Fat Jack. The Cause of Death was Birth
Woke at 4 to Jack’s crying, like he’s realised something very important and urgently needs to say it. The weight of a submerged object is equal to the weight of water displaced … Last time he did this he nearly broke the bank. The rubbery sensation of being dragged by the ankles across the smelly rug of your unconscious until you finally realise you’re awake, and that the plaintive cry of “Papa? Papa?” downstairs is your actual daughter, not the corgi-headed lovechild of your teenage girlfriend wiggling like a worm to escape an empty can of Heinz Baked Beans. I blunder downstairs in only my skivvies, barely flinching at the ‘Wow, you kinda got fat’ glance she shoots. She’s standing in the doorway, watching Jack careen across circles on the floor, eyes like saucers, making that crazy sound cats make when they’re yowling across the Styx. His front end seems pretty okay, but his back end’s all at sixes and sevens. It has fallen off the wagon and is flopping about behind him like discarded bagpipes. Neither of us does anything. We just stand there gaping. It’s weird and disturbing and also a bit gross; not the sort of thing you want to get involved in if you can avoid it. Suddenly he stops; kind of blinks a few times, staggers to his feet and totters off like a drunk into the kitchen, where he devours a massive bowl of kibble – purring like a tractor – before promptly dozing off on the sofa.
Four years later he’s still here, like a hot water bottle in a raggedy old porcupine cover. So what’s his predawn message this time? That we are infantile ninnies, babbling drivel, scampering like panicked ants in the shadow of God’s slipper? Hard to tell. He stands facing the wall, a cat of concrete, only his mouth moving. Perhaps he is reciting The Waste Land? ‘They called me the hyacinth girl …’ Or regurgitating David Hockney? ‘The cause of death was birth’. Still supine, I pull off my underpants, toss them at him. He burps a hopeful chirrup, trance broken, turns away from the wall and trolls off downstairs.
Worms are eating the kale, little green ones that hatch into paper butterflies. We thought it was snails and almost instituted a gastropological pogrom. A thousand escargots shrank into their shells at the sound of spray bottles being filled with brine, moist eyeballs widening at the tips of trembling tentacles. But it’s worms. Bastards! We fed one to the spider at the crook of the window, then turned to the garden like Mussolini and bellowed, “let that be a lesson to you all!” I’ve been in self-inflicted free-fall for four years. It might have been nice, if it wasn’t for the sight of you lot clawing up the rock face with bloody fingers, clinging to the creepers by your teeth. Witnessing your vertical endeavour as I hurtled past unparachuted, served to sow the seeds of doubt. ‘Maybe I’m not Icarus after all?’ I thought, breasts flapping at my armpits, ‘more like Tosca?’ But COVID, it seems, is putting paid to everyone’s illusions of defying gravity. The Letting Go is upon us and folk are peeling away from the cliff like gulls, learning to keen and crow as they drop. Only one ship is seeking us. And it plies the green waters far below.
This afternoon we made the margaritas early, which always brings a giddy blush to a twilight walk in the rain, followed by a dull thud between the eyes at 7.30, a glancing blow from a furry cobble. Just when you’re trying to juggle the ingredients for apple Brown Betty and the booze-aimed cup clunks the side of the springform and the sugar’s on the floor and you sweep it up but it’s still in the soles of your moccasins so you break out the vacuum but the cord’s retracted and it’s pulling the canister back towards the plug so it clotheslines yesterday’s bottle of red which topples in slow motion but your hand can’t decide to let go of the wand and catch the bottle so it does nothing and the wine’s glugging onto the floor in fat belches, slapping off shelves as it flops and tumbles like a murdered wedding cake. And the oven’s red hot and smells of bitter mouse, prickling the eyes; all hair, viscera and tiny piss. I slump next to Jack, who smiles broadly and maybe winks, and we watch Grey Gardens and can’t decide which of us is Big or Little Edie.
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