Man or Mango?

by Lucy Ellmann

  The old biddies were past caring about the future. They had no time for aftermath worries, no interest in repercussions. They were tired of self-admonishment. They lived for the moment. They wanted a good time and they wanted it now! To the shop assistants of Connemara they were just grey-haired old ladies in search of all-wool socks, shamrock brooches and whisky samples. To the clerks of credit-card companies, however, they were con artists wanted for a string of frauds throughout the UK.

  Owen

  I don’t regret a minute that we’ve spent together. Your dimpled hands when tiny, your eyes from birth like a whale’s. You should know that you are splendid.

  Owen was watching Ellen make her way nervously from the women’s changing room to the side of the arctic-temperature swimming pool (only a child could stand it, he thought, but then noticed the nice pregnant woman was in there too). He was awash with love looking at Ellen’s legs walking. As long as he lived he would never forget any part of her or anything about her. He was hazy now about what exactly a two-year-old or a four-year-old or a five-year-old is like, but in Ellen’s case it was all of a piece with her as she was now. The past, present and future all tied in with the sight of her now, moving in the sun, hair blowing: a daughter.

  (A father.)

  Eloïse

  ‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’

  ‘Wellll …’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I don’t … know.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take long. I want to look at you!’

  ‘I’m a little busy.’

  ‘It’s such a nice day. Just for a minute.’

  Downstairs, Eloïse stood nervously by the cold fireplace wondering a) why they hadn’t lit a fire, b) if he would bring his daughter (that might make things a little less awkward), and c) what was she getting herself into. She was not a viable female thing! What was she playing at, pretending to be capable of … sex?! She was a sham, a walking swindle.

  But the nice-looking man with the daughter never turned up. A gnarled moustachioed fellow approached her. He was even more nervous than she (: extremely twitchy), but as soon as he spoke she recognized the voice. She had misidentified her pervert! Ed was as pink and puffy as the pumpkin he led her round the back of the kitchens to see. It was huge and sounded hollow. She had an irresistible urge to sit on it.

  ‘There you go, Your Majesty,’ said Ed, as she positioned herself carefully on this throne. ‘Do you mind me calling you that? . . Your Majesty, I mean.’

  ‘No, no …’

  Ed got down on bended knee.

  ‘You’re my queen bee! I’ve been looking for a woman just like you … You’re very attractive! I like the way you talk to me … ‘

  ‘Well …’

  ‘On the phone.’

  …It’s been fun …’

  ‘I want you!’ said Ed, and flattened her across his pumpkin. She couldn’t move: she was pressed awkwardly against the pumpkin’s stalk and was fearful of struggling in case she reactivated her neck problem (though the feel of Ed’s wiggly willy bumping against her leg was not pleasant).

  ‘I need a woman,’ he puffed in her ear.

  ‘That’s very noble,’ she offered lamely, and was released.

  Ed was undone, ennobled! He stood up, looking round, sheepishly chuffed.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that …’ Ed said.

  ‘No, it is noble,’ said Eloïse as she sat up, rubbing her back where the phallic stalk had been. ‘Every man should devote himself to making one woman happy.’

  ‘Hmmm, well, don’t know as I’ve got time for that!’

  ‘One happy woman is all.’

  She got up, feeling like a battered Delphic oracle, and walked stiffly away. One happy woman indeed! She headed for her car — she could at least escape Ed for the afternoon that way. One happy woman is all.

  Ed

  Unnerved by his encounter with Eloïse, Ed didn’t at first know what to do with himself. So he played with his pumpkin and as he pumped he fumed — about the Connemara Vegetable Show. It had all been a terrible disappointment to him. Typical Paddies. They wouldn’t know a good pumpkin if it jumped up and punched them in the gob!

  Firstly, there was nowhere to put his pumpkin no space had been allocated for it! They said it was too big. Too big? What were they on about? What’s too big when you’re talking giant pumpkins? It was a deflating thing for both Ed and his pumpkin to hear.

