Three Dreams in the Key of G
Page 4
So here I am, casting back for marginalia with which I might gloss the immediate future, but my testimonial falls way short. What was I so busy doing when I had Suzanne? What was I thinking? I can hardly upbraid all the textbooks now, if I couldn’t even keep my own record up to scratch. I place the journal on the lip of the sink. So now I’m thrown back on trusting my own sense impressions, an altogether different reading proficiency, for Amy’s composition is unmediated and rudimentary.
Close my– well yes, why not begin with her eyes? That’s pretty elementary. For the eyes have it. Well, we’ve already forded the blank milky blue mists therein. And now, as the recondite cones and rods gradually cohere, I can see the pixilated pixie of myself captured in her iris. (And presumably in return, my eyeballs are tattooed with her indelible image). For this is how we must both entreat the world for the foreseeable future. Through the mirrors of one another. Myself, staring back at me. Shrunken and minute. Now I feel wholly contained. Like a matrioshka, the eye of the pinprick doll reflected before me, itself accommodates another pair of yet smaller likenesses. These in turn yield further refraction upon refraction. And so on until infinity and negation. I contain her until she releases me from within her inner core, when I am left glassy eyed. Spare the rod and spoil the child indeed.
And smell. So primary a sense, even that of the troubles (lowest case ‘t’) persists in full working order. Apparently. Amy issued into the world almost totally inodorous. Yet the world’s scents have already begun to permeate her. Absorbing my maternal infusions, her internal still regurgitates them as ubiquitous baby smells, such as milk and sick. Neither her hair nor her pee have much of a discernible whiff. She, no doubt, would be able to sniff my milch cow out in a dark room, but I’m not sure I could reciprocate and locate her uniquely as my heifer. But soon she will be responsible for imprinting her own olfactory wake. She will go airborne and assail the world, parachuting in her spoors of being, existence and occupation. Later yet, a blended admixture personal to her. The scented carbolics with which she unblocks her pores and which, in turn, quarry their seal on her. Her brand musk of choice. Perhaps the insinuation of cigarettes, a tincture of hair lacquer, a sprinkling of fried food, or any of the plethora of human bouquets with which she will choose to shower herself. And the ones she’s not in control of, yet is inevitably responsible to; the spray of pheromones, Nature’s genetic spaying if you’re not careful. And I should know. Hmm, this soothe-saying’s going terribly well don’t you think?
Touching. Whenever she’s cupped in my arm, Amy sports her feelings on my sleeve. Tears or vomit leave their frank impress. If teething she gnaws. If blissful, she wrinkles. The crook of my arm contains the whole of her heartfelt range of expression. Forever questing after moulding herself into me, as if seeking perfect fleshy union. Yet her emotions remain untrammelled. Sheathing her like an exoskeleton.
Nevertheless, from the canon of Suzanne, I know what lies ahead. The die is cast and stamped. Stuttering remouldings, a succession of anchored push-offs, before shucking me like a peach stone as she derives a new level of emotional assertiveness. But the autonomy has shaky legs and so the process of puckering up to Mum necessarily starts all over again. I am drafted in to drape copiously around her bruisable self, while from within she confronts the world with its brickbats and burrs. She reclaims my pliant carapace of love, as maternal obligation prohibits me from armouring myself. Yet I can feel the pressure building up inwardly, since I know full well, as each occasion arises, she will wrench away this intimacy. As she effortlessly moults me, my bones are left broken, bloody and desiccated. A push-me, pull-you continuum, until she can fully unfurl her wings and fly the nest. By then, her emotions would have calcified into the hermetic, impenetrable crannies and crevices of her inner skeleton, while mine will simply have been scooped out, leaving me a fleshless husk. A dusty fossil. For that’s what maternal love can do to you.
Suzanne is four years old. I’ve known her all my life.
I pull the plug out, but still recline. The lukewarm water gently slaps and slurps around my flesh archipelago as it forges on towards the gurgling vortex, without so much as an excuse me. Where it squeezes past, where it sucks me down into the enamel, I welcome the meagre embrace. But the contact soon drains away and I am left shored against an unforgiving algidity.
