The Edge of the Alphabet

I .

Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill-judged, costly, criminal – especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products. The creator of the world did not employ a dustman to collect the peelings of his creation.

Now I, Thora Pattern (who live at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence), now I walk day and night among the leavings of people, places and moments. Here the dead (my goldsmiths) keep cropping up like daisies with their floral blackmail. It is nearly impossible to bribe them or buy their silence. They are never finished with trinkets pockets lockets gold watches that swing on giant chains against their dust-filled hearts. They leave their marks like fly-specks upon my life. Why do they spatter my vision with the excrement of the past, buzz in my head, seek the snow-crystals of desire?

I made a journey of discovery through the lives of three people – Toby, Zoe, Pat.

His feet had finished bleeding. They were withered now. He thought they were sea-anemones or dried oak-leaves or burst pinecones from outside, where the magpies garbled A-Wimbledon-a-Wombledon-a-fourteen-miles, and a bush-wren obsessed the leafy places with a sound light as poplar-cotton or purple thistle-head, a tiny piping jig that betrayed more than sight or statistic the vulnerability of the instrument that produced it.

Yes, outside where the hawks fly.

Toby walked carefully, a saint or politician, between the layers of knives. He walked on the sea too, giving the offal of the past to the searching grey and white birds that rose and fell in the sky, like supplementary breathings of the tide.

Toby was dreaming of the Lost Tribe.

He was a tree. He was sitting on the bin in the corner at home. His arm was shaking, not a human arm, but a branch with twigs for fingers and scabs and cuts where age had scarred the bark. He felt so strange, as if he were an entire forest, with the Lost Tribe inhabiting him as if his head were a secret gully somewhere up-country, just below the snowline, before the clumps of tussock and snow-grass begin to shine in the wind and sun.

So his withered feet dropped off, like dead twigs. He dived now and swam deep in the curving waves until he reached the bed of the ocean where all forms were of shadowy dreams and ribboned sleep, and the sun was only a green inkling, an intuition of light in the brain.

The funeral was over. Toby’s father was listening, listening, and opening and shutting doors. Toby said to his dead mother, You old witch how I loved you with the Latter Days waving like maggots in your entrails and your targeted breasts hitched like moons in the sky, you old witch with your nose meeting your chin, your Blaikie nose, your Dunwoody chin.

‘If you ever go overseas, Toby, visit the places where your ancestors lived. I have their chin and their nose, registered parcel of history delivered to the womb’s door. And, Toby, Toby, sit in the old churchyard where the yew trees grow and where are buried John Blaikie, Master of Model Training College, Evan Dunwoody, Minister to the King, Dr Charles Gibbs, F.R.C.S….’

You pegged your ancestors on the line between the work-socks and the blankets and they bubbled with cleanness and kicked in the breeze and were slapped in the face by the oak leaves that got up one morning to wash their face in death. Oh Dolly Dolly Varden in pleated china with the dust in the cracks and the chipped eyes. I did not have dolls. My sisters had dolls blushed pink with hollow bellies and patent bellybuttons and limbs held by a knot of elastic, and the house was littered with amputations lying in corners by spiders’ webs and on ledges with empty bottles and beetles resting between engagements, and under the house near the blocks of Waimaru stone and the lank sleepless potato flowers looking for the light. And I, Toby, travelled a long way in my dream, and when I came to the pond and the patch of babies growing up like little green frogs from the bank, with leaves sheltering them as they shelter flower-buds, I, the tramp, the epileptic, drew my bundle of sharp stakes like the manuka my father used as religious instruction to discipline the beans in their search for heaven

my father the curate

so I pierced the little frog-heads and sat down and cried because my mother with her Blaikie nose and Dunwoody chin was dead.

(…)