Dot in the Universe

by Lucy Ellmann

  They went into a tiny café where impatient dogs were awaiting someone’s return. On the wall were little PAINTINGS done on cigarette packets and other empty containers: flower compositions and other more whimsical stuff. They were for sale! Dot bought two, one of roses against a black background, the other a trompe-l’oeil ASHTRAY with a smoking cigarette in it, painted on an old Camembert box. They were PERFECT, Dot thought. But a life based on perfection is a charade, a fraud carried out on yourself. Accept this and you’re in with a chance. Refuse and you get nothing.

  Their hotel room had beautiful french windows that opened on to a shared balcony. It was warm out so they left the windows open all night. The next morning the hotel CAT came in off the balcony, jumped on the bed and kneaded John’s buttocks, not unpleasurably, while John fucked Dot (no extra charge).

  On reaching Padstow they headed straight for Rick Stein’s restaurant, where they had some oysters and champagne! They had a nap at their guest house, followed by a stroll, and then RETURNED to Rick Stein’s restaurant in the evening to eat Pulpo a la Feria, Isinglass Sorbet, Prawn Jambalaya, Crushed New Potatoes with Watercress, and starfish-shaped cookies for dessert with their coffee. Everything on the menu cost £400. There was no sign of Rick Stein himself — a great disappointment to Dot who had long yearned for him in his buttoned-up white chef’s shirt.

  The guest house was rudimentary, the breakfast bad, and there was no SEX CAT. As soon as they’d paid, they went straight to Rick Stein’s BISTRO (a subsidiary of the restaurant) for an early lunch of Clappydoo Chowder, Mussel and Truffle Torte, Crayfish Gumbo, Monkfish and Turbot Timbale, and Crushed New Potatoes with Watercress on the side (£400). They told the waitress they were thinking of staying FOR EVER but that was just silly and a LIE: on exiting the restaurant they set off immediately for home.

  Dot felt REBORN, particularly when John played banjo on her knee (there’s an animality about music which is its hidden charm). But John had a surprise for Dot when they reached their house at 11 Abalone Avenue: his ‘penpal’, a bedraggled girl named Julie, whom Dot had never heard of before, was sitting on their doorstep. Dot obligingly made up a bed for her on the couch. She stayed for WEEKS.

  Julie was a quiet girl. The only problem was the way she SMOKED: she flicked her cigarette ash in the DIRECTION of the ashtray, not IN. Julie even used the brand-new painted trompe-l’oeil ashtray AS AN ASHTRAY and stubbed her cig OUT in it, unperturbed that the cig continued to burn, as well as the ashtray itself. Julie never noticed that it WAS a painted trompe-l’oeil imitation of an ashtray.

  Julie came into the kitchen one morning when John was at work, and announced to Dot, ‘I give good head. I fuck really good.’

  Clutching a tea cosy like a SHIELD, Dot offered Julie some tea. Julie payed no attention.

  ‘I’m quite famous in the business for double-penetration,’ she told Dot. ‘I’m willing to do anal if the guy’s not too big.’

  Julie had been a plain old ‘Reader’s Wife’ in a porn mag in Birmingham before she was DISCOVERED and sent to London to fuck some guy in a MOVIE. She returned to Birmingham full of excitement about her new career. But her hubby seemed a little HUFFY: he’d wanted to SHOW HER OFF, not SHARE.

  The marriage over, Julie had gone back to London to seek her fortune, and now lived in a flat in Shoreditch with nothing in it except a telephone and a pair of trainers — with the phone she received notification of future porn opportunities, with the shoes she could RUN AWAY from it all in the end. It was as if she had just INVENTED herself, just scrabbled out of an EGG.

  Julie spoke of her body as a WORK TOOL only; she was always getting stuff stuck into it or SUCKED OUT (a great fan of liposuction). In fact she considered plastic surgery essential to her career and spent most of her porn income on getting it done. She’d had LOTS of different BREASTS. She talked about them like OPTIONAL EXTRAS — she just couldn’t decide how big they ought to BE.

  The last movie she’d made was a Gothic horror thing. They had to film it at night with a lot of fake FOG, to which Julie was ALLERGIC. They kept pumping the fog at her when she was supposed to be giving somebody a BLOW-JOB, and it made her COUGH. She ended up fucking up the FUCKING scene too with her coughing. That was when she’d decided to accept John’s invitation to the seaside.

  Julie had first met John on a PORN FILM SET, where his ability to maintain an erection was much in demand. ‘If you’re good at something, you should be proud of it,’ Julie proclaimed.

