by Lucy Ellmann
Without even asking him, Dot had assumed John wanted their windswept bungalow to have an ENGLISH COTTAGE FEEL, and set about creating this with porcelain, pewter and chintz (it would have been simpler to buy mismatched furniture and just let the damp set in). She learnt how to incorporate her junk-shop finds into “Oceania” by reading the style section in the back pages of Sunday newspapers, and became ADDICTED to the advice of Belinda Lurcher who had her own TV SHOW. Belinda Lurcher’s ideas, often involving bun moss balls, were never SIMPLE, and always unclear. One was, why not take a bunch of old metal GRILLES to a welder, have him weld them together, and then put a big thick sheet of GLASS on top: a bedside table!
But John was a MINIMALIST! He didn’t see why anybody needed a bedside table when you can put all your junk on the floor for FREE. John was INCENSED by Dot’s purchases, the skittish egg cups, doilies, cracked plates and decoy ducks, that all seemed to need more DUSTING than they ever got. He had one personal possession — a fish fossil Dot had given him when they first met — and needed nothing more. John wanted a NICE CLEAN life, like the Ancient Egyptians! THEY never bothered with BEDSIDE TABLES. They lived off the flat of the land, saw everything from the side. Stripy tunics, beaded belts, skinny cattle, symmetrical legs, eye-liner, women with their breasts showing, men with erections, hieroglyphics all neatly stacked. John equated Nile with style.
Particularly perturbing to him was Dot’s TEA-COSY COLLECTION. They reminded him of his grandma’s UNDIES, saggy, baggy and stained (at some point she’d lost the knack of wiping her ass). They were not those stiff new William Morris monstrosities, padded semicircles of artificial FIBRE that STORE well in DRAWERS (where such tea cosies BELONG). Dot’s tea cosies were ancient home-made WOOLLEN concoctions, knitted by women inexplicably driven to provide the world with decorative structures in which to house teapots. Dot seemed to be one of the only people in England currently collecting tea cosies of this kind. Acquired fair and square from far-flung fêtes, or surreptitiously snatched from needless disuse in the kitchens of Jaywick Sands, Dot’s collection would no doubt have been FAMOUS if anyone CARED about tea cosies which they DON’T. You’d think, with pollution and over-population and the depletion of energy sources, retaining heat within a teapot would be given the respect it deserves but NO, nobody gives a FUCK about tea cosies. They all act like they’ve never SEEN one, or it’s a hat.
Dot’s tea cosies were a ratty bunch, bedecked with pompoms and polyps lovingly embroidered by gnarled hands, as well as more recent additions such as breadcrumbs, tea and jam smears (Dot was scared to wash them in case they SHRANK). They were also an UNWIELDY bunch, resistant to being folded or put in a pile. They would spring out of drawers unbidden and very slowly make their way across the counter like guilt-ridden animals, always ending up in the BUTTER or on the floor. Her favourite tea cosy was supposed to look like a basket of flowers. It had knitted pansies or petunias on top, and a floppy brown wool strap hanging against its side: the wicker handle of the basket! But she loved the others too. All gave stalwart service (insulation of a temporary nature) and made any teapot look good. Or SOFT anyway.
Jaywick itself is a tea cosy! An anachronism, a thing held dear only by old ladies, a thing full of HOLES. It is the CUNT of East Anglia. It has stared blankly at the sea for MILLIONS OF YEARS, engulfed by it when the tide was high.
It is everything at the bottom of your handbag! Slivers of glass, shreds of paracetamol, an old dried-up daisy, crumbs, dust, a blunt pencil, Kleenex, a scrap of paper bearing three-quarters of a phone number, a bedraggled tampon half out of its wrapper, a penny, and the tiny key to some long-gone suitcase.
Jaywick.
THIS IS NO PLACE TO BE!
Dot in the Kitchen
Many insects lead, if they only knew it, UNLIVEABLE LIVES. Lives so vulnerable, so beset with disaster and purposeless suffering, that they would COMMIT SUICIDE if they only grasped this for a moment. Why is it only PEOPLE (and lemmings?) that see the horror of existence and do something about it? The microscopic red spider running along the edge of Dot’s plate, making for an exit it cannot find, knows nothing of the horror of existence. It’s hard to imagine a thing this small existing AT ALL. It is BARELY DETECTABLE. It doesn’t even know how SMALL it is. How does it ever manage to find its own kind and MATE and make MORE of these? How big are the babies? Is the female mean to the male? Can it spin a web and catch bugs? How big are the BUGS? It senses food, air, light, heat, movement, gravity, it can run or stay still, it has few enemies except ACCIDENT OF EVERY SORT. This is a life?
