by Marc Nash
Amy’s buggy. Not exactly Suzanne’s mark II, let alone mach 2 like they have now. Scaled down dune buggies or quad bikes, that’s what current pushchair craft resemble. Flaming great pavement tanks, with baby bull bars to move pedestrians out the way. These buggies don’t get repaired in toy shops. It’s blessed garages for them! Have you not noticed, now the armoured personnel carriers have vacated our roads, we’ve moved to fill the gash with giant people carriers and land cruisers of our own? Either we cannot psychologically bear to be without this bellicose asseveration of our security, or we just need larger cars with hulking great boots to fit these new super buggies in even when they’re folded up! No, this family refuses to fall in with that particularly pernicious line of fashion, thank you very much.
We knew we weren’t going to have any more children. The calculation was therefore to get the cheapest, most basic pushchair there was. It may have been primitive, but had four wheels, collapsible metal tubing and some fabric to gather up Amy’s frame. All for twenty-five pounds. Of course, Suzanne’s rain bubble didn’t fit, so that was another tenner. Still, for a finite two years of pavement pounding, it seemed enough of the real deal. Only, four wheels compared with eight on Suzanne’s proved to be a false economy of scale. Since they were also fixed, they rotated but did not turn. To execute a change of direction, I had to drag-lift the whole fuselage and reappoint it to the required bearing. The bloody thing had the turning circle of a dreadnought. The sturdy metal tubing had no give in it whatsoever, so that other than for the restraint of the stubby plastic straps (whose locking mechanism always demanded an offering up of nail and skin before it’s scything thumbscrew), Amy’s small core would have been shucked from the buggy at the first sagging flagstone. As it was, on landing at the behest of her harness, she had to unsettle herself for the nightmarish persecutions of cardboard corner claws and tin-rimmed talons of the shopping in the net behind her back. For, as substantial as it felt, the seat twill was mysteriously fistulous.
I know for a fact that this bastard buggy would have chewed up the teeth of the dustcart and spat them out as shrapnel.
Another design triumph spawned by this cross-breeding of Harland & Wolff with Mothercare was the permanent blindspot at ground level, either side of the two front wheels. We’ll scoot on hurriedly past (or through) the pavement doggydo as a constant source of aggravation and alight on the propensity for contretemps, whether bagatelle or catastrophic. Today’s had been catastrophic, in a slow-puncture sort of way. Of course, since Vulcan himself had annealed the rubber coatings of the buggy’s wheels, they could never actually sustain a puncture, slow or otherwise. I’m talking about a figurative deflation. For, ahead of us, an old man was dragging his wheely shopping basket behind him. Now we each sported blind sides. I attempted to slow our progress, but we were in danger of being swallowed up by the throng of Saturday shoppers from behind. The push-me, pull-you dynamic was calling for a quick step and we were paired irresistibly together. I tried to slipstream him. Not in the sense of a sucking air turbulence, for he was shuffling along like a slowworm, while there was nothing remotely aerodynamic about my fortified piece of mobile scaffolding. Rather, I sought to match every sway and roll of his dumb charge, as it mooched along the buffeting paving. But finessed responses were beyond the parameters of my beast and my forearms soon wearied of trundling curvet for the heavily laden buggy. Dancing round handbag rather than ambage was more my style. I brought the buggy to land on all four of its wheels again and plumped for a plumb line. All our fortunes were now in Fate’s hands and we didn’t have to wait long.
