a capitol curly P, written in smoke by an invisible hand, loop the loop of joined up writing and I could see the words, but damn, two seconds later I couldn’t tell you what I just read and by then the first part had wafted apart. So I sat there reading the smoke until the last of it dispersed, and without thinking took another drag of the cigarette. I’ll be honest, I wondered whether to blow the smoke over my shoulder instead, but curiosity got the better of me, and I leaned forward a bit and screwed my eyes up ready to focus and started exhaling slowly into the sun. Not a damn thing this time, nor the next, and I almost lit another cigarette right off the butt of that one. Just to delay looking at that note again I suppose, but I didn’t, I stubbed it out and picked up the note. The smoke distraction did me good, I was over the shock of it and now I was curious.

The note was written in letters cut out of a map, by the look of it. Or maps, hard to say at this stage. The letters were pasted onto a yellowing sheet of stationary paper with a heading embossed on the top: Tattler, Trout and Trueman. Nothing else, just that, no address or phone number, or indication of who they were. There was a brown ring stain, which might be a clue, and a short message. Made me jump when I saw the name at the bottom, because the H was so tiny compared to the ILDE it caught my eye as Idle, which is what the twins call me, and the D I D letters were much bigger than the I E R, making me think it was Dido, which is what the others call me. It’s Delilah but nobody’s ever called me that, although Prune called me Dildo once and got a clip round the back of the head for it. So the note came from Hilde Didier, and I’m ferreting away in my mind and I can’t think of anyone of that name, but it might come to me later.

“Mater’s acting strange, Aunt Idle,” Corrie burst into the room giving me the most unpleasant jolt it made me think I was having a heart attack until I remembered the note in my hand.

“Coriander, darling!” I gushed, admittedly uncharacteristically but I didn’t have time to think, swiveling round to her while slipping the note out of sight. I stood up and hugged her, deftly spinning her around while scanning over her shoulder to make sure the note was hidden from view.

“Bloody hell, not you as well!”

Mater:

I feel myself moving slowly today. The thought of death and my poor little guinea pig is still nagging. It occurs to me that perhaps I am walking slowly because I don’t want to move too fast into the inevitable.

Or perhaps it is just that I did not sleep so well last night. It is so damned hot and night time offers little respite from the heat.

At least the kids have stopped fighting. I worry about them. Always shut away in their rooms on that internet thing.

I am so tired. More tired than I should be. It is not the usual aches and pains. Something feels wrong. I have made up my mind to go and visit Jiemba, the local aboriginal healer. It is a wee bit of a walk, so I will need to start early, before the heat gets up. I don’t want to ask Dido to take me. “Just go and see the doctor in town!” she will say to me. For all her alternative ways, Dido can still be pretty closed minded about some things—and she thinks I am a crazy old fool anyway.

But I think Jiemba has the gift—special healing powers—and he comes from a family of aboriginal healers. His father was a healer and his grandfather too. I went to see him once, his father, years ago. My back was bad and the doctor in town said I would need an operation. He did some chanting, calling up spirits I think, put his hand on my back and pulled out a stone. He said the stone was the sickness causing my back pain, or some such thing. I was sceptical at the time, but my back never did give me any more bother. I’ve read up on it since then and I think there is something in it all. The older I get the more I realise I don’t know it all.

Besides, there is something else I want to ask him about and I don’t know who else I can talk to. That’s the problem with getting old—one of the problems anyway—people tend to assume you are losing your marbles if you say anything out of the ordinary.

But I think the Inn is haunted.

Another bang on my bedroom door, my hands suspended over the keyboard. “Go away Prune!” I shouted, exasperated. “If you bang on my door again, I’ll come out and give you such a wallop, now bugger off, will you!”

“It’s me, Corrie” came Clove’s voice. Walked over to the door and unlocked it. A chat with my sister might help me with this project. Unlike Prune, who would be guaranteed to disrupt my train of thought.

Locking the door again I tell Clove what I’m writing about. We don’t go to school, me and Clove, we’re what they call “homeschooled” but what that actually means in our case is that we’re left to our own devices most of the time. Aunt Idle asks us (when she remembers) what we’ve been working on, and as long as we’ve been writing something or researching something, she’s happy.

So when I saw the group project about alternative timelines to avoid the disaster timeline, I had some ideas. Well, to be honest, I didn’t have any definite ideas until I saw the other suggestions. All Americans, and all of them talking about changing the timelines by changing the results of presidential elections!

“Not much chance of a different timeline there then!” remarked Clove astutely.

“Exactly!” I knew Clove would get it, she knows were I’m coming from, but then, everyone knows twins are like that.

“So this is what the plan is, right: “The goal of this exercise is to discuss amongst the group and choose significant past moments, and then As a Group, focus on creating alternate histories, thus sparking alternate timelines. We should vividly imagine moving forward from those probability forks and creating a more viable and desirable future.” Oh, and this bit here: “ our current timeline is convoluted to the point where many probabilities are leaning towards a disaster scenario simply to shake out of the current focus.” And then all these suggestions about different presidents, and then this: “My suggestion would be also to consider how we would like our current time frame to appear,” so I’m thinking…”

“I’m thinking” interrupted Clove, continuing my train of thought, “Of all those states and communities that got with the programme ten years ago, and took their kids out of school and built those Earthships so they didn’t need money for water and electricity..”

“And started cooperative worker owned businesses like they do in South America….”

“And they all started a guaranteed basic income years ago, so everyone was doing what they did best, especially the kids, cos they had such great ideas and weren’t stuck in boring schoolrooms…..”

“and there was no poverty, and nobody without a home…”

“Yeah, and they all stopped paying taxes so there was no money for the military, and then loads more people stopped paying taxes too…”

“Good one, Clove!”

“So nobody gave a fuck what president was elected anyway, because they were all sorting themselves out, and those states and communities were doing so well…”

“Because they’d already been doing it for years” I added.

“…that other states and communities started doing it too.”

“So that it snowballed, like dominoes, and there were more and more of these places..”

“And they had exchange students and stuff like that to learn from each other, and shared stuff online..”

“So when the disasters struck, it wasn’t half so bad because there were already a bunch of people managing perfectly well without dollars or oil, and they could help the people in the disaster. Makes more sense that electing another blimmin president, huh?”

“Bloody obvious if you ask me” replied Clove. “Pity we don’t have basic income, did you see Mater’s face when she was talking to that debt collector?”

That made me laugh, remembering her waving the stick around. “Her face was as purple as her cardigan.”

In unison, we both starting singing Start Wearing Purple and dancing around, acting the fool. I had a purple wig hanging on the back of my chair, so I put that on, and Clove grabbed a purple feather boa off the coat stand. No shortage of wigs in this town, though god only knows why. Just about every damn trunk in every empty house is full of wigs.