Duh, duh, DUUUUH!
The oyster shell! A hoax! A simple ruse! To bring her out here so she might be devoured, be consumed by Ein Sof!
A helpless offering.
A rebellious hors d’oeuvre.
Avigail tries to turn but cannot turn. The something-in-nothing, solid-in-space, quiet-in-sound energy – the awareness – the tiny adjustment – the shift – is consuming everything, entering everything, transforming everything but leaving all things exactly the same. Ah, such omnipresence, such savage-quiet-gentleness, such irreducible implacability …
Immanence.
All God.
All complete.
Everywhere.
In everything.
Leit Atar panuy mi-neya, as her father was often wont to say.
(No site is devoid of it.)
Ein Sof.
The Unending.
‘I starved you out, damn you!’ Avigail groans, then – using every inch of her remaining power – she hurls herself over a low garden wall and crouches there.
Hiding.
Hiding from Ein Sof.
Which is impossible. And ridiculous. But she’s been doing it her entire life.
Because Ein Sof allows free will.
That’s the whole point.
Isn’t it?
Time – obligingly – passes (and also – quite unhelpfully – stands still).
‘Avigail …? Um. Hello? Avigail?’
It is Charles. He has followed Avigail down the road.
Please don’t let that be Charles, Avigail thinks.
Although who else could it possibly be?
She opens her eyes. It is Charles.
Charles has been illumined by Ein Sof but doesn’t yet seem to realise (the idiot).
Have I been illumined? Avigail wonders. She peers down at herself.
She can’t really tell.
Perhaps she is in denial?
Screw ‘denial’! She has no time for ‘denial’.
Avigail is a great grasper of nettles.
She likes the sting!
Is the garden wall illumined?
Yes. The wall seems illumined. Everything is illumined.
Everything is illumined.
‘Are you feeling okay, Charles?’ Avigail asks from her crouching position (opting to take the initiative).
‘I …’ Charles is about to ask Avigail why she is hiding behind a wall and then is saved from this awkward necessity by a woman coming out of the house and asking Avigail what she is doing crouching in her flowerbed.
The woman is illumined.
‘Oh, hi.’ Avigail rises to her feet. ‘I am searching for evidence,’ she announces, with a slight air of foreboding.
‘Evidence?’
The garden is illumined.
‘A client of mine was injured by an oyster shell which was dropped by a seagull and I am looking for that oyster shell. As evidence. She has a head wound. It’s quite serious, actually.’
The woman silently processes this information.
The cottage is illumined.
‘If you happen to see a bloodied oyster shell – here, in the local vicinity – I’d be incredibly grateful if you could contact me.’
Avigail hunts around in her handbag and pulls out a business card.
‘Here’s my card.’ She points. ‘My name is Avigail. A-vi-gail. These are my contact details: mobile, email …’
She strides towards the woman and hands her the card. The woman takes the card.
The business card is illumined.
Am I illumined? Avigail wonders.
Damn you! Damn you, Ein Sof!
The illumined woman thanks Avigail for the illumined business card.
‘Thank you,’ Avigail responds. ‘And sorry for the … you know … disturbance.’
She takes the woman’s hand and shakes it, ceremoniously.
Yes. Extremely cordial. Utterly measured. Very calm. Perfectly normal.
She then strides back towards Charles. Out through the gate this time. She clicks the latch shut with a distinct touch of brio.
The latch is illumined. Click-ick-ick-ick. It sings.
‘Are you all right, there, Charles?’ she asks again.
‘Where are Ying Yue and Wang Shu?’
‘I came to fetch you because I didn’t feel comfortable showing them around on my own,’ Charles says limply.
Charles is illumined. But he’s still Charles.
Alas.
‘Do you feel different?’ Avigail wonders, inspecting Charles’s illumined face.
‘Sorry?’
‘Like soft water. You know how it is when water is hard – it’s been heavily processed, is full of chemicals – but then it’s filtered and it becomes kind of … softer … chalky?’
