Chapter One
A cockatoo the size of a tapir hopped impatiently at the end of a long corridor. It had one huge bulging black eye and wore a pirate hat. Mabel knew it was local custom to embrace the creature when the village had won a competition, like today. Hoping to avoid this, she walked up to a calm-looking Italian woman dressed like a grieving widow and asked what she was doing in her dream. The woman smiled as she began to force her thumbs into the soft hollow of Mabel’s throat, pushing down so hard on the jugular veins that blood was prevented from exiting her brain.
The pain sustained by a hard knock to the head against stucco plaster startled her back to the lack lustre lilac of linear time and with it, the regimented fright which rendered the disordered terror of her night-time transmutations a welcome deviation. Pirate cockatoos and choking widows notwithstanding.
The final nail in sleep’s coffin was hammered by her phone’s insincere chirrups urging its owner to engage with its pubescent preoccupations.
Had a badassical vacay with my fam! <3 feeling very blessed and looking forward to catching up with my mains! xxx
Grace wasn’t having the ‘badassical vacay’ her status claimed, not that she’d seen any of it. Even Mount Etna’s volcanic ashes couldn’t flick her Charlotte Tilbury Full Fat Lashes away from the Samsung Galaxy Ultra 5G Pro (with FHG display, fingerprint sensor and Space Zoom) during the two weeks she was kidnapped in club class to the warm Mediterranean fountain grass.
The delicate and ethereal baroque town in Sicily was exactly as described by Telegraph Travel Typist, Zoe Madmarch-Hare - a woman of whom it could never be said did not resemble an aristocratic horse wearing the spoils from some horse riot looting focussing mostly on Oliver Bonas.
OMG! I Soooooo love Solomon! Grace fawned over the Facebook wall of a boy who was definitely ghosting her since a poor internet connection had slackened the social media noose around her Achilles’ Spiel. Solomon’s currency was strong having been on the London news speaking truth to power about the personal struggle of moving from Sierra Leone to Putney whilst transitioning from gender fluid to gender rigid and back again with parents who inflicted an online theatre project upon ‘digitally impoverished’ teens.
“What’s his last name?” Dylan sprung up behind his sister’s shoulder like a hack-in-the-box, holding an imaginary microphone “What are his greatest fears? What’s the meaning behind the tattoo on his wrist? Unravel for us the interpersonal dynamics which cemented this unbreakable tryst?”
“WTAF!” Grace spat the acronym which took the same number of syllables to say as the words, and closed the door on her awkward, ugly, askhole brother. Her online activity was a delicately maintained political ecosystem and none of his business.
Grace had previously thought Sierra Leone was a car and gender fluid was the KY she’d found amongst their mum’s Marie Kondo concertinaed knickers – it didn’t spark joy but it did stop sparks flying – and however much Solomon’s shifting identity baffled her, she did understand that proximity to him was a political point scorer. He had a definitive package. Socially, if not in his trousers.
The cold leather of an armchair startled Dylan’s sun-scorched limbs. “Fam”, “mains”, was she insane? When did this begin? He couldn’t remember but was struck with a pang of nostalgia for the five-year-old sister who had helped him paint Tippex on snail shells so next time it rained they’d recognise individual characters, good old Snail Winton! (His favourite) Supermarket Snail was a childhood memory life could never wig snatch from him.
The rules were simple: gather as many snails as possible in empty egg boxes and the sibling with the least number had to leave them on a neighbour’s doorstep, ring the bell, shout “SUPERMARKET SNAIL!” and run away. This childhood game prompted their parents’ purchasing of a puppy hoping the distraction of a proper pet would end the trend.
Eleven years on, the Grace that Dylan remembered had been replaced with a gloomy spectre, a Superdrug Hannibal Lector, a cyber bailiff collecting data, a haunted house content creator.
Hair straightened so viciously it could advertise conversion therapy, eyebrows a kabuki actor would tone down, and contouring that would make Tony the Tiger feel like a flat-faced bastard. But creepiest of all, the eyes – the lights were off and even the squatters were thinking of calling their parents.
