The Microcosm

by Maureen Duffy

  and then nothing came though i struggled on beginning to feel cold and hungry and tired there was nothing that was my answer nothing for me somewhere id lost my chance when i hadnt even known what it was and now i was just an insignificant figure pretending to battle with forces that didnt care or know i existed at some vital point i hadnt understood hadnt known and it had gone away from me and would never come back linda was no longer the child she was herself id seen that yesterday she existed in a world quite apart from me one that would get farther and farther away as time went on and although she was all i had she had to get away from me or i should be repeating the old pattern all over again guy and i no longer existed for each other there was no one.

  what happened next. i came to the spot where the two boys had lain those summers ago and i stopped waited while the wind shoved its shoulder in my chest stood there trying to understand what had happened why i had suddenly felt lighter that day i hadnt understood but id got better id been able to go on all these years on that one moment i hadnt understood should i understand it now was that what i was here for. and did you understand. theyre a coupla queers do i have to spell it out for you men who go with men. but i still cant see why it should have made any difference to me why the school should have upset me so much and that teacher except that i was jealous of her i suppose mother losing her only chick. then why did you. there was no answer i turned away back along the beach the magic beach which had failed to free me this time. it wasnt the beach it was you who should have freed yourself the answer is always the same we have to do these things for ourselves. but sometimes we need help someone like doctor bailey or sister and there was no one. all they can do is show you things that you already know inside you but because they understand and accept them you can do the same. i know that now but not then at that moment there was nothing i couldnt see anything.

  wherever i looked down the years there was nothing and behind me there was nothing even to remember i might not have been born and i was no longer alive as i had been while i was living the child’s life linda had taken her own life on herself and she needed every bit of it if she wasnt to be overcome as id been. you didnt think of what would happen to her if you werent there. i only thought of what might happen if i was that i would find myself in that dusty room again at the end of the shadowed corridor only this time she would be trapped with me and become a shadow too in my nothingness i had never done anything for her except given her a life and then lived on it like a parasite now i would go away and she would grow up strong.

  the sleeping tablets were still there in the drawer from when id last needed them i got a glass of water from the bathroom poured them into my hand sat down on the edge of the bed and took them systematically one by one without any feeling of despair or pain only of being already at a great distance from what they call reality then i lay back on the bed and fell asleep.

  i wake to this room, when i open my eyes i shall see the flowers no longer burning fiercely beside the bed and the sunsplashed walls of this little ward the white counterpane and the window opposite. who am i lying here in the narrow bed with the world going on outside the window how did i get here and how long. im Marie and I haven’t been well. Marie and I are the same one myself lying in the bed looking at the flowers and out of the window. But I cant see anything except a patch of sky with clouds. Why don’t I get out of bed and look out of the window? Because there’s a wall there isn’t there and on the other side of the wall there is. Turn back the covers slowly sit on the side of the bed. Very weak still. I must have been here some time. Slippers under the bed now hold on and ease yourself gently towards the window on these cotton wool legs that are threatening to let you down at any sudden movement. Panting a little lean against the wall and look round the curtain. There’s the wall. But it isn’t very high I can see over it quite easily and on the other side there’s a sort of wild garden with bushes and flower beds rather untidy and paths that wander off out of sight. There’s somebody there digging in that bed. It’s a woman. Now she’s resting looking up at the house, leaning on her fork and looking up. Is she looking at my window? Can she see me? Now she’s gone back to her digging again. She looks very content. the fork going in easily under her foot. bend and heave up a chunk of earth, thresh it a little to break it down and then in with the fork again cutting a neat line. It would be good to be out there alone digging or just walking in the garden by yourself looking at buds thrusting through their skins. wallflowers too. Where did I see them last? At the school only it was too dark to see them very well and they were still wind-bitten. Those must smell lovely. What was it I wanted to get away from? The emptiness, I remember. The flowers by the bed, forsythia or is it jessamine I never know, anyway they don’t have any smell and the flowers are like bright yellow wax under my fingers.

