by Lucy Ellmann
As it departs with the smug doctor, the smug doctor’s wife, the smug doctor’s smug sons and smug daughter and the smug doctor’s as yet unborn, the ambulance has to squeeze past a garda van coming the other way.
A garda van full of old geezers, come to collect their wives, save them from a life of crime. But the 3 old biddies aren’t at the hotel. Gone into Clifden to do some last bits of shopping.
Ridiculous hubbies in a temper.
Ed looks down at the hotel from far above, exhausted from his hike up the mountain and rather surprised to find it’s as soggy at the top as it was at the bottom.
He watches the ambulance as he catches his breath. Who could be ill? He considers. Then, who would I want it to be? Probably some woman, not sure which. By now he’s spent hours on the phone with almost every woman in the hotel. Part pleasure, part pain: his duty to express himself.
He resumes his march through bracken and bog. With each footfall he crushes an infant stream. Water gurgles at him making him want to pee which he does, frequently, territorizing the whole bluff.
He has a walker’s map and has informed the receptionist at the hotel of his intended route. But he feels alone and far away. Unaided and unloved. What would happen if he lost a shoe in this treacherous bog, broke an ankle, had a heart attack? Would they come for him, would they get an ambulance for him?
He looks down at tiny farmhouses. Then at the crazy array of clouds that hangs like an old frayed harness across the sky holding everything together, and at that moment the sky moves. Ed distinctly sees it shift a little. And again! He loses his footing and ends up perched on a damp, spiky bump of grass. Under him the earth is moving. The ancient buffeted bluff beneath him comes apart, bracken torn asunder by fissures a foot wide. When Ed leans over to look into a crack, he sees the molten magma of the earth.
The earth is so quiet, so reluctant to offend. What if it merely felt like breathing? What if it were merely to swell and, out of the blue, to sigh? The diaphragm opens, the ribs crack with disuse, air rushes in where angels fear to tread: an earthquake.
On the beach, Ellen and Owen feel nothing, but he says to her, ‘Look! Look how low the tide is! I can barely see the sea.’
‘See … sea?’ Ellen chastises. She hates repetition.
The 3 old biddies gather up their cassette tapes of Irish folk songs, their tiny mugs bearing reliefs of Irish thatched cottages, their pinstriped Irish flannel Old Grandfather nightshirts. Time to be going, girls.
Suddenly, the whole shop rocks. It trembles. Hideous Waterford crystal smashes on the floor. In the havoc that follows, one cunning old biddy manages to swipe another tea towel and a tweed cap as a present for her old man.
Eloïse
It is a time of contentment. The fragrance of thousands upon thousands of blossoms will surround the hives, each still evening. This scent will come from the volatile, essential oils, collected with the nectar. It is perhaps the most beautiful time the bee-keeper will ever know.
Sun and shade caress the hillside, criss-crossing patterns intertwine on the water of the lake. I watch a surge of white exultant cloud, like the spurt of his semen in my throat. The staccato sounds of sex: cunt, cock, lick, suck, kiss, bite. Every noise is deafening, every sound is good. The world is beautiful, and it’s being beautiful just for me. I never knew it held such miracles as this within its crevices. He has come back to me, he has come back to me.
He is everything to me, his hands the only hands, his voice the only voice. I open the window to breathe in the wind and waves. A goose flies over the water and my hopes soar. Maybe it is not too late, too late. But waves of anger, sadness, lust and hate rage within me. How could he have left me? He will leave me again. He will disappear.
I turn to him on the bed. He must be real – he’s wearing a white T-shirt! He has come back to me: the one death that could be reversed.
I go to him, I will be with him, as long as he will let me, my fingers on his chest, his thighs, his cock, his lips — my new bag of worldly possessions. And we will cry together, for he has saved me, saved me from the underworld.
If only life could stop right now, so we never have to leave this room, never have to think again about the future or the past. You are the wind and the sea and the ground beneath me. You are everything.
If only it could all end now.
Thus, in her ecstasy, Eloïse dreams of apocalypse. Unable to save the world, she toys with its destruction.
This, our inheritance.
The Earth
No one expected the tidal wave that followed the earthquake, except the dolphins who swam way out to sea. But to them it was merely a big wave. Dolphins know that water runs through everything. It covers seven-tenths of the earth. It cannot be ignored.
The Dutch fight it non-stop, they stole their onion fields from it, their tulips. But the sea will have Holland back in the end. Its placidity deceives. You expect it to be benevolent? It holds more horrors than the human mind, or love. It is a monster, mammoth and uncontrollable and, like love, has its own unfathomable timescale.
Whales beached themselves along the coast of Connemara, caught off guard by the low tide. They waited for the unreliable sea to come back and fetch them, their helpless bodies aching in the weakly enfolding breeze.
