Man or Mango?

by Lucy Ellmann

  And their hobbies! Trainspotting, birdwatching, stamp collecting, amateur photography (porn), remote-control airplanes, giant vegetables … Why? Why? Only a man could think that getting a miniature plane off the ground was time well spent. And vegetables are better small. Not giant, small. The only possible reason for growing a giant vegetable is to prove (to anyone still in any doubt) that you are an utterly absurd and worthless human being with no recognizable function in this world.

  Men seem suspiciously eager to prove this (my father’s weird method of making beds saved him from ever being asked to make them). They seek to discourage any lingering notion that they might be people you can depend on. They pride themselves on their own futility, even award each other prizes for it: a prize here for growing a tuber too big to budge, a prize there for dragging yourself to the pub every night to throw darts. Purposeless pointless beings, intent on purposelessness. And forever shooting at things (with balls or bullets). They have all sunk into a realm of unreality because they cannot make babies and cannot make sense of a world in which they are so self-evidently useless. Crap. All of them. Crap. Oh hold me honey push it into me take me take me fuck me now. Useless. All utterly useless to me.

  I like to think of past loves: one hanging by his prick, another by the fingers he failed to thrill me with, one poised for all eternity on his sharp bum bones, another sucked into the air by a toilet plunger attached to his flabby bald head. All vultures who came to pick at my carrion flesh once, now pierced, poised, impaled, dangling helplessly for ever as punishment for their ill-treatment of me.

  No babies for me. No babies for me.

  HOW EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE WORLD IS MEN’S FAULT:

  1 Kleenex. Man-size Kleenex is not only bigger but softer. They think women don’t blow their noses. Men rule the world.

  2 Marilyn Monroe. Men don’t really believe that women exist. Marilyn Monroe died of this.

  3 Hobbies. Activities characterized by futility, sanctifying madness.

  4 Whistling. Men are forever announcing their presence with this territorial tunelessness. Their footsteps too are oppressive. They don’t give women room to breathe.

  5 Cats. Men have no understanding of cats. Cats are curvaceous and unwilling to be ordered about men therefore have no patience with them.

  6 Male nipples. Borrowed jewellery for a chest that is too flat. They even stuck nipples on their medieval armour! Ridiculous. Insane.

  7 Death. Unable to make babies, they make bombs instead. Men menstruate by shedding other people’s blood.

  8 Pollution. If men didn’t molest and abduct them, children could walk to school, thus saving on petrol.

  9 Men who catch butterflies. Enough said. Ditto, men who steal eagles’ eggs.

  10 Men who can’t sew. Or won’t.

  11 Men who fight women as windmills.

  12 Men of few words.

  13 Bathroom tiles. Men are always over-tiling things.

  14 Deprivation. Men do not rest easy in their graves unless they have deprived every woman they have ever come into contact with of whatever she wanted from them.

  15 Purpose. The only possible purpose in a man’s existence is to make one woman happy. They all seem depressingly unaware of this.

  16 Lists. Men have reduced the world to lists.

  Howard

  Howard’s inventory of flat contents:

  Howard’s room:

  2 floor mats

  2 mahogany chairs

  1 wooden towel rail

  1 bedside table with cupboard

  1 bookcase, small, wood

  1 double bed with mattress and valance

  1 table, kitchen type

  2 bedside lamps with shades

  1 13 amp extension lead

  2 sets window curtains (swag)

  1 × 2 kW electric heater

  Eloïse’s room:

  1 floor mat

  1 oak chair (fabric seat)

  1 bookcase, white, painted

  1 single bed, with mattress

  1 set window curtains (bramble motif)

  1 newspaper rack

  1 small bookcase

  1 bookcase attached to wall

  1 fire extinguisher

  Hallway:

  1 bookcase

  1 fire extinguisher

  Sitting room:

  1 floor mat

  1 hearth rug

  1 Chesterfield couch with bird-pattern, loose cover and 2 separate cushions

  1 wing easy chair with bird pattern, loose cover and 1 separate cushion

  1 mahogany chair

  1 oval gate-legged table

  1 bookcase (dark wood)

  1 table lamp with shade

  1 standard lamp with shade

  2 wall-bracket lamps with shades

  1 stereo radio with two speakers

  2 sets window curtains

  1 × 2 kW electric heater

  1 stuffed pike in glass case

  1 back-scratcher

  In cupboard:

  1 vacuum cleaner with tools

  1 ironing board

  1 iron

  1 clothes rack

  1 floor brush

  1 floor mop

  1 dustpan and brush

  5 glass preserve jars

  Bathroom:

  1 washing machine

  1 × 13 amp extension lead for washing machine

  280 stacked tiles

  1 set window curtains (abstract)

  1 shower curtain and rail (fish pattern)

  Kitchen:

  1 rush mat

  2 oak chairs (fabric seats)

  1 armchair with cushion

  1 dining table

  1 refrigerator

  1 refuse bin

  1 fire extinguisher

  1 fire blanket

  2 sets window curtains (bramble motif)

  1 doormat

  1 small saucepan

  1 medium ” with lid

  1 casserole with lid (stainless steel)

  1 frying pan with lid

  1 saucepan with lid, aluminium

  1 preserving pan with lid, aluminium

  1 ceramic casserole with glass lid

  1 enamelled metal casserole

  1 colander with lid

  1 wire cake holder

  1 toaster

  2 large meat dishes

  1 blender/coffee grinder

  1 filter coffee pot and filter holder

  1 hot-water jug (blue china)

  1 teapot and mat

  1 pepper mill

  1 salt canister

  1 tea caddy

  1 coffee caddy

  1 electric kettle

  3 wooden chopping boards

  9 wine glasses

  5 tumblers

  2 glass tankards (1 × ½ pt, 1 × 1 pt)

  7 sherry-size glasses, assorted

  3 milk jugs, various sizes

  8 cereal bowls, small red

  6 cereal bowls, large red

  3 butter dishes, 1 glass, 1 metal, 1 china

  1 sugar bowl with lid

  6 eggcups, assorted

  7 dinner plates, red

  7 side plates, red

  5 bread and butter plates

  1 small glass bowl (e.g. for salt)

  2 teacups and saucers, red

  2 ” ” ” yellow

  6 black coffee cups and 5 saucers

  2 large glass bowls

  2 china bowls, 1 blue, 1 yellow

  1 Pyrex measuring jug

  1 set scales, weights and separate pan

  1 bag clothes-pegs and washing line

  1 lemon-squeezer

  2 wooden spoons

  3 metal spoons

  2 metal forks

  2 tin-openers, 1 hand, 1 for wall

  1 jar-opener

  1 kitchen scissors

  1 cheese-grater

  1 egg-beater

  1 potato-masher

  1 soup ladle

  1 tongs

  1 knif
e-sharpener

  1 tea-strainer

  1 bottle-opener

  1 rolling pin

  1 corkscrew

  1 nutcracker

  1 carving fork

  1 knife, steel

  6 sharp knives

  6 teaspoons

  1 salt spoon

  8 table knives

  6 ” forks

  9 dessert spoons

  2 tablespoons

  1 flan dish

  1 oval pie dish

  1 sieve

  1 mixing bowl, metal

  1 mixing bowl, china

  3 pudding basins

  6 pastry-cutters

  2 hot-water bottles

  2 plastic bowls

  1 wooden bowl

  8 rush table mats

  3 trays

  1 concertina file containing inventory of flat contents

  Ed

  We had in this village … an idiot-boy … who, from a child, showed a strong propensity to bees; they were his food, his amusement, his sole object … This lad exerted all his few faculties on this one pursuit. In the winter he dosed away his time … by the fireside, in a kind of torpid state … but in summer he was all alert, and in quest of his game in the fields, and on sunny banks. Honey-bees, humble-bees, and wasps, were his prey wherever he found them: he had no apprehensions from their stings, but would seize them nudismanibus, and at once disarm them of their weapons, and suck their bodies for the sake of their honey-bags. Sometimes he would fill his bosom between his shirt and his skin with a number of these captives; and sometimes would confine them to bottles … As he ran about he used to make a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees.

