A path less straight (pt. 6)

The grapes of mirth

“So we’re just going to drop in unannounced?” I asked Egg.

“Last time I saw Giorgio he told me to drop by any time I was in the area,” Egg replied. “He’d be insulted if I did not take him literally.”

Either side of the road vineyards stretched over the hills. Egg drove the tiny rented Fiat with one hand on the wheel, content to leave the speed limit well alone. The one car that came up behind us was waved past at a wider part of the road.

I, too, felt relaxed. A meal in a compact, but excellent restaurant, followed by a slow and quite possibly romantic meander back to our hotel room in the old part of town had unwound me after our flight the previous day. I decided that I would just let the next weird thing wash over me without reacting.

“So who is he, exactly?” I asked.

“My godfather.” Egg answered.

Egg turned the corners of his mouth up slightly in response to my murdered rendition of the Godfather theme tune. He negotiated the car around a tractor before elaborating.

“He is an old friend of my mother. He used to be in the same line of work, but now he makes wine,” he said.

“So he isn’t involve in the mob?” I pressed.

“Cass, not everyone in Italy is a member of the Mafia,” he replied.

Our route took us through a village, the sort of place that tourists proclaim as enchanting and gets used in holiday brochures and as the backdrop to films, but with the tacked-on compromises for modern facilities and conveniences glaringly evident. The tiny houses crammed together proudly displayed their satellite dishes, Italian matron figures held mobile phones to their ears as they herded their grandchildren and the café whose chairs and tables spilled into the cobbled square advertised its free wi-fi.

Egg turned the car into a road that was little more than a gap between two buildings and then along a lane that could not make up its mind which direction is was supposed to be going. He slowed the car to a halt, licked his finger and stuck it out of the window, frowning. After a few seconds and before I could ask him what he was up to, we were under way again, turning down a narrow farm track, which led onto a wider road. He drove along this for a short while before turning to drive onto a gated driveway, the ornate gate swung open under its own power.

“Is this it, or are we lost?” I asked him.

“This is it,” he replied. “But he must have moved the gate since the last time I was here.”

The villa was a single story affair, built from weathered stone with a classic tiled roof, but I judged it more modern than its materials. It resided in a large garden of neatly mown and freshly watered grass, liberally sprinkled with well-coiffeured trees. A collection of buildings that ranged between ancient rustic shed and modern industrial unit lay to one side with its own road access, I took this to be the winery.

We parked by a weathered statue of a robed woman who stood in a circle of flowers at the end of the driveway. She regarded us with a permanently measured gaze. A small bird, perched on the hand of her out-stretched arm took offence at our arrival and fled twittering as we disembarked from the car and approached the door.

We were greeted at the door by a woman who looked like she was trying too hard to fit the role of wizened, old maid figure and ushered into an antechamber that was decorated strictly in the taste category with nothing from the catalogues of personality or comfort. It was a bit intimidating so I looked to Egg for reassurance, but he was staring out of a window. I followed his gaze to spy a courtyard bedecked in flowers with an ornate stone fountain.

“It is so pleasant to see my godchild again, and he has brought a beautiful companion.” I nearly jumped out of my skin, standing inside the doorway was a trim, tanned man with thick black hair, wearing a smart, grey designer suit with the collar open. He had a hook to his nose and his eyes were predatory, but the rest of his face was pleasant enough. His voice was deep and rich and his English carried enough of an accent to be exotic without being difficult to understand.

“My dear, I am Giorgio, welcome to my home,” he said.

I managed to murmur my own name and there followed a hand-shaking and kissing ritual in which he overshadowed the awkwardness on my part with the grace and fluidity of his own. He went through something similar with Egg that seemed better rehearsed and promptly told us that lunch should not be long and of course we were staying for it.

Egg had proved annoyingly fluent in Italian, it was handy, but it meant I was relying on him for communication. Now it meant I was standing like a lemon as a conversation that probably would have excluded me in English went on bilingually. I was rescued by a tap on the shoulder from a slim and exotic woman who was probably young enough to be Giorgio’s daughter, but somehow I sensed that she was not.

“You, must excuse the men while they talk of business.” She purred. “I am Isabella, let me show you around the winery.”

She led me away with a sway that could have graced the catwalks of Milan, and quite possibly had done, I considered. Her tour was bright and friendly, every step of the wine-making process had a funny story, and her depth of knowledge made me realise that she was far more than the trophy wife.

