A room of one's own

Though Mabel Fate had looked thunderous when Stella asked where her room was to be a room had been found and, looking around herself now, Stella had to admit that it was quite nicely furnished.  Which, she thought, it should be considering that Mabel had decided to charge her rent for it.

“If you’re a paying guest,” she’d said, “then there are proprieties that you should observe, and being a well-brought-up and college-educated girl I am sure you know all about such things.  They would have been taught in the same classes where you were told to write letters in this modern age, and probably taught to curtsey and patronise.  But if I allowed you to stay here as a family member you would probably feel compelled to interfere in the lives of the people around you, and since my family are successful I have no desire to have you meddle.”

“Where are my cousins, Great-Grandmama?” Stella had asked, her tone as sweet as honey and as dangerous as a agitated wasp.  “I was most certainly hoping to meet them all at last!”

Mabel Fate had looked at her for several seconds before answering, and then the answer sounded guarded, as though perhaps the news imparted was being carefully edited before delivery.  “Seb is home for three days,” she said.  “He will arrive at the station within the hour and I have sent Rupert to collect him in the Bugatti.  The Rolls is a little ostentatious, and the Bentley is being polished.  Seb is currently appearing at the Old Vic and his career as an actor, while not perhaps of Hollywood proportions is better than you might expect from a typical twenty-year-old.  Rupert is now returned from university with a basic degree in agriculture, a special project in the application of organic fertilisers to ancient soils, and a Masters degree is animal midwifery and husbandry.  He wishes to take over the running of the farm, and his father is thoroughly delighted by the idea.  Dolphin–“

“Dolphin?” said Stella, aware that she was interrupting but still unable to believe that she had a cousin called Dolphin.  Mabel seemed too sensible for that.

“The priest that year was regrettably hard-of-hearing,” sighed Mabel.  “Dolphin is overweight and underintelligent and I would despair of the child except that when I allowed her to attend the Debutantes Ball, against my better judgement, she came away with three proposals of marriage and some rather personal body jewellery that I instructed her to return by post rather than in person.  It seems that much of the landed gentry round here believe that a woman who looks like livestock is likely to be good with it.  I have endeavoured to teach the poor child to write poetry several times, but it seems like I have raised a farmer’s wife and that’s to be the end of it.”

“I have written poetry,” said Stella.

“I don’t doubt it.  Benny you have met already, and I discern in your letter a belief that he might be your maternal grandfather.  I should tell you now that I find that unlikely, but only because I believe he is your maternal grand-uncle.  You are clearly a child of the Wooden Post, and I will do everything I can to help you learn that sooner rather than later.”

“Is there an inheritance that goes with that?”

“Splinters, my dear child.  Splinters.”

That had ended that conversation, and now Stella looked around the room that she was paying to stay in.  The bed was solid with a firm but yielding mattress, and when she pulled back the sheets she discovered memory foam.  The pillows were feather but appeared new and soft, and the blankets were embroidered with homilies.  Or rather she had assumed they were homilies until she tried reading them.

The most dangerous word is bathtime.

Young devils may carry your knickers away.

Humility and Indigestion are often confused.

She pondered the last one for a minute or so before deciding that while it might be true, it was scarcely helpful.

There was a bedside table with two drawers and she wasn’t entirely surprised to find a Gideon’s Bible in the top one.  She was slightly more surprised to find it bulging with bookmarks, and when she opened to one at random it seemed like a full third of the page had been underlined with pencil or highlighted in a soft lemon ink.  She put the book away and closed the drawer with haste and crossed to the window.  It looked out over a nice green field with a wooden shed at one end and she immediately felt closer to the land.  This was surely what the countryside was all about.  Perhaps she might have a nice time here after all!

There was a robust tap at her door, in fact it was almost a thundering rather than a tap, so she leaned against the windowsill and faced the door, and called out in a light and cheerful voice, “Come in!”  The door opened and a middle-aged woman in a peach tracksuit that matched her lipstick stood in the doorway.  She held out a piece of paper, and when Stella approached to take it she saw that it was a printout of an email.

“Your parents are dead, miss,” said the woman flatly.  “Both of ‘em.”

Droplets

Droplets was the name given to the farm; burned into a large wooden shingle that hung on the wall at the entrance to the farmyard. The farmyard itself was set at the edge of a cliff so that anyone incautious enough to step out of the farmhouse's back door would have a single stone step on which to regret their decision, and then a fall over over eight hundred feet to a sandy beach below. When he was drunk, which was most mornings as he would wake at three and drink to forget his nightmares, John Clarke the principal farmhand would mutter that the name of the farm was a prediction: that it would take only droplets of rain to push it over the edge itself. As it was raining heavily when Stella arrived at Droplets, and continued to rain for most of the days she was there, she disbelieved him the moment he put this suggestion forth.

