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Bert raised an eyebrow at Elizabeth’s obvious sarcasm, which unfortunately caught her eye and put him in the spotlight of her penetrating gaze.

“How about you Bert? Were you listening?” she asked, raising an eyebrow of her own to match Berts.

Finnly, always on the lookout for an opportunity to out do Liz, raised both of her eyebrows simultaneously; then looked quickly down, pretending to examine her nails.

Bert decided that in this case honestly was the best policy and replied “No. I was wondering if Prune had cleaned up the blood spattered corridor.”

While Liz was momentarily speechless, Finnley quickly interjected another line from the book she had hidden under the table.

“Then why did none of us hear the blood crazed howl?”

“Ah! Aha! I’ll tell you why nobody heard the blood crazed howl!” Elizabeth had become alarmingly animated, leaning forward and rapping sharply on the table with her cigarette lighter. “The walls of isolation that surround you, the windows you keep closed and shuttered for fear of a draft of passion, the fences of barbed trotted out dogma you use as protection ~ but I ask you, protection from what?”

“Buggered if I know, Liz. Can I go now?” said Bert.

“… so leaving the book club just sort of snapped me into just buggering off with a lot of that individualistic stuff that doesnt resonate to the exclusion of other stuff. And then I started another book club which resonated more with my special individuality. I found I enjoyed starting book clubs just for the fun of it—I think I have quite a gift in that direction. After a while, out of curiosity, I went back to the first group. I changed my name and wore a hat and scarf as a disguise so I am pretty sure nobody knew it was me. Finnley, are you listening?”

heard box passed book
tell wondering clouds vacation
above feet trouble walking
smell bog certain mat
dreams began map project sister

It was the first of September and everyone in the village breathed a sigh of relief. Miraculously, it already seemed cooler, although it probably wasn’t, but the promise was in the air. Jack and Lisa stood on the roof terrace watching the migrating vultures glide past on their way to a new story for the winter, exerting little effort as they sailed on the thermals.
“They never flap, do they?” remarked Lisa. “No frantic flapping or struggling to beat back the air, they just float, and steer.”
“I wonder why they always circle our village before continuing south?”
“They’re saying cheerio to us, Jack, although I’m sure you’d prefer a more logical explanation. It’s a reflection that we stopped flapping around with all that teleporting lark, and that we’re all back home now.” Lisa sighed with relief and hugged Jack. “I’m glad you banned teleporting for a year.”
“I didn’t ban it!” Jack said, not wanting to me misunderstood. “You make me sound so dictatorial and bossy. I merely suggested it. Strongly suggested it,” he added. “We all need a bit of no nonsense plain old grounding and balance. It was getting ridiculous, all the drama and comings and goings.”
“Mirabelle says she wants to write a book about it” remarked Lisa. “Which is marvelous really, considering the trouble she had at first with the language. And Fanella’s studying archeology and plans to travel ~ she’s fascinated with sphinxes, not surprisingly, after leaving an energy fleck in that one on the island; not sure how much she remembers about that now though. Adeline has an exhibition coming up in Paris ~ she’s looking forward to that.”
“I think they’re all planning on going to that, even the Russian lads. A trip down memory lane I suppose, but I expect they’ll notice some changes. But that’s another story.”

“They said seventeen seconds, but I never would have believed it! Did you see that?”
“Seventeen seconds to barbecue a fish that size? Take a bit longer than that, Sha” replied Gloria.
Sharon rolled her eyes and turned to Mavis. “See that, our Mavis? See how that fish landed right on our barbecue?”
“Another trick out of that book you’ve been reading, was it?” Mavis replied. “Not bad really, but why were you asking for a fish? None of us like fish.”
“Ah, well….I wasn’t asking for a fish exactly, no. But the way it landed seventeen seconds from when I changed my energy, well…”
Gloria rolled her eyes and yawned. “When you work it out, I’m sure you’ll let us know. What did you ask for, anyway?”
Sharon blushed. “Remember that hot Russian guy I had a dream about the other night?”
Mavis and Gloria looked at the fish, looked at each other, and burst out laughing. They were still laughing when Igor landed in the strawberry pool just a few feet away from where they were sitting, soaking them to the skin. The barbecue took a direct hit from the pink deluge, and hissed.
Igor took a deep breath and dived under the water as Sharon staggered into the pool, while Mavis and Gloria hooted from the shore.

