Somnambulist 1.4

Her first appointment of the day was at the Stockley household. Amanda Stockley was having her first baby at 42 and Friday was there to help create a positively-energised environment for a home-birth without pain-relief. Meditation was also on the agenda. Mr. Stockley was supporting his older wife in any way she requested – this was her day – but so far had not been able to get time off to meet Friday. By contrast, Mr. De  Nilssen had met Friday and banned her from the house. Sarah De Nilssen was having her third, and after complications second time around, it was going to be a caesarian section. Friday was supporting her to make the best of a bad deal. They would meet in a coffee shop in town.

Helen Bostock-Cope was about to become a single mother. She wanted a woodland birthing in a yurt she was building herself. Amelie Ellis was expecting twins after fertility treatment. Her husband worked abroad for an oil corporation and didn’t expect to be home in time.

Friday didn’t have children, didn’t want children, didn’t like children. But a mystic has to embrace the continuation of life somehow, has to worship at the pagan altar of fertility. The easy way is to defer. Defer the whole process to others and pass on a knowledge culled from books about breeding, about fertility, about birthing the right way. Teach, preach, assist, inspire. Mediate the experience, but never experience directly. Never become impregnated. Friday was a Doula, self-accredited, happy to advise and support from the safe distance of knowledge without experience. At night, Friday worked with men and talked about sex. In the day she worked with women, and talked about birth. Of course, women could phone for sex talk. Men could learn to birth the right way. But it never worked out like that. Only one thing was universal. Friday could talk. Friday talked for a living.

Keri-Lesa’s real name was Kerry, second name Lisa, but she wanted to be unique and modern. Maybe she would say moderne. When her baby came along, she would give it a traditional name, because, for Keri-Lesa, tradition was important. She would misspell her baby’s name not because she was illiterate but because uniqueness / modernity was also important to Keri-Lesa. She wanted an outdoor water birth for her firstborn with herbal pain relief and her best friends present dressed in uplifting colours. Friday was visiting to talk about music they might play and check on progress of the birthing pool that Keri-Lesa’s partner Hal was constructing in the back garden. Unfortunately Hal had been called into work and wasn’t able to meet his wife’s Doula to talk through the project. Hal was such a busy man, said Keri-Lesa.

Friday always keeps an eye out for computers on her visits. If she can’t see them she asks. Most of her clients have computers. She doesn’t make many calls to the technologically-undernourished. The digital illiterati. They may be more fertile beneath the poverty line, and more hungry. But not for ideas. Not for alternatives. Friday works with seekers-of-truth. She preaches to the converted. You have internet access here? Have you heard of the wiki-tarot? Do you want a reading? They all want a reading, of course, being seekers-of-truth. The web hummed and hissed for Friday Solovide, indications and well-wishing emerging from the tangle of information. All these babies so well starred. And there, amongst all the randomness of global data, one page that came up in two separate readings on the same day. Friday made nothing of it with her mothers-to-be, those seekers-of-truth. It was not for them, it was for her:

Emma, Lady Hamilton. Mistress of Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson. How deliciously local. (Despite everything Friday could say, Keri-Lesa took ownership of that page. Emma. Tradition. Girls name. But how to modernise the spelling?)

Somnambulist 1.3

After Owen had left for work, she got down to the business of divination. In the spare time between her work as birthing counsellor and sex telephonist Friday considered herself a medium. A techno-mystic. She understood the world through communications technology and she could see patterns, interpret them, predict outcomes. Nothing was random. She could feel herself within the tangles of the fates, and when she achieved a calmness, a stillness, she could sense the movement of destinies on the threads of a great web; she could place herself at any point on that interconnected membrane and read the movements, the rumours, of others. The Web.

Friday played wiki-tarot. It was a divining game of her own making, connecting with her mystic Web through the World Wide Web; witnessing the ripple of weird in the broadband download of ones and zeros. Calling up pages of information for interpretation through the function of random searches, Friday could see the layers of pattern, the signified and signifier, the relationship between the sign and the symbol, the intention. Nothing is random. Owen could probably explain that in strictly mathematical terms, if the inclination took him. (If he had warmed up. If the hour was late). But Friday understood it as the workings of the Sisters who weave the web of fates.

Irritated by Owen’s distraction before breakfast, Friday found it difficult to meditate that morning. Her thoughts came back and back to his still, silent disruption. He had this notion that everyone might be born with a predestined allowance of words, and once you had uttered your allowance, your time was up. His life was often about being prudent with his allowance.  In some ways this gave Friday the platform she often needed for her own generous allowance, as Owen saw it.  They did not compete for word-space. But a speaker needs a listener, and while he had never mentioned any concept that a person might have an allowance of words they can hear in a lifetime, he often acted like he believed it. It was this aspect of silence, his not letting words in, that frustrated her.

