ALL ABOUT CREATIVITY

She hasn’t stopped speaking since they left the after-party but did now, momentarily, as the carriage lurched with the pull of the diesel engine. 

I’ll be glad to get home, she said. This town gives me the shivers. Just flatlands and drizzle. How can anyone bear it? It would send me do-daly.

Her fiancé, sitting opposite, had a different opinion but kept that to himself. Besides which he was exhausted and hoping to take a nap. Ever since they’d arrived on Friday evening, tired then, he felt as if there’d not been a moment to relax. What had Jake yelled in his ear as they stood taking a break from the dance floor, the strobes freezing people in stop-motion: Caroline’s the smartest of us. She knows what she wants. I hope you do too.

And I didn’t appreciate the way you left me with Annabel this afternoon, she continued. It’s not that I know her that well. Paul, are you listening?

He blinked slowly as he returned her flat stare.

Would you mind if we didn’t talk for a bit, he said. It’s just that I’m dead beat and I’ve got a heap on tomorrow at the office.

Oh sure. You just take a man-nap and I’ll work through all we still have left to do.

Caroline! It’s two years away. 

Twenty months.

Twenty months then. It’s ages.

            Caroline had a nervous disposition and seven months before the wedding fell ill, an acute loss of weight combined with an aversion to daylight and Paul’s voice. She spoke of feeling ants crawl between her thighs and their cat, a docile Siamese called Mooch, paw her hair. The doctor prescribed rest, reassuring Paul it was nothing to worry about, simply overwork and stress.

I see it all the time, she said. Are you able to take some of the load off her?

            Paul didn’t tell the doctor that’s what he’d been doing for the past 12 months, quietly culling some of Caroline’s more outrageous, and expensive, ideas. There would be no ice-swans; no string orchestra; no grand parade of distinguished guests, relatives and family in a procession of vintage and veteran cars; no troubadour’s roaming the lawns; in fact, no lawns. It was just as well since Caroline’s condition, whatever it was, did not improve and the wedding was postponed indefinitely.

            Over the following year, Jake married, as did another of his friends, and Caroline tried to participate for Paul’s sake (she knew few of the guests and, feeling weak, chose to sit on the periphery) and on the return journeys did not speak of their own. Paul thought this might have been the influence of her younger sister Hazel who’d come to stay – or more precisely invited herself as she was, again, homeless – during Caroline’s long, drawn out illness. Paul had nothing against Hazel, though sometimes she could be a fraction too strident about saving the planet, complaining at the blatant consumerism on show in their functional two-bedroom flat they rented, shoehorned along with 21 others into a triangle of land next to one of the main arteries into the city. 

We don’t have a car, he’d repeat, as demonstration of his and Caroline’s progressive principles. 

This bore little traction, for Hazel was a semi-professional protestor, chaining herself to immovable objects with the speed and skill Paul gave online gaming that was becoming something of a rift in his relationship with Caroline.

            Turning to other matters, as Paul would do whenever the subject of his obsession was raised, Hazel’s presence made Caroline re-evaluate her life. She liked Paul a lot, had once loved him but, as her sister observed one evening over a few glasses of Sauvignon Blanc, He is dull. Yet, Caroline reflected, so was she. For as long as she could remember, getting married, becoming a mum, were goals she’d set, along with having a career and her own bank account. She now had both, being moderately successful at work, identified as being of middle management potential. She considered herself feminist (Hazel found this laughable and did whenever it came up) and wanted a family. More little consumers, Hazel scoffed. The world doesn’t need more children. We’re on the edge of extinction. It’s morally irresponsible.

I don’t think we should, Caroline told Paul the night Hazel left, headed north to disrupt something or other. 

Whatever you say. I wasn’t too fussed in the first place. 

No. I mean not ever. Not at all.

Won’t your parents be upset?

I’ll talk to them. Will you talk with yours too?

If you like. What will I tell them?

Tell them we’re not compatible.

We’re not?

No actually.

            Paul began to focus.

Wait a minute. I thought you were referring to the wedding.

Oh no. It’s us. It won’t work out. Don’t you see?

            Paul didn’t and protested. He thought she might be having a relapse, asked if she was still taking her tablets, suggested they go out for dinner tomorrow, it had been such a long time since they had done anything like that, perhaps a movie too. 

It’s no use Paul. My mind is set.

Was it your sister? Did she put this into your head?

What a preposterous idea. Like I can’t work things out for myself? That just shows how far apart we’ve grown. I’m going for a walk.

But it’s raining.

I’m not a child Paul. 

