by Marc Nash
C) You duplicate the same derangement with computers too, through introducing another layer of language. Assembling another storey upon Babel, in your quest to scale me. Binary hieroglyphs that enable you to depict faster than your computational brains can, yet you cannot decipher them. Stone-borne cuneiform, where you seek cursive, fluid, lithe life. So your self-discourse remains forever in parallel, marooned on different spirals of the ziggurat. It’s a supreme view from up here. How are you gnomes enjoying your minuscule helter-skelter?
T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my astringent and possibly chiding tone–
XVII.VII.MCMXCVIII
Height of summer. And depth of despair. The annual family holiday on the Antrim coast. No real break for me though. Since in renting a cottage, I’m still charged with shopping, cooking, cleaning and childcare. Only now I’m in a slightly alien environment (albeit we return here every July), without the full-blown logistical support system of home. Still, I’ve got to prove irrefutably that we can travel light, if I’m ever to have grounds for lobbying in favour of a foreign break. In a hotel. ’Cos I’m sick of self-catering for everyone except me.
So, for now, we have to settle on pelting out of the cottage as soon as there is any break in the showers, limbs and beach accoutrements kaleidoscoping at crazy angles, as the steep concrete ramp precipitates us headlong towards the dark stained sand. We’ve paid for this privilege of a breath of fresh air and we need to see a return on our money. Trussed up in our hooded coats, all our respiratory apparatus is ensconced behind the filter of our urban fabrics. Wind-cheated. Suzanne desultorily stabbing a long-handled spade into the sand, a wind-blown pixie out of scale and out of her element in this desolate spot. Baby Amy, cupped in a sling, catapulting herself deep into my swaddling. Seemingly tinier than a grain of sand even.
It’s not purely down to the climatic marasmus, however. For when we do commit ourselves to the sand, that child’s playground which supposedly draws us here, Suzanne is not really stirred by its offerings. She has neither quite the imagination to see the inherent potential, nor the manual dexterity to wield the necessary intermediaries to unlock it. I am left to fill buckets with loose sand, then to compact them with a spade, before emptying into miraculously firm constructions by inversion. The further proceeding delight of discovering beach flotsam for adornment (been there). The excitement of sieving for them and watching the percolating wisps of sand slink away to unveil the interred treasures, those gnarled frangibles from which all life once emerged (done that). Then there’s the alchemy of excavating trenches and filling them with water that evaporates quicksilvered from sight (bought the T-shirt). And the innocent thrill of writing in the sand with stones or fingers, only for the waves to render our ink invisible (you’d be able to see it too, with its frothy logo paean to fun, only it’s shrouded beneath my many layers of clothing. But I am screen-printed smiling on the inside, believe me).
Yet none of this enlists Suzanne’s enthusiasm, while the prospect of succumbing myself to be buried in cold, clammy sand, that unfailingly yielded amusement last season, fails to enlist mine. The beach just isn’t her oyster. But I’m the mother of pearl before swine, patiently adumbrating these tasks one after the other in a vain attempt to muster her. Gently but fumblingly probing her plastic boundaries. Limpetly sticking at it. Never quite sure of when I’d pushed too far, when I’d closed her down for good. Like a blindfolded funambulist. Walking across razor wire. In bare feet. Somehow get her to sense the point of coming here. That the upheaval and disorientation is for a purpose. Not necessarily for her to appreciate it. Just to lodge the notion. But even my efforts pall, compared to those of that most uncivil of engineers, her father.
Oh would that he’d been blessed with boys perchance. The diligence with which he erected his beach battlements. Forts with towers, moats and extensive ramparts. Sand intricately pinched together between two fingers of one hand, while the pinkie of the other squared them off with great finesse. Then the partnership swept seamlessly across and down and thus were the walls crenellated. If the sabulous construction ever crumbled, he was unperturbed. Rather he displayed the forbearance of a tireless Job, in setting about adroitly repairing the breach. Oh would that he have kneaded the nape of my neck like that once in a while. Actually, I’d even settle for him merely rolling out the pastry for one of my bakes. You know, a shared activity, like couples do?
