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The day started like any other. The Jeremy woke to find himself presented with a slightly blurred view of the ceiling, adjusted his focus to include Gusk – his name for the little furry creature that always hovered a few inches above his face – checked he still had the use of his arms and legs, and in so doing, confirmed what had come to be an unsurprising and exceedingly tiresome fact; he was lying in a pile of shit which had been generously marinated in urine. The knowledge that it was his own shit and his own urine was not much of a palliative. There was only one possible course of action.
“Waarrrghhhh!” he shouted.
He knew he’d probably have to repeat it several times before his mother’s face appeared next to Gusk. He also knew that some days he’d have to repeat it more times than others. But it rarely got to the point of ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’ And on those very rare occasions when it did, his mother would be extra loving when she arrived, apologizing profusely.
The crux of the matter was, he knew she would come. She would appear and that would signal the start of the morning ritual. Not a ritual he particularly enjoyed, having exhausted his fascination with fluid mechanics, but one he happily endured because the end result was worth it. Besides, all through it, his mother would speak to him in soothing, reassuring tones.
On this particular morning, she appeared right on cue. She had an exceptionally chirpy disposition too – it was as if her face was bathed in the light of her own personal sun. He smiled and gurgled appreciatively.
“Mish,” he said.
Often, he would find that his ‘mish’ – a multi-purpose word somewhat similar to the Joker in a pack of playing cards – would be followed, moments later, by an involuntary ‘guck’. The ‘guck’ would be in response to his mother touching parts of his body. It was a touch which produced a pleasurable sensation, but one which could not be endured for too long.
“Guck, guck, guck, Guck, GUCK, guck, Guck, guck, Guck,” he giggled, as his mother playfully tickled him.
He noticed, with some interest, that he was being dressed in new clothes. Mostly white, with a bit of blue here and there. They had a smooth feel where they touched his skin, and made a rustling noise when he moved. He laughed, jerking his arms up and down. These were funny clothes! His mother laughed too. There was a hat as well, made of the same material. It felt a bit cold to the touch when his mother put it on his head, but not an unpleasant coldness. He laughed some more, and dribbled some saliva down his chin.
He was startled by his mother’s swift reaction. In a blur of movement, she produced a handkerchief and the saliva was wiped away. The Jeremy found this unexpected behaviour disconcerting and expressed it with a ‘Wrhgh’, an abbreviation he sometimes used as a forerunner to a full blown ‘Waarrrghhhh!’
“Oh I’m sorry my darling. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just want you to look your best today. There, there …”
The sound of her words permeated his mind as she gently picked him up, clasping him to her. He didn’t need to understand their linguistic meaning. He settled into his mother’s arms, listening to the beating of her heart while searching for the nectar. Soon his startlement was forgotten.
∞
He must have drifted back to sleep for a while, because the next thing presented to his conscious mind was the movement he’d come to associate with an influx of lots of interesting visual stimuli. His mother was carrying him while she walked. Not the way she’d carried him earlier – that was comfort mode. This was travel mode. She’d propped him up so he could see over her shoulder. He liked it when she carried him that way because things stayed in his field of vision for longer. When he was facing the direction of travel, things were forever disappearing before he could get a good look at them. Besides, it was a bit cold today, and it felt warmer this way round.
There it was – the big expanse of grass. He’d seen it before, but when he wasn’t actually looking at it he could never picture it the way it really was. The green of it. He spent a little time pondering the different greens he’d observed and their relative greenness. But it taxed his faculties just imagining colours in his head.
There was a bird strutting about in the grass. It spent most of its time looking around with little darting motions of its head and neck. Every once in a while, it would apparently glimpse something, and pause to peck at it before resuming its staccato perusal of its environment. Then, in a flurry of jumps, skips and wing-flaps, it took off and flew into the sky.
The Jeremy was not in the least bit amazed by the bird’s ability to fly. Birds just did that. But he was fascinated by their flight. He watched the bird fly away, first in this direction and then another. It held his gaze for a long time, until his concentration was interrupted by a change in his mother’s pattern of movement.
He felt the g-force acting upon him as his body was accelerated upwards with every step. His head wobbled in response, echoing the motion. He heard the change in the sound of his mother’s footsteps as her shoes made abrasive contact with the stone steps, which obligingly appeared under her heels. And then he heard other footsteps from unseen feet. Whose feet were they?
His mother paused. He noticed there were hundreds of little specks of colour randomly placed on the ground. Of course, he hadn’t yet mastered the art of counting, so for him, quantity was a simple matter of one or many. In this case, even ‘many’ seemed inadequate as a descriptor. As his mother turned through ninety degrees, he was just able to catch a glimpse of a cluster of the coloured specks rising from the ground. Picked up by a gust of wind, they swirled about as if they were all joined together by invisible elastic ties.
