The Tent

WINTER’S TALES

Once upon a time, you say, there were germs with horns. They lived in the toilet and could only be defeated by gallons and gallons of bleach. You could commit suicide by drinking this bleach, and some women did.

The young look up at you, wide-eyed. Or maybe they look down at you: they’ve become very tall. How young are the young, these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old. But they are still credulous, because you were there, once upon a time, and they weren’t.

Not only that, you say—you’re enjoying this—there were no bare midriffs, and only sailors and convicts had tattoos. There were no telephones, there were no vaccinations; so you couldn’t call the doctor when you were dying, of burst glands, of stagnant intestinal bloats, of webs inside your throat, of brain fever. If you had unprotected intercourse your nose dropped off, a lot sooner than it does now.

The young are still listening. Do they believe you? Have you been sensational enough for them? You certainly hope so.

If you were a married woman, it was all over at thirty, you say. You were doomed to put on a print dress and a rubber girdle and sit in a rocking chair on the porch—there were porches, back then—fanning yourself, because there was no air conditioning, and talking about your flat feet, your sciatica, your varicose veins, and the snoring habits of your husband, whose shirts you had to iron, every Tuesday—mountains of shirts. All of these were metaphors for unsatisfactory sex.

At this there are a few giggles. But you don’t want the past to be taken lightly: it cost too much. It deserves respect. So now it’s time for the serious artillery.

Let me tell you about meat loaf, you say, lowering your voice, as the already pale faces around you turn ashen. Yes—meat loaf! Meat loaf, and enemas, and bulb-headed syringes used for what they called “feminine hygiene”—the three are not unconnected, you say, in a thrilling whisper.

By now the young are staring at you with fascinated horror, as if you’re about to pull off one of your legs, revealing a green and mossy amputated stump. War stories, that’s what they want—war stories, and disgusting menus. They want suffering, they want scars. Shall you tell them about pot roast?

But that might be going too far. Anyway, you’ve excited yourself enough for one evening.

IT’S NOT EASY BEING HALF-DIVINE

Helen lived down the street from me when we were growing up. We used to sell Kool-Aid off her front porch, five cents a glass, and she always had to be the one to carry the glass down the steps, eyelids lowered and with that pink bow in her hair, and mincing along like she was walking on eggs. I think she palmed a few nickels, being hardly the most honest type. I know she’s famous and all now, but quite frankly she was a pain in the butt then and still is. She used to tell the worst lies—said her dad was somebody really high up, not the Pope but close, and of course we teased her about that. Not that this so-called big shot ever showed his face. Her mum was just another single mother, as they call them now, but my own mum says they had another name for it once. She said they had goings-on at night around there, naturally, since every man in town thought it was being handed out for free. Used to throw pebbles at the door, shout names and howl a bit when they got drunk. The two boys, Helen’s brothers—they were pretty wild, they took off early.

When she was ten, Helen went through a circus phase—liked to dress up, thought she’d be a trapeze artist—then she got close with the woman who ran the beauty salon, used to do her hair for her and give her product samples, and then she started drawing black rims around her eyes and hanging around the bus station. Fishing for a ticket out of town, is my guess. She was good-looking—I’ll grant her that—so it wasn’t surprising she got married early, to the police chief, a prime catch for both of them as he was pushing forty.

Then just a few months ago she ran off with some man from the city who was passing through. Didn’t need the bus ticket after all, he had his own car, quite the boat. Hubby’s pissed as hell; he’s talking about a posse, go into the city, smoke them out, beat the guy up, get her back, smack her around a bit. A lot of men wouldn’t bother, with a tramp like that; but it seems he doesn’t believe in divorce, says somebody has to stand for the right values.

Personally I think he’s still nuts about her and anyway his pride is hurt. Trouble is she’s flaunting it—the new man’s quite well off, set her up in some sort of mansion, her picture gets in magazines and people asking about her opinions, it’s enough to make you sick. So there she is, all diddied up in her new pearl necklace and smiling away as sweet as pie and saying how happy she is in her new life, and how every woman should follow her heart. Says it wasn’t easy when she was growing up, being half-divine and all, but now she’s come to terms with it and she’s looking at a career in the movies. Says she was too young to get married that first time but now she knows how fulfilling love can be, and the chief wasn’t, well, he just wasn’t. Of course everyone thinks she’s saying he was a nothing in the sack department, so there’s been some snickering up the sleeves, though not openly because he’s still got a lot of clout in this town.

The long and the short of it is, pardon my pun, nobody likes to be laughed at. The chief’s from a big family, a brother and a lot of cousins, all of them with muscles and tempers. My bet is things will get serious. It’s worth watching.

