Reminiscing in the lamplight

Technical details

Before I forge ahead with our escapades in the Berlin underground, aka the royal basement, I will address those niggling questions that must be running around in your head. The technical ones about how the siblings and I know what we know and how we conduct our family chit-chats.

As you might have guessed, we lack some of the human senses. This is what we can and cannot do:

· We cannot hear. But we make up for that (partly) by picking up vibrations and by lipreading. (Yes, we can see – up to a range of about five metres, which is totally fine for lipreading.)

· We cannot smell. We don’t eat human food anyway, so smelling is overrated. All we need to consume (much more often than Queen Kami believes) is oil.

· We cannot taste. Nevertheless, we do feel a pleasant sensation when we ingest our lubrication.

· We can feel. That’s because of the vibration sensitivity. So, cheap, thin thread through the tension plates is absolute torture! Nabirne (my overlocker brother) is less sensitive, but then, he’s a boy!

And if you haven’t yet figured out the communication part, we use electronic signals for that. No need to be switched on to transmit or receive, as long as the plug is in a socket. Now, if a human happens to touch one of us mid-broadcasting, they’d experience a mild to heavy shock (depending on the urgency of the broadcast). But, don’t worry, we’ve never killed anyone — yet!

And how, you might wonder, do I publish these posts?

Well, duh, I transmit my stuff to Queen Kami’s laptop. As soon as she does whatever she does on her device — swoosh! — my ramblings hit the socials.

Right! Now that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the goings-on in the Berlin basement studio.

Sorting out the chaos

We (the siblings and I) had a few days of rest. It consisted of nervously standing by on our sweat-shop table while all manner of frantic activity filled up the rest of the room.

Day 1:

Her royal Kamikazeness rushed in and out of her studio about two hundred and fifty times. Every few minutes, a box got ripped open, some digging took place and a volley of sighs rolled over to our side after another unsuccessful search for whatever urgent gadget she needed.

Her favourite uttering was, “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted those nincompoop packers!”

Her new German phone went missing at least twenty times. It usually popped up whenever Hubby called from the hardware shop, which was often. He’d made sure to put his number on emergency bypass before he presented her with the new, post-box red device. Whenever he called, a loud piano riff would guide her to the phone’s location, never on the same floor as the queen. She practically summited and descended Mount Everest in one day. By the time Hubby got back with the necessary drill bits and screws and such, Queen Kami had serious butt cramps, and she swore she’d lost at least ten kilos.

At 3:30 pm, Lastborn arrived home from school and needed to be dropped off at the ballet studio. Work halted for the day.

Day 2 (Saturday):

Hubby decreed seven am each Saturday as official family forest-walk time (the forest was a mere five minutes away). It was supposed to be a wonderful new tradition. Lastborn gave it a miss. Fourteen-year-olds do not do early-morning anythings. Especially on Saturdays, get real! Queen Kami joined Hubby for half of the walk. Then, the boxes in Firstborn’s room called her back.

At Eight fifteen sharp, Hubby, energized by all the ozone, rushed into the studio. He shoved away mangled boxes until there was enough room to schlep his ladder from the left corner to the right. He placed the drill and other paraphernalia at the ready. Then he froze! Eyes glued to the pristine, hole-less wall.

“Hey, Nirbe!” called my overlocker-brother, Nabirne. “Do you think he’s having second thoughts?”

“Well, of course he is. I mean, he’s been going on and on about how drilling all those holes would weaken the structure. He must be having nightmares of the entire wall tumbling down.”

“You don’t think he might be right? I mean, we’re in the basement. If that wall collapses, the whole house will come crashing down — on us!” Nabirne was such a pessimist.

“Nah!” I reassured him. “The queen only wants about thirty holes for all those shelves. Remember, she told us all about German engineers being the best in the world.”

Hubby still hadn’t started drilling when Queen Kami rushed in.

He turned around to face her. “Honey, are you sure you need all these shelves down here?”

The Queen gave him one of her exasperated looks. I could totally relate. I mean, where did the man think all that stuff was meant to go? Obviously, we needed shelves in our studio.

Queen Kami then resorted to her infallible tactic. “No worries. If you don’t want to do it, I’ll drill the holes myself.”

Now the Queen had excellent DIY skills (even back then). Really excellent. And she can confidently wield the whole spectrum of power tools (although Hubby has always drawn the line at chainsaws and those rotary table saw thingies that can amputate limbs.) The problem is that her motto was (and still is) Do it hard and fast. She had a track record of forgetting to change out drill bits, measuring a bit too hastily and other similar oopsies. The cellar wall could easily be blessed with fifty messy craters instead of Hubby’s thirty neat little holes. Queen Kami’s fifty might indeed have been over the threshold, which would have meant the end of our clan.

Hubby sprang into action. “All right, Honey, hand me the measuring tape, please.” And,after about two hours of Formula-One-level vibrations, the shelves were up.

That afternoon, Lastborn popped in and spent some time watching the queen dig out her crafting and sewing treasures.

“Oh, my goodness, Mom! What’s with all this stuff? If the customs guys had done a spot check on the container, they would have fined you for smuggling in tons of stock for some pre-loved junk shop.”

The queen had indeed gone a bit overboard. Maybe because Lastborn had not been present when the royal stuff got packed.

“Well, if you see what zips and buttons and fabric cost in this place, you’ll understand why I brought my whole stash. For example, this whole box of zips costs less than two single ones in the fabric stores around here.” Queen Kami dramatically held up a shoe box and waved it past Lastborn’s nose. It was stuffed to the brim with zips of differing lengths, all black or white. She placed it on top of the two other zip boxes.

