Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  Article 2) Chocolate and a sweet or two: again we can puff out our chests with conviction at the universal acceptance of these twin accords. So far, so unequivocal, as long as we collectively gloss over nannying government health warnings about too much confectionary’s pillage of our little treasures’ teeth.

  Article 3) At this point I suppose, it is incumbent on me to toss in the ticking time bomb of the cake:

  a) Lights down, here it is being marched out and regaled in song, festooned with midget flares, while being digitally preserved for later, post-prandial forensic reconstruction.

  b) Lights out, as its waxy beacons are snuffed (or not, as the case may be, if joke candles have been employed) and then the countdown really begins.

  c) Back into the galley, sliced up and individually wrapped in napkins/aluminium foil (to hell with ecological conservation, this is a party!) and placed in each bag, in time for the onslaught home. Unless...

  d) Some strategic parents buy a second, inferior cake and pre-portion and dispense it within each bag, before the first compelling tinkle on the doorbell has even signalled the party’s start. That way, they get to keep the perishable work of decorative art to themselves and the beatified (for one day at least) fruit of their loins gets to eat as much marzipan until they are sick and beatific no more. Meanwhile, the benighted have to content themselves with a facsimile, by devouring both the cake and all the bag’s confectionary (on top of the sweetmeats and sweeteners consumed at the party itself) in the time it takes to be driven home in the car.

  Article 4) Finally the declaration: the pre-prepared, generic ‘thank-you-for-coming and thank-you-for-your-lovely-(as yet unknown)-present, hope-you-had-as-much-fun-(presumptuous)-as-I-(presumptive)-did’ note. Makes a handy wipe for the child’s s(t)icky hand (see Article 3d) while still tethered in the child seat, when Mummy cannot leave the steering wheel and fully turn round to mop up. It’s the forethought that counts...

  Article 5) And on to the real nub of the predicament in which we parent hosts annually find ourselves. The clincher. The toy(s): the broad parameters are not in dispute. With fifteen to thirty kids to gratify, said toys must come from the racks in Pound-Saver/Stretcher/Or-Under shops, yet look as though they came from loftier perches. But you need to hit upon divergent bargain bulk buys, since boys and girls are irrevocably either side of the Peace line from herein on.

  Strand i) For every bloody party unfailingly sends the boys home with plastic arsenals. Here in Ulster, I ask you!

  Strand ii) While girls get miniature address books and hairgrips (if the birthday-feted child is a boy); something a tad more imaginative (if they are a girl and presumably insisted on some input [and first output] of the gifts).

  Implementation and review:

  I’m afraid I repudiated compliance. For, instead of toys, I intromitted books in each party bag. The boys indignantly demanded to be rearmed immediately. The girls querulously queried as to whether each Little Miss... book was my judgement on their character. I got to buy most of them back at the Thrift Shop in the space of a fortnight. No one had written their names on the inside covers. Suzanne’s party was talked of as one of the worst in living memory, simply on the strength, or weakness of the parting gift (forty quid squandered on a party entertainer, then). And all authors are decommissioned at a stroke. The pen is not mightier than the stiletto. Thank god next year’s round of parties bifurcates into exclusive football/make-over ones. That’s if any girls will still associate with her after her mother’s dagger of betrayal through her heart.

  Communiqué:

  Darling, I’m so, so sorry...

  I am so sick of other people’s problems. Occupational hazard of a theraputic community, I guess. We are all alone with our pain. Ultimately and right here and right now. We are born by and through, into pain. Born into it all alone. The pain of having to breathe for ourselves all of a sudden, when this helpful fleshy arterial line did it for us previously. Led us on, fastened our little mouths, then cast us adrift. I can begin to see where Megan’s coming from.

  But let’s not get carried away. All incremental tribulation is down to ourselves. Sure, we can share our experiences and maybe collectively find the vocabulary to express the agony. But each of our pains is uniquely seared into our central nervous system. No other bleeder can share that for you. You get to bear your own bruises and endure your own torments. All those words and talking are precisely that. Just words. Just talking. Can’t make the complaint go away. Can’t mastic back the insulating skin from where it’s been peeled back to expose your jangling nerves. Nor can it prise open rigidly spasmed muscles, whose tension loads have been stretched way beyond recovery. We are all alone. Especially in a community. A community of like-minded troubled souls.

