Prologue: Tell another one

The beginning.

Stories should start where they start.

There shouldn’t be a whole lotta throat clearing up front. They should drop us in. Throw us headfirst in the deep end, in the thick of things, in medias res, that’s Latin it is. Dead language, very dead now, never mind. Means the middle of things. Good stories start in the middle, you see.

But this story needs a bit of context. Some throat clearing, speaking of throats, mine’s parched. Would you mind? No, nothing fancy. Whatever Old Bill has on tap will do.

Yes, you’re Old Bill, older than me anyhow.

Thank you kindly, that will do just a treat. You’re a saint.

What? It’s a good person, a really good person. You’re good.

Thanks, where were we?

A story, yes, many would say the story.

It’s a story that concerns us all, the whole damn forsaken world, never mind just this forgotten tip of Africa. Way down more south than is useful.

I’m probably the only living person who has this whole story in his head. Scraped it together, I did, from scribbles, cuttings and any hard copy that survived the shitstorm that sucked the neon outta life. Brought back a bit of green though, didn’t it?

Gotta see the good side we do.

Anyhow, this is the best we’ve got of the whole story. Some of it’s made up to fill in the blanks and keep things interesting. Still enough of it’s true that, well, it makes you think in the dark of night, sitting on the shitter, just what the hell you’d have done in their shoes. Easy to curse their names without walking in their shoes. But, in the echoes of their choices lies our present, a world reworked by their actions, for better or worse.

As far as we can tell, it began with a man in a city. A sprawling metropolis wedged between burning mountains and rising seas. A city very much unlike our own, decades ago known as Cape Town, but in their day people just called it, Escape.

After what every one of ‘em wished they could do.

In that broken city, mother to our own, this broken man, heard voices in his head like we all do from time to time. But this was different. And he was different. Some say he was chosen. Chosen for what, you might ask?

Ah, that’s where our tale truly begins.