Gates Of Ivory

I went to the hairdressers to check out my hair but he only seemed interested in my appearing white hairs. I said I was happy with them, just in time, as he was already starting to prepare the dye.
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It was going to be a group holiday, starting on a ship. The harbour was enormous, with vessels going in and out in busy traffic. There were two exits to the sea, in the distance. It took me a few moments to realise that they were too narrow to allow for more than one ship at any one time, and it would need to be a narrow ship too. So it was a kind of one way system, and all the ships were long and narrow, and so was ours.
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It seemed like a fancy party with fancy dresses from ancient times, or perhaps it was a normal party in ancient times.

My friends had all dressed up but I had not bothered, I wanted to be in my normal modern clothes without giving too much of a second thought to my hair or jewels. They seemed to have some kind of obsession with jewels.
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It was a group of us, and the king and queen. The titles were just nominal, a way of referring to the couple. Otherwise it can’t be explained that any of us would have had a quarrel with them, as they had. So bad was the disagreement that the king and queen left our company and the next day we had no idea where they were.
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A group of us were travelling, and learning from each other. We were travelling on cars and bikes. When we stopped, we gathered in groups and had workshops and talks. Some of them had guitars. I wanted to join their workshops but I did not have a guitar myself. Continue reading →

There was a building a few of us had squatted, and it was our base of operations. It may have been a social centre but it was not necessarily open for all. It was like an ancient convent, with its gallery around a patio with plants and a fountain. But it was all derelict and almost ready to be demolished. We used rooms that were quite dark, because the mechanisms that actioned the devices to let the light get in the rooms did not quite work.
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I was anticipating the visit of Sir Ch. or at least one of his family members. I wanted to show them everything I could that would have related to my childhood, so I went round the neighbourhood to see what was still there and what had disappeared.
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I was getting ready to go away. Big and others were doing lots of things. Our house was being completely made-over; presently it was a building site, and it would continue to be so in my absence. Outside, the street was undergoing changes too.
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Tamar saw me and he demanded to talk. I had booked my flight, had even checked in my luggage and had about forty five minutes before boarding. Tamar and I talked. I left and he wanted to talk more. I did not want to be even more delayed. The boarding desk was in a different part of the building, away from the building where the checking desk was, although I knew I could go from one to the other all the way indoors. I looked at the clocks and saw that I had seven minutes left. I had been at the desk before but I could not remember how to get there from where I was. A member of the airport staff told me about the public phones from where I could get information. I got to one of those phones. The voice at the other end laughed at me for wanting information, or expecting to find information there. The whole exercise of explaining my situation and where I needed to go and being laughed at for expecting information cost me about one minute of the seven I had. I would have to run to the desk but I still did not know in what direction.
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Father and I went outside the city, to the mountain surrounding it, and saw the other cities that were next to ours, beyond the city walls, from the summit. Passers by would help us identify those cities it was not easy because it was in the night and the see behind them was as dark as the cities and the only the light from the stars could help us see.

Some times a star would cross the sky and help us see better in the night. Then some stars would actually fall on the cities. Then we realised they were not stars but bombs. Some war had started.

Father an I went back to our house and hid. But it was not long before we realised we had to flee, like the rest of the neighbours. We started to pack the indispensables, just grab however little we could carry, knowing that we would have to carry our things on our backs as we walked. It was summer, so what we were wearing at the time was light and did not cover the whole of our bodies. Half way through the packing we remembered that we would probably need winter stuff too, because it didn’t look like we would ever again be able to come back, let alone before the winter. So we packed a few warm underwear. Then it was time to pack items that were not clothes. And we also needed money. We gathered all the money we could find in the house. Old money, new money. We did not find any coins, perhaps we were not looking. We gathered mainly twenty pound notes, the occasional fifty. We found money in places we had almost forgotten.

As we were on our way out, the neighbour’s little son came to visit. He was about three years old. His mother came to fetch him. She apologised but it was perfectly ok with us. We realised she was also packing. There was a suggestion to flee the house together but eventually she left before us with her son while we remembered at the last second about things we wanted to bring with us.

We fitted it all in comfortable bags that we could easily carry on our backs and left the building. We only walked a few metres when we were arrested. But by this time I was no longer with my father. My companion now was my girlfriend.

One of the arresting officers was the local vicious bastard. It all looked like taken out of a film about the nazi occupation in France. We were not manhandled at this stage but it probably was the end of our adventure. We were guided to the local nick, or maybe it was a random cell in the middle of a jungle. It was not a police or any complex. It was a single room in a single building with no buildings next to it. As we arrived, there was jungle outside it, but when we tried to escape there were streets surrounding it.

