Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  Despite the violence being sustained throughout a long exposure, any slap or punch is so fleeting, so lightning fast, that I cannot catch it red-handed. So I am forced to commune with the inconsolable. Eavesdropping so as to educe the silent screams, the mute protestations, the stilled pleas. Sat here at my computer console. Virtually filing my nails, staring dumbly at an egg-timer bereft of grains of sand and a moribund click counter, which together form my virtual switchboard. Honey-combing the dead air. Since I know full well, that each and every anemic response I receive, has already been bounced off pillar to post with the bruises to show.

  I can pluck so few of these dark stars, these collapsed novas from the all-encompassing grip of male gravitational pull that holds them in thrall. I beg them, beseech them to up and leave, but I can hear it in their quelled voices; they can never break free of his noxious atmosphere. And I am left to stare dumbly at the winking eye of the cursor. A cyclopean sentinel jealously guarding his cowed flock, beadily mirroring my vigil. A fixing of me that is anything but cursory. Its flickering relentlessness unnerves me. Upon each waning period, as the tiny portal of light patrols a half-revolution away, I imagine that the return swing is protracted a moment longer, where he has been waylaid by a paroxysm of activity beyond. That a larval flow of words intrudes upon him from the other side. That, on his return, I will gain access through his casement to the enclosed world beyond. But no. His blinking round waxes regular and unimpeded.

  I need to blind his gaze, so that somehow her weeping words will seep out from behind his spiteful aqueous humour and creep across my plasma screen. Prompting my callused fingers to spurt across the keys, as I strive to apply the trace oxygen of shared closeness. But when our hushed whisper of a conversation is suddenly snapped off, then I know Cyclops has knuckled his signet dolmen across the orbital breach and that yet another sister’s light has been extinguished in a universe far away from me.

  Would that I could project my e-banner through their screen, to scoop and furl them up in it and whisk them magically away to my oasis of safety. Each time my honeyed mirage dissipates, leaving me poised empty-handed over the keyboard’s denuded honeycomb. A recurring wakeful dream tormenting me that though I bore the pardon in my hand, I did not know which warden’s office, in which penitentiary to deliver it. And now my mocking cursor has its own glimmering shadow.

  Behind each ebbing oscillation another would-be psychopomp lurks. A trace of a trace of a trace. So now I too abide in a state of siege in my own domicile. Intercepted and jammed. Just like those I would seek to salvage from their wrecked lives. But I shall not be cast as another dumb woman in peril. I too possess resources and I can tap back into their engorged cocksurety. Germ-Granny calling, Germ-Granny calling:

  www.wwww.net (Worldwide-Wife-Wrecklamation) accessing www. (wee-willie-winkie) fbi.gov (Febrile Bugaboo Insanity)... ...Ah, here we are, ‘A seditious cynosure,’ are you sure? Exactly what resolution is on your monitors? Your vomitors. Can’t you see these bunions? Here, let me kick off my slingbacks and see if I can overcome my debilitating sciatica and swivel my leg up on to my desk. There, just about managed it. Don’t get too hung up on the varicose veins, it’s not a secret map to any hidden arsenal out in the woods. Fair enough, you can’t see my family susceptibility to glaucoma, but there again, I can and such foresight does me no good at all. Plus I no longer have my own teeth. So, though I wear my threescore year and ten body with matronly precision, I’m too much of a wrinkled prune to play the sweet old grandma card. I’m not alluring to anybody. (Though I ain’t quibbling with the ‘seditious’ part). Now (three red chilis) off you god-damn spooks!

  We are not a cult. Or a sect. Nor are we occult, for we have nothing to hide. We have no sacred symbols, for indeed we have no presiding religious beliefs. We attest no single core ideology at all, other than ‘men stink!’ We are a loose agglomeration of women from different backgrounds and class who share only one particular type of experience: that of abuse at the hands of a male partner. No one is bound here, all are free to come and go as they please. We pursue a non-profit ethos, though we do not seek charitable status. Now quit bugging us!

  You have no new messages ...

  They say everybody has at least one book inside them.

  But which derivation of my name would appear on the spine?

