by Lucy Ellmann
The Gorgeous Gorge
Torn asunder when the world began, the rock and the lake remained estranged. The rock rested, an enormous CUBE, its perpendicular cliffs tricky for seals. A prison briefly stood there; earlier, a monastery; now an unmanned lighthouse only. The rest of it a yellow-white PRONG, schlong, dong, the colour of the necks of the gannets that gathered there.
The LAKE was left to ROT. People threw their DUNG in there, fish heads, bags of kittens, the carcasses of farm animals. They threw HUMAN BEINGS in too if they felt like it: witches, malefactors, stillborn babies, the OBESE. They all sank slowly to the bottom, arms outstretched, until the pond became a pestilential pool of slops and slime and DEATH GOO, the haunt of murderers, smugglers and suicides. Even the EELS died (and eels LOVE trash!).
So they DRAINED it. People are always draining things! Not just WOUNDS, or PASTA, but innocent things like MARSHLAND. Moisture incurs censure. It can never simply be LEFT. Baffled by an unseemly gulch of shame in the midst of their rural backwater, the locals decided to OBLITERATE it. But the lake didn’t MEAN to be a slime-pool, it had slime forced UPON it! Ignored for a million years it might have recovered, CLEANSED itself, become a place for eels and ornamental swans again. But the locals couldn’t wait: locals are so IMPATIENT.
At night, when her solitude is assured (and inescapable), the ancient, atrophied and misunderstood VOID heats up! Steam rises from her cracks and along her lonesome, loathsome paths. The gorge is ALIVE. She has lived SO LONG – and she longs, LONGS, for the rock. She plots – what? Reunion or retribution. And as she plots, her PLANES shift a bit. Trees sway, pebbles roll, flowers get temporarily buried, rabbit tunnels blocked. FORMIDABLE, as all cunts are, averse to abandonment or annihilation, she shudders ominously under her blanket of dust.
Through her dark and desiccated folds glides a gargantuan form: JEN. Sleepless, she paces. Like a blind emboldened RACEHORSE she pounds. Like a racehorse she stamps, kicking against her fate as she circles and re-circles her gorge. Jen can think of NOTHING now but ROGER LEWIS, his cleft chin, grey eyes and air of injury. She yearns for him, yowls, she YODELS for him! She seeks her own RUIN in Roger.
He is one of her SIX BLESSINGS! Jen has been reading too many Take a Break magazines, stolen from the waiting room. In the last issue, they advised their readers (some of the most flummoxed and forlorn folk around) to COUNT THEIR BLESSINGS: they were supposed to think up at least six blessings and then – COUNT them. It hasn’t been easy for Jen to come up with so many, but she finally managed the following:
1. Her FOREHEAD. Jen’s glad she has a forehead: she likes splashing WATER on it.
2. The jacuzzi. (A lot of forehead-splashing can be conducted there.)
3. Cargo pants. (DUNGAREES really.)
4. The TOMATO. Brought over from South America at some point and adapted by the Italians, the tomato has formed the basis of many a hearty meal for Jen.
5. Urma Thurb, although Jen hasn’t FORGIVEN her yet (and never expects to see her again).
6. ROGER, his swivel hips spiralling in his swivel chair.
But tonight Jen only gets as far as the TOMATO before her blessings are substantially REDUCED by a faraway YELP coming from the surgery! She looks up at the dark building. Clouds are forming strangely above it. Lights flicker in the attic windows. There’s another yelp, which sounds just like the laughing Jen heard when she was on the widow’s walk. And those aren’t CLOUDS moving above the house, but SMOKE, pouring from one of the windows.
THE SURGERY’S ON FIRE!!!
Jen charges uphill through the undergrowth, though RUNNING and going UPHILL are her least favourite modes of travel (no racehorse SHE!). But Jen is full of ZEAL to save Roger! It doesn’t occur to her to phone the fire brigade when she reaches the house. She doesn’t hesitate, she just starts clambering up the stairs. She might not MAKE it, she’s so out of breath, but the occasion calls for HEROISM, self-sacrifice, it calls for a GLADIATOR, and that gladiator is JEN.
The door to his flat is slightly ajar, so she barges in. This is the first time Jen has ever seen his place, but there’s no time now to dwell on the cherished objects of Roger’s existence (she can’t see them through the drifting smoke anyway). DUTY CALLS. Jen presses blindly on, panting, choking, calling, until she reaches the heart of the conflagration: Roger’s bedroom. Jen is so intent on her mission she doesn’t notice a tall figure sweeping past her as she enters the room, though she does hear a faint GIGGLE coming from somewhere. All Jen can see is ROGER, lying as Jen has always HOPED to see him: asleep in his bed.
