A New Hope
The beginning’s always the same:
It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armoured space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy…
It’s what comes after that changes.
The Nemesis and I have moved into a new place. She is still the same, I am still the same, but the setting is different. Which means that everything is different. I work when I can and she works. The relative worth of individual players has not changed. But the setting is different; which means that everything is. Different.
The home is no longer a house: it is an apartment. There is no more an eternal grotto to hide in; the light of day seemingly constantly streams through our wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows. Unlike her plants, I do not thrive in such conditions. There is nowhere to hide — I am always visible.
“What connection can there be,” she says as she walks into our room, momentarily darkened by heavy curtains, her hands hidden behind her back, “What connection can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connection can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Thackeray?”
“Close,” she says.
“Not Dickens?”
“Ah, sharp as always; on second try.”
“I knew I should have gone for the obvious.”
She sits and pulls a book from behind her back. “I spent the last ten minutes memorizing that paragraph.”
“But you hate memorizing,” I say.
“Indeed I do; except when I want to prove something.” She pauses, looking at me, teasing. “But as of now, I shall do no such thing. From now on, I simply read:
Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any link there be. He sums up his mental condition when asked a question by replying that he “don’t know nothink.” He knows that it’s hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that much; he found it out.
Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years—though born expressly to do it.”
“Oh, that Dickens,” I say. “Master of the eternal: Lord of the unchanging: Hero of the universal.”
She scoffs — and I am slightly injured.
There’s no tennis today, so we’ll find very little to bond over.
