Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  Yet worst of all is my stentorian tone. For as Suzanne now indifferently recounts me of her own seared primordial sensations, to the ears of a tiny tot of a thing cradled in my arms, all my speech rumbles like shouting. Language out-trumped and out-trumpeted by langrage. Just provokes the emotional equivalent of a burst eardrum and complete shutdown in my infant audience. And shouting intimates wrath. How could I possibly be angry with you little one?... You haven’t done anything yet, here on this earth. With its polar opposites, not of morals good or bad, but attraction and repulsion as propulsive forces of nature.

  The maternal contract (signed unseen), binds me morally and intellectually to teach and inflect. Yet all the while, my mother loded physiology demurs at any perturbations on its metronomic torpidity. So the everyday arpeggio of parenting inevitably thrums and frets my stretched nerve strings. Single noted, sharp and shrill, instead of flat and even. A drone all the same. Off-kilter rather than merely off key. Whatever the issue at hand, the tilting ground, the mittened gauntlet thrown down is ratcheted up into a disproportionate response on my part. Since, no matter how much it is cloaked with the pathognomy of tiredness or frustration, behind each and every one of my emissions flares the filament of anger. The incendiary of rage and dejection at myself and what I have become.

  Deadened. My language is dead because it conceals the full range of emotions behind it. It gushingly declares my love, but it is gnawed at by resentment. The love radiates from my mouth; the twitching rage is felt in the dissonances projected from my jaw. That is why you never recognise the sound of your own recorded voice. Because up till then, you and you alone have been the keeper of record.

  So I yearn for an untainted colloquy. Alive, vibrant, dancing from the tongue and straight into my daughters’ hearts. An innocent interlocution, like Ogham. Unlike most early written languages, that adapted themselves to the inventory, the table, classification and the matrix, Ogham just stopped in the forest to admire the spaces in between. The language was the trees and the trees were the language. Written on the barks, about the barks. Their love affairs and pillow talk.

  The Oghamites didn’t need to apply it elsewhere. To abstract it. I fantasise that they were polyglots, that they also had cloud alphabets and seashore alphabets and many more which were not passed down, since they had effectively been written on the ether, or seasonably perishable tracts. After all, these were private intimacies. The very diction I seek. A true antiphony.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ chimes the shadow backlit at the door. ‘Look at you brooding, all curled up there like a foetus! Oh, I see, you’re away there with your studies are you?’ I nod non-committally, given that the Open University had long ago been compromised for me through conscription into this closed society of motherhood. Still, give him credit, he had made a connection to a part of me independent from him. Even if only a superannuated one. Otherness, isn’t it termed? ‘Ogham, isn’t it? Ach, surely they were just the Forestry Commission of their day. Marking down which trees were to be axed for timber, or to make way for the new horse and cart bypass!’

  I know I shouldn’t have, but I just couldn’t: ‘Yes, they knew they were losing the demographics war. The Deciduous being supplanted by the Evergreens.’ And the look in his eye. I thought he was going to impregnate me there and then on the underlay, to help redress the balance. And part of me wouldn’t have objected either. A display of fire. Of spontaneity. Of fanciability, even through provocation. That there was still something between us. He was quivering so much, he was unable to shift from his spot. I shut my eyes. Unpeel me just like you ripped up that carpet. ‘You see! You see what happens when I try and show interest in one(!) of your things?’ And out he blusters. I can see the little black storm cloud that has settled over his throbbing pate. Yet again he’d contented himself with a peek and confirmatory pat of what lay beneath a lifted flap. That embers were still aglow at the edges, as sufficient proof that something still flickered, without having to stir the hearth.

  And I peer down at the matted, stained, dusty underlay. Giving my skirt a perfunctory brush, thinking that perhaps it’s better this way. Just another bodge job by that cowboy builder of marriage and family, my husband. I try and compose a love letter in Ogham, to recapture that innocent communion of sylvan and tree, between murmuring child and mother. A love letter to my offspring. But I only have the spiteful lexicon of my death-dealing, wood-pulped journal to draw on. We’re all losing the demographics war.