A chariot race in the circus minimus of the High Street and our wheels lock together. His neck slowly turtles round conveying a stooped head from the nuzzle of his chest. The only motion not proceeding in stages is the glower brandished by the creases of his aged face. I had violently disrupted his creaking progress. I kept my expression neutral, awaiting the cranking of his ill-lubricated facial musculature, until his lower lip finally dropped like the safety curtain at a theatre. He projected yellow teeth at me as if wheeled out on rollers. His eyes admonished me even as his brow knitted together in complete incomprehension, as he tried to fathom. Then he looked down at Amy, beaming up at him from her low vantage point. How dare you impute that it’s her fault old man! Before I can drape myself in front of her bound form, I trace a flicker of memory snail across his countenance and see he is thrown. His carriage heaves, his challenge now prostrate. The wheels of his upturned shopping basket have stopped spinning. I feel sorry for him, as he yanks his felled mount and totters off. Dragging it along the fabric rather than the axles, such is his hurry to reel away from whatever has crushed him. In that one passing moment, I saw in him what I have come to appreciate. That the seeds of being that lay within my life-giving egg were also to signal my own dissolution. Decidedly deciduous, some are merely further advanced towards evanescence than others. Soon to be harvested as chaff. The old man hated Amy for her box seat dependence on me. But he loathed her more for daring to be at the start of her life. He would sire no more children. Nor would he have the elastic powers of growth, regeneration and recovery, with which Amy was unconsciously mocking him through her innocent smile.
I suppose I’ve been peddling a conceit of sorts. I have in my time been associated with sects. Of a kind. That one known as the family (small ‘f’). The one we all seem to participate in of our own received volition. A doomsday cult if ever something merited the term. We’ll temporarily pass over the spouse louse, since I’m talking about that smear of me, somewhere out in the world. A real mothersucker of a son. And no, if you look on your files, I don’t have a lisp. Not that he’s a bad boy, but a mothersucker all the same. They all are. Just by being boys. That alien being amid your innards. Not like having a little girl. Already sucking on his thumb in greedy anticipation of his first and most formative treat in the world. It’s a fine line between rapacious and demure. An umbilical line. And he’s eating you up from within. Siphoning all your essences for joyriding fuel. All your physical discomforts are down to his greed. Your hair falling out and hives springing from his insatiable hunger. From his not knowing when to stop.
Wanting more, always more. Plundering you. Because, innately, he knows he only gets one crack at the whole damn womb thing. From inside. Belly cosy. Your daughter, she knows she gets to have the kindling passed to her. That she can ignite her own Olympian sized torch for a lifetime of carrying. But the boy gets just one shot at this wonder bliss, my blunderbuss, so he’s gonna throw his whole armoury at it. Besiege me. Rifle my personal affects. Disassemble the smooth bore muzzle, lock, stock, and barrel. Spin my chamber; scrape out the grooves; grease the firing mechanism; finger the trigger; and breach my labouring defences. What power. What a kick! What recoil! What shrapnel wounds. You can still see my scar.
Despite the fact that I run a breeding colony, any of the biological or physiological prompts still induces a shudder down my dura mater. Yanks me right back to that time. When my body and emotions were commandeered to some imaginary war effort. When I’d already surrendered myself. The trick is to fight back. Resist. Fifth column behind enemy lines. To regain suzerainty over your own colonised self.
Now I can’t claim to have worked all this out in advance. It was complete serendipity, albeit heavily laced with genetic fate. My son, that little piece of me now at large. Yet he never felt all of a piece. Caught somewhere in transit between his American father and English rose mother. Snagged on the briars of a poor quality graft. The scion didn’t issue a whole new genus. Just more of the same, inheriting the worst traits from both his parents. Poor sap. Never felt properly at home, didn’t take to it. Felt uprooted. He was familiar with his immediate environment, but did not recognise it as his own. Incised from the same contiguous material as that of the local stone-cutters, yet he found their guild too narrow to enter. Just like his dear old Ma, intaglioed in the grain of the place in which he grew up, but an impression from which he sought relie
f. To escape from himself. Thus was his fate determined for him, impelling him to rove and eschew such a destiny. Yet that eschewing too, was fate. As hard and fast and unyielding, as anything ingrained by his genes.
But it was not to be a random trek. For the icy warmth of my undercarriage had germinated the seed. He had a lead. A need to discover from whence he truly hailed. His mother-land. A child cut off from one half of himself. My own flesh and blood, who had felt adopted by his homeland. His recurring dreams unfamiliarly landscaped. Metropolises with the seeming solidity of a film set, populated by shadowy figures. These were not sinister lurkers, pressing themselves out of the penumbra of light, but rather, indistinct, imponderous beings lolling about in the foreground. They do not trail him into a persecutory light of day, rather, solemnly observe their stand-offishness. Their indifference pricked at him like a sore. And thus is he hag-ridden, barebacked. Each dawn, under starter’s orders, he is left in the stalls. Spirit drained, tapped by these anonymously intimate strangers. Tugging at the frayed thread of his identity, the day spent unravelling. Unbeknown to him, his circadian rhythms set to GMT. Lordy, I really landed him in it.