  There was also no machinery available to move the thing from the van to the tent. Ed had to drag it himself, on a sheet, on his hands and knees across the gravel path, which bruised the pumpkin’s underside. And in the end, it turned out that there was no prize that could be awarded to a giant pumpkin except ‘Weirdest Vegetable’ (which Ed naturally refused). They just weren’t interested in giant pumpkins! All growing fucking shamrocks for the tourist trade, and decorative gourds. They didn’t know their arse from their elbows, the Irish: Ed had found a mango on the Melon table, labelled ‘Dwarf Melon’. Dwarf melon! Fucking idiots.

  Ed had eventually flounced off with his pumpkin (not an easy thing to do with a vegetable that big), lugging it to the back door of the hotel kitchens where he’d presented it – with thudding irony — to the chef. To make a pumpkin pie. Or, say, three hundred pumpkin pies! (So far, the chef hadn’t taken him up on the offer.) After that, Ed had skulked round the hotel feeling cheated, occasionally peeing on the Connemara Vegetable tent at night. If he’d only brought the necessaries, he would have bombed the place. He could show these bloody Paddies a thing or two about bombs!

  The Murder Weekend was the only thing he had to look forward to. That sounded a good lark.

  On his way to pee on the tent again, he met Ellen. They got chatting, and got along so well that Ed snuck into the marquee and stole Ellen a pomegranate from the Exotic Vegetable display. The Irish can’t even tell an exotic vegetable from an erotic vegetable! Fruit. Whatever.

  Knowing she shouldn’t accept gifts from strangers, Ellen (or Persephone, as she now privately called herself) skipped off to eat the pomegranate in the shade behind the stables.

  Ed wandered off to the hotel, wondering if he might see Eloïse again there and whether he wanted to (she seemed a bit weird). Turning a corner in the long dark corridor, he came upon the more luscious Niamh, chambermaid of one’s dreams, being groped by the doctor. Ed scuttled behind a pillar with a good view. The doctor was holding Niamh’s hands behind her back, trying to kiss her. Ed wanted next go.

  ‘Bugger off!’ shouted Niamh. Escaping from his grasp with practised aplomb (and maybe a hint of martial arts training), she gave the estimable doctor a shove that nearly sent him into Ed’s pillar. Quickly regaining his supposed dignity, the doctor pretended he was going in that direction anyway. Ed surreptitiously followed Niamh down the corridor until she managed to duck so swiftly through a doorway that she lost him. Traipsing back and forth, trying to figure out which door, occupied the rest of Ed’s afternoon.

  Eloïse

  Nutmegs and Margin shells

  Harps and spiny Whelks

  Turrids

  Volutes

  Auger shells

  Babylon shells

  Cones

  Still shaking from my encounter with the pumpkin man, I drive to the beach near Grandma’s house. My beach where I used to take refuge from her whining, where I swam naked in little warm pools of water until Grandma found out and made me wear a suit.

  It has been taken over by a hideous Scuba-Diving Centre. I look at the centre, then at the rough grey sea, and think, why not? No one could find me in twenty or thirty feet of water. I have watched my share of Jacques Cousteau films. The sea is a perfect place for hermits. No one would know I was there.

  But it turns out I need a swimsuit, shorts, shampoo, and an appointment. I’m so rattled by this I can’t decide whether to do it or not.

  I creep back into the hotel and sit on my bed brooding about pumpkins, phone calls, appointments, Jacques Cousteau and my youthful noti
on of becoming a marine biologist, until I finally work up the courage to ring the scuba-diving centre and arrange a lesson for the next day.

  Dread and despair all morning for fear of scuba-diving! When I get there, an intensely beautiful man tells me he’s my Individual Instructor. He makes me sit in the tearoom and watch a video about scuba-diving, on which I will later be quizzed. Having fully grasped the video I am rather looking forward to the quiz. I also have to fill out a health form — if I answer Yes to any of the questions on it, I can’t go scuba-diving. I answer Yes to three: ear trouble in childhood, neck trouble now, nausea. I can’t go scuba-diving! I don’t even get to do the scuba-diving quiz. What a swizz. Am offered snorkelling instead. I do not dare tell my handsome Individual Instructor how inferior I consider snorkelling to scuba-diving (would he be hurt or relieved?). I end up agreeing to snorkel.