  When Dot confronted John about all this on his return that evening, he said he’d gone into porn merely to augment his meagre income so that he could take Dot to Padstow after her suicide attempt (Rick Stein has a lot to answer for); the affair with Julie was just an occupational hazard.

  There is so much we accept as the NORM, so much stuff under the surface we don’t look at because IT AIN’T PRETTY. The weirdness of desire, of fucking or NOT fucking the same person more than once, the wish to fuck AT ALL in between the eating and the shitting and the sleeping and the dreaming and the dressing and the undressing and all the DRIVING, this constant MOVEMENT. Let’s face it, we’re all SICK AS DOGS most of the time.

  So hard being alive, all the things you have to cope with, merely to exist: heat, cold, rain, pain, hunger, vomiting, defecation, menstruation … No wonder ADULTERY is the last straw for some women. Dot went down to the junk shop and bought a big old white CHEESE DISH, big enough to put her SORE HEAD in. It was shaped like a STONE, with an encrustation of oak leaves on the top and shallow ridges down the side. Like a STONE it sat in the kitchen after she left (John didn’t even LIKE cheese).

  But what could he do? John was tired of lying, tired of carrying out a fraud on HIMSELF. Accept something and you’re in with a chance, refuse and you get nothing. What John GOT with Julie was a pretty good trompe-l’oeil imitation of a marriage. The two little birch trees stood for John and Julie just as they had for John and Dot: forlornly.

  Dot Reborn (Again)

  As from today, Dot Butser has changed her name to Dorothea de Radziwill Butser.

  This is following on from the traumatic year of 1996 which she now wants to put behind her and start life anew.

  Dorothea is the name by which she was known before her marriage, de is a family name, and Radziwill is her maiden name.

  This distinguishes her from her ex-husband’s mother and any possible future marriage of her ex-husband.

  With the help again of her solicitous solicitor, Dot managed to hold on to all of the £38,000 compensation for being almost buried alive, and got a promise of receiving a portion of John’s future income, from porn or any other source (pimping, prostitution, gambling, extortion, ETC). With this, her new name, and her tea cosies, Dorothea de Radziwill Butser set off on a new life!

  But let’s not DELUDE ourselves. Dot was not exactly ‘reborn’. She was still the same old Dot, her body just a dot in the universe. INEVITABLE rather than brave, that she should go on tending it, with food and water, clothing and shelter, to her dying day. She was STUCK with it!

  Enraged by the east, defeated by the south and west, Dot headed north to the oceanic landscape of Yorkshire between Accrington and Burnley. But how can you ever feel safe when geological eminences keep BULGING at you, ominously obscuring things, the countryside folding and unfolding itself before your eyes, turning itself INSIDE OUT and threatening to COLLAPSE at any moment? Dot didn’t need this, land pretending to be water! Dot had had ENOUGH of the sea.

  She moved on to Edinburgh, where she wound up in a B & B in Morningside run by an actor called Umberto Opignanesi. His acting consisted of tiny parts in Shakespeare, usually CARRYING a spear, but he wielded great power at home.

  There were two bathrooms (shared), no apparent heat source, and lousy breakfasts (despite daily efforts, Mrs Opignanesi never mastered the EGG). Dot didn’t speak to the people she shared a bathroom with, she just heard them on the stair, or saw them at breakfast where NO ONE could talk over the sound of the radio pumpin
g out terrible pop music, rushed news reports and deafening ads.

  Guests were supposed to be OUT most of the day. ‘Out!’ Mr Opignanesi would yell, threatening them all with his spear. So Dot wandered the streets of Edinburgh, EDINBURGH — with its cosmopolitan range of shops, discos and veterinarians, its Georgian terraces and medieval passageways, its dark cobble-stones (blue-grey when wet), its clouds and low-slung light, its drunks, its many hospitals, hostelries and hostilities, its women with nasty coughs but real wicker SHOPPING-BASKETS, its traffic dilemmas, dog shit, and the Water of Leith, which offers FORGETFULNESS.

  Dot became a dot on the pavement, as anonymous as any man in the street.

  The Man in the Street

  There are many men in the street. MOST men make it out on to the street at some point. You see them walking along there. For YOU they are just part of the STREET. You forget they have HOMES, friends, desks, piles of PAPER. It is impossible to conceive what they are going through, have been through, are in for yet. It would cause OVERLOAD for you to fully fathom any life other than your OWN (or even your own). You don’t even know your PARENTS or CHILDREN. You know them only AS parents and children. Siblings are no better. You may have shared a womb, a house, a garden, meals, Saturdays, Christmases, tortoises, schools, beds, clothes, books, crayons and toys, but all that just gets in the WAY later. As adults, you become for them a repository of SHAME, the only person who remembers their infant nakedness and hairdo blunders and tawdry criminal record. You LOVE them, sure — but you hardly know them.

