Every town has one. Or one at the very least.
A patch of unhallowed ground. Some forlorn stretch of shattered tarmac. The pockmarked wasteland.
Terrain once staked out by man, now ceded by him. Bereft of signature jetsam, the condoms, syringes and empty rotgut bottles indicative of an agonised withdrawal.
Yet within an urban jungle, Nature does not make so bold as to reassert her dominion. Dereliction's removal men seemingly having thrown petrifying dust sheets over these fixtures and ill-fittings. The mosaic of the pulverised concrete, akin to the pebbledash cast of the surrounding building walls. As if the scene has been turned on its side. Even rootless litter appears to have been nailed down in permanent display. Blown from pillar to post, this particular spot has been deemed refuse's final blotching place. A potters field for the non-biodegradable. Devoid of potters and any living organisms at all.
Notionally delimited by the chain-link fence. But the border is indeterminate, for the fence has been trampled down. The negative space between the twisted metal links presents the only barrier now. Bayonet reeds jutting through these apertures. Chlorophyll halberdiers, braided with nettles and brambles sagging under their load of barbs and thorns. Sapper tripwires for where no feet ever tread. Tributary Nature's token conscription all present and correct, yet unable to advance any further. Held in suspended animation, just like the metal and brick all around. There is no nourishment to be derived here.
Wooden palettes charred from hosting obsolete fires. All colour long bled into their black hearts. Yet still this is not the predominant hue tugging the eye's apprehension. Jagged scars of livid brown rust uncannily funnels all sightlines. Oil drums, drainpipes, corrugated roofs, each a corroded excremental brown. Shed flakes like metal dandruff speckles the ground.
A brick building with entrance boarded up and all its windows put through. Thick gobbets of crystallised glass, a sheet laminate atop the torn up concrete. Razor wire lines the low roof. Strips of fabric and plastic bags snagged on its barbs ought to billow in the disdainful drafts, but they too are pinioned fast.
Aloft the building, a boxy metal housing. An air conditioning unit or electrical generator. Here where nothing respires, nor is any drawing of energy invoked. The caged blades are fossilised, like silted anchors dredged from the sea. Clamped to the building's walls, some outsized toy duct piping. Terminating in a chimney of simple geometric lines, a scaled down version of a watchtower at Auschwitz.
In among all this stasis, there is yet one outpost of movement. At the very verge of vision, something flaps fitfully, with just the faintest of feathery deviation from the rigid and the upright. Playing breeze-borne peek-a-boo from behind an unencumbered fence post, a bouquet of cut flowers. Desiccated. Mummified. Lifeless like everything else in this rubblescape. A fitting tribute to that other importation. The murdered little boy dumped here yesterday, today or last month. The forsaken living memory here can't quite recall.
Every town has one. One at the very least.
Thursday, 20 May 2010
Friday, 14 May 2010
Sunday, 9 May 2010
C °C - A life in a hundred words
ConceptionChemical
Concatenation
Cellular
Conglomeration
Caesarian
Commencement
Cradled
Cherub
Cosseted
Childhood
Carefree
Confraternity
Cadet
Certification
Collegian
Capers
Clownish
Corybantic
Cocksure
Cronies
Credentials
Corporate
Cartesian
Clockwork
Careerist
Commuter
Competitive
Calculating
Casuistry
Clinical
Conforming
Consummate
Cornucopia
Colleen
Courtship
Coupling
Completion
Candlelit
Caress
Charm
Ceremony
Cummerbund
Consummated
Connubial
Customary
Consuetude
Cloying
Contemptuous
Chore
Caged
Champing
Compulsion
Concupiscence
Cheating
Covert
Careless
Cocaine
Cavalier
Chancre
Caught
Confrontation
Conciliatory
Castigated
Condemnatory
Culpable
Candid
Callous
Charade
Casualty
Cant
Conceited
Covetous
Cacoethes
Carnal
Corrupt
Cataclysm
Check-up
C
Corporeality
Contemplative
Conversion
Covenanted
Campaigner
Celibate
Cathartic
Charitable
Consoling
Counselling
Compassionate
Content
Cessation
Cadaver
Cerecloth
Casket
Catafalque
Crepuscular
Cold
Culmination
Cursory
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Fairground Attraction
Husband and wife duellists whetting their custom weapons. As usual neither has any Seconds, no one to rein them in and make them see sense. No feud-fatigued child savant to bang their infantile heads together. Ding ding, seconds out, round on one another. Roll up, roll up. His tongue rolls the acidic spitball around the crevices and cavities of his mouth. Shaping and casting the verbal stilettos. Honing the precise dimensions of the intended words. Filing and grinding against his teeth. Ready to launch and thrust. The palate sheath withdraws, the acuity primed to cut
To the quick, yet not to the core. As in any quarrel, the aim is to wound but not fell. To pin down without impaling. To notch the unimpeachable point of an argument, not to clinch a lifetime of detestation. Delicate balance and distribution of point and edge. He fixes on aiming for that ridiculous kiss curl that mocks him from between her eyes. If he could snag that particular quintain, she would perforce have to tug her forelock and concede. Of course there is so much petrochemical gunk lining her head already, a single loose spark emitted from his cold metal barb...
