Turn Around, Bright Eyes

Now then.  I’ve been neglecting you.  I can see you there, in your electronic eyries, peeping and cheeping with your gobs agape, just itchin’ for me to hawk up a great glob of regurgitated words into your little trembling beaks.  Of course I won’t desert you again.  I’m a good mother.  Just look how well Baby Mumps turned out. 

After the initial period of mourning (oh those long nights of Blue Nun through a bendy straw and weepy wanks to Fanny Cradock) I am over the monkey.  I’ve done everything the magazines tell you to do – I’ve given myself a snazzy new look (‘Disco Prospector’), had a ceremonial burning of love letters and sentimental trinkets (I chucked on a few final demands while I was at it, and all those letters from the council about the Garum pit – never waste a good bonfire) and I’ve even signed up for something called Zumba.  I am a new woman.  

So my life has become a giddy whirl of Glamorous Stances and Executive Business.  My Filofax is full of cocktail parties and conference calls and at any given point in the day, I have literally just stepped out of a salon.  I’m pretty much Huddersfield’s Fanciest Lady. 

There comes a time when one must put away childish things and move on in life.  Obsession is the finest hobby you can have, but you must never let it get to the point where you are slumped in a cold bath slugging warm gin crooning Total Eclipse of the Heart to the memory of an imaginary monkey. 

Unless, of course, that’s all part of the fun.

P.S. Perhaps Zumba was not quite such a good idea.  Apparently they expect you to be on time AND appropriately dressed AND relatively sober AND they don’t take kindly to smoking AND they don’t want to see your Hornpipe, thank you very much. 

Apres le Singe

So now I’m in the market for a brand new muse. Butterface won’t do, of course – I wouldn’t trust her references – and that bastard Baby Mumps is out. It won’t be Michael, who came to stay on Mischief Night and hasn’t left his chair, Michael with his face like a sagging balaclava and his crinkling woolly hands, his hair slipping off at the back of his head and oh my god those thighs. And it can’t be any of my sundry cats – nobody wants a muse that’s always licking its arse and can’t kill anything bigger than a vole.

Nope, it’s an employers’ market out there. I’ve put a card in the Post Office window and am waiting for the phone to ring. I could be my own muse, I suppose, but I’d be an unreliable worker. I’d be tardy and churlish and smuggle stationery out in my hair, I’d clock-watch and time-waste and gob in the guvnor’s tea. I’d end up giving me the sack, for sure, and I’m pretty litigious when riled.

Essential attributes in a potential candidate will include a 2:1 or above in Applied Monstrousness, the ability to mix a perfect Benylin Sunrise, an unapproachable demeanour and unprofessional appearance, advanced skills in burglary, Beggar My Neighbour and Microsoft Excel, experience in dealing with difficult customers and at least five years in the position of muse, familiar or personal demi-god. An HGV license is desirable, as are a shotgun license and an elementary swimming certificate. Unsettlingly suggestive tails an advantage. I will be accepting bribes.

There’s something I haven’t been telling you. Something is different, something has changed. Something dreadful has happened.

It’s the monkey. It’s got lost.

It somehow didn’t make it in the move. I kept telling myself that it would turn up, that it would come swaggering in through the catflap or surprise me in the shower, that I would see a stirring in my sock drawer and a stiffly rising tail, but no, it is gone. It is gone.

How I managed to pack a Yellow Pages from 2006, the reeking duvet of a former housemate, a tin of pease pudding and a small pouch of hair and yet not the monkey, I will never know. The only conclusion I can draw is that it did not want to come and remains in the cellar of my former slum, gibbering softly to itself and making little sooty thumbprints on the walls. My prayers go out to the new tenants.

It was my muse, my god, my disciple and my lover, with its maleficent tail and its jaunty old fez. We had weathered so much together, skipping through my hinterlands paw in paw, prancing through the places it’s unsafe to go alone. Without my monkey, I am bereft. Who will mix my sild martinis and pinch me gently to sleep? Who will chase the Children from my door? Whose little leather fingers will sneak into mine when it’s 3am in my heart and all my glee is gone?

What am I going to do?

Ruptures

The sweet foam teeth spilled beneath the catkins. The Valentine's bear that moulders by the train tracks, stubbornly clutching its sodden satin heart. The empty house with the lush monstera at the bedroom window. The half-glimpse through the carriage window of the Alsatian on the balcony, sprawled dead or sleeping on a single sheet of card. Two shoes among the roadside crocuses, an immaculate white trainer and an oyster silk stiletto. These are the ruptures, the moments when some secret world forgets to fasten its flies and we are flashed by the hinterland where magic and madness root.

I think of these moments on this pretty, coy Sunday as I breathe in sandalwood and skunk and listen to the children chant their antic rhymes. Snout is in the music room conjuring booming natal grooves and Spatchcock limbers up in her velour tracksuit, ready to get out in the tentative sun and start some shit. I am eating Easter eggs and drinking advocaat on ice. There is still some time to go before the Season starts with Eurovision and I need something to keep me in trouble.