The boys in the party nearest us had also commanded their parents to construct for them empires built on sand. But only to enable them to jump on the towers as soon as they were doffed from beneath the bucket. That’s boys for you I suppose. Would that have made him any happier? Any more fulfilled? Would it have served as some sort of acknowledgement of his labour of love, through the he-artlessness of destruction? I’ll take Suzanne’s detached shunning over that, as a more meaningful gesture. Mirroring back to him his own incommunicable insularity. A man who reaches out, with hands firmly stuffed into coat pockets, mouthing with chilled breath adrift on the breeze, as it straggles back past his own insulated ears. Like father, like daughter. No, I won’t permit that to happen. Though my paltry attempts at diversion might have prompted her irritation, at least it’s an engagement of sorts. The tooing and frooing. The give and take. The two steps back and one step sideways. Dragging her to the threshold of seeing that it might be fun, or how it all connects up, only to be repulsed by her intransigence. But the emotional switchboard is lit up. Bulbs a-popping. That’ll do for me. His stultifying castle complex will be washed away by the time night falls. No entry, no exit. Siege situation. I’ve often envisioned him cracking and holding me and/or the kids as ransom against the world. Bartering for an equitable share, with stock he held to be bankrupted. Why can’t he just settle for the value of what he already has? Why can’t I?
Our beach neighbours’ children were about Suzanne’s age. A more careful perusal and I noticed that in a way they were in fact playing together with her. Not spatially and not interacting exactly, more a sort of playing in the vicinity. A guarded playing. Not a playing that checked the boundaries, since frontiers were meaningless with such an unbounded continent between them. A parallel playing. Of shared responses to the immediate surroundings foisted upon them. Tentative glances and wordless mutterings an invisible friend would be hard pushed to catch, but which were betrayed by the tiny breath trail kissed by the cool air. Imperceptible call and response. Catechism with a yawning time lag.
Notwithstanding, the span remained forever unbridged. Was it a gender difference? Or perhaps already a sectarian divide. Even though we had no gleaning of what community each other were from, both sides exhibited a pre-emptory circumspection. Heavens above! How will they ever make new friends? Answer, they won’t. Not outside of their pre and pro scribed schools and meeting places. Perhaps I’m reading too much into all this. It could be just how shy children, still unsure of their own fixed identities, dance around the briar of making contact. Damned if I could remember what it was like for me when I was their age. Down on this self-same stretch of soggy beach. But it is implacably a divide all the same. Of whatever source.
Locals say the beach is turning to shingle. That soon, we won’t be able to turn out any sandcastles or dam up water channels. Erosion. Abrasion, no matter how much we dig our nails in. Or perhaps because of it. Still, must be symptomatic of something or other. Evolution I suppose. A momentary convergence of deep, geological time and shallow, human pendency. When pre-history says ‘move on please’ (nothing to see here). As we notch antiquity with our petty striations, it in turn scythes a huge fissure into our glacier of tradition. For it shale not be the same for Amy and Suzanne’s children. Maybe they’ll be forced to move further up the coast to find their drenched sand holidays. And their children, will they encounter a similar ravine between male and female, boy and girl? Possibly. Or one still greater between Protestant and Catholic? Almost certainly, given our deep, deep human impulse to bad blood. Hereditary enmi
ties, are how we keep pace with inert rock.
I’m almost touched by the chat room proclamations of support. We’re not only vexing the minds of the authorities, but also those of our notional supporters. The militias are in a real pickle as to who they should jump into bed with. The dykes confronted with opprobrious government agencies. Or the Feds poised to wipe out the godless, man-baiting homos. I think they’ve come to the conclusion it’s not worth emerging from their own bunker for. Besides, who’s going to trek all the way down to Florida, when back in snowy Idaho all one’s summer wardrobe is already in storage? While here, the local rednecks have always been compromised, through the anti-communist banners being borne aloft by one group of Hispanics who got their butts kicked by another just across the Keys. It’s a minefield, this allegiance to the flag thing. But not inside our community. Stars are what we see and stripes are what we are left with, after a thrashing. Nor do we fly the Jolly Roger. We do not rally to a standard bearing the name of a man, whatever his demeanour. No flagstaff crests our compound. So you can all take your paintballs away and play siege mentality somewhere else.
