Chapter 3, in which we meet our protagonist.
Well, here's chapter three and it's quite a whopper. Sorry about that. I'm trailing a bit in my word-count because Tec work is taking priority right now and I haven't got much time for NaNoing. Tomorrow. Tec unofficially ends. Oh my God. O_o
More importantly, I have an awesome Firefly icon, which is so awesomely awesome I was almost crying as it cycled through the quotes. I know, I know, I'm a Firefly nerd. Shut up.
If you're feeling brave, here's chapter three. It's mostly ramble and checking messages. Good luck getting through it! :D
Chapter 3
May 24, 2022
It was life as usual for Bryn Finch. He’d got up, carefully left his bed unmade, made toast for breakfast, drank a cup of coffee in the shower, brushed his teeth, and put some food out for Chalk. It was a cloudy Sunday morning and he had nothing to do, not even tedious paperwork for his job. On such a dark and depressing morning he would have been glad of a little paperwork, if only so he could enjoy himself procrastinating and ignoring it. Alas, no luck. The day stretched before him with limitless possibilities, which he found quite tiresome. The whole world seemed to watch him expectantly, going ‘Aw, come on! You could go for a bike ride, write a novel, help the homeless! You could take a picnic lunch to the park, and watch the sun go down over the lake this evening! Why don’t you do something fun?’
But he didn’t want to do something fun. He didn’t have the energy. Life was much easier if you left it alone and let it pass you by, he found.
With nothing better to do, Bryn grabbed his PonPoko and flopped down on the sagging, threadbare couch, turning it on with a flick of his thumb. The loading screen chirruped happily at him, which he resented. A list flashed up on the display, showing books he was reading and newspapers he was currently subscribed to. There were a lot. Most of the books he’d started reading months and months ago, and had lost interest halfway through. Then he’d download another book, get bored of that one and well…the whole process would just kind of repeated itself. The e-reader was a present from his granna, a woman he quite possibly admired and adored more than his own mother. Had be bought the gadget for himself, it would have been twice the size with half the memory space. The PonPoko was the best model out there in terms of style, quality, and sheer sexiness. You just had to get over the ridiculous name. Bryn hadn’t really wanted it - fifty terabytes worth of books was more than he’d ever read in two lifetimes - but his granna had been adamant that, for his 21st birthday, her little boy would get the best there was.
Bryn wasn’t a big fan of books - he found the real world stressful and confusing enough without dealing with the problems of a fictional one - but he did love his PonPoko. He used it for everything, and made him think of his granna whenever he did so. It was a calendar, a notepad, a shopping list, and right now it was a distraction: the most precious thing of all.
He jabbed the header “Waikato Times” on the touch screen with a fingertip. The front page of today’s Times fizzed into existence on the display, screaming happy headlines at him as it did every morning.
Bryn perused the pages slowly, emitting a hissing groan from between his teeth. Years ago, the New Zealand masses, the great unwashed, the general public had put their feet down collectively as one and waged war against the media. We’re sick, they hollered, of all this fear-mongering and sensationalising in the news. This is it, we mean it this time, no more negative news. Ever.
And that was that. With a bit of prodding by some over-zealous and over-protective mothers and the support of some politicians desperate to get elected by pandering to the people, negative news was made illegal in New Zealand. Already failing newspaper sales plummeted through the floorboards and Australia killed itself laughing at the political-correctness-gone-wrong of its neighbours, but at least all that nasty, hurtful, negative news was out of the papers.
Today, the lead story was on a devoted mother of twenty-three who had made a lovely quilt for her new baby. The baby’s name was Hepzibah.
Bryn flipped despondently through the sweet, fluffy stories, their sheer upbeatedness doing nothing but creating an unhappy sinking feeling in his heart. What he wouldn’t give for a bit of drama.
At that point Chalk sauntered into the living room, yawning widely and showing off his brilliant white teeth. Once he’d finished with this important business, he fixed Bryn with a sad, green-eyed stare. It was the kind of look which normally precedes having to tell someone their mother has died.
“If you would care to look, your bowl is in fact full,” said Bryn, switching off his e-reader out of frustration. Chalk continued to stare soulfully at him for a few moments before trailing into the kitchen in search of this fabled food bowl. Bryn heard the sound of happy and frenzied munchings and sensed he’d been forgiven. Dragons took everything far too seriously.
Bryn had become acquainted with Chalk when an old woman living on a farm in Ngaruawahia rang his office screaming about a small black dragon that had flown into the netting covering the blueberry plants and become hopelessly ensnared. He had driven out immediately - after all, it was his job - and spent the next half hour detangling the poor little creature from the netting, and detangling the silly woman’s head from the web of preconceptions and myths she had spun in it concerning dragons. Demon spawn from hell, she said. Abominations against God, she said. Fire-breathing menaces, she said. Bryn had long lost count of the number of times he’d corrected people on this front alone.
Chalk emerged from his run-in with the blueberry netting with a few battle scars. Not only had his pride been injured, but one of his wings was torn in the struggle and he could no longer fly. He bore this reality with as much dignity as he could muster however, and visibly didn’t let it bother him.
It wasn’t common practice for dragon control officers to take their charges home and give them dog biscuits, but Bryn couldn’t help himself. They bonded in the car on the way back to the Department of Conservation office and Chalk never made it as far as HQ. In a moment of rash thinking, Bryn turned the car around and took the little dragon back to his Nixon St flat.
Since then, the relationship had been mutually beneficial. Bryn had someone to come home and talk to in the evenings, and Chalk would always listen intently. Chalk had someone to give him food and tickle him in that spot behind the ear that he liked so much, and Bryn would always get it just right.
Chalk didn’t seem to mind being reduced to the status of a common household cat. Bryn didn’t consider him a pet, though, at any rate. You didn’t domesticate dragons, you just came to an agreement with them. When he first arrived at 47 Nixon Street, Chalk was sleek, black and glossy like a Siamese cat. His scales linked neatly over a sinewy, muscular form. He was still sleek, black and glossy, but now he had the appearance of a beanbag on legs. When he stood up, it took a little while for the outlying regions to get the message they were on the move. So maybe he was a little portly; he was happy enough, relatively healthy and besides, with that wing he wasn’t going anywhere.
Bryn suddenly realised he was staring glassy-eyed at the television - a relic from 2004 - and shook himself awake. He needed to get out of the house, even for a few minutes. He stood up and grabbed his jacket off a hook by the door.
“I’m going out to the lake, Chalk,” Bryn shouted towards the kitchen. “I should be back this afternoon.”
There was no response but for the distant sound of Chalk licking the last traces of dog food out of his bowl.
Locking the door behind him, Bryn turned to face the morning. It was rubbish. Filthy clouds scudded across the sky, looking uncertain as to whether they would release a torrential downpour or just sit about looking sulky. A few cyclists pedalled past with a certain kind of singularity and speed that suggested they had important places to be; unlike Bryn.
