Chapter 3: All The Things We Don't Discuss
in which our erstwhile narrator discovers the internet
Welcome to (Re)wild Imagination, an exploration of how art can sustain hope & how ordinary people can help the environment through acts of citizen rewilding. You are reading the paid version, which includes a serialised gothic novel.
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I didn’t realise how much I relied on other people until I found myself so suddenly alone. The seclusion was deafening.
Christmas was a drab affair.
I was the king of time. It ran through my fingers like water. In the first days I remember being able to remember why I had left, but the memory faded, as though I had left a bright morning for the increasing darkness of a well. I forgot the whys and wherefores of everything until only the bare hint of them stained me.
In those first few days I clung to the security room that I had made my bedroom, migrating over to the kitchen only when I had to. I spent those first days in a makeshift bed, rigging a hammock up out of a collection of jumpers that had been folded neatly into a plastic bag by the front door.
I curled up in it and sweated and twitched there until the light that separated day from night receded again and again.
I was so afraid of the new sounds of St Catherine's, of there being somebody else there. I imagined monsters in the shadows of the rooms, and conspiracy theories, and all manner of absurd things.
The next night I could not ignore the sounds of the outside world, half expecting that if I fell asleep and then opened my eyes some terrible phantom would be standing over me, little hands ice cold, a torn grin and rags. So I didn’t sleep.
One night the angel came to me in a dream again and said, “Remember the transfiguration?”
I hadn’t eaten in about a week.
I said I didn’t. The angel disapproved.
The next morning I left the building and it was as though I was walking on air. The breeze on my face, the laughing light; I can tell you but you won't know, you won't understand.
That mid-January walk was one of the finest times of my life. I knew that I could do anything then. I even started nodding and smiling hello at the other passersby. To my astonishment they said hello back.
I strode into a large indoor market as though the crowd and raucous cries of the red-faced stall-holders weren't entirely new to me. One could purchase anything in there; dolls, stickers, sweaters, wool, gardening tools, animals (poor things in small cages), shoes, books, vegetables, rose bushes, spices from the far-off East. The air was laden with fragrance and shouting, with haggling and a little piped music. Everywhere twinkled with fairy lights and it was magical.
On my way back I walked past a small kiosk with a few old computers and printers inside that had internet access. How wonderful, I thought, marching up boldy to the man behind the tiny desk with a fistful of coins and a vague memory of the mechanics of typing. It took quite a while to know puzzle together to do things but I had the luxury of time.
What the hell is a Google, I wondered. I gaped at the computer screen, taken aback at the thought that I could find anything I wanted. In the face of ‘anything’, my mind blanked out. The man behind the tiny desk came out to me after about half an hour and asked if I could use some help. In a soft, Eastern voice he slowly explained the world to me. It was strange, and wonderful, and terrifying. I fell in love with the hypnotic cadences of his speech. I fell in love with the internet.
First I found the transfiguration. It involved being consumed in light, something that appealed to me. Then I found the phone number of an electrician. I questioned myself as to whether there was anything else I wanted to know. What other knowledge out there in the wide world did I desire?
I learned about how The Oxford English Dictionary's first reference to the word "tailor" gives the specific date of 1297; and certainly by that date there were tailoring guilds, as well as those of weavers, and cloth merchants, all well established in Europe.
I watched a video of a hamster eating a tiny burrito at a tiny table.
I found out what a burrito was. They're from Mexico.
The man behind the desk smiled and waved to me as I left. I told him I’d be back soon, and he nodded enthusiastically.
The electrician came the next morning. I had no idea what he did. I hovered around the kitchen stirring the same cup of tea over and over as my skin crawled and prickled at there being someone else in the building.
I was in an agony of awkwardness as he ignored me and went about his journey of wires and sparks. He took the cup of tea that I offered. We made small talk about the weather. He gawped around the rooms, obviously more interested in the building than in me, but he never asked what I was doing there.
I paid him in cash and then at last was alone again. I turned on all the lamps and walked around the blank rooms as though this act meant something.
I wondered if the light made a colour on my skin that was different to the one I could see.
There was a small windowless room off of my bedroom. I attacked the bits and pieces I had brought in my shoulder bag, but as I’d never left home before I had had little idea of what to pack with me.
In this little room there was a dresser that contained several crumbling lace gloves, some stockings, some bedding. I dressed up my hammock with all of the above, strengthening it up. The crucial article I found was an ancient computer that I turned on with delight. I had never owned one of these machines before.
I got the name of a company from a billboard on a street corner not far from the school, called them up, and hooked myself up to the rest of the world.
The kitchen was a time warp. Brown tiles, yellow floor, a ceiling lamp full of flies. The door into the kitchen was an old half-door such as they have in stables. The yellow linoleum was faded in patches and the resulting effect was that a cat had vomited all over the floor. I realised that in main room there were brown screens in the walls that could be pulled across, transforming each side into its own room, and this was truly wonderful indeed.
