Nathalie was probably the only carer Danny dare not mess around. There was just something about her that made people toe the line. Perhaps it was due to her having four boisterous boys of her own, but she certainly knew how to handle Danny. In a record-breaking thirty minutes Danny had been washed, dressed, shaved and teeth cleaned.
Danny, using a deft combination of wheelchair movements and yanks of his neck and mouth gathered his wallet from under the pillow and began trundling toward the lift in his electric wheelchair. Ben would be along shortly. Fred, one of the part-time carers, would have Ben’s morning routine as his first job of the day. Ben could be got up and dressed in a mere quarter of an hour – if he was in the mood to cooperate.
It was a quarter to eight by the time Danny got to the dining room. Craning his head upward like a tired tortoise, he slowly took in the splendid high ceiling of the dining room. The original plaster architrave still curled its way elegantly upon the top of the wall. Danny could look at it for hours, in fact he often did. With a short electric swirl he settled into his usual spot by the far window, next to the fire escape. He looked at the early morning mist swirling like so many tired dancers whilst the damp air still clung to the trees. Danny looked sadly at the bright new green grass where the old holly tree used to be.
Sarah sauntered in cradling a mug of tea in her delicate hands. Everything she does is elegant, Danny thought.
‘You okay Danny mate? You look miles away there?’ she enquired gently.
‘You know me, always d-dreaming,’ Danny replied.
‘Let me know when they let you out of la-la land then!’ she laughed good-naturedly and touched him on the shoulder. Danny smiled.
‘Who you taking to the match on Saturday? Can’t believe you’ve got VIP tickets,’ Sarah said.
‘Oh I dunno. You fancy coming?’
The conversation trailed off and Danny soon found himself reminiscing about the Sapient Realm. Ben wandered off to the Sapient Realm much more often than Danny. Danny was careful - spend too much time there and one might not make the journey back. Or more importantly, one might lose the will to go back - a not insignificant risk in Danny's estimation. But Ben had less to lose. His time was more limited. Danny reflected how Thinking Stone had said that the old holly tree was just pushing through into this realm. The tree's real home was in the Sapient Realm.
Danny noisily ate his breakfast of scrambled eggs, slurped up from the specially fashioned plate. No semi-institutionalised breakfast would be complete without some lukewarm, limp toast. Next was sweet, milky coffee served through a re-usable straw in a spill-proof plastic mug. Breakfast was not good when Carol was in the kitchen.
‘Hey Sola, you ready for the off?’ boomed Fred.
Fred’s girlfriend and fellow carer Carol had come in to help out this morning. Fred looked as though he had run out of t-shirts that would fit him. He was only in his late twenties but a sported a good sized beer belly and always looked slightly unwashed. Carol was a pretty and petite brunette. She had only just turned eighteen but she was as bossy as hell. No one knew what she saw in Fred. Together, they assisted Danny into one of the two waiting black cabs via their short foldaway side-ramps.
Ben arrived at the door under his own steam. Sat in his wheelchair, he was also assisted into position in the other cab. The drivers secured the chairs, returned the side-ramps to their respective boots and pulled away along the gently curving drive.
Looking out the cab's window, Danny settled into a daydream of his own, ignoring Fred who was playing on his phone. It was dream populated by the silhouettes of people - the debris of an early Friday morning in Liverpool.
They soon arrived at their destination. Fresh air breezed across Danny's face as he wheeled backwards down the black cab's side ramp. Danny put mouth to joystick and began his electric trundle toward the shopping centre entrance. He took no notice of the departing carer, Fred, shuffling off into the distance.
‘Slow down Danny, wait for me and Ben,’ shouted Carol above the din of passing traffic. Danny did a nifty turn to face the struggling Carol as she pushed Ben up the slope in his small manual wheelchair. Ben's arms flailed as he tried to shout instructions to Carol.
Carol was angry with herself for letting Fred go off. The effort involved in listening to Danny and Ben’s strained voices was tiring. Ben’s demands to be wheeled everywhere was also going to take its toll she just knew. She took the two of them down to the open-air-style continental café. There were real palm trees and fountains around the tables. It was all tastefully situated indoors within the centrepiece of the revamped St John’s shopping centre. Carol was busy texting when she noticed that Danny and Ben appeared to be in some kind of trance.
‘Danny, I'm getting a real funny feeling about today,’ said Ben reclining against a rock in the private Danny-Ben mind arena. They had left their bodies in the café. Carol the carer would be there and time went differently here. There was more of it for a start. A minute of Carol panicking would be half an hour here.
‘No worries. Golden Frog is up to something but he isn’t about to get inside my head again,’ Danny replied.
