Man or Mango?

by Lucy Ellmann

It is June 1940, in Paris. The Germans are

  about to enter the city. The trains are full,

  the roads to the south a hopeless snarl—

  GEORGE

  (interrupting)

  Jesus, the whole thing’s stolen

  from Casablanca!

  NIAMH

  (not hearing him)

  An anonymous letter arrives, offering

  each of you a ticket on a government

  train heading for the relative safety of

  southern France.

  GEROGE

  (mumbling)

  Yeah, and you’ll REGRET it. Maybe not

  today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon

  and for the rest of your life …

  GENERAL CONSTERNATION IN THE LOUNGE. EVERYONE FROWNS AT GEORGE. NIAMH CONTINUES.

  NIAMH

  During the trip, murder is discovered!

  The passengers must decide who among

  them has committed the crime.

  VENETIA GASPS APPRECIATIVELY. THE 3 OLD BIDDIES SQUEAL WITH DELIGHT. DOCTOR NODS

  CONSPIRATORIALLY AT NIAMH, WHO IGNORES HIM.

  NIAMH IS LONGING FOR GALWAY.

  PEOPLE SCATTER, COLLECTING THEIR SCRIPTS, COSTUMES AND VICTIM-OR-MURDERER CARDS. GEORGE JUST SITS THERE, LOOKING MOROSELY INTO HIS GLASS. VENETIA STANDS OVER HIM, PATTING HIS HEAD HAPPILY.

  CLOSE-UP OF GEORGE LOOKING GLOOMILY INTO GLASS.

  CUT TO PHOTOS OF LAP DOGS:

  CHIHUAHUA

  PEKINESE

  SHIH-TZU

  PUG

  TOY POODLE

  YORKSHIRE TERRIER

  BRUSSELS GRIFFON

  Eloïse

  Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

  More hideous, when thou show’st thee in a child,

  Than the sea-monster.

  The guilt of inheritance. I hated the woman. I don’t deserve her house. I expected it to have disintegrated beyond repair since her death, thereby rightly disinheriting me. But there it is, looking down from its old secluded spot above Lough Muck, just as Grandma used to (we secretly called her Lady Muck). The garden has been invaded by sheep. Some lie serenely by the little brook. But the house seems intact and defiant, that single sour storey of stone. I open it with a key and a kick.

  Depression of a place too long deprived of? electricity? love? Musty books, beds, those blankets that never kept out the cold, the three now-silent clocks. Dead bugs on the grey painted cement floor of the hall. Otherwise no sign of life or death. Dank ugly formicaed kitchen and, on closer inspection, something new to me: two separate loos, right next door to each other. The whole of the back end of the house has been given over to defecation! Improvements only an old woman would make.

  Holding an old book on bees snatched from off a shelf, I sit for hours in the front parlour, in the dowdy dimness, incapable of movement, the victim of snorkelling and other old mistakes. There is nothing left of Grandma in that house, no smell, no stink, no sign, no ghost. But she can still reduce me to torpor and grief.

  I can’t live here.

  What finally galvanizes me is the thought of banknotes! My father told me once that Grandma hid banknotes behind the wallpaper (old refugee habit). I get up and start pessimistically feeling the walls, unable to believe that Grandma would leave me anything so useful. I look behind the turned-up corners of the wallpaper in the hall, feel along the bedroom walls for telltale bumps, pursue my chosen profession: inheritance.

  It is in her bedroom that I finally find something, but it’s not banknotes. When I pull at a strip of bubbly buckled wallpaper, they cascade to the floor, tiny pieces of paper covered with Grandma’s scribblings. Poetry!? How my heart sinks at the sight.

  The downside of inheritance: I must read them. I stuff all I can find into carrier bags (even the kitchen of a dead woman is encumbered with plastic bags), and drive carelessly and gloom-laden back to the hotel.

  Miss Clavel ran fast and faster

  To the scene of the disaster.

  George

  Nothing graceful in this gliding …

  I watch the murdering from afar: poets do not take part in Murder Weekends (not if they can help it anyway). The other guests don’t seem all that absorbed either. Venetia’s the most avid, AVIDITY being her THING. Everybody goes around investigating things, talking to each other like 1940s BBC announcers (oh, death’s SO genteel), but as soon as they get a crime-free hour they’re all in the bar glugging it down for all they’re worth. Then another corpse is found and off they trudge, slightly sozzled sleuths, to round up the usual suspects.