SALOME WAS A DANCER

Salome went after the Religious Studies teacher. It was really mean of her, he wasn’t up to her at all, no more sense of self-protection than a zucchini, always droning on about morality and so forth, but he’d finger the grapefruits in the supermarket in this creepy way, a grapefruit in each hand, he’d stand there practically drooling, one of those gaunt-looking men who’d fall on his knees if a woman ever looked at him seriously, but so far none of them had. As I say it was really mean of her, but he’d failed her on her mid-term and she was under pressure at home, they wanted her to perform as they put it, so I guess she thought this would be a shortcut.

Anyway, with a mother like hers what could you expect? Divorced, remarried, bracelets all up her arms and fake eyelashes out to here, and pushy as hell. Started entering Salome in those frilly-panty beauty contests when she was five, tap-dance lessons, the lot, they’d slather the makeup on those poor tots and teach them to wiggle their little behinds, what a display. And then her stepdad ran the biggest bank in town so I guess she thought she could get away with anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some hanky-panky going on in that direction too, the way she’d bat her baby blues at him and wheedle, sickening to watch her rubbing up against him and cooing, he’d promised her a Porsche when she turned sixteen.

She was Tinker Bell in the school play when she was twelve, I certainly remember that. Seven layers of cheesecloth was all she wore, there was supposed to be a body stocking underneath but whether there was or not, your guess is as good as mine. And all those middle-aged dads sitting with their legs crossed. Oh, she knew what she was doing!

Anyway, when she got the rotten mark in Religious Studies she went to work on the guy, who knows how it started but when they were caught together in the stockroom she had her shirt off. The teacher was growling away at her bra, having trouble with the hooks, or so the story goes, you have to laugh. If you want what’s in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say. Anyway, big scandal, and then he started badmouthing her, said she was a little slut and she’d led him on, did some innuendo on the mother just for good measure. Everyone believed him of course, but you always knew with Salome that if anyone’s head was going to roll it wouldn’t be hers. She accused the poor jerk of sexual assault, and since she was technically a minor—and of course her banker stepdad threw his weight around—she made it stick. Last seen, the guy was panhandling in the subway stations, down there in Toronto; grown a beard, looks like Jesus, crazy as a bedbug. Lost his head completely.

Salome didn’t come to a good end either. Tried out for ballet school, Modern Dance was what she thought would suit her, show a lot of skin, centre your thoughts on the pelvis, bare feet, fling yourself about, but she didn’t get in. Left home after some sort of blowup between the mom and the stepdad, midnight yelling about Miss Princess and her goings-on, furniture was thrown. After that she took to stripping in bars, just to annoy them I bet. Got whacked in her dressing room one night, right before the show, too bad for Management, someone clobbered her over the head with a vase, nothing on but her black leather macramé bikini and that steel-studded choke collar, used to get the clients all worked up, not that I’d know personally. Saw two guys running out the stage door in bicycle-courier outfits, some sort of uniform anyway, never caught them though. Hit men set on by the stepdad is one rumour, wild with jealousy. Guys get like that when their hair falls out. It was all the mother’s fault, if you ask me.

PLOTS FOR EXOTICS

From an early age I knew my ambition was to be in a plot. Or several plots—I thought of it as a career. But no plots came my way. You have to apply for them, a friend of mine told me. He’d been around, though he hadn’t been in any plots himself, so I took his advice and went down to the plot factory. As for everything else, there was an interview. So, said the youngish bored man behind the desk, you think you’ve got what it takes to be in a plot. What sort of character did you have in mind? He was fiddling with a list, running his felt-tip pen down it. Character? I said. Yes, that’s what we do here. Plots and characters. You can’t have one without the other. Well, I said, I might as well try out for the main character. Or one of them—I suppose every plot needs more than one. You can’t be a main character, he said bluntly. Why not? I said. Look in the mirror, he said. You’re an exotic. What do you mean, an exotic? I said. I’m a respectable person. I don’t do kinky dancing. Exotic, he said in his bored voice. Consult the dictionary. Alien, foreign, coming in from the outside. Not from here. But I am from here, I said. Do I have a funny accent or something? I don’t make the rules, he said. Maybe you are, I’m not denying it, but your appearance is against it. If we were in some other place you wouldn’t look as if you’d come in from the outside, because you’d already be outside, and so would everyone else there. Then I’d be the exotic, wouldn’t I? He gave a short laugh. But we’re here, aren’t we. Here we are. And there you are. I wasn’t ready to argue about who looked like where, so I said, Okay then, not the main character. What else have you got? For exotics, he said, flipping through the pages of his list. Let me see. There didn’t used to be much of a choice. You could be a jovial, well-meaning exotic, or a stupid, drunken, wife-beating abuser of an exotic, or a hostile exotic falling off a horse, or a clever, malevolent exotic with some kind of big evil plan. If you were a woman, you could be a sexy exotic—a smouldering, beautiful, amoral degenerate. On the other hand, you could be a comical servant. That was it. That was it? I said. I was dismayed. But there’s more options now, he said. His manner was warming up. You could be the best friend, he said. You wouldn’t get the girl, but at least you’d get a girl of some sort. Or you could be the next-door neighbour, drop by for friendly chats. Or you could be some guy with lore—sort of like a coach. Teach the main character how to slice off heads, one-handed, with a sword. We can always use those. Or you could be a wise person; you could have, like, an ancient religion, or you could say meaningful but obscure things, issue what-do-you-call thems. Portents, I said. Yes, he said, like that. Once you only had to be a woman to get those wise parts, any kind of a woman, but then women started having jobs and no one could believe they were wise any more. Nowadays if you’re a wise woman you have to be an exotic woman. You can have wisdom if you’re a man, but you have to be old as well. Beards help. Can you sing? Not particularly, I said. Too bad, he said. The opera’s out, then. Lots of plots there. I could’ve put you in the chorus. They don’t care what anyone looks like. They all wear those exotic outfits anyway. Listen, I said. None of this sounds like me. It doesn’t exactly call out. How about getting me a job in the plot factory? I think I’d be good at that. What? he said. He sounded alarmed. I’d get the hang of it really fast, I said. I could make up some new plots, or give a twist or two to the old ones—move the characters around a few slots. Give some other people a crack at playing the drunken idiots and the comic servants and so on. Increase their dramatic range. What I was really thinking was, I’d be able to rope off a main character or two for myself. Fulfill my childhood dreams. Or I could do a whole plot with nothing in it but exotics. Exotics wall to wall. Then I’d be the main character for sure, no question.

