by Marc Nash
I’m so sorry, where were we again? Some susurrating and cooing wasn’t it? Flirtation, literary pigeon-fancier style. But I always remember my way home. I will not betray my husband, even in thought, for we are an association. A pairing. You, as a studied observer of human behaviour, may purport to know me intimately (while incidently refusing to disclose your own composed concealment), but you must understand I have responsibilities. I cannot just let go. I don’t want to be whisked away to a better place. I’ve made my own featherbed and am happy to sniffle in it. I’ve plumped for my pillow of down and am content to cradle my head there. And more significantly, for the superincumbence in turn of my daughters’ heads. My arms fully elongated above me, as they grip my hands and whip their gravity-laden cartwheels, like we’re some third-rate balancing troupe. Only sometimes I feel, well, wiredrawn. It would be nice... just to give my arms, hands and fingers some respite now and again. From the pins and needles of remorselessness. The voodoo of lapsed time.
Was that a whimper? Again, no barrage ensues, so I can stand down my instincts. Let myself go a bit. Engage in a spot of diatropism. As I incline further into the armchair, my feet reflexively tuck themselves under me. The joints creak with disuse. Griping at the sudden reimposition of a footloose teenage girl’s carriage, rather than that of a free-of-fancy mum. The stretched polymer of my unintentionally hipsterish leggings exposes pockmarks of flesh beneath previously undisclosed craters in the material. I look down at the frayed holes worming their way up towards my rump. A ladder in my tights used to indicate my sinew being wound too taut; when snagged, I knew the rough edge I had to negotiate was external. The shear litmus of sheer nylon. Wearing tights is another thing I don’t do any more either. And there is no litmus of leggings. No forensics of a parenthood found pickled in formaldehyde. Where was the author’s reportage on that fact?
My name is Jean Ohm. Silent ‘H’, as we’ve established. The ‘H’, to all intents and purposes, a waste of a space. A junk letter. But it performs a vital function. ‘H’ as a feminising character, softening the staccato percussive wallops of ‘S’s, ‘T’s, ‘C’s and ‘P’s. Junk male junked, as it were. Returned to sender, paid for by a no-longer-any-of-your-business-mate rate. How do I know this for a fact? Because there’s a learning toy in our communal crèche, a pop-up ersatz typewriter-cum-computer, for teaching the alphabet; and after the twenty-six characters and accompanying pictograms, follows ‘Sh’, ‘Th’, ‘Ch’ and ‘Ph’ (shell, thumb, cheese and phone). Nowhere else on the toy are there any other combinations of letters. So this is my personal revelation from the mandala of my name.
My name, as conferred upon me by my parents. Marking me for life. Or rather expunging me, as it now appears. Draped around me like the orange garb of the death row prisoner. The name embodies me, even as I enflesh it. But it was ever thus. The ‘H’ kept apart the feuding factions of my parents. The capital ‘O’ I take from my father, buffeting the stout, lower-case maternal ‘m’. Each seeking my allegiance against the other. Pressed in upon from both sides, until I lose consciousness and slip under. Thus is my feminised ‘h’ silenced and rendered inferior. A typographical error. The ‘O’ and ‘m’ too hellbent on knocking seven bells out of each other, to let anything come between them. The primal sound, a percussive peal; a ringing of the ears. The primal scene, a concussive writhing; a wringing of the invitingly arched neck. Male and female, yin and yang, each contained in the other and despising itself accordingly. Each determined to purge itself of its mirror image ball and chain. Each tearing after its own treacherous scut. Fomenting a frothing spindrift of steam, slewing round like a rabid Catherine Wheel, showering frictional heat sparks all around. Where were the law enforcement agencies back then? Or even now, in those places in which they are truly needed? At the breeched birth of every child, into the breach of a warring world. And in that vacuum, like a sweeper at the gladiatorial arena, what can I do, but just gather up the accumulated detritus?
We only desire to shield ourselves from the prevailing morality out there. But your guns and megaphones suggest that we are not permitted to remain outside. For a country founded upon non-conformity, there is a distinct lack of license granted to its citizens. So now we are forced to engage with you. Yet we do not proclaim our way of being as superior or purer than yours. Certainly not in any manner that catapults us into murderous rivalry with you. Our programme is glacial, an evolutionary pace of change. Lending Mother Nature a hand, giving her a demure leg up is all. Please let us be. We’re not harming anyone.
