CHAPTER ONE – A Brave New World
First of all I should tell you my name, although to careful readers it should come as no surprise. I am the aforementioned Dresden Hypotenuse, and recorded here, for posterity and some measure of ego, are the collected memories from my scattered years on this, the planet Earth.
I was born in Bridgwater, Somerset in the blazing summer of 1783 to proud parents, Hubert Hypotenuse and his lady wife, my mother, the honourable Lady Horatio Scrivens. My mother never took my father’s name, a matter of some contrition between the spritely young couple, despite their joyful union in December of the previous year. My mother, the heir to Sprugley House in the borough of Bridgwater, was of blue blood, somewhat at odds with my father’s employ as a rat burster. He would scurry with his small team of the disabled and dying at the vermin in the streets of the town with sacks of rice, exhaling mouthfuls of water and rice solution directly into the unsuspecting rodent’s gullet with the expected result.
My mother was a strange juxtaposition of personalities; an angry wasp in sheep’s clothing, vicious and brutal, yet compassionate and generous. She would often whip the servants of Sprugley House with metallised birch twigs whilst feeding them honeyed walnuts for offenses as minor as an untied shoe. She was shadowed everywhere by her loyal maid Dreseldeen, a woman who appeared consistently ninety years old from the moment of my birth to the present day, as I sit, writing this memoir with the rust of my own blood on old bits of tin foil.
My mother once told me that she had been rescued from wild foxes by Dreseldeen as a baby in a basket, in the woodlands north of Staines, and that Dreseldeen had been at her side since that day. Some evenings as a boy, I remember seeing my mother and Dreseldeen embracing deeply in the shadows behind the door in the scullery whilst my father picked the bones of the day’s rats from the raw skin between his knuckles. As the two women kissed and fondled each other, I wondered if my mother loved my father, or really did she love this mute old woman with a face like a boiled toad that groped her in dark corridors, and as I did, I felt something small, but significant, snap in the back of my skull.
My father hated Dreseldeen. When she wasn’t looking, he would pull offensive tongue faces and twist and contort his fingers into rude gestures, some made up, such was the wrath of his silent fury. He once told me that he would often imagine the rats that he burst had the head of Dreseldeen, and that he was really “bursting her fucking fat guts out.”
He had a quick temper and a rotten mouth, easily jumping to profanity in times of great emotional trauma. At the birth of my younger brother, (whom I will come on to in around two paragraphs time,) my father, who had been absent from my birth, ran screaming from the room past me in the waiting, room uttering the unforgettable; “Let me out! Her whole fucking arsehole just collapsed!”
I sat and pondered his words on many cold and lonely nights since that day. Of course, now I know the anatomical in’s and out’s of child birth thanks to my training in an underground Vietnamese tunnel hospital near Saigon, in nineteen hundred and seventy two. In those tunnels especially, his words echoed from the walls like the shells landing in nearby woodland. I had suffered terrible, crippling embarrassment around women since that supposedly joyous day. As the rumbles died away, I would lie still on my bunk and ask myself, God and nobody in particular if I would ever find love. The answer always fell immediately, an echoing vacuum of concussion.
Obviously, I was heavily hooked on opium throughout the conflict, often falling asleep with my hands inside a patient’s chest cavity and dreaming that I had opened my very own sausage factory as he lay screaming, awake and dying beneath my laughing fingers. I saved more lives than I lost, thanks to a mixture of Chinese I-Ching, common bleach and pure, magical luck. Before the conflict, I had received my First Aid badge at Cubs, aged nine, and this was considered more than enough proof of my medical credentials and prowess by the US Army. But I digress.
My younger brother was christened Timothy Jonathan Rosenbaumandsons Hypotenuse later that year in a ceremony that bored me very nearly to death, though I was always a sickly child to be fair to the vicar. Aged four, I wanted to be outside, kicking at pigeons and shaking sticks at the old and infirm with my friends from the house down the road, but instead my father would drag us to Church every Sunday and for special occasions like the christening. It was spoken of in hushed tones every day from Timothy’s birth as my father would meticulously plot the routes of guests, seating plan synchronisation and other such detail in his study, bare-chested and clutching at his St George pendant.
Sometimes I think that my brother was born to make up to God for me. My father was a deeply religious man, but my mother said that he only been that way since my birth. Before, when they had first met, my father had been a deviant, full of cheek and pranks and crude sexual needs. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck that read “God is Dead. Thank Fuck,” that he would later grow his hair into what would become known, in his honour, as the mullet, to cover. This had always confused me as my father would dress us in our Sunday best and drag us, sometimes screaming, to the little Church at the top of the hill, a smile on his lips, but a cold intensity in his eyes.
Something had gone wrong at my birth. The only thing my mother would say, once, with a shudder, was something inaudible except the words “the fire.” She couldn’t abide anybody screaming in her presence and once drop kicked a six month old baby through her bedroom window for crying as she “looked after it” for one of the serving girls. She had turned to look at me sat aghast, lips quivering on the chaise-lounge with a look that told me how close I was to a nice drowning in the moat and I quickly buttoned it.
As she hugged me and cooed about my curly hair, I resolved to never cry in her presence again. This philosophy served me very well, until one black day that will become apparent through the art of narrative at a time of my choosing in our joint future. That is correct, I, Dresden Hypotenuse, control the destiny of time and space itself in our literary marriage. I wear the trousers and cardboard crown in this relationship. You, reader, would do well to remember that. You are my bitch now. Unless of course you stop reading and throw the book out of the window and go and slander me to all your friends in the critical media like Garry Bushell and Piers Morgan. But, if you do go to do that, know this. You shan’t be missed.
Now that we have sorted the wheat from the chaff, I shall continue. You, my sweet, loyal friend, are to become privy to my darkest secret. After the following commercial messages, that is
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