Rising petrol prices meant that owning a car was a rich man’s game these days. Mere mortal like Bryn didn’t have cars and made do with walking, cycling or taking the bus. He got to drive the company car when he went out on jobs because DoC paid for the petrol, although he couldn’t help but think it hypocritical that a department dedicated to conservation would own a fleet of company cars. Several other companies in the last few years had phased out their fleet cars in an attempt to help their clean-and-green image in a progressively more dark-and-scungy world.
He breathed in deeply, feeling his lungs swell. That was something at least: the air in this corner of the world was still relatively clean. There was a slight metallic tang which tickled his windpipe on the way down, but it wasn’t yet so acidic that it would eat away at your insides. That was the way it was getting in some of the more densely populated cities across the world. The makers and distributors of designer gas masks were doing a roaring trade in those places, greedy eyes trained on other over-populated cities in the hope they would go down the same path.
Bryn set off down the road and immediately almost got knocked over by a passing cyclist, who rang his bell apologetically at him. It was only a short walk to Lake Rotoroa: one of the last green sanctuaries in a city that was gradually turning into a concrete jungle.
He liked the lake. It was a place he could go to think. Of course, it was a place a lot of people went to think, or take their kids, or entertain visiting friends…but still, he liked to think of it as his.
As he turned the final corner and started down the hill toward the lake, the sun broke through the clouds and scudded across the rippling water like quicksilver. Bryn allowed himself a smile. There was still some beauty in the world, you just needed to know where to find it.
He sat himself down on his usual bench by the water’s edge, where the slapping of the tiny waves against rock did a little to drown out the shouts of children thundering about on the nearby playground.
A small cohort of ducks sidled up to him; a feat in itself, given they were swimming, but somehow a duck always looks suspicious when it’s angling for food. One stared at him side-on and quacked indignantly, wondering what on earth was taking him so long with the bread. Bryn ignored it, his attention grabbed by a medium-sized shadow that soared overhead.
There was a splash, a flutter and an explosion of plumage as the ducks fled. A few feet away, a blue and grey flecked dragon the size of a Labrador had plunged into the lake and was now bathing, tossing water over itself like a giant scaly swan. It seemed to be thoroughly enjoying itself.
“Draco aquarius,” Bryn mumbled to himself without even thinking. He watched it with a certain warmness in his heart, taking in the characteristics that identified it as a water dragon, aside from the fact it was frolicking in the lake, naturally.
Everything about its body was narrow and streamlined, from the tip of its nose to its tail. Its feet were rounded and webbed, and used for controlling speed and direction while swimming. It propelled itself underwater with wings specially adapted for the job; they were tough and almost rubbery, positioned slightly lower down the shoulder blade than on your average dragon, and swivelled for best effect. This meant they weren’t so great when it came to flying, but could do so over short distances.
Bryn’s involvement with dragons travelled a lot further than his job. He held a deep, personal fascination with the creatures, although he couldn’t really say why. They were massively misunderstood, like sharks, but he knew they were a lot smarter than sharks. There were times he highly suspected they were more intelligent than people. There was a ruckus off to his left: an overexcited teen was betting his friends he could stick a twenty cent piece up his nose. Yes, definitely more intelligent than people, he reflected ruefully.
He watched enchanted as the water dragon dived below the surface of the lake to chase a fish. He could clearly see those brilliantly adapted wings, whirring and oscillating like a motorboat propeller and allowing the dragon to surge effortlessly after its prey. It threshed its tail, sending silver spray hissing through the air as it caught the fish in its jaws and resurfaced triumphantly. It proceeded to gulp the fish down then and there, swallowing it whole like a cormorant. Licking its lips, the dragon turned slightly and Bryn found himself looking into its deep aquamarine eyes. Time seemed to stop, and Bryn was sure he shared that gaze for an eternity and a half before a sudden splash broke his concentration. The dragon backed off in a flurry of droplets, its ears flat against its delicate skull, teeth bared at its assailant.
Bryn turned to look. A small boy, about eleven years old, was standing on the shore with a second rock held in his hand.
“Gerroff, y’ugly scaly bastard!” the little boy screamed, lobbing the rock. It sailed far over the dragon’s head to land with a gloop a few feet away. The dragon gave a snort which almost seemed to be mocking, and ducked under the water to glide away, leaving the boy shouting obscenities after it.
Sighing, Bryn stood up. I didn’t know what half those words meant at your age, he thought with some amusement as he approached the boy, who was now adding a few imaginative gestures to his display for good measure.
“Don’t do that,” Bryn said, once he was near enough to speak without shouting. The boy turned and glared at him for a second before his face turned guilty. The ultimate shame: he’d been caught swearing by an adult. Rats.
“Why not? S’dragon,” he said, as if this was explanation enough.
“Because. It has a right to be respected, and if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.”
“My uncle Ernie says one o’ them things grabbed one o’ his sheeps the other day. Picked it waaay up and carried it waaay away. Uncle Ernie was sure mad, mister. I’ll get the worm what done it,” said the boy brightly.
Under the circumstances, Bryn let the slang pass. “It wasn’t one of them, though. Did you see how small it was, and how its wings were different to allow it to swim under water?”
“Yeah…” said the boy, in a way that said he had considered no such thing.
“That tells you it’s a water dragon, and they only eat fish. So that one - or one like it - can’t have stolen your uncle Ernie’s sheep. See?” Bryn gave the boy an encouraging smile.
“But a dragon’s a dragon, mister. Doesn’t matter what size or shape, my uncle Ernie says. Them’s all maggoty bastards from Hell, my uncle Ernie says.”
“Your uncle Ernie seems to say a lot about dragons.”
“He doesn’t like them much, mister. They steals his sheeps,” the boy said.
“Some of the bigger dragons steal sheep, and it’s fair enough that farmers like your uncle Ernie don’t like them. But it’s not fair to condemn a whole species for the actions of a few individuals. You can tell your uncle Ernie that,” said Bryn.
“Yes, mister.” The boy nodded ferociously. He’ll forget everything I’ve said in ten minutes, Bryn thought grudgingly.
He wanted to add ‘And does your mother know you use such language?’ but decided that would be overly meddlesome.
The little boy sensed he was free from the ear-lashing and made a dash for the playground. Bryn let him go. It made him sad that people knew and cared so little about the previously mythical creatures which shared their world, and what could one man do against a whole generation’s worth of prejudice and indifference? For most people, it was a case of carrying second-hand hatred on behalf of the farmers who lost their stock to the larger dragons. But as Bryn was constantly trying to tell the people he met, not all dragons were sheep-stealing brutes and most were exceptionally lovely in their own way.
He looked out across the water to where the dragon had been bobbing. Unsurprisingly, it was no longer anywhere to be seen.
“On behalf of the human race, I’m sorry,” Bryn whispered. It was something he seemed to have to do a lot.
Bryn had rather lost his enthusiasm for staying at the lake and tramped back up the hill towards town. Nor did he feel like going home, and instead he felt his feet leading himself to his other local haunt: his place of work, the Hamilton DoC office. He enjoyed working, partly because it changed every day, partly because it got him outside in the fresh air, mostly because it put him in direct contact with the animals he most admired and adored.
