Rollerskater: Recuperation
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This instalment deals with themes of trauma and grief.
“Take all the time you need…Daisy, was it?”
The police officer was a friendly-looking woman, probably no older than thirty-five. She sat with her fingers clasped. The room was lit by fluorescent light, and the walls were painted a drab shade of cream. There was a formica table between them, on a floor of dappled grey linoleum. The police station was trying very hard not to be a police station.
“We’re just trying to establish some clear facts.”
Daisy was numb.
An ambulance had picked her up. They’d found her curled up in the foetal position around her guitar in a semi-catatonic state, and had taken her to the accident and emergency at the general hospital. A triage had found she had suffered a perforated eardrum and an emotional shock. The doctors and nurses had tried their best to maintain their good bedside manner, but they had avoided meeting her gaze where possible. She supposed afterwards that the haunted, distant look in her eyes seemed to frighten them.
At least, was part of it.
After she was discharged, she had been to a toilet, and had caught sight of her face in the mirror.
Her eyes had changed.
Her face was still the same shape, and her blonde curly hair remained the same, but her eyes…her eyes were totally foreign. The way they shone iridescent silver, like her Doctor Martens, like a hologram on a debit card, like an oil slick on a wet road.
Something about her had changed. She had transformed into something new.
“Daisy?”
The police officer appeared quite anxious.
“I don’t know what happened,” Daisy said, flatly. For the past week, she had felt like she had to re-learn how to talk. Her voice sounded different in her ears, like it wasn’t really her speaking. “I played the show, went to check up on my friend, and passed out. When I came to, I found out that Jules—”
The name still caught in her throat. She hadn’t quite accepted it yet.
“—Jules was dead.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the police officer said.
“That’s okay,” Daisy said. “He’s…still with me, in a way.”
“In your heart,” the officer said, trying to be respectful while also remaining secular.
“Yes,” Daisy said, fully aware that explaining the reality of the situation would make her look weird.
“Do you know anything about what happened to Sven Gunnarson and Danny St. James?”
Images flashed through her head – a destroyed human head, a neck snapped at a right angle to the left.
“No,” Daisy said, calmly.
Derrick le Prince had been identified post-mortem. They had found his boots on the stage, and the only parts of his body that were left in existence. Reportedly, his feet had been cooked inside the shoes, and his socks were stuck to a layer of melted fat. He had been identified mainly through eyewitness testimony.
The police had no way of creating a narrative for what had happened that night.
They could not explain why Jules’s corpse had been found laying backstage with a hole in its heart, but there was no murder weapon nearby that could plausibly have made the wound.
They could not explain why two members of The Light Havoc, last seen playing a show at Club Chill, had seemingly vanished body and soul into the aether, with the remaining member having apparently spontaneously combusted.
They could not explain or corroborate reports that a girl wearing rollerskates had been apparently thrown across the room as their show began and had been bisected by the bar, as when they found her she had been totally uninjured.
The gaps in their investigation had led them to ask Daisy to answer some questions about that night. Daisy had resolved not to disclose what had happened on that night to anyone. Who would believe her even if she did?
The police officer appeared disappointed. “Do you remember anything from before you were found unconscious, Daisy?”
Daisy sighed. “No. One minute I was checking on Socks, and the next I was waking up on the dancefloor. I don’t remember anything that happened in between. I woke up and Jules was dead. I don’t know who killed him or why. I…miss him.”
She didn’t cry. She had run out of tears to cry.
“I’m sorry,” the police officer said. “I understand.”
“No you don’t,” Daisy said, pointedly.
“Yes,” the police officer said, looking down. “Of course.”
“Do you have any more questions?”
“No,” the police officer said, sounding disappointed again. “I think we’re done here.”
“Okay,” Daisy said. “Am I free to go?”
“Yes,” the police officer said. “Though you were never actually under arrest. This was voluntary questioning.”
Yeah, right. Trying to rule out a suspect. “Thank you.”
“Oh, er, one more thing, Daisy.”
“Yes?”
“You have the most beautiful eyes,” the police officer said.
Daisy wrinkled her nose and walked away.
*
Internal bleeding. Three cracked ribs. Periorbital oedema under the right eye. Rhabdomyolysis. Tachycardia. Rapid, shallow breathing. Severe disorientation. Concussion. Post-traumatic amnesia. One perforated eardrum.
The nurse gave his diagnosis, with classic English understatement, as “very unwell.”
The first few days were a blur of morphine. He was hooked to a series of machines, some he knew the function of, and some he didn’t. For a day or two he had a persistent feeling of nausea and choking which, he eventually realised, was caused by a breathing tube that had been inserted into his throat.
He had been foolish, of course, to assume that he could wake up from what was more or less a several-hour-long coma completely fine. He wondered why Ella had healed K-Os but left him in this state. Perhaps, he thought, it was a limited ability. Whatever the reason was, he had been left in a sorry state.