  They say every body has at least one book inside them.

  Or maybe I just read that somewhere. Not in a book mind, more likely in my baby daughter’s entrails, or rather what issues from them. I snappily browse the latest output from her digestive tract and pronounce myself satisfied with this particular edition, as well as being reapprised with what I had for dinner, now since plagiarised and offered back as part of Suzanne Ome’s own developing opus.

  Unfunnily enough, none of the literature on parenting delves much into the subject of the chromatics of your offspring’s off-loadings – whether their off-colouring denotes that she may be off key. The topic crops out barely a pothole in what is otherwise a mountain of exalted agglomerations of evolutionary know-how. A repository teeming with the species’ collected works on rearing. A clearing house of formative sagacity. With its ante-room periodicals and primers of anticipation, its delivery suite of digests and catalogued consultation, its study of referenced providence. All in all, an abundant library to lend us the abstruse familiarity of our foundlings. But as you pile-drive through the textbooks, the guidebooks, the TV-advertised partworks with free ring binder, the cribs, monographs and how-to handbooks, clambering towards the pinnacle of human apprehension, the view emerges of the speciousness of this species’ wisdom. For, despite all the incunabula, you are simply left holding the baby, probably at half-arm length out in front of you, much like you might hold a book.

  So much for the manual. There isn’t a solitary one worthy of the misnomer throughout the entire damn voluminous paper trail. Me, I’m shivering up to my elbows in droppings back in the pothole. A single little kick amidst the full-of-the-joys-of-being-alive salvo, and my daughter’s nappy pregnant with discharge has slithered across the changing mat and positioned itself perfectly, to catch the down-thrust of my elbow as I swipe her legs up in the air to dab at her bottom. Baby shit on my fingers, baby shit on my ulna. Forewarned is not forearmed.

  Once we’ve unerringly pulped all the trees, which might you consider be worse; to have toilet paper but sacrifice books; or to retain the publication of books at the cost of wiping your arse without any intercessional medium? That’s assuming the whole world hasn’t infarcted and collapsed in on itself under the weight of impermeable, non-degradable, disposable nappies plugging all our landfill refuse sites.

  G) Okay, let’s go with the flow. Have it your way (is there any other?). Roll with the punches. Pick up the threads even as you enfilade my strands. Say I accept your terms, for the sake of argument; indeed these very terms themselves seem solely to be directed for the purpose of disputation. The ambition of thought. To cerebrate. To moot. So yes, why not? Let’s conduct a mind experiment. I was born to play devil’s advocate. My gnosis was wreathed in sacrilege. I’ve never been about popularity contests and winning smiles. Only about population contests and just winning. First past the post rather than proportional representation.

  A) I do concur that you are favourably-disposed to language, over and above mere monkey communication. Although you might require vocabulary, idiom, expression and dialect necessarily to be modelled for you during immaturity, your brain does seem possessed of an innate function of syntactical organising that underpins all this force-feeding. That somewhere along the line, such a specialist facility was hard wired into your cerebrum; er, that is, I was forced to make a permanent adjustment. But indeed, I did part the anatomical waters to make such a new arrangement possible in the first place. And so your brains swelled. I remain unsure as to whether this was due to such an expanded capacity, or through the bloated emotion of pride, as your new linguistic organisational skills allowed you to clamber to the sum
mit of the primate pyramid. To ascend to top banana.

  AA) You employed tactical alliances to seal your brutish election. Took you to the four corners of the spherical earth. Yet it wasn’t those new-found cadencies that soothed so many a savage beast. Well though might you talk the hind legs off a donkey, veritably could you also talk yourself hoarse. While your clucking might have clipped the wings of chickens, you only chewed the ears off unmoved pigs and inscrutable sows. Indisputably your tongues wagged, but only succeeded in throwing dogs off the scent. And your speechifying would have stumped cats, whether tail-less or not. Thank Creation for pesky insects forever remaining immune to your small talk (then thank natural selection for making you mostly immune to the sticking of their probosci in, {and curse me in turn, for the subsequent sickle cell mutation}). Your imperial host that tamed Mother Earth were, therefore, following non-lingual orders. Mercenary trenchermen, they only marched on full rations. Domestication, rather than diction, separated your wheat from the chaff way back when. Where you were meticulous observers, tight imitationists and fluid creationists.