And amongst the visual melange, a verbal cue. The word ‘Greenland’ bobbing repeatedly across his dream consciousness. How do I know this? Why, I’m his mother of course. Every night of his life, I’d hitched up the corner of canvas and ushered him into his Carney dreamscape with a kiss on his crown. And besides, I seized the opportunity to read his diary each time I cleaned up his room. Oh don’t come all the disapproving, wagging finger brigade with me. What are you snoops doing if not reading my journal? That’s why I put it online for you. So you don’t have to strain too hard in your purblind prying. So you don’t have to beat yourselves up about the morality of it (not that those in your weighty profession, would ever raise a hand to such a scruple). And, in addition, so I can indulge in a spot of misdirection. Blow a bit of smoke on you honey-bees, out there after some grand larceny nectar. Besides, if he’d tidied his room as I repeatedly requested, well, I wouldn’t have ever had any purpose in entering, would I?
So, after that unscheduled stopover to refuel my vitriol, time to get us all back on course for Greenland. Not any ‘Green and pleasant land’ I ever imbued him with at my knee. For I only ever reminisced its grey and oxidised red. The mills still dark, but dilapidated rather than Satanic. No, I demur; their half-baked conversion into facsimiles of theme-parks or other pleasure palaces is, to the original American Dream specification, as Mammon’s gaudy architecture of Hell is to that of Heaven. It’s enough to give anyone nightmares.
‘Greenland’, both extra-mundanely and in fact, is that land mass, the largest island in the world, which lies between America and Britain. You pass over it on many transatlantic air flights. I’m on top of the world, Ma! For no manchild is an island. The dear little boy didn’t want to have to choose between either parental anitpode UK/USA and so plumps for somewhere in the middle. And thus he drowns. Unable to maintain a foothold on the sheer ice face of frigid sentiment. Ten years of therapy hasn’t remitted him that. As for me, I wouldn’t have charged him half as much.
The conclusion he came to, aided only by the taciturn conspiracy of both mother and therapist, was to retrace my steps. Track back the evacuation of vitality. Root out the source of vacated meaning. Bidding goodbye to his future, as I had left in order to say goodbye to mine. Only in reverse.
A Saver Class ticket to Heathrow. Of course it cost him the same as a return, but I suppose it seemed symbollically important to hold out and not get dissuaded before he’d even set off. Bet it didn’t stop him getting drunk on the flight over though, seeing as he doesn’t know what he’s flying into. A cuckoo searching for a nest. See, always colonising. Appropriating the present I might have had, but never did. Conducting an archeological dig on my past, in order to divulge the gaps in his contemporaneity. Searching for a lost world, some mythical Atlantis swallowed deep beneath my mid-atlantic drawl. He asked me, when we took leave of his father, why I didn’t return back to England (whether moved by genuine empathy, or his own craving for apprehending his dreams, I cannot settle). Well now he’ll realise. For he will look round as a tourist might. He is not the proud possessor of two demesnes, two passport identities and two countries. Like his parents, each were asunder and irreconcilable. There is to be no homecoming for him, whether he holds fast, or returns to the fold here. He will remain alone with his isolation. Merely in different surroundings, that’s all. Like I said, he’s not a bad lad really. Just a bit confused. Like everybody else. So he should blend in nicely. And my work there is finished. My generational labour complete. I have replicated the action of recessive genes. Outside of a laboratory.
Skipping a generation, his own heirs will inevitably look back west and demand to know why he ceded the fecundity of America for their own dreary birthplace. How they in turn will hop on a plane and tilt at the land of opportunity in search of their true caste self, attaining after someone they could not possibly be. And so it goes on. Caroming from one base line double fault to the other. Like some great transatlantic tennis match. You get a crick in your neck and feel as though your spine can no longer support the weight of your head. Deuced.
