Chapter 23: The Life of a Grey Wall

Walking along the canal path, I greeted the world and the world greeted me. Specifically, a raven flew up from behind me and gave the top of my head a light brush with its wing.

‘And a high-five to you, my raven friend,’ I said as I walked past the patch of grass it had landed on.

No sooner had I walked past him, than the raven leapt up and patted my hair again. And just to be sure I was enjoying his company, he did so a third time.

Looking at the dark, intelligent eye of a raven is like studying an enigma. The bird is calling to you in an amused tone, come, come find out. Yet one can’t be sure that the lure isn’t to death and the invitation is to forfeit your juicy eyeballs to the raven’s appetite. That’s nature for you. Roses have thorns.

If ‘safety first’ was your motto, you were better off with inanimate objects and better still with insubstantial ones like the zephyr that the raven’s wings beat against. Communing with the ethereal, however, was far more elusive and alien than doing so with a raven. In comparison to seeking out a connection with a playful breeze, talking to a raven was like a talking to brother. Through Celine I could just about understand the wind and, thanks to my increasing integration with her, I was beginning to feel the world around me in all its gloriously vivid spirit.

Seest thou the little winged fly,

Smaller than a grain of sand?

It has a heart like thee; a brain

Open to heaven & hell.

Withinside wondrous &

Expansive, it’s gates are not

Clos’d.

Sometimes, when Celine wanted to speak with me I’d find myself in a memory. This one was of my old English teacher reading a poem. Very apt were the sentiments expressed in those lines, though I had not understood the poem until now. As a teenager, I had thought this poem to be a metaphor of some sort. That it was saying that we shouldn’t be shut off from the world, we should open ourselves up to new experiences. Now, I realised as I heard the poem again – does one really hear a memory? – that the poem was meant literally. The poet must have been attuned to the world a similar fashion to Celine. For, like the fly, I felt that there were open gates all around me, gates I hadn’t even been aware of before putting on the DreamAds hood. Heaven and hell were at hand.

Even the bank was alive. Red brick and toughened glass, it was a bouncer of a building, lord of the street, contemptuous of the butcher’s shop, and more still of the organic greengrocer. In I went, wondering whether I was in a fit state of mind to plan my finances. Yet this new awareness was not like tripping, I was perfectly lucid.

A short wait and then two men in grey suits came to the foyer and invited me into a consultation room. The hair of the elder man was almost the exact shade of his jacket. He was the one who greeted me – Mr Lasky – and introduced me to the other, much younger member of staff, who offered his plump, thick-fingered hand and I shook it.

‘I understand that you are an artist Ms Sweetwater?’ asked the senior banker, settling into the larger of two seats behind a desk. The chair was pleased with its role as the support to a tall and important human. Good. I appreciated pride in one’s work and if I could have sat in that chair, I would not have spun around in it and offended its sense of purpose. Certainly not.

‘I am.’

‘And I see that your current account was recently credited with a hundred and fifty-three thousand, four hundred and twenty-eight Euro.’

‘It was.’

‘And you want financial advice as to your options for saving this money?’

‘Not quite. In nine months’ time I submit my Form Eleven to Revenue and I will have to make a payment of around sixty-thousand. I want to maximise the interest in the meantime.’

Old Cyn might have suffered in the conversation that followed. These men had their own agendas – to sell particular products, presumably – and were not initially inclined to hear what I’d just told them. Old Cyn would have been annoyed with them. New Cyn listened to their speeches with a level of amused detachment. Was it Martin Luther King who had written Love Your Enemies? Maybe it was a bigger challenge to love your male bank staff in the course of them attempting to push you towards a course of action that suited them, but not you. I rose to the challenge.

The young man, in particular, was adorable. His tie knot was extra tight. His ruddy cheeks bore the faint traces of his careful shave that morning. His hair had been trimmed at the back and sides with army-like rigour. His shirt was new. This was a person in thrall to an institution and to the image the institution wished to project. If the bank had an avatar it would look like him. The walls approved. The cleaning-chemical-scented carpet approved. The desk approved. I listened, I understood, I nodded, playing my part as much for the inanimate spirits as the human.

The senior bank official did not approve. Had he not been in the young man’s position once? Perhaps not exactly. Perhaps when Mr Lasky had started at the bank the world was a different place. A place where you learned the story of everyone walking into the building: their goals, their family, their birthdays, their favourite hobbies. Perhaps Mr Lasky’s skills were with people and not with the min-max gamer strategies of finance. I loved him too, poor man. Even before using DreamAds and meeting Celine, I lived as an artist. In a labyrinth, certainly, but at least I had been looking upwards. Mr Lasky had been looking at grey walls for decades. And he knew it. He knew that wasn’t a life, even for a grey wall.

