The Un-Gate
So two days ago I went for a walk.
Which is what I, like a lot of people, do basically every day these days. The great thing about moving city mid-pandemic (and let me assure you, there are not a lot of great things about moving city mid-pandemic) is the change of scenery between Lockdowns One and Two. I think I’ve seen quite a lot of Berlin over the years for a city I haven’t really, fully, properly lived in until three months ago, but even in my immediate vicinity I’m managing to find something new almost every time I go out. Which is good, because it motivates me to leave the house. That, and the knowledge that if I do not Go Out And Get The Daylight In My Eyes, Every Single Day, Then The Bad Thoughts Start Happening, which actually is really exceptionally motivating once you’ve not done it once or twice.
The new thing I discovered this time was a pathway through the suburb of Alt-Treptow. It’s a raised walkway that crosses a couple of bridges and is just very pleasant, and reminds me of the abandoned railway in Flensburg I used to try and walk along now and then, if only for the pleasure of being thwarted by aggressively thorny plants. (You’re right, plants! You do deserve this thoroughfare more than we do! We put our investments in cars and trucks instead of public transport and rail and now we’re reaping the consequences!). The walkway started at the canal, and ended somewhat abruptly not far from the corner of Treptower Park. It ended like this:
You know that scene in Love Actually where Martin Freeman has just gone on the date with the girl and he’s standing at her door and then standing there indecisively kind of leaning awkwardly at her going “ahhhhh… okay”? That was me and this fence. I’m like – yes, okay, clearly someone didn’t want me (or anyone) to go through here. But also, someone else clearly wanted to go through here, and by golly, they made it happen. And I, too, could follow them! And who knows where it would lead! There are trees through there! And sort of a path! This haphazardly opened gate-that-isn’t-a-gate (or not-gate-that-is-now-a-gate?) contains many possibilities! And so I kind of leaned toward it indecisively, made the “ahhhhh” sound, and then the deeply anxious bit of my brain that asks, consistently, “Is this risk worth it? Are you sure? Are you SURE?” kicked in and I went, “okay”, turned around, and walked down the stairs a little way back along the path, because the un-gate can’t get frustrated at me and make me walk through it anyway.
Friends, how I would love to be someone whose volume dial on that voice was turned down just like three more little notches.
This is Berlin, after all, a city where many doors and gates are thoroughly ignored in the noble pursuit of looking at stuff that’s been locked away for one reason or another. I’ve seen the Instagram posts, I’ve heard the anecdotes, I’ve dreamed of clambering over the abandoned rollercoaster rails at Spreepark. But goddammit, that persistent little VOICE. So I continued on my walk, and told myself – okay, you didn’t walk through this particular gate this time. But you should give yourself another one to walk through instead. How about you give that creative writing thing a proper go this year? There might be something fun on the other side of that one.
So here we are. The first step.
Portals
I’ve actually been thinking a lot about gates and doors and portals of all kinds lately. The ways in which we move from one space to another space, the significance of the structures themselves. One friend recently put forward the idea that to move between this world and the Otherworld in Berlin, one would have to use the weird and potently liminal space that is the back room of Spätis, the fluorescent-lit kiosks around the city mostly used to procure beer, cigarettes, and chips. You’d walk into the back room, where the air is a little musty, the fridges fairly neglected, the dust conspiring in corners, and when you turned around and walked out again, beer in hand, you’d be… somewhere else.
Some years ago I went on a very impulsive weekend-date-trip to a town called Schwerin with a guy I’d never met. It required a lot of soothing that “ARE YOU SURE” voice in my brain to make the decision to go. It was a really good trip, definitely the best first date I’ve been on, and we never saw each other again. I wrote about it not long afterwards, just as a record for myself; the following is an excerpt.
* * *
Once upon a time, there was a palace on a lake. The roof was covered in gold, and the walls were festooned with colourful porcelain tiles.
“What year is that? M... what’s a D in Roman numerals?”
“I always think little turrets like that ought to have staircases up inside them so that you can stand in the top bit. But I think they’re not large enough.”
“Yes they are. You could have a stairway up there.”
“No they’re not, look how small they are. A person wouldn’t fit in there. Not an adult anyway.”
“Yes, look. Someone could stand in that archway and look out. I bet the servants all went up there to eat lunch and gossip.”
The palace was filled with different sorts of treasures – hideous porcelain figures, golden plates and cups, rifles inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Tea sets featuring fake Asian designs, and couples seducing each other. Mary Magdalene, allegedly atoning, leisurely reading a book propped on a human skull.
“Tickets please.”
“Here.”
“I have mine here... somewhere... it’s...”
“No, remember, you didn’t buy one, you said you wanted to save money.”
“He’s joking, he’s just being mean, I did buy one...”
“No, I don’t think you did...”
“I... here it is.”
There was a whole room just for tea, and the walls were covered in silk. In the throne room, there stood nothing but a grand piano and the throne, under an awning, with clawed feet.
“Those angels look so bored.”
“When they were first put up they looked happy, but over the years they got bored.”