“I would have made wine anyway,” she confided. “But Giorgio’s money certainly made it easier. Now, here is the secret at the heart of my craft.”

The device made little sense to me. Something was obviously poured into the top and cascaded down a series of ramps, funnels and slopes until it ended up in a number of different barrels at the bottom. It was kind of like a medieval pinball machine built by an enthusiastic but quite insane carpenter.

“It’s, er, well, kind of...” I trailed off. I should have said it was a metaphor for my past few days.

“Let me show you,” she said.

She pulled a rope and a barrel at the top tipped grapes into the machine. They bounced and rolled down chutes and tracks. Some collecting in one trap set off a counterweight that redirected another stream, others spun wheels that altered the course in other ways. I stood there and laughed at the fairground of the grapes.

“Each grape is sorted by the machine so that the taste of each vat of wine is perfect,” she explained. “The original device was designed by Leonardo Da Vinci, but there have been some small improvements since then.”

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “I wish I had one to pair up my socks.”

A path less straight (pt. 5)

Around the bend

The sun was up at some unearthly hour. Eventually I stopped cursing its brightness and decided I might as well join it, with no cloud in the sky there was little chance of anything beating it.

I found myself alone in the cabin with no note explaining this occurrence. It crossed my mind that I might have been marooned here by the pair of odd brothers, but the keys to the hire car were still hanging on a hook. I had got as far as filling the kettle and lighting the gas before an aquatic commotion down on the lake shore disgorged Bracken onto the beach.

“Morning,” he said leaving a sodden trail on his path through the cabin. “Let me get some clothes on and I’ll make a start on breakfast.”

Some clothes turned out to be a pair of baggy shorts and a t-shirt bearing the legend ‘Atlantis 2008 – still soggy’, he had towelled his hair until it was a damp mess and left it like that.

“Now, my lady,” he said, taking a bow. “Wouldst thou liketh a cup of tea?”

He busied himself around the kitchen area, emptying most of the contents of the fridge into a large frying pan and sourcing some clean cups. With a steaming mug of tea in my hand, I asked him where Egg was.

“He’s gone for a walk to clear his head, poor little fellow was up all night trying to divine the future in the entrails of goats,” he replied. “Plus we might have decided to finish off that bottle of whisky.”

“Goats?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Bracken answered. “Nowadays we use computer simulated goats, it's just as accurate but there’s far less bleating.”

He lit the grill, cut the remains of a loaf of bread into thick slices, fussed over seasoning and then broke the remaining supply of eggs into the pan.

“I’ve been recalled, so we might as well use everything up,” he explained. “Roll-mop herring?”

I looked into the proffered jar and declined.

“I was going to set the little blighters free, but it looks like they’re too far gone for that.” He took one himself and chewed it slowly and noisily, a look of bliss on his face. “How burnt do you like your toast?”

Egg arrived just as Bracken was serving up, pale faced and sunken eyed.. The meal looked just like randomly fried leftovers, but smelled divine. We ate in silence. The toast was only very lightly burnt.

“So what now?” I asked, a second mug of builders-strength tea in my hands.

“Bracken’s contact says Mother flew to Florence, which means she is probably visiting an old friend who has a villa not too far from there,” Egg answered. “I’ve booked a flight and hotel there, or you can return home with Bracken, if you want.”

I cancelled thoughts of shoe boutiques and chic little restaurants and replaced them with spaghetti trees and olive-throwing competitions, still it appealed, so I agreed to a little Italian adventure.

“And the goat entrails?” I enquired.

“You learn to ignore anything my brother says eventually,” Egg replied. “Everything’s done on spreadsheets now. The best I can scry is that you should save your work often. Something’s not right.”

I drove the hire car while Egg dozed in the back seat. Bracken was navigating, although somewhat randomly, insisting that we stick to the gravel back roads that wound through the forests and calling turnings according to his whim. He cautioned me to watch out for the locals who all thought they were rally drivers.

“Admit it,” I said. “You have no idea where we are and we are going to miss our flights.”

“Nonsense, my dear lady,” he replied. “Has Egg ever explained to you about following roads where they want to take you, rather than forcing them?”

“I think he mentioned it once,” I said. “It didn’t make any sense then either, the quickest route is the shortest one, any navigation app will tell you that.”

I pulled the car over to the side of the trail and came to a halt. My phone woke at my touch, I flicked across to the appropriate icon, launched the program and held the device in front of Bracken’s face.

