Pornography For Children - part of a story.

It came already born, grown and bound up in a skin, the beginning of my disasters. This was a most furious birth. Out came a skin of kinds, concealing a bursting grape of life, whose wetness soaked the hospital sheets and made the nurses exchange awkward glances. I had a terrible thing that came out covered in a plastic caul, gripping onto an elastic umbilical that almost snapped back inside me.

When this baby was conceived I didn’t ever think about birth defects, and I continued to live as though I was only taking care of myself. The one concession was giving up smoking because so many people looked at me like a child molester when I continued to smoke. So many people said “I don’t think it is necessarily bad, I’m just really surprised that you’d do it, that’s all”. None of them were pregnant though.

I’ve seen things I don’t want to remember. My son, I can’t erase him. He was born with hydrocephalus: a build up of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain. Water on the brain, a huge forehead and bulging eyes. I was cruel and named him Balloon. They held him, waving his arms and legs in front of my face and asked me what I wanted to call him. “I don’t give a fuck”, and I decided on Burt, because it was suitably unusual and suitably offensive.

“Burt….what a gorgeous name. Is it a family name?” crowed an obscenely broad nurse, whose tits I’m sure, were quivering wetly in response to the puling baby.
“Family? No.”

I never meant to have my legs that far apart, to be so levered. I never meant to part them for strangers at all, but parturition makes a public space of your body, and creates a stifling space for humiliation and rejection. Balloon exploded in the crisp hospital air, a tumescent thing, a balloon on a stick, bean shaped and gummy eyed. And only moments before he appeared, I looked into his father’s eyes as he said “good luck mate”, and realised that I had been rejected by this man I didn’t love or even respect, who was a stranger who slept in my bed.

He was altogether human, but I couldn’t touch him until he was three months old. His nappies were utterly repulsive to me, unlike other mother’s who bore the holistic glow of faecal connection with their children. At mother’s group they’d ask me ‘but don’t you find that it really doesn’t smell that bad because it is your own child?’ I thought that just made it smell worse. Other mothers gently removed their leaking udders from their milk encrusted bras and fed their babies lovingly, while I experienced the tickling sensation an amputee has in the limb that has been removed. When Balloon began to speak, I held him close for the first time and squeezed his head close to my chest. He cried and struggled to remove himself from my desperate embrace. Then he recognised me, and began calling me Ma, me instead of my sister Pol, who looked after him for the first years of his life.

There is a physical and emotional horror that is unique to material produced by your own body. Shit, piss, pus and snot are all expelled from your body, become abject waste. People learn to be humiliated by their own physical waste products, because it is considered uncivilised to be too intimate with functions we would rather not experience; the shy sound of shit shifting in its hold, the sound of shit breaking like bread, and the internal aromas meeting the fresh air. When Balloon was born and nearly ripped me apart with the insistence of his massive head, Pol said to me that I needed to accept the limitations of my own body, and learn to love what leaves it as much as what stays inside.

“When I say his name, I can’t help imagining him now as a hot air balloon.” Edmund smiles with me in confused sympathy. I have presented myself to him, a new ‘client’, a new participant in his professional therapeutic project.
“He was like a hot air balloon.” I laugh because it is funny.
Jovial cheeks and bad breath, he was bent and rickety, stumbling ahead with the vigour and enthusiasm of an aging athlete. E.T, or The Globe he was called at school and never made real friends who were able to envisage a smaller more appropriate head. For a while there was Natalie, who at six wore thick-lensed glasses, whose mother would wait for her after school, chain smoking and musing about how cruel children are to each other. Hair didn’t ever really grow properly to cover his head, so his soft fontanelle was slightly depressed and discoloured, creating a dark dip on the top of his head. I joked to him once about using his head as a mixing bowl, as it was just the right height when I was cooking, and he looked incredulous, beaten down and humiliated. I told him I only said things like that because I loved him, but never provided any explanation of how that constituted love. Perhaps he knew I loved him in an obscure and ashamed way, but he also knew he was hideous, and that I longed for beautiful children with glossy hair and manic smiles. Every day when he woke up, I saw him flip open his eyes and look at first astonished and then bitterly disappointed that he was still himself, still imprisoned in his horrible life. Sometimes I laughed when he did this, because his eyes were so huge, he looked alien, and sometimes I felt repulsed because he looked alien. Mostly we would sleep in my bed, except on the rare occasions when he was feeling brave enough to sleep alone. I laughed with him about how having him in the bed seriously reduced my chances of a normal sex life. He didn’t laugh with me though, because he didn’t understand the purpose or pleasure of sex, and nor would he ever. We lived together in solitary confinement, and I drove him the short distance to school every day as I was afraid of what other children would do to him if he walked alone.

Sometimes I watched him piss, fascinated by how he held himself, as if his penis were a dying bird, leaking precious urine onto the floor. He would stand before the toilet, penis across palm, and piss on the floor, as if he were not able to control the direction of the flow. And infrequently he noticed me watching him, and would turn and offer himself to me, dripping dick first. He’d carefully remove his clothes and stand there naked, as if trying to show me that his body was beautiful even if his head wasn’t. I would watch, mesmerised by the potential for sexuality in his body, and then turn away, repulsed, and shout at him to put his clothes on. “But I need a shower” he’d tell me, and I would realise that I hadn’t made him shower for three days.

Everyone is aware of the indignity of the self, of the horrible realisation that existing is contrary to dignity, that it is revolting and uncontrollable. Balloon though, he tried very hard, with grace and calm, to create a dignified self that could live with cruelty. But how can you live with the kind of patronizing cruelty that doctors and teachers lavish on you? “Oh, what a lovely big strong head you have there, let me have a look at it….”, and the jibes of school children who can’t contain their excitement when they see your misshapen head.

“In my family there is a tradition of producing monsters; loving them and hating them”
“You don’t seem upset when you say this.” He is curious and kindly probing.

