Gates Of Ivory

It is the 2020s. The 14-M movement has spread stronger and the forces have gone own against it. I explain to some younger friends that the violence was already felt at the start in Saint Paul. We even saw horses in some of the first demonstrations. The media thought the occupations and demonstrations were picturesque and they tolerated the masses until they realised they would end up destroying the system that sustained them.
that is now all the media seem so hostile and vile against this unrest.

I had never been keen on any of the occupations, although I liked their ideals. now their discourse invariably seems to consists of an initial declaration of principles interrupted suddenly by a passionate criticism of the rest of the movement, to finish off with a vile exercise of shouting off each other.

To prove my point to my audience, I call two small boys who are clearly part of the occupation movement. I ask them to explain their points. They take turns, one at a time, to explain their politics, all very civilised . I allow them to continue without any questions or guidance, and then one makes a smirk remark about the other’s group or organisation. The other responds with another remark. Their voices grow slowly louder and their words stronger, to end up in a full argument with personal attacks and almost a physical fight. I have rested my case with my little audience.

I see it all as if it was a documentary, I am watching the situation with my friends and we all agree that something went wrong somewhere.

I have come to this meeting on my bike, some other people have come by car.

There was a time when we all came by bike or public transport, now some people think it is just not safe. My house is not far, I could have walked but it felt safer this way. While we have been on the meeting my bike has been outside in the rain, it always is but it should not stay there overnight. We all go out to get out of the meeting, some to our bikes, some to their cars. Nito tells me: I’ll get your bike and take it somewhere water proof. I want to protest, it sounds too much of a favour, but then he explains that he had to park his car is so far away he does not feel safe walking there. He can bike to his car, then put my bike in his car and take it somewhere both dry and safe. I see nothing against this. Yet, when he gets on my bike, I have managed to get some friend to lend me his car. I follow him on the bike to the place where his car is. He gets off my bike and puts it in his car, it is already in a dry place. At some point, some how, I will have to sort out some means of transport to go somewhere far to recover my bike. But at least for this night, the bike will be safe and dry.

I park right behind his car, next to a luxurious car. Before getting into his car, he looks at me and signals that car. So he has noticed that I was following him. I am glad he does not seem angry.

The more luxurious car is owned by a beautiful and well dressed woman. She is doing something very strange to her car. My friend leaves the scene and I feel compelled to interact with this woman.

It has been difficult to keep my own car stopped but now I have found the hand brake and I can safely talk to this woman without the fear that my car will move. I ask her what her problem is. She says she has had a puncture, so now I see that the weird things she seemed to be doing are the logical steps required to change a wheel in a car. I wish her luck not breaking any of her beautifully painted nails.

She invites me to her car, she has something to show me, the reason why she needs to change her wheel. Some one has kicked her wheel, probably in anger, probably one of those pesky protesters who do not approve of luxuries. She has requested cctv footage to find out what happened. She shows me a picture of her wheel. It is a close shot, so if it comes from cctv, it is a good crop of an image taken at very high resolution. The picture only shows a wheel and a shoe against it. She says, it is one of your neighbours who did this. How do you know? The name of your street is printed on the shoe. I look carefully. It is indeed printed on the shoe, as if it was a brand, but any cop would know that kind of print. It is the kind of print that is put against the will of the owner of the shoes, and it can not be removed. It is for identification purposes, for occasions like this. I look into the picture more carefully, wanting to find some evidence that this can not be any one in my street. The woman has reported the incident and the possible suspect to the police. The suspect has been summoned to some preliminary hearing. He has had to submit a statement, in which he admits that he is the owner of that trainer, but he did not kick the wheel. He had a lot of mud on the sole, it was the only place he could find at the time where he could clean it and he used the wheel as a cleaner to some dirty nasty soil he had just got. Some how it sounds like a plausible explanation and I wish him well, I wish that he will not have to face nasty experiences in the process that awaits him, the police, the cells.

Then the woman in the car tells me things about the owner of the car I have borrowed. I am horrified. Apparently this person has been getting into my apartment without my permission but with some good keys, for some time. She says I will find the proof if I get into their own apartment. I refuse to believe it but I go to the car owner’s flat and enter it. Two people are sitting at a table in the living room. They do not seem surprised to see me there. Somewhere in the paintings on the walls I see the proof that the woman was telling the truth.

Outside, in the streets, there is some unrest in crescendo, in slow crescendo. There was some when I followed my friend with the bike and now it is a bit louder.

I decide to meet my uncle and auntie in some safe place. It has to be some posh shop, like a jeweller’s, so that we are not suspects of belonging to this 15M subversion mass.