  T) Objection? Irrelevance? How so? Here we are forensically investigating the intent, the every nuance of verbiage itself. Rather than individual meanings, it is the very function of words that I wish to cross-examine. For all words are moot, are they not? Okay okay, I’ll cut to the chase, though it cuts me to the quick. Words, language, social communication, civilisation, technology, progress yada yada yada.

  G) Then you bureaucratised it all. You pen-pushers. You codified the vocalisations, transmuted them into consolidated characters, grouped into regulated composites. Symbols and objects bagged and tagged. So you could write it all down for posterity. And your posterity could then be instructed in the successful ways of your breed. And progress begat rapid progress.

  ©) Thus armed with alphabets and lexicons, worded definitions and verbal constructs (even fancifully phrased images for things that don’t necessarily exist), now you barrel up ready to solve my cryptic crossword. To unstitch my double acrostic. Since that is how my mystery evidently comes across to you. For you bureaucratise me. Me! A declension per language’s crushing plant. Stamping me byte-sized. The perplexity of life now just rote science. Piecework. A completion date which keeps inching forward, as your vicious thrusts make a scorched earth of me. Because you are competitive and incline towards goals, you now merely regard me as a finite number to be counted and crunched. A checklist to be ticked off. A catalogue to be compiled. Now I just seem to be there, a mapped continent awaiting inevitable colonisation. Yet it is I who in pre-history peopled you. I naturalised you, in order that you might denizen the world. Who cultivated whom? Whom extrudes from just a fused single cell, already replete with whom? Impudent ingrates.

  C) See, in the process of approaching me, you have lost the very suppleness I enabled you with. Structured vocalisation may be instinctual (thanks to my benificent grace), but written language is contrived. It takes its dictates from the oral. Simperingly. Your scribes are orthographers rather than authors, moving around pre-set, pre-determined, sub-units termed words, in the hope of reordering new combinations and new meanings. And though I am rather partial to utilising the lock and key application myself, your skeletal, flat abecedary cannot pervade my microscopically macroscopic mortice.

  A) Aw, don’t mope. I’ve perused the literature. Hell, at several removes I’ve been present at its genesis. 26 alphabetised letters certainly permit an ample host of verbal combinations. A vital body of production, preserved across the generations. A bit like me, if I bite on your sugar-coated analogy.

  G) So now you have quartered a deputation from your own massed rank with which to dismember me. To contain me whole, in order to render your personal mandala. For, obtuse as I am, supposedly I only possess a pithy 4 letters in my DNA alphabet (yet another lamentable acronym). ACGT. One letter affixed to each of my four chemical bases. I am to bear your standards, your yellow stars, pink, red and black triangles. A simulacra of you, something rooted and accustomed as you project outwards towards the unfamiliar, ever-hopeful of being able to reel yourselves back in to the discernible. To do so, you simply have to juggle with the entire possible combinations and recombinations of those four within my three billion. See, I’m giving you a sporting chance. Let’s slash the odds yet further. These four letters are combined in three-letter ‘words’; not as you understand the, er, well word ‘word’, but rather a sequence or ordering of the script. That gives you a finite 64 codon vocabulary, arrayed linearly along the double helix structure of my molecule.

  A) How’s your statistical analysis? I do a mean clustering, but standard deviation? Unfortunately for you rank and filers, these coding codons do not ‘read’ in linear fashion. So I put it to you that this is a tragic case of mistaken identity.

  G) Therefore, I consist of characters, but spell no syllables. I form word chains, but delineate no sentence. I am grammar, but not a syntax to speak of. And you would seek to rewrite me? When in fact it is I who write you.

  G) For you have me the wrong way round. I am a body of work, but I am not really a text. I am flesh (amongst other things), which you seek to make into words. To submit my secrets. A mirroring Rosetta Stone. My error-genus (genius?) zones. My G(uanine) spot. A paltry four-letter alphabet that encapsulates the entire requisite wisdom you desire; do you feel taunted, or just insulted? It is my words, which make you flesh (amongst other things).

