9. The Origami Bomb
A writer decides to voyage across their atlas of island rooms.
Chapter 9
The Origami Bomb
At the end of the day I turn and look up to giant columns of stone.
It is late evening, I have returned to the cathedral to find myself readying to leave via its forecourt. My dusty tool bag with its collection of tessera hangs by straps from a shoulder. That pocketful of stories I carry is beginning to feel heavy. I look down noticing a fine powder of mortar clinging to the edges of my work boots. A trail of footprints leads out under the portico and down onto the green square, left by others departing earlier. I follow their trail, leaving behind the cloister with its contained air bristling with the approach of dusk.
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I try not to think too hard about the experience of the day, instead, after dropping by a supermarket to get food, I take the same route I always took back to the Hub across pavements devoid of people. Somehow though I end up getting lost. Peterborough centre is ridden with cobblestone side alleys to ensnare the unwary. My hearing becomes more acute in the night air. A rat crosses my path ahead, darting between bins, it’s tail rapping against asphalt. I guide myself toward the main highway as a thick treacle like noise of train carriages rolls over metal rails. I pass old brick walls, crooked and patched with lumps of flint, appearing ancient under the yellow sodium street lamps. Stray cats emerge along the way. I try walking faster, emerging back onto familiar ground, moving past abandoned allotments. It was beginning to get dark and the path by the gardens had very little street light. But my thoughts were occupied by the dream. I could not shake it. The impression it had left seemed so real. Of course it was real, it was a day from my past. Not so much a dream then but more like I moment relived. Brought about by a pattern I had found in the mosaic. One that rekindled a memory as a story. I crossed busy motorways, the lights of cars flashed by in streaks of blurred colour reminding me of the noir pictures in the Hub. Their red hazard lights glowing in steady rows of receding pinpoints, separated into blocks, turning them into a strange kind of illuminated mosaic, the colour of dusk captured. I see the rolling air borne plateau of red descend from a hill junction. An immovable shape, a cloud of billowing plumes slowly sweeping across tarmac lanes, swallowing them whole. A chain of red, looping into gridlocked knots reminds me of another place. And at my feet I cross another threshold where the muddy grass verge changes to warm dry concrete under an arid air.
The wavering traffic lights give way to the stationary purple glow of the Hub. The car park outside the motel is full of trucks where the ground glistens under street lamps.
When I enter there is no one at reception except for a tired looking driver waiting with a phone glued to his ear. The smell of disinfectant sits heavy in the corridors. I fish out my key card quick wanting to get into my room before anyone else appears. There is an unsettling silence to the Hub that only focuses my attention to the few stray sounds I hear. I turn on the lights and throw my key onto a table next to a ring of flakes, the essence of an imprint left by an instant porridge cup. From my bag I take out a book, pour myself the remaining tea from my flask and open a pack of dates. I plug in my laptop and catch up on the evening news. After I have finished eating I read some Ursula Le Guin. With the odd cry of bird song piercing the steady wave of moving traffic I turn pages, reading about Jed, a boy tied to his shadow, on an ocean. The book is about a journey Jed takes, cast out in a small boat across vast oceans where he discovers a distant archipelago. Dense with symbolism, the narrator offers up each line of prose in a style which is heavily textured in folklore. I think about this. How words can elevate the reader, take them into myth, not just to a past but to places that only ever exist inside people. The geographical journey Jed takes can be plotted by the map included at the front of the book, but it might as well be a map of his internal struggle. With the synapses linking his thoughts expressed instead here by a cartographers pen. Those lines which denote sea currents allow him passage but also chart the path his mind takes, the journey of self discovery. I think of how this resonates with where I currently am and imagine what landmarks would be on the map of the journey I am on? The hum of traffic lulls me into a semi sleep, a relentless hypnotic chant which wants to take me away to a land of dreams, a sound which reminds me of the chanting monks in the cloisters. A fixed high ground, an island above an ocean of turmoil, a bubbling swirl of movement. Is that what the sound of this chanting is meant to be? A white noise filling the background I can latch onto, a perch between landmarks, before setting out onto a rolling ocean of past events. To see the journey being taken, the places visited. My atlas of island rooms, where objects and buildings lie land locked in a permanent state of restoration. I imagine being back in the empty house, looking through that old atlas used to prop up the wet grinder. I find the maps inside covered in writing and begin to notice that the grid reference lines make the oceans look like squares of mosaic. It occurs to me that we must all have our own atlas of island rooms, a prop for support and a set of places we choose to revisit, a reminder of who we are.
In the sleepless lull of the motorway hum I imagine casting off in a small boat, paddling through an oncoming swirl of currents breaking across the bow and out into open waters. In the distance the horizon line is broken by a chain of raised crescents. I find the corresponding page in my atlas book and chart a route through this archipelago of island rooms. With my hands stinging from salt water I raise a sail feeling the boat suddenly surge, pushed along by the winds which whistle overhead. With the bow turning it points towards one of the island crescents, a broken thread, a hazy purple blue above a rolling ocean, like a shard of cut tessera upon the horizon. The gentle forward sway of the boat becomes hypnotic as it moves across water, its steady rocking like the swing of a cradle.