  Ed sat on some lovely squishy cakes of mud and talked to his pumpkins. ‘Someone’s for it!’ he warned them. The pumpkins hadn’t been making sufficient progress. There had been no advance in their diameters since yesterday, none that he could detect anyway.

  In his beloved shed Ed mixed a bowlful of his secret growth supplement, a combination of plant food, cow manure, Eco-Phos-Pro-Bio tablets, cherry linctus and a number of his own bodily fluids. Ed delicately sprinkled this mixture beneath each pumpkin.

  (His parents had named him Ed because it was only two letters and easy to spell.)

  Then he set about the most dilatory pumpkin with a shovel, bashing through its rich shiny shell and beating it to a pulp as an example to the others. (Plant lessons must be kept simple.)

  Ed had established himself by various means (not all of them wholesome or legal) as one of the leading names in the giant-vegetable-growing world. He had grown a 108-pound cabbage, a 53-pound beetroot, a lettuce that was 3 foot across and weighed 29 pounds. He had grown celery that was 5 feet high. With the help of his secret growth supplement and 43 bales of straw, 8 of peat and an extra pat or two of cow manure he had once managed to produce 493 potatoes from a single root! He had also been cultivating giant onions for many years, some the size of his own head.

  Ed (who liked to shoot at the full moon with an illicit handgun each month, and made a living as a burglar in his spare time) went to have a quick look at his beehives. A woodpecker had been at them, drilling holes in the side and then just sitting there picking bees off when they rushed out to investigate. In his shed Ed unearthed an old plastic owl (his shed had everything) and nailed it to the fence beside the hives in the hope that a woodpecker would be wary of an owl, even an old plastic one. As he struggled to get it into a convincing, aggressive pose, bees settled tenderly on Ed’s shoulders to bask in the sun.

  He sang to them: ‘I am the honey, honeysuckle, you are the bee. I like to take the honey from your sweet lips, you see.’ He no longer ate them. He’d stopped doing that when he reached puberty. None the less, he did sometimes chase them and liked to tease the queen. The bees were at his mercy.

  Leave the bumblebee in the killing-jar for at least half an hour … If the oesophagus has been cut by first removing the bee’s head, the whole honeystomach can be removed from the abdomen with a pair of forceps.

  Ed went home and switched on his electric train set, then made a phone call, his telephone manner becoming more and more lewd as the train zoomed faster and faster through the tunnels. But the woman on the other end didn’t seem unduly alarmed. (The stupidity of women astounded him. One neighbour once told him she’d seen a swarm of bees in his garden — months after she’d seen it! What use was that? What use was she?)

  In bed that night, he recognized that he was lonely, much lonelier than he’d thought. Apart from his bees, pumpkins, root vegetables, train set, pipe bombs and the various clocks and musical instruments he’d stolen from people’s houses, he was alone. No one knew of his many successes and failures, his birthdays, his plans for the future. He felt like a Japanese businessman holed up for the night in one of those ultra-modern hotels like beehives, with cells just big enough for the grubs (businessmen) to turn over: everything an inch from your head including sink, wardrobe, TV and breakfast. You know you’re dead when everything’s within arm’s reach. But we’re all single-cell organisms these days. Since the invention of the video and the telephone, people need never meet up again.

  He went into the living room and wanked to a video on insect mating behaviour that included crowds of ladybirds fucking merrily (‘Lesbians’, chuckled Ed every time he watched it). Ed’s genitals — gnarled knobs, wrinkly crinkly skin, veined, pimpled ’n’ ’orrible, asymmetrically protruding from a bed of thick, tough hairs reminded him of a carnivorous plant he’d once seen at Kew. In fact he’d queued to see it! Supposed to stink but didn’t. What a con.

