by Lucy Ellmann
Even Dot noticed the smell of orange blossom in the hotel garden, where lizards scampered over rocks. It was the first time she’d seen the Mediterranean!
They studied traffic interaction from their hotel window, which looked out on to a busy T-junction. Everyone seemed to have an equal right-of-way: scooters, buses, trucks and cars swerved round each other, honking but miraculously not hitting! Every once in a while a pedestrian would very slowly walk across the road. If you walked ELEGANTLY enough, you were safe. Hesitate — or RUSH it — and you’re doomed.
They took a boat to Capri, saw the Blue Grotto, swam a mile off-shore, fell entwined upon a beach and lay there until waves measured their bulk. Then John ate a bad clam. So Dot went alone the next day to a shoe market and got lonely and depressed and chatted up, but managed to buy some nice shoes also.
They went by train to Pompeii. Dot had never believed that Pompeii really exists, BUT IT DOES. John bought a guide-book and read aloud to Dot about volcanic plugs and peristyles as they walked along. He told her Pompeii was dedicated to Venus, goddess of love and the regenerative force of nature. Her cunt still soft and sore from all their fucking, Dot approved of such forces. John ran off to check out the brothel with its two-thousand-year-old stone beds. They agreed to meet up in an hour at the amphitheatre.
There are many dots in Pompeii (two just in the NAME). Mosaics are made up of dots. The mouths and eye sockets of the corpses. The sun-glasses of the tourists and their camera lenses and the sausage slices on their pizzas and the chewing-gum they spit out on the ancient grooved roads. Tourists themselves are dots from a distance.
Dot could see them below her as she walked along the perimeter path on top of the city wall. She was all alone up there, with some faint sunshine hitting her right arm and a nice view of the mountains beyond. She thought of the doomed inhabitants of Pompeii who had seen the same view, and wondered yet again WHY they all died. Dot couldn’t figure it out! They had died running, or crouched inside buildings, suffocating from fumes? Or ash? Dot couldn’t help wanting to give everybody a fairer chance of escape.
Dot’s feet in their brand-new high-heeled sandals were beginning to HURT, blisters were forming, disaster loomed. But she soldiered on. Looking down at the ground, she noticed ANTS scuttling there beneath her thudding feet. POMPEIIAN ANTS, just going about their business, making plans, ENJOYING THEMSELVES, unaware that they were about to be OBLITERATED by some senseless, meaningless force (Dot). She TRIED to avoid stepping on them, but she was due in the amphitheatre!
You go to these historic places and you think you will be IMMUNE, that you can see and absorb historic places and historic CATASTROPHES and be unaffected. But Dot had seen how easily people can be obliterated, even people with GREAT INTERIOR-DECOR IDEAS, and it changed her. (She told John later but it didn’t change him so MUCH.)
Dot in Danger!
On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Dot began to fear death. Up until then everything had been PERFECT. She had a perfect husband, perfect children (or WOULD have, if she’d ever had any), a perfect home, perfect body, perfect accoutrements, perfect table manners, a PERFECT LIFE! She even had friends in the Jaywick area with whom she played cards and WON. There was no other word for Dot and her life but: PERFECT.
Ah, but near-perfection’s better! The haphazard, the untried. There’s no FUTURE in perfection, nowhere left to go. There’s no LIFE in it. You stop loving, stop trying, when everything is perfect.
There is pleasure in decay, in the awkward and the fumbling, a good pianist muffing a Schubert sonata. There is pleasure in states of disrepair, disuse, the doomed, degenerate, unconnected, out-of-place, the miserable, malodorous, uncorrected and uncontained. There is deep pleasure to be had in old cement and gravel, cemeteries and the overgrown gardens of people who don’t care. In lakes the colour of anti-freeze, in which bacteria bloom. In rotting refuse and its attendant gulls, old army bases, abandoned runways, brickwork as it crumbles. Buddleia thrusting itself between forgotten railway sleepers — the smell of it is GREAT.
INDUSTRIAL WASTELAND, the last real wilderness on offer! Stare at the cracks in which green things grow.
At midnight on the dot, on the eve of her fortieth birthday, in perfect cliché fashion, Dot realised she would some day die. No amount of dieting, exercising, moisturising or medicating could avert it. Nor would MONEY help. Death would come, it was already on the way to her DOOR, and nobody could save her (nobody saved Schubert!). An unspeakably UGLY thing would come — death — uninvited and probably unannounced — to her — PERSONALLY — some time — and it would insist on being faced ALONE.