Sheep and creamy-coloured milk cows tell fretfully through cracks left by the earthquake as they made instinctively for the hilltops. There was a flocking of crows, had anyone bothered to look, and much barking of dogs. But people were too busy brushing up the broken crockery (housework to the last) and checking damage to walls and ceilings. They were unaware for a while of the wave, coming fast now to sweep them all away.
It moved with ease across the beach, across the fields. It deposited fish in the fuchsia hedges along its path as it thundered unthinking towards the peatbogs (which welcomed it, being kin). A ten-foot-high milky-green wave surged up the cosy riverbed behind some cottages. People in the gardens had time to yell at each other to run away but they couldn’t escape it, and as they were consumed they yelled for their mothers instead.
Abused donkeys and cute haystacks, woolly jumpers, bombs and insurrection, sheets of accordion music, young scholars from the local schools, cars from the scrap heaps and coffins from the cemetery, all floated off to less shallow graves.
It is only the sea, it doesn’t have malice, it is merely itself, has to be. Swim under and you’ll survive, swim away from rocky ledges and houses, boats and cars and land and jobs and towns and life itself and you will be all right.
Or so thinks Owen, as he swims, with his daughter clinging to his shirt. She trusts him, this forceful father pounding through the waves. He would not let her drown. Children do not die with their parents.
But he has long since given up any real hope of surviving. Instead he pedantically coaches her (his paternal duties the last thing to dissolve), commenting on the surreal debris that floats with them, articles from land. They come upon a little island a two-foot-squarc pad of earth bobbing like a jellyfish on which grows a sprig of lavender.
‘That’s lavender,’ he tells her.
But she doesn’t bother listening. He always repeats himself. He will tell her again some time what lavender is, and she’ll attend to it then. In fact he says they might come back and get some lavender later.
Owen and Persephone paddle away from all trace of land, he keeping her as calm as possible. But in the end father and daughter will rest their heads on the warm breast of the wave — mother of all mistakes — and sink.
Others, riding the swell, spinning round in eddies, swallowed up repeatedly and then spat out again, slide through the murk of their existences and out to sea. Hoping to save themselves, they stay awake, stay alive and afloat, for as long as they can. One old woman, limbs broken, hangs from a treetop by her teeth until she’s too tired. No one to help her.
Round her swims a shoal of naked children, blue as dolphins in the pale green sea. The children, the old, the sick: Connemara han
ds over its valuables.
The 44 elements in sea water (besides oxygen and hydrogen),
in order of abundance:
Chlorine
Sodium
Magnesium
Sulphur
Calcium
Potassium
Bromine
Carbon
Strontium
Boron
Silicon
Fluorine
Nitrogen
Aluminum
Rubidium
Lithium
Phosphorus
Barium
Iodine
Arsenic
Iron
Manganese
Copper
Zinc
Lead
Selenium
Cesium
Uranium
Molybdenum
Thorium
Cerium
Silver
Vanadium
Lanthanum
Yttrium
Nickel
Scandium
Gold
Mercury
Radium
Cadmium
Chromium
Cobalt
Tin
The hotel became a breakfast nook for fish that liked porridge. And its former guests? The old biddies were washed out of the souvenir shop and the world, still clutching postcards they’d never paid for and now would never write on. Niamh, drenched and crying on a roof but still luscious, was rescued by some fishermen, though in general it was each man for himself and most of the survivors were young and male.
The smug doctor escaped annihilation, as smug doctors so often do, but his family succumbed, one before he had even drawn his first breath, which made this infant one of the few to perish without swallowing their tongues in terror.
Eloïse was dragged from George’s arms and engulfed in darkness. The waye came upon her so fast she had no time to realize she was breathing water, not air. Her bloated body eventually washed up on some shore. It was by then an empty vessel full of gases, a bottle that didn’t look like a bottle. As we all are.
George could do nothing himself but plunge through darkness on the rivering wave, above and below and inside it by turns. He survived by thinking about Gary, Indiana, the ugliest city in the world, a city piled high with tyres! He sang to himself the cloying annoying song he’d sung as a bored kid on long car journeys: ‘Gary Indiana Gary Indiana Gary Indiana!’ It gave him hope: if even the thought of GARY, INDIANA would do, he must want to live.
After the deluge, he returned to London bereaved. After all his hesitations, he knew now that he had loved Eloïse, and wasted her. (He had her cats to remind him, rescued from their two-cat chalet at the cattery.)
All was tending mending kindness
Making up for time lost, making
Love to last a lifetime, making
NONSENSE of my THEORIES.