And she too is firing up her arsenal. Liquid accelerant lapping around her quivering mouth, working up the necessary flammability. To go incendiary on his hind quarters. Arse! This was going to be a big time blow up. Lardy! Quarter neither asked for nor given. And so it begins. Cocktease!/ Cockfeather!He lashes her to the revolving wheel in his mind's eye. Echoes of historical Inquisitions. When stilled, it facilitates his aim, training his trajectory along sharp lines for honed blades. But when that gash of a mouth of hers has built up sufficient steam, spinning wildly so she becomes nothing but a blur, a whirl of perpetual motion, he is charged with a far more hazardous plunge. She becomes a girandole of complete unreason. Snuffing out all further susceptibility. The pommels of his verbal daggers flapping with cartoon reverberations, having missed their mark. Dabbing uselessly in the air, like the snapped limb of an animal
She has her fire started now. Eternal conflagrations billow from the everlasting brimstone of her forge. Freshly quarried by her blistering tongue, seeking to spit-roast him for quarry. Her fierce heat singes his eyebrows. He hefts another knife to slice through the air at her heart. Cockroach!/ Coward! / Vermin! / Dung beetle!
His salivary salvo is unleashed. Whore! Meets hers head on. Limp dick! His words condense in her heat, vaporised with a tutting hiss of steam. His cutting edge tempered. Temper, temper, you're showing your hand. You got nothing Mr Limp wrist. That quenches him. Brittle now. Well you'd know, you wrote the book on temperamental. With the emphasis on the 'mental'. Temper, a double-edged word. Fit for an outburst, an unhinging of passion such as this. But also a mollifying, a soothing. A middle way.
Blunted, forced back by the heat, he must acknowledge the middle way to be her way for today. From knife thrower to sword-swallower. Forcing him to eat his own words. Falling on his own sword. Maybe not, a final parry possible; Make-up sex? he tentatively proffers.
She glares him down in flames.
Passion's big top blown for another evening.
This story appears in my first Amazon Kindle collection
Click on this for a troubling video of a knife throwing mother...
Thursday, 22 April 2010
Cinderella's Crystal Tips - Friday Flash
His ex-wife used to say you could tell a lot about a person by their shoes.
But then Cindy hailed from the Imelda Marcos stripe of finishing school.
He himself preferred to gauge by the fingers. It's said that the whorls and swirls on them are a unique colophon. But he felt even that missed the obvious. How people wielded their extremities, was the full embodiment of their very being. How they felt the world. Truly they were pointers in the purest sense. Analogue digits. Digital analogues.
A slender few were too dainty to span him. A further spread aped callipers, surveying him like a piece of cartography. A handful, just a handful, were bucket-like, making him feel akin to clay manipulated beneath a potter's hand.
Some were clammy. Others desiccated and cracked, rasping him like sandpaper. A sprinkling smelled... divine and fair carried him away in his senses. But that only beguiled him away from his true requirement. Certainly it was a transportation that he quested after, yet to far different a destination.
There were those with long, delicate fingers. Like the veins of a leaf. Piano players all, lightly brushing his skin ivory. A caress with the pad only, as if it were an invertebrate creature lacking for the articulation of any bone within. The merest dab of pressure, apologetically excusing its trespass even as it limned it.
