A Tale of Solidarity: Story Outline

A story that popped into my head earlier yesterday and which I have now developed into a long summary:

The owner of a block of flats discovers that his building-owner friends are making additional revenue by renting out the sides of their buildings for large advertisement placement. He becomes jealous and decides to do the same with his own building. No side of his building is completely without windows, but he goes ahead and rents out the side of the building to an advertising company.

A large advertisement is placed over the side of the building, blocking the views and shutting out light and fresh air for the people who live in them. The affected group of tenants get together and erect large wooden pillars which they push through their windows in order that at least a current of fresh air can enter the building. This completely ruins the effect of the advertising, so the advertiser complains to the advertising company, which complains to the building owner, who goes to the building to threaten the tenants with eviction if they don't stop. While there, he sees a middle-aged man who has struggled to dress himself properly. He laughs at him and mocks him and leaves feeling much better about himself.

A quiet old lady and retired librarian enters the building to find the middle-aged man upset and struggling more than usual. She discovers that he has multiple sclerosis. Gently helping him back to his flat, in her suppressed fury, she says that if only the tenants would act as a community instead of griping about one another's foibles, they could withstand the bullying of the building owner and achieve something meaningful.

Back in her flat, she tells her little dog her idea; she's going to create posters inviting all tenants to a meeting to discuss the issue, and she does so. The next day, fearing that only the affected tenants will come, she plucks up her nerve and knocks on every door of the building to ask people individually to come.

On the day of the meeting, she only expects four or five people to show up. She goes nervously to the small sheltered quadrangle, the only common space in the building, only to find that every single tenant has come -- with the exception of one family who are visiting relatives in another country and one who is too sick to come downstairs. Attendees call them on their mobile phones to let them know the meeting is happening and so that they can be in attendance virtually, which they do enthusiastically.

The outcome of the meeting is that the tenants will write a joint letter to the building owner saying that they will all leave if any one of them is evicted. They will also write to the local paper to explain the situation. They are all talking about the family members they could go and live with if this happens, those with stronger connections offering support to more isolated tenants. During the conversation, they lament the fact that, if this happens, their newfound sense of community will be lost.

The building owner continues to make threats. The tenants are scared, but the retired librarian has read a lot of books about this kind of thing and advises them to hold steady and be prepared for what's coming. The owner cuts off the building's water and electricity, falsely reports tenants to the authorities for excessive noise or the unhygienic conditions they live in and offers to exclude tenants who are struggling financially from the rent hikes if they will publically support him. But the tenants are strong in unity and nothing breaks their will or divides them.

Then the advertising company cancels the advertising contract and the building owner loses the revenue stream. He responds by increasing the rent to cover his losses. The tenants withhold the rent, and the owner takes them to court. A young woman legal aid lawyer agrees to represent them on a no-win-no-fee basis. After a protracted struggle, they win and the owner is forced to cancel the rent hike and pay all legal expenses.

The whole series of events is covered in all of the local papers and some national ones, including ensemble photos of the tenants gathered together outside the building with their young lawyer and pictures of the building owner's expensive car parked in the building's disabled bay. In fury and shame, the building owner puts the building up for sale, specifying that it must be bought whole by an experienced landlord. The building owner comes to the building to gloat that one of his rich friends will buy the building and make things even worse for them. There is a lot of activity amongst the tenants, but the owner can't find out what's going on, so he leaves in frustration.

Despite the building owner's cajoling and pleading, none of his rich so-called friends come forwards. Time passes, and he becomes desperate, but there is nobody to help him. Then a businessman the owner doesn't know makes an offer well below the asking price. Given the choice between accepting the disappointing sum of money and facing the revolutionary tenants, the owner agrees to a meeting.

At the meeting, believing he is in the company of one of his set, the owner explains the problems with the recalcitrant tenants and urges that force will be necessary to deal with them. The businessman listens attentively, thanks him for the information, and assures him that the tenants will be dealt with appropriately. The owner signs the contract and the businessman, his hand shaking momentarily, also does so.

In a flashback, we see how the tenants have crowd-funded the money to purchase the building, aided by the national scandal that started with their letter to the local newspaper. As their pièce de résistance, they encourage the middle-aged man with multiple sclerosis to be their front man. He is a bookkeeper and a former star of amateur theatre.

We see his preparation for his role as the mysterious businessman, which gives him a psychological boost and makes his condition almost invisible for a while. We see his momentary loss of confidence before he enters the meeting with the businessman, and we watch as he shakingly removes a piece of newspaper from his pockets, and unfolds it to reveal the photo of the tenants. With this reminder of purpose, he walks calmly into the building.

In a return to the present, the 'businessman' places the contract into his briefcase and calmly removes his moustache and wig and puts on his glasses. Horrified, the former building owner realises he has been tricked by the man he previously mocked.

As a result of the deal, everyone is able to purchase their own flat, and the former building owner never invests in property again. There is a huge party in the retired librarian's flat. The bookkeeper is going to get back into amateur dramatics. The sick tenant, relieved of rental payments, can now afford to pay for proper medical care. The retired librarian suggests they form a tenants' advisory group to help others in the same situation. The tenants are enthusiastic and the young lawyer agrees to help them. The end.

