Noise. Of roaring. Inside a furnace roaring up with a huge burning lion maw to swallow into red heat.
As it subsided she’d been talking on ‘ . . . because I didn’t, honestly, it never entered my head; he said, well, you can prove it. So he took her to the doctor’s and had a blood test.’
Roaring again, blocking her out. Red coming up before the eyes darkening to black. The white speaking senseless face blotted out, then hanging like a puppet gibbering before him. The mouth went on opening and closing, the face contorting, as he watched. She was crying. She was talking. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, David. I didn’t know, I promise you. You can – if you want you can see her – Mark won’t mind – if you want to see her sometimes.’
Without knowing how or where the strength came from he got out of the house, Elizabeth following him and crying at him all the time. At the door she caught his arm and he pushed her back, and stumbled down the steps. She shrank back into the hallway, staring at him. As he turned on to the pavement the corner of his eye was seared by a flash of white hair at the bedroom window.
He had never seen Amanda again. Except secretly, through fences. And the schoolteacher was right. Carry on like that and he’d turn into one of those perverts, be no better than them. Frightening a little girl at the school gate, with the ugly exposure of his crippling love.
Weds. morning
I am telling stories. In a chipboard cupboard of a room six floors up a cement column, with hot dry air and nylon sheets. The room is so full of electricity that I have adapted to walking slowly, avoiding contacts. My hair crackles, the dry skin on my face is peeling. My lip bleeds.
I am here, not there. There are the twins, Paul and Penny, giggling crying slavering slopping their food sucking their thumbs. Paul sobs in his sleep. Penny moans. My babies who have sucked my breasts and grown in my flesh, pieces of me, my belly my heart.
I am sitting six floors up with a window over the motorway to hills; a five-star view in a one-star room. Snow. Total snow, not London snow. Snow on road ditch hill tree roof cloud car field. I am not –
Not a diary not a journal. Not Marion, not a sniff or spit or print of her. In my cement tower (once doubtless white as an ivory but now yellowing grey as decayed teeth, a tower for my times, the days of ivory – like the golden age – being gone) I sit. Sit, wait, woman in a tower. Like Mariana in her moated grange. No, Rapunzel, gone bald. Stuck up a tower for good.
No games. Here. Nylon sheets, lemon. Two blankets, off white. Nylon quilted bedspread, pink floral. Grey fleck carpet. Woodchip off-white walls. Fitted white-wood wardrobe and shelves, white washbasin, and mirror. Bedside coffee table (supporting lamp) of such generous proportions that this exercise of arm and pen is possible. I sit on the floor under the window, back against the bed, legs outstretched beneath the table. Writing on a new block of A4 ruled feint (wide).
Me. No Penny no Paul No Ruth No Vi no Gareth. Me.
Yes, inescapably me. Not Marion, she says. Not a stiff or– But her sniffs and spits are all over David and Amanda. She has pummelled him into shape – hasn’t she? With her hammy fists, he’s moulded and sticky as dough, paddled with the prints of her flat-edged fingers. Listen.
‘He began to long for a child. Not knowingly, but with a dull subconscious pang of loss.’ He didn’t know (she says). But Marion knows. Mother knows what’s wrong before you know yourself. She names the pain. She identifies it, telling herself that thus it can be remedied, later in the story. Suggesting to herself – comforting herself – deluding herself again – that things follow on, make sense, have remedies.
Perhaps she wanted a good wallow. Nothing like someone else’s troubles. Liberally doused with ketchup, with ‘slow burning love’. Great towering passions, in red and black cloaks. She doesn’t feel secure unless she thinks they’re there.
Instead of real things. Little things, that lurk and move quick and don’t make sense. They resist explanation. They won’t stand still to have metaphors hung round their necks like mayoral chains. Quick, dart, lurk. They’ve gone.
Marion. Whatever she writes. She might as well stop now.
Fri. 7
Snow. More snow every day. Many roads are blocked. I thread my way along those that have been cleared; even in frost they remain wet because of the salt. The verges, heaped high with snow-plough packed snow, are ruined and blackened like a building after fire. On the other side of hedge or wall the white begins, snow clear to the next blobbed wall. There are no colours in this landscape, it is black and white, and even the black is faded – grey black, faint black: whiteness of snow overpowers all, bleaching the eye, leeching colour.
My eyes are suffering; they ache, and at times white masses seem to shift before them, even when I’m not driving. The world seems slippery to them, they can’t get a grip on it. Perhaps I should buy some sunglasses. My neck and shoulders ache as well. I need to take a rest from driving.
You talk rubbish. A tube of chemicals fizzing, changing colour by the minute. Lions pace. Pigs chew. Marion drives. It’s Nature’s way, my dear – survival. Do you think you’ve made a choice? Bid for freedom, escape? Can you escape your own nature, your own substance, the sloppy porridge of cells which are your construction, flesh and bones? All they’re programmed for is to keep you alive – they don’t care how.
1. Lion. In a cage, paces. Hormones thereby released dull its anxiety, keep it sane.
2. Pig. (More satisfyingly, more symbolically) in a factory farm, secured in its stall with chains, chews them. Day and night, obsessively. Survives, pain of captivity blunted, high on the heroin substitute its body manufactures in response to chain-chewing. Remove its chains, it cracks up: beats it brains out against the walls.
3. Marion. The case is less extreme. Drives. Brain pleasantly numbed from consideration of more serious matters.
Chemicals. Programmed to survive. All you are.
That’s enough.
Sat. 8
At times I can go down in an eddy – down, down, below the static-noise surface, into the quiet spaces (underwater?) where vision is peculiarly clear. One thought one image leading to the next like slippery underwater rope I’m on a trail, can’t let go in the dark clear depths for fear of total loss, but if it’s possible to pursue the thought to its end (cave diver in the liquid hollows of the earth) then I will win –
What? No more than a journey of that length. Always at the end, finally, a rock wall, a crevice too narrow for my shoulders.
Strange changes in my body as I travel through no-time. I seem to swell and bloat like a drowned woman. My hands and feet have puffed up so that the skin is tight. Reasonably, I argue that it’s due to hours of driving, sitting still, blood not circulating. My body remembers it as a sign of pregnancy. My aching eyes never recover from assaults of snow glare. And now my lips are dried and cracking like sun-baked mud. They too seem to have swollen; they are bursting through the old skin, which shrivels back, to be peeled absentmindedly by me as I drive. Today I peeled a section raw.
Reasonably, reasonably. The air outside is sharp and cold. Inside my car is hot and dry, the heater like a breath from the desert. My lips are simply dry. A sensible application of Vaseline or Lypsyl three times a day would sort them out. In the mirror I see a woman I’ve never met, with tiny squinting eyes and swollen bleeding lips.
My lips must be constantly touched. I find myself stroking the silken new skin; pressing them together and moistening the dry corners; brushing the back of my hand against them, peeling with my teeth the onion layers of old skin. I have picked foolishly at the scabs until they’ve bled again.
I am continuously aware of my lips. I feel them move and crack. I lick them to taste the blood. I can’t