by Lucy Ellmann
Ellen woke the next day and said she’d lost the will to live.
Does the cat think herself worthy, a being of infinite merit, and therefore entitled to the licking-into-shape? Or is she just uncomfortable in an untidy pelt? Is it the pleasure of licking, or a sense of personal honour, like a soldier in the trenches polishing his boots? Her duty to lick?
Owen wished he loved his life a little bit.
The smashing of babies’ heads reflects the extent to which the dualism of anti-Semitic violence persisted, with secret, scientific killing proceeding alongside sudden, spontaneous acts of unspeakable cruelty …
He was a fine example of health, strength and youth. We were surprised by his cheerful manner. He looked around and said quite happily: ‘Has anyone ever escaped from here?’ It was enough. One of the guards overheard him and the boy was tortured to death. He was stripped naked and hung upside down from the gallows; he hung there for three hours. He was strong and still very much alive. They took him down and laid him on the ground and pushed sand down his throat with sticks until he died.
Eloïse
Birds that sing in the night are but few:
Nightingale,
Woodlark,
Less reed-sparrow,
Walking along in my bad-luck jumper, I think of myself as fleshless, skinless down one side, my body a cave of reddish, dripping ribs empty of organs.
I step on a basking bumblebee on a quiet path: the telltale crunch of its outer shell collapsing. Realizing I must have stepped on it, I go back to check and there is the struggling bee. Guiltridden, I leave the bee to its dying and turn a corner into a sunlit field where grasses twist, lingered by an invisible giant’s hand: the world is beautiful. One bee short, but still beautiful.
Animals make the best of things. A horse is born a horse and makes do. No point in bemoaning the fact that it’s not a bird, It’s a horse! it’s got a mane and tail and four logs. So it shakes that mane and makes a dash for it on the legs. A dash for what? Happiness.
To sit under a beech tree in spring, its voting leaves still translucent. The branches shield me like a veil, trying to rest themselves on the ground. But when I leave, beech nut husks crunch under my feet, forewarnings of death. I will die before he comes to me.
It was on a free trip to the States to see the Fall, courtesy of Hoover plc (what a swindle: the leaves hadn’t turned yet, and the Hoover I had to buy to get the free tickets doesn’t work properly), I found him. My poet. He was working in a bakery. At first I thought he meant he was a poet of dough sonnets of baked goods lined the walls.
Customers came and went, merely mindful of their daily bread, while he filled my mouth with salted snakes and snails, sugared shells and stars. The soft forms he made for me. He gave me muffins made of mangoes and murmured in my ear — I seemed to stand in that bakery for days, watching the miracles and mysteries of manhood unfold.
Enough! he must have thought, we must introduce some harshness here. So he invited me to watch him play ice hockey. I had no idea what ice hockey was.
‘The queen bee of team sports!’ he claimed, astounded by my ignorance.
I hesitated, for I knew that as soon as I was alone in a dark car with this man I would want to put my hand on his thigh and my tongue in his mouth … Knew too that he had a wife and probably a million other bakery-shop flirtations to nurture.
But I needn’t have worried. In the car he was intent unswervingly on ice hockey: the game itself, numerous exciting manoeuvres he’d seen or carried out, the near slicing-off of his own ear under some blundering idiot’s skate, the nature, purpose, glory and general necessity of this violent game. Talking fast, driving fast, hunched over his steering wheel, he made himself a stranger to me. I sat far away from him, hiding from his coldness.
The evening passed for me in an agony of hypothermia and anxiety on George’s behalf. Glory indeed! A shuffle of great lumbering chaps awkwardly thrusting themselves about on ice (George’s litheness, he later told me, was a great advantage against these huge padded opponents, who never knew where he was going to turn up next). Rushing and shoving like little boys round an unexploded World War II grenade. Bloody noses and unknown fractures, much scowling and set jaws: mock heroes for a mock battle. Given the chance, men create strife all round them. Bees would have had nothing to do with this, the bee’s knees, be-all-and-end-all, of team sports! Bees do not gather together for purposeless displays of aggression.
