My Life With Eva

by Alex Barr

  “I don’t want to connect anyone.”

  He said, “You’re always phoning. Who were you on to this morning?”

  “Sue Perkins.”

  “If I want jokes I’ll turn the telly on.”

  Sue Perkins—that’s who she sounds like—is in the reference library. I used to talk to her a lot. I can’t phone from here. I have to make do with what I can remember.

  Phobos crosses the Martian sky in only four and a half hours.

  The Martian satellites may be captured asteroids.

  I’d like to capture Deimos. Imagine it brought here. Go on, try. Lying outside … I was going to say, our house. Lying outside the town hall. Six miles high, ten long, seven and a half wide. Covered in dust and grooves and craters. It’d sink in quite a bit. They’d have to re-route the buses. Move the day centre. Not that that matters now.

  ‘I won’t be here all your life.’

  I was terrified last night. Someone came in, his shoes creaked, he smelt of smoke. It was Dad. Ha ha, I thought it was. Hard and brittle with bits flaking off.

  I said, “Go away.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, so it wasn’t Dad. He gripped hard.

  I said, “Gerroff.”

  He said, “Someone’s overexcited.”

  It was Michael Gove.

  I tried to pinch his hand but he kept taking it away and putting it back, playing a game, not letting me. I could hear his metal watch strap.

  He said, “So you’re the culprit.”

  “What’s a culprit?”

  He just laughed. What is a culprit? I’d ask Bruce Forsyth, but I never meet him now.

  Dad came in the kitchen. I was making a model, you can’t guess what. Wrong! The other one, Deimos.

  He said, “You’d be better off making baskets.”

  He didn’t ask what the model was. Maybe it was that accurate he could tell it was Deimos at half an inch to the mile.

  He said, “Instead of wasting your time.”

  The model got lost then. I threw it at him.

  He said, “A bloody good thing you can’t see. Or I’d show you the look on your face.”

  I got up in the night. I could tell it was night by the quiet traffic. You can’t tell here, night and day are the same. I found the model under a chair but it hadn’t gone hard. How do you make a model of a moon of Mars? Get a potato the right size, put papier-mâché over it. The papier-mâché dries hard like rock. Because that’s all the moons are, big rocks.

  I like rocks. When I was five Dad took me to the sea and I held a pebble. It was smooth but after a bit you noticed little pits. The sea made the other pebbles go, ‘Sssh, sss’.

  I tried putting the model in the oven. When it warmed up the oven smelt of stale mackerel. I kept checking but the model wouldn’t go hard. Dad was asleep upstairs. I found his lighter fuel and poured it on. It took me ages to find his matches. When I tried to light it the fuel had dried so I put loads more on.

  Michael Gove said, “Alan the arsonist,” and I lashed out but he must have backed away because my hand just grazed the buttons on his cardigan. He laughed. What’s an arsonist?

  “You won’t be asked to identify your father.” A woman told me that afterwards. She didn’t sound like anyone. I said it didn’t matter not seeing, I’d know Dad by his smell.

  She said, “Dead people smell different.”

  Crisp like burnt toast. She wouldn’t let me near to touch him. Even though I hadn’t touched him since I was eight.

  ‘What will you do when I’m not here?’ I’m doing it.

  Theory & Design in the Age of Innocence

  We walked to a tree. The sun through its leaves and branches was warm on my skin. We looked at one of the things hanging on it.

  “Right,” he said, “find a name for that.”

  “The pehehehargorribololum.”

  Daddy sighed. “Isn’t that a bit of a mouthful?”

  I laughed. ‘A bit of a mouthful’ was a good joke, because the thing hanging there was tasty. I’d tried one and it was sweet and juicy with a small end you could bite to get started.

  He said, “You don’t want to say all that each time you refer to it.”

  “Why not? Who would I refer to it to?”

  He smiled—at least I think he did, because I could only look with my eyes half shut.

  “To me of course. Or to yourself, to help you think about it.”

  “Well how about just the pehehehar?”