The officer gave us a lecture on why we should not have tried to escape the country. He then informed us that we would be confined to their custody for the duration of the war. Then he left us alone in this cell and left.

After a few hours we realised that the cell was not even closed. One of the walls was missing, or maybe it was a huge door on that wall and it had been left open. Then there was a small door on the opposite wall, and that too was open.

We thought of just gathering our things and run. My girlfriend was not too happy about the idea. Neither was I, but it was worth taking our chances before they would separate us and maybe even terminate our lives.

The logical or at least the first impulse was to just jump the huge door. We kind of figured that there would be some kind of trick, some kind of impediment that we were not seeing presently. I approached the open door in order to jump outside. Suddenly a voice came out of the walls of the cell, a robotised voice that reminded us that we were not allowed to leave. The voice said ‘this cell does not face the jungle lane, it faces the traffic lane’. It sounded like a reminder of the address of the place. What the voice was saying was that the valid entry to the cell was the small door, which was the entry facing the traffic street.

So we both went out of that door. Surely enough, the police headquarters were right opposite and the whole system had been designed so that our presence at the door was detected immediately. We had not walked twenty metres when lots of police, the vicious officer with them, ran towards us. We ran as well. My girlfriend, only then I realised, had been sedated and she could hardly walk. I knew that this was the time to leave her behind, or none of us would be saved. The officer got my girlfriend, lifted her almost inert body, and with it on his back, continued to run towards me. For some unknown reason he was exceptionally fast. He was faster than even the riot police behind him. And he got me soon enough. I would have to walk back to the cell, with him and my girlfriend, probably to face some punishment. It was clear that we would not go abroad at all now, or ever.

A friend asked me to house-sit his enormous house. It was big enough to have a swimming pool both inside and in the garden, but he preferred the community swimming pool so he had not built one for himself. I could stay in the house but I did not need to be inside all day, I was free to make myself at home and have a life outside as well.
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I had some “important” business to do with my bike somewhere far away from home. The place where I had to be was in a big city, but the reception of my mobile was clunky at best. So it was difficult to communicate with my family back home.

I spent a whole day dealing with this business but that was not quite enough, so I needed to stay for at least one more day – and the night in between.

I lost all chance to stay in people’s houses so I decided to set up “bed” on a bench on the main street to sleep.

I had also been trying to communicate with my family the whole day after I had learned that one of them had just had a stroke, with little success. All I had managed to learn was that Antoine was under observation in hospital, with doctors trying to decide whether to operate now or wait.

There was plenty of light on the high street and a corner shop open next to the bench. With a thick blanket I managed to have a nap amidst all the light and noise.

I woke up at one point in the middle of the night. The street was quieter now, but there were still a bunch of party goers around. One of the groups of dressed-up people was familiar. I could recognise some of the voices. They recognised me as well. One of them suggested to come to the bench where I was laying down to talk to me. Antoine answered: ‘It does not look like this may be the best moment.’ They walked down the street and I kind of agreed with Antoine. It would have been weird for a bunch of dressed-up people to come and talk to some one sleeping rough.

Then I remembered that it was difficult to contact Antoine and I called out – this was a rare opportunity to talk to him.

The whole group stopped and some walked towards me. Antoine had a white suit on, with white shoes to match. He was properly dressed up for a fine party. I said something like, ‘but hey, you have just had a stroke, you should be in observation! You should be in hospital, not here?’ He responded that he felt fine and he was not in pain at all, although he did get his hand to his heart.

The next day I got on a bus to finish off the business I had come to town for. On one of the stops, Nathan and Antoine got on. Great, I thought. It was another opportunity to talk to the family that I really needed to seize.

We sat on those sits where four people can face each other and we talked. Nathan put some of his things under his seat to talk more comfortably. At one point the bus stopped and there may have been some announcement that there would be some delay, because Nathan and Antoine got off to buy something quickly, leaving me with Nathan’s things in the bus.

It may have taken them longer than expected or the delay may have been shorter than announced. The bus set off again as they were coming out of the shop. Nathan looked especially distressed. He put his hand on his nose looking at me with his eyes wide open, as the bus put more and more distance between them, standing on the pavement, and me, sitting in the bus.

I looked under the seat where Nathan had been. There it was, his inhalator, a few more things, and his phone. So there was not even any point in phoning him to arrange giving these things back to him.

