Some days I feel like I am in a giant well-furnished room,
waiting for death.
Before my daughter leaps on a plane, I wish to say on record
that the ever present Black Dog is not sitting on my lap. He has been circling
the room same as usual for the last 10 or so years, and I NEVER break eye contact.
He stays a respectful distance away, and I know EXACTLY where he is at all
times.
Constant Vigilance, as Mad Eye Moody says.
In reality, all is well.
Well, quite well.
It’s just that some very real truths are upon me.
I had my children young by today’s standards. In the estates
of certain counties in certain countries I might well be a grandmother by now,
but in MY group of peers, I was a VERY early bloomer. Shall we say.
My babies are all well and truly fledged into adulthood.
They still love me- most days- and I love them always, but in
reality my job as life provider is done.
In spite of the fact that my womb reminds me, with
astonishingly accurate time keeping, that the shop is still open for business and
available for action, the truth is that I have mentally handed her her pink
slip. She has retired, although she may not know it yet.
My ‘career’ such as it is, has provided me with enough
amusement to entertain myself for a few years now, but even that has lost some
of its sparkle.
I feel blessed to have been in a position to express my
creativity, and I hope- I believe- that I have provided enough entertainment,
even in the form of malicious gossip, to amuse others for the moments that they
may otherwise have spent hammering nails into their eyeballs.
Only one thing worse than being talked about….and that is
having your name misspelt in the press.
So what happens now?
In the last few months mortality has leapt into my consciousness
time and time again. There was a time, rather too recently, when my ‘sound bite
du jour’ was announcing that I had known of 6 adult deaths within 6 weeks. Sadly
this is true. Some of these people I knew well enough sit quietly and weep for,
some I knew only to mourn, as one does, more for the pain of others . One was
an absolute prick when living, and my only curiosity was the number of people
who, having mostly ignored him for the past several years due to his
unfortunate manner of having been a prick, then canonised him in death.
Apparently we are never to speak ill of the dead. I wonder
why?
They are dead.
What can they do about it?
Yesterday I discovered what a nematode is.
This was because I was cleaning out my fish tank, the one
with the goldfish I thought would die a year ago after having been won at a
Chinese New year fair that then went on to cannibalise all the other creatures
in the tank and thus quadruple in size, and to my HORROR, and that word MUST be
shouted in your head when you read it,I saw little white wiggle worms.
I almost dropped the tank.
I actually wretched, rushed to the sink, covered my arms to the
elbows in half a cup of Dettol and started scrubbing with a nail brush. I then
changed the sheets, and all the towels, and with my hands stinging typed the
words ‘little white worms and fish tanks’ into Google to discover that these
fucking things live in our water all the time.
I still get bile in the back of my throat as I am writing
this.
Nematodes are round worms. There are 28,000 species of them;
of which 16,000 are parasitic…that’s right, parasites.
Excuse me whilst I go and wash my hands.
The ones that are sometimes seen in fish tanks are
completely harmless to fish and people. They eat algae and the reason they
become visible is because they have so much algae that they get big. Over
feeding leads to algae in tanks.
Therefore, due to that fact that my poor lonesome snail and
tank buddy killing ten dollar goldfish gets fed too often and doesn’t eat
anything other than other fish and sometimes peas ( I read about goldfish
liking peas online) The nematodes have
been having a field day and are now visible to the naked eye. There were about
6 of them.
I say were because I swiftly put the goldfish in a cup (which
I later threw out just in case) and scoured that fucking fish tank to within an
inch of its life with boiling water and a new wire scourer which is also now in
the bin.
Goldfish, that is his name, is now back happily swimming
around in a sparkling tank without a worry in the word, and not a nematode in visible
sight.
But I now know that they are always there.
This is what my life has become.
I have recently moaned to others who try and care, that I
need to do something to give back to the community. People in horrible
countries live with worms all the time, and no one seems to give a shit, and if
they do, they do from a distance.
My life, although filled with friends and family who love
me, and art and good things, feels somewhat rutted.
Phil Collins reminds me that this is another day in
paradise.
I’m worried that I might not survive another 40 years of the
clean white walls and foie gras.
Nice as it is, if this is all there is, I may be doomed.
Nice is not quite enough for me. I have had money, and had
no money. It’s the same, only one has more side dishes and a better bottle of
dessert wine at the end.
I am yet to win a Booker prize, or own my own jet plane, it’s
true, there are things I wish to experience. I want to see the aurora borealis.
But if I don’t, and I die, will it have mattered?
Honestly, not really. Not to anyone but me, and I won’t care
anymore.
My body will be devoured by the worms whose existence may on
the surface seem less meaningful than my own, except that according to Wiki, if
all the nematodes died out, so would everything else.
So I sit.
In my waiting room.
A magazine in hand.
Reading about a woman whose breasts are made from plastic
and whose vagina secretes enough perfume to entertain a man who plays soccer all
day to make money and who has a larger income than 99% of the world’s
population and I ask myself.
Does her dress make her look like a prostitute?
And who the fuck cares?
When she dies, the worms will eat her too.
But not her tits.
And that about sums it up really.