  The terrible embarrassments connected with the ‘dry-suit’. The first one he gives me is too small. I can only get into three-quarters of it. Still in the suit and almost in tears, I have to pad past all the lounging scuba-divers in the tearoom to ask my instructor for a bigger one. I plod back upstairs. The bigger suit fits, sort of, but I’ve wrenched my shoulder so badly getting into the first, I can only pull this one on halfway! I plod downstairs again. Through the tearoom. This time, several hostile scuba-divers have a very good look at me not looking too good in my dry-suit.

  My instructor takes me in hand in a room full of the vaguely human forms of dry-and wet-suits hanging from above, drained and crumpled forms all in a line. He tells me to lift my arms. I lift them cooperatively, but he meant the arms of my suit. Into these he flicks baby powder, which is supposed to help case my arms into the sleeves. I duly stick my head and arms into the suit and now can hardly breathe: the suit is cutting off my circulation and strangling me! The only things that fit comfortably are the gloves, but he does them up so tight that they hurt too. The underwater world will have to be pretty spectacular to make up for this. But then — miraculously — after a momentary absence my instructor reappears in his dry-suit, which is sleeveless. Forearms in full view. I lust. We tramp down to the sea.

  There is much physical contact necessary between a novice snorkeller and her Individual Instructor. One could easily misconstrue his intentions, the way he binds and straps my chest and sticks my flippers on my feet, then leans lightly on me while he puts on his own. Next he carefully teaches me how to blow up my buoyancy vest which sits on top of a huge weighted belt round my waist (things have not moved on much from Jules Verne), and forces my hat over my head.

  With the hat on, I can’t breathe, and we’re not even in the water yet. It also mushes up my face in a manner that deeply worries me. Pink, puckered and choking, I long already to be back in civilization, with lipstick and hair and a tissue for my nose, safe and loveless on dry land, but first I must enter the sea with this handsome man who feels nothing for me. I am in fact utterly miserable. Misled by Jacques Cousteau.

  My instructor makes me kneel down and practise breathing underwater. I immediately fall over and flounder there like a beetle on its back. I smile bravely, pretending I’m having a good time, try to regain my feet but can’t: I am a big helpless inflatable blob, bobbing in one or two feet of water.

  Eventually we swim out a little. I try to snorkel. Water keeps getting up my nose. Each time it does, I’m supposed to turn over and float on my back while I readjust my snorkel and catch my breath. My Individual Instructor waits, fairly patiently (he’s getting paid 17 Irish punts after all, whether or not I ever manage to see the wonders of the underwater world). When we are finally swimming again, he tells me to look down. I do, and the first thing I see, right under me, about six feet down, is a shark! Terror. Panic. I start choking again. I want to swim away but instead have to lie on my back choking, salt water in every orifice and about to be mauled by a shark.

  My instructor waits. When I’ve recovered somewhat, he asks if I noticed the dogfish: totally harmless and about four feet long (it looked ten to me the mask magnifies everything). But it makes no difference. I’ve realized I am in the same element as monsters, and they could eat me.

  My instructor keeps diving down to the bottom and bringing things up to show me. As if I care. A sea urchin — one side the eye, the other the mouth, as far as I can understand it. Hermit crabs. I am incapable of mastering the ‘OK’ sign he seems to like to use underwater (thumb and forefinger forming a circle). Whenever he does it at me, I nod — which makes me splutter and choke. Not OK. Not OK at all! He shows me a starfish, one leg smaller than the others: a replacement leg (ugh). Spider crab. Some sort of flat fish on the bottom, burrowing under the sand (what a life). But worst of all are the high wavering cliffs all round us, covered with seaweed fronds. It is all too deep, too deep.

  Nose full of salt water, choking steadily, I am desperate to get out, but would rather drown than admit this to my instructor: my lust for him is now the only thing keeping me alive. Or human. The rest of me is but a spluttering, runny-nosed, bulbous thing (new kind of sea monster).

  I can barely walk when I’m finally allowed out of the water. I’m panting, smothered by my own suit. I’ll breathe later, I promise myself, pretending to be able to walk.