“Are you sure this is the right direction ?” asked Sha.
“The young guy at the Hotel d’El Refugio said it was down South the Sea of Bee Leaf, past the mangrove and the mystic wall”, said Glo.
“Are you sure about that ? Look, the brochure indicate the pyramid is past the misty wall”, interrupted Mavis.
“Mystic, misty, what’s the difference anyway ?” Glo tentatively rolled her eyes, but gave up the gym. “The young lad said mystic”, she added, not wanting to let go so easily.
“What young lad ? You mean the one at the swimming pool that tried to flog the helicoleopter trip over the underwater tunnels of Lacuna to Sha ?”
“Oh! I recall him well”, said Sharon, “He told me his name was Jube Lee ? He’s no older than eighteen. Don’t tell me you turned cougar Glo.”
“Bloody hell, what ? Noooo !”
“Here it is, the fog wall looks quite thin.”
They heard the sound of big flapping wings.
“Oh! Are you an angel ?” asked Sha. “What a beautiful face you have, young lady. As pure as vodka.”
“My name is Fanella”, said the sphinx with a wide smile, “Answer my question and you’ll be free to cross the corridors of time.”
Excited by the perspective of some fun the three ladies listened carefully.
“What’s the difference between a cat and a complex sentence ?”
“What the f*%$k ?”
“Is that your answer ?”
“No, no, no. I’m just thinking aloud”, said Glo.
“That rings a bell”, whispered Mavis to her friends, “I think that’s from one of Steven Kong’s books. It has something to do with the claws and the paws. Yes ! That’s it. I have the answer”, she announced proudly.
“Are you sure ?” asked Glo. “What happens if she give the wrong answer ?”
“You won’t be able to enter the pyramid for ten years.”
“Oh ! That’s all ?” said Sha disappointed, “I thought you were going to devour us or something similar.”
“You must have mistaken me for someone else. As you are already in transition, there isn’t much that we can do to you. So, what is the answer ?”
“A cat has claws at the end of its paws. The sentence has a pause at the end of its clause”, Mavis articulated clearly.
The sphinx smiled, and let them pass.
“Just one last thing”, she added as the three ladies were entering the Lion’s mouthed gate, “As you choose to go through, only go further, don’t stop or try to turn back. You may get lost in time and never come back. If you complete your taks, you may well find a new life.”
She disappeared, leaving only her enigmatic smile in the memory of Sha, Glo and Mavis.

“How about this one, it looks like one of them safari parks or petting zoos” said Sharon, pointing to a photograph of El Refugio in the Abalone blurb.
“Those little cabins look cosy” agreed Gloria. “And all them animals to take photos of.”
“On the coast too, the beach looks nice,” added Mavis. “Are we all agreed then? Shall I book the flight?”

“Shall I call you Fanny instead then, dear? It seems to be stuck in my head now to call you Fanella (which I do think sounds much nicer actually) but I think I can manage to remember Fanny,” suggested Lisa.
“Call me what you like, I won’t be here much longer” replied Fanella under her breath.
“What was that you said?”
“Coffee, Lisa, would you like a refill?”
Lisa’s reply was interrupted by an exclamation from Sanso, and they both turned their attention to him.
“Here it is!” he was saying. “Look! The island!” He pointed to an area of map collage on the mannequins left buttock, and stroked it gently while explaining. “It’s named Abalone ~ by some of its inhabitants, not by everyone, but more on that later. The fascinating thing about it is it’s mysterious properties ~ and I don’t mean real estate, although there are some VERY peculiar properties on the island! But properties that allow it to appear on the Earth only at certain times and places.”
“Times such as 2121?” asked Fanella.
“Yes indeed, and also times such as years 111, 222, 333 ~ in fact any number that has a particular significance really, it’s a very loose arrangement really, you know what some people are like about numbers, make up all kinds of nonsense about special numbers, but it serves a purpose as a sort of guideline, I suppose.”
“You don’t need to tell me all that, Sanso. I’ve already read the book.”
“Circle of Eights and Other Stories? Ahahahaha! But the stories in that book are forever changing, Lisa. You may have read the book but every time you read it, it’s different. You don’t know everything there is to know about that island just because you read one version of the book at one time!”
“I didn’t say I knew EVERY thing, Sanso” Lisa replied huffily.
“That’s where we’re going next” Fanella interjected. “Sanso is taking me.”
“Really? How exciting!” Lisa’s eyes lit up. “What a trip! I’ve been thinking about a holiday ever since we got back from Portugal. Hey, can I come too?”
Sanso stole a glance at Fanella, who shrugged helplessly. He winked at her and whispered “trust me”.
To Lisa he said “I can’t think of anything I’d like more. Is there anyone you’d like to bring with you?”
“Why yes, there is, how funny you should ask. I’ll ask Mirabelle if she wants to come.”
Fanella rolled her eyes.

