STEPS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Danger, Danger!

Only a single passage remained, embedded in my memory, something I wrote a few days after meeting William. "There was once a man who in a single night sent me home with the realization I had been touched by something out of the ordinary."

Those few words memorised, recalled over and over through the years. Persisting in my mind and I clinging to them because their presence was proof perhaps of all the rest existing.

Drifting for months afterwards... Picking up pencils, pens, half used lipsticks yet nothing writing - only blank white pages staring back at me, empty lined notebooks mocking my persisting ineptitude. Frustrated most days, I tried. I did. Dredged up odd memories, attempting to describe them, colour them new. Of course William returned. I appealed to him, I pleaded. Him to hand over words, so easily surrendered once.

"Please William, please!" I focussed on his absence. The pain within that final time. "Write damn it! Write!"

Back to riding trams and buses again, the anonymity, the swaying mass around me comforting... Staring at changing landscapes, the winter bitter, bloody cold - no matter what I did those months, the varied layers I piled on, the cold was inside me, the more I wore the tighter it was kept in. I transported myself to some tropical island - swaying on the tracks - walking a sandy shore, the sun warm on my skin. Or pictured myself enfolded in William's embrace, over and over, recalling the feeling of safety, the fire crackling... Still, I was always roused from the daydreams. End of the line.

Living dead inside. Nights chasing sleep and some relief, I conjured up disaster scenarios. Anything, to make me feel something. Terror. Panic. Crises. Immense emotions, huge tsunamis crashing to shore as I stood above, some place high, some place safe. I planned meticulous escape routes, heroism ever the goal. Saving my family. The well-prepared hero. Hours spent planning, researching, documenting.

When I happened upon an article about a volcano in the sea nearby, I focussed on this for a while, manufacturing possible eventualities. Desperate for some physical catastrophe to befall me, the chance to succeed, overcome, triumph... Prove I am worthy.

So fixated on these disasters they invaded my dreams. Heavy dreams, the tsunamis rolling in, the five of us saved in all of them. Always waking shortly after the waves arrived, having watched the devastation from a high place, a safe place.

In-between, I also concentrated on health. Noticed suddenly how everything in our world was contrived to kill us. Foods were thereby inspected, the ingredients scrutinised for dreaded chemicals. Artificial anything rejected. Over weeks, months, I started removing items, one after the other from the supermarket trolley. Gone the snacks, biscuits, processed meats... No drinking tap water either. I bought the purest, lugging home two ten litre cartons every couple of days. I bought too into the many health conspiracies: Fluoride. Vaccines. Chlorine... The world run by vast corporations, greed and financial gain overriding all concerns for human safety.

My poor boys! Watching their diet contract over time to a few basic food items. "It's for your own good," I reasoned, preaching my new-found expertise, pointing to statistics, referencing studies. What did they know? It was my job to protect them from the disease and death I perceived everywhere. I made it my job.

Filled in the hours tracking down genetically modified organisms. No buns from the chain bakery, no longer queuing up in drive-through stores for fast food. Contracting, contracting. Fizzy drinks out. Oily fries out. Chocolate biscuits no more. No lollies. I hunted down alternatives but the boys found them bland, unpalatable. Never mind. It was my duty to carry them through to adulthood and beyond in perfect health.

Cancer and disease everywhere I looked, in the food, in the water, in lotions and sprays, in clothing. In the air they breathed as I pointed to the long thin lines spreading overhead, until the sky became a hazy soup and the sun was dimmed day after day.