They are not very old but they both have white hair. Still, they are much older than me. They look like a proper, respectable, middle age couple, while I look a lot more youthful even though I have made the effort to look smart for this occasion. The unrest has grown louder and I take some care to make sure I am not mistaken with some poor protester.

My aunt and uncle introduce me to some very interesting people, and at one point we start to collective make arrangements to leave for home. All the way along the social occasion we have managed to show that we distance ourselves from the protesters, but we have sensed that all this is a façade on the part of all of us so that we are not reported to the police, for fear and safety. Now that the situation is a bit more delicate, because the crowds have gone a lot louder in the street, it is clear that none of us are fond of the police.

I look out to the street and I am shocked by what I see. It is a full riot! None of us expected this. Before we know, there is mounted police in the market arcade. Every one runs. My uncle runs. My auntie can not run so fast. The police on horses are approaching faster and faster. We are not going to go any faster, so I change tactics. I say to my auntie, look, you look really respectable. Let’s just make what we are actually doing, family members having a walk, going shopping. She agrees because she really can not walk any faster. The mounted police doubt on whether to club us like they have done with the other passers by or simply threaten us. Some horses go past, three stay with us. The cops have a weapon that can either be a baton or a machine gun. The three of them point their machine guns at us, one warning me that if I make a false move I will be dead. He mumbles this and I ask him to repeat that, because it is a strange threat, but his colleagues confirm this. One gun is pointed at me, the other at my auntie.

A young boy runs to my auntie from the rest of the crowd that had gone away running, gets his hand in her hand bag, grabs a cigarette butt and he goes offagain running. He has disappeared in the crowd. But this has made the cops suspicious. One of them dismounts. He wants to stop and search both of us. There are many things in my auntie’s bag. One of them is some plastic wrapping up something very small. The cop unwraps it, and then a very small dark soft stone drops to the floor. It is round, and very small, about a fraction of the size of a bike bearing ball. Yet, it is a gruesome offence to be carrying even that small amount.

My auntie’s eyes close. I don’t know what emotion she is hiding. She seems calm. But I know the situation is desperate. A club shows.

The next thing I know, I am in a cell, with my uncle embracing my auntie, on the floor. My auntie seems unconscious. Both of them are more or less covered in blood.

Suddenly a younger version of my uncle starts to narrate the history of the riots as if he was a tv, or documentary narrator. He says how at the beginning the media loved the 14M movement. But not now. Narrated from the present perspective, the documentary maker is scandalised that, at the first moments of the uprising, “these protesters were actually seen as the ‘cool yellow’, the good guys in the movies in front of the oppressor cops who were beating them out of the squares they occupied”. But then the powers, so lenient at the beginning, realised that they had to clean up the streets of the evil, the scum, the great bitch. I am seeing this documentary that my younger uncle is narrating. It shows how the police started to do raids before the masses got as angry as we saw today, when the riots ended up in my auntie’s arrest.

The narrator goes on: the streets had to be cleaned. Then the images show mounted police beating up, killing if necessary, some of the protesters, while the more scared have all but run away. ‘Then they had to clean up the mess.’ By the mess he means the blood and the dead bodies left on the squares. But that, the narrator, says, was a quick task. The images quickly show an empty and clean square. ‘but the great bitch always resurrected’ and the images show a naked stone woman resurge from the pavement.

I look at my auntie, who seems quite lifeless. She seems to be one more victim of the cleaning. I cry.

I was some kind of ambassador, although no one’s job was clear, so it was OK for me not to know either. The diplomatic meeting was about different nations and regions giving each other presents, or they may have been tax payments, although who was paying whom was not clear either. Also how the tributes system worked was not clear either. Most presents consisted of sacks of produce from the land, each from whatever region they came. It looked like a ceremony, in some throne chamber, but without a throne. In any case, if there were real payments in the form of huge amounts of produce, that was no storage space, there was no room for so much.

It was not clear whether the payments were symbolic, and all the exchanged that happened were the ones we saw in that room, with just one or two sacks pers region, or if these sacks represented actual exchanges of bigger quantities for the different populations.

My job was to explain (and maybe praise too) every one’s present. There were two representatives from one of the region that I knew personally, so I was excited, but I had to remember that it was just one more nation to explain. The representatives had to sit down at children’s desks. I also had two desks, just for me, placed in front of theirs so we were facing each other to talk about the tributes, but I remained standing up. The two representatives I knew sat down, expectant almost, of what I had to say about what they were either offering, or about to receive (again it was not clear). I had to make a short-ish speech about each of the products. For this two reps, there were two sacks. I was excited and nervous but as for other reps, I knew what I was to say. I talked about how good their lentils were, explaining the variety itself as well, and the characteristics.

