The Second Adventure: A Cat Called Britain (A Caper in Time Part 1)
by Evan Forman and Michael Robertson - 22.12.14
Aerin
rested his head on the side window of the car that ferried him
through this new world of steel and stone. Many of the brick
buildings were boarded up and rotting. The broken, crooked
pavements were almost completely free of footfalls. People only
seemed to exist as faces behind darkened windows and on
colourful posters that screamed "LAST CHANCE", "OUT NOW", "VOTE
DION", "GET READY". All of them elves. Why? Aerin remembered
human faces in Dryadora, darting through the mess of streets and
alleys.
Alvus had made valiant attempts at small talk to begin with, but
had kept silent for most of the journey. The two were separated
by a stick that Alvus shifted at seemingly random intervals, and
a spread of lit-up buttons and dials and numbers. A flat voice
out of the electric screen reported the day's events: a bomb
scare, an environmental hazard, power cuts, and the death toll
from thousands of miles away. The bomb was an attempted
terrorist attack (by whom and to what end, it never explained);
as long as you wore protection and didn't go out unless you had
to, you'd be fine; they're working on the power; our girls and
boys will keep on fighting. But enough about that, the fanfare
seemed to say, let's all have a party. "King's Day," it was
called. Aerin had never heard of it. A celebration of the
birthday of King Praeon II, "who led the elves to victory
against the savage horde and united the tribal lands under one
flag, one righteous cause." The machine continued with a deluge
of sound clips from people about how they planned to celebrate
with their themed cupcakes and barbeques. The car passed an
abandoned blanket clinging to the damp stone. Beside it was a
cardboard sign that read: "food".
The car slowed down and stopped at a bridge, guarded at both
ends by metal barriers. Aerin looked around for any kind of
landmark he'd recognise from his childhood visit. He didn't
remember rivers in the city. Alvus held down a button and his
window lowered down.
A skinny elf popped out of the booth. "That'll be twenty silve-"
Alvus held up his badge.
"Oh, sorry sir."
The elf pressed a button and the barrier lifted. Crossing the
bridge over the wide, sickly river was like entering a different
city: the black tar roads became cobbles; the flat, rectangular
buildings were given form and life as the car drove further into
this isolated kingdom. People began to appear on the pavements
in dribs and drabs wearing heavy coats and little metal masks
over their mouths, with rubber tubes that ran down under their
collars. Long, sharp-pointed ears poked out from beneath hats
and behind scarves. All elves.
Why? The question itched on the inside of Aerin's throat but he
didn't dare let it spill out. Considering how they poked and
prodded at John, how the friendly face sitting just centimetres
to the right had leered at his still body, he decided it was
better to keep quiet about these things. Maybe everyone had
decided it was better to keep quiet about these things. No
matter, the car was stopping, he'd be out in a moment.
Alvus turned the key and the rumbling snapped into silence.
"Well, that's us I think."
Aerin unbuckled the belt that held him in his seat and opened
the door, stepping out into the misty street that was squashed
between rows of five-story brick houses with ornate doors,
windows, fences, and gates. He walked around the car and onto
the pavement slick with fallen rain, at the bottom of a long
stairway leading up to a blue wood door. In gold lettering
painted onto the small window above it was the number 10. He
stared at the door for a moment, preparing for the revelation of
entering his own home.
"So...yeah, I'll be going now."
Aerin's attention snapped back around to Alvus. "Oh, right.
Thanks for the...lift and everything."
"Just doing my job sir." He smiled awkwardly until the window
had slid back up and the outside world was no longer staring at
him from every angle. He sighed with relief and turned the
ignition.
Aerin stood on the wide pavement and watched as the car pulled
out onto the road. Through the window he could just about see
the darkened figure of Alvus fiddling with buttons, and then
sitting back as the familiar music began hammering the car's
entire frame as it drove down into the fog until the
UN-TSS-UN-TSS-UN-TSS-UN-TSS was but the most delicate whisper on
the faint wind.
Aerin turned back to face the door of his house, and ventured up
the steps.
The door hadn't been locked, the key hung from its hole on the
inside. Aerin pulled it out and shut out the cold and smog
behind him.
He burst into a muffled fit of coughing, his throat trying to
shed its acidic coating, and tightened up so that his heaving
chest and shoulders didn't bash against something in the cramped
vestibule. He stumbled out into the narrow hallway and nearly
knocked over a wooden coat stand. A disgusting mass of phlegm
crawled up from the back of his throat and landed offensively on
his taste buds. About to vomit, he spotted a sink on the other
end of the hall, ran past the stairs and into the kitchen where
he keeled over the metal rim of the sink and expunged the
yellow-brown thing from his mouth. He spat out the last stains
of its colour and taste - of fog and cars - and rinsed it away
with the turning of a tap.
