Excerpt 147:
A Pier into the Dark
I looked out at the horizon-buffered sea; an aquariophile, salt-ridden, tide-swollen, driven by the trade winds arriving early for the cancelled Summer season. Overblown. I faked the captaincy of my own fate while my dead yearning spun in its grave at my pretence that it was not yet dead. I was harbouring the bravery to venture oceanward; following the lighthouse’s beams out to sea. The docks fell about labouring to load the vessel with something that needed delivering somewhere. But the anchor defied weighing as the cargo rotted in the hold.
Meon Sea, from my observation post, ran like clockwork. If I woke at midday the midday shift were hogging the grounds outside; hitting their marks, delivering their lines. I watched the backing and forthing that stopped and started with predictable repetition. I was aware that any disturbances in the patterns on the fabric of everyday life would stand out.
And, as predicted…
My peripheral vision noticed it first: incoming narrative diversion. Systems woke. Turmoil was tempered. Nonchalance ordered. Steady as she goes…
As…
A figure walked across the promenade with a diagonality that screeched imbalance, and sat at the bus-stop-cum-pagoda that, these days, bore the lanterns of a spreading Chinatown, featuring graffiti that detailed a typical British seaside Chinese take-away menu: sweet and sour mushy peas with sushi rice, tofu fish and chips with noodles, and the like.
I did not know who it was. But I did know who I wanted it to be. And the two options conflated with each other in a convergence I seemed to have little control over.
It was Judith.
I had suspected for some time that the Judith, who dwelt within the corporeality of a local Chinese businessman-cum-gang head, was running on scripts supplied by my own ingrowing delusion. And therefore had no real consequence other than competing in games I was playing with myself.
I had no idea who this interloping character represented. I primed the e-butler to spy from the background and open up evaluation files. I needed to know if she was generated by my own wishful thinking or sent here with a message that could free up the agenda from sleeping commitments and a brutally encompassing biscuitational regimen.
It was like a brand new giant ship being launched and voyaging to a port around the bay where the marine technicians could still see their baby. Everything went to plan. There were no reports of icebergs but the journey back was fraught and hazardous. The marine technicians vowed never to let the giant ship out of their sight again. So it was unlaunched and laid to rest in its dry dock bed. Where it slept until the rust came, and was used as a storage facility housing biscuit-based foodstuffs…
Where was I?
Finding out was the next big port of call. The incoming new arrival was shifting the permafrost of quotidian acceptance.
I wondered whether outside factors would lead her here. As soon as she looked in my direction I waved, nonchalantly and then as she seemed not to notice I transitioned into a larger more frantically energetic version. Waving big, waving tall, waving strong…
She continued to sit at the oblivious bus shelter…
I went back to people watching, doing the same old things, curiosity long since expended. Time checks, where’s the glitch? Never a glitch…they were that good.
When, without so much as a knock…
Judith, still looking as I remembered, walked into the flat as if incongruity was her middle name. AOS (All Of a Sudden), conjured from out of my own shame, becoming guest-shy, my humble abode seemed antisocially fugmangled, stenched-up with crumbsnoozing-biscuitslumber, ‘My name is Jocelyn Johnson-Ponsonby,’ she said, in a gabbled mouthful that put me on the verge of asking her to go out and come back in again with a more feasible name. She added that she was a lady, which skidded me of the verge. ‘Can I call you Joss?’ I asked, quite reasonably expecting an affirmative answer, but she said, ‘Call me Jo-Jo-Po…’ At which point I showed her the door… When she returned she was called Judith Judithson. Not entirely satisfactory… But I let it ride.
From my position of flat holder and my e-butler association I had the upper hand, but Judith had always had an ambition about her; not in an upfront way but in a back round and slightly slip-sly way. The force was with her, but you got the impression it was some other entity’s force using her node’s slot in the hierarchy. Like she has some kind of mutual arrangement with a parasite, like mitochondria hitching a lift in a cell and animating it while it’s there.
She did the tour of the small flat, nodding, shaking her head, tutting and expressing judgements through vocal tics…
‘This is not good enough…but it will have to do,’ and then asked, ‘where are you moving to?’
I had to think on my feet; rapid response. I spoke in haste and as I walked out of sync with Meon Sea, down the centre line of the promenade road, in front of the shops that were shutting up because they had no custom from Judith and her ilk, I had a fall. Not a physical fall but a situational one, in which I had hit the bottom that had nowhere to go but up.
The ‘up’ was ripping off my clothes and diving into the sea and swimming as hard and fast and as far as I possibly could. The next awareness I grasped, on a level way below the glass bottom I’d previously met was in a hospital bed in the Meon Sea Infirmary and Organ Leasing hospital; a place I had not come across before. I was unable to move at first. My limbs secured, I’d supposed, to stop me falling on to the antiseptic looking floor.