The doctors remarked on how the only part of his body that had been found to be totally uninjured was his left arm.
His parents came to visit him the day after he was admitted, and the looks on their faces were painful to see. His mother, being a nurse herself, was desperate to try and help him in any way he could, badgering nurses about his treatment. It must have been painful for her to see him like that, connected up to all those machines, with all these pipes and wires leading out of him.
After a few days, he recovered his ability to breathe on his own, and his kidneys had returned to their normal functioning, so they took away the machine that cleaned his blood and the ventilator. He was hoarse from the tube, but was able to ask a nurse if he could eat something. “Not yet,” she had said. “You’ll have to wait until you’re out of intensive care first.”
His mother sat by the bedside now, holding a plate of buttered toast cut into small squares, which she was feeding him, having kicked up a fuss.
“How are you feeling, Stephen?” she said. The worry in her voice was evident.
“I’m feeling better than I have done,” Socks replied. He still couldn’t see all that well out of his right eye. “Thanks for the toast, Mum.”
“That’s okay, pickle,” his mother said. “I’m just glad you’re alright.”
His father wasn’t in the room. He’d gone to get some fresh air. Socks was an only child, and seeing his only son on the brink of death had put fear in his father’s eyes that he had never seen before and hoped to never see again.
His mother looked him up and down and frowned sympathetically. It was as though he were a baby in his cot.
“What on Earth happened to you, Stephen?” she said. “You can tell me. I promise I won’t be cross.”
Socks loved his mother, but he resented the way she sometimes treated him like a child. He would very soon be twenty-two.
“I don’t know what happened, Mum,” he lied. “I just…fainted.”
“It wasn’t drugs, was it? Did you do drugs?”
“No, Mum. I had a couple of beers and that was it.”
“You don’t get rhabdomyolysis after a couple of beers, Stephen. I should know. Come on, you can tell me.”
“That’s the honest truth. You didn’t raise me to…lie to you.”
His mother looked frustrated. She could tell, in the way only mothers can, that he was lying, but she couldn’t pry the answer from him.
“You’re not a bad boy, Stephen Joseph. I know this. I just don’t know what it is you can’t tell me, your own mother.”
“Mum, we’ve been over this, my name is…”
“Stephen James, yes, you keep insisting, even after I show you your birth certificate. What on earth is going on with you?”
Socks sighed. Eventually I’m going to have to tell them, right?
“I don’t know, Mum.”
“Did they do a CT scan on you?”
“Yeah, to diagnose my concussion.”
“They didn’t…find anything in your brain?”
“A tumour? No, Mum. I feel like I would have told you something like that.”
“No bleeds? Aneurysm? Stroke?”
“Nothing.”
“Then there’s something you’re not telling me, Stephen. And as God is my witness, I will find out what it is.”
His father came back in. He still looked very worried, concealing it behind a thin veneer of cheerfulness.
“Everything alright?” he said, in his soft, lilting Sheffield accent, faded like the yellowed pages of an old paperback, but just as comforting. He held up a tube of Smarties. “I got these from the vending machine.”
“The nurse says I can’t have anything like that until I’ve had the all clear,” Socks said. “I shouldn’t even really be eating toast.”
“It’s for when you get better,” his father said. Uttering the words seemed to give him some reassurance that his son, his only son, would get better.
“Thanks, Dad,” Socks said.
His father smiled.
“I’m proud of you, son.”
Socks nodded.
Tears brimmed in his eyes, and he cried, openly and without shame. He wasn’t too proud to cry. The stress of the last few days finally caught up to him. His mother hugged him tightly and didn’t let go.
A nurse came in and told them that visiting hours were almost up.
“Get some rest, pickle,” his mother said. “Get well soon, my little angel.”
“Thanks, Mum,” he said. “I’ll try.”
His mother and father went to leave.
“I love you both,” he said, very sincerely.
His mother choked up as she left the room, and then he was, once again, alone.
He lay back and looked up at the ceiling.
I do love them both, he thought. That’s why it’s killing me to keep lying to them like this.
*
It was the small things that got to her – a song, a smell, a Simpsons meme, a facial expression.
Daisy had never really grieved. She was fortunate, some might say, in that her grandparents had died when she was too young to really understand. The closest she had come to experiencing grief was when her hamster had died suddenly when she was eight. She had cried uncontrollably for a week or so, and had then come to accept it. She had, perhaps naïvely, assumed that the same would be true for Jules. But it had been more than a week and a half now, and she still found herself crying intermittently, between long periods of emotional numbness.
Grief and trauma counsellors had been stationed at the university. She hadn’t needed to see them – she had her own therapist.
“It’s like I see him everywhere I go,” she had said. “I keep expecting him to walk through the door.”
Jules’s funeral had been postponed pending a murder investigation, but Daisy knew that it would turn up nothing, for his killers were already dead, by her own hand. It would be one of those stories that finds its way into true crime books and documentaries, an unsolved mystery. Eventually, his body, that empty shell that had once been a beautiful man, would be given a proper burial. She knew, also, that his spirit, in some way, was still alive, but it was no longer Jules. Its identity had gone with his body.
