And heart holds no secrets
by Fiona O'Connor
[ fiction - march 10 ]
Age, that's right I think: my most interesting, when I deign to tell -
Grip my bones,
I'll trade you smiles
From the mouth of hell.
It's hot. I lie here: small square of South London carrying me. Sun roasts, draws the last of the juice. I'm nut brown, face and legs. White haired. Am I beautiful? My hair shorn, the raddled face? I wear a shocked expression. It looks back at me from glass: shock or fright. Hard blue eyes. Legs and hands all mottled, all rope work of purple and green under the skin. Beautiful? To the Sun perhaps, as it devours. I lie in its particular beneficence. I'm practicing oblivion. Quiet spectacle: ancient sun seeker, flat out on the grass. Old bird in a tweed skirt. Ankle boots, fur-trimmed: found object let's say. Sometimes I read the newspaper.
Rude health my lot. I drift. Sometimes they wake me. It is night. Around the square the houses are lit. They want to lock the gates. I must go. Confused I reach for my skirts. Standing over me, two men, the watchmen; wardens. Come on now lovely, wakey, wakey. The houses all lit. I'm sent out. At night they come into their own, occupied and lit, lamp lit the drawing rooms. I leave for my own place that is not like this at all.
I've no children.
The earth smells sweet today. The Sun drawing perfumes, slight breeze surprising every so often. Ground is my gondola, I drift. No children - I am child only. My mother wore dresses razor-like. They all did then, as though they were cut-outs. She was my child, I think. My father had no hope. It wasn't the war, although that was bad enough. Pleats he was up against, pencil skirts, glimpses of nylon, lace; he was only a man. My mother, my child, born in a wool crepe fitted dress, heels, stockings, garters, small brassière sanctuary for small breasts. Small breasts filling my mouth.
I wake in the unfamiliar. It is dark, stuffy. Heavy curtains are drawn. Alert then, held under a hot blanket, fathoming estrangement.
Bright road I've come from in dreaming. It is still there, straight road through my mind, a child kicking stones. Moving forwards at ease.
Waking then in a dim disorient. She, missing, and all permission rescinded. I lie between two territories waiting. My eyes at least can look, plot movement, enliven the murk and surface the child of that dream in objects drawn to familiarity: that wooden chair back, its graspable staves and other hide and seek furniture brought to safety, fitfully, and held in the lap of a linoleum floor, all held in the provisional of a closed room. And eyes batten down the terrors. Ears meanwhile detect: Her whereabouts - proximate of possibility - her voice: harbour song of breast, skin, smell; fabric of mainstay.
There are voices. Low soundings, secrets confided behind the closed double-doors, pale sentinels guarding far across the separating blur; two women beyond them and she is there in light, in presence. While here a different dimension holds me. The child has no defence against such a strange hinterland and so it must escape. I follow that imperative.
Laughter too, I can hear it. Women's lowered voices, bright giggles flaring, more fiery for being forbidden. She laughing in another room. What age? I'm seventy-nine now. She? Twenty-seven. A compact, fine beauty in every feature, my child. And she's been dead for seventy years.
It could be any of these houses. Rooms of women, their concealments. Hidden ground of children who will never be, and me, who will carry the secret for seven decades before she tells it, even to herself. How funny. Age is a vast humour. You have only to see it right.
Back to that: my most interesting. Relic, c'est moi. History consigned, shocked glance of it there as I take my place on the blasted heath, minute the gates are opened.
Hag in residence, conventional at first - sits on bench, nothing off-colour there. Notes her boots as though they had just occurred. In time crosses bare leg under pleated tweed. Re-crosses. Notes something notable, middle distant. All normative, pass on.
Quiet moment, turn your back: she's down. Flat out behind a rose bed thinking of wallpaper. Roses squadroned up and down the bedroom walls, up and down. Mad repetition, whoever thought of it? Coldest pink lining her domain. Satin and thorns: bloodless consolation against the turbid day to day.
I sip you know. Private libations in the gin palace of the soul. Then run the reels. Roses, roses everywhere; mother rose open-blooming, daughter closed butt, close by. Over and over, straight-lined rosy regulation.
The child searched for some trick, chink, wink of divergence hiding in a leaf, a bud, hint of a joke or any possibility. No chance. Identical roses, infinite convergence: florality, pink incomprehension! History: do you understand? Are you getting this? Dolts. Daily grind, here, here. I'm at it. Read my face, white hair standing on end - voltage - I've taken it. I am back like Lazarus. You cannot understand my tale? Hah.
But enough of me. She, not me. She in chiffon. Moss-green evening dress, white neck, shoulders against the dark lacquered hair. My father a sand boy. That look she entailed in him: involuntary half smile, rueful but also crucial to his own solace.
On seeing my father
Seeing my mother
In a moss-green
Chiffon dress.
What more to say? Tripartite syllogism: subject (moi) - particular (parents) - Universal (fill in yourselves).
I used to teach, you might at least have gathered that much. Before insanity reached out one day, took hold of me from the mirror I was contemplating; grabbed hold, most forcefully, in fact. I was in the Ladies lavatory actually, quite funny, between a lecture and the hard place of a tutorial. Attending to my face, daubing to no avail. Madness reached out. Powerful strong hands, arms, coming at me, gripping me by the neck, tried to ring it. Found quivering under my desk, gabbling, so they say, therefore, taken away.
