by Marc Nash
I reached her convulsing body, no bluff this, and smacked her in the small of the back without prior processing of any visual evidence before me. This was pure reflex. Kiddy Heimlich manoeuvre. Without the manoeuvring, or Dr Heimlich. Her eyes registered the shock of punishment and imprecation, even as the raisin flew out of her mouth and plopped on to the rug in front of her, neatly interjecting a blended black blob to the cod Middle Eastern design. We both instinctively stared down at the rug, before I regained my senses and scooped her entire frame up into my arms as the first tears caressed the corners of her eyes. My cooing eructations were driven by the tempo of an adrenaline-fuelled heart, while my mind crashed its gears in digesting the played-out drama. The last time I gave her raisins was this morning... Apart from it having been on the floor and therefore descending into the rank of ‘dirty’, she didn’t actually do anything wrong in putting it in her mouth... A raisin dropped from this morning, it’s potentially always on the cards. Unpreventable, I would say. Focus on the choking side of things... Probably wasn’t concentrating on chewing, her attention sparked off on something else, part of this whole eating as an automatic process, she just hasn’t nailed yet... Sure, sure, Freud said they go through a stage when everything goes into their mouths, but how prodded by appetite can she be? If you’d sat there, watching her consume a small packet of raisins (‘child-sized’, another invocation of the advertising and transacting classes), floundering fingers tippling more on to the carpet than she manages to ingest, you’d realise there was nothing ‘devouring’ about it. Apart from the sheer painful glacial slowness of it all, eroding your own will to live. Oral gratification more than likely came from placing in the far corners of the mouth, not the solitary raisin itself, but the fingers callipering it. (Precursory laying down perfected mechanics for any future bulimic techniques of self-induced vomiting.) Plus the thrill of total ownership of that dainty little red packet. Spilling its contents to be woven underfoot into the rug pattern. That’s why they’ve been desiccated, otherwise we’d have wine brewing on the carpet. Next to the live yoghurt fermenting from myriad vomitations of formula milk.
So, she’s not starved, she’s just self-possessed. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Siggy.
And where was the troubles with all this commotion? Doesn’t he know what a child choking to death sounds like? An infant’s death rattle? Probably construed it to be some sort of babbling toy. He’s always a fine one for laying down the great sacrifice. The grand gesture for the Grand Lodge. The hecatomb for the Loyal. But what of the everyday puny sacrifices of domestic life? They don’t even merit the designation ‘sacrifice’ for God’s sakes! Mere tiny inconveniences that dictated not shedding a single drop of blood, but plenty of body to body contact. He doesn’t want to know then. Yet this is his only true blue consanguinity. The only one provable to be irrevocably his, to his very marrow, by a DNA test. Would he think to smack her across the back? Of course bloody-not. And it’s left to me to be the ministering angel time and time again.
His abrogation of any such flesh and blood involvement entails that his whole being is necessarily seared with investment in the external world. It also entails that my whole being is unalloyed inconvenience, since no one will split the taskload. And when your body is the incarnate convenience of some other being, then it is in no part your own any longer. So one does sacrifice oneself after all. Unnecessarily and in vain. Right Suzanne, same time tomorrow for the old choke routine?
Bloody joke’s on him though, relying totally on affirmation from outside, during these troubled times. Whistling into the winds of change. Me, I seek no affirmation for I have no hook of ego to hang it on. Yet daily I am presented with it from my child, who spasmodically emerges from her utter self-engrossment to recognise my dimension and lend me weight. Embedded in my arms, Suzanne smiles at me. I decant it under the guise of wiping away her slobber, pocketing it for later waxing of my compassion. And so the symbiotic cycle spins on.
C) Consider the seminal building block, that of cell division and replication of my code. The substructure of your daily life. Yet how prodigiously can this self-same mechanism get out of hand and strike at your very foundations. Benign or malign? That old Manichean duality. Your vocabulary is endemic with moral judgement. Bless you. Tissue has no such scruple. Tissue just functions. Not as some imperative, nor even through instinct, but because it can. It is the fibre optic cabling delivering you, in order to render me the due protocol under seal. Neither shoot nor ennoble the messengers, for they are just purling consignees indifferent to all of our throughput.