“See!” I told him.

“Yes,” he said. “Not far to go now.”

He tilted the phone so that I could see the screen clearly, the arrow indicated we were only a few miles from the airport. I tapped at the screen like it was a faulty dial, but the situation did not change.

“But, that’s not...” My words faded off. “But, look, we’re facing the wrong direction, right now you’re taking us further away.”

“I tell you what, how about a little bet?” He said. “Loser buys the winner a drink. We have to join the main road anyway, so you turn the car around and follow the map to here.” He indicated a spot close to the airport. “I’ll continue straight on and meet you there. I warn you though, I’m going to jog.”

“You’re on.” I told the maniac.

Once Bracken had closed his door, I turned the car quickly and set off with vigour, imagining I was one of those rally driving locals. Trees dashed by and stones rattled against the underside of the car. Coming around a corner it slid slightly so I reigned it in. A left turn took me onto a metalled road and I increased my speed.

The phone chimed and told me I should make a right turn, I slowed down as this was our finish line. Bracken was impossibly sat by the side of the road, a wild flower in his hand, he looked like he had not even broke into a sweat.

“You owe me a drink,” he said as he settled back into the passenger seat and threaded the flower into my hair.

As we parted in the airport, Egg urged Bracken to patch things up with Huggy, while Bracken urged Egg to grow a moustache. Bracken went down on one knee to kiss my hand and then flounced off to flirt with the girl at the check-in desk. Egg smiled and shook his head.

A path less straight (pt. 4)

My God, it's full of apps

With the boat returned unsunk despite Bracken’s best Admiral Nelson impression, we retrieved the car and Bracken directed us along a series of gravel roads to the wooden cabin he was renting. It looked like a completely rustic affair from the outside, with a separate hut for the toilet and no running water, but a wire promised electricity. Bracken had not locked the door, being short on pockets and long on trust.

Inside was more modern, with worn but comfortable furniture, a small, but ample kitchen and bedroom space on an upper level. Bracken handed us beers from the fridge and invited us to make ourselves at home while he dressed for dinner.

“He doesn’t seemed concerned,” I commented.

“Nothing bothers Bracken much, that what makes him good at his job,” Egg said. “Well, nothing except his relationship with Huggy, and that’s always on and off.”

Bracken reappeared in well-worn jeans and a shirt that had seen better days. He had his phone clasped to his ear and was having a rapid conversation that kept veering into something that sounded like Russian. Egg led me outside when his brother started banging about in the kitchen.

Down at the lake shore we watched the water and sipped our beer. The part of me attuned to city life marvelled at the complete lack of traffic noise. Tree rustled, somewhere across the lake a duck gave a raucous laugh, a series of waves lapped gently on the shingle beach, but there was no man-made noise other than that we made ourselves.

“Does he know where your mum went?” I asked. “When you two speak to each other I don’t catch more than one word in three.”

“He’s checking with someone who might know where she went from Vladivostok, but she didn’t say anything to him other than saying she was going to spend some time with friends and family.” He responded.

“That’s a start,” I said.

“The sky should be clear tonight, I’ll see if i can get through to Aphelia,” he said.

I frowned, the phone signal was excellent, I had made use of it to reassure my parents that I was not being spirited away to be married into a cult. Just then Bracken called to say dinner was ready and I never got around to asking him what he meant.

Dinner was salmon,accompanied by sautéed mushrooms, a mashed root that I could not identify and a sweet berry sauce, it was all excellent. Bracken said he had caught the fish himself, although I saw no fishing equipment, and everything else was gathered from the forest. He admitted that the beer was shop-bought, as it was out of season this time of year.

Throughout the meal he asked me everything about myself, recanted tales of his time in Russia that all seemed to revolve around potatoes or vodka or often both and let slip a few stories about Egg. I asked him what he did in the family firm.

“Trouble-kneeing,” he said. “Its like trouble-shooting, but instead of going in all guns blazing, you creep up on trouble, tap it on the shoulder and then, when it turns around, you knee it in the knackers as hard as you can.”

“So, why do they call you Bracken?” I asked.

“Because that, my good lady, is what it says on my birth certificate,” he replied with a straight face.

“He’s named after where he was found,” Egg added. “Some negligent sasquatch parent abandoned him in the undergrowth.”

“How dare you besmirch my honour!” He cried in mock anger. “Actually, its where I was conceived. Of more interest is why we call my brother Egg.”

