by Carmel Bird
Belinda, observed with alarm by her faithful husband, Gustav, who in fact somehow missed the sighting of the little paws, lapsed at once into a hysterical faint, clawing at the crisp green edges of the counterpane, and when she was brought round the child had disappeared. Belinda believed she had been hallucinating, affected by the labour, the epidural, the gas, the stress of joy, seeing and feeling a mother’s worst fears. The image of the little paws hung in her recent memory. Belinda, it should be explained, detested cats.
The Fate of Daphne
As a child of eight Belinda, with her friend Daphne, had crept through the witch’s garden, a riotous tangled place filled with an alphabet of plants from adder’s tongue to mandrake to wormwood, to peer in the foggy window. There was Mrs Macbeth, with her wild white hair and her tartan cloak, bent over a pot hanging on a hook over the fire.
‘That’s the cauldron,’ Daphne whispered.
‘Sshhh, she’ll hear us.’
The witch had a reputation for catching children and boiling them up in her potions. The smell of cooking flesh was known to emanate from the cottage at all hours of the night and day. Mrs Macbeth sold her concoctions at a roadside stall—in brown glass bottles with corks in the top, and with lists of herbs and ailments on the labels. Knapwort harshweed will cleanse the lungs of tartarous humors, and is indicated for the relief of asthma. The bruised herb is famous for removing black and blue marks from the skin. Ploughman’s spikenard promotes the flow of menstrual blood. No mention of rendered child, but it was obvious really. From time to time a child, particularly a girl, would disappear, never to be found, and the locals knew that the child, after being subdued with opium, had gone into Mrs Macbeth’s pot. But nothing was ever proved. The bones were obviously used to fertilise the garden which was the most luxuriant and burgeoning place for miles around. Every district had its witch, and people accepted the fact that some children were born to fill the bubbling cauldron and that was all there was to it. If you wanted magic potions, you had to pay the price, after all. And they did. People wanted three kinds of medicine in particular—the love potion, the fertility drug and the abortifacient. Those were, of course, the old days before exact and reliable science.
To get back to Belinda and Daphne—they go creeping through the comfrey and nettles until they reach the window, and they hold their breath and gaze in at the woman stirring the pot, a woman guarded by a small wolf lying on the hearth rug, and surrounded by a dozen cats of all shapes and sizes. All goes well, and the girls stare in fascination as the witch stirs her stew, and the cats doze, and the wolf looks with its yellow eyes into the blue flickering of the flames. Then Belinda leans against the branch of an overhanging almond tree and there is a little cracking sound. A small grey cat on the mat opens its eyes and looks straight into the eyes of Daphne who springs back, slips on a rotting-red fungus and slides to the ground, caught and tangled in a malicious serpentine vine. Belinda has already reached the road when the witch, in response to the commotion, appears in her doorway. She catches Daphne in her arms and whisks her inside the house before you can say ‘owl on the craggy rock’.
Daphne was never seen again, and Belinda was too shocked, afraid to tell anyone what had happened. In fact she didn’t really know what had happened. One minute there was Daphne in her brown-velvet dress with the lace collar, and the next minute there was nothing, and Belinda was running down the road with her eyes starting out of her head. Raving. Fear took her over and she was never the same. She almost lost the will to live, but her mother, at her wit’s end, bought (at great expense) a brown bottle of something from Mrs Macbeth, and Belinda was restored to a kind of sanity. People guessed about Daphne, but it was all rumour and speculation. A scarecrow wearing Daphne’s dress appeared in a field of prodigious opium poppies next to Mrs Macbeth’s house. There’s very little you can do in these cases, really, when all’s said and done. And so Belinda had to carry the guilt (I snapped the twig) forever, and she focused this guilt on her fear and hatred of the cat that looked at Daphne, and of all cats in general. ‘Pathological fear of feline species’ they wrote on her reports.