Collection Room

This short story was written in August 2020.

In the collection room, lit only by the light from a small window, over a thousand ugly sculptures cast their shadows. Figures are posed leering, scowling, and gesticulating. Individually, their awfulness is fascinating. Collectively, the room is a pandemonium, a carnival, a festival of hate. It belongs to my great aunt Bernadette, who is a witch. She knows she’s a witch, of course, but possesses the merest fragments of an idea of just how powerful she is.

Right now, Bernadette is on her way to collect me from the bus terminal. My parents have sent me to stay with her for a week or so, during the summer, to give them a break from my overbearing exuberance. She sits on the bus, handbag clutched to her chest. She likes to sit on the aisle side and put her shopping on the window seat, creating a small empire of her own, on the public bus.

The bus jerks around a corner and the bus terminal consumes the bus, becoming its external space. She gathers all her bags around her and forms the back legs of a queue centipede. Shortly, as she exits the bus, a young man in the uniform of the bus company pushes past her, speaking on his phone. She grimaces but alights mutely. Breath somewhat taken, she rests her bags on a deep window ledge in a nearby corner.

She feels the familiar weight in her pocket and, turning away from the human traffic, concealing her hands in the corner’s shadows, reaches in. It’s a tiny model of the uniformed man, his face arrogantly red, his oversized arms pushing, shoving. Later in the evening, she’ll put it in her collection room and an appropriately sized plinth or shelf will be there, waiting. She’s been doing this for years and nobody knows about it except her, so far.

She pushes the figurine back into her pocket and, as she turns, I catch sight of her.

“Great Aunt Bernadette,” I bellow, and hurry towards her, oddly lopsided as my legs haven’t quite recovered from the long bus journey.

“Hello, Joanne,” she enunciates perfectly. Her voice sounds soft though hoarse as she hasn’t used it for a while.

Believe it or not, that amounts to affectionate gushing coming from GAB. She’s not really a people person and hasn’t had a lot of kind words to say about anyone in my limb of the family. So, is it just me? I always got the impression that I was an odd but likeable girl, and seem, now, to have become an odd but likeable young woman, so maybe so, but the family is full of quirky, interesting and hospitable characters, and yet I’m the only one my great aunt would answer the phone to, never mind put up in her flat.

We make our way back to her abode, chatting pleasantly, until we get on the bus, which seems to bring the conversation to a determined hush. I notice that she spends a lot of time looking around, nervously, particularly as people get close, and they are not nice looks. She was always nervous about people, tending towards outright anthropophobia, but this is more extreme than I remember. Has the little satellite town of Flaxham gone to the dogs in the last few years? Well, perhaps there is a seething crime world behind the town’s art galleries and hatteries, but, if so, it’s far from apparent.

In due course, we enter her building and make our way up the stairs at an appropriate pace for mature ladies of unaskable ages. Somewhere between the third and fourth floors, a woman runs up the stairs, panting, talking loudly into her phone.

“Hang on, Jacob, honey, I’ll be there in a moment. Just keep squeezing the ball. I’ll be there soon, honey. Hold on!”

The woman’s hot worry blows past us, leaving behind the uncomfortable chill of Bernadette’s discontent.

“That’s really much too loud for the communal stairs,” she concludes.

“Alright, auntie, but it sounds like someone’s in trouble. If anything, we ought to go up and try to help!”

“You, perhaps, ought,” she is carving the words out of the air, her lips are so taut, “but I am sure it is none of my business.”

Preferring heated distress to the iciness of my great aunt’s words, I zip off after the concerned mother and try to lend a hand and, shortly, am dismissed with gratitude by the mother and her etiolated, but alive, son.

Later in Bernadette’s apartment, a punishingly small mound of couscous is served with a handful of steamed vegetables and a coin of lamb. It is a poor offering to my gargantuan appetite. I drink great volumes of water and try to distract myself with twenty year old editions of Reader’s Digest, occasionally glancing longingly down at the bakery on the street. Evening conversation is sliced between period dramas and Countdown and my ten days with Great Aunt Bernadette stretch before me as if over shimmering sand dunes, to a distant, beige horizon.

Later still, at night, the stomach rumbles have coalesced into a dull ache and although I belong in the hallway even less than I belong in the guest room, I decide to get up.

In the hallway, the electric fuzz of the dark gives way to the night-gowned form of Bernadette lingering, uncertain and ghost-like before a doorway I had not registered until that point.

“Are you okay, Auntie?”

She does not reply, and wonder if she is embarrassed, or still angry with me for trying to help her neighbour. Her actions are vague but I detect the linear glow of a key in moonlight, which she is raising to the door and then moving back to her side. She is mumbling an incessant muffled rant. My teenage work experience at the residential home has left its mark on me and I very gradually help her to lift her hand to the lock and insert the key. Once in, she wriggles it around in the lock until it gives with a faint reverberation.