“And why is that?” We had briefly giggled over the names in each other’s passports at the airport.

“Because after three live births, our mother was fed up with pregnancies, so left him in a nest for Dad to sit on.” He replied.

After more beer Egg taught me how the Finnish use a sauna, although I was glad he suggested we use bathing costumes rather than leap naked into the lake. I was a little dubious but there was no showering facility. Emerging from the water I felt clean and relaxed, the sun was just touching the trees across the lake. As I redressed I checked my watch, I recalled setting it to local time, but it did not appear as late as it should have been.

Egg and I sat on the lake shore and watched the stars slowly come out of hiding above us. There was a hooting and hollering as something naked dashed from the sauna and plunged into the water, Egg shook his head slowly. The splash turned to a wake and then vanished from my view in the gentle ripples.

“There are many more stars here than at home,” I commented.

“No lights to scare them away,” he explained. “Perfect for calling Aphelia.”

He retrieved his phone from his pocket, but instead of making a call he thumbed open a star-gazing app and placed the phone on the ground. Gazing out over the lake I could almost believe the stars and their reflections formed two separate hemispheres of night sky, leaving us adrift, floating amongst the points of light. Egg stood, looking up and turning, as though looking for a particular star.

Some stars seemed so close and bright. I twisted my body, but could not see the trees and cabin behind me, just more stars, my change in viewpoint making them into new and different constellations. Something nagged me that they should not behave like that.

Egg put his hand on my shoulder and pointed out a shooting star, it seemed impossibly close. He took a half-step forwards and made a grab for it. Opening his hand, he showed me a little sparkling sphere about the size of a ball-bearing. I suddenly recalled the mushrooms Bracken had prepared for dinner.

Threading her way through the shining throng was a short woman in a summer dress, her curly hair cascaded down her back and she was barefoot. As far as I could tell she had just materialised out of the air, but then I was too mesmerised by the surrounding galaxy to be a credible witness.

“Egg,” she said, with a voice that seemed all sparkle and comets. “Unexpected and long distance. It’s Dad, isn’t it? His heart.”

“Yes,” he replied. “You knew?”

“We’ve always been very close, even when we are so far apart,” she answered.

“I’m looking for Mother,” he said. “Has she been in touch?”

“She called me from Baikonur three or four months ago, we argued as usual, you know what she thinks of my marriage.” She shook her head lightly and frowned. “After then, nothing.”

“This is Cass, by the way,” Egg said belatedly. I smiled and waved, wondering if there was some sort of protocol to be observed. She greeted me in return and went on to ask about Vesta, Egg reassured her, but I could not help feeling there was something between them they were avoiding discussing in front of me.

As they spoke Aphelia slowly became less distinct, her voice sounding like she was drifting away from us. She finished with a warning.

“Be careful, Egg, there’s something major brewing and they don’t always let the junior members of staff in on that stuff.”

“Something’s been screwing up forecasting recently, I was told it might be a storm of some kind,” Egg said. “Do you think this may have something to do with Dad?”

“I don’t know, I’m too far away to have a clear picture,” she replied. “You need to find Mother to get to the bottom of it. Be careful who you trust. Take care, Egg, give my love to Vesta.”

With that she was gone. Egg stood still for a moment and then bent down, retrieved his phone and put it back onto standby. I realised I could see the trees and the lake again; the stars were once again distant pinpricks of light, still beautiful, but not quite bursting with same amount of splendour.

“That’s enough star-gazing, I think,” Egg said. “Fancy a night-cap?”

A path less straight (pt. 3)

Needing a bigger boat

“Are you sure Vesta’s going to be okay with your aunt?” I asked Egg somewhere over the North Sea.

We had deposited the girl in a cottage halfway up a hill in the middle of nowhere. Someone had added electricity and indoor plumbing, but the rest of the house looked unaltered for the last two hundred years and that included the furnishings. There was more than a healthy number of cats.

“Lily is my aunt by marriage, now divorced from Uncle Fez, she’s just normally odd,” Egg explained. “It will do Vesta good to get some country air, and avoid the telly and the Internet for a while. She likes cats.”

“Normally odd?” I enquired.

“Normally odd is buying a house in a remote area and filling it with a feline collection, the equivalent in family odd would probably involve building a successful urban giraffe farm.” He took a sip of horrid lukewarm tea. “Its Bracken’s expression.”