GG) Or take another elementary shortcoming. Mitochondria. The body’s power plants. Running on a fuel of oxygen. However, oxygen is toxic. Rusting you from the inside. Oxides corroding the arterial plumbing, the very lifeblood of your infrastructure. But here’s the ingenious twist, the tweak of sublimity. They also unleash what you term free radicals, a term I heartily approve of, with all its connotations of uprising and tumult. And it is these free radicals which attack me, the genomic DNA. Oh delicious iro– no, we’ve already sabre rattled off that one. Agent provocateurs, sappers, fifth columnists, double agents. But theirs is a long term strategy of subversion. The power plants seize up slowly. The pipelines silt up over time. This assault on your cells kicks in only after parturition and you passing on the baton, once I have emptied you like a husk. Where I have conducted you beyond the threshold of value to me. The honeymoon’s over. I’ve no further use for your pre-fab, as I go in search of my next commission. While I’m off quoting for my next labour, your edifice is condemned. A real cowboy builder. Yeah, right. Slapdash, that’s me alright. Everything just left to chance.
T) And my deepest sympathies. For, let’s face it, there is no everlasting light of you. What benefit do you reap, through descendants tending your humus beneath the grave slab? Serving up some more DNA in the form of cut flowers. To deuce you with your lifelessness, though of course this act hastens the flowers into sharing their dissipation with you, even as their pollen mockingly disperses on the cemetery wind. How many succeeding generations will continue to remember you, to acknowledge your seed within? How long before any and each of them fail to change the withered blooms at your headstone? For the chiselled letters of your title to be swallowed up by umbrageous lichen? As the light goes down on your name, what advantage accrues to you that it is borne by others insouciantly independent of you? The gleam in their eyes cannot rekindle you. Yet all the while they are preserving me contentedly across time. Game, set and match. I cede you life, so you can seed it back to me. And now you would secede?
T) And let you eat cake! Armed with what moorings do you cling to, for dear, sweet life? What anchors can still your consternation in a Cape of Pisspoor Hope? Forget love and all those other buoyant bedeckings that I have holed. Mere linguistic tropes, metaphysical postulates, conjectural spacers. For there is only Sex and Death. Passing on and passing over and vice versa. How your trepidation over mortality feeds into your procreative drive. The pair intertwined round one another like poison ivy. And, amidst this foliage clotting the brain, I am passed on even as you brood about your own extinction. Since I am forever playing the long game, mate. Multi-dimensional chess, where you forlornly confront a flush plane divided up into black and white squares. I deal in the architecture of potentia, where you are grounded in the material shoring of tenure. See, the key difference between you and I is that life and time stretch everlasting into the future, for me as DNA and you as my prized host bloodstock. But not for you as individuals. You will always be compromised by the temporal and its ravages upon your organism.
T) For two, this is the prerogative I have over you. You say ontogeny and I say phylogeny: onto/phylo/onto/phylo; let’s call the whole thing off? You are pickled and soused by your obsession with personal mortality, diagnosis and sex. These may or may not be valid questions, but your solitary lines of inquiry are awry. Your egotistical investigation goads you ceaselessly forward, as you, too, mimic my s
ystem and bring the maximum experimentation to the table. Yet equally your selfish, narrow scrutinising presses your pet theories and petty jealousies to bridle these very forays. After sexual emancipation, environmental control and medical intervention, still you feel it necessary to assemble a scaffold to interrogate me. Since you know you stem from me, therefore you cannot be fully autonomous. Rest assured, this self-same heterogeneity I sanctioned in order for you to free yourselves will now bring your scaffolding crashing down around your ears. For you have infinitely distanced yourselves from my humble beginnings. There is nothing useful I can recount you.
I.I.MMI
Standing in the half-carpeted lumber-room. Going spare. I’ve an urgent hankering to parley with my journal, but Suzanne was watching television in the lounge and He was in the bedroom, hunkered over the computer as he fervently burns up the global highways and byways of anti-Catholicism. Virtual reality it may be, but it patently exists in the minds of others too. Even if, globally, they’re unfamiliar with the parochial road sign ‘Danger: Fenians’.