He narrowed his eyes. Maybe he was reading my mind: I’m not very devious, I’ve always been bad at concealing things. I don’t know, he said. We have standards to keep up. I don’t think it would work.

RESOURCES OF THE IKARIANS

A country needs a resource, and ours does not have one. No oil wells, no mineral deposits, no diamonds, no forests, no rich topsoil, no fast-running rivers available for electrical power. How could we have such resources, stuck far out in the ocean on a barren goat-infested lump of geology at a point equidistant from all places of importance?

We have, it is true, some history. In the old days, before radar, a lot of ships were wrecked on our shifting reefs and unreliable shoals. Our ancestors did quite well out of that, moving the beacons around, raiding the shattered holds, robbing the corpses. We’ve tried to make this history into a resource, without much result. The distances tourists must travel in order to view the narrow, stone-covered beaches where these deplorable outrages occurred are too great, the prices therefore too high. We’ve erected a few ruins, but they are not convincing, even from a distance.

Some accounts of us—in the more outmoded and spurious travel books—cite a legend according to which our island came into being—through the act of some god or other—at the point where the Icarus famed in Greek myth plunged into the sea, once his artificial wax wings had melted. This mistake arose from the name of our island: a word not, in fact, even faintly Greek. It means—in our language—simply “wad of mud.” But the resorts—or the former resorts, built by hopeful foreign investors—resorts that invariably closed down halfway into their second season, after which we locals nicked the toilets—these resorts tried to capitalize on the romantic falsehood, and stuck a boy with wings on their notepaper. A scorched boy in the act of plummeting to his death, I should add. As a logo it was not well thought out.

What are we to do? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and—due to their knowledge of our history—have a bad habit of mugging prospective customers and shoving them over cliffs. We’ve tried to work up some local handicrafts: we taught the old women to do tatting—they had a vestigial memory of it—but who wants tatting nowadays? Not even our line of tatted bikinis was successful. We took a crack at Internet telemarketing, which allowed us to raid carelessly guarded credit-card accounts; we’ve always been hard to get at, legally, being so far away from anything resembling a court of law. We also had a period of virtual airline reservation booking, shut down after too many rage-fuelled manslaughters in the business-class lounge; and we tried a fast-food chain specializing in goatburgers, for which we failed to create a vogue. Also we ran out of goats. So what now, we ask ourselves? Our labour force is not numerous, and is in any case averse to labouring. What we would really like is some offshore banks, or else a penal institution, but those do not grow on trees.

In our desperation we’ve fallen back on the idea of artists. Surely we have enough misery in store to produce a crop of these. Out of the pain we’ve taken care to inflict on them during their childhoods and at random intervals thereafter, out of the poverty we can guarantee, the artists will make art. They will write or paint or sing and then they will die early, and after that we can cash in. Postcards will be ours, black-and-white ones in which the artist frowns or scowls; pilgrimages too, and places of interest (the artist’s birthplace, with a blue enamel plaque on it; his local bar, ditto; his favourite sleeping ditch); tasteless figurines of the artist made out of wire coat-hangers; perhaps—is it too much to ask?—a coffee-table book. In the far distance, a film, in which the artist suffers and scowls and drinks and dies young all over again. But this plan hasn’t worked out yet.