She felt angry at Ella, feeling that she had been lied to – that Ella had promised her the false hope of Jules’s continued existence, that she had been used as a means to an end. She was unable to speak about those feelings with her therapist, because the therapist simply wouldn’t understand what she was talking about. All she could do was bottle them up and try to focus on other things. This was not easy, when she was constantly distracted – haunted, it seemed, by Jules’s ghost.
She found herself looking at her bass guitar, wondering if there was some way he – what remained of him – could see her. The object did not appear to be imbued with any sort of energy or exceptional power at all. It looked as inert as it always did, leaning against its stand. For a short time, she even found herself wondering if she’d imagined the whole thing, until she looked in the mirror again, and saw the face of Ella looking back at her.
And it was while she was thinking this that a text message came through.
It was from Ollie, who had messaged Lewis, herself and Jules, in the group message they had established for their band – whose future, at present, was uncertain. Even the fact that the little read-receipt ticks didn’t go blue, indicating that all present had read the message, was enough to send her into another paroxysm of grief. She resented Ollie for not simply making a new group message, but then again, perhaps he had felt that it would be insensitive or even insulting to do so.
She had not spoken to Lewis and Ollie, or even seen them, since that night.
The content of the message read, simply: Hey guys.
Daisy messaged back: Hey.
Three dots bouncing up and down, then: cops asked me to speak to them. said no.
Lewis then came in: same.
Daisy: I spoke to them but only to get them off my back.
Three dots, urgently bouncing, so Daisy clarified: I didnt tell them anythig. I’m not an idiot.
The three dots ceased for a moment, and then Ollie replied: phew
Lewis: oh thank god
Daisy thought for a moment. We should really discuss this somewhere.
Ollie: pub?
Lewis: pub.
*
Socks was sleeping when he heard something move under his door. It was pitch dark in his private room, which he had been moved to after his condition had stabilised. He was still hooked up to a heart monitor. Contrary to popular belief, the machine made no sound – only showing peaks and troughs of electrical activity in his heart.
He couldn’t place what the sound was. He looked over at the monitor screen and noticed that his heart rate had spiked. Nice to have some confirmation, he supposed.
He lay back down and must have nodded off for a few minutes, because when he opened his eyes again, there was a shadowy figure standing at the end of his bed.
He cried out, and the machine went Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
The figure leaned forward, peeled back the covers…and tore the heart monitor electrodes away from his chest.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw who it was.
“For fuck’s sake, K-Os,” Socks said.
K-Os stood there, looking in no way like an inpatient, though she did look somewhat sheepish.
“Did I scare you?” she said.
“‘Did you scare me?’ Yes, you fucking scared me!”
“I apologise.”
“People are trying to kill me, K-Os, you could have knocked or something.”
“I didn’t think you’d be able to open the door in that…state.”
“That’s not the point! The nurse could have let you in or something…”
“Oh, I dealt with the nurse.”
“‘Dealt with her?’ You didn’t…” He sat up. “…You didn’t kill my nurse, did you?”
“No, no, I just…put her to sleep.”
“Oh, yes, apparently that’s a thing we can do now. Thanks for telling me about that, by the way, would have been good not to find out through Daisy. Daisy has magic powers, now, by the way.”
K-Os sat on one of the chairs that was reserved for visitors, and crossed her left leg over her right.
“Yes, she…healed me.”
“And only you, apparently.”
“I’m a lot easier to heal, Socks. You’re a fragile bag of bones and complex machinery. I’m not.”
“Well, when you put it like that.”
Socks drew his legs up and rested his elbow on his knee, and his chin on his hand.
“Where have you been, anyway?”
“I was put in the back of an ambulance, same as you, and came here. They found nothing wrong with me. I believe they would have been quite alarmed, had they put me through a scan, to find that I have no organs…”
“So how did you get in here?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Socks, I’m very good at squeezing into tight spots.”
“Ooh, matron.”
K-Os didn’t understand the reference. She sighed.
“That should never have happened, Socks. None of that.”
Socks leaned back. “You said we could deal with it.”
“Yes,” K-Os said. “I let my guard down.”
“They got us both.”
“I should have seen it coming, Socks.”
K-Os was usually very stoic. This was the first time that Socks had ever seen her actually express something resembling anxiety – fear, even. It dawned on him then just how close the two of them had come to being killed, were it not for Daisy’s intervention.
“Hey,” Socks said. “These things happen, right?”
K-Os looked at him with some disdain. “No,” she said, pointedly. “‘These things happen’ is what you say when you trip over. I did more than trip over, that night.”
“Well, we were the only ones injured, right?”
“As far as I know, but that isn’t the point. That was the opening volley, Socks. It gets worse from here.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“We have to stick together, that much is certain.”