It was an early morning flight and possibly due to dozing lightly on the plane everything felt as though I had not woken up and was still in a dream. We had our passports checked, collected our luggage and hired a car. Egg drove us a short distance until he found a café at which we sat outside and drank coffee.

My senses slowly came awake as the caffeine joined my bloodstream and I took in the differences that make a place foreign, all of which were small but somehow made it like suddenly finding yourself on the wrong side of the mirror. The language, of course, was a complete mystery to me, but Egg appeared to know a few words here and there from a previous visit. The weather seemed far too sunny and warm for the distance North we had travelled.

“Have you figured out where we are headed?” I asked him. He had a small laptop open on the table and was taking advantage of the café’s free wi-fi.

“Here,” he said, rotating the computer so that I could see the screen.

Egg had run a local news story through an online translator. Reading through the mangled English interspersed with Finnish words the program had baulked at I gleaned the tale of encounters with a lake monster.

“And this is something that was likely to attract your brother?” I asked.

“Bracken loves to swim,” Egg told me in lieu of an explanation.

We took turns to drive, stopping frequently to buy refreshments, stretch our legs and take in the air. Helsinki was quickly left behind, the road signs all pointed to unfamiliar places, but the map program on Egg’s phone was unerring in directing us to the small town outlined in the article. I had given up trying to pronounce place names, the combinations of letters appeared all wrong to me.

The road took us through forest and past lakes and farmland, gradually the mix changed, more forest and less farms and then the lakes started to become more dominant. I had quickly vetoed Egg’s choice of West African pop played from his phone and the local radio stations with their incomprehensible adverts, so we voyaged to the sounds of seventies disco I had downloaded onto my MP3 player one night while drunk.

At our destination Egg managed to hire a small boat for the afternoon. We chugged gently out onto the lake, passing a bunch of kids clowning about on inflatables. After rounding a headland the town disappeared completely, leaving us alone on a glass-smooth surface. Fir trees lined the shores and for a moment I thought us fully alone in the midst of a wilderness, until Egg pointed out the summer cottages. Set back slightly from the lakeside, they were spaced out evenly so that each never had to glimpse its neighbours.

Somewhere out on the middle of the lake Egg turned the small outboard motor off and let us drift silently. The water formed a mirror of the sky, blue and flawless. A quiet lapping of water was the only sound.

“Is this your plan for finding your brother?” I asked Egg quietly, not wanting break the peace.

“I admit I hadn’t thought much further than this,” he murmured in reply. “Just sit back and keep an eye out for lake monsters.”

I scanned the lake, adjusting my hat to cut out more of the glare from the sun. When I glanced back at Egg he had his eyes closed and was breathing rhythmically, sprawled on the seat at the back of the boat. Stern, I reminder myself, I wondered if nautical terms applied to small boats.

My eyes wandered and my mind relaxed, recalling the last time I had been abroad. I had been with Jason, all he had wanted to do was get drunk, party until the small hours, sleep until the afternoon and then repeat. Somehow I could not imagine Egg doing the same, even if we had not been attending a family emergency I surmised we would probably end up doing something similar as we were doing now. I wondered if it was the disturbed sleep or too much sun that was turning me sappy.

A line of bubbles rose up through the lake to my left, I peered into the water wondering if there were fish down there. Something indistinct moved in the murk and was gone. Further out a large v-shaped wave pointed at our boat and the was gone, I did not know if I had imagined it. The boat moved as though suddenly caught in a current.

I turned to wake Egg and a flipper or tail breached the surface of the lake about four metres from the boat, it had protruded half a metre from the water and then slipped back under. My mouth gaped open and my arm, outstretched to shake Egg, dropped back to my side.

Something grabbed the side of the boat and I gave an involuntary shriek. My eyes quickly focussed on a tanned hand.

“Sorry,” said a deep, melodious voice in a sheepish manner as a head appeared from the water. “Hey, bro, what are you doing all the way out here?” It added, spying Egg.

Egg helped his brother into the boat. Bracken, in way of thanking him, managed to soak Egg quite well. The brotherly love calmed down a little as Egg turned the boat around and explained the situation.

Bracken was taller and better toned than Egg, his hair was much longer and lighter in colour. You could have missed the family connection altogether, but then I caught them both with the same thousand mile look in their eyes.

“Allow me to formally introduce myself,” said Bracken, standing up in the boat and taking my hand in his. “I am Sir Bracken, a crusading knight from Beauchamp Avenue.”