  “I might think you were laughing.”

  “Just pehar, then,” I grumbled. “Or even pear.”

  “Pear sounds fine.”

  Daddy moved away and I followed, protesting.

  “Where are we going? We haven’t finished that tree yet. There are lots of things on it.”

  “Yes, and they’re all pehars. Pears rather. The one we’ve just looked at isn’t the pear, it’s a pear.”

  I pulled a face. I was getting a headache.

  “What if I want to refer to that one?”

  I pointed to the fruit at the very top.

  “You say, ‘The pear at the top of the tree.’”

  “You’ve just said ‘the pear.’ You said we had to say ‘a pear.’” I looked longingly at the treetop. “Can’t I call that one the phlegorog?”

  Daddy sighed again. The leaves all around us stirred.

  “It’s not worth giving them individual names. They don’t last long enough. If you don’t pick that one soon it’ll fall off and rot, and those stripy things you haven’t named yet will eat it.” He looked at me with a frown—I think it was a frown. “Look, talking of stripy things, why don’t we leave fruit and name an insect?”

  “Fine by me.”

  We walked—I walked, he sort of glided—to a clearing, past trees loaded with the things that only yesterday I decided to call mangoes, bananas, and figs. On the grass under the fig tree was a creature with big back legs, the knees back to front.

  I said, “Spregglygoggorus.”

  “Sheer cacophony, pathetic,” he spat, showering me with a tropical storm of saliva. “Find something euphonious.”

  I pretended to understand. “All right, cackledeflumius.”

  “Please! Look, an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified doesn’t work well. Just name things for what they do.”

  “But I want to be original.”

  “Originality is overrated,” he said, with some bitterness, I thought.

  The thing jumped.

  “All right, grassleaper.”

  He grunted. “I don’t like that s to l transition.”

  “Not euphonious,” I sneered.

  “Just bloody awkward.”

  “All right, grasshopper. Even though it doesn’t hop.”

  He nodded. ”Sometimes sound takes precedence over sense.”

  We walked on into a clearing. There were two big beasts with clumsy-looking feet, sarcastic expressions, and humps.

  “Did you design these, Daddy?” (I didn’t say I thought they were a disaster.)

  “Who else? You think I had help from a committee?”

  He sounded so cross I didn’t dare ask what a ‘committee’ was.

  I said, “I suppose it’s one name for both.”

  “Far more convenient. And please, think expressiveness. Think euphony.”

  “Camelammalamma.”

  He raised a huge eyebrow. “Expressive, yes. Euphonious to a degree. But a sign of the true artist is what he chooses to leave out.”

  I could tell which way the wind was blowing, “All right, camel.”

  “Good.”

  I studied the beasts. “They aren’t the same,” I objected. “One’s got something hanging off its belly.”

  “Yes. That’s a he-camel. The other’s a she-camel.”

  Just then the thing on the he-camel started to grow. It stretched and stretched until I thought it might burst. Suddenly the he-camel put his front legs on the back of the other camel and made the thing
disappear. He made very strange movements. My skin began to feel hot, and my willy very heavy. I looked down and saw I was stretched to bursting just like the camel.

  “What are we to do with you?” Daddy asked.

  “I don’t know,” I moaned.

  “Hmm. It occurs to me that you’re the only creature without a mate.” He sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Next morning I was eating a pear—still annoyed because I preferred pehehehar—when Daddy called me. I found him looking at a heap of wool and bone, the remains of a sheep. They seem to die easily.

  He said, “Adam, I’m going to make you a mate.”

  “Out of that lot? I thought you made me out of clay?”

  He looked around as if someone else might be listening, glowing red like he does when he’s cross. Or embarrassed.

  “That’s as may be. Do you want a mate or not?”

  “Well it’s not ‘not’,” I grumbled.

  “Then watch.”