But the bed is surrounded by FLAMES! Jen stumbles back down the hallway in search of the bathroom, throwing open every door in a PANIC until she finds it. She douses some towels in water and rushes back to SAVE WOGER! When she reaches him, she throws all the towels on top of him, then uses his duvet and pillows to smother the flames around the bed.
Waking to find Jen in his room, Roger for some reason thinks she’s about to KILL him! He begs her not to kill THE CHILDREN. Jen is surprised. She’s never even THOUGHT of killing Roger’s children, Jen doesn’t think about Roger’s children from one week to the NEXT (unless they happen to invade the surgery, from which they are quickly expelled by Francine). On the other hand, she hasn’t considered SAVING them either. So Jen sets off to FIND the stupid kids and make sure they’re alive. She soon spots them in a doorway, rubbing their eyes. When they see HER, running at them, they quickly retreat into their room. Far from the aura of racehorse, there is more of the RHINOCEROS about Jen in the heat of battle.
She returns to Roger to assure him that the kids are OK. As she enters his room, Roger LUNGES at her! In the haze of smoke he hasn’t RECOGNISED her and has apparently mistaken Jen again for the ARSONIST. But when he realises it’s her, he apologises and seems to relax. He starts pouring water over some clothes that are still smouldering in a corner. He is wearing, Jen notes, a day-glo green nylon dressing gown that will HAVE TO GO.
This seems as good a moment as any to shriek, ‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ – they both shriek it at the same time! Then Jen asks if she should call the fire brigade, but Roger is against the idea, claiming that everything’s pretty much under control. Jen looks around the room, which looks like HELL: a HELL-HOLE.
‘Who did this?’ she asks him.
‘Oh, these things happen. A bit of a firetrap, I’m afraid.’
Jen can’t deny it, as she surveys the mountains of clothes and papers and YOGHURT TUBS. She has always associated Roger with ORDER and WHITENESS, his white coat, his white paint, but now sees that Roger too is human. It charms her.
‘Well, I guess I’ll be off then,’ she says. ‘Downstairs. Back to the basement. If you don’t NEED me any more, that is.’
At this, Roger crosses the room and clasps Jen to him! Jen turns PURPLE all over but hopes he can’t see this in the gloom. Taking a gamble, she raises her face in anticipation of a KISS. But Roger is not in a kissing mood! He has just been almost SET ON FIRE and it has unnerved him. He leaps adroitly away to check on some more smouldering stuff.
Jen is HURT. What a let-down after all her exertions, the exertions of a RHINOCEROS, to be so dully dismissed. Down in the dungeon she cooks herself a HERO’S BREAKFAST and wonders who DID it, who set fire to Woger’s bedroom? And who does all this SQUAWKING? Who has it in for WOGER? Could it be those weedy children who ask permission to BREATHE? Must be some bloody patient. Patients are the WORST.
Roger & Out
The need, late in life, to go suck on some TEAT, to be NURSED. Most turn to drink; Roger joined the Air Ambulance Service! Helicopters offered the best view he was ever going to get of geological excrescences that resemble breasts. Dr Lewis’s ONLY interest in landscape was in its resemblance to breasts. There were many local hummocks, paps, bluffs and promontories he had long lusted to sink his teeth into.
He also craved EXCITEMENT, rescue missions, bad accidents on the highway, pain, death, gore, and looking DOWN on people. He had TIRED of his white docto
r’s garb – he coveted the ORANGE FLIGHT SUIT. It showed off his trim waist and hips! Even his CHIN CLEFT was becomingly lit by orange reflections bouncing off the suit. The straps under the crotch formed a protective LEDGE for his balls, which he found quite comfortable (unaware that the same straps, round the back, made his ass look like a VULVA). And he liked the LINGO. In the Air Ambulance Service you don’t just say, ‘Let’s go over there.’ You say: ‘TWO MILES AT TWELVE O’CLOCK’ (straight ahead), or ‘FIVE MILES AT THREE O’CLOCK’ (an abrupt turn to the right). There were all kinds of ALERTS too. Yellow, Green, Red – Roger had always wanted Alerts.
