The Longest Journey

 

If you are feeling cheerful right now, you might want to stop reading.

There is a sleepy little pocket halfway up the hills here in Cambradelaide, by name Mitcham. There are two locales here that means something more than mere locales to my sister. 

One is Scotch College, and the other is the Edinburgh Hotel on High Street. 

My sister was a faith-based support worker for the disabled. One of her clients from a different suburb died of cardiac arrest at the Edinburgh Hotel, on the floors of the gaming room, in September 2019, leaving behind two adult children, older brother David and younger sister Mary.

The nearby Scotch College shares the same name as the one in a neighbouring state to the west, where the eldest of three young siblings was a pupil, and where, in July 2014, all three of them perished together with their grandfather on the MH17 flight returning home from Amsterdam. 

The three siblings were called Mo, Evie and Otis, then aged 12, 10, and 8.

I was barely five years old, and yet I remembered the news. My sister couldn't stop watching or reading them, however morbid they might be. 

Our terms are reversed here down south, and July has always been the equivalent of Michaelmas term up at King's. 

My sister was at King's, and she belonged there 100 percent. 

I'm a mutt; I'm mostly Trinity but still have a certain portion of King's in me, which must have been inherited from my sister. I do not have any connections with any other colleges at Cambridge. I don't even know how many are there in total, and other than my own, I can only memorise the following few, as they more or less reflect a smaller part of who I am.

Pembroke - best mate for King's

Emmanuel - good at arts and languages

Murray Edwards - female only. My sister had a friend that read physics here.

Clare College - the college that gave my sister her second name. Just as my sister was raised by an adopted parent after much dispute with her real parent, St Hugh's and Oriel (both from Oxford) fought for ownership of Clare's sister college status for a long time before settling for peace. My sister started off accepting Hugh, had a few teething issues, was informed of Oriel's existence a while later, and is now at peace with both.

Back to Scotch college. I have a navy and yellow striped polo shirt that looked rather IKEA, and having discovered Scotch College's colours, I realised IKEA really is up to something. To try to conquerer your enemy, you need to approach your enemy's enemy and befriend them. IKEA found me, a Scottish mutt; she also found Scotland, my country, and she also found Scotch college, my alma mater before King's.

I walked past every building at the College. These carved pillars of sand and stone inherited the many souls and spirits that once dwelled, and their names are etched into plaques across different sites and locales. The plaques are small; you might miss a few unless you are really looking for them. 

Humans are not good at remembering things, and least of all, details. Small memorials and plaques suffer from this lack of memory and detail the most. Humans must make small things using completed tools to ensure accuracy, and it takes a lot more effort than making big things. 

This is comparable to making a (manual) watch vs making a mountain out of play sand. The latter is easy, straightforward and fun, with no need for memory or detail. It is a game, an activity.

While the latter may be an activity, the former is an art.

Watchmaking and repair are complicated, require hours of concentration, require the craftsperson to use their memories and pay attention to every little detail along the way. It is a lot more intense yet more rewarding than a mere activity. And the craftsperson pays a price for it. The price of their own brainpower, and perhaps also their own health: a lot of watchmakers have poor eyesight and stiff fingers. 

Again, back to my pilgrimage at Scotch.

I walked past every memorial I could find, and laid a flower at the feet of each of them. The cloister is home to the family and children's memorial. I was unable to find Mo and his siblings. They were neither there individually nor as a family, and I couldn't find Nick, their grandfather, either. 

I did, however, find a pole with a black and white stripped oval shaped image etched to the top. I stopped next to it, and I looked. I wasn't entirely sure why, or even how it drew my attention, given my bad eyesight and the image being soo high up and hard to find.

I have no more flowers left, only a purple helmet on my head. It doesn't really fit me. I have a youth-sized head, so Mo and I would be able to share the same helmet. Evie was 10, and she would have worn the 8-10 children's size. 

The purple helmet I purchased is a children's size. I knew when I bought it that it wouldn't fit me, but I still bought it and since then it had not left my car. Today, I brought it with me to Scotch. 

I took off the helmet and held it horizontally next to the image on the pole. Apart from the colours, they are identical in both shape and pattern.

Then it struck me. I have found Evie. This is Evie's memorial at Scotch. She is here all by herself, silent and unnamed, yet fully aware that the person really looking would be able to find her.

I laid at her feet the purple helmet, a purple water bottle I took from the water fountain, and some jacaranda leaves I picked up across the College.

I know she would be happy, and would move on. I also realised why I wasn't able to find Mo or Otis or grandpa Nick. They have already moved on. 

I know where Otis is. Yesterday at lunchtime, I was at the RSPCA. Out of many bouncy and cuddly little adoptees, one puppy with silver-grey fur pranced  in his cage and clamied my full attention. His name is Otis. 

Otis is me, and I am Otis. In our respective family and sibling food chain, we are both down the bottom, and we are both dinosaur lovers, and we are both very, very weird, and are able to turn into a drama queen quicker than you could say the word 'oh bugger'.

Evie, meanwhile, is my only sister, and a mother figure at that, too. She has been waiting for me to pay her homage at Scotch , because that's what big sisters ask little brothers to do. You feel free to roam around and be weird, but you have to uphold certain things, and if you've done wrong, you must apologise. Evie wants me to behave, because as long as I do, she will never really leave me. She is always with me, in the back of my head, ready to wack me in the face if I ever go astray.

But she is also very much her own person. She can't waste all her energy supervising a hopeless little bro, so she has been reborn as Violet to spend more time with her parents. Violet was born in 2016. Evie cares for her parents so much, she returned to them as soon as she was able to. 

I didn't find Mo either. As the youngest in the family and Mo's only brother, we have a special bond. I look up to Mo, and he guides me along life's longest journey. 

Not being able to find my brother upset me. I'm usually quiet, passive, and rarely get upset. Yesterday, however, I was upset that I couldn't find my brother. I went past a few more buildings, had some momentary fun in one of the corridors, but night had already fallen, and I became truly lost.

Upset turned into anger. I couldn't find my brother; couldn't find my car; lost my newly acquired soulmate, Phillipa the black mutt; I wandered and wandered and I suddenly ended up at the other entrance to Scotch and I saw three huge white vehicles. 

Devil seized me. If I couldn't find anyone or anything, I'm going to wreck and sabotage one of these vehicles. I chose the school bus, a Toyota HiAce, because my sister used to drive it and I'm also a fan of big vehicles.

I did wreck the vehicle. I turned it into a pile of battered metal plates on wheels. But I wasn't able to finish; I was exhausted and couldn't find the keys to start the engine. Then the police came, and I was arrested and taken to a holding centre.

I was released a short while later, to be put under house arrest at the mental health ward at one of the two major hospitals here in Cambradelaide. I'm not allowed to leave; my cell is an empty surround of white, with nothing but a bed and a couch.

I am in prison for a crime I did not commit. This does not surprise me.  Things like this happen all the time, across history and the entire globe.

Oscar Wilde wrote de profundis while he himself was in prison, having gone through something both similar and different to what I went through on this night. 

I toyed with the idea of giving this easy the same title; however, as close as I am now to finishing it, I again changed my mind. My other friend, alumnus praefectusque E.M.Forster, suggested I borrow the title from one of his novels. His reasoning is that although I have experienced something the likes of Wilde experienced, I am still fairely young; I should be looking ahead most of the time, not backward. 

Forster thinks I have been spending too much time looking backward. Thirteen year olds shouldn't be like this; thirteen year olds should be looking ahead, onward and forward and a Christian solider, towards life's longest journey.

Jan Hamish Apostolis

Apollo Day 

fourth of December 

the year of our Lord 2022