Dandelion chrysalis book.., p.6
Dandelion (Chrysalis Book 2), page 6
“It’s okay,” Alfie assures her as he checks his own watch, acknowledging that the airport beckons.
“I’m so sorry, but something’s happened at my son’s school. I really need to go get him. The nature of my husband’s job means he can’t get away or else I’d ask him. I will send you an information pack about Tanya AF. Everything you need to write the article will be in there. I’m sorry to have dragged you here for what has been a mere matter of minutes.”
“It’s okay. Don’t apologise. Emergencies happen. With the information pack, I will have enough to write the article, I’m sure. If there’s anything else I’ll e-mail you.”
“Thanks, Alfie,” Bridget says as she hastily gathers up her belongings.
“I hope your son is alright,” Alfie calls out as Bridget surges out of the room.
“Bye,” she calls out from the corridor, flustered and barely visible to the remaining attendees. Benny makes his excuses and leaves, not that he needed one. He offered nothing to proceedings. Alfie finishes scribbling some ideas down, toying with using some variation upon the headline ‘Now You Could Be Tanya AF!’ which he assumes is why the name is stylised like that.
After packing his notebook away, Alfie leaves the building too and makes the easy call to the cab company. He dithers over whether to make the difficult call, the one to his boss, but delays. Once he’s passed airport security he’ll make the call that risks his job security. At least he will have passed the point of no return by then. He is Lotus bound.
8
“How do you take your coffee?” I shout from the kitchen.
“Milk and two sugars please,” the postman, who I know now as Chris, replies.
I still can’t believe I invited him in. My heart rate feels like it has reached an impossible four digits. The quicks of my thumbnails are both seeping blood. I tend my pick at them when I’m nervous around people. As a way of verifying I’m awake, I pinch myself. It’s unfathomable that there’s a man, that there’s anyone at all, in my living room. Not in a rom-com way, not in a this never happens to me sort of way, But, at the same time, this does indeed never happen to me. I’m terrified from past experience, but I’m trying to remain calm. There’s no reason why, on the face of it, I shouldn’t be. He has this nebulous comforting ability, coupled with a better bedside manner than Dr Kajal. I really hope he’s no Dr Jekyll. His is the first face that I’ve seen in a long time – I’ll allow the word time here – that conveys warmth, not just pity or sheer perplexity.
It’s strange having welcomed a clock into a flat where they’re forbidden. That’s what people’s faces are after all, clocks – indicators of time passed. The more wrinkles the face has, the more time they have spent on this earth. It reminds me that I have a clock face too. Another important reason why there aren’t mirrors in my flat. I don’t need to see my ever-increasing and ever-deepening facial fault lines in order to document how long I’ve been keeping my head above water for.
I still can’t quite figure out how I’ve gone from just about keeping my head above water to it now being not just above the parapet, but in the frame of the guillotine. As I said, it was like I was watching myself from above. Except I wasn’t in control, I was sitting straddling a stratus next to some god-like version of me, a nimbus patrolling her head. I tried to get her to stop, to keep the door closed for good, to not unlatch the chain, but all my swipes passed through her. She was untouchable, incorporeal. I watched as she instructed my body below to welcome Chris into my flat before I reconnected with myself again in the kitchen where I stand now, shaking. Coffee spills from the first cup as I remove it from under the machine, replacing it with the second cup and pressing start again.
I have a contemplation as rare as eclipses. How do I look? I couldn’t apply make-up for Chris through a combination of a lack of preparation time and an absence of mirrors, but I have painted on my 10-2 smile. The same face I used to show everyone back when I used to venture out in public. I let him see the hands of my clock face at society’s prescribed perfect time, rather than showing that I’m cuckoo – anymore than I already have. But those hands are just a showpiece; a clock façade.
I imagine that they are for most people, even people who don’t have it anywhere near as bad as me. Everyone just wants to look happy, for everyone else to be oblivious to the mechanisms underneath; the wheels and pinions groaning under the strain of thought, to not have to answer the questions that would be asked were the hands not pointing at ten and two.