Aerin barely glanced around the kitchen, his attention hijacked
by a painting hanging on the otherwise bare wall back in the
hall. What immediately stood out, standing above and behind
about a dozen pale and serious young faces, was an old elf with
a large straw hat and a ragged beard. He wore a ratty white
shirt out of which extended two bony arms, curling around to
wiry hands which held on to worn-out leather suspenders. He
winked knowingly at the viewer and smiled a gap-toothed smile; a
yellow sun whose invisible rays Aerin followed down the
painting, shining over cities of black suits and fields of
slicked hair, to the caption at the bottom of the gilded frame:
'The Jingles'.
The only real light in the hall was streaming in through from
the living room, which Aerin decided to explore next. White
light from outside was turned into stale beige as it passed
through the closed curtains which made the messy room look sick.
He might have fixed this immediately, but he was more curious
about the mysterious object in the corner of the room.
He crouched down to investigate the thing, a polished wood box
with a gray glass face and a vertical panel of buttons and dials
going up the side. Aerin had become faintly amused by buttons,
and their omnipresence and importance. He imagined a world in
which all the buttons suddenly vanished one afternoon like this
one, and how completely useless this newfangled modern life
would become without them. A little red light stared out from
the black panel. Experimentally, Aerin pushed the largest and
most attractive button at the top. The light turned green, a
small congratulations of sorts, as some unseen mechanism behind
the reflective glass fizzled into life.
A lone violin began to waver on high, sustained notes. Out of
the darkness, a torchlight flickered off cave walls and the
grimy face of an elf. Behind him, wriggling out of the narrow
gap in the rock was a hunched-over beast with fangs protruding
from behind its lower lip. "Is it much further now, master?"
croaked the Orc.
The elf crept closer to the monochrome screen, the white light
glistening off his sweaty forehead and casting solid black
shadows from his chiselled features. "No, Orgon, this is it..."
The picture on the glass changed to show a view from behind the
two explorers, their shadows dancing on the floor as the image
floated above and away from them to reveal a great chasm. On the
other side of the abyss, the entire rock face had been sculpted
into an intricate facade of massive stone statues and
watchtowers. "...we've found the lost city of Ubo-Chazil!"
This revelation was clearly a shock to the unseen violin player,
who let out a sharp scream of strings as a cello began playing
low, mysterious notes. A new image wiped horizontally across the
screen, and an earthy, authoritative voice narrated over a
montage of two tiny adventurers amongst the forests of ruined
buildings. "Our hero and his trusty companion make their way
through the maze of empty streets and fallen palaces. An eerie
silence fills the cavern, the only sound to be heard anywhere is
the crackling of their torches and the landing of their
footsteps. Following the map they traced from the ancient stone
tablet, the explorers finally spot the ancient temple in the
heart of the city..."
Aerin was adjusting remarkably well to centuries of
technological advancement. The magic box reminded him of a
puppet show from his childhood. He stood up and investigated the
rest of the living room. "Now Orgon, it's said that the demon
people of Ubo-Chazil left all kinds of booby traps before they
died to stop anyone taking their beloved treasures. Whatever you
do, be very careful before you touch anything."
He rifled through various newspapers, magazines and books on the
table. Newspapers headlined 'KNIGHTHOOD FOR FRACKING BOSS
ONAER'; magazines about art and literature; books with arcane
titles like 'The Hero Complex: Where Anti-Societal Tendencies
Originate and How They Manifest Into Proactive Moral Insanity'.
Opposite the window were floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with
books and trinkets. Near the corner of the room opposite the
glass and wood box, white double doors which were open just a
crack.
"Oooh, shinyyy," groaned the Orc, a dumb grin stretching over
his round face to reveal a line of chipped and crooked bottom
teeth. Watching the floor for tripwires or pressure plates, he
slinked over to a bejewelled ceremonial cup glistening on an
altar.
Aerin made his way over to the door, the ornate handles stained
with tiny splotches of dark red. Bass strings quaked as he
reached for the handles. Orgon lifted the cup from its stand
with a click. Aerin tried not to touch the bloodstains as he
slid the doors open. Suddenly, the whole building began to
rumble. "Orgon! What have you done!?" Chunks of rock fell and
smashed on the floor as a deep voice bellowed out. Strings and
cymbals crashed and the unseen horror was finally revealed.
"MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! FOOLISH MORTALS! WHO DARES TRY TO STEAL FROM
THE LAIR OF RADIOACTIGOR, THE KING WITH A THOUSAND EYES?!"
The dramatic music subsided. Aerin stepped through into the
large conservatory, and found himself surrounded by paintings.
'We'll take a look at next week's instalment of our thrilling
story after these brief, but important messages," said the
narrator.
Rain pattered off and dribbled down the murky glass roof,
casting watery black shadows which slid down the yellowing sky.
Outside the windows, Aerin could see the beginnings of a large
garden with pink, red and white flowers peeking out behind the
fog. But most importantly, most curiously, were the paintings.
Half-finished sketches, scrapbooks, and pieces of paper littered
the room as well as every colour and kind of pencil or paint.
Displayed on an easel in the middle of the room was a black
canvas. The only light colours in the image came from a pale
figure cowering in the corner, hugging his knees chewing his
bloodied fingernails. Aerin inspected the painting closer,
sitting down on the small and creaky stool which the artist must
have been perched on. The man in the corner was painted with
careful detail as to render his delicate, if grubby flesh as
realistically as possible. There were slight gray smudges around
the edges of his body, where the ghostly white paint of his skin
bled into the blackness. The void surrounding him wasn't quite
complete, the artist had filled in the canvas with quick, angry
strokes of paint; and if Aerin looked close enough, he could see
that little dots of white canvas shone through the dark.
There was a knock at the door.
Aerin shot up off the stool, his startled leg nearly kicking
over the easel. He tried to put aside his logically unreasonable
terror of people knocking on his door, and set out to
investigate. It had been a long time since Aerin last had
visitors. He mentally ventured the joke that it had been 200
years since he'd had a visitor; but that was a stupid joke so he
swiftly and decisively unmade it.
Even as the light shone through the frosted glass window, Aerin
couldn't discern anything of the person on the other side. He
turned the handle and opened the door only as much as was
absolutely necessary for him to peek out from behind the safety
of the wood.
On the landing of the stairway outside, which was now being
battered with heavy rain, stood a large red duffel coat, which
happened to be wearing a long scarf, which happened to be
wearing a person. With yellow eyes like shining bulbs on salty
wet mascara stalks, beneath a sodden tumble of black hair.
Those eyes stared silently at Aerin from behind the scarf, which
had been brought up to the person's nose and wrapped around like
a mask. The stranger didn't say a word.
Aerin shrugged his shoulders and opened the door. "Yeah, fine,
why not?"
He stepped back into the hallway to make way for the stranger.
She trudged into the house and threw the door closed behind her
without looking; an automatic response to the cold and wet and
acid fog. She put a numb hand on the wall and clumsily pulled
her legs out of her wellies before unwrapping the scarf from her
face and tossing it onto the coat stand.
Aerin was compulsively fiddling with his fingers. "I'm sorry,
who-"
"No."
Without ever seeming to actually cross the space between them,
her soaking wet arms were wrapped around Aerin, and her frozen
mouth pressed against his. His eyes widened and nervously
panicked around the room and landed on the portrait; and the
late, great Jebediah Jingles' conspiratorial smile, encouraging
the next generation of the Jingles family line as it blossomed
right in front of his nudge-nudge paternal wink. Was Aerin even
related in any way to the old man? It didn't matter right now.
What mattered right now, was Her.
She pulled back - and down, having stood on the tips of her toes
to reach him - and Aerin got his first proper look at her. The
apples of her cheeks were covered in freckles and small
suggestions of dimples sat on both sides of a faint smile. Not
the happy kind of smile, something different; something strange
and complicated and almost unfamiliar to him. He knew enough
about people and their lives to see that this kind of smile
wasn't an exclamation, it was a question. "Are we going to
be okay?"
Aerin smiled slightly in reply, and hers became an exclamation.
"I should be the one apologising. It was stupid and mean and-"
"It's fine." Aerin had no idea what he was absolving but he
didn't really care anymore. He was too tired to care about
whatever it was. Life, death and filling out forms had had
sucked away what little energy he usually had.
"Sure?" She remained glued to him, her words muffling against
his chest.
"Of course." He positioned his arms around her, holding back
slightly due to the film of cold water covering her coat. "Now,
could you please go and be wet somewhere else?"
She smiled. "Oookay."
