When Is An Idea

When is an idea? What is the difference between a blockage and a bottleneck?

She cried and cried. I thought she would never stop. Every day. Every night. She screamed. Her face went all red and she pulled her legs up to her chest. I started watching foreign language movies, while walking her around, patting her bottom and jiggling her against my breast. Sometimes I slept, for moments, but then she would wake and then I would break into a hot sweat. Sleep, perfect sleep, it seemed like the most unattainable dream, like living in Paris, or holidaying in the Maldives, or having enough money to last me until the end of the month.

He carried on working. I did not understand his philosophy. The language he used, when talking to me, could have been German. I do not speak German. He expressed himself in numbers. I am no good at maths. Always and forever it was a problem that was bigger than I was. I could not make my brain stretch. Blowing bubbles. They exploding onto my face and stuck to my lips. There was never enough skin to accommodate the concept.

The children, the older two, Rosa and Jordan, did well at school. On Fridays they made bread. In the spring we visited the bluebell woods. Those flowers are real blue. Nothing else touches their colour. It is impossible to say 'like a bluebell'. Nothing is like a bluebell.

In the spring mud still sticks to the bottom of your boots and the earth smells fresh. Things burst out. It is not hide and seek, more an issue of instant recognition. I saw it. When Jordan staggered through the undergrowth. In the shadows. A low sun.

And then there was the time when we went to meet the shepherdess. She lived in the barn with her sheep. Her bed was there. She helped the lambs out. She knew her ewes. She saw them birth.

I had given birth and I did not know what to do next. My issue could not walk, or talk, or be independent. She hung from me, demanding. She ran me ragged. The doctor said it was colic. I did not understand. I had a name for it but that did not mean I knew it.

One day I painted the lounge yellow. I thought I could make the sunshine bounce off the walls. Yellow is not sunshine, it is a colour, with a name. I can say 'this is yellow', but I cannot say 'this is sunshine'. Holding a lemon I can say 'this is sunshine'. Raven was not my sunshine. She was dark and difficult. She was my lusting, crusting, dried blood, flaking and slaking me in equal measure.

And then, then, I nearly bled to death. I did not mean to. They said I had to 'rest'. How can you rest with one child in hospital and one child screaming? It is not possible. I'm and possible had married to create impossible. Their children are called frustration, difficulty and failure. So it was.

Christmases came and went. There were carol services. I attended advent spirals. Rosa smiled. Presents were bought for the family. Sex was had. Television programmes were watched. Faces were slackened and tightened. Fuck, eat, shit, sleep. Nothing else. Functioning. I was functional.

There were moments; when Matt gave me a kite for my birthday, with a gift tag that said 'never forget how to play', when I found a women's co-operative who made films, when the house fell down. Moments. Orgasms.

I started taking Prozac. After a week I could not make it to the end of the road. 'Dr I'm dying'.
'Take this, you'll soon feel better,' but I did not. I felt dead, inside and outside. I looked at people in the street. I could see death in their faces. I did not mean to. I tried to look away. Their time for passing belonged to them. I should not steal it.

I tried to write, but all that came out of me were tents and wandering dogs sniffing at grass. I saw rivers and laden clouds, lost sheep, grey pebbles, slate threads. I could not explain this. Words defeated me. I was beaten by language. All the time I heard crying, and not just her's. The mouth, at my breast, sucking from my nipple, drawing everything out of me. Weight fell off. Nothing fell in to replace it. I became empty. A big schism opened up inside of me. Something was tearing, tearing, rips and crying, ragged edges. Mother had pinking shears, maybe I could stop the fraying.

We staggered, Matt and me, like drunks on the street. One time we sat in a pub. He said “People are just a virus”. I flicked my head from side to side. There was a blonde woman. She was laughing, overly loudly. She was projecting. A man with torn jeans leant on the bar and fingered his pint. Two guys were playing pool. Nothing. An intuitive consumption. A part of them outside consuming, each other, mindless diversions. Take, take, take. Nothing made. Nothing produced. I felt like the only freak in the whole fucking place.

He went on. Empty. Silence. Non engagement. In the space but ... it's just strange, a non-connection connection. Forced to be private. Alone. No longer with yourself. Getting bent out of shape. Inside me. Crawling around like an ant. Bigger than me. Could not understand it. Like Lego, putting it together and pulling it apart, but nothing constructed, not for an eternity. Intricacies, lace work. The Prozac had not helped with the depression.

And then the children started to grow up. We moved out of our house. We lived somewhere shitty. I was scared and fucked up. I did not want the grey tiles, the three flights of stairs, the mad neighbours. Filth. Deep down and dirty. I cleaned the toilet every day. Bleach never smelled so good. I wanted to bathe in it. I tried 'Handy Andy' with a natural bristle brush. My skin went red. I was fascinated by the welts. Clean. Mother said “Cleanliness is next to Godliness'. I knew he was very white. Pure. He did not have a stove, so nothing to burn off and smoke drench his kitchen. God does not eat. God does not shit. Sex is not like flowers.