  The Structure and Shape of the Fungus Fruit-body

  Reproduction of Fungi

  Classification of Fungi

  The Life Cycle of Fungi

  Distribution of Fungi

  The Importance of Fungi for Man

  On rainy days Ed kept himself to himself, busy manufacturing the letter bombs he sent to women in the News (Newswomen, women mentioned by Newswomen, women who happened to get in the way of a News camera, etc.). He had nothing against women per se, just women in the News. He’d never killed anyone yet. A few fingers had been blown off here and there. Pretty harmless really. He didn’t want to kill them, just give them a fright. Like they’d given him.

  He had spent seventeen years perfecting his letter bombs, or ‘bomblets’ as Kate Adie had once called them on the News after one little incident (or was it spelled ‘bomelette’ like ‘omelette’? Ed ate a lot of those and often wondered about it).

  Each bomb was constructed from hand-carved wooden elements and home-made screws so that they couldn’t be traced to any shops. He even sanded off the serial numbers on the tiny batteries he used to ignite the fuse. They were beautiful little objects in their way, these bombs, but unfortunately so innocuous they never got the kind of publicity they deserved considering the craftsmanship involved in their creation.

  The truth was, Ed wanted to stop his bombing campaign, his lonely mission to save the world from women in the News. It had ceased to satisfy him. He was tired of travelling to distant deserted postboxes, wearing sunglasses, not even able to get a cup of tea in case someone remembered and could identify him. He had evaded detection with such ease that he had grown tired of anonymity, tired of success! — and longed to be released from his self-imposed solitude in which newspapers were his primary companions, newspapers full of women. (Doing without the News was not an option. He panted in anticipation of the next disaster. And he was not alone in this. There is global excitement about death in double figures.)

  Some of Ed’s many successes:

  Beetroot :

  53 Ib 8 oz

  Broccoli :

  25 1b

  Cabbage :

  108 Ib

  Calabrese :

  16 lb

  Carrot :

  15 Ib 7 oz

  Celery :

  26 Ib 1 oz

  Corn cob :

  26¼ in

  Courgette :r />
  44 Ib 8 oz

  Cucumber :

  10 Ib 1 oz

  Garlic :

  2 Ib 10 oz

  Green bean :

  48 in

  Leek :

  12 Ib 2 OZ

  Marrow :

  78 Ib 2 oz

  Onion :

  12 Ib 4 oz

  Parsnip :

  71¼ in

  Potato :

  7 Ib 13 oz

  Pumpkin :

  406½ Ib

  Radish :

  32 Ib 7 oz

  Squash :

  375 Ib 5 oz

  Swede :

  42 Ib 3 oz

  Tomato :

  7 Ib 12 oz

  Conclusion to Part One

  MANGO vs. MAN

  In what way is a man more than a mango?

  Is he more useful about the house?

  Is he more beautiful?

  Is he as generous and obliging as this succulent fruit gently ripening on your window sill?

  Is his ripeness as tender?

  Will your children like him as much as they’d like a mango?

  Has he got anything to offer in atonement for not being a mango?

  Mangoes do not lord it over everybody at committee meetings.

  Nor do they monopolize the conversation at dinner.

  With even the most lethargic of men, there is still the threat of physical force.

  Not so with a mango.

  A mango’s ears do not stick out.

  A woman does not have to wear lipstick and high heels in order to spend an evening with a mango.

  A woman does not have to wash her hair for a mango.

  I have only known one mango that was no good.

  (from the absent student’s notebook)

  Part Two

  Connemara

  All memory of the old home, its needs, conditions, and duties is cancelled, and the new communal identity proceeds to embark on the adventure of life without delay. Even the situation of their late home is effaced from memory.

  An inquest was held on the 8th inst., on the body of Mary Cunningham, of Carrick banagher … Verdict —“died for want of sufficient food.”