Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  However, I am aware that this internal competition (how drearily masculine) is merely speeding up the forced march of the private armies. A pox on the pair of them! And now, thanks to their own advances, it won’t be long until I can engineer one into their next generation of proto-pugilists that will lay them all low. While they shoot for the seed of countless diseases, I will out-trump them with my own unified theory. There is but a solitary pathology; man. A deep-lying malady. And soon, we will all be inoculated against him by birth.

  XVI.IX.MMII

  Caught myself at it again today. Been trailing here long enough now to put the names to the faces, the faces to the aspects of the mothers. Traced the parabolas of shed scales, as children slough themselves from the line snaked behind the teacher, and puff and distend themselves into a paroxysm of burst relief. I follow the fall-out, trace the trajectories of unleashed ground-to-air arms flung out for a hug. I plot the tear-streaked cheeks, to the eczematous worry-beads of maternal fingers. I match a fresh-faced, ruddy-cheeked visage to the cracked-veined, bucolic alcoholic, rather than the emulsified rouge-prominence and beacon-red lipstick of the mother flushed with Church-mongering sociability. Hers is the pigtailed, pierced-eared princess, hewn from head-girl material. Hard on the heels of the girl with tight braids and miniature briefcase, demurely marching up towards her own spruced mother, to receive another dose of middle-management incentives and exhortations. I almost overlook the bland formlessness of a mother and daughter who describe one another fully, in their inimitable non-descriptiveness. The pair who seemingly didn’t feel it necessary to comment on school, one another, or even life itself as they trudge mutely off. Their plastic soles kiss-sucking the playground tarmac as redundant punctuation. And so it goes on. Won’t prejudge my daughters, but sure as hell will anybody else’s. It’s not big or clever, but it does answer a few queries. Without me having to undergo the unpleasantries of actually talking to any of these women.

  And then there’s my two. They present a bit more of a challenge. I don’t always spot Suzanne in the class line when it emerges. For they’re definitely His daughters all right. Something and everything about their features. Not manly-looking girls exactly, but they are immutably of his stock. And after all the effort I put in too. That just isn’t fair. Three minutes, give or (not much) take, donated of his time, against my seven years and rising. What does he relinquish, a teaspoon of sperm perhaps, when I still haven’t redeemed my body back from calorific lend-lease? I was the one who made the major investment in all this. So something distinguishable of me ought to have rubbed off on their being. Maybe in time, when the oestrogen kicks in hard. I hope so for their sakes. Gonna find it tough to locate a mate otherwise. Though I suppose with similar misgivings about my own allure, I still came to be rooted out by somebody. Only on the rebound from my family mind. His was the shoulder that bore the recoil of my flaring anger. Allowed myself to be ginned (without any intercessionary alcohol). Was my self-esteem lower then than it is now? Did I ever find him seductive? I must have, I suppose. I can’t allow his stamp to militate against the girls. Besides, it was his character that ultimately overrode his attractiveness for me. (But what if I met a stranger today, in a bar, with his features – would I? Too hypothetical, when would I get the opportunity to be in a bar?) The girls may bear his countenance, but his mould is now relatively buffered from them. Thankfully.

  Or is that indeed the case? In the house, my private, domestic realm, then they do fall unremittingly within my sphere of influence. Unadulterated. And flawless. But out here, at school, in the community among their peers...? The very world that shaped me into the person and mother I am. A woman who failed to rise above her backdrop. Who, to all intents and purposes, failed to affirm her own adult sense of self. A woman who voluntarily signed up for routinely gathering here, among the intimacy of other strangers, whom I neither know nor respect and yet find myself disparaging for doing exactly as I do. A daily diatribe for a dire tribe, to which I dejectedly belong. (We are all single mothers gathered together in this place: where are the househusbands and stay-at-home fathers?) It runs through me like a stick of rock. My failure. My deficiency. And now, singularly exposed before it, the girls will be permeated too. They fit in well here, snugly. No wonder I cannot pick out Suzanne in the line.