The DoC office was right on the outskirts of the CBD; a five minute walk from the lake. Penelope, the receptionist, smiled and waved at him when he opened the door.
“Morning, Bryn! Er, a young lady turned up yesterday looking for you, didn’t tell me her name, but she’s left you a note on your desk. I told her you probably wasn’t going to be in until tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Pen. Was she pretty?” Bryn asked vaguely.
Penelope wrinkled her nose. “If you like that sort of thing. Now Bryn, one of my girlfriends has just moved to the city, and I was wondering-“
“No, thank you, Pen.” Bryn smiled. Penelope hated to see any nice young man or woman in an unattached state and had already tried several times to set Bryn up on blind dates which invariably failed spectacularly. After blind date number three had left his company in a gibbering, sobbing mess with jelly flecked through her hair, Bryn had quietly decided not to let Penelope butt into his love life; if it could even have that term applied to it.
He walked into his office, an untidy, comfortable space littered with six-month-old paperwork and three-month-old coffee mugs. On his desk, the MessagEx machine glowed with a pulsing green light, indicating there was a note for him to pick up.
Bryn sat down and pushed the ‘Relay Message’ button. A green-tinted screen was projected on the air above the machine, showing a flickering, nervous face, mostly obscured by an enormous pair of coke-bottle glasses.
“Um, hi there Mr Finch. My name is Madeleine Parsley, I’m a teacher at Peachgrove Primary. I was just thinking, you know, if you’re not too busy, it would be really nice if you could come in and, I dunno, just talk to the kids about your work and dragons and things like that, because I’m sure they’d really enjoy it. Your receptionist said you wouldn’t be in until Monday, but whenever you get this, would you mind getting in touch with me, please? If it’s not too much of a bother. Right, well, I’d better keep going, but I hope to hear from you soon.”
Bryn blinked as the message faded into non-existence. Somehow the woman had managed to fit far more than the legal limit of commas into one sentence than was allowed. Each line simply trailed until she ran out of breath, whereupon she would take a huge gulp of breath and begin again. All that aside, it wasn’t in Bryn’s nature to pass up a chance to teach people a little about dragons, especially a room full of impressionable primary school children. He took down her name in his PonPoko and deleted the message. He would get back to her when he got home.
He switched on his computer and quickly browsed his bulletins. Not much had happened between Friday and Sunday: an old lady in Morrinsville had found a water dragon in her fish pond and was after some advice on how to get rid of it, and his co-worker Greg was having a leaving party on Thursday afternoon. He didn’t like Greg, so quietly deleted the bulletin. The little old lady could put up with a dragon in her pond for one more day, even if it did mean she would have to buy more fish at the end of it.
Bryn got up and walked out of his office, waving goodbye to Penelope - who was chatting with a friend of hers who’d come in for some gossip - as he passed.
Milk. I need to get some milk. Bryn thought to himself as he ambled down the path. The sun resembled a badly poached egg, leaking runny yellow beams of light through the clouds.
He detoured a few minutes out of his way to pick up a two-litre bottle of blue cap milk, before returning to his flat. He thought dully about what his life was becoming; a trip to the lake to sit on the bench, swinging by his place of work and picking up some milk on the way home seemed a fair way of spending his afternoon.
***
In no time at all, his key was grinding in the lock of 47 Nixon Street and he was back in his bleached living room.
“Chalk, I’m home!” he shouted, slamming the milk down on the pathetically sagging coffee table.
There was a soft thump as Chalk jumped off Bryn’s bed and sauntered through into the front room. His tail flashed in a way that expressed his pleasure at seeing his person-friend and came over for a tickle behind the ear.
“I really don’t understand you,” Bryn said as he sat down with his back against the couch, scratching Chalk in That Spot and making the little dragon’s eyes roll into his head in abject bliss. “For a creature with so much presence and dignity, it never ceases to amaze me how happy you are to sleep in a cat basket or have a belly rub. So, what are you? A majestic being or a common household pet?”
Chalk merely gave him a look that said ‘Why can’t I enjoy the benefits of both?’ and jumped up on to the couch by Bryn’s head to curl up for his seventh nap of the day. He folded his damaged wings carefully around him like a shroud and sighed contentedly. Bryn watched with a smile on his face as the majestic household pet descended through the layers of sleep until he lay twitching in a happy little heap, chasing dream-sheep as he soared over snow-tipped mountains.
Bryn got up and crossed to where his phone cowered in the corner, sat down in the plastic dining room chair and keyed ‘Madeleine Parsley’ into the interface. There were forty-eight Madeleine Parsleys in the world, five of them were in New Zealand and only one of them was in Hamilton. He highlighted the name with a finger stroke and it brought up a short profile with contact numbers and a small amount of information on it. He pressed ‘Call’ and the screen hummed and flickered into life.
For a few seconds it only showed a twirling progress bar while the machine waited for Madeleine to pick up at the other end, which she did soon enough.
An apparition with altogether too much bushy hair and what appeared to be telescopic eyes appeared on the monitor. “Hello, Maddie Parsley speaking, who is it?” the apparition said breathlessly.
“Madeleine, it’s Bryn Finch. You called into my office yesterday and left your name, I’m just returning your call,” Bryn explained.
“Oh! Yes, of course!” Madeleine blustered, raking her hair back frantically with her fingernails and mangling it into a messy ponytail. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, Mr Finch, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until Monday at least, so I really do appreciate it.”
Bryn waved a dismissive hand. “It’s nothing, really. What can I do for you?”
“Well, as I said in my message, I’m a teacher at Peachgrove and I’d really like for someone to come in and talk to the kids about dragons. You know, since so few know the first thing about them, which I feel is a terrible shame. They’re lovely things, aren’t they?”
Even though talking to her was like holding a conversation with a digital recording on 1.5X speed, Bryn couldn’t help but find a place in his heart for Madeleine Parsley. “I’m of that opinion myself, I just wish it was shared by more people.”
Madeleine nodded furiously. “Misunderstood, I’ve always said so. Then you’ll do it?”
“I never pass up a chance like this when it’s handed to me on a platter, Ms Parsley,” Bryn said with a light shrug.
“Good! Good, good, good. That’s very good. When suits you?”
“Well…” he thought of his embarrassingly empty work schedule. “…I think I might be able to squeeze in an hour or so on Tuesday, if that’s alright with you?”
Madeleine clapped her hands and made a note in an e-reader lying on her desk. “Tuesday it is. And yes, if you’d just be able to tell them a bit about the different dragon varieties, how they fit into our environment and a bit of the history if possible. I thought about getting a dracologist from Auckland, but I figured a local man working with real dragons every day would be a billion times better than some crusty old bloke who spends his time staring at dragon dung through a microscope.”