Then there were those with manicured talons. Fingers always part curled at the knuckles, driving the varnished keratin in to break the surface of his flesh. Being stroked like a penitent with a fraying lash. If it were mere scourging and blood he sought after, he could always shave himself with a cheap razor. Those festooned and bedecked with jewellery amounted to the same. He had no desire to be cut and polished by the facets of gemstones. Or worse, those outsized rings that ran the length between the two knuckles from midfinger to fist. Those that inevitably branded his skin with their cold steel, like a lancet. Yet their bearers were also inevitably the most ardently amenable to his need.
Others had nails bitten to the quick. Simulacra stigmata of anxiety, signposting a likely lack of conviction to carry through his request to the full. Up close, he could see those cuticles still rimmed and tainted with old nail polish. They made him feel nauseous, as he could not allow their imprecision near his exactitude demanding flesh.
For there was only ever one reach, one scope, which would fit the crystal dimensions. Match the whorls and swirls of the livid throttle outlines left by his ex-wife's diamond-like grip. Before she left him in disgust at his lily-livered weakness. No other woman could stop up his breath quite like Cindy.
But then Cindy hailed from the Imelda Marcos stripe of finishing school.
He himself preferred to gauge by the fingers. It's said that the whorls and swirls on them are a unique colophon. But he felt even that missed the obvious. How people wielded their extremities, was the full embodiment of their very being. How they felt the world. Truly they were pointers in the purest sense. Analogue digits. Digital analogues.
A slender few were too dainty to span him. A further spread aped callipers, surveying him like a piece of cartography. A handful, just a handful, were bucket-like, making him feel akin to clay manipulated beneath a potter's hand.
Some were clammy. Others desiccated and cracked, rasping him like sandpaper. A sprinkling smelled... divine and fair carried him away in his senses. But that only beguiled him away from his true requirement. Certainly it was a transportation that he quested after, yet to far different a destination.
There were those with long, delicate fingers. Like the veins of a leaf. Piano players all, lightly brushing his skin ivory. A caress with the pad only, as if it were an invertebrate creature lacking for the articulation of any bone within. The merest dab of pressure, apologetically excusing its trespass even as it limned it.
Then there were those with manicured talons. Fingers always part curled at the knuckles, driving the varnished keratin in to break the surface of his flesh. Being stroked like a penitent with a fraying lash. If it were mere scourging and blood he sought after, he could always shave himself with a cheap razor. Those festooned and bedecked with jewellery amounted to the same. He had no desire to be cut and polished by the facets of gemstones. Or worse, those outsized rings that ran the length between the two knuckles from midfinger to fist. Those that inevitably branded his skin with their cold steel, like a lancet. Yet their bearers were also inevitably the most ardently amenable to his need.
Others had nails bitten to the quick. Simulacra stigmata of anxiety, signposting a likely lack of conviction to carry through his request to the full. Up close, he could see those cuticles still rimmed and tainted with old nail polish. They made him feel nauseous, as he could not allow their imprecision near his exactitude demanding flesh.
For there was only ever one reach, one scope, which would fit the crystal dimensions. Match the whorls and swirls of the livid throttle outlines left by his ex-wife's diamond-like grip. Before she left him in disgust at his lily-livered weakness. No other woman could stop up his breath quite like Cindy.
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Designated Driver
My mentor (tipster?) at the online wine club is on the phone to prompt me about the beaujolais nouveau. I thank him for his diligence and tell him I’m already on the case as it were. That for once, I had undertaken my own steps to secure a token sample from a local vintner’s. The insufflation down the line remained admirably even, when I explained how my circumstances only required a single bottle rather than the case he was offering.
Though this was one call I didn’t mind taking, I had assumed he would have a plethora of tinkling to address in this red letter week. Yet there were no swallowed exhalations evincing an indication of wanting to get off the line. Seemingly, since he was presently engaged on his quarterly communion with me, (as covenanted by a tick box), he felt obliged to transfuse a customary splash of his erudition. And since I carelessly remarked how I couldn’t see what all the palaver was about, we had become embroiled in a rather ill-matched debate on the fanfare reserved for the B.N. “... Of course it’s not the same as leaping in your vintage sports car and motoring down to the vineyards to ensure you took possession of it in advance of all your fellow countrymen. Entering into the venturesome spirit of it as it were ...”
