Chapter 9

It’s starting to rain.

Finally.

Which makes me think.

The strangest thing of my first months in Northgate was that so little was asked of me. When I feared the worst, everything went smooth. I mean, let’s be serious: I was an outsider, for starters. And I had a cropped short hair with an ugly scar in my skull, resembling a young man about to join the Navy. And I used —still do— a white blackboard and an erasable pen to communicate with people. I wouldn’t have blamed anybody, in case they had taken me as a freak and they hadn’t talked to me.

But they did.

The first one —Pat aside, of course— to do it was Sally Queen. I remember myself feeling the scar on the top of my head, throbbing as an open wound opened just yesterday —in fact I was operated weeks before that time—. I was staring at the sea, wondering about who I was and what the hell to do with my life. In fact, I felt so miserable that I was sure I wouldn’t ever have a place I could call my own again. I remind you that I had tried to step into my parent’s house and I had felt so dizzy that I felt to the ground. When I came back to life, I even made a list of my state:

Parents: gone.

Friends: none.

Things like that.

‘Who am I? What am I doing here?’, those thoughts droned my mind all day long.

So I couldn’t rest. Couldn’t even think straight.

And then, that very fine day, she came to me. It was in the middle of a beautiful sunset on the first day I managed to get out of the tree house by myself. I had seen Sally around, of course, doing her rounds at the promenade, but I never thought it would be her the one breaking the spell of my infinite sadness. I guess she deceived me: Sally Queen was the most particular person I had ever seen. But I don’t think anyone should be judged by their outward appearance, so I won’t.

Better start with something different. And, if we have to do it, let’s cut to the chase and tell the straight story: Sally insists she is a mermaid.

I know, I know, you are right. Saying this is not helpful in order to get to know someone. If somebody says he is an unicorn and you can’t see the remotest resemblance, it will lead you to think he is crazy.

However, as strange as it might seem, I have come to a singular conclusion myself: I wonder who am I to deny it. Somebody says he is a unicorn, fine for me. Sirens, elves, Snow White on her knickers.

Who am I to judge?

I don’t want to be accused of immodesty, but I do think it’s a wise thing to be said whenever you bear in mind a negative thought about someone.

Who am I to judge?

I mean, as soon as it strikes your mind, you should repeat Who am I to judge? OK, it doesn’t change much in your case, but imagine Hitler shrugging his shoulders before the crowd and walking away while saying ‘Who am I to judge?’ instead of ‘Let’s conquer Europe!’

So when I see Sally walking her rounds at Main Street —as if such a thing was a natural thing to be done by a sea creature— I stop and say ‘Who am I to deny she is a siren’. But, again, who are we.

And here comes the miracle: people do care about her, here in Northgate. Even when she claims to be who she says she is, I haven’t spotted anybody treating her as a crazy woman. It is possible that some people try not to look her in the eye. It is as well possible that I heard something unpleasant about Sally one day coming from Seamus Harrington’s filthy mouth, but it could be just incomprehension, which is the mother of almost every conflict you will find in a community, as you would have observed as a result of your own experience.

Of course, this point can be difficult sometimes. But even old stubborn Pat, who claimed to have seen no mermaid —nor any mythological creature— in all his sailing years, said he was alright with the siren fantasy and he was up to endless conversations with Sally Queen about the wonders that can be found under the ocean, if you hold your breath long enough and keep your eyes open.

Again, who are we.

And, talking about the devil, here she comes right now, as if her presence was just summoned up by my thoughts. Sally Queen of Main Street. The one and only. She gets before me and raises her finger, looking for her mighty umbrella —which used to be mine, by the way. It is one of those huge umbrellas where a whole family can be sheltered. She doesn’t normally uses it, unless there is someone she wants to talk to. Sun or rain, it doesn’t matter: Sally Queen will always open up her umbrella for a nice conversation with you.

She waits for me to produce the white blackboard with a kind of sizzling expectation. I am always flattered by her big round eyes and her body language as she waits for my writing. Once she said to me —and I keep her words as a treasure inside my heart— that I had the most beautiful handwriting she’d ever seen in her life. I don’t expect her to have seen many, God knows what kind of life she’s lived.

‘I salute thee, Sally, my watery Queen of Main Street, how are you today?’

‘Business as usual. Nothing to report, not even a trace of Captain Pat, yet. We can expect a glimpse of him any time soon’, she says and shows me her crooked smile. I don’t think she has accepted Pat’s death. As she talks to me,  she gets closer and closer. I look at my watch and nod sympathetically.

‘Bit early for him’, I suggest. Even when I can’t help a lightly sad tone in my voice, I try not to upset her. The image of Pat and Sally Queen together is still so clear that I don’t seem to be able to do it. I can picture her with open mouth, staring at the point old Pat is pointing beyond the horizon, where the boats sailed to the rescue of our soldiers, who were spilling their young blood on Dunkirk’s beach, d’you hear me, girl? Them being slaughtered by those nazis and then our boats ahead the horizon, proudly defying the open waters, oh, what a time to live on, my Sally. We could have used an army of you mermaids…

‘Might be. Still no phone on you? We could call him up’, she asks, overlapping my sweet memory. She is really worried about me not having a device for connection with others. In fact, her worrying is part my fault, which gets me back again to the first time I talked to her or to anybody here in Northgate.