On every occasion I wake, I just clock in and keep myself occupied, making stuff to sell to faceless customers on Etsy. I can’t afford to stand still, for in stagnant waters lie memories and monsters. Although, aren’t they both the same thing?
The coffee machine beeps to indicate that the second cup has finished pouring. I press my hands against the kitchen counter, trying to keep myself upright. I feel faint now that I know I can’t wait in here forever, now that I know the puppet master is no longer controlling me. I have to face Chris all by myself. My hands are still trembling with dread. I lift a mug in each hand about an inch off the worktop before setting them back down. Some coffee drips down from the rims of each. I need to compose myself. It’s just coffee and conversation. Normal people do that every day so why can’t I?
I retrieve a tray from the kitchen drawer to set the cups down onto and try lifting that. Even more coffee is spilled, about half a cup in total. I dispense with the tray, wipe the sides of the cups and top them up with more water. I close my eyes and take in a mass inhalation of breath, trying to calm myself. It doesn’t work. I clench the little handles of the ceramic cups so firmly that my knuckles are white. My body is still quivering, but I feel like if I hold on tight then I can make it back through to the living room with everything intact, the coffee cups and I. Once I’ve set them down on the aptly-named coffee table and sat down myself, I’ll be fine. Won’t I?
I take one purposeful stride and the plan all comes crashing down. The cups hit the floor tiles. Currents of brown, frothy liquid propel tiny ceramic fragments across the room. My legs give way and I’m down in the choppy sea of desolation beside them. Chris appears on the shoreline to see what the commotion is.
“I’m sorry.” It takes every ounce of effort I have left to announce this, but it leaves my lips softly, barely audible. “This was too soon. I’m not…”
“It’s okay,” Chris tries to comfort me. “I’ll help you…”
“Just go,” I berate him as tears stream down my face. I hate myself for saying it, for not coping, for pushing Chris away before I’ve even given him a chance.
“I can help you clean this…”
“Go!” I finally manage to sound forceful. Chris looks at me as deflated as my life raft is, like he wishes he could do something, but there’s nothing anyone can do for me, except Dr Kajal. I’m broken beyond repair.
I let out a long shriek. It’s not directed at Chris, but he won’t know that. It’s directed at the fucking deity I was sitting on the cloud with earlier. Why couldn’t she have stayed at the tiller a little while longer? Why can’t anything ever go my way?
I look down as my tears fall like rain onto the stormy waters below, the brown coffee now mixed with red. I look at the cuts on my hand, almost microscopic slithers of ceramic jutting out from them. I lift up one larger, jagged piece of one of the cups and contemplate something which isn’t as rare as eclipses; it’s as common as coffee and conversation. I look at my wrists and imagine slitting them for what could easily be the millionth time. No one’s coming to save me from this raft I’m on, are they? I should just throw myself overboard and be done with it. But I won’t. I know I won’t. I fail at everything I set out to achieve. Why should this be any fucking different?
9
“No problem, thanks very much,” Bridget says, as she hastily gathers up her belongings and leaves the room. “Bye,” she calls out from the corridor, no longer visible to Alfie or Benny. She repeatedly presses the button for the lift, flustered. It reaches her floor after what seems like an eternity. She collides with the embossed metal doors as she tries to slip between them faster than they decide to part. The high of getting Tanya AF a slot in The Custodian dissipating with the words parents hate to hear as much as the children do. Mrs Bradridge would like a word.
Once out of the lift, she almost bursts through the automatic doors of the office block, as they are too slow to contain her, and opens her car door with her phone. Once the engine has started, she ploughs an infuriated furrow through the congested London suburbs to Elliot’s school, not managing to keep a lid on her road rage. Curse words a plenty for any other driver capable of lip reading. She is just worried about her son, and doesn’t have time for anyone who feels the need to be in her way. What could they possibly be doing that’s so important?
