Friday 13 June 2014

Angels Dancing on Pinheads/Small Girls Hanging in the Breeze.

                                                    SAFE in your  HEAD, SCARED in your  HEART
                                         
The Boss declared to me in the morning that she was OK, she was good, "although I slept for only like three  hours?". Huh??  "It was so like strange. I mean even though I knew I was safe in my head I was scared, in my, you know, heart? It was beating so fast?" She had  watched some Horror Movie with the boy the night before, against my advice, but it was all right she said, because she had seen this one  already in the Cinema. Not scary.  No.  Though, she had like gone on line in the meantime, for research purposes, and turns out  the whole story was actually you know true!.

                                                           GOOD MUMMY, BAD MUMMY

I am one of the bad guys here. She knocked on my door at two in the morning,  wailing like Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering  Heights to be let in,   and I refused. Against my advise. "Tell me about it"  I say,  and she does at great and rambling length. For you dear reader, suffice it to summarize  that in a  family move to a new house, the Mummy gradually becomes possessed by a mad, bad killer ghost Mummy, who, having done in her one little one, seeks to pass on the child killing baton to good Mummy,. "And..like .. the worse thing was that you could see the you know  good Mummy being taken over by the like other Mummy, but none of her movie family  could. .  And you knew it was like true"  She shudders eloquently.

It all worked out in the end, with  bad mummy vanquished..  And the beautiful Girl, applied to in default, took her overwrought sister into her bed. For a time anyway until the Boss's  twitching overwhelming presence became too much, and she  was evicted... "Oh but I feel badly" the dear girl later told me. "But I just couldn't stand her any longer. And  what a  pair of yellow losers, she and the boy"  and she got back to her books. The Leaving Certificate. Hmm. She is herself  a person of contrasts, sound  in major catastrophe, liable to unravel over small things.

                                                        Nothing  Ever Scares me Much

"Yeah, I mean it was a bit scary. And you know nothing  ever scares me much?" the boy comments. I view him down the long lens of memory, his sweaty night terrors before he became fearless. See myself literally having to go in after him, where he shivered and wept in cavities of the unconscious sleeping boy mind. Coax him out, and gentle him back to safety.  So forgotten now.

                                                                I NEVER SAID THAT!

"So, anyways, I guess that Mummy  turning on you is the worst thing", I offer now, " I mean Mummy being  your first most trusted safety?"  "Yeah" she says thoughtfully, "like, that time on holiday  you said to me   " I'm not your Mummy,  little girl !!"   when you were getting your,  you know, Hot Stone message?"  "No!,"  I say sternly  "No!.  We have discussed this. That was not me".  "Yeah" she says  "Mmm, OK". Doubtful. to this day. dear  Reader.  It matters not how often I insist.  She, eight years old, and left with siblings in  a supervised swimming  pool, came to look for me, in the spa, and found another mother. "Why , I ask her now, would I deny you!". "Um I thought you were like in a..in  a.. another I mean  Zone,  and  didn't want to like be a Mummy just then. Yeah" ."But"   I said "but,  it was another mother!!".

                                                      WE ARE THE NIGERIANS

 I wish now I had let her in my bedroom, spared her some of those heart beats. We have a finite number of heart beats over a life time, I understand. You can use them all up.  Even though I wonder about holding back dark things  from children. I  am reading Half of  a Yellow  Sun. and,  blown away , I  think that  I will never look at  Nigerian persons again without seeing them against this textured backdrop, where, given the dignity of their own story, they are us and  they are other, they are themselves.  No longer simply immigrants. Having first read Americanah, I had  to read  this book.  I try to sound the writers lovely name.  One of her female characters, ferociously  individual, berates her sister for hobbling children by  cocooning  maternal fuss.  Quite

                                                NOT DANCING  I'm HANGING
..
And then  I am harrowed by  my own Horror Story this week. No dream this. The newspaper picture of two teenage girls swinging from the end of a rope as their people sit  underneath, looking like a Tim Burtonesque  movie still at first glance.  The people sit in protest at failures of local police to prevent the rapes of the girls, the hanging of their poor bodies in the trees. They sit, they do not look up. The photo has the quality of a dream scape, a depiction of a sort of heightened reality. The people continue to sit as the girls continued to hang overhead. How could  you not take your little one down? Stacked behind this tableau is a series of media reported murders of women and children this week  by stoning, torture, neglect, starvation. A yawning Septic Tank revealed, in grand finale,  the crypt in  Tuam, Co Galway.

                                                       LEAST THE BEAST SEE ME

The beast in community, the ultimate horror, the danger from your own.  The outcasting of individuals prior to their obliteration. Is it an  instinctive knowing of this darkness, also at the heart of family, that brings bad dreams to children? That which is never owned in daylight, riding free in dreams? Scapegoats, set apart and killed. Against the bad thing seeing me. And we  are all children in this, hiding under the bedclothes, imaging monsters, never facing our own monstrosity, our failures to act.