Port-a-Pet

A gigantic blonde teenager sits diagonally opposite me. Her pink-blonde hair is clogged with dreadlocks and she is dressed from head to toe in black, including a Marilyn Manson hooded top and a pair of heavy, decorated biker boots. One of her eyes is blind and staring and the skin around it is a frozen slab of scar tissue, fissured with white stars of twisted skin. In her hands she is holding a small cardboard box labelled 'Port-a-Pet' in which sleeps her hamster. Once the train is moving she opens the box and then proceeds to gentle the hamster for the remainder of the journey. She does not think there is anything unusual about this because she long ago accepted that she must take love wherever she can find it.

Domesticating Sean Bean and Grieving with Karl Urban.

I have come to a realisation. It's not the kind of realisation which imparts a sense of wellbeing or oneness with the universe. Rather, the knowledge chills me to the bone. You see, I have realised that the reason my wife is able to watch football with all the discernment and depth of knowledge normally (and misogynistically) attributed to men is because she watches Lord of the Rings films the way other women supposedly watch football: it’s all about the pumping thighs. And the swords. And all the enormous beards.

She was recently trying to decide which of her two preferred LOTR crushes she’d live with, Sean Bean or Karl Urban. The problem is that she only likes Karl Urban when he’s lamenting the death of his sister (emotional vulnerability + gigantic beard = erotic meltdown), and she couldn’t imagine a domestic scenario involving a constantly grief-ridden Karl Urban; she saw herself coming home to find the flat a mess, the beds unmade, washing up piled in the sink, tear-sodden Kleenex on every surface. Come on, Karl Urban, she would say, pull yourself together.

Sean Bean is, at least superficially, more straightforward. His appeal lies in the ability to embody a sort of righteous wrath; you can see him showcasing this emotion in LOTR, Game of Thrones, Black Death and every other film he’s been in ever – except perhaps Lady Chatterley’s Lover, when he embodied righteous gamekeeping. I tried to point out to my wife that righteous wrath might come with its own unique set of problems, particularly in the enclosed space of a semi-detached house; I suggested that the Bean would invariably end up smiting the soft furnishings left, right and centre. But my wife responded that at least he would be basically functional. I don’t know what exactly she meant by that, but she had a disturbing glint in her eye so I didn't press her on it.

Anyway, stemming from this discussion, I’ve had an idea. I think Sean Bean should volunteer at his local village fete. He’d be the centrepiece of his own stall, enclosed in a plastic cylinder with multiple small holes. Then members of the local community could pay to approach the cylinder, reach through one of the apertures and flick the Bean. Men could see how it felt. Women could do it in public. It would be great. I think I might write to him about it.

IoW.

There are no motorways here, no enormous monoculture fields, no depressed goth kids skulking round the village green (well, not many). Instead, there are hedgerows deep and full of song, bustling with the colours of celandine and vetch, cow parsley and primroses, dandelions and forget-me-nots. I’ve seen field mice hopping along the path in front of me, thrushes and blackbirds exploding out of bushes, fritillaries spiralling up into the flawless blue of afternoon as little freshets pour down off the fields into a brook beside which snowdrops and blue bells grow out of the cool black loam beneath the trees. In the woods there are chestnut saplings pushing up among the nettles and laurel candles nodding from among waxed leaves, and full-grown trees whose names I don’t know showing off great diadems of white flowers thirty or forty feet up their slender mossy trunks. In the banks of the brook I saw a ford criss-crossed with the tracks of animals. Here all paths lead eventually to the sea, where the sweet green smell of blossom and the sharp, fennel tang of sap rising give way gradually to ozone and seaweed, dreams of salt instead of soil. You can walk out along a rickety, storm-beaten pier and watch the white isosceles of sail boats tacking across the Solent while cruise ships and oil tankers inch their prostrate shadows across the horizon. Back inland you come across an old churchyard which has a yew tree in one corner and a giant pink magnolia in the other that sheds its petals over drunkenly subsided gravestones. Once ornate with mourning, today they’re chipped and faded and lost beneath thick growths of moss. Alongside the churchyard there’s a Victorian manor house with gouges in the chimneystack and slates in the gutter. Plastic and ripped drapes cover the windows. It looks the perfect setting for a gothic ghost story. Inside the church, there are several jars of marmalade made by a local woman and sold for £1.20, all proceeds going to the restoration fund, one of which you buy, leaving the money in the basket provided, feeling oddly enriched by the experience. As you progress homewards, first by paths and then by roads, as you feel the peopled world part to reabsorb you with all its motion and noise, you realise that this was the first time in years you’ve been completely filled with silence. 