50,000 times its size (and 50,000 times its self-importance), Dot very gently entices it on to a bit of torn-off newspaper (tricky to have anything to DO with something this small without KILLING it!), and puts the newspaper out on the window-ledge, hoping it’s an OUTDOOR spider. But later she wonders if she WRECKED ITS LIFE. That spider might have been in a state of ECSTASY, having just discovered in the glob of marmalade on Dot’s plate enough food to live on for a YEAR, and even get quite BIG. Then she comes along and ‘SAVES’ it. But how was she to know it liked marmalade? What do we know about ANYONE?
Dot was now yanking hunks of FENNEL apart, in anticipation of John’s return from a fishing trip. Dot existed, a blot in the universe, and she was making Cream of Fennel Soup with Tapenade Croutons. Like all gourmands, Dot and her hubby used food as a substitute for sex. But maybe sex is a substitute for FOOD. Food is essential, sex a LUXURY. Why else would it be so easily SUPPLANTED by shopping, gardening, cooking or watching TV (all unconscious FOOD-GATHERING activities — you may think you’re not accomplishing much by watching TV for nine hours but you’re actually accumulating DATA that might some day help in the search for FOOD: like a leopard up a tree, you’re gaining perspective)? NATURE is confused about the matter, messily combining defecatory organs with reproductive ones in what is surely the weirdest anatomical ECONOMY DRIVE in the universe. MUST we all be SHAT OUT into the world?
Dot located a singed blue, pink and green tea cosy, wholly abstract and geometrical except for a topknot of yarn like a tuft of hair, and stuffed the hot teapot into it. Then she dumped the old wooden breadboard, fennel-soaked (in Dot’s opinion, DIRTY), into the bin. This is so WRONG. People do not understand that wood has self-cleaning properties! It’s ALIVE (sort of). Otherwise it wouldn’t have been used for all this important domestic stuff like breadboards, rolling-pins, salad bowls, wooden spoons (carved for us, incidentally, by TINY UNPAID CHILDREN), butchers’ blocks, tables, chairs, walls, floors, HOUSES. People think everything’s got to be PLASTIC or METAL or at least SHINY to be healthy but they’re all going to DIE because they’re losing their immunity to GERMS while the wood-users will live, LIVE, surrounded by wooden objects and their wood-using children will flourish as they have flourished for millions of years. Wood-users survived and bred while SAND-users and LEAF-users and FEATHER-users and SHIT-users and PLASTIC-users all fell by the wayside! WOOD. It’s an evolutionary PROCESS. Get with it.
There was a slight draught coming through a gap between the window and window frame, above the kitchen sink. Dot tried to sort of BEND the window back into position. John never got around to jobs like this. He always had to have the right TOOLS for things: he couldn’t scrub a pan without a brand-new steel-wool pad (which he could never FIND), couldn’t glue a chair leg on without the right size CLAMP. For quite a while he’d been putting off some job or other for want of Needle Nose Pliers. Dot didn’t even know what they WERE (she thought he’d said, NEED-TO-KNOW pliers!). John always made a meal of such tasks. It wasn’t laziness but EFFICIENCY — of a peculiarly debilitating kind. Dot’s solution worked fine. The window now shut.
Another mossy plant flew off the rock garden outside. Dot and John spent a fortune on little green and grey plants that blew away. Their rock garden wanted to be just ROCK, and resisted all plans for it to nourish LIFE.
Every feeling in the world has already been felt, thought Dot as she struggled with her soup stock. Everyone the
SAME. And yet, bodies so different, forever alien. Wrinkles on knuckles in the wrong places — weird to have those hands. Hair always foreign, not like yours. And noses. How to relate to someone with a very different sort of nose? NO nose like YOUR nose.
Dot had just read that blue-eyed people instinctively prefer other blue-eyed people, and she wanted to tell John (whose eyes were NOT blue). They liked talking over interesting news items in the evening, with a bottle of wine and a filo-pastry parcel or two. Bitching about botch-ups: the NHS, the trains, the sinking of the Belgrano, the separation of India from Pakistan. They studied their rock garden as they discussed the deficiencies of the world, sheltered and snug like two peas in a pod!
