Plato's Cave Read online

  PLATO’S CAVE

  a slightly peculiar novel by

  RUSSELL PROCTOR

  Copyright © 2011 Russell Proctor.

  All rights reserved.

  Author’s contact: [email protected]

  For my mother

  Elaine Proctor

  Contents

  Part One

  Entering the Universe

  Part Two

  Reading the Flames

  Part Three

  Quantum Sex

  Envoi

  Plato’s Cave

  PART ONE

  ENTERING THE UNIVERSE

  Branwell’s First Law: A pessimist is never disappointed.

  I stood stark naked in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at the raw pork sausage that had appeared in the vanity basin.

  It lay curled around the plughole, maybe twenty centimetres long, with those little pig's tails on the ends where they get pinched off to keep the contents in. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary about it, except that it was in my vanity basin.

  The basin itself was not that clean, I had to admit. Maybe I leave the odd brown hair clinging to it after I've brushed, and there were a few patches of soap residue and the odd water stain. But I certainly wasn't in the habit of leaving processed meat products behind me.

  Until now, apparently.

  I gazed at the sausage carefully, forcing my eyes to focus despite my hangover. It wasn't easy. Even the shower had failed to stir my higher thought processes. They were still in bed, trying to snuggle under the blankets, muttering profanities.

  The sausage certainly hadn't been there a few minutes before. I couldn't remember going into the bathroom, but once there I'd spent a couple of moments leaning over the basin wondering if this was the best place to die, or whether the toilet would be more appropriate. I had looked into the basin then and it had been sausageless – not that I was specifically looking out for one, of course, but it was a hard thing to miss, given the circumstances.

  Waking, showering: that was it, my entire morning so far. I was unable to fit a pork sausage into the picture anywhere. It must have been put in the vanity basin while I was in the shower. I hadn't put it there. I was quite certain of that.

  A little gingerly, I reached out and poked it with a finger. Nothing. Not that I was expecting anything, of course, but at least if it was an hallucination, it was fooling my sense of touch as well. It felt like a raw sausage should: cold, soft, a little clammy. There was an indentation left from my finger in its skin.

  Suddenly the thing moved. It curled a little, squirmed around the plughole for a moment and then lay still again, obscene and pink in the bottom of the basin.

  Ok, so my hangover was worse than I thought. Lifting the sausage out carefully, I sniffed at it. The meaty smell almost made me vomit on the spot, but it was just my abused stomach reacting, nothing unusual about the smell itself.

  Hmm, I thought, and looked in the mirror.

  Not a pretty sight. There were too many of those little broken blood vessels in my eyes, and in my stomach was a lethal mix of vodka shooters and a three-year old Merlot. They had both tasted good at the time of drinking, but weren't doing too well in combination. A war had started down there, and I was copping the worst of it.

  There was a foul taste in my mouth. I poked my tongue out. It was coated in some horrible white goo. I could actually feel my bad breath.

  I brushed my teeth thoroughly, after placing the sausage down next to my deodorant stick. Then I dressed, picked up the sausage again, and went into the kitchen, hoping that a change of scene, and some food in my stomach, might make the world a saner place.

  Which shows how wrong you can be.

  Heather was there, watering her fucking plant.

  Sorry about that, but I hated Heather's plant. I know I'm exaggerating when I say she spent fifteen hours a day looking after the thing, but I can't help it. The plant was about thirty centimetres high and had broad, spear-shaped leaves. Once a year it extruded a pale yellow flower that sent the houseflies mad with desire – at least they congregated around it, burrowing into its depths, fighting each other over the sickly perfume. It was called Mike. It was the ugliest plant in creation.

  It sat in a green plastic pot on a white saucer. I mention this solely because, like many ordinary things that surrounded us on that last normal day, these three objects – the pot, the plant and the saucer – were shortly going to assume cosmic significance. Please be patient.

  Heather was my flatmate. She was twenty-two, with tidy black hair, a rather dumpy figure (all right, fat, but I didn't want to get personal – I could stand to lose a kilo or two myself. Or three. Let's not go there) and a round head. She was short in a jolly gnome sort of way. I'm now going to make up for all this and say that she had the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen: deep and black and somehow, even to me, invitingly sexy. I actually liked her a good deal. Even when she was at her most aggravating (or I was at my least tolerant – it's the same thing), it was impossible to deny she was almost always right. Except about Mike.

  She also had the most monotonous wardrobe on earth. Heather only ever wore tracksuits. Today's combination was navy blue and red, and she had combined this with her fluffy orange slippers, which she claimed she won in a poker game. I think her opponent lost deliberately.

  Heather looked up from watering the Plant.

  "Hi Emily," she said.

  Emily Charlotte Anne Branwell, that’s me. My mum has a thing for the Brontës; even married a guy named Branwell. I mean, jeez.

  Just don’t call me Em. I’m not a frickin’ letter of the alphabet.

  "Morning," I replied, which was usually the warmest greeting I could do at that hour (i.e. before lunch).

  She put the watering can down on the table and indicated the sausage I still held in my hand.

  "What's that?"

  "A sausage," I replied. "I don't suppose you know anything about it?"

