The Unspoken Song of the Broken

The night gargles and spits out the wing of bat, eye of owl, voodoo doll and dead man’s scowl. Wild beasts in the cranium: Stasi whips and Nazi boots, Uzi bullets, Gestapo plot – these are the feasts of the minds of the crazy, deep into the sweat of garrotted insomnia. They do not deserve to dream.

She dares to touch. She traces what is left on the outside; each pore a co-ordinate on her flatness, her invisible Cartesian planes. The body becomes a map with imaginary hemispheres, two poles. She finds her Arctic and thinks of polar bears in the snow. And she knows that the men sneering with the guns have killed so many that she conceives their deaths in scarlet ice melting and draining into her hypothalamus. She is suddenly cold.

The map: she finds a bruise at the Equator. The callous lover she took has had his weight, his weight-thud on her hips. She knows she is alive when she feels his pound, his throb, his desperate probe into her space, her empty place, the void of his pleasure. Then the heave and the pant faster and faster until she thinks that he will break her beneath his sudden groan. Alone now, and all that remains is the bruise at her Equator; the contusion, blues and greens surreal: the pelvis speckled with the algae of his desire.

Alone. The body, a map. She finds lines raised like bark: breasts, hips, thighs – each line a reward for the tummy swollen with the promised gasp of baby. The marks. She passed the children through her birthing place, where they emerged milky and sticky with a pulsing knot to the belly. She reached and they gnashed at the nipple while she smiled at the smallness of their toes.

Her body: now simultaneously corpse and corpus. How will she know which streak belongs to which child? She panics. The lines are there, but the children have gone. Three. There should be three, but there are none and she remembers that they were snatched from her, abducted from the stink of her mental illness. They have stolen the children and she cannot touch the lost shoe, the sun hat, the plastic lunchboxes sealed at the corners over peanut butter sandwiches on brown bread. And she seethes. She seethes. They have taken the children and they are not where she needs them to be: snug-as-bugs in their beds with the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceilings.

She is naked and the bones rise up to hide the place where the flesh should be. The weight of her has fallen and the children are gone and the tropics have taken leave and the poles play skipping rope and she feels herself blossom to the doom of her existence. Her thoughts are comma – caption – plot. Niagara Falls. Sahara dust storm. The pillow is wrong; she wants the feather, not the foam, but it has slipped to the floor and her arm outstretches like the General pointing toward this Guantanamo of her mind.

The body weary, the brain too wide awake. She scours the room for sleep. It is bare. She has hidden the photographs. She has hidden the hand-painted pet-rocks, the stick-figure pictures and the potato prints given to her in small rushed hands and smiles assured of embrace. The cupboard. The clothes. The shoes. The belts. The hats. The silk scarf from Istanbul. The body moves and wants to hold cotton and florals and the nylon pantyhose that make her eczema flare.

In the cupboard, she finds whiskey. Whiskey sips, the orifice screwed clean but for the band around the neck, the choke. She glugs and something in her burns and she must have more. Now she is desert, the quiet parch of memory. And the whiskey fills. The boil of ether quells a mind that dances naked at the intersections in the rain. And she will reign it, the mind.

She is mad. She swigs the whiskey. She is whiskey. She swigs the mad. And the bed is the ceiling and the ceiling the bed and the duvet slumps in the corner, and she cannot stop this. The cacophony of phoneme, singing note. She is diva, crescendo-diva, aria lifting through time to the ceiling and the voices – the voices … the voices will have her gaoled. She has failed the test of motherhood without the chance to write it and she is sure that she could pass if only. Yes, the marks; the stretch-marks bonus points and her work always so well done with star stickers. She searches the night for stars, but it is too dark and her moss smell has filled the room.

She studies the dressing table. It once belonged to someone else, but she can’t remember the woman’s name. The name and the dressing table. Dressing. Like a panacea upon a gaping wound. She is a haemorrhage and the bottles of paint and the grey pencil skirt will – Ah, the pencil skirt? Yes, she will make a good pencil; she will connect the dots in numerical order to discover the picture. She starts again to dress and now she is the aftermath of famine in the looking glass. The mirror concludes that she is not worthy of motherhood and she daubs the paint upon the face and wears the festive mask of the mummer and the mirror, mirror on the wall is mocking with eyes that pierce as she stoops to find the bottle and her clothes are loose and she is becoming nothing but the ether and she feels so much lighter. She is numb. The raw flesh has lost its nerve and she stretches to reach the hanged car keys. She puts them in the pocket, safe with the memories of the three children.

Vivid now, she pictures foetus, palm-sized blind-child, not yet formed. The mind, the schizoid mind throws them into her pocket: three Tom-thumbs and her car keys. She will travel. There is work to do. A job. That is the first number on the dot-to-dot. She has a job with words and a swanky title. She is chief, chief like the fire-séance myth where she is the flute and the others are playing the fire and she is the dancing feather in a drab grey office with windows on the inside for people to watch the spectacle of flute becoming nymph in the fishbowl.

She is salmon swimming upstream and the cars hoot and she thinks of the old fairgrounds sprung quietly as mushrooms in the sleep of her youth and she hears the music in her head as the tin notes louder, spinning, and then the lag of the music machine as the bumper cars stop. Oh, this is fun. If only she had left home later there would be more cars to play, but it is twilight and she is on the freeway pushing the pedal down, down, playing the cruel lover’s sex pound rhythm on the pedal and she is stop-start-wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee and she feels free and she hears laughter cackle and it is hers before she stops before the red light.

The whiskey. Ah, in the workbag beside her. Another bottle of numb. Yes, anaesthetise the place where once was heart, liver, pancreas and lung, a textbook full of mitochondria and Golgi bodies, all stripped along with the children. And she says their names and suddenly she is bone and she tastes the brittle marrow sucked dry and she would be no good for the stocks.

She sits at her office desk, letters surfing and dipping and reappearing like alphabet soup. She must mend the words. There is the news of other places, other people, and it is no longer sad enough for her. She shuffles the papers for tragedy, scrolls the screen PageDown into the gutters where she finds the number 36 and she hates that the end is always even and she wants to make it odd, but there are no half-measures, only the cavity-glug of her throat and her whiskey. The odd will never have the last word.

The people in her head escape. One voice is chanting and one is screaming and one is defiant and will not speak but her story falls out anyway with the gob and the spit and the teeth-lipstick-red and there are faces in suits to snatch up the whiskey and she feels herself unsettled from her cat-curl and she knows that they will take her away and when she kicks she sees a woman pull down the pencil skirt so that her dignity is intact as the timer buzzes and she realises that she has lost the race to find the children.

Drunk. And sleep and defeat blanket her as she is stretched and belted in the back of the ambulance with the siren, blood-thirsty, whirring.