6.6: The new arrival
The whole ethos of the Potting Shed is to welcome newcomers and to serve as a temporary home to anyone passing by. The first bunks, closest to the lobby, where everyone sits, and not very high, are reserved for travellers. (Lottie has perhaps the furthest bunk: at the very back and high up in the rafters.) But equally, travellers with tales they wish to tell are welcome to one of the hodge-podge of comfortable armchairs near the main stove and the front door, where the older members tend to snooze after supper, not unlike the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, though rather more hospitable.
Fabian, however, spurns such cosy accommodation and chooses to sleep outside on the veranda. Others do this, too, from preference. Moffat the sheep rarely enters the building, sleeping on the veranda and eating his breakfast – like the others, of toast, fruit juice and strong coffee – through an open window. But it seems that the newcomer wants even more privacy than that.
On this, his first, breakfast, he takes his large round cup of the Potting Shed’s famously strong coffee and slithers to the very far end of he veranda. Lottie watches at a distance through a window, curious about his reaction to the coffee. When she had first tried some she’d instinctively spat it out shouting “Grew! It’s horrible. Toucher... ucher!” to everyone else’s bafflement. (These days she drinks, with some pleasure, a 50:50 mix café con leche.)
Similarly, the breakfast marmalade is Chivers No7, which boasts on the jar that it is a ‘bracing and challenging start to your day!’. It seems that being challenged by one’s marmalade is indisputably a good thing, first thing in the morning. The fruit juice is freshly squeezed yellow grapefruit: tart and astringent. It is a wonder that Alcock does not also make everyone take a morning dip in the freezing waters of the stream.
Fabian, however, silently drinks his strong black coffee, eats his toast thickly spread with bitter marmalade, and swigs back his grapefruit juice without, apparently, noticing anything.
It also dawns on the other members shortly too that, while he clearly understands what other people say, he himself never speaks. Not all the creatures are very chatty. The most chatty are the frogs in the Swan Hotel who rarely shut up, blithering on in their impenetrable and vulgar argot. Lottie’s tutor Hipparchus is happy to talk at length on, seemingly, any topic. But the only creature anyone can think of who never speaks is Popty Ping, the little dragon in the Swan Hotel. There is a reason for that, founded in trauma, though only Alcock and the Barman know it.
Meeting back at the den later, pTravis, Masongill and Lottie compare notes.
“I don’t like him. He’s creepy!” – Lottie, speaking, as usual, as she finds.
“I’m not sure. I wonder whether he’s actually, really, quite sad?” – Masongill.
“I’m not sure. But we’ve got to give him a chance! – pTravis.
Funnily enough, it is pTravis who, within a few days, has decided he very much doesn’t like their new colleague.