After returning from Fanta’s house D’arby felt as if his brain capacity had grown, but he knew it was probably just that he no longer had to worry about where he was going to live. He suspected it would be more ‘normal’ for him to be worrying about whether he would like to live with Fanta and her sisters and whether the household would still be harmonious after he and John moved in, but instead D’arby was glad there was such a comfortable option. He wondered why anyone would choose to the cruel rental market if they had someone they could share with instead.
After John left to open the restaurant D’arby decided that instead of working on his thesis he’d indulge in an afternoon of thinking about other stuff. He cleared the table and got out some scrap paper, pens and a couple of textas he’d found lying around. D’arby was busy drawing complicated diagrams of money flows when the phone rang. It was Fanta, inviting D’arby and John to dinner the following night. D’arby wrote a note to John about dinner at Fanta’s and stuck it on the fridge. Then D’arby got back to thinking, and drawing, and more thinking. It was as if he’d connected his brain to an invisible network – thoughts kept pouring into his head and he had trouble getting them onto paper at the same pace as they arrived.
By the time it started to get dark D’arby had covered all his scrap paper in notes and diagrams, but more importantly he had changed his mind about lots of things. D’arby put down his pen and took a few deep breaths. He was feeling really tired suddenly but also scared that he’d lose his notes again, so he gathered up all the pieces of paper, put them into his backpack and set out to uni to scan and copy them.
When D’arby got to his building at uni he thought it seemed darker than normal. He opened the front door using his swipe card and when he got inside he realized that all the lights were out except for the emergency lighting. D’arby hoped that didn’t mean there had been a power cut because he really wanted to be able to use the photocopier. As D’arby walked upstairs to the photocopy room he thought he heard a door opening and closing, which comforted him. He didn’t want to be the only person in the building.
D’arby opened the door to the photocopy room and was pleased to see that the photocopier had power. He got out his pages of notes and spent a bit of time getting them into order and making them into a nice square pile. Then D’arby put the pile of notes into the automatic feeder, entered his pin number and instructed the photocopier to make a copy of them. The copier seemed to be taking much longer than usual to copy each page and D’arby became impatient. He also realized his bladder was full. D’arby didn’t want to leave his notes unprotected in the photocopy room while he went to the toilet, not just because he was scared someone might take his notes while he was away but because he didn’t want someone to wander in and see that he was using the photocopier for stuff that wasn’t directly related to his thesis, so D’arby stayed where he was and tried to relax by taking long and slow breaths as he waited. By the time the copier had spat out copies of all the pages D’arby was feeling much calmer, but still needed to go to the toilet.
D’arby gathered the pages together again, put them into the automatic feeder, instructed the photocopier to scan them and copy the file onto his USB drive then pressed ‘Start’. Scanning seemed to be taking a long time too. D’arby looked at the photocopier screen and saw that scanning was only 10% complete. D’arby felt a little bit more secure now he had a copy of his notes in his hands and so he decided he would go to the toilet while the photocopier finished scanning the originals – taking the photocopies with him as a precaution.
As D’arby walked along the corridor to the toilets he thought he heard the clicking sound of the swipe card mechanism unlocking the front door and then the sound of the front door opening. He walked faster, hoping nobody would go to the photocopy room before he got back.
When D’arby got back to the photocopy room the scanning had finished. D’arby gathered up the originals and put them into his bag, along with the photocopies. He was about to walk out of the photocopy room when he remembered his USB drive. He went to unplug it from the photocopier but found that it wasn’t there. He looked down at the floor to see if it had fallen out but couldn’t see it.
“I must have forgotten to plug the USB drive in” though D’arby. So he got his notes out of his bag, put them back into the automatic feeder of the photocopier and looked in the front pocket of his bag for a USB drive. The one he found was black with a green stripe. As D’arby plugged the USB drive into the photocopier he was thinking about the green stripe on the USB drive because he was fairly certain his USB drive had a red stripe. D’arby watched as every page of his notes was scanned onto the USB drive, then carefully packed his notes and USB drive into his backpack and walked downstairs.
As D’arby left the building he scanned the park on his left and noticed a figure standing under a lamp post in the middle of the park. D’arby knew his eyesight wasn’t good enough to make out much detail from that distance, especially when it was dark, but he couldn’t help thinking that it looked like Guitarman was standing there, smiling at him. D’arby thought about going over to see if his was right, but it would mean walking in the wrong direction and D’arby was scared of what it would mean if he was right. So instead D’arby gave a faint smile in the direction of to the person who could have been Guitarman and turned away towards home.
To read the story from the start go to https://the-inkling.com/catch-up-with-the-inklings/
The Inkling 