“I thought they only happened in books and films, made by people like Angela Carter. I’ve been a monster too, after Balloon died, I felt hideous.”
“But you wanted Balloon to die”.
I show him the only remaining photo of Balloon, playing in a dirty hollow in a park. Those filial and pious little hands, huge face pushing out of the head, constant sweat hanging from his skin. I would touch his beautifully hairless arms sometimes while he slept in a chair, a partially concealed erection pushing through from his sweet dreams, those thready veins on his face and purple stretch marks in his thighs as if he had grown over night, perpetually tumescent. I am ashamed when I recognise that he is wearing clothes that I know I didn’t wash for weeks. They are the clothes he died in, and the clothes he was burnt in. It was the moment that changed the world, made everyone guilty and complicit. Gilded with an ornamental spray of golden hair, Balloon was taken by furnace fire to somewhere I could not comprehend. Mrs Agary who killed poor Balloon wailed most, and reeked of stale alcohol and foot odour.

Here is that moment, constantly relived so he can always be almost alive: he stepped carefully onto the road, looked down at the path he was about to tread, lurched forward and fell suddenly onto his face and under the wheel of a yellow commodore.

As I heard a pop, or a bang, I don’t remember, I covered my ears, and felt a warm spray on my face. The screams of Mrs Agary provided me with extra-optic images; raw skin, twisted body, exposed brain. I assumed I had been covered in blood, but tasted it to find it tasteless. Water! He became a burst pipe on impact, a hydrant, rupturing onto the swell of himself and my sun dress.

I have looked for reconciliation – between things, feelings and people, as a way of having mercy on myself.

When I was a kid, in my bedroom one day, folding clothes into drawers, I was singing, and using words I found embarrassing and ugly, words that I had no idea about the meaning of, obscene words that issued forth in an angry mellifluous torrent. I turned around to find that my mother had come quietly into the room behind me. She was watching and listening with a wry smirk on her face. We stared at each other for seconds, neither of us wanting to be the first to acknowledge the words that were now between us. There was a moment of ultimate humiliation, because I had used words that I did not have control of, that were harsh and crude sounding. It was like being caught eating a scab you have picked, or sniffing your fingers after going to the toilet. Those things are intimate and private, but when you are caught doing them, it becomes public, and an indicator of your person. My mother said nothing and walked away, making herself complicit with the words, and the implication that there was something wrong with me.

It was similar to the moment when Balloon was hit, because at that moment I knew that I had a freakish son, who I had failed to protect, and that by implication I was a freakish mother who lacked the normal natural maternal feelings of other ‘real’ mothers. I realised that there was something wrong with me and that for ten years I had been attempting to come to terms with Balloon’s condition, my own unlovliness and my inability to hold down jobs or relationships.

For all the done things, there are a hundred that are undone. You can decide against all the stupid moralistic terms that have landed on you; like lazy, greedy, horrible, selfish and unkind. Surely everything must have an origin, and it can’t be reduced to a word, that links your whole being with some kind of weird religious guilt. I won’t feel that, I refuse to feel anything. Instead, there is Edmund to lick my conscience.

Like when you squeeze, and there is a sudden rush of pus, and it sits on the surface, and you whimper, because you assume that there is something wrong. And when you cry, or falter, or feel angry, you assume there is something wrong with you.

Context: a term of meandering meaning yet stable reference, a shifting notion that is occupied by every person, object and situation. Somehow it can only be used if we are prepared to use its opposite; formlessness. Here are two contexts; a society whereby common virtues are of ultimate value, and the commandments are easy to comprehend. Or, a society where frailty of truth is abundant, and multiplicity of understanding prevails.

Secrets. I recoil with sensible horror, after discovering myself so myopically attached to the deficient and reified notion of self truth. Truth runs steadily along unsteady axes and biases, and self truth has never existed. Surely the idea of being truthful with your own self is a sham metaphor, a moral obligation and a manipulator’s technique?

We understand secret actions and feelings in terms of privacy, but do we ever think about how so many absent minded, disengaged moments create an internal story that we can become shameful of? Everyone has these secrets, and I am fascinated by the truth……..What a nauseating and conspicuous version of voyeurism. We liked to be looked at, and more than that, to be seen. Hold your breath, feel your insides. We have somehow arrived at the same day, the same conclusion, but still we are no closer to what we consider to be an ‘essence’ of self. It is a world, a multitude in a bag, that is not able to make sense of the variables. Now I’m feeling shy, beginning all sentences with ‘oh, I think…’ I am owed an explanation. Luxurious sentiments.

When I woke up today I needed to cry but couldn’t . There was an awful lack of reason, and I was compelled by nothing, no reason. I was so scared by the absence of reason and desire. All that was left was the sediments of yesterday. Tomorrow will be the same. I have suddenly become ancient and sullen. Geriatric in my slowness, reluctance to go outside. I can live by proxy; I can be the third person, the body-less teller. Just a mouth or an ear. How does 4am come so listlessly, restlessly, silently, and with paroxysms of guilt?

Another day of warm and tired, no disturbances. It is so quiet when I wake up, as if no one exists any more. And there is a drop and looseness to my eye lids: they have no reason to stay open.

I dreamt that there were slug-like things attached to my feet, that had to be removed in hospital. I was looking after someone’s children at the beach and we had been running in the water, and then crawled into a cave, and I discovered them sucking on my toes. They looked like snails without shells, and I tried to pull them off but it hurt, and I couldn’t.

Perhaps we are husbanded like animals? When I look at you asleep next to me, grumpy colonialist. It seems that everyone likes to believe that there is no one word that would adequately describe them. It hasn’t been invented, and so none of us have been invented. What we have and what we are capable of speaking, is encased in the darts of skin and folded pleats of a finite body, a foreign object, a collector’s item, an antique structure, objet d’art. Have we become obsolete?
Movement is equated with sight. The blind traveller whose guide dog sees the cities and landscapes. And perhaps seeing is equated with experience?
There are no random fantasies, mass or individual. If you bring into words something you don’t know, haven’t you created an article of knowledge? Speaking means existing, yet they are so different. Sometimes I want to be a therapist, relieve people of their terrible burdens. So you think it happened, but it turned out differently, and you fucking choked on it.