He bent lithely at the waist and placed his lips on the back of my hand as though he was dressed in his court finery and not just a pair of tight swimming trunks. Egg rolled his eyes.

A path less straight (pt. 2)

The Wikipedia kid rides again

We had taken Egg’s five year old niece for a walk in the park. She lived mostly with his parents, although care was shared between various relations when they were available. Everyone seemed to travel quite a lot. I asked him why his sister could not look after the child.

“Aphelia? She swings around when she can, but she and Kuiper have important careers and it would not be fair on Vesta to have her live with them” he explained. “She’d probably grow up all weird.”

Vesta ran on ahead, a pair of dress-up feathered wings on her back and a plastic sword in her hand. She had explained to me that angels carried flaming swords to smite down their enemies. I had asked her if she wanted to be an angel when she grew up.

“No,” she had replied. “I want to be a corporate accountant.”

With the ducks fed, the swings swung, the slide slid and some imaginary, but fairly insidious, evil smote into small, charred pieces we headed back to Egg’s house.

Egg shared a fifties semi with his older brother, which he had explained meant that he mainly had the place to himself except for a couple of weeks every year when Bracken breezed into town, rearranged the furniture, enraged the neighbours and then disappeared again to wherever the family firm required him to be. The gardens were neat, the pebble-dash well-painted and while the car on the drive was a couple of decades out, it looked much as it might have done when it was first built. Inside it had been modernised, was decorated conservatively and only a few touches showed any of Egg’s usual disregard for convention.

He set out glasses of iced mint tea and a plate of beetroot and dark chocolate brownies and then paused as though he had heard a strange noise in an adjoining, but empty room.

“Sorry, I’ll have to take this in private,” he said. Then his phone rang.

Vesta and I had brushed away the crumbs and adjourned to the back garden to keep the dinosaurs away as we rounded up cattle on the ranch before he rejoined us. I had thought he looked a little under the weather all day, but something in the phone call had turned his face ashen and sucked all life from his usually under-animated features. He sat heavily on the low wall that guarded the central flower bed from the lawn.

“That was my uncle Fez,” he explained. “My dad’s in hospital, its his heart.”

“Is it serious?” I asked, not knowing what to say. I had met Egg’s dad, Rob, a small, bald, quiet sort of man, he and Egg conversed in partial sentences and long pauses, but seemed to understand each other perfectly. Fez was quite the opposite, overtly expressive about everything, spouting forth endlessly without actually saying anything.

“Yes,” he replied. “The doctor says he has myocarditis of some sort.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Myocarditis or inflammatory cardiomypathy is inflammation of the heart muscle (myocardium). Myocarditis is most often due to infection by common viruses, such as...” stated Vesta.

“Cheers, Vesta.” He took stock of my expression. “That’s just Wikipedia. I usually remember to turn my wi-fi off before she comes round here. It doesn’t look good, I’m going to have to get in contact with Mother.”

“Is that difficult?” I made a mental note to stop asking little questions.

“She was working with Bracken in Vladivostok last month, but left him to finish off. We don’t know where she went after that, usually she’ll get back in contact within a couple of months, but...” He swallowed.

“I understand, and does Bracken know where she might have gone?” I asked.

“He’s split up with Huggy again, which means he’ll be sulking with his phone off,” he said. “He could be anywhere, probably a cabin in the woods somewhere.” He paused. “But I know someone who might be able to point us in the right direction.”

We followed him back into the kitchen. He turned on the radio and played with the tuner until he found what he wanted. I vaguely recognised the intro, but when the voice joined the beat it was the voice of an old gent from the home counties and not some American rap star.

“You’ve got some dilemma, running through your life,

Causing you troubles, giving you strife.

You need to go searching, looking for your bro.

Sucker’s hiding where? You just don’t know.

Need to find that sucker, don't know where to go?

He's hiding in the forest, eating kalakukko.

That girl beside you, if I were you

I’d tap that ass

Touch it, stroke it, slow grind all night

Play it...”

Egg quickly snapped the radio off. The colour had returned to his cheeks in a rush.

“That was...” I began.

“...awful,” he finished. “He should have stuck to yodelling.”

“And that was supposed to help?” I raised an eyebrow. “What's that Kali-something?”

“Kalakukko is a traditional dish from the Finnish region of Savonia made from fish baked inside a loaf of bread.” Vesta answered.

“Cheers, Vesta,” Egg said. He turned to me. “Do you fancy a trip abroad? I can't promise there'll be much time for sightseeing, but the firm's credit card will be paying.”