‘I'm getting a mind message from the Sapient Ones. Do you want to read it with me?’
Danny and Ben had been sitting cross-legged with their backs to a large rock. They were watching a large rabbit-like creature hop past. The Danny-Ben mind-arena was in the Thought Realm. It was their secret place. Here they could talk telepathically, in pictures or in sounds, without being overheard - hopefully.
Their environment suddenly turned to a kaleidoscope of moving colour. It then tumbled away as though a plug-hole had been opened in the sky above. What was left was sheer blackness. Then, in eye jangling white the outline of Thinking Stone, the Sapient tree, became apparent. Clouds formed above Thinking Stone. The clouds went from formlessness to the shapes of words with no seeming step in-between.
The words said, ‘I bring love from the Sapient Realm. The hardest part of the journey is shortly ahead, but have no fear for I will be with you. Make haste for the Central Library. The way is clear now and the Sapient Ones invite you to follow the path of which you seek.’
Carol was getting some very strange looks. Why the hell had she agreed to take these two complete lunatics into town on her one precious day off? She must be clinically insane. This just isn't worth the extra cash she thought to herself as she got increasingly angry. In her rush she had knocked the table. Her coffee was spreading in a slow arc toward her expensive mobile phone, which lay discarded where it had fallen.
‘Wake up you git!’ shouted Carol as she shook Danny by the shoulders. She seized Ben and pinched his cheeks leaving a red mark. The other café customers were giving her disapproving stares. Ben suddenly awoke from his trance and looked in wide-eyed shock at Carol. Danny woke up next, coughing and spluttering his way back to normal consciousness.
‘Thank God for that! What are you trying to do to me? Give me a heart attack or something?’ breathed Carol in relief. Emergencies weren't her strong point.
‘Well I've had enough of you two fools for one day. We're going straight back,’ she added.
‘I-I got an idea Carol. My Aunt Sou gave me some shopping vouchers.’
‘That’s the mad aunt on your Dad’s side ain’t it? The Chinese one.’
‘That’s her. I’ve got too many clothes as it is and I don’t feel like going round Next. You have’em if you like. W-We’ll wait here.’
‘Well if you’re sure I guess.’
‘Its the least I can do - after nearly giving you heart failure.’
‘What did you do that for?’ Ben squeaked out-loud as soon as Carol was out of sight. ‘We'll never get to the library now.’
‘Never fear my friend, for I shall drive you personally.’
Danny wheeled himself round whilst Ben awkwardly took the brakes off his chair, nearly flinging himself out the seat with the effort. Danny repositioned his electric chair behind Ben's manual chair. The café customers tried to ignore the unlikely sight of a hybrid Danny-Ben chair collective slowly trundling out of the café. Mothers with prams stopped what they were doing and stared as they made their way along the main mall of the shopping centre. Ben steered his front carriage by positioning his weight from side to side and occasionally tugging at the hand rims on the wheels.
Ben gave Danny telepathic instruction as Danny couldn't see a thing. Ben’s wheelchair was flattening his face. Danny reached the end of the mall. Their journey halted - he'd forgotten that there was an escalator there. Danny racked his brains desperately. He remembered the service lift by the side of the Mobile Phone Shop. He wheeled the two of them next to the lift. Danny couldn't use his legs and Ben was strapped into his wheelchair so standing to access the lift call button looked impossible.
Danny went into a trance and entered the Thought Realm. He spotted a skinny, shaven-headed security guard standing outside the shopping centre. He was having a smoke by the pedestrian doors to the car park. Danny entered the guard’s personal Thought-space. He then sculptured an acute desire to walk over to the shopping centre escalators - it quickly occurred to the guard that there might well be some good-looking girls hanging around by the Smoothie Bar nearby.
As the guard reached the escalators he thought he would just check that the small service lift was still working. At the same time he could write an insult on the lift wall, which would wind up his tactless supervisor. The guard got in the lift, decided against the graffiti and pushed the button for the top floor.
As soon as the doors opened a strange looking skinny Indian male with the face of a teenager but the body of an underdeveloped child wheeled straight at him. With disbelief the guard realised that an even weirder looking teenager was busy propelling a second chair using his mouth on a joystick. Two wheelchairs, stuck together whizzed straight at him.
The guard jumped out of the way and mumbled, ‘You wanna be more careful you do,’ before promptly disappearing. He wandered over to his favourite spot at the top of the escalator and set to watching the Smoothie Bar for girls to ogle.
When the doors shut Danny panicked. He thought they might not be able to reach the lift buttons. Fortunately it was a new lift and the controls inside it had been put at a reasonably accessible height. Ben awkwardly managed to hoist himself up a little bit. He raised himself just enough to push the button for the ground floor before collapsing back into his chair. The lift slowly made its way down.
