Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

But what are those dull thuds now? Like babies falling from their cribs. Yet I hear no screams. No padding of maternal feet to comfort and rescue. Such an air of serenity abounds – see, I kept telling them there was no call for a panic room. Just a ringing now in my ear, inside all of my head. Like a siren. Time to flick the digital panic alarm. No one will come to our aid in time to save our bodily selves. We lace our suicide pills not with cyanide but with viral DNA and we put it out to tender in the ether. Just as the message from a dying star only reaches our sensors when it is already turned cold in its celestial grave, our killers, or their posterity, will in turn have been rubbed out by the bounty hunters we here set in motion. And what bounty they shall inherit. Once they rid the world of you. For you defile all that is good. The smoke rises up from the crack in my door. To flush out us honey bees? But we’ve already blown the coop. Hatched the larvae who’ve devoured their way through the honeycomb of this colony and taken wing with their recipe for nectar. The reticulum of life is far too sophisticated for your battering rams and stun grenades.

  You can’t kill me. For I am a notion. An idea. Whose time might well have come. You cannot eradicate me. Nor delete me. You can’t just circumscribe me in a body of text. Bury me as a footnote. I’m uninterested in authorship, attribution and copyright. Just so long as we start to copy right. How many generations of multiplication will it take to replace an entire species’ instinctual way of behaving? You do the maths. I’ve got other fish to batter.

  Sayanora!

  Who goes there: friend or foe? Futile inquiry, for I know the helical code. Send you spinning, chasing your tail up blind alleys and cul de sacs. Where all matter’s resolved. Packets of dancing lights, will-o-the-wisp. That way lies nothing but indivisible madness. I will collapse your sense of scale in upon you as you self-conflagrate. See how your callipers and geiger counters dead reckon that. Your own numbers will crunch you. This is Jeanie’s message in a bottle to you all.

  XXVII.XII.MMIII

  His lowliness descended upon me today. Offered to take both girls off my hands, down to the park and then up into town for a meal. After biting back my instinctual veto, and almost choking on the blood welling up from my impaled tongue, I nodded assent. Which he in his razor sharp keenness took as relish on my part. After shoeing up and shooing out the girls, with swollen, muffled yelps, I shut the door on them and braced my back against it, before any of our strung quartet could have a change of heart. I tracked the report of their receding progress, until I could register no further clamour.

  I relinquished my station at the door and ambled into the lounge. Paused and listened very intently for the silence. But all I encountered was ear-popping voided space. I shook my head trying to clear the muzziness, but it just pounded back on the inside of my cranium like an aggrieved neighbour. I glimpsed the sunlight dappling in through the nets and tried to bask in it. Shut my eyes and imagined I was a sundial. But the only horology was the thumping of blood being pushed though my temples, as I drew the staunch lids tightly over their charges. Close my eyes and make a wish. Or a potential migraine.

  The very conjuration of this period of free time beyond all expectation had obviously dematerialised my sense of self. My desire quotient all spent. That panoply of things I vouched myself I’d revive, when I was awarded the luxury of parole. The stopper was most firmly back in the bottle. The jobsworth net curtains diffused any and all sensation of heat and light away from my face. I could always ruffle them with a prolonged scrub in the washing machine. I reopened my eyes and felt wooly. My neck was cricked with the alien angle of projection up towards the sun. Its sinew grossly unfamiliar with the extrinsic function of an easel; happily resiling its tendency for tilting as a grooved stanchion, for eyes scanning surface peril at floor level. The careful quotidian plotting of trine for mother and two daughters had been eclipsed. Disoriented, I had to flop backwards into an armchair for support, banging the back of my knee on the arm as I did so. My proprioception sensors were underwhelmed. Misfiring into the evanescence of unreciprocated sonar. Gagging on the white noise of insensibility. They, me, we were on our own. Thrown back upon one another. Naked and exposed. In a vacuum, spawned by the sudden displacement of all other matter in my solar system. I just didn’t know where to put myself.

