Inside the villa they are taking no note of lines. Not of lines shall they be ruled, so it was said. Dr Ignatz is saying this.
‘For a day or so,’ (they whisper).
‘Soon enough,’ (they whisper), ‘best bet. They will be putting lines back in pronto.’
The villa was a house on the outskirts of a hospital, green expanse and trees surrounding. Dr Ignatz set the scene and it was she who said no more lines. From then on big V capital letter was quickly heard and so they now lived in The Villa, no longer patients but guests. Ruled and rulers sat down together. Rulers said the ruled could be rude or whatever: their show.
Journo Jim was knocking on the door.
Dr Ignatz wafted lyric-like, said she had wonder-drim and vision pictures. Ruled look to one another with arched eyebrow and mutter.
‘Ain’t that what got us in here in first place?’
‘I have a picture of progress,’ she says, ‘of how we are lifted when our hooks intermingle.’
‘Like Velcro?’ checks Geraldine Gee.
Geraldine is now in the parlance noted as guest but still she flinches at the sound of her own voice, expecting a battering. Expected battering does not come today.
‘Yes,’ smiles Doc. ‘Like Velcro, we lift the material together when our hooks intermingle.’
Journo Jim is knocking on the door.
‘What does this mean?’ asks Jim.
‘Spacesuits,’ is the urgent reply. ‘We must wear spacesuits.’
‘What?’
‘Gotta go.’
Following on after this phrase, with forensic fanfare and trumpet blare, Journo Jim is back at the office. He is a regular one-person band, a veritable orchestra, a strident jangle of story to be told; he sets forth the alarms and gets them running up and down all over his editor’s desk. Space suits he insists, but Harriet runs a finger down the guest list and says: GG.
‘Wha?’
‘Gotta go was a code. All the inmates are variations of GG.’
Calmer now, Journo Jim turned the paperwork around to see:
Garry Gold
Geraldine Gee
Gorgeous Govind
Genie Genitrix
‘This must. be made up,’ he hissed through teeth and whistled and scratched his head and took up his coffee cup and swilled it around.
‘Surely that’s your job,’ laughed the editor.
Harriet blacked in and buttressed all her staff output. She only drank water during office hours. And the drinking was out of a glass, always.
‘Day or two, not weeks,’ she concluded. ‘Something substantial, please.’ She is shooing her employee out of sight.
In The Villa they now wore grey jumpsuits, Velcro fastening, staff and guest alike wore the same. Ignatz alone wore a white jumpsuit. Everyone looked similar, although Garry Gold smelt very different. Garry Gold smelt as if he had filled his pants. Which indeed he had, several times over. And now it was his pleasure to walk along the building’s north corridor, up and down, shaking out a shitty trail. Gorgeous Govind was very upset about this. He lived next door and the neighbourly stench was creeping into his room, staining every part of his material existence. He washed down his mirror, polished his door handle, pushed cushions along the gap between grey carpet and blue-grey door. He returned to his mirror and practiced his tragic look before running down to the communal area and declaiming woe and begging for the convening of the council.
New thing this, the council. Gorgeous was the first to dare to convoke. It worked. Ignatz appeared as if pulled from a hat.
‘This is a drim,’ she delights, though only Ignatz herself appears comfortable in it. Others are coughing and shuffling, their eyes watering. This physical unease might be a consequence of Gold’s pervasive scent.
‘Now,’ Ignatz continued, ‘I have been busy with my Scribblings and Figurings. You remember how I shared this technique? Has anyone followed up on the Scribbling and Figuring rota? Remember, how we open to well-lit understanding and set to replay, looking in wonder at all that passes? Then, you recall, we turn up the illumination just a little, and look again at what feelings went into the review. After this we concentrate on just a little segment, a single feeling, and this forms the basis of our day’s Scribblings and Figurings.’
‘But I convoked a council, miss. This ain’t to do with any of that.’
‘All can come into the review, most surely.’
‘Then I might scratch about it tomorrow. What about today?’
‘What about today?
‘He stinks of crap. He spreads muck all up and down the north corridor. Why can’t I move to the south corridor?’
‘Can we talk to that my friends?’
‘South corridor is female only,’ points out Geraldine Gee. ‘North corridor is for all the others. Why doesn’t Garry just have a shower?’
‘Garry?’
‘Gold,’ he smiled. For a moment this seemed to be all the answer and the only answer he considered to be applicable. Yet he continued. ‘Gold by name, gold by nature. That is… That is to say, inner nature is gold. I just need. I need to get it out. I am waiting on true riches. Yes, waiting.’
