Reverberate
But Ruin did have to get back to his mother, and that misunderstanding, that space where some ‘intent’ might be suggested. He needed to somehow exonerate her, to say that it wasn’t her fault, or rather to prove to himself that it wasn’t. He recognized this as being virtually impossible, given his history, their ‘story’, and the reverberations through six decades, but he was going to try anyway. Her history, back story even, can’t really be delved into. There is not enough evidence there, just those initial tales of abandonment, her father, early grieving, her mother, and abuse, her uncle. Ruin could hardly remember his own story, never mind attempting to reconstruct that of the mater, but the pattern was obvious, and the repeat motifs presented themselves unashamedly. Ruin was used to looking for patterns, probably generated by a lifetime making visual art. There were also patterns in the mater’s behaviors, mirrored in his own. These he could see and understand. These were the drivers he wanted to expose. He wanted to explain these to Rack. Rack had been, for over three decades, a type of ‘sounding board’ for him, utterly non-judgmental, hyper vigilant even, with an uncanny ability to proffer solace. He had the idea that this was also mirrored back. They were, somehow, equally scabrous, wanton, lewd, call it what you will, and could laugh uproariously at each other’s coping mechanisms. This was probably central to their ‘screaming walks’ through the canyons of Manhattan in those early days of their beloved plague. Rack was very much the ‘screamer’ then, and Ruin was in awe of her ability to let one rip on a crowded avenue or cross-street, whilst quietly hoping he might be mistaken for her carer. He so loved that embarrassment. He also suspected that she loved watching him attempt to deal with it.
Those walks should become legend.
Yes, it all happened in a crowded room, a dark one to boot. There were two not quite double beds. Ruin didn’t know what size they were, they weren’t standard anything. He guessed they were more single size; two double beds would not have fit in that room. But this was years before he was aware of those designated sizes, queen, king, whatever. They were old metal frames, with exposed springs, on which the horsehair mattresses scrappily floated. His two younger brothers shared one, he had the other. It was their room, the boy’s room. His parents slept in the small box-room, so his sisters could share the other bedroom, furnished with two single beds. The youngest of the brothers, Johnny, was about 4 years old at the time. He was a troubled child, if his self-rocking was anything to go by. This self-soothing swaying back and forth relentlessly would infuriate his ten-year-old brother, Tony, until Johnny managed to soothe himself to sleep each night. Tony would then become comatose, at last, having endured that rocking until exhaustion intervened. Johnny also slept with his invisible friend ‘Ibi’, so their bed was somewhat overcrowded.
Ruin, the oldest, had a bed to himself, a sign of seniority, an acknowledgement of his waxing 'teenhood', until that interloper arrived.
Here, let me (that personal pronoun again) interject, by way of adding a warning. It’s simple really, and I am directing it towards all parents, of all persuasions and ilks, gender preferences, and identities. It’s blindingly elementary, an iteration I know. Please, never put a mature male in bed with an immature child, no matter how much you trust this male, no matter how close the family relationship might be. But I guess if I was being both fair and honest, I would have to extend this to include all maturated individuals regardless of gender or self-identification. My, perhaps unfair, focus on the male abuser here is because this was the case, both as far as my mother and myself were concerned, those wayward uncles. But then this isn’t about me, so I apologise for any presumptions made.
Ruin did not want to share his bed.
Rack: Ruin, It’s hard to respond. A part of me just wants to remove that sadness from your life. It’s heavy. I hope you’re doing OK. Sending love.