“Well...” I considered my options. I was between temporary contracts and my passport had been gathering dust, but I could never remember when on the relationship calendar you were supposed to vanish off into the wilderness with a guy.

“Separate rooms, if that's what you want,” he added. “I could just do with some company and an independent, sober viewpoint when it comes to family stuff. Steve's useless at that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” I replied. “I'll get my mum to water the plants.”

“C'mon, Vesta,” Egg said. “Let's go visit your granddad in hospital, and then Cass and I have to go to Finland to find your Uncle Bracken.”

“Uncle Egg, is Granddad going to be alright?” she asked.

“Of course,” he answered in that way adults say things to children when they are trying to convince themselves. “We'll find Granny and she'll know exactly how to make him better.”

“Citation needed,” Vesta stated.

A path less straight (pt. 1)

Egg and Chips

I met Egg through friends. We were gooseberries to the romance of the century. While they entwined on a bench on the seafront, we leaned against a railing and scowled at the seagulls. He had a kind of distant look, as though he was listening for very faint sounds from very far away.

He suggested that we find somewhere out of the wind, rather than rely on the radiated glow of other people’s love for warmth, so we sat in a café and ate greasy chips and drank over-stewed tea. Trying not to keep up both sides of the conversation or mention my recent ex-, Jason, I had asked him to tell me about his family.

“They’re odd.” He said.

“Everyone thinks their family are odd,” I told him. “No-one wants to be normal.”

“When I was twelve, I was listening to the radio with my Granddad,” he replied, adding more ketchup to the remaining chips. “ Suddenly, he stood up straight and saluted. He stayed rigid like that until the end of the song and then keeled over dead, still stiff as a board.”

“You must have been devastated.” I took another gulp of lukewarm tea.

“Not really, we had a sweepstake on who would be closest when he passed away, I won big-time.” He patted me on the back as I tried not to choke on my tea. “It was his idea, he hadn’t been well since he left the army and it was his way of preparing everyone for the inevitable.”

“What was playing? Was it the national anthem?” I asked.

“It was ‘Baby Got Back’, he hated all that patriotic stuff.” He replied. “Ever since then, if I ever want any advice, all I have to do is tune the radio into some hip-hop station and I hear his voice, rapping the answers to my problems.”

“That’s kind of nifty.” I gave a laugh, but he was not smiling, not in his distant blue eyes.

“It is handy,” he said. “But it makes MTV thoroughly embarrassing.”

Two weeks later Egg arrived unexpected at my door. The romance of the century was on the rocks, Janet had been on the phone wailing and cursing about what Steve had done. I was looking for an excuse not to go around to her place with a bottle of wine and try to hold back the flood of tears with a dam of platitudes.

“Have you heard about Janet and Steve?” I asked, somewhat taken aback because I had never told him where I lived or discussed the possibility of meeting again.

“I surmised something was up, but the battery ran out on my phone,” he replied. “Fancy a drive out in the country?”

Just then the opening bars of some cringe-inducing pop song trilled out from my phone. I noted Janet’s name on the screen, but the battery indicator was flashing and the device went black before I could hit accept.

“Oh.” I said. “Looks like its catching.”

“If it becomes an epidemic, how will people cope?” He gestured towards where an old Ford sat at the kerbside. “Perhaps we should escape before civilisation collapses.”

The car, he explained as we passed fields at a leisurely pace, had been his granddad's. It had never suffered any kind of mechanical breakdown, unless you counted the radio, which had ceased working properly six months after the car was bought and so would not play anything other than eighties tunes.

“That must be annoying.” I said.

“Granddad said it was novel in the seventies, but got old real soon after then,” he deadpanned.

He parked the car on the verge of a seldom travelled road, lifted a rucksack from the boot and led me through an over-grown stile into a field. I followed him along a meandering path, snaking around bushes and then taking a route through a small copse as though it had been laid by a drunk with nowhere in particular to go.

“They could have made this straighter,” I remarked.

“Its easier to follow where the path wants to go,” he replied. “That’s the problem with modern roads, they build them straight and it takes so much effort to follow them.”

I spent the next few minutes trying to digest this as the path zigzagged through a grassy meadow, but I guess he could have been right because we found ourselves at the top of a ridge, the car visible far below us, there had been no sense of climbing. He pulled a blanket out of his bag and set up a picnic as I surveyed the kind of view that people call idyllic but rarely actually go out of their way to find.