  My personal response, well, I took control for myself. I clipped my husband. Whether in the American or British vernacular is for me to know and the f(l)unking FBI to find out. Seeing as they’ve got their lugholes caulked to the walls of this place. They knew everything about Koresh and all the other shoot-out kills, but they know nothing about me. Can’t build a picture, see. ’Cos I don’t exist. An immigrant Brit. War bride wed in Blighty, official records blighted by the doodlebugs (entire suit chaperoned by German high explosive, we thought we wouldn’t live to see our honeymoon). Never green-carded over here, no social security number. No driving license or credit cards, gee thanks Gene (my husband; Jean and Gene, cute, kitsch, kismet. We were destined for each other. Lock and key, my face his fists).

  See, that’s where the Soviets went wrong (they’ll like this bit, there at the other end of the Hoover anti-dyke dam). Offering merely a bottle or two of vodka, or the chance to jump the bread queue, or even some minor apparatchik post, for spying on your neighbour. How could that possibly compete with here in the US, where they just get you on TV, or in the papers, for all the possible gen on anyone they might want? The Russkies should have surrendered state control of television to the free market ratings war. Then their revolution might have prevailed. I mean, all those grim, flimsily appointed apartment blocks. The whole country was, is, one goddamn giant trailer park! I whacked my husband (US/UK idiom, go figure), but Jerry Springer, and therefore the FBI, have got nothing on me!

  No single two-dimensional likeness exists on film. A distinct lack of archival footage or pictures from any vault. My posting among their ‘most wanted’ just has a silhouette of my imagined profile. Neither lifelike, nor flattering, it makes me appear not unlike the Queen on British stamps. Yet it’s not as if I haven’t registered. Do not the covert operations without suggest I have overtly entered the psyche within? I am neither clear nor present, but what peril I pose! They can’t pin me down, since I am multi-dimensional. The output of my mind has been floated, my stock soon to rise. My notions and concepts will become exchangeable currency, soon to be traded on the bourses and future commodity markets. I have made a deposit to the bank of human thought. I have endowed the pool of loanable experience. I am buzzing on the wires. The ticker tape showers me with recognition. I am a keyword. Type my name into search engines and you will regard how profusely I have hived. Just take note of how I have arrived, before you would hasten me through the terminal departure lounge. I can be passed down and inherited. Not me, the individual consciousness, but my legacy. I, who scarcely exists in any fleshy sense, have been transformed into a meme. That’s a meme, not a ‘Me-Me’ egomaniacal desire to be plucked from obscurity, but something worthy of generational mimesis. For now, my ideas might appear esoteric but, given time, humankind’s genius for adaptability and the dynamics of critical mass theory, I confidently predict a return on my work in the dusting of just a few generations. My sole regret is that I will not live to see it. Nor will Gene the bastard!

  Regard how I took control and stand on the cusp of wreaking my revenge. But it doesn’t diminish the pain any. My bleeding pain I mean! I’m not talking about some cosmic, mealy-mouthed, karmic sum total! No, I still hurt alright. But I have taken re
sponsibility for my life. So don’t credit I haven’t managed to move on at all. I’ve come a long way. A helluva long way from home. On either continent. I couldn’t have initiated all this and kept it running, if I was still that same cowed person. Whatever this ‘it’ is...

  III.XII.MMII

  As I flip through my journal, there seems a distinct lack of uplift. None of the joy or the shared laughter are present. Of course they aren’t. For it is and has been forever a space of my own in which to retreat. To retrieve myself. To shout, whisper, scream my intimacies. Naturally, my confidences ought to have been tendered at him. The concordance of the marriage partnership and all that. But he was a hollow tract, firing blank blandishments. I was deafened by my own reverberating echo. The journal, my journal, succours me to feed the starving homunculus inside. To attend the little one who was being neglected. The sitting tenant who had been kicked out the nest by the cuckoo chicks. The being evicted from my womb each time either of the two eggs moved in. I can date it that precisely, from the changing tone of my entries.