  Final humiliation back in the rubber-suit room: my instructor has to pull the suit off me, thereby getting a glimpse of my damprotty old shorts before we’re both submerged in the rancid smell of the suit. I wash my hair upstairs, splashing cold water on my face to try to reduce its incredible pinkness (caused by forty-five minutes of near-strangulation), then go down to meet him in the tearoom. We drink some tea together. I’m so relieved to be on dry land, I say I enjoyed my snorkelling lesson, even hint I might want to do it again sometime! But he’s not listening to my lies. He’s got his diary out, already thinking about the next underworld experience he can inflict on somebody else.

  George

  Individual: Watch the puck

  Individual: Talk it over

  Individual: Get up on the play

  Individual: Positional factor

  Individual: Be aggressive

  Individual: If you’re not clicking

  Individual: Giving credit

  Individual: When to pass

  Individual: When you pass, break!

  Individual: If the ice is slow

  Individual: Get off if tired

  Individual: Fundamental offence

  Individual: Missed goals

  I am coming apart here! Ireland has made a meal of me. It’s eating me ALIVE. Hungry kind of place.

  Or is it just Venetia? She’s after my SOUL. Seems to find this sort of cannibalism romantic!

  Empty Connemara moonscape —

  Long-gone, those who should still BE here.

  Vessels fueled by English apathy

  Took the helpless hapless poor to

  Strange new wastelands. There my starving

  Homeless, homesick forebears started

  Families — little knowing someday

  One would be a skater, back upon a

  Bright-lit neon moonscape.

  For the Crazy Irish ‘love of conflict’

  Carried down the line to ME. Not just on

  Ice my civil disobedience, but

  In my wrongful negligence, my ‘duty’.

  DEATH and WASTE my only offspring.

  Tender haystacks fuchsias, peatland.

  Peasants who have never married;

  Life but a business of wet walking,

  Soft rain, a cow or sheep to visit.

  Wrath and reason have no place here.

  No place, no USE, for my confusion,

  Chaos, conflict. Nor my coldness.

  1. INT. Venetia’s rented holiday cottage – late afternoon.

  VENETIA, DRESSED, IS TRYING TO LUG GEORGE (NAKED SPONGING IRRESOLUTE LOUSE) OUT OF BED. THE LOUSE DOES NOT WANT TO BE AWAKE. IF AWAKE, HE WILL HAVE TO ACKNOWLEDGE (NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME) THAT HE HAS SOMEHOW SUCCUMBED TO SERVICING HIS PATRONESS!
HE IS NO LONGER CONVINCED THIS WHOLE TRIP TO IRELAND WAS A GOOD IDEA.

  CUT TO AMAZING BLUEY CLOUDS FORMING OVER GLOWY BLOWY HILLS.

  VENETIA

  (coquettishly)

  Come on! Up. We’ve got to

  get to the hotel.

  GEORGE

  Why the hell do we have to go there?

  VENETIA

  The Murder Weekend! Have you

  forgotten the Murder Weekend??

  GEORGE

  Goofy Brits pretending to be Colonel

  Mustard or Miss Scarlet? Gimme a BREAK!

  VENETIA

  (genuinely startled)

  But … I thought that’s what you

  came for!

  GEORGE

  I came to write my POEM.

  VENETIA

  Oh, but I so wanted you to try it.

  2. INT/EXT. Venetia’s rented car a few minutes later.

  GEORGE

  (sullenly)

  Cute place, Ireland. You know, Venetia, the

  fact is, Venetia, I don’t go for murder

  mysteries, thrillers, detectives, forensics. I

  happen to think it’s kind of sick to take such

  a prurient interest in death! It’s OBSCENE.

  Death really ISN’T that entertaining!

  VENETIA (V. O.)

  Our first argument! How thrilling.

  CAR PASSES LONE DONKEY IN FIELD. CLOSE-UP OF DONKEY’S FEET: THEY ARE TIED TOGETHER WITH ROPE THAT HAS WORN BARE PATCHES ON ITS FETLOCKS. THE HOOVES ARE CRACKED AND SPLAYED.

  CUT TO DISTANT SHOT OF VENETIA’S CAR ZOOMING ALONG.

  3. INT. Rossadilly Hotel lounge – that night.

  NIAMH THE CHAMBERMAID IS READING ALOUD FROM THE LITTLE BOOKLET THAT CAME WITH THE HOTEL — GUIDE — TO MURDER — WEEKENDS KIT.

  NIAMH