The Marriage of Belinda
Because she was so strange and moody, people imagined that Belinda would never find a husband. However, Belinda’s mother was a determined woman, and having resorted to the remedies of Mrs Macbeth in one famous instance, she was not slow to avail herself of more. And so it was that Belinda’s mother baked her celebrated cinnamon cookies, mixing them with a decoction of lady’s smock, knot weed and a powder strangely reminiscent of dried baby’s blood, and offered them at Christmas time to all the young men of the district. Only one man was affected, but of course this was fortunate, as more than one could have given rise to complications, and there was really no time for that. So Gustav Tillyard fell in love with Belinda and they were married in the local Uniting Church on the corner under the peppercorn tree to great rejoicing, and for many years there was a feeling of happy-ever-after in the Tillyard home.
Let’s now return to the moment of the birth of Belinda’s fifth child.
The Concoctions of UNNXS
The child born to Belinda had, in fact, been placed in a special section of the hospital nursery, the part called UNNXS, signifying Unusual Neo-Nate-Cross-Species, where the mutations appearing at the time of the turn of the century were kept for observation and consideration. There had been babies with lizard tails, with dog faces, pig snouts, rat brains; babies with the tearless eyes of crocodiles, the fluttering umbrella wings of bats. Pussyfoot, as little baby Tillyard was labelled, was the first known example of her kind.
Hermione and her team made the decisions regarding the future of the babies in UNNXS. They were skilled and experienced in the business of manufacturing one whole child from several parts, and for assembling the leftovers into astonishing constructions in the Concoction Area. The Concoctions were raised under secret laboratory conditions until such time as they expired or became redundant for one reason or another. Or until they became useful. During the week of Pussyfoot’s arrival there was also in the nursery a boy with the bill of a duck and strangely deformed lungs which appeared to be composed of spongy fungal material resembling fly agaric. His little hands and feet were perfect. So the decision was made, after due process and consideration at the highest levels of the Department of Law and Prophets, that Ugly Duckling would provide the material for the extremities of Pussyfoot, and that her paws and his remaining parts would be put aside, possibly for the recycle, or perhaps for the redundant. A lifelike replica of a perfect dead baby boy was provided for mourning and funeral purposes, and the Ducklings were informed that their child’s respiratory system had failed shortly after birth—a true statement, after all. After an agonising length of time, during which Belinda and all the Tillyards were kept in the dark about their baby, they were able at last to rejoice in the news that although there had been some problems with ankles and wrists, requiring microsurgery, their baby was a lovely healthy girl. Her little limbs were wrapped in bandages and, though there were therapies to be followed for some months, eventually her hands and feet were free, and she was simply perfect. They called her, as you already know, Norma.
This name was chosen from a misleading book of babies’ names where it is said that the meaning is ‘priestess’. It does mean that, in a way, but the life of the poor druid priestess Norma of ancient times was a particularly violent and unhappy one—filled with bloody sacrifice, as well as murder and suicide. Not that anyone in Norma Tillyard’s family was aware that another child had to die that Norma might live. Poor little Ugly Duckling died that Norma Tillyard might live. The interesting thing is that in naming her ‘Norma’, her mother thought they were saying she was normal. But they built into her life terrible notions of treachery, of murder and of suicide.
The Ravaging of the Planet
Belinda never quite suppressed the hallucination she had experienced at the time of Norma’s birth. She kept it as a special kind of secret
, deep within her heart, for the moment had been so vivid, the little paws so very, very real. Truth to tell, Belinda relegated this image to a place where that other awful memory, the disappearance of Daphne, had its dwelling. And Belinda developed a passionate interest in news stories concerning birth defects and deformities, scanning the television screen, the web and such popular magazines as came her way for references to children born with the paws of kittens. The magazines were, in fact, very few and far between because of a temporary ban on the use of trees for the manufacture of paper. In any case, as far as Belinda could tell, no story of a feline mutant ever made itself public. Belinda grew accustomed to the idea that her vision had been nothing but an illusion, a gross and misleading image from the depths of her unconscious mind, a mind overheated by stress and drugs and whatnot.