We did have a poet who almost won a prize. He kicked the bucket last year, helped along by drink and drugs, and also by some of us. We may have been in too much of a hurry—perhaps we should have let him ripen a bit longer—but a living impoverished poet is a drain on the economy, whereas a dead one has potential.

We have hopes, however. Our greatest resource is surely our optimism: a tribute to the human spirit, you might call it. Already the T-shirt makers have swung into action. All is not lost.

OUR CAT ENTERS HEAVEN

Our cat was raptured up to heaven. He’d never liked heights, so he tried to sink his claws into whatever invisible snake, giant hand, or eagle was causing him to rise in this manner, but he had no luck.

When he got to heaven, it was a large field. There were a lot of little pink things running around that he thought at first were mice. Then he saw God sitting in a tree. Angels were flying here and there with their fluttering white wings; they were making sounds like doves. Every once in a while God would reach out with its large furry paw and snatch one of them out of the air and crunch it up. The ground under the tree was littered with bitten-off angel wings.

Our cat went politely over to the tree.

Meow, said our cat.

Meow, said God. Actually it was more like a roar.

I always thought you were a cat, said our cat, but I wasn’t sure.

In heaven all things are revealed, said God. This is the form in which I choose to appear to you. I’m glad you aren’t a dog, said our cat. Do you think I could have my testicles back?

Of course, said God. They’re over behind that bush.

Our cat had always known his testicles must be somewhere. One day he’d woken up from a fairly bad dream and found them gone. He’d looked everywhere for them—under sofas, under beds, inside closets—and all the time they were here, in heaven! He went over to the bush, and, sure enough, there they were. They reattached themselves immediately.

Our cat was very pleased. Thank you, he said to God.

God was washing its elegant long whiskers. De rien, said God.

Would it be possible for me to help you catch some of those angels? said our cat.

You never liked heights, said God, stretching itself out along the branch, in the sunlight. I forgot to say there was sunlight.

True, said our cat. I never did. There were a few disconcerting episodes he preferred to forget. Well, how about some of those mice?

They aren’t mice, said God. But catch as many as you like. Don’t kill them right away. Make them suffer.

You mean, play with them? said our cat. I used to get in trouble for that.

It’s a question of semantics, said God. You won’t get in trouble for that here.

Our cat chose to ignore this remark, as he did not know what “semantics” was. He did not intend to make a fool of himself. If they aren’t mice, what are they? he said. Already he’d pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking, and uttering tiny shrieks.

They’re the souls of human beings who have been bad on Earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now if you don’t mind, it’s time for my nap.

What are they doing in heaven then? said our cat.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

CHICKEN LITTLE GOES TOO FAR

Chicken Little read too many newspapers. He listened to the radio too much, and he watched too much television. One day something snapped. What was the final straw? Hard to say, but whatever it was it shouldn’t have made him hysterical. Most folks take such things in stride because whining is so unattractive, but not Chicken Little. He always had a short fuse. He went running down the street, cheeping at the top of his lungs. The sky is falling! he cheeped.

Oh for heavens’ sakes, said Henny Penny, who was loading groceries into her four-wheel-drive supervan. Chicken Little, this is a public place. You’re making a nuisance of yourself.

But the sky is falling! said Chicken Little. I’m sounding the alarm.

You sounded the exact same alarm last year, said Henny Penny, and the sky is still in place. Last time I looked, she added, with heavy irony.

“The sky is falling” is a metaphor, said Chicken Little huffily. It’s true that the sky really is falling, but the falling of the sky represents all sorts of other things that are falling as well. Falling down, and falling apart. You should wake up!

Go home, have a beer, do some meditation, said Henny Penny. Whatever. You’ll feel better tomorrow.

But the next day came and Chicken Little did not feel better. He dropped in on his old friend Turkey Lurkey, who taught at an institution of higher learning.

The sky is falling, said Chicken Little.

That’s one analysis, said Turkey Lurkey. But there’s data to show it isn’t the sky that’s falling. It’s the earth that’s rising. The rising of the earth is simply displacing the sky. It’s due to natural geocyclical causes and is not the result of human activity, and therefore there is nothing we can do about it.

I don’t see that it makes a blind bit of difference whether the earth is rising or the sky is falling, said Chicken Little, as the end result in either case will be that we are minus a sky.

That is a simple-minded view, said Turkey Lurkey, with offensive condescension.

Chicken Little slammed Turkey Lurkey’s office door, causing Turkey Lurkey’s corkboard decorated with clever newspaper cartoons to fall onto the floor. Then he took himself off to Goosey Loosey, his old roommate, who was now the editor of a major newspaper.

The sky is falling, said Chicken Little. It’s your duty to write an editorial about it!

If you’d said, “The stock market is falling,” that would be news, said Goosey Loosey. Granted the sky is falling, in parts. We’re not unaware of it, but the experts are working on it. They’ll have a fix very soon. Meanwhile, no need to trigger a panic.