  Of course we are, it’s inevitable. For we are beholden unto children. Children will decide the issue as they always do. Since the birth of progeny is the First Cause. The Prime Mover. Before they’re even conceived, our conflicts are played out in their name. Both domestic and societal. Since now, beyond armed conflict, we convert our offspring from professional mourners into ballot fodder. Headstone crosses in the cemeteries, transposed into ‘X’s in the poll booths. During that quinquennial day of the dead, when all sorts of resurrections miraculously arise, in order to scribe their mark, in mysteriously undegraded, composed script. Gerryadamsmandering. The embalmed wisdom of our ancestors, a spectral, skeletal hand reaching out in order to grab posterity by the throat, shake and throttle us with our own placenta, even as we are delivered into the nexus of life. Forcing us to inhale the ichorous fumes of our own secundines and make us gag, as we remember where we come from and where we are aheaded back.

  For human beings are scheming, manipulative fauna, vying for ascendency within the pack. Language, through its slippage and latitude, a decisive weapon. One that both announces us as feeling, sensitive beings, while simultaneously cloaking what we truly feel and what drives us. And today, my daughter shouldered her incipient arms, mounted her nascent spurs, and loaded her first clip when she reached for a phrase from her own quartermastered arsenal to unleash upon me. Drill time is over. The end of innocence is upon us all. I full well understand what she said to me, as a distillate of my own self. Yet I have never felt so far detached from her.

  And in time, she will also have stockpiled the ballistics of her father. A quiver full of quarrels. God help us all.

  More blessed blubbering! I should have instituted a more efficient tagging system for the newborns. Queer testosterone diagnostic markings only apprise the father’s identity. After all, the effects of that variability are what I need to study. But seems the mothers always get a bit possessive over who’s actually who in each incubator. Post-natal green-envy, rather than baby blues. They can also get a bit twitchy over the labels, ‘double blind’ or ‘control’.

  Aw, put a darned sock in it! Which is it this time? Gawd, now those two inhibitors Megan and Volte have got embroiled. Facilitating precisely nothing as usual. Despite the fact both of them supposedly have a real downer on neonates, they act more like fairy godmothers than sword-wielding Solomons. Bloody peonies, they don’t know they’ve been born! More side-saddles than side-kicks. They’re tilting at it. Caught in a twilight world, somewhere between giving birth and receiving it. A half-life between child and adult hoods, but the clock is ticking. Half-lives mean you are decaying my dears. Grow up and admit all you really want, all any of them in here want, is a man, or a baby, or preferably both, to make them feel whole inside. To confer ripening, with the magical excalibur of ‘the family’. Nuclear or otherwise.

  But it won’t work, see. It can’t. Even if they find ‘Mr Right’. He won’t be able to make them feel whole again. Either he’ll widen the crevice of their being, with more of the same abusive behaviour as they’re hewn from. Or dangling by no more than a silken sutre thread, he’ll disappear entirely down it, consumed by their resurgent need to be healed. No one can share your woe and no one can get inside your substance. Your muscles. Your memory. Or rather the memory of your substance and your muscles. Men can lacerate it and even destroy it, but that’s precisely because they can’t regain ingress. Not as they fantasised and imagined it at least. But they’ll tear it to shreds as they keep trying anyway.
If you let them. When you invite them in at the drop of a hat, the legerdemain of a bouquet of flowers. And when you’ve been deadheaded, you’ll blithely bowl on back up to me. Like I possess a skeleton key.

  I’m going to have to refine my programme. Go the whole test-tube hog. Select at the level of DNA, rather than of people. Since, despite all my best efforts here to provide a secure and reassuring environment, everyone who comes to me is a maladaptive. So although they may breed in this nurturing milieu, left to their own meagre rearing skills, their brood inevitably turns out to be the neurotic, over-anxious, timid victims that they are themselves. No environment can select out those traits. And the world is not waiting on me to duplicate such flawed clones.