I think what really gets up the authorities’ snub noses and plants a poppy for peace there, inside the barrel, is our pistil-whipped sisterhood. For what do men eternally want from us? Pleasure and progeny. But here, we retain exclusive rights to both. That immemorial (pre-DNA testing), nagging doubt, that any offspring perforce had to be the mother’s, but not necessarily that of the father. Both sexes could recreate themselves in the shape of either a little boy or a little girl, but only we women could carry a different sex inside our bodies. This is the power we held over men. Our sons, incubated in our wombs, would always remain part of us, no matter how much they bore of their fathers. While our daughters were of him, but never any part of him (even if he repeatedly raped her as countless numbers did). This is why daughters had to be enslaved and brought to heel by breaking their ankles. The light within destroyed and replaced with a blackguard, shining his warden maglight to ensure they hadn’t escaped the penile system. Well fellers, it’s the end of the line down here. The end of your tyrannical line at least.
Any requests? This one got a few hits on the click counter last time. I’ll spin it round again. This goes out to all of you tuning in with the speaker volume turned down. I don’t mind re-airing this one, ’cos there’s no copyright on it. How could there be?
Fly fishing. Those (m)anglers, with their practised hooks and sharp lines, how they sink us. They dangle their rods (custom-made for our backs, to rip out our spines and fillet us), and dip their tackles in the gene pool. Casting for the verb, rather than a noun, in ‘mate’. Master baiters all, they coat their tiny DNA tidbit with their wormy and maggoty anti-bodies. Anti our bodies. Anti any new organism that might threaten their integrity. And we, with our coiled, helical instincts, course headlong to unfurl our labia and perform our mating reel at the end of a bobbing barb that pierces and tears at our flesh. An involuntary volution that taunts us with its choreography. Salmon may swim upstream, but our spiralling is countermined by his DNA spiralling in the other direction twice as fast. The only impulse thus generated is a solenoid, us chasing our tails. Alternating current carrying us further into the shallows.
They pump out their bilge before they are sunk below our waterline. Their industrial effluence and untreated discharge battens down on our tides like a crude oil tampon; clogging the tangled forests of our swaying abdomens; lapping the promontories of our rippling breasts; or washing up on the distant shores of our faces. Dry-fly fishing. Gazing at themselves in the seminal slick. Oil and water. Job well done, with no self-contamination. They’re alright Jack. Every man Jack of them. Mutatis mutandis for the gills. Imprecation not impregnation. They have made unrequited fish-wives of us all. Fished out. A stagnant pond. But we have very short-term memories and will irrevocably, toothlessly bite at the next lure. Fishing for compliments, as against complements.
Having thrown us, tiddlers and Reubenesques all, back into the mocking vortices of the agitated gene pool, they still make it clear which of us, were they ever to pair off selectively, would capture their fish-eye lens. Arms outstretched across their chests, they expand upon how it was that big and this deeply embedded, yet still they managed to reel us in. All the while, their miserable harpoon stands primed at the perpendicular to their arms, its lone eye basking in seminal reflected glory.
So now you know. As if you didn’t already. I’m after a spot of in-house cleaning. Some genetic re-engineering. We women have more than held up our end of the species, w
ithout any internal input from a Y chromosome, so it’s obviously vestigial. A relict. Should be a simple enough task, since we only need attend to one single pesky unit of sex. X-cise it. Replace it with an andro-gene. No more ‘Y’s and wherefores. According to the scientific literature, it’s been shrivelling of its own accord. Only some 45 functioning genes remain on that benighted chromosome. They’ve been dropping off like flies. Never mind all the shit we pump into our rivers and oceans, so that now all the male fish are more akin to females... I’ve drafted in some consultant viruses. And some experts in the field who have changed their gender just by quaffing hormones. Yet we’re not after the species dying out. We’ll still hanker after reproduction in some shape or form. Lady peacocks have done it. They dandified their males, required them to comport in the most deliciously ornate frippery, just to get their scrawny leg over. So it can be done.