Even if only to the tune of one bottle, I began to ruminate on why indeed I had succumbed to the marketing campaign, (the pop-art labels, one shade shy of dayglo), trumpeting a brash ceremonial honouring of the new crop. “It’s a light frivolous wine,” - (no, actually it’s scarce better than gargling with mouthwash) –“gulped in a festive ambience rather than quietly savoured” (why go to the trouble of chilling it then, apart from making the bloody thing palatable in the first place?)
Here he is, half tour-guide, half landscape artist, using that mellifluous tongue of his to conjure up the dreamy world of the grape, so that I encounter it in its habitat rather than vice versa. Yet I have no particular yen to inhabit these places. I am not about journeying or discovering. Simply the convenience of having bulk, quality vintages, delivered at sizeable discount right to my front door. No more hauling bags of wine, distending my arms like an orang utang, the handles staunching the blood in my fingers like pillywinks. They’ve sold me on it already, after all I’m a subscriber am I not ? I don’t need any aspirational hook, for all this maven’s sensuous patter.
Certainly, part of my life involves imbibing, but I don’t intend to make a career, or a life, out of it. Sum and substance, I favour half a bottle of wine with my meal of an evening. Together with the food, I find it revivifying after the day at work here and any other disappointments requiring to be washed away. Yet I found it also has an inbuilt sedative to conduct me, with sufficient a strike rate as to make it worthwhile, into an uncontested sleep by midnight. Thereby allowing me to thread myself back into circadian life cycles. Hats off to any produce that can harvest that. Only I don’t like plonk. Call me a snob, but that’s just my gustation for you. And no, I wasn’t ever reared on the quality stuff either.
So it is not an asseveration of life, rather an antidote to it and its adulterations. BN day, supposedly toasts and heralds my new resolve, pre-empting the officially plighted one for the turn of the year. Mouthwash and then hogwash. For I can’t see anything realistically changing about my life. I could of course always just tell him this and thank him for his glorious but vain efforts. But I don’t. It helps pass a particularly slow afternoon in the office.
“Infusing the bouquet assails one’s senses. The pleasure zones scaled, each endorphin being delightfully tweaked by the grape’s grappling hooks, that lead it by its microscopic hooter. Expectantly anticipate the expectoration. Like the second coming of the sensory overload which it will inevitably form. That tidal inrush across the Hellespont of the tongue, driving inexorably toward the Pharos Lighthouse of the uvula, when with a teasing double declutch on the rudder of the jawbone, Bacchus’s marines instead wash up against your buccal shoreline. Scylla reflexively clenches her labial inlet and peforce Charybdis whirls the waves. In the choppy shallows, every inch of one’s mucus membrane becomes inoculated with the liquid nectar. Your palate fructified with the ancient lifeblood of the vine; your palette cleansed and ready to redraw the world afresh. The sap having performed its consecration, ought then to be expelled from the mouth, leaving one intoxicated even though a single drop is yet to enter the bloodstream”.
Oh he’s good alright. Apart from the wine being tailored for my tastes, was his delivery bespoke too? Could he truly be inside my head and mine alone, or was he routinely like this with all female club members according to their declared profiles? And the men too?
What did he get out of it, surely not just a desiccated coneyance of a shared liquid passion? To what end? Right now, that disembodied voice down a phone line, has a closer rapport with me than anyone else in the world. A subversive intimacy. He has less direct access than say my dentist, yet how skillfully he ingresses into the input of my mouth. He knows how to tickle and knead my tastebuds. In short, he palpates me, like ants to aphids. At the remove of a phone cable. And for his part, does he drink in any nourishment from me? What the deuce am I secreting down the line?
Though this was one call I didn’t mind taking, I had assumed he would have a plethora of tinkling to address in this red letter week. Yet there were no swallowed exhalations evincing an indication of wanting to get off the line. Seemingly, since he was presently engaged on his quarterly communion with me, (as covenanted by a tick box), he felt obliged to transfuse a customary splash of his erudition. And since I carelessly remarked how I couldn’t see what all the palaver was about, we had become embroiled in a rather ill-matched debate on the fanfare reserved for the B.N. “... Of course it’s not the same as leaping in your vintage sports car and motoring down to the vineyards to ensure you took possession of it in advance of all your fellow countrymen. Entering into the venturesome spirit of it as it were ...”