His epic poem had been washed away in the maelstrom, and disappeared again pretty quickly after he rewrote and published it (a few hundred copies sold). But its mere existence greatly added to George’s sex appeal (which after all is why men write poetry), and thus enabled him to carry out the important task he’d set himself in Eloïse’s memory: to fuck the wasted women of England. SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT.
And Ed, the man of the moment, the man on the scene, the man in the right place at the right time (out of reach of the tidal wave but with a good view?), Ed sent an eyewitness report on the natural disaster in Connemara to the Daily Mail, and was in due course awarded a prize for Best New Journalist of the Year. His subsequent exposé of the 3 old biddies — ‘GRAN THEFT’ — also earned him great acclaim (at least among people who consider journalism something worth doing). Ed would never achieve equilibrium but as journalists go, he was content.
His giant pumpkin had meanwhile floated bravely out to sea with the misidentified mango (‘Dwarf Melon’) speared on its stalk. Together, they spread their seeds across the globe.
‘… Stolen items recovered alter the ladies’ unfortunate demise included:
1,370
old lady scarves
843
woolly jumpers, both old and new
799
dowdy blouses
678
dated skirts and dresses
619
unfashionable undies
445
galumphy shoes
421
pairs gaudy earrings (clip-on)
415
unbecoming hats
394
puffy coats and jackets
369
pairs support hose
332
imitation gold necklaces
236
pairs gardening gloves
167
bulging handbags
38
geraniums
25
umbrellas
20
handy pocket-sized plastic fold-up
see-through rain hats
18
hot-water bottles
10
wigs
8
fur coats
4
cassette tapes Irish accordion music
3
wheely baskets
1
fire extinguisher’
(Ed’s article)
Eloïse’s grandmother’s tired old bones settled into a deep-sea cave, where what remained of her was nibbled by a dogfish. But a page of her poem on widowhood somehow survived and was later discovered floating off the coast of Newfoundland:
All of life a piecing-together
Photofits of names, faces.
A looking after, looking back.
Bothered by insects and the
Ill-fit of clothes.
At times
The urge to know
Colours things.
But it is as nothing to this
Slow silent crawl.
Poor further me etching this fate.
THE END
‘AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE.’ Job
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?
— Because one did survive the wreck.
Appendix A
ANOTHER list of about 20,000 dormant prewar accounts is to be published by the Swiss Bankers’ Association in October, continuing what one Swiss newspaper yesterday dubbed “an historic-striptease” to return the unclaimed assets of Holocaust victims.
The list of 1,872 non-Swiss names, published in The Times and other newspapers worldwide yesterday, as well as on the Internet, is the product of the banks’ own search. A helpline set up to handle inquiries was besieged yesterday by Holocaust survivors and claimants.
Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust which pressed the banks to release details, said: “The telephone has not stopped ringing for a second … it will create an appalling workload for the banks.”
Appendix B
As someday it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed, who never will be missed.
There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs,
All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs,
All children who are up on dates and floor you with ’em flat,
All persons who in shaking hands shake hands with you like that,
And all third persons who on spoiling tête-à-têtes insist
They’d none of them be missed, none of them be missed.
He’s got ’em on the list
He’s got ’em on the list
And they’d none of them be missed,
None of them be missed.
There’s the banjo serenader and the others of his race
And the piano-organist, I’ve got him on the list,
And the people who eat peppermint and puf
f it in your face
They never would be missed, they never would be missed.
And the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone
All centuries but this and every country but his own,
And the lady from the provinces who dresses like a guy
And who doesn’t think she dances but would rather like to try.
And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist
I don’t think she’d be missed, I’m sure she’d not be missed!
He’s got her on the list
He’s got her on the list
And I don’t think she’d be missed
I’m sure she’d not be missed …
(as sung by Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner,
in The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan)
Appendix C
WORST DISASTERS IN THE BRITISH ISLES:
DISASTER
NUMBER KILLED
DATE
Famine/Typhus (Ireland)
1,500,000–3,000,000
1846–51
Black Death
800,000
1347–50
Influenza
225,000
1918
Circular storm (Channel)
c. 8,000
1703
Smog (London)
3,500–4,000
1952
Flood (Severn Estuary)
C. 2,000
1606
Bombing (London)
1,436
1941
Single ship (Royal George)
c. 800
1782
Riot (anti-Catholic; London)
565 (min.)
1780
Mining (Wales)
439
1913
Terrorism (Lockerbie)
270
1988
Burst dam (Yorkshire)
250
1864
Railway collision
227
1915
Fire (London Bridge)
3,000
1212
Fire (single building; Exeter)
188
1887
Panic (Sunderland)
183
1883
Offshore oil platform (Piper Alpha)
167
1988
Landslide (Aberfan)
144
1966
Explosion (Notts.)
134
1918
Nuclear reactor (Windscale)
C. 100
1957
Submarine (Liverpool Bay)