‘Golden Goose,’ smiled Genie Genitrix,
‘All very well,’ pouted Govind, ‘only while he attempts to pass out some golden nugget, I am going to pass out from suffocation.’
He paused. He crossed his legs and arched his eyebrow, thumb lifted to touch chin, arousing the sense of canny ploy.
‘What is the line between south and north?’
‘A line between?’ Genie sensed the play.
‘Or is it a line along?’
‘The Villa has always,” repeated Geraldine, ‘always, always kept the south corridor for female residents and the north corridor for all the others.’
Govind crossed his legs in the opposite direction and lent forward, touching side of face with finger and blinking. He was trying to flutter his eyelashes, although he really had none to flutter.
Ignatz unhooked her keys and went to a door to the east of the common room. She pointed out that there are other directions apart from north and south.
‘Up and down, for instance,’ she unlocked the door and shouted upwards: ‘KARIN COULD YOU COME DOWN PLEASE!’ she shifted over to the west of the room and unlocked a second door: ‘KARL COULD YOU COME UP PLEASE!’
The council is as if cudgelled into silence, made dumb by this occurrence. What was coming to be? Footsteps, banging, shuffling – some indecision – then more footsteps. How was it that suddenly The Villa was so crowded?
Karl appeared first. His jumpsuit was grey, like theirs, but filthy; dirt rubbed smooth so as to be a graphite mirror. The room and its occupants moved as if a mirage over the rolling volumes of his legs and belly and sleeves. His hair was unkempt dreck drapery. He lifted previously chewed fingernails to his mouth and continued to masticate, a big grin creeping around the nomnomnom motion of his mouth.
‘Hello Karl,’ smiled Ignatz, ‘come and join us.’
Garry thoughtfully pulled up an extra chair.
Karin wore a white jumpsuit that had greyed with age and perpetual wear. Her hands and face were clean. Her curls were reined in by numerous clips. She walked carefully, and on surveying the meeting she stepped down the last few stairs rapidly and pulled herself a chair toward the circle. She laughed. Ignatz said it was good to hear her laugh and asked what it was that made her so happy.
‘We have not celebrated a rendezvous of this magnitude for many a moon.’
‘Many a moon,’ whispered Geraldine.
‘Ah!’ gasped Ignatz. ‘A celebration, yes!’ she clapped in a manner not to be ignored. ‘Hot chocolate please!’ And quick as you please the person who served in the kitchen hatch appeared with a trolley and on the trolley a jug of frothy hot chocolate and a wildly mismatched collection of mugs. Another cudgel blow: the occupants quietly sipped hot chocolate, and by this sugar and warmth more force fell; the shape of their world beaten and reformed beneath sweet, delicious jolts. Geraldine managed to shift around the seating to be alongside Karin. She gently allowed her knee to touch the new person’s knee. Yes, she was real.
Journo Jim was knocking.
Karl heard the thuds and, slopping chocolate on the carpet, got up and moved out the room as if to answer it. But he does not have a key Genie pointed out. And Ignatz replied that the door was not locked. This was too much for Govind. The mug he clutched, of Santa and reindeer in Bermuda shorts, sunbathing beneath the legend: Have a break. He dropped the mug. It did not break. Remnants of brown liquid spiralled out over the grey nylon expanse. Gorgeous Govind rocked back in chair, scowling. He pulled his legs up, foetal position, arms hugging his lower limbs. Ignatz took in the growing number of stains on the carpet and carefully replaced her cup back on the trolley.
‘What might it be, Govind?’
‘Doors.’
Karl came back thereabouts, large brown paper bag in his hand, stains oozing around the bottom of the bag. He dropped it on the trolley and announced he had Cut off the bastard’s head. Then he began laughing.
‘Why would you do that, Karl?’ Ignatz checked.
‘Journo, asking questions,’ spluttered Karl, immensely amused. ‘Nosey. Knew it was your birthday Doc.’
‘Did he? How lovely!’
‘And you chopped his head, for knowing that?’ checked Genie, shuffling closer to the bag but trying to keep away at the same time.
‘Yeh, yeh… Fruity fellow. Smooth white head… I did not count how many candles.’
‘That might be impolite,’ suggested Ignatz.
‘Would all the candles fit?’
‘Now you are being impolite, Karl.’ Ignatz began giggling. ‘Well, let’s share it out.’
‘Slice each,’ nodded Karin. ‘Although has anyone got a knife?’