“You can’t stay here,” Socks said. “My parents don’t know about you. Or my powers.”
K-Os rolled her eyes. “You humans and your petty social dramas. The universe is about to fall in on your heads and all you think about is appearances.”
“I’d appreciate it if you stopped saying bad things about my species,” Socks retorted. “Don’t wear the costume if you can’t respect us.”
K-Os sighed. “Alright, Socks. I’ll leave you to recuperate. Just be on your guard.”
“I’m attached to an IV line and a heart monitor – ow, by the way. I don’t think I’m in any state to fight.”
“After losing three of their best men, they’ll be regrouping. Just try not to draw attention to yourself, okay?”
“I’ll try.”
K-Os turned to leave.
“Oh, and one more thing,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I really did enjoy the show,” she said, with a note of sadness. “Thank you for inviting me.”
Socks was taken aback by how warm she was.
“You’re welcome,” he said, softly.
K-Os slid out of view as her body liquefied and travelled under the door.
His chest stung. He put the electrodes back on as best he could, then lay back down, and he fell into a restless sleep.
*
They sat around a table in the local pub, which had once been a courthouse, which gave the pub its name: “The Magistrate”.
“So,” Ollie said. Some barely-touched pints of beer sat in front of them, as though they were trying to keep up a façade of normality.
“It’s nice to see you both again,” Daisy said. The sight of them was bringing back painful memories.
“Yeah,” Lewis said. His voice sounded thin and empty. He paused for a moment. “This sucks, man.”
“Yeah,” Daisy replied. “So, you heard.”
“Yeah, we did,” Ollie said.
“He was a good guy,” Lewis said.
“He died a hero,” Daisy said. “He died…trying to keep me safe.”
“That’s the kind of guy he was,” Ollie said.
“You got that right,” Daisy replied. She picked up her pint and sipped it. They still didn’t know.
“So what now?” Lewis said.
“It’s a bit early to think about that, isn’t it?” Daisy said. “They haven’t even…”
She had intended to say “buried him yet”, but realised how monstrously callous that would sound, as though he were a piece of flesh, nothing but a sack of meat and bone.
“I don’t think so,” Ollie said. “Life goes on, right?”
“I don’t know what the future of the band is,” Daisy said. “I really want to keep making music, but…without him, I don’t know…”
“We don’t need to make our minds up today or anything,” Lewis said. “But it’s worth keeping in mind.”
“I think we need to process a few things first,” Ollie said. “There was a lot that happened that night.”
“Yeah,” Lewis said.
“Who’s going to be the first to say it?” Ollie said. He was met with silence. “Right, me, then. Daisy’s eyes have changed colour.”
Daisy felt her face flush red. “Yes,” she said. “What about it?”
“What about it? What about it? That’s not a natural eye colour.”
“Oh really?” Daisy said, involuntarily shading her eyes behind a hand. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“What happened to you in that room, Daisy? Before…” Ollie paused. “…before Ella took over?”
“I let her take control,” Daisy said. “And now I am her. For good.”
“But what happened?”
Daisy sighed. “Derrick was trying to kill me. Jules got in his way, and Derrick didn’t like that, so he…got him.”
“Jesus,” Lewis said.
“With what?” Ollie said, in a way that seemed infuriatingly blunt.
“I’d rather not discuss this,” Daisy said.
“With what, Daisy?” Ollie repeated, staring at her intensely.
Daisy turned her head away and then back.
“With Danny’s drumstick, okay?”
“The same one that exploded when he stabbed your guitar with it.”
“Yeah,” Daisy said. “What’s relevant about that?”
“That must have been the same drumstick that was stabbed into the skate,” Ollie said. “You – I mean, Ella – said as much.”
“Right.”
“And it awakened something in you and turned you into…into Ella.”
“Yes,” Daisy said. “So what are you implying?”
“There’s always been something weird about that rollerskater,” Ollie said. “I’ve never known what it is. But let’s be clear, here, and just between the three of us: She’s clearly not human, is she? I mean, you saw what she did to that guy’s head.”
“Right, but what does that have to do with—”
“Daisy, that drumstick changed you into something…new. You’re still you, but…it changed you.”
Daisy stood. “Do you really think I don’t know that?” she snapped. “I didn’t ask for this, Ollie. I feel like a fucking freak.” She sat back down.
There was a silence across the table, and only the clinking of glasses could be heard.
“I’m sorry,” Ollie said, after a moment. “I…I didn’t mean to make you feel like—”
“Just forget it,” Daisy said.
There was another silence.
“Alright,” Daisy said. “The truth is…I don’t know what Ella is. Was. It’s confusing. I’m her now. But I am also me. She isn’t…separate from me any more like she used to be. We’re…one thing now, a thing called ‘Daisy’. But…she was something…something else. Something not human. She knew things I didn’t know – about umbric, about chaos, about order…”
She sighed, frustrated. “…I don’t think I’m entirely human any more, either. I’m something new, something…else.” She sounded disgusted by the notion.