I also knew there was something going on behind the scenes as well. There was noise coming from the backstage. The reps could not hide that they could hear and notice that there was trouble. I continued talking, trying to hide the noise with my voice and trying to make as if nothing was happening.

But I could not; the nose of raw increased and eventually my voice was silenced by the noise coming from behind the stage. It almost sounded like a riot.

At the end of the day my mother was worried about how I was going to return home. I said: ‘Calm down, I have a bike’ or ‘I have the bike’. I went to the bike park and there I remembered that had left it at home, so today I could not go back by bike. I went to look for a bus.

On the way back I met Maid Nalik and Codea Albatros. Codea was playing the fool. There was a fence and she had climbed on it. Then she climbed down, she went through a hole on the ground to pass to the other side, then she jumped on to the fence and ended up on the same place. She wanted to return to the ground but she told the Maid: ‘I can not jump’. She climbed back to the top of the fence, jumped to the other side, got through the hole and came back to this side. It looked to me like a heavy exercise and it didn’t make me laugh.
On the other side of the fence there were three watchdogs. We decided that, whatever should happen, we were not going to get in there with those three dogs.
The owners saw us and decided we had done something worthy of punishment, and the punishment was going to be to put us in that cage those three dogs.
The three dogs were all chained and the three chains were fastened to the same point. They seemed angry. It seemed that if they just touched us, it would mean certain death.

Somehow we survived the test and left. Codea was still there, doing the same comic number of jumping the fence and going through a hole instead of jumping to the ground directly. I told the Maid that it was not funny, it was even tiring, and could she please tell Codea to stop trying to be funny in such a pathetic way.

They stopped and we designed some form of revenge. It was necessary to kill those dogs, so that they would not harm anybody. It was crazy but we got into the cage again. The cage was not square. There was the fence, but then there was a wall and corner. We looked at the dogs. This time they were fastened separately so we them could release them one by one. We used a blanket to catch them. I was responsible for the blanket. The others released the first one.

What came out was a butterfly, but it was just as dangerous. I caught it her with the blanket but the blanket was very big and the butterfly was very small. My mother was just watching. I managed to locate the butterfly, and crush it against the ground with the blanket and have it located. The blanket was transparent and it allowed us to see the butterfly, trapped there. My mother was marvelled that I had done so well and fast. I put my hand under the blanket and removed the butterfly. It started its own transformation. It developed a mortal sting that, if it touched me, it could kill me. I managed to catch the butterfly by its antennas with one hand. The other hand had to keep the sting away. I almost touched me. Now the butterfly was just its sting. It was not managing to touch me and I ended up having to tread the butterfly/sting in order to kill it.

The next day I went to work, this time by bike, in my trousers. I was shown a table with several suitcases. Each one contained a complete suit, office clothes. They told me to take one, they were the company clothes and I could wear them. They seemed good clothes, perhaps of the type that can only be dry-cleaned. I asked how the washing worked, was it me or was it the company that was going to wash these clothes? There was no response. I inspected one of the suitcases. The material of the shirt, the trousers and the jacket was silk or similar. They were different colours but they very well combined. I put the suit on and packed my trousers. To go back, I would have to change clothes to go on my bike.

We were trying to help Bella, a famous singer, get out of some mess she had got herself into. Part of her trouble was her son. We helped her first, up to a point where she had to talk to some authorities, on her own. We went with her to the premises where she had to do some paperwork but we could not go all the way inside with her; from that point on, she would have to sort herself out.

We sat on the floor, outside the office where she went. Then her son came in. “Hey, I have something to show you!” He looked so proud of himself. We wondered what he could have done to be so proud, because we were not aware of anything this boy had done that anyone could be proud of.
“I have a new piercing”

We didn’t exactly die to see it but we were somewhat curious. Then he started to undo his trousers. Before we could stop him, he was showing us his new piercing in his penis.

We wondered if Bella really knew what her son had grown up to be and, just in case, we decided not to tell her, once she was out.

I was part of an artist community in a huge city although in the process of getting out of it.

A famous duo of comedians had a show in the venue where we had our performances. Neither our performances or theirs were televised from this venue. As well as this, one of the duo, the tall one, had a show in a theatre, and this show would be televised in Christmas. When that finished, the shorter one had another show in the spring and in the summer. I said to a friend that it was good that it was always kind of shared, spread out, so every one had some work, and no one was working all year round, and no one was unemployed all the time.

I actually went to see the show of the shorter of the comedians. It was a good show, it made me laugh and it made me cry as well.