  It’s our infernal IGNORANCE of others that allows us all to DISAPPEAR, our tragedies only privately profound — to others they’re just NEWS ITEMS or a JOKE. We don’t see each other, we see only what failed to DISINTEGRATE at first sight.

  The cool-looking cowboy guy in the street, passing Dot right by, really feels the cold. It is only with his cool grey-green cords and cool beat-up leather jacket and cool leather cowboy hat that he manages to keep WARM. He’s going back to a flat he’s been trying to sell for months. It’s like living inside a FOLDER in a FILING CABINET, all sliding doors and mirrored walls and no natural LIGHT. The guy loves himself, innocently LOVES himself. He likes catching glimpses of himself performing every aspect of his existence, from making toast in the morning to touching his cock in bed at night. He opens ONE EYE when he wakes up, just to see himself SLEEPING. He has a beautiful garden he doesn’t care about, a strange flat-faced cat he does care about, and a flat nobody wants to buy. After years of self-examination, he has drawn a BLANK. He is fodder for filing, a base life in a basement flat. What does he make of the world as he sips his Tio Pepe, outstretched in front of his modern mirrored mantelpiece?

  Another one! Snappy dresser, over seventy, heavily moustachioed, unready for death, marching proudly into the stationer’s. He is hunting down some ancient kind of typewriter ribbon with which he will complete his monumental history of Edinburgh. This project makes him feel terrifically SUPERIOR to every other man in the street. He alone knows how long the street has BEEN there, for whom it’s NAMED (George) and why, and whether the arched vaults beneath it are about to crumble. But what will he EAT when he gets home? A ham sandwich? And will he think of his mother when the light falls a certain way? He recalls music at odd moments against his will. He knows not the joy of a MOZART song playing in your head; he is burdened with phrases from Elgar and Vaughan-Williams. Just before he dashes into the stationer’s (who do not HAVE his typewriter ribbon), he looks with disdain at a kid on the street who he assumes should be in SCHOOL.

  He’s WRONG. This kid is on his way to a special School Support Scheme for teenagers who are otherwise about to be expelled from normal school. To allow for short attention-spans and dishevelled backgrounds, the classes start at midday. This boy’s home life is INTOLERABLE. Nobody FEEDS him, nobody cares about him. Nobody notices if he’s THERE or not, nobody notices if he’s asleep or awake. Nobody knows how poignant he finds the back of his baby brother’s head, and nobody ever will.

  Perhaps they are all ASYLUM SEEKERS, the men in the street. One guy is. If he ‘outstays his welcome’, five policemen will break his door down, wrap him in a BODY BELT and wind thirteen feet of tape around his head. They do it ALL THE TIME. In bed at night he WRITHES WITH SORROW, remembering a dead aunt who loved him.

  Yet, round us all there comes a pink snow of petals in spring. Sunlight dazzles at us through bushes. Water runs between our fingers. BIRDS see us. We are stared at by animals a lot. To them we probably seem a tightly knit bunch. WE see ourselves as almost entirely SEPARATE — except when you put your tongue in someone else’s mouth and it tastes just like your own.

  There are LOOKS exchanged in the street, looks between strangers. Sometimes a BABY looks me right in the eye! And I wonder if any of these people could stomach what I really AM. Terrible, to grow and walk and talk and eat and sleep and shit and fuck and give birth and DIE only to be a shame and disappointment to all who know me. PERVERSE of me to hang on for dear life!

  Shit in the City

  With her attractive visage and personality, it was easy for Dot to make friends, especially in the New Town area, where her nasal English accent was no handicap. In fact she had hopes of being warmly welcomed by some Anglo-Scot in a Barbour jacket, ochre corduroy trousers, flat cap and a Range Rover at any moment.

  She rented a little basement flat and could have been HAPPY, but her toilet was somehow connected to a waste pipe that ran through the whole building, a CLOACA MAXIMA that was now leaking RAW SEWAGE into Dot’s HOME. Her redecorating plans were not just put on hold, they were somewhat REVERSED.

  People shitting in a city. How many shits an hour? How many shits a MINUTE? Not just TWENTY or THIRTY, but HUNDREDS, hundreds of people shitting, hundreds of toilets flushing, the whole city pissing and shitting itself SILLY every minute, liquid everywhere, running through the body, through the buildings, streaming always downwards, and then back up in US.

