by Marc Nash
The other woman and I sidled diffidently around the expanse of space, yet all the while managing to preserve the cleft between one another. She, I presume, vacillating over whether to have her foolishness openly acknowledged, even by a fellow transgressor; myself, since I was utterly opposed to interlocution full-stop. But such was the bloated need for absolution, she surreptitiously nipped and tucked the mantled bulge to a distance where megaphones were no longer required and any re-buffing of the buffer zone on my part would have been inordinately rude. The hiatus narrowed to good conscience, she flounced over. Her smile was weaker than the attenuated winter sunshine. The pigmentation was visibly evacuating her visage, decamping her freckles with it. So with her face parrying the forward thrust of the body, I’m charged with opening in order to save her from fainting. ‘I wondered why I’d nabbed such a prime parking spot. Never happened before.’ And in she launched, the release palpable, the safety catch off, spraying around salvo after salvo.
In the skirmishes we discovered our daughters were not in the same class. Did not indeed know one another or play together in the playground. Did not share a table at lunch. Did not coincide in any after-school activity (the school may have been pushy, but I was pushy-ed out through getting her admitted here in the first place). And no, we weren’t church-goers. That should have naturally reinstated the chasm as far as I was concerned, but I could see her sufficiently leavened so as to move to fill the lacuna entirely. Now it was simply a matter as to who was swiftest on the draw. Unfortunately, since my child-addled life had swathed itself in a giant prophylactic against self, the workings of my mind had not been lubricated for some considerable interval. So when I reached into my holster for some personal delivery, I was just mum.
She foisted on me her love of opera. My whole quailing frame evidenced the impulse to fold in on itself like a cuttlefish and service any caged bird of choice. Yet somehow the muscles in my face overrode the critical mass, by expressing mere incomprehension at the ranks of foreign names and serial numbers being spouted. She was perceptive enough to register this and changed tack. Minutely. Informed me about how she’d been hoarding her entire life, in order to splash out on a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Vienna, ‘Opera capital of the world!’ Now I merely wanted to kill myself.
She didn’t have her slides with her, but she was going to snap my patience anyway. Her transparent neuroses needed no projection. Apparently, every tourist attraction has two Austrian flags above its portal and these correspond to the numbered sites on the conveniently-provided-for-in-every-hotel expedition map. ‘They’re so well geared up for it over there. Not like here in Britain.’ I gargled my accord, or it might have been an intimation of a death rattle, since I hadn’t actually ever been to the mainland to accord anything. As she prattled on, I quickly gleaned that the flags had soon taken on greater substance than the architecture itself. Such was the all-consuming campaign to tick them off the guide map. We too have flags over the portals of some of our buildings right here, I reflected. But I would only ever dub them tourist repulsions.
She was not compulsive enough to want to troop every flag though. Freud’s house, for one, she expressed fierce disinterest at dropping by. Passive aggressive, I mentally diagnosed. ‘It’s amazing how the whole city is laid out. The old part, I mean. What they call “The Ring”. And so it is. It is! It’s just one big circle really, so perfect for getting round and seeing everything. It’s as if they designed it with tourists in mind all those years ago.’ I could no longer help myself: ‘Did you hire bikes?’, knowing full well the flounce in flowery dress before me could not mount a cycle, let alone have her thunder thighs power it. ‘You know, for a Ring Cycle cycle?’... ‘But that was Wagner,’ – not too many blowflies on her, obviously – ‘and surely he was German not Austrian?’ ‘Oh you know those Aryans and their love of Anschluss!’ ‘Oh! I don’t know that one...’ She deflated on the spot before me, even as I was puffed up now, ready for the coup de grace. But the woman was saved by the bell and a twin pincer movement of child’s bear hug around my upper thighs, while being clouted on my posterior with a re-materialised lunchbox. I didn’t mean to savage the poor soul. But it did feel good to act like an adult again. Get all such animus out of my system, so that Mother Theresa Omagh local 2379 can attend to the children at home once more.