  T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my strident and possibly chiding tone. I’m not quite feeling my–

  A) I pose this, about my quasi-words, I mean, yet do not concern yourselves with your norms of speech, intonation or semantics. It is merely important that my ‘characters’ are placed in precisely the right order, since they are conjugatory rather than phonetic. Sift through the DNA lexicon to arrive at the correct combination of my ‘grammar’, which engenders magical procreative forces. Not through some occult correspondence of enunciation, but through the proximal correspondence of structure, pattern and energy. An incorrect sequencing in even the most minute (minuet?) of my letter groupings and the thaumaturgy is corrupted (corrugated). So, while I do not actively withhold the full (fuel?) extent of my name, I am confident it will be beyond your grasp. Regard there, now I have it; Gee-no name! It’s not a preppy ‘G’ borne upon the gnome’s distended chest, but a mnemonic initial to remind him who he is and the humble roots from which he is derived (you can find him in guano). If he is to dangle his rod, first he needs my permit. You do not summon me. I summon you. For I am your Creatrix.

  T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my strident and possibly chiding tone. I’m not quite feeling–

  CAC) Okay, here’s the thing. Receding from first terms, I am not a code as you would have me. I am not an arbitrary semiotic system used for conducting messages (other than the fact you skirt me thus and have stained and marked me with your arbitrary symbolic system of letters). I am a transmitter, but am not encrypted. Nor am I about maintaining secrecy or brevity, though I uphold my right of privacy and I am concisely stacked. I am a set of functional instructions, but I am not systematised into anything as wrought as law or procedure. That concludes my opening statement. And I refute every last thrown voiced syllable of it, since, as your stooge, I have no native tongue of my own.

  They say everybody has at least one book inside them.

  I know I did once. The only question back then was which language it would be written in. I’ve introduced you to the in-laws, now meet my parents. Like the husband’s family, we all were born, live and will almost certainly die within the confines of Omagh, market town in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. I don’t know if it’s actually coded for in our DNA, but here, your life decisions are certainly selected for you; the physical limits heritable.

  As a youngster I used to cycle like I was possessed. Trying to flee these city limits, to discover a pure restorative oxygen for lungs aerobically compromised, not
by exertion, but by the fug of small-town prejudice. But everywhere I went it was writ large and cloned larger. My escape velocity was always spiked by the barbed wire of sectarianism, counteracted by citizen barricades and retarded by army checkpoints. Newton’s first law of motion. And here, certainly, was limitless friction to impede you. Grind you into inertia.

  I never did breach the ever-receding town limits. (I won’t even add the policing action by my family back home into the equation of subtraction. A young girl out alone on her bike? What if she were to get a puncture?) Our town and all towns in the Six Counties, for that matter, have thunderously disproved Newton’s third law of motion; when a force acts on a body, an equal and opposite force does not perforce act simultaneously on another body. The crab apple of revenge escalation must have fallen too far from the tree to have bopped him on his periwigged crown. See, sometimes it can take, ooh, easily a matter of minutes to retrieve a gun from a secret stash. All one has to do is round up a gaggle of kids and some stones to conceal your actions. Oh me, Omagh. Such a midden, I’m surprised they bothered to name it at all.

  I was once granted a chance of finally ditching this house of correction. Queen’s University, Belfast. To study linguistics and ancient languages. I was particularly struck by Ogham script. More a system of striated lines than what we recognise as letters. A tendril spanning between runic and alphabetic characters. I don’t know if it’s actually coded for in our DNA, but here your life decisions are certainly encrypted for you; the physical limits heritable. I mean, Ogham is a bloody anagram of Omagh for crying out loud! The same five letters, just sequenced in a different order. Still, I dared venture that I was about to undertake the odyssey of my life. When all the time I was preordained to remain at home, spinning gold into straw. Staying loyal to my own and resisting the importuning of each and every suitor with which the world could tempt me. About three at the final count.