Girl in Profile

by Zillah Bethell

  Jamie hits Mr Stinks with his stick. “Cunt’s a fanny, knobhead.”

  “Frou-frou,” I correct. “Don’t do that. It could hurt him.”

  “He likes it, see. He wants me to do it again.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “So there are lots of words for the same thing.” Ro’s interest is piqued. “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s how the language evolves.” I keep stumbling over the precipice of my own making. “Fanny in America, for example, means bottom.”

  “Fanny, fuck, cunt, cunt.” Jamie gyrates his hips like he’s having sex with an invisible nymph. I wonder suddenly if he’s witnessed his parents at it or accessed some porno site. Luckily I’m distracted from these horrific mental images by Dove grabbing my arm and pointing.

  “Look,” she squeaks, her eyes wide as flying saucers steeped in vodka. “Look.”

  Elizabeth

  Moonlight

  “Crudities and dip, Elizabeth. If they don’t do the trick, we’ll try a laxative.”

  “Thank you.” I have a surprisingly muscular sphincter.

  “Peter’s on his way.”

  “Oh, good.”

  Peter brings a record to play on the gramophone Minnie gave me for my sixtieth. Vintage kitsch. It’s pink, wind up, and the stylus wobbles in a zigzag pattern over the grooves. Peter has to steady my hand. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Sad, faltering, slow, but it makes a change from Satie. We chew splinters of courgette with jalapeno dip. Peter starts to sweat.

  “Phew.” He smiles. “This is tropical heat.”

  “Very good for Alzheimer’s, so my daughter informs me.”

  “Well, then, I must persist.”

  I smile and listen to the man who conducts moonlight, makes the stars shimmy. Peter’s face looks like it’s about to catch fire.

  “He was profoundly deaf by this time, of course,” he gasps. “The only music he heard was in his head. After a performance of his ninth symphony he couldn’t hear the applause and, fearing there was none, he wept. Someone had to turn him around to see it. When he died there was a massive peal of thunder according to his doctor. I like to think it was God, shouting him a welcome. Making sure he heard the ovation. ‘Well done, Ludwig. In you come.’”

  I giggle, nearly choke on a cauliflower floret. I haven’t giggled in ten years and Peter knows it.

  “Don’t stand on ceremony, man. Get yourself in here.”

  My cheeks ache.

  “Everyone shout ‘Ludwig’. One two three. Oh dear, he thinks we’re saying earwig. Ludwig, get in here you deaf bugger. I haven’t got all year. Christ, when I created a musical genius why the hell did I make him hard of hearing?”

  My cheek muscles have gone, as has my sphincter muscle. Thank god for plastic knickers. The smell mingles with the smell of Peter Pan’s colostomy bag, producing a new fragrance perhaps – vintage kitsch Minnie might call it.

  “I love you.” His voice is unnaturally loud. Like Beethoven’s probably. The man who made the stars shake. How shall I react? What word shall I choose to continue the narrative of our lives? In a selection box of words shall I keep the soft centres for last, leave the chewy ones unwrapped, go to the next layer?

  “Yes,” I said in the past tense, remembering the moment hours later.

  Gwen

  Note to Self

  Stop thinking about carnal relations, or at least have carnal relations with someone other than R. Anyone other than R.

  Letter to Augustus John

  Dear Augustus,

  I escorted father round Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. It was a good visit. Then he went back to Wales. He’s still much concerned about the weather and he still plays the organ every Sunday at Gumfreston.

  I hope you are feeling a little better about Ida. I notice in your lyric fantasies you often depict her holding a bunch of violets not unlike the ones I sent on her deathbed. Strange how you take my ideas and present them as your own.

  How is Dorelia? Do you still get her up in that ridiculous Romany attire? And does she still fulfil your romantic ideal or has she taken Ida’s place completely now – flatfooted, earthbound, domesticated, babies grunting about her like pigs? Is she finding out how hard it is (as Ida did) to be wild and free yet still be able to nurture properly?

  (Note to self – don’t send this draft.)