The other two regarded her for a moment.
“But you’re still Daisy,” Lewis said. “And we both care about you. It doesn’t matter what you are. You’re still you.”
“We’re still your friends,” Ollie added. “We love you.”
Daisy felt a lump in her throat.
“Thank you,” she said.
“If we – if the band – if we can’t still play together…” Lewis said, pausing to find the words. “Then I hope we can still be friends. Even if it’s not as bandmates. We need each other, more than ever.”
“Of course we can still be friends,” Daisy said. “It’s just been so hard…it’s like everything that was giving my life meaning, everything that was giving me purpose in this world – it’s been swept out from under me. And I don’t know who I am and what I’m here for any more.”
“We’re here for you,” Ollie said. He sipped his beer. “Tell you the truth, I’ve been feeling the same. This is…the worst thing I’ve ever been through. No hyperbole.”
“Same here,” Lewis said.
Ollie sat looking into his beer for a few seconds, and then tears started to fall from his eyes. He wiped them, and gave one of his trademark Cheshire-cat grins.
“Look at us,” he said, laughing. “Drinking away our sorrows like a trio of sad-sacks.”
Daisy and Lewis laughed as well.
“I’ve got an idea,” Ollie said. “Something to…get our minds off things. Fancy joining me?”
“What is it?” Daisy said.
“It’s about that rollerskater. I want to see if we can dig up anything about her…find out what she’s really about.”
“She’s our age,” Daisy said.
“Yeah, and? She probably gets around.”
“Alright, well, where do you want to start?”
“The university library,” Ollie said. “After we’ve finished these.”
They finished their pints post-haste.
*
The library had a search utility that allowed readers to search through the content of books that had been scanned in, such that they could find books to borrow, sure that the books’ contents would be relevant to their essays. It proved very useful, as they found themselves searching for the keywords “rollerskate”, “roller skate”, “skates” and “skating woman”.
They had, thus far, only turned up, among other things, a book about the gender dynamics of roller derby, an oral history of the roller discos of North West England, an autobiography of a (male) rollerblading champion, a few patents for improved rollerskate design that had been released into the public domain, an article in the British Medical Journal about the usefulness of rollerskating as exercise, another article in the British Medical Journal about the prevalence and propagation of injuries incurred at roller discos, and a smattering of articles, less interesting, from sociological and philosophical journals regarding the semantics, politics and poetics of rollerskating.
In all, their excursion had not been very useful.
“Found anything yet?” Ollie asked, stage-whisper, leafing through a book with a plain green cover, on whose worn spine were written the words A Brief History of Leisure.
“No,” Daisy whispered, reading yet another journal article about the semiotics of extreme sports.
“Me neither,” Ollie replied. “The history of wiffle ball, though, is surprisingly fascinating.”
Lewis, meanwhile, was flicking furiously through a variety of magazines, each of dubious condition, and finding very little to report on.
“We must be approaching this wrong,” Daisy whispered.
“I can’t believe nobody has ever noticed her, even in the last twenty years,” Ollie thought aloud. “Like, she must have been a teenager at some point, right? There’s no local newspaper articles about her, nothing. You’d think that someone would notice a six-foot-tall girl in rollerskates. Does anyone even know where she came from?”
Daisy had a brainwave, and went back to the computer that she was logged into.
“Maybe we’re not using the right keywords,” she said.
The other two crowded around the computer. It was mid-afternoon and the library was somewhat empty, all the usual suspects already at home or at the bar. Only a few stragglers remained, and most of them were too focused on their own work to pay much notice.
Daisy typed the keyword KOs into the search bar. A small pinwheel came up.
There were articles from business journals, public relations journals, economics journals, digital libraries journals, and even (and Daisy realised that she should probably have seen this coming) some very interesting articles on the history of a certain Greek island in the Aegean Sea, just south of the Bodrum Peninsula in the south-west of Turkey.
“Try adding a hyphen,” Ollie murmured, leaning over, deftly moving the cursor to the space between the K and the O, and typing a dash to make K-Os. He hit Enter.
This time, they were shown articles from various computer science journals, regarding theories of operating system architecture, a physics paper written in Hungarian, and most bizarrely, several articles on the penile bones found in some placental mammals.
“Well, that’s a bust,” Daisy whispered.
They stared at the screen for a few seconds.
“How is there no information on this chick?” Ollie said.
“Wait,” Lewis said. “Daisy’s right. We have been going about this wrong.”
He adopted a serious expression, leaned forwards, placed his hands on the keyboard as though about to write the words that would save the entire universe, and typed:
wheel foot woman
Ollie put his palm against his face.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’ll work,” he said, sarcastically.
“Shut up,” Lewis said, hitting Enter.
A result came up, just under a gruesome article from a medical journal about a foot injury inflicted in a road accident.