  I cower in an armchair by the fire, hoping not to be detected there, safely encased as I am in self-disgust. I feel a bit like I felt the night my wife, sitting in the bleachers, got hit in the chest by a puck. She couldn’t BREATHE for a while (neither could I). Wretched game, wretched as life itself.

  How COULD I be SERVICING my PATRONESS? Whom I don’t even LIKE. Who has no HAIR. God, the rich never give you a break. I should’ve known there’d be a catch somewhere. She probably has AIDS. And I deserve to get it. Have I NO CONTROL OVER MY DESIRES? Just a jerk who wants to get laid?

  I sit in the lounge trying to get SHIT FACED, downing Guinness and whisky by turns, comfy almost on my familiar cushions of confusion and regret if it weren’t for the sound of the dogged doctor chatting somebody up in the bar next door. His yelps bounce right off the intended prey and get ricocheted MY way. I could KILL that guy!

  Then someone comes in the front door. INCREDIBLY SLOWLY. The consequent gust of wind nearly knocks my drinks off the fireguard. I turn ill-humoredly to see who the fuck is causing the tornado, and there’s this misshapen maladroit milkmaid carrying in a load of bags, backwards. When she turns, I realize it’s Eloïse.

  I jump up, swaying somewhat but alert. Think a hug might be appropriate. APPROPRIATE?! The guy’s been pining for this mythical creature for SIX YEARS and now he can’t think of anything to say! Kind of like meeting a long-lost pal UNDERWATER — you want to speak but it would come out all BLIBBLES. She tolerates my hug – like a petrified tree would tolerate it — blushes, stumbles and is gone.

  I sink back into my chair. It is as if a whole lifetime’s confusion has been massing for this moment. What the FLICK am I going to do now? She’s here, she’s alive … Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

  And the image comes back to me — can’t get rid of it! — the image that made me leave my marriage, leave America, made me write about a mile’s worth of poetry then somehow stopped me in my tracks with a brand of purposelessness all my own: Eloïse, tender and serious, opening her legs to me in that Marblehead hotel. Sailboats out in the bay, my thumb in her mouth, her hand on my jaw.

  I MUST HAVE HER.

  Eloïse

  Is he staying in the hotel? What is he doing here? I must leave tomorrow. Tomorrow? I can’t live until tomorrow. His power to destroy me. Again and again he hurts me! It is agony to see him.

  I thought he would never touch me again, never touch me again.

  Eloïse’s grandmother’s love poems went unread that night. But one person’s sadness is much like another’s: Eloïse had already inherited all her grandmother’s despair.

  She looks at the five packets of Nurofen in the bathroom. How had she had the prescience to buy so many? Time to take them all. (Suicide on Special Offer today!) She gets in bed with the Nurofen and a glass of water, hardly able to breathe. This is not just the effects of snorkelling. Her heart is broken. She weeps until she sleeps (and forgets to kill herself).

  She dreams of wandering through a disused warehouse that has been polished and turned into a tourist sight. Dark blood-red cobblestones and shadows, cheery tourists striding by, and Eloïse lost. She cannot find the way out. Barren womb and me alone. A dream an old woman might dream. She wakes with a headache (ah, Nurofen) and blood running down between her legs. What a bloody mess the whole world is.

  But she has a plan. She feels sh
e will survive this day if she just takes it step by step and concentrates on purely practical things. She must pack. On her way into breakfast, she will ask the receptionist to prepare her bill. After breakfast, she will pay, then collect her bags and leave. Like an old woman might leave. Go to Grandma’s. No one will ever find her there. There she can hide.

  It will all be all be all be all right if she just takes it one step at a time. No one need know how terrified she is. But seeing George again is like meeting your own murderer in the afterlife. His power to destroy her.

  As she packs, she scolds herself. My own fault if he hurt me. He never asked me to love him.

  We, the spectators of the upheaval, were now menaced by a great peril, and before us stood a terrible and inevitable death. All that the most active imagination could evoke, all that the most fertile mind could conceive, was far, far remote from the horrible, frightful situation in which we found ourselves.