  Alright, maybe the correlation is not quite so precise, since Amy’s birth necessitated a big abeyance in my journal, as I had other more pressing engagements on my time. But when I did return to my log, the insular jocundity of before had noticeably rolled off downstream, seemingly lost forever to the vortex. Christ, I even doodle now, at a loss for what to chronicle. And how to say it when there is plainly nothing to say. Words fail me, since I fail to inhabit the everyday realm of the verbal. I fail words. I do nothing in my life worthy of inflection. I enact nothing to engage the sinew of verbs. I perform nought that would enable me to wrap around and enflesh adjectives. I interact with zero, so my unstirred sump cannot anoint conjunctions.

  My daughters briefly emerge from their self-involved omnipotence to acknowledge my intercession and propitiation. They know me as provisioner, feeder, carrier, driver, bather, catcher, cleaner, juggler, builder of toy worlds and even purveyor of lame magic tricks. All the doing words. Actions and activities. The service industries of musculature. Their musculature. My bodily efforts to define their capacity, to supplement them some gravity, as they move to cut a swathe through the world. They learn to contend with life as I cease to do so. My tension loads as their puissance lengthens. Shrivelling my anorexic soul as they bulk themselves up.

  XIX.IV.MCMXCVII

  ...my focus totally on her development. I am unaware of my own position in the scheme of things. I am coaxer, coach, cheerleader, prompter, role-model, tantaliser and bouncer. Always alert to situations and mediating between soft flesh and hard knocks. I am all these things, but none of them are me. I am moving, yet the motions are not performed for my benefit. The activities are to encourage crawling, standing, walking, running and the like in somebody else. It is vital that she obtain the sensations of what each kinetic act entails, rather than concerning what stokes my nerves. Her stimulations and responses are wholly what matter after all. So although I may be locomoting dynamically, firing and bursting on all fronts, I have no perception of myself other than as numbed stasis. My conscious self has been kid-napped for the duration. My knot shackled by the wiggling of another. My compass of movements entirely superimposed on me by my child. My perceptions and experiences always immediately relate to her waggling. And my emotions? They have no life of their own. I am split apart from myself.

  XXIII.IV.MCMXCVIII (not quite a year to the day, then...)

  How can I expect my daughters to know the real me; the former reader; linguist; cyclist; pacifist; performing artist; (Loyalist)? The abstract me. I mean we’re talking about getting Amy to sit up and support her body weight, prior to contraction of the muscles in her arse. Co-ordinating that with the rest of her body’s self-realigning stability, in order to shuffle herself across the floor as her first mode of propulsion in the world. So I don’t think she’s quite up to grasping abstract concepts at present. Tough for me too, since I’m a bit abstracted from myself these days.

  XIX.IV.MCMXCVII

  Only at the periphery is there any excited tautness. Fingers rigidly alert, stiffly splayed like a wicket-keeper’s gloves awaiting a delivery. Trigger mechanism waiting to spring the inflated airbag that is the rest of my bloated carcass. Mindful of blunt objects and sharp edges, or merely scuttling to the locus of scoured spillages. Currently they repine at their conscripted status. So I’m hanging on to any firm sense of self by my fingertips. And they’re neuralgically complaining mightily, at having to bear the rest of my deadweight. They whinge and twinge, pinch and dart, throe the mother of all wobblies. Jab at my face, pull my hair, allow themselves to be gnawed beneath brittle gnashers. But the residue of me will not be moved. Except to sag further. The light has almost faded. The switchboard of the central nervous system has pulled all the plugs. The twitchiness of the fingers is now spasmodic. When a click of pre-brood impulse jolts them like a tetanus. Of course, my journal! My fingers writhe like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Stung into activity, my hand swivels, flexing taut. Time to uncoil and stretch myself. Digits compress themselves around the unyielding trunk of the pen. Clarion call and conductor’s baton orchestrating the response. Shake a leg and stir the skeleton. I need you to back me and hold me upright if I’m going to do this writing thing right. Right? Now do you see why I need it so?