At one point he sang a song. From where I was in the theatre, I could not see him. I moved around, trying to see him, guided by the sound. I guessed where he was and stood right by the entrance, but I had no right to enter. Listening from the outside was enough, the song was beautiful, insightful about life, it made me laugh and dream and cry. I was with a friend and that is when I told him that the shows were spread out.

There were lots of communities of artists, some were crap, or their shows made no sense, but these had more success because their budgets were huge, and there there were the acts with just one or two people on them, with a very small budget.

I was sent to apply at a boarding school that was situated in an island. The selection process was sperpentic and crazy. It seemed to me that we applicants were terrified, but the pupils who had been there longer, and even the staff, were more generally terrified.
The main reason was the director of the school. She acted like a sergeant and some of the things she ordered were senseless or cruel, or both.
She had been to some kind of holiday and she had forgotten something important that she needed for the selection process. She sent her husband to find it. She decided to go ahead with the process this time, but there would be no more selection processes until her husband would return with the tool she needed. Normally, there would have been a selection and welcome process for new pupils every week.
Suddenly she remembered that she could use her boat. She did not have it in the island, but a new pupil had brought it as a present. She said: “Yes let’s have my boat here. We can go places with it; we will make excursions.” Every one except us newbies were enthusiastic about the idea, because it meant something sane in the middle of all her craziness. We were expectant. I felt relieved and was not sure if it was because of the prospect of no more craziness derived from the break in selection processes, or the fact that she had this positive thing about a boat. Later I would realise the two were intimately related.
She was generally behaving a bit more sane than when I had just arrived, and I could sense that everyone else was relaxing a bit too.
But then came the issue with showing off our skills and worthiness of being there. We could do whatever we liked, but whatever it was, it would need to be and outstanding performance, or else face the wrath of the director’s fury.
We had been through a previous, more general selection process, but this was kind of the final one. It was as if we now had to justify the fact that we had been selected this far. I could not see a reason to be worried because the worst that could happen would be that I would be sent home, but then the show started, as we were sitting down for dinner.
The old pupils, one by one, showed off their talents so we could see what kind of high standards were expected of us. Some acted, some played instruments, some sang, but all one by one, so the talent of each one would show off by itself. Every single one of the acts was astonishing. In the signing acts, it was not just talent and knowledge; their voices were naturally angelical too.
I felt there was no way I could even approach that level of quality in any of the disciplines. I wasn’t nervous about the director’s reaction or the fact that I would be sent back to my family, it was just wonder at the fact that I had been allowed to reach this stage of the process at all.
It was very few of us applicants, compared with the number of pupils already there. So we were sitting among the more veteran pupils, almost discreet. The pupils who sat next to me looked at me with a supporting attitude. I expressed my desire to just go home, my performance would be ridiculous compared to what I was seeing and I saw no sense in the whole thing. Either by the director or the pupils, I was made to understand that that was not an option. I was free to choose what discipline I would be performing at, but I had to stand up and perform. I was told to choose whatever I excelled most in. I thought the easiest would be to sing, although I had no hope of even half justifying my presence there.
Somehow I was allowed some time to choose the piece or song I would sign. There were not many songs I could think of, that were easy enough for me to sing, at at the same time would allow to show off whatever small beauty could be in my voice. All the songs I could think of were either too difficult or nursery rhymes. Signing the difficult ones would be embarrassing because my voice would not respond, and signing the rhymes would be embarrassing after the quality signing displayed in the dining room/ auditorium where we were.
I decided to find the easiest song among the difficult ones, and then the difficulty was to find one among those, that would be suitable for my voice.
Finally my turn came and I had to perform. I said I would sign. I opened my mouth. I sang. I heard my voice, just as every one else was hearing my voice, and I could not believe that what I was hearing was my own voice. But it was. It seemed the acoustics of the auditorium were so wonderful, they made my voice sound just as beautiful as any of the previous singers’. I was marvelled. So I sang in confidence, even enjoying how the sound of my voice was made so beautiful in that dining room.
My performance ended up being just as worthy as any of the previous ones. I sat down and smiled to the pupils who had showed some support.
The performances continued, both by new and older pupils. Then I went on to think, that it made sense that the applicants would perform, but why did the veteran pupils perform too? I asked the pupils I had next to me. One answered for all: “It is for the pleasure of performing in front of others, and being acknowledged for our talent and work. We enjoy the recognition, so we show off in these occasions to create that space where we give each other the recognition and praise we all want.”
It made perfect sense. It may have sounded like they were all feeding their egos, but given that apart from one’s brief performance, the rest of the evening was spent in applauding others’, the whole thing seemed to me pretty much an exercise in generosity.
In the following days I began to understand why every one was so terrified of the director of the school. She was so crazy, the whole thing was mad. However even I could sense that since she didn’t have the tool she needed for further selection processes, and she had that boat, she was more and more reasonable, although the improvement was very slow. The promised excursions never happened. People seemed more surprised at the positive changes than at the broken promise.
I actually became a bit friends with the director. Some times she would ask questions and I would respond calmly, relaxed and honestly. When this happened in public, I would see the terrified faces of every one else present. But she seemed to be taking even criticisms quite well, and I was aware that this was only thanks to the inexplicable change that her behaviour was undertaking.
About three weeks passed where living in the boarding school was almost bearable, especially towards the end of those three weeks. Everyone, even the director, seemed to have forgotten everything about the selection processes that had been missed three times already, even the need for them. So it seemed that those selection processes were the source of the stress for every one and the craziness for the director.
For those three weeks, the school life slowly evolved from total insanity to relative harmony. No one mentioned the so far broken promise, it seemed that for every one, as well as for me, not being drived crazy by a mad person was enough. She accepted mild criticism and was capable of having a reasonable conversation when some one expressed a disagreement with her, although people were very careful as to how they expressed that.
And then her husband came back, with the tool needed to resume the weekly selection processes to accept new pupils. She remembered, we all remembered, that those processes should have taken place every week and that work must have accumulated. We were all a bit surprised that we had forgotten all that time. She remembered it all at once, except the boat and the promise, and proceeded to prepare the selection processes and recover her insanity, all at the same time and just as swiftly.
Because I had never seen her madness in its full extent like the veterans and the staff had, I still dared to attempt conversations like we had had during those three weeks. I only tried once, however, after her husband had come back. We were in one of the cosy living rooms where we could all sit, on sofas in front of the fire. I mentioned the boat and what a good idea it had been to allow it into the island. Some one else ventured to remind her of the promised excursion. She interrupted with a histrionic voice: “I have not yet decided if it was a good idea or not.” I began to protest, intending to reach a conclusion together on whether it had been a good idea or not, like we had done in the past, having conversations about disagreement, and seeing if we could reach an agreement or not. But this time she was not having it. She made clear that she would only tolerate absolute silence so that she could think about her allowing the boat to be in the island. When she spoke again, she sentenced that of course it had not been a good idea, that it was a mistake and… I interrupted and she interrupted me. “I always make it quite clear, that when I announce a decision, it is because it has already been made.”
Life became quite unbearable, with the director telling people to do something, then telling them off for doing it, and claiming she had ordered the contrary, or simply being disagreeable about everything.
But people had experienced the relief of her sanity for three weeks and it was not clear if they would put up with her in the same way as they had done before I had arrived. We would need a lot of courage and coordination, and above all we need to be all united, because there was no way we could face her one by one. I could see signs of discontent, hands that went up to express disagreement and the will to act on it, but it was going to be difficult to act in a unified way. And then there was the problem that each week new people would come who had not known better than the worst of her craziness, and it looked like they were set to put up with it, just as the veteran pupils had done, before those three weeks.
I began to consider to run away.

