Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

A knock at the door made Sanchez jump with a start, knocking over the cards on the table. Miguel ran to open it, as Sanchez cursed his luck, he had had his best hand of the game before this interruption. Miguel opened the door on its chain to be confronted by an aphid wearing the uniform of the post office, with a clipboard and a large zip-up holdall.

"Yeah?" barked Miguel, annoyed at having his game interrupted.
"Got a parcel here for Miguel Cethora," mumbled the blue uniformed aphid, checking the clipboard
"That's me, hand it over,"
"Says here you've got to sign for it."

Miguel swung the door open and the uniformed aphid stepped in. Miguel accepted the proffered pad, took a pen from his pocket and squinted at the clipboard.
"Hey, this pad's blank." he started to say, but got no further than "Hey thi-" before an arm swung down, cracking him in the back of the neck and knocking him unconscious.

Sanchez looked up, first in shock, then in anger, then in unconsciousness, as a second assailant leapt through the window and wrestled him to the ground. The two intruders, the aphid who had tackled Miguel, and the black clad caterpillar who had struck Sanchez, looked at the two prone bodies and grinned.
"Everything ready?" the aphid asked, unzipping his holdall, and pulling out an addressed, postmarked parcel. His taciturn colleague merely nodded, and stepped outside.
The aphid opened the package he was holding and removed a box, and a hand-written sheet of paper. Studying the paper carefully, he secured the box and wires to the computer terminal. The caterpillar re-entered, rolling a large barrel into the room. Between them, they manipulated the controls on the box until the LED screen lit up and began a twelve hour countdown. The two assailants then attached wires from the box to the drum, and opened up the huge main terminal casing.
"This right?" The caterpillar asked, the first words he had spoken,
"It's what it says here," The aphid pointed to the sheet of paper, "It's what the man says,"
"It's what the man says, must be right, then."
The two saboteurs finished their work, and fled the room. They shared the warm glow of smugness emitted by someone who believes that they had done their work well.

Remiel ran into the club at 5:30 and saw the caterpillar he was looking for on stage, singing with extreme energy into his microphone. Remiel didn't have the energy or the desire to interrupt them mid-song, and so quietly took his seat at a table at the side of the stage without being noticed, ordered a double leaf-burner from the enquiring waiter, and managed to stay relatively hidden until virtually the end of the set when the singer glanced around the bar, flicked his eyes in Remiel's direction, and nearly dropped his bass guitar.
"Is it just me, or has Elroy lowered his standards enough to let scum like you in?" The voice was amplified through the PA, and filled the bar with tones of surprise and pleasure, "Welcome back, you old bastard!"
"Long time no see, Cornelius." replied Remiel, taking the sense of shock as a greeting, accepting the proffered limb and allowing himself to be hoisted on-stage. Wilson, a young, cheerful caterpillar who played lead guitar, moved to one side, relinquishing his microphone to an old band colleague.
"Come on" Cornelius murmured to Remiel, not letting his stage persona suffer any more than it had done so far, "You've got to do one song with us."
"OK," Remiel agreed, "Let's do my song, you know, the first one I wrote."
"You don't mean...?"
"Yeah!"
"'One voice listening'?"
"You know any other songs I wrote that you actually liked?"
Cornelius grinned, signalled to the band and the thumping snare-rim beat started. I will skip over the details of the song, as it might appeal more to caterpillars than people, and in my opinion, the chorus is repeated far too often, but suffice to say that it was not long before the entire room was on its feet³.

As the band began to pack away, Cornelius led Remiel over to the bar and ordered double Nectar slammers.
"So,", Remiel asked, as they waited for the drinks to arrive, "How've you been?"
"Oh, I'm cool", replied Cornelius, "I told you about the University thing didn't I? Double honours?"
"Yeah, you do realise what this means?"
"I sure do! We're both in line to be Butterflies!!"
The drinks arrived. The two caterpillars charged their glasses and downed them in one. A quiet descended, as if both participants in the conversation knew that an uneasy area of conversation approached. Remiel cleared his throat.
"So," he said, his voice suddenly quiet and serious, "How's Alicia?"
The lack of sound in the conversation well expressed the mood. There was a long history behind the three words uttered by Remiel. The conversation drifted silently in dangerously deep waters for ten seconds, before Cornelius drew breath,
"She's-"
"I still love her, you know?" butted in Remiel, more to himself than to anyone else, the end of the silence seeming to loose all the emotion he had welled up for so long, "I want you to know that. I want her to know that. I still love her."
"And she loves you, Remiel, but..."
"Yeah, I know, but not in that way," snapped Remiel in a tired, cynical way, as if he had heard the words many times before, " I had all this 'just want to be friends', 'I wish I could love you, but it would hurt you more than me', 'You deserve better than me' stuff when she left for Topsfield. I hated the clichéd sound of the words then and I hate them even more now. She seeing anyone special?"
"There's been no-one since you,"
"I can't believe that, it's been a full year, she can't have just stayed at home for that long. If there's been anyone, anyone at all, tell me. I can take it."
"No-one, I swear. She's always said that she doesn't want to get involved with anyone, not at the moment."
"Don't you see, that just makes it worse?"
Remiel sighed and fell back into his chair, massaging his temples with his thumbs,
"Deep down, I've resigned myself to the fact that she just doesn't feel for me in that way," he said, the conversation acting as a catalyst for his emotion, "But sometimes I wish she would get involved with someone, anyone, rather than live her life as a virtual hermit in a godforsaken backwater like Topsfield. If she's not attached to anyone I always say to myself, 'well, maybe she hasn't got anyone because she wants me'. And that's what will kill you, not being rejected, not failure, but hope. I'm like a pauper, begging for scraps from the table, hoping in vain that one day I'll be allowed to join in the banquet."
As suddenly as this mood had entered Remiel, it left, leaving a weary, emotionally drained, but smiling caterpillar.
"Anyway, what am I unloading all this onto you for? this should be a night for celebration! we're going to be Butterflies!", Remiel smiled, the weary depression pushed back in his mind. It would never totally leave, but could at least be kept under control. The pain caused by Alicia used to be like a shotgun wound, it hurt him all the time, never let up, unrelenting total pain. Time caused this pain to shrink and to resemble a sprained ankle, he could live with it all the time, until the moment at which any pressure at all was applied to it, at which point it became unbearable.

Cornelius looked up, realising that he needed to do something to lift the mood. It took him mere moments to come up with the perfect plan.
"Remiel?" he said, using this as a chance to break the long silence,
"Yes?"
"How many pubs are there in this city?"
"I don't know, about 100. Why, what are you thinking?"
The bar light twinkled off the edge of Cornelius's half-moon spectacles as he drained the last of the nectar from his shot glass.
"How long, roughly, do you think it would take to crawl a city like this?" he inquired, his soft tone, and serious manner betrayed by the growing look of mischief on his face.
The LCD display in the farm's building passed the next few hours by patiently continuing the countdown, passing 10:00:00, then 8:00:00, then 6:00:00

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