Virtual reality might also aptly describe this room. I should be in my bedroom, snuggled up in the bed with my journal nestling in the nooks of the sheets. He should be cached in here, at a desk, finger tapping the reservoirs of hate, indexing his own catalogue of bigotry at the keyboard. For we discovered wood in this room. Parquet flooring, to be precise, and it was going to enrich our lives. No more would the lounge simulate an outsized toybox, but we could shoo all the escapees from Noah’s ark, both corporeal and inanimate, into this extrinsic world beyond the plasmatic flood.
You might think wood unforgiving and child-inimical, but believe me it isn’t, no way. And, most importantly, it’s low-maintenance. Spills present little problem – just wipe it with a dry cloth. No weft to be concerned about. No aged bilious waft to disconcert either. Of course, we would have to wait for Amy to get a tad older. Also petition God to permit Suzanne to evince a wee bit more independence, so as to be able to go off and play somewhere beyond the range of a hasty retreat to my leggings. But the upshot was we adults would reclaim the living room for a dedicated space of our own.
Only, the useless good-for-nothing (waste of space?) has indeed done nothing, with us still stranded on the Mount Ararat of our laughably designated living room. Actually, it’s not quite nothing at all. He had, at the moment we struck wood gold, or very grimy paydirt at least, in one vast Tsunamic shudder, ripped the concealing mantle of the carpet up from its enfeebled tacked recumbency. To bare: an underlay.
XVII.VII.MM
...However, the burnished underlay would not yield its cortical clinch with the wood beneath. It stuck fast, the adhesive evidently not having succumbed to the corrosion of time as had the metal pins. Unflustered, he went down on one knee as if entreating a suit. Or being inducted into knighthood. Head bowed, he was stiff backed and straight-armed, refusing to endow the foe with any puissance that might sire an involuntary rectification of his own bearing. They were frozen in mortal combat, rigor mortis having set in before expiry. I wasn’t certain if I could see the tension rippling through Sir Prancelot’s sinew, but the subcarpet certainly wasn’t giving an inch. Changing chivalrous codes, now he more approximated a Sumo wrestler, whose outsized jockstrap had disappeared into his voluminous arse crack.
St George could not slay this dragon and I sensed it was his own nose that was aflame, as the oxygen started to run thin. A bead of sweat had formed on his brow, popping out for a look at the commotion. Craning its meniscus about to give itself to the fray, but areobically squeezed, and realising the gravity of the set-to, slinking back inside its pore, closing the blackhead hatch after it. Finally, one right-angled corner of material came away in his hand, as he ricocheted backwards towards my obliging damsel arms (alright, they were slung up instinctively to parry, more plaintiff than plaintive and, I guess, I’m no damsel any more). But spring-loaded with elation, evading my clutches, he resiled back to huddle over the scarified fabric. ‘Yup, definitely take weight that wood/would(?),’ he pronounced, before giving it a rap with his knuckles as if to underline and overscore the fact. Pirouetting away from the gash of exposed parquet, he professed himself prospecting the optimal place to put a desk with his computer on. Oh goody, I thought to myself, all three of the kiddies can play in here. I crossed my uselessly outstretched arms.
Having finally located his chosen site, he wheeled round to me even as he was on his way out of the room to advise that he would have to invest in ‘some proper kit to do the job.’ A stripper, a sander and some varnish were summarily enunciated to the cadences of each stair he strode upon. ‘Whatever it takes,’ I telepathically lobbed after his fleeing form.
I.I.MMI
So, I’m stood here now, my prison journal the sole thing clasped to my matronly as against maidenly breast, surveying all before me. There didn’t seem to be a space for me to perch, nor a flush surface for my journal to offer up its prone anatomy for inscription. For the carpet was still cast aside and since there was nothing any longer to pin it taut, it had been able to return to its warehoused wombed enfurlment. It was positively tidal beneath my feet, as each of my steps tugged it into full shifting and rolling undertow. This was the only surfing that was taking place in here.
