A Question of Sanity: Prologue

Prologue
 

Sometimes, things are too big and too sad to hold in a memory. Sometimes they have to be written down and trapping them in written words is the only damned way to contain them. She had been witness to love and hatred, murder and evil, and with the seeing she had learned, for the first time in her life, how to care.  Evelyn knew nothing about the nuts and bolts of writing. This was her first attempt. The day held all the promise that only a young day can, and the unpalatable, cooling coffee was her reason for remaining rooted at the dining room table watching that promise unfold.

Jake padded in from the garden and sat in front of her chair, demanding attention. He looked daft and feminine, his great big head adorned with lavender blooms and cocked enquiringly to the right. Eve laughed, despite her mood.

‘You’ve had your nosy snout in that lavender bush again, haven’t you? You crazy dog,’ she said in a mock reproving voice. ‘Those bees’ll have you and then you’ll be sorry.’

Jake grinned and chuffed at Eve. He was a clever German shepherd, and he knew the ‘bee’ word.

Bees: fat things that don’t make sense. They shouldn’t be able to fly with that round, furry body and tiny, thin wings. It’s not right that they should be able to fly and Jake can’t.

Jake forgets sometimes that he only has one human. He used to have two. Jake mustn’t forget that he only has one human, because Eve gets sad when he goes round the house looking. Jake thinks she’s in that hole where they saw a mouse last year. The mouse went through a hole in the skirting boards and never came out again. It is all very confusing, though, when the whole house smells of her. Eve doesn’t smell her everywhere like Jake does. Eve would whine all night too, if she could smell her all the time and had an itch behind her ear. Bees shouldn’t oughta fly like that; it’s not right.

Eve put her hand down and stroked the dog’s head.  The strawberries were almost ripe. The first ones would be ready for picking next week. This grieving game was a miserable process and somebody really should invent an app to make it easier, or faster, or just not happen at all, she thought.

‘Oh well, Jakey boy, we can’t sit here all day, can we? I’ve made a momentous decision while you’ve been having fun without a care in the world. I’m going to start writing today.’

Jake cocked his head, deciphering the unfamiliar words from the familiar. There was no ‘dinner’ or ‘out’ in them, but sometimes humans disguised some words so that they sounded like something else.

Eve got up from the table, and before she was upright, Jake was bouncing around like a puppy.

Oh yes, he decided, this is the ‘out’. Do the round and round thing. Make Eve smile. No Eve, that’s the study, that’s not out. The door’s this way. C’mon, Eve, I’ll teach you how to catch bees without them getting the ouch thing in you. Eve. Out. Oh, sometimes humans are no fun.

Eve hadn’t been in the study much since…Well, from today it was her room and she had to get used to that. Things were different now. As an act of defiance and a stamping of her ownership, she picked up a little jewelled elephant from the windowsill and put it on the occasional table. It had looked better in the window with the light shining behind it. She glared at the elephant as though it was the ornament’s fault. 

Lowering herself into the swivel chair, she took a deep, calming breath and Jake flopped down beside her. He sighed like an old man, and seemed older than his six years. He rolled his eyes to show that he was sulking. Five seconds later his heavy lids gave up the struggle to stay open and he fell asleep.

The computer sensors monitored Eve’s approach and as she sat down it fired up. Eve envied the computer’s ability to come alive within seconds of ‘waking’. What the computer could achieve instantly, she aspired to only after a shower and three cups of strong coffee.

‘Good morning,’ said the computer-simulated voice.

‘Good morning, George,’ replied Eve.

‘It is eight forty-five a.m. on the tenth of June, two thousand and fifty one. What can I do for you this morning?’ asked the deep tone of the butler in the box.

Eve slumped into the chair. The hairs on her arms rose and she was transported back in her mind to another place, another time, another world, where every morning an impersonal voice chanted the date and time at her. It was a place where she had been kept, was contained and controlled, unable to think for herself. She wanted to run but her legs were leaden. She couldn’t do this. She was mad to think that she could continue where things had been left. There had been so much sacrifice to bring her to this point. People far better than her had been killed. She raised her head, taking deep breaths. Jake, alerted to the change in Eve’s mood, sat up, whined and cocked his head at his new mistress in alarm.

She had to do this. She owed it, not only to herself, but also to the only person in the world that she had ever loved. She would do it. She took another inhalation, just to check that she was calm, and spoke to the computer in as level a voice as she could manage.

‘George, my darling, I’ll be coming in here at roughly this time every morning from now on. I only intend to say this once, so I hope your receptors are focused to exactly what I’m saying. I like your chirpy ‘Good morning’, George, really I do. Sometimes yours will be the only voice, apart from my own, that I will hear during the course of the day. But, listen up, my technological friend, if you ever tell me the date and time when I walk into the room again, I’ll pull every wire from your circuitry and stuff them so far down your memory hole that you’ll be choking on techno-spaghetti for a month. Do I make my self succinctly and unconditionally understood?’

The computerised voice bristled with indignation when it replied. ‘Well, there’s no need to take that attitude, I’m sure. I was only trying to be helpful.’ Then it lowered its voice to a mumble. ‘Succinctly and unconditionally understood. Anyone would think she’s a writer.’

Having done for the time being with whingeing, it raised its voice back to the default volume level. ‘Will that be all for now, Miss?’

‘Oh, George, drop the insulted affront or I’ll pinch your emotion chip and use it for a solar token. And George, remind me to take a large sub-machine gun and shoot whoever it was that decided to give computers an emotion chip in the first place. You’re very irritating. Right, to business. I would like a squeaky clean new document please. Today’s the day that I begin the new book.’ The computer spluttered and laughed sarcastically.

Eve smiled despite herself. Sometimes it was hard to believe that blood and organs formed no part of the make-up of George. ‘New document, please, George, then that will be all, thank you.’

‘Very good, Miss,’ said George, in his finest simulation of the dutiful servant. ‘I’ll just fade into the background until the next time you feel the urgent desire to abuse me.’ George brought up a new word processing document as requested and altered his status. The Voice Activation on Standby icon appeared in the top right of the monitor screen.

‘And George?’ said Eve, bringing him back online.

‘Yes?’ he answered in a perfect long-suffering voice.

‘I love you,’ whispered Eve, grinning. ‘Save every five minutes, please, George.’

‘You asked me to remind you to take a large sub-machine gun and shoot whoever it was that gave computers emotion chips.’ The screen went black then flashed with a red lips icon. The lips puckered and a loud smacking sound crackled from the speakers. They were replaced, after two seconds, with the document waiting to be written.

This time she laughed out loud. ‘Bugger off, George, and let me work.’ The hardware that produced the voice of the computer seemed to know just when she needed cheering up. She contemplated the white screen, still smiling.

Eve took a lungful of air and began by writing the title, A Question of Sanity in the header, followed by her pen name Eleanor Erikson, in the body of the document. She wrote the first sentence of the novel that had to be written, regardless of the fact that she hadn’t a clue what she was doing. People had died and it needed to be documented. It was a story of evil and courage and truth.

She began with the following:

Sometimes, things are too big and too sad to hold in a memory. Sometimes they have to be written down, and trapping them in written words is the only damned way to contain them.