Even if only to the tune of one bottle, I began to ruminate on why indeed I had succumbed to the marketing campaign, (the pop-art labels, one shade shy of dayglo), trumpeting a brash ceremonial honouring of the new crop. “It’s a light frivolous wine,” - (no, actually it’s scarce better than gargling with mouthwash) –“gulped in a festive ambience rather than quietly savoured” (why go to the trouble of chilling it then, apart from making the bloody thing palatable in the first place?)
Here he is, half tour-guide, half landscape artist, using that mellifluous tongue of his to conjure up the dreamy world of the grape, so that I encounter it in its habitat rather than vice versa. Yet I have no particular yen to inhabit these places. I am not about journeying or discovering. Simply the convenience of having bulk, quality vintages, delivered at sizeable discount right to my front door. No more hauling bags of wine, distending my arms like an orang utang, the handles staunching the blood in my fingers like pillywinks. They’ve sold me on it already, after all I’m a subscriber am I not ? I don’t need any aspirational hook, for all this maven’s sensuous patter.
Certainly, part of my life involves imbibing, but I don’t intend to make a career, or a life, out of it. Sum and substance, I favour half a bottle of wine with my meal of an evening. Together with the food, I find it revivifying after the day at work here and any other disappointments requiring to be washed away. Yet I found it also has an inbuilt sedative to conduct me, with sufficient a strike rate as to make it worthwhile, into an uncontested sleep by midnight. Thereby allowing me to thread myself back into circadian life cycles. Hats off to any produce that can harvest that. Only I don’t like plonk. Call me a snob, but that’s just my gustation for you. And no, I wasn’t ever reared on the quality stuff either.
So it is not an asseveration of life, rather an antidote to it and its adulterations. BN day, supposedly toasts and heralds my new resolve, pre-empting the officially plighted one for the turn of the year. Mouthwash and then hogwash. For I can’t see anything realistically changing about my life. I could of course always just tell him this and thank him for his glorious but vain efforts. But I don’t. It helps pass a particularly slow afternoon in the office.
“Infusing the bouquet assails one’s senses. The pleasure zones scaled, each endorphin being delightfully tweaked by the grape’s grappling hooks, that lead it by its microscopic hooter. Expectantly anticipate the expectoration. Like the second coming of the sensory overload which it will inevitably form. That tidal inrush across the Hellespont of the tongue, driving inexorably toward the Pharos Lighthouse of the uvula, when with a teasing double declutch on the rudder of the jawbone, Bacchus’s marines instead wash up against your buccal shoreline. Scylla reflexively clenches her labial inlet and peforce Charybdis whirls the waves. In the choppy shallows, every inch of one’s mucus membrane becomes inoculated with the liquid nectar. Your palate fructified with the ancient lifeblood of the vine; your palette cleansed and ready to redraw the world afresh. The sap having performed its consecration, ought then to be expelled from the mouth, leaving one intoxicated even though a single drop is yet to enter the bloodstream”.
Oh he’s good alright. Apart from the wine being tailored for my tastes, was his delivery bespoke too? Could he truly be inside my head and mine alone, or was he routinely like this with all female club members according to their declared profiles? And the men too?
What did he get out of it, surely not just a desiccated coneyance of a shared liquid passion? To what end? Right now, that disembodied voice down a phone line, has a closer rapport with me than anyone else in the world. A subversive intimacy. He has less direct access than say my dentist, yet how skillfully he ingresses into the input of my mouth. He knows how to tickle and knead my tastebuds. In short, he palpates me, like ants to aphids. At the remove of a phone cable. And for his part, does he drink in any nourishment from me? What the deuce am I secreting down the line?
Friday, 16 April 2010
Mirror Portal - Friday Flash
A long involved telephone call. I’m seated on the bottom stair, handset cradled under my chin, giving Amy a draught of flesh top. Suzanne is plucking my arm, but soon takes cognizance of her place in the orchestration. I watch her storm off. Momentarily I hold the phone away from my ear, and pitch for the timpani of small armed percussive reparation. But none is forthcoming. Amy falls asleep and takes my pinioned arm with her. My distressed cabled confessant is chewing my ear off. Yet what rips out and bears aloft my heart, is the petrified image of my eldest daughter’s receding elfin form. Seeing as only empty space now resides in front of me, it’s as if she'd disappeared in a puff of disenchantment.