  ‘Goodness Mrs. Pacey, I wondered where you’d gone.’

  ‘I’ve been looking out of the window. There’s nothing there except the wall and that isn’t very high and a garden on the other side with someone digging.’

  ‘That’s Miss Birk I expect. She drives the ambulance sometimes and looks after the garden for us. Do you think you should get back into bed now? We don’t want you to catch a cold.’

  ‘I’ve been ill haven’t I but I’m beginning to feel much better now.’

  ‘Good. I’ve brought you some tea and a couple of tablets to take Mrs. Pacey and then you should try to rest quietly til supper time. Dr. Bailey will pop in to see you later on. He’ll be pleased to see you’re feeling so much better.’

  ‘Is she still there?’

  ‘Miss Birk? Yes she’s still there but you mustn’t keep getting out of bed, you’re not strong enough for that yet. Perhaps Dr. Bailey will allow you up for an hour tomorrow to sit in a chair but you mustn’t overdo it at first.’

  ‘The flowers by my bedside.’

  ‘The ones your husband brought?’

  ‘Guy, yes. They’re starting to drop.’

  ‘I’ll take them away then shall I?’

  ‘Yes, please. Sister?’

  ‘Yes dear?’

  ‘Is thirty-three old?’

  ‘Of course not. Good gracious at thirty-three I’d hardly begun to live.’

  ‘That’s how I feel.’

  ‘Now I have to go and take the other patients their tea.’

  ‘Sister how did I get here?’

  ‘Your husband came home early from work to pick up some things and found you unconscious so they brought you here.’

  ‘I’m glad he found me.’

  ‘Will you promise to stay in bed when I’ve gone and not stand at the draughty window?’

  ‘Is she still there? As long as I know she’s still there and I shall see her again, as long as there’s time.’

  ‘Oh there’s plenty of time before you go home.’

  ‘Home? I don’t want to go home yet, not til I’ve thought it all out, till I’ve understood completely and know what to do.’

  ‘Dr. Bailey will help you to do that. Now try to get some sleep Mrs. Pacey and promise me, the window?’

  ‘I promise. Sister. My name’s Marie.’

  ‘SHE was, oh I don’t know, how would you describe it?’ said Matt. ‘I remember thinking when we were at school together that she was like a tender unopened flower. Do you mind me telling you all this?’

  She smiled a little. ‘No, why should I? It was all over and done with long ago, long before I knew you.’

  ‘Long before I knew too and there was nothing on her side of course except ordinary friendship. I used to think if any man takes her and hurts her, breaks something so delicate and vulnerable, that was the word I remember now that I used for her in my mind, I thought if anyone does that and I could feel a kind of rage rising inside me and still I didn’t know why I should feel like this, not til much later when I got to college and found so much of it there and started to take stock of myself. And then she sent me an invitation to the wedding. I didn’t go of course. Now I suppo
se she’s a typical suburban mum with two or three kids a brick box with all the latest gadgets and a commuter husband and the thought of me never crosses her mind. Why should it? I sometimes wonder?’

  ‘What do you wonder?’

  ‘Whether you wouldn’t be happier like that.’

  ‘But I love you. If I’d been desperate for that kind of life I could have had it over and again.’

  ‘All your past lovers madam!’

  ‘But I didn’t love them, not enough to marry them. Mostly I could see it was something else they were looking for anyway not really me and I didn’t want to be a substitute.’

  ‘Still you went to bed with them.’

  ‘Not all, only some, two or three.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I thought women were always supposed to remember these things.’

  ‘Men like to think so of course.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ll remember what it was like with me.’ He said it, he heard himself say it quite deliberately knowing it would hurt, watching the hurt come into her eyes, saying it not to hurt but out of his need, trying to make her say what he wanted to hear her say, to wound her into some defensive answer that would do him for the moment, carry him along a little further. Yet at the same time he thought that it was worthless a reply forced out like that as if he’d twisted her arm and childish of him to need it. ‘I’ve learnt nothing,’ he thought, ‘still a kid crying out for mother-love. Why can’t I stand up by myself and not need to be reassured, given lollipops, and anyway you know you won’t get them there, you know you won’t so why keep on trying.’ He took a step forward and put his arms round her, holding her so that her head rested against his shoulder. ‘I’m glad I’m taller than you, that you’re only little. What time did you say we’d be there?’