If it’s any solace, I spent the whole afternoon staring out the bay window, neglecting the children (so they weren’t to reap the benefit after all) and chastising myself over the whole tawdry episode. I’m not proud of myself, for all the verbal swagger. I don’t know where it came from. It’s not really like me at all. Or maybe it is. A glimpse of the new, metamorphosised me. The one that will emerge, when I can punch my way out of the chrysalis of child rearing. Shed my prophylactic skein and float off unencumbered into the sun. For that harpy had dared to travel and her a mother too! She’d had a lifetime dream and followed it. But she blew it! Missed the whole bloody point of it all. Aw, who the hell am I to judge whether she realised her vision or not? Me who has yet to travel much beyond the vista outside of these curtains. I did however delete Vienna from my imaginary itinerary. A list without any flags, but a list in the compendium of my mind all the same. To tick off as and when. My globe-hopping trip. New York, New York (Fifth Avenue, Fifth Avenue); The Pyramids and The Holy Land; The Galapagos Islands; The Empty Quarter (ah, indeed how that one does resonate with me right now and would it perforce stay ‘empty’ if one bought the kids along?)
Yet is the question exclusively one of scale? Since I’ve put so many of my woman hours in at the goggle box, I’ve always felt licensed to envision. I’ve exclusively toured all the holiday programmes. Paid my dues at the natural history slots. Hell, many’s the time I’ve sat on the sofa with a babe latched to my breast, in full synchronicity with some other endangered mammal being projected back at me. As for some of the other primal activities, exquisitely captured by telephoto lens and commentated on with reverent tones by that nice Mr Attenborough, well let’s just say you’d require a lot of time lapse photography, followed by a brief reel of slo-mo around this particular habitat I can tell you.
So yes, I avow I already have an intimate familiarity with these places and sights. Would they let me down, as I suspected the empty husk of Vienna’s Ring had defrauded her? What if the Great Barrier Reef or the Great Wall of China were, to my mind’s eye, not so great after all? But that is preposterous of course. They are great. The greatest manifestations of man or a higher power’s achievements. The majestic beauty and inherent sublime order underpinning it all. Therefore any failure of scale to overwhelm must be down to me. The shrinkage of my inner world must not be transposed on to things infinitely beyond my reach. Beyond my apprehension. My conjugation. So am I, after all, unconsciously complicit in my husband’s embargo on ‘abroad’? Damnation! This bloody woman, too uninformed to visit Freud’s house when in the neighbourhood, yet she can hold the mirror up to my face. And she made me waive a whole afternoon’s television engagements with house interiors, chat and quiz shows.
XXIX.X.MMI
Actually, I’m fairly well possessed whence my vitriol towards ‘Valkyrie Woman’ had been summoned. She was the selfsame woman at the check-out some months ago, in front of me at the ‘10 items or less’ aisle (now amended to ‘Or fewer’, following the complaint by a man, obviously, since one couldn’t imagine a campaign for correct grammar being waged by a housewife and mother now could you?) with thirteen – yes I counted them – thirteen items, if you please.
Exactly which part of ‘10 items or less’ was it that you didn’t understand, missus? And she proclaims to like and understand the complexities of opera?
Each one of those extra acquisitions was like a tin opener to my canned heart. The arbitrariness of it all. How many times had I attempted to break through the checkpoint with eleven or twelve items in my basket, been rebuffed and forced to turn back each time? That goading awareness of having just one item too many, but hell you’
re going to go for it anyway, ’cos it’s not like you’ve got a full trolley bursting at the seams. Besides, you owe them for a dashed trolley dash from days back, when you were countered and reproached by patronising staff, primed like Venus fly traps to clamp down hard on any axled shopping aid in the pedestrians only aisle. As they made you pack everything back in the trolley, you were only able to recover a vestige of your dignity by laboriously counting aloud each of the ten items in turn. So much so that it would have been quicker running it through their express till after all. A supermarket Mexican standoff. The customer is always righteous.
Actually, weighing it up a bit, I’m not at all sure it was her. But the point, or the grievance anyway, remains. Madame Butterfly’s original sin of XIII did not prick me enough to merit an entry in my journal at the time. Neither did my original run-in with the till monkeys, although that may have predated my little tan book. Yet the twin grievances festered until their vectors bisected. At the very moment, when I was standing in that deserted car park, expressing some impulse to action for whatever unrelated, extraneous third motive. S-triangulated.