Bryn laughed; something he hadn’t been treated to in a while. “To be honest, I sometimes wonder how those so-called dracologists get anything done. They seem to have their heads stuffed irretrievably far up their arses ninety per cent of the time.”
Now it was Madeleine’s turn to laugh. It’s sometimes said of women’s laughter that it sounds like a bell, but whoever said that obviously has an idealistic view on laughter and is probably such a dry and boring individual that they’ve never heard it in their life. Madeleine’s laugh sounded nothing more or less than the vocalisation of sheer mirth.
“So true, so true. Well, I look forward to your talk on Thursday then. Who knows? I might even learn something new, as well!”
“There’s always a possibility,” Bryn said, his face cracking into a grin.
“Cheerio!” the screen went black. Bryn blinked slowly; the only person he’d ever heard say ‘cheerio’ was his granna, and that was back when he was six years old. He wasn’t aware it was still in use. Mind, Madeleine did seem to be a singular young woman. He didn’t realise he was still smiling, staring at the screen. Then he heard a snicker-sneeze and swivelled around: Chalk was gazing at him, and if he didn’t know better he’d say he was smirking.
“What? What are you looking at?” Bryn snapped. Chalk rolled his eyes and turned over. It was disconcerting, living with a dragon. It was like having a foreign emissary sharing your house. Although you don’t speak a word of their language and they don’t speak a word of yours, you just can’t shake the feeling that they’re smarter than you and - what’s more - somehow they know exactly what’s going on while leaving you in the dark. Bryn was certain Chalk understood more about him than he understood about Chalk. There was a lot of mystery in those acid-green eyes, and he was in no position to unravel any of it.
He sighed, realising a green light was pulsing gently on the phone. His fingers moved quickly as he navigated through the menus to check his messages. Some years ago, a fad for voice-activated gadgets was born and then murdered brutally in a shower of rage and flames. For a while, everything was controlled by voice: electronics, appliances and - more alarmingly - vehicles. When it got to the stage that people were not calming stating ‘POP’ at their toasters so much as throwing them out second-storey windows in fits of mad-eyed, frothing rage, the fad died out and things returned to nice, friendly touch-activated interfaces.
The message was from his mother. She had a friendly, dumplingy face which seemed to be smiling constantly (Well, apart from that time Bryn had tried to start a worm farm in her jewellery box, but that was a long time ago now) and that was exactly what she was doing now.
‘Brynnie dear, it’s mamma! Are you there, darling? Oh well, I just wanted to let you know, granna’s coming up from Christchurch to visit us on Friday. I was hoping you’d want to join us for dinner. I know how much you enjoy seeing her…oh, is there any chance we’ll be able to meet Hazel this time? Only I think it’s been far too long for a mother not to meet her little boy’s gel, don’t you agree? Anyway, Bryn darling, must go! Do call me when you get the chance, won’t you? Hooray!’
Bryn felt his stomach flutter in self-shame as his mother signed off in her traditional manner: she was one of the few people he knew who still used ‘hooray’, an adaptation of ‘haere ra’, the Maori word for goodbye. His embarrassment was not stemmed from his mother’s use of antiquated farewells however, but by the mention of Hazel.
Hazel was 5’ 3”. Hazel was twenty-three years old. Hazel had black hair - cut short - and deep, laughing brown eyes. Hazel was slightly on the chubby side, which only added to her charm. Hazel was PA to the chief executive of Gallagher Animal Management Systems, a job which took her around the world on business trips and all sorts of exciting things. Hazel was into art and culture and all that kind of stuff. Hazel could make a woman weep with happiness at the mere thought of having her as a daughter-in-law. Unfortunately, because her job, severe allergies and a weak immune system, Bryn’s parents hadn’t yet been able to make her acquaintance. Despite this, Hazel was the perfect girlfriend. She just had one major character flaw: she didn’t exist.
She started life as a tiny white lie to help Bryn get his over-bearing mother off his back, and morphed into a multi-faceted, character with likes, dislikes, loves, hates and everything in between. Bryn was forced to get progressively more creative as his mother’s questions grew more probing. Yes, it kept her happy and it wasn’t as though he was lying about anything big and important. But that didn’t change the fact he was stringing along his dear old mum.
He stared at his own reflection at the phone and couldn’t help but laugh darkly at what he saw there.
You’re a right case, Bryn Finch. Can’t get a girlfriend, can’t tell your mum you can’t get one. He sighed, and in that moment resolved to fix up at least one of those scores. It was time to come clean with his mother…well, sort of.
He selected ‘Mum’ out of the Important Numbers list and sat back while it dialled.
Eventually, she picked up. “Are you there?”
“Yes, mum. It’s Bryn. I got your message.”
Her face cracked into a huge smile. “Brynnie! How are you, dear?”
“I’m doing just fine, mum. You know me; hanging in there.” He shifted into a more comfortable position on the rickety chair.
“Wonderful, darling. Wonderful. So, granna is coming to visit and we’re all going to have a family dinner. Just you, me, your father, your brother and granna.” Her eyes sparkled. “And Hazel, of course, if she can make it this time?”
Bryn exhaled deeply. “Actually…I’ve been meaning to say for a while, mum…Hazel…” He stared into her wide-eyed frown and suddenly felt as though he was trapped in headlights. “…We’re taking a break. Um. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier-“
His mother let out a cry of anguish. “Oh, Bryn! Why? She sounds like such a wonderful girl, I simply can’t fathom why…oh, dear…”
No, you wouldn’t, would you? Everything in your world comes pre-packaged in fluff and cotton wool with all the sharp corners removed. The thought that other people are struggling through their lives out here just doesn’t occur to you. He thought dryly to himself. But of course he couldn’t say that, and settled with, “It just wasn’t working, mum. And we might still get back together, who knows? But she probably won’t make it to dinner.”
“O-of course. I understand. Goodness, I think I might have to go sit down…” she said faintly.
“Now look, don’t get upset, I only-“
“-Oh, I’m not upset Bryn, not upset at all. I’m just surprised, is all. Don’t worry about me. Well, I guess I’d better let you get on. I imagine you must have a lot of work to get through.”
“Yeah,” Bryn said uncertainly, once again thinking of his pitifully dwindling workload. “I’ll see you on Friday, mum. I love you.”
“I love you too, darling. Hooray!”
Bryn disconnected the call and stood up, all of a sudden feeling completely exhausted. He hobbled into his bedroom and collapsed upon the crumpled sheets on his bed, crushing his head into the pillow until all light and sound was completely drowned out.
A gentle weight landed on the end of the bed and carefully picked its way over until it was positioned beside his elbow, where it curled up in a manner that can only be described as fastidiously.
“Chalk,” Bryn said, voice muffled by the pillow. “Starting tomorrow, I am fixing my life. I don’t know how. But I will.”
So saying, he drifted off to sleep. Chalk snorted and lay his chin on Bryn’s elbow. Humans could be so silly sometimes.
