To get to the other side...#5
Where we flash backwards and forward but get nowhere
Fabulous new collage for Chapter 5 from
If this is the first time you come across this story, you should probably start Chapter 1
Or read the story so far…..
“London's last Cabbie, Charlie Dawson, has been hired to take the last surviving Chicken, Brorwck, across London by his ex-wife, geneticist Nina. This seemingly simple task is hampered by armies of hungry savages that roam the ruined streets of our once great Capital. Charlie and Brorwck take refuge overnight in Charlie’s dead mum's house. Little do they know that pint-sized trainee gods Odin and Thor are planning a daring raid to steal the chicken and have a feast worthy of the gods themselves.”
Chapter 5.
“Nina and I met in a different life. She was 23, feisty, newly qualified, and out of my league. ‘Course, I was too stupid to realise that. We met the old-fashioned way, in a pub, at the bar, buying drinks for someone else. Side by side, elbows bumped, apologies, her smile, my laugh. That’s all it took. We left together. You know wot, I couldn’t tell you the name of the girl I came in with. How funny is that?”
Brorwck bobbed her head. It was funny unless you were the girl who got dumped in the pub, but as she was undoubtedly dead now, it was a moot point.
Charlie shifted in his seat and wiped some blood off his arm with the dirty T-shirt he’d pulled from a pile of clothes near the washing machine. It was clear Charlie hadn’t used the washing machine in years, but with so many clothes lying around London, washing them was a waste of water. He placed the bloodied t-shirt down and continued.
“We walked a long way to nowhere, ending up on a bench in some park. She asked me how far it was to my house, but I didn’t have a clue where we were. I’d got lost in her eyes and honestly didn’t care. We talked until dawn, watched the sunrise, an’ chased down a cab. On the toss of a coin, we went to her flat in Peckham. My house was less than five minutes away. She laughed so hard when I told her she got hiccups for an hour. Ever made love to someone with hiccups? It’s hilarious!”
“Buk!” Brorwck, being a chicken, hadn’t, but it sounded like Nina. She often got hiccups in the lab from laughing.
“Ah… yeah, sorry,” Charlie said, raising his eyebrows to accent the apology. His gaze lands on the picture between them. “Looks like Mum’s garden.” He picks it up and squints, his glasses were in the cab. “Ah, Molly’s holding Spangle Bear. It stank!”
“Buk, Buk, bruurck…”
“Eh?” Charlie considered this new sound Brorwck had made. With such a limited vocabulary, unfamiliar words stuck out. Brorwck was bobbing her head up and down; it was metronomic, like a clock, like tapping her foot, like...
“Ah, rule number 7, is it?” Charlie sits up and gives his voice an officious tone.
“The passenger may cut short any story told by the driver they deem too long, abstract, weird, familiar or of questionable morals.”
“Buk, Bukark.” It was too long, but that was partly her fault; she was easy to talk to, she had that kind of face.
“Too long, eh? Okay... I got the call-up papers a few days later, an’ I wos gone. It was hard for Nina, hard for everyone. Generations of people who knew nothing about war suddenly found themselves in one. Everyone was in shock. People died from the shock, frozen stiff with fear, caked in mud and blood…”
Brorwck cocked her head, “Buk…Buk?”
Charlie took a deep breath. “Ah sorry…! Tea?”
Outside, Odin and Thor had stopped their muffled screaming and removed their fists from each other’s mouths. They stood on either side of Charlie’s front door like snot-covered gargoyles.
“OW!’ Hissed Odin, rubbing his hand along the perforated line cut by Thors’ milk teeth. “You bit me!”
“You bit me!”
“You hit me!”
Thor lowers his eyes and scuffs his sandals in the dirt. “I didn’t know it was you.” He knew it was wrong to hit the all-father, but sometimes he was bloody annoying.
Odin folds his arms and pulls himself up to his full height, towering an inch over the mighty Thor. “Don’t do it again… or… else… yeah?”
Scuff, scuff, “Yeah… ok… soz.”
The two trainee gods give knowing nods. Nothing more needs to be said. They will die for each other to get this chicken if they have to.
“Wot now?” whispers Thor.
Odin smiles before pushing a rotting piece of wood off the door with his staff. Behind it, a strange little door. “I give you the door within a door.”
Thor was stunned. There was no way that had been there a minute ago. Odin was so cool.
“What do we do with that?” Said Thor, inspecting the flap with his dusty sandal.
“You go through it…”
“Oh!”
Odin was not cool.
Odin was a dick.
At the kitchen table, Charlie stroked Brorwck’s feathers and took a tentative sip of his hot tea.
“Remind me to hunt out some real sugar when we are out. Been using a bag of Werthers Originals, but they make tea taste funny.”
“Buk?” Brorwck wasn’t sure if Charlie was joking.