Dizzy with cold and the ghastly game, I told George in the car park that I was relieved he had survived. He pulled me to him then and kissed me. With his mouth against my cheek, he said he loved my toes, my ankles, my legs, my wrists, my hair, my nose (it rhymed!). He sank to his knees, there between the cars, grabbed my hips, opened my coat, kissed my cunt through my dress, gathered me to him.
‘Come,’ he said later, at the hotel. ‘I want you to come,’ his hand like a boat navigating the undulations of my abdomen, making wave upon wave. ‘Come.’ I quickly reached a level of pain, of pleasure, he’d never envisaged (his power to make me weep from joy or sorrow).
In the days that followed he showed me sprays of red leaves on faraway hillsides throughout Vermont and New Hampshire, but what I remember is the way he turned me on the bed, pulled my face round to kiss him, his thumb in my mouth, his voice. With these offerings he condemned me to wander the earth forever after bewildered and unappeased: I could make no sense of a world in which I had to do without him.
How nonchalantly he abandoned me. Back to his wife, his life. It took me years to understand (for he never explained) that this was a matter of honour. Men are so ethical, they let us die for their principles! He knew a lot of things but not what to do with me. He wasted me, made my body a moral minefield, a no-man’s-land. I would have had his child, I would have had his child.
How I loved him. But why? Because of his voice. Because of his poetry. Because he liked me but wouldn’t act on it. Because he didn’t always seem to like me. Because I don’t like myself either. Because he didn’t trust me but should have. Because I sensed beneath his coldness and his kindness — that he loved me, which is why he stayed away.
How hateful the socks he sent to me (hockey socks!), along with a poem that was really a list of passionate promises. ‘Come,’ I replied by return of post, and for weeks I wore those socks as an emblem of our love: engagement socks! But as time passed and his repeated threats to arrive faded into more concrete plans to go elsewhere (he wrote wistfully of Montana and Istanbul), the socks became an emblem of my mistakes, my idiotic hopes, my oceanic despair, my unloved feet.
He will never touch me again.
He began to write as if we were old friends, but we were enemies. The antipathy I felt for all who knew him (even his customers), free-floating hatred and jealousy. He told me about a child he knew with an itchy bum. George found this hilarious. I didn’t find it funny. I thought it quite possible the child had a serious medical disorder. I wanted him to talk of our children. Instead he sent a poem about a man walking across a street holding an imaginary child’s hand.
How he played with me, lured me, tricked me. Why? Has he never felt the ground sink beneath him and continue sinking? He wrote me the most beautiful letters in the world and left me to lick the envelopes where he had licked, this jagged wound our only bond. (In the end, I plundered those envelopes for stamps to give the neighbour-boy: a small revenge.)
When my parents died, I stopped writing to him. It had become incomprehensible to me why people bother with each other at all. I felt sorry for anyone who loved. Love makes you vulnerable — vulnerable to death, that greatest unfairness of all. But nonetheless the loss of him merged with all the other deaths around me, a sea of people swiped from me.
O for him back again, O for him back again.
He has somehow got hold of my bag of worldly possessions. I am dying from this.
The landscape here seems to sag, flop, like me. It’s not sturdy. In the sunken lanes, trees cling to a
piece of earth or rock and squeeze it to death. I am touched by the slow growth of lichen (an inch per century). Six years is only a moment to lichen! George and I, in our different time zones, are as alike as a nub of grey lichen and the beating of a bee’s wings: he has his fake strife, and I my hellish safety.
On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone’s throw of the shore … over which the beech tree extended its branches.
George
An amazing light was shed on London tonight! I was in a taxi escaping from one of Venetia’s dullsome dos, and from Kensington through Hyde Park to Westminster it followed us, this glorious GOLDEN LIGHT. The sun was hooded by a mauve-gray cloud that sent a piercing beam across the city, hitting trees and buildings horizontally. It was so beautiful, it almost made me cry, to think that human beings had erected this stuff Parliament in particular, with its gold trim just to catch this light, this once. The whole ballgame, the whole MESS humanity makes of everything, seemed, for fifteen minutes or so, JUSTIFIED. (And not so messy.)
