252. Work on what has been spoiled (VI)

This girl had Irish gypsy blood, very blue eyes, and very black hair; as with all Irish families she had a great many serious drinkers as relatives—although she was quite moderate in her intake. She smoked and would lie on the bed and blow smoke rings from her vape at the ceiling; as with many Irish people, she disdained mainstream Anglo society and its Germanic harshness—its bureaucratic rules and strictures.

When you get down to it, the Irish are a Mediterranean people; they are very relaxed. I am half Welsh myself, and I can tell you that I often find the English far too hard and cold; they are too Germanic and distant. After the war, many Italian POWs remained in Wales, where they had been imprisoned, because they recognised the hot Mediterranean attitude in a northern climate.

The Welsh tend to be temperamental—the women incline towards hysteria. This fact is even noted in Sherlock Holmes, when Holmes encounters a woman with an “excitable, Welsh temperament”. So I understand the Irish position in Anglo society, with its cold science and inexplicable rules—and I could not blame the girl when she ignored the bailiff’s knock at her door. “Oh, they never do anything. There’s nothing to take; and if I’m nice to them they leave me alone,” she said, and drew another breath on the vape. The Irish would never have an industrial and scientific revolution, and they are bemused with the one we have already—the one everyone takes so seriously. The Irish—especially the gypsies—know it is all a fuss over nothing, only 350 years old and hardly out of its wrapping.

I arrived at her house one day after reading about the Kabbalah, the Tantra of the West. At the time, it was a mere scholarly interest and the concepts seemed vague to me. Yet when I padded up to her bedroom I saw, directly over her bed, a great tie-dyed sheet that she had hung since I saw her last; and on that sheet was nothing less than the Tree of Life. I stopped in wonder for a moment, and even my sexual instincts subsided. A synchronicity; and, indeed, her aunt was a fortuneteller, a solid gypsy trade—though a dying art in these days.

However, this was not the end, we split up for awhile, yet, strangely, we rematched on Tinder even though I never her saw her picture when I swiped—some months later, I thought about her strongly and then, a few moments later, she sent me a text. As we texted back and forth, my neighbour’s cat—a grey creature called Hobbes—sidled past me. I photographed him and sent him off to her; a moment later, she replied with another picture: an identical grey cat, in the same position at the same time. It was the same cat; the cat can do this quite easily—traverse dimensions, I mean. Indeed, as a teenager a cat appeared at her door, pawed to be let in, and then shot upstairs and had a litter under her bed. It was her witch’s familiar; and after that time she had many problems at school, not least with a headmistress who tortured her—psychically, of course.

It was not so long afterwards that, while I walked in the fields, I texted her to say that the troubles in the world could be accounted for by the Kali Yuga: we live in the last dark age, as predicted by the Hindoos. I said that this age will soon draw to a close, things will reach a nadir. I expected her to ask me more about this exotic idea, but instead she shot back a text that said: “The Kali Yuga doesn’t end for centuries yet.” Then she gave me an exact date. She had never mentioned it before, nor had we talked about esoteric matters. You see, for Celts with the second sight, probable witches, this is quite normal.