There is something, always something, never nothing. There is a barrier I need to step through, this anterior film that prevents range and multiplication, a calcified relic that still has the power to summon panic, anger, illness and sadness. A concubine, I’ve harboured and eaten whole, rough skin and stems. My teeth shut tight together, and I am unsuccessfully pushing back an inflating anger. Tonight I feel so defeated, so hopeless. The apogee of my personality? Or a smart and unkind aphorism.

Occasionally the feint scent of piss is comforting. In bed here, so close to the bathroom, I can detect a vaguely acrid smell of ammonia, Edmund’s ammonia, a putrescence similar to men’s public toilets. His body too is humming with odours. I find my own body’s smells both repellent and comforting. Like the hair smell on my pillow that I am sometimes reluctant to wash away. Scent is a way of identifying ourselves historically, a way of tracing back through the day to when you emerged from the shower smelling only of soap and shampoo. Now at the end of the day your hair smells of oil, your armpits smell of a good curry and your genitals smell like decay. Scent reminds and re-introduces the past: it is your personal history of olfactory awareness. Chanel no. 5 reminds me of my mother, the way I smell when I wake up reminds me of my father. The smell of dirt reminds me of animals. I hesitate here, and stare at my fingers, wondering about the harsh scent they develop during the day. After urinating Edmund lies back down on the bed, resplendent in his morning glory. I gaze across his body and wonder about the secret mechanical processes that neither of us can to see. I think about the mechanics of him shitting, and laugh suddenly.
“What?”
“I was laughing because I was imagining you on the toilet.”
“Why are you thinking of that?”
“Because it’s funny.”
“Not especially.”
“No, but it is interesting”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me think about the fear and humiliation we suffer because of our bodies. We are at the mercy of our bodies. But once you have a baby, you have such different feelings about bodies.”
“I imagine so.”
“When I had Balloon I…”
“I really don’t want to have our therapeutic relationship continued in the bedroom.”
“All relationships are therapeutic Ed, or at least you can make them function in that way.”
“You have odd ideas about the functions of therapy.”
“I just think you can live in a manner that is therapeutic to you. Even pain can be, you know, like that amazing catharsis that comes after grief. Or when you are in physical pain and afterwards you feel stronger because you lived through it. Everything can be remade in your own image. You know when you experience something awful and you need to talk or write or think it out of you? That’s therapy.”
“Stella, I really have to refer you to a colleague. I can’t keep doing this. Not only will I be deregistered if we’re caught, but I’m really uncomfortable with it. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want for us to have two relationships.”

To form opinions and ideas we have to hesitate. Hesitation and space, arbitrary marks on a page? Look into the spaces between the words, between the letters. These marks are defined by relief: positive, negative. I am defined by what takes place in parentheses. What did I believe in when I was a child? Did I hesitate or did I know? Where is instinct in childhood? There is no coherent sequence of specific memories, a narrative as such, but individual memories and feelings seem to be non-sequiturs that are vaguely symbiotic and organically linked. Sense and scramble. How can the adult brain process and analyse the events that occurred in the childish brain? Nothing about it is accurate or analytic, it is floating and disconnected. Last year: perhaps that was childhood, because no matter how much, or how meticulously I record the specific context for memories or events, it is removed. All these years prior to now are childhood because they were once known, and are now unknowable. It is as if patterns are drawn onto the brain, a gestalt, symbolic marks pressed into the folds. And it is encrypted and phrenologically arcane. Still, the idea of the brain is invented, and we are looking for physical evidence of mental occurrences. Perhaps we are still too eager, with our attributive tendances, to find ‘the brain’, the improbable locus of all humanity. Almost, we are like tissue or muscle, looking for our limbs. We are all in some way horrified by our own bodies, the gentle alembics, in a way that we are not horrified by animal bodies. Did we become obsessed with the death of Christ because his decomposure and degradation was able to articulate our corporeal horror? It is a dreamless idiocy, a corrupt and manipulative image, in love with pain and humiliation.

“I am not really superstitious but there was a thing with a crow that happened ages ago. You know…? I was at a bus stop, watching this crow try to eat a piece of chocolate you know, and it was squawking really hoarsely, squawking as if it were trying to speak. And um, the inside of its mouth was dark, but I could see further, down into its throat, which was this kind of livid red. There was something ominous about it all and I felt like I should be superstitious about it and everything, but couldn’t really allow myself. I was very superstitious…….or just paranoid maybe….when I was a child. Odd and even numbers, steps, cracks, tiles, carpet.”

“I don’t think it is unusual for children to be that way.” In our ‘therapeutic’ relationship Edmund’s voice is low and devoid of emotion. I am desperate to make him react emotionally to me, but I know he won’t allow himself, because he’s abstaining, like a married man from porn. He thinks it is the right thing to do under the circumstances, and I admire his attempts at professionalism under duress. Rather than look at me he takes notes and deep breaths. Neither of us will at any point during our hour make reference to the other relationship we have.

‘When I was a child my grandparents had a horrible painting at the end of the hall. A man, sweaty, swarthy and serious looking, with a jacket of browny yellow. Side on he is dignified, but imagine when he looks straight at you he sees through your clothes and looks at your nipples becoming erect. Walking towards him I would try not to look into his eyes, but I was unable to resist the fear it caused me, because I knew he was always watching me, in the sly half light of the darkened hallway. Sometimes I thought about him when I had gone to bed. It was always me who looked away first.’

