The Runaround

It’s slightly past midnight on what I consider the second day of my time here in Patience, and so far… well, not much gallivanting has been done. I’ve mostly confined myself to the house and areas reachable by walking; I’d planned to go out on the town with the Pig for a drink, but he was indisposed. But I might as well start from the beginning, which is to say, this morning.

I woke at roughly 9.30am or so, to the entreaties of my mother to move my grandmother’s lounge chair downstairs. (It appears that old people tend to lounge chairs, or something. Maybe there’s some kind of visceral comfort to be gotten from sitting back in metal frames with broad plastic strips on them.) So I did that, and then had breakfast—simple stuff, nothing amazing, and then washed the car and my Crocs, which used to be white but were by then a sort of scuffed gray; all the morning and afternoon the Internet refused to connect, which was why I acquiesced to the chores without grumbling too much.

I also went out twice on the same errand, which was to buy extra credit for my phone; the first time I went to the nearby gas station, which turned out to be out of stock (though I suspect that they’ve never actually been in stock), and so I returned to the house and sat around for a bit. The second time I went a little farther afield, to the ‘mart where I used to work a long time ago (what was it, seven years? six?) and somewhere along the little line of shops there (I used to have tuition there too; the teacher, as I remember, was harsher than she was effective) I found a shop that sold newspapers (which I had been told to buy) and phone credit, so I bought those. And then, because it was more or less 12pm and I wasn’t too far from Loch Yuck, I went walking along and ambled past the area (it was full of schoolchildren and school-buses, the area being quite ridiculously full of schools both primary and secondary) and eventually arrived at Loch Yuck.

My first thought was to wonder if the principal was still the same one; if so the man would have been in power over the school for a little over a decade by then, at the very least, and the school would show signs of that. He is, and it did; the stalls have lost their coatings of paint and not been repainted, but there are new shelters outside the school (the newer the shelter, the farther from the school and the fresher the paint on it; the oldest shelter has scarcely any paint on it now, but all the shelters have equally uncomfortable-looking metal seats). I wondered briefly if the electric lamp-post opposite the oldest of the shelters (the one where I and my siblings used to wait for the bus or for the parents) was still vulnerable to being put out of commission by a kick to the base, but it was afternoon so I didn’t bother kicking it to find out. The school was very much the same in infrastructure, though the list of teachers has undergone enough changes that the principal’s name was the only one I recognised (when I left he only taught Moral Education; I wonder if he’s still teaching that now), and most of the buildings are still the same, except increasingly run-down and losing paint. The creaky old wooden buildings where we used to do woodwork are still there, still on their creaky old stilts and still looking like a firetrap to the properly morbid mind; and the auditorium is still a horribly-ventilated thing. The decorative ponds, to his credit (?) are still running, though; the pumps still circulate water around, and fish still live in them—I hesitate to say they thrive, and suspect that the population of fish is periodically renewed by purchasing new fish when the last batch of fish are all dead. Certainly I’ve never heard that the fish were fed, even if the ponds are all green with algae and the paint on the concrete flowers and things has long faded into grey. Behind the auditorium was the only real change I noticed—they’ve gone and built a new canteen behind it, but not added new stall vendors; and it’s a remarkably oppressive-looking place, which is probably entirely intentional. The canteen aunties and uncles are the same ones I used to order food from, though, which makes one wonder.

(I also wonder if I’m the only one of Loch Yuck’s alumni who goes back every now and then to look the old place over, and suspect that I am. It’s not the kind of place that breeds goodwill.)

At any rate I went around the place, and looked at the field and auditorium and computer room (ye gads, a course on CorelDraw? And the course load entirely written in Monotype Corsiva, at that? The teacher might know his way around photo editing (and even that is rather dubious) but his poster design skills leave something to be desired) and the labs and then I noticed that apparently Loch Yuck has got some kind of partnership with Taylor’s University going on, because all the cheesy motivational boards dangling from the walkway ceilings now have the Taylor’s U. logo in one corner of them, and there’s a great big Taylor’s U. electronic billboard in front of the administrative office with great big flashing numbers saying how many days there are to go before the next big official exam (it’s July, so the next exam apparently is the PMR).

And after I had satisfied myself that the school was still in the same old bad shape and apparently under the same old strange appropriation and use of its funding, I returned for lunch, then took a nap and woke around 5pm to find that apparently even sleeping counts as exercise in this climate—I was distinctly sweaty when I awoke.

Then I borrowed my father’s swimming trunks (I couldn’t find the goggles, so went without) and headed to the swimming pool—I may only visit about once a year at most but the routes to the usual few places are pretty much memorised—and ran into an old ex-classmate there, with whom I chatted until he had to leave, and then I started my goggles-free swimming, and managed to not bump into anybody, though there were a few close calls and at least once I had to stop moving entirely to let two people pass on either side of me without flailing my hands into both their faces at once. I swam until I judged that I had expended sufficient energy to call it exercise while still allowing me to walk back to the house, and then showered and went away. The shower area, interestingly, has had all the locks on the doors replaced—well, the few doors I looked at, at least—but not the light bulbs, which makes for a sort of gradient from the doors (where the natural light enters) to the showers (which are cast in gloom and shadow).

The night passed uneventfully for me, since I’d been expecting to go out with the Pig and maybe Herr Robson (who, it turns out, has resigned and has been spending some time here with his mom) and so had not gone with the parents to watch Transformers in 3D (my mother later said it didn’t appeal to her, but that was expected); but the Pig has a sort of temporary job that is apparently exhausting, which I don’t have many details about, and he would not be roused, so I stayed in the house reading Cracked articles and Facebook and XKCDb (which turns out to be pretty hilarious).