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Chapter One
Eloise
A plump and cunning baby hangs in the crook of her sister's arm. The older girl looks out to sea. She wants to wipe her nose but can't: in one hand the plump and cunning baby, in the other the bag of worldly possessions. In one hand, a sack of family history (Russian baubles and heirlooms), in the other a living breathing squawking baby. Elsewhere, an itchy nose.
Fine-looking gentleman steps up. Sees her predicament. Offers to hold something. Dilemma: whether to hand over the compact prescient baby wrapped in her ancient shawl, or the bag, their lifeline in the New World. Uncertainly, the girl swings the heavy bag forward. Within seconds, no sign of the bag or the gentleman amid an undulating crowd of untrustworthy folk. There will be no carriage costs for their belongings at Ellis Island -- no belongings!
The boat, the bag and the baby. That baby was my grandmother who hates blacks, Catholics and Arabs, thinks all supermarket chickens have cancer, bakes her own chollah bread, boils up her own yoghurt, does daily eye exercises, brushes her teeth in salt water, stores plastic bags in the washing machine, hides banknotes behind the wallpaper, keeps a glass of water by her bed in which to drown wandering insects at night, and writes excruciating little ditties about giraffes and flamingos on the back of animal postcards. She has reached a horrendous age in the damp of Connemara (they were on the wrong boat) whilst threatening us continually with her imminent demise. Given the choice between Grandma and the bag of worldly possessions ... well, I've always been curious about that bag.
Reverberations of the trick played on Eloise's great-aunt travelled down the generations: Eloise's father suspected theft whenever he lost anything, and Eloise too thought she was being swindled at every turn. But wasn't she? Aren't we all?
A butterfly, a pig, a pretzel, a windmill, a marble-topped washstand (complete with jug and basin), a potato, a hammer, a poodle, a bell, a boat, a monkey, a book entitled The Spirit of Scotland (Vol. 1), a gun, a telephone, a mermaid, a cockerel, a sack of money, a huntsman, a beer barrel, a golf bag, a hand: Eloise's father collected bottles that didn't look like bottles, bottles that look deceptively unlike bottles, bottles that do not seem fully aware themselves that they are bottles. Bottles designed to be mistaken for jestful souvenirs of foreign travel or merely tasteless trinkets. He was forever retreating upstairs to these bottles, to escape his undaughter-like daughter (a quality Eloise shared with daughters everywhere).
Eloise eventually inherited the bottle collection -- along with some money, several trunks and suitcases full of sodden family papers (kept in the garage awaiting organization), and the tiny box freezer her father had used for his home-made ice cream, which came in two flavours, coffee or vanilla (strawberry didn't seem to work). She also inherited his car, a fancy one he'd bought himself as reward for a lifetime's labour (a lifetime's despair) before realizing how close he was to death. He was the hero of his own tragic tale.
Eloise did not deserve these things but took them, as one does. To her dead father's fancy car she added a cheap radio and, in consequence of that, a car alarm, ruining the smooth lines of the dashboard: she was a bad daughter. In deliberate defiance of the instruction manuals for both appliances she had the box freezer hoisted up on top of her own fridge, and stocked it full of ethnic dishes from Sainsbury's so she'd never have to cook again. She spent her father's money on this exotic fare and a picturesque Tudor cottage in which to eat it (thatched roof, rose bushes, small ancient asparagus bed, defunct outhouse for rakes, coal and flowerpots, Aga, flagstoned floors, inglenook fireplace, beamed ceilings like the inside of a whale's rib cage, small leaded windows with views over blue hills only partially obliterated by neighbour's lurid green garage), spent his money on a style of life suited to her situation, age and temperament, spent it all on lifeless lovelessness in fact, half-alive hermitude, spent so much that if she didn't inherit from somebody else soon she'd have to get a job.
Her father's bottles filled every darling black and white niche of her tiny cottage. Some were attractive enough but Eloise found herself staring more at the ugly ones, garish caricatures of politicians, monks and milkmaids (sales gimmicks for Lourdes water or whatever). Petrified forests of these figurines stood about in resentful groups on window sills or menacingly surrounded the phone. What they all had in common was that their heads came off, or some other bit, to reveal that while they might look like useless household ornaments they were in fact vessels capable of bearing liquid. Under her father's devoted care they had retained some dignity but now, in undisciplined retirement, lonely and liquidles, they frequently fell to sorry ends when Eloise reached for a new loo roll or wound the clock.
Everyone would reinvent the world if they could. Eloise had tired of watching the multitude commingle, overblown insects each with its own Me. Most people seemed to her worthless (herself included). She had tired of death and disappointment, her own guilt and sorrow, and the distress of others. She had tired of the speed with which things happen. She had tired of boring human busy-ness, human requirements, human bodies. She had tired of streets, buildings, farm produce, `romantic bathrooms'. She had tired of the News! She had tired of her species. So she set off to construct for herself the illusion of a less populated world, in which no one knew or cared who or what she was and she in turn was free to care about no one.