“Did you feel sexually uneasy when you looked at the painting?”
“In a way, but it was strange, because I always knew it wasn’t real. It seems that every time we draw on an old memory, remember something, we re-experience it. Is that how you can end up being fucked up by things? Is that why I’m so angry? We re-experience the pain or anguish we initially felt, only we don’t have the initial point of reference, only the overwhelming emotional reality of the situation. Is that what you think I do?”

‘Perhaps this is something we can continue this evening?’ His voice is so cool, and I am drawn to it as it provides safety, normality and equilibrium. Tonight, tonight……something in west side story?

I know we’ll meet, and have dinner in a lovely restaurant. I won’t eat too much, but I will eat, because it is sensual, and I want him to see me putting things in my mouth, and swallowing. All the sallow and shredded skin will glow with desire. I’ll mount a mutiny, to bring him into my harbour, overthrow his power.

It is tonight. Question me, as if I was bodiless; mercurial and tyrannical. I told him that I could tell him anything, give myself to him, be his experiment. There is an uneasy tension between the definitions: doctor/patient, friends or lovers?

“Have you been thinking about those techniques we discussed last week? I really want you to try to visualise the pain you feel, really give it colour, shape, depth, dimension. Don’t think of it as an expulsion, but as a release.”

“I feel so guilty though. If I allow myself to release this pain, it is like he is gone forever.”

“Stella, sweetheart, he is gone forever.”

I can only stare at him with wonder and horror. We are in a restaurant, decadent and decked out with money and style. I have such subtle make up, to appear younger than I am, but so as not to appear a desperate old slag.

“I don’t want to talk about him now, not here while we are having dinner. It trivialises him, and I feel sick. I really do feel sick.”

“Do you need to go to the toilet or something?”

“Or something? God, I’m not a fucking constipated child.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to sound like that.”

“How is it supposed to sound when you ask someone if they feel sick because they need to shit? I’m not one of your kids.”

“I know that.”

He pays the bill and goes to the toilet. I wait outside and feel bitter and ill. Of course, we will go to his place, because mine is disgusting and inappropriate for this kind of liaison. His place is neat, clean, impersonal and well lit.

“I want to go to my place.” I know now that he will make an excuse.

“Sure.” I am surprised and nervous.

We walk to his car and drive carefully to my street. I can’t help watching him drive, and finding his ability to control such a big machine appealing. I want for him to control me in that way.

The vacuum cleaner is a ‘dirt devil’, it says on the box. And there is a tea chest: product of Ceylon. Videos and records with titles that seem arbitrary and prosaic are scattered near the television. A Red table, a shopping trolley, collected on a drunken city rampage. A ‘political’ map of the world, tattered corners, which seems to be a kind of cartographical subjectivity. A doll’s head, dirty and scarred, eyes rolled upwards. Clothes drying, evidence and remnants of enjoyment. Food, wine and tobacco, postpack all the way from little Tasmania, which is on the map, but not very politically. It is a beautiful big room, but the objects it contains are awkward and disjointed. Of course, he eyes them all with suspicion.

The first light of morning casts heat on my side of the bed. A weak syllogism. These church bells crow every morning, and there are murmurings from another kitchen of someone rummaging for food or water. It is almost winter: that seasonal menopause. I worry about my life being prosaic and unremembered. I worry about things not being the way I had hoped, as if I have made such a failure of everything. It was never meant to be like this.

Edmund is still asleep, but I am awake staring out the window until my eyes ache. I have dreamt of Balloon again. He was drowning, and I had to pull his body from a deep murky pond, to resuscitate him. His arms and sides were scraping against the stone walls of the pond and he was bleeding and limp. He wasn’t dead, but somehow there was no discernable life in his body either. There was no breathing, and I was held there in abeyance, like a soul before St Peter waiting to be judged. Balloon died in my arms a romantic watery death, with wet shining lips and a cold furze covering his head. His body was firm but malleable, as if death makes a comical putty of the human body. I screamed at him, and put my mouth to his and blew as hard as I could, pumped his chest ineffectively with my fist, the other arm supporting his body. I put my tongue inside his cold wet mouth and sucked until I was hoarse. I kissed him passionately, in the way that I had been taught by the boys at school. Long firm deep strokes in and out of the mouth with the tongue. Make sure you have some chewing gum, and make sure you don’t produce too much saliva. Lick the lips sensually, and tilt your head to the side, allow him to put his tongue inside your mouth, swish it around a couple of times, and then draw away slightly. You don’t want him to think you are a slut. Balloon’s mouth was salty and small. His tongue didn’t move, but lay inert against his teeth. Will I put myself in your hands Balloon, or will you always be in mine?

My fingers are so bitten and raw they are starting to appear deformed, or ravaged by eczema, or burnt. Yet I can’t stop myself from pulling off the skin. I have found something so satisfying in peeling fingers, as if they were very hard and erect fruits. Even now, I pause momentarily to take some skin between my teeth and pull as if it were a thread.

Is it everyone’s fortune to become a gap or to fill gaps?

These instances are movable yet static, deeply listless particles of someone’s life undone from behind. These people who stayed in the same place, who grew their hair long and forgot to wash.

I woke feeling caroused and jellied, shaking and barely awake. This stinking place is wretched. I wanted to cry when I woke up because I remembered being so cruelly exposed. A humiliated anchorite. I woke up panting, startled and hot. Today it seemed so funny to me, the way people want each other, so arbitrary to desire itself. It is perhaps a symbolic sating of the wrought senses, the engorged brain and inflamed face. It cheated on me, gave me a feeling that can’t be transformed, or eradicated by my willingness for it to change me. The agonizing alembics of irresponsible desire: tied me in knots, this solipsistic movement; a revolution in ideology. As old as molecules, the gravel of genes, there was no time before I met Ed.