ALSO. SQUEE, I HAS NEW JONATHAN STROUD BOOK AND I AM STUPIDLY HAPPY. :DDD I HAVE NEVER IMPULSE-BOUGHT A BOOK BEFORE BUT NOW I HAVE.[/stupidly happyness]
More importantly, I have an awesome Firefly icon, which is so awesomely awesome I was almost crying as it cycled through the quotes. I know, I know, I'm a Firefly nerd. Shut up.
If you're feeling brave, here's chapter three. It's mostly ramble and checking messages. Good luck getting through it! :D
Chapter 3
May 24, 2022
It was life as usual for Bryn Finch. He’d got up, carefully left his bed unmade, made toast for breakfast, drank a cup of coffee in the shower, brushed his teeth, and put some food out for Chalk. It was a cloudy Sunday morning and he had nothing to do, not even tedious paperwork for his job. On such a dark and depressing morning he would have been glad of a little paperwork, if only so he could enjoy himself procrastinating and ignoring it. Alas, no luck. The day stretched before him with limitless possibilities, which he found quite tiresome. The whole world seemed to watch him expectantly, going ‘Aw, come on! You could go for a bike ride, write a novel, help the homeless! You could take a picnic lunch to the park, and watch the sun go down over the lake this evening! Why don’t you do something fun?’
But he didn’t want to do something fun. He didn’t have the energy. Life was much easier if you left it alone and let it pass you by, he found.
With nothing better to do, Bryn grabbed his PonPoko and flopped down on the sagging, threadbare couch, turning it on with a flick of his thumb. The loading screen chirruped happily at him, which he resented. A list flashed up on the display, showing books he was reading and newspapers he was currently subscribed to. There were a lot. Most of the books he’d started reading months and months ago, and had lost interest halfway through. Then he’d download another book, get bored of that one and well…the whole process would just kind of repeated itself. The e-reader was a present from his granna, a woman he quite possibly admired and adored more than his own mother. Had be bought the gadget for himself, it would have been twice the size with half the memory space. The PonPoko was the best model out there in terms of style, quality, and sheer sexiness. You just had to get over the ridiculous name. Bryn hadn’t really wanted it - fifty terabytes worth of books was more than he’d ever read in two lifetimes - but his granna had been adamant that, for his 21st birthday, her little boy would get the best there was.
Bryn wasn’t a big fan of books - he found the real world stressful and confusing enough without dealing with the problems of a fictional one - but he did love his PonPoko. He used it for everything, and made him think of his granna whenever he did so. It was a calendar, a notepad, a shopping list, and right now it was a distraction: the most precious thing of all.
He jabbed the header “Waikato Times” on the touch screen with a fingertip. The front page of today’s Times fizzed into existence on the display, screaming happy headlines at him as it did every morning.
Bryn perused the pages slowly, emitting a hissing groan from between his teeth. Years ago, the New Zealand masses, the great unwashed, the general public had put their feet down collectively as one and waged war against the media. We’re sick, they hollered, of all this fear-mongering and sensationalising in the news. This is it, we mean it this time, no more negative news. Ever.
And that was that. With a bit of prodding by some over-zealous and over-protective mothers and the support of some politicians desperate to get elected by pandering to the people, negative news was made illegal in New Zealand. Already failing newspaper sales plummeted through the floorboards and Australia killed itself laughing at the political-correctness-gone-wrong of its neighbours, but at least all that nasty, hurtful, negative news was out of the papers.
Today, the lead story was on a devoted mother of twenty-three who had made a lovely quilt for her new baby. The baby’s name was Hepzibah.
Bryn flipped despondently through the sweet, fluffy stories, their sheer upbeatedness doing nothing but creating an unhappy sinking feeling in his heart. What he wouldn’t give for a bit of drama.
At that point Chalk sauntered into the living room, yawning widely and showing off his brilliant white teeth. Once he’d finished with this important business, he fixed Bryn with a sad, green-eyed stare. It was the kind of look which normally precedes having to tell someone their mother has died.
“If you would care to look, your bowl is in fact full,” said Bryn, switching off his e-reader out of frustration. Chalk continued to stare soulfully at him for a few moments before trailing into the kitchen in search of this fabled food bowl. Bryn heard the sound of happy and frenzied munchings and sensed he’d been forgiven. Dragons took everything far too seriously.
Bryn had become acquainted with Chalk when an old woman living on a farm in Ngaruawahia rang his office screaming about a small black dragon that had flown into the netting covering the blueberry plants and become hopelessly ensnared. He had driven out immediately - after all, it was his job - and spent the next half hour detangling the poor little creature from the netting, and detangling the silly woman’s head from the web of preconceptions and myths she had spun in it concerning dragons. Demon spawn from hell, she said. Abominations against God, she said. Fire-breathing menaces, she said. Bryn had long lost count of the number of times he’d corrected people on this front alone.
Chalk emerged from his run-in with the blueberry netting with a few battle scars. Not only had his pride been injured, but one of his wings was torn in the struggle and he could no longer fly. He bore this reality with as much dignity as he could muster however, and visibly didn’t let it bother him.
It wasn’t common practice for dragon control officers to take their charges home and give them dog biscuits, but Bryn couldn’t help himself. They bonded in the car on the way back to the Department of Conservation office and Chalk never made it as far as HQ. In a moment of rash thinking, Bryn turned the car around and took the little dragon back to his Nixon St flat.
Since then, the relationship had been mutually beneficial. Bryn had someone to come home and talk to in the evenings, and Chalk would always listen intently. Chalk had someone to give him food and tickle him in that spot behind the ear that he liked so much, and Bryn would always get it just right.
Chalk didn’t seem to mind being reduced to the status of a common household cat. Bryn didn’t consider him a pet, though, at any rate. You didn’t domesticate dragons, you just came to an agreement with them. When he first arrived at 47 Nixon Street, Chalk was sleek, black and glossy like a Siamese cat. His scales linked neatly over a sinewy, muscular form. He was still sleek, black and glossy, but now he had the appearance of a beanbag on legs. When he stood up, it took a little while for the outlying regions to get the message they were on the move. So maybe he was a little portly; he was happy enough, relatively healthy and besides, with that wing he wasn’t going anywhere.
Bryn suddenly realised he was staring glassy-eyed at the television - a relic from 2004 - and shook himself awake. He needed to get out of the house, even for a few minutes. He stood up and grabbed his jacket off a hook by the door.
“I’m going out to the lake, Chalk,” Bryn shouted towards the kitchen. “I should be back this afternoon.”
There was no response but for the distant sound of Chalk licking the last traces of dog food out of his bowl.
Locking the door behind him, Bryn turned to face the morning. It was rubbish. Filthy clouds scudded across the sky, looking uncertain as to whether they would release a torrential downpour or just sit about looking sulky. A few cyclists pedalled past with a certain kind of singularity and speed that suggested they had important places to be; unlike Bryn.
