GESCHICHTE

GESCHICHTE

She stared at the sea and thought of The Little Mermaid. She wore her insoles in the wrong shoes for two days, until she was nearly crippled. But physical pain wasn't cathartic. It wasn't an emotional release. It just made her more bad tempered.  

GESCHICHTE

GESCHICHTE

The sea kept them out 

The sea kept us in 

Drowning in nostalgia and nationalism 

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GESCHICHTE

As said, opined Ines 

(Her audience had grown),

The streets are a mess,

There's no place like home. 

My senses are sore 

My heart is quite dead. 

The life that I long for

Goes on in my head. 

GESCHICHTE

Indeed, these days Ines was so lonely that she'd have welcomed gladly an encounter with someone she professed to hate so long as he were familiar. 

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The man she'd loved most had had beautiful arms. 

Now she was obsessed with a stranger because he had too. 

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As the streets began to disintegrate into pot holes and rubble, the urgency to create Home Beautiful increased in a frenzy. 

The obsolete white goods and soft furnishings were left on the pavement to rot. Stray cats slept on cushions and dogs pissed up armchair legs. 

GESCHICHTE

It was a mystery ...

The 95A, or could it be B?

Left at 5 past the hour 

Or, perhaps, 33.

It may go to Asda

Or, then again not

The jury was out 

On where it may stop ...

Was für ein verdammtes Land, said Ines. 

GESCHICHTE

And another thing. 

When did it happen? Where had she been? At what point had the definition of fact become repeating nonsense ad nauseam? 

When everyone had stopped listening?

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She had always thought positively about nature's potential to reclaim the world, its capacity to wear away at manmade structures. To restore an order of some kind. 

But since the secession her opinions had changed. Ivy everywhere, and tenacious grasses. Mud and shit and leaves. Brambles that pricked and ripped and tore. 

Nature could also be mean and ugly.  

GESCHICHTE

For example, I went to order a book. The woman at the desk took a very long time - and very pretty friendly chatty too - to explain that it wasn't in print. 

I said it was. 

She looked again. 

Oh yes, she said, a different one. 

A different what? exclaimed Ines to her imaginary audience. She waved her left hand dismissively. A different one from the one that ten minutes ago didn't exist? 

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There's a direct correlation between inefficiency and bullshit, said Ines to her invisible interviewer. 

She was standing in a queue. 

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So what, said Ines to the imaginary microphone, what exactly strikes you as different now?

It's an aural geography, she began to explain. Bitterness and poverty are actually very noisy.

The imaginary interviewer looked at her quizzically. And what do you mean by that?

The roads are so bad that the traffic bangs and rattles. 

The brakes on the trains scream like people being tortured. 

The people complain like there's no tomorrow. 

The problem with earplugs is they make your ears itch. 

GESCHICHTE

Things had changed since the country had voted to secede from the Union. 

The  separation process was ongoing - though the economists, sociologists  and anthropologists believed it would never be complete, while the philosophers and some of the physicists opined that completion was an outmoded premise anyway - but its effects were very apparent to Ines. 

She'd been in self-imposed exile for twenty-six months. 

GESCHICHTE

Ich bin wieder da, said Ines to herself.

Looking a little worse for wear and speaking German like a Gastarbeiter, she added out loud. 

What passed for sensible and sartorially-acceptable where she'd been evidently looked out of place - perhaps insane - at Temple Meads. 

She felt like Julie Andrews leaving the convent. 

No one would meet her gaze.