She arrived clinging to the back of a produce truck whose driver had stopped to help when her car had broken down in a runnel by the side of a narrow country road. He had offered to let her sit in the truck itself, but the front seat was occupied by two growling alsatians, and the truck body was refrigerated, so she'd bitten down hard on her collection of journalistic swearwords and clung on as tenaciously as old ivy. The journey had been cold and wet and her fingers were blue and claw-hooked when she arrived, but she still surveyed the farmyard with the eyes of someone who thought they were a Jane Austen heroine.

She was quite dismayed to see that the farmyard, though inevitably muddy in places, was well-swept and tidy; rope neatly coiled on hooks, bales of straw stacked carefully against walls and under shelter, and an old but serviceable flat-bed truck parked up near the house. As she sighed, unable to think of anything to improve, the front door opened and old Benedict came out to greet her.

He greeted the produce truck, the cataracts in his eyes being so bad that everything was seen as though in thick fog, and when corrected of his misapprehension he smiled and hugged the produce man. Stella sighed again and walked inside, leaving the man who was probably her maternal grandfather to his misty confusion.

"I saw something nasty in the water closet," said a small, lugubrious child as she walked past it. She paused, wondering if she should be able to determine its sex, but the swaddled clothing and its extreme youth made it impossible for her to guess.

"I saw something nasty in the linen cupboard," said a young girl, dressed a maid, walking past.

"I saw something nasty clinging to the back of the produce truck," said the produce man, who'd come in behind her leading Benedict by the hand, and Stella whirled around, spraying water droplets everywhere, to berate him.

“If I’d wanted to be soaked in my own kitchen I should have bought a dog,” said a cool voice behind her before she could open her mouth, and so she turned again.  This time she turned more slowly so that her wet hair slapped lightly against her face and the water droplets simply hazed a little in front of her face.  The speaker was an elderly woman, tall and well-dressed.  She stood with impressive mien, suggesting that she fully ruled all she surveyed, and her face had a certain smoothness to it that Stella understood to mean that she was much older than she actually looked, but had taken care to conceal it.

“You have four dogs, Great-grandmama,” said the lugubrious child, walking now in the opposite direction and carrying a pie in a china dish.

“Hush child,” said the woman, not taking her eyes off Stella.  “None of my dogs would come into the kitchen and shake themselves free of water from their coats.  They are too well-trained for that.”

“She said she were comin’ ‘ere,” said the produce man, and Stella considered turning yet again to face him, but then worried that she might seem like a whirling dervish.  She’d never seen such a thing, but she’d written four articles on the topic for Sunday supplements and had received a modest amount of appreciative letters that she’d been able to feed to the Editor for the Letters Page over a period of weeks.  “So I let her come along.  I’d no idea that she would be so ill-mannered, Ms. Fate.”

Ms. Fate!  The woman who faced her, whose eyes seemed to be trying to dig into her face and tunnel through her skull to inspect her brain must be Mabel Fate, head of the clan at Droplets Farm!

“No blame attaches,” said Mabel sounding eerily like the I Ching.  “I’m sure she seduced you with her London ways.”

“A seduction!” roared Benedict, his voice too loud even for the large kitchen.  It echoes from the walls and bounced off the rafters and threatened to rattle the glass in the windows.  “Now there’s a thing!”

“Indoor voice, please, Benny,” said Mabel.  She spared him a glance, freeing Stella momentarily from her icy gaze, and Benedict subsided, his own near-blind eyes casting to the floor.  “Now child, what brings you to Droplets?”

“I sent a letter,” said Stella.  She was trying to sound calm, collected and defiant, but she was worrying the whole time that she sounded petulant.  “And I received one in return, filled with mysterious references to sexual liaisons and the promises of rights owing to me if I came here.  So naturally I came at once.  I sent another letter ahead of me, surely you’ve received it?”

“And what is wrong with email anyway?” said Mabel, her words as smooth as new ice on water.  “Or a phone-call perhaps?  Heavens, I think there’s even still a fax machine in the hall if you’d tried that.  The number is on the Droplets Farm website.  But either way, I dictated the letter you received myself, and I am certain that what I said was: ‘that if you came here, I’d see you bang to rights’.  I imagine in your London hurry you were reading it while rushing through the Underground and managed not only to misread the words but to misunderstand those that percolated through.  You are, after all, the Wooden Post’s child, and I am expecting little more than a stump.”