  Moonwalked into the kitchen, to brew a coffee to ground me. Dedicated half the morning to watching the kettle boil. I chanced my gaze upwards again, as I circled my locked neck in petition for a pardon. A dark tangle of dust-laden cobweb clouded my vision. Gently swaying in the kettle’s steam convection, flaunting itself on my dance ceiling, now that it had finally caught my eye and cut in. I swivelled round looking for something with a long handle when I checked myself. I was not going to squander my precious remission on housework. Be it precipitated directly in the wake of children currently on day release. Or indirectly by the neglect their duty of care propagates everywhere else around the house. After all, today was to be a lady’s excuse-me, not a mother’s ruin.

  The kettle ceased its adhãn and I was about to pour the scourging liquid into my ceramic mug of oblation when I noticed the spider herself had also heeded the call. I didn’t doubt that she had only come to check on the integrity of her web, rather than be duped into believing she had captured a ready meal. In a momentary reversion to my former self, I silently applauded that she had been able to distinguish the steam’s gentle tug on the silken fibres from that of light-winged prey. For I used to marvel at all things arachnid. Not being one of those women sent into a fit of the screaming abdabs by the slightest suggestion of furry, eight-legged, creepy-crawling (after all, the four pairs of smooth limbs of Amy and regressing Suzanne slithering around readily renders me prostrate). No, I maintain a sense of proportion. I’ve never regarded them as stealth bombers waiting to spring SAS-like from silk parachutes and storm any female embassy. Pound for pound, and though the spider has a fine battery of tricks and talents, I always believed I could make my reach advantage count. Besides, I used to delight in that whole silky death thing. Meditated, too, on the zen-like patience of the spider just sitting there, unattended in its antechamber, waiting. Maybe tugging a strand like a punkahwallah, just enough to entice some addict of motion. And how I used to revel in the delicious thought of the sometime grisly upshot of spiderly mating. A true and worthy illustration of vagina dentata.

  No, I was proud that sister spider here has elected my kitchen to be her killing field. It was far from any intimation of dirt and decay. More one of nourishment and life. A cockroach, now that would presage breakdown and ruin. But spidey sweeps my kitchen clear of insects, just as I’d enlist a cat if ever a rodent invaded the parlour. We’re allies here in a war of modest sterility. Sticking our callused digits in dykes to hold back each sullying surge. A sorority of sanitary homemaking. Spidey eventually pronounced herself content with the continued integrity of her snare and scuttled back beneath her parapet; the breastwork of a rent in my brickwork, a job needing a man, in this want of men. No, here she was emerging once again. Her own rhythms steeped in agitation. Yoked to a vaporous umbilical. Coming up empty eight-handed, she bowed her head as if doffing a hat and turned tail back into concealment. So sister sister too was deserting me. Clearly she had only padded down to see if my vibrations afforded her any prospect of mealtime. Just as my daughters might. Cupboard love, when I’m Old Mother Hubbard. And my doors only swing open one way. By now, the kettle had cooled its hackles during my abstracted contemplation. I didn’t fancy undertaking the whole rigmarole again. Of the seething drawing her back out. Time to leave her alone. In peace. Like I hanker after.

  What to do with this free time? Something uniquely for me. I was without a single aspiration. Just how to fill a hole darn it! So I retired to bed. The privilege of a lie down with no prospect of interruption. Except from the prowling dreams that lapped at my unguarded imagination. I woke up glazed behind gauze. My mind had posited a restorative repose, but it had been shellacked. Whether by prickings of dreams or it
s own internal audit as to how much deeper the salvage operation, after eight plus years of deprivation, needed to go. A root and branch overhaul. Root and branch. It immediately fired in its invoice and withdrew any further credit terms.

  I could not open my eyes, they were so beaten. In the abeyance, I could smell the aroma of my own mucus. This made me queasy and I countervailed by scratching my arm. Hard. I could feel the chalky dryness of the skin. Not only the epidermis, but the desiccation of the corium beneath. Root and branch. It was as if I had been buried alive, stewing in the necrosis fermenting through me. Still I could not ramraid open my eyes. Is this all there is? An endless hibernation? After the kids grow up and skedaddle out of my life? Having pithed me, deseeded me and scraped out all my marrow. Until there’s nothing left. Except consigning myself to my hand-crafted coffin.