As I said, I was staring at the sea on a rainy day, so alike today’s weather that it really makes me think of something more profound than a coincidence. Anyway, that day she sat next to me at the bench in front of the ocean and I could see she was all soaked and I decided to offer a part of my space under my umbrella. She looked up at it in amazement and showed a shy smile. I waited for her to talk, but something in her told me that she wouldn’t, so I bravely took out my white blackboard and asked her name and did everything normal people do when they meet anybody. I remember that I thought about how weird she would think I was. A girl chatting without a voice, just writing. But after a while —so bizarre was her conversation— I ended up explaining to her where I was coming from and all my issues and about dad and mom and everything.

And that’s how I told her about the incident.

In my defense I must say that I’d have never thought that she would be able to understand me. As I said, I spoke a broken English at that time —I had lost my words and I couldn’t find the right ones easily— and on the top of that she didn’t seem the kind of person who would retain any complicated drama-stuff like that in her head. And maybe now that we have come to this point I can talk about her appearance and you will be fair enough not to judge her just for the sake of it.

Sally, the Queen of Main Street, as I call her, has always those mittens on her hands and waist-length dreadlocks and she dresses Salvation Army clothes as if it was the coolest and trendiest fashion. And she’s got holes on the soles of her shoes and I have no idea where she comes from or why she keeps on rejecting the help of people who offers her a roof to sleep under. Father John is sick and tired of chasing her, specially on freezing cold nights. It is said she lives in a rusty sea container by the harbour, where all the junk and the useless machinery are. I have seen it from the fence and it doesn’t look like a safe place to live, with all those stray cats and dark corners. Avner told me other day about a dream of his: he saw Sally Queen coming in the container and it wasn’t shabby at all; he described a palace inside, full of luxuries and with a TV set and internet and even an air conditioner machine. Of course, he winked at me after telling me, so I am not sure if he is trying to say something or he’s just kidding. To be honest, I don’t really know how she manages to survive. Or how she manages to be so clean and smell like a meadow. In her own mysterious ways, you can tell she is really into life. She cares for me and I can remember her face as I was trying to explain why I couldn’t use screens after my epileptic crisis, ‘cause the doctors said blue lights and flashes and prolonged exposition to electronic devices could cause new seizures and damage my brain or something worst.

Yes. I might be dead. It gives me the creeps when I think about it, but it’s true.

And yes, now that I realise, Sally Queen is the only one who knows about the incident here in Northgate. I guess Pat knew all about it, but I never talked to him. Fate works in weird ways, dunno. The secret used to affect my sleep, but that’s not happening anymore, especially since I realized that Sally’s hands are the safest place in the world to keep a secret. And now that I say it  aloud here and now, it doesn’t seem anything so bad. Everybody hurts, uh?

But let’s get back to Sally Queen. She has something of an untouched human being, like a big baby who has never faced the world. Sally’s hair has never been cut. Her dreadlocks are on the brink to get to her ankle and I am not exaggerating this bit. Sally is this kind of flexible and skinny person and I sometimes think of a reed when I see her coming, partly due to her tattoos, which are all in green ink. You can see in her eyes that there’s something else inside of her, not only a human root, but a natural breath, like something wild and free. She is quite and peaceful, though, and she would never hurt anybody or say anything to diminish people around. But she sometimes snaps, yeah, that’s true too, and gives way to fantasies and lose herself into pits or holes or soul places where I have never been and I will never be, no matter how far the incident would take me. But she is free and she is sweet once you see through her greenish line tattoos —not an inch without ink in her visible skin—, which is something I know for a fact some people won’t be able to do. You know, looking beyond the appearances. And that’s a pity.

That day she asked me ‘Where have you been all this time?’, and I didn’t know what she was up to, so I followed her words as she explained to me how much she loved wandering around Main Street, which seemed to be like a private universe for her, without boundaries nor limits. As I told you, it was a time when I could see no light. ‘I myself feel as the Queen of Main Street sometimes’, I heard her whispering, ‘and see? Floro is taking his geraniums outside right now and Tony will be passing by in his morning run and, yes, there she is, constable O’Malley surveying everything. And I can bet everything I own on Father John’s looking for me right now, a storm is coming, see those clouds gathering there?, you will see him coming round the corner in no time’ and so on and on and on and I could see it was sunny and I understood that it was the time for it, you know. The time for me to understand that the day was today forever and everybody is doing the same thing over and over today and tomorrow and the day after, and that’s the way life merrily goes along. People and simple things such as taking pots and plants outside the windowsill and even into the yard to grasp a glimpse of sunlight, as if the garden were inside their houses and not the other way round. I really think that’s how Sally got her eerie notion for life and maybe —just possibly maybe— she is rejecting this other way of living we are all in. We look at her and say ‘Poor Sally, such an innocent creature’, but we don’t really get it, do we? Our in is her out and I know you must be thinking that I’m talking in riddles… but whenever I am beside her, it comes to my mind that at least she is the Queen of Something. Or maybe I am just trying to get a fistful of wind. But think about it, that question, ‘Where have you been all this time?’ is not what it seems. It is hiding something about the world as we know it... don’t you get it?