Stella’s mouth gaped like a stunned goldfish, and after a short pause she collected herself and closed it up again.  She was sure that the letter was different, and she’d only written out of deference to the fact that these cousins, however remote, lived on a farm!  Of course they couldn’t be expected to be modern and moving with the times.  And Mabel Fate, legendary dowager, had to be eighty by now, and presumably was scared of televisions, hairdryers and microwaves.  Email was unthinkable to a woman like her, surely?

“I was hoping to visit for a while,” she said, aware that it sounded mean and wheedling.

“You were hoping to interfere in family life,” said Mabel, as firm as Stella was indecisive.  “It will not happen.  I have no desire to incubate adders in the womb.”

“I wanted to ask about that!” said Stella, latching on to something where she felt she might have an edge.  “Your name is Mabel Fate, yet the family here are all called Arkstabber.  Why is that?”

“There have always been Arkstabbers at Droplets Farm!” said Benedict suddenly, cutting Mabel off before she could speak.  “Always!”

“In fact,” said Mabel in the tones of one who has had to explain this more times already than she felt was necessary, “this a New Farm built in the 60s when the government was worrying about too few people living off the land.  Before that it was a crematorium, and before that it was the site of two kilns.  This explains the local deforestation that made this viable as farmland, and allowed the crematorium to take advantage of the kilns and repurpose them as ovens.  We have further repurposed them as small, inadequate granaries, but we they’re apparently listed buildings so we have to do with them what we can without materially affecting them in any way.  Since no Arkstabber has been cremated, let alone worked in a crematorium, and kilning is simply not something Arkstabbers do, there has in fact been Arkstabbers at Droplets for only the last 50 years or so.  Benny.”

The old man dropped his gaze back to the floor again and looked a mere shadow of himself.

“As for you, young lady,” she continued, “You may call me Great-grandmama only.”

“That’s a bit of a mouthful,” said Stella, endeavouring to protest.  Her voice was still weak and reedy in the large kitchen.  Only Mabel seemed to have the trick of using the acoustics to add body to her words and reverb to her speeches.

“Then perhaps it will encourage you to think through the rest of what you’re saying before you say it.”

Futureproofing your prison

"This is by nature of a test," said the little man on the television screen.  His face was rosy-cheeked and slightly too plump, he looked like an idealised child from an Enid Blyton novel.  "The key to your manacles has been fed to your sleeping companion.  They are comatose and will remain so unless fed an antidote, which is just outside the door to this room.  The ceiling, which you will have observed, is decorated with art deco spikes, is descending at the rate of fourteen yoctometres every nanosecond and will not stop descending.  You may choose whether to save yourself, by extracting the key from your companion, or to die together in a companionable death that will be rather more agonising for you that your anaesthetised friend."
Max produced a gun from the waistband of his jeans and shot the companion in its head.  It exploded like a rotten melon, scattering seeds everywhere.  The man-child on the television started screaming, its hands thrown up own its face with only its eyes peeking through its fingers.
"Key, huh," grunted Max, forcing his hand down the companion's neck.  The companion's body split rapidly apart, confirming that it had never been human and was, in fact, mostly deoderised pork with lumps of plaster-of-paris here and there, plus two hands and two feet for realism.
"Where did you get that gun?" screamed the man-child on the television?  "You're not supposed to have a gun!  You're supposed to be caught in an ethical quandary!"
Max's questing fingers found a key and pulled it free from the meat-sack with a sucking sound.  He looked at the television screen, a little flat-screen set into a concrete wall above a prison bunk.
"A tickle quarry?" he said, his brow creasing.  His eyebrows were the black, bushy kind that looked ready to walk off his face by themselves if you stopped looking at them for long enough.
"An ethical quandary!" screamed the man-child.  "You're supposed to care for your companion!"
"Never cared for nuffin', right?" said Max.  "Nuffin never cared noffin' for me."
"...what?"
"Anyway, that's not Jamie," said Max.  "Jamie snores when he's asleep, right?  And Jamie's not dumb enuff to eat keys.  That's Dave.  Dave eats keys."
"Dave eats keys?" said the man-child weakly, pulling its hands away from its face.  The ruddiness of its cheeks had gone splotchy and little white spots had appeared.  "Who is Dave?"
"Dave's my other friend," said Max. "But Jamie's my real friend.  He lets me stick it in him when he's sad."
The man-child stared at the screen, its oversized eyes somehow managing to grow a little bigger still.  Pink veins appeared in the whites, close to the corners of its eyes.  Finally it seemed to get hold of itself.
"Hah!  Well, you might have the key but that's only the key to your manacles.  You still don't have... wait, where are your manacles?  Why aren't you wearing any manacles?"
"Big fish, ain't they?" said Max inspecting the key, and wiping pieces of sticky melon from it.  "Can't wear fish, not on a Friday."
"Bu–whu–muh." said the man-child, its mouth moving like a goldfish while its voice tried to syncopate.  "Fish?  Fish?  You're supposed to be locked up, so that I can tell you that unlocking one off the cuffs will set off a charge inside the manacle that will sever your wrist and cause you to bleed to death unless treated."
"Right," said Max.  "What cuff's that then?"
"That's the problem!"  The little man-child was visibly raging.  "You're not wearing the chains!  You're not doing it right!"
"Chains?  I've got some of them down here," said Max, picking up a length of heavy chain with a metal wristcuff at either end.
"Oh... foodstuff!"  The little man made it sound like swearing.  "Fine, well, you still can't get out of the door because you've not got a key to it!  Haha!  You'll just have to sit there until the ceiling impales you, knowing that you killed your only friend to satisfy your own selfish urges!"
"Weren't my friend," said Max stolidly.  "Which end of this chain is the explodey one then?"
"I'm not telling you," said the man-child.  "It would do you no good anywa– wait, what are you doing?"
Max clicked both cuffs around the door handle and stuck the key in the lock of one of the cuffs.  Then he picked up a hand from the mess on the floor and bent its fingers around the key, ignoring the screams of rage from the television screen.  Then, standing to one size, he jiggled the hand until the key turned a little, igniting the explosive charge and blowing the handle and lock off the door.
While the man-child screamed and Max opened the door, two more people were sat in front of another television screen watching the interaction.
"But haven't you let the prisoner out now?" asked the person on the left, making a note on a piece of paper on a clipboard.
"No," said the other, picking at a freckle.  "The prisoner is the man-child."
"Ah," said the first, nodding and making another note.  "Perpetual frustration."
"And a never-ending sense of futility," said the second.  "The escaping prisoner has many more hoops to jump through, but the man-child believes he will be punished for every trap the faux-prisoner evades."
"You'd say you've succeeding in futureproofing your prison then?"
"In the sense that no-one in it has a future, yes."

