Beluga by A. B. Lord. (little readers txt) 📕

In the time it took Kate to go back to bed, sleep for a few hours, then wake up again, her mind had been doing some serious pondering. She had dreamed dreams of polar bears, little snow huts and warm tea. She could see it all in her head, but Svalbard was a long way off. It was the Arctic. Did they even have electricity there?


They must have electricity, thought Kate.


She wanted to go to Svalbard. If not for the break, then just to see the Northern Lights her Dad had once seen. Ever since his death, in the back of her head Kate had constructed a list of things that her Father had done that she too wanted to one day; and seeing the Northern Lights was one of them.


Despite all the developments in technology, still few people could say they had been to the Arctic Circle. But her Dad had gone, and she wanted to join him too, on that smallest of all small lists. Her and Camilla could go up there, stay in a nice little hut. They’d go for snow dog sledge rides, and maybe one of those night time arctic safaris she’d seen in the brochure. And then they’d go out to sea on a boat and she’d finally be so far out that she would see the curve of the earth, and then she’d look up and in the eternal darkness of the arctic, see the Northern Lights, sparkling with electricity over head. Then someone would shout “polar bear!” and they’d all look over to a cluster of ice and see a white fluffy bear padding about, eyeing them nervously, and they’d think themselves all very lucky to see a polar bear, an animal that one day could be extinct.


Something was definitely drawing her there, she could feel it. She didn’t have to try hard to imagine her holiday there; a constant playlist of clips of arctic adventures ran through her head, pivoted around the image of the welcoming polar bear. It was the same polar from the cover of the Svalbard brochure, big and fluffy and welcoming. Images were constantly being fed in to her brain out of seemingly nowhere, and all the time, this strong niggling feeling that despite it been freezing cold and the last inhabitable stop on the way to the Arctic Circle, she wanted to go.


But in spite of the romance of it all, Kate knew running off to Svalbard without little preparation, financial or practical, was out of the question. She would shelf the idea for now, but not too far to the back of her mind that she wouldn’t be able to find it again. No, she’d tell Camilla about it as soon as she could and together they’ make a plan. Then one day, hopefully within the next year, they would go and see about that polar bear and those northern lights.


Kate once again got out of bed, pulled on some clothes and went through to the living room. She picked up the Svalbard brochure and walked over to her little writing desk towards the back of the room, and plopped it down. Reaching in to the drawer of the desk, she pulled out a post it and quickly scribbled “holiday” and stuck it down on the front cover making it look like the polar bear was wearing a neon yellow dress.


They would go someday soon.


But with Svalbard now shelved, there was still a looming problem. Kate’s panic attacks had been getting worse and she could feel her personality and behaviour changing with them. Svalbard would give her something to look forward to but it would be a good few months in to the future. She had problems that needed solving now. She’d become reclusive. Not so much like a hermit, with matted hair and dirty clothes, but the type of recluse who doesn’t want to be at the centre of parties with hoards of people, and who doesn’t like to talk on the phone for so long. She’d boarded herself away in this glass walled flat and only emerged to go to other relaxing quiet places, like St James Park, or the Victoria and Albert, or a little boutique in Knightsbridge where she knew she wouldn’t be disturbed. Never Oxford Circus. If she wasn’t in a calm and quiet space, she felt as though the humming of the world around her was a rude person yelling over someone else. She couldn’t escape the feeling they were interrupting someone and she wanted to turn around and tell them all to “shut up”, so she could listen, but whenever she did manage to find silence, she could never hear whoever was trying to talk.


She leaned against the stiff red arm of the sofa.


So many nights, she just spent sitting here. Days too. In an odd sort of way, being this high up in a metropolitan flat was like an escape. London, the people and all the noise, was down there, and she, Kate who likes peace and quiet and her beta blockers is all the way up here. She was hiding. It wasn’t about not wanting to go outside, it was more an avoidance of the noise of the big city. She could never explain it but ever since her great escape, it was as if the world hummed around her. Not a quiet soothing sort of humming, but a full blown humming and vibrating like that which resonates from inside a wasps hive. And like the wasp hive, it made her feel uncomfortable. There was too much noise and a horrible sense of foreboding. She worried constantly about the events of the future, about people falling ill and about people dying. She felt she could look at someone who has upset and just feel their stress. It was catching.