Sitrep.

I’ve decided it’s time to try and refresh this site a bit. There are a great many things happening in real life at the moment, what with all the wonders (seriously: wonders) of fatherhood and being back in the UK, exploring the Isle of Wight, visiting old friends, seeing Spring steal over the landscape. However, there are also lots of shoots and leaves straining towards the light from the stygian funk of my hard drive. I’m still working on my big thing (more of which shortly), with numerous pained hiatuses for real life (real life – pah!). I’ve also got lots of blogs to post, some new poems and my new idea of ‘Micro Theories’ to hammer away at. Finally, loads of thanks to my beautiful wife and the only slightly less beautiful Mr Donal Kerr for the prescient advice about moving towards shorter, more immediate and hopefully more readable content. Excelsior and so forth…

Prepartum

It's all been a bit of a whirlwind here during the past two weeks, as our son was born on January 1st. He is wonderful and we are overjoyed. I don't think I really understood quite what overjoyed meant, actually, until now. Anyway, in lieu of the stuff I normally post, here's a collection of notes I took about the pregnancy over the past nine months.

Movements.

At today’s scan (31.08.10), your mum was amazed to see you rise and fall with her breath and flop lazy as a sea cow in the warm, loud darkness.

Your spine was so beautiful, so perfectly detailed and curved, with your ribs adorning the curvature like spars in a rowing boat and your organs full of darkness. 

In the first trimester, when you were the size and shape of a kidney bean, your heart was disproportionately massive, pumping away constantly, fuelling the power-hungry processes of cell subdivision and organ creation. We used to joke, ‘that kid’s all heart.’ Now, with the rest of you catching up and balance arriving in your proportions, your heart has emerged as a kite transected by two ties, one vertical and one horizontal. This cross is the walls of your heart, separating the two atria and two ventricles. It flutters in and out with your pulse, the silver transepts against the darkness of your blood. It is a beautiful shape, another iteration of Thomas Browne’s theory of the quincunx, like a leaf or the foundations of a ruined church which you trace out with your feet through exposed chalk and close-cropped grass.

At our last appointment our obstetrician explained to us how, when you take your first breath, the walls between the two ventricles and the two atria will, in that selfsame instant, close and your circulation will change direction as blood is received into the atria and then dispersed in two directions through the left and right ventricle; one side, the right, will start the lifelong job of discharging blood into your lungs for oxygenation while the other, the left ventricle, will push the blood out through the aorta to the rest of your body. For now, it scares me just how fragile this structure is, as the dark and light pattern contracts and dilates faster than thought.

At the moment your flesh remains translucent, but your bones and muscles are already in place. Your nervous system, all those ganglions and synapses, have branched out from the great trunk of your spine and are mapped all the way down to your fingertips.

You stick your tongue out occasionally and gulp down amniotic fluid (this being mostly wee). We haven’t yet seen you sucking your thumb.

I spend a fair amount of time in the evenings talking to you with your mum listening. I tend to give you advice about how to deal with absurd situations in the outside world (galactic war, zombies, girls), but I also like to try and get you on my side in the imaginary conflict between me and your mum. Don’t worry, there isn’t really any conflict.

You seem quite devoted to your exercise routine, often hiking your legs over your head or at the very least up to your neck. Occasionally, when you were smaller, you would do a full superman, launching yourself from one side of the uterus to the other, arms flung forward in heroic flight – but you are now a little too big for this.

You like resting your head against your placenta, which is high and to the left in your mum’s uterus. You use it as a big soft pillow.

We just saw your ear, quite perfect, and a downward view of your forehead, an eye socket and a bit of chin.

Your mother is very pleased whenever you kick her. She likes to know you’re there and has recently taken to playing with you.

We also play you music sometimes. I think you like Mozart. Your mum thinks you like Kenny Loggins.

When I felt you kick for the first time, my expression of astonishment was so perfect that your mother laughed about it for hours afterward.

Insights

It's December now and you’re folded up in there like a winter deckchair, rotating like a satellite, our son, your beautiful legs kicking, measuring out at 51cm, the graceful oval of your head.

I want to be the one to cut the umbilical chord. Your mum says she wants to keep it attached. After all it’s been there for so long, it would be a pity to get rid of it. I suspect she’s becoming attached to you. I point out that it may be hard for you to climb trees, attend school and go on your first date if you’re still connected to your mum by a couple of feet of intestinal tubing.