I thought it would be easier to cancel or delay the appointment to which I was heading, get off the bus, and try to catch them on the high street. I gathered my things and Nathan’s and requested the next stop. The bus took a few turns before letting me out, and I tried to remember all of them so I could go back to where those two were. I hoped that they would have stopped where they were or at least not walked too far away.

As I walked back the streets the bus had taken me, I thought how happy they would be to see me back with the inhalator.

A desease had happened on the fifth floor. Really bad things had happened there. And now the fifth floor was cursed; years and years later, it was still affecting the people living in the flat, even after they moved two flats down.

The flats were connected, and every one in the building knew each other. All the neighbours had family ties with each other. They had their conversations on the hallways, which were merely extensions to their living rooms, only on-looking the stairs. Parts of the flats.

The fifth floor flat was not in a living condition. It looked like a building site, and the family that wanted to move in had to do it up. They were not told about the curse so the unnameable events that happened, one after the other, caught them by surprise.

They tried to overcome it all but the suffering gradually made the family disintegrate. Moving to a different flat did not make much of a difference.

Even the rest of the street became more and more sombre. The building looked strangely older than the oldest buildings in the neighbourhood, at least from the outside. People tried to celebrate street-wide parties but those seemed cursed too.

Some of the neighbours moved out of the city. Those who remained wondered how it had all began, and eventually one of the eldest recalled the initial happenings. All had happened before any of the present tenants had moved in, even before the ancestors moved in, several generations earlier. The first occupants of the building. No one knew who they were; it was all made of the stuff of legend.

They tried to recall what the street used to look like, at the time of the first tenants. Not all of the buildings existed yet. In fact, the house with the fifth floor flat was the only one standing in the whole street. One sole proprietor rented the flats out and collected the rents money.

That had been several generations back. Now the terrible events affected especially one of the sons of the family in the fifth floor, to the point of illness. And the illness affected the whole family and, by extension, the rest of the neighbours.

The family tried to solve their problems but the problems were bigger than them. And they did not know the root of the problem, the initial curse.

When they moved out, no one wanted to live in that fifth floor. Another one of the sons had wanted to do the place up, build some furniture, clear the dust. He was not allowed.

They had hoped to rent the flat out to help pay for the new one, but it had to stand there empty to avoid any more disgraces. So the flat was empty, a building site forever after. Perhaps waiting for some one to tackle the curse, face the problem head on.

The dust gathered on the ancient clothes and on the planks the son had brought in order to build his bed.

I went again to a retirement with like-minded people, like in the previous dream where we almost watched the film where God intervened in human history, only in this one, the film was the central theme and not just something tangentially talked about. This time the setting was rougher. We were not staying in a building, but in some kind of cave. In the first assembly we decided that we were going to see the acclaimed film where God made his intervention in human lives and that we were going to try to experience or identify God’s intervention in ours.

I was asked to share the paperwork I had brought to the gathering. I had lots of paper, all A4, and most of the pieces were wrapped up in chunks. One big chunk had fifty pages that were attached together by a whole in each of them, with a bike bolt.

The leader of the gathering held the stack by the bolt in order to show it, and said this was the guide with the instructions for what we had just decided to do. Other papers of mine were also useful, and I was made the guardian of them, but the fifty pages had to be split between the attendees of the gathering.

The idea was not very clear but it seemed to involve following the instructions and we would experience something similar to what the characters of the film had experienced.

The first step was to actually want to experience that, and for that we needed to some how change our consciousness. This happened almost physically in the way it had happened in the film, although in the film the characters were all physically distant from each other and didn’t know each other, at least at the beginning of the film, and we were all together, gathered in the same place.

At the beginning of the experience, then, there was a wave visible in the air and that touched us all. That was the physical sign that the first shift of consciousness had happened. Our minds changed their way of thinking a bit but this was difficult to express. The second step was to find a specific bunch of keys and then use them one by one, but not necessarily to open physical doors.

We walked the mountain, lived in caves, doing the things estipulated by the papers I had brought, one after the other. In the process, we regularly put more keys in the key ring and took some out, depending on the requirements of the different stages. They were old, metal keys. As the days progressed, the keys were gathering soil and dirt, and so did we.

At the end of the experience we all gathered around a table, although there seemed to be fewer people than on the first day. The leader wanted to put the fifty pages back together and my other useful pages too, but we had been loosing things as we had gone along, living in wet caves just with our small ruck sacks. I had lost most of my papers, some of the keys and, actually, a good part of my luggage.