He returned from his heroic escapades ready to face with equanimity another boring afternoon of his own patients. And the flight suit had the desired effect: he became even more beloved in the community! PHOTOS of the dishy doc began to appear in the local paper, along with brief descriptions of his best emergencies. For one of these photos, they made Dr Lewis come into a STUDIO, where they attached a rope to the straps on his flight suit and hung him in the air! He was supposed to look MID-RESCUE, like Superman.
Soon he was being stalked by a pushy but appealing LADY REPORTER who wanted to write an IN-DEPTH PROFILE. She asked him a lot of technical questions, which Dr Lewis answered in his usual thorough manner, bombarding her with more info on helicopters and flight paths and Alerts than she’d ever dreamt of! In his excitement he made the mistake of mentioning the Golden Hour, the crucial period within which seriously injured people are supposed to receive medical attention (he immediately regretted this, since he and Charlie, the pilot, RARELY managed to get to anybody within an hour). Whenever he SHUT UP, they would sit for a moment of mutual perplexity, then the lady reporter would snuggle up and they’d have a SNOG.
‘Isn’t she too FAT to be a nurse?’ the lady reporter asked Roger one day after encountering Jen in the corridor (eighty-four). ‘Looks too fat to me!’
‘Good little worker though,’ Roger offered in Jen’s defence.
Jen HEARD this! How she ACHED for him – her EARS ached from being pressed so often against their adjoining wall. She too wanted to finger the plastic placket of his orange SCRUB SHIRT! She didn’t like him talking about her behind her back to that skinny REPORTER BITCH. Surely men will TIRE one day of skinny women, once they realise how much VOMITING’S involved.
Down in the dungeon, a pretty, perky, skinny little party bag was put through untold miseries, the LEAST of which was having tomato soup injected into it until it BURST (ah, the tomato). But Jen saved the woman’s article (HIGH-FLYING HERO SWOOPS AGAIN), and treasured the picture of Roger in his flight suit, hanging in the air.
He was busier than ever these days, and correspondingly ALOOF. He was too grand even to speak to Jen! He would push past her in the corridor (ninety-nine) mumbling, ‘I’m sending you a collar bone and a sore throat. There’s also a hand for later.’ The guy no longer had time to mention WHOLE PATIENTS: he was narrowing things down to their essence.
When not airborne, Roger was on the phone to the General Medical Council, or writing them LETTERS, which Jen instantly had to post because, according to Roger’s new lingo, they contained ‘time-sensitive material’ (they were late). His current dispute was with JEREMY, a patient who had thought he was DYING (because Dr Lewis had TOLD him he was). In view of his imminent demise, Jeremy had of course SOLD EVERYTHING and gone round the world. (Why do people DO this? But they do.)
When Jeremy got back from his travels, bewilderdly blooming with health, Dr Lewis informed him that he was not dying after all, there had just been a bit of a MIX-UP with the files. (ANOTHER guy had meanwhile died, with no warning whatsoever from Dr Lewis.) You’d think Jeremy would have been PLEASED to find out he wasn’t dying but he was FURIOUS. For, though somewhat better acquainted with GEOGRAPHY, Jeremy was now FLAT BROKE. Dr Lewis had to explain to the General Medical Council that it was an HONEST MISTAKE that anyone who’d mixed Jeremy’s file up with somebody else’s could have made and he would have told Jeremy sooner if he could have FOUND him, but Jeremy was in VENEZUELA or TIBET by then and therefore unreachable. Doctors can’t be expected to keep track of everyone all the time.
The only patient Dr Lewis looked forward to these days was Martha, the ORGASMIC WOMAN, whose doses of electricity, Seroxat and Valium went on without any sign of improvement so far (if having fewer orgasms can be called an improvement). Instead, Martha seemed to get a big KICK out of every experimental treatment Dr Lewis could think up, her appreciation audible through the walls of the consulting room. Jen had already tried to EAT the handbag she’d assigned to Martha, an ugly brown WOOL affair with leather handles like BINGO WINGS and CROCHETED decorative elements, after stuffing it with PARMA HAM: it was a ham-bag sandwich! She had chewed and chewed it, and had made some progress with the RIM and the icky woollen clasp, but wasn’t getting anywhere with the HANDLES, and the whole thing was beginning to ALARM her, since the dye stained her cheeks and she didn’t know how long Parma ham LASTS.
