by Lucy Ellmann
Friday
1 Made bed (wished I could get back in).
2 Washed hair.
3 Had flat tyre; got it fixed.
4 Cured headache with paracetamol.
Eloïse wept easily these days. She was about to have a good cry in the car one day when she got a flat tyre. Hoping she could manage not to cry in public, she duly delivered herself and car to the tyre-repair place, got the tyre fixed at small financial expense but considerable of time (while she waited in the rain which was falling horizontally), then took off home. Blessed relief of being alone and homeward-bound. Considered weeping. But halfway home, the same tyre went exceptionally suddenly flat again. Eloïse had to change the wheel herself on a desolate country lane, kicking things a lot, feeling irate and swindled and preparing a tirade. ‘I could have been killed,’ she wanted to say, but she knew nobody cared at the tyre-repair place whether she was alive or dead. So in the end all she said was, ‘I’m very annoyed.’ Got a free tyre anyway. (Success!) While they put it on, she waited in the waiting room, undone by anger and her own bold words. She wondered if she might cry then but was determined not to make a spectacle of herself, there being a spectacle in the waiting room already of a different sort: a young woman wearing leather trousers. Eloïse sat in disgrace, wet ringleting hair and no leather anywhere, trying to stop shaking.
Eloïse had learnt to talk to men of nothing. She even wore her mother’s engagement ring on her old-lady hand so that men would not feel cruelly compelled to mention their wives and girlfriends as soon as they saw her.
So she was appalled when a man winked at her at an auction (she was still looking for bits and pieces of furniture for her cottage). Auctions are usually perfectly good places for hermits. The only eye contact necessary is with the auctioneer, and then only briefly. A hermit can spend a whole day in catatonic stupor at an auction.
So this wink alarmed her. She smiled valiantly, trying to seem adult (?) but crumpled inwardly. She was in such a state of inner torment in fact that she could not look in the man’s direction again for two hours, by which time she’d forgotten what he even looked like — but still feared him. All she knew was that if he winked at her again she might let out some strange cry and/or blush, and/or weep. To cope, she had to convince herself that it had not been a wink at her but perhaps some sort of secret signal to an auction ally behind her. Sufficiently calmed by this assumption to make a bid of her own, she managed to acquire an old shabby mirror in which to look at her shabby old self. No bargain.
Then she was off to the music shop, which she’d never visited before and had been nerving herself to enter for some weeks. She had heard Weber’s Clarinet Quintet, or one movement of it at least, on Classic FM and was determined to hear it again (she was at war with silence). But the shop was too quiet, manned by a seedy bloke sitting behind a desk. She felt like she had intruded on his home — he looked as if he ate and slept in that chair.
He seemed to find her request for a tape of Weber’s Clarinet Quintet odd. But she was used to everything she uttered sounding strange to people, and smiled gamely.
‘Cassette tapes aren’t that easy to get hold of these days,’ he mumbled.
‘Oh, yes, I know,’ she gabbled. ‘I haven’t caught up with the modern era …’
He looked at her piercingly. ‘You ought to come upstairs sometime.’ Then, catching her startled expression, he added hastily, ‘To see our collection of CD players.’
Awful purple-faced struggle to leave her name and phone number after this. She couldn’t have cared less about Weber any more. Best never to leave the house.
Poor ant was hurt,
so bee said they would
live in the house till
ant got better.
Bee put ant to bed
to get better.
Eloïse took her antique clock to the jeweller’s shop to be repaired: it could neither tick nor chime. The clockman took it off to the back room but would not give Eloïse a receipt. That was Not How They Did Things There.
Eloïse thought she could handle this hut later succumbed to terrible suspicions, nervous episodes, bad dreams. How dare he take my clock? My father gave me that clock!…
Distraught but defiant, she finally decided to go back to the shop to see how her clock was doing. She searched the clockman’s face for devious intent while she made polite enquiries after the clock (at least the man was there, and not heading for the nearest port with an irregularly chiming bundle under his arm).