  At breakfast in the low-ceilinged dining room (another womb-room) — the last time I will ever sit here — the air is full of porridge, kippers and conflict, memories of childhood, sausages, orange juice and married people plump with pride and pity, all thinking that marriage somehow makes them more substantial beings, perhaps even immortal. The creepy doctor and his wife! Compared to them I am an insect, a parasite, licking up food which could be put to better use by People Who Run A Household.

  If someone loved me I might be a nice placid sort of person, I meekly think to myself, before catching sight of George far away across the room. He doesn’t see me: he’s totally absorbed in talking to a beautiful woman in a big hat. Do not speak to me, do not speak to me.

  I rush out of the room, out of the hotel, seek refuge on the rocky beach. The wind clasps me, then pushes me away, tired after a night spent sweeping and dusting the wilderness of Connemara. My feet sink in the round stones as I weep outrageously for my poet. But just as my moans reach a peak of plaintiveness they turn into loud guffaws! I am overwhelmed by the certainty that no one loves me, vet, insanely, this now seems a firm basis on which to build a life! I’m bathed in it, clasped by it: the apathy of the earth has been mine, and will remain mine, for ever. It is laid at my feet.

  In short, I am nothing but a slug in the corner, not even worth crying for.

  Etesian wind

  Mistral

  Chinook

  Harmattan

  Pampero

  Monsoon

  Kamsin

  Sirocco

  Doldrums

  George

  There is BIG STUFF, big stuff to FEEL that

  No one tells you, no one CAN tell you.

  Stuff you’d kill for, DIE for;

  Stuff that you were BORN for.

  When we first met, all those years ago, I felt her succumb to me so swiftly it almost hurt. It seemed too simple, too OBVIOUS. I didn’t believe life could BE that simple. For me she tightened herself willingly into a ball. I felt dutybound to UNTWIST her, soothe and smooth her. Release her. In this I failed: I could not persuade her not to love me.

  A love affair is an art form, creating something from nothing. How could I not see the beauty of the thing she had made for me?

  Having as delicately as possible over bony breakfast kippers extricated myself from Venetia’s clutches (forever), I searched the hotel grounds for Eloïse (in between whiskies for me nerves). Finally I found her wandering near the stables. I was almost too drunk by this time to STAND UP but nonetheless boldly planted myself in front of her, blocking her path. She did not look at me. She was staring into the darkness of one of the stables.

  ‘There used to be puppies here,’ she muttered faintly.

  ‘Eloïse.’ The over-arching word.

  Holding her hand, I ran with her back to the hotel, catapulting her past madmen and murderers, along the dark corridors, to the sanctity of my sunlit room. There, her panting began, wave upon wave of it. All the rhythms of the sea and its wildness.

  Music is LOVE and LUST and SADNESS, the best sounds in the world, however repetitive they might be!

  Eloïse

  He came to rescue me! I could almost see my way through the maze as he took my hand and ran with me.

  He sucked at my dried-out nipples, put his fingers in my atrophied cunt, lay across my barren back, encircled me. I clutched the quilt with wind-dried hands and kissed his shoulder with my bitter lips.

  Slowly he touched me, slowly he turned me, moulding me into what he wanted until I was screaming and crying, how I loved him! and still he held me, like a lighthouse he would lead me, never leave me, like the Rock of Gibraltar he would heave me, rock me, ream me, until my six years half-alive worked themselves into a torrent of wanting and having. And being.

  At last he would let me love him.

  … A three-mile thick laver of basic rock, gabbro, coming up molten from deep in the earth’s mantle, had been forced between its strata. As the two continents now moved towards each other, squeezing Japetus out of geography, the rim of the northern one was crumpled into long ridges … In this upheaval proto-Connemara’s rocks were repeatedly folded, faulted and thrust to and fro, until it became completely detached and was driven eastwards by the oblique collision of the two landmasses. As the two halves of Ireland were finally rammed together, proto-Connemara was slid southwards over volcanic rocks of the southern shore of Japetus, and welded into its present position.