  XXXI.III.MM

  Well, it finally happened today. I’d kept entropy at bay for nigh on two years, but ultimately I lost the battle to preserve a token birthright to pass down from Suzanne to Amy. The last of the plastic coins from Suzanne’s toy till has ineluctably slipped away and eluded my twilight fingertip search and recuperation missions. I’m done now, groping behind radiators, offering their extemporaneous rapid deposit service. Barbie’s car remains currently unladen and so no longer will it be assigned the Group 4 delivery run. I’ve even sifted through my own purse that has occasionally proffered plastic tips for good mothering, or contributions towards chocolate sorties to the shops. Nothing. Toytown has a liquidity crisis and it isn’t of the nappy kind. Still, gone for good will be those countless nights sat in front of the TV, trying to jemmy open the till with a kitchen knife because Suzanne’s stood coinage on its edge before closing it again.

  Just as she was approaching the objective of the training drill too. As presumably had been anticipated by the giddily ambitious aunt who’d bought it for her. Expecting to inculcate good housekeeping from the age of three. (For what’s it’s worth, in my experience, the best recipe for success is not the promptings of elders, nor classroom home economics, but the sharp end, crisis management of being married to a wastrel. All in good time.) Anyway, from the outset Suzanne had largely utilised the lolly as impromptu rusks or teething rings, thereby cutting out the whole middleman basis of transaction, and going straight for the end consumption (by gad, I think she’s got it!). A thrust now repeated by her baby sister, necessitating a new rafter to my own jerry-built housekeeping. In order to pre-empt Amy from (non-comestible) choking.

  Eschewing the material basis of the enterprise, Suzanne had proceeded to commerce spookily with fantasy and myth. Oftentimes, she had laid the currency across the eyes of her dollies, or over pictures in books, thereby paving the way for Charon to ferry them across into a netherworld of god knows where in her mind. Once crossed over to the far, untracked bank, then she’d taken to burying them. For nest egg or other occult purposes, which had necessitated my nightly inspection of toytown’s accounts to keep its tottering economy from calling in the receivers. The lone authentic element of the endeavour was that I’d frequently found stubby plastic money shoved down the sides of my lounge chairs, though I never once unearthed any synchronous real riches. Only fools gold. More fool me.

  So, as the spectral asset strippers move in, just what fiscal edification had it laid down? Even now, at age five and a half, Suzanne operates her shop by giving me the goods. Both imaginary and now tangible miniaturised toy renditions of brand name products to lend solidity to the exercise (necessitating further strain on my own housekeeping budget calculations, through having to make good this deficiency in the aunt’s programme). Yet, no matter how often I protest, she insists on also giving me the money from her till, to enable me to pay for them too!

  Nevertheless, musing on it further, I glean that she has merely reproduced a photographic negative of how her own mother transacts much of her business. For how many times have I paid for goods in the supermarket and, under pressure from mutinous hands, heads and bottoms beneath the plimsoll line of the check-out counter, then proceeded to cast off leaving behind sacks full of booty? Or else, stranded countless sundry items that had rolled down the conveyor belt and niched themselves snuggly under the billow of plastic bags, hauled one handed from the receding chrome frame? I was indeed paying for the privilege of letting the store retain its goods. Or subsidising the woman behind me, who could quite easily inherit enough pre-scanned and paid for provisions to see out a bank holiday weekend. Or at a pinch, even a Drumcree sit-in.

  Supermarkets really are the devil’s realm. You can childproof your own dwelling, but not a retail outlet that conveniently caters to all your inconvenient requirements (the ones you never knew you needed). For that is the point of them, surely? Or their layout at any rate. In this child-friendly consumptive main, the standard of parent power is struck and the pester power ensign, of tiny fingers tweaking adult elbow, raised. Since, if you hoist the little darlings into the trolleys with the child seating, there is now nothing that is out of their reach. Yet, if you retain the child carriage, as well as the shopping trolley, it is impossible forever to remember to wheel the trolley close to the shelves, while leaving the buggy splendidly isolated in the middle of the aisle.

  Either way, symbiosis is engaged. Amy will moisten her fingers to initiate conductivity at one end of the nexus, then snake out her arm like a tendril until she locks on to the fulgent label that induces her. She leaves her ephemeral anti-coagulant on the packaging, while it imbrues its indelible brand through the glistening blotter pads of her fingers. She assimilates the colour and shape of the consumer choice she has made, by retracting her fingers back into her mouth. Some new neural pathways are electroplated, as she is barcoded for life. And it is good. She chuckles with relish.