Rising petrol prices meant that owning a car was a rich man’s game these days. Mere mortal like Bryn didn’t have cars and made do with walking, cycling or taking the bus. He got to drive the company car when he went out on jobs because DoC paid for the petrol, although he couldn’t help but think it hypocritical that a department dedicated to conservation would own a fleet of company cars. Several other companies in the last few years had phased out their fleet cars in an attempt to help their clean-and-green image in a progressively more dark-and-scungy world.
He breathed in deeply, feeling his lungs swell. That was something at least: the air in this corner of the world was still relatively clean. There was a slight metallic tang which tickled his windpipe on the way down, but it wasn’t yet so acidic that it would eat away at your insides. That was the way it was getting in some of the more densely populated cities across the world. The makers and distributors of designer gas masks were doing a roaring trade in those places, greedy eyes trained on other over-populated cities in the hope they would go down the same path.
Bryn set off down the road and immediately almost got knocked over by a passing cyclist, who rang his bell apologetically at him. It was only a short walk to Lake Rotoroa: one of the last green sanctuaries in a city that was gradually turning into a concrete jungle.
He liked the lake. It was a place he could go to think. Of course, it was a place a lot of people went to think, or take their kids, or entertain visiting friends…but still, he liked to think of it as his.
As he turned the final corner and started down the hill toward the lake, the sun broke through the clouds and scudded across the rippling water like quicksilver. Bryn allowed himself a smile. There was still some beauty in the world, you just needed to know where to find it.
He sat himself down on his usual bench by the water’s edge, where the slapping of the tiny waves against rock did a little to drown out the shouts of children thundering about on the nearby playground.
A small cohort of ducks sidled up to him; a feat in itself, given they were swimming, but somehow a duck always looks suspicious when it’s angling for food. One stared at him side-on and quacked indignantly, wondering what on earth was taking him so long with the bread. Bryn ignored it, his attention grabbed by a medium-sized shadow that soared overhead.
There was a splash, a flutter and an explosion of plumage as the ducks fled. A few feet away, a blue and grey flecked dragon the size of a Labrador had plunged into the lake and was now bathing, tossing water over itself like a giant scaly swan. It seemed to be thoroughly enjoying itself.
“Draco aquarius,” Bryn mumbled to himself without even thinking. He watched it with a certain warmness in his heart, taking in the characteristics that identified it as a water dragon, aside from the fact it was frolicking in the lake, naturally.
Everything about its body was narrow and streamlined, from the tip of its nose to its tail. Its feet were rounded and webbed, and used for controlling speed and direction while swimming. It propelled itself underwater with wings specially adapted for the job; they were tough and almost rubbery, positioned slightly lower down the shoulder blade than on your average dragon, and swivelled for best effect. This meant they weren’t so great when it came to flying, but could do so over short distances.
Bryn’s involvement with dragons travelled a lot further than his job. He held a deep, personal fascination with the creatures, although he couldn’t really say why. They were massively misunderstood, like sharks, but he knew they were a lot smarter than sharks. There were times he highly suspected they were more intelligent than people. There was a ruckus off to his left: an overexcited teen was betting his friends he could stick a twenty cent piece up his nose. Yes, definitely more intelligent than people, he reflected ruefully.
He watched enchanted as the water dragon dived below the surface of the lake to chase a fish. He could clearly see those brilliantly adapted wings, whirring and oscillating like a motorboat propeller and allowing the dragon to surge effortlessly after its prey. It threshed its tail, sending silver spray hissing through the air as it caught the fish in its jaws and resurfaced triumphantly. It proceeded to gulp the fish down then and there, swallowing it whole like a cormorant. Licking its lips, the dragon turned slightly and Bryn found himself looking into its deep aquamarine eyes. Time seemed to stop, and Bryn was sure he shared that gaze for an eternity and a half before a sudden splash broke his concentration. The dragon backed off in a flurry of droplets, its ears flat against its delicate skull, teeth bared at its assailant.
Bryn turned to look. A small boy, about eleven years old, was standing on the shore with a second rock held in his hand.
“Gerroff, y’ugly scaly bastard!” the little boy screamed, lobbing the rock. It sailed far over the dragon’s head to land with a gloop a few feet away. The dragon gave a snort which almost seemed to be mocking, and ducked under the water to glide away, leaving the boy shouting obscenities after it.
Sighing, Bryn stood up. I didn’t know what half those words meant at your age, he thought with some amusement as he approached the boy, who was now adding a few imaginative gestures to his display for good measure.
“Don’t do that,” Bryn said, once he was near enough to speak without shouting. The boy turned and glared at him for a second before his face turned guilty. The ultimate shame: he’d been caught swearing by an adult. Rats.
“Why not? S’dragon,” he said, as if this was explanation enough.
“Because. It has a right to be respected, and if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.”
“My uncle Ernie says one o’ them things grabbed one o’ his sheeps the other day. Picked it waaay up and carried it waaay away. Uncle Ernie was sure mad, mister. I’ll get the worm what done it,” said the boy brightly.
Under the circumstances, Bryn let the slang pass. “It wasn’t one of them, though. Did you see how small it was, and how its wings were different to allow it to swim under water?”
“Yeah…” said the boy, in a way that said he had considered no such thing.
“That tells you it’s a water dragon, and they only eat fish. So that one - or one like it - can’t have stolen your uncle Ernie’s sheep. See?” Bryn gave the boy an encouraging smile.
“But a dragon’s a dragon, mister. Doesn’t matter what size or shape, my uncle Ernie says. Them’s all maggoty bastards from Hell, my uncle Ernie says.”
“Your uncle Ernie seems to say a lot about dragons.”
“He doesn’t like them much, mister. They steals his sheeps,” the boy said.
“Some of the bigger dragons steal sheep, and it’s fair enough that farmers like your uncle Ernie don’t like them. But it’s not fair to condemn a whole species for the actions of a few individuals. You can tell your uncle Ernie that,” said Bryn.
“Yes, mister.” The boy nodded ferociously. He’ll forget everything I’ve said in ten minutes, Bryn thought grudgingly.
He wanted to add ‘And does your mother know you use such language?’ but decided that would be overly meddlesome.
The little boy sensed he was free from the ear-lashing and made a dash for the playground. Bryn let him go. It made him sad that people knew and cared so little about the previously mythical creatures which shared their world, and what could one man do against a whole generation’s worth of prejudice and indifference? For most people, it was a case of carrying second-hand hatred on behalf of the farmers who lost their stock to the larger dragons. But as Bryn was constantly trying to tell the people he met, not all dragons were sheep-stealing brutes and most were exceptionally lovely in their own way.
He looked out across the water to where the dragon had been bobbing. Unsurprisingly, it was no longer anywhere to be seen.
“On behalf of the human race, I’m sorry,” Bryn whispered. It was something he seemed to have to do a lot.
Bryn had rather lost his enthusiasm for staying at the lake and tramped back up the hill towards town. Nor did he feel like going home, and instead he felt his feet leading himself to his other local haunt: his place of work, the Hamilton DoC office. He enjoyed working, partly because it changed every day, partly because it got him outside in the fresh air, mostly because it put him in direct contact with the animals he most admired and adored.
