Chapter One
Family Portrait
There is this funny thing about life and I don�t know what it is, it�s just funny. Now I�m not sure if it is funny haha or something different like, �that smells funny� or �you are a bit �funny� (meaning a bit loopy)�, or something completely different. All I know is that here I sit in this cold, damp room with one small light bulb, hunched over my computer. I�m not being kept captive by demons and I am not a squatter! I pay decent money to live here, I just haven�t got around to changing the other light bulbs, my heater is playing up again, and the drunken morons next door broke my window last night.
As well as all of this I�m bored. I�m bored, cold and there is this �funny� feeling of uncertainty hanging in the air. I�m not sure how it feels, its just there all around me an engulfing me in the unknowingness of life and everything in it. Maybe I should stop reading Hitchhiker�s, it�s making me all funny inside. And there it is again. Funny! What is this mysterious word? Maybe I should research it, I was looking for something to do my Doctorate on, and this could be the thing? But then I would have to get motivated to some point and actually put into practice the last five years knowledge�where is the fun in that? Okay, I suppose it may help me extend my brain and eventually get some money together, but where would the fun be for me? More work, more bills and more no-money times ahead for the short term. I might just stay where I am, static.
Kaylen Knight closed the journal and shut her computer down before turning off the monitor and then the light. She sat in the dark contemplating everything that had happened over the last twelve months. There was something funny about life, and death. The latter one was a definite common occurring theme in the tangled web of Kaylen�s life of the moment. The death of her mother in a car accident, the death of her father by suicide. The death of her spirit because of both of these events� Ain�t it funny sings Jennifer Lopez through the speakers of her radio in the distance, isn�t it funny indeed thinks Kaylen as she wipes a single lone tear from her eye remembering. Isn�t it funny how some people have everything and others have nothing.
Six months ago she had everything. A loving mother who she loved with a vengeance and a father who at least stayed under difficult circumstances, who supported and loved her mother. Kaylen didn�t blame her father for killing himself and taking the easy way out of his problems. The thing she did blame him for was leaving her with the bills, debts and settling what there was of both her parent�s estate. She was only twenty-three; she didn�t need that type of experience. Kaylen had been quite happy to go along with her parents living only a few hours away, with her job in a small publishing company, a flat with nice people and a little car of her very own. She had simple tastes and did not need much in life to make her happy. Then she received the phone call. Joanna Knight had fallen asleep while driving home from her job as a nurse and ploughed into a power pole at 110 km p h. The bottom fell out of Kaylen�s life; nothing would ever be the same again. Although she thought her father had handled the grief quite well at the time, three months later and his neighbour found him with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head.
Now all she had left (after selling the house, paying her father�s debts and the small loan she had taken to pay for a couple of years university fees) was �20,000. Kaylen really had no idea what to do with herself. She still had the job and the little flat with the little car, but what she needed was a sign. Having already completed her Masters� degree in literature studies the only other step was to do her Doctorate and become a lecturer or professor, or someone who writes great novels. What did she want to do with her life? What was the funny thing about life that was going to jump up and grab her, shake her and not let go until she had actually figured out the point of life? Stupid Hitchhiker�s Guide sitting on her bedside table!
Time for bed decided Kaylen. It was dark outside, in her room and in her heart. Time to set the alarm clock and drift off into a sleep filled with memories of the past and hopefully inspiration for the future. No more time for trying to decide on what to do with the future, just let it happen. She hadn�t really believed in signs and fate before but maybe Kaylen needed to just let herself be taken somewhere on some great magical adventure. Lying in bed now with the lights off and with only the sound of cars driving past on the road outside, Kaylen sighed. This was no normal run of the mill sigh just expelling air, no, this was a sigh involving the expulsion of every worry, thought and predisposed idea she had ever felt in her relatively short life. This was the sigh to end all sighs and Kaylen lay there in the dark, empty for the first time in a long time.