Casoni had two bikes she wanted to fix. Then we could bike together. We fixed one of the bikes first and she asked me to try it.

It was an old bike, newer than the other one but just as uncomfortable. It had the dropped, narrow handlebar of old race bikes. I did not quite know how to put my hands so that they would be in a comfortable jet safe position. Without even noticing the gears, I started to pedal inside the garage where the bikes were stored.

It was difficult to control the bike, and my posture was most uncomfortable. I mentioned that the saddle could be higher, because I noticed that I had my legs bent at all times when I pedalled. She dismissed the idea.

I decided I could not safely ride this bike outside, in the road, and out of politeness started to fix the other bike too.

I went away with some like-minded people to spend a few days of retirement. There was a priest with us too. Some one offered to show a specific film about God’s intervention in human history. Apparently it was a classic even in non religious, mainstream film making. It was an adaptation of a book that was regarded as very good too, but not good “and glorious” like the film, which expressed better some of the feelings the book had only tried.

I had the book in my hands once but it was not the moment to read it, plus, I had heard in the grapevine that the film was going to be shown on tv on the last day of our retirement and we were going to watch it.

I heard the film was a story of how God had wanted to intervene in human lives. Initially He had thought of planting a tree, or a seed, in some one’s place, and then people heard that God was going to do something of the sort, and every one began to look out for such an event.

But then God thought that the way He had thought was too conventional and predictable, so He decided to intervene in people’s lives in a way that they would not expect, or even discover. It could only be discovered by people who would undergo a shift in their paradigms, in their way of thinking, or their consciousness.