The clockman went to the back room and returned with a huge chunk of inner workings (supposedly from Eloïse’s father’s clock), called the ‘movement’. He then embarked on a lengthy explanation of horological technology that involved a spring breaking, a cylinder warping, bulging and/or cracking, and all in all a tedious conglomeration of metal machinery reaching a sickening and unedifying standstill: the ‘movement’ no longer moved. All due to a terrible shock, a sudden change of temperature at some point in the past. Then Eloïse remembered dutifully putting the clock up in the freezing loft for a while after the neighbours’ burglary. She thought she could hear the boing!!! now of clock springs unravelling in that sad and silent loft …
The clockman asked her for £10 towards the expensive repairs he deemed necessary. But at least she got a receipt for the £10.
Yet she continued to dream of clocks, treachery, and undeserved kindnesses: a cheap imitation of her clock arrives in the post. She storms into the shop to complain about being palmed off with the wrong clock. The clockman (now surprisingly handsome) explains that she’s been sent a temporary replacement as a special honour for valued customers, while her clock is being fixed. Backing away shamefaced, Eloïse starts to apologize, but the clockman then expresses great interest in her clock fixation. He asks gently if it’s anything to do with mortality, or perhaps her biological clock… Now in love with the clockman, Eloïse replies, ‘No … I just thought I was being swindled.’ End of dream.
Eloïse still half-believed all the men in the world were after her worldly possessions.
Owen
Owen dreamed he was being shown around a marine research station, far out to sea. At first the vessel — a hollow cylinder – seemed immobile, though it was being beaten by twenty-foot waves which Owen could easily see through a huge window. Turning, he found the same was happening on the other side, except the waves here seemed if anything fiercer. You could look right into them: they were wild, frenzied, no-man-fathomed, green near the edges, darker inside, and so deep. When they got worse, the cylinder began to rock freely, riding the waves by rolling over on to its side, back upright, then over the other way. Owen was just supposed to endure this!
Ellen was always on the lookout for a better name than ‘Ellen’. She felt her parents had belittled her, had branded her as ordinary, with this dull name (though they had only wanted to give her the roof-over-your-head a familiar name provides). She was forever coming up with new names for herself: Sally one day, Stephanie the next, Sophie, Anastasia, Sarah, Libuska, Myfanwy … Romilly … Some rotated and returned to live another day, long after Owen thought she’d finished with them.
On the way to the auction to purchase a desk for her (if possible), Ellen asked suddenly, ‘Why didn’t you call me Persephone?’
As soon as she said it, Owen began to wonder the same thing — Persephone was the perfect name for Ellen. Why hadn’t they thought of it? Names are awarded with such needless haste before you have any idea of the person you’re dealing with.
‘I hereby rename you Persephone,’ he offered lamely.
Ellen shook her head, even crosser now. ‘That won’t work! Nobody else is going to call me Persephone.’
‘They’ll catch on.’
‘No, they won’t. It’s too late.’
The bus trundled on, Owen grimly hopeless, Ellen hopeful but grim.
Owen’s wife had been reading Moby Dick while pregnant: an ocean inside her. She was determined to finish the book bef
ore giving birth. It took her six months! Finally, the battered paperback on its shelf, waters broke, and a baby with eyes like a whale’s beached itself on the bed: Ellen.
You know how women are always jumping off piers to save their dogs? A Jack Russell or Yorkshire terrier or some other unseaworthy canine creature is swept off a slippery promenade by a freak wave and in her distress and pity the mistress pops right in after it not knowing until she hits the water that her muscles will immediately become numb in the cold and she will have difficulty keeping her head above the swell and the mammoth weight of the water will edge her rhythmically towards the slimy ballasts of the pier and she won’t even be able to see the dog now that she’s level with it. This is reported briefly in the next day’s papers.
