- The first phase was about denial. We tried to hide our son away from this malignant spirit. It looked into our hearts and found our love for him and popped his head off with a thumbnail, like a pimple. I won’t describe the act in any more detail, it was utterly appalling.
- The second phase was sacrifice. We wrecked the church in grief and anger and tried to instil hate in our hearts for each other, to protect each other. But as we screamed and struck each other it saw love as the primary motivation and as it was my dream, of course, it killed my partner.
- The final phase was even more unpalatable. I realised that the only way to destroy the demon was to learn to love it. If I could only dig deep enough, find a way to convince myself, to really believe it, feel it in my heart, then it would turn on itself and be consumed by its own vengeful, single minded purpose.
Christ, no word of a lie, I woke up gasping and in a sweat. Love the thing you hate the most? It still makes me dizzy just to think of it. Who could do such a thing after the havoc already wreaked? Surely it flies in the very face of being human?
Thankfully it was only a dream but it did not auger well for the week ahead and the parallels with what comes next are hard to ignore. Yesterday the boss called a special meeting to announce something important. Now you remember what I said about taking a photo of the Black Bullet with the family and the guitar all posed in front of the house? It was the 1st October 2010, the day I realised I had everything I ever wanted. Well, be careful what you hope for, it lasted barely a week.
To explain this I need to backtrack momentarily. We can only afford to live in this house in this village because it is part of a charitable housing trust, set up to save the landowner property tax. The trust requires that occupants qualify for charitable housing status by working on, or for, the Estate. It’s a legacy of more patriarchal times and we have benefited from this arrangement since I moved here to take the job.
Now our new parent company has decided to close our office and combine two offices in one, in North Oxfordshire, which effectively means we’re going to lose our home. It a crushing blow, make no mistake about it. We’ve built a life we love out here and some fool with a sharp pencil has just crossed it out. Simple as that.
There’s always been a sense of crossing over into the pastoral, as you drive down into the village from the main road at the end of a long day. The mobile signal fades and the chestnut bordered horse paddocks buzz with insects, picked out against the shadows by the low evening sun. The swallows go crazy for them, darting past ducks on a lazy flap over to the lake.
So it’s hard not to be really angry about this, but in the meeting rooms of a Cheshire Travelodge, or wherever it may be, it must be quite easy to ameliorate the bank manager by describing how you’re going to streamline your operation and pay back what you’ve borrowed by cutting this and rationalising that. I’ve been on the end of this kind of thing before and the funny thing is you’ll never find anyone directly responsible for making these decisions. It’s spineless bullshit, in my view, not ‘hard business decisions to match hard times’ as the people responsible would have you believe. These crackers don’t know hard times.
It reminds me of a telling scene in a kids movie where all the ants stand on each others’ shoulders to allow the ruling ants to climb to a leaf out of danger. When the last of the ruling ants steps to safety the ant at the top of the column pulls at the leaf to steady a wobble and the ruling ants nearly fall off.
“Let go,” shouts a ruling ant, “it’s for the good of the community!”
The top ant looks up and pleads, “but we are the community.”
We can only conclude that the new company has no interest in ‘the community’ and even if we survive this change and get to stay put, I’m not sure I can continue to work for them in the way I used to. there was no spring in my step this morning and I'm spending lunchtime in the pub, fuck them. Change is daunting but not nearly as scary as damnation.
Anyway, the final tranche of paperwork for the Black Bullet has been submitted. I posted it in this time, I’m not sure there’s anything more I can do or say to sway the decision. I headed the letter, Application for an Age-related Registration. Now we await the final outcome.