  Elizabeth

  Perfect Turd

  We eke out the days, Peter, Wendy and me. The sunlight stretches like an ageing ballerina en pointe, fearing the imminence of the final curtain. On Tuesdays we take tea al fresco on the bench by the ornamental pond. It’s a small privilege allowed patients who are not completely delusional or dangerous. Cucumber sandwiches and scones, sometimes a pot of tea and jam. Peter Pan refuses any food that is pink or orange. His wife and the stains on her clothes put him quite off colour. A subdued palette, however, he eats with relish.

  “Strawberries,” Tinkerbell announces, putting up the camp table in front of us and spreading a blue-checked tablecloth over it.

  Peter makes a face.

  “Maybe a glass of white wine.”

  Then beams.

  “As it’s my birthday.”

  Exclamations at this. How old can Nurse Tinkerbell be?

  “Twenty-one is it? Twenty-one again?” Peter’s attempt at chivalry goes a little astray.

  “Will it interfere with my medication?”

  “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Oh, how lovely.”

  The poor old crotchets and quavers stuck in the Blue Room with Satie floating around their heads.

  “This is nice. A few boats on the pond and it’s Henley Regatta.”

  “Oh yes, Eleanor went every year with a French hamper and a bottle of bubbly.”

  “Was it as wonderful as they say it is?”

  “I don’t know. I never went. I stayed back, looked after Bruno. Eleanor’s cousin Rosemary once said, ‘Dear Wendy, always so obliging.’”

  “Destroying angel.” Peter Pan consults his book on Common Toadstools of the Great British Isles. He points to the rotting fence surrounding the ornamental pond. “Jelly ears, elfin saddles, hairy curtain crusts if I’m not mistaken.” He wheels away, waving. “I’m off in search of the rare Pongchámbinnibóphilos kakokreasóphoros.”

  Wendy’s on her tenth sip. I’ve been counting. “Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life obliging. Smiling and obliging.”

  I catch up in sips. “I’m lucky if my son writes to me once a month. Some postcard from Nigeria where he’s sorting out the Igbo tongue, whatever that is, after the mess the missionaries made. Never a ‘What’s the weather like in Tenby, Mum?’”

  “I hate to say it, but I don’t think Eleanor always got it right. Jerry and I planned to be wed.”

  Light glimmers on the veins in a leaf.

  “Until she put her nose into that. We used to … play ping-pong … up on the roof terrace behind the hydrangeas. One time we were in the middle of … ping-pong … when there was a most dreadful smell. They were frying onions for the chow mein special. Jerry made a carefree, grandiloquent gesture up there on the roof terrace underneath the stars and said, ‘I shall let my wok burn.’ It is something, isn’t it, that a man let his wok burn for me.”

  What a waste. All this life reduced to a pencil sketch of two old women on a bench. I surpass her in sips, drain my glass like a clown fish. “Definitely. Definitely something.” We giggle like schoolgirls, don’t hear the soft split of the rotting fence as it gives way to Peter’s wheelchair. Nor the deep plop as his body hits the water, submerges with barely a ripple like a perfect turd. The kind of turd that doesn’t need toilet paper. Clean submarine. Our reminiscing hearts can’t beat fast enough to save him. A pencil sketch of two old women on a bench, life and death going on behind them.

  Gwen

  My Despair Over the Inexorable Nature of Time and How We Cannot Ever Go Back to That Moment When All Potential Was There, When It Wa
sn’t Over

  Why does it fret me so that we change and age? Why does it fret me so that we can’t hold on to that one luminous moment?

  Moth

  Foxes

  In the middle of the off-road cycle track sits a fox like a shy red dog. When the sun hits its coat it could even be a golden retriever puppy. Mr Stinks is wagging his tail and sniffing him all over like he’s thinking, yippee, fox shit to roll in soon.

  “There’s another,” breathes Dove, and sure enough a second fox limps out from behind a tree trunk to join the first.

  “His brother,” Jamie asserts. “Have you got any rope?”

  “Absolutely not.” I ignore the look on Dove’s face. “We definitely don’t have any rope.”

  “You must be mental. Everyone has rope.”

  “Ssh.” I put a finger to my lips. “We don’t want to scare them. They shouldn’t be out. Foxes are nocturnal. Does anyone know what that means?”

  “They’re zombies?” offers Max.