Concern eats into every person, and brings to life dead objects. Significance, born of concern, places itself, often inappropriately, between objects and subjects. Uncomfortable conjunction. There is no easing it away, like soaking the bandage, hard with dried blood and scab off a knee. It clings keenly, and for dear (dear) life, significantly, while you reassess the significance of the significant item. The most significant person is the/your/my self. I bear the weight of the world on top of me, I understand its sickening and resurgence, the uncanny infarctions. Every day I stuff everything into my mouth, and then I excrete the world, whole and in agony.

You have to understand that the world can only happen in fragments, because really it is unspeakable, unthinkable, unknowable. To exist you have to scrape some significance for yourself, make yourself a private thing, get all dolled up, go out on the town and make a life that is explainable. It’s desperate, a corollary or perhaps consequence of fear, of aging and dying. I’m fucking terrified, I want someone to save me, immortalise me, and that is the reason to write; you give in to posterity and fear. There is no need to be brave.

There was a car, still in the middle of the road, no one seemed attached to it, doors closed, engine off. On the bus, every day, I go to put my foot on a shelf beside me that I know isn’t there. Today I looked down, despairingly, and said, I know you’re not there. Those endless repetitions, the ultimate check, where you think you know for sure, but have to go back, in case you were in fact wrong. Does it come from the feeling that you are stupid, I am stupid, and unable to remember and understand? I can point at those repetitions, that can span a life time and form a humiliating matrix, and say there it is, that is eternity, self perpetuated eternity. But perhaps life is just sad, and knowledge is saddest.
Balloon comes back to me, a late night chimera. I lie in the sweat of sheets, the ripple that has occurred because I can’t keep still.

Bitten, swollen and mauve. To calm that vertiginous feeling I went to the roof and let the sky hail on my face. As soon as something is considered or thought of, it is domesticated, made tame, given a name, demarcated.

Distillation. I must talk about a dream I had last night. I walked into a room that was art somehow. The floors and walls were made of a wild green but transparent rippling rubber, that looked vaguely like guts. As I stepped on it, it quivered and bulged, gave way beneath my shoes, and I sank slightly but bounced back with each step. There were paths in the room, and I tried to get through the room, but was halted by the arresting sight of tiny figures. Not dolls, but representations of people, somehow made of eggshell but reworked into human features. They were all broken though, just pieces of arms and legs, faces with the back of the head missing. And really sad faces. I picked up a few faces and took them with me, knowing I shouldn’t, but they were so fragile and beautiful. I had walked up a large hill, in the sun and heat to get to this place.

There is that morbid slippage that makes sex so revolting and so comforting. As that benevolent and lambent sheen falls over you and you are coloured, skin coloured by what you want. It is morbid because time stops you still, and stolen you are. Because it is an entry into the world.

A crazy reticulum, a taut beginning.

Using arbitrary terms to produce/create something, you have no real relationship to the thing produced. Being fed other people’s shit and neuroses. Illness as cure.

Tonight I saw the most beautiful sunset. I stared straight into the sun as it eased itself below my eye. It was tempestuous but so sad, so sad and quiet. Everything paused, and for just a moment I felt the most impossible serene calm, like I was lying, supine, waiting for the sun to eat me. Tonight the sun was an eternity, and it was breathing. I wanted to cry, I wanted everything to run down my face. But I couldn’t, because that lack of tears was beyond speechlessness.

The discomfort of wanting someone who doesn’t really exist.

Set alight, I’ve been in so many dark rooms, sat still. Never really wanted feet, just wanted my parents to put me to bed softly. I will be children again, oily and bent. If I keep going, it has to get better, if I give up, then I have given up.

But I feel hopelessly dirty and trawled, the physical discomfort that seems only to be eased by sleep. Film of dirt over my skin.

Just as poignantly and pungently as she had arrived, she departed, leaving, amongst other things, the poison bearer’s fumes, and the pugilist’s mark. Thick masks of airy sadness made the air hot, and gelid men, were worn into their clothes with sartorial wit. But she had left forever, and the fever hadn’t ceased for weeks, just wavered around public places. You might think of Buffy, or Dana Scully, but she was something other than that. Because she was not beautiful, or pretty or handsome, and because her eyes stung when she turned them on you, she charged every person she encountered with discomfort and self consciousness. Not only was she excessively built, but she consumed as if she meant to consume the world, and every person in it. Passionately she’d consume food, alcohol, cigarettes, books, music, films, art, drugs and conversations. She was the nightmare and the precious fantasy of every man in the town, because she was mother and seductress, she was huge and welcoming and harsh and terse. Deep in the matt of her pubic hair, was a richly putrid scent that was both alluring and utterly repellent. Tropical, Amazonian and sweet lipped, giantess Lulu, Lucy or Lola (depending on when and where you met her) swayed through days with the gravity and grace of a tragic Victorian, yet there was nothing at all Victorian about her manner. In the days before she left, she bore everyone around her, they swung off her, tried to chew on her, sucked her hair and nipples, and begged to be the one allowed to go with her into her future, which was cut dramatically short when she stepped out in front of a car and was seriously injured and confined to a wheelchair. It was a future of sorts, but not the one that the glistening Barbarella had sought. Her breasts wilted and she cried bitterly about the murderous rage she felt for her deflated life.

She went to Pol - champion of the underprivileged - worn and grey. And Pol loved her like a baby, despite the fact that she would never grow, change or progress in the way Pol hoped everyone could. Her real life was cut short, and all she had now was a dreamy stasis. Pol, Lo and Frankie, the defective trifecta, lived comfortably within each other’s ear shot in a comfortable suburban bunker. Their house felt safe, with its vulnerable and tough occupants guarding all the entrances. It was a veritable fortress that offered protection and retreat from the world.

