Simon pulled at the door. The lock jiggled. His face reappeared in the gap. “It’s locked,” he said.
“I know. What’s going on? You have to get me out of here.”
“I can’t now if they’ve locked it.”
“Is the caravan here yet?”
“Almost.” The thin strip of Simon’s face was close to mine. I could feel his breath and how it rippled with nerves. I felt the disquieting swell of empathy, rendering him so eerily modern. “I don’t think we can get you out of here anymore. Not tonight.”
“Simon please. You can’t leave me.” The growing darkness gripped me. Blankets of air were thick and stale. For how much I had been tenderly swaddled by this isolation, I couldn’t return to it, no I couldn’t. My modern brain had snapped feverishly back to reality—I needed to get out. I felt my cheeks flush with anger and fear.
Simon said nothing else and disappeared. I resisted everyurge to yell after him, but it wouldn’t make a difference because a swarm of noise was approaching. The whole house rattled. Doors and windows opened and slammed. Footsteps ran across the ground outside. Excited voices. And far away, but growing louder like a sturdy, rolling wave of stones, were horses.
The noise traveled from a mile away, then less than a mile, then less. I could see nothing from my cell as it arrived. Gaps in the wood slats of my cell looked out on only trees and a storage shed and a cloud of dust that was suddenly kicked up. The caravan was here. A thunderous team of horses was out front—chains, leather, wheels, boots all clattering together in a swarm. I questioned, for a second, if I had been transported back to the present day and was hearing a busy high street. Again I was awed by the voices—men and women disembarking, warm greetings, laughter, dogs barking. I thought of Matilda out there skipping around. The languages spoken were new slurry mixtures of English and French. But the awe I felt was only in a minor key this time, giving rise to an anger that was too familiar, too modern: I felt excluded. I was wholly on the outside, connectionless and adrift. I had no one. I thought of my ex, I thought of our home and all its thick lacquer, glass everywhere, not going anywhere, not saying anything, two clouds built up and smooshed against the walls. I was fired. I had lost my job, all my savings, lost my partner—boyfriend—boyfriend who I was starting to call my partner like a business partner, a transaction, failed, declined, lost him, lost my self-respect, lost two dogs, lost my sanity or, more accurately, lost track of time.
The door to my cell unlocked with a thud and swung open. Men I had never seen before entered my squalid space and surrounded me. One of them asked me a question in a language Ididn’t understand. The question was repeated, in what I believe was French. Then it was repeated one last time in English:
“I said why are you crying?”
“Huh?” I hadn’t even noticed. I tried to wipe my eyes but scraped my cheek against the thick shackles. I lowered my head in shame and the first thing I noticed were the man’s shoes. They were leather and well-made. Stitched and studded with adornment, pointed at the toes. Clean. I looked up.
The man standing in front of me was a mass of contradictions. Old, sallow-faced, painfully skinny, but engulfed in layers of fine clothing that upholstered him not like a wizened turtle, but like an exoskeleton. A barrel of tunics, robes, shirts, vests of leather and metal and thickly woven fabrics gave him an automaton body on top of which rested his shrunken, aged head. He was wealthy, obviously, and maybe to be wealthy meant to be saddled with it, to wear your net worth on your person.
The lord waved off the guards on either side of me and stepped closer. From a pocket in his cloak, he withdrew a small square of fabric and handed it to me. It was a swatch of black fabric, soft and stretchy, finely woven. It was mine. There was half a Reebok logo on it. It was a square cut from my black running shorts.
“Where did you get this?” asked the lord. “What kind of material is this?”
“This is from my running shorts,” I said. “It’s... I don’t know, polyester or something? A spandex blend? I’m from the—”
“Yes, I know, you’re from thefuture,” he said in a mocking tone. “I can’t have you running around my estate saying things like that. You’ve made people very uncomfortable. Now tell me where you came from. Tell me if you want your life spared.”
“I’m from the future. I don’t know what else to say. I have nothing else—”
“OK then let’s say you are. Where in the future are you from? Even a time traveler has to come from somewhere.”
“I’m from here!” My voice was breaking. There was an audience of onlookers behind the lord. “I’m British. I’m from right down the street. I live here in Greenwich, I work in Canary Wharf—or at least I used to. I was a dog walker—that dog! The weird dog with the long hair—that’s my dog.”
“A long-haired hound, yes.” The lord was unfazed. “I’m familiar with the breed, they’re nothing special. I’ve seen plenty at court before, which is why I’m asking you again, one last time, where did you come from?”
My hope was fading. The iron chains dragged on the shackles, cutting into my wrists. I had genuinely nothing to say. If Matilda the dog was deemed nothing special yet she had been out running free all this time while I had been imprisoned, then surely that made me less than the least. And maybe it was the intimidation of the lord—the vibrant dyes in his fabrics, the gray locks of hair that hung coiffed under his cap—and the desensitization of all I had been through—the loss of identity, the physical taxation of living here, of being human in such a primal, impersonal thrashing—that I felt like it was true.