She practised a decorously inconspicuous form of hermitude, designed to attract the least attention, the least need for explanation. She told no one (there are surprisingly few people to whom one can usefully impart the news that one is a hermit). She was polite, but her friendliness lacked all sincerity: most of her time was spent reeling from windows, barely breathing in shadowy corners of her house in order to avoid suspected visitors or merely the innocent glances of passers-by. She even hid from helicopters! Outside, catching sight of someone on the path ahead, she would stand sideways behind trees, very slowly changing her position so as to remain blocked from view as the other person unwittingly strolled past. But, some days, even the possibility of being seen from a distance was too much for her: on those days she could not go out at all.
For indoor use she had developed a gormless daffy-duck walk to emphasize her distance from humanity. She played Bach's unaccompanied cello suites on the cello her father had bought her when she was young and supposedly musical, played in the frenzied manner of someone unsure of hitting the right note, played badly but so sadly it often brought a tear to her eye.
She was losing touch with humanity. To hold on to language she listened gravely to the radio (sometimes falling into the hermit's trap of thinking celebrities were her friends). One day Paul Theroux was mentioned and she realized she'd forgotten he existed. If they hadn't said his name on the radio she might have forgotten for ever Paul Theroux! But why think about him? She hid like a lump in her fortress, her underworld, trying to forget everything (for every memory was painful).
She had had some trouble buying a house. It isn't easy persuading people to sell their houses to one so strange. They all want them occupied by people similar or maybe even a little superior to themselves, not some twitchy female attesting a mysterious solvency, cash deals, deep desires. Not some loner lady mumbling about the resemblance of the master bedroom to a whale's insides. Nor did they have any faith in her gardening abilities. People were not comfortable having her fall in love with their houses. After taking a good look at Eloise the second time she came round, one couple suddenly remembered their daughter's A levels and decided not to move that year after all. Another pair, to whom Eloise had offered thousands more than the asking price, said they would have to think about it. What they were thinking about was Eloise: a classless, raceless, rootless, restless, reckless, feckless, orphaned outrage.
But who is loved?
George
Strikes me there aren't enough burglars to go around. Why haven't I been burgled yet? How do they manage to make a LIVING, these lousy good-for-nothing English burglars? Every tree its nest, every acorn its squirrel, every bus its drunk, every factory its toxic waste, every block its McDonald's, every house its burglar! What's happened to the NATURAL ORDER of things?
Those gerbils gay men stick up their asses. What does the gerbil THINK? The stink, the moist closeness, wedged tight between those dark enfolding walls ... Must think it's being EATEN.
But I guess it's no worse than fucking chickens (and all the other barnyard love objects favored by heterosexual farmers). Somehow my HOMOPHOBIA'S getting mixed up with my ANGLOPHOBIA but for Christsakes, the country's full of wankers and cross-dressing! Shakespeare started it -- half his characters are in drag, And then there's the little matter of the Dark `Lady' of the sonnets and the `second-best bed' -- which faggoty actor pal got the BEST bed? And all those PUTRID Xmas pantomimes that you have to be born and bred here to be able to STAND: most of them can surely only be of real interest to transsexuals! The favorite British comedians are all female impersonators. Single-sex education has its CONSEQUENCES: all the English seem to think about is sexual stagnation or ambivalence. NOBODY BOTHERS TO FUCK THE WOMEN! (How does the race survive?) A land of safe but wasted women.
I wish I could help them, those overdressed gals wheeling out their peaches `n' cream complexions and rusty flirting techniques. But I came here to sober up, to find peace in a cultured land where, among like-minded folk, I can finish my epic poem on ice hockey. OK, so they've never heard of ice hockey. I'D never heard of sticking gerbils up your ass before I came here -- but I'd support anybody trying to write a poem about it.
The English are not supportive, they're reserved. This has nothing to do with some kind of endearing and comical shyness. It's a brutal and senseless DETACHMENT FROM THE WORLD. They're simply unwilling to fully endorse anything, unwilling to ENJOY anything. They'd rather DIE than please you. They never even SMILE. Try speaking to one of 'em at a bus stop -- they act as if you ought to pay them a GUINEA A WORD! `This bugger thinks we're gonna talk to him for free? Thinks he has a right to a little human contact, does he? Who does he think he is, the Queen?'