  The Earth

  The earth has embarrassing incidents of its own that keep it humble. It is not in total control of itself. It must make the most of gravity, tides, eruptions, winds and weather. The sun and moon too have some say. At any given moment on the earth an unforgiving river of molten lava, orange against a twilight sky, clots like menstrual blood as it stretches down a mountainside.

  Life itself is as senseless and unthinking as the sea, as storms that finger prairies in spirals. In this it reflects the apathy of galaxies. We try to impose some purpose (love?) on life but through the fence we get glimpses of meaninglessness. When a pair of drowned children, brother and sister, wash up on a Norfolk beach and life just goes on. When generation after generation of donkeys suffer.

  The map of the world is covered by layer upon layer of such tragedy. A body is always washing up on some shore.

  There’s no excuse for human existence, since we don’t make honey! What have we got to offer the universe? The occasional unsolicited kindness, and the smiles of children. This, our only contribution, not love. What a disappointment, huh? We’ve all been cheated.

  CAN YOU LOVE US? To embrace your species you must be the Nazi and the Jew, man and woman, the burglar and the burgled, colonizer, colonized — simultaneously. You must embrace your present and your past, embrace all the cruelty, the arrogance, the damn-fool mistakes, the Industrial Revolution! You must hold all this in your hand.

  You can’t? Then you cannot accept your species and will never be more than superficially content. You will never more than superficially love.

  But even bees fail in this.

  … According to my impression there are at least 2–3 million men and women well fit for work among the approx. 10 million European Jews. In consideration of the exceptional difficulties posed for us by the question of labor, I am of the opinion that these 2–3 million should in any case be taken out and kept alive. Of course this can only be done if they are at the same time rendered incapable of reproduction. I reported to you about a year ago that persons under my instruction have completed the necessary experiments for this purpose. I wish to bring up these facts again. The type of sterilization which is normally carried out on persons with genetic disease is out of the question in this case, as it takes too much time and is expensive. Castration by means of X-rays, however, is not only relatively cheap, but can be carried out on many thousands in a very short time. I believe that it has become unimportant at the present time whether those affected will then in the course of a few weeks or months realize by the effects that they are castrated …

/>   The Hotel Crowd

  Ed has retreated from the Murder Weekend. No one seems to want to listen to a word he has to say about the possible culprit! He prefers to be in the kitchens bothering the chef.

  ‘Fifty-three-pound beetroot I had once,’ he says. ‘Now what would you have done with that?’

  The chef tries to think of an answer that isn’t obscene.

  ‘Well, I suppose … borscht?’

  ‘And how about a seven-pound twelve-ounce tomato? Grew by mistake! One single tomato! It grew by mistake!’

  Ellen is meditatively picking mussels off boulders. As he watches her beat her fist against the rocks, Owen allows himself a moment of pure joy. I don’t regret a minute that I’ve spent with you … But then he remembers there is something inconsolable about Ellen, and this quells him. Her sorrow for her mother, he supposes, is unappeasable.

  Niamh is very disappointed. Germans have invaded Paris, five different corpses have been provided, fifteen clues, lots of weapons, umpteen motives handed round on screwed-up pieces of paper — yet none of the guests could be bothered to figure out who was responsible. Daft things. She can’t be doing with them.

  And now the lecherous leprechaun of a doctor is coming her way. Probably to complain about the bloody boggy golf course again, or to feel her up.

  ‘My wife!’ he yells at Niamh.

  ‘I’m not your wife, and wouldn’t want to be!’ retorts Niamh scornfully.

  ‘No, it’s … she’s having the baby!’

  Niamh runs after him to the terrace, where she finds his wife lying on the warm flagstones with her legs shooting weirdly out in all directions. She’s a monstrosity, poor thing, thinks Niamh as she kneels down and takes her hand.

  ‘Can’t you do something?’ asks the doctor.

  ‘You’re the bloody doctor!’ shouts Niamh, but she gets up quickly and heads for the phone. Already she regrets snapping at him: seeing him there, so worried about his wife, she wonders if she shouldn’t have obliged him after all, one of those times in the corridor. Where’s the harm?

  The doctor, less concerned by his wife’s predicament than by the hideousness she displays in it, is fascinated to note that, even in the midst of the imminent expulsion of his next child into the world, he can still be absorbed by the sight of Niamh’s white riding breeches as she flaps off to the phone.