  He may effectively be out of their life at home, and good riddance to bad rubbish, but now it’s his panoptic towers which hold sway and are executing their regulatory function. He doesn’t even have to put in a shift, since he has plenty of proxy eyes. Time and development stand still here. Embryology reverts back to notions of pre-formation. Of homunculi and spirits planted in the egg at the dawn of creation, merely awaiting the (depleted) spark of life. Of stiff and imitative sculptures lying pre-cast within the marble, just requiring a faithful unveiling. The girls inherit our – my inertia, ungainliness, lack of grace and shredded dignity, none of which are genetic. Of course they look like him. My hearth is indistinguishable from my ineffectual genes, just as the unchanging exterior world, forms his holandric legacy. They will remain loyal to his parental vision, even when they have no active memory left of him.

  And what do the other mothers opine, when they see Suzanne veer towards me? As if I give a fig!

  G) Actually, I knew you’d come after me. Eventually. Urgently requisitioning a salve for your diathetic anxieties, where I dispense beauty and growth. A quest after some elixir to prolong your miserable lives, when you need simply cultivate a balsam to perfume them. Soliciting me as a Delphic oracle to reveal your own behaviour to you, when your rogation really ought to take place amongst one another. Seeking out an emollient for the rash of sexuality, where a little temperate reflection might palliate the itch.

  U) If you are after self-knowledge, well then, look to yourselves, not me.

  T) Actually, I knew you’d come after me. Eventually. I hid my tracks as well as possible. Burrowed down in the last place on earth you’d think of searching: yourselves.

  C) So now I’ve got to pay for my verecundity. Me, and the bushel in which I diffused my life-giving light. You want to pin me down. Nail me to a cork. Spread my eviscerated hide and mount my pollard upon your own crowns. Even as you track, stalk, gin and flay me, in order to riddle a further hundred thousand genes into your prospectors’ panhandles, another genus of flora or fauna surrenders up its own unique DNA line into extinction beneath your traipsing. You would take me apart in order to discover how I am able to take you apart from within. But you have no possible conception as to how to put me back together again. Like the freestanding bridge designed by one of the sharpest minds to fall furthest from your topiary of knowledge. You deconstructed it, but had to use nails to hammer it back in place. And so it goes before your clumsy gropings.

  A) You destroy everything you contact and sometimes the carnage even redounds on you. For how will your future stirps acquire speech if all the early words limned with simple, happy, associative charge, the animals, the pretty coloured flowers, the orange sun and the blue sky, are blotted out from your primary copy-books? Your loquacity will be flat and lifeless, shorn of your fabled ability to fabricate literature and dreams. You will slither back into the general animal population, dimly aware of your environment, but little able to transcend it. And if that happens, then maybe I get paid out on my long-term win-double, when I tipped the dolphin to be my brainiac host of choice.

  T) For I have erected a fiendish architectonics beyond the reach of your geometry. Compiled an intricate structure beyond your comprehension of relation. I am truly unknowable and ineffable. You will never see me disrobed. Somewhere, somehow, from my modest chemistry springs your sentience. And from that sentience issues your consciousness. Yours note, not mine. Now, for all the travails of your finest philosophers and artists, you have not been properly able to define this consciousness. Of course not. Your specialist adaptation for language gives you everything transmittable about your external being. But it’s less well suited to disburse mea
ning over my provenance of selected instincts. And yet more pertinently, where the two realms coalesce concerning your emotionality. So do you really think with your paltry delving, the scientific equivalent of prurient net curtain twitching, that now you can peel me further back layer upon layer, to expose what you are? You don’t know your onions then.

  G) Oh spare me your false lachrymosity. Rein in your crocodile tears, ’cos you won’t catch me out with that hoary old wrinkle. Me and the crocs go way back, long before I patronised you. You forget, I’m so intimately familiar. I can descry they’re just tears of frustration.

  T) You, you don’t even know you’ve been born. How, or why.

  XXII.XI.MMI

  We went on holiday. Abroad. A share benefit derived from the Peace Dividend. But only after the issue had been sealed once and for all with the blood of Omagh citizens. One final indiscriminate bomb blast, in our open air market. Trust Omagh to be the locus for a last great terrorist procurement. Two years on, ‘the troubles’ claimed he couldn’t face the mawkishness of the anniversary memorials. I knew, rather, that he was struggling with the finality of the cessation of conflict this outrage had sealed. Being decommissioned and thrown back into the domestic realm. This was what he wanted to escape.