However, in the various media there was no shortage of other strange and quite amazing events to report.
It was a time of swift, dramatic and bewildering change. The sea would rise up and sweep away coastlines; fires raged across forests and cities alike; wild winds uprooted skyscrapers; there were famines and plagues; water supplies were polluted by nuclear waste, by surgical waste, by mysterious viruses. Kind priests locked their congregations inside their churches and administered lethal doses of old-fashioned poisons in the communion wine and somebody had to come along and decide what to do with the dead bodies all over the glittering pictorial mosaic floor. Stars came spinning out of the sky, searing the tops of mountains as they rushed by. This was so spectacular. Scientists gazed in fear at old pictures of the Tunguska butterfly—was that the result of a visit by random meteor or evil enemy? It goes without saying that the planet was eroded by wars of all kinds, and that hopeless people roamed about stripped of all, of hearth, home, on the seas, in the deserts, in the mountains and through the jagged silent stench of ruined cities. A child was born in Peru with the head of Socrates.
The Safety of the Tunnels
The Tillyards lived underground in The Tunnels, spending a certain amount of time by day in The Basin, which was a secure park, open to the sky, at the hub of The Tunnels. Air and sunshine and fresh raindrops could thus nourish and give pleasure to the people. At night The Basin remained open to the heavens, to the moon and the stars, and because it was patrolled by guards equipped with the latest weapons and security devices, it was classified as a ‘Lifesafe Area A’. In the event of an environmental, political or other disturbance, The Basin would automatically close over, shutting out the moonlight and the stars, until the threat had passed.
Norma Tillyard was a delightful child who, far from suffering from a weakness in wrists and ankles, was very athletic and fond of physical activity. At the age of six she took up ballet in a serious way and rose to be, at the youthful age of sixteen, the prima ballerina in The Enlightenment, which was the ballet company in The Tunnels. Norma’s hands and feet were abnormally large and powerful for a girl of her build, but this fact enhanced rather than impeded her career.
The Great-Grandmother’s Words
Meanwhile, far, far behind the scenes of Norma’s life, back at IOSV, the research—into the reasons and uses for, and the implications of, such birth variations as hers—was continuing. The human species was, as they said at IOSV, ‘throwing up’. That is, the species was offering so many unusual variations at a greater and greater rate that researchers such as Hermione Uhu were coming round to the notion that these things really must have a meaning. Could they hold some key to some sort of knowledge? Now it was Hermione who incubated the idea that perhaps, instead of forever looking, looking, looking into the blood and the genes and the environment of subjects such as Norma, she might examine the thought material, in particular the unconscious content of the imaginations and dreams, of the parents of the aberrant babies. On the wall of her father’s study there was a small sampler depicting children digging in a cherry orchard. It had been embroidered by Hermione’s great-grandmother, and the text read:
You May Find the Answer if You Look in the Right Place
Hermione sometimes thought about that sampler with its tiny faded stitches resembling spider’s marks worked in figures of dried blood. The right place, Hermione realised one night, as she strolled in The Basin looking up at the twinkling of a few stars, was quite possibly located in dreams and hopes and fears. She had nursed the theory of the Genetic Unconscious Deciding Factor for a long time, but nobody would take her seriously. It came down to funding, of course. Hopes and fears were such insubstantial elements, and research was generally funded for something that could be seen in test tubes or at least in computer images of various kinds. The GUDF hovered at the front of the back of Hermione’s mind.
The Part of Fate
One night Hermione and her father, the philosopher, attended a performance of The Enlightenment company, playing at The Mineshaft Theatre in The Archive which is the area in The Tunnels where you can find the arts. Hermione followed Norma’s career, always hoping for some hint, some clue, to all the mysteries of Variation.
Fate Can Perhaps Sometimes Play a Part
(I am just telling you that. You probably won’t see it on a sampler anywhere.)
