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There is something creepy about that new maid.
“I think she’s got a crush on me”, I said to Joe the other day. “That bush pig’s putting porn red lipstick when she knows I’m coming to the Inn.”
Actually I hadn’t really noticed it until Prune mentioned it. Not with those words, of course, she’s too sophisticated to use such words. I used them because I knew it would catch Joe’s attention and make a better story. But truth is, there was not much of a story to tell.
T’was pathetic and oddly arousing at the same time to pretend I would be interested in catching the maid in the laundry room and give’er the bone on the washing machine.
“She’d slap my face with her feeders…” You know how boys are. We can be stupid when excited.

It was something to make jokes about it in the barn with Joe, but I had a hard time at Christmas trying to avoid her. I caught more than once an amused look on Prune’s face when Finly would bent over lower to serve me some stuffing. I’d swear she had no bra and no knickers. It could have been exciting but her armpits smelled of fried onions, barely masked by her cheap perfume.

After diner, I pretended a headache and went to my room. That’s when I heard that strange noise in the corridor. It was coming from room 8.

arrived age
horse karmalott above mind nobody towards somewhere
sent especially mentioned
hear linda
tried happened longer losing
free fucking choice

Corrie:

I was offering the plate of mince pies to Mr Cornwall, who had been coaxed out of his room for the first time in ages and was sitting next to the gum tree sapling that Aunt Idle had strung with fairy lights in lieu of a Christmas pine, when they arrived. We were all surprised to hear the taxi hooting outside, that is, except Bert. I heard him mumbling something about “She bloody meant it, the old trout,” but I didn’t remember that until later, with all the commotion at the unexpected guests.

“Here, take the lot,” I said, shoving the mince pies on the old guys lap, as I rushed to the door to see who it was. A tall autocratic looking woman swathed in beige linen garments was climbing out of the front seat of the taxi, with one hand holding the pith helmet on her head and the other hand gesticulating wildly to the others in the back seat. She was ordering the taxi driver to get the luggage out of the boot, and ushering the other occupants out of the car, before flamboyantly spinning around to face the house. With arms outstretched and a big smile she called, “Darlings! We have arrived!”

“Who the fuck it that?” I asked Clove. “Fucked if I know” she replied, adding in a disappointed tone, “Four more old farts, just what we bloody need.”

“And a baby!” I noted.

Clove snorted sarcastically, “Terrific.”

Suddenly a cloud of dust filled the hall and I started to cough. Crispin Cornwall had leaped to his feet, the plate of mince pies crashing to the floor.

“Elizabeth! Do my eyes deceive me, or is it really you?”

“Godfrey, you old coot! What on earth are you doing here, and dressed like that! You really are a hoot!”

“Why is she calling him Godfrey?” asked Prune. “That’s not his name.”

“He obviously lied when he said his name was Crispin Cornwall, Prune. We don’t know a thing about him,” I replied. “Someone had better go and fetch Aunt Idle.”

Elizabeth suddenly felt overwhelmed with loving kindness, and hugged everyone. “I am so sorry I’m a sourpuss at times, I love you all.”

While everyone was speechless, she continued: “This is indeed a trying and difficult season at times, despite our best efforts to eradicate it from our calendars. The social constructs of cheer and goodwill must never be confused with acquiescing to the pressures of the needy, if the needy resort to emotional blackmail and bullying. Indeed, it is a kindness to all concerned, not least ones own self, to refuse to kowtow simply because of the date on the calendar!”

“Hear! ……Hear!” said Norbert slowly.

“Blimey,” muttered Finnley, while Arona Haki whistled and said “Bloody heel!”

“Waaaahh wahhhha!” cried the cold baby shivering on the patio.

“Oh my god, the fucking baby!” Elizabeth shouted, leaping up and running outside, and accidentally tipping over the sherry bottle and the plate of mince pies.

“Will someone get rid of that old woman with the horrible accent?” hissed Finnley, ungraciously.

“What on earth for? She is doing a splendid job. I must say though, Finnley, just as a side note, it is good to hear you sounding more like your normal ungracious self.”

“I found dust,” muttered Finnley, glaring accusingly at Haki.

Elizabeth look unaccustomedly thoughtful. “Do you think you need a break, Finnley dearest? You really must be exhausted after all the splendid proof reading you have been doing for me this year. Why don’t you go home for a while, on full pay of course.”

Finnley burst into tears. “Where is my home though?” she snuffled. ”I am not good with descriptive details. I just found myself in this stupid story doing your stupid cleaning. And now I have a Bulgarian sister, to boot. And,” she looked witheringly at Elizabeth, “ proofreading is one word”

“Crikey, matey,” said Norbert patting her awkwardly on the shoulder. “Christmas is a killer, in’t? Family coming out of the woodwork like blimmin worms. Keep ya chin up though, eh. Ya can’t be letting things get to ya like this. Ya wouldn’t be able to carry on like this if ya were in bloody China ya know. Like bloody robots they are there. I don’t think they know the meaning of the word feelings over there.” He shook his head in wonder at their philistinism.

