First Published "Elegia" 1991



Gordon watched his mother sleeping.

There was a strangeness in comparing the one he loved so very much during her waking hours (a Mummy worth all the money in the whole world - plus sixpence), with this snorting beast in the bed.

Her mind was so far away in personal dreams. The mouth gaped wide, red-smudged lips flinching with each laboured breath. The ridged veins in the eyelids pulsed with a sluggish bloodbeat. The nostrils were alive with wriggling hairs, each unrhythmic snore arriving in a relay of false starts. From time to time, she groaned, as if she were in pain. Yet this creature couldn't be his mother: it was a monster of the night, with surely no connection with the adorable, caring, understanding angel of the day. Funny what sleep could do...

Only that very afternoon, she had rocked Gordon on her lap, crooning nursery rhymes: going up hills for water, fishing cats out of wells, boiled eggs smiling, lowing cattle silhouetted against moonrise, fairy pippin orchards, groves of wild honey...

They'd always given each other afternoon cuddles, followed by tea: silver tiers of jam puffs, filled cones, custard creams, almond slices, coconut pyramids, gingerbread children; muffins toasted over the open fire with long-handled forks; manicured cucumber sandwiches; weak tea in fine bone china, which Gordon often slurped from the saucer for fun: all so safe, all so cosy.

But creeping up the wooden hills to the dark landing, which represented the beginning of the day's end, was a different story: when the fears gathered in living shadows and followed him to the bedroom door, wherein he still used a cot. Despite being over eight years old, Mummy could not afford Gordon a proper bed. He'd doze off, almost bent double...

Recently, Mummy said it would be allright if he slept with the side-bars down, if that would help him feel more grown-up.

He settled down quickly upon the small mattress, a veritable island of safety against all the bogey men he created from the dark corners and from the clothes which were left hanging to smooth out their wrinkles. He desperately tried not to sleep, for he wanted to wait till his mother came up to give him a surreptitious goodnight kiss. He did drift off, however, the kiss becoming part and parcel of other dreams, other scenarios.

Later, he thought he heard her voice, sometimes in the lilt of lullaby, but often weeping for the husband she'd lost in early marriage.

The cot was in the same room as his mother's own bed, for they could not afford furnishings for two, and he liked it that way, in any event. He rather have the money spent on the fuel for the coal fire in the parlour and on the Royal Teas. But, when he did happen to wake up, in the very centre of the night, he watched his mother snoring, her loose chest rising and falling in rhythm to some inland sea. A monster was all the more monstrous for being manufactured from the flesh of an angel. He knew this, though not in those words.

All things good and evil have to come to an end. On what turned out to be the last night of his childhood, Gordon felt that very afternoon's tea rising towards the gullet, on the point of over-spilling the rubber lips of his belly. He stood up in the dark cot, muffin fork aloft, bringing it down into the throbbing meniscus of the eyeball beneath him. He lost the handle in the process somewhere at the edge of the cheekbone, as the prongs, with a motive force not solely derived from Gordon, found the mattress through the skull.

The sick only came later.