Catholic Cunt

My mother had a very catholic cunt. Shall I qualify that for you? Which needs further clarification, ‘catholic’ or ‘cunt’?

“You see,” she said, as we walked home from school one day, “A man has a penis and a woman has a vagina,” I was six, “And the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina,” my sister was pregnant, “The seed fertilises the egg and makes a baby.”
“Like those flowers mommy?”
“Which flowers?”
“The ones with the big pointy things that stick out from the middle.”
“No, sex isn’t like flowers.”

We had lilies growing in our garden. I liked the lush enthusiasm of them. They reminded me of the delicious rudeness of sticking your tongue out. I used to do that. When I was told off, for some imagined crime or other. I would hide behind the door, as I backed away from my spitting mother, and stick my tongue out. Oh, the rebelliousness of it. As I got older I learned other ways to subvert her discipline. Two fingers behind my back was a favourite. Once an adult I became even more sophisticated and enjoyed discrete sign language, that entreated her to ‘fuck off and die’, or ‘eat my shit’. Fortunately, she never saw or understood what I did.

When my nephew was born I hid, along with my brother-in-law, in the hospital grounds, so that I could see him as my sister held him up to the window. He looked like a small, blue dot. It was summer and everything was in bloom.

I don’t remember him as a baby, why would I? I was only six. But I do remember his sister being born, some four years later, vaguely.

“Will she be alright?”
“Yes, yes,” said mother.
“Why is Paulette in hospital?”
“Because she has placenta previa.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, the baby grows in the womb and, when it’s ready, it comes out through the cervix,”
“What’s that?”
“One thing at a time dear,” whenever my mother called me ‘dear’ it meant ‘shut the fuck up you snotty, little bitch’, but perhaps without that violence, except for when the violence was there and she rasped the word through her clenched teeth and pinched lips. “While the baby’s growing the placenta feeds it and gives it oxygen. Unfortunately, Paulette’s placenta is in the wrong place and the baby can’t be born.”
“How’s it going to get out then?”
“The doctors will cut open her tummy …” The conversation was cut short because, in my horror, I had neglected to notice my nephew’s hand was clutching the frame of the car, and I’d slammed the door on his fingers, nearly detaching one entirely.

Paulette and Jasmine arrived home in due course. Mother and baby both healthy, apart from crashing post natal depression. At this point I was pretty much usurped in everyone’s affections. There was 21 years between me and my eldest sister, fifteen between me and my middle sister. I had grown up used to being the baby of the family. When Christopher arrived he was like some magic child, the only boy born into a viper’s nest of females. My, how the puking infant was adored. Jasmine was also a sickly child, requiring my mother’s ever vigilant care and attention. I was put away, like an old doll. I did not mind though. The benign neglect enabled me to escape from their merciless consideration.

I liked my own company. Unlike the adults around me it made complete sense. We lived in a big house, a converted boarding school. There were miles of corridors, decorated in magnolia woodchip and carpeted with a mustard weave. I hid in the furthest corner of the house, my teddy bears ranged around me, serving tea and having the most pleasant conversations. I found that ‘Big Ted’ and ‘White Teddy’ rarely propositioned me with inane requests, or accused me of transgressions. Indeed, ‘White Teddy’ was a masturbatory favourite, and I did not feel much penitence, given as he always wore the same calm smile on his face, even after I removed him from between my thighs.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked, as she stumbled into my room with an armful of washing. I sat up. I did not know the word. She glided down onto my bed, like a kestrel moving in for the kill. I sat on my hands. My fingers smelt slightly of musk and fish.
“I’m playing,” I said, feeling the panic rising in my throat. She had that look on her face that she reserved for extreme news items.
“I don’t want you to play this game again,” she said flatly, rising and smoothing down her skirt. It was as if her whole body was sneering at me. “It’s DIZGGGusting”. The way she pronounced that word, like she was chewing shit. I said I was sorry. I was always sorry.

Christopher and Jasmine were growing up and throwing up respectively. He was an easy going child, she was a pain in the arse. Life rattled on around me. School was a trial, because I found it difficult to make friends. I was not exactly a pretty child and I was somewhat limited in my social skills. I was expelled from my first primary school for stealing modelling clay. I must admit, at the age of five, I did know it was wrong, but it was so seductive. Squeezing that soft, vanilla smelling, stuff through my fingers was a pleasure I had not felt before. I liked the way it stuck, submissively, to my palm. I enjoyed digging my fingers into it and then scraping the deposits out from underneath my nails. The teacher caught me while I was sitting, absorbed in my crime, on the reading mat. Mother was called and I was syllable slapped all the way home. “Don’t,” slap, “You ever,” slap slap, “Let me catch you,” slap slap slap slap, “Stealing anything again,” slap slap.