Emboldened by the electrician I had men in to fix the oven, the heating system, the fridge. Anything they wanted to fix or said that needed to be fixed in order to fix something else, I got them to put right. Money poured through my fingers. No letters ever arrived there, and certainly no electricity bills either. It was not something I wondered about until much later. I didn't care. I hadn’t known that my credit cards would before long be cancelled.
Tinned peach sandwiches became a delicacy. Loving any contact with other humans, I began to ply the workmen with tea and chatter. They took it in good stead, and I began to realise that I was actually not a bad conversationalist. They left business cards in case I needed to talk to them again. It must have been obvious that I was lonely.
I began a siege cupboard, tins of food, tins of peaches and pineapples, vacuum-packed bread that went mouldy anyway. I prepared for a war that never came. I was prepared for Ranulph’s cataclysmic return.
Despite all these purchases, I didn't cook a real meal right away. In preparation for this I had gone out and purchased the most colourful cookery books that money could buy. There were quite a few with photographs and simple instructions and I loved them.
To Craven, I inscribed them. Happy beginning of the rest of your life.
The first dish I ever prepared for myself was the tastiest banquet I’d ever had. For the life of me I cannot now recreate such an assault on the senses as I had that evening so many years ago. That night I slept peacefully at last, unmolested by sounds of strangers or wind.
I washed myself at the kitchen sink and dressed in the only clothes that I owned. For a stretch of time, I had been watching the perambulations of a young man who lived nearby, taking quick little notes of what he was wearing on any given sighting. I can't say why but I liked how he looked.
I learned the times of his comings and goings and would be here or there, on this corner or that with my notebook and a pencil. Fortified with this knowledge, I descended on the shops with my credit cards and optimism, visiting Krink one afternoon to collect a new suit that he had made for me.
“But this is a morning suit,” I said, modelling it in front of a mirror.
“Yes.” Krink said.
“I’m not going to a wedding, am I,” I said.
“Maybe you will be.”
He gave me a look that suggested that one of us might be getting married soon, but not wanting to know what he meant by it, I changed the subject.
"How is your son?" I asked. I had been well brought-up.
"Very well, thank you."
"Is he a good tailor?"
"Some people might say so."
"Some people say I'm the best tailor ever," Ryan's voice called from a different room and I had the pleasure of seeing Krink's reflection roll its yellow eyes.
"You should give heed to what you are doing," He muttered, snipping with undue force at a thread hanging from my cuff. Was he talking to me? He turned on his heel and stalked out, head high and walking carefully, just like that king of birds. The agony of unknowing filled me up again.
"So how're you getting on?" Ryan's reflection asked behind me.
"Very well, thank you."
Ryan just stood there with his hands in his pockets, under a short apron that held all manner of tools that I could dimly remember. He was a smaller man than me, but most men are. Standing on the stool I felt stupidly tall. I sat down and we were equal.
"I've been undertaking some repairs," I offered.
"I'd say the kip – no offence like – needs it."
"It's far more comfortable now."
"Ah yeah well that's the main thing isn't it, having a place to call yer own at the end of the day like."
Was it?
"Does he - does your father expect me to follow him in?" I asked, glancing back at the door that held no sign of Mr Krink.
"Prolly. I dunno. Da!"
"Oh no really, please, you don't have to sh - "
"Da!"
Krink appeared in the doorway and I deflated into soggy embarrassment.
"I am not a dog," he clipped at his son, "so if you wish to speak with me you come and you find me. Yes? Yes. Now. What."
"He said - "
"I had merely been enquiring as to whether I ought to have followed you in to the other room or - " I stood up. It made me feel better, being able to look down at the world again.
Krink's cheeks yawned into a repugnant smile.
"Forgive me, Mr Wren," he said, "it was rude of me to leave like that with no indication. If you'd come this way please." He stood back and gestured at the door, closing it behind him with firm intent when we had both left Ryan alone.
"It is a gift," Krink waved his hand at me as we approached the singing cash register. Business had picked up since we'd been inside and the shop held a handful of drifting gawkers. A clutch of customers were waiting at the cash registers but the ladies manning their yelping machines floated around like calm swans and the whole room was suffused in a warm sense of comfort.
"I thought your silence was a gift," I mumbled. He turned to me like he'd been jabbed with a cowprod and looked into my eyes as though trying to transmit some kind of telepathic message.
"My silence on all matters is a given," he said at last. "I can assure you."
I tried to summon up a wisp of my father's haughty bearing. Command, he had been fond of saying, has much to do with posture - and he'd jerk my shoulders back.
"I am gratified to hear it," I nodded. He handed me a bag containing the clothes I'd come to the shop in, and we shook hands. The bell at the door chimed me on my way, and that was that.
It had always been just us at Auburn; my parents, my mother's sister Beatrice, and then Ranulph, Sarah and I. There were servants, of course, but one could never be friends with them.
We seldom had visitors; so seldom, in fact, that their coming would be preceded by weeks of cleaning and consumerism. But we did sometimes see the denizens of the other world, as I thought of it, that world beyond the walls and gates of my home. They are bizarre beings in my memory, their clothes so odd and different; even their speech patterns were not the same as mine.
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