A book of silences

Chapter one - Golem

  Cat did her best work after midnight. It was a combination of the dark, the silence and that slight echo that the night added to every sound that excited her. Also, the fact that at night, when no-one was about, she could move her work from the tiny studio space she shared with two other students into the corridor. Or the workshop. Or in fact anywhere that the night guard didn't object to. And as Joey, the regular security guard, was a huge fan of Cat's work (plus free espresso and cake a couple of times a week), that meant just about anywhere, as long as she'd cleared it all away by 8 AM. Oh, and if the occasional post-grad student doing an all-nighter before exams or presentations didn't object too much. As her twice weekly all-night coffee-and-cakes smorgasbord was open to anyone, she seldom had a problem.

At present, Cat was working in one of the workshops that she'd emptied earlier that evening. At less than one hundred and sixty centimeters' tall and with a slight build (child-like was a phrase she hated), moving all the easels and stools to the edges of the room, or stacking them in the corridor, was a big job, and her muscles were aching badly. She had her hair twisted up untidily on her head, and strands were falling about her face as she worked, red faced and bad-tempered, overalls tied loosely at her waist.

 Once the space was clear, Cat pulled the plastic cover off a bulky shape in the corner of the workshop. This was 'Golem', a three-meter-tall sculptural piece she'd been grappling with for some time. It was human shaped, with heavy arms and legs, but squatter and thicker. The sculpture was made of salvaged wood, leather, and metal fixings, and incorporated wires, hinges and pulleys to allow movement. Rib-like curved wooden struts jutted from a solid backbone, enclosing a central space that was just big enough for a small person to get inside. It was accessible from below after a scramble, using dowel pegs set into the legs as steps and handholds. The piece needed a person to work it, whilst nestling within the chest cavity, strapped in with a climbing harness and boot clips. Unfortunately, she thought it was a bit too much like something she'd seen in a sci-fi film, Alien, or maybe Alien Two, the big mechanical lifting suit, and she was pretty sure a couple of her not-so-friendly fellow students were bound to point that out in the next crit.

As she worked, Cat realized that Art school had been good for her. She'd gone from an angry, obsessive, weird schoolkid, to an angry, obsessive, weird art student. Thing was, she'd discovered others just like herself. In fact, being weird and obsessive was about par for the course at college, and in some ways, it was a distinct advantage. The Art school seemed to act as a collection point for unusual people, and had accreted a solid core of atypical individuals, lecturers, students, cleaners and technicians. Or maybe people just became weirder the longer they stayed here. Anyway, for whatever reason, she now had friends and acquaintances as strange as herself and had found something that she loved and could obsess about to her heart's content. 

 Going back to Golem, she finally realized that she'd never really gotten it to move as she wanted. The backbone of the piece was fixed into a pivot joint, and couldn't bend gracefully, which she didn't like, but this served to brace the heavy shoulders of the sculpture. Below them hung the upper arms, jointed at the elbow and connected to forearms that linked to three skeletal fingers, each tipped with sharp metal. At present, these were splayed out to cover Golem's belly, in a protective manner. Cat had to push them aside carefully, avoiding the metal fingertips before heaving into the sculpture. Once strapped inside, Cat could ponderously sweep Golem's arms about, and a clever set of cables within the limbs allowed her to snap the digits together sharply, producing a pleasing cracking sound. was strapped into the piece, slashing the arms back and forth with a high noise and just pondering on whether a soundtrack might add something to it, when she heard a something in the hallway.

She stopped moving the arms and hung the straps, breathing heavily. There'd been a series of break-ins here at the college in the last few days, and studios had been ransacked, art works damaged, things stolen, causing the Dean to ask that no-one work alone after hours. Scarcely breathing now, Cat listened carefully, but could hear nothing. After a few more minutes, she began to relax; perhaps it had been the sound of the schools' old radiators gurgling, or a door swinging shut at the other end of the school.