  He took some of the leg bones and stretched them. He squeezed the skull so it was nearly round, I’m not sure how. He did things to the other bones, then laid them all out in the dust, in a shape which I had to admit (feeling my own bones with my fingers) was pretty similar to mine. But I still wasn’t optimistic about how she’d turn out.

  Sensing my doubts, Daddy said, “This is pragmatic design. Using readily available materials as a starting point.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or you could call it elementarist.”

  I began to feel more confident. He obviously knew what he was doing.

  “What’s elementarist?”

  “An element is a structural part that clearly registers in the composition. Preferably of simple geometric form.”

  “Great.”

  He pulled down some creeper, cleared the tough stems of leaves, and strung them along the bones.

  “Now we have an armature. Right. You can help.”

  We went to a stream, where he told me to dig handfuls of soft mud from the bottom and put it into his cupped hands. As his hands are very much bigger than mine it took a long time.

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “Is that what you’ll say to your mate when she asks you to you-know-what?”

  “No.”

  “No, so keep at it.”

  When we had enough we went back to the bones and he moulded the clay around them. I was so excited! It was beginning to look like a real creature. I wasn’t sure whether it looked like me, so I went to a still pool to check my reflection. I nearly fell in.

  When I got back she was standing up. He was just giving her hair, from the wool from the dead sheep. He put plenty on her head, and quite a lot on her lower belly. I wasn’t sure about the body hair.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Ornament. You’ve got hair there, haven’t you?”

  “Not as much as that.”

  He looked offended. “Ornament isn’t a crime.”

  “It’s all right, Daddy. I’m sure she’ll be great.”

  I went close. She had eyes, a nose, and lips like mine, but—maybe my imagination—her face reminded me of a sheep. One of her eyes was bigger than the other.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Adam. You don’t want too much symmetry. It has a deadening effect.”

  “Right.”

  She was unlike me in having two big lumps on her chest. They were different sizes—to match her eyes, I supposed. Daddy smiled, at least I think he did; when he’s glowing I can never tell.

  “I made those with implants of that fruit.” (What I later called melon.) “Do you like them, Adam? When you get to know her you can fondle them. Right, take her away. Oh—you might like to name her first.”

  “Unaroonakaboona,” I offered.

  Daddy raised a sardonic eyebrow.

  “All right, just Una.” To her I said, “Hello, Una.”

  “Uechch.”

  She sounded like one of those jumping things in ponds. (Must remember—I still haven’t named those.)

  “Shall we go for a walk?”

  “Uh-eech.”

  I took her hand and off we went, Daddy watching us proudly.

  The sun was going down when we got back. Daddy was lying in the clearing dozing, glowing deep purple. He heard the rustle of leaves as we approached, sat up, and smiled down on us.

  “I was tired after all that effort. Well son, how did it go?”

  “It didn’t. For one thing she doesn’t walk right. She keeps falling over.”

  “Too much asymmetry, perhaps.”

  “And, she just makes noises unrelated to any meaning.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Too much reliance on language can lead one astray, you know.”

  “Maybe, but also she smells like rotting vegetation. I fondled her—she didn’t seem to mind, at least all she said was, ‘Wer wer’—but her skin feels like tree bark.”

  Daddy gave another deep sigh which shook the forest.

  “I’m sure the concept is right. The fault must be in the execution. Oh well, back to the drawing-board.”

  “What’s a drawing-board?”

  “Never mind. Your descendants will find out. If you ever have any,” he added darkly.

  And off he went, crashing through the bushes. Descendants? What are they? As for Una, I haven’t seen her around.

  Daddy decided that because I’m such a good ‘specimen’, whatever that means, he’d try again using what he called iconic design.

  “I’m going to model her directly onto you. Actually this may be canonic rather than iconic. Either way, here goes.”

  He told me to stand still and started fiddling around behind me.

  “Ow, you’re hurting.”

  He tut-tutted, told me to wait, and went into the bushes. He came back with a length of creeper dripping with sap and held it for me to drink from. Whatever it was, it made me feel good and I couldn’t feel what he was up to at my back. All I was aware of was his shadow in the dust ahead of me, his hand busy with a knife and lumps of something—clay perhaps.

