Dot in the Universe

by Lucy Ellmann

  Dot sought forgetfulness in the Water of Leith. Whenever there had been rain, the river rose and its waters turned milky brown. Seemingly ALIVE, it rushed along, water flowing always downwards — except when it hit a rock or a bank or the thin ridge of an island and flowed briefly UP. Squabbling ducks passed by at top speed.

  In the winter she watched a blizzard from her semi-redecorated living room. The white dots seemed to hover close to the window-pane, staring back at Dot, before falling to their doom. No POINT in these dots.

  Early on a peachy day, when the air was soft and damp and the sky shot out spurts of rain in a SEXUAL MANNER, Dot took a taxi to South Queensferry to see the BURRY MAN. This is a guy that emerges annually from a pub at 9:00 in the morning, covered from head to toe in green BURRS. Flowers are added on top of the burrs. It is unclear how he sees or breathes! He is held up on both sides by male escorts as he trudges through the town offering FERTILITY, collecting money for charity, being given whisky by people outside their houses (he has to drink it through a STRAW).

  Dot trudged behind him for a while, picking up a few lucky burrs that had fallen off him on to the road. Then she got another taxi and went to the Forth Road Bridge, which is close to the Forth Railway Bridge but is NOT the Forth Railway Bridge.

  The Forth Railway Bridge is a remarkable, wide-angled, almost ORGANIC structure in RED, with Victorian ENDEAVOUR and heroic ENGINEERING in its bones. It is the gargantuan equivalent of a tiny red SPIDER. It looks like it’s collapsing all the time, it’s so metallic and thunderous and kind of CURVY. Cormorants take advantage of its nether regions, and the sound of trains going over it is GREAT.

  The Forth ROAD Bridge is nothing like this. It was built in the 1960s for £20 million and it’s a noteworthy sight if you’re in FIFE and eager to get back to Edinburgh but up close it’s a GREAT BIG BORE.

  Dot walked out to the middle of the duller bridge, noting on her way the absence of any good graffiti. How can people have so little to say? she thought, as she climbed the railing. Below her, sunlight was hitting the boats on the Firth of Forth, making them glow bright white. The full moon was still visible to the west. Dot always chose good days to commit suicide!

  People saw her clinging to the bridge and called the police. The area around Dot was cordoned off while the police tried to talk her down. Traffic was reduced to a SINGLE LINE IN BOTH DIRECTIONS, causing UNKNOWN HARDSHIP and TRAGEDY to commuters. As they drove slowly past Dot, people yelled out their windows, ‘Jump, bitch!’

  She jumped. And she smiled as she sailed downwards, always downwards, everything always downwards, knowing she was about to be OBLITERATED, her body released from its old order and scattered on the hard spiked swollen surface of the water. She had no regrets as she fell, but clasped her arms tightly over her breasts for fear of them being TORN OFF on impact. There are aesthetic considerations even in death. (Even in DOT.)

  There was a tremendous PLOP as she hit the water: an imperfect performance. Gravity gets us all in the end.

  John Finally goes Swordfishing!

  While Dot died, John was sitting on a boat that was making its way back from Greenland. He was writing yet another letter to Dot’s solicitor with poor sore hands.

  Dear Sirs,

  For the record, your client’s name is not Dorothea de Radziwill Butser — it is Mrs Butser.

  I was prepared for us to have a mutual consent divorce, though I wasn’t happy about it.

  But now you have led her to believe she can get some sort of fancy show-biz divorce and all my money.

  Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know about Mrs Butser. She turned my house into a gazebo bordello. While I was away fishing, for our mutual benefit, she was organising orgies with men I formerly trusted. One of them gave her a trestle table in recompense for her atrocities. He was forever phoning up, presumably to arrange further assignations.

  She says I’m unfaithful! The truth is, when the going got tough, she scarpered — with £38,000!

  So go ahead and sue me. I’m going to sue her! And you!!!

  After losing his job as a Careers Adviser (for advising too many youngsters to go into PORN), John had become a fisherman! It was a true penance. The boat was 73 feet long and capable of speeds up to 12 knots. John was TERRIFIED by the size of the thing.

  They worked for 20 hours a day, in swells of up to 30 feet. If a storm was approaching they had to dog down every hatch, porthole and watertight door, check the bilge-pump filters and fish out any debris from the bilge water. Then they removed the scupper plates. WHATEVER. John was sick as a dog most of the time. Covered with bruises, he slept in his clothes. The SWORDFISH scared him, lashing out at him with their swords like PIRATES as they came on board.