In bed I listened to Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch'. Smoking mammoth quantities of dope meant that I was largely anaesthetised to the outcome. Sleep. Unconscious. No dreaming. Why bother to dream? Nothing comes of nothing. I had nothing. I could not make something out of it. “Cut your coat according to your cloth,” mother said, “you made your bed, so now you have to lie in it,” mother said. I never made my bed. I did not have any needlework scissors. Why did she not help me? Why did it all have to be my fault?

We moved back into our house. Yes, they had fixed it, they way they do, but our heads were still broken. I took Matt a cup of coffee in the bath. We argued. He threw it at me and broke the toilet. We fixed it. Everything patched up, patched together. I used to call my boy 'patch', because of the birthmark over his eye. People tutted. It made him sound like a dog. I did not think he was a dog. I did not know how to acknowledge his difference. I wanted to make it sound friendly. People stared at him. I scowled at them. They made my body seem thin, translucent. Why do they do that? How are they making their judgements? I suppose they were neither stupid nor intelligent.

Friends were good. KT was good. She did not know Ezra would die. He was born with his heart connected to his liver instead of his lung. They fix that. They always try to fix everything. They did not know he had no lymphatic system. She took him home and put him on the kitchen counter. You do not put a baby on a worktop, they might fall off. He was dead already.

His ashes were scattered at Cuckmere Haven, right into the wind. We made him a pine box. KT put her china faced doll in it. The features were green. It looked oxygen deprived. Cards covered it. She kept this coffin in her bedroom. Occasionally I took lilies, big white ones, that spilled out everywhere. Once I took an empty cardboard box. I told her to put her nightmares in it. I threw it away. The pictures are never going to leave her, not even with the vodka.

I wandered around the streets, looking at the light and the dark and the in between. Sometimes there were shadows. Sometimes there were huge images that painted themselves onto my retinas. I had a dream. I was in a white room. There was a door. I went through it, and then there was colour, big colour, like the Wizard of Oz. I walked up to a tree and stroked it. Brown came off on my hand, smeared right over my palm. Then there was red, cherries. Leaf green running down my arms. Sky blue dripping into my eyes. Technicolor rainbows.

It rumbled like persistent diarrhoea, like belly ache, like a bleeding heart, like period pain and a missed pregnancy. It rattled like death. I felt it under my feet, threatening tectonic plate shifts. Earthquakes shook the ground and shattered the silence. I hid under door frames. That is where the structure is strongest. Buildings collapsed. I was safe, apart from the rubble and dust.

Matt worked on his PhD. I worked in the voluntary sector. The youngest was in nursery. The middle one was in kindergarten. The oldest one was seven. The Jesuits say 'give me a boy until he's seven and I'll show you the man'. This is what we figured. We wanted to get enough into her. For many years we had tried to recover from our own emasculation. Confidence is not something that should be stolen from children. Rosa was safe, with her bottom swishing blonde hair and her desire to question and never be satisfied unless he had an answer that made sense, to her, it does not matter if it is inconsequential to anyone else.

We moved the children's schools. They joined the mainframe. Friends and security disappeared. They had to make their own way. Rosa stumbled about, looking for a best friend. Jordan enjoyed his classroom assistant. Raven was in reception. They tumbled in and out.

We went ice skating. We went to the cinema. We walked in the woods. They stuttered to each other. Their gloves were on strings of elastic, threaded through their coat sleeves. Rosa complained that her hat made her look like a cartoon character. We laughed. One time we threw a party for their friends. They threw chairs. We had to shout. Ten year old boys are odd. Children are animals.

And then it was over. Rosa went to 'big school'. Dressed in a uniform she became part of the machine. Within weeks I had lost her. When I tried to talk to her she shrugged. “How was your day?”
“Alright.”
“What did you do?”
Shrug.
“Did you learn anything new?”
Shrug.
“Who did you play with?”
“We don't play any more.”

Messy bedroom. Diffident attitude. Out of reach. Not knowing someone. Grief. I missed her. When I was 11 I had missed my mother. Nights in bed. She was not there. She was 6,000 miles away. I cried inside my head, until my belly ached and my head wanted to vomit, “Mommy, mommy”. She never answered, except for that one time she phoned up. I did not want my daughter calling out in the same way. You never recover. It causes a kind of constipation. A poisoning. I did not want that for my daughter, but every day she was getting further away, receding, becoming indefinite. I wanted to say “Don't leave. Don't disappear”. I did not know how to keep her visible, how to hold her in my mind's eye. I was terrified.

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