  I must have dozed off standing up, because the next thing I knew Daddy was tapping me on the shoulder.

  “Feel behind you,” he said.

  I put my hands behind my back. My back had gone further away! In fact my lower back felt more like a belly. It was a belly. A very smooth belly, not hairy like mine. I moved my hands further up. There was something sticking out which I could just about reach—two things sticking out. They felt very pleasant, soft but firm, but my shoulders hurt trying to get my arms up to them. I bent forward to see if that made it easier.

  “Ow,” said a voice. “My back.” A musical voice, not gruff and booming like Daddy’s, more like a bird singing.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I haven’t got a name.”

  Daddy came round and looked down at me, glowing gold, with a huge grin. He spread his hands as if to say, ‘Sorted.’ I wanted to call my new companion Deedledeedledurdur but thought better of it.

  “I’d like to give you a long name,” I said, “but Daddy only likes them short. So I’ll call you Dee.”

  Dee and I spent quite a few days together. She was nice to talk to. When she wanted my attention she bumped the back of my head with hers. She noticed things around the place that I hadn’t. ‘Look at those birds gorging themselves on berries,’ for example. Or after it had rained and the big leaves of the gunnera (as I later called it) were dripping, ‘Listen. You can pick out a rhythm.’

  When we walked around we had to agree who was going to walk backwards. We took turns watching camels, sheep, and other beasts mating. “I’d like to do that,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  But we couldn’t. She could just about reach my willy, which was nice, especially as her hands were softer than mine, but it was harder for me to reach what she had instead. I tried bending and putting my hand between our legs, but she complained again about her back.

  In th
e end we fell out. If she said, “You say such interesting things, Adam,” I wasn’t sure she wasn’t being sarcastic because I couldn’t see her face. When I did a poo she complained about the smell, and when she peed I got annoyed because she couldn’t do it properly.

  “It’s no good,” I said to Daddy one day. “I need to get her off my back.”

  “And him off mine,” Dee added.

  “Oh dear.”

  “What is iconic design anyway?” I asked.

  “You use an existing artefact as a pattern and change one aspect. That’s why I built her onto you.”

  “We can’t watch the moon rise with our arms around each other,” Dee complained. “I’m tired of taking turns to look at things. And we can’t you-know-what like the camels.”

  Daddy sighed. “I’ll do what I can.”

  One morning I woke with a start. My back and bottom seemed to be on fire. I felt behind me. My bottom had no cheeks! It was horribly flat.

  Daddy turned up, glowing amber.

  “Where’s Dee?” I asked.

  “Gone off. You wouldn’t like the look of her, Adam. Her back’s raw and she’s got no bottom.”

  “Won’t it grow back?”

  Daddy looked embarrassed. “To be honest she doesn’t like the look of you either, bottom or no bottom.”

  I later learned that, not believing we were the only couple on earth, she’d gone to search for another mate.

  Weeks went by. My bum grew back. I kept asking Daddy when he was going to try again, but he just changed the subject, pointing out more plants and animals for me to name. He quibbled all the time, so it took ages. I wasn’t getting any job satisfaction, or willy satisfaction for that matter. I kept remembering the feel of Dee’s hands, and my hands on her belly, and feeling sad. Watching animals mate didn’t excite me anymore. Also, I didn’t see much of Daddy, and began to feel really lonely.

  One evening, sitting by a waterfall watching the sunset through the banana leaves, I heard an unfamiliar voice, powerful and melodious. It scared me so much I hid among some rocks.

  “Run along dear,” it said. “Say hello. He won’t bite. You-know-who tried to make him but couldn’t get him up and running. I had to sort him out. Good luck.”

  None of it made sense. Whose was the voice? Who was it talking to? Had to sort me out—how? I sat hunched, waiting for whoever spoke to go away. After a minute or so there was a rustling in the undergrowth behind me, and then, amazingly, soft hands on my shoulders.