“Like, ‘I do not get paid enough to hold this shield, man. No healthcare, even.’ I feel bad for them.”
Many different people had once lived in the castle, ruling their domain. But now they were all gone. The locals thought a small ghost inhabited the chambers, but he was nowhere to be seen, either.
“I like this room.”
“Okay, I’ll buy it for you. Then you can put the vase that you liked from the other room on that table in the middle.”
“And the flower you gave me at the train station goes into the vase!”
“See, it all comes together.”
The lake outside reflected the sky, and the green pastures around it, and the small town that curled around its edge.
“These spiral stairs are a good idea. Then someone with longer legs can walk at the same pace as someone with shorter legs.”
“Let’s try it. Hey, it works!”
“Actually the steps are still just a little bit too short.”
“But perfect for me. Okay, I’ll walk on the outside...”
“And I’ll take the inside ones two at a time. Okay, go!”
“Wait! Oh no... you beat me. Oh, you’re waiting? Such a gentlema- hey!”
“I would have stopped if you hadn’t called me a gentleman.”
Outside, in the garden of the palace, was a secret willow-tree island. You could only reach it by crossing a wooden bridge, guarded by swans. Next to the palace was a glass room, with a fountain that spun around, pushed only by jets of water.
“Imagine if you put all your bags in a locker, and then the key to the locker was actually heavier than your bags, and you had to carry that around.”
“Just everyone walking around the palace carrying giant keys. ‘Welp! Let’s go see this palace!’”
“And then like, ‘Hey, maybe if we all put our keys in this other locker...? Like six of us could do that?’”
“And then the key to THAT locker is so huge it needs lots of people to carry it, like a coffin or something.”
Around, past the island, past the glass room, past the colonnade, was a magical tree. When the tree was young, it had split in two, each side arching away from the other to form two trunks. As its branches grew, however, they reached out towards one another, seeking to be whole again.
Eventually, they fused, forming an unbroken circle of tree.
“It’s definitely a portal. Like, to Narnia or somewhere.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. Okay, I’m going through it, I’ve gotta find out what this tree portal leads to. If I don’t come back, tell my family... well, actually you know nothing about me, so you won’t be able to tell anyone anything. I guess they’re going to think you really did murder me.”
“No, if you don’t come back, I’m coming after you.”
“Alright then. Here goes nothing. One...”
“No, wait!”
“What?”
“There’s a small barrier, a little fence on the path, you’re not allowed to cross it!”
“Hah! Okay, one, two, three... bzzzht!”
“Hello? ... Caitlin? ... Okay, guess I’m going into this tree... whup!”
“Over here – you found me! Well, this new universe is weird, it looks just like the old one.”
“Except your eyes are brown!”
“Oh, that’s strange! They were blue before.”
Rain plagued the palace island, falling in fits and starts, unpredictable. A smaller model of the castle, standing inside the castle itself, showed a version of the building without the golden roof. In the paintings on the walls, the sun was rising.
“So - are there an infinite number of universes with small differences, or one universe with an infinite number of differences?”
“I think both. This universe has an infinite number of differences to the one we started in, but only a few that we can actually perceive.”
“I like that idea.”
* * *
We knew we wouldn’t see each other again after that weekend; we live in different countries, and it was what it was for that moment. But I think about that tree a lot.
My favourite novel on the topic of fantastical doors and portals is, of course, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and if you like this sort of thing then you should add it to your reading list right away.
Two Doors
When I was young, we had a nanny. That’s one of those statements I feel more and more conflicted about the older I get: the things it says about class and privilege, the excruciating North Shore Sydney-ness of it. That’s a discussion for another time, but suffice it to say that statement and my conflicted feelings about it doesn’t at all do justice to the person it describes. Her name was Deedee – at least, that’s what we called her – and she was my favourite person in the entire world.
Do you remember the first time you knew you really loved someone? Like – of course I loved my parents, my little brother, my Nan and Pip, in that kind of in-built familial way. But the kind of love that really little kids experience for the first time where it’s like – it’s THAT PERSON! The one who makes everything better! The one whose presence in my day means it is going to be fun and I am going to feel great! I remember barrelling down the hallway as her key turned in the front door lock in the morning, yelling “YOU’RE HEEEEERE,” and consciously thinking for the first time: I love her so much! Deedee was about the same age as my parents, wore glasses with a tortoiseshell frame, always had a small herd of Pomeranians in her house, and had an American accent that meant she had to make an extra effort to ensure she taught us to end the alphabet with “zed” and not “zee” by accident.
There were two stories involving Deedee and I that we used to refer back to, over and over, in the way of family lore. In both, I think I must have been young enough that my brother Declan either wasn’t born yet, or was so small that someone else was looking after him – so, I was somewhere up to the age of about four. Both stories involved doors.
At the park around the corner, there was an old roundabout that had been pulled off its runners for health and safety reasons, but left there as a reminder of how super lame it was that we weren’t allowed to have a functioning roundabout. It was big and wooden and painted dark green, and you could get some really decent splinters from it if you weren’t careful.