Roger was so busy and self-important now that he was too busy to have a GIRLFRIEND. He found the lady reporter’s incessant questions exhausting and, when she started asking for FREE MEDICAL ADVICE, he knew it was over. So he DUMPED her. But JEN didn’t know this. JEN had reached a peak, a pitch, a PAP, of jealousy. WHAT AM I, A ROBOT, AN AUTOMATON, a nurse MACHINE? Does he think that, just because I am poor, obscure, ugly, huge and weird, I have no FEELINGS? When he PRICKS me, do I not bleed?! Does he think I can just carry on mopping brows and living in the basement, and mean NOTHING to him?
In fury she slipped out of the surgery one day and went to see the Eakinses. Jen had been put in charge of May ever since her return home after her stroke. Jen was supposed to go over there and check May’s BLOOD PRESSURE every now and then. There wasn’t much else they could do for May. She could barely walk (the physiotherapists had given up on her) or talk (ditto, the SPEECH therapists). She couldn’t read or write or concentrate well enough to be read TO. She couldn’t even watch TV, except maybe GOLF programmes. It wasn’t clear how much she understood. May was a mass of DEFICITS, deficiencies – but she was HAPPY. She sang, she smoked, she drank wine! And she kissed everybody’s hand when they came to see her.
She kissed JEN’S hand now, and offered to share her lipstick with her – May touched up her own lipstick frequently throughout the day. She LOVED lipstick! Since the stroke, May’s former disapproval of everything had dissolved into APPROVAL: everything was now OK WITH MAY. Marvin felt the same! People (old friends and colleagues) were always telling him to put May in a NURSING HOME, or just let her DIE of one of her many bronchial problems – but he didn’t WANT to. That would mean the marriage was over, and he didn’t want it to end.
He went off now to make Jen her EIGHTEENTH nice hot cup of tea of the day. But Jen hadn’t come for TEA. Nor did she appreciate May’s insistent offering of lipstick (make-up being a sore point with Jen). She was OFFENDED by May’s contentment and affability, her warm spot by the fire, her loyal hubby. Jen was convinced that Dr Lewis was applying DEEP-TISSUE MASSAGE at that very moment to either Martha or the reporter bitch, maybe BOTH, and she could stand no more.
It cannot be stated too emphatically how DANGEROUS self-hatred is. IT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL TRAGEDY. It will bring the whole species to its KNEES. Hitler, Oscar Wilde, Elvis, Caligula, Walt Disney, the Hutus, Nixon, Oppenheimer – they all hated themselves. It’s a BIG PROBLEM.
Jen scrabbled around in her bottomless bag for a syringe and quietly injected May with some spare INSULIN she just happened to have left over from some other poor slob. Then she smothered May with one of her comfy cushions. By the time Marvin arrived with the tea, May was unconscious! Jen, playing the Heroine of the Hour, called Dr Lewis, who rushed over, his defibrillator dragging romantically on the ground behind him.
Roger did all he could until Charlie could get there and whisk May off in the helicopter – Marvin had to make his own way to the hospital, on LAND (they never had room for RELATIVES in that thin
g!).
From the hospital, May was eventually sent to a nursing home, from which she never escaped! Marvin visited her there every day, but she wasn’t allowed cigarettes or wine any more, nor did she get to see much golf on the communal telly. May was left slouched in a chair all day, eating MICROWAVED PUDDINGS that burnt her tongue. At night, nurses lifted her up off the loo by her BREASTS and yelled at her for soiling the bed.
But JEN was pleased by her little adventure. She liked the way Roger’s lips thinned when he DEFIBRILLATED. She had always liked to see the doctors on the Children’s Ward confused and sweaty, as they tried to revive some kid who’d turned navy-blue. Jen had turned navy-blue herself from the EXCITEMENT of it all, whenever she called the Crash Team. Of course it wasn’t NICE of her to inject sick kids with insulin and vincristine. But we’re told EVERY DAY that there are too many PEOPLE in the world! We can’t AFFORD to be sentimental about human life any more.
We’re ALL mass murderers anyway: we live with the ATOM BOMB. Our names should REFLECT this better. No more Jills, Jeremys, Jeans and Jeanettes. We should all be called ZIT, ZILCH, ZERO. We should all be called LOATHE SELF.
Sharp Moments
Though he’d joined the Air Ambulance Service for the sake of geological titillation, Dr Lewis’s study of landscape soon palled. You lose DETAIL, the further you get from the earth. Instead of mountainous MAJUNGAS, he found he was preoccupied by CHARLIE and the other paramedics, their romantic ups and downs, who had the best CAR, music system, and sporting highlights RECALL, as well as head winds, wind speed and cold fronts. Only PATIENTS now relieved the ennui.