The Blackberry Walk

Dave looked downwards and furrowed his brow in thought and recollection. The quest breaking the spell bewitching him, as if a gust of cold cavern breeze had blown away her faerie dust. The girl looked to the rugged stone ceiling so as to no let her tears be shown, and chucked to herself. “I suppose you wouldn’t know..”, she trailed off with a rueful smile. She looked back to the displayed books with the melancholy of a dwindled flame. Re-stoking her fires, her eyes once more locked onto his, “I’m Ginette, what’s your name?”. Dave searched for his words. “David Hathaway”, he said, averting his gaze from hers. Dave was unsure why he gave his full name. He stood up from his chair to shake her hand and exchange SCIDs (sub-cutaneous IDs), but when their hands shook there was no confirmatory vibration. Noticing the slight confusion painted on Dave’s face, Ginette smiled from the corner of her mouth and interjected. “Oh, I don’t have one of those.” Responding as if he’d been shocked with static, Dave retorted, “No SCID! How do you survive nowadays without a SCID? How do you pay in supermarkets and bars, or book doctors appointments, or board buses?” Whilst Dave stood, jaw agape, Ginette reached into her handbag and pulled out a chequebook, waving it around in front of him. “I also have a mobile phone you know”, she said with a marmalade smile, and pulled out an old Blackberry, bearing it as if it were a potent talisman to modernity. Dave then hardened with a faux suspicion. “You aren’t a drug dealer or anything, are you?” Ginette responded with a hearty belly-laugh. “What if I was?”, she said with such a gay cheekiness that Dave fell back into his chair. The creak of the wood echoed in the warm cave air. Reaching into her handbag once more, Ginette took out her notebook and tore out a page. Uncapping her gold-rimmed fountain pen, she wrote down some digits on the page and scrumpled it up in one hand. Dave felt a light tug on his arm, and felt Ginette prying open his clenched fist. She then shook Dave’s hand with a victorious grin, leaving the scrumpled page with him. Dave uncreased the page and looked up at Ginette, whose head blotted out one of the larger green lights in the room. The light seemed to beam out like a verdant halo. “I hope to hear from you, later!” And with a surge of enthusiasm and energy, she turned one-hundred and eighty degrees on point, and marched out from the room, arms a-swinging. The coffee on the table grew cold. Whilst the coffee was like the Sargasso Sea, Dave’s interior felt like a storm in a teacup. There was within him an effervescent excitement of the kind he hadn’t felt since boyhood, a sense of adventure and excitement his humdrum life of little pleasures had merely whitewashed and plastered over; his hands trembled, not with the tremours of an elderly man, but with the vibrations which precede the tribulations of one’s youth. He reached for his book, and found his page, but his eyes kept glossing the same line over and over, never quite taking it in. “Another coffee, sir”, the barista asked from behind his bushed grey moustache. Dave’s attention was yanked from his deep monologuing, turning to the sounds at once. “Yes, please”, he replied, huffing the words out. The coffee was clinked onto the table, but the noise did little to take the reigns of Dave’s attention; for he was away with the faeries, deep under Ginette’s spell, staring deep abysses into the cavern lining. Hours had passed, and the coffee shop’s grandfather clock chimed five. “I’m afraid we’re closing now, sir”, the barista said. Collecting his thoughts and his possessions, Dave bid the barista farewell, and made his way out of the underground markets. Emerging in the Corn Exchange building, the evening breeze smelt sweet, and there was innocent laughter in the air. Dave took the tram home, ascended the stairs of his flat, and set down his purchases. Walking over to his record player he put “200% Electronica” by ESPRIT on, and lay in bed dreamily. “What a day.” His internal monologue in his own home’s privacy managed to make itself flesh. “I’m not even sure what today, what the stress of today, has been. Taken in material terms, I’ve done nothing more than my usual routine, but her - Ginette was her name, must’ve been - her appearance... I’m not sure. Her appearance has been something else entirely, something I don’t understand. Her copper hair, her electric visage, her powerful presence - was she even real? I’ve never had such an experience. Is this love? Is the desire, want? Is this hunger? Has my life up until this point been one of satiety, where I live seeking peace?” Tears began to well in the corners of Dave’s eyes, and they slid down each cheek like droplets on a train window. The bullseye was hit; the arrow had pierced the apple; a tender unconscious truth had been uprooted into the evening sunlight. “What have I been living for up until this point; is working from home with weekend coffee shop visits even living?” A vital energy rose from his toes to his nose, and a kind of aggression and anger washed over him. By the force of sheer momentum, with no aid of his arms, he sprung from his bed, landing on his feet. Pacing now, he repeated, “I must’nt let this white rabbit get away; I must’nt let this opportunity slip through my finger; I can’t. I can’t. I can’t let my chance for adventure disappear. I want to be lost”, and he felt the soft burning from tears welling once more, “I want to be lost like Crusoe and have to survive, even if its only to find my way back again. I want some kind of challenge.” The first side of the record had finished playing, so he flipped the record to play the second side. He searched his pockets for the scrumpled paper with her number but it was gone. He searched his pockets thoroughly and many times over, but couldn’t find it. He crouched before his bed, head buried in the duvet, and thumped the bed with both fists, crying “My ticket to freedom; it’s gone.” He raised the turntable’s arm to stop the record, and slunk into his armchair, defeated. Maybe it had all been a dream; maybe it had all been a fantasy, or wish fulfilment? Dave summoned his phone to order a takeaway - it was a takeaway kind of day. Before long, his pizza had arrived, and he gorged himself to fullness. Food has a way of taking the edge off of pain. Dave now sat in melancholy thinking of Ginette, as if she were some sort of old companion who’d past away before her prime. Recollections of her smile, her laugh, and the look in her eyes, the hunger in her eyes, cycled through Dave’s mind in an unending loop, bringing nought but nostalgia and a hopeless smile to his face. Then the words formed themselves on his lips as a faint whisper: “Orchard Online”. His hopeless doughey-eyes sharpened, his brow furrowed, and he repeated once more, “Orchard Online.” “Or was it Orchid Online? No, no, no, definitely Orchard Online.” Reaching for his phone, he did a quick search, but it yielded no results. “Orchard Online”, he repeated once more. The words rolled round his mouth as if they were made of fresh butter. There was a mystery - a deep mystery - to these words. Spoken by a prophetess, a muse, these words contained a kind of potent magical quality. He gazed up once more, with a weightless smile, as if his previous woes were washed away and cleansed. “Orchard Online”, he said once more, marvelling in what wonder could lie behind.