Not the shrimp

"Why are we here?" The Blonde was looking particularly angry and for once I couldn't fault her. When we'd arrived, the maître'd had led us to our table at a processional pace more suited to a funeral, seated us with cold aplomb (and as regular readers will be aware, I like my aplomb luke-warm to hot) and had then, with quiet dignity, picked up the Blonde's handbag and placed it in an ice-bucket. Where it sat still, the stitching slowly coming apart and the faux-faux-crocodile skin losing its patina.
Faux-faux-crocodile, if you're interested, turns out to be real alligator. The trick is to say faux-faux with such a tone of world-weariness that the pest who's demanding to know if it's real or not understands that you hear the question all the time and are sick of having to dignify it with an answer. I am still trying to think what other situations I could put this to use in.
"Because I review restaurants, darling," I said, "and this is the one for next week's column."
"I hope you won't be saying anything nice about it!" When she's in a tizzy she looks a little like Charlie Chaplin, which I happen to find quite erotic. I may have to buy her a bowler hat when I am dragged to New York to replace the handbag.
The waiter reappeared at that point and asked what we'd like to drink, and if we were ready to order. Pleasantly he appeared not to recognise me, and as the Blonde was still staring at her handbag and fuming I ordered more or less at random from the various vellum pages that were arrayed in front of me. Then I asked him about them.
"Vellum? That's that thing from the Lord of the Rings film, isn't it?"
I opined that although making a menu out of Gollum might be seen by some as the only humane thing to do, there probably wasn't enough of him to make menus for the whole restaurant. The waiter did his best troglodyte impression, and, heaven help me, I persevered.
"Why is this menu made of this substance?" I translated, waving a sheet of cured sheepskin under his nose.
"Dunno, guv."
Can I say I was surprised? Can I say that I shouldn't have been?
Twenty minutes later he was back with our starter. He set a glass plinth down in the middle of the table, set a single shrimp atop it, produced a tiny dish of what I assumed was cream, or possibly whipped horseradish sauce, and carefully lathered up the shrimp's face.
"What's he doing?" whispered the Blonde. She has a stage whisper, so nearly every head in the room turned, save for the waiter who was now industriously stropping a straight-edge razor.
"I think he's shaving the shrimp," I whispered back.
"Why?"
I couldn't answer that, even after requesting a copy of the menu when we left. The menu certainly listed shaved shrimp, but was I really expected to believe that they were going to shave each individual shrimp in front of us and then expect us to eat them?
"I need a new handbag," said the Blonde as she hailed a cab by the simple expedient of unbuttoning the top button of her blouse.
"I shall get you a hat to go with it," I remarked.