  But it was his hands in the end that really hurt. First his right hand swelled up and started to THROB. He held it above his head a lot, which seemed to help, and used his left hand for everything. Then his left hand began to hurt too. It was a relief when both became NUMB.

  John was baiting hooks and putting on light sticks when he finally collapsed to his knees and WEPT, wept for his life, for his hands, and his WIFE.

  To his surprise and additional dismay, the other men came over and gave him a big GROUP HUG — they too had seen their fair share of schlock.

  Part Two

  I will not flow for you into a bowl,

  I will not empty out for you into a basin,

  I will not depart upside-down for you.

  The Egyptian Book of the Dead

  The Cloaca Maxima

  I know what you think. You think you get to KEEP YOUR BODY. You think you go shooting up a long dark tunnel towards a bright light and when you reach it you’re surrounded by LOVE and dead relatives in white gowns. You recover instantly from all your ailments, stroll on over to the Pearly Gates, get judged and admitted. Then you spend the rest of eternity listening to the tinkling of tiny bells and the flapping of angels’ wings while you lounge absolved on well-kept lawns, ambrosia and myrrh in abundant supply.

  But what if souls float in solitary BUBBLES in the afterlife, an unphysical ABSTRACT existence in some kind of EGG? O egg, O egg. What a RELIEF, to live without a body! No more nose-blowing, no more DEFECATION, no illness, no hunger, no worries about SELF-PRESERVATION and all the running, fighting, hiding and SHOPPING that entails. No loud music in restaurants (no RESTAURANTS), no Trash Night, no TV, no taxes, no communication by NOTELET. No punctuality problems — the final deadline has been met! No tears, no sleep, no night or day. No aspirin (but also no headaches!), no booze, no News, no pain, no fear. No smells or textures, no jokes, no PRIZES, no make-up, no reading, no itching, no adding or subtracting. No growth or shrinkage, no heat or cold, no land or sea, no plants and animals, no friends, no lovers, no bicycles, no sex, no DEATH. No paying of bills or brushing of teeth or changing of sheets or shovelling of snow or snivelling of kids. No GODS, no goblins, no milk or honey (none needed!), no Dante, no Beatrice, no Dido or Aeneas. No ELVIS. No Isis or Osiris either, no Anubis, no Shesmetet, no Nehebkau, no Renenutet, no Sobk, no Wepwawet, no Djafy, no Thoth, no Muhammad, no Messiah, no Yama, no Chitragupta, no Munkar and Nakir. No Granny and Grampops, no spirit guides, no harps or haloes, no seventy-two virgins, no scythe, no Styx, no NOTHING.

  Just space, endless space, and you a sphere. Aware of other spheres perhaps but alone. Like water: bodiless, without will, flowing you know not where. Maybe we all get sucked down a PLUGHOLE, some kind of cosmic CLOACA (the universe must need good drainage), but it won’t matter much.

  Or what if it’s just LIMBO LAND, no better or worse than THIS world, just a lot of unfriendly STRANGERS? What if the Underworld is a SLOW TORMENT of grouchy types who look disapprovingly at your choice of SANDWICH (as if it’s not up to YOU what kind of sandwich you want to eat in the Underworld!)? What if the Underworld’s full of people who’ve heard you FART, and REMEMBER it? Or TV licence snoops and traffic wardens, BUGGING you for eternity? Interview panels that never gave you a job, forb
idding bus drivers, cranky stationery-shop employees who treated you like SHIT when you tried to order a new address stamp?

  What if the Underworld’s just LOW-KEY? Not dramatically bad but full of dreary fluorescent lights, the constant smell of CAT SHIT and the clackety-clack of hundreds of idiots using computer keyboards (they sound like mice MASTICATING!). No proper assessment of SIN, just a lot of anxious travel dreams on a repeating loop (lost passports, missed planes, abandoned offspring), and every day you have to go get some WOUND dressed by a sadistic nurse who YANKS the previous bandage off without pity and stuffs so much GAUZE into the wound (an orifice created for her pleasure) that it will NEVER EVER HEAL.

  Instead of darkness or hell-fire, the merely unclear. Instead of authoritarian deities thundering around, PAPER-PUSHERS. Instead of pure fury and despair, petty gripes.