We may have experienced something of what the characters in the film had. However, the whole quest had used most if not all of our energies. We were now tired, wet and dirty, and in loosing so many of the things we had needed, we felt we had mostly failed.

The leader managed to gather, from every one, the pages he had distributed from the stack of 50. Then he came to me and asked: “do you have the “bolt for fifty pages” that these fifty came in?” I looked in my bag but that too was lost. The leader had to find some way of stacking together those fifty wet pieces of paper. And he did. But that made me feel ever so failed.

I worked in a food processing plant. We had to work hard, a few of us were a team, a few women but mostly men. We discovered that one of us was sick. We stuck together and one day we promised to help him. He was bleeding a lot.

He stayed in a kind of bathtub and we brought food for him. Then there was a parade. It was necessary to be discreet but we could greet each other. That was where I saw the first one deny the sick friend. Later in the bathtub I was with him but far away. He asked some one else for help, could he take the garbage out. It was disgusting to touch it, but we wore gloves for our work so it was not a problem. But another one of the friends who had sworn loyalty refused to take it; he looked at him as if he were a pestilent. It was true that there was propaganda in the factory against him, I realised that the pressure was very big. But it was very painful to watch as, little by little, they were leaving the friend we all had sworn to help. I approached and asked him for the garbage. It was truly disgusting, but I also wore gloves. I asked him about the red spot in the bathtub. He said it had no importance and I helped him clean it. He wondered why I did this, to help him, I told him that the less evident it was, the better, because, maybe, even with all the propaganda against him, not all the people knew that it was him that we all were supposed to avoid.

In order to be able to help my friend I decided to become a journalist. I took the garbage out and now it was necessary to feed him. There was food I could take from skips. It was fruit and vegetables, but suddenly I found a plate with what looked like a velvet or a crab. I thought to take it to my friend and ran to tell him. Then I thought that the crab may well belong to someone because it was on a plate, so better not to tell him anything, just in case I could not take it to him.

I decided to bring him food like fruit and vegetables and ask about the crab. Just as I was going to bring the meal to him, I saw a thin brunette girl take the crab, it seemed that it was hers. Thank goodness I had not mentioned the small crab to the sick guy.

I wanted to go with a few to skip some food. For that we had to take some bags, which may have been garbage bags. We had to analyse them. I asked three or four of the guys who were coming with me to help me with the bags. It was a long walk. As we arrived to Taroneca I realised that one of them was not carrying the small bag I had given to him. He said it was very heavy, that it was burdensome to carry it, that the walk had been very long and he had thrown it away. I got mad, at least he could have told me and I would have carried it myself. I decided to keep the bags safe and we went through the skips. Lots of people skipping.

We tried to get into a skip where there would not be too many people. I remained with the bags, I did not skip but I was there until they finished. More people came to the skip where we were although it seemed that they had already seen it before. A car came, almost stalling. This was danger. None of us had a car. They got off the car and arrests and beatings began.

I tried to move away discreetly, as if all that had nothing to do with me, but I was also carrying those bags that could be mistaken so easily with food bags from the garbage. I decided to run like the rest of them, although that would mean to risk getting arrested and beaten up. We ran a lot on the flours side-walk.

There was a garbage container. It seemed that we had escaped them but more were coming ahead. We did not know that to do. I had the idea of hiding behind the garbage container and then negotiate them. But surely they would see me …

I remembered I could now act as a journalist. In fact it had taken a few photos of the guys as they were coming towards the dustbin. They were not very good photos but they were the beginning of my journalistic career. I joined Naush and we got some material although not much. We got something on the scandals in the factory where I had worked. We got some pictures and audio, maybe video. Naush was nude above the waist but it could be seen that he had gone tanned with a t-shirt on, in such a way that it he was wearing that T-shirt.

Naush stopped to speak with a girl who looked like the Canadian, but I was more keen to see if she had got a tan; it seemed she had, I remembered her completely white. I had seen some of the white in her skin and had the hope of seeing at least the albino parts of her skin. While Naush was speaking with the Canadian I noticed two journalists harassing a big shot. A third journalist haunted another one, by simply putting the camera at a very few centimetres from his nose. Since I was not obtaining anything with Naush I joined Junk TV, with whom I wasn’t going to obtain much more anyway.

Mr. George Marmalade said: “Well, we have not got that much so far, now let’s go for the personal shit”. The King saw us and called us ‘slag’, because we only went for the human miseries. I realised I could not defend myself too much since it was clear that I was with Mr. Marmalade’s team. But as we went past him I said to him: “what do you know… Juanito.”