I’m also investigating utilising the principles of that humble hermaphrodite the earthworm. Same-sex reproduction. Self-fertilisation. I’m sure my chicks here will go for it. Chicks with dicks...
Oh ho! Do I detect the squealing white noise of bugged out distaste, mixed with the shrill whirring of lensed lasciviousness? Squinting peepers and sound-bitten lips. Your needle sensors are all standing to attention, way off the scale at that one. Why should it be a surprise that any appulse of women would develop periodic confluence? If you gave me the world’s airwaves, even for twenty seconds, I could have the entire fellowship of men instantly converge to troop the colour before my right royal flush of a mouth. Maybe that’s why they have me pegged as so powerful. Christ on a bike! You can resheathe your tongues now, you monitor lizards. Dicks with dicks...
XX.XI.MCMXCIX
He’s still whispering in my ear. But not appreciatively. Almost seems uninvolved. Heedless. Dragoman’s apparently not about offering a full-blown adulterous affair. Never even on the menu. As he slips a couple of cucumber slices over my eyes to change the filter, he envelops me in his warm, caressing word-albumen. Tenderising my weary skin, incrassating my torpid blood. If only the publishers had the foresight to make this a scratch and sniff edition. Nonetheless, I’ve helped myself to a glass of wine.
This penman, this tapered suitor has seemingly crawled right inside my head and discerned the dimensions within. Floating in the sensorily deprived tank of my adult mind, he can do what he wishes with me. But, good to his word, he does not take advantage. He merely fords my Hellespont to receive me. Finally, a meeting of minds that was quorate. A knitting circle within which to swap worthwhile patterns.
I put down the book and gambol over to my journal. I’m enjoying reading, but I feel like I’ll explode if I don’t get these coruscating thoughts out of my head and on to paper. I feel guilty. That’s just daft. It’s his fault for being so perspicacious. For getting me ticking again. Even if it’s only the inspiration of the mundane. Every minute of every day, I’m helping my daughters position themselves in this strange new array of the world they find themselves deposited in. We roll call its arrangement together. We accompany one another on a daily pilgrimage of meaning. Well, it’s about blinking time I get my story narrated! Dear diary just doesn’t cut the musty. Page after page of fretting about the folds of a child’s rich tapestry. Look see here, when we went out for an anniversary meal (ours as against some historical battle or triumphalist march), we devoted the whole current affairs discourse to our children back home. It is all indeed, as this hoarse whisperer surmises, point lace. A needless needle point. Knit-wit one moment, mother of purl the next. Patchy patchwork. That’s just how Mummy is (I think the wine’s gone straight to my nib). It won’t mark them for life. So I drop a stitch or two, or at least catch my breath for a while, big deal. The girls won’t tumble and fall. I’m still the safety net in place. The whole thing doesn’t unravel because I snap a couple of links. Life doesn’t unhinge itself merely from the quotidian loop going awry now and again. Let someone else make the running for a change. It’s uncanny (and unnerving). I feel like I’ve had a delicate finger rub on the inside of my cranium. Each synapse individually massaged and gently realigned by this man’s soothing words. I am appreciating something once again.
I am
Oh God, she really is crying! I should have read the tracer. I’ve left it too long. The balloon’s gone up. She’ll be jerked fully awake now. Her unregimented mind launching her into daytime and milk supply. Flying full in the face of her overtaxed and undercompensated muscles; the darkness beyond the curtains; and the empties, still waiting to appoint their polite request for one extra lactose delivery please. Somebody else providing the wherewithal for me to dispense her needs. Since now I’m just a catalysing enzyme. A cow-cocktail waitress and bottle washer. The former umbilical and mammarial maternal hearth impression, subtly revised into galley proofs of bovine and warmed silicate surrogacy. The hot metal of the outside world lies just beyond. I’ve been steadily losing her, from that moment we no longer maintained a joint circulation.
Oh God, she really is crying! I’ve left it too long. I’ll have to raise a liquid white flag to sue for peace and quiet, before the war for regulation (aka the waxing and waning weaning war) escalates to other rooms in the house. I hand her the vitreous acknowledgement of my recrudescing inconstancy and my overlying weakness, and she laps greedily at it. Co-dependents. Passed down through the maternal line? Or sucked in through the teat?
