A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious. Of all of them he was the worst, not because his delusion was any greater but for his intent. The others - that is the people who had crossed my path before and there abused their power - were convinced, if they thought about it at all, that they were doing me good as well as themselves. But he knew he wasn’t. He was shooting fish in a barrel. That night by the fire, paint on my feet, I heard the word doormat and felt immediately frightened. I hadn’t realised. He was right. I had to act. This is the way of the shattered brain. All it needs is a picture. He laid out in that hour drinking tea exactly what he would do to me, precisely how I would lose control at his hands by drawing a story of it already happened, a picture I walked right into. Not everyone on the commune was lovely but not one of them had gone out to cause me harm, they were people getting on with their lives in all their funny, normal ways. They trusted me. The first one I told was the woodsman, an original member who had kids at school, who was married to a Wiccan woman. They’d built a complex home in the bluebell copse, there were daffodils and paths, terraces edged with stone. We sat in the field and I said he and his family had a month to get out. His wife took a broom to my car, smashing it on all sides. A tall, skinny, glasses druid with the skew leather hat who’d lived quiet and happy played out his hurt in relentless speechless moments in the kitchen. The road protester took his coffin and bag of oats. The old couple in the top wood left with shaking heads. I don’t remember my megalithic giant friend going, but one day the metal barn was empty. I do remember walking in the woods and finding hanging from a tree an effigy of me, a figure dangling by the neck within a triangle of sticks, a branch I would see on the path behind my house. The egg man kept out of the way. He’d played his first hand and gone back to London while I cleared the farm. The fucking coward. And when it was over, the commune dismantled, the people gone, the land empty of yurts and tipis and trucks and friends and drums and didgeridoos, he came back.
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Now we have to wait the whole weekend for the next instalment with only something as drab as the coronation to distract us.............lol
Have you reunited with any of the people who lived on the farm? Especially the children?