The DoC office was right on the outskirts of the CBD; a five minute walk from the lake. Penelope, the receptionist, smiled and waved at him when he opened the door.
“Morning, Bryn! Er, a young lady turned up yesterday looking for you, didn’t tell me her name, but she’s left you a note on your desk. I told her you probably wasn’t going to be in until tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Pen. Was she pretty?” Bryn asked vaguely.
Penelope wrinkled her nose. “If you like that sort of thing. Now Bryn, one of my girlfriends has just moved to the city, and I was wondering-“
“No, thank you, Pen.” Bryn smiled. Penelope hated to see any nice young man or woman in an unattached state and had already tried several times to set Bryn up on blind dates which invariably failed spectacularly. After blind date number three had left his company in a gibbering, sobbing mess with jelly flecked through her hair, Bryn had quietly decided not to let Penelope butt into his love life; if it could even have that term applied to it.
He walked into his office, an untidy, comfortable space littered with six-month-old paperwork and three-month-old coffee mugs. On his desk, the MessagEx machine glowed with a pulsing green light, indicating there was a note for him to pick up.
Bryn sat down and pushed the ‘Relay Message’ button. A green-tinted screen was projected on the air above the machine, showing a flickering, nervous face, mostly obscured by an enormous pair of coke-bottle glasses.
“Um, hi there Mr Finch. My name is Madeleine Parsley, I’m a teacher at Peachgrove Primary. I was just thinking, you know, if you’re not too busy, it would be really nice if you could come in and, I dunno, just talk to the kids about your work and dragons and things like that, because I’m sure they’d really enjoy it. Your receptionist said you wouldn’t be in until Monday, but whenever you get this, would you mind getting in touch with me, please? If it’s not too much of a bother. Right, well, I’d better keep going, but I hope to hear from you soon.”
Bryn blinked as the message faded into non-existence. Somehow the woman had managed to fit far more than the legal limit of commas into one sentence than was allowed. Each line simply trailed until she ran out of breath, whereupon she would take a huge gulp of breath and begin again. All that aside, it wasn’t in Bryn’s nature to pass up a chance to teach people a little about dragons, especially a room full of impressionable primary school children. He took down her name in his PonPoko and deleted the message. He would get back to her when he got home.
He switched on his computer and quickly browsed his bulletins. Not much had happened between Friday and Sunday: an old lady in Morrinsville had found a water dragon in her fish pond and was after some advice on how to get rid of it, and his co-worker Greg was having a leaving party on Thursday afternoon. He didn’t like Greg, so quietly deleted the bulletin. The little old lady could put up with a dragon in her pond for one more day, even if it did mean she would have to buy more fish at the end of it.
Bryn got up and walked out of his office, waving goodbye to Penelope - who was chatting with a friend of hers who’d come in for some gossip - as he passed.
Milk. I need to get some milk. Bryn thought to himself as he ambled down the path. The sun resembled a badly poached egg, leaking runny yellow beams of light through the clouds.
He detoured a few minutes out of his way to pick up a two-litre bottle of blue cap milk, before returning to his flat. He thought dully about what his life was becoming; a trip to the lake to sit on the bench, swinging by his place of work and picking up some milk on the way home seemed a fair way of spending his afternoon.
***
In no time at all, his key was grinding in the lock of 47 Nixon Street and he was back in his bleached living room.
“Chalk, I’m home!” he shouted, slamming the milk down on the pathetically sagging coffee table.
There was a soft thump as Chalk jumped off Bryn’s bed and sauntered through into the front room. His tail flashed in a way that expressed his pleasure at seeing his person-friend and came over for a tickle behind the ear.
“I really don’t understand you,” Bryn said as he sat down with his back against the couch, scratching Chalk in That Spot and making the little dragon’s eyes roll into his head in abject bliss. “For a creature with so much presence and dignity, it never ceases to amaze me how happy you are to sleep in a cat basket or have a belly rub. So, what are you? A majestic being or a common household pet?”
Chalk merely gave him a look that said ‘Why can’t I enjoy the benefits of both?’ and jumped up on to the couch by Bryn’s head to curl up for his seventh nap of the day. He folded his damaged wings carefully around him like a shroud and sighed contentedly. Bryn watched with a smile on his face as the majestic household pet descended through the layers of sleep until he lay twitching in a happy little heap, chasing dream-sheep as he soared over snow-tipped mountains.
Bryn got up and crossed to where his phone cowered in the corner, sat down in the plastic dining room chair and keyed ‘Madeleine Parsley’ into the interface. There were forty-eight Madeleine Parsleys in the world, five of them were in New Zealand and only one of them was in Hamilton. He highlighted the name with a finger stroke and it brought up a short profile with contact numbers and a small amount of information on it. He pressed ‘Call’ and the screen hummed and flickered into life.
For a few seconds it only showed a twirling progress bar while the machine waited for Madeleine to pick up at the other end, which she did soon enough.
An apparition with altogether too much bushy hair and what appeared to be telescopic eyes appeared on the monitor. “Hello, Maddie Parsley speaking, who is it?” the apparition said breathlessly.
“Madeleine, it’s Bryn Finch. You called into my office yesterday and left your name, I’m just returning your call,” Bryn explained.
“Oh! Yes, of course!” Madeleine blustered, raking her hair back frantically with her fingernails and mangling it into a messy ponytail. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, Mr Finch, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until Monday at least, so I really do appreciate it.”
Bryn waved a dismissive hand. “It’s nothing, really. What can I do for you?”
“Well, as I said in my message, I’m a teacher at Peachgrove and I’d really like for someone to come in and talk to the kids about dragons. You know, since so few know the first thing about them, which I feel is a terrible shame. They’re lovely things, aren’t they?”
Even though talking to her was like holding a conversation with a digital recording on 1.5X speed, Bryn couldn’t help but find a place in his heart for Madeleine Parsley. “I’m of that opinion myself, I just wish it was shared by more people.”
Madeleine nodded furiously. “Misunderstood, I’ve always said so. Then you’ll do it?”
“I never pass up a chance like this when it’s handed to me on a platter, Ms Parsley,” Bryn said with a light shrug.
“Good! Good, good, good. That’s very good. When suits you?”
“Well…” he thought of his embarrassingly empty work schedule. “…I think I might be able to squeeze in an hour or so on Tuesday, if that’s alright with you?”
Madeleine clapped her hands and made a note in an e-reader lying on her desk. “Tuesday it is. And yes, if you’d just be able to tell them a bit about the different dragon varieties, how they fit into our environment and a bit of the history if possible. I thought about getting a dracologist from Auckland, but I figured a local man working with real dragons every day would be a billion times better than some crusty old bloke who spends his time staring at dragon dung through a microscope.”
Bryn laughed; something he hadn’t been treated to in a while. “To be honest, I sometimes wonder how those so-called dracologists get anything done. They seem to have their heads stuffed irretrievably far up their arses ninety per cent of the time.”
