IV

I got another one of Danny Miles’ stupid bloody “communiqués” in my e-post this morning, and it irritated me so much that I decided that I really had to break silence.

There is a well-known syndrome in both fact and fiction that someone to whom strange and inexplicable things happens refuses to tell anyone because they didn’t want to appear to be losing their sanity. This doesn’t apply to me. No-one has ever considered me to be sane, nor have I ever pretended that I was. All sorts of strange things have happened to me throughout my life, and I have usually written about them. The only reason that I have not been doing so over the events of the past few weeks, is that I don’t care. I have far more important things going on in my life at the moment than Danny Miles and his damn fool attempts at being a Black Panther, and even the fact that a strange Halfling from the depths of the forest has taken to visiting me in the middle of the night in search of chocolate pales into insignificance in comparison with my main concern of the moment. A few weeks ago I became a Grandfather for the first time, and the doings of the rest of the omniverse really do not matter a damn in comparison with that.

So I have been doing my best to emulate a proverbial ostrich; I have been sticking my head in the sand and ignoring everything else while I try to grok the biggest and most momentous thing ever to have happened to me.

I have never made any secret of the fact that I am bipolar. I am also not that far away from being a Paranoid Schizophrenic, and I also have a fair parcel of neuroses and personality disorders sprinkled here and there as well. Physically I am a fairly uncontrolled diabetic, I have a heart condition, arthritis and a number of other things wrong with me. I am also overweight, drink heavily, smoke more cigarettes than I admit to my doctor and occasionally partake in more exotic diversions, so both my physical and mental condition is pretty ropey.

I have tried to kill myself, twice. The last time was fifteen years ago and I don’t think I shall try and do it again. Russell Hoban described it best in Turtle Diary:

“It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide. I had been thinking of it right enough, often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in the back of my mind. But I’d never do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. no place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the laundrette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of what I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy…”

Over the last decade and a half I have acquired an ever expanding extended family, and the main reason that I don’t think that I will try and kill myself again is because of them, and especially because of my wife whom I love very much indeed. But the thought of it is always huddled like Hoban’s sick ape at the back of my consciousness, and I have never much cared whether I lived or died, as long as my departure from this world is not as unpleasant, painful; and undignified as most people’s seems to be. That is why I still drink, smoke and do other things potentially injurious to my health. Because my particular sick ape tells me that it won’t really make much difference whether I do or I don’t. But now things have changed. I have a reason to live. I want to see my granddaughter Evelyn grow up.

This is the biggest change in my mindset for decades, and I am trying to get my head around it, which is why Danny Miles’ damn fool nonsense has not really made much of an impact on me over the past few weeks. However, now I begin to think of it, the events of the past few weeks really do need to be written down whilst they are still fresh in my head.

The night that Panne turned up in my sitting room was the beginning of it all. (S)he had come through two locked doors without disturbing either of my dogs. Archie, the smallest and most volatile of them had been sitting on my lap as I vaguely scratched his tummy whist reading, listening to music and vaguely worrying about the journey to Norfolk which we would be undertaking a week or so later to be there for when Olivia gave birth.

The fact that even when (s)he appeared before us, Archie didn’t rush about excitedly, barking like a mad thing, but lay respectfully at her feet and silent as the grave was weird enough, but it was his/her completely banal request for chocolate that floored me. I smiled at him/her and went into the Dining Room which doubles as my wife’s office and broke about six squares of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut off a big bar that I knew that she had secreted next to her scanner. I went to the Court Cupboard that Lady Christine Hamlyn had given to my Grandmother as a Christening present back in 1898, and grabbed a bottle of brandy, the cheapest that Asda could provide, that I had bought at the supermarket the previous day, and went back into the Sitting Room.

Panne was still there; motionless and silent, with Archie supine at his/her feet. I passed her the chunk that I had pinched from my wife’s chocolate bar, and poured myself an enormous brandy and coke, lit myself a cigarette and wondered what I was going to do next.

I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that there was what appeared to be a naked Godling covered with hair standing in front of me eating my wife’s chocolate. I remembered Mr Beaver’s advice from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe:

“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

But I didn’t have a hatchet. Or rather I did – it was in the fireplace awaiting its task of cutting up kindling if the winter of 2014-5 is cold enough to warrant more log fires than we needed last winter. But Panne was between me and the fireplace, and my mobility is so severely impaired these days, that even had I wanted to I wouldn’t have been able to outfox her and get to the fireplace in time and grab it. And even if I had wanted to I wouldn’t have done it. I instinctively knew that Panne was good, or at the least morally neutral, and – even if I had been in possession of my hatchet – I was never going to use it to attack a creature that appeared to be a very sweet, slim fifteen year-old girl, albeit one covered in hair, with cloven hooves on her feet, and cute horns curling out of her forehead.

So I took a drag on my cigarette, gulped down a huge mouthful of brandy and diet coke, took a deep breath, and – for the first time – summoned enough courage up, and spoke to her.

“You know who I am, Panne. But who are you?”

Time seemed to stand still. She looked straight at me, and I gazed into her deep yellow eyes with the caprine vertical pupil, as she stared back at me in silence.

Then she slowly stepped towards me and – even more slowly – bent down towards me. For a few moments I stared back in horror, thinking that she was going to kiss me. I was still very aware that she may have been covered in hair, and may have had hooves and horns and the amber coloured eyes of a wild goat, but still in part appeared to be a naked teenage girl, and furthermore one who was (in some arcane way) allied to Danny Miles, who I have known for well over thirty years, and wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him.

I started to protest, but she put one finger over her lips in the internationally recognised symbol for silence, bent nearer and rested her two horns on my forehead.

Then everything changed forever.