Strange tales of foreign-lands. Print book. 1689 (1952 reprint.) Available on Floor 3. HI 3185.13
“Worth a look, I suppose,” Ollie said, sheepishly.
They quickly tidied up after themselves, boarded the library’s paternoster lift for the third floor and got off, then entered the history section, scanning the bookshelves for the designation. After a few minutes of searching, they found it, a plain brown book, leather-bound, with gold lettering on the spine reading “STRANGE TALES OF FOREIGN-LANDS HI 3185.13”.
The book was in surprisingly good condition for having been printed in the 1950s. Its contents were printed as more-or-less a facsimile of the original text from the seventeenth century, barring an introduction by some long-dead professor of history at Cambridge, who wrote of the contents within with the sort of dry amusement common to humanities professors who are desperate to convince the lay reader that academia can actually be fun.
After the preface was a title page, which read:
ſtrange tales of Foreign-lands.
BEING A
HUMOROUS ſURVEY
of
Life, as it is beyond our ſhores.
“F-trange?” Ollie said. “Did they print it wrong?”
“No, that’s a long S,” Daisy said. “They stopped using it in the nineteenth century.”
“I can see why,” Ollie said.
Lewis had made a note of the page number they were looking for.
“Page fifty-six,” he said.
Daisy hastily flipped to it, past tall tales about a drunkard in Venice who had tried to drown a fish, and a man in Constantinople who had invented a “Flying-machine”, only to be drowned when he had crashed it into the Bosphorus. Some of the tales were helpfully illustrated by woodcuts.
She opened to page fifty-six, where the thirty-ninth tale in the book had been published. It read:
“ſtrange tale of a Woman in Denmark.
“A Woman, standing taller than a Man, did arrive in the Citty of Koppenhaggen, bearing Wheels upon both Feet, and hair of ſtrange Color. She said her Name to he that would aſk to be Katheryne. She ſpake little of the Danish Tongue. One day, an Alchemyſt did proclaim her a Homunculus of his own Making. The Woman did ſtrike the Alchemyſt and throw him in-to a Well. The Woman was accused of Wytchcraft by a Conſtable, and fled. Most curiouſly, she has never again been ſeen. The Merchants of Koppenhaggen do preſently ſell ‘Katheryne wheels’ to Children, who think the ſtrange Woman to have been a viſitor from the ſea.”
Daisy turned the page.
There was a woodcut of a woman. She stood on a cobbled street, and in the background was a well. On her feet were a pair of rollerskates – rendered as accurately as possible given that the artist likely had no references to work with – and an outfit that was profoundly anachronistic. Those socks, that skirt, that vest top and jacket, and those loose ponytails. The image was captioned with the words “ſtrange Woman of Denmark.”
The woman was, unmistakably, the girl they knew as K-Os.
They sat silent for a few moments, flipping the page back and forth.
“What the fuck?” Ollie said, after a few moments, a little too loudly for a library.
“That makes no sense,” Lewis said. “This book is three hundred years old.”
“Rollerskates weren’t invented until the nineteenth century,” Daisy said.
Yet the woodcut, as far as they could tell, was genuine.
“Are we sure this isn’t a joke?” Ollie said. “Could be a prank – a really elaborate one, but…”
“I’d agree with you,” Daisy said. “But…that still wouldn’t account for the fact that this book is obviously almost seventy years old…”
The spine was cracked and bent, the glue had long since expired and rotted. If this were a forgery, it would be a very good one. Daisy knew of no artificial aging process that could authentically produce a book that looked this old without in the process destroying it.
They flipped back and forth through it, trying to find evidence that it was a forgery. But why would someone want to forge a book about K-Os? And, moreover, who would want to do so?
They went back to the preface, written by the old professor, and decided to look him up, and found, to their shock, that the man had indeed died in the early 1960s of natural causes. They searched for his name and “Strange tales of Foreign-lands”, and found a digital copy of the same book, dated to 1954 (in its second edition), with the exact same preface.
They finally took the book to the library’s helpdesk, and asked for confirmation of the book’s age. The librarian gave them a funny look, but looked up on an old system when the book had actually been added to the catalogue. She told them it had arrived sometime in the early 1990s, which only raised further questions. They asked if it was possible anyone could have intruded on the system and fiddled around with the dating, but the librarian rudimentarily explained, and Lewis, a student of computer science, confirmed, that the dating system used UNIX time – a 32-bit timestamp counting every second from midnight, UTC on January 1st 1970 – and that it would have been very hard to modify that integer without arousing suspicion.
The book was not a forgery.
At a bare minimum, K-Os had existed at some time in the early 1990s, despite looking physically somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-two years old. Which would imply that she had also existed at some time in the 1950s and 1940s. However, the veracity of everything else would also imply that the reprinted book, dated to the late seventeenth century, had indeed existed.
This was no prank. K-Os was, at a conservative estimate, over three hundred years old.