  “It means they sleep in the day and come out at night. Something’s wrong. Look how dazed and thin they are. This is a bit of an emergency, guys. We need to get home as fast as we can and ring the RSPCA. We’ve got a mission here.”

  I’m surprised by the children’s response. The words emergency and mission have galvanised them. They all turn on a ten pence and start moving. Even Jamie has a True Grit look about him. That’s all he really needs – a goal, a purpose. Something to dig his teeth into. (Enough of the Pot Noodles and porn.)

  We speed back up the hill, overtaking Mo and fizzy pop Cherryade. I explain about the foxes as we pass.

  “Vermin,” she calls after us. “If Gavin still had his gun, he’d shoot ’em.”

  Dove starts to cry and I scoop her up for the last few paces. “Nobody’s going to shoot them,” I tell her. “We’re going to save them.”

  Elizabeth

  A Ceaseless Rumba

  Dear James,

  I am Ondine tonight, the watery sprite. I arabesque from the sunless depths, take my first tentative steps on dry land. My body’s chalk, the rocks are dust, grass is sharp as bait. I acquire a shadow from the burning light, receive air like rain, kiss my mortal lover on the lips. Drained of all life, he gasps like a fish. I’ve spent too long in the deep to frolic now in the shallows. Peter lies dead at my feet.

  Gwen

  Letter to Rodin

  Mon maître,

  I have sold Fenella my nude girl to the Contemporary Arts Society, and the American collector John Quinn has bought Girl Reading at the Window, so I do not want for money at the moment. I nearly died when the letter came addressed to Miss John, 29 Rue Terre Neuve. “A five hundred franc advance awaits you at Brentano’s bookshop for any picture you care to send.” He looks for something he calls acid in the work he picks. Evidence of pain and struggle. Well, I have certainly had enough pain and struggle to warrant getting a little acid. He’s something of an eccentric apparently. He rides his horse in Central Park every morning, takes castor oil, wears rubber heels. He said he would get rid of his Picassos for a Gwen John. Augustus is both pleased and peeved at the outcome. I think he rushes too much in his life and his work. It is all action and dynamism but little reflection or meditation, which is so important, n’est ce pas?

  I realised I want to paint consciousness. Just as in your Thinker you make the act of thinking theatrical, I want to make consciousness palpable. To suggest connections between objects and personality: the closed book, the open book, the window, the cat, the teapot, the diary. You think I am too high-flown. Well, perhaps I am.

  I followed you to church last week. I sat in a back pew. You didn’t notice me. I barely heard the sermon. Was it light came first or was it the word? Surely it must have been light. I was busy sketching hats, plaits and backs. Oh, the baffling secrecy of a back. I am half in love with the little orphan girls and their snowdrop bonnets. Do you know why they sit on their hands? Well, I’ll tell you. It is because they know that the hands reveal all, betray everything. Perhaps that is why you never finished Whistler’s Muse. Because you knew my hands would betray everything. Like the long fingers to the mouth in your Farewell. The fluttering speech of the hands. Do you really imagine you can spend the rest of your life without visiting me again? Without warming your thumb in my mouth once more? Without tasting the origin of all creation as you call it? If a woman undressing is like the sun coming out then your eye must be continually blasted by the naked models you employ to cavort and shove their pudendas at you. Your fucking whores. Strange how they change shape whilst working with you. Is that because you fuck them all? Is that because you fuck them into being pregnant? Is that how come you sculpted Eve cowering, hands over her belly? Cast out. Cast out of Eden. Your fucking whores.

  (Note to self. Do not send this draft.)

  Elizabeth

  The Weight of Words

  Peter’s memorial. I wear black, Wendy plum. Someone is playing the bagpipes. It is monstrous, ludicrous. I feel quite sure Peter would have preferred Beethoven. He’s to have a woodland burial. There’s been much debate on the subject.

  “Under a toadstool.”

  “Good for the agriculture.”

  “Lay where they fell in World War One.”

  “Should have left him in the pond where Martha tried to leave Harry, but he kept on screeching.”

