The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (35 page)

At twelve years old Potato Head has learnt to manage the double syllable quite well, echoing her upper and her lower shape that look like two cells filled with sap and preparing for separation. But other words come hard through her cleft palate. Gug-gug-grr, she says. Everyone looks at us in the big canteen and I feel overcome with shame, don’t talk, Potato.

–Gug, gug, nnn–da.

–Stop it, Potato.

–Grr – da.

–Come to mummy, Potato Head, come, here, this way. Here, my love.

Potato Head turns her watery eye towards the voice and gropes at it, burying her blind face into her mother’s lap. Grr … da … grrr … da, she sobs.

–She says her grandmother has died, Something tells me. Well, we’d better go to her, hadn’t we, my sweet?

–Her grandmother? Who, for heaven’s sake? And where?

–Not far. Next door, in fact, upstairs.

Dippermouth weighs a ton in my right arm and wakes with a short burst of ringing. Where’s Gut got to, he asks.

–Next door. Upstairs.

We have become quite estranged, Something and I, as if my impatience with Potato Head came between us, which of course it does, for I envy her ability to hear and translate my daughter’s speech. Next door in fact upstairs Gut Bucket stands stock still under the bed of his large unconscious grandmother, respectfully receiving her incontinence. Hi, fat grandma, says Dippermouth and dips his mouth a little while Potato Head gropes blindly towards the smell. Gug, gug, … grrr … pa-pa, she wails like a bent doll.

–We’ll have to change her, Something says. Help me, Lazarus.

The name floods through me incontinently and I
remember
everything, the almost perfect spheres, the travel agent, the journalists, good people all, the meridians like elastic and the cat’s cradle we played, the canals and the horse-power, the pond of heavy water sinking like my heart, the giant trumpet and the ear of the world turning away lined with cork peeled off in curved segments wounded in bright orange. I hold my two hands over my ears and shout to drown the pain. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

But I do, because Something tells me I must. I stand behind the big fat woman’s head and slip my hands under her sweaty arms. Something takes her under the thighs on one side, Potato Head unexpectedly strong on the other and we lift her off the bed onto the floor where she moans and makes a large puddle. Something changes her bedclothes quickly, laying a plastic sheet on which we lift her back. She weighs a million million years.

–Good people, good, these hands that saved. I shall flounce out and, then, what will you, do.

–Hush, grandma, says Gut Bucket in a cleaned out echoing voice, don’t tire yourself.

–Useful, for the, waste-disposal, Bucket, boy. The bond, remains, where –

–Here, grandma. Dippermouth Blues, grandma.

–Oh yes. My, how … and you, what do they …?

–Lazarus, madam.

–The bond, my, rights, you know.

–Gug – gug – grrr.

–Ah my Sweet Potato.

She dies, her muscles tighten, her juices dry up. The journalists bring a stretcher and lower her through the puddle on the floor into the chapel below where a coffin on wheels receives her in the midst of lilies and white
carnations
that absorb the smell. Gug – gug, Potato Head sobs in my arms as we walk down the spiral staircase, there, my love, don’t cry, my little one, my daughter, and the Blues played by Jonas and his Jovials wail writhing up the aisle, don’t cry my love until at last the funeral music stops.

–Bury me under the cork-trees, says the body of
Something’s
mother in the sudden silence amid the lilies and carnations and Potato Head screams.

–Gug – gug – grrr – na da, na ba, na ba.

–Of course she has died, my little one. And we must bury her. She only speaks from reflex action, it will pass. Look, it has passed.

–Pa – pa. Pa – pa. Alalala – love you.

We walk the earth on our ten feet like a decimated centipede, Something and Dippermouth, Potato Head and I, Gut Bucket bringing up the rear. Tall blue flowers line our path. Ahead of the procession Something picks a few here and there as she walks, and lays them in a long and shallow basket. I pick some too to help her, but they won’t pick, they draw out on and on from deep down, and come up with the root that wriggles like a lizard. Do your flowers have live roots? Yes of course, we have to live on something.

–Pa – pa, wa – wag – ga?

–I don’t know, my sweet. Where do we go, Something? I mean, I would like to know and it might help the children not to get too tired and nervous.