            When midnight came and she hadn’t returned Paul grew anxious. He started to cry and lay on their bed, his face buried in her pillow.

*

At first Caroline enjoyed her independence, even if she did return to live with her parents, Doris and Ron, who had kept her room with its collection of fluffy animals arranged neatly on a shelf. Her mother was upset and tried to broker a reconciliation (she was friends with Paul’s mum, they had met at the school gates on their children’s first day), wrote to him when this proved unbridgeable, emphasising he was a ‘dear, honest and good man’, hoping he would ‘find the happiness that is your due’. Ron kept his opinions to himself but was quite glad to have more money in the bank than he had anticipated and thought about purchasing a caravan or small motorhome.

Not long after Easter she met David, a seemingly regular guy nearly ten years older with a successful fruit and vegetable wholesaling business. He called himself an entrepreneur with political ambitions.  He’d been married before with two children but said he would like a new family for his new start. He would not stand in the way of Caroline’s own career, just as long as she understood he would need her full support to get himself through the selection committee and on to the ballot paper for the local council. She said she was prepared to consider this but would need some details in writing, to which he agreed and they announced their engagement. 

            Hazel’s reaction was utterly predictable.

He’s a climate denier – have you read what he’s posted online? He doesn’t believe any of it. 

To which Caroline countered: He doesn’t eat red meat though. He won’t have it in the house.

Two years later, after a miscarriage and another debilitating illness that left her bed-bound for the duration of the summer, at times the medical staff claiming they could, Do no more, with one doctor confessing to David that, despite all the advances in science, they were as often in the dark about patients’ conditions as their medieval predecessors, she gave birth to a girl they named Poppy. It was a miracle, that doctor said, after all that had come before.

But Poppy died – Taken from us, said David – after five days in intensive care, and Caroline’s condition worsened. The doctor took David into a room and asked him to prepare himself.

She is very weak and has a history of illness that no one has quite been able to put their finger on, he said. The risk of a pregnancy was flagged I believe. Do you know if she is religious?

            David called Doris and Ron but not Hazel as she had posted some extremely vicious comments on his social media. Doris did instead but Hazel was in Copenhagen at a conference and asked to be ‘kept in the loop’. After some anxious days and nights Caroline pulled through and a month later was discharged home where she received 24/7 care. David gave up his political ambitions and worked from home to keep an eye on things. He turned to God and was baptised. He believed Jesus was the Salvation and dedicated his life and fortune to the church he joined. He lay down beside Caroline when she was well enough and asked her to join him in his journey with the Lord. She asked for time to think this through and, when she had, went to stay with Hazel who had become something of an internet star and was banking good money. 

*

Would it be fair to say you’ve found your metier? she asked her sister.

            Hazel spoke while she continued to type, the three monitors on her desk alight with videos, chat boxes and TV news channels. 

It’s called making a difference.

So you don’t go and throw yourself in front of excavators and things?

That’s last decade sweetheart. I can do more sitting here in one hour than I could in a month back then.

Pays well too.

            Hazel spun round, put her hands on her knees and leant forward, her face transfigured by the careful application of make-up she said was necessary for the cameras.

Capitalism is broken. It’s a wounded animal, limping from hiding place to hiding place, waiting for the final assassin’s bullet. 

I know. You’ve told me that many times. Yet it seems to be taking rather long for it to give up the ghost.

What would you rather? That I didn’t try?

No, not at all. As long as you’re content.

It’s got nothing to do with my feelings sis. We’re a collective and whether or not I succeed individually is immaterial. We will triumph as a group. As a group we will deliver the final blow, from behind, slice the head off for good.

            There was a beep and Hazel turned back to participate in a video conference, faces popping up all over the screens in little boxes and from all over the planet. 

            Guns, knives, it was all one and the same: carnage. Caroline never doubted her sister’s passion or commitment but considered her intentions misguided. Not that she had strong views on the merits or otherwise of capitalism. She recalled history lessons from school: the French Revolution, the overthrow of the Tsar, the rise of fascism, the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima. What had these led to? Forms of dictatorship under different names with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, millions may be. Who’s counting? But to be honest, she didn’t care. All that was way above her and the future didn’t matter when you didn’t see yourself as having one.

*

On the first anniversary of their daughter’s death, David sent a card asking if she would like to come to a celebration honouring Poppy’s ‘brief time on this Earth’. She tore it up. 

Hazel was overseas, leaving Caroline in charge of her labrador, Max, three chickens and a vegetable patch. She ignored the vegetables, was pleased with the eggs but less so with the daily maintenance of the cages and, as for Max, well, she had never been a dog type of person and enticed him outside with a bone where she left him. The house smelt of Max, the chairs covered in hairs. What made someone keep an animal inside when common sense told you they belonged in the fresh air? Fortunately for Max, Hazel’s trip was short.