“I’m nothing,” I said. I was crying again. Or maybe I had been crying the entire time. I noticed Simon and Wulfric among the hushed faces of guards and servants behind the lord. “I don’t belong here. I’m not a soldier, I’m barely a passable servant. I was born here—in London, farther west, then moved even farther west, then came back to London for university, France sometimes for holidays, Spain, never Denmark, I’ve never been there,I don’t speak Danish, if that’s what you think I am, I can’t speak anything. I’m not anything. I’m nothing. I’m truly nothing.”
When my arms slumped to their sides in final defeat, they slumped too far. The wide neck of my tunic pulled too much to the side. A glittering, fat diamond revealed itself.
Everyone gasped and my heart sunk. I tried to shrug my shoulder to hide it but it was too late. It was over. The lord narrowed his eyes and smiled. He stepped forward and came inches from my face and towered over me not because he was taller but because I was slumped over, shortening myself, shrinking away. I showed no resistance, only a flinch, when he reached into the neck of my tunic and grabbed the dog collar. The crowd murmured in hushed, excited tones, sharing theories and disbelief. I felt the disappointment of Simon and Wulfric, the cruel inevitability of their life paths. The lord remained calm and slick, almost meditative as he inspected the fake crystals, the cheap gold plating, the thick leather and nylon. His cold fingers rubbed like wet reeds against my bare shoulder. He stared into my eyes. He stared back at the collar. He exhaled slowly and withdrew a large, curved knife from his belt. He held it up to my neck.
“Don’t worry, everyone,” he said over his shoulder. I closed my eyes and winced, waiting—I couldn’t even accept my end with valor, with open eyes. But the lord didn’t hurt me. With one jagged yank of the knife, he cut the collar off me and turned around to face his subjects. “The man is correct. Believe everything he says. He’s nothing.”
3
I resigned myself to the fact that it was over. I had no other choice but resignation because dissecting what had just happened inside me was too overwhelming. The lord had pulled out a knife, held it up to me, and I had closed my eyes. Earlier I had done the same thing when Wulfric pulled his bow on me and all I could do was wince—that was the pinnacle of my instincts, not to pull away, not to fight, but to in fact stifle those reactions in favor of something more compliant. I might as well have presented my neck to him. Please kill me. Please kill me now. I thought about Ryley, the bichon frise I used to dog walk, and how he would lie on his back, legs in the air, wiggling his body back and forth, ribs and abdomen exposed, expecting nothing but belly rubs from the world. “Please kill me now, please kill me now,” I would sing, imagining a voice for his body language. “He’s so trusting, look at him, he doesn’t have a clue—you don’t have a clue, do you? You just want your belly rubs.Please kill me, he says,pleasekill me now!”
My boyfriend would watch this and laugh from far across the room with one single, forlorn haaaaaaaaaaa like a circle drawn around a lonely, empty page. I should have detected something wrong in that sound—no, Ihaddetected something wrong. What I should have done wasdosomething about it, but again I was compliant, I was nothing. I would appease the unappeased. When HR pulled me into a side office at work and told me I was being let go—not fired, not made redundant, just “let go”—I smiled and nodded, I did what wasn’t even asked. I let them let me go. It’s always “the needs of the business,” the current situation is always “untenable,” and it always seems to make perfect sense to my pigeon brain. Yeah sure OK. Anything I am or have done is only ever alluded to as a circumstance, a situation. There is discipline but there is also: let’s get this over with. Dowdy HR varmints I had never seen before suddenly clinging to my every word like exhausting little pets. Please kill me.
Ryley was my first dog. His owner was a guy in North Greenwich who worked from home during the day and needed the dog out of the house for midday calls. In those early, freshly unemployed days I was militant with the dog walking app—sharing my location at all times, sending photo updates, bringing along an extra battery to keep my phone charged. I stuck to a prescribed walk up and down the river with Ryley, along the eastern edge of the peninsula, then a rest and a game of fetch in the park, then back to Dad’s. “Back to your dad’s, c’mon let’s go,” I’d say, and I’d feel a pit open in my stomach, a depressive pang at the earnestness I too easily slipped into despite the job/gig paying next to nothing and the fact that not long ago I had been just like this dog’s yuppie dad, working/staring from home at mydinky plastic laptop, wiggling the mouse every twenty minutes to keep my chat status present, commuting to the office a few times a week to feel air con, lust for bankers, and purpose in an otherwise directionless morass all while the consequences of earlier transgressions grew wings and began to fan.
You don’t learn from your mistakes, you only learn to make them in easier, smaller ways.