They're all so glum, they act BEREAVED. Can't look you in the eye because they're BEREAVED, can't speak because they're BEREAVED, can't cook because they're so BEREAVED, don't FUCK because they're BEREAVED, drive on the wrong side of the road because BEREAVEMENT has confused them. But what are they bereaved ABOUT? What is this gnawing collective tragedy? The loss of an empire they should never have had in the first place? Lack of sun? Train privatization and a year of tricky train timetables? Fluctuating Darjeeling prices? The perpetual self-abasement of the Royal Fambly? It could be ICE HOCKEY deprivation, for all they know.
They're philistines too. You can't get a bookcase in this country for love or money. They've filled them all with their hideous knick-knacks and they're NOT LETTING GO. Shelves sag throughout the land under bubble-glass paperweights, china figurines and photo albums full of blurry `pics' of soggy camping `hols'. Probably put the gerbil cage in there too, and, of course, the VIDEO collection. The Brits watch more videos per capita than any other race on earth.
Anything to avoid a roll in the hay, I guess.
The sporting man parades his fury
For the crowd, his judge and jury;
Mimicking the lack of feeling
Men adopt for raping, stealing,
What they need in war for killing.
Nothing slows him, nothing stops him
(Skating dimly, puck before him)
In his phony-baloney anger,
His IMAGINARY DANGER.
When not writing my poem, I battle on with my hapless screenplay for the BBC -- now in its EIGHTH INCARNATION. All a big waste of adverbs:
MAN NOISILY EXTRACTS BREAD FROM OVEN. MAN
LOOKS HESITATINGLY AT WOMAN. WOMAN LOOKS
SADLY BACK. MAN DROPS PAN CLUMSILY. MAN
BOLDLY CROSSES ROOM. MAN GRABS WOMAN
FIERCELY, DELICATELY PARTS HER CUNNINGLY
WANDERING WISPS OF HAIR AND KISSES HER.
FERVENTLY.
I'm just beginning to get the hang of it. Lotta good it'll do me. Now they want me to get rid of the LOVE interest (what do the Brits know about love, after all?), make all my characters shallow and promiscuous and generally `lighten' the thing up a bit! Each character's got to make a JOURNEY, they say. Something like a pasta machine: start off as one sort of guy, go through stuff (:LIFE), and come out different by the end (twirled, ridged, tubular or green). How childish can you get, this idea that everybody's CHANGING and IMPROVING all the time! Jeez, if they mention JOURNEYS once more I'm taking the next plane home.
Their latest complaint is that my dialogue isn't AMERICAN enough! They've assigned me a new script editor (:glorified PAIN IN THE ASS), Iolanthe, to `help' with it. She's ENGLISH!! She tells me my dialogue doesn't tell you anything about the characters. Tells ya what they're SAYING though, huh? The new dialogue tells you a lot about Iolanthe: she's CRASS. But the last one was worse, kept making me rewrite stuff As It Would Be Filmed. I have wasted MONTHS of my life changing things like: `MAN WALKS TO WINDOW ENJOYING THE JOKE', to `SMILING MAN WALKS JAUNTILY TOWARD WINDOW, LAUGHING A LITTLE'. Months.
They dangle before me the tantalizing prospect that Charles will someday read it. Charles is too busy ever to be personally consulted by a writer -- he delegates the script chicks to deliver his message to the scribes, I wouldn't have even believed the guy EXISTS, except I saw him on his way to the john once. Never saw him come OUT, though. The entire future of BBC Drama rests on Charles, and Charles is resting on the john (well, I would too, probably). But my producer insists she knows what Charles likes and if I make all her changes (that is, fuck the whole thing and myself up in new and wonderful ways), she'll eventually shove my pitiful screenplay, about the pitfalls of love, in his direction. Together we daily try to please and appease Charles.
My only comfort: pinball. Old family tradition. My father's gangster uncle, Harry `Hands' Hanafan, used to control all the pinball machines in south Boston. The guy had hands like BEAR PAWS. Only had to walk into the bar or grocery store and show those paws and they'd hand the money over! My dad went along for the ride occasionally (about which he was not proud), but by the time I could have joined them Harry seemed to be permanently in prison. I never even got to meet him! God, I would have LOVED to check out all the old pinball machines while Harry was arranging those mitts of his on the counter beside the cash register.
What's wrong with promoting a little pinball anyway? A noble game. Must've given hope to many a sad lad. I wouldn't have gotten through college without it! Ice hockey and pinball saved ME.
And behold, in striving for the attainment of ... his own individual welfare, man perceives that his welfare depends on other beings, And, upon watching and observing these other beings, man sees that all of them, both men and even animals, possess precisely the same conception of life as he himself. Each of these beings ... is conscious only of his own life, and his own happiness, considers his own life alone of importance, and real, and the life of all other fellow beings only as a means to his own individual welfare. Man sees that every living being, precisely like himself, must be ready, for the sake of his petty welfare, to deprive all other beings of greater happiness and even of life.
Copyright © 1998 Lucy Ellmann. All rights reserved.
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