Zen's place

This is where I met Zen and began chronicling her adventures as I followed her into our futures...

It came to be called Zen’s place, or as some called it: The Rebilous Exchange, but it started off as signing-on point for the unemployed. Then it was sold to the landlord’s father who eventually rented it out. Over the years wind and rain had taken their toll, so that all the paint had blistered and the tin roof was sagging and dented which all helped to make it a dilapidated looking, ramshackle building.

It had five bedrooms, three of which had been added on over the years. It also had a proper kitchen and bathroom, which were a recent addition. It was heated by cast-iron pot-boilers, one huge one in the main hall and various other smaller ones in the bedrooms. They were fed with small logs, but sometimes if there was enough money or a generous benefactor appeared, coal was used; but mostly they were sustained by whatever could be brought back from the woods.

When it rained, drops of water fell on the pot-boiler in the main hall and sizzled into steam. The roof leaked in other places too, causing little puddles here and there to be stepped over; but after a few beers, in the dark of the night on the way from the bedroom to the toilet, a curse always accompanied a cold wet foot.

In the bedrooms, the smaller pot-boilers were constantly kept going, and except for the coldest winters would keep the rooms warm, sometimes excessively so.

All the bedroom roofs sloped at steep angles; the outsides covered in corrugated sheets, the insides were made up of wooden tongue and groove cladding which were all warped and twisted with pieces missing.

Through one of the windows in the hall could be seen the mountain. Pine trees covered the lower half, but the top half reached into the clouds. When a ten foot root was found exposed to the daylight hanging just out of reach outside a cave, water dripping from it to echo inside the depths of the cave, two went to climb up to the root to prize it away.

It took them both many hours to carry it back through the woods with frequent rests and some complaints from one less quiet. The root was carried down the mountain to the village, along the main street past eyes that stared in amazement, past the only food shop, on past the overgrown graveyard to a small undulating lane and into the main hall where it was placed to dry near the pot-boiler. When it had dried sufficiently, it was carved into twined lovers by Kelek the poet and placed in the corner by the door to hang coats and paraphernalia on.

Jumble sales were held frequently in the community centre next to the library on the other side of the lane. Exquisite things were found for a few pennies in those sales amongst the heaps of unwanted clothes, mostly only worn once; teddy bears with star-lustre eyes were brought back and put in a place that was right; they would stare back at you from the most unexpected of places: in the bathroom, hung to dry on the towel rail, or asleep in a picnic basket, found only when you raised the lid; or standing out of a flower pot as if to say: hey! Look at me. Sometimes you would look twice at these bears and swear you saw a smile shine from the depths of their beaded eyes.

Other things were brought back from the jumble sales; ordinary woollen jumpers which were unravelled then re-knitted into socks or gloves, scarves, waistcoats or back into jumpers again but all individually unique. So different from anything that could be bought from a shop. And books were piled in a corner, growing ever higher, to be read when that special moment came for reading, which was quite often.

Sometimes you could lie in bed for a whole week and no-one would find you. Days would drift by like a dream, stars then blue sky with white cotton clouds would picture through the windows.

Zen would leave meals, feed the fires which always glowed and set the clocks which couldn’t be wound for the keys had been lost years ago. In her bedroom, ornaments hung from the ceiling on varied lengths of string or ribbon; things like, a coloured balsa parrot in a bamboo cage, a small cardboard stiffened silk balloon and basket with a funny gargoyle peeping out of it.

Bells also hung from the ceiling, so low you’d hit your head as you walked past. Patterned embroidered squares were pinned to the ceiling to cover the worst of the peeling paintwork and helped to decorate the room as well, perhaps not to everyone’s taste, slightly bizarre, but certainly different and unusual.

A Perspex skylight over Zen’s double bed gave a great view of the stars, and lounging in bed under the drumming rain was the most fabulously cosy place to be, especially when the wind howled outside, moving the whole building so it creaked and whistled like a wooden ship on the high seas.

One of the walls of the bedroom was covered in poems from Kelek the poet, who would come from somewhere remote, unexpectedly, carrying bottles of wine or whisky under his arm and poems or music he had made himself. Then he would sit at the communal table in the hall drinking one of the bottles of wine or whisky and become morbid, listening to the angel Gabriel, or some other fantastic vision that would absorb him.

A pot of water was always boiling on the pot-boiler for tea and coffee and helped make Zen’s place cosy, and the door was always left open, anyone could go in and just sit or paint or talk or even show off their culinary skills which would be appreciated by everyone as food was one of the biggest events of the day.

One morning Zen was sweeping the floor raising clouds of dust that made her cough; “damn dust,” she said going to the window and pushing it open wide. She put her head and shoulders through the opening and took deep breaths of fresh air.

“Good morning,” she called out to Mr Aldus the librarian who was passing on his way to open the library.

“Good morning Zen,” he returned, “brisk this morning.”

“Yes it is,” she said, feeling the cold. She shivered as she shut the window. She decided to leave the sweeping and have a cup of tea instead.

Long hours passed in contemplation as the shadows moved over the floor. Cats came in and did things like in a cartoon then went away again, to sleep or just wander. The fire crackled, was fed, growled, eventually filling with ash.

Innumerable cups of tea were made and drunk but were hardly tasted. The lazy day was going by like some kind of an after-thought of her imagination. She felt she had to do something before it all went, ‘before it all wasted away,’ she said to herself aloud. But she didn’t move, instead she remembered back.

Zen was born in a city of long ago and far away from parents who were small-time crooks. At the age of three her parents were both riddled with bullets while attempting to rob a bank, so her grandparents took her in and raised her as their own until she was fifteen. It was about then that the wanderlust crept into her soul, so she ran away to the country and worked on farms.

For the next three years she learnt all about the land and how to grow things from it and also about the animals, which weren’t so interesting, for they were always being taken away to be chopped up and eaten, just like the vegetables, except you didn’t get attached to vegetables. When she was eighteen she decided to see some more of the world, so she went far to the south and picked grapes and other fruit and lived in a commune with others who were struck with a similar desire to broaden their horizons.

After a year of that she got the wanderlust again and went far to the east where she found work herding goats. For three years, back and fore over those ‘damn mountains,’ so she would always say in reference to that period of her life, she herded those ‘bloody goats,’ until one day she marched away over those same mountains to another village and walked into the bee keeper’s job. The previous keeper was being buried on the day she turned up; he had been stung to death.

There were eighteen hives to be tended and the bees seemed to trust her and she got on very well with them, only getting stung once by mistake. She also got on well with the owner of the bee hives, and moved in with him into his big house. For the next few years life was very good to her, and busy.

Once a week she went to market and sold honey and vegetables that she had grown in the big gardens behind the house. She also sold goats cheese and milk, there being some goats in the village that she had purchased very cheap. She also ran the house and saw to its up-keep.

It was a very large house and in the summer it was turned into a hotel of sorts; the region being popular with tourists and that was where most of the money came from to carry the locals through the slack months of winter. She was very happy there and would have stayed forever, but one day the owner of the house, and her man, so she felt, came home with a young girl.

“Some help for you Zen,” he said. Zen protested she didn’t need any help but the owner wouldn’t listen and the girl was moved into the attic and within a very short time the owner did too. So Zen moved out, and took with her only what she could carry on her bike, and cycled for a very long time west.

For the next couple of months she went from one place to another, not really happy, until one day she found in a small village an old building that needed someone to bring it back to life, and fell in love with it. It was ideal, large, secluded, very cheap and vacant so the landlord let her move in straight away. It was about then that Zen’s double trouble started.

End of part one

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