‘YOU SEE!’ screeched Govind. ‘Doors! All evil happens at doors.
‘It looks delicious,’ Genie admitted, having overcome her dread and stood and closely looked at the contents of the bag.
Ignatz went to the kitchen hatch and returned with a bread knife and some plates. She ripped the brown paper bag apart and there was an open cardboard cakebox splodged with jam and chocolate, and in the box a cake. The white icing bore in red the word Congratulations and seven candles.
‘Four and three,’ said Geraldine.
‘Oooh,’ Karin clasped Geraldine’s hand, ‘we could not possibly presume,’ Karin’s gesture making a joke, but her fingers twisting around Geraldine’s.
‘I am not saying,’ smiled the clinician, ‘but who wants a slice?’
Jim and Ignatz looked at each other across the table. Ignatz wearing a drab institutional tunic, mark of incarceration.
‘That moment should have been our happy ending. Maybe you and I should not be speaking…’
‘Harriet would not allow anything prejudicial out into the wild, I assure you, she is ferocious.’
‘You know; I am fairly sure our paths have crossed. In my university days I attended Happenings. Body painting and bubbles, inflatables and manifestoes, that sort of thing. Harriet was there. She was pretty much instrumental in this scene.’
‘I’m speechless.’
‘Well, speechless is good.’
‘Do I speak too much?’
‘Perhaps I do. You are obviously good at research. The cake was an excellent approach. Yes, so I am sure Harriet’s history in the Happenings is not hidden. You may not have thought to look, of course.’
‘Only, we are talking about The Villa.’
‘Yes…’
‘And that day.’
‘That filthy day…yes.’
‘I met Karl.’
‘They are saying I unleashed monsters, are they not? This is outrageous. The regime had these poor creatures bolted down, terrible. Truly terrible We were not set up to either enslave or imprison.’’
‘He has chopped off heads,’ Jim checked his notes. ‘Seven.’
‘But he did not chop off your head,’ Ignatz pointed out.
‘Ah, true; only according to these timings you had not yet introduced the knife into the room.’
‘All of which is beside the point. Karl is innocent in this. It was Govind who gutted Garry.’
‘Karl escaped that day.’
‘He went for a walk.’
‘And Karin?’
‘It was love at first sight, Geraldine and Karin.’
‘Was Geraldine aware of the, um, history.’
‘They held hands. They ate cake. It was cute.’
‘Cute.’
‘Oh…well, maybe I am getting sentimental in my old age.’
‘If Govind had been allowed to move away from Garry?’
‘It was voted down in favour of Garry taking a bath.’
‘But that night he was caught straining, mm, passing out, how shall we say? Waste matter in the corridor.’
‘And Gorgeous had borrowed the knife.’
‘He is insisting that the golden egg is his now.’
‘Yes, he does so like things. Look, I know it is all a bit of a mess. My Scribbling and Figurings keep coming around to this.’
‘Coming around…to?’
‘Mess! It was, well, how shall I put it? Harriet would have approved of my little anti-hierarchical experiment, once upon a time.’
‘Who was the experiment for?’
‘That is the question, is it not? I would ask that question, very good.’
‘Who was the experiment for?’
‘This had little to do with my poor cohort. Dear sweet things, they were doing fine. Karl, he of course has a permanent chemical imbalance. Everyone else was set to resolve and move on. Karin’s hunger had abated. But the mess on the carpets? Chocolate stains, and… Honestly, it was a challenge to allow that. One does get challenged by the smallest of details, and on such occasion, one must spend a good deal of time Figuring. Drinking chocolate on the carpet and normally, of course, one does not just forget about a knife. One might suggest that aged forty three I set out to deliberately undermine myself. But let me tell you about Harriet now.’
‘I’m not sure we have time.’
‘Only, I am remembering how the cake was brought in. You collaborated with Karl on that, did you not?’
‘Collaboration is hardly the term I would use.’
‘Knowing that a cake needs a knife to cut it.’
‘Well now. If it comes to this, I must say, I was presenting the cake to you.’
‘With Karl’s help.’
‘It was not for sharing.’
‘A cake that big! Was I to eat it all by myself? Surely, one shares a cake that big.’
‘Which must perforce be cut by a knife. Anyhow…’ Jim scratched his chin, scrubbed the hair behind his ear, made a quick calculation on how calculating his interviewee may or may not be. ‘Let me just rewind the tape,’ he said. ‘I think we might start a way back here.’
‘James you are a drim, a drim and a sweetheart. Such a diligent, clean-cut young man.’