Patient Blue

It is the morning of my twenty second birthday, a birthday and age I share with the whole new human race. I come gently awake from a refreshing dreamless sleep. There is warm sunshine on my face. I do not have a hard on. Rosslynne is lying on the soft fragrant grass next to me breathing rhythmically in her sleep. I touch her arm and she stirs. I kiss her forehead gently, ‘happy birthday sweetheart, twenty two today.’

‘You too Michael, only I think in reality it’s more like one thousand and twenty two at least.’

‘Yes true, but I’m feeling very good for such an old bloke and you’re wearing well yourself.’

I rise from my makeshift, though comfortable bed and survey the scene. I don’t know how we got here or when exactly we arrived. We are in a shallow lightly wooded valley with open views towards a coastal plain and the distant blue shimmer of the sea.Gentle hills rise in the near distance. I assume these are to the east as dawn is breaking behind them, creating a stunning pink and orange tinged sunrise. It is pleasantly warm and the scented air feels pure and clean.

I must have been asleep for some considerable time as my bladder burns and I need to take a leak urgently. I walk some fifty yards from our shared bed and urinate blissfully in a long uninterrupted flow. I disturb a large bumble bee in the process which drones angrily away from the scene of chemical desecration towards a new source of non piss polluted nectar. My first act in paradise, pee on a bee.

On the near horizon and dominating the landscape is a huge tree, several hundred feet high with large red leaves, undoubtedly the Tree of Life. I’ll take a proper look later.

Rosslynne, who has herself discreetly urinated behind a low growing bush, joins me and we quietly survey the scene together

I point, ‘must be the Tree of Life.’

‘Oh yes the apple tree that awful woman told us about.I thought she sounded a hard nosed bitch, officious cow, really talked down to us like we were a bunch of morons’.

‘I think we need to take care of the tree and the apple, look after them.’

‘I hope it’s juicy, pity there’s only one though,but perhaps it’s really big.’

‘I got the impression that we’re not supposed to eat it.’

‘You mean in case we piss off that officious bitch.’

‘Not just that, they’re sacred or something vital to the balance of here, a bit like that big spiritual tree in Avatar.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I think this place looks familiar in some ways, the South Downs maybe, definitely somewhere in West Sussex though.’

‘It’s beautiful, look at the size and colour of those flowers, the scent is gorgeous and all that fruit, pears, plums, oranges, lemons, those orange and green nobbly things. Look, there are strawberries and raspberries, what season do you think it is by the way, feels like—’

We are interrupted by loud insistent squeaking and a group of six large long haired guinea pigs scuttles past.

‘Aah they’re adorable,’ says Rosslynne.′

’Yeah cute, perhaps we’ll eat one later, they’re supposed to taste like chicken.

’No, leave them alone they’re lovely and I want some as pets, there is no way we will ever eat one.

‘Speak for yourself, a fruit and vegetable diet is all very well if you’re a vegan, but some variety in the form of meat, especially meat that tastes like chicken, might go down very well.’

But as I look at the six creatures chasing each other through the long grass, I know it will be difficult to kill and eat them. But I also know that in life, you should never say never and if one turned up roasted on a plate, well that might be a different matter altogether.

We explore our surroundings, which although in many ways are familiar, seem altered in subtle ways. We pick succulent ripe fruit which tastes wonderful, fresh and full of intense flavours. At a crystal clear stream that bisects our land we drink the cool delicious water and marvel at the large fish that swim lazily in the gentle currents. I could most definitely eat some of those fat boys though,′ says Rosslynne.

‘I’ll make a fire later, somehow I know how to do that, catch a couple of those fish, call me Bear Grylls, and we’ll have a little fish supper. Could murder some booze, but we’ll have to ferment some of these grapes first. Something else I seem to know how to do, but that will take a while sadly, and not sure what to make it in yet.’

‘Let’s check out the caves up there and see which one we’re going to live in, at first anyway. Though eventually I quite fancy a nice wooden house, just there,’ Rosslynne points to a spot close to the stream, ‘nice sea views as well.’

‘Yeah I always wanted one of those. You can help me construct it. I was never any good at DIY but I just know that I could build a whole wooden house easily without nails or tools of any kind, just stack those hardwood logs in the right way, easy, hard work but doable when the time is right.’

‘I’ll give you a reminder, when that time comes I don’t want to hear any of this manana, manana, I’ll start it tomorrow bollocks.’

I wince at the familiar resonance, but can’t quite remember why. OK but I don’t want to hear any you’ve missed a bit, crap.′

I stare at the summit of the hill. ‘Before we pick a cave, any cave, there’s something up there I want to investigate, that dark lump sticking up at an angle, see it?’

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘Not sure, let’s look.’

We reach the top of the hill and approach the object. It appears to be metal, bronze in fact, green with verdigris, and part eroded but still unmistakably a statue of a giant horses head several metres high.

‘I know this statue, “Artemis” I think the sculptur was Nick Fidian-Green or something. it used to dominate this hillside, overlooking Goodwood racecourse, you could see it for miles, my God still here after all these years.’

I feel a slight pang of nostalgia for the old and imperfect world I used to know. Lost now forever, that world of chaos drama and unfulfilled dreams, though also excitement and reckless hope. Little else of that flawed old world was left, no house or whole human made structure, all crumbled to dust or choked by weeds and trees. But here stood “Artemis” whose sightless eyes bear witness to the return of the new human race to the gentle unthreathening anodyne paradise the earth has seemingly become.

For some reason, as I survey the scene I have the strangest thought, a long distant almost faded memory of an episode of Spongebob. The one where Squidward, great character I always thought, gets so pissed off with Spongebob and Patrick that he leaves the chaos of his home in Bikini Bottom and moves to a place called Tentacle Acres. At first, to Squidward, it seems like paradise, where everyone looks the same as him, does the same things, all play the clarinet like him, exercise and ride bikes in the same way and eat bread in a can, that he loves. There is no trouble or anyone or anything to be annoyed or threatened by, no non conformity of any sort. Eventually Squidward starts getting bored, misses Spongebob and the anarchy of Bikini Bottom, and begins to slowly go mad with boredom and the lack of challenge variety or adversity. He finally goes completely insane and wrecks the place. Now as I survey my perfect new world I really hope it won’t become boring, unchallenging and just too perfect.

With an insight that only few would understand, certainly not Roslynne, who could never get the appeal of Spongebob to anyone over the age of five. I realize the real problem with the human race is they just don’t want to live in a place like Tentacle Acres. Eventually they always go insane and wreck the place.