What’s wrong with you? Can’t you do anything? What have you done? Fat fanny all by the looks of it.

            Even though she apologised later, Caroline knew Hazel spoke truthfully. She’d lain on the sofa, made notes in her journal, watched the light rise and fall during the day, ignored sounds of obligation from animals. She didn’t bother to eat, or wash, was wakeful at times she did not catalogue for she paid no attention to the clock. But she saw dust settling. The dust was everywhere. It was in her hair, between her toes, under her fingernails, caught in her throat if she removed the piece of cloth she wore to cover nose and mouth. At night the dust breeched her eyelids, swam in the waters of her eyes, even infiltrated her dreams, jolted awake by nightmares of being buried alive under avalanches of dust.

            She returned to her parents but it was no better, worse as a matter of fact being in suburbia. She wore a ski mask and a face mask and latex gloves used by surgeons and only consumed what she could suck through a straw. She lost a lot of weight, lay in her room surrounded head to toe by fluffy animals. Doris, not in the best of health herself since bruising her pelvis in a fall in the bathroom, and with Ron away trialling his pre-owned Winnebago, called the ambulance one particularly hot Friday afternoon and her daughter was insitutionalised. 

It was for the best, Doris explained to a neighbour. Caroline was always a difficult child, seeing things that weren’t there, speaking to imaginary friends. A sickly child with aches and pains the doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t diagnose. It followed her into adulthood. Such a contrast with her sister, though that’s altogether a different story!

*

One weekend Paul came to visit her. He had kept in light touch with Doris and asked if he could, if it would be appropriate. Doris thought that would be good. 

You’ve always been a good man, she said. If only she had …

He sat with Caroline an hour and promised to return the following Sunday. 

Will you bring your friend? Caroline asked.

Would you like me too?

It would be nice to see her. Only if she wants.

I’ll ask.

Don’t force her. I wouldn’t want her to feel she had to, just for me.

            They came with a cream sponge which a nurse cut into slices before they were allowed into the walled compound. Paul slipped a duress alarm into his pocket.

It’s so wonderful to see you, said Annabel, leaning in to give her a kiss on the cheek.

            Caroline recoiled.

Oh no! That isn’t allowed.

            Annabel stepped back on to Paul’s foot, spun round and looked at him with a mix of confusion and panic. Paul wondered if she might run off, confirmation it had been a mistake to come.

She’s still very unwell, he’d said on the train down. You may struggle recognising her. She’s lost a lot of weight. Underneath, though, she’s the same Caroline. I’m certain of that.

How? How can you be certain?

            He looked out of the carriage window. Everything was flat as far as the eye could see. He remembered this landscape, her comment when they left all those years ago. 

She asked for you. 

Does she know about us?

I’m not sure.

But isn’t that weird? I mean, you were going to get married and now we are.

We don’t have to talk about that. 

What if she does?

She won’t. We’ll just keep it general.

But if she asks what do I say?

We’re friends still. We don’t have to get into that. We’re trying to help that’s all, get her better, get her back into the world. 

            Annabel sits. Paul stands. Caroline wanders.

Why did you come? she asks Annabel.

I wanted to see you. It’s been so long.

See me like this?

            She circles. Paul sits next to Annabel, takes her hand, offers reassurance silently.

Greed, says Caroline, her back to the couple. Greed’s everywhere except no one looks. You have to lose your mind to see it.

            Annabel rests her head on Paul’s shoulder. He feels her shaking, removes his hand and places his arm around her protectively. Caroline sits on the artificial grass, pulls her knees to her chin, rocks. A blade of sunlight illuminates her.

What should I do Paul? she asks.

            Paul does not move, does not answer.

Do I tell everyone about what I know or do I suffer like everyone else, like you and her, suffer the lies they tell to dull us? You know what I’m saying don’t you? Don’t you? Why don’t you say anything Paul? Are you ashamed? Do you think I’ve lost it. You do don’t you? Poor poor Caroline has fallen down the rabbit hole, is do-daly god bless her soul.

            Paul presses the alarm. Two nurses come and escort Caroline back into the building. The door clicks shut.

It was wrong, Annabel sobs, to see her like that.

There’s no right or wrong darling. There’s only the truth.

Do you think she’ll ever get better?

Who knows?

The truth Paul, tell me the truth.

            He takes her face in his hands. She finds an answer in his eyes.