I wasn’t tracking her down, more trying to clear my head of phone tinnitus. Having decanted Amy from my arm into her cot, I wandered towards my bedroom. I must have glimpsed a dash of colour through the door crack, since I snapped myself back before the threshold. The hue displaced itself once again and unblocked the sliver of light that affords me witness. There she was, sat at my dressing table. In front of my hinged mirror triptych, that gateway to the source of identity. The family omphalos. For I too had sat in front of just such a mirror, a child seeking reassurance of my Mother’s continued existence, when confronting her temporary absence from the house. Jesus wept, suddenly even my pang had a pang of its own now!
My mother’s orderly bedroom with nothing out of place. Everything personal and messy having been buried behind sober, white wardrobe doors. Over the marital bed, fundament of my genesis, a neutral, passionless landscape with a tiny cottage at its heart. ‘I shouldn’t be in here, I shouldn’t be in here’ I inhaled pantingly. ‘I’ll get caught’ I exhaled.
But then my eyes alit on the dresser, with all those personal allures of womanhood. Whisked away by the faint scents and oily emulsions lingering in the air, held in the glass at the forge. The foundry. For all that was feminine. A place of creation, beauty and adornment. I knew I must not approach, to seat myself, to touch. For this was the portal to the forbidden world of boys and sex and once seduced, my soul might be whipped away from me. I would be discovered still sat in this grotto, dusted head to foot in incriminating powders. Guilt and shame battling it out with non-hormonal rouge for incontrovertible confession written upon my cheeks. But I felt the warmth surging through me anyway. Imagining for my mother, a divine trinity illuminated in those three mirrors. Ambrosias and honeys in hand, as she peers in towards the core of her central glass, fluently kindling the two vitreous handmaidens either side with her radiance. Thrice-enhanced, I felt myself equally ordained to enter the world inhabited by my mother and her mother before her. The nine of us stretching back towards infinity.
And now, admittedly at somewhat more of a precocious age, here was my daughter undergoing the very same private initiation. I did what any proud mother would do, I checked that the decor was fitting. I didn’t have such a big heavy dresser as my mother possessed, nor could not even recollect whence I had come by the picture above the bed. The unguents were not as dense as in my mother’s day, but for all their brittleness, I felt still presented a palpable patina with which you could almost gild the walls of the room.
What was she doing exactly? She was bobbing in front of the mirror. Instinctively I pressed my torso back from the door, as she herself cringed back from the purview of the lens. At present I couldn’t get her in focus. Since I’d sat there, both as mother and tremulous daughter, I knew I couldn’t reveal myself and expose her. Yet I had to know precisely what was happening. Fortunately she dipped forward into the dimension of the mirrors again and tugged my frame back to the buffer of the door. Several times we repeated this process as if we were attached by an elasticated umbilical. That we'd never shed the toddler reins.
I gleaned she was ducking in and out of the glass’s survey, as if it was a searchlight. Trawling for a breakout. For escapees and absconders. Fugitives from familiarity. If the beam didn’t sweep you up, it meant that you’d slipped away. If it conjured you in its field, you were held fast and atomised. My daughter was too discerning to want to convene the snarled trinity of me and my mother before me. For here she was, treating the triplicated lenses as if they were sited in a House of Fun. Distorting and reassembling. Distorting and reassembling. Whose genes does she see eyeballing her from within the scope of the looking glass? I just pray that it was only the sloughing of me and my mother that she craves after and not that of her own self. For mirror narcissism is bipolar and self-antipathy gilds one of those foci.
I took my leave. I went into Amy’s room, as if to confer with her that I wasn’t going to fail her as demonstrably I had with Suzanne. She was still in the land of nod. I stood there forlornly, trying to red eye my doting behind her shielded lids. I held there staring, just waiting to harvest the emanations of attachment, but my well seemed either dammed or dried up. Now I really was marooned. Already exiled from my own bedroom, I didn’t want to creep out of here, lest Suzanne hear me and then denounce me for being close enough for spying and yet too distant to be present with her. Something was ricocheting around between me and my daughters, but sure as hell it wasn’t love.
