"What are you?" stupidly, slowly.I mean this: "What are you doing?" What were you doing? Looking at my hand, like it might be written there. Making something; Coffee? Tea? Sigh again, or for the first time. Sighs splits crashes sits
I have a message,it says: "What should I wear?" So I close my eyes and I make this very elaborate and sarcastic reply but - Ah ( it's a yawn, not a sigh) I drop my phone and it skitters beneath the counter. One of the cats looks at it, looks at me, looks at it. my hands make these trails, delightful and I conduct the cat and mouse scenario. I mean phone, cat and phone, spider phone cat mouse, whatever.What else? Dust, baskets of vegetables and spices. I burrow some more. Paper shed garlic skin cat-trapped now, beneath her paw.The kitchen floor sticks to my cheek.
"What are you doing Mischa?"(That's not me)Someone else. I'm armpit deep in this miniature world."Cleaning?" Shrugs all round. They look like giants to me. "You look OK from here" "OK?" 'OK' is this insulting thing, like 'fine' as in "You look fine" "It all depends where you put the stress" He regards something about his person and I trap his foot beneath my paw.Snigger: "Luce, your name is ridiculously symbolic" I speak maybe a third of the words that form in my head. This is how I write too.
Smoking desperately at the bus-stop here. I can't make the cigarettes hold together, couldn't make them. My fingers are ash, soft, useless curds of it. He does it for me, planted between my legs. Hectic red cheeks and glowing, definitely, in the gloom. These narrow, deft fingers rifle through papers, tobacco, wipe something from my nose all beauty and productivity. He lights it in his own mouth, places it in mine."Thank you" I say, or try to.
The whiskey is all peat and ancient leathery bodies, the smoke like a funeral pyre. My mouth full of death-tinged water; a prelude to vomitting and I spit and laugh this "I'm like - goth-mashed - Edgar Allan - fucking - Poe" He's about seven, en route to a birthday tea. Let's sleep on the bus, when it comes.
In the hallway he says: "My dad knows this guy" and screws up his nose. A small voice in my head says "Run away, Run away" like I'm Jean Rhys now, or something.
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Did I ever mention that I hate you?
ReplyDelete"I wanted to go away with just the same feeling a boy has when he wants to run away to sea at least, that I imagine a boy has. Only in my adventure, men were mixed up, because of course they had to be." - Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Like, huh? Don't get the JR ref at all. Prob because I don't read the right things. I finally got the Carter book you recomended, but so far, no joy.
First part: You pissed out of your skull and that is your bf or someone else standing above you? Or is it like a childhood memory (them so tall above you?) Probably the former, given the cats, but still, it has that sort of a quality.
The image of the little boy rolling your cigs is devastating and beautiful. Headshot, like. "My dad knows this guy" - Is he one of your bf's kids? (How old are they? How old is he?)
Whisky - leathery bodies... beautiful.
You never answered my question what about crippling yourself with booze or drugs gets you so off on it?
It was just something i was reading - Good Morning Midnight - that line is in it, was also in my head. as usual, your story is better than mine - like i read it and - oh - THAT'S what I meant huh? But no, no-one is a little child and I don't write about him or his kids, as a rule - not here. If you're reading this T - then - yeh - that's a lie, obviously ;p. The clue is in the title, maybe. Don't you think - messing with your chemical balance is a very primal human urge and quite universal?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean, "no-one is a little child"?
ReplyDelete"He's about seven, en route to a birthday tea." So, who is that?
With all the different "he"s, it's hard to tell who is who. I figured the he in the last three paragraphs was one and the same, especially since the third paragraph from the end describes the bus-stop and the next one ends with "Let's sleep on the bus, when it comes." That is after the seven-year old. Yeah, I wondered where you got the peaty whiskey from at the bus-stop, but still. Hence the image of the 7 year old who rolls your fags on the way to a bd-party and dismisses you as someone "my dad knows".
I think the title was what gave me the idea. Double date. There is obviously the moment you dig around in the trash. The phone-call and that was like, the first date. And then there is the second occasion. (I know what a double date is, but there don't seem to be 4 peeps present at any moment. So I figured you used the term differently, somehow.)
Anyway, I like my version. Including you drunkenly bringing your bf's child to a bd-party, need him to roll your fags, and being dismissed so callously by him...
Hmm-hmm...
"If you're reading this T - then - yeh - that's a lie, obviously"... I am assuming this remark wasn't meant to make any sense to me.
"a very primal human urge and quite universal" Certainly. But you do seem to relish fucking yourself up to the point of invalidity, and then revel in the humiliation of it. Which turns me on to no end. But it goes beyond the human universal.
I still don't understand the JRhys remark about running away. I mean, wouldn't you be Sasha Jansen, if it was from GMM? (I'm not trying to be a pain in the arse. Honest. Just puzzling through them.)
The narrator here is obviously rendered incompetent by substances unknown, although whisky features later. Okay, they are struggling with simple, everyday tasks - like replying to a question based phone message, but the incompetence somehow makes the mundane magical and glitteringly profound. Trying to fish the phone out from beneath a kitchen surface becomes an important action - seared into the memory like the treasured passage from a favourite novel. It can be chewed, tasted by the reader. Sucked on to glean meaning that isn't necessarily there in either the initial action, or in the committing it to words? But it's a real meaning, because you, the reader, read it there. Or tried to, at least
DeleteThe reference to Jean Rhys is intended to alert the reader to this, another unstable, unreliable narrator making casual, jewel like but somehow infuriatingly incomplete images from the mundane mechanics of struggling through life, wasted mostly.
I think the child is metaphoric, the companion is red cheeked, healthy and competant. Like children are usually competent if given the chance to be. Like their liver still works. Their cheeks are red and yeah, maybe they are a little younger than the narrator - they have an aura of innocence, note the "what shall I wear?" It seems a little gauche, suggests they dont know how to present themselves for the task in question. Later the reference to the father: "My Dad knows this guy" infantilises them again, it is sneering, juxtaposing the older potential john with their glowing youth. I like how you thought the comment was aimed at the narrator, I don't think this narrator is able to present themselves as that abject - toomuch youth and edgy narcissism here.
Like the author says, "the clue is in the title" the crux of the story should be the presumed sex work scenario they are preparing for, travelling towards. The kind of hackneyed, full of presumed meaning act that is trotted out as what makes us. This author is suggesting that identity formation is perhaps to be found elsewhere, the dropping of a phone, the fumbled rolling of a cigarette - not the sexual act with an acquaintance of the friend's father? This seems quite a dissident approach.