The way the film told this story was by short glimpses of the lives of quite a few people. At the beginning of the film there was a shot of a floating tree that God was considering planting and He was deciding where to plant it, and from there the film showed different, unconnected people going about their lives.

That was all I saw from the film, or all I knew of the film.

On the last day of our retirement, we were all packing and saying our goodbyes in the afternoon. Some people were watching tv, waiting for the famous film to be broadcast. But at the time they were only showing the lunch-time news bulletins. Then, just as our coach was announced, the film was announced too. Some of the people sitting on the sofas got up and announced to the rest of us: “whoever wanted to see the film, they can watch it now”. But most, if not all of us, could not see it, because we had arranged this coach to go back home and we could not stay to watch it.

I was learning to play some new sports. It was not difficult, but it made me remember why I had played them when I had been little and gave up. Then it was the turn of tennis. For this one, I was made to make bigger efforts; it was as if I was training for competition. To make sure I hit the ball with the centre of the racket, I was given a very small racket; yet, it was very heavy. The ball was very small as well. I remembered how difficult it was but this was worse; it was especially difficult to hit the ball and the racket was heavy. I kept having to run after the ball after missing it, as well, and the ball seemed to be alive and escaped consciously from my racket.

The ball also got smaller all the time until suddenly, it wasn’t a ball, but a flat potato having been cut to the same size of the racket, as if I had hit it with it and it had adopted the pattern.

I go to the computers room. There are computers that show some videos, functioning then more like a tv. The screens show scenes of what my friend is accused of. I try to analyse them and my friend and others come to use the computers too. I run away from there.

My phone rings but I can not pick it up. I guess who it will be, and I know he will just demand an explanation from me, as to why I am still in talking terms with my friend. I get on my bike to go back to civilisation. The friend who was ringing asks me: What are you doing? I answer: ‘loose friends’.

I find a computer room and I sit down at one to do things I need to do. My friend is there, calls me and shows me a video of Nirvana that I had not seen before; he says no one has.

I was travelling with a friend who could be Canimo, the redhead from secondary school. We were in the airport and we wanted to check when we were coming back. We had to check it while we were boarding our plane. We did not have much time from the time we could check up the lists and the time we had to board our plane, so I panicked when I could not find my name. Canimo’s and another friend’s name were in the list of passengers for the following week or so. That was right, they were coming back in time for the continuation of the academic year, after Christmas. But my name was not there where it should be, roughly two days after them as I had booked.

Then an assistant came and wanted to help me find my name, but he said that it was impossible that I had booked a return flight because my name was not there.

Then I remembered that I had not booked my flight back. He said it was too late for me to book for next week because I had to allow for two weeks between the booking and the flight itself. I made myself a promise to book a flight so when we arrived, I went on the internet and managed to book a flight roughly within the days I needed, in order to go back to class after Christmas. I had not checked the day the lessons started, but I thought it would be after the 10thof January, and that is when I booked my flight for, roughly, maybe between the 5th and 10th and I was sure I was going to be on time.

After all my efforts, it seemed when I went back that I was late for everything. I had secured a part in the theatre play of that year. All the actors were new, only the director was the usual one. They were approaching the performance day and they all knew their parts, but not having even looked at my own part, I didn’t know any of my lines, and this time they were many, or at least too many to just learn them in two days. I panicked a bit and told the director I could not do this play, but he insisted that I should try, that he was sure of me.

Part of my performance was going to be to dance on stage while others were acting. At the beginning I was dancing very conscious of my movements, and my face was serious. Then I realised I had to reflect the mood of the play so I began to dance looking at the audience and smiling all the way, and dancing energetically. Some times I had to change clothes; I danced in different clothes. There was a play where I changed my clothes from one dance to another in order to give the impression that there was a variety of dancers, that it was not the same dancer all the time. On another play we were supposed to have different colourful clothes, but we only managed to wear all red, or all blue. The director asked: ‘have you not been able to find any other colour?’ I went to the clothing place and found a fuchsia t-shirt, it was not a good combination with the red of the other dancesrs, but it was at least showed that we were wearing different, colourful aggressive colours.

But I still could not learn the lines I had to say in the talking play . We had the dressed rehearsal and I could still not say my lines. I asked one of the actresses for help to practise, the way I had done with an actor in another play, and she said she could not help me but there was some one else that she said very good who could help me. Then I realised it was the same actor I had been practising with, in a previous play. It would be the same practice that allowed me to learn my lines a few plays back. So I approached him to practise the way we had done then, and he agreed.