Yes, Ruin was doing okay. He knew it wasn’t Rack’s job to take the sadness away. How could it be? Anyway, he was doing exactly that himself, and it was about time, in every possible meaning of that phrase. It was about time itself, indeed, nothing more, nothing less. So not counting on any, a godly and honest state if ever there was one, he would get on with it until he no longer could. There’s a definition of fulfilment there, that recognition of oneself as that veritable elephant surfing on the fabled edge of that infinite black hole, and writing this out made him happy, elated even. For what it’s worth, it records itself anyway, endlessly, and anything the universal you or I might choose to add is simply non-essential extra, that ‘Froth on a Daydream’ which Boris Vian liked to write about. It is written for the self, a gift. He was looking at Vian again for a reason, or at least was planning to, it having once been important to him. A new copy sat on his emptying shelves, quietly reverberating. Hum diddley hum. This hum was once beautifully described as ‘the music of the spheres’.
There is there, there.
Anyway, back to those words of advice, my abridged handbook for would-be parents.
Do not circumvent the grooming, do not make it unnecessary by placing a potential predator and a victim in a dark, and silent, bed together. Whilst I am not going to dissect what happened on that mattress, I am going to look at why a child might have erroneously projected that grooming onto his mother for almost 60 years. There’s the crux, Rack, that mistake, that almost lifelong, retarding, projection that might have turned a 68-year-old child into a storyteller.
It was almost impossible for that son to describe that mother, to find the words, I mean. But he was going to try. There was no malice there, and she wasn’t stupid. Being stupid and ignorant are not the same thing. But then the whole story is also tinged with her innocence, something which can often be confused with ignorance, but here they were intertwined, and she had no way to pick them apart. These traits were very much part of her Gordian Knot, that imponderable she had inadvertently played forward.
To go further he knew he was going to have to do it alone. He was going to have to, temporarily hopefully, let Rack go as well. He knew that it was going too far, and could even be triggering, to use a woke expression, for her. It was almost going too far for himself, even. It felt like an essential step, so he would take it. This would constitute a huge, and frightening, departure, a rupturing, after 25 years of corresponding. He was going to go back alone. She knew where he was, he knew where she was, that would have to be enough for now.
There is always that cracked open window here, letting some air in, and stench out.
That will be enough in this interim, he guffawed quietly to himself, recklessly Rackless, perhaps, but enough for now.
Reverberate
But Ruin did have to get back to his mother, and that misunderstanding, that space where some ‘intent’ might be suggested. He needed to somehow exonerate her, to say that it wasn’t her fault, or rather to prove to himself that it wasn’t. He recognized this as being virtually impossible, given his history, their ‘story’, and the reverberations through six decades, but he was going to try anyway. Her history, back story even, can’t really be delved into. There is not enough evidence there, just those initial tales of abandonment, her father, early grieving, her mother, and abuse, her uncle. Ruin could hardly remember his own story, never mind attempting to reconstruct that of the mater, but the pattern was obvious, and the repeat motifs presented themselves unashamedly. Ruin was used to looking for patterns, probably generated by a lifetime making visual art. There were also patterns in the mater’s behaviors, mirrored in his own. These he could see and understand. These were the drivers he wanted to expose. He wanted to explain these to Rack. Rack had been, for over three decades, a type of ‘sounding board’ for him, utterly non-judgmental, hyper vigilant even, with an uncanny ability to proffer solace. He had the idea that this was also mirrored back. They were, somehow, equally scabrous, wanton, lewd, call it what you will, and could laugh uproariously at each other’s coping mechanisms. This was probably central to their ‘screaming walks’ through the canyons of Manhattan in those early days of their beloved plague. Rack was very much the ‘screamer’ then, and Ruin was in awe of her ability to let one rip on a crowded avenue or cross-street, whilst quietly hoping he might be mistaken for her carer. He so loved that embarrassment. He also suspected that she loved watching him attempt to deal with it.
Those walks should become legend.
