6
Brian had been absent for almost three months.
At the start of summer he had picked up a rucksack ad announced that he was “off for a bit.”
The ‘bit’ was something of an understatement. It turns out that Brian had taken a cheap flight to Barcelona where he had looked into the Picasso museum, the maritime museum, The Rambles, several eateries and a good few nightclubs before heading east.
Heading east had taken him across the south of France and into northern Italy. From Italy he had taken a boat to Rhodes and then onto Cyprus where he decided that he would indulge in a trip to Egypt and the pyramids of Geyser.
Once again a museum had hooked him and for three days, Brian had virtually lived with the artefacts gathered from the pharaoh’s tombs gathered in the vast rooms of the British museum in Cairo.
Returning to Cyprus, he had played the waiting game until a holiday flight was able to squeeze him into a cancelled seat and bring him back to Britain.
The very notion that anybody could travel so far without having a schedule, a planned itinerary or a list of things to do filled Helen with a confusing mixture of admiration and anxiety. The fact that Brian could do it without even sending word home drove her to distraction. But then, why would he let her know. Only Helen knew how she felt about Brian and she wasn’t telling.
On previous occasions when Brian had ‘gone walk-about’ Helen only learned anything of his exploits if Brian sent email to David and even then only if David thought to mention the fact that Brian had sent an email.
Helen was gasping to know more of Brian’s adventures. She agonised for Brian to invite her to sit with him while he elaborated on the detail of the various places he had visited. She was desperate to live some of the spontaneity of his adventures even though the thought of travel, especially the haphazard travel as undertaken by Brian, filled her with a dread that was both illogical and irrational. And she was surprised to find that she both wanted to know and didn’t want to know whether he had always been travelling alone.
Instead, David brought him up to speed with his explanations and arguments surrounding his theories on dimensional relationships. In particular the suggestion that from any dimension it was almost impossible to relate to the next dimension ‘up’ the list. Whilst from any dimension all dimensions ‘down’ the list were totally available.
Brian grasped the logic immediately and joined with David to help Helen to understand – quite unnecessarily – the finer points.
Helen wondered whether she would ever hear of Brian’s adventures.