–One never does know exactly, does one, Lazarus. If one did one wouldn’t get there. But we have to find the lady.

–The lady. Now what? Another secret instruction?

–Every spy-story has a lady, you know that.

–Oh, you mean the decoy blonde? Well, why didn’t you say so?

–Because I don’t know the colour of her hair, her shape, her age, or anything about her.

–You seem pretty helpless I must say, for a
girl-spy
. How will you know her then? By a secret sign I suppose?

–In a way. By the square we shall find her in.

–Oh, so we move in squares now, do we?

–Of course, haven’t you noticed? Every circle has its square, you know that, Lazarus. Every sphere has its cube. We live in squares and on square roots.

–I can’t see anything square about these roots. Wriggling lizards and worms, moles, rats, ferrets and snails. Do you really expect me to eat those?

–I expect nothing of you that you don’t freely want to give. We’d better stop here.

–What’s happened to you, Something, why do you act like some sort of schoolmistress, so estranged, so distant?

–You make the distances, Someone.

–Me? I don’t. Good heavens, you’ve called me by my real name. You haven’t done that for a long time.

–Pa – pa.

–You have many names to answer to, Lazarus, and you don’t always answer. I even send you little notes sometimes, but I don’t suppose you read them.

–Notes? I’ve never seen little notes from you.

–Well, you’d hear them, actually, or see their sounds.

–Oh. Yes I do receive your notes. But you don’t exactly put your signature on them, do you?

–Stop quarrelling, dad.

–I like to preserve a certain discretion in the
circumstances
. Besides, you don’t really read them so what
difference
does it make?

–I shall scream for attention like a child of three if you two go on. Time to eat.

–Bang-bang, pop, time to eat.

–Smile, Something.

–Well… you smile first.

Potato Head gives a loud gurgling laugh. She hasn’t heard this code before. I smile and Something smiles and takes the lizards from the basket to fry them alive so that they shrivel into chopped up cubes. What spheres? I mean, what circumstances?

–I beg your pardon? Oh. My professional circumstances.

–Ah yes. As a girl-spy. I don’t altogether like your profession, you know.

–I don’t either. As a matter of fact for a long time I haven’t had much future as a girl-spy.

–You mean, because of me?

–Well, yes and no. Without you I wouldn’t have any future at all. I mightn’t even exist. But you think you can live without causality, pretending that each moment has its own separateness, that anyone might come or go in that moment like an electron. Why, you might as well ask for the moon.

–I didn’t ask for any moons.

–Sometimes I wish I had married a poorer man, a man less well endowed, I mean.

–D’you know, these square roots don’t taste too bad. Not very satisfying, though.

–Coo – na – ska.

–Quite right, Potato Head, cube roots. Bright girl.

–Say, pop, we could live on cube roots for ever, couldn’t we? Let one run up and another run down, take any number, to infinity.

–Well, they leave me with a hungry hole.

I sense the chasm there beyond the trees ahead with the round lake of heavy water. I fear the presence of the dead fat woman with the heavy buttocks on my chest and the busybody hands that rummage in my pain, deliver me of great weights which go off into orbit only to return, heavier still with infinite calculations raised to the fifth power. The daybreak reached however meets us at a great height, looking over the sloping woods, not into the round pond of heavy water but down at a distant square house with the roof right off. Inside a large square room surrounded by a narrow corridor an old lady walks about, bent almost double, wearing a flowered house-coat.

–The quaternity, Something murmurs and starts to cry.

–But Something, she has white hair.

–How did you know, Lazarus, have you learnt to see?

–Come, we must go down.

The firmness of my tone dispels her sudden fatigue. Yes, yes. We must go down. Yes. Let’s go down.

She speaks busily, brusquely. What have I done to her? I have not seen, not heard, I have quenched her with my quibbling, absorbed her into my opaqueness. I move through my sleeplessness and my internal decay, where I have someone and I don’t know who. A sort of giant horse-fly falling into dust, who radiates and writes me little notes unsigned which I don’t read, losing points all the way.

The white-haired lady, bent double in her flowered house-coat welcomes us in dumb-show and Potato Head translates. La-ka – Alalala. Foo-dra.

–Thank you, thank you, we can do with some real food. We love you too.