I have forbidden myself exactly this kind of speculation in my journal. I am just to let them grow and merely monitor the process. Why? Do I strive to preserve their childhood, to pickle it in aspic, so enabling me to let them roam free in real life? Then why am I left beached here so high and dry? What started as an exercise now leaves me aerobically in debt. Who will sanction me to be free? How the hell have I permitted all this to happen?
I rose from the empty bath and wrapped myself in my towelling robe. It smelt slightly of mildew. I pulled the belt tight around my midriff, so that the flab spilled over it as the breath was pressed from my abdomen. I knew now why my husband collected miniature ships in their airless bottles. Those were the dimensions of his window out to the world. Mine occupied the surface area of a closed book and the aperture of an open teat. Though I am not enchained to respond to my textbook taskmaster on a daily basis, my overseer mocks me with the quotidian nature of my life therein. I cannot escape the consuetude, that which my journal returns me to constantly. The entire scope of my life tapering, as witnessed by my own testimony. Ostensibly, the journal is a riddle of my life, with no nuggets of self left behind, once the child-scourings have been sieved through. I should have drowned my journal at birth. Or at least let the ink run irreparably free, when there was still water in this bath. I used the sleeve of my robe to dab at the wet imprints of my fingers on the soft leather (the protective wax sheets having long since been forsaken). But they appeared to be set permanent, now woven as part of the very grain. Like livid throttle marks. I escorted it out the bathroom with me. Blubbering could always smudge the ink. Reckon I’ve enough tears to blot each page.
A) So, I am to be Exhibit A. Exhibit C. Exhibit G. Exhibit T. That book, in which all life is written. Your Doomsday Book. The book of genetic fate. A survey of all your riches. And all your shortfalls.
C) Verily I am a survey, but proffer no treatise. I am an ancient codex awaiting to be written. A prescription subjacent to an inscription. A living language beneath the skein of your dead one. A magical incantation you are neither sufficiently prestidigitous, nor visionary to invoke. The proof is in the reading, when you are barely literate. My stock still awaits its wax covering, before you can even contemplate your etching.
T) Three billion letters; two hundred volumes; half a generation of intensive reading. Just to glean authorship and copyright. Imagine that? So here’s a potted version. A prècis. A primer. I want to relate you a story. It’s your story actually, your incunabula. Though I’m not sure too many of you are familiar with the implications in all its relatedness. You couldn’t be, since you plumped for an azygous reading of the following complementary strands. Meiosis instead of mitosis. Here, let me retrieve the ineffable volume from the shelf. Allow me to blow off the dust from the hidebound covers. Permit me to cleave open the rosin seal that time seems to have recongealed into its intrinsicality. Now, if I can just first restore the necessary pages blighted by degeneracy. May I insist I also point you in the right direction. East and West. Ventral and dorsal. Lead you by the nose, back to some of your own most tenacious allegories.
G) I marvel at them, I really do. Both sets of scribes show remarkable skill. The monk with his illuminated majuscules and uncial script, the Jew with his unadorned calligraphy. Neither can afford a single aberration in his hand-written transcription. No errata along the entire length of the book, as the divine Word, the Holy Writ, must be wholly writ. Precisely rendered. One mistake and the whole volume is junked. There are no possible corrigenda, for the Author has bequeathed the editor neither cosmic correcting fluid, nor liquid paper. There can be no splicing or stitched insertions into calfskin v
ellum. I can only muse on my copying being a fraction as rigorous.
A) Hence these men are perfect practitioners of their art, for they do indeed commit no errors. Through practice and learning, passed down over many generations, they are selected specialist transcribers. The erratum made by the Church was that they did not allow their monks, their men of learning, to breed. The coding of genes for assiduousness, for ardour, for devotion were never transmitted (unlike with the Hebrews). Their holy enunciations remained in a hieratic tongue, whereas each Jewish male was required to read of his, in order to attain adulthood.