Liquid white sands of time slither past imperial marking posts that seem to be staking out my life for me. Her alluvium, my moraine. A patient overseeing of her lethargic but resolutely determined draining of the bottle. A floppily folded bracing of her tiny frame, somewhat less bent on surrendering its salient of swallowed air. A spiky struggle over nappy-changing a suddenly metamorphosed baby octopus, replete with green-brown inky squirt. A seemingly endless reassuring rhythm of susurration, hair-stroking and stilled digital touch, and my vigil would finally be over. Another day skewed and skewered before it had even got underway. Before I’d wrapped up the previous one. Plop went the discarded nappy in the sanitary disposer.
I stood at the frame of her door, gazing on her now tranquil features. And I saw myself expressed in them. But then again, I knew that I had stood here countless stretches previously, transfixed by her pinched or simmering being, and also recognised myself in her animal neediness. Here I was outside, looking in on my daughter, yet seeing mainly myself. Just like the refractions of my book. Time to get back to the grown-ups. Sweet dreams. For all of us.
My parting ‘I love you’ mouthed toward my little ’un back adrift in the land of the giants once more is speared by the sonorous reports from the far end of the hall, confirming that my big ’un was slumbering pricked at by the elves. (Leprechauns and fairies having long been expurgated from this household’s lexicon of the Queen’s English. Eugenics even in fairytale land. Sorry, that should be make-believe land.) Off in another room. On a camp bed. For a camp follower. In both creed and sex. The man who liked to bang on somebody else’s big, base drum. The genetic Protestant protestor. Of how the nightly wailing incursions into his sleep slew him for the day.
Certainly they did, for that was the bloody point! An instinctive cry for succour and an instinctive response to tend. It’s how the human race gets on. In Amy’s case, a scream already adapted for pitch, so as to compete with the Lambeg beat behind which this household supposedly ought fall into line.
Of course, I had no rejoinder to his star witness for the persecution, Suzanne, averring that she too was assailed through the night. Nor had I an answer to his remarking that our baby girl had elegantly adapted the conduit to manipulate us beyond the call of Mother-nature. I didn’t bother to retort that this was evidence of her undertaking the long-forced march to little personhood. Accruing those skills necessary to master her environment. An environment completely predicated on relationship. In fact, I had no answers at all. Other than that he might see the way clear, to sharing the burden and lend a hand of course. Perish the thought, but
not the species!
For I am the bottom line. The load line. I am forever to be the one to pick up the slack. Since she can’t and he won’t. Mankind’s evolutionary adaption. Beyond reproduction, human love lies dormant. Shackled and in thrall to the stresses of our surroundings, mutated by the interpolation of our progeny. I cuddled up in the cere-cloth of the marital bed, with a ciggy and my new book for some warmth and understanding. My journal lay spreadeagled on the floor where it had flown with the initial infant incendiary. Victim of the push-me, pull-me of apron-strung life. It not only lay embedded in a very domestic environment, it suckled and yielded it its vampiric life . Maybe I do want to be transported in my mind after all.
We don’t allow men here. Other than gay males. While they too welcome this oasis we provide in the macho desert of minacity, the majority are drawn to the facilities we offer them. Most are medically trained, and seek to isolate just what it is that constructs masculinity. Whether in reference to themselves, or seeking out some sort of ‘ideal’ male, either provides felicitous research for our own purposes. Poor suckers, unwittingly writing themselves out of any futurity. But there again, most wouldn’t be siring any progeny in any place. Having said that, their only actual obligation here is to impregnate once a year. Park, ride, pump and then dump. A mutually satisfying arrangement. For those too queenishly squeamish, or otherwise conscientiously objecting, we bear IVF technology to take their sperm without the intercession of pudenda.
Thus we begin to breed out the hetero male strain. Thinking about it, maybe that’s why the DEA are prowling around. Though we’re unlicensed IVF practitioners, we don’t make a profit nor is any medical insurance involved, so they can’t get us that way. But maybe our specialist drug requisitions give them jurisdiction.