An empty nappy on the baby swings. A trail of moths from the neighbour's door. Bacon on the coping stones of the playground wall. Flesh-coloured tights in the willow tree. My own little ruptures. I'll have to wait until it's dark. The monkey can't stand the sight of spring.

The Most Important Meal of the Day

The dormice, from the jars in the back bedroom, were done to perfection, their little bacon blankets crisping up nicely. The eggs were resting so that the hot fowl broth could seep back into the bodies of the baby birds and soften up their filigree bones. The bright paint on the eggshells looked so cheery in the dirty light, the red and the gold and the deep beetle green, and the fact that they were served in shot glasses rather than proper eggcups only added to their charm. The toast was translucent and in each perfect triangle a woman’s face was branded in a cameo of darker brown crumbs. In the plain white porcelain teapot that was only slightly chipped but quite badly stained there was enough fortified wine to wash the feast down, and in the matching sugar bowl there was another kind of white powder for pudding. It was the perfect breakfast and there was a place laid for the monkey too, even though the monkey only eats hair.

When I Was Just a Little Girl

As a girl I was godhungry, I collected them like stamps. Many-armed and jackal-headed, blue-hued and cloven-hoofed, playing the pipes, the harp, the fool, fickle, flawed and fictional. Boy-gods naked, thumb-sucking, silent; bare-breasted girl-gods of sex and the sewers. A god for everything and every god in its place, like so many insects in my killing-jar. The monkey indulged my avarice, bringing me them like a cat brings a corpse. I mounted my gods in scrapbooks and on cork, cataloguing and curating and all the time incredulous that it should be them instead of me.

Tiring of gods like colouring books I began to paint my own. I went to the seaside and found a god at night beneath the waves. I saw the whales hanging, heads-down in the lambent blue, like bombs falling in aspic. I saw the squid slide, their petticoats rippling, their beaks bared for a kiss. I saw seasponges like sweetbreads and the umbilical eels. That wet god sent me jellyfish and prophecies in the flotsam, wood bleached to bone and salt-licked pebbles of glass. I caught birds and carved them, sending them off to sea in paper boats with sails made from hankies. With my worship, the beach grew smaller, the tide sidling higher, the water closing in.

Mo mo mo mo Monkey

I lean out of the window and watch the children ply their trades in the street below. Some of them have baboons on chains, others are half-hauled along by leashed hyenas. A few idly copulate among the bodies of the fallen. I pick my teeth as the monkey aims its catapult and the ballbearing is loosed right straight dead in the eye of a monstrous baboon. The beast freaks, its scream incongruous to its lethal bulk. It turns on its child-mistress, tearing her like bread, howling and gibbering with strands of spit and viscera flinging from its bloody maw. The other children try to flee but their beasts are aroused by the carnage, and all are devoured. The monkey must have its sport.

Last Things First

This post has disappeared. It is a mystery.

Pinta

The Milkman comes at dawn, his cart drawn by steaming cows with curlicue horns, their lowing soft as blankets. Sometimes milk in the shit-caked bottles, milk for the lucky ones, raw and thick as spunk, the cream yellow and spreadable. Sometimes he brings eggs, each blue shelled with the virgin in its yolk, delivered in the nest, or pungent, weeping cheeses wrapped in hide. Capricious Milkman doesn’t always deliver and from time-to-time does worse, depositing on doorsteps pints of slurry, pigs’ ears or piteous two-headed calves which whimper and flail and have to be dealt with.

It Will Be Told In Reverse

When I walk down the street I see a parade of snaggletoothed mummers with yellow mucus dripping from their lips, and it seems like on every bench and on the top of every war memorial and in all the alleyways full of shoe shops and coffee houses there are eleven year old girls trussed up like sluts fingering their open cunts. The supermarkets sell dildos and spreader bars, and the people who run the place are all hobgoblins with glass eyes and wooden tails. The streets are crawling with them, the mummers, and they move like they're on caterpillar tracks and their eyes are eggs with broken yolks, and they try to pinch me sometimes.

Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey

Every time I open them, these pain-blue eyes I've got, that monkey is there, staring sideways with eyes like bags of death. Lobster Monkey, claws for thumbs, slides its tail into my armpit. In and out. I had wellington boots like frogs when I was young, and the monkey dipped its fez in blood, the tassel braided from my baby-hair. Before that, in lux perpetua, it sat amongst the scabby stars like a heron, its tail wrapped about in ribbons. Some trees have cages inside them, rhododendrons and the grabbing hollies. The monkey pinches me with feet that move like hands, black leather like killer’s gloves. Mantailed monkey sews seeds in my sweat so I wake every morning crawling with moss, and crying like the rain.