Upon arrival at Elliot’s school, Bridget, now too fatigued to still be irate, follows Mrs Bradridge to her office just as the bell sounds.
“Careful,” Mrs Bradridge sternly hollers at a stampede of overly-excited children. The two ladies weave through a gauntlet of flailing arms and killer lunch boxes.
They get seated uncomfortably in the deputy head’s office.
“We’re just waiting for Carol,” she announces. Bridget looks confused. “You’ll most likely know her as Mrs. Gibbs,” she clarifies, “and you can call me Hayley. No need for all the formality.”
“Where’s Elliot?” Bridget asks; worried about him and confused as to why, considering everything is obviously about him, he isn’t here.
“Carol is escorting him along. The ladies in the office have been keeping an eye on him.”
“So why this meeting? Why the urgency?” Bridget is aware she's coming across as blunt, but something isn’t adding up. The need for her to come as soon as she could isn't dovetailing with Mrs Bradridge's calm demeanour and repeated assurances that her son is okay.
“Unfortunately Elliot was involved in an incident today where he was struck by another pupil. I think I know who, but he won't confirm my suspicions for sure.”
“So, you want me to get him to spill?”
“The sad thing is that it won’t make any difference.”
“I don’t understand,” Bridget says, confused.
“The thing is, even if you get him to tell us…” She hesitates. “It's complicated. If it is who I think it is then it’s his condition that makes him prone to erratic, and often violent, behaviour. He isn't necessarily misbehaving. He can't help himself.”
“For God's sake–” Bridget roars, grabbing the edge of the table in front of her as she feels that she might take out her frustration on some arbitrary object. “–There must be a way to punish the boy. You can’t let the fact that he doesn’t know what day it is mean that he is allowed to do whatever he likes.”
An awkward silence fills the room, slowly diluting Bridget’s anger.
"Sorry," she says as she regulates her mood and composes herself. "I shouldn’t have worded it like that. Look, whilst I appreciate this little boy's condition, he can't just be allowed to run riot surely?"
"Of course not, we just have to manage him a bit differently compared to how we manage the behavioural issues of the rest of the children."
"And aren't children like that–" an anger-induced brain fog prevents her from finding the correct terminology, "–not better served in a school that can better suit their needs?"
"I couldn’t agree more, but..."
Hayley looks dejected at this point, defeated almost. The penny drops for Bridget as to where this is going and her whole perspective changes. It all makes so much sense.
Hayley goes on to explain what Bridget already knows, what she and her husband have discussed many times, about funding cuts and a general disregard for public schooling from the government. All the hallmarks of a potential post-Chrysalis society that many commentators are warning about; a society where those who are wealthy enough can forego education for their children altogether and simply imbue them with knowledge, allowing them to work for them in other capacities; around the home or being quasi-employees of their businesses, giving them real world skills at the same time the rest of their peers would be spending a week trying to wrap their heads around trigonometry.
Special educational needs used to be a great equaliser for children, having to mix irrespective of how wealthy their parents were. In much the same way that first class passengers will also perish in a plane crash. The wealthiest people who have ‘problem children’ can simply pay to have those problems solved, and now that they can they’re not as interested in helping those who can’t afford to. Less funding for special educational needs schooling means those facilities are inevitably disbanded; the children from them put into mainstream education, as there’s nowhere else for them to go. This is spun positively by the government who claim that they’re helping them to integrate into society, whereas all they’re really doing is hindering those children without special educational needs’ chances of attainment.
The Chrysalis has essentially created a third tier of schooling above private education and state education; transactional education. Bridget and her husband kept Elliot in a mainstream state school out of principle – mainly Bridget’s principles – but she realises now in a moment of clarity than principle is unproductive. It’s the unprincipled in society who prosper. The current government are running amok. They’ve always been in post to create an increasing divide between the outcomes of the rich and the poor, but it was always a gradual creep towards that end game. The invention of the Chrysalis was the passing of the final baton and it’s now a full on sprint to the finish line.
