The Irish Tales

Hiatus


Many things need explaining now, not the least of which is the Residence, where all Time is regulated, where all the Regulators live and beneath which lies The Pond.

It isn't hard to find the entrance, but getting in is another matter altogether.

On Marylebone High Street in London, there is a Greek restaurant called The Hellenic. Right next door is a small, rather seedy shop, which claims to sell "military antiquities", by which is meant officers holsters, dubious looking binoculars, rusty bayonets, faded sepia pictures of long-dead soldiers and other such melancholy curiosities.
(Almost all of which are fakes, or replicas or other forgeries; except the hip-bone of Adolph Hitler, which I know is real because I put it there.)

On entering, an old man with a limp and a cleft palate awaits you. He is known as The Guardian.
Should you be a genuine customer, interested in a battered WW1 German helmet, you will be politely told that, alas, it is sold. As in fact is every item on display in the window and in the shop.

Baffled, most visitors leave feeling slightly cross, not unnaturally.

However, were you to ask him the simple question, "Do you have the time?", you would be ushered through a side door where a Chronodog would escort you into The Residence proper.
(Normally, it's a very secure procedure but it did fail once, when an elderly lady who was slowly losing her wits, blundered in and asked The Question, in all innocence.
She was duly allowed to enter and promptly went completely insane. She now resides in her own comfortable little cottage on the estate, watched over lovingly day and night by Chronobitches. It was clearly inadvisable to allow her back into Real Time.)

You know the Arabian Nights tale of the small tent which, once entered, revealed a huge, sprawling palace with gardens and fountains ?
No ? Ok, think instead of the Tardis.
That's the Residence.

4,000 acres of luxurious accommodation, bars and brothels, art galleries, orchards and hothouses, lawns and lakes, desert islands worthy of Crusoe and a first-class cricket pitch.
A bizarre mixture of baroque, neoclassical, Palladian, Art Deco and Stalinesque architecture, (that's the barracks housing the Chronodogs) it is a product of the whimsy and passions of two millennia of cultural looting and pillaging by, well.....er...us.

The main building is where the Regulators live in considerable luxury and lack for no creature comforts, except maybe the company of women.
Hence the brothels, which are run by Chronodogs and manned (if that is the right word) by drugged mortals who are rewarded handsomely for their unwilling and unconscious services, which last only long enough for them to be set up for life, detoxed and sent back.

(You've doubtless heard all the stories from people who claim to have been abducted by aliens and "probed" ? I shall say no more.)

For obvious reasons, contact with Real Time is needed, but carefully monitored.
Outside of the Residence, no Regulator is allowed to have mortal relationships of any kind, other than strictly business.
It wouldn't be fair, it wouldn't be ethical and it wouldn't be practical.

I know, I know. I can hear the question hovering on your lips.
"So how can Friday be half-mortal ?" you wonder.

I shall tell you, but to do so I have to take you back in time, metaphorically speaking.
I am my own father. And grandfather. And great-grandfather. And so on, as far back as you care to go. I have never known a "mother's" love and frankly, do not miss it one jot. I am born of Time and happy to be so.

Every now and then I am "renewed" and may choose to alter my appearance to reflect my age as I choose to look. For decades, I remained a fresh-faced twenty-five year-old, tall, blonde of hair, blue of eye and fair of face.
Recently, I have allowed myself to mature to a rogueish-looking forty-five, the kind of cad and bounder you would never, ever trust with your beautiful teenage daughter.

But enough about me; Friday's Chrono-father was an unknown Month who fell fatally in love with a female mortal from one of the Residence's brothels. Whilst not unusual in itself, what followed was shocking and utterly wrong.

When her time was up and she was returned to the outside, he found her loss intolerable.
And so he crossed the line and the tragedy began. He saw the woman frequently, though furtively, engaging in unprotected physical congress each time, with the inevitable result.

She of course was completely unaware of her lover's true identity and therefore deliriously happy.
Until she gave birth to the anomaly now known as Friday. She died almost immediately afterwards, from "complications", leaving a squalling, puking infant and a heart-broken Month.

Something had to be done with awkward infant and so he was placed with one Sarah Mumbless, a decent and discreet woman with a child of her own, Martha.
Until, that is, he was old enough to be taken into the Residence and informed of his descent and his destiny, by The Calendarist.

Which Month was his father ?
Why could he not be left alone in ignorance ?
And how did he become a Day ?
All will be revealed, Dear Readers. Have patience.


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