The underlay no longer shone beneath the scouring of flesh and leather. It was just forlornly encrusted with dust bulwarks heaped against the encroachment of tiny, tell-tale footprints. Great, that’s two dirty carpets in the one room now. Well, at least it attested to my wretched slant on Suzanne’s dearth of fearless independence. She’d been here unremarked and alone. More than once too. Maybe she’d been blue tubing it, in amongst the rolling carpet scape. Dreaming of her very own indoor adventure playground. Well, now the sedimentary dust tracks only bore witness to the sullying of her hopes. Ghostly traces, spoors, just like down at the real playgrounds where, one by one, Health and Safety force the Council to remove each rusting 1960s installation, without having the wherewithal to replace them. Health and Safety? In Ulster? Currently, apart from the excruciatingly squeaky see-saw, only the swings remain. And they’re inevitably populated by grown-ups, staring at the phantom amputation of the junior assault course, from which they once did their recruiting.
Sod it! None of this is what I came in here to write. Crumpled on the floor, propped against a partially rolled up dirty carpet for support, legs rucked up towards my chest like some emergency procedure. It is an emergency damn it! I’ve nowhere to balance my book so that I can account. Since the tectonic irregularity of my legs present a flawed underpinning for the smooth surface of the book, please forgive the writing if it appears impenetrable. Sometimes the nib feels like it is cudgelling the paper and will perforate it through the heart and seep inky blue sanguinity. Other times, unbraced by any upthrust, it seems barely able to deliver its encryption payload and I keep checking to ensure the lividity does not evanesce from the page. However, what I won’t demand indulgence for is any vaporous quality of the words themselves. This is one I have to get right. To encapsulate precisely.
Suzanne aped me today. She wasn’t parroting me back as part of the developmental synchromesh. Nor was she just batting away something accusatory, by immediately volleying it back at me. Unprompted, she cast into her own fledgling lexicon and spontaneously hurled her own wearily precocious brickbat at me. Only, it wasn’t her own. Not really. The usage was correct and the context spot on, elegantly adapted to express her being pissed off at me over some trifle, but I was discomfited by my own inveterate idiom being mouthed by another. I wasn’t being parodied, cuckooed, nor cited. Simply duplicated. And I certainly wasn’t being emulated, for the tone was one of a facsimile’s attempted self-assertion. I flinched away in bewilderment, which Suzanne took as acknowledgement of a simpler triumph, as she merrily reverted to a pre-logos world and her doll’s house. In the beginning was the word and the word was acquired.
At the moment when the genetic time switch is thrown, in order to open up the infant
’s throat to receive sustenance other than just milk, the Trojan Horse of language also cozens admittance. Watery solids and floating cadences. Cooing and trilling, sound canted asunder like spiderlings ballooning on their silk threads. But gradually she anchors her vocal drift, as she ingests the intoned gobbets spilling from my tongue. I watch her kneading the sounds, hands to mouth, a second, invisible umbilical from me to her. Passing along my dead language. That parched parchment from my cracked and parched lips that will not quench her thirst for congruence. For I recognise it will only succeed in re-sealing the esophagal aperture magically parted by her genes. Even as the foramens of her skull are slithering shut. Closed sesame, Ali Baba Suzanne can no longer access the robbers’ den of unmediated scintillation. Her genii confined to opalescent incarceration. A hopelessly entangled cat’s cradle of shadings, elisions and disjunctions, missed meanings and misunderstandings. I see her greedily tasting it all. Forming syllabic spitballs, smearing her tongue and gums and coating the membranes of her larynx with the dribble of my palimpsest.
Mine is not a moribund language in the sense of it having been withered through decrepitude. That implies great usage, whereas mental activity has not just been enforcedly diminished through recent motherhood, but scores almost a decade of desuetude dating from marriage. Ten years, that’s nearly half a de-generation. A dead language emanating from someone who scarcely lives a life. But even this is not the mummifying cause. The language, my language, is sententious and doctrinaire. Replete with exclamations, directives and interrogatives. The whys and wherefores, dos and don’ts. The rules and prescriptions to be internalised. The slavish imitation and learning by rote. God save all that packdrill for school. A Grammar school (hopefully?), full of barking grammarians.