Toyland. It Deepens Like A Coastal Shelf

Brand new baby in the village last night. All stony silence and snow, the clip-clopping Robert Frost poem nobody bothers to hear. They’re all inside, watching The Bachelorette, life-size. Philip took a walk and a few pictures. Because thinking back to the winter of ‘98, he and Monica had been so utterly transfixed by Millie, they never even looked up. And everyone who found them was transfixed too. It was all flat light and grinning peasants, the Bruegel nativity Bruegel never painted. There was nothing else. No sky, no traffic, nobody cold, unhappy, hustling home. No horse at the corner of the canvas scratching its ass on a tree. The unique state of the universe’s indifference went unrecorded. But time passes, and the hungry eye roams from the immaculate adoration in search of context that affords meaning. The enduring memory of being frogmarched out of the manger on the ninth floor of St Vincent’s, midnight, and having to walk home alone through the mirror symmetry of a world unaware it had been turned upside down. It was snowing then too. He stopped at McDonald’s on 6th Avenue, ate a Big Mac and fries under Mengele fluorescents. They were mopping the floor. The solitude of the suicide bomber. He had just fathered the Lamb of God and nobody gave a fuck.

Like an adulterer, and sweaty as a Serge Gainsbourg interview, Philip slipped away from Paris at dawn wearing the same undershirt he arrived in. His only regret? Missing the Santa Maria Novella haze of Perine on the breeze two days hence. Funny, the lovely free radicals our corpuscles adhere to. Perine in Paris. Like riding a bicycle round Montmartre in a beret with onions, forking snails through the bee-stung lips of Françoise Hardy. Only the best people eat their babies. He would suggest they slow-braise Théodore in a hot airing-cupboard, like confit, while they sip kir pêche beside an open window overlooking Jardin des Plantes. “Rôtie!” Perine would say, clapping her hands. Millie they’d drown in Armagnac and consume with tea-towels over their heads like Mitterrand and his bunting. Her organs would be bitter. Her bones would crunch into shards and pierce their gums. Afterwards, he’d fashion a funny little shrine for the two tiny residues in the old part of Montparnasse. A bronze fish with boobs. A child suckling a cow. Perine and Philip knew; the only way to completely love one’s children is to devour them.

The time the spaceship landed on the front lawn, they’d just finished doing the dishes. Monica had baked some tofu with nutritional yeast and a bit of kale, and they’d enjoyed a nourishing family dinner while listening to Willy the Whale with the Curly Tail. After a quick bath and book, Philip put Millie to bed, dozing off for forty-five minutes before tottering down to get back to not communicating. That’s when he noticed there was an alien in the living room. It was difficult not to notice really, since he was a big blob of protoplasm, throbbing purple, yellow and green. Monica was already chatting to him. He said he was from Jupiter, he’d been sent here to procreate with a human female, but he didn’t mind if a male joined in too. Philip was a bit skeptical at first, or maybe just tired, but Monica had set aside her knitting and was giving Philip sidelong glances. He was a bit of charmer, Zob, had no end of pseudopods and a vacuole which could be fashioned into a goatherd’s pouch and caused to vibrate. It had been several years and two children since Monica had felt the protean gurgle of prurience below the beltline. A unanticipated resurrection might have something in it for everybody. And it was the Catskills in February, after all.

In the end everything seemed to go pretty well; Philip didn’t remember the last half hour (something about a train braying ‘choo-choo-choo!’) because he popped off to make a pot of tea, and by the time he returned Zob was cocking one abbreviated eyebrow and slipping out the back door, whistling Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual. Anyhow, fifteen years later …

They don’t boast. Which is all Philip and his ilk ever did. Raised to believe that without serious over-egging, the pudding would be shite, every third place in the sack race was a win and why call it big if you could say it was huge? It was a working class thing. Accept you’re crap, then lie. Years later they were all lying for a living, for a life, flogging artlessness with drivel and blather, calling it art. What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good. Philip looked at this vanilla braggadocio, still flapping like laundry on the line, then over at them; and he saw they were not interested. Despite the money, the store-bought aesthetics, the useless beauty. They knew that lies beget lies and without truth there is only anxiety. No justice. And little joy. Philip was older now. And he had built his castle on sand.

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