“Yes, well … she won’t be able to sit down for a week,” my mother explained to my father, her face twisted with the sincerity of her punishment. I looked down at my plate of something with gravy. I hated it when my father shouted at the meal table, because food fell from his mouth and lodged in his beard. He had these oddly wet lips, always glistening. I didn’t like them, especially when they were very close to me, and the smell of nicotine and alcohol escaped from between them.

I’m not sure I liked my father at all when I was little. He used to make me clean his shoes, every night, after dinner. I would sniff at the polish, in its perfectly rounded tin. I smeared it on with a duster, rubbing the matt glaze into the leather. The greasy colour appealed to me. It was so smooth. After a while I buffed each shoe to a shine. The brush had a brown wooden handle and black bristles. My hand was barely large enough to stretch across the back of the tool. The ridges from the wood dug into my small palm. Father inspected my work. If it was not up to scratch the job had to be repeated. I did not mind though. Sitting on the kitchen steps, away from the bustle of the household, huffing at the shoe polish, I was fairly happy. But it did bother me that he never said thank you.

I was expected to undertake a wide range of household duties, usually the boring ones. I seem to remember forever peeling potatoes, in the winter, or scrubbing them in the summer. I also podded peas, trimmed brussel sprouts, de-strung green beans, etc, etc. We had a large garden and father grew a lot of what we ate. I was active in the workshop as well, generally with screw and nail sorting. He believed that everything had a place and everything should be in its place. To this end, empty jam jars and the like were requisitioned, their lids stuck to the underside of shelves, and then they were filled with neatly ordered items.

The workshop was probably my very favourite place. It always smelled of linseed oil, because father allowed me small chunks of putty to play with. Putty is flesh coloured, and over a period of time I made a vast Chinese army of little people. I scattered them everywhere, all over the house. “Why are you doing this?” mother asked, at a loss to understand why a child needs to display and accentuate.
“They’re my friends. I made them myself.” I thought that is what ‘making friends’ meant. Given that I found it hard to form intimate relationships with children of my own age, I decided to literally ‘make’ my friends. She gathered them up and threw them away.

My ‘best friends’ I kept hidden. Eventually, I discovered that it was probably a good idea if I did not even let anyone else see them, so I stored them in my head. Frightened that they would be taken away from me, I refused to play with them in public. They did not like to come out during the day anyway, because they were so thin and papery, and the sun shone right through them, rendering them invisible and in considerable danger. At night, under the moonlight, their colour came alive and they glowed like silk worms. I would wait for them, with my head on my pillow, pretending to be asleep. I had to keep very still and very quiet.

Shhhhhhhh. Her she comes, always the same one, leading the others on. Her feet felt like fingers against my legs, little tickling touches, because she was half flying and half running. The others followed her in bright sparks of reds and electric blues. I had to keep my eyes shut though, ever so lightly. If I opened my eyes something bad would happen, maybe they would disappear or I might hurt them in a way I could not understand.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” they were always telling me to be silent. They moved my bedclothes around and clambered over my skin. Sometimes their feet were wet and once every so often it felt like they were wearing ice skates, because they scratched me. The main faerie, I think they were faeries, would come up to my head and play in my hair, wafting it around with her wings, parting it and flattening it. That felt nice. It relaxed me as I fell into sleep.

My dreams were a hammock. It took a lot of faeries to lift me. I think they must have done some spell or something, because when they were flying with me it was as if I was floating in water. I swung above my bed, all light and feathery, leaving heavy me down there, with the heavy breathing.

Whoooooooosh and I was through the door. Nothing could stop me when I was away with the faeries. We glided gently down the stairs, touching the occasional step, but gravity could not pull me back down to earth, then out and into the garden. They would deposit me in the branches of the pear tree, or sometimes I sat on my swing that hung from the silver birch. All night long they scurried about and I watched them.

The little faerie boys wore beech nut helmets and pushed barrows made from leaves with berries for wheels. They always seemed very happy, laughing and joking. They were a bit naughty though, and the bigger faeries, who were always girls, had to tell them off from time to time. The faerie girls were beautiful. Their gowns were made from spiders’ webs, dyed by rainbows. The ones in charge rode about on the backs of big dragon flies. One, who I thought might be the queen of the faeries, had six massive bumble bees that pulled her chariot. She sat on her gilded rose, tapping the bees with a crop made out of a single star beam that fell to earth a thousand years ago.

Just before dawn, when the faeries would be invisible again, they gave me a special drink of silver apple juice. It tasted like the syrup that mother would drain from tinned fruit and put in a glass for father. I was not really meant to drink that, but occasionally I took a sip. The faerie juice made me go all sleepy and next thing I knew I would be in bed, with mother at my door, wiping her hands on a tea towel, all flustered because she was trying to cook bacon and eggs and get everybody off to where we had to go. Father was already at the breakfast table when I came down, wiping egg from his beard and slurping tea. When he kissed me it reminded me of the faeries wet shoes.

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