I worry about Eloïse. There must be some way of finding her. Why’d she stop WRITING? Tired of my confusion? And the occasional long silence while I supposedly sorted myself out? She could be DEAD. Dying? Sick? Married to some aristocratic lughead? ANGRY? (Probably.) Sad??
But I had this crazy idea that if it was meant to happen it would happen, without my having to do anything much, or hurt anybody (my WIFE, in particular). Jesus, always trying to be GOOD, as if life were just one long trudge after moral RECTITLIDE! Who do I think I am, George WASHINGTON? And for all my efforts to play the game by the rules, I still leave a trail of devastation in my wake. I’m a criminal at heart: Uncle Harry Hands’ rightful successor.
She will wait forever, WON’T she?
Meet on the street one day and say, ‘I LOVE YOU’?
All too LATE, too late now,
Near her but not WITH her, IN her.
Anguished by my own inaction.
Lost all sense of what I came for,
Who I am or what I’m born for.
What I mourn for: Eloïse.
Sometimes I want to hug someone so much I search the immediate vicinity for ANYBODY. Since I’m usually in my own BATHROOM, don’t find anyone. I cross my arms in the air around an imaginary love object and the hug gets tighter and tighter until I want to crush my fists through my chest wall, grab a lung in each hand, and tear myself to shreds.
My absent student is my sole companion, her and her wierd malaise.
CUTE MEN OF OUR TIMES
Joseph Faller Sr. stabbed his wife Florene 219 times because she stacked the refrigerator full of vegetables, hiding the milk, and he wasn’t going to stand for that any more.
A man slashed his wife open with a carving knife and hung her heart out on the balcony to dry because she said he’d overcooked the pasta.
Britain’s most boring man became boring when he was 14 years old and started collecting old copies of the Radio Times. He now has them all. He also collects wind-up toys, every type of paper bag and the sticky labels off fruit.
A wasp, desperate for something wet and sweet, clings boldly to a mango moving swiftly through space. The fruit is one in a box of twenty being carried down Brick Lane on a man’s shoulder: he is taking them home to his family.
But Brick Lane, the box, the shoulder, the family, all mean nothing to the wasp, who is acutely aware only of her separation from her own nest and has fastened herself for what seems to her an eternity to that drying drip of juice on the mango’s side.
(from the absent student’s notebook)
What is the point of labeling each individual piece of fruit? Buy the fruit, EAT the ad! We’ve carved a chunk out of the ozone, burned up all the rain forests, soon we won’t be able to BREATHE, and all because we had to label each individual piece of fruit.
Eloïse
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before …
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
Each love affair has its one central memory. Incongruous items appear: bicycles and ginger beer, my burp at tea with some boy’s parents, sitting on a pavement blotto from vodka, an off-putting surname and talk of anal sex, a sore chin from too much kissing, the scald from babyhood on a man’s shoulder, an African stew made from tongue, sad and final fumblings in a Spanish hotel, a walk on a beach with a dog. I was once drawn in my bath by an artist with a curved prick … Our biggest romances boil down to this, flotsam and jetsam unworthy of recall.
For such trifles friends and family are forgotten, vows made, bills paid, children begotten and a lifetime’s discomfort endured in a bed too small for two. For the sake of mere sexual attraction whole lives are lived and lost — and afterwards you hate the bloke.
Quickly manufactured passions, between people who don’t even like each other! I seem to be the first person in history who doesn’t think about sex from one week to the next. Romans, Vikings and Visigoths thought about sex all day. Lenin, Hitler and Napoleon were probably thinking about sex all day. I can no longer understand the general fascination with it. And the further you get from it, the dimmer the details. Do women really care what a man’s bum looks like? And if so, why? And why so much nakedness? Surely it’s chilly and inhibiting (must be a throwback to prehistoric times). I can no longer remember how you get past the hurdle of someone else’s intestinal gurgles, or the ugliness of genitals.
Yet for sex women put up with hairy ears and orders, the loo seat up, the nightly meal and mockery of women. For sex they put up with men who eat spaghetti straight out of the tin. For sex people risk their lives! Does no one fear AIDS? Am I the only person who fears death?