She might die AT ANY MOMENT. Dot lay in bed next to her magnificent hubby and thought she could already smell the putrefaction of her CORPSE. There was a slight whiff of it. Lying in bed on the eve of her fortieth-birthday, Dot got a glimpse of her own SKELETON. She imagined herself just BONES: no skin, no fat, no muscle, no sinews, no tissues, no veins, arteries or capillaries, no eyes, no tongue, no ears, no glands, no valves, no membranes, no ducts, no enzymes, no bile, no saliva, NO NUTTIN. None of the glue that holds you together! Her skeleton, just LYING AROUND somewhere, long after her perfect tits and ass had MELTED AWAY, or been eaten by LARVAE or something, forgotten, all memory of her gone. Dot lay in bed on the eve of her fortieth birthday and realised that DEATH WRECKS EVERYTHING.
She listened to her breathing and thought, it might stop at any moment. One day it definitely WILL stop and that will be that. Unimaginable not to breathe! She grasped her rib-cage, felt her heart beating and knew that it could, and WOULD, one day stop, probably WITHOUT WARNING. No apology, no refund, NOTHING.
It could happen TONIGHT, thought Dot. And even if it doesn’t happen tonight IT WILL HAPPEN. It will all be taken away from me, only hair and FINGERNAILS left, still GROWING. What is it with fingernails anyway? What do they think they’re DOING? They think there’s still HOPE? Do they expect to be RESCUED? Fingernails are CREEPY. They’re actually little WINDOWS to the insides of your fingers! WHO NEEDS THIS?
On the eve of her fortieth birthday Dot finally managed to get to sleep. She dreamt about a kelim-clad alligator which had invaded her hotel room in some sunny clime. Dot did not think the hotel management would want an alligator in her room, so she tried to shoo it out on to the balcony. End of dream. The alligator probably represented Dot’s grandmother but to explain why we’d have to go WAY BACK and that would cost you more (it would also negate the illusion of progress created by moving in a more or less forward direction).
Full of mortality fears and the alligator dream, Dot got up the next day — her BIRTHDAY! — and went to the kitchen to make John the perfect cup of tea. He always said it was perfect so she always tried to make it perfect again (he tried to ignore the crucial role TEA COSIES played in this process). John drank his first cup of tea in bed, which indeed IS the perfect way to start the day.
The day they were starting was starting elsewhere for six billion people, twenty billion chickens and fifty-four billion galaxies. Dot was just a dot in the COSMOS! Nonetheless, she was starting her day, as one must. I think toast and jam are called for, but opinions differ. I have had to eat SALAD on occasion, or cold soup, and once, THE TINIEST BAGEL IN THE WORLD.
Dot looked out of her kitchen window at her rock garden, what was left of it, and thought, I could die of cancer or a stroke. I could have a heart attack or liver failure or an EMBOLISM, or some long humiliating illness involving DIARRHOEA. I could die in a car crash, train crash, plane crash or ferry DISASTER. I could be MURDERED: stabbed, strangled, shot, garrotted, macheted, pulverised, electrocuted, torn LIMB from LIMB. I could die from neglect, exposure, sunstroke, malnutrition. I could be eaten by a SHARK (Dot had been badly affected by Jaws) or sputter out like the woman painted gold from head to toe in Goldfinger (likewise). I could be pelted with PUMICE STONES (Pompeii).
Dot realised she could die from her own mistakes or someone else’s: she could walk out in front of a bus, eat something p
oisonous or place herself in the hands of a CRAZED ANAESTHESIOLOGIST. She could die EMBARRASSINGLY, drowning in a cup of coffee or having something silly fall on her head, like a poodle or pork chop, leading to a death no one can speak of without GIGGLING.
You can die having done everything right: Dot would die having completed any number of rearrangements of knick-knacks, and never having smoked a CIGARETTE. She would probably die before she’d sorted out her shoe rack or made much headway with the dried fruit she kept buying. You can die HEROICALLY, in some frantic aquatic rescue operation, or HAPHAZARDLY, taking others with you: fire, flood, salmonella. At ANY MOMENT you could find yourself so ill you have to decide whether life is still worth LIVING, before it’s TOO LATE and you’re lying paralysed from the neck down in some hospital bed, having already watched all the Columbo episodes in the WORLD. Humbling, to have to lie there re-watching Columbo.