Charles gazes at Avigail for a few seconds and then says slowly, ‘I’m not sure if I’m really capable of answering that question, Avigail.’
‘Not to worry.’ Avigail shrugs. ‘I just wondered.’
‘I didn’t want to leave the door on the latch,’ Charles explains. ‘You have some … uh … soil on your skirt.’
Charles doesn’t want to admit that he has suddenly become nervous around Ying Yue. There’s a kind of …
What is it?
Impossible to say.
Something new.
Something distinctly alien.
‘It’s twelve years since the attempted burglary.’ Avigail dusts the mud off as she walks. ‘Last year there were six burglaries in Llandudno, which totals at 2.6 per cent of all crime in the town. Burglary is not a serious problem in Llandudno. It’s only a problem in Llandudno if you choose to make it a problem.’
‘There’s a small issue with the bailiff,’ Charles explains, ignoring this.
As they walk up the road and approach Charles’s house they stroll past a tiny, elderly man who is wearing a giant pair of dark glasses and holding a white cane. He is standing next to a large, blue, waste disposal bin. He is perfectly still.
The blind old man is illumined.
‘I see. Yes. Isn’t that your cat?’ Avigail points.
A hairless Sphynx cat is mooching down the road.
It is Morpheus. Charles curses and trots after Morpheus.
Morpheus is illumined.
Morpheus makes no attempt to avoid Charles on his approach. He is passive. Charles picks him up.
Illumined man. Illumined cat.
‘I pulled the door shut behind me,’ he grumbles.
‘I’ve no idea how he got out.’
‘Let’s get inside,’ Avigail suggests (determined to snap out of her stupid, trippy head-space), ‘and try to salvage what remains of this viewing, shall we?’
Charles follows Avigail back into the house. He senses that Avigail thinks he is the problem when in actual fact she is the problem. Yes. Avigail seems to be exhibiting a mode of behaviour which Grannon may well call ‘blame shifting’.
Avigail’s ‘Reality Filter’ is all fucked up, Charles thinks.
Seriously.
She’s nuts.
Crouching behind the wall like that?!
He puts Morpheus down and shuts the door.
Hmm. He shoots a bolt, thoughtfully.
The ‘somatic’ body? What is ‘the somatic body’? What did Grannon mean by ‘the somatic body’?
Must Google.
They find Wang Shu and Ying Yue in the kitchen. Wang Shu is on the phone talking in Chinese. Ying Yue is poking an inquisitive finger through a small hole in a pair of Charles’s Y-fronts which are hung on a large, rectangular drying rack.
She seems to be holding her breath. Or if she isn’t, she exhales, sharply (for no discernible reason), when Charles and Avigail enter the room.
Charles ignores Ying Yue. Ying Yue is freaking him out. Instead he glances over at Avigail and wonders if there is anything about her – anything at all – that might be worth emulating. Avigail must be all of twenty-five years old (Avigail is actually thirty-five years old) and has a funny way of tensing her right cheek and glaring intently at a person when she’s concentrating. It’s a kind of grimace – almost a tic.
Her dedication to her work – her … passion? Drive? Focus? Diligence? It’s certainly notable – interesting – almost admirable. But no. No. That’s not something Charles would want to impersonate. He fleetingly wonders whether Avigail is a perfectionist. And whether Avigail herself has any role models; people she aspires to emulate?
There is actually someone.
Avigail aspires to be like Lucy Molloy, the Perth-based YouTube housewife/tattoo model.
Given a thousand guesses, Charles would never have imagined Lucy Molloy was Avigail’s role model. This is mainly because Charles has no idea who Lucy Molloy is. And he doesn’t know Avigail very well. But there are other reasons, too.
Ying Yue knows, though!
Ying Yue knows who Lucy Molloy is!
Ying Yue also worships at the altar of Lucy Molloy!
