An excerpt of a story I will never write - not about babies

Here’s the last assignment I did for my writing class, which ended in July. I’m posting it here because originally we were supposed to turn it into a story, or even a novel. We were meant to do this on our own time, but as you know, I can’t accomplish anything unless there is a toddler standing directly over me with an empty bowl of fruit and screaming BUBBIES; and then I might refill that bowl with berries, if there’s any in the fridge to be had.

And since this excerpt will most likely only gather space dust in my virtual documents folder on our PC, I thought I’d give it a slightly less dusty home on this here disused blog. Enjoy, time-travelers and future occupants of planet Earth!

Assignment #8 - Untitled

Doug kisses Bonnie on his way out the door, and she slaps his backside and makes her usual quip about his pajamas. They are rather like pajamas, these hospital-issued garbs all staff are required to wear, and Doug often wonders why, as one who occupies a role in the perpetual staunching of physiological turmoil, they are not kitted out in costumes better suited to the gory drama of life-in-crisis - like maybe chain mail, or grease paint and camouflage.

His daydream about being stationed on the roof of Ward B and peering through the scope of a sniper rifle as he picks off the degenerative diseases and gangrenous limbs of patients who stumble towards the double doors of A&E is quickly suffused by the sight of Jenny, who is actually standing outside the double doors of A&E and delicately puffing on a Pall Mall menthol, extra-light. He swings his Volvo into a reserved spot in the emptying staff lot and checks his mirror to see if she’s noticed him pull in, but she’s already blowing her last, minted stream of smoke skyward and disappearing into the refrigerated jaws of the hospital.

Doug is by no means a one-trick custodian. He has polished, buffed and waxed every square inch of available floor space in this sterile house of horrors, and knows that there is no more glory in a vicious slash of arterial matter than in the bleak trickle of urine that escapes an abandoned catheter. His is not to question this erratic release of human detritus, but to simply pass over it with his humming, undulating brushes, leaving in their wake a smooth, uniform gloss. In the six years he has spent polishing floors, Doug has learned that the great equalizer is nothing more or less than the ground you walk on. Heaven or hell, as long as you keep your eyes planted squarely on your feet, you could be anywhere at all.

This evening, Doug’s anywhere happens to be back in Ward B with the schizos and depressives, the suicidally watched and, more sadly, the lifeless dummies they rotate in and out of the electroconvulsive therapy unit on level zero. These are the messes Doug prefers least, as the stains are not of human making, but the sweet, sticky remnants of melted Popsicle, juice spilled by a shaking hand on level zero or sometimes the sputtered tail-end of an antidepressant in liquid form. Bodies are by nature permeable, inwardly sodden and therefore subject to leaks; it’s when the fluids cease to make the return journey home that you know you’re in for a spot of bother, and that is a reminder Doug does not especially cherish.

Besides, he would much prefer to glance up every now and again to see Jenny striding purposefully through A&E inside her floating pajamas, the tail-end of her stethoscope switching against the place where her navel would be, were he to look beneath the pale pink shirt she wore tucked into her drawstring scrub bottoms. He likes the way she runs her fingers through her white-blonde hair, twisting it with surgical precision into a no-nonsense knot at the nape of her neck, her elbows askew and palely freckled. Her skin gives the impression of having been freshly scrubbed and expertly dried, though he supposes she does this often enough anyway, given her line of work. Doug finds it heartening to know that however harried the glistening, patchy floors of Saint Mary’s hospital might become, Jenny will always remain uniquely, wholesomely untainted.

--

Thank you and goodnight

So, last post of November! Part of me thinks a retrospective would be the way to go, but I’m not sure I have the stamina to turn the threads of thirty (30!) posts into a coherent...uh...post hanky.

I will say that posting every day for a month has brought about certain benefits which, apart from giving me the opportunity to flex my writing muscles, I hadn’t considered. For the first time in a long time, I can see a kind of rough continuity in what, up until recently, has seemed like an endless path choked with vines, which I’d been slavishly hacking my way through without any reflection whatsoever.

Since moving to England, and since having my first child, I haven’t had the time or the energy to stop and really look at the shape my life has taken over the past three years. I approached this task knowing full well that I would finish NaBloPoMo, however dubious I felt about the quality of the ensuing content. Now I know that the content wasn't really the point – at least not for me.