The Continuing Adventures of the Three Time Traveling Maids From Versailles.

The three maids, Fanella (previously known, briefly, as Fanetta), Mirabelle, and Adeline and the three time travelling Russian stage hands, Igor Popinkin, Boris and Ivan, leave Paris in the 18th century via hot air balloon, heading for the Tower of Hercules on the Galician Coast, with Mirabelle’s parrot. Sporadically they are assisted by Pseu Dan, a cross between a sort of oversoul 8 and a future focus with cloaking abilities and other skills, who tends to be unreliable due to a fixation on building a folly of tiles in the City.
After a series of mishaps attempting to board the ghost galleon of Belen, an Amazonian shapeshifting timetravelling pink dolphin pod comes to their rescue, and they find themselves washed up on a beach near the Pillars of Hercules (Spanish side) in the year 2020 and are found by Lisa, a middle aged Englishwoman. She takes the six timetravellers back to her village, an experimental new kind of community in the orange groves not far from the beach.
Jack is Lisa’s partner, and other inhabitants of the village include Etienne and Pierre.

Mirabelle and Igor continue an on/off tempestuous affair, Mirabelle often considering Igor (somewhat unfairly) a feckless whoremongering cretin. Igor considers himself to be an average adventurous funloving young man willing to explore new opportunities.
Mirabelle, once considered to be the bossiest of the three maids, finds she has no need to control the others in the absence of the responsibilities of working long hours for others at Versaille. Initially she struggled with learning the new languages, but was easily diverted from the worry and thus learned with ease, after the unexpected trip to Portugal (looking for the stolen whale tile) with Lisa. Lisa finds herself strangely attracted to Mirabelle while under the influence of sangria.

Adeline settled into the new timeframe by pursuing her fascination with the unfamiliar multitude of coloured plastic objects, making them into sculptures. She and Boris have an easy ongoing friendship; Boris and Ivan settle into life at the village by taking an interest in car and tractor mechanics and farming, and digital photography.

Fanella was the most unsettled, yearning to return to the familiar hometimezone in Versaille. She found peace in solitude outside in natural surroundings, often practicing teleporting and projecting by the river or in the woods. She rediscovers her adventurous spirit after a series of teleport and time travelling mishaps. Her unexpected meeting with Sanso in the Great Fire of London in 1212 starts another chain of teleport and timetravel adventures, as she is now determined to reach the island in 2121 that she read about in an old book of Lisa’s called Circle of Eights and Other Stories.

I’ve been such a fool! Running away like that! Fanella admonished herself, biting her nails and pacing up and down in her room. I wasn’t paying attention! I should have stayed with that funny man, now I feel sure he would have taken me to that island in 2121 if I had just been patient instead of running off like that!
Fanella heard a man laughing, and spun around, but there was nobody there. Dear god, I’m hearing things now, she thought.
“I’m coming to get you, you daft bint, just hang on and don’t go anywhere!” Sanso told her via telepathic means. “We have a few other calls to make as well, but I will come and fetch you first, even if I have to use every shoehorning trick in the book. Now stop sniveling and I suggest you dress appropriately.”
Fanella started sobbing, unsure whether it was relief or apprehension.
“There, there,” Sanso said kindly. “You have a good cry, it will do you good.”

When Igor read about the three women, Gloria, Sharon and Mavis, he had a sudden inspiration that they were connected to the three maids in some way. Yes, surely there was a connecting link. Perhaps it would provide a clue, a direction to start his search. But what would Fanella be doing in a military hospital in Antarctica? It didn’t sound like a good place to be, but it did sound like a marvellous place to be rescued from. Igor closed the book with a decisive snap. Snap! he exclaimed. The SNAP projection technique will get me there, thank goodness I read about that on the loo this morning.