The gaps between the planks on top were also just slightly too wide. So, in the way of small children who have been given keys to amuse them and immediately teach adults why that’s a Bad Idea, one fine day I dropped Deedee’s key ring through a gap and down into the cool dark shadows beneath.
She must have tried for a long time to retrieve them. I pressed my face to the gap and tried to look down to where they were, but of course my head was blocking the sunlight and so all I saw was black. I moved a twig back and forth in the gap, assuming that the keys would adhere to it much like the magnetic fish in one of the games I had at home. I looked at her; she looked at me; this was a challenge we were in together. The roundabout was very large and heavy and simply wasn’t moving anywhere for now, and so we had to go home.
The house on Glover Street was pink and white, and had a stone lion called Aslan next to the front door. But without the keys, I now realised, that door may as well have been another wall. The house also had a side path we almost never used, a forbidden zone – but today we were called upon to be adventurers. To venture beyond the gate into a brick-paved wilderness, populated with plants that I never usually saw in my day-to-day life, quietly living just beside us and just out of sight, alongside mysterious buzzing boxes and the fascinating Other Side of windows we only ever looked out of, not into. It was a thrilling and solemn occasion. Into the back garden – up the stairs onto the verandah – and there we were, in front of the sash windows, one of which was unlocked but which would not open far enough for an adult to climb through. However –
“Okay, listen,” she said to me. “I’m going to help you through the window, and then you’re going to go straight to the front door and wait there until I come around. And then you’re going to unlock the door, okay?” My heart thumped. What if I couldn’t figure out how to unlock it? What if I wasn’t strong enough or tall enough? What if I fell a long, long way down on the other side of the window? “You’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. We can do this if we work together.”
The transformation of a window into a door, as Deedee gingerly pushed me through it – theoretically it had always been possible, but the reality of it exhilarating. In just the last ten minutes, the most familiar place to me on earth had suddenly become strangely elastic in its form, all perspectives shifted. Doors to walls, windows to doors, unseen to seen, I was in the house, alone. I was alone. In the house. It was enormous, and I was alone in it, and –
“Caitlin! Go down the hall, okay? I’ll meet you there.”
I was alone! In the house! And I was going to save the day! I, brilliant prodigy child, was going to solve the mystery of the lock mechanism! Now utterly oblivious to the fact that I was absolutely the cause of this problem in the first place, I saw myself shining, brave brave hero, alone in the house but SO BRAVE, small hand on shiny metal, listening carefully to instructions, push this, turn that, and – click! Open door! Celebration!
The true mark of how well Deedee cared for me is that while I was young, I often thought of that first story as the more daring and thrilling of the two.
The second story went like this: one day, Caitlin and Deedee caught the bus together, and it was very full. So full, in fact, that when the bus stopped, and they went to get off, Deedee got out of the bus but Caitlin got stuck, small and stuck among a crowd of legs, still holding tightly to Deedee’s hand. And so the bus door closed on Deedee’s arm, and nobody could see, full bus, crowd of legs, crowd of grown-ups looking the wrong way, mirrors useless, engine starts, bus driver can’t see can’t hear can’t anything but drive, so Caitlin YELLED and SCREAMED and was VERY LOUD until everybody heard and saw and the doors opened, and then everything was okay!
When I got older, the full gravity of that situation finally sank in. It’s one of those rare stories that gets more terrifying the older I get. The doors had shut above her elbow, and shut bruisingly hard. There was no way she could pull her arm out, and somehow despite her yelling – she was always relatively soft-voiced – the bus driver hadn’t noticed. A couple of other passengers did, and tried to raise the alarm, but the noise in the bus was just too loud, and it only takes a few seconds for tragedy to hit. The bus started, and was beginning to drive off. She was forced to start running. I can actually still see that in my mind’s eye, Deedee running on the other side of the glass. It couldn’t have been more than a second, because buses accelerate slowly, but not that slowly. The panic I felt was not: absolute disaster is imminent. It was: I am alone in this bus, and Deedee looks really, really worried.
I don’t remember screaming, but I had a banshee set of lungs on me as a kid, and not even the most packed bus could dampen the noise I was able to unleash. With everybody’s attention on me, and then finally on the woman about four seconds away from grievous bodily injury and possibly grisly death, the driver finally received possibly the most important four-letter message of his life: STOP. And then: OPEN.
I knew the story made adults gasp when she told it afterwards. I assumed it was because the thought of a child alone on the bus (and who knew where buses went, anyway?) was alarming. And she loved me so well that the end of the story was always: isn’t Caitlin great for saving the day? Compared to the story with the keys, I thought this one a little lacklustre. Isn’t working out how to unlock the door more impressive than screaming?
Of course, the real end of the story goes like this: the whole time, she never let me know how scary it really was. The whole time, she never let go of my hand.
Thanks for reading the first edition of Figs for Breakfast. It’s all very new and exciting and in the figuring-stuff-out stage, so I’d love to hear suggestions if you have them.
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You could, 100%, transform your date story in a absurd literature-type short story
Very enjoyable. Keep writing!