Florets: Rocky tries to shot: a putative title of a novel
a pilot edition by Annie Siddons
In a room that resembles a function room possibly because it is a function room there is a circle of blue velvet tip up chairs that are not attached to the floor so when you tip one up to sit on it it judders forward. The floor is red lino. There are lights. There are beery exhalations. This function room is being used as a performance space for a performance which is not set in a function room but has sections where low-grade function rooms - school halls particularly - are mentioned.
She’s a vision. Red suede stilettos. A peacock print silky shirt and a super tight royal blue body con skirt. Shoulder pads. Wildly backcombed blonde hair. The resemblance to a derailed Maggie Thatcher is not accidental. Red lips to match her shoes; blue shadowed eyes to match her skirt. She is tall. Or, as the white suburban youth around these parts are wont to say - she TAAAALLLLL.
This woman, whose face makes sense all the more when you realise she is half German and if you squint you can see Marlene Dietrich in her, some kind of melancholy, some kind of masculine stoicism, a great deal of handsomeness, is commanding the room effortlessly because she is a clown. She comes in and sits down on one of the insecure tip down chairs and talks about the 80s. A song comes on and she says to us, Love this one, love this one, love this one, and she looks at us with mischief and we laugh. The 80s, she says, and we laugh. Benson and Hedges, she says, and we laugh. This woman is so in command of us, her audience, that she can say a the word YES and we are howling with laughter because she makes that YES so full of complicit naughtiness. Her YES is an invitation. The 80s, she says. Party line, she says, and we howl and howl.
She dances, and we howl and howl.
Later on after we have howled and howled and I have clutched at my friend R in my hysteria and she has also clutched at me and I have looked over at my friend M on the other side of the chair circle and met her gaze and seen that she too is howling, covering her mouth with her hands because she is howling so much, then there is a sudden telescoping. We are still hysterical but there is a tectonic shift. Sadness
rises
like
sulphur
and mixes with the hysteria.
I feel vaguely cyclothymic, mixed state.
It is uncomfortable. It is deliberate.
The woman is now talking about trying to feed her mother who we gather has dementia and how her, the woman’s, back is hurting. The mother isn’t cooperating with being fed. There is broccoli, and mashed potato, on a fork . It’s not on the right bit of the fork, says the woman. I think about the word TINES. The woman asks if we are sick how are we supposed to look after ourselves? The woman asks who will look after me? The woman talks about how we are supposed to believe in ourselves, develop ourselves, be positive, swipe the bad thoughts. So that we can look after ourselves. But what if we can’t look after ourselves? The character that the woman is playing is confused. She is in pain. She is angry and bored and sad.
She is in command of her performance. Every nuance is considered.
The sulphuric sadness has now risen sufficiently that there is no more laughter. We are all feeling this woman - Denise, the character is called -’s anguish.
On one of the tipping up chairs opposite me an audience member bursts into tears. They are sobs of agony, not pulchritudinous little drops. There is snot. This audience member has probably had a mother with dementia or some other kind of illness that meant she had to care for her, and it has probably been extremely painful and difficult, I skilfully deduce.
I can feel physiologically that if I wasn’t medicated up to my tits I would possibly be sobbing too because the electricity of this woman’s performance is such that the question she is asking - which is where do you end and I begin - feels like it is the only question.
It is the only question.
Where do my responsibilities for myself end and my responsibilities for you begin?
Isn’t that the ONLY question?
I am minded of my own ageing parent and like a coy brat practising alluring moues in a mirror I see if I can muster up a tear or two on their behalf.
I can’t.
It’s experimental.
I try inhaling quickly as if to imitate the graspy breath of sobbing. No biscuit.
In the place where my heart should be, I feel a drag weight. It is FIXED. It is immutable. It’s like arguing with a Capricorn.
The thing is, not to beat about the bush, the parent in question, that is my parent, not the fictitious parent of the fictitious character we are watching, really was a terrible cunt. The terrors of our childhood in our parent’s cult in the forest are not for polite conversation. Even therapists have baulked at the horrors that were meted out on us, and turned tail in their thousands. Every single one of my numerous cult siblings is maimed. Some are reclusive trolls living in mud dwellings and some are besmirched denizens of the streets. Of course I’m talking about psychic maiming here but actually no in some cases there is physical maimage also.
I was the runt, the last one of the litter, and I survived by being a deceitful little dickead, and thus becoming a storyteller and now make my living as a minstrel, slipping between categories so no one can catch me or pin me down. Or, as some wiseass has probably said, lying to protect my vulnerabilities.
The thing is that we now know enough to know that anyone who is damaged enough to inflict such extravagant and grandiose and comically pumped up damage on their own loin fruit is probably pretty fucked up themselves. Thus a paradox:
if I feel your pain
if I lean into your pain
if I feel your pain and lean into your pain sufficiently to forgive you
I will have to forgive you
To forgive you I will have to work extremely hard, visit necromancers, shamen, angel diviners, and psych wards, etc etc, over many years. As minstrelsy is not that well paid I will probably definitely have to get into debt to do it.
And the thing is that now you are mollified by your condition and its palliatives and are often misdiagnosed by the ones that do care for you as a charmer or, worse, a sweetheart, and so you will have no fucking idea of what I have theoretically been through to get to the stage where my heart is no longer obsidian but warm flame of compassion and beatific love, enough to feed you broccoli when my back hurts.
so that my reward for all that suffering is simply more suffering
and not meeting of my own goals which are numerous as I spent so long in the death cult with you and then recovering from the death cult with you.
Between watching the woman sobbing and being distracted by the resolute stoniness of my own heart vis a vis my cunty progenitor who is now little more than an adult baby, gurning and smiling in its own runnels of filth and hillocks of flesh, I miss a loop of the story.
Because now I am swimming in lake me
I am doing me
I am checking my own list
I am concentrating on my own journey
I am the hero of my own story
I am YAS QUEENING the shit out of my soshe meej.
These are colloquialisms that I’ve picked up that I like to use judiciously sometimes but I can’t help saying them in an annoying way which jars with my extremely odd accent acquired from being raised in a religious cult on a farm.
I feel like because of growing up in this death cult in the mountains that I had to use up all my compassion early on say by the age of 19 and now there isn’t any left.
It doesn’t seem to have renewed: or at least I haven’t found a cheap sustainable source of renewal, wind turbines for compassion, I haven’t found those, yet.
wow! great writing.