As I climbed the dipped and worn stairs, I heard Frankie cry out. “Frankie?” I found him wedged into a chair beside a mirror. “What is it?” Frankie turned his streaming face towards me, eyes like swollen arseholes, and opened his mouth to cry. “Love” he replied casually, as if I should know what it was. “Love, Stella, I can’t cope with it anymore. All the pain in the world can’t be fixed by love. I can’t ever be made right with love can I? Cos there’s no love that can fix me right up.”
“Frankie, you know that Pol and Lo and I love you so much.”
“Lo’s my sister, you don’t love anyone, not even Balloon, and Pol won’t fuck me because I am ugly.”
“That isn’t true Frank.”
“Which part isn’t true? The part about you not loving anyone? ‘Cos the rest of it’s true for sure.”
“We all love you. Pol loves you enormously. She really does.”
“She won’t fuck me. We did it once, but she won’t do it again.”
“You did it once?”
“When I wasn’t as ugly. She let me play with her tits, and lick her and stick it in until…”
“Ok. I don’t need to hear about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a private thing that adults do.”
“You don’t think I’m an adult?”
“Of course you are.”
“So why can’t I talk about it?”
“It isn’t appropriate to discuss it.”
Frankie started crying again. Big ugly wailing, punctuated with funereal moans.
“Fuck you….fuck you. You’re a big old bitch, Stella. You don’t care. All you care about is fucking and yourself and Edmund, who doesn’t even love you. You didn’t care about Balloon, you fucking bitch, you didn’t love him. You were glad when he died. I wasn’t. He was my best friend, and you fucking killed him, because he wasn’t right. Like me, he wasn’t right.”
My face prickled with heat and a rash bloomed on my chest and spread upwards to my neck and face. I felt Pol behind me, seize my shoulder as it collapsed into my chest. She held me up as grief poured down my face, leaked out of me. And behind her was Lo, who had hauled herself out of her wheelchair and dragged herself up the stairs. She was resting behind Pol because her arms were hot and aching from exertion.

Many years ago Lo would disappear for months on end, ‘go on tour’ as she called it, which meant she was travelling the country and performing in strip clubs in her exotic manner. She never stopped believing that her burlesque art was beautifully crafted and poetic. I saw her strip on many occasions, and it was incredible. The intensity with which she gave herself to the audience, the ethereal facial expressions she pulled to enhance the drama, served to make her a goddess of nudity. Shining Lo in the throes of a dance would have the audience enraptured, the men became quixotic and gallant in her presence, each one straining to be her suitor. She never seemed especially interested in men though, only in Frankie, Balloon and her work. She worked desperately to conceal what she did from Frankie and Balloon, yet worked incessantly to increase the respectability of her art. “It is art, I do it artfully, I do it with passion and precision. I don’t just take my clothes off, I am a performing body, and I provoke emotional responses the way any other art form does.” When she was in her early 30’s, Lo consented to an affair with a lonely bar manager who artfully seduced her by suggesting she go to a college for performing arts. “You are so right Lo, it is a beautiful and old art form that is never adequately recognised for what it is.” On the nights when Lo performed in his bar though, Steve would avert his eyes, or find reasons to leave early, because he hated the idea of other men looking at beautiful Lo’s writhing performance. He believed in art and modesty in equal measures. Lo asked him why he never watched, and he broke down and admitted that he found it cheap and slutty, and that he was jealous of the other men looking at the body he thought should be private. Lo said that once someone has sexualised you, made you their object of their desire, they can never see you as fully human again, because to be desired is somehow ignoble and disgusting. Steve felt that the desire of other men was encroaching upon their relationship, cheapening and weakening it. “But you are the only person I give myself to darling” she’d implore when he cried and raged. When their relationship ended, she insisted that it was because he was many years younger than her. “He was such a pup, had no understanding of his own sexual fallibility” she’d insist. “Christ, if he wanted a little church bred girl to screw, what was he doing with me? I’ll always be a loose woman, a tart with a heart, but soft to the touch all the same”.

And now I’ve known Lo for all this time, and she has never quite reached the state of bliss she has aspired to. She will always extol the virtues of sexual and corporeal liberation, despite not really being sure of what that means to her, and continue to coach her harem of dark eyed virgins in the feminine wiles and the art of strip tease. “You must tease them, mercilessly, and make then feel as if it will never end, as if they must get down and kiss your feet before you will reveal another inch of flesh. You must learn to find yourself sexy, no matter what size or shape you are. It is that you are a woman that makes you sexy. You are beautiful and free, not sleazy and cheap.”

When I was a child, my mother’s father lived with us. For the most part, at home in the quiet damp, he was miserable, bellicose, a fiery brethren prone to wheezing and coughing fits. He’d sit in front of the tv all evening with my father, his eyes smarting and keening at all the tits on display. “Give me a go of her and I’d be up to me nuts in guts”, he’d slur. I’d sidle into the room, and he would pull me to him and sit me on his lap, force my legs apart with bony knee and bounce me up and down. “You’re my girl” he’d croon, while I started to feel excited by the motion of his legs and the scent of beer on his breath. I’d kiss his rough cheek and he’d bring his mouth around to meet mine “my sweet baby, my precious little princess” he’d breathe into my mouth and slide his hand up my leg. I would slide off just as I knew my mother would enter the room, and run upstairs to my room and furiously masturbate until I came, shuddering and sweating.

Recently I was thinking about the immense pain of loving and caring for people. I thought about my grandfather, and the photos of him that I kept beside my bed when I was about 12. I imagined him as a brave and emotionally damaged war hero. It wasn’t until I was 21 that my mother told me that he didn’t go to war anyway. I don’t know why. I went to the cemetery to see him but didn’t find his grave. I was in love with him as if there were two of him; the smooth faced war hero, who would have rescued me from the sleazy old cunt in the sitting room.

