I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted in to this thing we’d started, a commune in Surrey, everyone else getting on with it but I was lost. I’d set about my bedroom floor with white gloss, a fresh start, and forgotten to leave a way out. Barefoot, dripping paintbrush, my back against the wall, he appeared in the doorway opposite and introduced himself. He didn’t say I am the egg man but we came to know him as that. Many years ago when he was just a boy from Kent he’d had a dream about a place in Mexico. Like it happens in the story books he’d taken a flight, walked into a cafe and a grizzled man in a large hat had glanced from under the wide brim and said I’ve been waiting for you. He’d gone with this man, a shaman, into the jungle and emerged twelve years later a shaman also, whereupon he’d left his teacher and set up shop in India where a friend of mine had met him and brought him back to the farm where he met me, dripping brush in hand, back against the wall, painted into a corner. His teacher had taught him the ways of divination by eggs; a process of wafting and breathing and cracking into water, the white tendrils and yolk a replication of your innards, not just your guts but your soul and heart and innermost feelings too. He didn’t do that to me yet. He didn’t need to. I skipped over white gloss leaving toe prints and smudges and made tea for him and we sat together before the huge open fire in the sitting room where he told me my home was not my own. I remember he used the word doormat. He said These people walk all over you. These people who I had lived with for four years, who had set up home and had children and built a life there on my farm, the land, in the house hugged by woodland. Who had taken care of it while I went off for a year to be smashed by a cult masquerading as a drama school. Who were happy. He said I had lost control. This sense of invasion was hardly breaking news but the power of that moment was in its voicing, your home is not your own. I had grown up in a house like that, a place overrun with guests my mother used to make up for the guilt of being rich, everyone more important than herself or us because we had money and they had nothing. At least that’s how she liked to put it. The commune was a beautiful attempt at another way of life and also a replication of this stab at feeling better about wealth. He didn’t need an egg to divine that. A child could have seen it. And in naming it, he provided an answer, hey presto, it was him. He would sort it out, he would save me, all I had to do was close the commune and tell all these people to get out.
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I agree with Emma, the tension you build with each micro-cliff-hanger is amazing. It's creates a sensation my dad always called feeling moreish--as is you want more of it right now.
The suspense you create in a one minute memoir is brilliant. I wait for the next instalment with bated breath.