The blunt instrument of sharp words. That’s what you’re supposedly meant for, my calfskin punchbag. To cauterise and drain off my ire. Leave me in peak shape to deal with the children. Stop me throwing in the towel along with the kitchen sink. Help me to keep my kid gloves on. To open up a second front away from home. But always you swing back on your pivot and cuff me straight between the eyes, with an aggregation of aggrieved slights I can never disembogue.
Just come from a group session. The radical firebrands were holding forth on the floor again. To the exclusion of everyone else. I felt compelled to break my neutrality and rescue the situation. I knew from their diehard commitment and personal loyalty to me that they weren’t after staging a coup. But their incendiary fission threatened a meltdown all the same. I essayed that they were conflating reparations with reprisals. That our breeding out programme was reparation enough. Would not its success forever disarm menkind from the wherewithal to harm us again? But if I’d even thought about it for one second, no genetic fabianism was ever going to sate the bloodlust careering in the air tonight.
Hurriedly I changed tack and drew on the same arguments I employ against our external foes. We were not a cult. We did not have followers. (A high risk strategy, this: if it attenuated my authority in their eyes, it might dismantle their personal allegiance and then we’d all be dead in the water.) I for one, certainly did not want people to go abroad in my name. (Now, in like flint and soften the stomach to receive the rapier.) Besides, there are no such things as fanatics even in real cults. Those hard of mind and empty of heart, who will genuinely, willingly end their lives for a cause, are few and far between. Forensics show us repeatedly that all mass cult ‘suicides’ are shot in the back, or the rear of the head, as well as often having the insurance overkill of poison in their blood. Jonestown across the water was a typical example of this. I’m telling you ladies, even the executioners don’t do it out of faith or belief in the end. Only steely resolution. They’ve abdicated their own individual thought processes. All they have remaining is a votary’s adherence to the leader. They enact his orders, as the only residual verification of their crumbling faith. Would you top yourself if I ordained it?... I expected nothing less. (Are Americans familiar with this idiomatic usage of the word ‘top’?)
Suicide is still a struggle, no matter how much you prepare and acclimatise yourself for it – cult member or just survivor of an abusive relationship. I mean, we all still made it here, didn’t we? Fought chipped tooth and wrenched nail against extermination. Christ, even Jesus on the Cross crossed over, when he more than anyone should have known. Okay, technically I know he wasn’t a suicide, that his fate was determined for him by Pop. Didn’t he read the Bible (before the revision in his name)? Pater had pulled the same stunt with Abraham, but got cold feet at the last minute. Ignorance is a form of suicide. Much more pernicious too. Jesus, ya shoulda read your own previews... Then see if the meek would still inherit anything.
Go pick the bones out of that lot, ladies! A subtle and not so subtle insinuation of your lack of both bottle and smarts. I don’t expect we’ll be having any more trouble from them awhile. Besides, I’ll make a point of sleeping with each of them, as a reaffirmation of my affection and esteem... the only slight quandary being which one to select first without the other’s flaring nose being put out of joint. Of course the pragmatist in me would just make it a threesome, but I have to be wary of any fervour being reinforced by affections between the two of them. This is just the sort of snafu my two political, so-called moderators should be resolving for the community. But if you want a job done properly...
Here they come now, my beloved, trusty cadres. No doubt coming to pledge their gratitude for my deft application of emollient on rash and scaly hides. Sweet, sweet Megan Hertz and dear old Volte Face, aka Glangela. Oh don’t get me wrong, I will succour them with every last breath in my abdomen. Just don’t ask me to respect them, that’s all. They’re so damn grateful that I selected them, for delegating the upholding of our community’s values. Can’t they see that I did this precisely because I knew that it was beyond them? Tie them up in knots, to leave a nice vacuum in the middle where everyone could just project whatever they wanted. Some overseeing Goddess and mistress, or personal spirit guide. Or, perhaps just a liberated space to move around in, untrammelled by coercion. Either way it all boils down to the hoary old free will or determinism dichotomy. I just didn’t intend the task to devour them that’s all.