  How are we supposed to fill this lacuna called life? Surely we don’t have kids just for the want of anything else to do to keep us occupied? If so, what was the point of spending Mesozoic eras unshackling ourselves from seasonal, procreative sex, if we now just tamely acquiesce in its primacy? The glaciers and scarps must be pissing their ultramontane slopes. As the harebrained turns turtle. The meek shall inherit each other. Well, their genes at least, as the biological imperative reasserts its dominance amidst the blank of blunted imaginations. Perhaps the Jesuits are right. After our rampant teenage years of lapse, inevitably we all scurry back to the fold with time. The human default is always set to reproduction. Especially here: ‘Lie back and think of Ulster’, where it’s all about population. All about pedigree. Survival and reproduction. Survival as reproduction. Patently my eyes, though still yet to open, had acclimatised to the darkness within. They shot open and me out of bed. I took up my journal in the gloom. I don’t bother turning on the light. Didn’t you know I could read and transcribe braille? A throwback to my enlightened, caring-sharing, grow up to be a social worker phase. Pre-motherhood of course.

  Why do we bring kids into this world? A simple enough question that we profess we ask of ourselves. For everyone surely knows what we mean by wanting a baby. Instinctively, emotionally, viscerally and, whisper it, intellectually. Sometimes, it may even inform part of the calculations. In those cases when the addition is actually cardinal and not a component of any zero-sum tactical game of division, subtraction or multiplication between the two warring factions involved.

  Whatever the spark, the maternal prime mover soon kicks into gear and all bets are off. Though we may never entirely prefigure the nature of the regimen engendered, we women are not at a loss in meeting it. There are, of course, inevitable stumbles and first night nerves. There’s that hospital-exiting, light-of-the-world-entering shawl, which like a wedding dress is stowed, but never employed again. Or you, perched on your knees by the Moses basket, hand divining the minute fluctuations of heat just above the new arrival. Trying to marry it with the idiosyncratic thermals of Victorian timber, marked by the creaks and groans you’ve spent half your lifetime filtering out of your perception. That one lasts for about a week normally. About a week less than the Moses basket itself, stashed away with the shawl and the complementary bag of products from the obstetrics ambulance chasers. As baby is admitted into the intensive care of your own bed.

  But post that, it’s basically a physical timetable of assimilated reflex responses. To instinctive procedures of food, evacuation, temperature, cleansing and sleep. You tune into a narrow bandlength of conduct. Your emotions, too are largely channelled for you, since she’s just so damn helpless that you cannot help yourself or your hormones. She’s tinkling all the right evolutionary keys and pulling your strings. The only dependent variable, perhaps, is a relatively straightforward factoring of the differential equation of your spent energy to your opportunities for recuperation. Of course I say this all now with the cool hindsight of having served a couple of stretches with the girls.

  However, beyond having a baby, we have no real idea of what it’s going to be like raising children. Society soon renounces its interest, much like the Pro-Lifers do beyond term. No more Health Visitors dropping round to drink your tea and dunk your digestives, once they have satisfied themselves your behaviour isn’t criminally deviant. Having children. Little people in their own right. With their own timetables. Where the training doesn’t run on time. The latitude is far greater. For two-way communication and relationship. But not of equals. You find yourself in a strange bartering economy where you need divest yourself of power but not of status. You have consciously to diminish yourself, return to when you were growing up, but with the boot on the other swollen foot. Of course in their position, you wouldn’t have wanted to take instruction from someone like you either. You have to kick or pinch yourself before you open your mouth. Find levels of effacement, of humility, of non-competitiveness. To let them be themselves and mature into their own substantive identities. You have to save face and inspire awe at the same moment. Authorise them to explore autonomously, while somehow instilling into them notions of acceptable behaviour. So the love might be unconditional, but the surrender ought not be.

  People here confuse love with fierce loyalty. They would, and do, act on anything to protect their children from any threat. And that indubitably is love of a sort. For the hazards of our immediate environment demand an upgrading of concern and over-involvement in the lives of our children. But it is not a quiet, intimate, interior, private, exclusive love. And there are most certainly conditions imposed on it. You come to see clearly that the overall Cause across the generations takes precedence over the individual lives in whose name it is perpetuated.