“And ya right about that one,” he added quietly, with a conspiratorial raised eyebrow and a slight nod of his head towards Haki.

Elizabeth leapt up and rushed to the bookshelf. “I know what you need! some Lemon Juice! I will pick one at random; they are all absolutely superb.” She opened the very small book and closing her eyes stabbed the page dramatically with her finger.

”Let’s not be overachieving fucks.”

“Wow,” she mouthed, awestruck. After taking a moment to recover herself, she looked sympathetically at Finnley.

“The oracle has done it again. Do you hear that Finnley? You are an overachieving fuck.”

Finnley rolled her eyes.

“If anyone needs exterminating,” muttered Clove under her breath when she heard Finly on the phone, “It’s you, you fucking Nazi.”

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.”

I found Joe near the fallen bridge. He was sobbing. I approached silently and put my hand on his shoulder.
“Are you alright, mate ?”
“Yes I’m alright”, he snorted. “You remember when we used to play there ?”
Of course I remembered, we called it the bridge to nowhere. I’ve never really understood why Bert had built that bloody bridge. Jasper told me after the blast that the old man also made sure nobody could use it again. That was no surprise. Old Bert was a tight as a duck’s ass when it came to his craft. That’s why he never could make it in his trade, if he didn’t like what you did of one of his creations he’d rather smash it up so that no one could use it afterward. Always the sneaky one.
“I remember”, I said. “Your face looks like a Panda.”
He snickered. “You know my father. He’s got a liking for China.” He laughed, but it felt forced. Anyway, I laughed with him. There was no point in bringing up the gloom, we needed fun.
“Let’s take a dive!” I said. Hoping to change his mind. He tried to smile but cringed as his face must have hurt badly. When he removed his shirt, my heart sank as I saw the dark marks on his chest and back. No pushing him in the water.
“Last one to reach the other side of nowhere!” he shouted before jumping in the cold water.
“That would be you!” I roared. Naked in the wild, at least as close to the wild as you could have here, I felt like a lion, full of strength, dangerous.

Nobody heard him so he tried again.

”knock knock”

”Who’s there?” called out Elizabeth

”Norbert”

”Norbert who?”

”Nor, bert ya shudn’t cull out uf ya don’t wont mey tu carm knuckin”.

”Friggin kiwi accents,” muttered Finnley. “I can’t understand a word they say.”

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!”

“Finnley, I do hope you realize the extent of my kindness and patience with you. I hope you appreciate it. Not only should you be cleaning, which I have generously turned a blind eye to while you read cheap tuppeny scandals, but you badger me to keep busy while you are relaxing on full pay!”

But Finnley was engrossed in her tawdry novel again, and didn’t hear her.

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.

“God damn it, my headpiece! I forgot my headpiece!” croaked Mother Shirley when she heard the command to assemble in Area 12. She looked around desperately for the final piece of her attire but it was nowhere to be seen.

Mother Shirley hated to be seen without her headpiece. Other than a few wiry grey hairs, she was bald—a fact which under normal circumstances her veil and wimple disguised admirably. It was a devil of a thing to get on though.

As the alarms sounded for a second time, she grabbed a pyramid shaped receptacle from the small desk in her capsule, and placed it on her head, where it perched precariously.

“God help us,” she grumbled, as she stiffly creaked her way to Area 12.

It was Mater who decided they needed to get some cleaning help. She commandeered Clove to do some research on the internet and eventually found a woman from New Zealand, Finly, who was offering her cleaning services in exchange for room and board.

“Bloody kiwis,” said Bert when he heard. “The place is riddled with them. Bloody come and take our jobs. Haven’t we got more than enough of them here already? I am having a hard enough time avoiding that Flora, going on about her spiritual bloody awakening.”

“If you can find anyone local who would be willing to do the cleaning in exchange for a place to stay, I will be glad to consider them,” retorted Mater sternly. “But in the meantime this place is fast becoming a pig-sty and Dido is too busy smoking and drinking to see it.”

Naturally Mater got her way and a few days later Bert, still grumbling, agreed to go and pick Finly up from the airport. Mater assembled the family in the main living room.

“Now remember, the main thing is to be courteous. God only knows why she agreed to come to this backwater of a place, but we don’t want to put her off.”

”Don’t we indeed?” smirked Aunt Idle.

“Yeah exactly, it is friggin’ weird I reckon. Why would she come here?” asked Clove, privately deciding she had better run a more thorough background check on Finly.

“I thought Finly was a boy’s name,” said Coriander. “That would be cool. A boy cleaner. I hope he’s hot. He can clean topless”

Aunt Idle, who had already been into the gin even though it wasn’t yet 10am, put her hand over her mouth and started to giggle.

“It can be a girl or a boy’s name and someone called Coriander is in no position to throw stones. And mind your language, Clove.” responded Mater tartly.

Clove rolled her eyes and sighed dramatically. “Well as long as she doesn’t try and boss me around, it might be quite fun to have a slave to clean up after me.”

Prune had been keeping an eye on the window. “Shush, she’s here!” she shouted excitedly.

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.