We met today, unceremoniously, and humiliatingly, he gently suggested that I have aged considerably during the eight years we haven’t seen each other, and so I wrote to Pol;

Today I feel really sad, because I missed a connection, something I had built up for 8 years, and it was wrong. I saw him, and he saw me, and it was awful Pol, I could have died. There is so much past there, a dam of emotion, for me…..at least for me. And then that unknowing of love, and that agony of wondering and not wanting to assume. You cling to the vestiges, to what imprints have been left, whatever inconsequential pieces have been delivered personally to you. I am so sad, so full of regret. I have done this to myself so many times, and so last night I dreamt of them all, a group of similar and different men, all utterly vulnerable to me, all different and very unavailable to me. I’m chilled with possibility, framed when I speak, and eager. How do you become responsible, and why do I feel so fucking hard, like I have an overabundance of feeling, like I need to be deeply affected by every thing?

It was dramatically hot. As I walked home, hot dust blew up my skirt and scratched my legs. Coming around a corner I fell, onto my knees on the bitumen, ungracefully twisted. All the air exited my lungs in a strained exhaust of sickly breath, and I felt that falling-induced nausea, where your organs turn into soft beads, livid and racing, and sweat trickles between your cheeks to give your underpants a bloom of a stain. Plumes of flies follow every movement of your body, drink your bacterial sweat, and settle on your skin as if you are already dead.

I found Balloon in the garden, (or what I called the garden but was actually a square of dirt and dead grass), supine, with arms spread and flies crouching around his nose and mouth. He was naked and asleep, a silvery trail of semen creeping up his stomach and falling over his side, his long brown body stretched from garbage bin to fence. Discarded beside him was a magazine, pornographic. On the page that lay open was ‘Velvet Vanessa’, with the soft smooth velvet vagina. I could imagine Balloon’s eyes, bugging out at the size of her breasts, with aureole and nipples the size of large biscuits.

It is a terrible banishment from life. It is a negative knowing, an ersatz for life. Recently I have thought about the meaning and mechanism of death. How can you not be curious about the space, existence or origin of it? I am besotted, the idea of it runs my head into the wall, and I am constantly fighting off its permission and regard, decency and reality. It is one of the only certainties. And so many people have died, are dead, no longer exist as anything but an idea. They have become negative space, only thought space. This makes my life feel like a dirty ugly wasteland where everything becomes refuse, because I can not refuse inevitability. It is unspeakable, unknowable and unexperienced, but it is our main theme of obsession, the lowest common denominator that makes everyone the same. How many times have I asked Edmund what it feels like to die? He has seen it and felt nothing but surprise. How are we supposed to live with the knowledge that we will die?

Urine scented sweat. I build a fortress to buttress me. If everything is a series of moments, and regret is the effect of not taking the other path, or not making the other decision, then I am paralysed by the power of this assertion, because it is always so linear and sequential. Every moment is contingent on the last, alive with plangent moments, so your life is built, and it seems irrelevant to think about long past moments. The proliferation of choices makes everyone impossible, but so corporeally congruous.

I dreamt of porn, of watching porn with other people, but showing the wrong thing continually. I meant to show something funny and tame, but showed a tape of violence and bestiality; people in animal masks with circular blades. I was admitting to enjoying this tape. It was the shock of sex and violence, explicit and in repulsive permutations that embarrassed me. Is revelation the end of desire? Losing something you have never had hold of, a strange fragility in the way you hold time, desire, real time in a gestalt of nights and days that are never adequately punctuated. It is mystery and lack that enable desire, a contradiction, that desire means you want to know or possess something, and when it is possessed it is no longer the same object, it can no longer be the same desired thing. The reward is always empty, eventually, extinguished, exsanguinated. An experiment in perpetual desire that never comes close but is always on the edge of orgasm, a self-perpetuating and motor-driven condition. That edge; puberty, death, health, comfort, and always the desire for the almost-state that can eventually be relinquished. Pleasure seems to arise from the discomfort and enormity of desire. I feel like a machine sometimes, wet and wired, electric and mutable, poisoned and illuminated by everything that passes through me. Everyone comes alive through knowing, people live for knowing, finding out, and suspense.

I want for you to be able to understand everything, and to be complicit in this story. I want to reveal these things to you slowly, and allow you to be drawn in. At the same time, I don’t want to give it all away instantly. By the end of the story, you will know whether or not you were meant to read it, and if you were, you will take on a burden of knowledge, and become part of the tale. You are, in a sense, me. You are the perfect reader, who is in a position to understand. You are only partially a real person, and the rest of you is so fragmented that it makes no sense to you. Nothing makes sense does it?

I am the subject, with a compulsion to tell, explain, divulge. The urge to tell is like a constant erection, and I am straining against it, trying to pace myself. I’m in a dark room with a fan pointed at me, because this process makes me sweat and heave.

We moved into a little red brick house in a suburb north of the city. It is a small but dense city, richly populated and quietly fickle. The house was dark and the walls were blistered with old paint but the carpet was new and felty soft. We each had bedrooms, one beside the other, and a huge garden full of dandelions and assorted weeds. Sometimes we’d spend the day gardening together, but neither of us knew anything much about plants, so the garden eventually looked barren and sore. Next door was another mother and son, who lived in their private ghetto. Balloon used to talk to Pete, the child, who had dentures at the age of twelve. Pete and his mother had been in a car accident, she was drunk, and Pete’s face had shattered so badly all they could do in the end was remove the shards of tooth from his head and start again. He had a beautiful shining set of teeth that looked slightly too big. “He’ll grow into them” I heard his mother say on a few occasions. Whilst playing with Balloon, he’d take his teeth out, so he could concentrate better, and leave them in the dirt amongst the tiny trucks and cars. His mother, Ellen, would start to breathe heavily and work herself up into a furious moan about finding his teeth. But it was always her who retrieved the teeth from the dirt and lovingly cleaned them and set them in denture solution to rest.