It wasn’t that their dog wasn’t worth saving, a gentle fellow who never barked. Of course she couldn’t just watch him drown. At first, though worried, Owen had yelled encouragement from the pier. He recognized that it was inconvenient to get your clothes wet on a Sunday stroll, but she would save the dog and they would hurry home, get a taxi perhaps if they could find one. He would make her a cup of tea with lots of sugar in it and drag blankets down from upstairs to wrap her in. He could even see the steaming cup of tea in his mind, a nice shiny red cup on a red saucer, like a cup of tea from an advert. In fact, it was a cup of tea from an advert they had no red cups and saucers at home! Later, when the fakeness of this image came back to him, he realized he must already have given up hope. But at the time he didn’t know that.
Minutes passed and neither she nor the dog had emerged from under the pier. Hypothermia, he thought. They might have to go to the hospital, just to have her checked out. Holding Ellen to his chest, he ran screaming back towards the shore, begging for help, trying not to trip over on the wet uneven planks. But he no longer remembers this. All he remembers is standing there staring at his wife’s head as she bobbed out of sight under him. It seems to him he did nothing (though what he did was hold Ellen); the memory is frozen at the point when he stood there paralysed, purposeless.
He sometimes wonders now what Ellen must have thought, so silent in his arms. Does she think this is what you do when someone you love is drowning, just stand there?
WHAT ELLEN THOUGHT: She remembers the scene (or thinks she does) from afar. A man and a girl (she doesn’t know she was a baby) stand motionless as a woman sinks into the sea. She doesn’t remember her father running, or the people trying to help, the empty life-ring, her father’s sobs. She’s fallen for his version of events. She only remembers them standing there.
And she thinks they should have done something, not just let her mother go, not just watch her die.
Eloïse
Dear Madam,
I have been informed by my client that there seem to be at least three cats on your premises.
Unfortunately, they are also frequently to be found on or near my client’s property. My client has more than once had the unpleasant experience of coming upon rodent remains. He has found a mouse’s large intestine or duodenum leaking juices into his doormat. This same doormat has also on one occasion been soiled by feline faeces to a diameter significantly greater than that of the deposit itself.
May I inform you that neighbouring gardens are not to be used as an open sewer? Excretions of pets and/or their owners are not to be left on common or neighbouring property.
Yes, my cats shat on the mat. I hate my cats, but I hate the neighbours more. The wife had the cheek once to tell me I don’t look Jewish; people always seem to think this is a compliment.
I started to apologize to her about the cats, but all that came out were the sordid unbearable details of my mother’s death! To the neighbour’s obvious alarm — my guts on her paving stones …
But not to worry. The wound clotted. I shan’t be bleeding all over her again.
I care about no one.
Are all its leaves needle-like?
Do the needles grow singly?
Is the bark soft and spongey?
Does it have an undivided trunk?
Is its fruit berry-like?
Are the cones more or less spherical?
OK, I admit it. I killed my parents. Oh, their GP pitilessly mishandled them, in (curiously) opposite ways: over-zealous with my mother, who only needed to be left alone; stubbornly unmoved by my father, who only needed painkillers. But I killed them, I stood by and watched them decay and did nothing. Watched, while the doctors tinkered with my mother’s body until she could take no more no more doctors and died in order to escape them. Watched as my father drifted into an impenetrable despair. Watched as he took his Nurofen!
I failed them.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
He must have been very angry to leave me like that, without a word. But even my father would not have stayed angry for six years! When I think of that, the guilt lilts a little, this heavy bag of guilt I take with me everywhere. He would not still be angry.
Maybe his suicide had nothing to do with me, maybe it was a wholly personal matter, a final declaration of loathing for the world, not me? A world in which life begins and ends in a hospital full of strangers. Born alone, live alone, die alone. Maybe it was a private matter and I have no right to intrude. Let him have his death. But a daughter should intrude on her father’s death, it is not too much to ask. Instead, I left him to his despair. I have to live with this.