  She frowned. "Should I?"

  She looked innocent enough. Even Mike had a guiltless shine to his fronds. I was prepared to believe Heather had not put the thing in the basin while I showered. Heather had a horror of naked women. There was no way she was going to enter the bathroom while I was less than fully clad. This was why I was forced to dress in there rather than casually strolling unclothed to my bedroom, perhaps pausing on the way to open the curtains in the lounge and stare out at the street for a while.

  "No," I said. "It was in the vanity basin. It moved."

  I filled the jug to make coffee and then dropped the sausage into the garbage disposal. A few seconds of its hungry growl and the minced remains were off on that long subterranean road to wherever it is things go down garbage disposals. Like I care.

  "Moved?" said Heather. "What do you mean, moved?" She was persistent, I'll give her that.

  I had no choice but to go into detail. "It twisted round the plughole," I said. "Like when you cook a sausage and don't prick it. It curls up."

  "You did get drunk last night, didn't you?"

  This is perfectly true. I not only got drunk, I got rat’s-arse shit-faced. I felt no embarrassment about it – such things were not unknown in the Emily Branwell scheme of things, and was a good deal less embarrassing than some other stunts I had managed to pull off in my time.

  But at least now I remembered waking up; Heather's comment had set a few memories sparking. Dawn had pierced into my eyes as I lay head downwards on the cushions in the lounge room, spread-eagled on my back with the empty bottles beside me, drool spilling from my mouth. Neither a comfortable position, nor a flattering one, and certainly a little dizzying.

  It had been quite a night. My boyfriend, Jack, had announced in no uncertain terms that he hated my guts and neve
r wanted to see me again. I had responded by drinking myself stupid.

  I still wasn't sure if I felt sad about our break-up. Certainly, I was disappointed. Angry, a little, but it wasn't as if I had loved him or anything. Not really, not like that. I had liked him a lot, sure, but I always seemed to have problems with male friends – those I became intimate with, that is. Before too long one or other of us would start to feel stifled or bored, and take off. But Jack was slightly different. In my own selfish way I was more upset by the missed opportunities he had presented rather than the loss of his brawny, suntanned arms around my slightly overweight but diet-conscious body.

  The bastard.

  In any event, Jack's splitting with me was why I had decided to get drunk. Destroying brain cells with alcohol following a break-up had become a sort of tradition with me. So when I finished the bottle of vodka that we had been drinking, and realised I could still feel my legs, I opened the wine. Even that had been a disaster: my finger still hurt from where I had stabbed myself with the corkscrew. And although that morning I felt less than one hundred percent, I was fairly sure I was not suffering from the DT’s.

  Basically, therefore, life pretty much sucked this morning, and the future wasn't looking too hopeful in the emotional stakes either.

  I didn't know how much Heather guessed about all this. But it wasn't my future with Jack that concerned her just then.

  "I mean, are you sure there was a sausage in the vanity basin?" she asked.

  "You saw me with it, didn't you? You saw me flush it down there." I pointed to the garbage disposal like it was Exhibit A.

  "I saw you with a sausage. But how do I know if it came from the vanity basin?" retorted the learned counsel for the prosecution.

  "It's hardly something I'd make up. Believe me, it was in the basin. And it moved."

  Sensing perhaps the point had gone out of the discussion, Heather flounced out the newspaper and turned to her favourite section, the weekly horoscope.

  I finished making the coffee. The few minutes it took to brew before I gleefully pushed down the plunger were always a torment of anticipation. I love my coffee, but it has to be the genuine, unadulterated article. A friend once introduced me to the outrageous horror of that decaffeinated stuff, but I quickly returned to the real thing. What's the point of coffee with no soul?

  I fetched out two cups and checked that they were at least fairly clean. My fault: I hate washing up.

  Heather choked from behind the newspaper. Perhaps her stars weren't that good.

  "What do yours say?" I asked. Funny, that. Astrology did not interest me at all but, like everyone else, I couldn't help wondering what someone's horoscope has to say. As an idiosyncratic quirk, it's harmless enough. At least it's better than slowing down to gawk at traffic accidents or wearing your baseball cap backwards.

  Heather read out the following:

  SCORPIO Beware of a mysterious stranger. Money matters could be rather better than they have been for a while. You will have a flat tyre.

  She tossed the paper down on the table, as if daring me to deny what was there in black and white. I read it for myself and decided not to.

  "That's fairly precise," I said.

  She picked up the paper again and offered a bigger choke. "Just listen to yours."

  LEO Beware of a mysterious stranger. Money matters could be rather better than they have been for a while. You will find a raw pork sausage in the vanity basin.

  I slowly put sugar into the cups - one teaspoon for me, 2.17 teaspoons for Heather - then picked up the paper and looked at the LEO section myself. My reading glasses were lost somewhere in the avalanche that was my bedroom, but I could make out enough to see that at that precise moment everyone born under the sign of the Lion was awakening to the sight of a sausage in the sink. Picture it in your mind's eye for the moment. Frightening, isn't it?

  "If this is a joke," I observed, "it's a bloody good one. Who wrote this column?"