If the besiegers were somehow able to track him down and bring him in to winkle me out, I’m sure he’d merely scream down the wires, ‘Kill the Bitch!’
VII.III.MCMXCIX
I’m laying out the washing to dry on the line. A rare sunny day this portentous spring (they were opening the doors of Stormont once again, this time for an all party parliament). I’m angling for the air to expel the caustic smell of laundry detergent. To leach the bleach. Infuse the synthetic fabrics with a more natural aroma. Now, two hands engaged in pinning a chemise, with midriff swaying kyphotically so as to avoid the rivulets of water beating down the dress’s straight course, necessarily meant that my mouth served as a receptacle for the pegs. Wood stained dark by years of clammy contact with damp raiment, yet my tastebuds were assailed only by additive chemical pungency. From a time before I heeded the television adverts for a ‘softer, safer’ wash. From a time before I had to. For the sake of my daughter. Or her skin anyway. Standing as a preventative bulwark against allergies of course. In a world suddenly awash with hyper-sensitivities, that never seemed to be a problem in my childhood. We’re breeding poorer specimens. Or perhaps our environment is what is labefying their immune systems. Either way, it’s yet another involuntary parental legacy for their offspring.
Tantamount to blackmail, if you pause to think about it even for a second. Stood there like an idiot, with wooden sabre tooth dentures jutting out. That’s what the advertisers are playing on I suppose. A mother consumer’s love of her child. Do these detergents actually offer any greater protection? Who can tell? Maybe the pegs are chemically redolent as much from these pro-children tablets, as the previous ones I was prepared to scourge my own spinster skin with. But you can’t chance the risk can you? So every wash day, my palate will continue to offer up evidence of a new accretion to the four categories of sapidity. In addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter (elegantly, though not deliciously, unified in any dish down at our local Chinese takeaway), we now have industrial-chemical. Of course, anyone who has also sampled the bleached wares of our traditional chippie next to the Chinese will be able to empirically back me up on my discovery. Wash day Thursdays, fish and chips Fridays. Chronic chemically catalysed days.
(Of course, all housewife-mothers know this last statement to be partly false, since wash day cannot be restricted to a unique day of the week. And am I the only one too weary of an evening, to turn my hand from tinned spaghetti hoops and amorphous nuggets and set my face towards grown-up cooking, so as to leech the Friday fish supper on to other days of the week?)
Buying new wooden pegs is the answer, of course. Run a controlled test. Observe if the new ones also sweat chemically, after exclusive exposure to ‘non-biological’ cleaning products. Then we’ll see. Then I’ll set
it straight with you buggers out there in the outside world. Reel you in–.
Shit is she co-choking? What’s she found to put in her ruddy maw now? I spat out the pegs and dropped a pair of sweat pants towards the ground, even as I impelled them further down underfoot, so swift was my pivot. In the span of the six paces or so of our patio, her whole brief little life passed before my scanning eyes, as I speed-searched for similitude (with just a beat for my wry subconscious to interpose that an equivalent span of mine would only cover traversing two patio paving stones). Yes, she had recently learned to feign coughing, but the mockery was usually easy to pierce. However, that was a mutually preserved collusion, habitually face to face, never when she was alone. And the distorting effect of the plate glass meant I couldn’t tell whether this was authentic or not. Contrary to that, I never, never leave her alone when she’s jousting with food. For no matter how often I implored her to take small bites, she still inundated her tiny orifice with too much to cope with. If she was in the mood to accede to my pleas, then it was without pausing to chew and swallow each small morsel in turn. Such recurring trajectories were nothing to do with the throat, as the food never reached that far. It was all to do with the mouth. Was it symptomatic of some unquenchable hunger she felt? Did she feel perpetually malnourished? None of the books will admit to this possibility. Too close to mad, bad Uncle Sigmund’s notions. For we live in a less judgemental world now. Or so we like to gauge it. Yet what could be more basic than learning to eat properly? Eating without expiring from the very act of eating?
