Chapter 1: All The Things We Don't Discuss
Welcome to (Re)wild Imagination, an exploration of how art can sustain hope amid climate crises, and how ordinary people can help the environment by supporting native wildlife in local areas. You are reading the paid version, which includes a serialised gothic novel.
Chapter One
Escaping the house of my fathers was my second and real obstacle: deciding to go at all had been my first. I had of course seen cars on the road, and there was my parents’ old Rolls in the far garage, but when it came to a practical knowledge of driving, I had none whatsoever.
That’s how I came to be standing beside a car parked audaciously in front of the main house at roughly six o’clock on a Tuesday morning, the day before Christmas. It was a bitter, dry cold, and my breath hung in the air. My hands inside their gloves clenched consciously and unconsciously against the chill. I circled the vehicle. It was a dull green, a green I would later associate with armies, and a bit rough around the edges. The left door panel had been removed and replaced entirely with one of a different colour (beige). My footsteps crunched on the gravel and I glanced a little fearfully up at the house. No movement. Who on earth would be awake at this hour?
Whose car is this anyway, I wondered. Who on earth would dare to park their car so proudly right in front of the great crumbling edifice that was my ancestral home?
I crammed my lank frame into the driver’s seat and fumbled around with it until I found out how to slide it all the way back to accommodate my gangly legs. I scrabbled with the keys I had found on the rack in the servants’ hall – keys of all kinds; large, small, brass, silver, utilitarian, ornate. They were heavy as a bag of sugar. At last one fitted the ignition. Turning it, it caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. I straightened the mirror, staring at myself, blinking my eyes fixedly to make them seem even blacker – this works, I swear it – and playing with my mousy hair briefly. One must look wonderful when running away, mustn’t one? The car rumbled into life under me, and I wrenched myself back into business. So far so good. My adventure had begun.
I would soon discover that there were no birds in the city. The monotony of the hours crowded in around me, and soon even my new home at St Catherine’s School for Girls felt claustrophobic instead of vast and empty. The days before I made friends were a trial by horror. I believed that I would die that winter, curled up in a coat and scarves, and leg warmers I stole from an Oxfam bag.1
I would tangle up into knots thinking about my home and my family; my father, my sister; even the groundskeeper with his crusade against the weeds; how the weeds and the loneliness were taking back that house and its occupants for themselves.2
I could not envisage the reactions of my family, nor how they coped with my disappearance. Did they presume that I had run away? Because my brother had. Did they think I had found him? Did they think I was his mirror image in my evaporation? Did they think that we were both off somewhere tropical; the two of us escaping our names like refugees do their nationalities - ?
Because we were, in a way.
I was.
I was becoming someone else in that shell of a primary school. And my brother Ranulph – well, heaven knows what or where he was then. In truth I could barely recollect what he looked like. I couldn’t even describe his height. He could have been any passing stranger in the street. This was the way he had shed his own identity too.
For us, our name was our flag, and being a Wren was to live in another country. There had been Wrens in that antediluvian ruin for untold generations, and shedding my name was freedom.
You can’t imagine how wonderful it was to suddenly be just another man.
I bought some newspapers at random one day, looking for myself but knowing deep down that I wouldn’t find me.3 I had little idea of anything else to do in this new life I’d thrust myself into here in the city. I didn’t even have electricity. Standing in the shop itself was painful. Getting there had been terrifying. I can’t expect you to understand experiences that I can now only barely comprehend. The smell of sugar and paper was alien to me, and I fingered the newspaper while I waited for the man reading a book behind the glassed-in counter of what I thought might be confectionary of some sort to notice me. Eventually he put his book down. The walls around us in that small room grew even tighter. There wasn’t enough oxygen. I handed him the paper, awkwardly reaching high over the confectionary, and before he even had it in his hand he said, “Two fifty.”
Two fifty, I thought. Right. 2 euro … fifty ... cents … I counted out the money judiciously, being a bit more familiar with it than I had been on my arrival in the city through careful study of the coins in the school. When I had the coins I wanted, I counted them out into his outstretched palm.
This was it! I was making a transaction!
He flipped the coins into the till barely looking up from his book, and slammed the till closed. I knew tills already from my visit to Krink, the tailor’s as a child.
Some of the inside of St Catherine’s was painted with excrement. I tried to scrub it off, but it’s a stubborn substance believe me. In the end, because I was lazy, I began to live in the rooms that had less of the contents of the inner tracts of city animals and the homeless.
I fondled past and present circumstances meditatively in my mind during those long cold days and nights in which I wasn’t myself or anyone else either. Curling in on my bones, I remembered myself huddled in the kitchen. Those first few days of self-determination. A decrepit room slowly mouldering into obscurity.
After a few weeks, I became more accustomed to the new sounds and smells. The venturing outside began. I walked the length of the street one afternoon, and out onto the main thoroughfare a few days later. The people and their cries! The profusion of clothes and dress styles; all those textures! Dizzying! At home in Auburn, where life was so fixed, the clothes familiar like the groove in a favourite chair.
I grew bolder. I found workmen in newspapers. I had things fixed. After two months, I had electricity. Then the gas came, the hob, the cooking. I bought4 a slim cookery book because the paper smelled nice and felt good under my fingers, and because I was tired of eating beans.
Those beginning weeks were full of small steps to glory. Everything was marvellous to me; turning on the gas hob, the hiss of air and rush of blue flame. Exploring the apocalyptic garden was like hacking my way through a jungle and I loved it.
I thought about Ryan one night as I was flicking through the cookery book in search of something new.
I felt like a de facto human being.
It was through that little book that I first found pasta, and it was through pasta that I came to meet Ryan for a second time.5
By the time I really knew Ryan, I felt like a parasite crawling up out of the earth, a ghastly thing with unkempt hair and nails encrusted with dirt, with plasma, with blood. A hollow-cheeked ghoul. Hunger made me hollow. It was a tightening. I became more air than water. I was transubstantiation.
Charity begins at home.
I missed my twin sister Sarah most of all. I hoped she found my note.
I dare not even describe that transaction, my first ever; the exchange of money, the scrutinisation of the coins, sweaty palms and hot cheeks. Awful.
This transaction only a hairsbreadth better than the last.
Tossed in butter, in pesto, in olive oil; what did extra virgin mean? Al dente. Conchiglie. Farfalle. Ziti. Macarone.