Dylan felt a prick - of guilt - about his austere assessment when a new notification busy-bodied its way through the inter-net curtains. Grace Curtis likes the page You Were Born an Original, Don’t Die a Copy! His top lip snarled back so far you could see his gums which were vexed vermillion courtesy of a crudely constructed toothbrush his mum had bought by the side of the dusty Ragusa Road from a carefree nomad with a small pet monkey and no teeth, but plenty of enterprise thanks to gap year Gabbys in hemp harem trousers and Sanskrit tattoos wanting selfies with him.
Ping, ping, ping. Half their halfwit mutuals also ‘liked’ the page. Dylan knew that to call it a sleight of hand by a generation of risk-averse conformists trying to make pumpkin spice blusher the new punk rock would be ‘negative’ or worse! – make him a ’hater’ He considered posting this expedient exposé for a misguided moment, quickly realising that whatever he wrote would be dismissed as a rant and so would writing that he acknowledged it would be dismissed a rant. And this, and this, and - looping endlessly with regularly repeating periods of expansion and contraction.
He closed the app - blue and white like government toothpaste. A screeching spreadsheet of salutary gloom. Nurse Ratched with a hatchet and a big birthday balloon.
The light faded, confronting him with his own face in the cracked screen and he frowned at his reflection upon reflecting that the Bugsy Malone cheek of two summers ago had been evicted and his body was being squatted by Glenda Jackson bones and David Bowie teeth.
Dylan took a deep breath, felt sick in his throat, and coughed, making his eyes water. There was that smell again; tainted, stagnant, prickling the back of his nostrils. It had become so rampant that he’d started searching under furniture and in cupboards for corpses.
He hadn’t even wanted this stupid account. Dad had created one for him when he was twelve so that he could ‘be involved’ with a charity motorcycle ride he was planning with some of the other dads; a complete ersatz of the never-ending BBC 3 programme a few months earlier: “Three Amigos Magical Mystery Tour!”. The comedians his dad idolised were now doughy, with podcasts, beards, cardigans, and autobiographies full of noble self-reflection about their patriarchal privilege. It felt as if not a day went by when it wasn’t on the screen. A Prime-time Michael Myers where every day is Halloween.
Three years had lapsed and Dylan had only used Facebook a couple of times. There was more on his page from his parents than from him. Once, in a moment of vulnerability, he’d written how bored he was and to his bewilderment, being five metres away at the time, comments from both his mum and dad appeared, informing him that there was a “brill” Bauhaus documentary on BBC4 prompting other adults to throw their two pennies down memory lane. Impaling offspring on Cocteau Twins, garrotting them with Joy Division. Dylan didn’t write about being bored again, with terse teenage derision.
“Dad, why?” without moving his lips, he shifted long, insolent legs under the mock wood table in the airport departure lounge.
“Just one more!” Dad was positioning a glass of white wine so that he could take a picture of the glass - caption: ‘be rude not to!’ - his children behind it and, if he contorted his body and used landscape, an aeroplane through a small window.
“Fucksake,” Dylan hissed through clenched teeth. Dad was now lying on the ground as two French girls in skiing gear giggled at the ghostly arse crack escaping the top of his Levis. “Who’s it even for?”
His protestations pissed into the wind as the pointless pictorial essay of Grace narrowing her eyes at a new TikTok star’s two minutes of lame, mum frowning at an angry rant another mum had posted on the Neighbourhood App about an email scam, and Dylan scowling through bony fingers pissed into Instagram.
#holiday #children #wine #airport #travel #summer #flight #home #sicily #family #photography #travel #gratitude.
Back in England, time crawled on its belly until their people carrier crawled into the orderly oppression of Magdalen Road. Dylan had been counting wicker hearts on doors and in windows since the M4. 3038.
The family exited the Twickenham Tanker and led each other up the garden path, each looking at their phones. From the back it would have looked like a clan in mourning, heads bowed in silent private prayer. The procession was lined with terracotta pots, the pallbearers two large, judgemental pedigree cats.
The priest was a La Hacienda linea self-standing chiminea with a sizable firebox and the removable flue was over their cuckoo’s nest as the device-driven dynasty dug into their digital dwellings.
Welcome home.