Fate placed Hermione and Professor Uhu in seats next to Belinda and Gustav Tillyard.
Although Hermione obviously knew who Norma was, she did not recognise her parents. It was the hand of Destiny at work. Norma was dancing in a short sequence titled ‘The Lion in the Desert Eats the Stars’, inspired by a painting of the desert at night, a sleeping gipsy in a striped costume, a guitar and a golden lion. Norma portrayed the part of the Lion, and she received a standing ovation. She was absolutely brilliant, no question about that, so graceful and yet so utterly and savagely convincing. Hermione and her father were on their feet clapping and beaming, and beside them was Norma’s father, vivid with joy and pride. But Belinda, when she tried to stand up, fainted dead away, collapsing into the red velvet theatre seat.
Hermione turned to her at once in professional concern, and as the patient was coming round—it is all too much for her—overwhelmed by Norma’s great success—mother of a top dancer—prima ballerina—Hermione heard Belinda say,
‘Daphne, Daphne. I am so afraid, so afraid. The lions. I am so afraid of the lions. Don’t make me look at the lions. My baby. I hate the lions. Daphne! All cats. I hate all cats. All cats. All cats. Lions, oh Good God. Oh, so scared. There was a little grey cat and it looked at Daphne. Slipping, slipping, slipping.’
Hermione held Belinda’s hand, and she listened.
‘So, are you the mother of the little star?’
But Belinda said only,
‘The poor baby’s hands looked like kitten’s paws. Kitten’s paws. Paws. Paws!’
‘She’s delirious,’ Gustav said.
Hermione Uhu, almost delirious herself, slipped quietly away and returned home, inspired by all that had happened.
‘I wonder,’ Hermione said to herself as she rested in a huge brown leather armchair, sipping her vodka and Sirop de Violette, ‘I wonder if there really is anything in the fact that the mother suffers from what amounts to a feline phobia.’
And she smiled her special mysterious smile as her incredible mind elegantly put the facts together, one by one by one:
Childhood trauma fear of cat.
Deep repression of the fear.
Breeding of the fear in the profound imagination.
Resolution of the fear in physical form in offspring.
The power of the imagination to direct genetics. The idea that GUDF might prove valid was almost too exciting, and Hermione felt a little faint herself.
The Recording of Dreams
Hermione had of course the power to put in motion an Order of Isolation for Belinda. This was fairly routine. Belinda’s dreams must be completely documented, and so Belinda was placed in an investigative coma, the decoction of monkshood farina and strawberry juice was introduced into the sockets of her eyes, and all her dreams from her own birth up to the presen
t day were then recorded in moving images on a computer, using a program developed by Hermione. All our dreams are imprinted on us, stored in our profound imaginations, and can be retrieved and read by the use of MUSH (Maximum Unconscious Spirit Hallucination) after the inexplicable stimulation of the monkshood and strawberry decoction.
And sure enough, there it was, a DDI, or Dominant Dread Image, trawling through the history of Belinda’s unconscious, slicing through all narratives just as commercials slice through the narratives of television, and permanently swimming through Belinda’s bloodstream, washing over her ovaries trillions and zillions of times. The jaws of the leopard. The bloody flesh of the prey. The paws of a kitten. The eyes of a cat. The strange image of a lion opening its great mouth to swallow all the stars of the Milky Way. Then there came the birth of a perfect child with perfect furry paws. Criss-crossing with the DDI was another image, that of a beautiful child in a brown dress, lace at the throat and wrists, slipping down a long green slope, sliding, forever sliding, disappearing from sight, and reappearing and slipping, and sliding, sliding.
‘The key lies in the unconscious mind. There is no longer any question of that. The answer is in the imagination of the subject, in the memory, in the traumatic events of the formative years. Mutation is linked to imagination in a most intimate and complex and elegant way,’ Hermione wrote. ‘The junction of herbal medicine and the new technologies has brought to light the secret of the link between the content of the unconscious mind and the genetic codes of the subject.’