The sky hangs low and grey like a giant car park that might fall and squash him flat. The day is finally here however, the special day that is the moving day of Louis Faranelli. We won't tell you how the packing went because it went very badly indeed and all Louis Faranelli wants to do is forget about the packing. So instead we'll move on to the actual moving because the packing is all over now, and that's a relief. Anyway he's on the move now, packing done, and even though a lot of blue, red and yellow socks are not in his bag, being still in the wash or still under his bed, covered in dust, Louis Faranelli is on the bus. The dark starless night and the traffic are whizzing past but the bus is warm and comfortable with soft red seats and a yellow pole which he holds on to whilst seated as a sort of safety measure. It's a comfort for some reason and as well as the pole, there is also one dark haired woman wearing a red hat, and one bald man wearing a brown coat, double breasted, and of course there is also Louis Faranelli, who is traveling to find his new life.
Louis Faranelli sits near the front upstairs on the bus. He is sandwiched in between a green rucksack and two yellow plastic bags, pretty sturdy, that hold some of his more miscellaneous things: his mouse traps, four notebooks and an aloe vera plant, which he does his best to make sure remains upright. He watches the woman with the red hat alight. She is wearing a blue coat and has a chawawa and carries a box that once contained crisps, salt and vinegar flavor, but now probably contains something else, perhaps some knitting and a few books or some quick drying clay. He watches the bald man alight and walk off into a dark suburb with a few lights and trees and small garden gates and a few cars. Louis Faranelli stays on the bus as he is the final passenger to alight. So he stays on the 8099 (for that is the bus number) until it reaches the final stop on the very farthest outskirts of Nod-Nol. It is completely dark by the time he gets there: it's difficult to describe the totality of this darkness. It's like space. You cannot see anything, you cannot see your hand in front of your face as Louis' granny would have said. Black, it is black, very black and it's so dark he's surprised to see the moon there above him. It is a sort of white full stop that seems to put quite a rude end to everything.
Louis Faranelli walks the last stretch of lonely motorway by himself, the cars whizzing past like enemy bullets. All of his belongings fit into one rucksack and two plastic bags. He carries these now as he walks along the motorway on his long, skinny 'tall-deer' legs, fearing and hoping.
It is both a relief and not a relief when the directions state that he must turn right through a field. This leads to a path that is not a path but a muddy track that is hardly a track at all. It is a relief because here Louis can escape the enemy fire, which is the traffic, but it also leads into an opaque blackness and into a kind of forest that, he won't mind me telling you, totally creeps him out. Louis Faranelli has noticed something.
Louis Faranelli walks for some time through this blackness (that is a forest that totally creeps him out) until he reaches a building. This is the house in which Louis will rent a room. Actually this will be a bathroom.
Yes. In fact, Louis Faranelli will rent a bathroom of a falling down house to live in. Why you might ask, would he rent a bathroom. Well, times are tight, and a bathroom, quite frankly, is all he can afford.
We might ask what the falling down house looks like, this falling-down or unfinished sort of house, in the dark on the edge of a dark motorway? Louis Faranelli doesn't know. Though he wants to believe in a homely kind of place, perhaps like the servants quarters of Thornfield Hall where he Jane Eyre, with Mrs Fairfax there to welcome him with a cup of tea and a roaring fire, and tales of Mr Rochester away in exotic lands or in prison, for putting a bullet in the 'feeble wing' of an inferior rival. Louis, though a fantasist, is also a realist, and fears that it actually no maternal figure will be present and instead all will look grim and abandoned and forbidding as if to confirm his complete aloneness. There are probably boarded up windows and things (instead of a roaring fire and a tea pot and a fruit scone, warm from the oven.) He is correct and he discovers this when he remembers he has a torch: yes, the house looks abandoned, forbidding and there are boarded up windows. It is also cold. Cold, and there are one or two flies. No scones.
Despite all this: the sinister, creepy darkness, almost losing his life on the motorway, being alone in a creepy forest on the outskirts of Nod-Nol, Louis Faranelli is thankful. Thankful he has found a place to live.
It's a long story, but Louis Faranelli found this place, even in the eleventh hour, with only 24 hours to spare before he might become homeless.
Louis Faranelli wouldn't last a night on the streets. He has three masters degrees and a phD and a very correct accent. He has limited people skills.
He walks through the front garden and discerns a door. There is a plastic sign stuck across it at a slant. At first he thinks it is a 'Welcome' banner. But unhappily it says: 'Danger, keep out!' Louis finds his key and lets himself in.
Inside it is black as tar and smells of petrol. The torch helps. Louis doesn't spend time looking at the other rooms because they are none of his business. He is renting the bathroom and that is that. Yet, he can't help but discern the broken glass and distinctive lack of floorboards, two further abandoned wheelbarrows and some disassembled scaffolding. He ascends some stairs made out of misfitting planks, and it is at this moment he shines his torch ahead, only to see...
His new front door.
Louis is excited, yet apprehensive. He goes inside and switches on the light which he soon discovers is turned on by a string attached to a spring. It emits a good glare that illuminates the clean white space. It is a decent sized bathroom, both tidy and empty. It is a large rectangle and has a blue floor and the bath is on the right. It's also not as cold as expected. He puts down his rucksack and smiles. He smiles because there are six cupboards on the wall. So many, he thinks. Here's luck!
He starts to plan before he has even unpacked, he is so excited:
Cupboard 1 will hold his weetabix.
Cupboard 2 will hold his clothes. (2 grey shirts, an extra pair of red jeans, a blue and yellow sweater.)
Cupboard 3 can hold his paper, toolbox and materials and books.
Perhaps in time he will purchase a teapot and some cups and a kettle. These will be allocated to cupboard number 4, his kitchenware cupboard.
Cupboards 5 and 6 he will consider in due course. (They will most likely store any food that is not weetabix.)
He sits down on the toilet seat a little overwhelmed. Louis Faranelli feels grateful and relieved. He had never dared to believe he would have so much storage space! Everything has worked out, and here he is, installed in his very own bathroom!
He has a home in Nod-nol.
He sits on the toilet seat and thinks. Only days before he had quite simply accepted that he was going to be, as we may have mentioned, homeless; destitute as a penny sparrow. There was no doubt in his mind that this would be his fate. None. It was inevitable and he could see no way around it. This was because of student debt.
Being a European student studying in the UK, Louis Faranelli was up to his neck in debt. More than eighty five thousand pounds of debt to be precise. He had a very small income from a part time job and nobody to help him. No parents. No trust fund. Just him by himself with his fascination for both mathematics and dead languages, an insatiable love of learning, and a lack of people skills which meant he couldn't get a job. So all he could really do what made him happy whilst wading deeper and deeper into debt.
So Louis found himself suddenly in a procarious fiscal position which frankly meant he was about to be evicted. This was because he had not paid rent in three months. He would be evicted on the Saturday, a fine good day for an eviction! This was inevitable.
YOU ARE READING
Tales of Disturbance
Science FictionA young teenage girl, haunted by the memories of her father's execution, attempts to escape a cruel regime by night. A solitary woman, abandoned by her husband, inadvertently plays into the cruel hands of 'the state'. In another totalitarian regime...