More than anything, it’s been refreshing to take a bit of time each day to process all the little trials and tribulations of being a new mother living in London. Knowing that I could come home and unload everything onto my blog also gave me the courage to push myself in ways I might not have otherwise, even if it meant subjecting Hartley to psychotic toddlers, or forcing myself to sit in a sauna with a depressing Austrian film director.

Erm, and a moral? Okay.

This month of posting has taught me that the most important thing of all is to write – not well, not even passably, but to keep putting it into words, whatever it is we see fit to immortalise for ourselves. Because at the end, even if we don’t have an answer that will help us to unlock the mystery of our lives, we will at least have a residue of what it was like to be here.

Okay, thanks for tuning in.

Much ado about blogging, and pasta

Let me sully this post by first speaking about my writing here, and elsewhere. I think reflexivity is pretty pertinent to a month-long yard sale of musty, randomly priced ideas I’ve had to drag out from storage because I have nothing of real value to say. Everything I write is off-the-cuff, from conception to execution, and I only sit down to write when I feel confident that my mojo (or in this case blomo) is in good working order.

This is why I have a partially written piece that gives me the evils every time I maximize its worthless bulk to see if I can perform some kind of emergency surgery to get it at least looking like something I could post on a collaborative site made up of fearless, prolific bloggers. But that’s the irony of my situation: the words I conjure are either living or dead, and the dead ones are usually too far gone for the defibrillators.

So you may be in for a fairly ghastly house of spooks, gimps and amputees this month, and I can’t even pretend it’s a lead-up to Halloween. What I can do is try to keep this as close to its original intent as possible: an online log of day-to-day events as they occur, at least for the month of November. I might even be able to convince you that I do more here than shovel gruel into the mouth of a nine-month-old boy and then scoop out the results hours later. Slightly more, then.

Today, for instance, I tried to do what I do every day, which is to make a sort of minor celebration of life using whatever positive feelings and tangible materials I have at my disposal and fashioning them into some kind of ticker-tape, bunting-choked fanfare that will propel me out the door and into the world, where we all live and pretend that nobody else lives as well or as colourfully as we do. That last part is something I don’t do anymore, actually. I’ve let too many minor characters act out their stories on my stage over the years, and wouldn’t know how to play the leading lady to a flea at this point.

Regardless, I know that I have to raise a wee one, and wee ones naturally feel they are at the centre of everything, with passersby cheering them on from open windows and city sidewalks. This is why they smile so damn much, and why they have no qualms about screaming at you in public if you’ve deprived them of a teething biscuit for longer than five minutes on a bus journey to the nearest play group. This is a delusion you want to nurture, because it takes a buttload of confidence to make your way in this world without letting some bullish, snub-nosed kid grind your feelings beneath his heel because you wouldn’t let him push you off a swing.

We do not push people off swings, we two, no. We stand idly by and grin madly at the fun those kids are having until someone’s father notices us and sheepishly pries his sprog from the chain-linked ropes so that we can have a turn ourselves. It’s chilly, and his breath is hitching with laughter as I push him gently away from me and he comes drifting back into my hands, and I remember that although this doesn’t come naturally to me, the stuff of memory is born from playground antics with your mother or your sister or whoever is in charge of your experiences, and I want him to have as many happy memories of his childhood as I can reasonably provide.


I remember how some baby book or website or newsletter told me that it was my job to make sure that Hartley transitioned from helpless infant to confident baby - to “turn him on to life,” they said. And I wondered how I could do this after allowing him to lie naked under a florescent lamp for three days, screaming for hours on end, because he had a touch of jaundice and that’s what the hospital wanted. He went from being the only baby on the ward who never cried or complained, to an inconsolable, blubbering mess who hated everything to do with being alive. I really felt like that was my fault.

But I needn’t have worried, as this kid is turned on full bright. I don’t think a day goes by that he doesn’t screech with delight over his evening bath, or his lunch, or some silly expression on my face.

So anyway, we had a bit of a swing, and then I took him down the slide a few times, and we headed back home, where he played happily alone in the living room while I made dinner for myself. Whenever Bruce is out for the evening, I try to take the opportunity to eat something he would never in a million years concede to trying. That’s anything that includes vegetable pieces, by the way. Earlier today I’d picked up fresh ingredients for a vegetarian bolognaise (I use Quorn mince, because it makes an awful lot, and because I’m the only one eating it so I have to consider its longevity in the fridge), and I chopped and seasoned and threw it all together in a pot to simmer for an hour.