Yes, it all happened in a crowded room, a dark one to boot. There were two not quite double beds. Ruin didn’t know what size they were, they weren’t standard anything. He guessed they were more single size; two double beds would not have fit in that room. But this was years before he was aware of those designated sizes, queen, king, whatever. They were old metal frames, with exposed springs, on which the horsehair mattresses scrappily floated. His two younger brothers shared one, he had the other. It was their room, the boy’s room. His parents slept in the small box-room, so his sisters could share the other bedroom, furnished with two single beds. The youngest of the brothers, Johnny, was about 4 years old at the time. He was a troubled child, if his self-rocking was anything to go by. This self-soothing swaying back and forth relentlessly would infuriate his ten-year-old brother, Tony, until Johnny managed to soothe himself to sleep each night. Tony would then become comatose, at last, having endured that rocking until exhaustion intervened. Johnny also slept with his invisible friend ‘Ibi’, so their bed was somewhat overcrowded.
Ruin, the oldest, had a bed to himself, a sign of seniority, an acknowledgement of his waxing 'teenhood', until that interloper arrived.
Here, let me (that personal pronoun again) interject, by way of adding a warning. It’s simple really, and I am directing it towards all parents, of all persuasions and ilks, gender preferences, and identities. It’s blindingly elementary, an iteration I know. Please, never put a mature male in bed with an immature child, no matter how much you trust this male, no matter how close the family relationship might be. But I guess if I was being both fair and honest, I would have to extend this to include all maturated individuals regardless of gender or self-identification. My, perhaps unfair, focus on the male abuser here is because this was the case, both as far as my mother and myself were concerned, those wayward uncles. But then this isn’t about me, so I apologise for any presumptions made.
Ruin did not want to share his bed.
Rack: Ruin, It’s hard to respond. A part of me just wants to remove that sadness from your life. It’s heavy. I hope you’re doing OK. Sending love.
Yes, Ruin was doing okay. He knew it wasn’t Rack’s job to take the sadness away. How could it be? Anyway, he was doing exactly that himself, and it was about time, in every possible meaning of that phrase. It was about time itself, indeed, nothing more, nothing less. So not counting on any, a godly and honest state if ever there was one, he would get on with it until he no longer could. There’s a definition of fulfilment there, that recognition of oneself as that veritable elephant surfing on the fabled edge of that infinite black hole, and writing this out made him happy, elated even. For what it’s worth, it records itself anyway, endlessly, and anything the universal you or I might choose to add is simply non-essential extra, that ‘Froth on a Daydream’ which Boris Vian liked to write about. It is written for the self, a gift. He was looking at Vian again for a reason, or at least was planning to, it having once been important to him. A new copy sat on his emptying shelves, quietly reverberating. Hum diddley hum. This hum was once beautifully described as ‘the music of the spheres’.
There is there, there.
Anyway, back to those words of advice, my abridged handbook for would-be parents.
Do not circumvent the grooming, do not make it unnecessary by placing a potential predator and a victim in a dark, and silent, bed together. Whilst I am not going to dissect what happened on that mattress, I am going to look at why a child might have erroneously projected that grooming onto his mother for almost 60 years. There’s the crux, Rack, that mistake, that almost lifelong, retarding, projection that might have turned a 68-year-old child into a storyteller.
It was almost impossible for that son to describe that mother, to find the words, I mean. But he was going to try. There was no malice there, and she wasn’t stupid. Being stupid and ignorant are not the same thing. But then the whole story is also tinged with her innocence, something which can often be confused with ignorance, but here they were intertwined, and she had no way to pick them apart. These traits were very much part of her Gordian Knot, that imponderable she had inadvertently played forward.
To go further he knew he was going to have to do it alone. He was going to have to, temporarily hopefully, let Rack go as well. He knew that it was going too far, and could even be triggering, to use a woke expression, for her. It was almost going too far for himself, even. It felt like an essential step, so he would take it. This would constitute a huge, and frightening, departure, a rupturing, after 25 years of corresponding. He was going to go back alone. She knew where he was, he knew where she was, that would have to be enough for now.
There is always that cracked open window here, letting some air in, and stench out.
That will be enough in this interim, he guffawed quietly to himself, recklessly Rackless, perhaps, but enough for now.