  Dot in the Underworld

  Midway in her life’s journey, Dot had gone astray. She woke to find herself on a plane subject to turbulence. It flew past philandering husbands and the old ladies of Jaywick Sands, across cartoon landscapes and the stomach troubles of a lifetime, the vomiting, the diarrhoea, the rumbles and gurgles of a contorted intestinal tract, the agony this brings. Through the porthole she caught embarrassing glimpses of herself over the years, picking her nose or wiping her ass, drooling, sneezing, wanking.

  They flew judderingly across a mountain of RAGE, stuff slithering down but forever re-forming itself, like a backwards volcano. A mountain of all the fury she’d ever felt, all the times she’d wanted to KILL, beat, pulverise, all the times she’d wanted to pound stationery-shop attendants’ HEADS in with their own embossed address presses, and all the people who’d bullied, abused or DUMPED her without a qualm.

  Beyond that was a steaming pool of shit, a sea of pee, a black lagoon of menstrual juices, pus, phlegm, snot, sweat, slime, nail clippings, dead skin cells and HAIR, an AMAZON BASIN of all the crap that had come out of Dot over her forty-four years.

  Followed by the crap that went INTO her: unbelievable how much she’d downed, the BARRELS of stew, acres of potatoes, onions and carrots, caldrons of soup, the pounds of flesh and lard and all the unnecessary steaks and pies, the PIES! There was a mound of dried APRICOTS too, and an ominous field of hens and cows. Whole salmons she must have eaten lay gleaming, slapping their tails on the ground. And then the sandwiches, piled so high that some had fallen and caused a LOG JAM in the river of snot. THE SHAME OF IT!

  Now the plane was flying over a desert land littered with the CLOTHES Dot had bought and never worn — Dot had been led like a LAMB by fashion. Shirts, tops, jackets, dresses, trousers, whole hillocks of TIGHTS, winter, autumn and spring coats, sweaters, shoes, boots, undies, accessories, all of which suddenly IGNITED in a mighty conflagration as the plane passed over them, designer labels or NOT, darkening the sky.

  When the smoke cleared there was COLOUR, as if the desert had bloomed. But these colours belonged to an enormous JUNKYARD, composed of all the PLASTIC items Dot had used and discarded: toothbrushes, hairbrushes, combs, make-up and toiletry products of every sort, buttons, sun-glasses, pens, picnic cups, plates, cutlery, alarm clocks, records, Hi Fi equipment, cassette tapes (the Underworld has been TAKEN OVER by cassette tape — it hangs off everything like kudzu vines), dustbins, cling film, food packaging, soft-drink bottles, Barbie dolls and other toys, baby bottles, condoms, buckets, shower curtains, Band-Aids, carrier bags, suitcases, sandals, stupid ornaments, fake fruit and flowers and other home-decorating FIASCOS.

  Next came a plateau of PAPER, a massif central of notelets, notebooks, postcards, photographs, diaries, documents, calendars, message pads, chequebooks, envelopes, application forms, loo paper, Kleenex, paper towels, food packaging, books, magazines, papier mâché OBJETS, pound notes and dollar bills, paper cups and paper plates, bus tickets, plane tickets, train tickets, parking tickets, receipts, recipes, paper bags, posters, cardboard boxes, playing cards, wrapping paper and suicide notes. Also all the newspapers she’d bought but never read (info of no ultimate value but current at time of purchase).

  Next, a glittering array of the bottles she had recycled or NOT recycled. On all of this, across the vast plain (seen from the fast plane), fell all the rain and snow that had fallen on Dot during her lifetime, and all the waters that had tried to engulf her, from a bath in a basin as a baby, to a dip in the Mediterranean a mile from shore, an Arctic plunge in a pool at some sauna, and the many oceans she had crossed in planes. Also, the TEA she had drunk or not drunk, all those WASTED POTS OF TEA she’d made (without their COSIES on!), sloshing around down there under the zigzagging plane for HOURS, until it reached the brackish waters of the Firth of Forth which had done for Dot in the end.

  Infinite Dots

  Dot found herself in a dark wood. Two black horses cantered past. She tried to step back, but there’s no stepping back from DEATH. A big guy with a scythe (yes, let’s get it over with) cut her head off but it didn’t hurt and she was able to find it and put it back on. Then he sliced her from crotch to collar-bone, and her GUTS fell out, which dismayed Dot because it was so MESSY, but she managed to scrape them up and shove them all back in.