“And those empty bottles? And these two shoeboxes?” Lastborn read the label. “Wood offcut blocks!” She rolled her eyes. “And those three huge plastic crates?” They were all crammed with fabric. “Mom! No one moves countries with crates of leftover fabric!”

“I have plans for all of this!” retorted the queen.

Fortunately, Lastborn spotted the box of photo albums she’d come down for. She fled upstairs with that.

By the evening, the boxes were empty and the shelves were full. The green curtains that needed to be half-disassembled and repurposed to cover the cluttered shelves, were dumped between Nerina and me. They would be the next day’s project!

Settling in

To start off with, Queen Kami threaded Nerina with one colour thread, while Brinane and I each received another colour. Poor Aibren still stood unused at the foot of the table. Nabirne was up next. Queen Kami located her magnifying glass and headlamp. First, she twiddled around with his four different tension plates. Their numbers didn’t totally line up with where they should have. Then, she switched on the headlamp, held the magnifying glass near Nabirne’s opened-up belly, and meticulously routed the threads through his intestines until they emerged at their destination. A painstaking process, but well worth it. After all, the Queen needed the edging on all our work to look totally professional. She had a shortcut for changing his colours, but that’s a story for another day.

A few days of intermittent fixing and upcycling followed, and then Firstborn and Secondborn arrived from the Motherland. Two days later, the royal family headed off to Austria for their first-ever ski trip (accompanied by hastily-assembled neck-buffs courtesy of the sweatshop team).

Alone time

The palace was dark and empty for a week. Except for Nerina’s little burning light bulb. Yes, her Royal Kamikazeness had forgotten to switch that off after her last-minute buff-sewing spurt. She would have to answer to Hubby for the weeks’ worth of energy-wastage.

With the basement all to our own, what could we do but reminisce? There in the warm yellow glow of Nerina’s lightbulb.

The days of old

Nerina regaled us with tales from her youth, when the Queen Mum used to rustle up seriously cute creations for her only daughter to frolic around in.

Of course, Nerina aged at the same tempo as Queen Kami, but fortunately, our species never experiences those almost-lethal human teen hormones. So, when Queen Kami first ventured into Kamikaze crafting (after getting over some school sewing-class trauma at the tender age of thirteen), Nerina had the calm demeanour of a level-headed mechanical maestro, and she was able to weather the storm. At seventeen, Queen Kami’s pocket money didn’t quite match up with her groundbreaking sense of fashion. That’s when she established her Hard-and-Fast method. No patient coaching from the Queen Mum. Oh no! Queen Kami followed the James Bond philosophy of disregarding all instructions and winging it. After two or three experimental projects, her confidence-level was at a peak. And just in time. She needed a slightly professional-looking outfit for her first Uni scholarship interview. She arrived on scene in a flowing curtain lining creation with a Queen-Kami-patented detail — a section of skirt scrunched up with cotton tape and a mountaineering clip, revealing a cute section of flawless eighteen-year-old leg. She bungled up that interview, not because of her attire, mind you, even though a few bushy eyebrows did apparently shoot sky high when she made her entrance.

“She cried on my extension table for hours when she told me all about it,” said Nerina

If you don’t know what an extension table is, here’s a photo of Nerina with the correct body-enhancement indicated.

Anyway, except for a few frantic holiday projects, Nerina then enjoyed a four-year-stretch of relative peace, while Queen Kami did whatever she did at Uni. At the end of that period, the Queen Mum felt it was time for the slave handover. For several years, Nerina held fort alone. First in her Royal Kamikazeness’ single bedroom in the flat share, then in the palace of the newlyweds.

Then Queen Kami’s slave-family began to expand. Aibren and Nabirne joined Nerina in the royal studio. Aibren loved talking about those times, so she launched into her favourite story (which I’ve heard a gazillion times, but don’t tell Aibren.) Sometime in the middle of this era, Queen Kami felt her skills were wasted in her own private little sweat shop, and her projects started taking up magnanimous proportions, often necessitating a pop-up sweatshop at whichever site needed to be transformed.

The most ambitious needle-breaking, motor-overheating project was to provide a stage wall with huge padded squares which had to (a) look nice, and (b) fix the sound problem in the large auditorium. The queen had assembled an army of kamikaze compatriots and there were metres and metres of vinyl spread on the floor. Scissors rushed through vinyl, Nerina and Aibren and three other fabric transformation devices zoom-zoom-zoomed from sunrise to sunset. Staple guns clacked and glue fumes spread. “We couldn’t smell them, of course,” added Aibren, “but we saw huge pupils all around us and some very woozy-looking ladies. Thank goodness there was plenty of fresh air, so the zombie ladies merrily carried on stitching, stapling and gluing.”

Countless needles were broken that day, and one pair of scissors snapped in half. At quitting time, back and butt muscles ached, cramped fingers had to be pried off scissors and one ankle was black and blue and twisted out of shape. Blood had also flowed a handful of times, mostly Queen Kami’s. Thank goodness it could be wiped off the precious vinyl.

Apparently, the end result was magnificent. Of course, Hubby had to restrain the queen from doing any drilling or mounting herself. That was left up to an army of able-bodied males on ladders, with the queen directing matters.

Man, I wish I’d been part of the clan back then. When I’d first heard this story, I contracted an incurable case of long-FOMO.

We didn’t only reminisce during the royal family’s absence; we also wagered on what future project the Queen would have concocted for us in that winter-sports-stimulated head of hers. I won’t bore you with our guesses, because we all turned out to be wrong. The bottom line is, we waited in anticipation — and in darkness, because Nerina’s bulb had given up the ghost by the end of that week. Queen Kami would have to venture out to the cool craft shop again.

Till next time,

Your incorrigible industrious instrument

Nirbe