Chicken Little went away, disconsolate. He took refuge in a bar. He had a few drinks.

Drowning your sorrows? said the bartender, whose name was Skunky Punky.

The sky is falling, said Chicken Little.

They all say that, said Skunky Punky. The bitch not treating you right? So get a different chick, if you want my opinion. Play some golf. Work off some energy. Do you good.

Golf greens have toxic chemicals on them that will give you cancer of the gonads, said Chicken Little.

What sort of bullshit tree-hugging crapola you giving me? said Skunky Punky, who was tired of his job and wanted to pick a fight.

Excuse me, said Ducky Lucky, who’d been eavesdropping. I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m the president of a lobby group dedicated to solving the very same sky-oriented deficiencies that appear to be disturbing you. It’s not something you can take on alone. Together we can make a difference! Got your chequebook handy?

Chicken Little rejected this kind offer of assistance. He formed a group of his own, called tsif—an acronym for The Sky Is Falling, as he had to explain carefully to journalists, at first. He launched a Web site. Soon he had a dedicated pack of disciples. They were mostly woodchucks and muskrats, but who cared? They picketed political gatherings. They blocked highways. They disrupted summit conferences. They carried big signs: Take Back the Sky! No Sky, No Pie, No Sweet Bye and Bye! The Sky’s Our Limit!

This is getting serious, said Hoggy Groggy, who was head of a large development company that sold retirement-home properties in the sky. He himself lived in a bunker designed to protect him from the large chunks of sky that were now falling at random intervals and in unpredictable locations.

He called in Foxy Loxy. Foxy Loxy moved in the shadow world. He did nasty things for a price, and was a devotee of zero accountability. Guy’s gotta put food on the table, was his motto. Not that he bothered much with tables. As far as he was concerned they were a frill.

This Chicken What’s-his-name twerp is making a dent, Hoggy Groggy told Foxy Loxy. He’s giving me a headache. He’s against progress. You should put him out of his misery.

I eat guys like that for breakfast, said Foxy Loxy. It’s the best method. There’s no mess except maybe a couple of feathers, and they never find the body. What’ll you pay me?

The sky’s the limit, said Hoggy Groggy.

And so it was.

THYLACINE RAGOUT

They cloned the Thylacine. They got some DNA out of a bone and they emptied the nucleus out of the egg of a Tasmanian devil and they put the Thylacine bone DNA into the egg, and it grew, and they implanted it, and it didn’t work, and they did it again, and it didn’t work, and they did it again, again, again, and they tried it a little differently, and they tweaked it this way and that, and finally they cloned the Thylacine. Out it came, the baby Thylacine, and they nurtured it tenderly and with great interest and there it was, running around with stripes on, frantic, as in the only remaining film of it, where it runs and paces and utters silent yelps because the film is a silent film, and it stops to gaze into the camera with an expression both poignant and severe. It was a Thylacine all right, or it looked like one, or it looked like our idea of one, because it was an animal no one still alive had ever actually seen. Anyway, what they got was close enough. Why quibble?

This event made the headlines, of course it did, and they named the Thylacine Trugannini, a name you see on restaurant menus in that part of the world, as a gesture of respect perhaps, or a way of selling something, or a commemoration, as on tombstones. Anyway, they named it Trugannini, after the last fully Aboriginal inhabitant of that island, who was raped, or that is the story, whose sisters were killed, or that is the story, whose mother was killed, whose husband was killed in front of her eyes, whose father died of grief, who lived in solitude, solitude of a kind that would kill most people, whose bones were dug up and put on display for a hundred years, against her will, but she was dead so what will did she have, what right do the dead have to a will, they are dead after all, they are not present except in bone form, in a glass case, for people to stare at. Like the Thylacine bones, the ones that were stared at for years, the ones they raided for the DNA to make the Thylacine clone.

Crowds visited. A documentary was made. Prizes were awarded. Then what happened? The Thylacine disappeared. It vanished. One day it was there, in solitude, in singleness, in its cage, or rather its large tastefully landscaped compound, running round and around as if looking for something, and then it was gone. It didn’t die of solitude, however. It was sold. A bent scientist retired to Bermuda on the proceeds. A very rich person with refined tastes ate the Thylacine. He ate it in the form of a ragout. He had a yen for the unique, he wanted to be the only person ever to eat a Thylacine. It did not taste very good, despite the care taken in the preparation of it—well, there were no recipes—but it tasted very expensive, and the man who ate it wrote in his secret diary that it was good enough value for the money.

THE ANIMALS REJECT THEIR NAMES AND THINGS RETURN TO THEIR ORIGINS

THREE NOVELS I WON’T WRITE SOON

In this novel all the worms die. That would include the nematodes. Also anything wormlike in shape, though it may not be a worm proper. Should grubs be included? Should maggots? I’ll know better once I get thoroughly into this thing.