Dot could die before she was READY, in the middle of something she REALLY WANTED TO DO. Most of all, she didn’t want one of those long lingering painful shameful deaths, with months of involuntary spasms, the colostomy bag, amputations, swollen MOON face, night-nurse brutality and other patients stealing from her purse. Dot craved and expected PERFECTION. Terrible trick to play on you if life were to end before you got it RIGHT.
After John left for work, Dot busied herself sweeping up the curled dead or dying wasps that lay about the hallway, lured there by the light she left on at night. DAYLIGHT had not cured her fears of mortality, so she resorted to HOUSEWORK.
But death’s the best housekeeper! Does your dusting AND your polishing, eats the skin right off your BONES.
And so began the traumatic year of 1996.
The Traumatic Year of 1996
Dot in the universe. No more or less significant than anyone else. Nor was she perfect. She THOUGHT she was, apart from her Fatal Flaw. This was a bit like a third nipple or birthmark you can’t get rid of (though it was neither of these). Trust me, modern medicine offered no solution, nor was the problem covered in the Trusty Tips section of The Clacton Wanderer (serving Clacton and the surrounding community).
Apart from that Fatal Flaw though, Dot considered herself pretty sweet and nice! And it was her intention only to become SWEETER and NICER. Poor duck, she believed that niceness could grow! She had failed, despite forty years of existence, to note the universality of decay.
When the weather cleared at 3:30, nice sweet Dot set off for the shops. The roads, though muddy, were not busy. 3:30 is not RUSH HOUR in Jaywick Sands. Dot reached the corner shop without incident.
The corner shop wasn’t actually on a corner, nor was it close to Dot’s house. So when she mentioned ‘the corner shop’, people often thought she meant ANOTHER shop that WAS on the corner. But that shop was hardly ever OPEN and was hardly what you’d call a SHOP. The one Dot called ‘the corner shop’ was much more like a typical corner shop than the real corner shop would ever be.
A window ran the length of the shop-front, displaying old fruit in separate boxes. Sometimes a box was getting kind of low, the apples wrinkled and dented and the oranges mouldy. Bananas hung above, sometimes greenish, sometimes just right, but more often speckled and bruised. People have never reached AGREEMENT on ripeness in a banana. This is what makes selling bananas such a FREE-FOR-ALL.
High above were things that nobody understood or bought, though they might have if they’d known they were there: hair grips, combs, toothbrushes, beach toys. Below, in darkness, lurked vegetables. Vacuum-packed into the rest of the shop were all the other necessities for a MINIMAL LIFE in Jaywick. The shop wasn’t MESSY, it was just stuffed to the BRIM. Old ladies came in who didn’t want to search for anything, so the shopkeeper man or woman would come out from behind the counter to help them. They also emerged to get you your fruit (in case you dented it MORE) and the (invisible) vegetables.
Dot and John had a funny story about the shopkeeper couple which they told at dinner parties. John’s car had broken down once in a country lane and he needed to phone the AA. So he knocked on the door of a nearby farmhouse, and who should poke their heads out of the upstairs window but the shopkeeper couple? In their JAMBOS. Dot and John had always assumed they lived above (or below) the SHOP, but in fact they merely exploited Jaywick all day and ESCAPED it at night! (Good idea.)
Dot was in a hurry. She only wanted to buy a few dull items here before driving on to the Safeway’s in Clacton. As she entered the shop she gave an old lady by the door quite a BUMP. Dot felt bad about this and made apologetic manoeuvres to get around the woman, while secretly hoping the mishap would enable her to beat the old bird to the TILL!
Women when shopping are DIFFERENT, not so nice. You see them in supermarkets, eyeing their prey. It is the primitive life of the hunter-gatherer. She seeks. She listens to stirrings in the forest (of aisles), her eyes attuned to any sign of a bargain. She is not bedazzled by plumage and packaging. Nor does she feel the cold as she nears the refrigerated section. FOOD ON THE TABLE: that is her quest.
Dot rushed around finding things and was standing innocently in line near the till, safe in the belief that she would soon be served, when she heard a crash. By squidging too close to the woman in front in order to gain a firm place in the notional queue, Dot had managed to knock over an entire stack of NOODLES, on Special Offer. Dot now had to give up her promising position in the queue in order to REERECT the stack of noodles. There proved to be a KNACK to stacking that Dot LACKED. Every time she got the goddam noodles into a pile they fell down again, tubes, bows, shells, stars, dots, space-ships, the LOT. When Dot looked up from her stacking she found the queue had become impossibly long, and her RIVAL was in it!