Poor old Megan. Michael Jackson’s her role model, and I don’t mean by his singing career. More the way he reinvents his actual corporeal image. She has a bit of a parent thing going on. Doesn’t want to resemble them in any way, so she’s superficially altering the configuration brought about by her genes. Megan really goes skin deep. Trouble is, from the little colourations of her language, compared with that in the letters from home which I intercept, I think she’s adopted. Ho hum. Might explain why she’s so angry to have been brought into this life in the first place. Though, fair play to her, she’s never allowed her marasmus to reduce her to a full-on, method-acting, true-to-death zombie who could audition for one of Wacko’s videos. She contents herself with lobbying local abortion clinics. Not because she’s against the right to choose – Christ she wouldn’t be in here with all the other oil-seed-rape castaways if she did. Besides, she votes Democrat anyway. No, quite the converse, she’s ploughing a lone furrow down there. Trying to gain access to obsecrate with the aborted foetuses, as to what a lucky break they caught, in escaping the miserable destiny that life has plucked for her. If ever there’s any sabotage of our IVF cultures, I’ll know it’s an inside job.
And dear old Volte Face. Another one with a parent issue, but then again which of us haven’t? Her father Nathan died on Labo(u)r day. Not that it came to her as a shock or anything. On the contrary, she indirectly precipitated it. There he was, celebrating the news of his daughter’s birth down the local bar, when he drops dead of a peanut allergy he never even knew he had. Actually, way I read it, don’t think it was peanuts what did for him. More like the contaminating urine of seventeen different men, since the slobs never wash their cock-cradling digits after the urinals, but go straight back to the peanut bowl unlucky dip. Or should that be drip? The tombola of contagion. Quick on the prize draw, revolve the chamber and let loose a deadly round. They literally pissed all over poor old Nat. And his wife, Glangela’s mother, too. Since she was post-Nathanly depressed, suddenly all alone with a little baby to bring up. So she threw in her hand and folded, leaving little old Volte Face an orphan. And, on account of all this happening during the peanut-brained, peanut farmer Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, voting Democrat has never been an option for her. See, it’s so straightforward this causation thing. Moreover, I have my political balance right where I want it. Annulling one another. Do Megan and Volte sleep with one another? The thought is t
oo tawdry to contemplate.
VI.III.MM
The daily grind of the weekly shopping. Or the weekly grind of the daily shopping. Or perhaps the daily grind of the weakly shopping. But you get the general drift. Pushing Amy along in her buggy. Unfortunately not the grand prix rally special I had for Suzanne, with its beautiful pneumatic purchase and light, responsive suspension, which cushioned and cradled her tiny frame against the impact of each pavement plunge. A streamlined chassis that allowed me to hurtle frictionless back to the car as soon as the rain came down. Suzanne safely encompassed in its plastic bubble (for, light as it was to push, I could not simultaneously wield an umbrella). We’ll pass over the rain’s redoubled frenzied assault on her exposed form, as I struggled to transfer her from the fettered prison of her bubble buggy into the shackles of a car seat. That, I feel, is down to the physical laws of stationary objects, rather than lay the blame at the wheel of my beautiful perambulator.
No, lamentably not that same buggy, for one cracked and sunken paving stone too far and her tubing was buckled irreparably. The rubber tyre no longer palpated the asphalt, but hung uselessly twisted in the air, compulsively dabbing and twitching before a non-existent reflex gavel. I knew it was fatal, but I demanded a second confirmatory opinion. So I took it to a toy shop(!), the only place that offered the requisite buggy repair service. They sat me down and told me in hushed tones that she had dislocated and wrenched her foreleg and had to be put down for good. We gave the old girl a fitting send off, buried her with full campaign honours. Attached the unused (in two and a half years) sun parasol to her and slipped her beneath the meniscus of the wheely bin, so that the dustmen wouldn’t realise she was in there until they had slid her beneath the waves of pared matter. We could but fantasise that her metal would temporarily arrest the grinding mechanism of the cart’s crusher. A pertinent temporary hush, that marked her repose in the way that she had lived her service. But the beast’s mighty jaws seemed untroubled by the task, licking its chops with a loud pneumatic sough, as it let out its brakes to saunter on down the road.