  It was done by some horoscopically inclined person styling herself Joanna with your Stars, I noted from the head of the page. I looked to see what was on offer for the other signs of the zodiac. Capricorn was good.

  CAPRICORN Beware of a mysterious stranger. Money matters could be rather better than they have been for a while. You will read Faust.

  - Whose version? I asked myself. But I wasn't listening.

  And even Virgo, that slightly unpopular sign (having as it does a certain unavoidable smutty innuendo) was somewhat unusual.

  VIRGO Beware of a mysterious stranger. Money matters could be rather better than they have been for a while. You will have a wild, passionate session of uninhibited sex.

  "Well," I said. "Kind of makes you wish September was your month, doesn't it?"

  Ever the practical one, Heather remarked: "It has to be some kind of a joke. I mean, it couldn't be real."

  "I just said good morning to a very raw pork sausage," I said. "It was real enough."

  "But I don't have a car," persisted Heather in her ox-like way. "How can I have a flat tyre?"

  "Checked your bike this morning?"

  It was apparent this idea had not occurred to her. She frowned and started ingesting a mound of bacon she had slipped from the frying pan onto her plate. Watching her eat reminded me of a whale surrounding a school of krill. She strained her baleen for a moment in silence. With me, a silence is always a silence. Not a peep out of a single neuron. My brain just shuts down for minor repairs. With Heather, a silence is always significant. It can portend either a wry comment or the eruption of Vesuvius. But she is never silent for long.

  "All right," she said at last. "I'll check my bike later."

  I decided her comment had not been worth the wait. I buttered some toast and took out the Vegemite.

  "On the whole," Heather concluded, "I'd prefer to find a sausage. You got off lightly."

  I picked up the paper again. There was a photograph of Joanna at the top of the column. A thin sort of woman, with intense features, and probably stark raving vegetarian. Joanna with your Stars it said, next to a picture of one of those little wheels with the signs of the zodiac around it. I read through the signs again. They all had the same first two sentences, then dropped a bomb in the third.

  Heather finished her last 44-gallon drum of coffee and prepared to leave. She did voluntary work at a women's shelter downtown. She was good like that: better than me, in fact, since I have no time for charitable stuff.

  "I'm off," she said unnecessarily.

  "Then get back in the fridge," I remarked in my frustrated-stand-up-comic voice. She didn't laugh. Neither did you.

  "Will you be in for tea?" I continued. This was a vitally important question, as it was my turn to cook, and I knew there was nothing worth eating left in the refrigerator: the last of the steak (that had developed a funny colour) and some frozen minted peas that had also seen better days.

  I was impressed by how well my brain was working, given the sorry state of it that morning. By the time Heather answered, which was really very little time at all, I had managed to think the entire previous paragraph to myself. And this paragraph as well. Amazing.

  "Yes," she said. "I'm only going for a few hours."

  I knew then that I had to go shopping and find something to slap on a couple of plates, or else go hungry. But I knew that was out of the question, because neither Heather nor I had much money.

  Heather is unemployed. This is not her fault. She is, in fact, a fully trained shorthand typist, with all the necessary word processor skills. She just can't get a job, which is no surprise in these troubled times. I'm studying hard at University (a contradiction in terms?) for a BA. I'm in my second year. My majors are Literature and Ancient History. That ought to get me far in life, no doubt.

  Between us, therefore, our monetary resources were not overwhelmingly large.

  "I'd better go to the shop then," I replied. "What do you want for tonight?"

  "What is there?"

  No
w, Heather knew as well as I did there was nothing in the fridge, especially since she'd just eaten the last of the bacon (see above). Nevertheless, being human, she had asked what I thought was a rather dumb question.

  "Nothing," I said, entering into the level of the conversation with an inward sigh.

  "Well, get anything," she said.

  "Right," I said, and that was the end of that brilliant piece of dialogue.

  Heather left. I don't know if she checked her bike to see whether she had a flat tyre. She was gone when I stepped outside a few minutes later and called to Bruno for him to come and have his breakfast.

  "Bruno!" I called, only a bit louder than that.

  Bruno is a white cat with a brown tail and a couple of brown spots on his back. He emerged from under a bush at the bottom of the baked desert we called a garden, and scurried up to lick at the plate of PussyChow or whatever the stuff was called. I had to go to the shops urgently, otherwise Heather and I would be eating PussyChow as well. I grabbed what little there was in the kitty (ha-ha). This was the bit of money Heather and I kept in the blue coffee mug on the top shelf of the second cupboard from the right in the kitchen, if you ever break into our house looking for the spare cash.

  As far as I remembered, the kitty contained $4.65 and a plastic toy from the corn flakes packet. When I lifted the mug, though, it seemed rather heavy. Glancing in, I noticed it was full of $100.00 notes.

  I stared at them for a moment but they didn't go away.

  Hmm...

  I put the mug back and went over to where the newspaper lay on the table. I read my stars again.

  LEO Beware of a mysterious stranger. Money matters could be rather better than they have been for a while. You will find a raw pork sausage in the vanity basin.

  Well, I couldn't deny it. Money matters were rather better than they had been for a while. I lifted the wad of notes out and counted them. There was $4004.65 and a plastic toy from the corn flakes packet.