  It’s probably easiest if you try to think of just ONE person shitting, then multiply this by ten, then twenty: TWO HUNDRED people on two hundred loos (unless they share), dealing, struggling in whatever way (you hope, ABLY), with their shit. For some this is the only shit of the day, for others just one amongst many. There is constipation in the city, there is diarrhoea, there is blood and piss and vomit. They can be MESSY, these outpourings. The world doesn’t WANT them, but we give them anyway. If only it DID, we would seem so GENEROUS: sure, I’ll shit for you today, NO PROBLEM, hold on to your hat!

  So there they all are, struggling. Two hundred people, starting or finishing, straining, farting, yelping, reading, wiping. Let’s assume they all stand up simultaneously and FLUSH. Two hundred flushes scattered about the city. But it’s MORE than that. You must now multiply this intimate scene (assholes, soiled loo paper, locked doors) by ten, twenty, thirty! Two thousand, four thousand, SIX THOUSAND PEOPLE (with their newspapers) rising in secret from SIX THOUSAND SHIT-HOLES and flushing it all away.

  Somehow the sewage system COPES. It doesn’t have time to COUNT, it just TAKES it. Next minute, ANOTHER six thousand. Until there is a constant stream of gurgling faeces rushing through the metropolitan area! THIS is the true business conducted in a city each day.

  A pretty woman struts by: Dot! She has pissed and shat her way through FORTY-FOUR YEARS. She has drunk coffee, tea, Coke, milk, juice, eaten noodles, taken vitamins. She has no doubt been to school, participated in team sports, ridden a bicycle. She has sent the requisite thank-you notes of life. She has been loved, she has been disappointed, she is still confused. She has seen the sea. She is as ridiculous as you or I but acts SUPERIOR because she SHITS seldom!

  Women are under such pressure to be PERFECT. An obvious way to achieve this is by not shitting! There’s no HONOUR in shitting, you get no CREDIT for it! Anorexia has a lot to do with not wanting to shit. Those skeletal frames are an open declaration of the REFUSAL to shit and we’re all supposed to ADMIRE and feel GRATEFUL: ah, thanks to Dot there
’ll be ONE LESS TURD in the world today. Hoorah!

  It is so tiring looking at these gutless women poking at their salads while I attempt to claim my RIGHTFUL AMOUNT OF FOOD. Paris is full of them! Prancing around as if their lives are worth living. How COULD they be, amid all that pretty pâtisserie?

  Dot as a Decimal Point in the Wrong Place

  Dot was getting her cunt noticed AT LAST, but the experience was not gratifying. She was lying on a hard hospital bed in the gynaecological department of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, receiving no compliments. Doctors and nurses were speaking to Dot from BETWEEN HER LEGS. They discussed the WEATHER and the NEXT APPOINTMENT as if they were all in some CAFÉ together — with Dot’s belly as the table. At one point a doctor reached up towards Dot’s left BOOB. He quickly withdrew his hand, but Dot knew: he’d expected to find his COFFEE CUP there.

  They think they’re easing your embarrassment by treating your privates as suddenly PUBLIC, a MEETING-PLACE in which to exchange light remarks and medical banter. But they’re not easing you out of your embarrassment; they’re easing you out of EXISTENCE. Once they’ve alienated you from your body it’s easier to lever you off the PLANET.

  The body is a JOKER, it toys with us, testing us, to see how much we can TAKE. Dot couldn’t take much at all!

  What do you do when you find out you have a deadly disease? You SIT TIGHT, hoping it’ll go away! It’s not actually killing you yet, so you pretend it’s not there and continue with your usual routine. It’s some time later that you are forced to recognise you haven’t carried off this miraculous feat: the disease is still there and it’s now having a bearing on EVERYTHING. It took a while to absorb the news (SURPRISINGLY long) but now it’s absorbed and it’s having an IMPACT. You haven’t sorted out a Will or taken lots of expensive trips or read all the books you always meant to read or done anything so CHEERING to others, were they to know you had only months to live. There is nothing CHEERING going on. You have not been BRAVE. You have simply become more self-pitying than ever before. You feel you have already lost everything, though this process is still to come. You are not worth KNOWING any more and have no one to CONFIDE in and live in a LIMBO LAND from not telling anyone. You have begun to FEEL ill, and you envy and resent everyone except those who are clearly suffering MORE than you: people who’ve been BOMBED or GARROTTED, or people with fatal diseases at a more advanced stage than yours. Your disease HUMILIATES you, so you try not to think about it. When you do, you feel like KILLING YOURSELF. When you have to see DOCTORS you feel like killing yourself.