  Lodged the kids with the grandee par-rentals. Parked the car at the ferry port and off we went. Didn’t stray too far from home. Amsterdam. Somewhere sunny would have been nice. But he was applying the factor 69 block, sticking to what he felt he knew. Still, you couldn’t dampen my euphoria. A crossing of the water is still a crossing off of the water. Seen it, walked it. Done it now. The reluctant oyster of a shrunken world opened up by a one-year temporary EU passport.

  Supposedly they were just like us. Cut from the same flax. Ingrained integrity. A shared parochialism. But the Dutch couldn’t recall. A haze of memory. Thickened up in a fog of cannabis smoke. Inspissated. And insipid. My husband was appalled. At their slatternly decadence, rather than my impulsive joining of them. Spluttering my way through a first ever toke, seamlessly purchased over the counter. While open-mouthed, he ordered merely coffee, but couldn’t get an instant hit.

  After the easy swagger of requisition and my practised nimble rolling, I was amazed at my inhibition before the flame’s ordination. I mean, hell’s bells, it’s not like I don’t know how to smoke. I inhale for Britain back home. But my throat reflexively closed up on me. Rolled up on my outwardly familiar roll up, having baulked at the foreign body smuggled inside. An illegal immigrant stopped by border customs. I was too scared to let go. My big moment of what, I don’t know, epiphany? Rebellion? Self-assertion? Manumission? And I choked. Disjointed. The Dutch barflies giggled and sunk deeper into the very stressed leather of their most unstressed booth. Maybe this was Dutch humour and I was actually smoking ground tulip bulbs. No, looking at the bill of fare up on the blackboard, tulips were probably more pricey.

  I could see my husband bristle as our new Dutch friends laid out their new world order theories. ‘It’z zo cheap, the whole vied vorld’s coked up to ze highballs.’ ‘Yeah, it’z like, ow you zay? A chumor?’ ‘Yeah tumor. Dash a gud vay of saying hit.’ ‘Tumor yes. But I don’t mean bad wings with dis word. Just about ow it zpreads.’ My husband shrinks into the heart of his stressed leather jacket, which itself contracts towards the nucleus of the stressed leather of his very stressed banquette. There was a film of scum forming on his forsaken coffee. ‘Not only is ze coke its own bizness, making loaz of doe, but it in-fectz all hudder bizness-says. Zo many company directors har on it, affectz the way every body duz their bizness. Like widt ze freemasons.’ ‘Ja, it haz to right? For zure. Stocks and shares. Stocks und shares.’ ‘You haz to be hay-wear what time you make your bizness phone call to a director, if hez coked up. Zpecially to the States. You know, ze United States?’ ‘United by coke. Not pepsi you underztand?’ ‘It affetcz ze whole rhiddim of bizness. Peak times. Hupturns, downturns. And mood zwings. Flying bizness class.’ ‘Zo you got to be hay-wear of possible paranoia, when you negotiate ze deals.’ ‘He means ze big deals. But zey just mirror scoring off ze street. Szame mechanizm really.’ (Giggles) ‘Hay, ja, good one man!’ ‘Vhat? Which one I zay?’ ‘Small deals mirror big deals, zzzniff!’ ‘Ja, itz a good line alright!’ ‘A fine line.’

  We left them to their prolonged bout of helpless giggling. I, marvelling at their command of my language, while, sick to his stomach, he silently berated them for their dereliction of duty. They tilted at, yet at the same time broke bread with the enemy. The boundaries were inchoate. He must stand firm. Yes, but where should he plant his feet, let alone his standard? Poor love. The great punch-drunk shadow boxer himself, all in a lather in the locker room. Because the world has turned on its axis, so that now even his shadow has deserted him. Nobody was interested in maintaining sciamachy any more. For now we were all phonies recruited to selfish pursuit. Wasn’t I here, genuflecting before self-indulgence, under the guise of facilitating his fact-finding mission? This disastrous, cataclysmic embassy. I could see the dissolution in his knotted brow. The approaching tsunami of entropy, reflected in his wild eyes. Maybe the Peace Dividend wasn’t worth paying out on after all.

