The bells danced as he closed the door behind him and silence descended on the café but for the fulsome drone of Toktela making his way over to the coffee machine to perch and keep her company.
“Hello Tick Tok,” she said.
“You keeping an eye on me?”
Toktela rubbed his forelegs and they enjoyed the easy silence of a
well-worn camaraderie. Outside a summer
rain began to fall.
It never rains in Cylinder City, yet now it did. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody looked up. Nobody looked down at the dark-spattered pavements and
frowned. People continued to come and
go, the entire city pretending there was nothing out of the ordinary. Maeve2 leaned on her elbows and stared
without focus through the streaks running down the window, thinking virtually
nothing at all, the painful pounding of her heart fluctuating erratically in
its intensity, but held down to bearable levels. When it lurched suddenly she applied a counter pressure of mental
will that kept it contained but left her feeling disassociated from her
surroundings. It was then that a huge, suited shape, blurred through running rainwater and small, defocused eyes, but
definitely possessing a blue head beneath a dark grey smudge of hat, slid into
view. It paused, and then, just as she
began to focus, it moved towards the door and opened it, setting the bells
jangling. Her heart shifted with a
panicked determination, as if it were looking for a way out of her. Maeve2 was used to her heart communicating
to her in a kind of physical sign language whenever she tuned out the
synaesthesia borealis, as though it was an absolute necessity for her to have
some form of sixth sense operating at all times. Her heart was a mute, not averse to poking, punching or even
kicking if necessary, to gain her attention; but now, as he stepped forward and
looked down at her, it twisted and back peddled, flitting uncertainly against
her ribcage and making no sense to her at all.
And her internal narrative suddenly opened up like a daisy beneath its
first sky…
I will be Maeve. Maeve, number two. I won’t have expected to ever meet anybody more beautiful than
Balast, not even another blue.
That could seem naïve of me,
as Balast will be the only blue that had ever stepped foot in Cylinder City up
until then, certainly the only one I had seen in the flesh anywhere. But I will know for sure that Balast is a
beautiful soul, even amongst his beautiful people, and a great loss to their
society, whether it is they that have exiled him or he who has exiled
them. I may not always seem like much,
but I will see the true stature of everyone I meet, and at seven and a half
feet in height, and as wide and blue as the sky over Cylinder Bay, Balast’s
physical presence will only be a fraction of his actual stature. It will set him apart from the other blues,
in my eyes. In some ways they will all
be alike. They will all be smooth and
giant and muscular, not from the exercising of their obscene strength but from
the restraint of it, every second of every minute. Any blue will be able to sit motionless for a year and still have
a body as big and strong and hard as an orca, muscles kept toned and vital by
the unending clench of their resolve.
And they will all emit the invisible blue sparks that have escaped the
burning embers of dark blue magic that is crushed down deep inside them and
held in abeyance as a dense, long lasting fuel. But Balast … oh Balast … by the time his core energy has filtered
up through the layers of his self-control, and out into the air around him, it
will be purified. There will only be
the merest hint of blue left. Now it
will almost be white like the sparkling snow of high altitudes, brought down
into the sun-trapped bay to melt and evaporate and ease our fever. And though there will be no one place in
Cylinder City that isn’t palpating with some form of magic or other, I will
have seen that the arrival of Balast’s presence is always gently yet powerfully
transformative, much as the tide-like arrival of Gumbo’s aura, only deeper,
heavier and colder. His artist’s shack
will sit down on the bay by the cycle path, surrounded by an unlikely gathering
of palms and conifers and broadleaf trees that all seem to be jostling elbows
in their efforts to edge closer. It
will have become deeply ingrained in the unspoken code of the people of
Cylinder City that you must not impose yourself uninvited into the awareness of
the blue man, and if you absolutely must pass through his grotto of deep green
leaves, cool dark grass and buttery globs of sunlight, in the hope that he may
appear, and maybe even meet your eye and grunt a reluctant acknowledgement, then
you should at least lower your voices and keep moving, lest you break the spell
and drive him away forever. It will
seem that the best and only way to make his acquaintance will be to pretend
that you haven’t noticed he is blue at all.
He will be an avatar, trying to go unnoticed amongst the
troglodytes. How could any living being
compare …
The huge figure in the dark suit looked down at Maeve2 with quiet
gleaming eyes and took off an incongruous pork pie hat. He was only about seven feet tall, and while
he was more solidly built than any human had ever been, he didn’t come close to
the wide sweeping proportions of Balast.
But, as she looked up into those small bright eyes that seemed so shyly
self aware, she was seeing his real stature, and her heart energy gushed
outwards until it had filled her body and was streaming invisibly through her
skin. She gaped helplessly. His voice came and it was velvet and humane,
suffused with the kind of humility only great people can experience; it was
effortlessly cultured, intimate and deeply respectful, all in one sentence.
“Could I have a filter coffee, please?”
