Ian McDonald by Some Strange Desire

Author:Some Strange Desire
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-02-21T12:24:33+00:00

18 November

On the third day of the jhash, I went to see Mother, a forty-five-minute train journey past red-brick palazzo-style hypermarkets under Heathrow’s sound-footprint.

When the great wave of early-Fifties slum clearance swept the old East End out into the satellite New Towns, it swept Mother and his little empire with it. Three years after the bombing stopped, the Blitz really began, he says. After three hundred years of metropolis, he felt a change of environment would do him good. He is quite the born-again suburbanite; he cannot imagine why we choose to remain in the city. With his two sisters, our aunts, he runs a discreet and lucrative brothel from a detached house on a large estate. The deviations of suburbia differ from, but are no less deviations than, the deviations of the city, and are equally exploitable.

As Mother opened the door to me an elderly man in a saggy black latex suit wandered down from upstairs, saw me, apologized and vanished into the back bedroom.

“It’s all right dear, he’s part of the family,” Mother shouted up. “Really, you know, I should stop charging him. He’s been coming twenty years, boy and man. Every Tuesday, same thing. Dresses up in the rubber suit and has your Aunt Ursa sit on his face. Happily married; he’s invited us to his silver wedding anniversary party; it’s a nice thought but I don’t think it’s really us, do you?”

To the eye they were three fortysomething slightly-but-not-too-tarty women, the kind you see pushing shopping trolleys around palazzo-style hypermarkets, or in hatchbacks arriving at yoga classes in the local leisure center rather than the kind that congregate at the farthest table in bars to drink vodka and laugh boorishly.

My mother was born the same year that Charles II was restored to the monarchy.

We kissed on the mouth, exchanging chemical identifications, tongue to tongue. I made no attempt to mask my feelings; anxiety has a flavor that cannot be concealed.

“Love, what is it? Is it that pimp again? Is he giving bother?” He sniffed deeply. “No. It’s Cassiopia, isn’t it? Something’s happened to him. The Law? Darling, we’ve High Court judges in our pockets. No, something else. Worse. Oh no. Oh dear God no.”

Chemical communication is surer and less ambiguous than verbal. Within minutes my aunts, smelling the alarm on the air, had cut short their appointments with their clients and congregated in the back room where no nontesh was ever permitted. In the deep wing-chair drawn close to the gas heater sat my grandmother, seven hundred years old and almost totally submerged into the dark, mind wandering interminably and with death the only hope of release from the labyrinth of his vast rememberings. His fingers moved in his lap like the legs of stricken spiders. We spoke in our own language, sharp-edged whispers beneath the eyes of the hahndahvi in their five Cardinal Points up on the picture rail.

Jhash. It was made to be whispered, that word. I suggested medical assistance. There were prominent doctors among the ul-goi .

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