“Yeah! Molly’s fave.” Charlie smiled, took another sip, and grimaced before continuing his story. “She was eight when I left and eleven when I returned. Three years is forever for a kid. She lost us both. Nina had buried herself in her work, and me Mum stepped in. Kept a routine going for Molly, but… the school got bombed, the street got bombed, food was scarce, it was a shit show. I was a broken, Nina was a mess, Molly somehow was holding it together…” Charlie sighed. Brorwck gave him a nudge with her soft head.
“Mmmm, yeah, it’s okay. Anyway, like many of the injured, I got work fixing the city, which was a sick joke, the broken fixing the broken. We used to joke that it took ten of us to have enough body parts to make five people, even then, we were one eye short.”
Charlie laughs a little too loudly, then catches Brorwck’s questioning look. “Gallows humour?”
“Buk?” She likes a joke as much as the next chicken, but she wasn’t sure if that was one.
“Sorry… the words have been in me ‘ead for so long, feels weird spilling my heart to a chicken… no offence.”
“Buckark.” Chickens don’t take offence at being called chickens. It’s part of the job.
Thor was stuck in the door within a door. The mission had started well. Odin had held the flap open with his staff, and Thor had entered the orifice, hands above his head, gripping his war hammer. Once his arms were through, the head followed easily. Now, half-in, half-out of the Cab driver’s house, Thor got his first proper look around. The hallway’s classic dystopian hoarder chic style shows obvious influences from the early 21st-century Covid movement. Stacks of disintegrating cardboard boxes with tins of food jutting out at rakish angles, creating a sense of urgency without veering into panic. Cans of soup and pie filling artfully scattered in the modernist faux-casual riot style, made popular in corner shops over the last 5 years. A tower of loo roll confirmed the occupant’s American Covid hoarder influences, and whilst a bit on-the-nose, it never overwhelms the vision behind the hallway. The backdrop of green floral peeling wallpaper, underpinned with black damp and fungal growths, finished with two artfully placed broken wall lights, confirms the designer’s skill at highlighting the intersection between normality and decay that so many strive for but few achieve. However, the industrial-sized blue barrel of Ammonium Nitrate jarred somewhat, pulling the eye and dominating the overall cohesion of the aesthetic, creating an unnerving imbalance that left Thor wanting to get out of the cat flap quickly.
“Keep moving!” hissed Odin up Thor’s ragged trouser leg.
It irritated Thor when Odin commanded him to do things he was obviously about to do, anyway. He felt it gave his brother more power in the relationship and undermined his heroic agency. Despite his frustration, he wiggled again. Moving a full centimetre in the wrong direction.
Charlie, however, was finally moving forward with his story. “Nina was working late in the lab, trying to fix the food situation. I’d picked Molly up from here. She wanted to see some fuckin’ ducks or something. The sirens went off. Everyone was standing around confused. Nobody knew what they meant. Did we have minutes, hours, was it bombs, nukes, or a hurricane?” Charlie took a deep breath, his eyes tearing up as the memory of the water flooded in. “The water hit us hard. We were only a few feet above the river when it tore up the streets, a rolling wall of debris, bodies, and cars. I ran into a building, a baker’s or something. We climbed the stairs as the windows disappeared behind us. Molly slipped. I turned and reached for her hand, but she was gone. Someone pulled me up, screaming and kicking, fighting to go after her. The bastards knocked me out, or I hit my head trying to kill them. When I came around, they were gone, Molly was gone, London was gone. I searched for days. Nina thought we were both dead. It took me two weeks to get back to her, but the flood had washed away our only reason to stay connected. Until you…”
Brorwck nodded. The enormity of her role in the lives of Charlie and Nina now fully revealed. She understood why Nina chose not to mention any of this. It was a tough enough decision to make the trip without the added complexity of Charlie’s redemption and the forgiveness Nina could never give.
A wave of silence washed over them as deep as the flood that had finally brought them together..
“You’re not moving!”
Thor knew he wasn’t moving; he could tell by his distinct lack of movement.
“I’m trying!”
He was trying. He flicked his legs like a mermaid, trying to swim through the air. His sandaled feet scraped the rough tarmac outside while his fingers scrabbled to gain purchase on the greasy carpet.
“Drop your hammer!”
There it was again! When Thor got out of here, he would speak with the All Father and his need to give obvious instructions. Obviously, Thor was about to relinquish his grip on his hammer.
He dropped it.
It bounced…
Bounced again…
Then… struck a lone can of oxtail soup, which rolled across the floor and tapped, ever so lightly, a great pyramid of soup. Had Thor ever watched a comedy series from the late 1980s, he would have been less surprised by this single can’s ability to destabilise one of nature’s most stable shapes and bring the pyramid tumbling over him. However, Thor had never seen a sit-com and was mouth wide, aghast as the cacophonous avalanche made enough noise to wake the dead Mrs. Dawson…
“Bukark!” said Brorwck, but Charlie was already out the Kitchen door, crowbar in hand.
Chapter 6 coming very soon, subscribe so you don’t miss it…