  ‘If we get there by half past eight we can get a seat near the band. It’s not so noisy up there.’

  Blades of light scythe through the dark air mowing down the night in swathes that fall blackly from the lamp-path, lying thick in the gutter and at the roadside. Inside the car is warm and drowsy with the scent of her body. She puts a light hand on his thigh and he is conscious of them both rushing under dark branches, cut off from the rest of the world by a thin skin of glass and painted metal, hurried along together in its soft upholstered belly. He winds down the window.

  ‘No wonder the advertisers exploit the car as a womb symbol.’

  ‘Oh there’s too much of that.’ She withdraws her hand to light a cigarette, making a small glow that comes and goes in the blackness like the fading and blooming of a blown ember. ‘Everything’s a symbol of something else. What happens when you get to the something else?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well draw a car and it’s a symbol of a womb, draw a womb and what have you got?’

  ‘Motherhood I suppose. Except that wombs are pretty unprepossessing things, rubbery and clinical like pigs’ hearts in a butcher’s window only really signifying surgery and pain and death unless you express them in abstract terms. You know figurines like the ones in Blegen’s Troy. They puzzled me for a long time, trying to see them as representations of the mother goddess without arms or legs like a mutilated Aphrodite. I didn’t see why they should have made them like that. After all they had eyes. They knew humans had arms and legs so why not whatever gods or is total anthropomorphism a late decadent development. That can’t be because the neolithic ones are closer to the original human shape and they’re earlier. So they must have progressed towards greater abstraction. Those little blobs on top of bigger blobs are too crude for failed females, if you see what I mean, for people who lived in walled cities and made fine pots and bronzeware. But if they were abstractions, symbols of a desired fertility what would they mean to an ordinary little woman touching the rough stone with a sort of fierce reverence to bring her a son. It would be the essence of womanhood surely, her own womb with the child in it. That’s what I think they mean.’

  ‘But a womb isn’t that shape is it with a child in it?’

  ‘No, but then they wouldn’t know that unless they went in for cannibalism which there isn’t any evidence for. I mean they wouldn’t have seen inside a human body. Animals yes but even then not animals carrying young. They were very selective in their slaughtering as far as we can tell from the bones. They soon learnt about killing the goose that laid the golden egg. A newborn child or calf must look rather like that particularly if it’s born in a caul which is traditionally supposed to be lucky. So I could be right, though I can’t really prove it of course. It comes under the heading of beliefs and ritual and you know how the old die-hards hate that, shy away from it. That’s the trouble with so many of the interesting things, you can’t prove them and I’m not even in a position to try.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Oh I know it’s my own fault but there we are. We’ve been into all that and it’s entirely my own choice but it doesn’t stop me thinking even if I’m nothing but a greasy mechanic all day. Anyway you’re the sixth drawer of chamber pots in the country so one of us is making a contribution to the total sum of knowledge. The cause goes forward. Funny it should have been just that I found in the wood and it was before you got this job too so I couldn’t have been influenced. The female symbol to represent them all. But you don’t believe in all that of course.’

  ‘I’ve heard too much of it. “You are walking through a wood and suddenly you come upon the utensil. What is it?” I take it with a good big pinch that’s all. Did you know I’ve got a diploma from an institute that says I’m an expert in these things?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘There are a lot of things you haven’t seen yet. I’ll get it out and show you some time.’

  ‘So having been through it you end up thinking it’s a lot of old eye-wash?’

  ‘Not all. There’s something there of course but they make a system out of it, wrap it up in fancy words, and then it gets into the wrong hands, the unqualified, trading on the fact that it’s a field where everyone tries his hand a little just in the course of everyday life rubbing against other people, you know.’

