Darkness, darkness, all around.
The distant crying of the sea… or is it my heart in me? Thou nede not be afrayed of any bugges by night… it must be the livingroom circle by now… this step? What if I've stepped out of my retreat and this downward spiral goes on and on in the black forever? Steep deep, deep where light suffocates and people become tiny creeping shades unseen ever except by horrible-
"Thank heaven," in a loud voice, stepping out into the livingroom. The great window lets in enough moonlight for her to see by.
Wonder when me new one's coming?
She lights a lamp quickly, and another, and another, and their flames all seem to run together in a blurring winery flicker.
"I can see. Short of. I mean, sort of. Sort. Of. Thank you." She bows to herself, to the lamps, to the moon.
Take it easy, Holmes, take it slow.
"Bugger the guitar, I need tucker, I need food."
Hunting through the cupboards, remembering with a vague despair that she'd eaten the remaining tinned food yesterday and earlier today, and had meant to get more when she went into Whangaroa, but….
"Ah typical," she sneers in derision at herself. "Floating on a lake of grog, and sitting on a mountain of tobacco and assorted weedery, and watch ya got to eat?"
A jar of lumpfish caviar.
She sighs.
"Better than nothing."
She blows out two of the lamps, and takes the other up the spiral with her. On the floor below the toadstool niche there is a small shining smear. Her eyes fill with tears.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. Too impatient y'see… do you see? Don't be berloody dense, woman, how could a toadstool see? Well, the Toad mighta retracted and shat an eye eh?" She starts to giggle-It
becomes a dirty lowdown chuckle, blatting out, a gutty bleat she can't stop.
Easy! says herself, cold and furious. Quit it!
She sobers momentarily, bends down swiftly and kisses the slimy patch on the stair.
"Really sorry," she says, and continues upwards, marvelling at the ease with which she'd bent. Never do it sober, sweet, you'll bust your spine-
She stops in the doorway.
"Only half a bottle left? Hell, it'll have to do…."
She puts the lamp by the great candle and slumps onto the bed. The lamp goes out. Face flushdown in the rubicund dark — e hine! Haere mai ki te kai!!
O yeah… sitting up stupidly, and fishing for the small jar. Sticks her tongue in and sucks a mouthful out. Squelching the tiny oily globules… dunno whether it's the salt soy taste or the burstingunderteeth scrunch… delicious anyway.
You have just eaten enough lumpfish to stock an ocean… so what? Whattabout me cod roe patties? Millions and millions of codfry, never going to make it… and for that matter, think of eating a fish of any kind, anything… all its potential gone… mind you, snark, you could eat people like me with impunity: we're kind to mother earth, and don't seek to stock her with replicas of self… we're neither horned nor slatted, a twilight of the genders, as Fletcher rewrote of Agathon… so come all anthropophagi and feast in innocence, least so far as me potential reproductive processes are concerned… neat of Joe to be so understanding, or at least show a mask of comprehension, that's more than most have done… damn hell, I've let a Gillayley back in my brain… distant or near, they close in-
She leans on her elbow to stow away the empty caviar jar, and her elbow collapses under her. She falls forward, on top of the candle. The flame spurts up and scores through her hair.
She jerks back, rubbing frantically.
There's a charred track through the front curls, and a vile stench of burnt hair.
"Ahh heeellll," she says wearily. "Ah to hell." The candle has gone out.
Woken once by a thin tinny whistling, like breath from a bronchial baby.
Then a small moan, and scuffling somewhere under the window.
Stiffen and tense, bent with the ears towards where the sound last came from.
It doesn't occur again.
The silence is ominous, nerve-wracking
Woken twice by having to get up and urinate.
She sways on the toilet, feeling sick and thickheaded. Her eyes are sore, and sticky with mucus. Her head is throbbing.
"You getting old. Old, old old. Bladder worn out and self in misery, just from a few drinks."
There is an odd pressure on her bladder these days.
"Beer belly," she says critically, looking at herself in the mirror. "Fat gutted pig that you are."
All those innards pressing upon one another, she thinks, angry at her self-despoliation. No bloody wonder you can't hold your water anymore.
She goes back to bed, and tosses restlessly for a long time, waiting on sleep.
When she wakes again, it is late morning, the sun streaming in through the sea-coloured window.
The air is stale, and soured by the smell of burnt hair.
Running her hand over her head and discovering the burned patch anew,
Sweet hell, what a morning.
She half-expects Simon to come around, even though it is the first day of the new term. But he doesn't turn up.
"Just as well," growling to herself, standing in front of the mirror again. "I am fed up with Gillayleys to here," knifing her hand across her throat, scissors perilously close to the skin.
We did wake in a bad mood, didn't we? says the snark. Just because we got carelessly drunk and burned ourselves, we start taking swipes at our near and dear friends.
"Near and dear friends be damned… what the hell are they doing to me? Sucking me dry, it feels like. Emotional vampires, slurping all the juice from my home, that's what." Even with the new lightheaded feeling a haircut gives her, she still feels resentful and ill-at-ease.
Better go back to being your natural self, dear Holmes. The loner on the fringes. Phase Joe and his brat out… but I think I'd miss them. Think? You know you would! But don't think… play it as it comes. And enjoy this peaceful solitude — it makes a bloody neat change. And speaking of neat… this place is becoming a hovel.
She starts a cleaning binge. Niches in the Tower that have been undisturbed since the place was built are rudely dusted. The bonsais get trimmed, the toadstools ruthlessly pruned, and the insect population gets the kind of hurry along it's never had before. And she discovers mice everywhere.
There are tiny furrows from their teethwork even on the great candle she notices, while cleaning up the splatters of spilt wax.
"Strangle-traps," with heavy emphasis on the strangle. "That's what it's gonna have to be."
What was that line of Nash? In "The Mind of Professor Primrose"? O yeah, "He set a trap for the baby, and dandled the mice." Got his priorities right, that fella
Normally, she dislikes killing mice. There is something about their beady-eyed furtivity, their wholesale preying on humans, that appeals to her outlaw instincts. But at the moment, they're in her way, and they're doomed.
She fantasises some baby traps though, while baiting the traps for the mice. Glittery things, she decides, that make zing and beep noises to lure the wee souls in. Construct them of shiny fireproof plastic: mould 'em to look like bubbles. And Baby comes to play… once yer victim is inside, an automatic dispenser dispenses a whiff of extremely potent anaesthetic, the clear walls turn opaque, and the cell swiftly incinerates its contents. Just turn upside down afterwards, and let the clean ashes sift away-
You're a morbid abhuman bastard, Holmes… where were you when they built Treblinka and Dachau?
It isn't a mood she enjoys. She clenches her shoulder and back muscles, loosens them, tightens them, trying to physically get rid of a grim humour. It works, until she does a round of the strangletraps in the afternoon and discovers she has caught a fine crop of mice, every size from decrepit patriarch to tender pink nosed fine-furred baby. She flings thirty corpses out to the gulls, and the cold-eyed birds squawl and battle for the stiff little bodies. Some are gulped whole, others torn apart, before she can get away from the view, and she has a new gruesome set of images to fight.