K8 the GR8

One of the best parts of having a head cold is that constant stoned feeling, I find.  Every now and then I find myself displaced, like I’m frozen in a weird reality where the atmosphere is denser and objects don’t make sense, like the world has been superimposed on itself.  This is when the strange stuff happens, stuff that you write off as temporary insanity.  Like last night, for instance.  The following is nothing but the truth.

It was dark.  I had a clingy child who needed distraction.  I carried her downstairs through the unlit sittingroom, and into the unlit kitchen.  There’s a very large wendy-house in my kitchen which takes up most of the floor space, it’s there because our garden is a mudbath and a pretty unsanitary place for a child to play in, unless you’ve done the rounds with a pooper-scooper. 

I bent down, puppychild in arms to the door of this wendy house and opened it.

“What’s in there?” I whispered excitedly to her.

“A man” She said.  She stared at the far corner of the miniature house.  My blood suddenly changed it’s direction of flow.

“What man?  Who’s there?”  I asked.  Puppychild began to babble non-sensically, then suddenly clung to me for dear life and shouted ‘Mummy no!‘ repeatedly until I stood up. 

Somewhat bewildered, I flooded the kitchen with light, and put puppychild down.  She ran out of the kitchen immediately.

Tommyknocker

This mildly creepy event would ordinarily have been written off in my mind, if it wasn’t for my friend once telling me that my house stood on an exhumed burial ground.  She told me I could look it up in the Wicklow Courthouse if I didn’t believe her. 

I would love to see a ghost.  I’m convinced I would be able to stand tall and look it in it’s misty eyes and talk to it quite sensibly.  At least I was convinced.  When you get spooked suddenly like this though, it’s quite easy to slip into mild panic.  I kept glancing at the reflective window expecting to see a horrible disfigured head behind me.  I kept glancing at the wendy house, looking for shifts in reality or cloudy apparitions.  Of course I saw nothing.

It doesn’t end there, my pretties, oh no.

Laughing boy’s room is a makeshift adaptation… we divided the kitchen in half with a partition, and made the extra space into his bedroom.  There is a small window cut into the partition that looks into the kitchen, and a small shelf which I use to make up kiddo’s meds.  I was standing here at this shelf, with puppychild to my left, playing on the floor.  Laughing boy was giggling in his bed behind me.  This was only a few moments after my wendy-house shock, so I was nervously humming ‘La Bamba’ to regain focus.

I turned to my right to fetch a syringe, and I saw this:

Thank God I don’t have kitchen chairs

I want to stress that this room is increadibly small.  If puppychild had done this, she would have to have done it extremely quickly, and would have to have pushed past me to do so.  The thing was that she was still playing on the floor on the other side of the room.

I got a dose of the shakes that Shane McGowan would’ve been proud of, let me tell you.  I left the bottles as they were for a moment, putting logical explanations together like a jigsaw.  When nothing fitted, I decided to ignore the whole issue, and went to put the bottles away.

“NOOO  mammy!” Puppychild yelled - “Um man diddit.  He’s help!”  I looked at laughing boy for support, but he was gazing at a spot over my shoulder with a blank face.

I’m a pretty sanguine girl you see.  I didn’t run away.  One word ran through my brain like an unstoppable train: Logic.

There are certain times in life when logic can’t be found, and you just have to accept the fact that there may be other forces at work,  which leads me to the acceptance that there may be a freeloading dead man sharing my house, and apparently he has something to say.

I suppose now it’s my job to investigate this.  I will start taking pictures of my empty kitchen.  I will place a full alphabet of magnetic letters on my fridge, and blank paper on the countertops, assuming this dude is literate enough to write something for me.  I will employ my dog to guard me, and note unusual behaviour. 

And, last of all, when I’m tucking my child into bed at night and if she whispers ‘I see dead people!’, I won’t doubt her for a second.

I sat on the floor at the back of the van, dangling my feet over the tarmac below.  A cool wind blew through me despite the oversized jacked I’d just put on.  I’d just spent two hours helping two men clean a housefull of gutters, which involves hoses and ladders and cross-breezes and accidental drenchings.
Mr. P walks over and tells me I don’t look well.  He advises me that as a fellow employee, he would advise me to bring them all home, lest I infect him and Ladderman D. He tells me that having to miss half a day’s work to go to TAT’s to play Tiger Woods would be worth the loss of earnings.

That gave me the idea. 

* * *

The battle raged as it had done for the last 27 years.  Constant enemy attack was commonplace inside the keeps, but the troops were well fed, well numbered and constantly prepared to defend their walls at whatever cost.  Recently they had been working harder than ever, but the atmosphere was running hot and cold, and their Queen was becoming weary.

She sat in a cold tower high above her kingdom.  Constant sounds of invasion clammered below, but were drowned out by the queen’s thoughts as she hatched a plan. On the sixth bell she sent for her messenger.

~

“You heard me.” The head of defence paced nervously around the main room that served as control centre.  “Direct orders.  We need to monitor sector 4 closely and relax it’s defences.”  He gazed over the see of confused faces and began to lay down the plan in detail. 

The orders didn’t make sense to these loyal subjects.  They had been told to let the enemy in.

A northern representative piped up.  “This could have disastrous effects, sir.  Head of State really isn’t going to like it.  Be it a direct order from our Queen or not, it still poses a great risk.  The enemy is clever, and can find doors within our castle that we have no knowledge of.  Once they enter, they can hide and infiltrate our system quickly.  By the time we catch wind of this, it may be too late!”

“This is why we must also prepare.  A message has already been sent to your sector.  There will be a great gathering tonight, where we will be merry and replenish.  Stocks of medicine have arrived, rest assured we will not be found weak.  We are preparing for a minor controlled invasion in sector 4 which will be over in a matter of days and then, my good people, we will re-emerge stronger than ever!!!”

The room erupted with cheers and animated chatter.  Meanwhile… elsewhere in the castle, a portcullis gate slowly opened.

* * *

The computer hummed and keys tapped names and numbers onto a spreadsheet.  I lounged on the couch nearby and passed the Xbox controller to a guy sitting to my right on a foldup chair smoking a cigarette.  I tried to speak, but the words got stuck in sticky sludge and made me cough.  He took a swing.

“Umm.  I think I’m sick.” I said.  TAT swung round in his leather office chair instantly.

“You’re shitting me!” He exclaimed.

“Doesn’t sound like it to me…” Xbox boy chimed in; “she sounds kind of husky to me.  One sick cat.”

TAT sank into a pool of groans and wore an expression like that of a hound in the rain.  The decision slowly dawned on him that maybe a day driving the lads around whilst sitting in the van reading a book might not be such a bad thing after all.

Today.  I am sitting on the couch with a duvet wrapped around me swigging echinacea straight from the bottle and playing Tiger Woods with glee.

Project ‘Mind over Matter’ executed succesfully.