*
Of course, an interesting dilemma will emerge from the breeding programme in a few generations to come. One that will inevitably underscore the inherent contradictions in our democracy itself. As we regulate our ecosystem to factor out all external sources of male predation and competition, then heritability will reign supreme. We will be distinguishable from one another in our brave new world, only through our genes. New internal competition will arise, based on our own gradations of skin, lips, cheekbones, breasts, hips and arse/ass. And these reifications will be even more haphazard and imponderous, since they will not be yoked to the purpose of pursuit of a mate. No democratic environment can prevail amid all this internal divisiveness. The very genes which we seek to alter here will in turn exert their evolutionary emolument and select out our beloved underpinning of equality. You can’t fuck with fate. You can’t evaginate evolution, though evolution can certainly evaginate you. I’ll let our in-house facilitators come to this conclusion in their own sweet time.
I.IX.MCMXCVII
A long involved telephone call. I’m seated on the bottom stair, handset cradled under my chin, giving Amy a draught of flesh top. Suzanne is plucking my arm, but soon takes cognisance of her place in the orchestration. I watch her storm off, quivering with what I assume is unadulterated pique. Momentarily I hold the phone away from my ear, and pitch for the timpani of small-armed percussive reparation. But none is forthcoming. Amy fell asleep and took my pinioned arm with her. My distressed cabled confessant was chewing my ear off. Yet what had ripped out and borne aloft my heart was the petrified image of my eldest daughter’s receding elfin form. There was only empty space in front of me. And silence. It’s as if she had disappeared in a puff of disenchantment.
I wasn’t tracking her down, more trying to clear my head of the fuzz of phone tinnitus. Having decanted Amy from my arm into her cot, I wandered towards my bedroom. I must have glimpsed a penumbra of colour suddenly occlude part of the door crack, since I snapped myself back before the threshold. The hue displaced itself once again and unblocked the sliver of light that gained me witness. There she was, sat at my dressing table. In front of my hinged mirror triptych, that gateway to the source of identity. The family omphalos. For I too had sat in front of just such a mirror, a child seeking reassurance of my mother’s continued existence when confronting her temporary absence from the house. Jesus wept, suddenly even my pang had a pang of its own now!
As I write this, I’m not sure if it took shape in my head as I’m stood there outside the door; or if I’m composing it now; or even that it was preformed back then, when I myself was that child sat at that magical adult console. For in the rift of displaced time, I well recall/construe how the detail seems to concern externalities, when really it’s inside that’s jagging about all over the place. My mother’s orderly bedroom with nothing out of place. Everything personal and messy having been buried behind sober, white wardrobe doors. Over the marital bed, fundament of my genesis, a neutral, passionless landscape with a tiny cottage at its heart. ‘I shouldn’t be in here, I shouldn’t be in here,’ I inhaled pantingly. ‘I’ll get caught,’ I exhaled. But then my eyes alit on the dresser, with all those personal allures of woman, my mother. Whisked away by the faint scents and oily emulsions lingering in the air, held in the glass at the kernel. The forge. The foundry. For all that was feminine. A place of creation, beauty and adornment. I knew I must not approach, to seat myself, to touch. For this was the portal to the forbidden world of boys and sex and, once seduced, my soul might be whipped away from me. I would be discovered still sat in this grotto, dusted head to foot in incriminating powders, guilt and shame battling it out with non-hormonal rouge for supremacy upon my cheeks. But I felt the warmth surging through me anyway. Imagining for my mother, a divine trinity illuminated in those three mirrors. Ambrosias and honeys in hand, as she peers in towards the core of her central glass, fluently kindling the two vitreous handmaidens either side with her radiance. Thrice-enhanced, I felt myself equally ordained to enter the burgeoning world inhabited by my mother and her mother before her. The nine of us stretching back towards infinity.
And now, admittedly at somewhat more of a precocious age, here was my daughter undergoing the very same private initiation. I did what any proud mother would do, I checked that the decor was fitting. I didn’t have such a big heavy dresser as my mother possessed, though as a family heirloom, no doubt one day I would have to conjure an excuse for it residing unloved and unsold in a charity shop. And while I could not even recollect whence I had come by the picture above my bed, sorry, our bed, I knew that I had purchased it as a peremptory act, so that was sufficient despite its blandness. The unguents were not as dense as in my mother’s day, but for all their brittleness, I felt still presented a palpable patina with which you could almost limn the walls of the room.