Driving me to the station once, my father had a minor collision with a bus. The bus driver jumped out, full of needless fury, spluttering, ‘All incidents must be reported’, and accused my father of being drunk. My father was dying. He was not drunk.
Are the leaves thick and fleshy?
Are the leaves regularly toothed?
Are the leaves hairy?
Are the lobes rounded?
Is it weeping?
Owen
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure … Consider … the universal cannibalism of the sea …
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
WHAT ELLEN LIKES: Monopoly, Pound Puppies, card games, Cluedo, Chinese food, Pepperami sausages, Start cereal, Barbie dolls, noodles, some pop music, Nancy Drew books, Hitchcock movies, US sitcoms, women’s magazines, horse-riding, a hall light on at night, stability, an electric blanket, all animals.
WHAT ELLEN DISLIKES: her name, sharks, snails, slugs, moths, earwigs (in fact all bugs), dentists, doctors, know-it-alls, scolders, earache, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Flies, White Fang, fox-hunting, her mother’s death, injustice.
WHAT ELLEN HAS: one parent, will-power, tangled hair, teeth (both baby and adult), a diary, a taste for drawing complex rabbit warrens, a baby blanket her mother knitted her, a room full of animal toys (hard and soft), a fear of mortality, alien abduction and burglars, an unappeasable sadness.
All animals lick themselves with love. It’s natural. Owen wished he loved his life a little bit, like a cat who licks herself, imagining life to be worth the effort of upkeep. The cat thinks so.
He’d finally exploded with Ellen. Her illnesses always threw him. He dreaded them. He’d once overheard a mother say that she loved her children most when they were ill, but he found Ellen’s illnesses a provocation. They frequently brought him to the brink of disaster.
She had been ill in bed for two days when he finally tore round the room accusing her of messiness, illness, selfishness. He even railed against her choice of friends (there was one little boy he particularly disliked, who didn’t say ‘please’ and was always asking what time it wa
s). A pathetic scene: healthy man versus small sick girl. Ellen lay there, resigned to her fate, bracing herself against the onslaught, trying not to aggravate him further but none the less flinching irritatingly sometimes when he said something particularly hurtful. The flinching and, underneath it, her resilience, only make him want to yell at her more, to break her.
It scares him. He has to lock himself in the bathroom for fear of encircling her throat with his hands. He longs to kill them both, feels they would both benefit from it! Almost feels he has to do it. He imagines life on the run if he kills only her and not himself, wandering round winter seaside resorts until his money ran out … He paces the bathroom seething, eyeing the key in the door that could release him; pacing back and forth across the blurry bath-mat until he can remember himself, his love for Ellen, his own name.
The outburst has come, as always, out of the blue — terrifying compared to his normal placidity. He returns at last from the bathroom with effortful apologies, which soon descend again into a kind of whine. Everything after this feels risky: he could crush her, break her, with just one more word. She has had enough. Yet everything he says to make up for it still comes out petulant.
Once the storm has passed, they chat more cheerily than usual! Ellen seems astonishingly cheerful, in fact no longer ill. But Owen has had a glimpse of the underworld: scratch the surface of his peaceful, polite demeanour and beneath all is molten guilt, despair, certainty of failure, indifference to life. Or is he just still angry?
You can hate a happy child, want to ruin its day that began so well, reject it, neglect it, break its favourite cup! Their fucking little fears, their endless needs! A child can drive you to the brim of the abyss. If we both died today, you think, it would save the world a lot of trouble. Death, the proof of your inability to love. Death your reward, parenthood your punishment.
You know those women who strap their children into car seats and let the car roll into a lake? You know those men who, in a fit of jealousy over a wife’s infidelity, insist on killing the whole family as well as themselves: knives, poison, exhaust fumes, jumping off Beachy Head with a toddler under each arm? Well, Owen did none of that. He struggled on.