Dot suddenly gave up on EVERYTHING, maybe even life itself. She no longer saw the POINT of noodles — why do people need their food curled, tied or TWISTED into silly shapes? What does this say about HUMANITY? Dot could not resurrect the stack of noodles, she couldn’t beat the old biddy, had no TIME for this nonsense anyway, needed to LEAVE. So in the end she just sort of TIDIED the bags of noodles on the floor, gave the woman shopkeeper a look meant to seem abashed but received as surly, and left the shop feeling quite flustered. She didn’t understand why people had to be so UNPLEASANT when she tried so hard to be NICE.
Brooding on this and whether John would prefer her birthday supper to be Stir-fried Squid with Chilli, Chorizo, Tomatoes, Baby New Potatoes and Roasted Red Peppers OR Sea Bass with Salsa Verde on a bed of Wild Mushroom Risotto (Rick Stein has a lot to answer for), Dot drove rather hastily up Lincoln Convertible Avenue to Buick, then on to Daimler. She crossed Volvo with the intention of reaching Range Rover the back way via Humber, and was just speeding up as she neared the edge of town when she noticed roadworks at the junction of Vauxhall Terrace and Cuttlefish Crescent, a tricky spot (all those TENTACLES). Not wishing to SLOW DOWN (it being her custom when leaving Jaywick to make a quick getaway), Dot skilfully mounted the bank where a child was playing and ZIPPED past a big roadwork machine that was scooping stuff. She was momentarily absorbed by the grace and skill with which the scooper was scooping and distracted enough by this to hit what she thought was a traffic cone. She pressed on, gripping the steering wheel with tense and scrawny hands.
But there was something funny about hitting that cone, something UNFORGETTABLE. Once you’ve hit one you’ve got to hit ANOTHER. She sent several spinning, and watched them hopping about in her rear-view mirror as she raced through the countryside looking for MORE CONES. In her exhilaration she nearly hit a dog, a cat, a man in an electric wheelchair, a mouse and a magpie. She did run over some bugs (who KNOWS how many?) but nothing stopped her until she reached her favourite parking place at Safeway’s in Clacton (serving Clacton and the surrounding area). THEN she remembered the Sea Bass, the Risotto, and the KID — was there really a kid? — and vomited out the door into her favourite parking place (needless to say, her favourite parking place no longer).
To sum up. Dot left the house that afternoon feeling SWEET and VULNERA
BLE, a Birthday Girl! She returned some hours later a malevolent MONSTER, a femur-smashing FEMME FATALE whose Fatal Flaw was now the least of her worries. The repercussions of the car crash were numerous and complex and would need to be looked at by an EXPERT. I will elucidate but a few.
One repercussion was that Dot no longer felt she was a GOOD DRIVER! She consequently became a slightly WORSE driver, and drove with no ENJOYMENT, aware that elation can get the better of you and one thing lead to another until there are CONES flying and CREATURES DYING all over the godforsaken east coast of ENGLAND.
Another repercussion was the expense of getting a new car (Dot had a PHOBIA about the old one) and dealing with the new car mechanic in his bright-yellow overalls, who liked to explain car-engine intricacies in DETAIL. There were also insurance forms to fill out and legal letters that Dot was supposed to OPEN and READ.
Then there were all the radio bulletins about the boy’s progress (he’d broken his leg), followed eventually by frightened visits by Dot to the HOSPITAL to see the boy and his mother, who was very ANGRY. Also, whenever crashes or boys or cones were mentioned on TV, Dot felt faint.
Going places was complicated by Dot’s determination to avoid the crash SITE and anything associated with the crash (the corner shop and Cuttlefish Crescent were both ruled out). As a result Dot’s CARD GAME suffered. She didn’t even go to the ALTERNATIVE corner shop any more because she’d once seen someone going in who LOOKED like the boy’s mother and just the POSSIBILITY that it MIGHT be the mother was enough to send Dot home in a tremble.
Dot was appalled by the woman’s FURY. People act like there’s some intrinsic MERIT in motherhood and the way mothers behave. But every LIZARD thinks well of its offspring! Swans go to infinite pains for theirs. What does THAT prove? Fish sensibly ignore the whole business. Salmon have a purely romantic view of procreation — just an all-out battle upstream for the fuck of a lifetime and then TO HELL WITH IT.