She peeled herself off of him and he helped her take off the
heavy, dripping coat which she reached up to hang on the stand
(she was awfully short for a dark and mysterious stranger). She
began to climb up the staircase "I'm gonna go have a shower.
Coming?"
"What?"
She stopped halfway up, standing directly above Aerin. "Shower.
That's what kissy people do." She made a little gesture where
she mashed her index fingers together, two tiny finger-people
from rival hands, swept away in a forbidden romance the public
obnoxiousness of which had never been seen before. "That, and
you're covered in mud for reasons I'm...not even going to ask
about."
Aerin looked up at her. "Are we..." He almost shuddered at the
term. "...kissy people?"
"The kissiest," she assured him.
"Well...see, I have...things..." Aerin pointed in the general
direction of the things "...to clean up, you know?"
"The plates?"
"What plates?"
"The plates."
"What plates?"
"Never mind." She ran up the rest of the stairs.
"Oh, hey!"
"Yeah?"
"You know that black painting in the conservatory?"
A short silence, followed by an impatient THUDTHUDTHUDTHUD. She
popped her head down from behind where the stairs rose above the
ground floor roof. "You like it?"
"Um, yes. Very...symbolic."
She grinned excitedly, her cheeks reddening a little, and shot
back up the stairs. She shot back down the stairs. "Okay, I do
have one question."
"Yes?"
"Just why ARE you dressed like a banker from the 1700s?"
Aerin pretended to have just noticed the floral silk waistcoat
which was covered in dried muck. "Oh, see, it's..." he leaned
against the wall in the same way John Boss did. "...It's
actually from the early 2000s. It's vintage."
She stared for a few more seconds before smiling and shaking her
head as she finally went upstairs. Aerin was alone again, and he
tried to hold back a smile that spread across his face
regardless. But all was not right in this new world, something
from the kitchen floor glinted in the corner of his eye. He took
a few cautious steps into the room, and lo and behold: the
plates.
They were shattered on the floor, on the other side of a table
with strange uniformity except for a few scraps of food
decorating the area around them. The shards were too close
together to have been thrown, so they'd been dropped; shattering
along with somebody's patience. Where did She go last night?
Where did Other Aerin go last night?
The latter question answered itself almost immediately. As he
started to pick the pieces off the floor, Aerin, the forest, the
tracker, the house and the past two minutes all began to fit
together into one painfully ordinary story. He made mental notes
to himself for a novel he knew would never exist. He thought
that every plate becomes a broken plate eventually, and every
person becomes a broken person, and sometimes broken people find
each other and their broken shards will cut an-"OW, FUCK," he
whispered as he pricked his thumb on a sharp edge.
Where was I? Yeah, right: and their broken shards will cut
together, grind together and bleed together as they
merge...together...and as they desperately try to reassemble
each other the pieces get mixed up because they're...such
similar brands of plate? Well, no, people usually buy plates in
sets so...so maybe certain plates were made to smash
together...and...right, no, fuck this. You see, the key to
success is to come up with one tragically beautiful yet - and
this is crucial - immediately quotable summary of all the little
hells of dangerously meaningful human connection and then that's
you sorted. You have become an orally transmitted disease of the
phraseological lexicon, where you shall live forever in the
hearts of wonderfully mopey teenagers across the generations.
Another day (Aerin told himself), another day.
He dumped the shards into a bin. Maybe it was a symbol of
mortality or something.
As he reached the top of the stairs, Aerin could hear the
streams of the shower behind the door. On the opposite end of
the corridor shone a bright blue room filled with books. Aerin
stepped in, and found his bunker.
Outside the window, he could see the top of the conservatory and
its rusted ornate crown. Maybe as She painted, he would write in
the room above. Maybe the other rooms and halls were just places
where the artists crossed paths on occasion. He leaned back into
a leather chair on wheels, spinning around to face the desk and
large, clunky machine on top of it. It had all the lettered
buttons the machine on Enos' desk had, but no glass box. He
cautiously typed the word "Hello" with one finger, and little
arms inside the machine hammered the letters onto a sheet of
paper. It was a fun distraction, but something else caught
Aerin's attention.
A double-spread page (presumably out of one of those garish
technicolour magazines) had been pinned to the wall above
Aerin's desk. One one whole page, in a black and white picture
taken in the garden outside, was Her. And in elegant white
lettering, her name: "Krieda Caishead."