We ate a spread of off-beat food, brie and beetroot sandwiches, quail eggs wrapped in bacon, parsnip and sweet potato crisps, cheese scones spread with quince jelly and a cake that he said was made with pineapple and courgette. He told me that it was mostly what he had found in the fridge.

We spent a couple of hours sat, chatting about nothing, drinking gooseberry cordial and enjoying the one nearly perfect day of Spring, until a chill wind rose up and he suggested heading back. He left the rest of the cake, telling me it was a present for the pixies, so that they might let us use this spot again some other day.

As we drove back, Wham and Duran Duran playing on the radio, I realised that I had just broken all of my rules and spent the day with a bloke I hardly knew, leaving my phone at home. But there had been none of the pressing for a drunken Friday night tumble that marked my usual relations with the opposite sex. It was more like a date from the fifties as I imagined them, all jolly good fun and none of that hanky panky, but with less smoking and fewer quiffs. It was certainly better than spending the day agreeing with Janet on what pigs men are.

A fortnight after that I managed to get Egg’s number from Steve, who had sealed the rift with Janet by single handedly keeping the local florist solvent. He apologised for not getting in touch, work had managed to get on top of him. I suggested that we go out to see a film and then I would cook us a meal, he agreed and arrived five minutes early with a bunch of pelargoniums and a bottle of rioja.

I had not heard of the film, but it turned out to be a quirky and intelligent thriller. We laughed at several inappropriate moments and he did not hog the popcorn. The cinema was virtually empty, it was not until a couple of weeks later that I saw it advertised on television so I assumed it was some sort of advanced preview screening.

Back at my house we dined in style on my vegetable lasagne served with over-done oven chips. He told me a story about the layers of lasagne representing the social strata of medieval Italy, proving that to survive at the top you have to tolerate slightly burnt cheese. I drank most of the wine as he had to drive home and had to work in the morning.

“I work for the family consultancy firm,” he explained. “Mostly communication and forecasting.”

“Sounds complicated,” I said.

“Not really,” he replied. “Its mainly answering the phone and making guesses.”

He kissed me sweetly as he left. Not a huge romantic snog, but a gentle peck on the cheek. Some of the distance had gone from his eyes and there was something in his wave as the old Ford pulled away from the kerb. My lasagne never fails.

I was a teen-aged cyborg

“Its completely experimental, quite on the bleeding edge,” Nina had told me, beaming the words and associated data straight to my mind. “Although, of course, its a very long time since either of us had any real blood.”

The image she sent of a girl laughing was an old one, a reminder of our long friendship. I had captured it myself with my first set of artificial eyes just after we had both recovered from the surgery. It had been the first step on both of our journeys into becoming post-human.

“I don't know,” I replied. “Its such a big step and you know how I like to take things slower.”

I sent her my memories of recovering from that plane crash and the painful choice of deciding which parts of my body to replace with machinery, which to regrow as before. Part of me still wonders how my life would have turned out if I had kept as much flesh as possible.

“But don't you think things have become a trifle staid and boring?” She asked me.

I received and perused her delight at her first transformation into something truly non-human. The winged, four-armed form was designed for working in a reduced gravity environment, Nina had turned it into a beautiful artistic gesture.

“You have always moved faster than I have.” I responded.

I dredged up a memory of us in our old bio-mechanical glory and transmitted it to her. Racing through clouds on jets of fire, I had been unable to keep up, only tracking her through my radar sense.

“Have you lost that sense of adventure, of discovery?” She demanded.

She sent me a recording of two vessels leaving the docks and heading for the open vastness of deep space. We had travelled between the stars for centuries as living ships, revelling in far-flung stellar oddities.

“There is no shame relaxing and taking pleasure in a myriad of little joys.” I told her.

I connected her to my live feeds, monitoring the lives, loves and losses of my million inhabitants, each as individual and different as we had been. As a space-borne mining and processing station I was their home, their employer and their carer, they were my obsession and my entertainment.

“Think of it, inserted into the informational fabric of the Universe at the most basic quantum level, you'd be a god, the creator of your own reality.” She insisted.

“Then you go first, create a reality for both of us and I'll follow when I'm ready.”

I watched her go through the procedure, watched the energies build and flow and watched her disappear from my life. I considered taking the same procedure for many years, but eventually turned my back and joined the rehumanist movement. I was tired of following Nina from pillar to post-human.