Novella (i/?)

Munda lived for one summer. More specifically, she lived on the fifth floor of a block in Kensington, in a room that the Domestication Bureau had chosen and paid for. It was in the business of finding rooms. In return for the room, the Bureau decreed that they owned Munda’s time in a shift schedule that slashed up the hours between seven in the morning and half past midnight. There was rarely work to do after nine pm, but the Bureau seemed to get perverse pleasure from pinning Munda’s day on its belly and making it eat its tail.

The Domestication Bureau found accommodation for migrant children. It met them with a stiff smile at detention centres along the South Coast. Then the children were stripped from their parents and their aluminium blankets and put into Bureau coaches, coaches that were silent if the driver chose not to hear the same thought-epiphany being screamed in different languages: “The journey is about to get worse.” The Bureau did not hire translators. Instead, it hired Mundas. Mundas who may have been anaesthetists in a previous life. Previous summers. Now she wore a lanyard that said ‘Junior Medical Consultant.’ Consultants facilitated each child into a legally medicated sleep within which they would slip, if they knew what was good for them (minimal thought screams, minimal kicking and biting, thought or otherwise) into new rooms and new British surnames. There were twenty-six domesticated surnames. They were doled out in an alphabetised cycle of queuing children, the same process that the World Meteorological Association uses to personify tropical storms when they ricochet over the Atlantic Ocean, tipping over channel rafts with a final, anthropomorphised belch. Ashford. Bennet. Clark.

Summer was the stolid season. A happy time at the Bureau. For the nine dark months of the year, it had to flit around, sniffing out negative space around the government’s whims. It trailed on the scent of empty B&Bs in Northern Ireland with a cross over every sink, prefab blocks distending at boarding schools’ perimeters, waning hotels that the asbestos people had circled in red. The Bureau slipped into any desperate crevice with a twin bed. But in the summer, London’s university residences became empty. Then, the Bureau nested in temporary offices over the museum exit of South Kensington like a fat, flightless bird and let the coaches come to it. The rare international students who could choose not to go home received a handsome payout for sharing their corridor with the alphabet migrants. Munda received her salary and a room on the staff floor of an Imperial College building, where she didn’t have to see the wards. She had few qualms. The Ashfords, Bennets, and Clarks that caused trouble were only on a comparable cocktail to that which their international neighbours likely used to study. And they got it for free.

Munda’s block was a four-minute commute from the Bureau’s office. One minute - 6:53am - to descend in the Imperial College lift. One minute each to walk the length of the quiet square, turn left at the Mormon church, and right through the underpass labelled ‘Natural History Museum.’ A ground-floor window of the church was always lit. In it, there was a statue of Jesus pre-Cross, tall, muscular, and white. Always awake. Four summers prior, Munda had looked at the Jesus as she queued along the pavement by the Natural History museum foyer for a Covid Booster. The next night, the left side of her body stopped working. It stopped working so instantaneously that a tray of lagers toppled, left side first, onto the ground of a late-night dive bar in Vauxhall. The owner had been so incensed that he’d made Munda finish the shift. He heard the customers complaining better than her half-mouthed suggestion, “I might be having a stroke.” Once the bar was closed for service, a series of night buses had dropped Munda outside St George’s. According to the emergency doctor, it wasn’t a stroke. “Left side? Pfizer side? Yes, lots of young women. Reacts funny with the IUD and any pre-existing nerve damage. Think of it as your carpal tunnel kicked up a gear.” The doctor, a man, had prescribed reparative physio stretches and a more efficient bus route home. Despite his nonchalance, there were no other rag doll women in the waiting room, just a trio of pretty anaesthetists who watched Munda limp away as if they weren’t one bad choice away from her predicament. Full sensation had returned after a few months. Still, Munda preferred to take the underpass rather than walk along the pavement.

Each day, she reversed the journey eighteen hours later. There were hours in between when she was On Call. Behavioural reports to read. Nicholsons, Ogdens, Palmers, resurrected daily with new faces, fresh files. Earlier ones fetched if their doses weren’t holding. Pill bottles that the government deemed as safe and mandatory as the Pfizer vaccine. She was always aware of On Call thanks to the red, digital lines of the wall clock. There were hours of not On Call designed for sleep, but Munda killed that time in the breakroom watching darts. That way, she only had to walk towards the block once a day. After a week of nightly returns, its dark outline looked to her like a tomb. A great monument to sleep. She would hang her head to swing her lanyard against the door, shaking it until the access card overpowered her Junior Medical Consultant ID. The lift was troublesome at night. It liked to halt on every upward landing, opening to empty corridors, empty presences, but she soon gave up being paranoid. Cell service did not work in the lift, had she needed to call the police. The fifth floor was the rooftop although, amidst Munda’s exhaustion, it may as well have been a pressurised basement. She inched nightly back behind door 503, where, within minutes, Munda was back in the lift. As her body locked on the bed, her subconscious careened upwards from the top floor in a steel chute. Nothing to read but a rape report poster. Nothing to look at but herself, sallowing in the mirror. In the lift, the Bureau’s red clock face was branded onto her retinas. Dream time matched Bureau time, and she spent her four hours of sleep awake in the lift, counted upwards by the six grey surfaces of the box and the soundless progression of the digital lines. The interminable threat of false stops on triple-digit corridors. In this way, Munda was delivered upwards into her alarm clock.

To Be Continued (-/?)

Dear Paying Subscribers.

Welcome to the Mundaneum. I won’t embarrass us all by addressing you individually, although I could.

This is the first instalment of a story. I imagine part 1 of 8, 10, or 12. I have the rough plan in my head because I, like Munda Neum, spent this summer working in South Kensington and self-medicating, albeit in far less sinister ways.

The purpose of this serialisation is to help me commit to a longer project. As you may be able to tell, any creative writing longer than 1200 words scares me, largely because dialogue is so hard to write. Please bear in mind that the novella will be imperfect and manic due to the nature of the exercise and will blatantly copy several popular writers. Feel free to identify them in the comments.

For the foreseeable future, fortnightly additions to this novella will be exclusively for paying subscribers. You will also receive the full archive, most of which is paywalled, and new posts that free subscribers can only access for 7 days after publication.

Thank you. Be lucky.