The step up to the stage is worn by the sweating feet of a thousand vaudeville girls and burlesque ladies. Lo and Bess step up to the stage and into the spot light, with stuffed chests and hidden veins. Each night, a tribute to strip tease is made by some front row Joe, who spills it all out onto the stage and at the bar, rupturing pockets and testicles, awry. The bar is lacquered smooth with years of sticky alcohol, and pock marked, like acne scars, by cigars and cigarettes, grease stained by burgers and chips. On any seat you choose to sit on, there are stains in the ancient garishly patterned velvetine. The chairs were covered cheaply in the 1956 refurbishment. Now they are considered ‘originals’, and contain an organic history, a love taxonomy, an inventory of seminal secretions. The staff joke at female customer’s expense, “don’t get pregnant in the love chair, love.” But still, it is a beautiful cove of ill repute, where men can be wild animals and women can be flies.

Lo and behold, Lo and Bess, tall and painted, smiling chimeras, undulating ladies, step onto the stage, Lo behind Bess. Lo smiles triumphantly, while Bess sniffs the air for premature ejaculations from the front rows and she is always furious. Strange large Lo, who is also furious, but cunning and circuitous, fashioned after her dear mother, shaped by adventure, arrives ahead of time and sings to her customers as they eagerly undress her. Joe, who has been coming to see her perform every weekend for a year and a half, has begged Lo to run away with him, get married, have ugly babies and die old and together. Lo laughs and says sure, squints at his moustache, revolted by the greasiness of his skin and the softness of his erection. Long Lola, were you trying to say something to me with the flailing hands, create a particular intimacy?

Pol thinks of Frankie as a small stone, smoothed and pressed privately into her palm, and she sweats around it, makes it slippery. From behind they look like mother and son, Pol is so tall, with long long straight hair, and Frankie short and rounded, always distracted, slightly hunched. Frankie asks Pol frequently if she is going to always take care of him, because now that he has her, he has forgotten about the ‘independent living’ program, and the classes on personal hygiene and appropriate social behaviours. He’s never been drunk, never been laid, never left the city and never slid his hand inside someone to see if it will fit. He has small browned hands.
“Frankie you can look after yourself, you know that.” But Frankie is not hesitant in telling her that he is in love with her and wants to be with her.

A single bed, and him there, on his insidiously drunken maiden voyage. Too subtle to think, the stiff air lies around him, slips away like a slippery eel-faced friend to leave him breathless and dying. This is the gauge and the thermometer; the twittering mass of twitching, that imparts knowledge and adulthood in the most cryptic and sequestered way. There he beats beside Pol, erratic little heart and bursting erection. Pol is the teller, he’s the listener, and he pushes his hands and face between her legs. She helps him to take his pants off, and smiles when she sees the bald faced genitals, small but straining, and takes it all in a bunch in her mouth, and feels the slimy secretions. He cries as if scared, and he is scared, because this could be a first and last, a glimpse of what most adults do with frequency and ardour at some point in their lives.

Frankie’s eyes are brown like cow’s eyes. Ears look dried out, leathery, rigid. Nose is small and rounded, mouth large with small jagged teeth. Always a silver streak of misplaced saliva on chin. Hair coarse and chin length. Small body with ill fitting clothes.

He lovingly brought down her clothes from the line, stiffened by heat and wind, and folded them into squares for her to collect when she needed them.

What happens when I come home at night? I want to talk about you, think about you, write you into my life. I wipe my eyes and the eyeliner rubs across my cheek. But that isn’t something you have space to be concerned about when you are roping yourself into a story. I come home to you, an absence, and I feel bloated, stuffed into my dress. Today it is a polyester dress that makes me sweat and stink, but I persevere with it because I have been told my tits look ‘great’ in it. How can tits be great? They are ridiculous formations. I have been told that ‘over-identification’ can occur when you feel that someone really understands you. That extraordinary intimacy shakes me, and we talk as if trying to subdue deep priapism in each other. I have always been erect, engorged with blood, red and hostile, blistering with the desire for an intimacy that will transcend my experience and anger. You look for familiarity and home and blow jobs with me, and it excites you not to find them, but to find a deeply selfish un-nurturing un-caring wreck. When Balloon was small I read to him the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. He cried when Sadako died, and from then on built symbolic cranes, as homage to Sadako’s suffering. He built private structures in his room, in the garden, with food and kitchen utensils. He bottled worms and flies, all for Sadako, so she could know (albeit posthumously) that he cared enough to try to capture and recreate the world. I told him that death means no more hearing or seeing, that it is the end of something and the beginning of nothing. He said that nothing ever really dies, but that all things are transformed, made good or ungood. I am not a spiritual person, and Balloon did not believe in endings, but in transcendence and continuation. Balloon was a creationist, an alchemical theologian. He was epic in proportion and reputation, and exhausted by life and its mutations. Mutation into what? He asked why I had such an aversion to creating beauty; “Mum, why do you try to make everything nasty, and not make anything beautiful?”

“It’s me…. Stella…”
“You can’t call me this late”.
“Why not, are you busy? Were you asleep? Are you with someone?”
“No”.
“What?”
“What…….it is really late, it’s 3.00am. I was asleep. Why are you awake?”
“Aren’t you pleased to hear my voice?”
“I was asleep”.
“So you’re pissed off that I called”.
“No, just surprised.”
“Surprised? Who else would be calling you at this time?”
“Not surprised that it was you, just surprised that the phone rang at all. Have you had a bad dream? I can come over if you like?”
“No, I’m just a bit drunk”.
“Oh Stella. I love you. You have to stop doing this”.
“Really? Fuck it, I can’t. Look what your therapy did for me, just fucked me up even more.”
“I don’t really want to talk about this now”.
“Everything has to be on your terms doesn’t it? Nothing is ever about me or how I feel”.
“We met because you felt”.
“Don’t be so bloody facetious.”
“I’m sorry, I’m tired, I have to work in the morning. I’m pissed off you called and woke me up. But it’s ok. I am pleased to hear your voice, and I want to know when I’ll see you.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
I have the feeling that I should cut myself off from Edmund.