  Another guy lured her on to a boat. Not a FERRY or a BARGE, but a raked-stem, hard-chinned western-rig SWORDFISHING boat, 72 feet long with a hull of continuously welded steel plate and a 365-horsepower turbo-charged diesel engine capable of speeds of up to 12 knots. Its DOWNWARD push of gravity and its UPWARD lift of buoyancy generated a TORQUE, which was called the ‘righting moment’. Nonetheless, halfway across the Styx it sank.

  Dot found she could breathe underwater! She wandered along the bottom examining things. Large fish passed, gobbling smaller fish who in turn were gobbling the smallest fish (there was a painstaking ORDER to the underwater world). Porpoises swam up to Dot but, finding her dead, shunned her. Starfish squirmed under her feet, terrified she’d use them DRIED for her interior-decor ideas. Fanned by manta rays, she walked past underwater WIGWAMS, sodden duvets and deck-chairs. From above drifted lit cigarettes which sparkled when they hit the sand. The starfish now turned into BIRTHDAY CAKES, one for each year of her life. Dot was longing for a cup of tea! Some fish eggs floated by, the size of tennis balls. Dot grabbed one and gingerly licked it, assuming this to be a dream.

  She lived in a winkle shell for a while. She discovered she could enter into everything! She became a ROCK, and stretched out along her own fissures, feeling rocky. She was an old bored beech tree, her trunk painfully widening. She was a duck, in order to eat with a beak. She became a horse, to finally know what it’s like to have hooves. She was a spider in a web, she was the web. She could be a flea, but preferred to be the air AROUND a bunch of fleas, tickled by their jumping. She wonderingly entered an ONION, as if it were a palace.

  She was the left leg of a marionette. She inhabited an oboe as the helpless melody being puffed out. She was the type on this page for a while, but couldn’t understand a WORD. She was all of ARISTOTLE and his philosophy. She was a cinema, the audience in her STOMACH, stereo sound coming from her lungs, her oesophagus projecting the movie on to the stomach lining. She jumped off mountainsides, was sluiced through dams, she sat (unseen) in burning houses and watched the occupants die. She passed right through a train carrying nuclear waste and felt only a brief ZING.

  She could travel twice, THREE TIMES the speed of sound. For fun she leaned against a solar flare — it felt like a waterfall pounding on her back. Dot was the earth itself, with its hot and cold places, bare patches and hairy bits, gullies and protrusions: the whole Equator was an erogenous zone, wars were like an itch, and all she really wanted to do was SPIN.

  You’d think that by now the world would be overrun with ghosts — so MANY dead! — ghosts everywhere, YOUR ghosts getting mixed up with MY ghosts, a hundred to every house, confusing everybody with their thumps and whispers and dropped crockery and eerie trails of smoke. Ghosts in grey, ghosts in green.

  But in fact there’s no profusion of souls in the a
fterlife. Somehow they all manage to knock along together and not get in each other’s way. Maybe the Underworld’s not just an IMMIGRATION POINT, a WEIGHING-STATION for moral corruption, where you hang around waiting to be forgiven for things. Maybe there’s room in an infinite universe for a little MAGNANIMITY, and plenty of room for souls.

  A Skeleton Band

  A skeleton band was playing. It’s not just that they were under-supplied in the trombone department. The MUSICIANS were skeletons! They wore sombreros, some had shoes, but none of them had any FLESH. Every bone was out on show, some held on with coils of wire to keep them supple. Each musician had a little coccyx hanging between his legs. They were immodestly naked of LIFE. Their vertebrae trembled as they played.

  Flesh is proud, bones are not — in mockery of us they wore clothes they didn’t need. A woman standing near the band wore a low-cut dress that showed off her wind-dried white sternum. She held a cigarette in her pretty knuckle bones and raised a jaunty FEMUR under her skirt in revelry. Other bags of bones stood around swaying to the music, which was folksy rather than funereal. Dot was attracted by the catchy tunes.

  As she approached, a young skeleton with a basket of fruit on his head cycled helter-skelter through the crowd. People playfully grabbed his fruit and pretended to eat it but where could food GO? They laughed without sound, kissed without tongues, fell clattering to the ground but jumped to their feet unharmed, give or take a fibula that was now the wrong way round, or a knee-cap swinging by a thread. The skeletons lacked an interior life that could be probed. You probe MUSCLE, FAT, cavernous GUTS and MINDS, not stacks of ribs with no belly button, like a cage with no canary. Love is bound up with the body. No love in the Underworld.