Bridget berates herself for being so stupid. It’s not like she hadn’t seen the warnings. It’s not like she isn’t in the industry. She’s helping Tanya to endow unprivileged people with the privileges associated with a TNO. She read an article in The Custodian, penned by Alfie Fallon, who is fast becoming an authority on dismal, but often prescient, predictions. He summated impeccably everything that’s happening right now. It’s just human nature to believe that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Until they are. That’s the trap that Bridget has fallen into. In fact, it’s worse than that; it’s the trap she’s set for Elliot, who has blindly stumbled into it, still too young to understand all the moving parts around him that have his life already mostly mapped out.
Fallon painted a picture of a society where skills are bought and sold, but in market more akin to that for Lamborghinis rather than lemons; a society where essentially, through the commoditisation of knowledge, jobs become commodities too. People no longer apply for jobs. They pay for them. Like everything else since time in memoriam, it suits those who can afford to pay the most. It used to be that no matter how wealthy someone became, there was always one thing that could never be bought: competence. Rational people always found incompetent leaders and politicians terrifying, but perhaps an even more terrifying proposition is a ruling class able to render themselves so completely diligent that they will never become complacent enough to relinquish that status, cementing their power and status forever.
She suggested that it was strange that a shift away from ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ had somehow become a negative. Now it’s not what you know, but how you know what you know. Some students would forget what they learned in a lecture before they’d even left the hall. But people can’t forget what’s been implanted inside of them. It’s essentially perfect recruitment; no danger of candidates being able to talk the talk at interview but not walk the walk, they just show the vacancy holder the receipts and in return they’re told they can start on Monday. The only obstacle towards them achieving everything they’re capable of is procrastination, which can probably be erased too. After all, rich people choose their own characteristics now like Bridget chooses an outfit for work each day.
Just then Mrs Gibbs, Carol, appears with Elliot.
“Mummy!” He drops the ice pack he’s been holding to his face to the floor and sprints towards Bridget, his face a spectrum of colour; the red glow of his cheeks at the relief of seeing his mother, as well as the oily puddle on his left cheek. Bridget stands up and opens her arms to receive him. He nearly knocks her down with the vigour with which he accepts that invitation. She holds him close for a few seconds before trying to push him away, but not out of rejection. Out of curiosity and concern.
“Let me see your face, sweetie.”
Elliot removes his face from her lower ribs and looks up at her with the look of a puppy that after several nudges and licks has realised that their owner has died.
“Oh my gosh, darling. Is it sore?” she asks as she carefully caresses the bruised cheekbone with her thumb.
“Ow!” recoils Elliot, burying his face into his mother again.
Bridget instantly forgets about causing a scene, about forcing Elliot to tell her everything and ensuring the bully is punished regardless of his needs. Her enthusiasm for the fight has been quelled entirely by the sight of her son. So delicate. So vulnerable. She’ll speak to her husband when she gets home. It’s been made crystal clear that the school aren’t going to exclude the perpetrator, so, as a couple, they will exclude Elliot of their own volition. It will feel like they’ve lost in a sense. It will feel like they’re cheating by moving him up a tier in the educational hierarchy, to private school, perhaps even to education by transaction, but since Bridget got involved with Tanya Alora they more than have the money, and to hell with unproductive principle.
10
I had ignored Chris for several parcels since the incident. He knew I was inside my flat. Where else would I be? It would have been obvious why I didn’t want to talk. Technically, he’s supposed to take them back to the sorting office for me to go and collect, but he was obviously nice enough to appreciate that I wouldn’t go, my parcels would end up returned to sender and my business would suffer. He also can’t leave them at my designated safe place, with a neighbour for example. This fucking prison is my only safe place. Instead, Chris left them at the door within easy reach so that I could grab them through the little gap that the chain lock allows.
