Helper
Hello, my name is Helper and as far as you are concerned, I’m not real. I’m sure we would be super-special friends but my owner, Fate, says I have to be neutral. La-dee-dah, why so grumpy I ask, but then I’m given even more jobs to do.
What is it that I do, exactly? Oh yes, I was coming to that because it’s smashingly kind of wonderful. I’m a natural force that assists everything alive, day or night and gives power to a billion scrabbling elbows, all the moving, grooving, walloping large or titchingly brittle things that make up the exquisite, ever-moving web of existence. You can tell I’m a fan.
Look at me, fiddling about, just an intangible wisp in the corner of your eye but I help with the tiny functions that always seem to go unnoticed. I drag away the shambles of hair that hangs down the pipe from your shower plugs. I really do, but frankly, you great apes are all so hairy it’s hard to keep up. I’m the spirit of tiny moments that make a huge difference, like making sure the ink is flowing in pens at peace conferences and keeping the hair out of your eyes when you’re skating. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wetted the powder in a soldier’s bullet, so funny; or how I get the cap off and do that either.
You perhaps won’t remember an afternoon in the hot summer weather when you were eight and the sun felt like a forge in an iron sky, where none of a million heads could bear the glare of staring upwards? Anything could have been hanging above and they wouldn’t have seen it, but what was up there was me. You could say it was just another day when that ball of moss withered and dried, shrinking in vegetable shame against the potter’s thumb-print on a loose roof tile, moss the only thing holding it up. Then there you were, all tired legs and ice cream, strolling below with a lifetime in front of you, step by step, eating it up. A pause and with perfect timing the tile slid off the roof of course, it meant nothing personal by it, then a pattern of air corkscrewed from nowhere to nowhere and met itself in the middle, budging the tile’s course to narrowly miss your head and thunder-crack splinter on the narrow pavement. A punctuation of dust. A pause, then the yelling began. Frost cracks mountains and not a soul sees it but nature also comes to town and boy didn’t that wake you up.
I remember the moment — but I remember so many. I touch the river and its always different, yet always there in some form or other as the light changes. Leaves fall and leaves grow, a mushroom takes the oak, the sun beats down the same in this place or that and life sparkles and prospers.
Today I’m helping a famous bacteria spread through an airport. Oh come on, don’t laugh. It will be all over the world soon, with a little assistance from me, Somerset to Dar es Salaam, from throats to coffins. Don’t look surprised, with those bubble-gum eyes when you realise I’m serious. I have to help all life, you see, the entire disparate and desperate tapestry of the planet, and the pathogens outnumber your kind, they’re so industrious. Human anti-biotics have hurt them awfully for so long and we can’t have that now Fate has asked me to stop favouring you and restore neutrality. It’s such a pity single cell bugs have no conversation, but then again you don’t think I’m real, so neither did we, as I delayed you at the airport for another two minutes.
