Ella
Our friend Ella was a talented artist, but it seems she had struggles with showing her work to the world. She would often find ways to disappear, even when we were at home. She had a way of hiding behind things, and she once told us that there was a elephant in the room. She also talked a lot about the things being displaced, and she was concerned with her belongings disappearing. Later we learned she had pursued the study of UFOs, and that there were sightings near her hometown while she was a child. She was curious about this, and she studied the topic. She talked to us about it, and showed us images of what she called the Grug.I had never heard the word before, and she explained it was an alien from the planet Mangywood who had come to earth in 1897. She showed us a picture of the Grug, it had big yellow eyes and was covered in pink flesh. It seemed real. Later I found out later it was just one of her hobbies, drawing these kinds of creatures, and there were many more than the Grug. She had a whole series of aliens, some in the shape of birds or insects. They all had big yellow eyes, and pink skin. She even wrote a story for them, that was all in capitals I think:
YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORK ANYMORE
WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO?
WE DO NOT NEED YOUR WORK ANY MORE
I HAD TO HAVE IT JUST IN CASE
BUT YOU'VE ALREADY GOT ENOUGH
OH WELL (SAY WE) GET A LITTLE MORE WHY DON'T THE REST
AT LEAST TRY AND USE IT FOR GOOD
WANT TO SAVE THE HUMAN RACE
OH WELL
She was a bit of a paradox, not that I thought about it too much at the time. She did not think about things much, that I could see. She was there, reading the same book I was (The Awakening by Joyce Carol O'Neil), marking the pages like me. She wore yellow. I thought of the Grug, and wondered where he was now. She talked of telekinesis, and told me that 'it would come in handy on the stairs' . She talked about the 'elemental forces' that she was training in preparation for when UFOs landed. I wondered if there had been sightings near when my father was on the stairs, 'practicing' . I also wondered if that was how he had died. She talked, talking past me. She read out loud. The book drifted into my hand. I held it in my hand when she finished, and read the last few pages by myself.
We drove. She drove, as I showed her the area. I was telling her about 1000 acres of land being developed on the former airfield. I told her about housing development, an industrial estate, a country club with an 18-hole golf course. Then I guess she said something snotty about rich fucking hypocrites and all that stuff, you know, the 'in' crowd who have nowhere to fuck with their Sunday best. I told her that the site was located on a planetary chakra. That the human population had increased, and so too the number of cars on the road. This caused blockages on the psychic plane, thus causing congestion in the mind. The solution: to install psychic traffic lights.
Well I must say it was a nice drive. I think she got a bang out of it. She shouted out and said:
'Like being in a box, with old Mr. Tickle tickling me!'
I got the sense that she really wanted to talk, but couldn't. She talked throughout the drive. I listened, and while agreeing where necessary I wondered what had happened to Mr. Tickle. I had never met him, and hadn't seen him for over a year before this trip. I thought maybe she talked to him on the phone, or wrote to him. I even had the idea that maybe he was living upstairs, but there were no signs of habitation up there except for a few broken bottles and paper bags. Maybe Mr. Tickle had moved in there.
The drive ended. We got out of the car. It had rained during the trip and rain still fell. There was a small pond formed by the diverted stream, and I could barely see across it because of the water flowing into the river. There were several large oak trees with limbs that stretched over the little brick building and formed a kind of arc around it. There was a wooden swing, and some ladders. It was a rustic retreat, the kind of place my father used to take us kids to. We remarked on the ladder, and she said something that confused me immensely, as if it was a response to something that hadn't been said, but that we both knew anyway, or rather something that had been said but not by us.
I got out of the car. The rain had stopped. Ella closed the door, and we walked along a small tiled porch toward the building. My feet were already slipping, they had just started to rot when I began walking on the grass. My shoes crushed worms and insects that turned into long limp bodies, and fossil fuels. We entered the building. It smelled of mildew and dampness, coupled with some kind of mouldy vegetable matter.
I think she had a slight feeling of deja vu at this point, but I did not. Possibly she thought this was a place where she could isolate from the world for a few hours or so, read and relax. Maybe she thought I had brought her here for that purpose. I looked around. There were some candles, but no matches or lighterers. There were some seed packets, opened. Elsewhere in the building there was a sink, and some kind of garden.
I will leave you to your reading, she said. Is it possible to imagine that Thomas Mann was an anti-Semite?
I can't stay too long, she said. I have to get back. I have appointments in town. I have a paper to finish and honestly, I haven't even started. I have a life you know... She started laughing and commented on my small frame, that it looked weird somehow without the suit. I laughed and said that it was pretty weird with the suit, as if the suit accentuated my appearance rather than diminished it. She laughed and said that I looked like a robot, a real freak. I agreed. I said that I was a mechanical individual, designed to perform certain tasks, and that this suit had been specifically constructed so that my body would look like any other man's when out of gear. She started laughing and said that was pretty weird, but I didn't care. I started laughing and said that the joke was really on her, she had come all this way for a certain man who wasn't there. She said: I'm here for you, that's why I came. I felt she was talking in some sort of code that I didn't understand, but it wasn't difficult to guess what the message was. I had already picked up certain hints on the way, here and there. It was the kind of hint that sinks into consciousness slowly, as one drives. There's something about the way a shoulder moves, a smile that comes and goes. It's a kind of parade. It's a situation that calls for a certain kind of response.