  Now plenty folk have scoffed at my take on this precocious animadverting. But I well recall Suzanne’s visual field being tenderised at a most tender age by the world’s whispering campaign. At about the same time she managed to distinguish the four different Teletubbies, through confirming approximations of the correct name upon each one, she could already tug my sleeved attention to repeated street sightings of Royal Mail lorries and vans. I might say, now, that The Royal Mail have given Postman Pat his own cards of the P45 kind, that future generations of British children will have had one vital ligament of their ocular matrix amputated. Mind you, to judge by Suzanne’s recognition of British Telecom vehicles, the lack of an intercessionary cartoon character promoting the logo on children’s TV hasn’t seemed to have done their branding any harm. My incredulity was warranted, when on a routine pavement perambulation, Suzanne chimed ‘Phone, phone,’ where I could see neither call boxes nor maintenance vehicles on the road at all. I looked down to reproach her gently when I saw a concrete manhole with the BT logo, presaging a vipers’ pit of tangled cabling. Now, for all her advantage of a low perspective in her buggy, I did marvel at her forging of this optic connectivity into a new context.

  It is not that I believe either of my children to be particularly acute in their abilities. Merely it rammed home just how fertile a child’s, any child’s, mind is at this stage of development. Nothing can lie fallow there. And I am drawn back to the proliferation of motifs and logos here. The predominant colours. The persistent sights of pomp, parading and gesticulation. The abiding sounds of drums, flutes and vilification. Actually there’s nothing preponderant about them at all. For this is just the cosiest of degrading duopolies. No matter how much we mothers shield our progeny from this exposure, they will inevitably imbibe its everlasting hook. This season’s colour is orange (green). Same as last year’s.

  You know what? This is all consuming. Better off rummaging on all fours after counterfeit coinage than impoverishing myself and my daughters with these fatalistic forecasts.

  So much for good housekeeping. For keeping one’s house in good order. They won’t learn it at my knee. Even allowing for Agent Orange, my husband, the door-to-door pedlar of encyclopedic Protestant resistance, my girls will not be baptised into the church of anarchy. But still they will inevitably take the sacrament. For you can choose
whether to be moved by it or not, but you cannot simply ignore it. We have no giant murals here in Omagh, no subrogate hoarding campaign. But the message is overweening and cajoles its way in effectively all the same. Discourse is entered, voluntarily or otherwise. There is nothing sophisticated about it at all. And our children’s potentialities run to seed. Does the giddy aunt have any remedial guidance on this?

  There is a perception I think, that the Peace Process only progresses, if that is the right word, when one or other of the extremists or militants stamps his little foot, throws himself down to the floor in a screaming tantrum and refuses to budge. The more amenable ones around the table behave like grown-ups and, after a decent time span by which they believe they have at least lodged their argument, they cave in and take the brat into the larder to see what goodies he can find for himself. He waddles back out, swollen and sugar-high, his arms laden with everything he can possibly carry back to his bedroom for a midnight feast with his sleep-over cronies. This has nothing to do with nuances of language. This is unalloyed, gorging, naked greed. Gourmand rather than gastronome.

  If they want to secure weapons decommissioning, they should follow the compulsion of their own infantile logic. Treat one’s political adversary like a child plays its mother. You want to keelhaul him, berate and flay him alive possibly. But he looks at you with those eyes that implore you, just to love and reincorporate him and your resolve is melted. You are disarmed even as he climbs into your arms for a bolstering hug. You are put irrevocably beyond use. Alternatively, you could just bang their bloody heads together!

  *

  A brief note on the etiquette of party bags.

  They think they’ve got it tough, with their protocols and prov(is)os. Have they ever once just paused to give thought to the intractable problem of divvying up the going-home party bags?

  Article 1) Shiny pencils: well, I think all of us round the table can concur on that as uncontentious. Of course, one’s making assumptions about the artistic/literary culture of each family, but in the main, the key issue is merely whether they are combined with erasers on the top or separate. Economy usually wins out.