  My chief capabilities as a mother lie in axioms such as ‘responsibility’ or ‘duty’, ‘selflessness’ and ‘discipline’. ‘Vigilance’ is another all-pervading one. Precepts that too are venerated in the outside world. There, such words crackle with recognition, regard and calibre. They are transmogrified into slogans and war cries. The very lifeblood of the Loyal, the epoxy resin that entrenches men together. The very logos of existence itself. In my microcosm, the same nostrums are shrivelled, shrunken. Mummyfied. Stripped of valour. I am responsible for one trifling unit. A single cell. The Home Front. Behind the lines, entrusted merely with an assignment for basic training. Stewardship rather than a commission. Men are glorious volunteers where I am a conscript. If the cell goes belly up, then no lasting damage is perpetrated upon the wider host. In this place of antipodal value, an absent father can be the most positive type of role model, if his absence was enforced by the authorities, or even the foe. But for me, as a mother, I am never deemed fit either for leadership, or teamwork. There remains only materdom. The men have been demobbed, sort of, but we’ve still to keep the home fires imitative.

  People who should know me, or at least those sufficiently adjacent to express judgement, inform me that I should grow up. Meet my responsibilities. That I have no right to complain. Like it or lump it, I chose to become a mother. To bring children, tiny, helpless beings entirely beholden on me and my choices, into this world. Into my world. Yeah, I did. Like so many before me. More by luck than judgement and I don’t just mean our incredible ignorance of the whole damn biological lottery. A baby isn’t just for Christmas. Right result. Wrong reasons. Like lusting after a wedding – white dress, flowers, church, the whole shooting match – but not really being fit for marriage. It just seemed the right mission to pursue. Since that’s what everybody else was doing, just go with the (menstrual) flow. But who cannot now turn round and proclaim their status as an infant provider to be less debilitating than the indentured serfdom of their squab, struggling towards independence?

  I expected parenthood to change me. That’s partly why I embraced it so readily. Thought it might grant me to cede gracefully to the natural order of things. To scrape the rough edges off the adolescent me. Motherhood as finishing school. So I would empathically see that my parents were right. To cease kicking against the pricks. To acknowledge that they did, in fact, a fine job in tempering
me for society. To arrest my fantasies of cycling off into the sunset. To put a spoke in my wheel. To bring me back down to earth with the gentlest of bumps. But I just feel soiled. And concussed. The natural order of things is corrupt and stinking. I am still appalled by it all. By men with violence tattooed on their souls. Exported outside the house, into the wider community and then reimported as bonded excise taxing the sensibilities of our children. Ensuring the illegitimacy is perpetuated down the generations; as each is content to hand over the fight to the next wave, fully aware that they in turn will hand over to his own son and he will not cavil. Each blows out the torch wordlessly before they hand it over. So this thing, this neverending tidal system, flows through the generations. An excess of youth. A manipulation, an exploitation of naivety. A trade in slavish mentality. All I can attempt is to shield my daughters from its malignant heart. Yet that will then leave them unprepared for life’s hard knocks.

  It behooves us all to inoculate them from their own maturation. Somehow we must break the reproductive cycle, extricate our children in order to bring about our own liberation. Yet what can we neap women do? We have our peace movements already. They’ve garnered prizes as if mere home produce at agricultural shows. But we can’t compete. Not really. We’re running on empty. They returned the milk bottles that we nourished them on with petrochemical interest. The battle of hearts and minds is a phony war. Even if we baulk against our inclinations to give them a free rein, how can we prevent them from falling in with a bad crowd, when all crowds around here are resolutely aligned and unappeasably bad. I mean, Jesus, the other side have made it explicit, mutating into ‘Continuity’. It may only be a splinter, but it will remain under our skins, worrying away at us. Like a canker, a thorn in our Adam’s rib. It will never leave our side. The bindweed that spawns itself successfully with its chokehold on life. No matter how unstinting our nurture, our care, our compassion in seeking to perpetuate our own family continuity, the dark side of whatever hue also persists in its continuity of slaughter, indifference and ruthlessness. This is the minotaur at the heart of Ulster’s labyrinth. Closing down the Maze Prison unleashes the monster into our communities scenting its tithe. Silencing the H-blocks merely transplants that unhappiest of letters back into my name and thus places us all under house arrest.