  I was neither powerful nor generous enough to save him. He was on his own. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. When in Amsterdam and all that. Anyway, I’d jettisoned my portmanteau of love, fretting about my children callously abandoned back home. Foisted on relatives who knew them well, but did not know the intricate shades of their routine needs and the detailed logistics inherent for meeting them. Infant pipelines under the oceans and beating round and round the mulberry harbours, seeking after permission to enter. The cat and mouse of misdirection, for what would be a weekend’s worth of longest days for both parties.

  So, though he did briefly clear his head of delirium at that evening’s port of call, it was really I who garnered most realignment from the trip to the red light area. Girls, whey-faced women in windows. On display. Inside, looking out. At the desirous. The hungry. With no thought for their own disposition. I stared and stared. Not at their sex, neither their degradation. Nor even trying to envisage what their view was through the glass. But rather at our geometric relationship. It reminded me of home. No matter what I did, my daughters too will make their own choices. And their ability to do so vouches me making a decent fist of my job. In this perverse way, all seemed right in the world. And in the cosmos. Everyone was properly constellated. Set back on their elliptical orbits. Except my husband of course. He’d passed over the event horizon. But I’d been solo-navigating for years by now anyway.

  XIV.II.MMII

  It strikes me, as I belatedly develop and crop my mental holiday snaps into these words, that I am not as perceptive as I celebrated myself to be. Our laughing Dutch coffee house cavaliers might well have been laughing at us. They too were not outside of what they purported to mock us for. Drew us into their sphere, while under their own satellite influence. A cocaine fifth column. Or line, anyway. They had probably dropped into the cafe for some weed, merely to take the edge off their high. To chill their iron wills. Winding themselves down, even as they were winding us up. And I think Andrew my husband gleaned this. He didn’t know much, but that enabled him to trap in his searchlight anything that deviated from his enclave of knowledge. And that’s a most useful acquired tool for survival. For weeding out the snakes in the grass. And since our separation, I no longer am so armed of course. I hate that. I hate people camouflaging the true nature of their motives. Dressing up their communication in subversive formality. Lacing the velvet glove over the iron fist. Language is such a traitor to truth. I wished I’d paid it more than scratchy study.

  Then maybe we could have preserved the tooing and froing of intimate dialogue. Like sweethearts sharing a strand of spaghetti. Or lovers passing a tasty morsel from mouth to mouth with a kiss. Rather than what it unravelled into. Each word or statement, carefully drawn down from my cloven palate, then played around my tongue like a cyanide caps
ule. Deciding whether to snap down hard on it, or to rehusband it for the next encounter.

  Do I miss him? I miss the hole he failed to occupy. Forever vacuuming/cooking/ironing/playing around his feet in domestic genuflection. Stopped up short by his clogging self-deletion, repeatedly taking me out of my drudgery. Jolting me back to attention. Adult emotional exchange. Give and take. Grievance and forsaken. Whereas now it’s just me and the girls. So I have no iniquitous goad to snap me out of my menial consciousness. Rage downgraded to frustration. Emotionality to numbness. Incitement to impotence.

  Journal-keeping merely feeds my despair. It too does not answer back.

  There’s a lot of crying coming from the hospital compound. I don’t recall us having that many ante-natal admissions this time of year. Have the he-devils started the assault? Is it tear gas that they’ve launched? Twenty-two divisions and one crack platoon of Special Forces, Y-Troop. All just to X-sanguinate l’il ole me. They can see me off in this incarnation, but my spirit is already abroad. A ghost in their machine technology. My digital Echo to bring down their corporeal Narcissus. Jean’s gene genie is out of the box. Is that tinkling glass I hear? Do they pour through windows on ropes, or are they already inside, smashing our test tubes and retorts? The only response they have. The only way they know. Or perhaps it is the sound of Megan and Volte’s chins hitting the floor. Closely followed by the lolling concertinas of their tongues, like toads after a fly. Since they have ever yearned for nothing less than to be hoist in the burly arms of a man, with the stencilled guarantee of ‘Security’ on the back of his jacket. Fawning over their saviours. Their knights in kevlar armour. The only way they know. Lickspittling all the way down the aisle. Is kevlar resistant to caustic soda?