They didn’t know they were only POSING as happy. They thought a bottle of wine, a rock garden and thee WERE the requirements of happiness. But happiness is not in a plant, a pea-pod, or a filo-pastry parcel. It’s not in any PACKAGE.
For Dot, happiness was in John’s chin when it rubbed hers raw, his tongue deep in her mouth. Or when he grabbed her cunt while he fucked her, or splashed his cum on to her belly where she would spread it around with her hand. She also appreciated his sense of smell. A wife so unsensual she had to be REMINDED to smell things! Without John, Dot would have smelled only SHIT, sweat, shampoo and newly mown grass. Without John, Dot would have missed out on a LOT of apples and roses. She liked HIS smell too (he smelled of CINNAMON).
So her soul cried out to him!
Dot in the Distance, Seen from the Side
When he first met Dot, John had thought her head was full of lofty things: the arts, fossils, botany, astronomy. Later he’d realised she didn’t know much and she dreamt only of PIE. He knew this because he’d asked her once why she smacked her lips in the night, and she’d admitted to dreaming CONTINUALLY of pie. Not just FRUIT pie either. She liked all kinds of pie, even things bearing little relation to pie, like SAMOSAS. Just the word on a menu lured her: Steak & Kidney Pie, Pork Pie, Shepherd’s Pie, Banana Cream Pie, Mississippi Mud Pie, PAELLA.
Dot had once dreamt the QUEEN was coming to Jaywick (fat chance) and wanted to meet DOT. Dot was waiting for her at the Jaywick Community Centre, but the Queen was held up by well-wishers cheering her through the streets of Jaywick. Dot got so hungry waiting for the Queen that she started eating some very messy PIZZA. Her hands were all TOMATOEY when the Queen finally arrived. To Dot’s shame and dismay, she was seated very CLOSE to the Queen! Undone by pizza pie.
The world is not a unified and harmonious structure. From the baby’s desertion of the womb to the clear demarcations between land and sea, night and day, oil and vinegar, chalk and cheese, inside and out, substances seek SEPARATION. For every pull towards union there’s equal or greater pressure to DIVIDE, disperse, disentangle, disintegrate. You never fully merge with anyone, you never fully UNDERSTAND anyone, including yourself. You come out of nothing, come out with nothing. It would be insulting to MISREPRESENT this, to suggest there could ever be togetherness that made up for how lonely we are.
John told PORKY PIES. Gone for weeks at a time, he claimed to be SWORDFISHING on a 73-foot, 365-horsepower, continuously welded steel vessel capable of speeds of 12 knots. It left Clacton every few months loaded with 40 miles of 700-pound test monofilament line, thousands of hooks, 5 tons of bait fish, an ice machine that could make 3 tons of ice a day, radar, loran, single sideband, VHF, a weather-track satellite receiver, a water-purifying machine that forced salt water through a membrane at 800 pounds per square inch, a Givens auto-inflating life raft, 7 type-one life preservers, 6 Imperial Survival suits, a 406 megahertz Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), a 121.5 megahertz EPIRB, vice grips, prybar, hammer, crescent wrenches, files, hacksaws, channel-lock pliers, bolt cutters, a ball peen hammer, a spare starter motor, cooling pump, alternator, hydraulic hoses and fittings, v-belts, jumper wires, fuses, balls of STRING, needle nose pliers, hose clamps, gasket material, nuts, bolts, screws, cogs, wheels, sheet metal, silicone rubber, plywood, screw gum, duct tape, lube oil, hydraulic oil, transmission oil and fuel filters. The diesel fuel for the turbo-charged diesel engine was held in two 2,000-gallon tanks beside the engine and two 1,750-gallon tanks at the stern. Another 1,650 gallons were lashed to the whaleback in 30 plastic drums. 2,000 gallons of fresh water were stored in two forepeak tanks and another 500 gallons in drums on deck. The boat stayed in Clacton harbour just long enough to sell its catch, do repairs, get supplies and find enough crew members, before setting off again for GREENLAND where the men on it RISKED THEIR LIVES so that we can eat swordfish.
But not John. He wasn’t swordfishing! He was just off having AFFAIRS.
Each apparently the apple of his eye, if his first choice didn’t come to anything someone else would do. John’s desires weren’t generated by specific women, they were a constant stream which found various eddies. Recently, he’d moved swiftly along after a rebuff, but he was too FAST — she wanted him after all! So now he had THREE on the go, each equally dependent on his devotion and convinced of his FIDELITY, each apparently the apple of his eye.