I want a child.
Scientists have abolished love. We’re all in it for the sake of our genes. We weep for the smiles of children because we’re programmed to. In anguish we languish, unwitting slaves to biology. But sexual love is but a pale imitation of the love between a mother and child (you don’t choose your friends and family on the basis of what they look like!). A feeble thing concocted out of hormones, clothing, lies and a junk diet of pop songs, its shallowness confirmed every time someone says, ‘There are plenty of fish in the sea’: the assumption is that you can direct your desires at practically anyone! In an ideal world, love would mean more than that even microscopic germs have sex.
All wasted on men anyway. Can they love? They are from a different planet, certainly a different timescale. Their only aim is to spread their seed far and wide. They are born to deceive, to deprive, to misunderstand, mislead, ignore and ruin women. Love is wasted, wasted on them.
Men are lonely, much lonelier than they realize. Their mistake is in spending too much time with other men: equals only in futility, they speak so that other men will hear and listen only to hear what other men say.
I hate them all! I hate them because they’re married, I hate them for their aloofness, their hostility, their arrogance — the arrogance of people who don’t menstruate (you can’t be that proud of yourself if you run the risk of leaking bodily fluids in public every month). Men have no humility. This makes them dangerous. I want to kill, really kill, men who rape and murder. How could it be rational not to want to kill them?
And they dare to rule the world! They have made it so ugly. Square houses! Their obsession with straight lines and right angles has ruined the earth! They consider all curves, all subtleties, all softness, all indefinites, female, and they shun them. They have poisoned and denatured everything they touch, and expect us to be grateful.
I once found a butterfly sanctuary nearby. Never found it again. Either they redesignated it as farmland or what they’d designated was tinier than I thought. If i
t were up to me the whole planet would be a butterfly sanctuary, but leave it to men and butterflies get ten square feet.
Nuclear bombs, fluorescent lights, burning witches at the stake, deciding animals have no emotions only men could have come up with such ideas. And they’re so messy: oil spills follow them wherever they go! They’ve jammed the underwater sound waves with so much primitive sonar equipment and motor boats that whales can’t navigate or even hear themselves think. Men will be our downfall. They will take us all down with them.
Love is wasted on them. They are miniaturists! So bogged down in trivia they never see the whole picture. The pettiness of my flatmate, Howard, with his inventory of every teaspoon, right down to the old frayed clothes-peg bag! Complaining about the couch! The couch had survived two world wars, according to him, and then I’d wrecked it. How many more wars did he have planned lor it? Him and his chintz.
People waste your time trying to convince you that men are reasonable, respectable, human. They’re not. They’re crap. Mutants. Bygones. Useless. Why won’t anyone just say so? They shouldn’t be let loose on the streets — they make life impossible for everyone, mugging and tormenting people … They’re crap. Slugs writhing in mud. Crap. Attention to detail. ‘Sense of history’! Crap. Dullards, malingerers, gigolos, sycophants, boors and that’s the best of them! Poets. Parasites on women, betrayers all. None of them worth the socks they stick their big feet into. All crap. We should take them and their capitalist system and their so-called democracy and their ludicrous judges’ wigs and their fucking Industrial Revolution and everything else they’re so proud of and stuff it into one of their leaky nuclear-waste canisters and blow them all to smithereens, the great male death wish finally fulfilled. Crap. All.
They don’t even believe women fart! They don’t believe we piss whole pints of pee just like they do. They’re ignoramuses, they invent the world to suit themselves, they don’t really want to understand it. Slugs. They can only locus on tiny bits at a time. Train timetables, periodic tables, billiard tables! And all their lists! Even the best of their ideas are tainted by myopia. They invent things without a thought to the consequences, what heartache they may cause. Napalm, BSE, nuclear power stations leaking into the Irish Sea … How can they do it? The man who released African killer bees in South America has apparently forgiven himself (hundreds of people have died). Their fog of self-satisfaction knows no bounds. Newsmen launch into sports news after news of air crashes, the slaughter of Hutus and Tutsis, the whereabouts of Nazi gold with a smile. A smile.