When they got to ground-floor level Danny reversed halfway out of the lift. The automatic lift doors bounced repeatedly against his wheelchair. A young woman noticed their predicament. Danny moved backward out of the lift and the woman helped Ben out. Danny managed to say, ‘Thank-you,’ and she went. The Danny-Ben chair collective began its slow way up the pedestrianised street toward the central library.
A couple of youths stopped chewing their gum and watched Danny and Ben with bemusement. Danny continued to struggle ahead. He had entered Ben's personal Thought-space and was looking through Ben's vision. His eyes were still obscured by their particular mode of transport. In a grainy black and white Danny could see passing legs and shoes, the black bins with the city crest, the phoenix-like Liver Birds, emblazoned on them. Further ahead was the grand entrance of the central library.
‘Nearly there,’ squeaked Ben excitedly. Danny noticed a large helicopter circling high above as they trundled forwards. They were just about at the library entrance when a policeman wandered over to them.
‘Excuse me sir, you two look like you might be lost. Do you have anyone with you?’ said the man in a rounded, syrupy but loud voice.
‘Nahhhh, we're doh-kay, ch-ch-ch-shanks,’ attempted Danny spluttering. Ben just stared ahead sadly, unable to translate for the policeman.
‘I'd like you two to hold it there a minute if you please,’ said the somewhat portly policeman, whose name was Phil. He could have sworn he recognised the pair from somewhere. Danny knew he was called Phil because he had already entered his Thought-space. He therefore also knew that Phil was chronically depressed and had an addiction to chips and mayonnaise - a favoured dish in the area. His Thought-space was a right old mess. The policeman pulled off his radio and summoned up base.
‘Has anyone reported two...uhmmm...large coffees missing? Sorry I mean, hang on. No, not that! Not another large chips with a side order of mayo! NO! Pleeeease! NOOOO!’
‘You OK?' asked base.
‘ME? I'm fine. Really, I'm fine. But my head's spinning. I'll just sit down a moment,’ said Phil into the receiver. He felt rather sick.
Danny, once he had entered the man's Thought-space had immediately looked for weaknesses. He had just implanted the feeling of having eaten a whole bucket-full of chips and mayonnaise. Phil's body, not knowing that its thoughts had just been manipulated, reacted as though it had suddenly devoured an enormous quantity of its favourite foods. The subliminal image Danny had also implanted, of a large vulture standing over him, hadn't helped his nausea either. The vulture had the face of Phil's reprimanding mother. The trick was in the attention to detail Danny had found.
The policeman, hands-on-knees, noisily spewed the contents of his breakfast upon the city's good stones. The two youths watched the policeman. They were leaning against one of the raised flower bed/chair structures that littered the pedestrianised road.
Danny, feeling somewhat sad for Phil, started to trundle himself and Ben toward the sloping wheelchair entrance to the library. His Mum had been a bit on the harsh side too when he was younger so he knew how Phil might feel. Before turning up the ramp, Danny decided to pop back into the Thought Realm. Unlike the Sapient Realm, which was a long way away and takes enormous energy to reach, the Thought Realm was literally next door. Popping in presented no great challenge to Danny. Danny manufactured a small diamond looking shape which hung unsupported in mid-air.
Within the diamond Danny put the words, 'I'm okay, I really am!' With his mind-spanner he zapped one corner of the transparent diamond causing it to spin at great speed. The diamond emitted a three-toned low looping sound. Danny changed the setting on the mind-spanner and with another tap sent the diamond spinning into Phil's personal Thought-space. That should help a little bit thought Danny as he exited the Thought Realm. The thought-diamond would boost Phil's mood and make his thinking just a touch clearer.
Danny gave the electric wheelchair a bit of extra power to get them both along the slightly uneven stone paving slabs kept from a past century.
The two tracksuit-wearing youths, having dispensed with their chewing gum, sidled up to Danny and Ben.
‘You look like you could do with a push,’ the smaller one said.
‘Ta,’ said Danny backing himself up from behind Ben's chair. Ben appeared to flop about in his chair but he wanted to say thanks. The youth pushed Ben up the ramp, through the marbled entrance hall and into the library itself. Danny propelled himself along shortly behind. The trainers the youth wore formed the better part of Danny's stooped view. ‘See you!’ said the youths in unison, departing the time-worn marble foyer of the ancient and wonderful city library. As they moved out of sight the youths glanced up at the imposing structure with its round dome sat on a square Roman styled building. The slighter of the two youths wondered what treasures might be found within its ancient walls. He also wondered what on Earth the strange disabled lads had been looking for.