When you kick now, the surface of your mum’s stomach is transformed. It looks like a whale breaching or someone squeezing a balloon or a massive electrical pulse, like one of those defibrillator machines they use in films when someone’s heart has stopped. Very rarely the whole surface of her belly rears up like a volcano, which scares the crap out of me. I worry that you or your mum might get hurt. But she just laughs, and cups her stomach and stares down wonderingly at where you lie and I can tell that she’s listening for your next move with all her heart and soul, waiting for whatever it is you’ll do next. This will continue for the rest of your life. 

Sometimes you get the hiccups, and we worry that this will annoy you like having hiccups annoys us, but apparently it’s different for babies. Sometimes, when you're rolling over lazy as a seal, we wonder if you’re dreaming in there, and what dreams you can have when you haven’t seen the world yet. Sometimes, for a moment, we feel something hard and specific pushing against the surface, a fist or a knee or a heel, and we touch you through that thinness of tautened flesh to feel close to you.

You seem to respond to our singing, and talking, and me playing the guitar. We do not know whether this is a sign of pleasure or violent objection. With the guitar-playing, I suspect the latter, as you always seem to be thrusting your bum up in the direction of the music (if you can call it music) as a sort of symbolic judgement.

Then there are the nights and early mornings we spend curled up, feeling you kick between us. As your mum goes to sleep, she wonders what time you’ll decide to wake up and start doing the Snoopy dance, and whether it will be on your bladder, as it has been for the past three nights, or on her lungs. Or will you go for broke and combine your kicks with breathtaking punches to the lungs, a manoeuvre we have christened the disco star jump.

Finally, what of all the hours we’ve spent talking over your head? I think it’s wonderful that you have spent all that time – 9 months, 40 weeks, 280 days – in the womby darkness hearing so often somewhere above you the sound of your mother’s laugh, booming around the closely roseate space, her, your goddess mother. 

Another Side

When the man thinks about all the things which he might have lost or gained by his life, he need only think of her, and he feels immediately a great sense of happiness invade and quiet all his fears. Depending from her image is a network as fine and intricate as the skeletal tracery in a leaf held up to the light – all the things they have ever said to each other, ever laughed about, those painful nights of truth telling and change that was growth, her sleepy smile, her chuckle mellow as cider, all that love which she embodies, all those years of it. When he considers it all, he sees that everything was meant, and so right as to be inevitable; that each time he made a choice he made the same choice and each time brought himself a little closer to truth and happiness. And now every quantum, molecule and fibre of that story has been transmuted into this other symbol, this spiralling column of information in which their two essences are intertwined, this heartbeat and these organs filled with darkness, this presence which makes itself felt by tiny motions and gradual changes. They have approached this moment hand in hand and step by step, looking together unswervingly into that brightness which waits to unfold now from her beautiful body. It is beyond words what this means to him. It is what he would take with him into a nightmare, and what would bring him back.

Maternity Leave

It is eight thirty in the evening now, here in São Paulo. Eight thirty in the evening on 17.12.10, the day on which your mum begins her maternity leave. It’s a good moment, quiet. I’ve just got up from a nap and left your mum sleeping next door to come in here and write this. Outside I can hear the car horns and shouts of Friday night as everyone hurries home to their families or heads out to sit in bars and share tall bottles of beer. In the playgrounds down below, children run and cry after footballs or in games of tag around the pillars of their high-rise apartments. It is warm today by the standards of a British summer, though not too warm for São Paulo, where you have grown and lived for almost nine months now – only around 25 degrees. Happily for your mother, this summer has not yet been as hot as we feared, though we have bought a portable air conditioner for the hotter days and even hotter nights, and it has already seen some use. Looking out of the window, wiping sleep from my eye and listening for the slightest noise from your mum, the towers of the incredible, filthy city of your impending birth shine above a cushion of pollution and heat. The headlights of an aircraft coming in towards Guarulhos are lambent pins piercing the orange clouds. An almost full moon hangs remotely above sheets of cirrus then, as the sky changes, tendrils of denser cloud seem to twine themselves about her like milky thorns. Suddenly there is a silent, horizon-wide flash of lightning in the distance where the Christmas illuminations of Avenida Paulista dance upon the banks and office blocks. Perhaps there will be a storm later, but not yet. Down below the endless traffic on Henrique Schaumann and Rebouças still moves like the whirl of sparks in a fire. The air is smoky and sweet. I dreamed just now that you were already coming. Your mother was scared, but I was right there with her, handing her paper towels every few seconds. I’m not sure what that was supposed to be achieve, to be honest, but I remember feeling so excited and happy. You will be here very soon now. We can’t wait to meet you.