“I knew there was something weird about her,” Ollie said, as they stepped outside. “I knew it.”
“Yeah,” Daisy said, feeling somewhat dazed by the revelation. “There’s still a lot of questions unanswered, here.”
“Do you think she shot JFK?” Ollie said. His tone sounded like he had intended it as a joke, but halfway through the sentence, he realised his heart wasn’t in it, and he returned to stunned silence.
Daisy turned to the other two.
“There’s someone I have to speak to,” she said.
The other two nodded in understanding.
She ran to catch the bus across town.
*
Socks was finally beginning to feel better.
A lot of his muscles still felt like scrambled eggs, and he was relearning how to swallow anything larger than an inch square, but his condition had stabilised. He was eating some dinner – usually, this unhappy-looking mass of jellified gravy, drab beige potatoes, rubbery vegetables and gristly meat would turn his stomach, but his body was so desperate for nutrients – any nutrients – that he found himself wolfing it down a little more eagerly that he cared to admit.
There came a knock at the door.
“Come in.”
A nurse entered the room.
“Hello, Socks. A friend of yours has come to pay you a visit. She says her name is Daisy.”
“Daisy?”
She stepped out from behind the nurse. She looked different to the last time she had seen her – haunted, fidgety. The makeup had long since been cleaned from her face, and her hair was blonde again…but those eyes.
“Hello, Socks,” Daisy said.
“I’ll let you have some privacy,” the nurse said, and left.
“Hi, Daisy,” Socks, said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yes,” Daisy said. “We were supposed to meet each other for dinner at some point, weren’t we?”
“Yeah, this isn’t exactly my idea of fine dining,” Socks said, sitting up. “How are you?”
“I’m…” She trailed off. “…not doing great, actually.”
She corrected herself. “Obviously, better than you, but…”
“I understand,” Socks said.
Daisy sighed. “Socks…I don’t know if you heard…”
Socks felt a knot in his stomach.
“…Jules is…dead, Socks. He died…protecting me from Derrick.”
Socks remembered Ella’s words. The man you killed. He had been so caught up at the time in trying to survive that it had not occurred to him that he had never seen Jules, the tall guy with red hair, emerge from the backstage area.
“Jesus, Daisy, I’m sorry,” Socks said. “Are you okay?”
“As okay as I can be,” Daisy said. “It’s been hard.”
“I understand.”
“Listen, Socks, some weird things have happened to me.”
“That’s an understatement,” Socks replied. “Your guitar and your…”
“Eyes?” Daisy said.
“Yeah…something happened to you while I was out…and it transformed you.”
“No,” Daisy said. “Ella was always there with me…but the situation I was in…it drew her out. It gave her a doorway. And now I am her.”
Socks remembered what Dolly had said, about how some abilities are acquired, and some are innate.
“But there is a connection,” Daisy said. “To K-Os.”
Socks sat upright. “Yeah,” he said uncomfortable. “I reckon you’re right.”
“Danny St. James stabbed her skate, Socks. There was this light. It burned him – burned his mind out and destroyed him. He used – and this is Ella talking now – something called an ‘umbric blade’. Do you know anything about that?”
Socks looked at her. This was the moment that had been coming for months now. He couldn’t keep telling her lies. It was now or never.
“Yes,” he said, after a few moments of deliberation. “I…know what umbric is.”
Daisy’s eyes bulged in surprise. “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said.
“It’s…it’s like a kind of crystal,” Socks said. “It can hurt us. Hurt me and you, I mean.”
“And K-Os?”
Socks swallowed. “Yeah, her too.”
“That would explain why you were injured by the music…and why I was injured by it after I changed.”
There was a long pause.
“I learned something about K-Os today,” Daisy said. She got out her phone, which had a cracked screen, walked across the room and handed it to him.
There was a picture of a book, with what looked like a medieval woodcut inside it. The woodcut was of K-Os.
Daisy seemed to study his reaction.
“She’s over three hundred years old, Socks,” she said, as though it made complete sense.
“Yes,” Socks said, uncertainly. “I…know.”
Daisy withdrew her phone and put it in her pocket.
“You know?”
“Yeah, I’ve…been spending time with her.”
Daisy slouched a little, as though dumbfounded.
“So you aren’t…dating?”
“No, we’re just…well, I wouldn’t say friends, but…”
“Alright, okay, but – let me get this straight – you know she’s several hundred years old.”
“Er…well, she’s a bit older than that,” Socks said.
“Several thousand?”
“Try…million.”
“Million?!”
Socks nodded. “She’s been fighting people for a long time. I’ve been helping her a bit. Because, you see…” He couldn’t believe he was going to tell her this. It felt like a load off. “…in December…when I left with her, there was this guy…he could control shadows. He tried to kill K-Os with an umbric blade, and I caught it. Some of my blood got on her skates and she killed him. When I woke up, I had these…these powers. And ever since then I’ve been helping her out.”