Worms, anyway. Those in the earth, and those in the water. Those inside fish. Those inside dogs. Those inside people, such as pinworms, roundworms, and tapeworms. They die, each and every one. It’s not all downside.

Or it’s not all downside at first. But quite soon—because the earthworms are now defunct, and that’s important—the soil is no longer circulating in the usual fashion. Worm dung is no longer extruded at the surface, wormholes no longer allow rain to penetrate. Valuable nutrients remain sealed in layers of subsoil. Formerly productive fields turn to granite. Crops become stunted and then won’t grow at all. Famine gets going.

Who shall we follow in the course of this doleful story? I vote for Chris and Amanda. They are a nice young couple who’ve had great sex in Chapter One, or possibly Chapter Two. Then realization has dawned on them, ruining their plans to renovate their kitchen and install a new round eco-friendly refrigerator that pops up out of the kitchen counter.

They flee to their summer cottage, as civic order breaks down in the once-thriving town where they live and people start eating their cats and goldfish and the dried ornamental sunflowers in their dining-room floral arrangements.

Amanda, who is the optimist of the pair, tries to grow some Tiny Tim tomatoes in the pathetic little patch of ground they once used only for petunias. Chris is a realist. He looks disaster squarely in its wormless face. (Yes—it’s come to me!—the maggots have perished as well, which explains the various animal carcasses littering the cottage premises, gnawed on by crows and such, but not cleaned up neatly the way the maggots would once have done it.)

Last scene: Amanda is trying to poke holes in the flint-hard soil with a knitting needle. Chris comes out of the house. He has a cup containing their last scrapings of decaf instant coffee. “At least we’re together,” says Amanda.

Or should I have Chris yell, “Where are you, fucking worms, when we need you most?”

Maybe Amanda should yell it. That would be unexpected, and might show that her character has developed.

Now that this has happened—this cathartic, revealing, and somehow inspiriting yell—a small, still-wriggling worm might be discovered in the corner of the garden, copulating with itself. It would sound a note of plangent hope. I always like to end on those.

In this novel, a sponge located on a reef near the coast of Florida begins to grow at a very rapid rate. Soon it has reached the shore and is oozing inland, swallowing beach condos and gated communities as it goes. Nothing is able to stop it. It shows no respect for roadblocks, state police, or even bombs. A sponge on the rampage is a formidable foe. It has no central nervous system, not like us.

“It’s not like us,” says Chris, from the top of his condo, where he has gone with his binoculars to reconnoitre. Amanda clings to him fearfully. What a shame this is—they just bought the condo, in which they had great sex in Chapter One, and now look. All that decor gone to waste.

“Could we sprinkle salt on it?” Amanda asks, with appealing hesitation.

“Honey, it’s not a slug,” says Chris masterfully.

Should these be his last words? Should the sponge fall upon him with a soft but deadly glop? Or should he be allowed to defeat the monstrous bath accessory and save the day, for Florida, for America, and ultimately for humanity? The latter would be my own inclination.

But until I know the answer to this question—until I’m convinced, in my heart, that the human spirit has the wherewithal to go head to headless against this malevolent wad of cellulose—because as a writer loyal to the truth of the inner self you can’t fake these things—it might be as well not to begin.

I heard it as if in a dream. “Beetleplunge.” I often get such insights, such gifts from the Unknown, They just come to me. As this one came.

That word—if it is a word—might look quite stunning on the jacket of a book. Should it be “Beetle Plunge,” two words? Or possibly “Beetle Plummet?” Or perhaps “Beetle Descent,” which might sound more literary?

Let’s think outside the box. Scrap the title! This is now a novel without a name. Immediately I am freed from the necessity of having to do something about the beetles. I saw them so clearly when I was first thinking about this book—all the beetles in the world plunging over a cliff, like lemmings, driven by some mysterious instinct gone wrong—but they did pose a problem: that is, what was to follow as a result?

Maybe I misheard. Maybe it was “Bottle Plunge.” Maybe it was Chris and Amanda, in Chris’s green Volkswagen, being forced off the road, and perilously close to the edge of an escarpment, by a black Mercedes driven by Amanda’s drunken husband. Chris and Amanda had great sex in Chapter One, but Amanda’s husband arrived in Chapter Two, in the Mercedes, just as Chris—who is their student gardener, at the gated community—was giving Amanda a post-coital explanation of the infestation of Coleoptera (red and black, with orange mandibles) currently ravaging the herbaceous borders.

As Chris was pronouncing the word ravaging, the husband sprang in through the French doors, in an advanced state of inebriation, with murder in his heart. Chris grabbed Amanda by the hand and made a dash for his own battered vehicle, a green Ford pickup: I’ve reconfigured the Volkswagen, it wasn’t muscular enough. Cut to the chase. (Chris will drive very skilfully despite the distracting screams let out by Amanda, and he will swerve at the last moment, and the husband, whom we have never liked—he was a dishonest oil-and-gas executive and a sadistic foot fetishist—will go over the cliff instead. Chris and Amanda will end up shakily but gratefully in each other’s arms, exactly where we want them to be.)

