I Am Sovereign
Page 3
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Richard Grannon has emphasised that it is important – nay, vital – to find a vocabulary with which to describe how you are feeling.
Words are the harbingers of feelings.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Even if you aren’t feeling. That’s okay, too. You just need to check in, every day, and ask yourself a couple of simple questions about how things are going.
Jot down some notes in a pad.
Charles immediately paused the recording and went online and spent several hours trying to find the perfect pad to jot down notes in. He ended up buying five pads with nice, hard covers in a special Amazon Prime deal. They were a good price but they were unlined. After he had placed the order he realised, to his horror, that he doesn’t actually like unlined pages. They seem …
Hmm. The word?
Engulfing.
Like a black hole.
But just all … all … all white.
A white hole.
TRI BRAWD.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
How am I feeling? Charles wonders.
I am feeling …
Claustrophobic.
Disgusted.
Nervous.
Stupid.
Fastidious.
Sad.
Alone.
Charles worries that he may have shingles.
‘Would you mind showing Ying Yue and Wang Shu through to the kitchen while I pop outside for a minute, Charles?’ Avigail asks, as Charles scratches gingerly at a suspicious rash on his upper forearm.
‘Perhaps you might … I don’t know … bathe her head in some warm, salted water? I just need to pop outside for a second – I won’t be … uh … long … if that’s okay …?’
Avigail promptly disappears, leaving a delectable cloud of Body Shop Japanese Cherry Blossom Strawberry Kiss Eau de Toilette in her wake.
Wang Shu is still on the phone, talking in Chinese.
‘Bathe her head?’ Charles murmurs, horrified.
‘There’s no need,’ Ying Yue pipes up. ‘Mother is tough. She hates any fuss. She doesn’t welcome any fuss.’
After she finishes speaking Ying Yue quietly inspects all the locks on Charles’s front door.
‘Plenty locks,’ she says, approvingly.
Ferocious innocence.
No judgement.
Nothing.
‘Ha. Yes …’ Charles almost winces (making up for Ying Yue’s lack of judgement by sternly judging himself). ‘To keep me in!’
Ying Yue glances up, thoughtfully, and still, miraculously, no sign of judgement.
‘Uh … joke …’ Charles mutters.
‘Ah.’ Ying Yue smiles broadly.
Ying Yue doesn’t really understand jokes. And she doesn’t really speak English. I mean … she isn’t … she can’t … not … not really. She doesn’t truly speak any language. Well, she can speak, just a smattering, but she doesn’t fully possess any language. And no language fully possesses her. She slips and trips and falls cheerfully between the letters. Yes. That’s her. That’s Ying Yue, holding on for dear life to the lip of an e, the tail of a q.
It’s quite impermanent, quite temporary – her grasp of these things. Everything’s just hashed together, just piecemeal, just loosely tacked into some semblance of coherence – of intelligibility – by giant, scruffy stitches of sincerity, simplicity and goodwill.
Charles suddenly crosses himself, in his mind, for protection, even though he isn’t currently – never has been, and never will be – a Catholic.
Protection from what, exactly, he doesn’t yet know.
Perhaps he never will.
2.
EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A TYPO, THE ERRORISTS WIN
Perfectionism is actually a major part of the problem. Perfectionism and entitlement.
Charles knows this. He understands that his fervent desire for things to be ‘just so’ is a stupidly anal, self-involved, un-evolved way of being. Grannon sometimes links ‘entitled’ behaviour (a modern scourge) to a tendency that is found to be prevalent in the Cluster B Personality Disorder Matrix called ‘Magical Thinking’. This is something that very small children with porous ego-boundaries are apt to engage in, i.e. believing that their internal urges/desires will somehow be ‘magically’ expressed in the outside word.
The Toxic Inner Critic is behind this craving for perfection, surely? The Parent voice? The hectoring voice? The ‘moral’ voice?
Never satisfied. Always looking for a weakness. Always sniffing out a problem, an inconsistency, a dreadful flaw.
Richard Grannon’s mantra is ‘Good enough is more than enough for me.’ He came up with this idea of good-enoughness as a teenager – imagine that! A teenager – while he was living in Portugal among wolves – being raised by wolves. Then one day the Alpha wolf – the pack leader, an amazingly accepting, generous, infinitely wise wolf called Ranwa – was struck by lightning and died and Grannon had to step up to the mark and fight his beloved wolf brother, Simco, for the head role. Simco was a good and kind wolf but he was weak. He was indecisive. So Grannon honestly had no option but to challenge him for dominance. For the well-being – nay, survival – of the entire wolf community.