Lungs having emptied, vocal cords having ceased to quiver, I let the silence spread through time. Then I explained again that I would need immediate access to sixty-thousand Euro in nine months’ time and that none of the plans currently offered to me would suit.

Connection having been properly established this time, we approached a solution via diminishing oscillations. One tempting offer was for four per cent interest over the nine months, but that was entirely dependent on the FTSE Ireland Index.

‘I do appreciate that the Irish stock market has averaged returns of around ten percent for the past five decades,’ I said, pleased with the subtle response in the eyes of the bankers, ‘but the worst case scenario for me is that there is a crash and I am unable to pay my tax bill. So although that is a good rate, I want one that does not invest my money on the stock market.’

To everyone’s satisfaction – chair, walls, desk, carpet included – we settled on a three-year fixed deposit for sixty thousand Euro, an immediate access but low interest saving scheme for sixty thousand, and the balance to remain in my personal current account.

Outside again, I relied on Celine to guide me back to the canal path while I opened the bank app and made transfers of a thousand Euro to the Irish Anarchist Network, Irish Left With Ukraine, Food Not Bombs, and Oxfam Ireland. Then an impulse made me reach back with the phone in my hand, ready to hurl it from me and into the canal.

A Nike symbol on someone’s runners caught my eye and I knew Celine approved of my thought. How wonderful it would be to launch the device from me and be liberated from the two-hundred unread emails. I would have thrown away my phone but for Amanda and, to a lesser extent, the disapproving canal, which although it had a collection of phones that would be of interest to the guards, regarded mine with complete disinterest.

Amanda. My only connection to her was the Signal app and I wanted her help to go to the DreamAds HQ. There had been no replies to my messages. Had she given up on me? On the world?

Breathe. Return the phone to my pocket. Enjoy the company of the raven, seagull, robin and pigeon. Of the birch and the beech. Of the narcissus bulb fly who landed on the sleeve of my coat. It was only January and while the weather had been mild, it was far too early for most flies, especially those like this one, which imitated a bee. Hello Mr Fly, what’s it like to be such a loner? Is there anyone more lonely than the narcissist? Probably he didn’t care. I loved him anyway.

A memory. Watching Spartacus as a child and being bored. Did I like oysters? Back then I’d never had one.

Only when the man approaching me spoke did I realise that Celine had recognised him, from the day at the Helix when we’d mocked Neo. Three seats to the right of Daniel. Good-looking bearded face a little older than me, paunch, thicker olive padded coat than the weather needed and the rolling gait of a man with confidence.

‘Sorry love, I don’t mean to intrude but you’re on the DreamAds pilot as well, aren’t you?’ It was polite of him to ask, when we both knew the answer.

‘I am.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Well… Got time for a coffee?’

‘I don’t love, sorry. Due at work in ten.’

‘Did you change? Because of the hoods.’

‘Aye, I did all right. Once I got rid of the adverts anyway. I saved myself the fine and it turns out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

‘I know, right? Do you feel the spirit of everything? That the whole world is alive?’

His expression became thoughtful. ‘Sometimes. For me, it’s like I know what’s going to happen and can give the world a steer to suit me. Poker. Snooker. I’m sensational. I’ve even taken up darts like a champion.’

‘Touch me.’ I took off my glove and held out my hand.

Fading smile. Dark eyes on mine. From being on the balls of his feet the man settled, his pose stiffened. Then he put his hand on mine.

Imagine molten metal flowing down a channel, all yellow and orange. It comes to a junction where another stream meets it and together they flow onwards together. That’s what touching this man was like.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I know. I love you too.’ He laughed, taking his hand away. ‘But don’t tell the missus.’

‘Do you think we’re all like this?’

With his upper lip pulled in, my comrade gave this some thought before replying. The same raven as before hopped closer to listen.

‘I had to fight the adverts. It wasn’t easy. There was this inner strength. I’d like to say it was mine but that would be fooling myself. That strength came from someone else in my dreams who was also me. Without him, I’d have gone under. With him, I’m sorted. My guess is we all have that voice inside us. Did everyone find that voice and chuck out the DreamAds people? I hope so but I can’t say so. There was a lot of effort needed to drive them out.’

‘I’m going to try to help everyone.’

‘How? Do you have a way of getting in touch with everyone? If we could make a WhatsApp group, I’d join it.’

Even though I knew enough to love him, I didn’t know enough to trust this man with my idea of going to the DreamAds HQ, an idea that seemed more important than ever. If there were people who had not escaped the adverts in their dreams then while I was in heaven, they were in hell.