Spontanéité

À la tombée de la nuit // Beschreibung

The room wasn't big, but it wasn't small. It was just right. Goldilocks probably would have said so, if she'd been there to compare the sizes of the rooms in the house. It had one big window, opposite the doorway, its smaller rectangles of glass panes separated by a grid-looking structure of wood. The window was screened by two layers; the hanging, pale blue-grey blinds first, and then a thick curtain. This one was white, with a repeating pattern of a ragdoll picture all over it. The ragdoll had messy, woollen-looking orange hair, a smile sewed on, and bright blue overalls. It came in the form of hundreds of clones, but it wasn't creepy or scary, it just was how it was. And the window stretched up to almost the very top of the room, from right next to the blue carpet itself.

In the right-hand corner of the room was a tall, thin white wardrobe, smooth in appearance and touch. On its left, much shorter, was a structure that resembled a set of steps. One, two, three steps, like a sport podium that had been made with a mistake. It held colourful tubs as its drawers, tubs bright red, bright blue and pale pink. Inside these were toys galore, all sorts, and plenty of them were unwilling to stay put. They liked exploring the room, sitting or sprawling on the surface of the stair-like drawer-holder. That was white and smooth, too, like the wardrobe. Along with the toys was a little lamp, dusty and old-looking, the colour of dull gold that hasn't been polished for a hundred years. Maybe if it were polished or rubbed, a genie would appear, to grant three wishes. The lamp was often left on all night, sometimes found still shining on in the mornings. On another of the steps was always a stereo, or in other words, a boombox.

It was referred to more commonly as the CD-player, because that's what it was used as most of the time. It was blue and white and silver, shiny metal and clean plastic put together to make something that was always used, always. During the nights they would play CDs or cassettes, all night unless someone came in when the residents of the room were asleep, to turn the CD-player off and let it sleep, too. There were a number of CDs always played in that room.

There was one that had come with a square, bright-red-coloured hardcover book, with a collection of stories in it. The people who listened to it all night knew exactly what the interlude sounded like, between each story. The narrator's voice was familiar and soothing, and the added sound effects in the background, there to make the story come alive and surround them, well, those were recorded in the memory too. There were other CDs, those having both stories and songs on them, a three-pack that came in a little shiny-papery box. Those were nice, too.

There was one with only nine tracks on it, each without a name of its own, and no lyrics, the order of the songs memorised. This was a favourite at night, and said to have been played nights when the listeners were too young to comprehend it at all. There were others like it sometimes, played less frequently. A pink one, with a teddy bear on it, for example. Some of the songs on that one had words, and it had come with a proper CD case, so it had a list of proper names on the back, and fancy colourful font on the front.

There was the one played during the day while its listeners sang along and turned up the volume, dancing around the room. They danced around the square wooden table in the centre of the room they would use to play LEGO™ on, and build great walls and towns on, and draw people and animals of all kinds, real and imagined, on. The order of those songs, those 25 songs, was memorised too, and the lyrics to every part of each song. The CD case was somewhat broken on the inside from frequent use, but that made no difference to the regularity with which the two discs were put into the music machine at alternating times.

And there was one cassette. It was green, fit neatly into the palm of a hand, and they'd play it at nights too. It had a little case of its own, which they grew used to opening and closing without difficulty, and the case had had chickens drawn on it. There were three; one red, one white and one black, which had a red little blob on its head. And the cassette and the case had Chinese writing on them, weird characters with lines all over them, near and pretty, but so foreign to the listeners, who couldn't read or write any of the words. But they listened to the Chinese stories, delighted when the narrator made the chicken sounds herself in one story, familiar with the classical music in the background used for dramatic effect in another, memorising phrases of Chinese they could use from all of them. They understood most of the stories well enough, and even if not, they were familiar.

On the left-hand corner of the room was a wooden "beige"-coloured bunk bed, and the corner of its right-hand just touched the start of the window. Next to the bed, there was a white-grey heater, lumpy and irregular, like an accordion that had been squished and compressed, and couldn't be stretched out again, and didn't have keys. It had a face, too, made out of black numbers and words, and a red indicator, and a red circular thing that was moved to indicate the amount of heat the machine should give off. They left this on all night, too, to toast their socks and keep them warm at night*.

And at night, with the bedroom door half shut, on those few nights when the little lamp wasn't shining from the staircase drawer-holder, the girl with black hair and dark eyes in the top bunk would sit up and cautiously lean over, towards the corner of the window. And with the CD-player talking or playing music quietly in the background, and the heater giving warm air to the room and blowing a soft breath up to her face if she leaned over to check on her socks, she'd inch up close to the window and its two-layered covering. She'd push the corner of the curtain to the right, just a little, and she'd look outside and see the back garden, overgrown with its weeds, tall and green and looking almost like wheat, weeds she and her little sister in the bunk below would grab and toss around the garden, unknowingly encouraging the growth of more. And she'd see the concrete, and the shed that was usually pale creamy yellow in colour but dark at night. And she'd see the moon, the round, milk-coloured moon with little patches of grey in it, and she'd leave the curtain just slightly open.

She'd lie down, pull her blankets up to her chin, and smile at the little path of moonlight that would float through the night sky, through the glass, and settle contentedly on her blankets. It wouldn't be much longer before she fell asleep, her pale green Mickey Mouse™ quilt-blanket behind her head, her blue bear-picnic blanket covered in white stars spread over her, content in the warmth, in the moonlight, in the familiarity and in the Love she didn't yet comprehend.

*warning: don't try this at home, it's a fire hazard; clothes are flammable, so don't leave them on your heaters or radiators or whatever you call them, it's not safe, especially when left unguarded like overnight in this Beschreibung