Uh-oh.
Do you see that?
Do you see how the Toxic Inner Critic is trying to belittle Grannon with a blitzkrieg of blithe sarcasm?
Ha ha ha.
Grannon wasn’t raised by wolves. Although from what Charles can deduce Grannon spent part of his childhood in a Portuguese commune, which isn’t really that different, is it? A commune in Portugal?
Oh, it’s all so enviably cosmopolitan.
Charles suspects that Richard Grannon speaks about five different languages. He imagines that Grannon has a ‘smattering’ of German and passable Thai and that he would positively thrive in Brazil.
Richard Grannon speaks his excellent English with a broad Scouse accent (more marked when he’s feeling especially ebullient or pissed or tired).
Richard Grannon adheres to the fight/fawn archetype.
Charles has made quite a study of this by watching all his posts on YouTube.
(That’s quite a lot of posts.)
Grannon teaches that you should closely study the people you admire and try to actively impersonate the good qualities you find in them. This is an NLP strategy.
Grannon isn’t just a therapist, remember? He’s a life coach.
He is receptive.
He is flexible.
He is open to change.
Avigail doesn’t actually lock the door behind her (there are too many locks – Charles is a freak) but leaves it on the latch (even though she has a spare set of keys) and quickly turns left down Ty Isa Road, heading back towards Trevor Street. Avigail really loves Trevor Street despite its unbearable, seasonal gull problem. It’s very close to the seafront and the houses on one side are pebbledash cottages, all set back behind low, stone walls with nice, manageable gardens. On the other side are the traditional, seaside terraces: two-storey but with sweet, little pitched windows in every roof. There’s a polite, artisan vibe on the left, offset by a more traditional, seaside feel on the right. Nothing too arty-farty.
Cocktails?!
Charles is a pest.
A pest.
Avigail reaches the near end of Trevor Street and stands there, firmly planting her feet, sternly squinting up it.
Gull-shit-splattered everywhere – like a real-time Jackson Pollock.
Oyster shell … Oyster shell …
?
She walks slowly up the road scanning the tarmac and the pavement. It isn’t a long road. She looks for the oyster shell. Nothing. No sign of an oyster shell. Where is the oyster shell?
Avigail closes her eyes for a moment and tries to recall exactly what happened on her earlier journey up Trevor Street.
She plays an edited version in her mind.
Nope. Nothing.
It couldn’t be considered �
�normal’, surely, to be so oblivious? So unaware? So absent? So absent that an oyster shell can fall from the sky and hit a client on the head? For an oyster shell to fall from the sky and hit a client on the head and draw blood?
Do I trust them? Avigail wonders, slightly paranoid.
Wang Shu and Ying Yue?
Are they trustworthy?
Is this a prank?
A joke?
A set-up?
Avigail needs to be perfectly normal. She needs to be the most normal, most present, most effortlessly functional person in every situation, in every environment.
Avigail longs to conform to the wider culture ABSOLUTELY.
Even though she is secretly at war with the algorithm.
Even though she secretly calls other human beings ‘fleshies’.
Even though she secretly makes abstract tapestries which attempt to depict the ruah hakodesh.
Even though she secretly thinks the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus gets a bad rap.
Even though she makes her own foundation by combining three different foundations and a fragrance-free hand cream.
Even though she sometimes wears sequins during daylight hours.
Why do I always get found out?!
For the smallest, the most insignificant of breaches, dammit?!
A car sounds its horn in the distance.
Avigail opens her eyes and sees a car driving up the promenade, and beyond that, beyond the mew of gulls, the roar of the sea, beyond all these – beyond the honking car – she suddenly
CHING!
feels the spaces between things.
Space as substance.
A slight shift in perception.
Like the feeling of disorientation when you are just about to swoon …
Something utterly insignificant greatly magnified
and rendered dreadfully significant.
Oh no, no, no.
Avigail shakes her head.
Oh no, no, no.
Not here! Not now!
Don’t let this happen again!
The quiet in sound – the energy in space. The movement in stillness which is the hallmark of …
of …
Don’t utter it!
Don’t name it!
Don’t give it the opportunity … the elbow-room!
Avigail will not be appropriated.
No.
She will resist!
She will stand her ground!
She refuses to be hijacked!
Here!
Now!
At approximately 2.45 p.m. on Trevor Street in Llandudno by … by … by …
Argh!
NO!
The Transcendent One!
Duh, duh, DUUUUH!
The oyster shell! A hoax! A simple ruse! To bring her out here so she might be devoured, be consumed by Ein Sof!
A helpless offering.