Socks had always imagined this conversation as provoking amazement, with Daisy reacting with excitement, confusion, maybe fear – but he had always expected a positive reaction.
She looked more hurt and angry than he had ever seen someone look. It was not the facial expression he had anticipated at all, and he had no script in his head to account for it.
“Let me get this straight,” Daisy said, with a quiet fury. “You…have powers. You…didn’t tell me, and disappeared off with that girl for months. You lied to me, repeatedly. You’ve been fighting people for months, getting into all sorts of trouble with this girl, and you think it’s fine. And then one day, your friend says she wants to come to my show, knowing it might bring bad people with her…and you just let her.”
Socks tried to clarify. “Daisy, it wasn’t like that—”
“Those…bastards were at that show because they knew she would be there and that you would be there. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. But they knew what she was and what you are. They damn near killed you, because you were so blind, you didn’t even stop to think that they might pose a threat. We fought them, on your behalf, to keep you safe. You brought them upon us, and we fought them. And now a man is dead, Socks. A wonderful, beautiful man. He’s dead, and you and that girl are the ones who brought it upon him.”
“Daisy…”
“How dare you?” she spat, ferociously. “I had one good thing in my life, for once, one little piece of happiness, and you let them burn it, kill it, like it was nothing. Don’t even try to apologise for that, you piece of shit. Nothing you ever say will make it okay.”
Socks was silent.
“I came in here to get answers, Socks. But it turns out I already had them, right here in front of me. It was stupid of me to think otherwise. Goodbye, Socks.”
“Where are you going?”
“I never want to speak to you again,” Daisy said. “Enjoy the rest of your life with K-Os. I want nothing to do with you.”
“Daisy, listen…this is important.”
“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT, SOCKS.”
Her shout reverberated around the room, and a deathly silence fell upon the room.
“There’s…there’s a war coming,” Socks said, quietly. “You’re in danger. You have to be prepared…”
Daisy wheeled around.
“That’s all this is to you, isn’t it? You and her. A game.”
Socks said nothing.
“Fuck you,” she said, raising her hand to slap him across the face.
There was a flash, and Daisy was back across the room. She stared at him in shock.
“I’m sorry,” Socks said.
Daisy regarded him with disgust.
“No you’re not,” she said, bitterly.
She left the room.
The nurse re-entered.
“That didn’t take long,” she said, jokingly. “Must have only been in there a minute.”
Socks stared at the door.
“Yeah,” he said. “A minute.”
*
Jules’s funeral was held in his hometown of Leicester. Daisy couldn’t attend in the end – the train fares were too much, and besides, she felt that this strange girl with oil-slick eyes turning up to his funeral would have been inappropriate. He would have wanted her to be there, she thought, but the dead don’t always get what they want.
Instead, she attended an impromptu memorial service in the student union bar – Club Chill was still being treated as a crime scene. People said words, read out poems, sang songs. A girl called Alessi, who knew Jules through the Rock and Pop Society, delivered a beautiful acoustic rendition of Cloudsurfing which made her cry. Afterwards, she put her arms around her, they both sobbed, and they drank sherry together.
They stood in the rain under a black umbrella, and Alessi smoked a roll-up, and they reminisced. They exchanged phone numbers. It fit neatly into the slot where that absent friend had once been.
It got dark, and they went home on the £1 off-campus minibus service. As she disembarked, Alessi kissed her cheek, and she wondered what that meant. I don’t have time to think about that, she thought, and put it to the back of her mind.
And then she was at home, sobering up. Her guitar was laid across her lap. All that remained of him.
It was still stained with her – with Ella’s – blood.
She tuned it, idly. She wasn’t sure if she could ever go back to making music. Something had fundamentally changed in her. She had literally become a new person, of course – Ella had become part of her ego – but she had also been through a terrible trauma, and that was a far less supernatural kind of transformation. To see death is to see the end of the world in banality.
She wanted, on some level, to continue Ella Foe and the Oscillations, to honour his memory, but on another, she wasn’t sure if she was strong enough, and that made her feel ashamed.
She finished tuning the guitar, and strummed one of the strings, to see if she had it in her.
Dai
…what?
She played it again.
sy.
The guitar spoke to her.
She looked down at it, and smiled.
Of course, she thought. Even after the obliteration of his mind, the regeneration of his soul, the fundamental transformation of his being…the echoes of his last thought, of protecting her, lingered.
The guitar was not Jules, but it loved her all the same.
She got up and placed it back on its stand.
She wasn’t ready to play again yet. She had grieving to do. Mourning to complete. But there were certainties she could cling to. Tomorrow would always come. The sun sets, yes – but it rises, too, and even on the bleakest days, there is still daylight, however faint.
No, she would not play today. Not tomorrow either. Not even next week.
But someday?
The beauty of someday is the perhaps.
Another time, another place…
Special thanks to Jo, Hannah and Salty for their assistance in writing this instalment.
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
ARC ONE: UMBRIC SPRING
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