She doesn’t go in. She turns back towards her bedroom, looking through me, and then, with a force that cannot logically have a point of origin in her unsteady physique, she strikes the door open with her right elbow and turns to face the room with unseeing eyes.

From behind her, my vision roams around the numerous, almost familiar characters in the room. It is a legion marching into reality from some other dimension. Glancing around at the array of sneering faces, lizard eyes, I am forced to conclude that whatever place gave rise to such an abhorrent parade must be foul indeed; a veritable hell.

“Auntie!” I gasp, and suddenly her eyes are on me, her expression somehow reminiscent of a mortified pug, and then I see it; a single glittering statue, a young woman with milk-smooth skin and strawberry hair, hands on hips and smiling from her glittering eyes to her pigeon toes. She’s beautiful and I wonder who she is.

Bernadette follows my gaze and gasps. I look closer and at the base is written ‘Joanne Marie Shepley’. It’s me. The single solitary statue amidst this Dantean free-for-all who looks remotely benevolent is of me. And as I watch, my avatar’s hand unfolds from her hip and points a judgemental finger, a frown forming on her earthenware brow.

“No, no, no, Auntie, no! I understand. I’m not against you. I want to help.”

She is conscient, now.

“You can’t help me. Nobody can.” I have never heard a voice so dejected, so lost, in all my twenty-two years on this Earth.

“I don’t believe you,” I tell her, and then notice something in her hand.

“What’s that?” I whisper in panic.

She lifts her hand towards me and opens it, fingers opening, her gaze focused on mine.

There are two more malevolent manikins in her hand; a uniformed arrogant figure and a mother-in-flight yelling into her mobile phone. She has already immortalised the woman who dashed past us a mere twelve hours ago. Not only that, but there are two small clearings on the plinth before us. The room is ready for them. I examine the plinth and find that this is the space for irritating neighbours, including the dark-skinned family next door, who are frightening and primitive to her. Well, her collection is well-curated, I’ll give her that.

I turn to suggest she place the new entries in their allocated place but she is gone. By the muffled bangs and clings, she is in the tool cupboard. I get as far as the door before she returns with a hammer in her hand and a look of grim determination.

“Let me past!” she shouts, and pushes me aside. Surprised by the sudden force, I stumble. She hefts the hammer and crushes a model of six demonic children into a mound of particles and then, again and again, she is smashing one after the other. Dozens upon dozens are rendered into dust before my eyes, to the sound of irregular percussion, and gradually heavier and more jagged breathing. I am relieved when she collapsed into a chair.

It is so sad to see her weep, the way she tries to wipe away the tears with the cuff of her pyjamas and misses, but what happens next is all the worse. The fragments of the statuettes begin to rise from their mounds. They are reforming! But now as the pieces of their faces bunch together, cracked and broken, they look all the more hideous. The pair of us look on in horror and despair. There will be no easy way to deal with this.

“You need to talk to them.”

“What? All of them?”

“Well, not all at once,” I say, gently.

She contemplates it.

“But I can’t. I don’t have long enough. I don’t know where they are!”

“You know where Mrs Henderson is,” I said, trying to stay calm.

“Who’s she?”

“Her,” I said, pointing to the figurine of the woman who rushed past us earlier, now jawless and with unsteady eyes.

“Not now!” she exclaimed.

I shrugged.

“In the morning, then.”

“But I’ll never find them all. I’m old and disgusting and nobody will help me,” she sobbed.

That is when I noticed a twitch behind a curtained off area at the back of the room. In the darkness, the main exhibit had remained unnoticed until now. The contents of this private booth were growing. Bernadette looked too struck with trepidation to move forwards, so I stepped towards it, but somehow she summoned the strength to get there before me.

“I think I know what’s behind here. I think I remember.”

She slid the curtain slowly back, the curtain’s metal rings grinding along their overhead runner.

It was disfigured, withered, and decrepit; its spiked fingernails were like talons, its arms reached out to throttle and yet it bore the expression of one shrinking away. It was like gothic horror’s reincarnation of a Dali woman, without the sensuality. If the discovery of myself in Bernadette’s collection had made my eyes pop out, it was a walk in the park with sandwiches compared to the discovery of Bernadette’s own twisted self-image.

“Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s what I am.”

“That’s not what I see, when I look at you.”

She gazed up at me.

“I’m very fond of you, Bernadette, and I’m so sorry you’ve got so lost.”

And then she fell into my arms and wept, with grating sobs that sounded like the last of the bath water going down the plug hole.

The rest of our holiday was extraordinary, if repetitive. We tracked down everyone we could identify and find, so Bernadette could have a chat with them. She invited them to coffee and asked about their children. When I saw her lose herself in a memory, her eyes angering, I would give her a nudge. Then, at the end of each day, we would unlock the Collection Room to marvel at how the statues were untwisting, ungnarling and, very slowly, starting to shine.

That one hideous statue at the back still looks pretty bad, but its features are softer and it doesn’t look so old. It’s an immense tragedy that my great aunt didn’t put her magic powers to good use earlier in life. Just think what she could have achieved. However, the tale goes to show that there’s always hope for the cynical old witches (and wizards) amongst us.