I wasn’t tracking her down, more trying to clear my head of phone tinnitus. Having decanted Amy from my arm into her cot, I wandered towards my bedroom. I must have glimpsed a dash of colour through the door crack, since I snapped myself back before the threshold. The hue displaced itself once again and unblocked the sliver of light that affords me witness. There she was, sat at my dressing table. In front of my hinged mirror triptych, that gateway to the source of identity. The family omphalos. For I too had sat in front of just such a mirror, a child seeking reassurance of my Mother’s continued existence, when confronting her temporary absence from the house. Jesus wept, suddenly even my pang had a pang of its own now!
My mother’s orderly bedroom with nothing out of place. Everything personal and messy having been buried behind sober, white wardrobe doors. Over the marital bed, fundament of my genesis, a neutral, passionless landscape with a tiny cottage at its heart. ‘I shouldn’t be in here, I shouldn’t be in here’ I inhaled pantingly. ‘I’ll get caught’ I exhaled.
But then my eyes alit on the dresser, with all those personal allures of womanhood. Whisked away by the faint scents and oily emulsions lingering in the air, held in the glass at the forge. The foundry. For all that was feminine. A place of creation, beauty and adornment. I knew I must not approach, to seat myself, to touch. For this was the portal to the forbidden world of boys and sex and once seduced, my soul might be whipped away from me. I would be discovered still sat in this grotto, dusted head to foot in incriminating powders. Guilt and shame battling it out with non-hormonal rouge for incontrovertible confession written upon my cheeks. But I felt the warmth surging through me anyway. Imagining for my mother, a divine trinity illuminated in those three mirrors. Ambrosias and honeys in hand, as she peers in towards the core of her central glass, fluently kindling the two vitreous handmaidens either side with her radiance. Thrice-enhanced, I felt myself equally ordained to enter the world inhabited by my mother and her mother before her. The nine of us stretching back towards infinity.
And now, admittedly at somewhat more of a precocious age, here was my daughter undergoing the very same private initiation. I did what any proud mother would do, I checked that the decor was fitting. I didn’t have such a big heavy dresser as my mother possessed, nor could not even recollect whence I had come by the picture above the bed. The unguents were not as dense as in my mother’s day, but for all their brittleness, I felt still presented a palpable patina with which you could almost gild the walls of the room.
What was she doing exactly? She was bobbing in front of the mirror. Instinctively I pressed my torso back from the door, as she herself cringed back from the purview of the lens. At present I couldn’t get her in focus. Since I’d sat there, both as mother and tremulous daughter, I knew I couldn’t reveal myself and expose her. Yet I had to know precisely what was happening. Fortunately she dipped forward into the dimension of the mirrors again and tugged my frame back to the buffer of the door. Several times we repeated this process as if we were attached by an elasticated umbilical. That we'd never shed the toddler reins.
I gleaned she was ducking in and out of the glass’s survey, as if it was a searchlight. Trawling for a breakout. For escapees and absconders. Fugitives from familiarity. If the beam didn’t sweep you up, it meant that you’d slipped away. If it conjured you in its field, you were held fast and atomised. My daughter was too discerning to want to convene the snarled trinity of me and my mother before me. For here she was, treating the triplicated lenses as if they were sited in a House of Fun. Distorting and reassembling. Distorting and reassembling. Whose genes does she see eyeballing her from within the scope of the looking glass? I just pray that it was only the sloughing of me and my mother that she craves after and not that of her own self. For mirror narcissism is bipolar and self-antipathy gilds one of those foci.
I took my leave. I went into Amy’s room, as if to confer with her that I wasn’t going to fail her as demonstrably I had with Suzanne. She was still in the land of nod. I stood there forlornly, trying to red eye my doting behind her shielded lids. I held there staring, just waiting to harvest the emanations of attachment, but my well seemed either dammed or dried up. Now I really was marooned. Already exiled from my own bedroom, I didn’t want to creep out of here, lest Suzanne hear me and then denounce me for being close enough for spying and yet too distant to be present with her. Something was ricocheting around between me and my daughters, but sure as hell it wasn’t love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)