  Peter’s body arrives in what looks like a giant laundry basket followed by a solitary mourner – a man in jeans and tee shirt. Wendy starts giggling. “Dirty linen,” she whispers to me. “I can’t help thinking of dirty linen.” There is talk of God and the resurrection, some dreary singing, praying, a creaking of knees. Somebody farts continually, possibly me. The man in jeans gets up to speak. He is very sunburnt like a fisherman.

  “Peter Sillitoe, what can I say? A man of many words, as you probably know, and many talents. But what you probably don’t know is that he as good as killed his wife.”

  Someone applauds like it’s a piece of theatre. The rest of us lean forward, sick with excitement. This is soap opera come to life.

  “Steady on,” the vicar says, patting the man on the arm. “Remember where you are.”

  “He said he did his best. ‘Oh, Herb, he used to say’ – that’s not my name, it’s just what he called me – ‘Oh, Herb, I did my best…’” (He is nodding now like a dog in a car window.) “But you didn’t, Dad, you didn’t. You could have stopped her and you didn’t, and she was my mother.”

  We are creaking gates agape, ajar. Nurse Tinkerbell leads Herb off to calls of take care, mate, don’t let it get you down. Man united in grief. The vicar takes up the eulogy but the words have lost their meaning with the wrong reader.

  “Peter slept in a camper van after Nancy died on Kenfig Nature Reserve. Ate noodles, brewed tea. A common sight with his binoculars, conserving, collecting, collating. ‘Oh, Herb’ (my real name’s Richard by the way) ‘between the petrel and the porpoise, the wind cry, the wave cry.’ He would quote T S Eliot. ‘In the end is my beginning.’”

  Afterwards there are sausage rolls and jam tarts. The piper eats five of each according to Wendy, and there is nothing under his quilt. I am garrulous with emotion.

  “We were so busy gassing we didn’t notice a thing. He tipped over, couldn’t right himself with his weight. Gurgle, gurgle, then it was curtains. Horseshoe – I mean Mr Smith the caretaker – fished him out and he was smiling. Not Mr Smith, I mean Peter. That’s what made me really cross. Like he was happy to leave me, leave us behind.”

  Nurse Tinkerbell hands me a black notebook. “Herb, I mean Mr Sillitoe, didn’t want it, so we thought you might like it, being an avid reader.”

  Peter’s diary. I’m left holding the weight of words. The corpse of a man. Is that what we all boil down to in the end. A bunch of words. A few nouns, a connective, maybe an adjective or an action verb if we’re lucky. Suck it. Suck it hard. That was an action verb, my goodness. And isn’t it often the case that the important things lie in
the addendum? Like Horseshoe licking the jam clean out of a tart leaving a crusty old dusty old shell, a small empty hollow where something good was. Where the heart lay.

  Gwen

  Young Nun

  The young nun asks me why I want to become a Catholic. Her eyes are bright and remote as stars. I sit on a cane chair in a puddle of shadow, murky, tainted. I have prepared my answer.

  “I want to subdue the extremes of my personality. Align myself with something good. With God. Generally my feelings are refined, sensitive, but sometimes I suffer from an excess of them. I’m overwhelmed by carnal desire.”

  She smiles, complacent in virginity, having given it all to God. What would happen if she died and found there was no God? What cry of desolation would escape those pale shrimp lips? Or would it matter? Is the striving all? Is the hoping all?

  “I feel that the core of me is dark, that I am bad, unworthy, unable to love or be loved.”

  “He loves us all, even the sinners.”

  “But I want him to love me the most, love me the best. Don’t you see?”

  The young nun sighs – are we all in thrall to the same master? – and her response sounds rehearsed. Is life just a series of empty gestures, grotesque poses?

  “How can God compare a lion with a flower? He loves the different qualities in each of us.”

  “But what if there are no qualities to love?”

  “You paint, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Why not find God’s love through the beauty of nature. Be God’s little artist. God’s little flourish.”

  “Oh yes, how nice. What a good idea.” Empty gestures, grotesque poses. I sit in a puddle of hypocrisy, a bag of piss and shit.

  “In fact, we’re looking for someone to paint the founder of our convent, Mère Poussepin.” She gets up, bustles about, her beautiful young body straining in the dove-grey uniform. I suspect that later tonight I will imagine myself a man, shoving God out of her mind and body with my dick. Please forgive me.