  ‘See that silly bugger can’t wait, has to nip in and cut me up; about six inches between him and that lorry and he’ll go home and tell his wife what a good driver he is, how smart. I’m doing just over thirty so what was he doing? Come off the by-pass I suppose. Thank God I don’t have to use up my aggression that way. There we are? a perfect example of what you were just saying.’

  ‘You use yours other ways.’

  The suggestion prickled the hairs at the back of his neck. ‘You’re a bad girl when I’m driving.’ He heard her smile in the dark inside of the car, with a low sound in the throat, and knew how her face would be though his eyes never leave the road. The car runs out from under the intricate vaulting of plaited branches the bare flanks of the common drop back from the pressure of marching houses outcropping from the core of the city, sprouting from the tarmac skin along the radiants. He took his right hand from the wheel and gestured. ‘The urban sprawl they call it but what’s the use of kicking; we belong to an urban civilisation and we might as well accept it and use it. You know I often imagine all those hundreds in their tiny bedrooms at the top of the parental mansion in Lugton and Bigthorpe and Bumpstead Major making the great decision about themselves and throwing their battered suitcases on the narrow beds, packing slacks and pullovers, shirts and socks with clocks, bought secretly and only worn in their own rooms, taking a last look in the mirror, a last look round at the cell where they first came to consciousness that they could never grow into the pattern set for them, feeling their desires running out over the edges of the mould, slopping out their parents would have said if they’d ever dared to tell them, or just knowing themselves made of a strange alloy that would never gell at the normal temperature, the die not take, never be stamped in the resistant flesh; sleeking back their hair and murmuring to the sallow features i
n the glass, you are, yes you are different, and turning and snapping the locks to on the case, taking hold of the handle, opening the door and shutting it firmly behind, going down the stairs with the memories, the demands, plucking at a sleeve whispering in an ear and falling back as the front door closes; down the road, no one can stop me now, and caught up in a train hurrying South or East to a life they’ve only dared to imagine between sleep and waking.’

  ‘But will it be dreams when they get here? Do they really have to come?’

  ‘Not if they’re like you perhaps. If the war hadn’t moved you, you’d have probably still been there, married to a bank manager with a nice house and a couple of children, but people like me and, say David, what could we do against the pressures of a smalltown closed society? Our only answer is to up and run, lose ourselves in the shelter of the city.’

  And the train pulls in, draws its length along the platform kerb, brakes wheezing with the effort, doors flung open, watch that door, opening on the foam of fairy seas, breaking against the barrier white surf of faces, all your tickets please, and the station booming like the public baths with echoes of feet, voices, slamming metal bouncing off the glass and girder roof. A female voice amplified as if the deity speaks from the throat of some brass idol sends its commands flying in scattered fragments of sound incomprehensible as the delphic oracle to strike the inattentive with apprehension and trembling. Step through, give up your ticket, all tickets please. Where do we go from here? Up to now it’s been easy. Get on a train and the machine will make all the decisions, carry you across country once you’ve set its wheels in motion, and spill you out of its tired belly at the appropriate time, a little late perhaps as the timetable shows but time enough for you with nothing in front of you. Almost as you draw through the suburbs you would hold the wheels back now with a braking will but set going like a sentence half spoken and regretted there’s no drawing back and now you’re on your own, beyond the man in uniform taking away your pass to security the decisions are all yours; resume responsibility for the feet that move you into the dour entrance hall, the place of transit where even the tramps and the meths drinkers, the hooked at the end of a visionary high who clog the benches for a little, are only passing through though they sit humped, motionless as statuary, limp hands crossed, or shuffle uneasily in their stale clothes, migrants brought down on this draughty perch by a sudden squall of down on your luck. Leave them; continue up the ramp and pause at the top of the steps. At your feet thunders the river of the Euston Road. You stand on the bank, held above the flood that sweeps along cars, buses, lorries; straws, leaves, logs whose waters are the dark waves of hurrying taxis. Go down, immerse yourself in the stream that can hide your past in the anonymous swirl of its waters until you no longer even remember yourself, the hurts soothed, the edges smoothed away.