After my fears in a previous dream, revolution kicked off. I had to go underground with a few other people. Internet had collapsed in part. We could no longer rely on it. We mainly went back to face to face communications, like in the time of history when telephones did not exist or were not common.

As I was preparing for my visit, it slipped off Jack’s lips that Neia fancied me. Neia was in a relationship so I wanted to know more about her situation. I could not hear any more, or Jack would not tell me more. Neia was not completely a trusted person in the view of our underground community. We had to do something to find out whether she could be potentially with us, before I could get into a relationship with her. I had to give her a date but it could not be done on the internet, or by any communication medium, because we would never know if she would pass the information off to the authorities, so even encryption was not safe. I wrote something on a piece of paper, some encrypted-like text . It was a poem. It asked her to do something if she wanted to approach me, that would evidence that she were on our side, but she would not realise what was asked of her if they were not already somehow in the know of the practices of the underground groups, so if she were with the authorities there was no danger of her outing me because she would not know what it was about.

I used the canal to go to Neia’s place. I had to leave the paper with some one from her household. When I got to her door, people from her household passed by, but the correct thing was to check first if she were there or not, not just ask any member of her house to be allowed in.

She was indeed in the house, which was bad luck. I would then have to give the paper to her and risk having to talk with her for long, which I really did not want to do. I told her some brief words and left for the canal, where a canoe was waiting for me. I had to put it in the water and then get on it to paddle to the other side. I put the canoe in the water and then the current took it away. I had to get on that canoe, otherwise I would have to stay talking with Neia and I could not do that. I had to leave. But the canoe had left. I decided to swim to get it. The current was a lot faster for the canoe than for me. From my past experience I knew that it was not a good idea to try get the canoe by swimming hard. It was better to allow the current to carry me towards it or even to my destination.

I was all dressed up and my clothes and hair would get damaged by the water, but I just jumped to the water to try to swim or at least be carried by the current. I relaxed. But then I swallowed a big amount of water and it was not nice. Still I managed to allow the current to carry me down the river. The boat was well gone by then. At least I had managed to deliver the written message without talking to her much.

Some how I arrived home and put my clothes to dry, my hair was a bit ruined but the first thing was to get it dry, then asses the damage, then take action. But I don’t remember doing anything more about it, and then my visit came: three of my best friends.

I had news for them: “Hey I have spoken to Neia and she may be hiring out rooms in her place, it is cheap and centric.” Then I realised I should not have said anything because these three friends did not like Neia at all. One of the three said: “I will tell this to the rest of the group”. Then something slipped off his lips: my home address. I asked him how come he knew that detail about me. In the whole discussion, whoever was in “the group” was never mentioned. They wanted to keep secret who was in it, so they never mentioned it. I was outraged that they had obtained that bit of information about me behind my back, and then shared it with some hotmail address. They explained that I had no right to be upset because some one else had done something much bigger and serious than that. I said that was not my problem. They had shared my information about my home, something I could not change, with hotmail, with the authorities. I wanted to know what more information they had on me. They tried to convince me that not much of importance. My arms hurt. I said ‘let’s change the subject, or I will leave.’ They could not change the subject, so they just stayed silent. I commented to my friend with a smile how convenient it had been that my home address had slipped off his lips.

Sonia was an excellent lawyer who had won a few cases, avoiding evictions and repossessions. Our case may not have been related but this was why we chose her. We were all women on this case except for a man, Peter. The women seemed to be all friends and close, expect for Peter.

I can’t remember what Sonia looked like because we didn’t see much of her. It was mostly her assistant, Padma, who spent hours with us, preparing the case thoroughly, rehearsing the questionings, the possible outcomes so we could react. What we looked like was not too relevant, but Padma looked always perfect, with her skirt and jacket suit, her white shirt and her black, curly long hair perfectly combed and shiny.

The other side of the case was also all-female, but they did not look dark skinned and relaxed like us. They were blond and slim and smart. Like Padma, but all of them. Their lawyer was very slim, and her hair was curly and blonde, and short. They were all blonde and slim and smart. In our group, only Sonia and Padma were smart, and our skins were all quite dark in comparison with the blondes.

Padma and Peter both knew the building of the court rooms really well. We were not sure why Peter knew it so well and had privileged access to some rooms, but he offered us some nice rooms. Padma clearly worked there, and she had privileged access to some rooms as well, and we chose to take her offer and not Peter’s. When Padma gave us directions to the room we could be kin on the day of the court hearings while we were not in the court room, Peter said that was the same room he was going to offer us, only he had different directions to reach it because he used a different door.

