Ah, there it was. The green rotting lawnmower in the driveway. Like some neglected old man, turned vagrant, that had become stuck on a particularly large stone in the gravel driveway.
Every time, I’m so tempted to run my wheels over it. To hear the soft crunch of decaying metal, a massage to its tired bones, setting their history free, burying it forever in this same tired spot. A fracture of relief. Instead like always, I veer around it, looking nastily at it through my high window, and toward the black gate of my house, which lurches into submission as I press the little button.
Little little buttons. Electronics are like children’s toys. To remind us of the simplicity of things. The simplicity and the structure. White for open. Red for alarm. Green to disarm the alarm. And a little blue one, that seemingly does nothing, which I’ve never trusted. Every time I push it, I can feel someone’s alarm set, or a small pig suddenly rolls over and dies, a tree withers, a teenage relationship ends, the lights in a hospital ward go out, someone loses feeling in their right hand. Click, click, click.
And now the dog has to run into the driveway. Pests everywhere, getting in the way of my smooth return home. How can one be valiant with so many things too small being pulled like magnets to the greater being. God forbid I run one of the little shits over. The tension in the house would twist into something tangible. A window and a knife, the reflection. The scratching. The metallic transparent isolation.
I wish I could care for animals. Feel that soft melting feeling that fills your body, see their little bleating faces when I eat some perfect stretch of meat. I just cant, I’ve tried, I’ve pretended for various soft eyed men. But the same contempt rears its head. Animals are so ungrateful. Last time I went to help de-oil penguins, the little black oiled demon pecked at the eye of the volunteer next to me, who’s now blind in one eye. If it had been me, I would’ve ripped off its wing and slapped its face with it. I have no time to forgive such inhuman misunderstandings. Even in the light of oil-angry penguins.
And these dogs hadn’t even gotten any thinner. I’d been unknowingly starving them for a month. Something about mixing up ml and grams the vet had patronisingly explained to me.. the point is.. there is now an explanation for the increased energy and needy scratching at your leg. I thought it was love for me, rather than ravaged desperation.
Engine off, unlock, radio out, window up, door open, foot out, me out, door closed, lock, de-alarm, de-alarm, de-alarm… they forgot to put on the fucking alarm. And the skip, jump, hop to the front door. Did anyone see? No one saw. The door unclicks like it does every time. Marking me in time and space. Click, this is your life.
I could feel that burning sick nausea again rise up from my stomach and settle in my heart, wrap itself tightly round, as if my heart was creating giant loaves of bread that it would deposit there. Instead of pumping blood like a scientist, it had turned into a faggy cook, saying voila! and making me tired and heavy with this wedge in between.
I let myself settle and put my hands on the counter. Taking my weight off my feet. The actions of the day begin to form themselves over my body, one by one they float and settle, adding the lightest of weights so that I don’t feel it till they’re all assembled, pulling my eyes down, my hands, my shoulders. Must. Go. To. Bed. Paella, Thai stir-fry. Lamb Curry. Skin peeling. Eyes bleeding. Nose running.
I can feel something behind me. Janine the maid is sidling up and down the kitchen in her slow walk. Her teeth are all falling out… I didn’t know if I should turn around or pretend I was in a deep trance. Yesterday we had one of those awkward outings together, where I asked the wrong questions and she either laughed at me or pretended she couldn’t hear. The rumours that must have already been spread in her neck of the woods, I don’t dare try imagine.
We had gone to find her teeth. Well dentures to be exact, hers were no longer ‘good enough.’ Which we both thought was an outing to a dentist of some sort but instead we ended up wandering further and further into the industrial centre of Epping before we came to a small dingy looking garage that had been attached to a large house like a side cart. It had dirty windows and a slanting tin roof. There was an unnerving screeching sound coming from inside, the dreaded drilling of human bone. I remembered looking at her nervously. My eyes asked if she was taking me to her township friends to murder me and pillage my house. Hers asked if I was selling her as dogmeat.
It turned out to be the place where all the teeth come from according to the blue-overalled man who wiped his hands and then his face with a ragged cloth before shaking our hands. Basically, to be able to afford the teeth, I was paying for half, which I thought was quite generous, we got sent to this back alley warehouse or garage you could call it, with three dusty men making the teeth at their DIY desks.
That is what God’s offices should have looked like.
Or perhaps the God who ended life, if there was one. There should be. Surely the unravelling of creation was just as difficult as the creation itself. It was harder to lose weight than put it on right? So this was destruction: a lot of men, below the bread line, making these white teeth for people dying, decaying and losing themselves.
I had felt close to Janine then. For the first time in a long time. We had seemingly crossed the racial and classist gap in encountering this absurdity. Years and years of projected and imposed prejudices warped into a familiar eye twitch at the scene.
She was taken behind a little curtain and must have been laid down. I snooped around looking over the desks pretending I was some sort of inspector. Pretending that they were staring at my cleavage and that I didn’t mind because I used sex as a way to get above in the world. They seemed busy at work though and after a while I headed back outside into the Epping air, thanking God, or the God of destruction that I didn’t live in this shit hole. Or attached to the side of a shit hole. Finally Janine came out looking slightly guilty.
She sat cradling the teeth all the way home, the same teeth that would enter her mouth that afternoon after a visit to the dentist. And now behind me I assumed they were in her mouth, sneering at people without them knowing.
I turned around.
‘Morning Janine’, I said rather tiredly.
‘Morning, morning’ (always double speak with her)
(she didn’t give me a smile, but just padded on, toward the door)
I wanted to say, Show me your teeth I paid for half of them Goddamit. But instead I held it in, I didn’t want to ruin the progress we had made yesterday. I watched her retreating oval body out the door, tied in the middle like a figure of eight. I couldn’t stop the broad smile that stretched my lips. My teeth. Her back. My kitchen. Her work. My heart. My dogs. Her hands. My head. My hands.
And then headed to the bedroom for a long deserved nap.