The closer I get the clearer the memory becomes, and as I begin to see the shoreline, falling breakers throw up a sea-spray around the sides of the boat, plunging it into a rapid spin, causing me to lose control and submit to the pull of the current, until eventually the swirling bubbling water recedes, becoming smooth as glass, where I find myself gliding on the mirrored edge of a lagoon, and like a knife slipping through butter, the bow slides through clear water and up onto a white beach, coming to stillness. Wiping the sea-spray from both eyes, I lift myself out, stepping onto a bank of soft sand, where the only sound I hear is coming from the waves singing their song of silica. I walk up the beach heading inland, until I arrive at a steep grass incline where a dense canopy of trees appears beyond. Lying on the ground nearby is a small inflatable dinghy, a grey flat oval with rope trailing either side.
I crouch down, taking a closer look noticing the sides of the dinghy have been slashed with a sharp blade and the rubber is degraded as if it has been here a long time. I have seen this boat before, it is an artefact from my past, a story byte if you like. I already know the recollection of that memory resides somewhere ahead, up an incline, deep within this island.
Entering the dark forest I feel the trees looming above, the air becoming increasingly still with an all pervading silence. The deeper I go the denser the forest becomes until eventually I find myself in tight corridors that twist and turn between the tall trunks of silvery white trees. The sides of these trees begin to compress ever tighter, forming walls, their branches interlacing into a flat canopy like a ceiling. Eventually I find myself in a space with a bench and walls stacked with boxes. It is a room I recognise from my past. A room in the basement floor of the Imperial War Museum.
I recall it was late at night. The work table in front was full of commemorative cigarette tins made for soldiers on the front line. The cases look practically new. Unfortunately they never made it into the hands of the soldier they were meant for. I assess the condition of each tin before packing them carefully into padded boxes like hallowed objects. Each a poignant reminder of an unknown individual it failed to meet. I peel off my nitrile gloves after stacking the boxes and wait for them to be carried up to the new gallery space above. My phone rings, there is a problem with an exhibit install and they need some tools quick. I grab a small kitbag, check the ID lanyard is slung around my neck, and make it through security doors into a maze of corridors and stairwells. I reach the relevant floor where exhibits litter the floor in preparation for installing. There are twisted chunks of metal, torpedo heads, plinths with model aircraft, trolleys lined with wrapped rifles, hangers stacked with uniforms, endless rows of accession labels tacked everywhere and amid all this are the art handlers. With them are the mount makers who are either on ladders or crouched around a large open Perspex case. Hung from clear wires inside the case is a thick oval shaped mass with rope tied around its edges. It looks like something dredged from the sea, which is exactly what it turns out to be. The artefact is a boat, a dinghy used by the Allies in the Second World War. There is a damaged bolt at one hanging point which requires replacing. The case is not designed to accommodate the art handlers and mount makers as they get the life raft into position. In addition to this the install is being captured by a small film crew. I hand over the relevant tool as the delicate operation is completed. I lean in close, seeing how parts of the boat have perished into clumps and yet remains recognisable, retaining enough essence of itself. I think of the lives it carried, the stories it holds.
With the artefact sealed, we take a five minute break amongst the cases. The newly installed exhibits and those still waiting to be hung crowd around us. Aware of their physicality in our tight space, the presence they hold and the history of each, in silent containment, destined to be preserved within transparent boxes. I open my phone, read the last tweet, and succumb to an intuition. Sitting down I try to write but I have that sense of being watched.
Looking up I notice in front of me is a bomb sat on a low pedestal. Complete with tail fins, the bomb has a clean painted metal surface except for a panel which is bent and crushed out of shape as if it were a failed origami fold. It has the essence of a sculptural form, but carved out by the act of war. Sat on its mount, the bomb looks back in quiet contemplation, as if in the hushed cathedral like surroundings, alongside the other bombs and weapons of destruction, it’s accepted its ultimate fate, and I realise that this bomb looks at home on its pedestal due to the fact that it has an exterior as smooth and polished as a Faberge egg. Next to the bomb is what appears to a barrel, its sealed lid corroded tight.
“It’s a mystery what that holds.” says a technician nearby, a pile of documents by his side. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Oh it’s nothing hazardous.” He replies. “We just don’t know the full details of its provenance, thats all. The curator who was documenting a portion of the artefacts was in the middle of an extensive research project when he unfortunately passed away, leaving some of his findings incomplete. The relevant pieces of data exist somewhere in a file, but not retrievable without looking through everything first.” I look at the innocuous barrel, the physical object with bits of its past waiting to be rediscovered and then again at the origami bomb, realising this is a process we probably spend much of our daily lives trying to do. Building connections and filling in the gaps, constructing frameworks, assessing our provenance alongside others. It wouldn’t be such a waste of time considering a lot of people often display a lack of connection with those around them.
Returning to the stairwell I descend back under semi darkness, pushing a door open onto a blinding rectangle of beach where my boat awaits.
To be continued..