Now it was Madeleine’s turn to laugh. It’s sometimes said of women’s laughter that it sounds like a bell, but whoever said that obviously has an idealistic view on laughter and is probably such a dry and boring individual that they’ve never heard it in their life. Madeleine’s laugh sounded nothing more or less than the vocalisation of sheer mirth.
“So true, so true. Well, I look forward to your talk on Thursday then. Who knows? I might even learn something new, as well!”
“There’s always a possibility,” Bryn said, his face cracking into a grin.
“Cheerio!” the screen went black. Bryn blinked slowly; the only person he’d ever heard say ‘cheerio’ was his granna, and that was back when he was six years old. He wasn’t aware it was still in use. Mind, Madeleine did seem to be a singular young woman. He didn’t realise he was still smiling, staring at the screen. Then he heard a snicker-sneeze and swivelled around: Chalk was gazing at him, and if he didn’t know better he’d say he was smirking.
“What? What are you looking at?” Bryn snapped. Chalk rolled his eyes and turned over. It was disconcerting, living with a dragon. It was like having a foreign emissary sharing your house. Although you don’t speak a word of their language and they don’t speak a word of yours, you just can’t shake the feeling that they’re smarter than you and - what’s more - somehow they know exactly what’s going on while leaving you in the dark. Bryn was certain Chalk understood more about him than he understood about Chalk. There was a lot of mystery in those acid-green eyes, and he was in no position to unravel any of it.
He sighed, realising a green light was pulsing gently on the phone. His fingers moved quickly as he navigated through the menus to check his messages. Some years ago, a fad for voice-activated gadgets was born and then murdered brutally in a shower of rage and flames. For a while, everything was controlled by voice: electronics, appliances and - more alarmingly - vehicles. When it got to the stage that people were not calming stating ‘POP’ at their toasters so much as throwing them out second-storey windows in fits of mad-eyed, frothing rage, the fad died out and things returned to nice, friendly touch-activated interfaces.
The message was from his mother. She had a friendly, dumplingy face which seemed to be smiling constantly (Well, apart from that time Bryn had tried to start a worm farm in her jewellery box, but that was a long time ago now) and that was exactly what she was doing now.
‘Brynnie dear, it’s mamma! Are you there, darling? Oh well, I just wanted to let you know, granna’s coming up from Christchurch to visit us on Friday. I was hoping you’d want to join us for dinner. I know how much you enjoy seeing her…oh, is there any chance we’ll be able to meet Hazel this time? Only I think it’s been far too long for a mother not to meet her little boy’s gel, don’t you agree? Anyway, Bryn darling, must go! Do call me when you get the chance, won’t you? Hooray!’
Bryn felt his stomach flutter in self-shame as his mother signed off in her traditional manner: she was one of the few people he knew who still used ‘hooray’, an adaptation of ‘haere ra’, the Maori word for goodbye. His embarrassment was not stemmed from his mother’s use of antiquated farewells however, but by the mention of Hazel.
Hazel was 5’ 3”. Hazel was twenty-three years old. Hazel had black hair - cut short - and deep, laughing brown eyes. Hazel was slightly on the chubby side, which only added to her charm. Hazel was PA to the chief executive of Gallagher Animal Management Systems, a job which took her around the world on business trips and all sorts of exciting things. Hazel was into art and culture and all that kind of stuff. Hazel could make a woman weep with happiness at the mere thought of having her as a daughter-in-law. Unfortunately, because her job, severe allergies and a weak immune system, Bryn’s parents hadn’t yet been able to make her acquaintance. Despite this, Hazel was the perfect girlfriend. She just had one major character flaw: she didn’t exist.
She started life as a tiny white lie to help Bryn get his over-bearing mother off his back, and morphed into a multi-faceted, character with likes, dislikes, loves, hates and everything in between. Bryn was forced to get progressively more creative as his mother’s questions grew more probing. Yes, it kept her happy and it wasn’t as though he was lying about anything big and important. But that didn’t change the fact he was stringing along his dear old mum.
He stared at his own reflection at the phone and couldn’t help but laugh darkly at what he saw there.
You’re a right case, Bryn Finch. Can’t get a girlfriend, can’t tell your mum you can’t get one. He sighed, and in that moment resolved to fix up at least one of those scores. It was time to come clean with his mother…well, sort of.
He selected ‘Mum’ out of the Important Numbers list and sat back while it dialled.
Eventually, she picked up. “Are you there?”
“Yes, mum. It’s Bryn. I got your message.”
Her face cracked into a huge smile. “Brynnie! How are you, dear?”
“I’m doing just fine, mum. You know me; hanging in there.” He shifted into a more comfortable position on the rickety chair.
“Wonderful, darling. Wonderful. So, granna is coming to visit and we’re all going to have a family dinner. Just you, me, your father, your brother and granna.” Her eyes sparkled. “And Hazel, of course, if she can make it this time?”
Bryn exhaled deeply. “Actually…I’ve been meaning to say for a while, mum…Hazel…” He stared into her wide-eyed frown and suddenly felt as though he was trapped in headlights. “…We’re taking a break. Um. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier-“
His mother let out a cry of anguish. “Oh, Bryn! Why? She sounds like such a wonderful girl, I simply can’t fathom why…oh, dear…”
No, you wouldn’t, would you? Everything in your world comes pre-packaged in fluff and cotton wool with all the sharp corners removed. The thought that other people are struggling through their lives out here just doesn’t occur to you. He thought dryly to himself. But of course he couldn’t say that, and settled with, “It just wasn’t working, mum. And we might still get back together, who knows? But she probably won’t make it to dinner.”
“O-of course. I understand. Goodness, I think I might have to go sit down…” she said faintly.
“Now look, don’t get upset, I only-“
“-Oh, I’m not upset Bryn, not upset at all. I’m just surprised, is all. Don’t worry about me. Well, I guess I’d better let you get on. I imagine you must have a lot of work to get through.”
“Yeah,” Bryn said uncertainly, once again thinking of his pitifully dwindling workload. “I’ll see you on Friday, mum. I love you.”
“I love you too, darling. Hooray!”
Bryn disconnected the call and stood up, all of a sudden feeling completely exhausted. He hobbled into his bedroom and collapsed upon the crumpled sheets on his bed, crushing his head into the pillow until all light and sound was completely drowned out.
A gentle weight landed on the end of the bed and carefully picked its way over until it was positioned beside his elbow, where it curled up in a manner that can only be described as fastidiously.
“Chalk,” Bryn said, voice muffled by the pillow. “Starting tomorrow, I am fixing my life. I don’t know how. But I will.”
So saying, he drifted off to sleep. Chalk snorted and lay his chin on Bryn’s elbow. Humans could be so silly sometimes.
ALSO. SQUEE, I HAS NEW JONATHAN STROUD BOOK AND I AM STUPIDLY HAPPY. :DDD I HAVE NEVER IMPULSE-BOUGHT A BOOK BEFORE BUT NOW I HAVE.[/stupidly happyness]