Disparity in their character was as much the foundation of their relationship as a matter of contention. For Owen, her vitality connected him to the world, to other people, when he might otherwise withdraw. He recognised in himself the recluse waiting to happen, but he could not decide whether this was a good thing. Friday made the decision for him – she would not let him withdraw into himself. For Friday, his stillness, his calm, was a haven. Though this morning it was an irritant, on the whole Owen provided the peace and sanctuary and space for self-discovery.

She stared at the screen, cursor ready to hit the random page option, but to do so was to enter into a contract. Once the process is started, you have to accept what comes, feel it, and begin the interpretation. Each page relates to the next and the previous, there are no gaps, no exceptions. Each page is a join on the web, and vibrations pass between them, diminishing and amplifying according to their place and the forces at work on them. You can’t choose to skip a page if you can’t feel it. And Friday was not feeling it. She ought to have left it, but settled instead for a single page reading. She would not have to be concerned for connections, only connotation:

Tangaroa. Maori god of the sea. As powerful a single page as she could ask for. Auspicious. Nothing is random.

Somnambulist 1.2

“Chuck was on the phone again last night.” Friday didn’t often get up before Owen left for work, but she had made the effort this morning. She wanted to give him some care. Some attention. That boyish look in the night reminded her that she loved him. But he was very soon annoying her. His morning routines, his silence. The internalisation of his existence. She was convinced that if he could make himself invisible, she would never see him. At least, not before lunch. He was like a low energy light-bulb, warming up noticeably slowly. It didn’t make sense for her to be fluttering around him like a moth when he was barely putting out any warmth or light, and she resented having to make an effort for his attention. He looked up from his book, disturbed perhaps by her dusty wings, beating lightly on the fringes of his awareness. “Huh?”

“That writer, he called again last night.” She could see it was going to take some time for the words to sink in, the neurones to make the connections. Owen wasn’t stupid but when he was somewhere else in his thoughts there was an interminably slow process for interfacing with the world around him. Friday often wondered if this was a deliberate ploy to put off all but the most dedicated communicators. To filter out all but the most vital information. She had planned to mention the sleep-talking, but it was a treasured moment and she didn’t want to spoil the memory by discussing it while annoyed with him. So she stuck to business. Telephone sex calls.

“I told you he’s been calling lately. I don’t like to name drop, but hey, I’m providing a service to the stars now.” He was still thinking about it. She didn’t know how far behind he was, how long it would take him to catch up. Sometimes he never did. Or he would answer with a completely unrelated statement, like he’d processed all the words she had spoken, and come up with a different conversation altogether. She was never sure how long to give him – if she carried on talking, she might just go beyond the point where he could memorise all the words she spoke, and any hope of creating meaning from what she said would be lost. He continued to stare, as if in thought. And then sometimes he would surprise her with a lucid moment: “Are you sure? Only I read he was gay. And he lives in Minnesota or somewhere. Any way, you specialise in men who don’t speak. How could you possibly know?” He could reason when it suited him. This annoyed her even more.

Somnambulist 1.1

The early hours: as dark as the city gets. As quiet. Friday Solovide is barely asleep, tumbling slowly into her dreams after a long night on the telephone. Owen: hours ahead of her, deep in the landscape of his night, unreachable. They are back to back, but separated by a vast unconscious distance, the abyss of the mind unfettered.  Oblivious of each other for a time they can not measure; perhaps minutes, perhaps millennia.

~

Something must have disturbed her because she came back; came round. There was a seamless transition from the utter unconscious to almost conscious. She was vaguely aware of the sulphur glow pouring through the window, the city night which Owen would not shut out. And then he said: “I can only see the green one.”

It was purposeful, an unusually certain tone, cutting through the silence of the room and the fog of her early sleep. As she turned to him, confused, his tone became more soothing: “No, I think we’ll be over there.” He was sound asleep, eyes closed but an alert, conscious look on his face. He smiled at whoever flickered in his imagination, all innocence. “Of course.”

Friday smiled back. He looked like a sweet child. It was a warm moment, a one-way intimacy. A gift for her, from a part of Owen that even Owen was unfamiliar with. She wanted to wake him, kiss him, talk back. But she did not want to lose the moment. She spoke softly, trying to appeal to his dream-self without waking him: “Where are you, Owen?” He chuckled, amused by something, and turned onto his front, burying his head into the pillows. And then he was gone.