But maybe it wasn’t “Bottle Plunge.” Now that I think of it, the phrase may have been “Brutal Purge.”

Where does that get us? Down to earth. But which brutal purge? There are so many to choose from. Those in the past, those in the present, and, unfortunately, those yet to come. Anyway, if it’s “Brutal Purge,” I can’t see a way forward. Chris and Amanda are very likeable. They have straight teeth, trim waists, clean socks, and the best of intentions. They don??instst o C do?t belong in a book like that, and if they stray into it by accident they won’t come out of it alive.

TAKE CHARGE

I)

— Sir, their cannons have blown a hole in the ship. It’s below the waterline. Water is pouring into the hold, Sir.

— Don’t just stand there, you blockhead! Cut a piece of canvas, dive down, patch it!

— Sir, I can’t swim.

— Bloody hell and damn your eyes, what wetnurse let you go to sea? No help for it, I’ll have to do it myself. Hold my jacket. Put out that fire. Clear away those spars.

— Sir, my leg’s been shot off.

— Well do the best you can.

II)

— Sir, their anti-tank missiles have shredded the left tread on our tank.

— Don’t just sit there, you nitwit! Take a wrench, crawl underneath the tank, fix it!

— Sir, I’m a gunner, not a mechanic. Anyway that wouldn’t work.

— Why in hell do they send me useless twits like you? No help for it, I’ll have to do it myself. Cover me with your machine gun. Stand by with grenades. Hand me that spanner.

— Sir, my arm’s been burnt off.

— Well do the best you can.

III)

— Sir, their diabolical worm virus has infected our missile command system. It’s eating the software like candy.

— Don’t just lounge there, you dickhead! Get going with the firewalls, or whatever you use.

— Sir, I’m a screen monitor, not a troubleshooter.

— Shit in a bucket, what do they think we’re running here, a beauty parlour? If you can’t do it, where’s the nerdy spot-faced geek who can?

— Sir, it was him wrote the virus. He was not a team player, Sir. The missiles have already launched and they’re heading straight for us.

— No help for it, I’ll have to do it myself. Hand me that sledgehammer.

— Sir, we’ve got sixty seconds.

— Well do the best you can.

IV)

— Sir, the makorin has malfunctioned and set off the pizzlewhistle. That has saddammed the glopzoid plapoodle. It may be the work of hostile nanobacons.

— Don’t just hover there, you clonedrone! Dopple the magmatron, reboot the fragebender, and insert the hispeed crockblade with the pessimal-point attachment! That’ll captcha the nasty little biobots!

— Sir, the magmatron is not within my area of expertise.

— What pixelwit deployed you? No help for it, I’ll have to do it myself. Hand me the mutesuck blandplaster!

— Sir, I have been brain-napped. My brain is in a jar in Uzbekistan, guarded by a phalanx of virtual gonkwarriors. I am speaking to you via simulation hologram.

— Well do the best you can.

V)

— Sir, the wild dogs have dug their way into the food cache and they’re eating the winter supplies.

— Don’t just squat there, you layabout! Pick up your stone axe and bash them on the head!

— Sir, these are not ordinary wild dogs. They are red-eyed demon-spirit dogs, sent by the angry ancestors. Anyway, my stone axe has a curse on it.

— By my mother’s bones, what did I do to deserve such a useless duck-turd brother’s nephew’s son as you? No help for it, I’ll have to do it myself. Recite the red-eyed demon-spirit dog-killing charm and hand me my consecrated sacred-fire-hardened spear.

— Sir, they’ve torn my throat out.

— Well do the best you can.

POST-COLONIAL

We all have them: the building with the dome, late Victorian, solid masonry, stone lions in front of it; the brick houses, three storey, with or without fretwork, wood, or painted iron, which now bear the word Historic on tasteful enamelled or bronze plaques and can be visited most days except Monday; the roses, big ones, of a variety that were not here before. Before what? Before the ships landed, we all had ships landing; before the men in beaver hats, sailor hats, top hats, hats anyway, got out of the ships; before the Native inhabitants shot the men in hats with arrows or befriended them and saved them from starvation, we all had Native inhabitants. Arrows or not, it didn’t stop the men in hats, or not for long, and they had flags too, we all had flags, flags that were not the same flags as the flags we have now. The Native inhabitants did not have hats or flags, or not as such, and so something had to be done. There are the pictures of the things being done, the before and after pictures you might say, painted by the painters who turned up right on cue, we all had painters. They painted the Native inhabitants in their colourful, hatless attire, they painted the men in hats, they painted the wives and children of the man in hats, once they had wives and children, once they had three-storey brick houses to put them in. They painted the brave new animals and birds, plentiful then, they painted the landscapes, before and after, and sometimes during, with axes and fire busily at work, you can see some of these paintings in the Historic houses and some of them in the museums.