Igor Popinkin had been reading the old book all morning while anxiously waiting for Mirabelle to return from the search for Fanella. Maybe he could find some clues about where Fanella had gone. If he managed to find the missing girl, Mirabelle would be impressed, and perhaps think him a hero, instead of a feckless whoremongering cretin.

When Jack had sent Lisa a message to ask if Fanella had joined her and Mirabelle in Portugal, she was worried.
“Mirabelle, Fanella has disappeared, do you know anything about it?” asked Lisa. “Did she say anything to you that might give us a clue? Was she planning on going anywhere, did she have any friends outside the village? I know she homesick for 18th century Paris, but she couldn’t possibly have gone back ~ or could she?”
“Bit of a dark horse, our Fanella,” replied Mirabelle. “Always down by that river on her own, reading that strange old book.”
“Not Circle of Eights and Other Stories!”
“Yes, that’s the one. She was practicing projecting to the places in the book.”
“WHAT?? Mirabelle, there’s no time to lose, we must go back to the village at once. If Fanella has been doing that, she could be anywhere, anywhere at all ~ and the trail will be a hard one to follow!”
“But what about our holiday? And not only that, what about the strange tile that was stolen that we’re supposed to be looking for?”
“The damn tile can wait.” snapped Lisa. “But I haven’t forgotten your arousing arms,” she added, her voice softening. “But we must find Fanella first.”

~~

Lisa was not surprised to find on her return to the village that everything had descended into chaos. She knew that her responsibility belief about her herd tribe had something to do with it, and although she detested the word control, she was well aware of her propensity for monitoring and guiding the creatures and characters in her domain. The lifestyle in the village had relaxed her guidelines about fair play to some extent, but by golly some people were lazy slackers at times. But the one thing that got her goat was being kept in the dark. How could she keep a benevolent control if she wasn’t aware of what was going on? When she found out that Fanella had been making a granite box, and that she was the last to know, she was furious.

Without Mirabelle and Lisa around, trying to encourage her all the time but succeeding merely in making her feel harassed, Fanella had relaxed enough to achieve a remarkable degree of success with her teleport and projection practice. Projecting had been easy enough actually, but a full teleport was another matter. But she was encouraged by her successes with the projections, and the few seconds of full body teleporting here and there that she had managed.
Her attempts to return to her original physical focus timeframe had been futile; there were mental and emotional blocks and too much associated baggage getting in her way, and her lack of a specific intention with other timeframes had led not unsurprisingly to random times and places which had been unsettling ~ at times alarming ~ resulting in her finding herself back where she started in no time at all.
Fanella decided to pick a date and a location and be firm about it and unwavering.
She chose a date and a location based on an old battered book she had found on the shelf in Lisa’s house. It was called Circle of Eights and Other Stories. Many a happy hour had she spent reading the book down by the river, a gloriously feast of imaginative tales, with no dull steadfast tiresome normal plot or structure. It had appealed to her greatly, and sparked many fantastic ideas and wonderings. She felt particularly attracted to the tale about the island in 2121, and decided to make that her specific teleport destination.

The early morning sea mist was evaporating as Fanella strolled around the village picking up dog shit. She reminded herself to fully appreciate the damp coolness, before the scorching summer sun enveloped them in a bone warming blanket, and then reminded herself to appreciate the bone warming effects of the full sun later. As she retraced her steps she noted how differently everything looked on a return journey, how piles of dog shit had escaped her notice while going one way, but were obvious on the way back. It reminded her of something she’d read recently in one of the books that Lisa insisted she read to improve her English ~ A Field Guide To Getting Lost . Hah! Had there been a cruel irony in that choice of book? Fanella had felt lost ever since she arrived in 2020. But according to the book, getting lost wasn’t a bad thing, not at all.

To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

Fanella sighed. All sounds very philosophical, but I’m still stuck in the wrong time zone.
Another passage from the book popped into her head:

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

Fanella gazed up at the sky ~ the blue of longing was taking over, as the white wisps of clouds dispersed.

The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle…. how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly….No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Charming, Fanella thought, just bloody charming. Rotting soup of change, that just about sums it up. No wonder I wake up every morning with my bones feeling like mush.