U) But while Christendom attempted to arrest evolution, the sons of Abraham ensnared themselves on the briars of their environment. Their prescriptions for circumcision and dietary selectiveness were always going to uncouple them from their neighbours. Not that they were seeking converts of course, being God’s chosen People. Given what befell their core sense of sight, one might have apprehended that their biology would adapt to select out the foreskin wholly from the male line; or effect a total digestive intolerance for porcine meat. But then their Election is about the committing to, rather than the mark of faith itself. Therefore also, perhaps you and I, casuists both, have this all transposed. Perhaps it is only the enforced suppression of the monks’ breeding drive that led them to such prodigious penmanship in the first place. The sublime from the sublimated. Exquisitely bred through the prohibition on breeding. For God moves in mysterious ways.
T) My corpus is supposedly a testament to the health and hope of future generations. The case history to end all case histories. Elevating everyone to the status of playing God. Hmm. Let’s see, in your own deposed words, what God has to say about testaments. A will, a legacy encoded to haunt you from the grave. ‘Unto the third and fourth generations,’ with parole for not just good, but perfect behaviour. Testament. A proof of something. God and his people swearing fidelity. By the book rather than on it. By the bollocks would be more like it. ‘The Testament’, a cupping of the testes as proof of masculinity; therefore witness to infallible, unbending truth. Like a couple of codpiece posturing rap artists you’ll find in any promo video. Us females have about the same value in all three creeds – no?
A) Which bit precisely are you objecting to? Oh really? Don’t give me that. I’ve seen your screensavers and the J-pegs exchanged in your breaks. During those increasingly long lulls as your computers chew on me in order to spit out my indigestibles. While you wait for the cafetière to decant your hundredth cup of coffee, you’re all finger popping and cussing in time with the beat. Shame it isn’t tea (maybe it is in your British Labs!). Then you could look down and read the leaves before they’re typeset by scourging water. There you’d come across adenine and get a more representative taste of your own worth. So, us sob sisters lack a phallus? Yeah, well, you co-respondents lack a second X chromosome to mask your degeneracy.
T) See, what your god didn’t tell you, was that he might just as easily have passed an X chromosome in his cupped testes. If it was down to us, the Fallo(silent ‘p’)-centred, we wouldn’t have to swear on our ova or anything else. No compacts necessary (apart from a bit of foundation, we’d want to look our best on our betrothal day wouldn’t we?). No shady deals sealed on shaky avowals of essential organic truth. The outcome would never be in doubt, since the mother unfailingly passes on either of her SWALK XX chromosomes. No grey areas, as one of our Xs must always hit the spot and mark everyone for life. Meanwhile, the paternal germ, sorry, germ cell, that recessive gene, either splits off a pathetic Y chromosome to his unfortunate progeny, or yields before his dominatrix and passes on his X chromosome like an obedient little mummy’s boy. HIS recessive Y-indeed gene certainly programmed HIS Son for a short life. My descendants will truly inherit the earth. For we females are intrinsic and you males extrinsic to the prime DNA mover. Anything else is strictly for the birds. That’s just the way the genetic cookie crumbles from the tree of life. But you can never accept this, let alone live it, can you? You’re always going to shake it and bring down the entire bruised crop.
T) You know God’s problem? He got so old, his chromosomes didn’t split. So the Son of God got two X chromosomes (we’ll pass over just how untainted Mary’s X chromosome was passed on in pre-surrogacy/IVF times) and one Y. Now that’s what I call a holy trinity! God the Mother, Virgin Ma and Her son. No problematic vague notions of holy spirits. That’s why the old paternalist God had to seal his covenant by grabbing on to his crotch. To reassure himself and to shake things up a bit in there. A desired outcome, from a loosening. Male... but ultimately sterile. Free will or determinism? You decide. Go with your instincts. But you’ll be needing more efficacious parables, with greater defined arcs than have served you up till now. God is too loose a canon with which to orient yourselves. Hoisted on your own rhetorical petards. Intestate. (Interstate?)