Bottomline, I spent the whole day talking/writing to her. She asked me ‘Are you dumb or something?’ and I laughed and fired back ‘No, Sally, I am not, I just decided not to talk’.

‘Why?’, she asked again, and I just hang my head and tried to explain that somehow it didn’t feel right at that time, when the incident happened, and afterwards I found that it was better to remain silent. Silence was a great place to be. Even now, still is.

And here comes the kernel: after hearing this out, she remained silent too. Any other person would have asked me without blinking about that incident I had mentioned. Wouldn’t you as well?

Well, she didn’t.

And that’s why she remains me a reed by the creek, a green reed that would never let itself go. Resisting. In spite of the current, no matter how strong it comes. Or a hollow reed with the wind passing through it. So that was the first time I really came close to the fact that I had to let it go and that I was —am— no reed. I had no other choice. So, I took my white blackboard and began my confession with Sally.

I begun by telling her how I felt when I opened my eyes after my first stroke, right after I tried to get inside my parents’ house here in Northgate-on-Sea. It was like a storm inside my brain, full of bolting lights and thunders. Right afterwards, I can still vaguely recall seeing someone’s eyes right in front of mine —now I know it was the doctor— and hear their voice calling for me ‘Good girl, good girl, you are coming back with us’ but I couldn’t really understand the words. I felt his hands holding mine —so maybe he wasn’t the doctor after all—, but I had lost my language somehow, in the middle of the storm.

And, god, how hollow I felt. Imagine your mind as an empty desert. Without sand, without a single thing. As an infinite wasteland of nothingness. At the beginning it was so sad and so lonely, you know, watching people’s lips moving and hearing the sound and not knowing that it was words. Believe me. A door shrieking, the bark of a dog, the clap of your hands. I couldn’t tell the difference. I spent days without sleeping and I thought I really went crazy. Or close to it.

Then one day Pat came and played music for me and I understood it out of the blue. The voices, the instruments. It all became a real thing again. So I started learning again, gaining words and concepts and smiles and gestures. Of course, that’s when I knew why I was feeling so lonely in the first place. It was not only because of the lack of words. I saw a family in the hospital and I suddenly thought Where are my parents?

After a while, I managed to ask the doctor, but I can’t really remember how he managed to answer my question. Maybe that’s the point when Ms Therapist entered the scene definitively. And after that, there it came some Mr Lawyer and tried to explain to me what were the legal procedures when a minor is left on his own in the world, without any family. Be as it may, it was then when I was told that dad and mom had had a car accident and they were dead.

And so I understood that I was alone.

At this point Sally Queen was crying. And out of words. To sum up, all I can tell you is that silence is something I really appreciate in people. I hate those who talk and talk senseless whenever they hear something that has happened to you and say Well, I… and they try to make you think they feel the same as you do. When they just can’t. I mean… who the hell has ever lost her language after having an epileptic crisis after trying to open her parent’s doorway after their car had been crushed against a concrete wall at M2 motorway? I don’t really think that I am unique, nor a special person, but… come on, who the heck has ever experienced something like that?

Anyway, old Pat took me to the hospital and stayed with me and, after a while, he proposed me to go and live with him in his boat-house. But I couldn’t find my place there so I ended up in the house-tree, yes, the one who was build for Avner boy in the first place and, yes, the same one which caused my father’s suing old Pat. So I guess I ended up shrugging my shoulders and accepting my fate, which was the same as saying my teen-ever-favorite answer. Whatever. In time, now I can tell, this word resounds in my memory as a great decision. I can say now it was the right thing to do.

Who am I, after all.

It’s true that I could have thought of trying to start my life from scratch in London again, or in Manchester or other choices would be a better match for me, but finally I accepted reality and the fact that I had no one with me but Pat. So I got in board with him. And so we found that a white blackboard could be the best solution for my language matter, notwithstanding Ms Therapist. But I guess she agreed it wasn’t a bad idea to try to gain English at that point, even without my words —my voice—, and accepted the white blackboard. Even more if we keep in mind that using blue light screens would be a risk for my health. ‘A quiet environment’, she says. ‘And silence. Silence would be just perfect for you’.

And I am a very diligent person and I love doing what I am told.

That’s why I think silence is the way for me and I don’t think I will be talking in the next future, to be honest.

And this is what I told Sally Queen. This, and a couple of things more.

No, I won’t share them with you.

But don’t feel bad about it, it’s just I know her better than you.

And yeah, I know you are so sorry about my lost.

Thank you.

Yes, it’s hard for me.

Yes, it was difficult to adapt myself to Northgate and get back to language. As it was hard to accept that old Pat is not longer with us.

But let’s move forward, please.

© Enrique Armenteros Caballero, 2025

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