  Do we hate men? We hate their bodies that do all their calculating for them. Their powerful, triangulating bodies. The Carib of the brain, the Babylon of the eye and the Zion of the holy of holies. The corporeal theodolite that makes all the rest of us mensurable. There’s no way of getting past that. The whole world is erected upon this one fact. Male scale.

  From the first moment man rose up from his thorax and ceased crawling across the humus. And that frottage with mother earth, which had kept him grounded within a certain sense of his middling status. Initially, he stayed close to his roots. Plated breast pressed snug into the bosom of the soil. Little did she realise it was the first fumblings towards a survey of all her appendagable riches.

  He imprinted hands, palms and cubits across her unsuspecting breasts. Spanned her with his itchy fingers. Employed instruments to increase his province over her; twigs, stakes and staves. Peered down at his natural spirit level and felt emboldened to confer upon it the imperious charter names of Rod, Pole and Perch. Marked out his own front yard. Yet he longed to strive further. To range beyond the merely tangible. To match his burgeoning scope. To defy the limits of his two-dimensionality (since to this day man has failed to fathom the concept of depth) and in doing so flatten the rest of us in the animal kingdom to wretched dots, smeared on the underside of his leather sandal. Sole mates. He picked up his feet and stepped, strode and paced all over our domain. A mile as a thousand paces. That should do it. For now.

  Yet, what could be more haphazard than a handspan or a footstep as a means of calibration? It served only to demarcate a man from his neighbour. But that was precisely the point, wasn’t it? To enable each man to erect his fences. Plant his standard and sink his ‘No Trespassing’ boundary pillars, as he enclosed all property beyond his mean embrace. To partition the land. With inbuilt space for dispute and conflict. And the king/khan/tsar/kaiser was the alpha-male, the one with the biggest forearm, or longest reach, or greatest stride. He who could win the arm-wrestle/toss the caber/best the two-handed battleaxe/piss highest up the wall/own the biggest schlong. In order to become master of all he surveyed and more. To become our master (with some complicity on our part, since he was the alpha-male after all... ). A genetic vote of divine election. And we the rank find ourselves hemmed in by chains. Our furrowed brows unaware as to their own branding. Like all other chattel, this side of the furlong (long furrow) skirting posts.

  But his immutable, shifting restlessness would not cease its jerk. Man could not measure above his head. Distantly referred to as the heights, dizzying or otherwise. In the clouds, or mountain high. Imprecise. Bluffing it. Scaled upwards to make man feel towered over, even if borne aloft on another man�
��s shoulders. Either upland or barrow, he was thus reacquainted with his own lowly mortality. Then there was high water or flood tide, further threatening to reinstate him in his vulnerability before nature. He envied the birds. Until... Un-till. I looked it up. ‘Til’, from the Old German, meaning a goal or an aim; to hasten towards. ‘Und’, meaning as far as. Man’s incessant kineticism, his primary evolutionary adaptive tool, down to a low boredom threshold. So he totted it all up and obtained the summit. Scaled the zenith. The apex. The maximum. Once again, he did so by collapsing scale so as to conform with his own. Of crown, peak and brow. He looked it straight in the eye, browbeat and headbutted. Before mooring another rippling banner. So that conquered nature’s strongholds amounted to nothing. Swept away in the male-strom.

  And then the gaze yonder. Always yonder. One more crest to be cut down to size. Foreshortening all the time. Till he can rein in the horizon. For the grass is always greener. Yet all the while paying no attention to detail. To what he already possesses, cupped in the palm of his hand. Crushed by his restraining fingers crimped back over. Look at any image of a king with his orb and sceptre. Digits cusped around the orb, cradling our plucked ovum. Palpating blinker for our eye, sucking the sphere of the sun into eclipse. Absorbing its orbit completely, until rendered mere satellite. Gripped in the other hand, the retractable snake staff, both ruler and telescope, conferring his secreted authority. King cobra engorges his hood and we are all paralysed with fear. The venomous magic wand that disappears all nooks and crannies which will not submit their unnavigated occultism. The master stroke that permits yin finally to burst its borders and devour yang.