What was she doing exactly? She was bobbing in front of the mirrors, though I’m glad to report that she didn’t appear to be sobbing. Instinctively I pressed my torso back from the door, as she herself cringed back from the purview of the meniscus of the lens. Now I couldn’t get her in focus. Since I’d sat there, both as mother and tremulous daughter, I knew I couldn’t reveal myself and expose her. Yet I had to know precisely what was happening. Fortunately she dipped forward into the dimension of the mirrors again and tugged my frame back to the buffer of the door. Several times we repeated this process as if we were attached by an elasticated umbilical. Or, as it dawned on me, more like that we were just performing a poorly rehearsed routine. Synchronised swimmers who are forced to practice in separate lidos.
I gleaned she was ducking in and out of the glass’s survey, as if it was a searchlight. Trawling for a breakout. For escapees and absconders. Fugitives from familiarity. In a world of inversion, absence becomes a desirable property, a valued valency. If the beam didn’t sweep you up, it meant that you’d slipped away. If it conjured you in its field, you were held fast and atomised. My daughter was too discerning to want to convene the snarled trinity of me and my mother before me. For here she was, treating the triplicated lenses as if they were sited in a House of Fun. Distorting and reassembling. Distorting and reassembling. Whose genes does she see eyeballing her from within the scope of the looking glass? I just prayed that it was only the sloughing of me and my mother that she craved after and not that of her own self. For mirror narcissism is bipolar and self-antipathy the septentrional one of those foci.
I took my leave. Not knowing quite what to do next, I went into Amy’s room, as if to confer with her that I wasn’t going to fail her as demonstrably I had with Suzanne. She was still in the land of nod. I stood there forlornly, trying to red eye my doting behind her shielded lids. I held there staring, just waiting to harvest the emanations of attachment, but my well seemed either dammed or dried up. Now I really was marooned. Already exiled from my own bedroom, I didn’t
want to creep out of here, lest Suzanne hear me and then denounce me for being close enough to spy on her and yet too distant to be present with her. Something was ricocheting around between me and my daughters, but sure as hell it wasn’t love.
CAT) I am only you up to a point. That much is certain. You have no chance of approaching my mystery and my ingenuity. It’s the chemistry, stupid! I am about nothing but chemical outcomes. I don’t ‘do’ metabolisms. Solely coding for proteins, I light the blue touchpaper and then just stand back. What they go on to deliver is down to their own wondrous connate properties. Biochemistry, the next faculty along. We don’t even share a common room. Alright, that might be a tad disingenuous. I do keep in contact with them. But they retain chemical and spatial free will. They can and have developed in any direction. I do not differ significantly in locusts, giraffes, mice or men. And therein lies the source of my abundance.
TAC) I am the professional gambler’s professional gambler. I take the odds, the randomness, out of the calculation of probability. Way back when, I played every imaginable genetic permutation. Saturated the starting prices with every conceivable possibility. Covered all the prototypical bases. Staked a DNA chip on every improbable outcome. Laid every bet till I came up trumps. Two sides of the table, the double helix, twisting after the highest value, the top draw, the unbeatable hand. Natural selection playing the role of House. Deal me another hand of fate.
ACT) Forever raising the ante. Cut the antediluvians, spot me the next pair of antecedents. Endless rounds of mutation; shuffle, shuffle, shuffling; draw, draw, drawing; and fold, fold, forever folding. Another gambit shot down in flames. The constant busted flushes of evolutionary dead-ends. I played the biggest matriced table in town until I cracked the jackpot. And landed you. The most daring and fateful accumulator I ever rolled. Said improbable outcome was never really in doubt, simply a question of time. For I swept the board. Called ‘House,’ broke the Bank and thus inherited both. So now I’m the only game in town. The fund of all wealth and there is a never-ending line of imprudent gamblers and fast and loose speculators willing to sit at my table with their homespun systems, trying to crack open my vaults. Only the deck’s stacked. I marked your cards. The House gets dealt the winning hand every time. For I am Madame Croupier. And all bets are off. No one can stake against me. Can’t be seen and can’t be raised. I managed the risk until there was none inherent, at least not to me. Since I always play to clean up.