A rebellious hors d’oeuvre.
Avigail tries to turn but cannot turn. The something-in-nothing, solid-in-space, quiet-in-sound energy – the awareness – the tiny adjustment – the shift – is consuming everything, entering everything, transforming everything but leaving all things exactly the same. Ah, such omnipresence, such savage-quiet-gentleness, such irreducible implacability …
Immanence.
All God.
All complete.
Everywhere.
In everything.
Leit Atar panuy mi-neya, as her father was often wont to say.
(No site is devoid of it.)
Ein Sof.
The Unending.
‘I starved you out, damn you!’ Avigail groans, then – using every inch of her remaining power – she hurls herself over a low garden wall and crouches there.
Hiding.
Hiding from Ein Sof.
Which is impossible. And ridiculous. But she’s been doing it her entire life.
Because Ein Sof allows free will.
That’s the whole point.
Isn’t it?
Time – obligingly – passes (and also – quite unhelpfully – stands still).
‘Avigail …? Um. Hello? Avigail?’
It is Charles. He has followed Avigail down the road.
Please don’t let that be Charles, Avigail thinks.
Although who else could it possibly be?
She opens her eyes. It is Charles.
Charles has been illumined by Ein Sof but doesn’t yet seem to realise (the idiot).
Have I been illumined? Avigail wonders. She peers down at herself.
She can’t really tell.
Perhaps she is in denial?
Screw ‘denial’! She has no time for ‘denial’.
Avigail is a great grasper of nettles.
She likes the sting!
Is the garden wall illumined?
Yes. The wall seems illumined. Everything is illumined.
Everything is illumined.
‘Are you feeling okay, Charles?’ Avigail asks from her crouching position (opting to take the initiative).
‘I …’ Charles is about to ask Avigail why she is hiding behind a wall and then is saved from this awkward necessity by a woman coming out of the house and asking Avigail what she is doing crouching in her flowerbed.
The woman is illumined.
‘Oh, hi.’ Avigail rises to her feet. ‘I am searching for evidence,’ she announces, with a slight air of foreboding.
‘Evidence?’
The garden is illumined.
‘A client of mine was injured by an oyster shell which was dropped by a seagull and I am looking for that oyster shell. As evidence. She has a head wound. It’s quite serious, actually.’
The woman silently processes this information.
The cottage is illumined.
‘If you happen to see a bloodied oyster shell – here, in the local vicinity – I’d be incredibly grateful if you could contact me.’
Avigail hunts around in her handbag and pulls out a business card.
‘Here’s my card.’ She points. ‘My name is Avigail. A-vi-gail. These are my contact details: mobile, email …’
She strides towards the woman and hands her the card. The woman takes the card.
The business card is illumined.
Am I illumined? Avigail wonders.
Damn you! Damn you, Ein Sof!
The illumined woman thanks Avigail for the illumined business card.
‘Thank you,’ Avigail responds. ‘And sorry for the … you know … disturbance.’
She takes the woman’s hand and shakes it, ceremoniously.
Yes. Extremely cordial. Utterly measured. Very calm. Perfectly normal.
She then strides back towards Charles. Out through the gate this time. She clicks the latch shut with a distinct touch of brio.
The latch is illumined. Click-ick-ick-ick. It sings.
‘Are you all right, there, Charles?’ she asks again.
‘Where are Ying Yue and Wang Shu?’
‘I came to fetch you because I didn’t feel comfortable showing them around on my own,’ Charles says limply.
Charles is illumined. But he’s still Charles.
Alas.
‘Do you feel different?’ Avigail wonders, inspecting Charles’s illumined face.
‘Sorry?’
‘Like soft water. You know how it is when water is hard – it’s been heavily processed, is full of chemicals – but then it’s filtered and it becomes kind of … softer … chalky?’
Charles gazes at Avigail for a few seconds and then says slowly, ‘I’m not sure if I’m really capable of answering that question, Avigail.’
‘Not to worry.’ Avigail shrugs. ‘I just wondered.’
‘I didn’t want to leave the door on the latch,’ Charles explains. ‘You have some … uh … soil on your skirt.’
Charles doesn’t want to admit that he has suddenly become nervous around Ying Yue. There’s a kind of …
What is it?
Impossible to say.
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Something new.
Something distinctly alien.
‘It’s twelve years since the attempted burglary.’ Avigail dusts the mud off as she walks. ‘Last year there were six burglaries in Llandudno, which totals at 2.6 per cent of all crime in the town. Burglary is not a serious problem in Llandudno. It’s only a problem in Llandudno if you choose to make it a problem.’