Keeping all these women happy was an impossibility. In fact it gave him an excuse to keep NO woman wholly happy. They got their fractions of the pie. With his time scattered between women, work, wife, even DOGS IN THE STREET, John had reached the stage when he couldn’t caress a breast without his loyalties being divided.
His real job was as a Careers Adviser for schools in Clacton and the surrounding area. This was mainly a matter of administering QUESTIONNAIRES. The kid would arrive in John’s office, John would administer his questionnaire, analyse the results, and then almost invariably advise the kid to become a DENTAL PSYCHOLOGIST (somebody who holds people’s hands at the dentist’s) or some such job the kid had never heard of. It’s precisely BECAUSE no one’s heard of them that there are vacancies in these professions! Anyway, John was tired of directing people into computer jobs, call centres, and the Royal Marines.
INSATIABLE, his new woman’s need for love, sex, food, booze. She threatens to call it off, saying that despite his charms and her love for him, she fears he will never be able to appease her neediness!
SOLUTION: John sits her down, says he won’t leave her side until she asks him to. He stays with her, stares at her, holds her, talks to her, follows her into the loo, fondles her in bed all night, never letting her not feel his touch, his presence. When she’s sick of the sight of him he goes out and returns with bags brimming. He cooks and cooks and makes her eat and eat until she refuses to eat any more! Still he makes her eat though. When she’s full and fat he goes out again and returns with a litre of GIN and makes her martinis, very dry, day and night! She becomes aggressive after two but he keeps making them until she learns to drink four at a time without passing out. On waking he makes her more and when she is drunk and floppy he fucks her for hours. When he gets tired he fucks her with a dildo, for hours and hours and hours. She becomes CONTENTED.
He was splendid in his way.
Like many morally uncertain men, John was always telling women what to DO. He was very free with his advice. There’s nothing quite like an itinerant lover standing in your living room telling you to CALL YOUR FATHER or deal with your CHILD. He was always ready to propose some good deed to which his women could devote their lonesome weekends or dwindling cash reserves. He was a useful addition to any household! Well, an addition anyway.
One of his girlfriends landed a MODELLING job. She had been putting out the rubbish in her underwear (the bin was just a few feet from her front door), when she was SPOTTED by an advertising scout. They wanted her to model that season’s underwear, in fact they were going to slap her whole BODY across the Eiffel Tower!
John was appalled. He’d left her a failed art history student, and come back to find her a STAR, thanks to RUNNING AROUND NAKED IN THE STREET. He berated her but she just giggled, and John had to acknowledge defeat — what man can compete with the EIFFEL TOWER?
He got home a little late that day, full of excit
ing news. ‘I had to shake him to wake him up,’ he recited with animation, recalling a heroic moment in the wheelhouse. ‘He was sleeping at the WHEEL! I had to grab it and change course quick to avoid a collision. That bloke’s been sacked. How’s the wine?’
He poured himself a glass. Dot was at that stage of drunkenness when you think putting on your lipstick is EASY.
‘Have to be off early tomorrow,’ said John. ‘We have to sharpen all the hooks, test the beeper buoys, adjust the crimper, make six thousand leaders and some ball drops, add three miles of mainline to the spool, service the air-pressure system, charge the salt water ice machine’s compressor with Freon …’
It was sometimes an uphill struggle getting Dot interested in the workings of a swordfish boat (she was easily bored by sea breezes blowing at 15 knots, and responded best to accounts of John SAVING LIVES). But later they ate Cream of Fennel Soup (an aphrodisiac) with Tapenade Croutons (not so much) and were content.
What’s it like to be named ‘John’ anyway? To be for ever one amongst so many. What does it say about your PARENTS? Did they find you boring FROM BIRTH? Or did they just want you to fit in with the crowd? (Why is THAT a good thing?) Does it give you HUMILITY to be named ‘John’? Are you always sure your friends know WHICH ‘John’ they’re talking to? (John got most of his girlfriends to call him ‘Jack’.)
Dot in Pompeii
Dot and John went to Naples! They fucked in the morning in front of the big mirrors on the wardrobe in their hotel room, then presented themselves downstairs for breakfast. It was a serve-yourself affair, with tiny rolls, white butter, ham, jam, fruit juice, and coffee that was not hot. A French woman complained in poor Italian that there was no CHEESE. There is so little assent in the world on the subject of breakfast.