My pasta sauce is pretty much like my writing – I mainly rely on common sense to roll it out, and if I throw in a little more cooking wine and a little less oregano than last time, it usually still turns out okay.


I had to let Hartley play with a plate of cold noodles, since he’d already had his dinner and wasn’t in any mood to let me eat mine without his participation. Then I gave him a lovely warm bath and a good feed before putting him down, and now he’s sleeping soundly in the next room, which is how I managed to find the time to bash this out. Usually, I lie with him until he’s fully asleep and then transfer him to the cot before tiptoeing out again. While he drifts, I surf the internet on my iPhone, which is mainly how I get around online these days. I steal a moment here and there when I’m out with the baby, or while he’s napping, or sitting in his Bumbo eating toast.

As the cold weather sets in, I become more interested in stories about recipes and cooking, and Erqsome never lets me down on this front. She remains the biggest culinary/crafting genius I’ve ever met, and she can turn a pretty mean phrase as well, which consequently leaves me feeling hungry and full, all at the same time. I know I don’t usually praise other bloggers here (most of them are pretty good at bigging themselves up on their own blogs), but you’d be surprised by what this girl can do with cabbage. She’s my inspiration in most things, and I still refuse to molest that lovely hank of wool she gave me for my birthday this past year. At least until I can work out what I’m doing.

To be continued

I wouldn’t use the term ‘schedule,’ though let’s just say that it’s become a trend for Hartley to fall asleep for the last 2 minutes of an outing, a nap which he will happily continue in his pram near the open back door so long as I can manage to get the entire operation inside without too much hassle.

Given the transient nature of baby trends, I am even more hesitant to decree this unexpected period of rest ‘me time,’ except that I need to start thinking seriously about writing – writing anything at all – before the urge is entirely discouraged out of me.

Lately I feel no impetus to turn every last detail of my life into a blog post. Partially this is due to the fact that I can’t seem to keep on top of processing the rapidly expanding details, nor locate a familiar frame of reference by which to pin them down. Partially I just can’t be bothered. My inner life is not so interesting anymore – at least not in the way you’d want to magnify, and Hartley’s inner life is mainly only interesting to me. Even so, I scramble for moments to myself to record what I can - moments that are quickly snatched away before an epiphany of any kind can resolve.

I read the headlines every day, and bits from the Guardian on weekends, but events only serve to illustrate how specifically focused my life has become and, as such, untranslatable. Motherhood is truly not of this world – we walk around duck ponds and grocery stores, form bonds of convenience and sing songs without a shred of dignity or cynicism. Conversations are always to be continued, and you continue them with about as many mothers as you come across until you are satisfied, except you are rarely ever satisfied.

See? It’s fairly nonsensical. You have to be there.

But that’s not to say I’m not having the time of my life, or that I’ve capped my pen and welded it shut for all eternity. There are plenty of people with children who write (you only have to type ‘baby’ and ‘blog’ into a search engine to see how many) and plenty of people with children who write (how often are works of fiction dedicated to children?), so I hold out hope that one day I too will fall into one of these camps.

So now that we got that straight. I have a grizzling infant to rescue.

Covering the mirror

Bad writing is almost always bad for the same reason: the writer believes that staying true to their own unique perception will lend a piece enough authenticity that a reader will be able to overcome the hurdles of clumsy prose, the poor handling of dialogue and bad pacing. (I use the term ‘writer’ quite loosely, in the context of a verb, as writing does not a Writer make.)

Most of us experience the world in ways that are similar enough that when someone makes an astute observation, it can give you the impression that this person somehow ‘read your mind.’ If they are very clever, they will put a unique spin on things, thereby making us all feel like dimwits who should just cap our pens now because we will never achieve this level of lucidity.

On the other hand, if a writer interjects too many of their own quirks, the piece risks devolving into an alien text that, while being utterly relatable as far as it may refer to something of a shared experience at times, more often than not fractures our sense of unity and dislodges us from the fantasy. In this instance, even when they believe that they are tapping into the life-force of the universe, these writers are still mainly writing about themselves.

And this is where I get stuck. The navel can be a beautiful thing to gaze on (just lift up your shirt and see) but I want to escape the restrictive playpen of my own ego and immerse myself in fiction for once.

I think I need to detoxify and take a complete holiday from the internet. It frightens me a little bit to contemplate, but on the other hand, this fear only strengthens my resolve.