It was a nice name - he'd always thought proper Elvin names had
a nice sound to them - and while recognisably the same physical
being he'd met a few minutes ago, this was not the same person
who had been soaking with rain, tears, and snot in his arms. Her
arms were draped down those of a large wicker chair in the
middle of the garden, the harsh sunlight behind her cutting
white edges around her cheekbones and hair. She had her legs
loosely crossed, right ankle on left knee. Her facial expression
said 'intellectual', her posture said 'confident', but some
vague tension in her eyes suggested 'uncomfortable having
pictures taken'. This was all fascinating to Aerin, but what
really interested him were the words on the page next to her.
DR: What was it that originally attracted you to art?
KC: I suppose it was kind of inevitable. I didn't really have
friends as a child, they were bigger, louder and much scarier
than I was, so I ended up more or less living in my imagination
at the bottom of the garden alone; drawing pictures out of
storybooks and making monsters out of play-dough. I think
there's a photo of me when I was about five, and I'm wearing a
daisy chain around my head and I'm cutting up a clay man's limbs
with a little plastic sword from one of my brother's toys and
I'm rearranging him into some new monster with legs for ears and
eyes for nipples. So...you know, start them off early. [laughs]
DR: Do you think those childhood creations have directly
affected your art in later life?
KC: There is a nascent fascination with material objects as an
extension of the self, no more separated from the mind than the
muscles and hair and, given the more visible and lasting nature
of fashion and art or craftsmanship as opposed to, say, skin
cells, more expressive of one's being than one's own actual
existence. [pause] Is what I'd say if I were a massive prick.
Basically I just made stuff out of shit I'd found lying around
the place, and that's still [she puts on a posh accent, miming a
cigarette between her slender fingers] an artistic technique
that one employs in one's recent works. But no, other than being
a bit weird there's not much of a connection or a...recurring
theme. I sort of fell into exploring more violent ideas in the
beginning because of my brother and his semi-murderous games. I
never really played with princesses and castles and all those
other things apart from when I got tossed into another child's
birthday party and I had to try and blend in with all the other
kids. Not that I particularly believe those princesses and dolls
are sort of bad or...socially regressive things for a young girl
to be playing with. I think it's just that those were what the
normal children were into and the normal children were
ritualistically horrible to me, so out of that I think I grew to
despise normal things and normal people, and dedicate myself to
sadder and stranger things. At least when I was younger.
DR: Do you still feel that way about 'normal' things and
'normal' people?
KC: I try not to. I realised somewhere in my late teens that
'normal people', whatever that even really means, are actually a
very powerful force to draw on as an artist. They are, in a way,
THE timeless subject matter, or at least the real emotional meat
of good art. They're where the magic happens. My boyfriend's a
writer and he goes on walks at random times of the day to sort
of...absorb the general atmosphere of the world other people's
lives, if that makes sense.
DR: Your parents [her eyes roll] are well known patrons of the
arts in this city, and after the opening of your exhibition at
the Dryadora National Gallery, the critic Tarene DeBlon
questioned to what extent this had assisted your career
prospects and perhaps, at twenty-three and having just left art
school you're too young to be suddenly be in the spotlight.
KC: I would counter this by questioning to what extent Mr.
DeBlon's once-brilliant, once-inquisitive, once-imaginative
brain has not yet been pulped by the throes of public
intellectual menopause. As for the suggestion that my
achievements thus far have been the result of nepotism, I invite
anyone who thinks they can do better than me to try.
Aerin sat back in his chair, listening to the towering genius on
the page belting out some trash pop song in the shower across
the hall.
"Don't."
The chair was on wheels, and he span back and forth a little in
excitement. He leaned forward to inspect a strip of little
pictures flattened in a glass frame on the desk.
"No, Aerin, don't even-"
They were of Krieda, sitting in a booth and making a variety of
silly faces: squashing her cheeks in with her thumbs as she
stretched her eyelids down, crushing herself into the corner of
the booth and staring up at the light with puffed-up cheeks,
frozen in a ridiculous cackle at her own comic ingenuity. He
tried to repress a smile which spread across his cheeks anyway.
"Oh for fuck's sake, here we go."
And somewhere in his system, a little shard of his heart began
to throb, before he accidentally touched the lump beneath his
right palm.
"But she doesn't love you. You are aware, yes? She loves the
other you. Likely, the better one. She doesn't love you, she
loves her version of you. There is a difference."
He spun around in his chair, trying to distract himself with the
impressive collection of books, when he noticed it. It had other
ideas. Sitting patiently in the corner of the room was the paper
bin, the eventual home of nearly everything Aerin did. And it
was overflowing.