She stood up again, drawn to stand by the glass and look down. The beehive hummed below her. Across the street an almost identical block of flats stood. Inside the living room of one, she could see a woman watching tv. The tv lit up in all the colours of the rainbow, but all of them a decoy and entirely faux. The woman was absorbed in to it, and the room all around her lit up viciously, reflecting the angry glare of the television screen. The colours grabbed at the women’s furniture greedily, and it was as if it the tv was growing in presence. Kate was glad she couldn’t hear it. She watched the woman reach down and pick up what looked like some sort of mobile phone and begin clicking away on it frantically. It was 10am in the morning. Who the hell was she texting at 10am with such ferocity? The flat opposite seemed to glow with technology and it gate Kate a headache. The colours, glowing like giant preservatives and e numbers spoke to her. They gave her a headache and hinted at a life encroached upon by the low IQ of daytime tv shows. Staring at it, she was conscious of hearing a strong ringing in her ear, the type that world go with a migraine. She stepped back from the glass.


She’d read in a magazine once that the presence of so much technology in our lives was creating invisible energy which was damaging to the human mind. She believed that. She imagined it like neon purple and blue claws, constantly trying to grab people at every given opportunity; dragging them in to their blackberries and their facebook accounts, and although she tried, even she wasn’t free of technology. She had a blackberry which even she had to admit was useful living in such a large city as London. It could tell her exactly where she was, where she was going, what time the tube would come, which tube she’d have to get, whether or not it was going to rain. It could even call her a taxi if she needed one. It slept by her bed, feeding her with its daily, hourly, minutely information, like some sort of minute life support machine. She wished she could turn it off, but in an odd way if she were to turn this connection to the outside world odd, it would be like disconnecting the wire that connected her to everyone else and the world down there in the city.


Kate turned pressed her forehead against the glass wall. It was cold and gave her clarity. The cold calmed her nerves. She wished the woman across the road would buy blinds. She loved London so much, but sometimes it felt the only place she could truly escape, and block it all out was in this flat.


Her blackberry bleeped from through in the bedroom. It’s battery was going flat. In her hasty arrival in bed last night after the hallucinations an the feeling of sea sickness, Camilla must have forgot to hook it up for her to the charger. That was usually something Kate did. Its bleeps reminded her she hadn’t completely managed to escape the modern world.


If she were to go downstairs and outside, the hive would hit her with full ferocity. Sometimes on an evening sitting on the sofa, it would invade her peripheral vision. Neon purple, electric blue and acid green fingers, shattered in to oblivion by total black outs. Then she’d turn and see the woman across from them; her tv in full predator mode, sucking her in. The colours were vile, fake and not at all real.


When her and Camilla had moved in they had made a conscious effort to make the flat minimal. Neither of them liked clutter and Kate had lived in the city long enough to realise that all this technology, with its E number pumped colours gave her a headache. When they had got the tv, Kate had made sure it could go inside a little acrylic finish cabinet on the wall, so that she didn’t have to look at its ugly grey eye all the time, like some sort of demented digital Cyclops, staring at her from the wall.


Kate walked to the kitchen and popped the kettle on. Waiting, she switched the radio on, keen to hear the mornings news. The signal screeches and hissed at her, and she began twisting the knob trying to find the right channel – something must have knocked it. Different voices, pieces of music and broken sentences crackled at her, like disjointed and broken fragments. Occasionally, something sounded interesting and she paused for a few moments, then dismissed it and moved on to the next valid frequency. The forgotten beginnings and ending of entirely separate phrases morphed together forming random words. She listened as she went, listening in to snippets of the world around her.


Something about an electrical surge somewhere deep in the North Sea...


Something about a whale stuck in the Thames. She’d have to go see that later, if it was still about.