–Lavava. Da-gra-basa-ya.

–Yes. I remember, the man said you had inherited the patch of earth next to ours. Thank you for recognising us. A little recognition can do a –

–Fa.

–Four? Already? When do you expect him?

–Soo.

–Will it … hurt?

The old lady and Potato Head both put their hands to their ears.

–I see. Yes. I thought so.

She hobbles round among her antique furniture and tapestries. The blue flowers on her house-coat smell of lilies and carnations. She takes my hand and leads me to a tapestry embroidered with the Whale and River constellations, the Serpent-Bearer and Cygnus whose Deneb shines brighter than fifty million suns, fifteen hundred light-years away and yet no brighter than Vega in the Lyre like fifty-two suns twenty-six years away. Gug, says Potato Head. It draws up to reveal a corridor full of doors, the first of which opens on a young man who sits on a divan in a small square room. The top half of his head stands open like a casserole lid and he spoons out the contents of his brain to eat it. He smiles for it tastes good. She shuts the door and leads me to another, behind which the same young man sits on a divan bed repeat performance. Each door, all round the corridor, reenacts the same scene until at last we reach the opening in the tapestry and re-enter the large square room where Something looks anxious.

–I don’t think you should have shown him how. He did the others in unconsciousness.

–Not all of them, Something, not Potato Head.

Who feels for my hand so that the sap of her new strength flows into me.

–A little consciousness can do a lot, you said. Surely you want me to see and understand?

–I can’t bear you to suffer.

She starts crying again. What have I done to her?
Dippermouth
toddles up. Dial me, ma, you’ll see, you’ve just lost contact, ma, dial me, please, you haven’t dialled me for so long.

She takes him on her lap and dials him through her tears, the big hand a quarter round and so forth listening carefully to the uneven morse and staring hard into his face.

–I can’t hear. I can’t see through my tears.

Potato Head holds my hand. Ya, she says.

–I know. Here, Gut Bucket, stand close, you’ll come in useful for the placenta. Dippermouth, stay with your mother and keep trying. Potato, don’t lose my hand.

The old lady comes towards me and pushes me onto the divan with her bent head. My face from the lower level looks into hers, my eyes watch her sensitive hands as they take up the knife and cut carefully along the eyebrows and around above the ears. The noise deafens my brain. The houses on the distant edge of the world’s ear laugh like asses’ jaws, the giant trumpet blares, the walls come tumbling down. The top lid of my head opens up slowly and with a trembling hand I take the offered spoon. I ladle out the food from inside my casserole head and hand the spoon first to Potato Head, who takes it to her mother. Something sips at it disconsolately, then gulps, and revives. She gets up, comes towards me with Dippermouth ticking weakly on her left arm and the spoon in her right hand. She dips the spoon into my head, feeds Gut Bucket, then hands it back to me to dip into my head again and feed Potato Head myself. Potato Head grows strong and takes my hand. She feeds me with the spoon. One for mummy she says in silence or perhaps in her glug language which I now hardly notice. One for pa … pa. One for your Sweet Potato. One for Dippermouth. She feeds me like a child. The blood drips into Gut Bucket who stands in a deep double meditation full of my placenta and smiles a beatific smile. But the noise crashes through me still. Dippermouth now fed revives. He dips his mouth with a loud creak, twenty to four, got you, twenty past eight, twenty-five past seven, and on until my eardrums burst and his mouth joins itself to form one vertical needle that swivels with a screech in one
wave-band
round the dial, emitting a whole agony of gunfire as the boys come roaring through the screen on motorbikes, swerving and bending low, their white crash-helmets like big moons in orbit, falling down out of orbit, vanishing, falling, crash.

He walks into the room in black leather and white helmet. He lifts the transparent vizier, looks at me and laughs.

–How do, pater, he says in a mock-Victorian voice, or else mock-army, who knows in all that noise. Tin Roof reporting for duty, sir.

The way devised by Professor Head to obtain recognition for his junior colleague Dr Dekko consists in dying before his time like a great clumsy oaf. Nor does he undergo any amazing recovery and the pain of mine clatters through me again, shaking the giant decaying horse-fly of my internal body, sending its anti-atoms in a whirl of mass morse along the fibres of my loneliness.