Again Ella, as you know, was something of a conundrum. She suddenly started to search frantically for her spectacles. She said:
Oh my God I can't read without those things. What a nightmare! I'm sorry I won't bother you, go right ahead. I'll just find some quiet corner over here where I won't disturb you. I have to find them. She disappeared. I heard her high-pitched voice soon after as she screamed from the other side of the building, and when I looked out there was a lizard on one of the ledges that ran down to the roof. The little lizard was caught between the rainwater guttering and his perch, he hung by one leg. Ella was standing in the middle of an open field, and it looked for a minute as if she would be the one to fall.
I went out and down the hill to where she was. I said: let's go back to the car. She said: I can't go back there and look at that thing creep down on me. She said: we should have brought some beer. She said: the last thing we need is a fucking lizard. I agreed. We should have been cautious, not have gone for that short cut. The last thing we need is a fucking lizard. As we drove back Ella said: I thought you said this was a safe place? I replied that it was, but there's always the risk of a lizard coming down. She said: how can we be sure there's not a fucking lizard in that car? I agreed, and said we really shouldn't have gone for the short cut in the first place.
That evening we drove further north, stopped at a town called Murchie. She showed me where she had been born, and also where she grew up. There was nothing there now except for a brick factory where they made bricks by hand. There used to be a mill, where all the young boys would throw stones into the water. There was an old picture gallery where the local historian lived, and he would spend hours behind his glass window, looking at photographs, some of which were thousands of years old. There was also a place that no longer existed - the world's last flea circus, where men and women in white hairwigs stood around with arms raised, calling out numbers. I was intrigued by this and Ella immediately said: 'oh that's the man who's been in the papers, they're going to put him away for life. He's been in the circus with us for nearly 20 years. ' I sat in the car and observed these characters, some spectators and even a couple of men wearing winged hats. The atmosphere, as always with circuses, was that of a kind of religious zeal: the fanaticism to see it all.
Later we drove north and stopped at a beach. The ocean stretched out for miles. There were some cliffs that rose from the sea, and it was here that she said: 'we can wait here until you're blown up with your fucking atoms. ' She was angry that I hadn't seen the ruins, which we now saw above us as she pointed and said:
You can see them from here. Isn't it great? they're just ruins now but in a way this is the original building. all the rest just got knocked down. see those lines in the rock?
It was hot, bright. I was wearing the suit and it made me feel claustrophobic. I wanted to remove it but didn't want to alarm her further. She took off her hat and shook her hair out. Her hair blew out into the sand. She continued talking, not looking at me:
You know there was a planet that had only ruins but then suddenly it started getting skyscrapers. so it got this and that until there were skyscrapers all over, with thousands of people packed in each one... They were crowded as fucking roaches man, crammed on each other like roaches in a crack, fighting over a shitty little crack to survive... People in this or any other country will turn into roaches if given the chance. roaches don't have no fucking time to think about the future they just scratch around for themselves and their little family.
I thought it was a weird metaphor about that time, but I didn't know whether to take her seriously or not. We looked out over the water where the wind mixed with spray rose in small spumes then broke in heavier sprays. Higher sprays. She went on and said:
You can hear the atmosphere, man, revving up out there - in four more years everyone will be packed as tight as these cliffs that were formed by sand drifting in from the desert. You can hear the sense of siege out there. people trying to bunker themselves down. Well here we are getting out of jail a few years early. I can't hang around for four years. I have my own cliff to bunker myself for the rest of my life.
I said: You're being dramatic. There's been no real emergency. I think the threat is fairly theoretical. She said: you think? you don't have to be an anarchist to know that we're all inevitably enemies of the system, even those who profit most from the system are most in danger of its destructive consequences. We live in the antechamber of doom, we can barely hear the sounds coming out of it but they keep trying to drown them and as soon as they succeed there will be no life left on earth. She said: why don't you get out of that thing, aren't you hot?
I looked down at myself. Yes I thought that suit was intended to eliminate any possibility of getting hot. The suit was made of some plastic stuff that kept me warm in winter and cool in summer. She said: when I think of fashion today I don't even think of it as progress, but rather a regression to nothingness. She said: what's the matter, why don't you get out of that thing? I was just checking out all the ghosts. I said ghosts? She said the things you take for granted are really pretty amazing: electric lighting, automobiles, indoor plumbing. I said: There's a lot of trash piled up against the cliff over there. She said: yes that's the garbage disposal centre. It just goes down there and drops but the ocean will get it in a couple of years when all the pipes burst.
I stood up. The suit cracked like a tin can under my feet and rained down pieces of it over the sand.
There's no place in that suit for sweating, she said. Get rid of it. Drop it in the ocean, wherever you were thinking of taking it. There's no future in it. I went over to the top of the cliff and threw it into the pile of trash, but a fierce wind caught it and swept it back over the cliffs. I followed and slipped on the loose stones.