In his new orientation, that which came into view was the small-faced person, who was looking up at him from below. One of its hands was clutching his mother’s coat belt. It made no funny or peculiar facial movements. It just looked up at him, and began absent-mindedly twisting the belt. He returned its gaze. It wasn’t a stand-off sort of gaze, just two observers observing each other but having nothing to say.
He tried to adjust his position, but found his movements were restricted. He gave another wriggle. As he did so, he felt his mother’s grip on him tighten very slightly, and then the steady thunk, thunk, thunk as she patted his back. The rhythmic thunking had a hypnotic effect and was sufficiently distracting that he forgot about being unable to move. Dr Benjamin Spock would have been proud of the Jeremy’s mother. She adjusted his shawl to keep it snugly wrapped around him. He quite liked his shawl. It kept him warm even if he couldn’t do much wriggling, something he liked to do for no particular reason now and again.
They were on the move once more, and he detected the change in ambience as they passed through the big, open doorway. He’d noticed the effect before, but it was still interesting.
There were a lot of people inside, mostly of the big variety, and more were following behind him. He thought he might have seen some of their faces before, but things were moving fast. He found it hard to focus on any one face long enough to be sure. But he could detect that lots of them were smiling, and the smiles appeared to be aimed in his direction.
“Mish,” he said.But this time there was no involuntary ‘guck’.
∞
The Jeremy resurfaced from a reverie. A quick check of his sensory inputs told him he was still in the big building, safely in his mother’s arms.
“Mish,” he said again.
Still no ‘guck’, but it did generate a gentle squeeze in response. His mother stood up and moved again. Not very far this time. She simply took a few paces forward. Then he heard a voice which was vaguely familiar. ‘Familiar’, in as much as he’d heard it in this building before, but not in the sense of being particularly fond of it. It sounded slightly surreal. Of course, he had no awareness of the surrealist movement, but even so, the voice was no less surreal.
It was a good deal closer to him than usual. Every so often it would pause and his mother would speak. Her voice was slightly odd too, not at all like the way she talked to him. Then she fell silent, gently rocking him in her arms. The voice continued on in its surreality, this time the pauses filled by his father’s voice. It was more difficult to tell if his voice sounded odd because the Jeremy had much less historical data to go on.
The surreal voice was at it again, the only noticeable difference being the filling of the gaps, first by one voice, then another. He thought he might know those voices too, but he couldn’t see the faces to which they belonged, so the identity of the speakers remained just out of reach. His mother continued to rock him gently.
Things were happening again. His mother was removing his hat which was a bit of a surprise. The contact with the air made his head feel somewhat chilly. It didn’t make any sense to him, but she often did things he didn’t understand. He was used to that.
What she did next was strange. She held him out in front of her, not quite at arms length. It was as if she was going to give him to someone, but he couldn’t feel any hands preparing to take hold of him. He lay there in her outstretched arms, looking up into the vast space between him and the curved shapes of the far away ceiling.
A face appeared a short distance above him. When it spoke, it proved to be the source of the surreal voice. He couldn’t remember any previous occasion when he’d seen it at such close range, and certainly not from such an angle. It was smiling, or rather, had the appearance of smiling. He felt unsure if this was a face he could trust, and he was certainly glad his mother was holding him, no matter how strangely. The face spoke again and, as it did so, in to view came something else.
It took a moment for him to figure it out, but it looked a little like the jug his mother used when she bathed him, except this one was a bit more fancy. It had a pattern on the side, but he couldn’t make out the detail due to the angle at which it was held. Almost as if it was able to understand his difficulty, the hand which held it slowly began to turn, enabling him to get a better look.
Time decelerated to very nearly a complete stop at the exact moment the meniscus of the water appeared at the lip of the jug. That is, of course, everywhere except inside the Jeremy’s brain where the neurone cavalry had already begun its charge, mobilising all idle cells as it went. The order for adrenaline was given and it was there in an instant, a testament to the impressive efficiency already in place in this developing environment. Next up was the order to take evasive action. Like fire-fighting bucket-chains on steroids, the message was passed from cell to cell on its concurrent journeys to the muscles in his arms and legs. The muscles obeyed without question, but in a tiny fraction of a second, the feedback showed their efforts were not producing the expected results. In a last ditch attempt to prevent what was rapidly becoming inevitable, the Jeremy’s vocal chords were primed for action.
In the conscious part of his mind, the foregoing events could be translated as, “WHOA! BE CAREFUL! THAT WATER IS GOING TO FALL OUT OF YOUR JUG AND LAND ON MY HEAD! HEY!! IT’S SPILLING!! IT’S SPILLING!!! WHAT’S GOING ON!!? HELP!! I CAN’T MOVE!! SOMEONE HAS PUT ME IN A STRAIGHT JACKET!” swiftly followed by, “MUM!!! HELP ME!!!!!”
And to find out what happened next, you'll have to beg, borrow or steal the book. Or you could buy it...
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