XX.X.MCMXCIX
With the children in bed, I undertook something I hadn’t done since shunting my own juvenile berth. I picked up a book.
I picked up a book. It felt like an affair. For initially the book had picked me up. Trawling a car boot sale, on the lookout for cheap boardgames (not travel editions, for where would we go? We’ll kill time and each other at home, thank you very much). A whirligig of tiddled winks, anthropomorphic counters, shapeshifting dice and garish cardboard harbingers of hazards and forfeits. Senses submerged by the flux, I was really only aligning for the horizon, when a flicker of recognition anchored my gaze. My eyes gained purchase on a crate of paperback books. I think their orderly ranged legibility, offered me respite from the torrent. A dredger ploughed through the suspension of my mind, to present me with memory. Read her. Shared some nice moments with him. Undecided about that one, for all her reputation back in the day. Oh yes. I used to especially like him. Could it still be possible, after all this time?
Second-hand. Well-thumbed. Me more than him by the looks of it. Immaculately preserved, as I gave him the eye and looked him over. Good, no name scrawled on the inside cover. Maybe his last partner never got to first base. Swallowed his pick up line, the bait on the fly leaf. But then didn’t like the flavour of the first chapter, so they threw him back in. Sinker, hook and broken line. And I chance to be downstream. All washed up. Doused in domestic effluent. Needing something to wring me out.
Oh yes. I really used to like him. In a platonic sort of way. Long before the printing block that was the issue of my daughters. Could it still be possible after all this time? Of course, you never forget, just like riding a bike. Not that I do that any more either.
I shone a flashlight into the upper stories of my mind’s storehouse. Marvelled at the organisation. A few pages struggled through, in a mechanical, instructed sort of way. Blowing a few cobwebs off the reading template. Just oiling the cogs, you understand. I reflexively recall letters and retrieve words. Syntactical sentences helped co-ordinate my breathing. So I could eavesdrop. The words were speaking to one another. But not yet to me.
How well we are configured for learning. How well are we configured for learning. How we are well configured for learning. Once. When the genes were still actively nattering away to each other. Seething with possibility, growth and development. Before the boiler room in the basement had seized up with inactivity. To drive or burn anything new into my schemata was now beyond it. I needed to understand the interaction of the phrases. Across the paragraphs. The chapters. Which bits were relevant to where in the chain. To note things that for now didn’t seem to portend anything significant, but which were sure to come back and hit me straight between the eyes when I least expected it. When I wasn’t looking.
A few pages struggled through, in a mechanical, instructed sort of way. Trying to find a lead into this story, which had seemingly been pitched at random on page one. Soon I began to educe threads and connections. To pick up a narrative and voice. Yes, a voice. The sounds of the words, drifting to me across the monochrome print’s diffident regularity. Not a hero as such, just a conscientious e
scort leading me by the hand. Pausing patiently with me, as I cock an ear at a perceived cry of objection from the nursery above my head. No, it’s alright. It’s not sustained. A monstrous moment in her purling dream picture narrative, before she rolls over in her sleep and the world regains its unfathomable composure.
Or maybe it’s not quite so unfathomable. My guide tugging me gentle attention. He’s something he wants to show me. His secret place. If we are to scale this pinnacle together, I’d better give him all my energies. Allow him to lash us up tight against one another’s being. Let out the cable. How well we are configured for learning. How well we were configured for learning. How well we are configured for learning. The reading template perfectly grooved to adapt and acquire each unique sequence of letters presented before one. God, I just pray we can get Baby Amy into the Church school. It’s her best bet for getting ‘the three Rs’ implanted. Good God almighty, would you settle yourself woman? She’s only yet a little bundle and already you’re predestining her life. Well, that’s what living in a place like this can do for a person. For a woman at least. There’s always people prepared to shout the odds and others to place the wagers on a filly’s life. Running in blinkers. Martingaled. In the one-horse town handicap, held under the auspices of the Ulster positional jockeying club, everybody always comes in a runner up. And each-ways are just not permissible.