*

For a decade, or was it longer, Caroline lived in community housing where she became something of a legend. She volunteered at the drop-in, preparing food, chatting with those who came, listening to their stories, never revealing hers. She did courses and was offered part-time work. She now had a future. She studied law (she’d always wanted to) and after six years qualified as a solicitor. She was offered a job at the legal centre, specialised in children and families. She was good at her work, described as a tireless advocate by colleagues, always ready to take on the bureaucrats. She purchased a small flat in one of the poorer neighbourhoods, living among her clients, protected by them. She was never burgled, never harassed, though she was never close to anyone and they respected her privacy. At Christmas and Easter, and on other public holidays, she would receive invitations to events, would call in, make herself known for an hour or so before leaving quietly as the music pumped up and the drink and drugs started to flow. She was never lonely but she had no friends. She never heard from Hazel, though she read about her now and again in the papers or saw her on TV. Doris rang twice a year, on her birthday and on Boxing Day, asked when she was going to visit, how Ron was away most of the year, she never knew where, told her about her declining health, how she feared dying alone. Caroline listened obligingly and ended the call with, Take care mum. Love you.

*

This February morning was like the last and the ones before that and most probably those still to come. Caroline’s body ached from the cold, her feet were sore and her teeth were actually chattering. The bus was, as usual, saturated with commuters and she stood in rivulets of filth, anticipated the coughs and splutters of those carrying disease, patiently waited her stop, thankful for some relief from mortality as she listened to Annie Lennox through her headphones. When she was launched from the vehicle, pushed through the exit doors by the swarm, she felt such a light-headedness she wondered if she was stepping out from a nightmare. A woman with sad eyes glared threateningly at her as she popped open a small salmon-pink umbrella; she was elbowed in the back; a schoolgirl, teenage, spat out gum; a man swore, another voice (female) shouted above, You’ve got a cheek! There was a constant of movement yet she did not move. 

Is this all there is? she wondered and there came into her mind images of waves breaking against the shore. The sea is oblivious to us, it doesn’t care about us, our trivial lives, our daily worries, our stupidity. It goes on and on and will always go on and on. I don’t matter. Nothing matters. 

You’re holding us up. Move along or move aside. 

Am I? I was lost in thought, she said.

And I’m the bleedin’ guardian angel love.                 

*

Two weeks later as she was leaving court she ran into David. 

Caroline? Is this you? What are you doing?

I work here? I mean, this is where I work. I’m a solicitor.

My oh my, that’s great! If I’d have known I’d have engaged you.

I’m not sure that would have been appropriate.

            She would have walked right by if he hadn’t spoken. Gaunt, bald, stooped, only his voice reminded her.

Do you have a moment?

I’m rather busy.

Of course. Of course. Perhaps another time? It’s so lovely to see you again Caroline. God bless.   

            He put his hands together in front of his chest like a benediction she thought.

            On the way home that evening she bought a bottle of Gordon’s, a four-pack of tonic water and a lemon, observed how cracks veined the ice cubes and were mirrored in the cracks forming elsewhere in her mind.

*

When Doris died Caroline made all the arrangements. The funeral party was small. Ron had ceased all contact some years before, his whereabouts unknown, and just a few distant relatives responded to invitations, while half-a-dozen friends came to the spread after. By late afternoon only Hazel remained.

What do they call us now? Hazel asked, stretching her arms behind her head as she looked up into a darkening sky promising an evening shower. 

How do you mean?

When you’re left after your parents have passed?

There’s still dad.

Hah!

Why do you laugh?

He’s a joke. Always was. Don’t you remember when we were kids how he’d never let us speak at meal times, even when we were teens? Mum was no better. Did what he said.

He was never one for talking.

He was never one for fuck all. He was a parasite. Cared for nothing except his bank balance and his car. Wash, polish, polish again. That’s his epitaph.

Those were different times, different generation. They were legacy of the war.

Not that again sis. He was too young. He never fought.

Mum always said he was different after the war.

Mum had her agenda too.

So you’re saying she didn’t know him, it was all make-believe?

I’m not saying anything. It’s the past. We’ll never know. We weren’t there. It’s gone. Leave it.

            But Caroline knew she couldn’t. It was those cracks again. They were moving. She felt the vibrations.

How are you sis? Moving on?

From what?

            There were so many questions, fewer answers.

Are you OK? You look a bit off, if you know what I mean. 

I do.

It’s been a tough day, maybe you should rest.

It has.

I’m sorry if I’ve talked too much. You know me, eh, rubber mouth!

I do

Do you need anything? Water? 

An ending, she thought. I just need an ending.

copyright John Pitt 2025 ©