But when I was released from the physical bounds after being given a shot, I thought could be vitamins of some description, but turned out to be a sedative to replace the binding on the bed, so I could go down the hall and phone for money to settle my account. I drifted past the window, that had a view out on to the main cemetery of the district and gave a clue as to where a lot of customers might be going. I made my way out into the corridor that ended in a narrow phone booth, past the swish elevator that yanked its riders up to a waiting roof chopper coordinanced for ‘a destination of your own concern’…
I picked up the phone, but had no numbers or letters or conceptual manifestation of executive action at all. I held the receiver to my ear and recited a passage from Under Milkwood which I’d picked up along the way. I stumblewalked back past the elevator that I would not be using due to unforthcoming finances.
My route from the scene of my crime was down a spiral staircase designed for one way travel, cave-stone, brackish brick, stress inducing coward step aided by gravity that could not promise an easy return.
Doctor Cino-Nippon, distant cousin and brother of the Chinatown kingpin mini-emperor, offered a deal: payment in full for services rendered and help up on to the roof or I would be moved to a cell below the facility until the debt was recovered. All modern hospitals, he said, have a prison below to house the people who can’t pay their debt to Chiron or at least Hippocrates; first, pay your bill: the sick-client code. Being ill and accidental has its consequences. It was like being admitted for a badly broken nose and having to pay through the nose for the treatment; a broken nose meaning a broken bank…
‘Wait,’ I shouted harder than I would have liked. I’d forgotten: code. I had drifted parsecs away from Wokeful Island & the cliffs of Focus; my wandering mind repurposed for trivia. People do not treat people, or animals, so cruelly unless it is to express code that the victim can use to elevate with illumination, I told myself…but I wasn’t listening.
My cell seemed to be closing in; I suspected those who had no prospect of ever paying ended up in the crusher, so luckily I was moved to the Financial Arbitration Lounge where my unappointed advocate waited in a flowery shock suit and a gleaming intent. My heart sank because this was not the businesslike legalperson one would prefer, but my heart also sank because I had seen that waltz before and associated it with trouble and a level of trouble that was up there in the same category as a killer disease.
There is no point dragging is out, no need for the drum rolls of previous introduction, my Attorney at Medical-Bill Help was the Prof. you know, THE Professor…
‘I will get you out.’
‘I don’t want to get out.’
‘What?’
‘Until I can get to where I need to go.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘I do not know. But it is a place that is not Meon Sea. I envisage some kind of parallel world that is inaccessible, normally, but I am, somehow, an exception.’
‘I can’t get you out. The bill is insurmountable, but I can rewind to where Judith (it is not Judith, it is you in disguise, hint) enters your apartment. She…you…have information that might lead to a way out
I managed to splurcate the name of a species of tree: oak, a shortened version of okay as I was semi-transwhizzzlocated back to the pokey, e-butler run joint on the Meon Sea promenade seafront, pre-Judith. I’d forgotten how through my stored resentment I took the place as a warm and sturdy protectional hulk; a nest bulging with eggs of my own potential.
I hardly knew what I was supposed to say to myself to find out how to escape the perversing currents of the situation…
Suddenwise…
There was a timid knock on the door, a bell-ringing, a louder knock, a longer ringing, then, not welcome but necessary Judithson walks in, all stout like… We knew each other’s what-was-nots and faced each other like two toreadors without the bullshit of bovine cruelty dressed up as sadistic fun.
I took my head in my hands, I wanted to kiss myself on the cheeks repeatedly; an answer had sprouted from the question seeds… I had to put my hands somewhere… If Judithson was made to realise that she was me, she’d bat for the whole of us. Ally with the whole she was part of. She knew what I was thinking, why wouldn’t she…we were a team.
‘I want you you to go about town and find everything out you can. I want you to find a way for me to escape this…shit…and land in the next level—‘
‘Ambitious!’
‘You must talk like me, walk like me, and dress like me….and anything else I do, you must do that too…with a fundamental me-ness.’
She was game-engaged from the outset and pulled off a sharply observed tribute act, deciding to portray me as a slightly unhinged; could be eccentric, could be la-la, transphobic mutter-esconsed transgender stereotype.
I just had to play fiddly-tiddly-mind-tennis with the e-butler until she got back with bagloads of solution. I just needed to forget the sugary call of the biscuit and resist the gentle gravity of sleep or any of her attached hazardously somnambulant temptations.
But, then…
Everything began to look shaky and take on a shifty shapelessness as the realisation dawned at dusk that everything now depended fully on how long Judith Judithson would take to come back and how empty her hands would be with solution juice. The real question being, of course: was she going to come back?