This is a powerful tie – a profound connection – between Ying Yue and Avigail, but unfortunately neither of them is aware of it or is likely to find out about it, either, during this brief, twenty-minute house viewing.
Such a shame.
Good enough is more than enough for me!
That’s the mantra. That’s the phrase that Grannon came up with as a perfectionist teen.
Good enough is more than enough. For me.
They are in the kitchen. The short entrance hall leads straight into a dark, poky kitchen. There is some rather astonishing 1970s tilework in here by the famous designer Alan Wallwork, although much of it is obscured by a random collection of stuff (some still unopened and in its original packaging) which litters the counters.
It has never struck Charles as remotely ‘ironic’ that a celebrated designer of tiles should be called ‘Wall-work’. Given Charles’s advanced grasp of this particular comic form/rhetorical device, such an oversight on his part could probably be seen as ‘ironic’.
Ah, but ‘the world is incorrigibly plural … crazier and more of it than we think’, as the great poet Louis MacNeice was oft wont to say (although not quite in that order).
These tiles are definitely an acquired taste. Charles doesn’t like the tiles but he is very, very attached to them for some inexplicable reason probably connected to his mother, Branimira. And, as luck would have it, Charles has recently taken the opportunity to do a load of washing. About five ironic T-shirts – one of which reads: Every time you make a typo, the errorists win – some baggy, black Y-fronts and some black socks are hung over the heated bars of a free-standing electric clothes dryer. A rack.
The room is consequently very hot.
Wang Shu is still talking on the phone in Chinese.
On the very rare occasions when Wang Shu isn’t talking on the phone in Chinese she enjoys watching YouTube footage of cats falling.
Someone or something scaring the shit out of a cat makes her laugh so hard and so loud that sometimes her loving daughter Ying Yue fears for her well-being. And her sanity. She laughs and laughs and laughs until she sobs. And then suddenly – in an instant – every inch of happiness is sucked – by a giant, black vortex – out of the world and Wang Shu is rendered inconsolable.
This has made Ying Yue suspicious of pleasure. Ying Yue has not been raised in a faith tradition but she senses that pleasure often has dire consequences. The Christians were completely right about that.
‘Do you have a bin, Charles?’ Avigail asks.
Avigail could happily punch Charles square in the face for opting to do his washing today and for hanging it on a sodding free-standing heated rack in the tiny kitchen and then loitering next to it, hugely, and draining all available light and air from the room.
Avigail’s mother actually used a rather more antique version of this particular kind of dryer when she was a girl. It brings back bittersweet memories for Avigail. Whenever Avigail was home from hospital as a teen she would sit in the kitchen, gazing at her plate of gefilte fish patties (she was a slow eater until she stopped eating altogether) and imagine that the dryer was some kind of Tardis. A time machine that she could climb inside and use to travel to distant epochs/different galaxies. Yes. Away.
AWAY FROM FAMILY.
AWAY FROM GOD.
Charles has neglected to cover the rack in a sheet or duvet cover. Avigail believes that this is key. The idea is to do your sheets and duvets – your household linens – in the first wash so that when you do your personal items – your vests, smalls etc. in the second wash they can be hung within a modest curtain of fabric, the warm air is contained, and the dryer is therefore rendered both more cost-effective and more productive.
Charles is standing next to his kitchen bin with his foot applied to the little pedal so the lid is standing proud.
‘Would you like to dispose of your tissue in Charles’s kitchen bin, Ying Yue?’ Avigail asks, pointing.
