Gethseminal

I’ve made the final cut. The blood wells in the narrow gash, a burgundy meniscus rising, filling, tipping, dripping. I watch, fascinated.

I’ve sliced it the right way this time, but I don’t know what to do next. It’s pooling on the bathroom floor tiles. What’s black and white and red all over? In ancient times they knew how to do it properly; their multitudinous baths incarnadine and all that. Seneca, wasn’t it, who sat in a warm bath and opened up his wrists, or was it Archimedes? No, he’s the one who measured his bulk in the bathwater. If he’d cut his wrists as well I wonder if the results would’ve been the same. Eureka, I’ll never do it wrong again; I’m in control. I’ve taken medical advice.

He was full of useful information last month, that callow Dr. Singh, the emergency department physician. He breathed biryani across my narcotic bed, his gaze lazily sashaying from my medical notes and down the deliberate cleavage of the suturing nurse.

‘She’s been in here before, what, twice? Classic cry for attention. Look, nurse, it’s a transverse cut, not very deep. See the stutters, the false starts.’ I wasn’t there to him, the ugly unseeable appearing unhearing. ‘If she’d been serious about it, she’d have cut deeper – a longitudinal cut over the radial artery.’ It was as though the contents of my triple chin had oozed out like a gelatinous worm and coiled itself into my ear like a plug. ‘Finish up here and I’ll arrange her discharge and medication.’

Ah, yes, those round white discs of redemption ... the pills that tuck a fleecy blanket round me while I lie in half an inch of stagnant water at the bottom of the ditch. They cover me up but underneath they’re wicking, and it isn’t until later that I’m drenched in the stink.

Longitudinal, he said. Lengthways, like the stripes that people like me shouldn’t wear lest we look as wide as a barcode or a zebra crossing. I was lovely once, when my breasts stood proud beyond my belly and I’d stare down each passing male as he glanced up from my nipples to my eyes, shooting him with a tensile arrow of sexual possibility. Look at me now, draped in the swags and tails of outrageous corpulence. Blame it on my mum, my genes, my glands; blame it on him, his withdrawal, his derision and disgust; blame it on cakes, chocolate and cappuccino; blame it on misery, self-indulgence and greed; blame it on me and my liposuccubus.

‘Oh that this too, too solid flesh should melt,’ or is it ‘sullied’? No matter, no difference, grey and drooping both like outsize grubby knickers hanging out to dry. ‘Inside every fat person, there’s a thin person screaming to get out.’ Why should fatties have the monopoly on stereotyping? What about ... inside every fat person there’s a fat person happily guzzling chocolate, or there’s a thin person hiding because she can’t stand being touched, or there’s an obese person screaming with hunger? I’m not even obese except on their scales. Hath not a fat person taste? If you prick us do we not cream? I’m not freak-show fat, I’m Rubenesque, just big enough for smarting little kids to ask, ‘Is that lady going to have a baby soon?’ Just fat enough to make a perfect trophy ex-wife.

It’s difficult to cut your wrists with a safety razor; the plastic ridges get in the way. Ask me; I’m a professional. A longitudinal, deep cut – that would require a different choice of weapon. So down to the study I went, our old study, our fertile thinking room, past arena for the thrust and parry of our sparring. The tongue can sometimes cut unkindly as a sword.

The light-table’s still there, on the old desk with the legs that wobble where I sawed them in half and nailed them back together again to get it through the doorway. Its cloudy glass is criss-cross scarred in wax and masking tape from countless flickering night time hours of paste-up, slice-up, make-up. Such precision we insisted upon, points and picas, shade and balance, bordering and justification. Such perfection we’d achieved together as our lives fell into disarray around us. Such an astounding child we had nurtured here, offspring of my fertile brain, of the marriage of two minds. I always meant this room to be a nursery.

I reached into the top drawer, into the sturdy cardboard box with the torn label hinging its side, searching for a small flat paper packet. Little square flat packages – I remember them well: barrier and protection. Smoothing and moulding with sensual rhythmic fingers, I loved to build a rubber barricade and watch it stretch and grow. Pointless, even comical as I look back, those teaspoonfuls of wasted potential were beaver-dammed into a silicone bulb and flushed into fertilizer at the sewage plant. My throbbing rhythm always lagged a beat behind. He seldom noticed, or acknowledged that he did. Maybe if we’d felt each other more, our marriage would have lasted.

No, these packets sheathed rapiers of a different sort: scalpel blades, sharper than razors, fiddly to grip. My fingers fumbled, bracing a steel sliver against its malevolent will to fit into the safety handle. It slipped, spiked, sliced my fingertip. Ridiculously, tissue-wrapped, I searched through the first-aid tin, patching my body’s premature leak with a woven pink plaster.

What is an artery, anyway? Nothing more than a pulsing, blood-filled tube. So simple to open – just slice along it with a sharp blade. So why are my darker, buried female tubes so irretrievably blocked? Why have my eggs been sent to an all-girls’ boarding school when they are dripping in vital eagerness for their cherry membranes to be popped by any blindly poking male? So pointlessly, pleasurably ineffective was all that grunting, thrusting, pumping power when even Dyno-rod couldn’t have flushed my pipes clear. You entered me, you bastard grim reaper of future souls, with your dirty little fornicating disease, and crippled my femininity, my fecundity with your second-hand inter-city weekend break bacteria.

‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ My wrist doesn’t hurt. It stings a little, like a paper cut. Suicide is painless. And has God ‘fixed his cannon ’gainst self-slaughter’? When I was a child, I thought as a child; I thought that meant God would shoot you if you tried to kill yourself. I’ve often wondered which would get me first. My soul doesn’t hurt much, either. To die will be an aptly big adventure; life is a dictionary of famous quotation, vicarious sensation.

I didn’t write a suicide note. And when they see that no-one asks to read it they’ll understand why I didn’t need to write a note.

I could leave a cryptic message in blood on the white squares of the chessboard floor like a prisoner. I could scrawl ‘Only you’ or ‘Calais’ or ‘Burn in hell’. I can’t be bothered, to be honest; my energy seeps. Will they burn me? They’ll need to put the coffin on a rack like a farm-bred duck and catch the dripping in a pan below, else spattering flares could set the audience alight.

‘On my count, one ... two ... three ... heave.’ The appalled bearers will invisibly grimace and slide secret glances at each other. ‘Lend us another pair of arms, mate. Need wheels with this one.’

My ex-man won’t offer to help. He’ll sit impassive in his trenchcoat and unblack tie, hiding his glittering green amusement beneath hooded eyelids. His beautiful, mobile mouth will move in silent commentary. He’ll be playing ‘had her, had her not’ at any female arse that dares to take a seat amid the sparse congregation. He always loved to watch my friends come.

She won’t be there, his swollen baby-soft gloating tricoteuse. She’s fostering a changeling, sole progeny of my heart, my art and my hands-on intellect, into her pc world with its sliding guidelines and snap-to rules. She’s emasculated it, growing out its severe crew-cut into fauntleroy curls and dressing it in designer logos. It’s too late for it now; she’s soft-focused its rigorous exactitude. I’ve exchanged my copyright for a mess of sugared porridge. No, she won’t deliberately disturb the still calm centre of her equilibrium, not for me.

Bitch-sister might come. Black always did suit her. She’ll languorously drape her length along the blind pew, twanging her thong between her cheeks and twisting her high-skirted black stockinged legs into unanatomically becoming positions. She knows how to angle. She’s always nicked stuff out of my bedroom. Maybe they’ll glance at one another in sympathetic mock-sorrow. Maybe they’ll go gladly together to a hotel where he can forget the rounding cherub left at home and turn her into his latest silk-tied arched angel, wings spreadeagled from the iron bedhead, singing out in seraphic ecstasy. Just hear that heavenly organ blow; celebrating life, of course.

I yearn. If he would stop and turn and look at me with yesterday’s eyes, even now I’d dam this welling tear. I walk the fields alone forever gloved, loveless, missing so much. Nothing remains but choice, ultimate autonomy. I offer up my arms for oblivion; Lethe accepts me as I am.

There should be music, beautiful music. There should be a full moon mirrored in the black clotting pool, metallic like the bonnet of his Porsche, a headlight dipped into the darkness. Moon River? The Pathètique, perhaps, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky? While my Guitar Gently Weeps? I Know that my Redeemer Liveth? Angels? From the sublime to the anodyne, the slowing beat pulses vacantly through my skull.

I’m on quite a pleasant high now. There’s a frilly vagueness to the edges of things, and tiny targets keep floating in front of my eyes. Pot shots at a fairground, cross-hairs sighting the lambent end of the long littleness of life. My arm is marble white, blue veins deflating. My fingers feel only a weary cold detachment, a blessed inevitability. The bloody waterfall has stayed tidily between its banks, no meanders, not an ox-bow lake in sight. It’s slowing now; the well-spring must be drying up, but where it flowed from is an Easter scene: pouting, puckered open beaks of flesh, a row of three white crosses standing proud.

That young doctor was right about the stuttering. The blade went in easily. It was like slicing a tomato – start with the point of the knife; make an entrance. It was the scar tissue that held matters up, prevented the single samurai slash that would have proclaimed its purpose. It was a drag. First I tore across the oldest scar, the kitchen devil cut, the impulse bite, the only one I did in front of him. Yes, of course it was a hopeless cry for attention, for sympathy, for anything but indifference.

The second attempt was vodka-fuelled, sad, pathetic; I took myself to hospital with that one, driving one-handed, the other swathed in perforated sheets of bounty. I only did it so I’d fit in with their common statistics, pandering to the mean. The third – that was a look back in anger moment. It wasn’t enough that he’d stolen my youth, my sanity, my fertility, he had to take my work as well, and win our prizes in their name. I saw them smirking on the telly, saw that fruitful, burgeoning belly, and the monstrous green-eyed life director called out ‘cut’.

A row of white crosses. Three graves – faith, hope and charity; the weariness, the fever and the fret; Conley, Weightwatchers and Atkins. Three cold preprinted rejection slips when I first tried to write alone. Three little deaths of hope when my pee left the wand blue. Three times I knowingly took him back inside me, basted with the juices of an earlier bird. That intolerable, fatal betrayal as his cock crowed for the third time.

One for sorrow, two for absolution, and three for me.


Alexandra Fox

Seventh Quark actively seeks prize-winning material to reprint. Gethseminal was First Prize Winner, The Momaya Prize 2004 and printed in the Momaya Anthology before being reprinted in Seventh Quark Magazine.






Photo by Hazera Forth