We go into the museums, where we muse. We muse about the time before, we muse about the something that was done, we muse about the Native inhabitants, who had a bad time of it at our hands despite arrows, or, conversely, despite helpfulness. They were ravaged by disease: nobody painted that. Also hunted down, shot, clubbed over the head, robbed, and so forth. We muse about these things and we feel terrible. We did that, we think, to them. We say the word them, believing we know what we mean by it; we say the word we, even though we were not born at the time, even though our parents were not born, even though the ancestors of our ancestors may have come from somewhere else entirely, some place with dubious hats and with a flag quite different from the one that was wafted ashore here, on the wind, on the ill wind that (we also muse) has blown us quite a lot of good. We eat well, the lights go on most of the time, the roof on the whole does not leak, the wheels turn round.

As for them, our capital cities have names made from their names, and so do our brands of beer, and some but not all of the items we fob off on tourists. We make free with the word authentic. We are enamoured of hyphens, as well: our word, their word, joined at the hip. Sometimes they turn up in our museums, without hats, in their colourful clothing from before, singing authentic songs, pretending to be themselves. It’s a paying job. But at moments, from time to time, at dusk perhaps, when the moths and the night-blooming flowers come out, our hands smell of blood. Just the odd whiff. We did that, to them.

But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? Is that them, landing in their illicit boats, at night? Is that them, sneaking in here with outlandish hats, with flags we can’t even imagine? Should we befriend them or shoot them with arrows? What are their plans, immediate, long-term, and will these plans of theirs serve us right? It’s a constant worry, this we, this them.

And there you have it, in one word, or possibly two: post-colonial.

HERITAGE HOUSE

The Heritage House is where we keep the Heritage. It wasn’t built for that—it was once a place where people really lived—but the way things needed to be done in it was cumbersome, what with the water coming out of a well, and the light coming out of oil lamps and tallow candles, and the heat coming out of a stone fireplace, and then there were the chamber pots to be emptied and the tin bathtubs to be filled. Also it was so hard to keep the rooms clean. So people built newer houses, with plumbing and so forth, but the Heritage House was not torn down, and when we decided to have some Heritage we agreed that the Heritage House was a good place to store the stuff.

We spruced it up, of course: fresh paint, brass polish, floor wax. Women were hired to show people around: they are adept at smiling and giving explanations, and nodding. Among us, it is thought that if men perform too many of these activities their faces will crack all over and peel off, and there will be nothing but gristle underneath.

The people who visited the Heritage House were mostly women as well. They wanted the explanations that could be found there—why some chairs were higher than other chairs, in the days of Heritage, and who did the scrubbing of the tin bathtubs and the emptying of the chamber pots, and how the water used to make its way out of the well. They wanted to know how things got the way they are now, and they hoped that the explanations given by the smiling women in the Heritage House might help.

Men didn’t care so much about those subjects, and so they didn’t go. Also they said that Heritage ought to mean things that have been inherited, passed down from father to son as it were, but since nobody did the so-called heritage things any more, or even thought about them except when they were in the Heritage House getting nodded and smiled at and bored to death with explanations, Heritage House was a misnomer in the first place and they didn’t see why they should have to pay taxes to keep the joint going.

Over time, the Heritage House filled up. It was such a convenient place to stash things you no longer had a use for but didn’t want to throw out. More and more Heritage was crammed in. An annex was built, in the style of the original edifice, with a tea room in it where you could rest your feet and relax—Heritage could be exhausting—and more female guides were hired, and research was done on authentic costumes for them to wear. But then there was a change of government and funds were cut. Perhaps some of the Heritage should be disposed of, it was said. But by now there was so much Heritage jammed in there that just sorting it out would take much more money than anyone wanted to spend. So nothing was done.

I went to the Heritage House myself, the other week. It was in disrepair. The windows were opaque with dust, the front steps were a disgrace: it was clear to see that nothing had been scrubbed off or fixed up in years. I rang the rusted bell for a long time before anyone answered it. Finally the door opened. I could see a long hallway, piled to the ceiling with boxes and crates. Each box was labelled: CORSETS. MIXMASTERS. THUMBSCREWS. CALCULATORS. LEATHER MASKS. CARPET SWEEPERS. CHASTITY BELTS. SHOE BRUSHES. MANACLES. ORANGE STICKS. MISCELLANEOUS.

From behind the door an old woman appeared. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe. She let me in, pushing aside a stack of yellowing newspapers. The place stank of mouse droppings and mildew.

She nodded at me, she smiled. She hadn’t lost the knack. Then she launched into a stream of explanations; but the language she spoke was obsolete, and I couldn’t make out a word.

BRING BACK MOM: AN INVOCATION