No more philosophy then.
My father alone visiting. Frail old man. Till they put a stop to it.
Subject, particular, universal. Moss on stone, crumpled on the bedroom carpet, her dress a sea cloud then. Behind the roses I listened, hearing her moaning, hearing his young man's head-bursting outcry.
O that clay-soft darkness:
Beneath her clothing
Malevolence lurks.
Darkness her sisterhood
She left me there -
Deep lake - fathomless
There I floundered.
In the dark, behind the roses, there I floundered, hearing their together motion. Did they think of me then? ME?
The child's imperative: I went to them, my rutting parents. Went right in as was my prerogative, found them naked in the wreckage.
Withdrew in a hurry - to the bathroom with him. She lay sourly prone. I tried to climb onto her myself. All I wanted: to lie my length on hers. In the lamp-lit bedroom, gloomy bars of roses, mother and child, mother and child.
Rain outside, wet streets banana black under the street lamps.
My father removed from the scene of the crime.
Her warmth beneath mine.
Lying on her, stretched out and not reaching any limit, border, cease.
She said, 'Get off.'
At the quayside, my father, far below, pulled out his white, white handkerchief, wrapped something up in it, threw it into the damp night air. On deck she opened the love knot, found a shiny florin, gave it to me.
'Reciprocity: The child coerces the source towards unconditionality, backwards motion.' Who wrote that? Don't know? Look it up.
Symmetry there: child is sole issue after all, from their conjugations: sole survivor at any rate. Intimates we three - unholy ménage in the Absolute. Banana light had shone just the same on motions conjuring ME, after all.
Out of a rainy night's bedroom-sacred rumping:
extending the jiggedy jig.
Segue to the leery couplet,
mediatory-
ME.
that she just would not see.
In the morning, after he had gone, I'd crawl in to her and if I lay still and she didn't notice I could stay. I'd watch her smoking or just her aimless pondering of the empty window, a steel sky, seagull turning there perhaps, vanishing into its grey. Her hand across her lap. Yawn occasionally, following yawn-tear wiped away.
At night they put me out, locking the gates. I wander counting lampposts, return. There's a root of Blackthorn assists me. I climb up, over the railings. It takes some time, I'm seventy-nine. But I always return. Small square of night: this is my domicile - this square of night, no other.
Shopping List
2 yards apple green satin
1 cake black eyeliner
1 small round mirror
Sanitary towels
Gin
Safety pins
nothing else.
Here lies her archetype; you have her now; you find her in a shopping list. She is all that is missing.
Lying low my highest aspiration since I got out. Demobbed, as I can fondly term it, being now reconfigured, with probity or some such. Moon slips up, sheer peppermint, cool radiance. I can't lie any lower than I am.
She, I see, austere at her morning cold table, thimble glass of gin, cigarette clock in ashtray smouldering minutes in smoke, small mirror half-cracked propped. She, lining her eyes, not seeing their cracked glint.
Moon here Rise to Slow rise
you find slow grin terror
me you your
lying low steady glow trajectory
After she was gone I somehow moved into her place. How to put it? One has to be careful of delicate sensibilities. As Freud noted: sometimes we know not what we know.
Screaming starts and when it does it won't stop, no. You can try as you might, you might try bleach. In the bath, your skin already pale as moonlight. Hamartia, your name. Tip in a bottle or two. Sit down in cold water, Daffy Duck marooned on a reef, scream; you can't hear yourself.
This penny dreadful at the very least must offer up a secret, eh? Yards of apple satin? Moon mirrors? Seventy years of moon-wrapped secrecy, safety pinned? What was it now? Sanitary towels and Gin? Ships in the night? Locked doors, voices, the loony bin? You've come this far after all. Surely the moment for dénouement approaches?
I found her hanging by the neck. Will that do you? Our neighbour broke the kitchen window. He'd always had a fondness for her incidentally. Undid the catch. I being small enough climbed in: footprints all over the pristine Formica. I'd been at the door an hour or two knocking. Not unusual. Through the letterbox, Mama, Mama. Heard the drop, the chair fall. Thought nothing much. Drunken Mama always stumbles always falls. Mamaaah.
Found her feet first, stockings shrivelled round her ankles. She'd never have wanted that. Looked up, Mama.
The pale moon was rising.
If I say grief that just consigns it to a word. I might say the word killed her: demiurge of signs. She who searched for signs in everything. Numbers: warnings, portents. If you see a seven come home straight away, she'd said. I told them I did not. They said it didn't matter. The lunatics have taken the asylum - diagnosis: It Did Not Matter. But I saw seven's everywhere.
Seven swans coming down river
Seven pence in a fat man's purse
I sat with seven monks on a number seven bus
Walked for seven hours
Took seven million breaths
Heartbeats, steps
Across all the oceans - seven.
And did not come back. They said that didn't matter so I moved
into
her
bed.
My father let me
To stop the screams
He said.
In night I found him wanting her. Will this do you?
The moon is a pebble thrown out in the Universe, sucked small by day, replenished in night's cloak. Heigh ho, up she rises, like laughter rising, ease and release, upwards she floats, floats upwards.
Safety pins to hold her down.