The directions to the room read: “follow the corridor straight on from the door, then there is a ramp on the right, still straight, from there take the right turn and the room is at the end of the corridor.” When we opened it, the paper took on some life and became a GPS screen, but it was still paper. Padma explained that on the day of the hearing, she and Sonia would have to do some talking with the judge and could not be with us, so we had to find the room on our own and do the last minute preparations in that room if we wanted to.

We entered the building as we were told, on the day of the hearing. Indeed there were three corridors from the door, one straight, one left and one right from the door we entered. We followed the one that went straight on and we soon saw the ramp that was drawn on the paper Padma had given us, as well as the corridor on the right where we had to turn. As we approached, Peter finally admitted that this was not the same room he had access to.

The room had a big table for meetings, with chairs, and it also had a whole library, with shelves and books all the way from the floor to the ceiling. It also had smaller tables with books and papers, it did not look very tidy but I felt comfortable there. I immediately spotted some soap bars on one of the shelves, next toe the books, and I wanted to smell it. It was not a too special smell but the soap bar looked nice and I was tempted to just grab it – there waere quite a few bars there. I was persuaded not to and went to the meeting table with my colleagues. Then the time arrived and as we were told, the room would be needed from the time we had to be in the court room, and although we had not surpassed the time we had kind of booked, there were already people approaching the room, probably from a different door that we had used, thankfully, so we could sneak out of the room before being seen by a horde of blonde men who also needed the room, probably had proper access to it and not just granted by a friend like we had.

We got out of the room in order to go to the court room; for some reason for this part of the journey inside this building we did not have directions, some how we knew what corridors to follow.

Now we seemed to be in some kind of hotel, because there were some people carrying towels and soap. Again I had to smell the soap bars, which were square and white, like the ones in the room Padma had given us access to. Again I was tempted to grab at least one of them and again I didn’t.

We arrived to the court room. It was more like a church, or a theatre, but on the front it did look like a court room. It had so much space for the audience, and the ceilings were so high. It was like the hall of the royal courts of justice, or like a cathedral inside.

We approached our sits and on our way we saw Padma’s mother. She looked very emotional. In fact she was crying, seeing the important things her daughter was doing.

Sonia addressed the audience very briefly. Very briefly because she said all the merit and the work of the case were Padma’s, her assistant. So every one applauded Padma as she got up to the podium to address the audience, and there she had a long speech explaining our side of the case, like lawyers do in movies.

I had bikes but they didn’t work. Some times it didn’t matter. Some times it did because I had to travel great distances. I didn’t know this was a Friday but it was, and I was due to help in the bike workshop all day. But no one noted it. I had also been to the food shop and got what I needed, but that day I rather wanted to socialise. The bike workshop consisted on a small building, or room in a building, and a huge park outside which was the real work space. I worked on my bike on my own, and I noticed how alone I was in the middle of the crowd; no one spoke to me, but then every one was busy. I noticed my friends busy and silent. I missed their conversation.

Then I noticed that I had neglected lessons at school in a scandalous way. I went to class and noticed I should need a note book, especially for maths and the problems to solve we had, exercises. I had to buy a new one, brought a small one and was advised to buy a big one, among other things to fit the size of the exercises and the size of the sheets of paper where they were enunciated. I did that and worked hard. I then realised I would have to spend some time in deciding what subjects to prioritise, because there was not enough time to study for them all now. It was despairing to see how much I had to study and how little time I had. And I wondered why on earth I had neglected my studies to this extent that now I could not take all the exams I had signed up with.

On that Friday, I finished fixing my bike and decided then to go back home to rest. I checked something on the internet and by inertia I went to the calendar of the bike workshop. On being a Friday, I realised it had been my shift to help others and take care of the place. It relieved me to recall that there were two people, more experienced than myself, who had been at the workshop today, who were more capable to help others than me. But I still felt guilty that I had forgotten my duties. Yet, I wondered how on earth I could help others, when I could hardly help myself. I then considered going back to the workshop to do the shift but was not too late, or so I decided. I also wondered, yes there were two people who could help, but they did not have the distinctive apron, so no one could go for them for help, no one could go to anyone for help because there was no one around with the apron. However, the whole workshop seemed to have been run smoothly, no one asked around about the aprons, no one asked around for help.

I had a friend who worked in a bar and I visited him. He and his colleague were cleaning up after closing time and they allowed me to stay there after they finished. Then they started to enjoy the perks of their job, which were to drink from certain drinks from the bar.

After offering some drink like juice, they produced a bottle of liquor. I thought they were only joking but they filled a smallish glass to the top and they drank it.

“Do you know how much we charge for this?”

That drink was excessively expensive; I asked them if they were sure they were allowed to drink from that without paying for it and they assured me that they were.