Ying Yue is still clutching the bloodied tissue. She looks over towards the bin. She frowns and focuses very hard. Then she screws the tissue up into a tight ball and lobs it towards the bin. The overall distance between Ying Yue and the bin is about three feet, in total. There is no discernible reason for Ying Yue not to step forward and gently place the tissue into the bin. But she throws the tissue. And she misses the bin. The tissue hits Charles in the groin area and then ricochets on to the kitchen lino and slides across the floor. Before anyone can move to retrieve it, Morpheus, who has been loitering around in the hallway, darts into the kitchen to attack the tissue and play pitter-pat with it between his funny, naked, pink paws. Because Wang Shu has been talking on the phone (in Chinese) all the while, she has only been partially aware of the transaction re the tissue and is completely unaware of the existence of Morpheus. When Morpheus suddenly darts into the kitchen, Wang Shu (who is still talking on the phone) takes him – in his hairless state – to be some kind of bizarrely distended rat. A terrifying, supernatural creature. She screams (of course Wang Shu does not scream – she is constitutionally incapable of anything as feminine and pointless as screaming – she yells, she squawks, like an irate raven) and springs away from Morpheus into the gap between the fridge/freezer and the door. Unfortunately any sudden movement in a room so full of stuff is liable to cause a measure of disruption. Wang Shu knocks into the fridge/freezer on top of which Charles stores not only his kettle, but a tea tray full of tea accoutrements, and a second and a third kettle (which he has reason to believe will be more ergonomic/faster/cheaper to boil/less prone to producing limescale etc. than the one he currently uses), plus a collection of black teas, white teas, green teas and smoked teas, and teas to aid the promotion of digestion, sleep, liver and kidney regulation, nasal decongestion, calm, serenity etc. etc.
Avigail moves (her lightning responses are something Charles does find enviable) to support Wang Shu, although she finds herself actually unable to touch Wang Shu in the final instant because Wang Shu seems to have an inviolable space around her which it is absolutely impossible to penetrate (this is an essential part of something which – in informal lingo – you might call Wang Shu’s ‘personality’), so Avigail diverts to catch a couple of the items currently falling from on top of the fridge/freezer (a tea for menstrual cramps, a silver-plated cream jug).
Ying Yue (as Wang Shu’s mirror) is compelled to mimic her mother’s reaction (but with a little more finesse) so also springs back, in shock, against the surface behind her and accidentally knocks into a broom that happens to be leaning there. The broom falls forward. The broom’s handle knocks into Avigail (first), then hits the very tip of Wang Shu’s trainer (after). Wang Shu yells again – even louder (if that’s remotely possible) – and drops her phone.
Wang Shu’s sacred phone!
Where is Wang Shu without her phone?!
Who is Wang Shu without her phone?
Can this really be happening?!
As she catches the jug Avigail has a sudden – unconnected – thought. She thinks.
Oh. I see … Everything is illumined. Of course. Everything is illumined –
speciality tea, cream jug …
Everything is illumined. Always. Constantly. Perpetually. Ineffably. Illumined. All of matter. Illumined. It’s just a question of quietly glancing down, focusing …
Ein Sof, in everything, NOW.
Ein Sof is always in the present tense.
Ein Sof never was. Ein Sof IS.
The broom clatters to the ground. The broom is illumined. Ying Yue makes no attempt to grab the broom because being hit by a broom (even an illumined broom) is considered INCREDIBLY BAD LUCK to the Chinese. Charles – who has very slow reflexes – does nothing. Morpheus is thoroughly traumatised by everything (the squawking, the sudden movements, the phone, the illumined broom) and piles straight into the illumined drying rack. The rack teeter-totters (Charles – finally spurred into action – stills it with a single, calm movement of the hand) and Morpheus performs a quick 180-degree turn, exiting the rack (head and torso obliterated by a T-shirt that reads: I support the right to arm bears).
Because Morpheus is unable to see where he is going, but is terrified, he (illumined cat) careers straight into the fallen (illumined) broom, panics still further, continues his forward momentum, smacks into the (illumined) fridge and is now moving at such high speed that he just keeps on going, runs approximately a foot, vertically, up the fridge, then performs an impressive loop-the-loop, or a back flip, or whatever it is.
Wow.
A cat falls.
A shocked silence.
Wang Shu starts laughing.
Oh shit.